Internet Design, Development and Programming Services:

This website and this tabbed control is a prime example of what can be done in ASP.NET.  Of course it cannot be easily done without the right tools and that does not mean the free edition of Visual Studio.  CIT invests heavily in software, the full version of MSDN is $2,299 and we have the full legal version.  This tabbed control is not part of Visual Studio, instead it is from Developer's Express, another $1,499 for the Enterprise version.  Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection is another $1,600, we have that too.  Add two powerful desktops, a laptop and a couple of 25 inch LCD monitors and you may understand why I am not enthusiastic about designing a $250 websites.  But if you want a first-class website that does not look like your nephew slapped it together in Word Press over a weekend, come to me.  My prices start at about $500 which is less than most of my competition.

There are several approaches to websites.  The basic approach is a marketing website, sometimes called a glorified business card.  Almost every website should start with a Home Page and a Contact Page explaining your business and telling customers how to contact you.

An eCommerce website is another approach, it adds an actual Store to the 2 marketing pages.  This can be as simple as a PayPal Buy It Now button or it can be a full implementation that rivals Amazon in complexity.  CIT has a full implementation of eCommerce.  Perhaps more importantly, we can support it for you, so you are not in your store updating inventory at midnight after having closed your physical store at 9 PM.  Not every businessperson is computer literate enough to maintain one of the generic eCommerce "solutions" that the big vendors provide "cheaply".  Some of you might even want to see your family rather than the computer when you get home too.  I implement eCommerce solutions but I don't track your inventory - that is a service for my associates to do if you don't want to do it.

A website can also be a business tool for out-of-office employees.  Sometimes it is easier and less expensive to provide your employees with exactly what they need rather than change your business to match a generic solution like Google Apps.  You know your business and what it needs; if you can't find an attractive generic solution, call CIT.    ...more

SQL Database Design & Development:

Popular databases include:

• Oracle: Oracle databases are uncommon in small or even medium sized companies but they are often no more expensive than Microsoft's SQL Server. If you are designing a database and expect to have tables with hundreds of thousands of records, or if you are designing a data warehouse for complex what-if reporting, then consider Oracle. Optimizing a query so that it runs in 1 minute instead of 10 hours is best done in Oracle.
• Microsoft SQL Server: SQL Server is the standard for medium sized companies or smaller departments in a big company. SQl Server is easy to implement and support but harder to optimize than Oracle. There is a free version that works well for small businesses and a full version comes with some versions of Microsoft Small Business Server.
• PostgreSQL: The main difference between Oracle and PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server is that PostgreSQL is FREE and open source. I highly recommend it rather than paying $10,000 or $100,000 for a big implementation of Oracle or SQL Server. Getting it installed and getting me up to speed again is going to take me a week, as opposed to a few hours on Microsoft SQL Server.
• Others: Microsoft Access is not free but it is a great front end to a real SQL Server database. As a stand-alone platform it is slow and the syntax for SQL statements is not industry standard SQL. MySQL is free but not open source and should only be used with small databases that will never need to be optimized.

Please consider CIT Services if you are looking to implement a real database using Oracle, SQL Server or PostgreSQL.  I'm really not interested in the others unless you are just using Access as a front-end.  I am not an official DBA but I have done DBA work for over 10 years and I don't charge $100 an hour.  As a Database Developer, creating tables, writing Stored Procedures, I am the greatest bargain in CT as my productivity is very high and my rates are low.     ...more

Website Promotion, Search Engine Optimization:

You can have the world's most attractive and flashy website but if nobody is visiting your website, you are losing business. SEO is the art and science of getting Google, Yahoo, MSN and other Search Engines to place your website high in search results.  The days of encyclopedias and printed Yellow Pages are over, few people use them any more.  When people want to know something, they turn to Google, Yahoo, and occasionally MSN.  Something can be who are the New England Patriots going to draft, a recipe for potato salad or who is the best website designer near Enfield CT. If you have a business, you want people who are searching for the goods or services you provide to find your website.

Every decade has it's fads some of which survive and become mainstream technology, others of which don't.  Social media, Facebook and the like.  Note that I no longer have a Facebook account(or rather I have an inactive Facebook account, there is no way that I know of to get rid of it and purge my personal information from their database) but I do have a Google+ account. If you have guessed that I disapprove of Facebook, you are correct.  The point is that most businesses should have a top-shelf website first and then if do the social media thing.  It boils down to: Social media gives you an internet presence to people who already know about you while a website allows people that don't know about you to find you.  SEO helps those strangers to find you.  A first-class website sets you apart from your competition.  A Social Media page looks just like everyone else's Social Media page and is - well - boring in comparison to a first-class website.

Google+ account

Effective SEO starts with a properly designed and syntax error free website.  It never ends but the critical points are links from websites that are respected by Google and the other search engines, and knowing who you want to attract to your website and what they are likely to be specifically looking for.  For this reason, contracting SEO outside the USA is a bad idea, you have no control over links from a website that Google has or will blacklist and it is very difficult for someone in Asia to understand American cultural nuances.     ...more

Application Development for Windows using .NET, SQL Server and WPF:

Windows Presentation Foundation is the recommended-by-Miscrosoft replacement for Windows Forms.  It allows a developer to design using a combination of XML for the user interface and C# for the logic.  Some people say that tablets and smart phones will replace Windows PC's.  Maybe, for the Facebook crowd but not in the business world where productivity matters more than extreme portability.

Since August of 2011 I have been working about 15 hours a week for Bishop's Auto Parts in Middletown CT.  I have completed 3 applications to arrange and inventory recycled parts as they come off a recycled vehicle.  These applications have greatly improved employee productivity, changing tasks that used to take hours to under 5 minutes and putting parts with picures onto eBay minutes after they came off the car instead of weeks later - if at all.  Currently I am working on a Quote system so that when a customer calls for a quote on an engine or smaller part, they automatically get an email within a few minutes with the vehicle, part and quote data plus pictures.  Typically about 10 quotes per hour are processed and we expect the sales rate to increase dramatically.  Since an engine may be quoted at several thousdand dollars, this is potentially a very profitable system.  All these applications pull data from a Microsoft SQL Server database and update that database.

If you need something more than Microsoft Office and QuickBooks to help you profitably run your business, please contact CIT Services.  You don't need to commit to 40 hours a week for 3 months at $75 an hour to get the relatively simple applications your business needs.  You don't need to pay a consultant and a project manager big $$$ to tell you it can't be done or that you will have to hire 2 programmers, a DBA, a Project Manager and a lawyer to write the contract. One of the truths in the software development industry is that an expert programmer is 5 times as productive as an average programmer and only costs twice as much.  That is an understaement, an expert programmer does not need a DBA or a Project Manager.  And, guess what, if your on-site time requirements are flexible I typically cost LESS than that average programmer who can't be trusted around a live database and needs a Project Manager to tell him that he is 2 weeks behind schedule on a 4 week project.  You also won't hear excuses about the programmer in India who quit half way through the project and now they can't find the source code.  From CIT, you will get a solid application that does what you want it to do efficiently and costs about 25% of what others charge.      ...more