Current Projects: The Social Radar
My good friend Keith Crawford and I have been working on a sideline project / podcast for the past month or so called The Social Radar. The Social Radar is a weekly podcast that Keith and I record to discuss the ever changing world of social media. Some of the areas we cover include desktop and wireless applications used to manage social media (ie. Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Twhirl, etc.).
We also plan to cover new products that are released onto the market that are of a social nature. It is our goal to update our show on a weekly basis with new information. The Social Radar podcast will soon be available for download from iTunes, stay tuned for that announcement in the very near future…
The initial design for The Social Radar is extremely simple but expect it to evolve as we add new shows. Below is a screenshot for The Social Radar in it’s current state:
You can click the screenshot above to visit The Social Radar online and listen to our first podcast…
Current Projects: Custom PHP/MySQL Members CMS
It’s been a long time since I actually coded a custom standalone php application for a client and I found my skills to be a little rusty at first. The reason I don’t get to code a lot of custom applications anymore is because most of the client projects we see today are built on top of a cms like wordpress or a framework like modx. In this instance the client already had their website developed internally and just needed us to develop an enhanced members area so they could communicate and share information with their members.
The membership table for this project has approximately 500 members in it, each member has the ability to authenticate by login and then view protected content. Members can also submit changes to their contact or login information that has to be approved before it’s accepted. Of course the normal features such as lost password restoration are also in place.
This solution was built entirely using PHP and all of the data is stored in 17 tables inside a MySQL database. For easier management of a large membership database with over 500 members, I also built in the ability to export and import data to the database from either XLS or CSV format. This should be another convenient aspect of the solution for our client.
I am pretty anxious to demo this application and bug-test it this next week. I used the newest version of PHPRunner IDE to develop this project and even though I was a little out of practice I still was able to code the project a lot faster than if I had used another tool like Eclipse or Notepad. The new version of PHPR is very nice, it’s been a while since I upgraded and have to admit that there are so many new features that I haven’t even looked into yet.
Recent Projects: Belle Corn
My business partner Greg launched a redesign this morning for one of our clients, Belle Corn. He has been working on this project for a few weeks now and I think it turned out great! Since we have been working with Belle Corn, we have gotten to know the owner of the company very well and he has an awesome understanding of how to promote his brand online, and if you work in our industry you come to appreciate that. In fact, I think that Belle Corn and it’s partner company, Cullum Seeds, have won Addy’s in the past for some of their advertising campaigns. You can view the new design at: http://bellecorn.com or click on the screenshot below.
In addition to their new website, we have also assisted Belle Corn to establish a presence on Facebook and Twitter. You can find Belle Corn on Facebook here, and on Twitter here. Below is a screengrab of the Twitter profile page that we implemented for them as well…
We have to also thank the team at Powell Creative, Greg has worked closely with them on this project…
Microsoft Outlook 2010 Enhancements
I have been a power Outlook for as long as I can remember and I have used it to schedule every aspect of my life for as long as I can remember. In fact, as much as I hate the way it performs sometimes, I wouldn’t know what to do if I had to abandon it and find another desktop solution.
The biggest competition to the Outlook application that I have seen so far would have to be Thunderbird, but unfortunately it doesn’t have all of the features that Outlook has out of the box right now. With the Office 2010 suite is soon to hit shelves, I found a great post on Web Worker Daily that outlined some of Outlook 2010’s enhancements. Here’s an excerpt from the article…
If you are interested, there are some additional screenshots on Web Worker Daily’s website…
Backstage View.
Personally, I think the addition of the Backstage View in Office 2010 applications sets a new level of application accessibility and usability, especially in Outlook 2010. Clicking on the Office button gives you access to Outlook settings and account information, including account settings, automatic replies to email, mailbox cleanup, and rules.
Bringing all this information into one interface should be a boon to productivity, since users will no longer have to hunt around for management features in various Outlook menus.
Schedule View.
Although there were different “views” of Outlook data in previous releases, the implementation meant that they weren’t that useful. However, Outlook 2010 includes better control over views, and I recommend anybody test driving it to spend some time using them.
A case in point is the new Schedule view, which provides better insight into your daily schedule, as recorded in your Outlook calendar. Moreover, as with the other views, you have the option to set different time scales to provide a granular look as to what is going in your day. The new Time Scale feature enables you to scale your schedule view from 5-minute to 60-minute increments.
Task Notes.
