Archive for the ‘Web Devevelopment’ Category
Why should I use Visionary Web for my next web project?
Well let’s start with the basics – what services do we offer for web-based projects:
Web design – including GUI design, page layout, and integration
Web development – including PHP, mySQL, SQL, CGI programming, VB and Access (and others)
Graphic Design – including logo and company identity design, photo editing, and other graphi design services
Translation – we can translate your web site to or from: English, Spanish or French (others available)
Integration – we can assist you in making your web site more productive by integrating existing data systems into your site. For instance do you want your online orders directly imported into your accounting system? We can do that. What about making real-time front-office information available to your employees at a different location? We can do that too.
SEO – search engine optimization and placement. Want your site at the top of the major search results? We can do that too!
Hosting – we have a wide variety of hosting related services and packages to fit any budget!
What else do we offer?
A comittment to make your web-related project the best it can be!. We have a comittment to quality parts, products and services that can’t be beat by anyone. We take a personal interest in your company and in your satisfaction.
We also offer you a service company that has been in business since 1997 with employees that have nearly 100 years of combined experience!
Let us help you on your way to a successful web site or web-related system that does more for you than you ever dreamed possible.
I bet you are wondering what the heck is squirrelcart? Well, I’ll tell you. Squirrelcart is a fully customized PHP shopping cart system. We have 5 – 10 clients using this software right now, and they couldn’t be happier with it. It is very EASY to install and upgrade the cart. It only takes about 15-30 minutes to upgrade the cart so you have very little down time for the customer. Squirrelcart also has GREAT customer support which you can find here.
Visionary Enterprises will install, setup and customize this shopping cart to your needs.
Product cost is $750.00 (includes software) + $10 per item.
Here are just a few of some of the other features that Squirrelcart offers:
- Customers, Products, Categories, Store Settings, Shipping Options, Payment Methods, and Orders are all stored in an MySQL database.
- Unlimited number of products and categories.
- Upload images for both products and categories via the cart.
- Display new products on your homepage.
- Simple and Advanced Search.
- Keep track of your stock.
- Email order confirmation to customer.
- Email order notification to merchant.
- Email newsletters to all customers from the admin interface.
- UPS OnLine® Tools Built In.
- Custom Shipping Couriers and Methods can be added.
- Customers can view their order history in detail.
- Order statistics – displays total number and amount of orders in admin interface.
- And much, much more!!!
Our web development clients have been keeping us very busy as of late. Of course this is good, as we enjoy helping customers utilize the web to highlight their services, products, and offerings. Here are a few of the clients for whom we have recently released a new website:
Wabash Realty, Inc – This growing real estate company is located in Wabash, Indiana. With a small and dedicated team of professionals, they are ready to help you buy or sell your home. Check out their website for all of their up-to-date listings.
Curvie McMurray – Curvie is a gifted piano player, song writer, singer, and performer who resides on the east side of the Hudson River just north of NYC. As I write this, Curvie is on a plane to Paris, where he will be sharing his skills and passion with our European friends. Check out his website for clips of his music, a review of his experiences, and to enjoy his unique enthusiasm for life.
Wabash County Connection – The new Wabash County Connection website is a collective effort of the Wabash Area Chamber of Commerce, the North Manchester Chamber of Commerce, the Wabash Economic Development Corp, Wabash Marketplace, and the Wabash County Convention and Visitors Bureau. The site aims to be a central location for organizational news. Allowing each agency to share their latest headlines electronically will allow them to save money, while also expanding the reach of their message.
One of the things I love about the Internet is that to a great extent it is built upon the contributed efforts of an open and collaborative process. A great many of the servers that house our favorite websites run on Open Source software created by communities of people who strive for efficient code, logical functionality, and long-term sustainability as opposed to short-term monetary gain. Many of the standards that guide us in the development of websites are the result of thoughtful and passionate consideration by professionals, laymen, and end users. I love the Internet because in its purest form it is a creation of a collective global community.
I also love the Internet because I can connect with other people using the tools that suit my individual tastes and preferences. Likewise, the people that I connect with can use the tools that are to their liking. By adhering to standards of communication and connection, each Internet user can utilize the web in their own special way.
After reading these thoughts you can understand why I get steamed when I visit a website and I am presented with a message that says something to the order of “This Website Best Viewed with Such and Such Web Browser.� If that’s not bad enough, I really get upset when I visit an important banking, business, or related website that will not work with the web browser of my choice, especially when the browser I am using adheres to a greater number of standards than the browser I’m told to use with the web application.
That said; rest assured that we at Visionary Enterprises take web standards seriously. Not only because we want your site to be viewable by as many people as possible, but because we want your users to be able to see your site the way they want to… using the tools that meet their needs. At Visionary Enterprises we desire an Internet that is open, collaborative, creative, productive, and built on standards. Therefore we build websites best viewed in the web browser of your choice.
