Toyflow.com is a new Canadian-based deal of the day site that sells toys and other children’s products to customers in the United States and Canada. The daily deal site has now been through two phases of development and has been in production selling products for the last month.  The site was designed with some very unique features in addition to the typical features you would see on a deal of the day site.

• Since the deal of the day site sells its products to customers in the United States and Canada, there were some customizations that needed to happen to accomodate the diverse customer base.
• The site is fully internationalized when it comes to language and can be configured to display text in both French and English.
• Toyflow accepts both the Canadian Dollar and US Dollar.  A user can elect to show prices for the products in either of these currencies as well as shipping costs, tax, and discount codes.
• The site utilizes geolocation to determine which currency to show to a visitor as well as assists the user in filling out their order info by pre-filling their country, city, and state/province based on this geolocation data.
• A full shipping integration has been built in order to allow the site to compute shipping costs to the United States as well as to Canada.  The entire shipping process has been fully automated.  The client can export orders to UPS Worldship for printing labels, print packing slips, and process returns using RMA numbers.
• Canadian sales tax is calculated automatically based on the GST and PST taxes in each of the Canadian provinces
• The site has the ability to feature side deals in addition to the standard deal of the day.  These deals can be scheduled based on date or on inventory.
• Integration with Moneris for secure credit card payments directly on the site.
• Ability to tag products for use in reporting.  Products can be tagged and placed into various categories so that sales can be analyzed to see which groups of products are selling the best.  This reporting is built into the site’s administrative console and all reports are exportable to Microsoft Excel.

We at Halfslide Design really enjoyed working with David and Terry at Toyflow on the development of their daily deal website.  They are excellent communicators and have an excellent business plan.  In addition, they did a superb job of planning the website design project and clearly illustrating the requirements of their site.  If you haven’t checked out Toyflow.com yet, give it a look and grab some toys for your kids.

Visit Toyflow

iChooseGolf is an exciting new fantasy golf site that seeks to provides a unique fantasy team experience to its users. The basic idea behind iChooseGolf is that a user can create a fantasy golf league, invite his or her friends to join that league by creating their own teams, and then compete against them in weekly matchups. Each team in the league can build a list of PGA golfers through a draft, trades, or free-agent signings.  The team then receives a score based on how that team’s players perform in the weekly PGA tournaments.  A team is matched up with another team from their league once a week and the winner is the team with the highest score.  At the end of the season, the team who has the most victories over other league teams is the winner.

Those who have participated in other fantasy games (such as fantasy basketball or fantasy football) will find much of this familiar.  What sets iChooseGolf apart is the fact that the commissioner has full control over how the league is managed.  Each league’s schedule, score format, matchup format, and draft are all totally configurable and allows the league to find the exact format that is perfect for them.  The league truly has a powerful set of options for completely customizing the entire fantasy experience.

In addition, iChooseGolf has two different types of matchups:  ICG format and Gridiron.  The ICG format is completely unique and allows the league to score each round of a tournament in a different way.  They can setup “Best Ball” for round 1, “Worst Ball” for round 2, etc…  So each week, the scoring can be different, leading to a much richer experience for those who appreciate the strategy behind fantasy sports.

Halfslide Design was able to partner with Magdesign on the implementation of this new site.  Magdesign developed the really excellent layout and graphical elements that you see on the site as well as worked with iChooseGolf’s creator to flesh out the site’s vision.  Halfslide Design was responsible for implementing all of the business logic and UI architecture.  It has been a truly excellent partnership.

Mike at iChooseGolf is the client that every developer dreams about.  All through the project, he clearly communicated his vision in a way that I found refreshing and easy to work with.  I’d gladly work with Mike again any day.

iChooseGolf has just gone into beta so feel free to go over, sign up, create a fantasy golf team or fantasy golf league, and give us your feedback.  You can participate by creating your own league, joining an existing league, or participating in one of their public solo leagues.

Visit iChooseGolf

Lure Depot is a daily deal website recently completed by Halfslide Design. We were contacted by the owners of Lure Depot about creating a daily deal website that would feature their fishing related products on a daily basis. In additional to featuring one daily deal, the clients wished to be able to feature up to an additional two side deals each day in a manner that is similar to other deal sites.  The site also features:

