info@HolophrasticEnterprises.com  •  416-230-1410
 
Building systems
that have never
been built before

Small business can have big-business technology.

Custom web-sites, custom business software, eCommerce, dashboards, project management & architecture, data-privacy & accessibility compliance, software consulting, Solution Reporting™, and Augmented Video Reality™.

Streamlining businesses for over 30 years.

Small business can have big-business technology.

Custom web-sites, custom business software, eCommerce, dashboards, project management & architecture, data-privacy & accessibility compliance, software consulting, Solution Reporting™, and Augmented Video Reality™.

Streamlining businesses for over 30 years.

Small business can have big-business technology.

Custom web-sites, custom business software, eCommerce, dashboards, project management & architecture, data-privacy & accessibility compliance, software consulting, Solution Reporting™, and Augmented Video Reality™.

Streamlining businesses for over 30 years.

 

Small business can have big-business technology.

Custom web-sites, custom business software, eCommerce, dashboards, project management & architecture, data-privacy & accessibility compliance, software consulting, Solution Reporting™, and Augmented Video Reality™.

Streamlining businesses for over 30 years.

 
     

Accountability. Responsibility. Trust.
+1 (416) 230-1410
info@HolophrasticEnterprises.com
© Holophrastic Enterprises Inc.

Stream-lining businesses for over 30 years. Web-sites, e-commerce, dashboards, business software, touch screen kiosks, IOT solutions growing small businesses without additional staff.

 
 
      Custom Web-Site Development
 
Promotional, Portfolio, & Single-Purpose Sites

In generaly, single-purpose web-sites are limited in scope, and have a narrow, very well-defined objective. They need not be sales-oriented.


Promotional web-sites act as on-line brochures, have a set-number of pages (few or many), and mostly-static content.


Portfolio web-sites act as on-line showcases, are usually based on a growing-library of photographs.


Information Capture web-sites centre around one or multiple input forms that ultimately prompt the visitor to enter information in order to register for something: an event, a download, a request, a survey.


Publication web-sites centre around article content (text, video, etc), for public reference, official announcement, magazine, or recreational blog.


Services, Catalogues, and Corporate Sites

Corporate web-sites cover the same gamut as corporations do. Their content tends to require multi-departmental approval in consideration of corporate image and return-on-investment.


Product Catalogues might have a handful of products, or tens-of-thousands of SKUs.


Service Offerings might be simple text, or custom on-line tools.


Education Courses might be scheduled classes, or on-line offerings.


In any case, R.O.I. guides development of all kinds of fancy features to meet business goals.


Community, Club, and Organization sites                

Community-oriented web-sites focus on a social objective. They often have no profit objective at all.


Social club web-sites serve recreational clubs of any kind, organizing members and acting as a communication hub.


Charity web-sites aim for low-cost options, sacrificing efficiency in favour of greater contributions.


Community calendars focus on co-ordinating a defined population, usually in terms of reserving resources or disseminating information.


Match-making web-sites need not be romantic. Matching the right person to the right solution might be a destination, a service, a resource, or a piece of information.


Private Social Networks are portals (like Facebook), dedicated to a given industry, or a defined population.


High-Capacity Sites

High-Capacity web-sites have very high traffic needs, storage needs, or calculation needs. These requirements are so high that maintaining performant speeds is what dictates what can and cannot be done.


A wealth of techniques must come together in order to ensure that these sorts of projects are possible in the first place. Even more techniques are required in order to ensure that these projects can grow in the future at all, without requiring a complete redesign.


High-capacity web-sites depend on a detailed deployment & execution strategy to avoid being forever-in-development.


Confidential Communications & Severing

Some projects deal with highly-sensitive information. We're not talking credit cards here. Think medical problems, therapist notes, badge numbers, and trade secrets.


This is the kind of information that ideally would never be recorded in the first place; but computers don't work that way.


Deciding when to store the data, how to store the data, how to use the data without exposing it, and then how to completely sever the relationship between the data and the author, or how to entirely destroy the data, that's the job.


Sometimes lives depend on it.


Augmented Video Reality™

Augmented Video Reality™ is a Holophrastic-invented technology. It's new. It's bewildering. It was a dream ten years ago, but wasn't a technical possibility until 2020.


Perhaps you remember choose-your-own-adventure books. Perhaps you remember '90s video games like Myst and 7th Guest.


AVR™ is that kind of choose-your-own-adventure video presentation. It's the perfect tradeshow booth tour. It's the most interactive instructional video. It's a recorded video production, sequence-controlled by the visitor, complete with dynamic overlays and interactive elements.


