Information Design vs Information Technology
Each professionally produced website is made up of two parts, or should be.

Information Design is the art and skill of designing the content that is delivered as a webpage. The fine folks who do this job are usually graphic designers, copywriters, interactivity designers and producers, or any-or-all combinations of the above. Good information designers can take a large volume of data and categorize, sectionalize and ultimately digest it down into clearly understandable pieces that make sense to layman or expert users.

To a Information Designer, a well designed website, often called the "front-end", will deliver useful data and look great!. A website must be able to retain the attention span of today's web-surfer before compelling the visitor to their ultimate goal of getting the information that they need, or executing on a purchase, or performing the tasks that are required.

Information Technology on the other hand is the mechanics involved in the delivering of dynamic webpages. The hardworking men and women of today's IT world are usually programmers of various disciplines, like java, c/c++, perl, asp, jsp, sql. Other members of what is commonly known as the "back-end" team includes database administrators, system engineers, business analysts and systems administrators.

To an IT professional, a well designed website must be efficient and optimized for speed. Each transaction must be fast and secure, each piece of data collected must be carefully stored, indexed, qualified and quantified. The middle tier or the transaction layer must be modular and maintainable.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that a good designer will be a good programmer or that a good programmer is a good designer. Although there are rare people who can perform both these tasks well, generally, Info Designers and IT Programmers come from two very disparate groups, one might even say two different worlds. How many times have you heard the phrases "It's not supposed to look [or work] that way!...", and, "It can't be done!...", when vocalized, they are usually pointing to the same problem, it depends on which side of the camp you are from.

Chino.Com has evolved into a team that specializes in taking work from designers and delivering component HTML objects designed to fit whatever back-end requirements are specified by the IT folks. The webpages we code look and feel like the original Photoshop files that were delivered to us, while performing all the tasks that are required for an efficient and secure transaction.

We believe in user-experience driven websites and applications. Our philosophy is to allow the designer to do his/her work, to design the best, most compelling website or application possible, without having to worry about the technology used to support it. While at the same time, our involvement in a project allows back-end programmers the freedom to design and develop server structure as they see fit without worrying about authoring HTML or client-side scripting. We will often work as a consultant during the design phase of a project, interfacing between the designers and the programmers, we speak both languages fluently.

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