Office 2010 includes OneNote 2010 integration with the main Office applications, including Outlook. From the Outlook Tasks List, click “Task Notes” and the “Select Location in OneNote” dialog box appears. From this dialog box, you have the option of selecting a section or page for your task notes. Even if you are currently a big OneNote user, the introduction of Task Notes in Outlook 2010 may cause you to reconsider your existing OneNote organizational schema.
I see the integration of OneNote with Outlook and other Office 2010 applications as one of the highlights in this upcoming Office release.
Publish Online.
The new Publish Online feature gives the promise of a geographically-dispersed project team being able to publish their personal and team calendar data online, and make it accessible to the team. With Publish Online, you can publish your Outlook calendar to Office Online, or a WebDAV server. I like the options here because it won’t tie you to an expensive online collaboration solution.
Customize Common Tasks.
There have been few (if any) changes to how you perform common Outlook tasks in quite some time. With the launch of Outlook 2010, you have the option to customize how you perform common tasks like sending meeting invites to your team, sending emails to your whole team, and forwarding emails. You also have the option to create your own “quick steps” from scratch. These options are available from “Quick Steps” in the Home ribbon or from the “Quick Steps” dialog box. The best part is that these options are dialog box-driven, with no knowledge of macros required.
Outlook 2010 and Your Productivity
While I lamented in a previous post that Outlook 2010 needs to be more social, the productivity enhancements present in Outlook 2010 offer a lot for everyone from novice to power users. My history as a writer and computer book technical reviewer on Office topics goes back to Office 2000; the Office 2010 Technical Preview — especially Outlook 2010 — show a lot more promise at this stage than previous releases, so I’m looking forward to checking out the final version.
What productivity features are you looking for in Outlook 2010?
Current Projects: Mark Martin Museum Twitter Profile
My business partner Stephen and I have been going back and forth about how buggy the backend of Twitter can be when you go in to load a new background image or even change the color of your sidebar. Several times I would try to upload the background image that I had been working on this afternoon and would get notification that my settings had been saved but when I clicked on Profile I would see the same background that my partner had uploaded several hours earlier. It was a really buggy process!
Fortunately I finally got my photoshop background to line up right on a 1024 resolution monitor, and I think that this will work for now, but at some point I think we will probably add some information for the museum and store to the design.
If you are a NASCAR fan, be sure to follow @diecastcars on Twitter for the best deals on NASCAR merchandise as well as autographed Mark Martin Merchandise. Here’s a screenshot of what we finally decided on for their background image…
Current Projects: Caring Hands Hospice
In addition to the redesign project we have been working on for Approve Home Medical, I have also been working on a new project for them as well. Caring Hands Hospice is an affiliate of Approve Home Medical Services and is locally owned and operated. The Caring Hands service area includes Independence, Sharp, and Randolph Counties. They also have offices in Batesville and Cherokee Village.
As I mentioned, this is a completely new project seperate from the Approve Home Medical project. We are in the client review phase of this project and awaiting some content so it’s hard to say when the site will launch, but here’s a sneak peek…
Current Projects: Approve Home Medical
It never fails, every time I head out of town for a few days I come back to a mountain of open projects. Fortunately I haven’t had a lot of disruptions the past two days so I have been able to make some headway. One of the projects that I have been working on is a redesign for an existing client, Approve Home Medical.
Approve Home Medical Services is a full service health agency that has been in business since 1988. They service Batesville, Arkansas and a 50 mile radius of Batesville. They also have a new branch office in Cherokee Village which is in Sharp County.
We haven’t launched the redesign yet, but here’s a sneak peak if you are interested:
Recent Projects: MOKSACVPR Redesign
My partners and I have been fortunate enough to call the Missouri-Kansas Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation (MOKSACVPR) clients for about 5 years now. Recently we were in discussion with the MOKSACVPR website committee regarding some updates to their membership registration system and recommended they also allow us to do a light redesign to their existing website. They agreed and I drew this project…
I tried to style their redesign as closely to their existing website as much as possible but added some features and functionality that made the website a lot more user friendly. I am still in the process of hammering out some tweaks to the design, etc., but here’s a screenshot of where I am so far…
Current Projects: Streamlining Project Discovery
I have been developing websites for a long time now and over the years I have seen a lot of changes in the way that we, as developers, approach projects. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the fact that we not only approach projects differently but we also build them differently.