Infinitely-Granular User Permissions

Some projects have multiple users. Sometimes different users have different permissions. Maybe managers can change content. Maybe supervisors can run reports. But that's all too easy.


In the real world, permissions often need to be much more granular. This person can run this report only for these date ranges and only on these products, and only from this office.


In a similar vein, maybe this user can make this change, but the change doesn't get published until it gets approved by that other user. Or unless it gets denied by that other user.


There's no restriction on what kinds of permission-requirements might come up, nor when. Maybe this user can rewind time and see what things were like in the past, or how they're scheduled to be in the future.


Whatever your business, and however it grows, user permissions can be developed at any level. Secure content might need to be secure internally as well. That's business.

Visitor-Driven Content
                

Some web-sites have too much content; too much for any single visitor to consume. Maybe it's hundreds of articles, years of financial advice, thousands of products, dozens of services. Not every item is suitable for every visitor. Searchable? Sure, but that presumes the visitor understands how to find what pertains to them.


                

In the cases where visitors aren't privvy (or savvy) to your industry, we build things inside-out instead.


                

The content being presented is chosen on the visitor's behalf. That may be based on a few questions, how they reached the site, what they've already done on the site.


                

This might be as simple as "product recommendations" based on past products purchased, or it might be "other's like you enjoyed this".


Micro-Sites & Sister-Sites
                

Some projects blur the line between "one" and "multiple" web-sites.


                

Sister-Sites are designed to appear to be independent from one-another, but share a backend -- maybe a database, administration panels, or entire codebases.


                

As sister-sites, they might present a different corporate image, different visitor experiences, and may serve a different class of customer, all from the same superset of content.


                

Micro-Sites are designed to appear to be a single site, when in reality they are maintained by different entities.


                

Micro-sites are often seen as a collection of pages, perhaps a company's list of manufacturers, where each manufacturer has a dedicated profile page. In actuality, each manufacturer administers their own profile page, as a micro-site within the company's site.


Simple/Complete eCommerce, Order & Checkout
                

eCommerce comes in many shapes and sizes. It can be as easy as clicking a single button to instantly pay, or as complicated as selecting multiple products, navigating a shopping cart and a checkout process.


                

Invoices, receipts, and shipping integration, past purchases, product recommendations, and feedback all adorn the one line of code that charges the customer.


                

Projects charge credit cards, debit cards, pre-paid customer accounts, and non-monetary customer accounts.


                

When it comes to transfering real monetary funds, there are many options available. Some release the funds sooner, some have greater processing fees, some are more secure, some are more flexible. Your requirements and your business priorities will determine the best option for your project.

Multi-Language / Multi-Audience Sites
                

Some web-sites are presented in multiple spoken languages: English, French, Spanish, et cetera. You might also consider altering verbiage for other audience shapes: masculine, feminine, child-appropriate.


                

Automated translation is quick and painless, when it's suitable.


                

Background human translation can automatically ship off your English content to human translators, and re-integrate it just as soon as it's ready.


Interactive Live Chat
                

You've seen them before -- click here to chat with a live agent. Traditionally it's been text-only, though video conference is certainly a modern option.


                

As a customer/sales/tech support mechanism, it can be heralded as a highly-efficient use of personnel -- staff can handle multiple customers concurrently, while maintaining a complete record for future analytics and training.


E-Mail & SMS Automation
                

Automatically sending e-mails (and text messages) has become a staple of web-site interaction. Sent immediately, event-triggered, or scheduled for later; broadcast to hundreds or thousands of recipients, or narrowcast to a select few, they can be as simple as a single sentence, or as complex as a statement of a customer's account history. Plain text or a beautiful layout matching your corporate design.


                
                

Business Clarity: maybe you'd like a text-message as soon as one of your investors visits your site -- a great time to call them. Or when a visitor looks at a particular product, or spends a long time doing so. Maybe you want to know when a certain announcement has been viewed a thousand times. Or when your assistant finishes publishing that new product page.


                

Algo-selection: let's send only to customers who spent more than $100, but not the ones who live in this city, unless they purhased one of these three SKUs, but not if they work for that company -- and let's schedule it to be sent next Friday, but calculated on Tuesday's data. Your business has realities, and your business has strategies. We don't require them to be boring.

Selection Wizards & Configurators
                

Does your catalogue have hundreds of similar products? Dozens of similar services? Often they are very different to you, but very similar to your customers.


