The Best Web Testers Are Paid in CookiesWhy Six Year Olds Are Great Website Testers

The Valentine Day Sprint

Ok, how many of you have been out at the store at the last minute getting those flowers for Valentine’s Day, grabbed the box of chocolates, and then suddenly remembered that you needed a card as well?  To top it all off you were running late in getting back to your house for that special V-Day dinner?  Arrggh….panic is starting to set in.

So you quickly run down to the greeting card aisle, quickly survey the demilitarized zone of Valentine’s Day cards, find one that looks nice and has words that seem appropriate and zip over to the checkout counter.  Ok, we’re nearly complete…but wait….we need to write something inside of the card and sign it….oh no!

So we look frantically through the glove compartment box, flip the sun visors, look in the change drawer, the middle console, under the seat, all in the hopes of finding that single writing implement that is most likely missing a cap, has a glob of ink dangling from the tip and has been severely chewed on the end so much that you could dislodge a penny from the ashtray by using it as a chisel.

This is usually the moment where for some strange reason you’ve luckily managed to hit all of the green lights for a change and are actually hoping for a red light for that mere 30 seconds you need to write those unending words of love and compassion that will sweep your honey right off of her feet. 

Ok so you get a red light finally and then warped pen in hand you stroke those loving words on the open side of the card right on the steering wheel.  However you then push too hard on the Love…Me….which of course beeps the horn at the car in front of you and awards you the friendly one finger wave from the driver ahead of you.

So you get back to the house in time to go out to dinner, you calmly stroll on into the house, flowers, chocolates, and your novelette of a Valentine’s Day card in hand, and proudly give the items of your affection to your sweetheart.

She gasps for a moment, just so happy she has married a man who still likes to make Valentine’s Day special…grabs the flowers, the chocolates and the card sets them down to give a very welcomed and very earned Valentine’s Day smooch.

Finally without another word, she sniffs the elegant scent of the roses, mouth waters over the chocolate treats she’ll be enjoying later tonight, and then opens the card…which magically says on the front….

“This Valentine’s Day I wanted to say Something Special…”

and on the inside…

“You’ll Do.”

Funny enough…I don’t think she ever read the other side of the card I wrote on.  Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone!

At least I have a website…isn’t that enough?

Going Green by Going Red

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.

Getting the CRUD out in your code

Ok, it’s Thursday Tips Day, and I wanted to show you a very handy tool you can be using to speed along your development time, or help your web department speed their development time along at your own company.

The tool is called an Object Generator or an O/R Mapper.  Some also like to call them “CRUD” Tools.  CRUD is an acronym we geeky coders like to use that stands for:  Create, Read, Update, Delete.  In almost every basic web application out there today, we are asked to interface with some type of database or datasource.  And in almost every instance of that interfacing we (the coders) are doing some type of call to the database.  It could be reading one record, getting several records, updating a record, or even deleting one. 

Writing these calls can be very mundane.  Ones I usually save for my new coders to do <insert evil laugh here>.  However, these CRUD or Object Generator tools can help things along tremendously in development time, which then allows us or your web developers, time to focus on things that are usually overlooked or zipped through at the end of a project such as field validation, styles, SEO, etc.

For ASP.net we personally like to use O/R Mapper (www.ornetmapper.com).  The thing I personally like about this open source tool is the simple fact that the developer continues to really improve this tool with newer and more awesome releases than its prior.  As of this updated blog, the latest version is version 6, and it’s come a long way and really could be the easiest most comprehensive way to develop the business logic for your next .NET project.

A Screen Shot of O/R Mapper (the ASP.NET Object Mapper Tool)

And using the code is even easier than using the tool itself in .NET.  So here’s a quick example.  Let’s say you have a table called Users and in your datagrid you have your typical select button which triggers your onSelect event in your code behind.  So now you want to populate a few text boxes in your form for editing.  Here it goes….in C#.net

          Users u = new Users();
          UsersAssembler a = new UsersAssembler();
          UsersCriteria c = new UsersCriteria();
          c.Set_Username(CriteriaBase.AVAILABLE_STRING_OPERATORS.EQUALS, “doug”);
          u.ReadSingle(c);
        �
Now that you have the information loaded into the “u” object…you just assign your textboxes accordingly….

          tbUsername.Text = u.Username;
          tbPassword.Text = u.Password;
          tbFirst.Text = u.FirstName;
          tbLast.Text = u.LastName;
     �
          etc.

Did you blink and missed it?  Yes it’s that quick.  You can also retrieve lists of results and do things like auto-bind it to your gridview, etc.  Really really cool.

For PHP, we personally like to use POG.  (www.phpobjectgenerator.com) This nifty little online tool will allow you to not only create the code classes you’ll need to interface easily with your web application, but also build your tables for you.

      

A Screen Shot of POG (the PHP Object Generator Tool)

Once all of your code and tables are built, its a snap to interface with them.  Let’s say you have a table which has your user’s vital information in it and you want to retrieve a list of users that have signed up in the past week.

       <?PHP
                 �
                   // Create a new instance of our POG class for Users
                   $u = new users();

                   // Call the GetList Function to bring us back a list of users meeting our criteria
                   $userList = $u->GetList(array(array(“signupdate”,”>=”,”2008-02-16 00:00:00″)));

                   // Now loop through the results and display them for the end user to view
                   foreach($userList as $user)
                   {
                         echo ‘<p>User Name: ‘ . $user->username . ‘ <br />Name: ‘ . $user->first . ‘ ‘ . $user->last . ‘<br />Signup: ‘ . $user->signupdate . ‘</p>’;
                   }
          ?>

Pretty simple huh?  And you can send as many criteria you want in additional arrays all in that same GetList() function.  So the speed at which you get results and have the ability to update them are fast and easy.

