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Madison Skincare and Laser Center provides skin health services, laser rejuvenation and dermatology services. They offer diagnosis and treatment of skin diseases and skin cancers as well as Seattle skin cancer surgery. They offer state of the art cosmetic services, including a full range of laser services, the Thermage non-surgical skin tightening, peels, Botox, Restylane, the new Aramis laser for acne treatment and prevention and Seattle aesthetician services.
Their cosmetic dermatology sessions provide cosmetic procedures to patients in a caring and professional environment. Services include several types of cosmetic procedures including Laser Services, Thermage for Skin Tightening, SilkPeel Microdermabrasion, Sculptra, removal of moles, Seattle Botox Injections, and Seattle Aesthetician Services.
You may also be interested in this skin care information and skin care resource website they provide to help you discover skincare treatment options and information available for different skin types. Of particular interest is their Guide to common Cosmetic Treatments.
September 30th, 2008
We’ve been doing a large number of custom Joomla development projects this year. Most of which seem to have a custom component that “normal” developers just do not know how to develop for them. In our Company, since we use all local, on-staff developers and designers - we have multiple people to work on our clients needs. There is rarely something our staff cannot solve when working together as a team. Here are a few recent project and how we worked with Joomla to bring about their solutions.
Skin Tour - Skin Health Tips & Care - We built a series of Flash Quizzes, each with a rather large system of branching paths that sorted users into one of ten different profiles and suggested treatments to the user. We also built an Interactive AntiAging Guide in Adobe Flex and tied its results into the User Profile system. Finally, a Joomla Video Blogging system was created with a tag cloud module and feeders.
The Quick Path - The Quick Path is a membership-based business website that offers wealth-creating and asset protection products. We built it around a core Joomla build with a custom, 4-tier affiliate program, virtuemart shopping cart and linked the affiliate program (JAM / JROX) to Joomla in a way that it creates a replicated website for each affiliate upon sign-up. Other features included: ACH integration, bulk pay for Affiliates via a Web Service and custom virtuemart reporting.
Fantagraphics, Inc -Fantagraphics is a custom Joomla build with a virtuemart shopping cart system. We created a special series of shipping tables, a destination-based sales tax system for virtuemart and a special “club discount” system for customers who want to purchase a discount club as a prduct.
If you want some local help from our Seattle Joomla Developers or even if you are located out of our area and want to talk via phone or email - contact us today!
September 18th, 2008
The Zen Cart & OSCommerce AJAX POS System is getting close to having a release ready. For more information on the OSCommerce POS or the Zen Cart POS - click here.
It works as an add-on module that hooks your OSC or Zen Database and still allows you to control attributes and information from inside OSC and Zen cart respectively. The fact that it is AJAX means you can do speedy real time lookups of customer information and orders. We have several brick and mortor stores who do millions in sales using the BETA of our system.
September 17th, 2008
After a very long development cycle, we now have custom modules for Zen-cart and Oscommerce that can calculate destination-based sales tax. Using a combination of address verification and data made available by your State you can become compliant in no time flat.
The modules calculate based on Zip +4 to break down the sales tax by zip code and the 4 digit code as well. If you tax rates change quarterly like our state, you can upload and parse the CSV file they make available to you in order to update the rates in bulk. For more information, contact us here.
September 17th, 2008
After a very long development cycle, we now have custom modules for Zen-cart and Oscommerce that can calculate destination-based sales tax. Using a combination of address verification and data made available by your State you can become compliant in no time flat.
The modules calculate based on Zip +4 to break down the sales tax by zip code and the 4 digit code as well. If you tax rates change quarterly like our state, you can upload and parse the CSV file they make available to you in order to update the rates in bulk. For more information, contact us here.
August 8th, 2008
Don’t Know Dino is where you should really look for information about Dino Rossi; the facts about his record and other information you need to make an educated vote.
August 7th, 2008
One of the markets we obviously target is Seattle Web Design & people looking for Seattle Web Designers & Seattle Web Developers.
We love working for Seattle clients on development or design projects. It is an easy hop down the highway, preferably made at off-peak times since Washington State does not believe in building roads or non-Boondoggle mass transit projects (Hear that “Big Dig” we’re coming for you!).
Seattle is a funny area for Web Design & Development. Take us as an example. We are a company. We have an office. We have all local designers and developers. You will probably talk to the same people year after year because we have had less than 5% turn-over since we started back in 2000.
We tend to get a lot of work from a certain breed of company. This breed basically has very nice offices, slick salespeople and puts a lot of time into fancy proposals and “the process”.
What they do not do, is the actual work apparently .. but you wouldn’t know that from talking to them. They in turn, sub out your projects to people like us. Want to confused this breed of salesperson? Just ask them who specifically will be working on their project and watch them either
1) Tell you the name of someone who will probably NOT be working on your project.