                

You've seen these kinds of Product Wizards: "help me choose" or "which one is right for me". The visitor is presented with a handful of questions to describe their scenario in their own terms, and are ultimately presented with a narrowed list of options.


                

Similarly, Configurators build up a customized offering from a product- or service-line. Add this option, in this colour, with this graphic.

Customer Order Tracking
                

You've seen Customer Order Tracking before: enter your reference number and see how your order is progressing -- received, backordered, ready to ship, in-transit. That sort of thing.


                

Taken much more broadly, we're talking about exposing internal back-office information to specific outside visitors on your web-site.


Discussion Forums
                

Discussion groups have become a standard element of many web-sites. Essentially, they allow visitors to communicate with each-other.


                

Some businesses with very large customer bases use discussion groups to allow customers to help each-other, to avoid over-burdening customer service staff.


                

Other businesses choose to interact with their customers through these discussion groups in order to build a library of support material.


                

Of course, discussion groups are useful for non-business web-sites as well. They are staples of recreational clubs, technical references, videogamers, sports enthusiasts, and hobby-goers of all sorts.


Long-Term Future-proofing
                

To paraphrase H.G. Wells: what is the value of a perfect web-site that exists for no time at all?


                

Future-proofing comes from the wisdom of knowing how the industry will change over time, and how your business needs will change over time. Acting accordingly ensures that your web-site not only lasts for many years, but that it evolves in tandem with your business, and never becomes a chokepoint.


Custom Intelligent Search Algorithms
                

You're no-doubt familiar with simple site search; not unlike a google search, they find your words in a library of content, and list headlined results. Of course, even with billions of pages to index, even google has some more detailed results at the top.


                

But your product catalogue and your service offerings aren't billions of completely different pages of global content. Therefore, an intelligent search can do so much better.


                

You've spoken with your customers. You know what words they tend to use; what mistakes they tend to make. You know they aren't searching for the legal disclaimer. You know that some words mean a lot more than others.


                

On the results side, you know when visitors are looking for the product page, or just a quick product manual. Results don't need to be uniform, and they don't need to be simple links.


                
                

Competition-aware search: what happens if your visitors search for your competition's product names? Do you show them no results? What would you say in-person? You'd direct them to your competitive product -- and then highlight what makes yours better!


                

Discontinued products: ...and if they search for a product that you discontinued last year? Do you again show them no results? Wouldn't you want to direct them to the replacement product? Or to the support materials for the discontinued product? Or to the recall notice?


      Custom Business Software Development
 
Zero-Prep Presentation Systems

Stop spending days preparing powerpoint presentations, slide-decks, sales presentations, and keynote speeches. No need to prep, no need to rehearse, no need to fret about staying-on-script, and no need to demand that audiences wait until the end to ask questions.


Say what needs to be said. Go off-topic. Jump around. Take questions. Get interrupted. Be interactive, engaging, and professional.


Dynamic Dashboards
Warehouse Production Dashboards
                                                                Administrative dashboards
Contact Management
Business Process Streamlining
Confidential Communications & Severing
medical, badge numbers
Custom Adminterfaces
Integration w/ Other Software
accounting integration to extend and track new things
Custom Algorithms & Tools
Infinitely Granular User Permissions

Some projects have multiple users. Sometimes different users have different permissions. Maybe managers can change content. Maybe supervisors can run reports. But that's all too easy.


In the real world, permissions often need to be much more granular. This person can run this report only for these date ranges and only on these products, and only from this office.


In a similar vein, maybe this user can make this change, but the change doesn't get published until it gets approved by that other user. Or unless it gets denied by that other user.


There's no restriction on what kinds of permission-requirements might come up, nor when. Maybe this user can rewind time and see what things were like in the past, or how they're scheduled to be in the future.


Whatever your business, and however it grows, user permissions can be developed at any level. Secure content might need to be secure internally as well. That's business.

Geography Calculations & Coverage
Invoicing, Receipts, eCommerce, order tracking
Complex Commission Calculators
Barcodes, QR Codes, Scanners
Automated Printing
High-speed printing
Interactive Live Chat
                

You've seen them before -- click here to chat with a live agent. Traditionally it's been text-only, though video conference is certainly a modern option.


                

As a customer/sales/tech support mechanism, it can be heralded as a highly-efficient use of personnel -- staff can handle multiple customers concurrently, while maintaining a complete record for future analytics and training.


