Custom Software Development

How to save a lot of money on web design..

Nexus Software — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:36:00 -0400

The way to save a lot of money on web design and still have a professional site is to start with a high quality webdesign template, these templates can be modified and customized to be exactly they way you would like them to be with your own logo and content. They are developed by professional designers that have been making websites for years. There are thousands to choose from and many of them are less than $100.

With the money you save not hiring a professional web designer to make a custom design, you can probably afford to add some real functionality to your website like dynamic content, interact user applications, a blog and much more.

Could your website be better?

Nexus Software — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:12:00 -0400

In most cases your website could be better.
The way to be sure is to look at the tangible elements of your website.

Is your website completely functional?
Does your website provide your visitors with what they came for? For example, if you have a real estate website. Does your website enable your visitors(current and potential customers) to search for and find property listings based on the criteria that they specify?
If your company sells products or services. Are your customers able to easily locate all of the information pertaining to a particular product or service? Are they able to easily make purchase?
Are your website's vistitors able to easily contact you or someone who can answer their questions?
Does your website provide fresh dynamic, relevant content based on your user's interests?
Is your website user friendly?
Are you able to easily update any and all of your website's content?
Does your website have all the features you would like it to have?

If the answer to all of the above questions is yes, then your website maybe as good as it can be, at least in terms of the functionality.
The design elements are a different concept and are a lot less tangible except where they interfere with or influence the usability of your website.
You could change the colors or graphics forever and still only please some of your website's users some of the time.
Everyone has a different opinion about what looks good to them. If your website is providing what your users want in terms of functionality, then their opinion of your choice of colors probably won't matter too much. Conversely, how many times would you visit the most beautiful(in your opinion) website, if it didn't provide you with the functionality you required? Fortunately, the design is the easiest part of a website to implement and modify.

Lastly but certainly not of least importance is the search engine friendliness of your website.
Organic search engine traffic and visitors from direct links from related websites is the highest quality and least expensive traffic your website will get.
These traffic sources tend to work together. As having links to your website from other related websites will enhance your website's search engine ranking and having a good search engine position will inspire other related websites to link to your's.
This creates a snowball effect that will provide your website with a lot of high quality traffic.

Please contact us to learn more about making your website better.

How to choose your web developer / programmer

Nexus Software — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:03:00 -0400

You would like to enhance or create a website for your business. It seem like everyone is a web developer nowadays. Where do you go to get your website developed with the design, features and functionality you would like to have?

We think the functionality is the most important part of a website. Content management systems, property listings, blog engines and contact applications. Anything that enhances the usabilty and value of your website.

These dynamic applications, while enhancing your website for your vistitors and making your web site easier to maintain also provide tremendous results in terms of organic searchengine traffic.

When you have an application that works well, saves people time and money by enabling and organizing their activities, they will want to use that application, which is your website. We think in terms of design for the Web, simpler is better. Yes, you want it to look professional and attractive, but not to the point of detracting from the use of your Website. Why risk turning some people off because the graphics are taking too long to load on their dial up connection? Clean and well functioning makes for a high performance, useful, revenue generating website.

The user interface or overall design elements of your Website, the graphics, layout and colors are all very subjective. For this reason we think Website templates are a good place to start, there are many to choose from. Our Website template designers have been creating Website designs for more than 10 years, they have gotten very good at it. With the templates, for around $100, you know what you are getting, a high quality Web design. Having a professional Web designer make a similar quality custom website design would cost at least $1500, without any programming. Even if the template needs to be modified to achieve the results you would like, you would be starting $1400 ahead. You save a great deal of development time as well.

Every aspect of these templates can be modified. Regrdless of the programming language used to create the dynamic aspects of your website, ASP.net, PHP or Cold Fusion, a website template can be easily applied to your application's framework, which provides you with a lot of freedom in terms of the look and feel of your Website.

Therefore, instead trying to find a Web designer, that may or may not be able to create exactly what you would like, and paying them a lot of money. Choose a web design template that you know you like and invest your savings in customizing it to be your own and the more important functional aspects and productive aspects of your website.

When you are ready, please contact us to have your Website developed or to learn more about your options.

Google Base Housing : The new free MLS / IDX?

