Shepherd Interactive

For the past decade Flash has been largely the de facto way to do vector graphics and animation on the Web. Flash has brought us a long way, raising the bar for Web users so that we now have high expectations for websites we come across. Implementing the compelling interactivity of Flash, however, has not been a painless experience for developers. Creating a sandalone Flash application hosted by a webpage is straightforward, but the integration between Flash and the Web has been a notoriously difficult problem because Flash is not built with Web technologies. However, the preeminence of Flash is beginning to wane as all major browsers (except MSIE) have implemented Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an interactive vector image standard. With SVG, integration with an XHTML webpage is a non-issue since SVG was designed utilizing the core technologies of the Web. Like XHTML, not only is SVG an XML vocabulary but both XHTML and SVG use CSS to style content and both use JavaScript for scripting. Not only does this mean that stylesheets and scripts can be shared among XHTML and SVG documents, but it also means that SVG can be embedded within XHTML, and XHTML within SVG. Indeed, one of SVG’s most compelling features which makes it a viable “Flash killer” is that SVG code can be embedded within XHTML markup, something which is quite impossible for Flash due to its binary SWF file format.
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Several months ago Shepherd Interactive had a website implementation project where we had to support dynamic features on a medium sized site whose content management system did not support (with the purchased options) any dynamic features, it publishes static files only.  It was a fun and rewarding challenge.
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Search engine ranking is very important to our clients. They want their information to rank highly in customers’ search results. They want the right information to show up for the right search keywords and they know that this is a fundamental key to a successful online business. Shepherd Interactive gets it. We know that there are many techniques and strategies that can assist with high search engine ranking — in fact, entire businesses are built around search engine optimization (SEO) consultation. When we work with our clients, we not only give them good SEO advice they can use, but we also implement many techniques for them “behind the scenes” as well.
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One of my favorite things about working at Shepherd Interactive is that I am encouraged to research cutting-edge technologies and experiment with innovative solutions. Often this research is done for client projects, but if I have some down time, I am encouraged to work on projects that interest me. It’s similar to Google’s 20% policy. The end result is that work is more enjoyable, I gain experience with areas that I may not run into on everyday client work, the community benefits from new open source solutions, and Shepherd Interactive benefits from increased exposure.
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