Document Servers
Vast Document Library Search
Scheduling, Calendars, Co-ordinating Humans
E-Mail & SMS Automation
                

Automatically sending e-mails (and text messages) has become a staple of web-site interaction. Sent immediately, event-triggered, or scheduled for later; broadcast to hundreds or thousands of recipients, or narrowcast to a select few, they can be as simple as a single sentence, or as complex as a statement of a customer's account history. Plain text or a beautiful layout matching your corporate design.


                
                

Business Clarity: maybe you'd like a text-message as soon as one of your investors visits your site -- a great time to call them. Or when a visitor looks at a particular product, or spends a long time doing so. Maybe you want to know when a certain announcement has been viewed a thousand times. Or when your assistant finishes publishing that new product page.


                

Algo-selection: let's send only to customers who spent more than $100, but not the ones who live in this city, unless they purhased one of these three SKUs, but not if they work for that company -- and let's schedule it to be sent next Friday, but calculated on Tuesday's data. Your business has realities, and your business has strategies. We don't require them to be boring.

Long-Term Future-proofing
                

To paraphrase H.G. Wells: what is the value of a perfect web-site that exists for no time at all?


                

Future-proofing comes from the wisdom of knowing how the industry will change over time, and how your business needs will change over time. Acting accordingly ensures that your web-site not only lasts for many years, but that it evolves in tandem with your business, and never becomes a chokepoint.


      Augmented Video Reality™
 
What Is AVR™
                

Augmented Video Reality™ is a Holophrastic-invented technology. It's new. It's bewildering. It was a dream ten years ago, but wasn't a technical possibility until 2020.


                

Perhaps you remember choose-your-own-adventure books. Perhaps you remember '90s video games like Myst and 7th Guest.


                

AVR™ is that kind of choose-your-own-adventure video presentation. It's the perfect tradeshow booth tour. It's the most interactive instructional video. It's a recorded video production, sequence-controlled by the visitor, complete with dynamic overlays and interactive elements.



Tradeshow Booth Tours
                

Everyone has a different idea of a tradeshow booth. Big or small, products or personnel, pamphlets or pitches. But no matter what, your tradeshow booth is a significant investment in your sales strategy.


                

It seems a shame to relegate such a great booth to warehouse storage until the next tradeshow. What if you could bring it out at a moment's notice? Augmented Video Reality™ is the perfect way to use your booth whenever you want.


                
                

We're not talking about virtual walkthroughs and video games. Ewww. We're talking about Hollywood-quality interactive video productions. Just a video? Nah. Way WAY more.



                

Why is AVR™ more successful than a normal video?


                


                                Visitors watching videos run out of steam pretty quickly these days, and the moment you show a diagram with numbers, half of viewers turn away. Blockbuster Hollywood studios have trouble keeping fans engaged for a full 2-minute movie trailer. AVR™ is something very different.
                


                


                                With an AVR™ production, your visitors get to choose what they want to see, what they want to read, what they want to experience. This product, not that one. Now let's go over there. They get to choose when they want to see the numbers, not be forced to see them when you guessed that the average person might. With this kind of fully-engaged visitor, we see them guide themselves through a 20-minute AVR™ production in their own preferred manner.
                



                

Immersive engagement. The telemetry makes it obvious -- the AVR™ booth tour experience is exactly the same as the real-world tradeshow booth experience. And that's why it works.


Interactive Product Instruction Videos
                

Your products are amazing. Words just aren't enough. Technical specifications and numbers are a great closer, but they scare-away first-time visitors. But while a picture is worth a thousand words, those thousand words aren't very specific. That's where video shines.


                

But what kind of product video? Regular usage? Assembly? Repair? Installation? A dozen different videos?


                

An AVR™ production let's your visitors decide for themselves.


                

Here are five products. "I want to see that one." "Show me the back." "That's the wrong product, let's see the next one." "That's the one I want. Show me how to install it." "Not on the wall, on the ceiling." "Show me the dimensions of the product."


                

With your visitor fully-engaged, they get what they want, in the order that makes sense to them. It's not about rewinding and fast-forwarding a movie. It's the natural process of asking to see what you want, interupting the presenter with questions or the desire to move on.


                

And most importantly, when they sale is made, your AVR™ production makes it just as natural for your visitor to self-convert into a paying customer.


Service Demonstrations & How-To Videos
                

You're an expert providing your services to customers, and have been doing so for years. But you spend most of your sales effort teaching prospective customers what you do for them.


                

Every customer's different, so there are custom aspects to every project. That can be difficult to explain.


                

Augmented Video Reality™ allows you to pre-record a video presentation of your service, while allowing your visitors to see just how it gets customized to their needs.


