Joy Pruitt Photography is an independently-owned business run by photographer, Joy Pruitt. Joy is located in South East Texas and specializes in doing family and event portraits. Joy came to Halfslide Design to have her site created.

Joy’s requirements included the ability to showcase samples of her work in various galleries. She also required to be able to offer her clients the ability to log-in to a password-protected proofing gallery to see and purchase photos from their photo shoots. Finally, Joy required the ability to be able to sell stock photography from her site.

Halfslide Design was able to complete all of the requirements for Joy’s site in under four weeks. The site includes an administrative panel that gives an administrator the ability to manage many facets of the front-end site. An admin can add, remove, and reorder images that display on the front-page’s slideshow. They can add new proofing and sample galleries as well as manage the photos that go with each gallery. And finally, they can track purchases of stock and proof photos.

As for the front-end of the site, Halfslide Design utilized a custom-built shopping-cart that allows virtually any photo on the site to be purchased through Paypal. When a customer purchases stock photography, they can choose from three different resolutions, pay for the photo, and then download the photo immediately after payment.

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 $50 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. If the optional store is used, we will integrate all products with Froogle and update their details (such as quantity, price, etc…) on a nightly basis so that Froogle always knows about your latest products.
5. Two rss feeds - One for listing the site with many of the deal of the day trackers like Cheapofeed.com.  The other rss feed is for visitors of your site to retrieve your latest deal through their own rss reader.
6. Payment integration with Paypal, Authorize.net, and/or Google Checkout
7. Order management through an administrative backend.
8. Customized blog.
9. 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.

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.