2) Make up a name.
3) Tell you that will be decided later.
The last time we competed against a firm like this, after seeing this firm in the waiting room, I challenged the client to ask them this question. Apparently they did and they fumbled it bad. Sorry folks, no points for second place. Honestly rules.
In our area there also seems to be a large number of single individuals “faking” being a larger firm than they really are. Now I know this is common in other industries, especially whenever the ambiguous word “consultant” is invoked, however with Web Firms it seem to be more prevalent. Selecting a vendor is an important decision. It can make or break a project or even a business if you are building your business around a new application, portal or website.
A lot of people in our industry have full-time jobs doing something else, but still act like a 9-5 firm. This is a huge disservice to their clients.
Here are some examples and patterns to watch out for:
- Any firm that uses the words: Studios, We, Our, Staff, Employees, etc.. - yet doesn’t have a page devoted to Staff Bios or Resume. (To be fair - here’s our Seattle Web Developers bio page and I need to add recent hires.)
- Any firm or individual that lists portfolio pieces or clients by name, but does not link to the website or describe in detail what they did. This usually indicates that they were either employed at that Company or we not 100% responsible for the project.
- Any firm that does not list a mailing or office address.
- Any firm that seems to have a half dozen email address yet they are answered by the same person.
- Any firm that cannot tell you “who” will be working on your project - this means they take all jobs and then scramble to find people to do the work. These are called unnecessary middlemen in the real world.
- Any website that uses a non-professional email like AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.
- Any firm that talks about their multiple locations or offices, yet doesn’t list addresses. These are probably apartments.
- Any firm with a poor looking website; a website or portfolio that consists mainly of web templates or that can sell you pretty much the same solution no matter what you tell them you want. When all you know how to use is a hammer, everything is a nail.
Well, I am out of time for now. What do you think?
Tom
July 31st, 2008
Plyboo is in the business of Bamboo Flooring & Bamboo Floors, along with Bamboo Plywood and sustainable green flooring and other “Green Building” materials. We were called in to aide in correcting certain Joomla navigation and site structure requirements. We also added SugarCRM and worked on some lead generation & sample request forms that piped data directly into SugarCRM to integrate their website workflow and process with their back office systems. Our Everett, WA Office is currently covered in SugarCRM manuals and print outs.
Their products are fantastic. They have nearly every possible bamboo flooring product or derivative you could possibly want, including Bamboo Veneer & Durapalm Woven Paneling
Check out the Joomla build and product portfolio to see a content rich website using Joomla, custom components and SEO rich content.
July 25th, 2008
We’ve recently completed a new modification to a West-Coast Satellite Radio retailer - JJIElectronics.com that is working really well for them. We’ve added the ability to define the specials and featured products on a per-category basis.
Example #1 -XM Satellite Radios
For the admin, it really is as easy as assigning special or featured products with a few selection boxes and both the design styling and information shows up within the design template. Your clients do not have to mess with the description box or define_mainpage - it is that easy.
Zen Cart Feature - Displaying Zen-Cart Sub-categories in the Main Menu.
We’ve also built a dynamic menu system that displays all the the categories & sub-categories on the same menu - this is great for providing customers the ability to see all of the types of products you offer rather than force them to search. You can see the Zen Cart Dynamic Menu examples here. This helps your main page get spidered for all top-level keywords (which for an ecommerce site should start with your categories of products that you sell at the very least.
Zen Cart Feature - Multiple Shopping Feeds and “Referral Network” Integration.
Feedburner, Yahoo Shopping, Google Base / Froogle and Bizrate. We set up this Zen Cart build so it would detect the inbound referral and pop the correct survey box based on whether they came from BizRate, Shopping.com, etc. Most of these services give you their code to integrate and it really does nothing except pop the survey after you have successfully checked out. If you are a business as large as this client - and make use of several networks - then you either have to dynamically detect the referral and trigger the appropriate code - or you are stuck with popping all of the various surveys and letting the user fill out whichever one is relevant. Since JJIElectronics.com cares about their user’s experiences - they went with the auto-detect.
Additional Zen-Cart Modules
In addition to the stock build, we also added:
- Custom Shipping Tables & Rules
- Google Checkout & PayPal Express (that conforms to the above - just try that… we dare you.)
- An AJAX Sidebar Manager - to allow the various advertising, banners, buttons and tables they display throughout their site (ala DeepDiscountDVD.com & TigerDirect)
- A Zen-Cart to QuickBooks Exporter
- An advanced order manager that allowed batching of functions and printing.
- An advanced reporting module that allowed for reports to be generated on keywords and stock control.
- A total Zen Cart SEO overhaul.
- and Special Holiday Headers for a nice friendly touch!
