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Welcome to Poised Solutions; an Information Technology consultancy, and Software Development house, operating in the Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Thames Valley, and London areas of the UK.

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Poised Solutions offers a host of bespoke web based services, from ecommerce, and presence sites to intranet business solutions.

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Primarily utilizing the BSD, Solaris, unix and Linux based platforms, Poised Solutions configures, installs and customizes a number of server based applications; Mail Servers, Web Servers, Firewalls, Databases, LDAP Servers and Virtual Private Networks.

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Poised Solutions offers, software design and analysis along with project management. Input from the client is always welcomed, and we are happy to work together to achieve the information technology system you desire.

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Application development from specification, in a number of modern and older languages, is also available. The language of implementation is often decided by best fit or existing infrastructure, so most languages are accommodated.

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For a comprehensive list of IT solutions offered by Poised Solutions, please visit the services page.

To get in contact with Poised Solutions to discuss Information Technology or marketing related projects; please visit the contact page.

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Page Commentary

The original home page of Poised Solutions, found through the index page of Poised Solutions. This was a deliberate move to reduce the exposure of Poised Solutions, and combined with a meta http refresh on the index page it meant that the search engines were less likely to rate this page. This position has now be changed and the Poised Solutions site is being used in a very search engine friendly fashion. Even with this in place the Poised Solutions site indexed fairly highly for various search terms.

The HTML code used was old style markup, and the new style markup has been applied. The new style, developed by Poised Solutions, allows for simpler changing of tag parameters whilst respecting the problems of white space. The new style of markup also shows quite clearly where certain ideas were used such as differing title and alt tags.

The navigation code, uses a contained div and anchor tags, this was used in preference to an unordered lists and list items, as it actually creates less code, though most of the newer sites that Poised Solutions has done uses the unordered list approach. The image tags do contain the border parameter, now that is handled in the CSS and even at the time it could have been, but by default a border will be drawn by a browser around an image unless turned off.

The document type specified was HTML transitional, and that seems to have bought the slash closing on single tags, those have been removed to no slash as per W3C recommendations, the jury use to be out on this one.

Spelling has been a little bad, in my defence I will call them typos. But, it does highlight a need to constantly check spelling as documents are updated, there is a tendency to write the text fairly fast, publish and then never read again, that needs to be addressed.

Comments in the markup are quite extensive, I must have been in a commenting mood at the time, but they are extraneous when it comes to markup and they have been removed.

Titles on anchor tags wrapping text are missing, that is something that doesn't happen with the newer sites, it acts as quite a good visual clue to get the title popup, and the title allows for longer text than perhaps the actual text allows.

The legacy site was written in a python web application server, this meant it was not necessary to supply file extensions. Over time though Poised Solutions has developed a better method of creating web sites, using a hybrid approach of a templating system offline and only an application server for the elements that require it.

The icons are always quite a hard one for IT sites, and this in part explains the purple pyramid. It actually gets used in different places to show login status, and at the time I was using povray (persistence of vision ray tracer), so a 3D icon seemed appropriate, though there was an internal debate. Well, the purple pyramid has gone on the new site, but not forgotten. The UK map was used to show local services to the UK, the idea may resurface but with the improvement in network connectivity most Poised Solutions services can be done anywhere in the world for anyone in the world so it is less of an issue.

The opener paragraph has endured, doing something to the first letter of the first paragraph of a page, is something that most Poised Solutions sites do, it helps track the eye to the content. The something has been refined though, due really to compatibility problems of layout in IE, normally it is colour that is now used.

Welcome has been removed as the first word of the copy, it was a bit of a tradition for a while, but nowadays front loading the context of the page has become more the norm for Poised Solutions sites, who knows if AI does improve the welcome may make a return.

Relative URLs appear to have been used quite often, currently Poised Solutions has moved to a full URL per anchor, in part the relative URL is useful in development, but the current templating system has been tweaked to allow a staging area and a change of URL prior to upload. It actually gets quite involved but this is not the place to explain how that mechanism works.

CSS integration into the new site, throws up a number of interesting CSS points, it would appear to be wise to break the design into elements and ensure each element conforms to it own design through all the css parameters. This does pose the problem of the cascading element of CSS and is worth further investigation to create exceptionally felxibile web pages.