Hi everyone.  Need to keep this light for a Friday since I have had one helluva week.  So what better way then to play movie critic....well not really.

Yellow Flag on the Track
I promised my son that I would take him to see Speed Racer today.  As a father, I so enjoy taking him to movies that he is really looking forward to.  However, given that this wasn't Monsters Inc., or Garfield...I was somewhat concerned if in fact he would enjoy it.  Strangely enough, I was pretty concerned for myself being that I grew up watching Speed Racer cartoons and as strange as they were, I really liked them.  However, making it into a live action move....definitely needed a yellow flag on the track.

Green Flag
The good news...we both loved it.  Even at 2 hours and 15 minutes, he was on the edge of his seat the whole time.  So by now you're wondering what Speed Racer has anything to do with web development and design, so I'll let you off the hook.  The marketing job of a web designer is to cater to their client's target market.  However, when the audience ranges from young to old, our jobs become very tough and we need to take cues from the Wachowski Brothers as to how to do it well.

Designing for the Masses
Even though this movie has been getting blasted in the movie reviews (which is not surprising considering Underdog got blasted even worse and is one of mine and my kids favorite films) it is a great example of how to take a wide audience range and piece together a presentation to keep all parties interested.

Speed Racer catered to boys obviously because of the cars and some pretty intense racing scenes, however it also catered to girls because of some great humor by Speed's younger brother, Spritle and his pet chimp, Chim Chim.  I also think the bright colors appealed to both as well.

For the adults, the wives/mothers/girlfriends who may have gotten dragged to this film by their husbands/boyfriends/kids seemed to really enjoy the storyline.  It actually surprisingly had a very good one, and I don't think the CGI graphics hurt either.

For the guys, who doesn't love a lot of action, fast cars, and some pretty nice eye candy courtesy of some scantily clad female airline attendants, vegas showgirl looking grand prix driver escorts, and yes....a very nice outfit worn by Christina Ricci.

Websites are Much Like Movies
So if you approach web design from the same thought pattern, you essentially can design websites that can cater to a wide array of audience members.  Therefore potentially reaching a wider customer base.  Even if the members themselves viewing the site aren't potential buyers, if they like the site, they will probably mention it to someone who does. 

And don't rule out putting in some things for kids.  Let's say you are designing a site for a pest control company.  Creating a nicely organized, informative website with good monthly prices will probably get the attention of the adult homeowners you are looking for. 

How Kids Can Be Helpful in Reaching Your Buyers
But let's say you throw in a flash ant farm game, or something like pick up the food before the cockroaches get it (I know I need help).  And one family who is looking at pest control companies finds it on the internet...sees the game....has their child play it....who then tells their friends at school about it...they all go home...ask permission to play it (we hope) and then the parents of those ten kids see it....viola'....you've just reached another 10 homes through young adults who probably think bugs are a lot cooler than you do!

So if you get a chance, go see Speed Racer and see how you can appeal to a very wide audience range, and at the same time...see what changes you can make to your own website to appeal to a wider range as well.

Happy Coding!

Doug.

Have you ever visited a website that had so much information on the home page you just didn't know where to begin?  I've been to them too.  It almost gives you a headache. 

Marketing 101
Some of the best marketing minds have written (and I remember this from my own marketing classes in college) it is best to give your visitors a chance to decompress when they enter your store.  Now of course they were referring to retail stores, but the same theory applies to websites.  Take these two sites (click for a larger view):
  


Both are nicely designed, but the 2nd clearly gives you a moment to take in everything, figure out where you're needing to go...and then go there.


Be Nice to Your Users Through Simple Elegance.
As CNN clearly demonstrated...they have more links and loops because they are in fact a news company.  However, as a user coming to their site....I get overwhelmed.  If they would just set up a few custom paths for their users, I think their site would be much better received in the web.  So remember this term...."Simple Elegance".  It is the term we here at Justice Solutions coin for our design concepts.


Custom Pathways
I'll probably dedicate a blog to this next week and come back and link to it from here, but to give you a preview...I've been telling some of my larger clients that if you have more than 20 different places any user could go to from your home page....consider the use of custom pathways.  Because even the most busy and huge sites could probably take the 100+ links they have (to major sections that is...not individual articles, etc.) and categorize their users to fit into maybe a handful of choices.  So instead of a vacation destination having tons of links to hotels, flights, restaurants, attractions, etc.  Change it to "Plan My Trip", "What to Do When I Arrive", "Where Can I Eat".  Then once in that subpage...give them the options to plan their trip with links to your flights, hotels, etc.

Well that's it for this week.  Remember....Simple Elegance....let the user take in your site....admire the design....hell you paid for it....so might as well let your users enjoy it too.  Until next week....happy coding.  Chief Superhero Doug, out.

Doug.

Ok, this week on Thursday Tips Day, I have a rather unique situation I was working on for a client.  The issue:  To get Tomcat 6 working on a Windows 2003 server running IIS and have ColdFusion 8 running on the Tomcat install.