• Configurable product options: the client can fully configure how the products are listed such as when each daily deal ends, how many pictures to show on each product, how many features, etc…
• Each product can feature videos hosted on youtube.  Each video is listed in the sidebar of the product and plays in a pop-up window when the visitor clicks to view it.
• The site features a mini-CMS that allows the client to add/remove/update any pages on the site such as the About Us, FAQ, Contact us pages.   The CMS features a mini-WYSIWYG editor to allow the client to have full-control over how the page is designed.
• Integration with Google Checkout, Paypal Website Payments Standard, and Paypal Website Payments Pro.  Each of these integrations can be turned off at any time.
• The ability to add discount coupons that provide various configurations of discounts such as a fixed price, percentage of order cost, free shipping, etc…  Each coupon can be controlled to expire at either a future date, or after a certain number of uses.
• A customizable schedule that allows the client to setup an unlimited number of future deals and configure how long each deal lasts.  In addition to scheduling the main daily deal, the client can also schedule up to two more side deals.
• A listing of the previous five deals featured on the site to give new visitors an idea of what products have been recently available.
• A ‘Past Deals’ page that features the most recent deals that are still available to purchase.  This gives the client the ability to continue to sell a product to visitors who may have missed them when they were originally for sale.
• Customers can setup accounts on the site which will allow them to see their order status as well as store their checkout information for quicker purchases in the future.

Visit Lure Depot

Countshop.com is an online retailer of fine watches with an international client base. The owners of Countshop contacted us at Halfslide Design about creating a daily deal store to complement their current e-commerce website.  Halfslide recently completed the work on the site and is happy to announce a successful launch.

The site is built with a goal of being easily reproduced in the various languages of the countries that Countshop seeks to market to.  Halfslide Design built the site fully internationalized so that it is easy for the client to swap out language files for customers in Sweden, Japan, Brazil, etc…  The site also features:

• Configurable currencies to allow each site to sell products in the native currency of its targeted market.  For example, the Swedish Countshop site will list all products in the Swedish Krona (Sweden has not yet adopted the Euro).
• Configurable product options: the client can fully configure how the products are listed such as when each daily deal ends, how many pictures to show on each product, how many features, etc…
• Each product can feature links to comparable prices at other competitors in order to showcase the savings that Countshop provides over its customers.
• The site features a mini-CMS that allows the client to add/remove/update any pages on the site such as the About Us, FAQ, Contact us pages.   The CMS features a mini-WYSIWYG editor to allow the client to have full-control over how the page is designed.
• Integration with Google Checkout, Paypal Website Payments Standard, and Paypal Website Payments Pro.  Each of these integrations can be turned off at any time.
• The ability to add discount coupons that provide various configurations of discounts such as a fixed price, percentage of order cost, free shipping, etc…  Each coupon can be controlled to expire at either a future date, or after a certain number of uses.
• A customizable schedule that allows the client to setup an unlimited number of future deals and configure how long each deal lasts.
• A listing of the previous five deals featured on the site to give new visitors an idea of what products have been recently available.

Visit Countshop Daily Deal

Blogs, when continuously updated, create a way for the client to create content that is relevant to their subject area and creates new search engine entry points to their site.  For example, one of my clients is a real estate agent here in the Austin, Texas area.  They have a website that features many images of the properties that they are selling and a few short paragraphs of text that list the amenities of the property.  They aren’t getting great search engine optimization due to the fact that they have very few words in their site that might be relevant to their target audience.

I advised this client to start a blog and to write at least one article per week regarding real estate trends in the Austin area.  They have posted a few articles about specific areas in Central Texas such as the Round Rock, Pflugerville, and Cedar Park areas.  In each of these articles, they’ve discussed how the market is recovering from the housing collapse and listed a few links to some of the houses that the agent has for sale in the area.

After analyzing the visitor data from Google Analytics, we’ve noticed a dramatic rise in traffic to their website as visitors search for keywords like “Cedar Park Real Estate” and land on the agent’s blog post about the homes in that area.

So, with a blog, the client can spend ten to twenty minutes per week putting together a short article on a topic relevant to their visitors and reap the rewards of increased page views.  It’s a win-win.

If you are interested in discussing a blog integration with Halfslide Design, please contact us through our contact page.

Halfslide Design was recently contracted to redesign the site for Austin-based author and inspirational speaker, Sherry Ransom. Sherry wanted a more modern and user-friendly design applied to her personal site. Her goal was also to make it easy for visitors to get in touch with her and hire her for speaking gigs. Finally, she expressed that she wanted to be able to manage content herself and be able to publish articles on a regular basis without getting a web designer involved.

Halfslide Design built her site on the WordPress CMS platform.  This allows Sherry to manage the content on each page and article completely on her own.  In addition, Halfslide extended the WordPress administration area to give her the ability to manage the events listing on her site so that she could easily alert her fans to the fact that she would be speaking in their area in the near future.

We also built the site to highlight the articles that she has written in an effort to increase her search engine optimization around her topics of expertise.  Visit the site and let us know what you think about the new design.

Visit Sherry Ransom

Storage Strategies Now, an Austin, Texas based storage analyst firm, recently requested Halfslide Design perform a renovation of their website www.ssg-now.com. The stated goal behind the redesign was to both provide sample content to those who are new to their service as well as provide a protected area for content that requires a subscription to access. The client also wanted to improve their search engine optimization by providing more content targeted around their service in html format rather than in pdf or doc attachments.

