About Control Through Pictures

History:

Our collective history spans well over 10 years as Internet Professionals. This experience covers operating within a whole range of companies from small start up companies during the 'dot com boom' period, web design agencies of many sizes and all the way upto serious big players in the form of Orange.

Our backgrounds range from graphic design to developer to managing teams of developers and how they operate. There's very little that we haven't come across before in one shape or form. We've written software and applications, fixed other peoples software and applications and in some cases added to other peoples software or applications to make them do what our companies needed. And the likelyhood of 'one size fits all' ever becoming true and being anything less than a bit of 'buzz word bingo' wont happen for quite some time yet! This holds true when regarding a software tool, a technology or technique and even a development methodology.

We learned a lot through those times and experiences. The overriding fact being that there are always many different ways to build the solution to a problem or build against a set of requirements. There are always several different approaches, several different technologies or languages and even several different ways within a specific programming language that you can build a particular piece of functionality. The key was to become familiar with as many of the programming languages that were available, their strengths, weaknesses and how best to utilise them.

Things move pretty fast in the 'Internet' world. New versions of languages are released at fairly frequent intervals, with speed, performance and feature improvements. New versions of software make it easier to tie together the different jobs involved across the development of a solution.

One of the main improvements has been to the fundamental way that 'Web developers' go about building websites for their clients. It used to be that you would need to build every element of a website from the ground up. That is not necessarily the case anymore. This approach is certainly not the most effective use of skill and resource.

A lot of this process can be fairly repetitive. You build the same or similar components for each client. They each want to enable their visitors to send them emails, enter competitions, target specific types of customers with certain adverts or promotions, etc. Rebuilding this functionality each time is not sensible.

This caused developers to look to a way of making these types of functions re-usable.

This re-usability drive went even further with many companies around the world, groups of people and even individuals, building components that can be integrated to form a whole application.

There are now hundreds of thousands of 'components' available, along with libraries of components for virtually all the more prominent programming technologies. There are also many full and free Content Management Systems (that can be downloaded and used) that provide an extensive set of tools for building a product or information based website that would satisfy most small to medium sized businesses.

In some ways the situation is more complicated now, as it is no longer a question of simply building a website or application to satisfy the clients requirements. It is necessary to evaluate those requirements in depth and possible identify a solution that comprises of some pre-built components, some bespoke components and the additional work of making all the components communicate so that the solution operates as a whole.

Control Through Pictures can do exactly that for you!

We will evaluate your individual requirements and propose a solution that best suits your needs.

Skills and specialisations:

We are well versed in the end-to-end process of gathering and interpreting requirements, formulating a solution proposal, developing against that proposal and finally releasing and supporting the finished piece of work.

There are a phenomenal number of elements involved in this process and even different techniques that can be used to approach this undertaking. Our experience provides us with an unrivalled toolset to support this undertaking and ensure that not only are all your requirments successfully gathered and interpreted, but also so that the delivery of the solution is achieved in a timely manner producing a solution that exceeds expectations.

The following list identifies the core skills that CTP currently has:

• General processes: Requirements gathering, Development methodologies, Documentation, etc
• Cold Fusion programming language (MX 7) (including Mach-ii framework)
• Classic ASP
• PHP (procedural and OO)
• Javascript (procedural and JSON)
• HTML/DHTML/CSS(2)
• Adobe (Allaire) Spectra
• XML/XSLT
• Server software: IIS & APACHE; including ANT, SSI, Redirect, Security and full Apache configuration
• 'Media Wiki' implementation and underlying architecture and construction
• AJAX / Remote scripting
• Regular Expressions
• SQL: Microsoft T-SQL, Oracle PL/SQL, MySQL & SQLite. This includes database design, configuration and support
• JAVA
• Software Configuration Management: Borland Starteam & Rational Clear Case/Clear Quest
• Version control: Starteam, Clear Case & Subversion
• Usability: basic, service & information acrhitecture and user testing strategy definition, undertaking and results interpretation - along with the process that companies use to actually develop and deliver solutions, 'Usability' is one of the most poorly addressed topics. When in reality it is crucial to the success of a solution

These skills provide us with the tools to support any of our clients requirements. This skllset also makes us confident that if it were necessary for us to support any technique or technology that is not on this list it would not be difficult for us to gain the necessary understanding to do so.