                

Prospective customers get to choose their own path through your AVR™ production, ultimately revealing different outcomes based on choices they make.


                

How-To videos are an easy analogue here. "You'll first need to remove the dishwasher's front panel." "Does your model have four screws on the top, or three screws on the bottom?" "Let's remove the three screws, and we can see the panel comes right out." "Now, do you see a red value labelled #13, or a blue valve labelled #8?" "You need to squeeze the two tabs on the blue value inward."


                

Whether describing how you work, or walking someone through their own, it's all about showing them what they expect to see.


Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Videos
                

You continue down the tunnel as it opens to reveal a large stone cavern with gargoyles carved into the walls. In the middle stands a conspicuous pedestal. Atop the pedestal is a golden statue.


                

You pickup the golden statue... turn to page 18.


                

You intuit the weight of the golden statue, and smoothly replace it with a sandbag... turn to page 32.


                

You recognize that defeating the boobytrap is a futile effort; so you ready yourself like an olympic sprinter and take-off, grabbing the golden statue at full-stride, hoping you can out-run the boulder... click here.


                

Augmented Video Reality™ brings interactivity to pre-recorded video. Include animated dynamic overlays, multiple audio tracks, information from a database, and even external on-line content. Your visitor chooses their own path through the story.


Custom AVR™ Applications

Being such a new technology, we're looking for more creative ideas. If you've got an immersive experience in-mind, Augmented Video Reality™ is finally here.


With high-quality production value at every budget-level, limitless creative elements, and ultra-high performance, AVR™ has been future-proofed to ensure a longevity worthy of your creativity.


Let's talk.

How easy is it?
                

You set up your booth/scene/room/product-wall once, and you invite a videographer to walk a video camera through it. From then on, your web-site visitors can interact with your video walkthrough forever.


                

Like any quality production, it's not a puzzle, but it is a process to be followed. We'll work with you to storyboard your AVR™ production, ultimately lining up a smooth and straight-forward video recording session. Your specific objectives will determine just how far your budget can stretch. With so many post-production options, there's a tonne that can be done with even limited budgets.


                

Mix on-camera actors, audio-only narrators, background music, and elegantly silent experiences.


                

Include animated overlays, written specifications, and deep-links to your existing web pages -- all dynamically presented within the video.


                

With very limited budgets, put the video camera on a tripod, and we'll do all of the movement (zoom & pan) in post-production. Replace the video camera with a high-resolution photograph, and still have the post-production movement, overlays, and dynamic narration as visitors click to move closer to any product on your wall.


      Reporting & Visualizations
 
Solution Reporting™
                

Solution Reporing™ is Holophrastic's term to describe reports that serve a business objective. Just dumping numbers isn't helpful as a report.


                

Data Infinity Reports put the onus on the administrator running the report to decide what makes sense. Records in this date range, for customers who purchased these SKUs, but not in that city. The right data, and only the right data, to answer a specific question, instantly. If you're in a monthly strategy meeting, you need to be able to justify new ideas on-the-fly. You don't want to wait another month for someone to collect the data first.


                

Information Reports answer more specific questions by gathering the relevant data and aggregating it into a human-sized summary. A thousand individual numbers answers nothing. Here are the three totals and two averages. This sort of instant-aggregating would otherwise take hours of tedious human effort.


                

Knowledge Reports analyze the relevant data, in order to present fully-formed knowledge to humans. Again, a thousand individual numbers answers nothing, but three totals and two averages don't tell you what you want to know. Here are the two unexpected outliers that look weird, and the otherwise consistent trend that you can count on. This sort of data analysis would otherwise be nearly impossible for humans to do manually.


                

Decision Reports present conclusive decisions, plain and simple. This is the SKU that should be discontinued because it isn't profitable. This sort of intelligence comes from understanding your business, and ultimately programming your priorities into a system capable of analyzing that much data in seconds, your way. Whatever your way is. Your intuition now acts as coroberation, and your vacation no longer limits your staff from utilising your wisdom.


                

Suspicion Reports are Decision reports that attempt to identify negative events, allowing you to catch them before they happen again, or red-handed. Unusual activity, consistent outliers, and coincidences that you said should never happen.


Dynamic/Interactive Diagrams
Push-Button Accountant Input Reports
                

The trouble with accountants is that they often don't have access to the data they need. Leaving you with the resentful routine of pulling things together before they can even start.


                

Ironically, they usually need the very same set of data every time, and it's always very straight-forward.


                

Imagine pushing a single button that produces a packaged export of exactly what your accountant wants. Imagine giving them the ability to push it themselves.