Part two of my article on integrating existing business systems with your web site (a look at two recent clients).
Halderman Companies: Halderman (http://www.halderman.com) is a farm management and real estate company that employs managers to help existing farms manage their resources better, they also offer consulting services to major agricultural companies throughout the world. It is in this area where we assist them in integrating existing business systems with their web site.
We do this in two ways. First we tie their web site to their existing management database so that there are instant displays of information including farms and land for sale, recent sales and upcoming auctions. This information allows their customers to get instantly up-to-date information about what land is for sale and what auctions are going on.
All contact forms are structured in such a way that they can easily import this data into their customer contacts database.
Secondly we have created an extranet that allows their field mangers to enter checks, write invoices, etc. directly into their accounting system. They are using MAS200 and all entries are imported into this system from the web.
Shaw’s Knox Fertilizer: Shaw’s (http://www.knoxfert.com) is a fertilizer manufacturer in Indiana. There main audience is golf courses, but they also sell retail via a large network of distributors. In order to lessen the number of phone calls that are received by the main office we helped them to setup a quote system whereby their distributors are searchable by type of products and part numbers so that new customers can more easily get the information they need and place orders quicker.
We are working on a complete re-design of their site that will more readily separate the consumer and wholesale sides of their business. Along with this we will be implementing a more complete distributor datbase as well as a retail location finder.
Tying your web site to existing business systems is just one more way to make your website work for you. At Visionary Enterprises we work to help our clients more fully realize their goals of having a web site that is both informational and helpful to our clients and their customers.
Our office regularly hosts clients for meetings, tours, and trainings. So I find myself giving out directions a lot. Being located on a well known busy thoroughfare lends itself well to giving quick and easy directions. Having a large lighted sign and being directly across from a large well-known company also helps. In the end, our customers have little difficulty finding us.
We also want our customers to have little trouble finding us on the web. Our domain name, visionaryweb.com, is short, to the point, encompasses the unique aspect of our name, and is memorable. Customers have little trouble finding us on the web.
What makes a bad domain name? Well, for starters, I think it’s general a good idea to stay away from domain names that resemble vanity license plates. Ugo2myURL4good8ts. Next how about we stay away from super long domain names, such as: mywebsiteisreallyneatandgollygood.com. And for the sanity of all web surfers everywhere, can we please stop using long acronyms that aren’t used in your every day business, and ones which don’t have any semblance to anything that would normally be spoken by polite folks. Take a gander at what ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC stands for? Let’s not make a domain name out of it, OK? These are just a few things to think about when you consider registering a new domain name. You would be surprised at how many good intention folks come up with domain names that break one, two, or all of these rules. For a good review of what makes a good domain name, check out this article at http://www.philosophe.com.
So, how do you go about finding a good domain name? Well, after reading the article linked above, make a list of all of the words associated with your business or venture. Check your business name first, and then start checking various arrangements of the words in your list that work well together. If you get in a bind, check out the “Name Spinner� tool at www.whois.sc. Type in a couple of the words from your list and let the tool generate several available domain names. It really is a very nice tool.
In the end, remember to keep your domain name simple and remember that your domain name is your address when it comes to your prime location on the web.
Q: How important is it to integrate your existing business systems with your website?
A: It really depends on what you are trying to do with your site, but for many of clients this has become a key to making a really useful site and one that is worth the money that you put into it. By integrating into your existing business systems you can communicate with your customers and your distributors easier and you can also increase sales.
Some examples of integrating your site with existing business systems:
1) Tying the web site to a Point of Sale system so that users can see their account balances (this may help ease the number of phone calls you get from clients to get this type of data). This might also lead to allowing customers to pay for their balances online which would streamline your receivables.
2) Tying the web site to an existing accounting system. This type of integration could allow outside sales people to enter invoices or print receipts. This also could reduce double entry of information by allowing clients to pay for their products online and having this info link directly to your accounting system.
3) Linking your site to your Customer Relationship Management System may allow an ease of contacting and communicating with new customers. Tying the web to a ticketing system may streamline customer support issues.
I will follow up on this article next time with some real-life examples of integration services we have performed for some of our clients.
I really don’t want to turn this blog into a forum for my personal rants, but today I just can’t hold it back. This past weekend as I perused one of our community’s newspapers, I was surprised to see some sections of the newspaper included a new website address for the newspaper. I was especially surprised because I knew the new website address was not correct. In fact it is the web address of a paper in another state (Cleveland, Ohio).
While I’ll leave it to the local paper to figure out what went wrong, I will use this space to encourage you to check with your marketing, public relations, customer support, … OK, everybody in your business, to make sure they know your website address. As hard as it is to effectively market to your target audience, it’s a major problem if your own staff is putting out incorrect contact information. Make sure your company knows its place on the web. And if you don’t… give us a call and we’ll help you find it.
