This site was designed by Gary Speer of Cortech Technology Services. Gary is a new resident of Park City and brings with him over 20 years of experience in business and technology management, including cradle-to-grave project management and the inside perspective of being CIO for a major financial services firm.

Technically, beginning with his MIT education, Gary has extensive experience in database design for both large and small organizations. He has both object-oriented and traditional programming experience, as well as experience in developing 'programming-free' application environments. He has spent the last several years specializing in web-enabling business processes.

His primary design philosophy is to keep it simple! He does this by evaluating and streamlining business processes before automating then so you do not end up with expensive automated bad habits. There is nothing worse than a technical success that is a business failure. By not short-circuiting the discipline of the planning process, costs are controlled and business acceptance and success is assured.

In sites such as this one, a balance must be struck between aesthetic excellence and honoring the internal structure and framework that enables maintainability. This site was designed for ease of change and growth by being built in the Zope integrated webpage server / application server / database server environment which excels in providing highly reusable modular components. (Zope version 2.6.1 on Python version 2.1.3) The pages degrade gracefully in smaller browser windows, but the choice was made for them to nevertheless degrade in favor of keeping costs low and the ability to update content easy. Most content is delivered from user/owner-editable text files to keep the designer and programmer out of the routine updating loops and to separate content from presentation and business logic.

For those not familiar with Zope, it is an integrated web server, page server, and database manager that is highly popular in Europe and expanding into the United States. It is open source with a strong development and certification community supported and funded by a publicly-held corporation. Zope runs best in a Lynux / Apache environment; however it is portable to any major Unix or Windows system and easily scaled.

If you have any interest in learning more about this approach to managing online content or in having your business and web presence enhanced, please contact us by sending e-mail to siteinfo at cortech.org.