Starting in 1996 already, Knipp has been developing Internet presences, especially for medium-sized companies from various industry sectors. In the beginning of the commercialisation of the World Wide Web, the first Internet agencies, just like Knipp, often approached companies with full service-offers, comprising the whole range of Internet services.

Today, the Internet is an »industry« of its own, with manifold and differentiated services that are characteristics of any ripe market. For every part of the value network »Internet«, specialised service providers have established themselves. There is almost no one-stop company nowadays which can offer all established Internet services, for instance from the areas online marketing, web analytics, usability, online shops and handling of payments.

Knipp, too, has been focussing, namely on the domain business, business provider services as well as software development for websites and related services.

In the beginning there is a meeting with you and your lead agency, in order to get to know you and your wishes and goals for your web project. The result of these talks is your requirements specification: a written »wish list« for your web presence. On the basis of the requirements specification, we work together with you and possibly your lead agency on the technical specification and on defining the structure and conceptual design of the web site.

Knipp can also take the role of the lead agency, of course. In this case, Knipp serves as a pilot as well. There may be services necessary for the implementation of your project that are not all offered by Knipp, for example in the areas conceptual and screen design, usability or web analytics. In these circumstances, the necessary services are pointed out, suitable experts are identified and taken aboard for your project.

Knipp's core area of expertise is the development of software for dynamic web pages with a large amount of programming. Depending on the specific technical demands of the customer and on the budget, different technologies, script and programming languages, and databases are used. The essence of the implementation of a web site is mirrored by the well-known markup languages for pages on the WWW, HTML and XHTML, as well as the declarative stylesheet language CSS. Both of these fall back on the server-side interpreted script languages Perl and PHP. These are mainly used by Knipp for technically less demanding projects with lower budgets.

In the high-end sector, Knipp exclusively uses the object-oriented programming language Java, which is one of the most secure, robust and well-performing programming languages. Additionally, further technologies like AJAX come into play if they are necessary or advantageous for the implementation of a specification. AJAX is a technology based on the client-side interpreted language JavaScript that uses the XML format for an asynchronous data exchange between web browser and web server. That allows to update and manipulate certain contents of a web page only, instead of always loading the whole page anew for each user interaction.

Regarding the use of databases, Knipp adopts a multi track strategy, too. In numerous web projects, the open source relational database management system MySQL Server has stood the test of time and is the »workhorse« of database developers. For other projects, the also free RDMS PostgreSQL is used, depending on the requirements of the resulting database application. At the high end of the performance and budget range Knipp relies upon the database ASE by the US-American company Sybase Inc.

No matter which database technology is actually used, a reliable data management has to be ensured at all times. To this end, well-performing and scalable databases are as important prerequisites as the know-how of the database developer when designing and implementing a system. That is why Knipp always has an eye on new developments like the non-relational, distributed database technologies that are summarized under the acronym NoSQL.

For lack of an alternative, Knipp developed its own content management system for web sites at the end of the 1990s. This system could be used intuitively and allowed customers of Knipp to update the contents of their web presence independently of an agency.

In the meantime there are powerful content management systems (CMS) available. Knipp banks on the widely used open source CMS TYPO3 and has already used it successfully in a number of projects. It goes without saying that you will be provided with a timely introduction and detailed training course of TYPO3 for your web site. We will be glad to give these presentations in your house if this is your wish. In case you would like to conserve your human resources, Knipp can also take over the continual maintenance and update of your web pages.

Apart from the continual manual updating and maintenance of classical contents of corporate web sites like news, press releases, job offers or references by responsible online editors, the automatic updating by database replication is of considerable importance. Often, companies already keep many pieces of information up-to-date in databases that are useful and usable for the web presence (e. g. enterprise resource planning systems, products and services catalogues). This fact can be used for updating the web page contents in two different ways: Either the web database is brought in line with the customer-side databases one or more times a day at certain times, or there is a direct online connection between the databases. In the latter case, changes made to the customer-side database become effective on the web page in real time. In both cases, the consistency of the data in the data sets is ensured. The database developers at Knipp have many years of experience in defining, managing and programming database interfaces. This is why you can be sure that in your project, too, the data replication will work smoothly.