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I consider anything Active Discovery Designs mine and have an agreement about that, but I am no more associated with ActiveDiscovery, Inc., so I am looking under which name I will continue my services.

Please note I am not associated in any way anymore with ActiveDiscovery, Inc. and vice versa, but (of course) I will continue serving existing and new clients, for now as a freelance (full stack) web developer.

Contact details are still the same, so you can just go the contact page if you want to contact me.

Guus Ellenkamp

 

Web development

Overview of our website building services.

We can offer you the following types of web development:

In the paragraphs below you can find more information of each of these services.

Basic web development

Being a web development company we can of course create a basic website for you. With basic we mean a website with some information about your company and maybe a contact form with a nice graphical lay-out.

Being a company with high quality as a major selling point, a basic website would still take some time to develop, so if you really want the cheapest possible website we may not be the right web development company for you, even though we are located in The Philippines where salaries are at more reasonable levels than in Europe and the United States.

With our standards even building a very simple website would take some time and effort as the process would still be:

  1. Do some research about your company or study materials provided by you.
  2. Make one or more sample lay-outs based on your input and our research.
  3. Present the result and process your feedback on the design.
  4. Create the <html> code for your website. This would include making the code according to the standards of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and putting the right title, description and keywords plus some additional code to make your site Search Engine Friendly.
  5. Present the site to you and process your feedback on the result from step 4 until you are fully satisfied.

You may understand that this process, even for a basic website would still take at least 40 hours.

Dynamic web development

Next to 'simple' web development we also do so called 'dynamic' web development. In its simplest form dynamic web development means that you as the owner of the website can make changes to it without involving the developer, so in this case us.

Dyamic web development comes in many forms and flavours. In our case with a dynamic website we mean a website where you can add and change for example product data only, like the price or the description or the picture of a product.

Major advantage of what we call our dynamic website is that you only need some basic computer knowledge like knowing how to type and knowing how to open a website in order to maintain the data on your site. You don't need any knowledge about websites or html (the language used to build websites).

Web development based on a CMS

The next type of website we can offer you is a website based on a so called Content Management System (CMS). The idea of a website based on a CMS is that the developer, in this case us, defines the basic structure of the website, mainly the graphics, and that you as the owner of the website can maintain the whole 'content'. In this case 'content' does not only include specific data like the changeable data in what we call our dynamic website, but basically all the text and also the menus.

Even though the 'code' for CMS websites is free (we use the Open Source system Joomla for our CMS sites), this type of site is quickly to implement and this type of website gives a lot of freedom to the customer (you), we do not recommend this type of website very often to our customers as in our opinion they require a lot of effort and knowledge to stay 'looking clean' and require quite some maintainance in order to stay up-to-date.

Please remember, it is our business to make professional websites, maintain them and keep them 'clean' for our customers (you). Of course we are very happy to provide you with a CMS-type website which is relatively cheap to setup, but in practice we have seen too often that customers underestimate the knowledge and time required to keep their website up-to-date and often come back to us for the maintenance.

For us maintenance of a CMS site is more expensive than any other type of site as we use simpler technology for non-CMS sites, so in the end a site built with a CMS may end up more expensive for you than you initially thought (and any other type of site that looked cheaper at first).

Please do not misunderstand us. Of course we are happy building a website based on a CMS for you if you need it. Among our customers are several satisfied users of a CMS site we have built and are maintaining. However, we believe that in general the cost for a website, as with other software, are mainly defined by maintenance cost, not by the initial building cost. And we prefer to build websites and web applications that are maintenance friendly. This also brings us to our current motto: 'Dutch quality at affordable prices'.

Web development based on our own Framework

Based on our experience with the CMS Joomla, the development the web based computer program MIS-Improved and our other ventures we decided to build our own web development framework, the Active Discovery Application Framework.

This framework originally started as a simplified version of Joomla, maybe amazing to some readers, WITHOUT the Content Management features. Over time, several years now, this framework evolved into an application framework with which we can build advanced websites and websites at an amazing speed.

Our framework also evolved in a way that it allows us to create the earlier mentioned dynamic websites in a more efficient way than to build them 'from scratch', which we normally do. There is one major drawback to it and this is that we invested a lot in our framework so it is copyrighted, meaning that we don't allow customers to own and change it without the proper agreements.

In practice the 'copyright' restriction is merely a not so important legal issue. In order to make use of the advantages of our framework we only require you to sign a license agreement after which you are basically free what to do with your site. The only thing we won't allow is that you use our framework technology to build other sites as we invested a lot in it. In other words, we are happy to share it with you and you may even change it if you want, but for use in any site we would like to be paid for our effort creating, maintaining and extending it.

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