So take some time to check out POG or send this blog link to your favorite PHP coder.  They very well may thank you for it, however knowing most coders they’ll probably say they already knew about it, thanks for the link, and then when people aren’t looking will start to use it all the time.  Ha!!  Happy coding!

Doug.

Testing the Waters…or WebWhy sites fail

Taming the Cat…Tomcat and Coldfusion 8

Why Arizona is the next “Orlando”

Ok, the first question you are all asking is, “what does Arizona being the next ‘Orlando’” have to do with websites and web development.”  The answer is, plenty!

Websites are marketing tools.  Whether you have a great product or service you want to sell, or have a great relationship with a distributor that you have the upper hand in giving your customers the lowest price available…the web is the best place to get it out there to so many people in such a short period of time.

Even if you don’t have your own super-duper SEO working your site, while expensive and not as powerful as SEO natural listings, pay per clicks are out there and if you have the money, can get your site out in front of thousands, maybe millions, within just a day or so.  But let’s say you don’t have a product yet….and want to get some feedback and generate interest to develop a product or service.  The web is another fantastic way of generating “buzz” about something not even built or designed in hopes of generating enough interest that it eventually develops into a lucrative business venture.

Right now, I have my eye on a website that is of particular interest to me and I would like to get it in front of many other Arizonians, as well as other folks who visit Arizona on  a semi-regular basis.  The website is www.decadesusa.com and is a site working at bringing a “Disney-like” theme park to the Southeast Arizona valley.  Their concept is a great one….music through the decades, which will translate into theme park rides, restaurants, a water park, nightlife, and a four-star hotel.

As said above, this is a “concept”.  It is not built, it has just recently passed a major hurdle in the Arizona State Government, but still has a little ways to go before becoming a reality.  The website itself is pretty well designed, and of course being the overly critical nit-picking perfectionist I am…could use some improvements in design, SEO, and functionality, but overall a great way to start getting the buzz out there for something that could mean a very state-changing event for Arizona.

Ok, my two cents on Arizona and why it is better than Orlando.  First of all, I’m from Orlando, Florida and lived there for over 15 years.  The area is chock full of entertainment, great hotels, and fantastic dining.  And no matter what anyone says, it is all due to “the Mouse”.  Yes, Universal Orlando is awesome as well, but it is mostly due to the genius of Walt Disney and his vision to take a new approach to entertainment and family vacationing.

Now, let’s think, the busiest times of the year for Disney/Orlando is June, July, August, and a little of September.  That is also the times of the year in central Florida where the temps hit in the high 80’s to low 90’s, with the humidity way up there as well so much that just breathing makes you into a human shower.  The reason Arizona has never been considered a prime area for tourism and travel is because of the misconception that the desert heat is just unbearable in the summer.  Not true.  If you consider the heat-index, which is a fancy way of determining just how comfortable the temperature is with all factors (temperature, humidity, etc.) considered…you’ll find that during the busiest times of the year for central Florida, the heat index is actually LOWER than Arizona when we’re in the 100’s.

Let’s also consider the wonderful afternoon showers and thunderstorms that occur in Orlando during these busy times.  They hit every day just at about 3pm…causing everyone to run for cover in the parks, and have to get out of the pools at all the resorts.  In Arizona….it’s a desert….enough said.

Also…have you ever tried sitting out back at night in a non-screened in area in Orlando?  You might as well be ringing the dinner bell for the mosquitoes and their cousins.  Again…not a problem in Arizona.

Lastly, every now and then a little weather event called a hurricane pops up.  It is the biggest waiting game in the history of the human race.  Everyone wakes up in the morning, logs into NOAA and sees where the latest track is projecting the hurricane to hit.  It messes up vacations, businesses, cruises, you name it.  Arizona is pretty well situated that it shouldn’t get any hurricanes and and doesn’t have the tornadoes that usually accompany big tropical storms. 

So in my humble opinion, Arizona…Phoenix…specifically….is really where theme park developers and hoteliers should be looking.  With modern “cooling” features such as good design of ride queues, and plenty of shade, it is very easy to see how Decades USA could take Arizona into a brand new area.

So check out their website if you live in Arizona.  Or, if you know someone who lives in Arizona or visits the state…send this link along to them as well:

http://www.decadesusa.com/show-your-support/index.php

Be sure to tell them to mention in their comments that you learned of the site from Justice Solutions LLC.  Maybe they’ll let me be in one of the parades….ha!!!  Until next time, happy webbing and coding!

Doug.

Make Testing a Part of Your Contract

I’ve recently changed my contracts to include some specific information about testing and testing scenarios.  You’ll recall my blog about how important testing is to the success of a website retaining its visitors, but I’d also like to point out how testing can really get in the way of your contractual obligations as well.  Take this example (and no Mike M. this isnt’ you….LOL)

You have a contract which outlines what a site will need to do….allow a company to login, create a job for a customer, do the job, bill the job.  Sounds simple right?

However throw in the variables such as, they don’t have any standard billing methods (not ones that could be followed by an application at least), multiple scenarios of “exceptions”, and a staff that doesn’t seem to talk to one another.

Now from a legal perspective, if the contract is simply written outlining the issues above, we’re sunk.  The client can take as much time as they want to test, to work out their own billing practices, etc.  However if you add a paragraph which specifically outlines how the system will be tested and what to do if “exceptions” to those rules come up, you’ll be in much better shape.

So here’s my paragraph (feel free to use in yours, and send me an email letting me know you found it helpful):

Give Them a Chance to Breathe

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.