IT Services

Quite often, a company needs to manage several kinds of Web sites — usually an external Web site (Internet), one or several internal sites (intranet) and sometimes, B2B sites (extranet). Within each of these Web domains, individual sites can be very different depending on their function and purpose. For example, it is common to see combinations of corporate sites, marketing, customer support, portals, knowledge bases, forums and online applications. In large international corporations, one can count hundreds, if not thousands, of sites — often managed by different teams.

These teams deal with the following issues:

All companies are organized differently; in one company, the Webmaster role might be attached to the marketing/communication department; in another, the same role might be managed by the Information Technology (IT) department. Therefore, we will endeavour to focus on the benefits of Web standards in relation to the above issues rather than to a specific organizational role.

This insures a business’ competitive edge in this era where operating systems and applications are increasingly accessed and/or stored on the Internet. Web applications that can function on a variety of platforms or in a variety of contexts have been difficult to attain. Third-party protocols like Flash or Java’s “applets” have tried to bring more dynamism and user-friendly interactivity to web applications.

Other limitations of using web applications are the frustration and workflow interruptions that come from page-loading delays. However, the technologies encompassed in Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) try to enable web applications so they can function quickly and efficiently in a variety of contexts without this lag time.