Ross Software Solutions is a small software house located centrally in the Scottish Highlands.

We have over 25 years of experience in the commercial software industry, and specialise in the following:

More information on each subject can be found by either clicking the subject header in the list above, or scrolling down the page.

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Website Design and Development

We design websites using what's called "CSS standards". What this means is that your website has been built to operate efficiently in the language in which it was written and it will look the same on the majority of modern web-browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 7 +, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari). Websites constructed using HTML <TABLE> tags will be more likely to render inconsistently on each of these browsers.

This is also known as keeping the content separated from the design. This comes in very handy when the time comes to change the design of your website. In the majority of cases, all that is needed is a change to the CSS and the website content will simply flow as normal within the new design.

Our websites are also web 2.0 designs. This means many things to many people, but we like O'Reilly Media founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim O'Reilly's definition:

Writing websites which anyone can use, instead of having to use the Microsoft Windows platform
Harnessing collective intelligence, such as the way Google links to the most-popular pages and Amazon offers popular books, and the way Wikipedia and blogs use "the wisdom of crowds" to come up with information
Enriching data for a deeper online experience, as seen in mashups like www.housing maps.com, which combines Craigslist apartment data with Google maps
Software as a service, which gets constantly updated online rather than sold in shrink-wrapped packages
Software such as Apple's iTunes, which works seamlessly online, on PCs and on iPods
Rich user experiences, so that Web sites often feel like the software that runs on a PC.

However big or small a site we build for you, it will comply with the above.

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Shopping carts and eCommerce systems

At the heart of every site which sells products are three components which are key to the success of the site. These are:

Product Database
Shopping Cart
eCommerce (payment mechanism).

The Product Database needs to be structured using a relational database such a SQL Server, but we'll come onto that shortly.

The Shopping Cart integrates with the product database and houses the intelligence which:

stores what you've placed in the cart
works out what (if any) discounts you are entitled to (based on things like how many of a particular product you're intending to purchase, whether you have any discount vouchers, etc.)
works out what the resultant delivery charges will be (often, these are based on both the weight of the items you've purchased and the actual delivery location)
Totals this up and tells you exactly how much you must pay for your purchase
Offers you various payment options
Reacts appropriately to the results of the payment option taken via the eCommerce (payment mechanism).

The eCommerce (payment mechanism) is the part which takes over when the customer chooses to purchase using a credit or debit card.

Normally, the amount being charged and some descriptive information is passed to an external, online payment gateway (e.g. SagePay, PayPal, Google Checkout, etc.) for processing. Since this is not part of your site, it means that you do not have to worry about the security of any transaction, as the payment gateway provider takes care of that.

The payment gateway provides a secure form on which the customer can enter their credit/debit card details, checks with the customer's bank to see if the transaction will be approved and if so, returns a message to your site to say "approved" and your site processes the purchase. If the transaction is not approved (which can be for many reasons - not only "no funds available"), this is also passed back to your site and handled appropriately.

It is important that the integration of these three key systems works as seamlessly and flawlessly as possible, so that your customers have a good experience and return to shop on your site regularly. We understand the importance of this and design our shopping cart and eCommerce system integration to be as simple to use and intelligent as possible.

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Database Design and Development

In the previous section, we mentioned that any site's product database should be created and structured using an RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management System). There are many RDBMSs in use on the web today such as MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle. We have long experience of, and specialise in each of these systems.

As the majority of our clients prefer a Microsoft platform, we therefore use SQL Server most of the time.

The reason for using an RDBMS is so that the data which describes your products can be structured in such a way that the product database will always respond quickly and efficiently. It therefore wouldn't matter if one person or one million people were accessing your website at the same time, they would all receive a quick response to their product queries.

Of course, there is much more to designing databases for an RDBMS which we can't cover here. You may have heard terms like "normalising" and "3rd normal form" banded around by those in-the-know in this industry. This website isn't really the place to explain these terms, but if you would like an explanation, please contact us and we will be happy to provide one.

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Smartphone and PDA software Design & Development

These days, a HUGE percentage of those connected to the internet do their business using a suitably equipped mobile phone (or "Smartphone" as they're now known). This is staggering, and is predicted to increase exponentially over the next ten years. It is therefore important that your site is able to be accessed properly via this fast-growing medium.

We have long experience not only of creating websites which display properly on these phones, but also in creating applications which run on the phones themselves (rather than being a website, the applications are actual "programs" which run on the phone, whether it is connected to the internet or not).

One of the most popular Smartphones at the moment is the Apple iPhone, and in Q4 of 2012, we will be adding iPhone application production to our product portfolio.

In recent years, Smartphone technology has also found its way into the automation and control industries. It is likely that you will have had to sign the screen of a smartphone to confirm receipt of a parcel/delivery at some point. These systems tend to have additional components built-in, such as barcode-scanners and they may also operate using a variety of connectivity systems such as Wi-Fi, GPRS and 3G, etc. so that updates taken at point of delivery (as an example) are immediately available online to customers or suppliers waiting for that information. We have many years of experience designing software to operate on such systems.

If you would like to know more about our mobile web and/or mobile application capabilities, please feel free to contact us.