                

This isn't magic. We'll work to design the custom report from what your accountant tells us they want. If we need to gather it from multiple sources, including your existing accounting software, that bunch of e-mails, those distributor's spreadsheets, and that filing cabinet in the back office, then that's exactly what will happen.

Dynamically-Rounded Accounting
                

Ironically, numbers are meaningless without other numbers against which they are compared. Often, show enough numbers to make sense, and you've entered the realm of scientific statistics -- a far cry from business.


                

How much? $341'253.13. And the previous year? $313'974.71.


                

How much? $340'000. And the previous year? $315'000. That's normal rounding -- all numbers to the same magnitude.


                

How many of each? 173, 81, 4'281, 18'293, 3, 92, 6'190, 48'621.


                

How many of each? 200, 100, 4'000, 18'000, 5, 100, 6'000, 50'000. That's human rounding. It's readable.


                

How many of each? -, -, 5'000, 20'000, -, -, 5'000, 50'000. With some context, we can forego accuracy-of-value in favour of accuracy-of-decision. Now we're rounding to business significance. And by removing below a threshold, we've made it extremely easy to read because there's only half as many numbers to read.


Certainly, there are times when to-the-penny is the number you want. But a table of 100 numbers is useless when there's more specificity than there is context.


So we build systems that let you adjust the rounding, instantly, to see what you're looking for. Then change it again to see something else.

Custom Visualizations
                

Everything we do is custom, but sometimes it's custom for the first time.


                

Your business needn't be limited to what others do. If you've got an interesting data set, or if there's something that you want to be able to isolate within it, or there's this seventy-five step process that your assistant does in excel every month, then you'll benefit from proceduralizing that need into a visualization that tells you what you want to know; instantly.


                

An upside-down graph, an inside-out pie-chart, something that moves; it's whatever makes sense to you. We'll work together to design an output that gives you what you need. It's a simple process.


                

Don't let anyone tell you we can't compare apples and oranges. Newton is famous for comparing an apple to the moon.


Push-Button Exports
                

Nothing beats a well-developed report. But sometimes that's not your web-site's job. Producing an export that you can drop into excel for flexible processing, or that can feed into your accounting system, or that you can archive in a filing cabinet. Push a button, get your data out.


                

Maybe that's automatic, every week, or hour, or minute.


                

Maybe your data is complicated, and doesn't fit into a simple spreadsheet format. Whatever your need, we'll figure it out.

      Interfaces & Adminterfaces
 
Cascade™ Interfaces
Dynamic Dashboards
List Widgets™
call lists
1" to 100' Mobile-to-Projector Interfaces
                

There are five major screen shapes, and dozens of minor ones. Modern web-design means responsive design -- dynamically changing shape to fit whatever size screen.


                

Yes there are phones with screens one inch wide. And yes there are boardrooms and lecture halls with projection screens one hundred inches wide. Does your web-site need to work on all of them? Well, it needs to work on many of them, and that's the same amount of effort.


                

There are countless ways to adjust your design. Zooming works great for larger screens, but text is useless when it shrinks too far on smaller screens. Conversely, rejiggering three columns into a single column works great for narrow screens, but you don't want twelve columns on a large screen. Removing unneeded elements works, but they were usually there for a reason.


                

Done properly, some elements move, some stretch, some squeeze, all to ensure that your web-site looks great at any size, and is usable from any device, anywhere, at any time. But even that is not enough. It won't look the same at every size, and that's the idea, but it still needs to function the same way. You still need a customer service agent to direct a customer to a part of your web-site without first needing to ask how many inches their screen is.


                

There are also legal requirements. Meet the ADA, and the WCAG: regulations ensuring that designs and interfaces don't discriminate against visual disabilities, physical disabilities, and cognitive disabilities.


Interactive Diagrams
Selection Wizards & Configurators
                

Does your catalogue have hundreds of similar products? Dozens of similar services? Often they are very different to you, but very similar to your customers.


                

You've seen these kinds of Product Wizards: "help me choose" or "which one is right for me". The visitor is presented with a handful of questions to describe their scenario in their own terms, and are ultimately presented with a narrowed list of options.


                

Similarly, Configurators build up a customized offering from a product- or service-line. Add this option, in this colour, with this graphic.

Postal Geography
Universal Notes
      Media Solutions
 
Graphic Design
                

Small sites, big sites, e-mail templates, document templates, printed materials, or a single image. If it's going to look good, it's going to go through a graphic designer.


