Project Examples

 

netBiog.com

 

This is a Web 2.0 web site that uses a social networking approach to create skills and competency profiles of individuals based on input from peers, mentors and managers. It currently supports about 50,000 active users and is closely integrated with other systems via a web services interface. The initial customer is AIESEC, the world's largest international student organisation.

 

We built this site from the ground up; this included running focus groups, designing the user interface, the high peformance database architecture and the data models to support both large user populations and flexible reporting. The site has now been running with no unscheduled downtime since January 2008.

 

The user interface is intended for users with a range of English language skills as the site is accessed from over 70 countries worldwide. We have built in a number of usability features to assist with terminology etc. In addition the site is designed for partner co-branding.

 

We use XML extensively to allow competency and skills profiles to be designed offline and loaded dynamically. In addition, there is an email invitation engine that manages new contributions from users.

 

The site supports IE 6 & 7 as well as Firefox which, for a leading edge application utilising newer AJAX patterns, requires a lot of web know-how and persistence to get working well!

 

The screen shots you see are of the home page, the closed landing page and a profile output page. The closed landing page contains links to site facilities as well as a workflow panel for contributions to other people's profiles. The profile output page shows how someone's competencies map to an in-house competency model (this example was developed by AIESEC to help their members develop into future business leaders). You will see on this screen a number of bespoke graphical components we have developed to encapsulte this quite complex concept simply and quickly for the user.

 

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This is a typical "Corporate" brochure online website. In development terms, it is a relatively small project and is technically quite simple. We have adapted a design used by the parent company but populated the site with completely new content and graphical elements appropriate to the subject of accountancy software for publishers.

 

Whilst this site is comparatively simple in programming and design terms, it contains quite a lot of custom javascript to help ease of use as well as flash to liven up the content in places. In addition, due consideration has been given to searchability and access from older systems.