Halfslide Design redesigned the site to run on a customized WordPress platform similar to what the Halfslide Design site currently runs on.  We had to make several changes based on some specific business logic.  First, we had to update the customer registration process.  On SSG-Now, users who register get access to the full site the first time they visit.  Once their visit ends, their account is disabled and can only be reactivated after working out a subscription membership with SSG-Now.  This allows users to get an in-depth look at the content published by SSG-Now before they subscribe.  Halfslide Design modified the customer registration process so that all users were set as inactive after their session ended and also built-in functionality for SSG-Now to update customer accounts once a subscription had been initiated.

In addition, Halfslide Design reorganized the site so that all content published by SSG-Now that was public would be easily indexed by search engines.  Sitemaps of the site are automatically updated daily so that search engines are always aware of new content within 24 hours of it being published.  This has resulted in a dramatic increase in visits to the SSG-Now site since launch.

Finally, one last requirement from the client was that they be able to manage and update the site themselves.  In the past, the client was providing new content to Halfslide Design that we would then post to the site.  The client is now able to manage all site content, pages, links, and pages themselves.

Visit Storage Strategies Now

Halfslide Design recently finished the construction of a new site for a condominium and villa management company located in Cabo, Mexico. The site’s graphics were created by Graphic Designer, Barry Link. Halfslide Design took the design and built the site on top of the WordPress content management system.

The site utilizes lists condo and villa objects that the client can manage themselves.  In order to provide this functionality, we modeled the villas as wordpress posts and built them out with custom post fields.  This allows the client to manage all of the page content and villa objects through the single wordpress interface.

Halfslide was extremely happy to work with Playa and the client continues to be easy to work with.  If you are interested in visiting the Cabo, Mexico area some time soon, I would highly recommend checking out the site and giving the crew a call to inquire about possibly staying in one of their condos or villas.

Visit Playa Luxury Villas

For the last three weeks, I’ve been busy completing a total redesign of Shirtaday.com. The site was originally created in early 2006 and was extremely simple at the time.  During the next three years, it progressively grew new features and each of these features were bolted on without keeping a consistent object model or design.  It turned into a maintenance nightmare.  Also, the design had several cross-browser issues with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6.  It also looked poor at smaller screen resolutions.  These are just a few of the issues…I could go on forever about things that I hated about the site.

The goal of the new design was to resolve all of those issues mentioned and to really just make the site much easier to maintain.  Previously, if I changed something, I never really knew for sure just what that’d affect on the rest of the site.

A few of the things that the redesign accomplished:

1. Better SEO. On the old site, the links to shirts and pages in the warehouse were built using query parameters such as “shirt.php?id=1″.  Most modern search engines completely ignore the query parameters, so our 700+ shirts were being treated as essentially one page.
2. Paged Warehouse and Shirt Listing.  At one point, the warehouse contained over 120 shirts.  All of these were loaded on the single warehouse page when the user viewed it.  That was a lot of data to load and display, and if you were on a slow connection, it was painful to wait for it all to come down to your browser.  The new design incorporates paging of each list and allows the user to search through the lists using some new search functionality that we built into the site.  For instance, if you want to buy a black, large shirt for less than $10, you can narrow your search to this so that only shirts relevant to your criteria are displayed.
3. Better design. The original design was table-based, and some tables had tables within them that went three to four layers deep.  Ouch.  What a nightmare that was to maintain.  The new design is completely css based and is much more straightforward to maintain and enhance.  New pages and sections can be plugged in or move around extremely simply.
4. Better navigation. The main goal at shirtaday is to sell t-shirts and i think the new design helps shirtaday reach that goal better.  I believe it’s more intuitive for a user to come to the site and get through a checkout with a shirt they like.  Purchase options are emphasized with bold print and highlighted colors.
5. Ajax and jQuery. The new site utilizes ajax and jQuery for many things like voting for your favorite shirt or adding an item to your cart.  This, in my opinion, really enhances the user experience at the site.

Visit Shirtaday

Patrick D. West Law Firm is a Dallas/Fort Worth metro area law firm that specializes in bankruptcy and tax litigation for small businesses and individuals. The firm recently came to us to have a complete renovation of their site as well as hosting on Halfslide’s dedicated servers.  Their previous site had a dated layout and wanted to take advantage of new design techniquest that could improve their search engine rankings.  We delivered a new layout to their site as well as optimized content completed by our project managing partner, Renee Harrington.

The new site incorporates a wordpress blog so that the firm can frequently post interesting articles and how-tos on bankruptcy related topics.  Halfslide created a custom template to incorporate the blog into the new site so that navigation between the blog and the rest of the site would be seamless.  See for yourself the new look of Patrick D. West Law Firm here.

Visit Patrick D. West Law Firm