Posts filed under 'Client Projects'
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
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
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
This month’s technical question seems to revolve around the following questions.
1) How do I get a jump drive to boot?
2) How do I make a bootable usb drive or device?
3) I JUST WANT MY %#$%ing THUMB DRIVE TO BOOT!!!!!
Yeah, we feel your pain, so brace yourself for the harsh reality. Whether you want to get a jump drive to autorun or autoplay - here’s the straight scoop.
Getting a jump drive, thumb drive or any nearly any other usb hard drive device to autorun is almost impossible to accomplish.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news - but with today’s security settings and restrictions - even if you do get it to work - it is only under the most controlled of circumstances.
Now, this does not stop customers and marketing firms from calling us every week asking for how to do an autorunning USB Jump Drive for some marketing project they have (and usually frantic because they have already promised someone they can) - so obviously there is great need for this.
That being said, we’ve been actively studying how this is accomplished and under what circumstances. Gleen what you want from this - as we are merely reporting what we’ve found along the way.
1) Pre-conception #1 - All I need is an autorun.ini right?
Wrong. That might work for your typical CD-ROM or DVD project, however a jump drive is not treated the same as a CD-ROM or DVD. It is a device, not media. Granted, on some older Win 98 machines - we actually got the following to work by including both an autorun.ini & a seperate autorun.inf (as if it was a CD-ROM ISO).
If your file was presentation.exe, then your files would look like:
[autorun]
open=presentation.exe
or
[autorun]
shellexecute=presentation.exe
To see a list of all the various autorun commands you can use, visit this link.
Another resource is: http://www.phdcc.com/shellrun/autorun.htm
If you want Windows-based resources for booting from a USB Drive - here is the official Microsoft spiel: Recommendations for Booting Windows from USB Storage Devices: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx
To sum the above article up - if you find that type of reading boring - Windows can easily make a USB Drive boot - if
1) You’re the manufacturer of Jump Drives, and
2) You can change your USB Device’s hardware BIOS to allow for Boot instructions.
If you cannot do either - then you cannot make a USB Drive bootable and anyone who says they can is a big, fat liar.
If you want to see some very cool multimedia presentations we can build for you - then give us a call about that. THAT - we can get to autorun for you!
UPDATED - We found this great little post on Digg - Simon’s Blog - how to autorun a USB Device.
March 16th, 2007
- Also know as - OSC POS, OSCommerce POS, POS Plugin for OSC
- POS System for OSCommerce
- Point of sale for OSCommerce
Figure 1 - posshot1.png - Creating POS Orders in OSCommerce.
This screenshot demonstrates the standard three-part sales order view. The very top bar indicates where in the system you currently are. You are logged in as a sales-rep - βDanβ and you are processing a new sale. Next will come the individual line items.
Basic product lines in this OSC Point of Sale (POS) example, including kilt types and belt types, are specified in the first dropdown. Each has a two-letter code. Once these codes are learned, you can enter them without having to click the drop-down.
There are two types of order as specified in “Product”. A stock item is usually scanned, which populates the entire line with the relevant data. But it can still be manipulated manually. Grabbing the drop downs in a Stock Order will indicate what options are available, based on what you have already chosen. Choosing added-cost options will cause the drop down to change color and an extra cost amount to appear in the Attributes pane.
Figure 2 - posshot2.png - Using SKUs in OSCommerce & access your OSC Database via the Point of Sale System.
The SKU field is what the scanner will populate. Each combination of options has a unique SKU, so scanning a tag will cause all of the dropdowns to automatically update. When manually configuring an order, the SKU field is not normally touched. Clicking “Clear” will clear the entire line.
Putting more than a few line items in this view will give the Items pane a scrollbar, but in the top right corner of the pane, you’ll see an Expand button. This will expand the Items pane to the entire visible browser window, moving the Customer and Payment elements below the fold. The scrollbar will transfer to the browser window itself, as is depicted in the next screenshot.
Figure 3 β posshot3.png - Accessing customer data (OSC) via the POS.
When the Customer field is visible, it can be used to enter a new customer as depicted in Figure 1, to search for customers as depicted in Figure 2, or to display or edit existing customers as depicted below.
Figure 4 β posshot4.png - POS & Payment information. Using a POS in OSC to fullfill payment and transaction.
This also showcases some of the Payment field functionality. Since this functionality is usually tied to your preferred Gateway / Payment processor, we will not go into detail on it. It serves to indicate at a glance what the payment method and details are.
This POS System for OScommerce & ZenCart is VERY robust and is not one of those things that just comes off the shelf. It is a custom install service we’re happy to offer. For more information - call us at 877-239-3063 or 425-482-7941 if you are in the Seattle-area.
Email us questions about our OSC POS!
October 10th, 2006
InviteDesigner.com is a “do-it-yourself” invitation (weddings, etc) website that allows you to build and customize entire sets of wedding & wedding related “stuff”. We say “stuff” simple because there is so much collateral related to weddings we are still realing from all the work. Colors like “Champagnique!” and “Crystophague” - who knew. Those were not in my box of crayolas.
You can check the site out here: http://www.invitedesigner.com
& their blog here: http://www.invitedesigner.com/blog - which talks about the business of weddings, creative ideas and, yes, probably the merits of using “Champagnique” colored something or other.
October 10th, 2006
