Info

Florida Atlantic Technologies, informally known as FAT Designs, was developed in early 2002 to fill a niche for quality affordable database-driven website design in northeast Florida. Owner Ed Toy was employeed as a database administrator at the St. Johns River Water Management District, working in conjunction with software developers and environmental scientists to develop a detailed water quality application. The district was spending millions of dollars for programmers from India to write and debug Java code connecting with an Oracle database to obtain water quality data based on search criteria.

Starting out by designing several personal websites hand-coded in HTML, Ed saw an opportunity to develop smaller-scale database driven websites for local businesses. About that time PHP was making it’s debut as a database scripting language, along with the MySQL database. Our first project was Tuttle Dental out of Melbourne, Florida, where we designed and implemented a New Patient Registration and Medical History form that is still in use today: http://www.tuttledental.com/.

Having designed several involved PHP/MySQL projects involving custom back end administration platforms and AJAX powered forms, FAT Designs started delving into the world of eCommerce. To keep costs down, we chose to utilize open-source software, namely Zen Cart for the shopping cart. To keep it simple and offer a secure, consistent platform for web development, we rented a managed dedicated server to provide business-class website hosting. The first successful website initially developed in 2002 was Ocean Extreme Sports, launching their online store in 2004. Over the next several years, Ocean Extreme Sports would do over 50% of their $1 million total revenue online and through email leads generated by the website. Since then we have designed and built online stores for the Pit Surf Shop, Melillimoto Ducati, Clare Toy Music, Tree Threads, Resin8 USA, and Vexillum Clothing, all hosted on our Linux dedicated web server.

Over the past couple of years, FAT Designs has branched out into using PHP/MySQL driven Content Management Systems to allow for dynamic content creation. After much research on the most popular open-source CMS solutions, we initially started developing websites in Joomla: Bikram Yoga St. Augustine, Thomas Long’s Create Glass, Melillimoto Ducati. Joomla was originally developed as a fork of an existing web Content Management System called Mambo, but we found it to be too confusing for our customers to manage content, and if possible had too much functionality that we simply did not need for our websites. In come WordPress. We originally dismissed WordPress after working on a site for Extreme Hotels down in Dominican Republic. It seemed like the software was only designed for blogging, and we wanted more than just a blog. We needed to be able to create pages, and add different types of multimedia content from image galleries to videos. But over the past several years, WordPress has gained immense support from the open-source community, and blossomed into a full-fledged CMS capable of almost anything we need to do online.

Our goal is to work with small locally owned businesses and give them the same advantage that multi-national corporations have in our global marketplace. To this end we offer internet marketing services ranging from identity and brand development to print marketing, email newsletters, social media integration, eCommerce solutions, banner advertising, and website hosting. Depending on your budget, we will work with your company to develop an online marketing plan to meet your business goals. Please check out some examples of the work we have done in the past, and know that whatever we design for your business will be unique, created specifically for your company’s needs.