This is not as easy as it would seem.  According to the Adobe ColdFusion 8 site (www.adobe.com/coldfusion) Tomcat is not directly supported as is was in the past.  The only mention of Tomcat in any of the installation documentation is only in a JBOSS type instance.  So here's the first question...why would someone want to do this?

The client's decision is actually a very good one.  Those of us familiar with ColdFusion over the years would agree that JRun is not the best Java server around.  In fact it sometimes causes more harm than good.  And in some unique situations it really ends up crashing the server and causing all kinds of Coldfusion errors when it gets too bogged down.  Now in CF8's Enterprise Edition, the server monitoring tools are very good in letting you know what is causing the overloads.  Sometimes it's your own code doing it.  Sometimes it's not.  However for those of us not willing to spend the $4,000+ to purchase a copy of Enterprise Edition, we're back to the same page as always.

Anyway, by choosing a Java server such as Tomcat, which has plenty of public support and has been running Java apps for quite some time very reliably on both Linux and Windows platforms (and even a Macintosh here and there I've seen), the client will be able to run their JSP apps, plus leverage Tomcat's excellence in running CF8's Java based programming technology.  Therefore a very lean and mean system and as the client puts it, "a smaller footprint" on their server.

The Installation Sequence

Ok, so to start, go ahead and download the latest version of Tomcat (http://tomcat.apache.org/download-60.cgi) and install it on your Windows2003 Server.  You can do the direct services install or the longer more in depth binary install, but both work just fine.  After the installation is complete.  You should easily be able to browse to http://localhost:8080 to get the nice little Tomcat welcome page.

Next download a copy of CF8 from Adobe's website (http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/) and install that on your server next by using the "Deploy as J2EE, and as a .WAR" installation.  When the installation is complete you should have a .WAR file most likely if you used the defaults in your C:\ColdFusion8 root directory.

Stop the Tomcat Server via your services or direct command line. 

Now copy the .WAR file into your {TomcatRoot}\webapps directory. 

Start the Tomcat Server and within a few minutes, Tomcat should have expanded all of your directories into the webapps folder.  So at the end you should have a /cfusion directory sequence in your webapps directory.

Stop the Tomcat Server again. 

Ok, now for a fun part.  Open up notepad and create a .bat file called setenv.bat and place it in the {TomcatRoot}\bin folder.  Place the following code in that .bat file making sure to change the bolded areas to your exact folder structure:

rem Set a few variables.
set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_14
set CF_HOME=C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 6.0\webapps\cfusion
set CF_WEB_INF=%CF_HOME%/WEB-INF

rem Concatenate binary file directories into a single variable.
set CF_SHARED_LIB=%CF_WEB_INF%/cfusion/lib
rem The following variable must be on a single line.
set CF_SHARED_LIBS=%CF_SHARED_LIB%;%CF_SHARED_LIB%/_nti40/bin;
%CF_WEB_INF%/cfusion/jintegra/bin;
%CF_WEB_INF%/WEB-INF/cfusion/jintegra/bin/international

rem Add libraries for binary files to the Windows system path.
set PATH=%PATH%;%CF_SHARED_LIBS%

rem Set JVM options to enable sandbox security (all on one line).
set CF_SECURITY_JVM_OPTIONS=-Djava.security.manager
-Djava.security.policy="%CF_WEB_INF%/cfusion/lib/coldfusion.policy"
-Djava.security.auth.policy="%CF_WEB_INF%/cfusion/lib/neo_jaas.policy"

rem Set JVM options for CORBA. Uncomment this line if vbjorb.jar is not in
rem your JRE's lib/ext directory.
rem set CF_CORBA_JVM_OPTIONS=-Xbootclasspath/a:"%CF_WEB_INF%/lib/vbjorb.jar"

rem Consolidate JVM options.
rem * Uncomment this line if you've configured CORBA
rem set CF_JVM_OPTIONS=%CF_SECURITY_JVM_OPTIONS% %CF_CORBA_JVM_OPTIONS%
rem * Uncomment this line if you haven't configured CORBA
set CF_JVM_OPTIONS=%CF_SECURITY_JVM_OPTIONS%

rem Populate JAVA_OPTS, which will be used by the catalina.bat file
rem when starting the JVM.
set JAVA_OPTS=%CF_JVM_OPTIONS%

Ok, go ahead and start Tomcat back up, and browse to localhost:8080/cfusion/cfide/administrator and with any luck, you should have the nice welcome screen of the ColdFusion 8 admin staring you in the face.  Go ahead and configure your instance with datasources, etc. and place any .cfm files you want to run in the /cfusion/cfide/ directory.

That's it.  I'm now in the process of getting the .cfm files to render in other directories and folder structures in the rest of the Tomcat so you can browse to other directories with .cfm files and get them to render.  Until next week!

I've seen about as much "going green" marketing as I think I can take...however there are a few things that we've recently been doing for some customers which actually falls into the whole less paper, less waste basket.  So I thought I'd share accordingly.

