Futuretrend Technologies -Enhance your IT Solutions and Unleash the potential of your business

Futuretrend eBusiness Solutions

At Futuretrend we deliver all the services that makes the Internet and web technologies a successful business tool. Our core competencies are web design and development, content management systems, database-driven websites, portals, ecommerce solutions and online marketing.

Since 2000 we have created thousands of web sites, designs and multimedia applications for our clients. When creating web applications we primarily use industry standard Open Source web development languages, including PHP and MySQL. Where appropriate, we also use other languages and technologies.

Web Site Design

The primary task of a website is to deliver information to it's audience quickly and efficiently. We design websites which are search engine friendly, content rich and easy to navigate on just about any platform and connection speed, while still maintaining a high level of graphic and design quality. All our websites are designed from scratch as we are not keen on the use of templates. This means that each site is expressly designed for your purpose and around your companies existing (or new) image. Our best practice values ensure that your site is built with user experience and accessibility standards in mind.

Development of your website will usually start with an initial consultation to discuss your overall requirements, including the promotion, hosting and the sort of costs involved. If you are working within a budget, we will discuss this with you and propose the best options for the amount you want to spend. After the first consultation we will give you a quotation for the whole project based on your requirements as well as an idea of how the site will look. When it comes to your products, services and things you need existing or potential clients to know, no one knows them better than you. For this reason we like to work closely with you, especially in the early stage of the design and development of your website, so we get a good idea and feel for your business in order to propose the best concept for your website to learn more about how we can design a highly functional, visually stimulating and customer-focused Web site for you.

PORTALS

Futuretrend has deployed portals using the best of tried and tested open source frameworks that are available. A portal brings together interest groups, professions, associations or defined groups of any kind, filters vast information sources on the web, to their own specific interest. By using, as their entry point, a portal that is specifically targeted at their interest group people can quickly access the information they require. And more than that. They can also use the modules contained within that portal to communicate with like minded people, through business directories, forums, chat rooms, newsgroups, newsletters, member areas and even e-promotion schemes offering discounts to portal members or visitors.t us

The optimal solution in many cases may not rely on a single technology but a host of them working in tandem. This is the case especially when dealing with the integration of data which may be spread across disparate systems and accessible to the end users through portal-based applications.
To find out more about how Futuretrend can help you create a powerful and scalable portal,

E-COMMERCE

Futuretrend is proud to offer a range of ecommerce solutions. We work with a wide range of out-of-the-box apps which allow online stores to be setup fairly quickly and for free as an Open Source based solution released under the GNU General Public License.

Most of these are not only easy to setup and maintain, but also made easy for store administrators to present their stores to their customers with their own unique requirements. open source solutions provide a free and open e-commerce platform, which includes the powerful PHP web scripting language, the stable Apache web server, and the fast MySQL database server. With no restrictions or special requirements, most ecommerce tools we employ are able to run on any PHP3 or PHP4 enabled web server, on any environment that PHP and MySQL supports, which includes Linux, Solaris, BSD, and Microsoft Windows environments. Here are some of the features that your online store will have:

	Customer accounts
	Customer address books (other shipping destinations)
	Order history
	Temporary (not logged on) and permanent (logged on) shopping carts
	Search catalog for products or manufacturers
	Product reviews by customers
	E-mail notifications
	Forseen checkout procedure
	Secure transactions with SSL
	Number of products in each category are shown Bestseller lists
	Display what other customers have purchased (relating to the current product displayed)

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Futuretrend can give you the means to control the content of your Web site. No technical knowledge is needed because it is done through your Web browser from any location, and is password protected. Any of your staff will be able to use the admin area to keep your content up to date as often as you want. This could be content such as daily menus, stock availability or a searchable address book.

Your admin area would look like a form where you are prompted for details, and by changing the records a template displays the new information immediately on your Web site. Typically, we make use of popular opensource content management systems such as Joomla and PHPNuke but can also build solutions from bottom up to meet clients specification.

To have any chance of success, a content management project must follow the same user-centered design practices as any other project. Task analysis, rapid prototyping, usability testing — all of these methods are crucial to a CMS rollout. It’s foolhardy for instance, to unveil a huge, six-month project to an unsuspecting user community and expect adoption. We will provide you with first class advice and consultancy to ensure a successful and sustainable implementation of your content management system.

ONLINE MARKETING

Getting your website ranked high on major search engines isn't easy. Most search engines use complex algorithms to determine the position of your site in the returns on a keyword search - and the algorithms vary from engine to engine. On top of that, Google alone has 3 billion web pages indexed or recorded and millions of new web pages are created every day. Websites that haven't been optimized get lost, meaning no one can find you, let alone buy from you. Search Engine Optimisation is the answer.

Our initial approach is to adjust your content, text, tags and page names to ensure your site is picked up by search engine spiders. After all, if you can't be found, you can't put your well-designed website to work. There's more work to be done thereafter which involves a lot of specialist techniques. We believe Search Engine Optimisation is a work in progress and the moment you let your guard down your competition takes your spot.