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Custom Software Design

In a marketing move, we are now focusing on making things simpler for the customer. We have agreed on doing free initial consultations and proposals. Talking to us then becomes a zero-risk opportunity!

Price quotes will be feature-based and we have a good idea of how much time each feature will take to build. We know you want an interactive site with lots of fun features. We also know you want to market your site to a large audience. We will work with you on the marketing end, whether it is registering you for the search engines, directories or setting up affiliateships.

Just a little history...

Muscle City Glass contracted Orange Crystal Consulting to do their website a few years ago. The site was fun. We designed the original power window rollovers you can see in the nav bar. The site used the following technologies:

What was challenging about the site was how to organize auto parts into a database which made sense. Each auto parts vendor had their own way of cataloguing the parts so a flexible database structure had to be engineered. One thing we are proud of is that no 'bugs' were ever found in production. We feel this is due to the tremendous amount of testing undertaken.

The site was also graphically VERY intense. For that reason we had to be clever to correctly optimize its graphics.

The next site we did was for The Egerton Group, Ltd. This is a site, still in production today, which allows publishers and authors to communicate and facilitates a 'workflow' of sorts so that books may picked-up, corrected and dropped of. It also generates HTML reports which are then converted to PDF. It uses the following technologies:

Our own Orange Crystal Consulting website has gone through numerous changes and we're still not done! Our site uses the following technologies:

Regarding projects in progress...

We have recently taken over a not-for-profit website http://www.policesupport.com.

Recently, we have put together our own Linux server using a 2.6.13 kernel, Apache 2.0.54 (Linux/SUSE) as well as MySQL 4.1.13 and phpMyAdmin 2.6.3. We installed phpopenchat but were discouraged much of the manual is still in German not to mention it won't work under Safari (there is a fix available)!

Some other technical junk...

phpBB was a pain at our ISP due to their cgi mode configuration of PHP. What this meant was that shebang lines had to be added to each PHP script (when doing our forum). I doubt if I'll be recommending an ISP that has PHP configured this way! Also a good reason to consider a virtual server environment!

We also have cooked up some registration code in PHP for when we need it. What we found tedious was setting up the security within MySQL, getting around the SuSe Linux firewall issues and one other thing. We noticed that for PHP here documents one cannot have any leading whitespace before the final termination token! Never noticed that to be a problem in ksh here documents but again that was long ago. Is it coincidental that a recent client wanted just such code integrated into their website?

We are working with a partner who has a dedicated server running a full blown OS Commerce installation. More on these opportunities soon, or call to ask!

Call us at 914-469-7545 or email us at our office for more information. We look forward to hearing from you!