                

We're happy to work with any graphic designer that you may have on-staff or at-the-ready, but as you'd expect, we've cultivated some amazing relationships over the years, and will happily provide a designer suitable to your project.


                

There's a lot of co-ordination involved when it comes to a modern web-site's graphic design -- shapes and sizes, icons and images, fonts and what's fashionable. Some designs aren't legal -- accessibility requirements. Some aren't future-proof -- technology obsolescence. Some restrict content length or expected business growth. Some can't stretch for mobile devices. No matter who handles the graphic design, it's a delicate dance between business objectives and technical requirements.


Layout Design
                

Layout Design is distinct from Graphic Design, though they certainly overlap a lot.


                

Layout design is usually indepedent of colour and images and actual verbiage. It focusses on, well, the layout of the elements. Layout often involved much more technical co-ordination.


                

Larger projects typically have a single Graphic Design, but multiple Layout Designs. To over-simplify things, the same colour-scheme would be used by your web-site and your e-mails, since they share a corporate branding, but they'd have completely different layouts as they server completely different forms of content.


                

This distinction is a vital part of future-proofing. By recognizing where one ends and the other begins, they can grow and evolve independently of one another -- allowing you to change your design when your corporate image changes, without needing to change your layout; or the reverse, allowing your to change your layout to include a new feature, without needing an entirely new design.


                

With proper co-ordination, any design is possible. Simple single-page designs, magazine-style designs, or whatever meets your objectives.


Animated Designs
                

Simply put, no one said designs need to be still. Background movement, interactive motion, dynamic presentation, colour shifts, animated images, and video backgrounds. Subtle or obvious, if your objectives warrant it, there's a professional way to do it.

Visitor-Duelling Designs
Manipulation / Conversion / Compression
                

Images, Video, Audio.


                

Whether a part of a larger project, or as a one-off service, if you've got files that need changing, hand them over. One or many or too many.


                

Images: colour correction, sizing, cleaning, cropping, converting, compressing, visual effects, or just making it look better.


                

Video: sizing, cropping, splicing, converting, compressing.


                

Audio: splicing, converting, compressing, cleanup, isolating, aural effects, and volume adjustments.


Stock Photography Selection & Tailoring
                

There are vast libraries of stock photography and stock videography available out there. Some are free, some are low budget, some are expensive, but they all create the very same challenge -- there's so much to look through!


                

There's an art to finding photographs that suit your needs and fit your space. A good graphic artist has the further flexibility to manipulate those stock items to perfectly tailor them to your needs.


                

This becomes even more aparent when it comes to compiling a set of suitable fonts, or designing custom icons -- both staples of modern design.

Custom Infographics
                

You know them. You probably hate them. But they work.


                

Infographics is a term used to describe those poster-style business abstracts that summarize large volumes of information into over-simplified visual memory-aids. It started with the workplace-hazards poster in the factory, the first-aid poster in the kitchen, the wash-your-hands-step-by-step poster in the bathroom.

More recently we see everything-you-need-to-know-about-that-new-regulation poster, fair-hiring-practices, registering-a-complaint, and troubleshooting-your-dishwasher. Highly-visual, always colourful, and the more you look for them the more you'll notice them.


                

They make excellent sales & marketing tools. Far better than a powerpoint presentation, and more memorable too. Full of juicy numerical stats, how-it-affects-you and what-you-need-to-do-about-it.


1" to 100' Responsive & Accessible Layouts
                

There are five major screen shapes, and dozens of minor ones. Modern web-design means responsive design -- dynamically changing shape to fit whatever size screen.


                

Yes there are phones with screens one inch wide. And yes there are boardrooms and lecture halls with projection screens one hundred inches wide. Does your web-site need to work on all of them? Well, it needs to work on many of them, and that's the same amount of effort.


                

There are countless ways to adjust your design. Zooming works great for larger screens, but text is useless when it shrinks too far on smaller screens. Conversely, rejiggering three columns into a single column works great for narrow screens, but you don't want twelve columns on a large screen. Removing unneeded elements works, but they were usually there for a reason.


                

Done properly, some elements move, some stretch, some squeeze, all to ensure that your web-site looks great at any size, and is usable from any device, anywhere, at any time. But even that is not enough. It won't look the same at every size, and that's the idea, but it still needs to function the same way. You still need a customer service agent to direct a customer to a part of your web-site without first needing to ask how many inches their screen is.


                

There are also legal requirements. Meet the ADA, and the WCAG: regulations ensuring that designs and interfaces don't discriminate against visual disabilities, physical disabilities, and cognitive disabilities.


