AFP Webworks - Portfolio

Portfolio

A selection of the sites we're involved with, to give an idea of our capabilities and range of expertise

Small Business, Self-Maintained Site

A La Castina School of Wholistic Horsemanship - The site belongs to a school of horsemanship, that also has horses for breeding, and sells very high quality saddlery. Using the AFP Webworks Content Management System, they maintain all the elements of the site by themselves, with no need for constant support from expert web design/development staff. Naturally, AFP Webworks is here to assist, guide, advise on their site.

A La Castina dont have anyone knowledgeable about web techniques - they're expert in horses and horsemanship - but with AFP's CMS, they dont need to be. They can add, edit and delete content any time they wish, day or night, and the only skills needed are roughly the same as preparing a document in a word processing program.

Using our online image management software, the client uploads, resizes, crops and manages images on the site without any need to refer to us for help with routine tasks.

AFP's CMS Helps nationwide organisation run its web site

The Human Genetics Society fo Australasia is the professional organisation for medical practitioners in the field of genetics. As such it has lots of people involved in the web site spread all over Australia and New Zealand. Widespread organisations like HGSA have many needs, many consituencies, many objectives to meet with a single web site, and AFP's own-design Content Management System (CMS) meets those needs.

Some of those needs include:

Content can be set as visible to the public, to the logged-in membership of the HGSA< or even special interest groups or management only.
Any content - either whole pages or parts of pages - can be embargoed to appear only after a specific date
Any content - either whole pages or parts of pages - can be removed automatically from the site after a specific date.
Authorised people anywhere can add content to the site, but unless they have been granted the appropriate rights, the content does not show on the site until it has been approved by more senior editors
Photo galleries can be created automatically, with images uploaded direct to the site, with captions, photographer credit etc with thumbnails automatically generated.
Site map is created automatically as pages are added to the site, and it automatically allows for whether the user is logged in or not, or whether the user belongs to special interest groups or not. In other words, the pages are only listed in the site map if the user has the authorisation to see them.
No specialist web knowledge to be required in order to maintain the site. If a contributor to the site knows how to use Microsoft Word, that is enough to do nearly all the tasks
Just about anything is configurable by the site owner - the category of templates, the categories of users, editors, and others involved in running the site.

AFP's CMS is highly adaptable to many different kinds of organisations, from large to small, and can esily be customised to suit the specific needs of almost any organisation.

Standards Compliant User Maintained site

Redback Grinder Company makes large machines that crunch up whole trees into mountains of mulch. Their site is a fully standards-compliant XHTML site, where content, style and business logic are separated. This means the underlying code for the site is reduced and easier to maintain. Less code means the pages load faster and use less bandwidth. In turn that means lower bandwidth costs for the site's hosting.

The company has an administration area under password access that allows them to change some parts of the site at any time they like without needing any web design skils. Any staff member who can use Microsoft Word can update these parts of the site. For most routine tasks, there is no need for any specialist web staff. In the event there is a change required that isnt provided for in the administration area, AFP Webworks provides ongoing maintenance support on an 'As Required' basis.

Online Media site

Music From Foggy Hollow - A Talking Dog Site - the site for Mike Kear's weekly radio show. This site uses version 3 of our own design Content Management System (CMS) The site automatically builds pages on the fly including all the navigation menus and buttons and the site map. All content can expire on specific days and/or be visible only to people with pre-defined authority levels. IF you dont have the right approvals, or if the content has expired it is automatically removed from the site and there is no trace of it as far as the users are concerned. There can be content restricted in this way on any page.

The site also acts as the front end for the CD library used on the show. Listeners can search on the library, view statistics about the most played songs, most played artists etc, all dynamically generated from the logging generated during the running of the show on the air.

All look and feel aspects are controlled by CSS2 Style sheets, meaning presentation and content aspects are separated. To completely change the look of the site requires editing only the few style sheets. The site is accessible to users with disabilities because of the CSS construction and the use of the latest ColdFusion MX programming techniques.

Large Government Intranet

NSW Roads and Traffic Authority Contracted to do modifications to the intranet overtime claim and reporting system. The site is large and the infrastructure is very large. Some of the Oracle queries were very large and very complex, joining many tables and sometimes running query of a query to dynamically modify the query objects on the fly. Involved ColdFusion Fusebox framework, and a large Oracle database. Sample pages can't be shown here because that section of the site is internal to the Authority and not for public view.