All in all - a very effective website and relationship. For more information on our custom Zen Cart Developers & Zen Cart Development Services - just visit our website. Whether you need a Seattle Zen Cart Developer
or just want to outsource your problems to us - we are ready to help you. [We do not outsource ourselves, the buck stop here.]
March 14th, 2008
After several years worth of work and hundreds of hours spent with a consultant who does nothing but write Government Grants and Grant Proposals - The Government Proposal Pack of Templates is available for purchase.
Increase your odds of winning a Government Grant or Proposal using a proposal structures based on actual winning proposal writing “Best Practices” and formats.
- 50 sample proposals - over 770 pages of government proposal template material included. ($300.00 value.)
- Proposals range from a 1 page government proposal quotes to 10 to 15 page average RFP answers to complete 270+ page proposals.
- Over 270 pre-designed editable proposal chapters & proposal chapter templates.
- Government Proposal & Grant Templates are Self-guiding templates and walk you through the process of assembling and writing your proposal.
- Immediately Downloadable - start immediately!
- Create unlimited Government proposal and RFQ answers - at no extra cost
- Completely customizable with your branding, logos and information
- Save thousands of dollars and days or weeks of time
- Includes government grant work order contracts, non-disclosure forms, an extensive business proposal writing guide as well as a government grant proposal writing guide.
- Includes how to develop your proposals and analysis worksheets and spreadsheets to keep you on track
- Over 900 hundred pages of material and you can easily create new documents based on our templates to suit any government grant writing situation you may encounter.
- Includes Windows, Mac and Linux downloads for a single price!
Includes templates for:
Business Proposals
Federal Govt. Grants
Educational Proposals
Technical Proposals
Non-Technical Proposals
Non-Profit Grant Proposals
Business Plans
Quotes and Contracts
Buying or Selling a Business
Project Proposals
Local Govt. Grants
Book Proposals
Resumes
Letter Proposals
Product Sales
Service Sales
Sales Letters
RFP Responses
Get Government Grant Templates here.
December 31st, 2007
We’ve recently launched JJIElectronics.com new ecommerce website.
About the client.
JJIElectronics is the #1 independent Internet retailer in the USA for sales of XM Satellite Radio, Sirius Satellite Radio & Garmin GPS.
About the project.
The project involved moving JJIElectronics.com off of a hosted ecommerce application and creating a new custom store. The client had grown large enough that they wanted more control over the features their ecommerce storefront would offer.
They also wanted a dynamic template-swapping feature which would allow the entire store to re-sort and re-filter all results by clicking on a tab. This would allow them to present an “XM-only” or “Garmin-only” storefront to their customers as well as aide them in any manufacturer-sponsored promotions or offers where they didn’t want competitive products to show up as well.
We deployed Zen Cart with a number of custom features we built. The template can an AJAX back-end that allows the client to edit each of the sidebars and place in advertising and special offers. A multiple offer-related shipping module takes the default Zen Cart build to a whole new level. We also create an advanced reporting and export feature to tie Zen Cart to Quickbooks better as well as manage sale tax.
The Zen Cart - “Specials by Category” module we designed allows for category-specific specials, featured and “what’s new” in each product channel.
If you would like to know more about our Zen Cart Developers or our custom services - contact us today.
December 12th, 2007
Real Estate Flier Templates - a new product from the TemplateKit.com development team.
IMPROVE YOUR IMAGE & Close the deal with our Real Estate Fliers
Now you can download and customize more than a dozen, ready to use, ready to deploy sales sheets for real estate marketing, home sales, specifications sheets, info sheets and more. Click on an image to see greater detail.
Just replace with your own photos and you are ready to save and print. Includes Both MS Publisher 95 - 2003 and the New MS Publisher 2007. Click on an image to replace the default with your own.
Unlimited Combinations. Click here to view all Real Estate Flyers.
December 12th, 2007
Here we are, in our HTML Email Laboratory again with another Gmail-specific problem.
Symptom:
Gmail does not display images in an HTML Email.
Culprit: Border Styles.
Example: style= “border:none;
Because Gmail and other web-based email systems tend to strip out styles - it looks like using a style reference in your IMG tag will cause Gmail not to render the entire image.
What you should just do is use border=”0″ to accomplish the same thing, namely you want to avoid that little blue border that surrounds an image when an anchor link is placed around it. Our tests rendered just fine in Hotmail, Horde, Yahoo and a few other web-based clients.
December 3rd, 2007
We’ve hired two new employees here at FDG Web. Jared & Blake.
Jared is a graphic designer fresh out of school (for the most part). You can see some of the great stuff he is working on for JJIElectronics.com (Special Christmas Zen-Cart Overlay). Jared is a designer. Did I happen to mention that? Photoshop, Illustrator, Vector Artwork, print work, etc - that is his area.