Nexus Software — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:03:00 -0400

For years, much to the detriment of real estate buyers, sellers, agents and brokers alike, real estate listings have been restricted by Multiple Listings Services(MLS) that subscribed to an IDX(Internet Data eXchange) to provide access to listings in a particular area for a fee. Now, with Google's open Base Housing API(Application programming interface), which is still in beta, but already has close to 7 million real estate listings, we think the typical MLS will become a thing of the past. They cannot compete with Google's data capacity, technical prowess or ability to provide exceptional traffic to a particular real estate listing. It's free to list properties, free to view properties and is gaining momentum from Internet savvy brokerages and agents. This is great for just about everyone involved. Having real estate listed on Google Base provides tremendous exposure for homes that are for sale or rent. Google Base enables everyone to access these listings for free, as well. This provides a transparency that very well could bring real estate prices into a better perspective. With everyone having the same access to real estate listings, true home values can be more accurately assessed and it opens up a great opportunity for home buyers to research properties for sale.

We have implemented a very basic interface to Google's Base Housing data at : http://nexwebsites.com/Real-Estate/

Custom Real Estate Management Software

Nexus Software — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:49:00 -0400

Custom Real Estate Management Software - For Resale

Dr.Landlord:

The Challenge
Our customer, Property Direct Inc. wanted a custom real estate management software application that they would be able to use for their own business as well as to resell to other property management companies. They had an Access database that contained many of the tables that they use in their business, which they wanted to base the functionality of their new real estate management software on. They wanted to modify some of these tables and add new ones to enable more features.

The Solution
After analyzing Property Direct Inc.'s Access database along with their specifications for their new real estate management software. We suggested some ways in which they would be able to improve the performance of their application and insure data integrity by restructuring their tables and normalizing their database. Being in the real estate business, Jesse at Property Direct Inc. had a clear understanding of the features, functionality and design that they wanted for their property management software. He was also very good at being able to convey these ideas to us with precise descriptions of the functions and screen shots of their desired user interface. This enabled us to create an even better software application than they had envisioned. As we were able to suggest new features and ways in which their software could be improved during the development process.

The Benefits
Property Direct Inc.'s own property management business has been greatly enhanced by the use of their custom designed software and they have made back their initial investment many times over and continue to make money everyday from sale of their custom designed real estate management software.

Please contact us to learn more about custom real estate management software for your company.

Custom Board of Realtors website

Nexus Software — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:50:00 -0400

"I spoke with many companies prior to choosing Nexus Software Systems. Everything that I was promised was delivered completely and within a short period of time. Our new website is not only exactly what we wanted, it will last us for years. The developers at Nexus Software Systems are extremely helpful, very knowledgeable and patient!"

Kathryn Townsend - Townsend Real Estate, President of the Greater Portland Board of REALTORS®.

Greater Portland Board of REALTORS® website:

The Challenge
Our customer's old Board of REALTORS® website needed a complete redesign with the ability for the administrator to easily manage the site's content and features.

The Solution
The Greater Portland Board of REALTORS® new website was custom designed to utilize a powerful content management system in order to enable the easy administration of all the site's many new features.

Kathryn's input was instrumental in the design of this website. She is a very smart lady, who knows exactly what she wants. Which made our job, to provide her with exactly that, much easier.

The Benefits
The Greater Portland Board of REALTORS® now has a greatly impoved site, with many powerful features including dynamic content, a real estate listing portal, events calendar, real estate agents database and the ability for the administrator to easily edit every aspect of their new website.

Please contact us to learn more about a custom real estate website for your company.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Nexus Software — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:52:00 -0400

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) produced by Microsoft. Its primary query languages are T-SQL, Entity-SQL and ANSI SQL.

The current version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2008, (code-named "Katmai") was released on August 6, 2008 and aims to make data management self-tuning, self organizing, and self maintaining with the development of SQL Server Always On technologies, to provide near zero downtime. SQL Server 2008 will also include support for structured and semi-structured data, including digital media formats for pictures, audio, video and other multimedia data. In current versions, such multimedia data can be stored as BLOBs (binary large objects), but they are generic bitstreams. Intrinsic awareness of multimedia data will allow specialized functions to be performed on them. According to Paul Flessner, senior Vice President, Server Applications, Microsoft Corp., SQL Server 2008 can be a data storage backend for different varieties of data: XML, email, time/calendar, file, document, spatial, etc. as well as perform search, query, analysis, sharing, and synchronization across all data types. Other new data types include specialized date and time types and a Spatial data type for location-dependent data. Better support for unstructured and semi-structured data is provided using the new FILESTREAM data type, which can be used to reference any file stored on the file system. Structured data and metadata about the file is stored in SQL Server database, whereas the unstructured component is stored in the file system. Such files can be accessed both via Win32 file handling APIs as well as via SQL Server using T-SQL; doing the latter accesses the file data as a BLOB. Backing up and restoring the database backs up or restores the referenced files as well. SQL Server 2008 also natively supports hierarchical data, and includes T-SQL constructs to directly deal with them, without using recursive queries. The Full-Text Search functionality has been integrated with the database engine, which simplifies management and improves performance.

