Instinctive Software

Joomla
http://docs.joomla.org/Coding_style_and_standards
Drupal
http://drupal.org/coding-standards
Zend
http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/coding-standard.html
Based on Todd Hoff’s C++ Coding Standard.
http://www.dagbladet.no/development/phpcodingstandard/#important

Cross browser testing is one of the critical tasks that needs to be done if you have a high volume of customers or are looking to grow your existing user base. One way to stop users dead in their tracks is to not cross browser test an upgrade.

While a site might work fine on your new computer with the latest browser. That same site might not work so well on your customers computer. For example, say you have 100,000 people visiting a shopping cart this week and you earn on average 1 dollar per person visiting. You sell lots of widgets and have a top notch customer service.

Now you want to make your site better, faster and easier to use so you upgrade your add to shopping cart button and then release your site with out cross browser testing. There is two things that may of not been taken into account, one users with Internet Explorer 6 can no longer add items to their cart. Two 15 % of your traffic uses IE 6. This results in a 10 % or more drop in sales on the week of the upgrade.

If you are lucky you have some kick ass internal reporting and pick this up with in hours of the upgrade. Though, if you don’t it might take weeks to find out about the problem.

With out it, every 1 in 1000 users who have the problem complain, but not accurately enough for customer service to figure it out. Maybe customer service takes two weeks to notify development that there is a problem. Then the software developers take another two weeks to figure out what it is and they must just say it is not worth while to fix.

If you are luckily you have some good internal reporting on sales and you see the drop in sales with in hours or a few days. Other wise might might be a month down the road before you see the noticeable drop in sales.

What this really adds up to is for the sake of having a developer do a days work 10 % of sales might be lost for any where from a few days to a month. The profits lost on a month of sales is far more then the cost it would to have the site cross browser tested.

Then there is the hard to measure costs:
How many people complained to their friends that the site did not work ?
How much future business did you lose due to that customer ?

mylinkmaps.com was setup to experiment with various items.

• Google Maps
• AJAX/Javascript
• Complex query optimization
• User interface experiments

Where is your source of Innovation ? Often customers I have worked with have great business ideas and a good idea of how the site should be built. To turn those good ideas into a matching great ideas I rework them and add my own creativity. The end result is great ideas with a great solution.

To do this requires a fair amount of feed back from you my customer, developers with different skill sets, potential users and people that will use your site. Most importantly this feed back needs to be very carefully listened to.

This process takes time and people who understand your business. To save time many development companies will skip or reduce this creative process. This allows for a much lower quote and your trade off is innovation.

With out innovation the market will eventually change and your business will fade from great to good to poor.

halifax.searchns.com is an expermental mashup using data from the Halifax Regional Police to create a map of police reports in the area.

Features

• Reports displayed on map of halifax
• Searches can be done by your location
• Module to read police reports to extract address information with 75 % accuracy

halifax.searchns.com

This blog is intended to focus on issues developing an online business.