Featured

Adrenaline Communications' team melds with your organization. We understand your goals, difficulties and culture before we define a single task.

Please have a look around in this section to get an indication of the diversity of our work.

The Full Picture

As the newly designed Progressive Staffing Solutions site was set to launch, they discovered that the sites appearance was not consistent in different browsers. Not only was it inconsistent depending on which browser you viewed the site in, the layout was mangled. Adrenaline was recommended to PSS as a source to consult. We examined code used to create the site and discovered that it was out of date and very problematic. We recoded the site maintaining the new design, as well as implementing a Content Management System allowing changes in the future to be easily executed.

Internet Evolution

The Internet is constantly changing. The shape that it takes is influenced by a number of factors. Because different browsers have traditionally interpreted, and therefore presented, code differently, it is often a struggle to get a web site to display and function consistently across all the major browsers. To solve this problem, browsers have steadily, though slowly (particularly in the case of Microsoft's Internet Explorer) moved to support web standards. The idea being that code display and functions consistently in any browser. One of the means of acheiving this consistency is the use of XHTML for content and CSS for layout and display. In other words, content code and display code are separated so that if you need the size of your Headings in your page turned to blue, or made larger, you modify the display code not the content code.

In the early days of the Internet, display and content code were mixed. Web developers who have not kept up with modern coding standards still mix them, which can cause the sort of problems we had in this and many other cases. Adding to the problem are developers that attempt to use modern code standards, but don't fully understand it. This is the chief problem with sites that do not display or function consistently across different browsers. Even if full standards are adhered to there are still some inconsistencies, which we try to minimize. In this case, it proved to be the perfect solution.

The Toolbox

Adrenaline used the following key elements for the Progressive Staffing Solutions website:

• Use of Standard CSS/XHTML
• A Content Management System

Standard CSS/XHTML

Adrenaline is committed to coding sites using web standards, which means using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for layout and XHTML for content. Using web standards ensures the site is accessible to a broad range of browsers. Standards also make the site Search Engine friendly, by making it easily indexed by the search engines. In addition, by separating presentation and content, the site design can be updated without having to recreate all the site's pages.

The Content Management System

A content management system, often referred to as a CMS, is a system that allows individuals who are not programmers to manage the content of the web site. Tasks include change, add, and delete content (text and graphic) as well as add or remove pages as needed. This is done by logging into the system through a browser. The content management is simple and quick, making changes much like you would if you were editing a Word document. With an hours worth of training, anyone can manage the content of a web site using the CMS we designed. The CMS model empowers our clients and allows them to make changes quickly and easily without additional costs. Alternately some clients prefer that we make changes. Our CMS speeds up those changes and saves costs in this model as well.

Because the system abstracts content from presentation, another great benefit of using a CMS is that should an organization opt for a new design there is no need to start from the ground up and redo the entire site. We are able to program a new look and use the existing content as well as easily modify the existing content. It's a return on investment that you may not see immediately, but over time it will pay for itself over and over again.

 

More Featured Productions

View more of our featured productions by selecting any of the items below.