So, what you are seeing here is the result of our having put him next to the programmer’s pit here in the office.
[click to enlarge]
November 21st, 2007
Here is how you can use Window’s built-in FTP client through My Network Places (or Netowrks in Vista)
How to FTP Files using Windows - Steps:
In XP - go to “My network places”
In VISTA - “Go to “Networks”
Select “Add new network”
Select “Other network place” (usually the last option, some computer “load” this section with ISP offers, etc - by default it is just ‘MSN’)
Type in the following:
ftp://ftp.[your-domain-name]
Password: [whatever your ftp pass is]
Username: [whatever you username is]
Now you can drag and drop files into your ftp space “almost” like your desktop. A cut & paste job results in ftping those local files on up to your website. If you intent in ftping is to place files on your website - make sure you are placing the files in tghe right directory for the control panel or server type you are using.
cPanel places files in public_html, while PLESK uses httpdocs. This is where your website begins and the root of the site is located.
November 19th, 2007
FDG Web has uprooted its Bothell office and moved to downtown Everett, WA - just down from the Everett Events Center. We now have a more creative space to work and design for our clients and projects. Since we serve clients worldwide and are not just offering Everett Web Design & Development services - everything is pretty much the same as it was before.
Our number, as always is: 877-239-3083 or 425-374-5383
We’ve added three new employees recently. Shannon Harper, Blake Morrison and Jared Albright. Look for samples of their work coming soon.
With the addition of these employees, we now have a well rounded team who can provide web design, graphic design, flash, multimedia, programming application development, print design, brochure design and other services for our clients in whether they live in Everett or elsewhere.
We’ve also been busy creating new Flash Applications and Templates for purchase.
November 11th, 2007
Web Development Contract (Developer Centered)
View Document Sample
Document Length: 5 Pages
Retain more designer & developer ownership in your project.
This is the standard Web Site Development Contract we use when working on a project. It favors the Designer or Developer and helps them retain the rights to their work using very friendly language. Edit as needed to create your starting contract for your business. Each client may require modifications to the standard contract which you will need to deal with on a per-project basis.
There is an alternate version of this contract which is more client-centered (however with minimal ownership rights for the developer). - See Web Development Contract (Developer Centered)
Alternate documents are those which may be used instead of this document depending on your situation. Alternate documents may be better suited for different size projects, more specialized projects, variations on rights, etc.
August 31st, 2007
Web Development Contract (Client Centered)
View Document Sample
Document Length: 5 Pages
This is a variation of the standard Web Site Development Contract. Edit as needed to create your starting contract for your business. Each client may require modifications to the standard contract which you will need to deal with on a per-project basis.
This version was created by common request from many developers wanting a comprehensive contract, without the clauses their clients found objectionable (typically regarding copyright ownership). The client-centered version gives the client basically rights to everything done (except to your preexisting material). Normally we do not recommend this, as it will prevent the developer from leveraging work created on a project for future use in other projects. It is only included by common request from our users. It is your responsibility to understand the implications of giving up your rights to work created for a client which, by default, would normally be retained by the developer. We recommend that you compare this variation with the standard version above and consult your own attorney if you have questions.
Click here to view:
August 31st, 2007
Web Site Development Agreement (Australia)
View Document Sample
Document Length: 9 Pages
If you are in another country operating under English law (such as Scotland, New Zealand, etc.) you can use the Australia and UK contracts as a starting point. You can save hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars having a solicitor review and make minor edits to our contracts tailored specifically to your country. Using our contracts as starting points could cost as much as 10 times less for a review and minor edits than asking a solicitor to create a custom contract.
Edit as needed to create your starting contract for your business. Each client may require modifications to the standard contract which you will need to deal with on a per-project basis. You may use the various contracts and agreements as starting points for use in other countries. You will need to have your own attorney review and edit the contracts for use in other countries and states where the standard pre-written versions will not be applicable. If you find an attorney who wants to redo everything from scratch their own way, consider getting a second opinion, unless you are in a country where US, English or Canadian law do not apply.
The original English Law UK Web Development Contract has been edited by a solicitor in Australia to conform to English/Australia law. There are a few minor differences between the UK and Australia versions (mostly relating to references to the Privacy Act, country location information and tax and banking rate information).
Due to the differences between US and English/UK Law this version is much longer. For small projects see the Australian/UK short form.
Click here to view:
August 31st, 2007
Web Site Maintenance Agreement Template & Contract
The Web Site Maintenance Agreement is an agreement template that is used when taking over the maintenance of an existing project or web site or when you are separating the development agreement from the maintenance agreement. Use this to specify exactly what the client is getting in terms of maintenance, and also to disclaim what you will not do and what you are not responsible for.
Click here for more information on Web Site Maintenance Agreements
August 31st, 2007
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