I recently got involved with a project for a client that is offering a private voluntary barter currency. The site was designed around the desire of setting up one shell site that is easily replicable across geographic locations. For example, the first site, Liberty Dollar Dallas, was created and the client wants to be able to take that site and use it to quickly set up sites like Liberty Dollar Austin, Liberty Dollar Tuscon, etc…

This goal was accomplished through creating a base content management system that is completely data-driven through a backend database. The client can manage virtually everything about the site through an administrative panel and can easily set up new sites by copying very minimal amounts of code, updating their DNS servers, and creating a new header image. This is ideal as it requires very little interaction from me, the designer, and thus results in very little additional costs to the client. And because the site is based on centralized code, it is very easy to maintain. The client wins and so does the designer!

So check out Liberty Dollar and tell me what you think about the site. Also look into the idea behind barter currency and see if it appeals to you as well.

One of my software developer friends recently told me that he’s leaving his company. His reasoning behind leaving was really disturbing and I wondered if it could be considered the “ultimate sin” of software development.

He started as one of the first five developers at a local startup company and was a major part in designing the system. He had input in everything from what language/frameworks to use to how the system would be layered. He spent about two years with the company and is now leaving because, as he puts it, he no longer wants to work on the product due to the fact that the system itself is so onerous to manage. His team has essentially built their product into a Big Ball of Mud. Rather than continuing to battle to make the project work, he’d much rather start over new at somewhere else. And there are many companies that would give him a raise in pay to do this.

This reasoning struck me as just about the worse thing that a developer can do career-wise. The company that he started with invested a large amount of time, money, and trust in him and the rest of his team. They depended on him to create a successful product that was both profitable and maintainable. His team failed that duty and now he’s decided to bolt because it would be too much work to re-architect the product. This leaves the company in a tremendously disadvantaged position. They must now replace him with a new developer who will most likely require a large amount of time to come up to speed on the product. And if the developer is any good, it is likely that he/she will leave the company as well once they discover the true condition of the product.

So is this truly the “ultimate sin” of software development?

Halfslide Design is proud to announce that we will soon be offering a new service for sites looking to create or update a daily deal website. We are offering to create and customize a template-based daily deal site as well as host it for a flat fee of $40 per month. The templatized site would look and feel similar to Game Deal Daily. Each site created and managed by Halfslide Design would feature the following:

1. A clean, standards-based interface that is completely browser-compliant.
2. The ability to add/edit/delete/schedule products through an administrative interface.
3. An optional store that would allow that would allow the site owner to sell other products in addition to the current deal of the day.
4. Two rss feeds - One for listing the site with many of the deal of the day trackers like Cheapofeed.com or dodtracker.com.
5. Payment integration with Paypal, Authorize.net, and Google Checkout
6. Order management through an administrative backend.
7. Customized blog.
8. FAQ, About Us, and Contact Us page.

Halfslide Design is offering a discount to the first ten sites that sign up for this service. If you are interested in having your site created or redesigned, please contact Peter.

The owners of deal a day golf recently came to me and asked me to completely redesign their daily deal site, Deal A Day Golf. Their old site had a very dark theme with lots of black and dark green which made it very tough to read. They were also having to do much more maintenance on the site than they really wanted to. I spent the next few weeks working with them to create their new site which has gone live in the recent weeks.

Their new site was built around the goal of being able to configure the site and let it run with very little attention. I provided them with an administrative interface that lets them manage their products, schedule products to run, and set many other options on the site such as page meta and even gave them a somewhat simple store in their Past Deals section.

The new site also incorporates payment integrations with Paypal, Google Checkout, and Authorize.net. Their previous site only allowed individuals to pay using Authorize.net. Providing Google and Paypal just gives their customers that much more freedom when choosing how to pay for their products. If you’ve never seen Deal A Day Golf, check out their site and send me feedback on how you like it.

Cheapofeed.com has recently gone live in a beta version. We are still working out a lot of the kinks in the site. The site is unique in the way it tracks and ranks deals of the day. The site has a list of daily-deal sites that it reviews every 24 hours. When it finds a new deal, it posts it in the appropriate category. Users of the site can then vote whether they like that deal by clicking on the deal and visiting the site that is running the deal. The more votes that the deal gets, the higher the deal is listed on the page. In this way, sites are rewarded by running attractive deals.

Visit the site and let us here at Halfslide know if you find any bugs.

