The previous company has left them in the lurch, and from what I can tell from reviewing everything, has left them with programmatically correct code, but not a holistic approach that touches the other elements necessary to make sales over the web. For example, the markup (client side code) used in the site executes the design well enough, but does not accommodate or take into account how search engines work, and most importantly fails on some user interface / usability fronts too. It’s not a product company that sells widgets, but one which relies on personal contact with a salesman to make revenue, but where the personal contact could be first initiated over the web.

If people can’t find you on the web, then whatever your site is, and however good it is, and however much it cost you, is nigh on useless. So these are things that we’re going to be working on – the objective is to improve the organic search funnel to get more people to the site without paying anything, and to increase conversion so that when people are on the site, it does what it is supposed to do. To coin another phrase to explain things, “we want our site to be like 3 salespeople”….

And so this is the high level project breakdown:

1. Setup infrastructure to work fast and make changes quickly
2. Move CRM system over to new server to remove old service provider dependancy
3. Setup Google Analytics and Google Adwords; make them efficient
4. Transfer previous (old) website search engine juice
5. Fix markup sitewide for organic SEO
6. Improve homepage usability and conversions
7. Move content from old website to new website
8. Setup blogging platforms for CEO and company
9. Setup social media funnels for engagement and credibility
10. Create content funnel sites for SEO, client education and acquisition

As you can see, the work varies from development, to online marketing, and with a bit of social media thrown in to make the client acquisition funnel wider.

I’m really enjoying working with a group of people that understand the importance (after a little education) of a holistic approach to what they do on the web, but more importantly the recognition that it is a process that needs to fit in with whatever is already there and is not something that can be rectified overnight (without a huge capital outlay).

The web is too much of an ecosystem now to ignore how people interact with different utilities (google, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube), and thus how they directly affect the number of visitors to your site. Making sure you optimise for the funnel (into the site), and the site itself (generally usability on the site) will stand you in good stead.

Another update: This has also now started encompassing social media and software as a service consulting and implementation -> “How do we use Twitter?” and “What’s this Google Calendar thing?”….

We also need the following:

1. Allow emails from more than one account to be diverted to the system and converted into tickets which can be assigned to team members according to language.
2. Have predefined responses stored in a database which can easily be included as a basis for an email
3. Allow specific emails from specific accounts to be automatically assigned to individuals
4. Have various levels of importance for support requests
5. Should allow the creation of different groups with various role capabilities

If you have any suggestions or experience to share please let me know in the comments.

Update: we’re using eSupport

From:
http://blog.kindo.com/

1. Pruning is better (and you can use your keyboard to move your family tree around)
2. Invitations are smoother (and we’re playing nicer with Hotmail)
3. Your profile page has more information for your family (more status updates, and a better calendar)

Since we’re no longer in “beta”, you can be sure that your tree and pages will work as expected. So continue to build your beautiful trees, and share it with your whole family. And tell your friends to start their own tree too!

We feel we’re far from the finished article – Kindo will grow up, evolve, and get bigger and better all the time. We’ve launched a new Kindo forum [http://forum.kindo.com] too, which is a good place to ask questions if you need any help. Please tell us what you do and don’t like about Kindo, and also tell us how you want it to grow too!

Bye for now!

We have also released a new blog on blog.kindo.com, so if you would like to keep up to date with our latest news, then please visit it. Comments are more than welcome

Here are some snippets from two interesting posts on the Kindo blog

http://blog.kindo.com/2007/08/02/some-technical-details/en/

We’re having fun building the Kindo application and used a number of frameworks and components to achieve the finished result.

For the web framework we’re using Seagull which offers excellent integration with Flash through the AMF PHP request handling and easy integration with Ajax and Graphviz. For the Ajax interactions we use jquery exclusively, for Graphviz a heavily extended version of the PEAR lib of the same name. Working with the dot language has been interesting and a good opportunity to experiment with the subtleties of a genealogy graph.

http://blog.kindo.com/2007/09/04/welcome-to-the-beta-release/en/

A little while ago we released an Alpha to a small group of people, to gather valuable user feedback. Thanks to those great people, we’ve had our heads down improving Kindo, and as a result we’re releasing the Beta, and at the same time opening it up to a wider audience for more feedback.

Living and breathing what we’re doing every day sometimes means that often we don’t see the wood for the trees. Having people external to our team try out what we’re doing then give us feedback, is such a valuable process, and we’re hoping that it will help us to discover new bugs, problems, and cultural differences that will enable us to give our users something truly exciting. Of course, we are already aware of many bugs, but having our friends help us to find more is both important and rewarding. We like to think of it as continually polishing our masterpiece.

