Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category

Oct

30

Client Profile – Toyflow

October 30th, 2011

Visit Toyflow

Toyflow Latest Project

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

Jan

27

Visit Halfslide Deisgn MobileHalfslide Design is happy to announce that we have completed our new mobile site at m.halfslide.com. If you are on a smart phone, you will now be automatically redirected to the mobile version of our site with scaled down pages including our list of services, contact information, portfolio of web design projects, and list of testimonials from happy clients.

Usability was the main motivation for creating the mobile site.  The site provides visitors with a better experience by serving them smaller images, less css and javascript, and formatting the navigation and text in such a way that they do not have to zoom or horizontally scroll.

The mobile site was designed to be compatible with all mobile browsers on smart phones like the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones.  If you are interested in having Halfslide build a mobile version of your website, please contact us through our contact page and we’ll be happy to discuss your project and provide a quote on the expected cost of your site.Visit Halfslide Deisgn Mobile

Mar

14

We had an issue this weekend with one of our high utilization servers at GoDaddy dropping dead. We’ve still not been completely briefed on what happened, but the end result was that our server was dead and we had to rebuild it from scratch. I learned a lot about what to expect from Godaddy’s disaster recovery process in the meantime and thought I’d share my experience.

The first thing that stuck out to me was that there was no notification that the server was dead.  My partner actually discovered that there was a problem when she couldn’t access one of the sites on that server.  She immediately called GoDaddy who then informed us that the server was dead.  Maybe I am naive, but I would have expected that GoDaddy would be more on top of the situation and would alert us if they noticed a problem.

We had backed up all of the code running on our servers, but did not have recent backups of several of our databases.  I fully admit that this was a glaring hole in our own process.  GoDaddy knows that they have you over a barrell in this case so they charge you $150 to take the old drive off of your dead server and then hook it up through a USB enclosure.  This allows you to get at your old data.

Not only is the cost extreme, but the process is really involved from the client perspective.  From the minute we noticed the outtage, we really had to drive the GoDaddy service technicians to do everything.  We had to initiate the reprovision and then we had to contact them about reconnecting our drive.  We then had to get them to notify us when the old drive was reconnected.  They were also very unhelpful when I asked them for assistance in mounting the usb drive.

In conclusion, the whole process has lead me to rethink my relationship with Godaddy.  Their service technicians are extremely unhelpful, their hardware is flaky, and they’ll really take advantage of you when they see an opportunity.  I believe that from this day forward, I’ll direct my clients who need hosting to have that hosting done with a different provider.

Have you had a similar situation?  Feel free to post a comment and share your experience.

Oct

19

After Our Day

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.