Well, I've not posted on here for ages.  I've been meaning to but it's been really hectic here with Silver Pride.   It's all been a bit of a whirlwind.  There has been some major developments which I will post on in more detail in the next few posts.  

 In brief; 

1. I have now brought onboard two gentlemen as directors in the company.   Ben who brings a wealth of commercial project experience of working with SMEs (small/medium enterprises), public sector and blue chip clients.  He manages the commercial client relationships, professional analysis services and much more.  The second is Craig who is by trade a designer and has worked and managed large marketing campaigns and graphics/web projects with some high profile clients.  The there is myself, Graham, who is the lead developer and techy geek type who creates and keeps all the software and sites a smooth oiled.

 2. The SPARK Web Management System has been finished and launched.  More on this in the next post.   There will be a full product site launched later this month with online payment, support/ticketing and developer resources. 

3. We've got a new SPARK site and new Silver Pride site coming online in a month to reflect our new services and showcase some of the projects we've done recently. 

4. Last but definately not least we have moved offices to (fittingly) Pride Park in Derby (UK).  This a large industrial park in Derby that houses many new tech companies.  The office is a lot better than the last one which left a little to be desired.  I'll not say more than that. 

I'll try not to be too long before the next post where I will outline some of the features of the SPARK system.

Cheers

Graham

Well, I'm nearly there with phase 1 of the CMS I've been developing.   An overview of the CMS capabilities are listed here.

Full control of your site content

All site content text and graphics are editable in place using an easy to use WYSIWYG interface.  

Multi-lingual

You can multiple versions of your content in a wide variety of languages including Arabic and Chinese.   SPARK CMS automatically translates your original text when creating foreign language content.

Use for the Internet, Intranet or Extranet

Included is a comprhensive permissions system which means you can have secure pages or content.

Next gen site management tools

Creating and managing your site and clients is easy with the site management system.

Site and departmental themes control

You can have a global site template to your site or control the site template by sub site or pages.   So, for instance, you can have a global site look and feel but then have a completely different look to another department or section.  

Fully accessible to W3C standards

The site generated are full W3C complient which are accessible by screen reading software.

Search Engine Friendly

Sites created with the SPARK CMS are designed to be extremely search engine friendly.   Techniques such as Google Sitemap creation, friendly url re-writing, and meta content control (meta-tags etc) are included as standard. 

Integrated Google Analytics

Track the search engine usage and visitor statistics through the integrated Google Analytics console.

Full CMS Branding to your company logo and specification

This is a major feature of the CMS! More details on this later.

Design

The system is written on ASP.Net and uses many advanced techniques such as Ajax and JQuery to give a very intutive user experience.  Anybody who has worked with me will tell you I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to user interfaces and I've put extra emphasis on making the CMS very easy for novice users to get to grips with quickly.  The result is a system that I think acts more like a client side application than a web application.   This means you get instant "stateful" feedback (I try to avoid refreshes/postbacks where possible).

I'll more details up of the CMS and with it's own homepage in the very near future.

Well I've been meaning to do this for a while now but I've always seemed to find and excuse to not do it.  Anyway, introductions...my name is Graham Till, a developer by trade specialising mainly in web based .Net development these days.  Though I've been around long enough to have worked and sometimes suffered on C, MFC, COM/ATL etc. (I won't go on as it's not intended to be an online CV.)   I'm the founder and owner of a company called Silver Pride Software based in Derby (UK). 

The purpose of this blog is to bring updates to the latest developments happening at Silver Pride plus other interesting titbits I come across as I go along.  I'm planning to release a JQuery plugin at some point.  It's my first attempt at such a plugin so the results may be interesting!

Lastly, the blog is called AOB or Any Other Business.  No doubt it will also stand for Any Old B****** at some point as well. 

Thanks

Graham