To do that we’ve created an area we’re using to discuss everything related to what we’re doing, because we want to keep things real. We’re hoping that as we grow and develop further, you’ll help us to make the right decisions about what features we add, and tell us what you think we’re perhaps doing the wrong way. After all, we’re only people, and we’re making the assumption that getting things right for users is going to be an interactive process involving everyone!

So today, while getting the Alpha out the door, it felt incredibly rewarding, both to be working with such a cool team, but also to actually get something out that people are using and testing.

Our initial stats show that the trend we were hoping for is in fact happening, which is also very rewarding. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to take something very complex, and turn it into something visually simple and easy to use. I’m not saying we’ve achieved that, but we’re certainly most of the way there.

So, it’s almost time to go home and do some more work, but it sure feels like today (even though it feels like we’re in a heat wave) was a good day

The site which I am talking about is http://bd4d.com, which stands for By Designers 4 Designers is built using the seagull php framework with the new cms module

General comments

Media Temple Installation

During the live installation I encountered a few problems, most of which related to permissions of files on the server:

The main one however were the permissions of the /var/lib/php/session/ folder – it has to be writable

Plugins that I found really useful during development

There were two firefox plug-ins that I found very useful during development of the site:

Colorzilla – gives you # codes for colours on any webpage
IE tab – allows you to open up ie7 tabs within firefox, which is great for cross browser compliant xhtml/css

Thanks to the developers of these two add-ons

Paypal

The site has a payment gateway for listing jobs and events which has transaction processing done by Paypal.

In terms of project mistakes, this was one of the biggest we made. The support that James received from Paypal was extremely poor and the general documentation which they supply is often out of date and incorrect. I am amazed that they have become such a successful company, when it is so difficult to integrate their transaction processing into one’s site.

However after a lot of waiting for accounts to go live, numerous queries, emails, phone calls and a lot of frustration, we did eventually get the transactions working. It is working fine now, but it was definitely not worth all of that hassle.

I would be interested to here about other experiences from developers using Paypal – hopefully you had a better one than we did.

Site Features

Showcase

The section of the site that I am most proud of is the Showcase section, which has flash and movies of some really cool clips which the bd4d guys have done. The section allows comments to be made on each of the movies and I think it looks pretty slick – even if I say so myself

To get the section functioning, I used the following:

A comment manager which Dmitri initially developed and then I adapted that code to be used for the site.

To prevent spam on the site I used captcha package from the php pear library

And I used the following code in the template to hold the movies/flash files:

< object width="550" height="400" >
< param name="movie" value="{webRoot}/themes/bd4d/showcasemovies/
{oItem.media}" >
< param name="quality" value="high" >
< embed src="{webRoot}/themes/bd4d/showcasemovies/
{oItem.media}" quality="high" width="{oItem.width}" height="{oItem.height}" autostart="true">< / embed >
< / object >

Events

The Events calendar uses the default seagull events module as a basis, but there where a few enhancements made to fit the requirements of the site. The majority of the development of this section was done by James and I think that he did a pretty good job of it.

The calendar looks pretty slick and works really well, also the backend of the seagull events module provides a lot of flexibility for administrators wanting to manage events.

Job board

The Job board uses custom managers in the default module and as I have mentioned in my section about paypal, it allows members of the site to post jobs for a fee. The transaction processing handles straight paypal payments as well as credit card payments which are verified by paypal.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in the introduction this site took way longer than expected and there were a number of hard lessons which the whole team learnt. But at the end of the day, the site looks pretty good and works as expected, so in some way it can be seen as a success.

We’re growing faster than I can keep track of, so I’m looking for a senior php person to join our team of ninjas.

Details below:
A growing web applications company based in Putney Bridge, London, specialising in Web 2.0 work in the LAMP stack, seeks an ambitious, talented, enthusiastic and motivated PHP Developer.

You will have:

1. 3+ years PHP experience with an excellent knowledge of object oriented PHP 4/5, MYSQL 4/5, and a good understanding of CSS, xHTML, AJAX and JavaScript?.
2. Apache and MYSQL administration experience would be ideal but not essential, as would experience with the Seagull framework.
3. Exposure to Open source technologies/frameworks/classes eg PEAR, prototype, scriptaculous is essential. As is exposure to web-based APIs (using SOAP, XML etc).
4. Experience writing/working with CMS, E-commerce systems is beneficial.
5. You must be able to manage a development environment, be able to accurately quote time for completing required tasks and be comfortable working with Trac and svn.

Please get in touch if you are interested.

Emails / responses where the applicant does not fit the above requirements will not be replied to.
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If you use Basecamp, it’s worth checking out…

Hat tip to Ido