About Graphic Impact

Graphic Impact is the web and graphics service of Stuart Johnson & Associates, a communications consultancy based in Wheaton Illinois. Our purpose is "making information make sense," through research, writing, presentations and websites.

Dynamic websites: Our website service is tailored to provide small organizations and businesses with dynamic, database-driven websites. This is ideal for organizations whose information includes documents, lists, links, calendars, etc. Once basic information is in the database, it can be viewed and used in multiple ways. A content management system (still being developed for our newly implemented site design architecture) allows clients to make many updates themselves.

Site design: Web design is a rapidly developing area. Frankly, while it's interesting, we can't afford to be on the "bleeding edge." We do, however, maintain a best practices approach to produce sites that make good use of current technology and techniques.

For example, in 2005, we started developing sites using a variation of "frameworks" and "model-view-controller" architecture, designed to separate data management and other behind-the-scenes functions from the actual web pages you look at (the "presentation" layer).

Our adaptation of this approach isolates the specific content on a page from the surrounding header, sidebars and navigation elements, as well as controlling database and other operations.

We make extensive use of cascading style sheets to maintain site-wide control of fonts and page layout. In fact, it is the combination of an elegantly simple site architecture and style sheets that makes possible the printing option made available on many pages—it simply passes the content through a print template, with its own styles, instead of the web page template and styles.

You'll find links to maps and driving directions throughout most of our sites. Cold Fusion enables us to automatically insert these whenever there is enough address information in the database. We recently switched from Yahoo! to RandMcNally mapping service. It's not used by many websites, but we liked it's accuracy and the fact that we can specify the name of the target location on the map. In some applications, we're starting to use GoogleMaps, which works especially well when showing multiple locations on a single map. .

Graphic Impact websites include e-mail (with plenty of mailboxes and disk space), the option of using the SmarterMail web-based email system, ample standard disk space and monthly traffic limits, and comprehensive statistics. A basic monthly report is emailed to clients each month, and much more extensive statistics can be examined. In addition, a quarterly trend report shows a graphic representation of a three-year history on site visits, page views, hits, and bandwidth—key items in judging a site's activity over time.

The tools we use:

We use the latest version of Adobe* Cold Fusion to work with MS-SQL databases. (Some older sites still use Access). You'll notice most of our site pages end with ".cfm" - on other sites you'll find other "server" technologies, such as "asp" and "php." We have found Cold Fusion to be a powerful and fast development platform. Cold Fusion is integrated into Adobe Dreamweaver, which we use for site design.
Graphics are prepared in Adobe Photoshop and Image Ready. The preparation of Photo Galleries, for example, uses batch processing in Image Ready and Adobe Bridge, making it possible to convert a package of client photos into an online collection in just a few minutes.
Adobe Flash is used for animations as well as some forms, tables and charts..
We are starting to use Adobe Flex, a powerful tool based on Flash technology to develop applications and interact with the database.
In addition, Flash technology (in the form of Adobe FlashPaper documents) is used in the rendering of documents and printer-friendly versions of pages. Using FlashPaper instead of Word documents on a site provides a version of the document that can be viewed and printed, but not saved directly to disk or edited.
In addition to FlashPaper, we also use Adobe Acrobat to prepare some documents as PDF files. We have the capability, for example, to convert client paper forms to versions that can be filled out online. Acrobat 8, released in November 2006, will improve the handling of such online forms.
* Adobe Systems bought Macromedia in 2006, so that Cold Fusion, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Flex are now identified as Adobe products