Augmented Video Reality™

Augmented Video Reality™ is a Holophrastic-invented technology. It's new. It's bewildering. It was a dream ten years ago, but wasn't a technical possibility until 2020.


Perhaps you remember choose-your-own-adventure books. Perhaps you remember '90s video games like Myst and 7th Guest.


AVR™ is that kind of choose-your-own-adventure video presentation. It's the perfect tradeshow booth tour. It's the most interactive instructional video. It's a recorded video production, sequence-controlled by the visitor, complete with dynamic overlays and interactive elements.


      Project Management
 
Deployment & Migration Strategies
Database Design & Architecture
Security Architecture
Programming Code Audits
security, conventions, readibility, inject-points™
Encryption Architecture
Backup Strategies
Search Engine Optimization & Campaigning
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     
 
About Holophrastic

Every one of the services listed above comes from projects that we've actually built over a quarter-century of business. It's not a complete list.

It all started in the early-'90s, when there was very little to learn on a weekly basis. There's still little to learn each week -- over a thousand weeks later. We've been around from the beginning, back when web-sites were rarely more than on-line brochures.

Our business began with basic information capture, and extended into full-featured e-commerce product catalogues. Seemingly without delay, we'd added custom business software to our service offerings; it seemed the natural progression. Around the turn of the century, we offered large-business solutions at the small-business scale.

Nowadays, the industry has twisted, blurring the lines between web-sites, internet applications, custom business software, mobile apps, and business process streamlining. So today, we talk about business clarity: allowing those at the top to see what's happening at the bottom, clearly.

Looking forward, the industry is entering a new phase: government regulation. Accountability is now placed on your financial shoulders; you need to trust that your technology meets both today's and tomorrow's legal requirements. Our responsibilities now cover accessibility compliance, data-privacy compliance, and algorithmic bias/discrimination compliance.

Custom development means you get exactly what you need, and there's no possibility of finger-pointing; problems and bugs are always our fault. Whether yours is a small promotional web-site, a large business application, or anything in-between, we do custom work focusing on your ability to grow and change over time -- thus ensuring the longevity of both your project and our of trusted relationship.

Let's Work Together

After 30 years of custom work, you might be interested to know how many clients have been with us for decades.

Even more interesting is how many currently-active projects have been in-use for decades -- and how many of those have done so with little or no modification.

Call if you're a phone person like me. E-mail if that's your preference.

We'll discuss what's complicating your business, and how to eliminate the tedious, repetitive, superfluous, and impossible tasks restricting your growth.

Bryan S. Katz
Owner & Software Architect
+1 416-230-1410
info@HolophrasticEnterprises.com

About Holophrastic

Every one of the services listed above comes from projects that we've actually built over a quarter-century of business. It's not a complete list.

It all started in the early-'90s, when there was very little to learn on a weekly basis. There's still little to learn each week -- over a thousand weeks later. We've been around from the beginning, back when web-sites were rarely more than on-line brochures.

Our business began with basic information capture, and extended into full-featured e-commerce product catalogues. Seemingly without delay, we'd added custom business software to our service offerings; it seemed the natural progression. Around the turn of the century, we offered large-business solutions at the small-business scale.

Nowadays, the industry has twisted, blurring the lines between web-sites, internet applications, custom business software, mobile apps, and business process streamlining. So today, we talk about business clarity: allowing those at the top to see what's happening at the bottom, clearly.

Looking forward, the industry is entering a new phase: government regulation. Accountability is now placed on your financial shoulders; you need to trust that your technology meets both today's and tomorrow's legal requirements. Our responsibilities now cover accessibility compliance, data-privacy compliance, and algorithmic bias/discrimination compliance.

Custom development means you get exactly what you need, and there's no possibility of finger-pointing; problems and bugs are always our fault. Whether yours is a small promotional web-site, a large business application, or anything in-between, we do custom work focusing on your ability to grow and change over time -- thus ensuring the longevity of both your project and our of trusted relationship.

Let's Work Together

After 30 years of custom work, you might be interested to know how many clients have been with us for decades.

Even more interesting is how many currently-active projects have been in-use for decades -- and how many of those have done so with little or no modification.

Call if you're a phone person like me. E-mail if that's your preference.

We'll discuss what's complicating your business, and how to eliminate the tedious, repetitive, superfluous, and impossible tasks restricting your growth.

Bryan S. Katz
Owner & Software Architect
+1 416-230-1410
info@HolophrasticEnterprises.com

 
     
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