Personally, I wouldn’t have dreamed of using an open source content management system or framework about 7 or 8 years ago because a lot of these solutions weren’t mature enough to be trusted, especially from a security standpoint. Of course, this is polar opposite today, many popular content management solutions like Wordpress, MODx, Joomla, and Drupal have all matured and are viable options for building web projects in.
While a whole lot has changed in terms of how we develop projects, one aspect of what we do hasn’t. Project Discovery, or the initial conversation you have with a prospective client prior to quoting out their web project, is extremely important. During this process I like to try to get my head around everything the client is wanting to achieve with their website.
Phase One:
This initial conversation, or Phase 1, usually consists of the following determinations…
- Do they require content management?
- Do they plan to blog or publish news releases?
- Do they need graphic design / photography / or page layouts?
- Do they have a rough project outline?
- Do they have content writers, or will we be quoting this out?
- Do they plan to capture any user data?
- Do they need any custom applications or functionality?
- Do they need to plugin or interact with any third-party applications?
- What is their timeframe for testing / launch?
- Do the also need email?
- What is their budget?
Phase Two:
Once I have all of the answers to Phase One I can pretty much start on a proposal, but before delivering the final cost analysis to the client I usually will follow up with them regarding our initial conversation about the following…
- Has anything changes since we last spoke about the project?
- Can we nail down the project outline and go through it to make sure we haven’t left anything out?
- If the project requires capturing data or any custom programming, can we nail down the specifics and build a model of how they are envisioning the project to function.
- If the project requires interacting with a third-party application or service, do we have a method for me to test this functionality? Is there support documentation or point of contact for this service?
- Who is going to be my point of contact during the project?
Once I have all of this information in my head, and I have already gone over our policies and procedures for dealing with scope creep and additional development costs down the road, I am usually ready to build them a proposal based on the information I have.
Since most of the discovery information I get from clients comes through either web conferencing or telephone calls, I simply jot down these notes in my notebook and pull from that while making the proposal. A few years ago I would send the prospective client my discovery notes along with my proposal just so that there wouldn’t ever be any confusion once the project got started. Over the years I have stopped doing this but I got to thinking today that it might not be a bad idea to start doing this again.
What Got Me to Thinking About This?
Today my business partners and I were on the phone w/ a potential new account and were asking him the usual discovery questions regarding his project. My partner Stephen had already spoken with this person briefly so he took the lead on the call, my partner Greg and I listened in and chimed in with any questions we might have. While this was going on, I jotted down a few notes in my notebook about the project, even though I had already more or less made the determination, as did my partners, that I was more than likely not going to be the one developing this project. Internally we are able to discern which one of us is best suited to manage a project, sometimes even from the initial conversation we are able to make this call…
When we got on the phone after the conference call with one another we all agreed that it would more than likely be a project that Greg would oversee. But, let’s say that Greg get’s bogged down and needs for me to pickup and help him out on a project, it would be nice for me to have access to the discovery notes that Greg has put together regarding the project. We currently use Basecamp for project management but it doesn’t do a detailed job of capturing discovery data in my opinion so I got to thinking what we could do to build onto this…
Idea for Custom Application
I am going to build a custom application that we can enter in discovery notes for projects into a form online during our conversation. I am also going to have this form be accessible by our blackberries and iphones as well. Of course, once all of the project discovery information is input we will be able to generate a PDF or Word Document from the data entered. I haven’t got the entire schematic worked out in my head as to what this is going to look like yet and I haven’t started on it, but once I have something rough, I will be sure to post an update here.
Just out of curiosity, what do you use for your project discovery process? Be sure to leave me your comments below…
Current Projects: Xtreme Green Lawn Service
I was contacted a week or so ago on Facebook by Xtreme-Green Lawn Service about redesigning their website. I have known the owners of Xtreme Green for a long time and have worked on other projects for them over the years. The goal of this project was to take their website and to make it look more professional and to increase their rate of conversion on the website from visitors to actual customers. Xtreme Green operates in the Dallas / Fort Worth area so they have a pretty big focus area, as well as a lot of competitors from both a local and national level.
Content management is an important requirement for this project, they need the ability to post updates easily as well as publish content about their service offerings and specials. With this in mind I started the project with wordpress version 2.8 and have used woo theme as the basis for the design. The client is out of town on vacation this week so I don’t have a preview link for this project yet but I can share a screenshot of where I am at so far…