Now that I’ve completed work on two successful “Deal of the Day” sites, I receive a lot of questions about them. This post is for those out there who are weighing the possibility of building their own daily deal site. In my opinion, daily deal sites are beneficial for several reasons:

1. Google loves daily deal sites. From all of the reading and work I’ve done with Search Engine Optimization I’ve seen how having dynamic content helps your page rank. Google is not going to rank your site high in their listings if you haven’t changed your site in weeks. So having a new deal every day creates dynamic content and boosts your page rank.
2. A daily deal site is a great way to build a large core or regular visitors. Many ecommerce sites would love to have visitors checking their site periodically. If you have a daily deal site, you are providing your potential customers with a new item to purchase every day and therefore, your customers are reminded to check your site regularly.
3. Daily deal sites act as a fantastic funnel to your primary ecommerce site (if you have one). A great example of this is Hataday.com. Hataday is associated with Just Sports. Hataday receives thousands of page visits every day and each of these visitors sees the Just Sports logo clearly at the top of the Hataday page. Visitors, if they like what’s for sale on Hataday, can click through to visit Just Sport’s main site, creating new sales opportunities for Just Sports that were previously unavailable.
4. There are many daily deal tracking sites like Cheapofeed.com that do nothing but categorize and list the deals being offered on daily deal sites. This is free advertising that is not generally available to most other types of ecommerce sites. The people who regularly visit these sites are people who are very interested in buying something. This means that when you get a hit from one of these tracking sites on your daily deal site, you already have a visitor who is primed for a sale and intends on buying something.

All in all, producing a daily deal site is well worth the expense in time and money. They can be designed so that they can be managed with minimal effort and provide a vast array of benefits. If you are interested in having a daily deal site created and managed by Halfslide Design, contact us here.

I recently finished a site for Storage Strategies Now, an industry analyst firm that provides reports and commentary on the technology market. There’s not much to the site itself other than the fact that it was created using php and it uses Adobe’s Contribute technology to allow the client to make updates to the site themselves. I basically put together the layout and used php includes to include small pages of content that the client can update. This gives the added benefit of allowing the client to update the content on the site without having to worry about disturbing the general layout. Very cool technology.

After Our Day is an online honeymoon registry that I’ve created that allows couples to set up a wedding registry that will apply to their honeymoon. An honeymoon registry works exactly like any regular wedding gift registry. The only difference is that wedding guests can purchase things like “10,000 Miles of Airfare” for your honeymoon instead of getting you that fancy new Cuisinart. The goal with this site is to provide a free way for couples to earn money for their honeymoon. The site will be completely free to use and would (hopefully) be self-supporting using ads.

I’m still working on a lot of the user admin stuff, but hope to have it open to the public by the end of the year. Feel free to leave any comments on the idea of the site and how you like the layout currently.

I recently finished work on hataday.com for a client at JustSports.net. The site functions similarly to Shirtaday in that a new item is put up for sale every single day and only a limited number are available. It’s all based on the woot.com business model. The only difference with this site is that there is no price decline with each item that is purchased. This makes sense as the hats are all pre-ordered so there is no cost decline as with t-shirts.

The site was my first interaction with authorize.net. Overall, I would say that they have a strong product offering. Their developer integration documentation is very rich and their example code covers just about everything you will need to do a full integration. I wasn’t pleased with all the hoops you have to jump through to get started with them though. For example, in order to get a developer account, you have to basically send them an email and they will get back to you in a day or two. With paypal and google, all you do is create an account through their websites and you are off and running. Much simpler and allows you to do everything you need to do without getting help from their support teams.

There weren’t too many suprises with this site and it looks to be a really good front-end for justsports.net. Let’s hope they can get some traffic flowing to the site through all of the deal of the day sites so that they can be successful.

Launching a website over the internet was never so easy before. However you must be careful in choosing an appropriate site design for you. You can get the assistance of a web design consulting company to design a technically as well as aesthetically good website. The website design must follow the technical aspects of web development to ensure the best launching over the internet. There are many web design sites available over the internet which offer free custom logo design to choose from. You can learn web design basics from web design or a software and can design your website at your own. You can launch your website over a wireless network like verizon wireless etc.

One of the problems with implementing an ajax4jsf command button on your site is that it gives the user the ability to submit the button as many times (and as quickly) as they can click the button. If the ajax4jsf button is tied to an action that performs intensive work on the backend, this could seriously hamper performance. A quick way to prevent this is to disable the button when it is clicked and the re-enable it when the action finishes. The ajax4jsf command button actually provides a quick and easy way to do this.



oncomplete=”this.disabled=false” action=”…”/>


This will disable the button as soon as the action is fired and enable it once the action completes.

*** Correction *** See comment from Sergey Smirnov below. My mistaken assumption was based on me misreading the cause of the behavior. It turns out that my commandButton is actually located inside an ajax4jsf outputPanel that is being re-rendered. I’m guessing that it is the re-rendering of the panel that is enabling the button after I had disabled it.

Due to the advancement in the technology communications throughout the world has become very fast and easy. People are now communicating with each other not only via telephone but also through internet. The new technology used in this respect is broadband phone service. Many companies are using services like voip calling services to communicate around the globe. They have to install internet voip software to implement this over the network. There is much software which supports voip calls. You can get this free from internet. The example of this is skype phone software.