How can I determine how successful my web site is? How productive is it?
These are questions that we are asked all of the time by our clients. The answers are probably different for each individual client, but I will try to outline some ways that Visionary Enterprises can help you determine how successful your site is and how productive it is (in reality these are one and the same question).
#1 From the first launch of your new site or re-designed site set goals for your site like: I want to get x hits by x date or I want to do x amount of sales by x date. Visionary Enterprises can assist clients in setting realistic goals and a plan for measuring and meeting these goals.
A) Measuring hits or visits to your site – Every hosting account we setup has measurable logs in the form of Webalizer Statistics. We can customize these stats pages to reveal the information that is most useful to our clients.
1) Sometimes number of visits isn’t as important as WHO is visiting and whether those visits turn into sales or contacts. Visionary can assist in helping you determine the success of these visits to your site.
2) Some of the new pay-per-click advertising services such as Google and Yahoo! have code that you can use to track visitors to your site from their service. In particular they allow you to track contacts or sales that are made as a direct result of visits from your pay-per-click advertising – this in effect allows you to literally see and estimate the impact of your advertising dollars.
3) Visionary can assist clients in determining their advertising productivity and develop a means for getting these results. This used to mean putting a question on your contact or shopping form asking where a user heard about your site (no one really tracked this information it was just nice to know). Now there are technologies that allow us to help you estimate not only where a user came from to place an order on your site, but how much that user cost you in advertising dollars to make that sale.
#2 Determine how you are going to track the productivity of your site
A) For some clients getting lots of traffic is key to making their site productive – for other clients number of sales – and for still others generating the most traffic/sales for their money is most beneficial.
B) Having set goals and an outline of what productivity means to you are esential to getting what you want out of your site.
1) Visionary Enterprises can assist clients in listing and mapping goals for their site and then tracking the results of these goals to determine the overall productivity of their site.
2) It is first and foremost important to set attainable goals and measurable results and then to track these as accurately and consistently as possible.
C) Determining how and at what intervals you are going to measure your site’s productivity is very important.
1) We have had clients who say things like “I want 10,000 visits a day within the first three months my site is up.” This is very unrealistic. Visionary Enterprises can help you determine what are realistic goals for your site in your industry and can help you compare results to similar sites.
2) Determining intervals of measurement is important as well. To be honest, some days sites do well and some days they don’t. Why? Much of it depends on your industry and who your target audience is.
#3 And speaking of target audiences that brings us to our final productivity tool/hint: Determine your target audience up front.
A) Make sure you know who your target audience is – age, gender, race, status, educational level etc.
1) Visionary Enterprises does not condone the production of websites that excludes or demoralizes any of the above demographic categories, but you should know who your target audience is going to be or is.
2) If you are selling jeans and 90% of the people that visit your site are people who make less than 10% of all jean purchases then you are doing something wrong. If you are selling rock music that is load and the primary audience you are looking for is male between the ages of 16 and 20 and most of the people visiting your site are 60 and female then you are doing something wrong.
B) Visionary Enterprises can assist you in determining not only how many people are coming to your site, but who they really are, what their interests are, etc.
1) How can we do this?
a) Using polls that offer a % off for completion
b) Using demographic information as part of the signup process
c) Using coupons that are used in specific ad campaigns etc.
There are many ways to determine if your site is productive and many ways of determining what is productive for your company or site. Visionary Enterprises is capable of helping you determine the success of your site as it relates to an advertising campaign, the launch of a re-designed site or a new product or just the overall effectiveness of your marketing.
Visionary works with marketing companies all over the world when asked. We can work with your marketing agency, division or firm to find out how your overall marketing strategy is working with regards to your site.
Call us today at 260-569-0260 to determine how we can assist you in determining the productivity of your web site.
At Visionary Enterprises we want our clients’ websites to be successful long after the development stage. For long term success, it is important for websites to continually have fresh content. We should all know by now that if we don’t give people new things to experience on our websites, we won’t have repeat visitors. It’s also becoming more important to have fresh content on your website for search engine placement.
To help our clients develop long term plans for keeping their site full of fresh content we have been putting significant resources into researching and developing Content Management Systems (CMS). Through our research we have found and tested a system that we feel meets the needs of a majority of our small clients (5-20 page sites). This solution is Website Baker. This Open Source solution provides significant advantages over competing systems, including ease of use, intuitiveness, an advanced WYSIWYG editor, and a clear upgrade path. Being Open Source, the only cost for our customers is the cost of implementation.
We want our clients to have very successful websites. Our new focus on CMSs is one part of making this happen. Contact us today if you would like to see a demo of the Website Baker CMS or to have us implement the system on your site.
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