SQL Server now includes better compression features, which also helps to improve scalability. It also includes a Resource Governor that allows reserving resources for certain users or workflows and capabilities for transparent encryption of data as well as compression of backups. SQL Server 2008 supports the ADO.NET Entity Framework and the reporting tools, replication, and data definition to be built around the Entity Data Model.

Custom Database Software

Nexus Software — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 10:21:00 -0400

“Nexus Software Systems' custom database software enabled us to integrate our offline database with our web site.”

Jessica Sybel
AutoFindParts.com

The Challenge
Our customer was concerned about being able to use data from a variety of sources and be able to integrate it with their new website.

The Solution
AutoFindParts.com chose Nexus Software Systems to develop and implement their custom database solution and website because we were able to provide a custom software application which interacts with a variety of data feeds in order to populate their online database with dynamic search results, which was then able to be integrated with their new custom website.

The Benefits
AutoFindParts.com has saved a great deal time and money and they continue benefit everyday, because their solution was able to be implemented quickly according to their exact specifications, integrates perfectly with their current system, required very little additional training and enables them to have complete control over every aspect of their online application.

Custom Property Management Software

Nexus Software — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 10:17:00 -0400

"Nexus Software Systems provided us with exactly with what we needed for much less than we could find anywhere."

Emily Rosen
First Choice Realty

The Challenge
Our customer needed a custom designed property management software application that would be able to help them manage their properties. They also wanted to utilize and modify their current Access database, which they had been using for years without many features or functions that they needed.

The Solution
First Choice Realty chose Nexus Software Systems to develop their custom property management software because we were able to design their software to help them to stay organized, save time and work with them in a way that enhances their business by keeping track of their properties, tenants and financial transactions and automates many of the tasks that were done manually. We upgraded their old Access database to an SQL Server database which provides them with increased performance, with all of the functions and features that enable them to better manage their business.

The Benefits
First Choice Realty is now able to quickly determine the status of any of their properties or tenants and has been able to increase their number of properties by 150% because of the enhanced efficiency of their custom designed software system.

Please contact us to learn more about custom property management software for your company.

Microsoft .NET Framework

Nexus Software — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:27:00 -0400

The Microsoft .NET Framework, yes it's sweet from a software developer's perspective.

What exactly is the Microsoft .NET Framework?

It is a software framework available for Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98 and above It includes a large library of pre-written software to prevent common programming problems and a virtual machine that manages the execution of programs written specifically for the framework. The .NET Framework is a key Microsoft offering and is used by most new applications created for the Windows platform.

Using the .Net Framework software developers can greatly reduce the amount of code and maintenance required for data-oriented applications.
The framework's Base Class Library provides a large range of features including user interface, data access, database connectivity, cryptography, security advancements, web application development, numeric algorithms, and network communications. The class library is used by programmers, who combine it with their own software to create applications. This in part, is based on the idea of re-usable code, which by the way, isn't a new idea by any means. I remember writing software in Assembly language nearly 25 years ago and still being able to call lower level functions that had already been written. Device drivers or low level hardware interface functions for example.

Prior to the Microsoft .Net framework software applications that were written for Windows had to be distributed with all of their dependencies, in the form of Dynamic Link Libraries(DLLs) and other external resources, used during runtime. Which caused a lot of problems with different versions of a particular DLL, missing dependencies and compatibility with what you already had installed on your system.

Programs written for the .NET Framework execute in a software environment that manages the program's runtime requirements. Also part of the .NET Framework, this runtime environment is known as the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR provides the appearance of an application virtual machine so that programmers need not consider the capabilities of the specific CPU that will execute the program. The CLR also provides other important services such as security, memory management, and exception handling. The class library and the CLR together compose the .NET Framework.

How does the .Net framework benefit you, if your are not a software developer?

Running software that was written for the .Net framework, means your applications are much more reliable and secure, your system is much less likely to crash or freeze up. In terms of having custom software developed for your business, it means your application can be developed much more rapidly, with more features, that will run reliably on any machine that is also running the .Net Framework.

Version 3.0 of the .NET Framework is included with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. The current version of the framework can also be installed on Windows XP and the Windows Server 2003 family of operating systems. A reduced "Compact" version of the .NET Framework is also available on Windows Mobile platforms, including smartphones. If you are running Windows XP or Vista, it is probably on your machine now. Learn more at Microsoft.