Shepherd Interactive

We just celebrated the launch of the new Oregon Re-Bath website this last week. I’m proud of the work we did on it. This site marks the third site I’ve developed at Shepherd Interactive using HTML5 markup. HTML5 is the next version of HTML which standardizes the language of Web 2.0. Ben Brown (a designer here at Shepherd Interactive) did a great job on the graphic design, incorporating the Re-Bath franchise’s graphic elements into a unique design while at the same time allowing for the latest Web technologies to be employed. I worked to make the interface more engaging by adding in some animation. The navigation menus, home page elements, and the special offers sign-up are all animated using declarative CSS Transitions, which are supported natively by Safari 3 and Google Chrome. Firefox and Internet Explorer, however, do not yet support CSS Transitions. Because of this, I worked on implementing a subset of the specification so that the site could maintain a clean separation between HTML content, CSS presentation, and JavaScript behavior—this CSS Transitions via jQuery Animation source code is available under an open source license. It was a stretching experience to say the least, having to delve into CSS DOM internals and XBL/HTC bindings, but it’s rewarding to see the great results.
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Object-oriented design principles are one common way of designing distributed applications.  In this methodology, the system is architected (by way of state diagrams and UML sequences) primarily by focusing on generating actionable results based on computations and processes done at endpoints, designed as procedures or objects (think stubs and skeletons).  This means that data within the system cannot be viewed in its ”raw” format (because it is presumed to be an intrinsic part of objects), and the data format itself is fixed within the object — although generics alleviates this somewhat – and access to this data is only available through predefined methods within the context of the object.  Relational databases such as MySQL and SQL Server have table definitions which cannot accept data in an arbitrary format, because data must first be adapted to meet existing table constraints(unique and primary key), NULL-field requirements, data-length requirements and column-type requirements.  This type of design architecture is known as “application-centric” architecture.
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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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