If your company uses any type of printed materials for either contracts, sales orders, forms, etc. you should consider perhaps going with a more dynamic solution of taking your contracts and forms to PDF's which can be signed digitally pretty easily now, and emailed back without a single sheet of green gold being wasted. 

Companies like eFax (www.efax.com) have really stepped it up and have even added a free service to their monthly subscribers by allowing them to upload and store and then use their scanned in digital signature for even more paperless processing.

ColdFusion FlashDocs/PDF
If your website or web application is ColdFusion based, you're just about as close as you can get to already having this functionality added to your system.  Simply by using ColdFusion 7&8's <cfdocument> tag like the following will instantly transform your page into a PDF which can be enhanced with dynamic data from your application/forms very quickly:

<cfdocument format="pdf" name="mydocument">
<cfloop index="x" from="1" to="40">
<p>
doloras lorem upsom doloras paris hilton is my hero loreum ipsom dsoio foom an to dht end of the world
will anyone actually read this probably not but let me put more realtext in so it flows a bit nicely
<cfloop index="y" from="1" to="#randRange(1,9)#">This sentence will appear a random amount of time.</cfloop>
</p>
</cfloop>
</cfdocument>

.NET and Tall Components
If you're a .NET firm or company, there's quite a number of solutions out there for you as well.  We've personally just worked on a project for Westcor Land Title www.ewestcor.com where all of their jackets and other assorted loan closing documents are generated on the fly.  Thereby reducing their need to request hundreds of these jackets and documents from a printer, thus reducing paper.

For that project we worked with TallComponents www.tallcomponents.com/ to accomplish this task which really allows for quite a bit of customization even more so in some respects than Adobe's solution.

For you PHP and Ruby folks, I did find a few quick and free solutions to generate PDF's from PHP.  The one that seems to be the easiest to use, but doesn't do a whole lot of fancy effects is www.fpdf.org
So you're in good shape as well.

Go Green By Going Red
So you can go a bit greener by using the "Red" logo Adobe PDF format in a host of different ways on almost every type of web programming language in use today.  So save a tree...plant a PDF on your web app today.

Image is Everything!

Ok, it's Friday and it's my birthday...so woo hoo for me.  However, I wanted to quickly make a blog about how many times I've heard people say, "Well at least I have a website" or "It's not a great site, but at least I have a website."  These are the same companies that can't understand why they are getting low conversions and low sales.

The simple fact of the matter is, image is everything.  Whether your site is just a few pages, or a full fledged application portal, it must look and behave as though it cost a million bucks.  Otherwise, people will quickly dismiss your site feeling as though you probably don't have the ability to either service their needs, or deliver the products or services you are selling.

Take for example these two BBQ style restaurants: 

www.thehornytoad.com

www.santanflat.com

as you can see they are similar in the style of restaurant and even most of the items on the menu are pretty similar.  However, which one are you more likely to take your family to?  I'm assuming you said San Tan Flat....and I'm assuming that most of you reading this blog have never been to either establishment before.  But faced with the tantalizing decision as to which BBQ restaurant you'll be taking your family to on Friday night, chances are you'd first try San Tan Flat before you'd try the Horny Toad. 

As a side note, you definitely want to check out the video San Tan Flat has on its home page.  Drew Carey did a spot on Reason.TV about this restaurant recently.  Apparently there's a "Footloose" type drama going on between the restaurant and the county for get this..... "The patrons dancing to the music".  The appear to be charging them $5,000.00 per violation.

This is also the case for many companies who even may outrank some of their competitor's sites in the search engines.  Why?  Because the site says it all.  One is a site that clearly has taken the time to give itself a very professional appearance, and the other, well just wants to have  website that they can put on their take out menus and coasters.

Keeping your site fresh, up to date, and professional looking is just as important as the quality of products and services your business is trying to promote or sell on the web.  You'd also be amazed that many times a site "facelift" isn't as expensive as you would think.  So when you're looking to either create a new website, or have its look changed...please keep this example in mind.  It could mean the difference between a successful business and a failing one.

Have a great weekend everyone.


Doug.

I had one of those very strenuous days today.  These are the ones that as a web developer you just feel like taking your computer and throwing it from the highest location you can find.  The problem?  A website checkout process that was failing over 50% of the time with its users. 

I sat back and said a prayer for a moment since I believed that getting angry was not going to solve my problem.  And just like that I had a thought....approach this problem as if I were my 6 year old son using the form.  Within minutes I had the problem figured out, put in a quick javascript validator to make sure the values would be entered correctly and just like that...the problem was solved.

So I decided to blog about this since many times not only developers, but business owners will have their websites so complex that it will cause more problems than successes simply because they are not thinking like a user who's prime source of income would be a nice chocolate chip cookie.

I've actually had my son test quite a few of my websites and even though I may have to read the form to him to fill out, he has discovered some issues with my sites and I've coded appropriately to deal with them.  So the next time you're ready to launch a new form, or a new functionality of your site, think to yourself....if I were 6 how would I look at this.  Or better yet, if you can snag a youngster from your family or your close friends, use them to test it themselves and pay them with a nice big cookie for their good work.

Happy Coding!

Doug.