The intranet alone is managed by a team of developers, and our brief required us to work in alongisde the other developers, maintaining coding standards, and working within the existing code framework, without affecting the work the other developers were doing.

Online Media Site

Hawkesbury Radio - Windsor an ongoing project. Fully dynamic site, with every page built on the fly from a content management system of our own design and development. Currently using version 3 of the CMS system. Some of the dynamic features of the site include

up-to-the-minute news feeds
live webcam into the broadcast studio
upto the minute weather stats, drawn from the station's own weather station at the studio property
dynamic "what's on now" based on a database schedule and local time of day.
All programme representation on the site is colour coded.
The programme guide is also dyanmically built as it's called, including the colour coding and table layout.
Many people have input to the site, each updating their own portion of the site without needing to worry about affecting the other parts of the site they're not responsible for.

The look and feel of the site is totally run by CSS - style sheets. This makes it straightforward to change the appearance of any aspect of the site, and simplifies the code required to render the pages. And the pages are more accessible than the vast majority of media sites.

AFP Webworks designed, developed, and built the site. We host it on our own servers in the USA and act as webmaster for the radio station.

Online catalogue and shopping cart

Auslegs Custom Woodturning makes furniture components - lounge legs, stair bannisters etc and supplies the furniture manufacturing industry. This new web site was designed, built and is hosted by us to offer Auslegs' components on the web. We built a custom shopping cart that allows for multiple colour styles for each product. The shopping cart uses the latest CFC (Object oriented) techniques of the newest version of ColdFusion and has a number of advanced features. The shopping cart doesnt connect to a payment gateway, because the client doesnt need it yet, but all the facilities are built into the shopping cart to connect to a payment gateway.

Also required was a custom built back-end, so the client can add their own products as and when needed without requiring intervention of us.

When products are put on special prices, some photographs on the right side of the pages are replaced with a box showing the special products, and connecting to a "specials" page.

The entire site is built using the latest standards compliance techniques, and the whole look and feel of the site can be altered very simply by just replacing a single style sheet file. Furthermore, because it's built with to the XHTML standard, it is compliant with the majority of browsers, and even other devices such as hand-held computers, phones or even internet fridges.

Dynamic site with many non-technical contributors

Bluegrass Australia - it's completely dynamic, and ColdFusion based. The site is being rebuilt, totally dynamic. All events and other information drawn from a SQLServer2005 database, using the latest CFC (component) techniques and object-oriented architecture. This enables code re-use, minimising coding and maintenance requirements. Users can update their section of the site remotely, without the need for intervention of the webmaster. When members log in, they get slightly different displays, including flashes showing what has been added or updated since their last visit.

A feature of the site is the 'events' area, where people can add band gigs, concerts, festival details etc from anywhere and they will appear in the listing for the state, ordered by the date of the event. Events disappear from the site automatically as soon as the event is over, meaning the site is more likely to be up to date, with less need for maintenance by the webmaster. Two other associated sites also draw on information from this same database for their own users.

The "USA News" section is a RSS feed from a companion site in the USA, and the site provides several web services functions, syndicated around the world to other bluegrass-related sites.

The site is maintained using a custom-written Content Management System (CMS) designed, written and supported by AFP Webworks

Fully accessible standards-compliant site

Metacoustics.com.au- a small but fully standards-compliant accessible site. Built to the new XTHML1.0 Strict standard, this site is totally styled by the use of style sheets. The content and look-and-feel aspects are separated. This means that the site is simpler, smaller file sizes, loads faster, and is much easier to maintain than sites built using older methods.

Standards compliance is important because:

It allows access to people with disabilities using devices other than regular PC browsers
It provides for access using hand-held devices, PDS, palm computers etc
The file size downloaded is smaller, meaning it downloads faster, and reduces bandwidth cost for site owners
It gives users a better internet experience than the older methods
The underlying code is simpler and easier for developers to read, meaning development and maintenance is faster, and costs are lower.
Change is much simpler, and therefore faster
Styling, colours etc is far more consistent across the whole site

If the client wants a change to the way the site looks it can be done in one step, changing a single CSS file. Because it's built to strict web standards, its fully accessible not just to browsers, but to any device that meets accepted web standards, such as PDAs, screen readers, even fridges.

Want to see more?

These are merely representative samples of the many projects AFP Webworks is associated wtih. If you would like to know more about what we've done, please contact us and we'll be in touch as soon as possible.