What’s more, the employees and managers can actively monitor anyone’s progress and efficiency.  At the end of the month, a development manager can instantly get data on how quickly, efficiently, and bug free any given developers work is.   The per project information also helps determine which projects are more or less profitable, which in turn lets us determine which project should be looked into (if development and efficiency needs to be improved).

The last piece of the new functionality deals with performance bonuses.  The system is designed to automatically determine performance and show each employee if they have a good chance to receive a bonus for any given month (including the estimated bonus amount).  All settings dealing with what is a good/efficient month are 100% configurable and can be changed any time (depending on who is using the system).

This is saving Intechnic a lot of time in administrative overheads and it has given employees an additional incentive to do a better job.

The point here is that a lot of times they are designed with only the latest hardware in mind. So why not have two versions of the site? Google is doing it with gmail where you can switch to html-only if the regular interface is too slow – something that’s very useful if you are browsing the web on an older computer or on a less powerful tablet (for example: Nokia N810 – which is what I have). That’s not to say that the entire site has to be redone in a slow-computer-friendly way, but definitely some of the elements. As an example, the tag cloud to the left of this blog is done in flash, but it will automatically switch to simple html if flash is not supported on your browser.

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Let’s take a common case as an example: a medical practice. In order to operate, the practice needs a centralized database of all patients and their entire medical history with all procedures that were done. The system needs to contain their insurance information, emergency contacts, and so on. Even if that exists, what are the chances of that office having an online registration form for all new patients? That’s compared to the regular “please come in 20 minutes early to fill out some forms” (which, by the way, someone has to then enter manually into a database, if it exists). And this is just one example of inefficiencies that can easily be addressed (how much does a full time data entry person cost?).

To sum it up, with the right understanding of your business needs and of what is possible to achieve from a technological standpoint, as salesy as it may sound coming from the vice president of development here at Intechnic, it makes sense to take some of that business development budget and invest into a good website and a good business automation system.

As an example, one of our clients has a configuration utility for their billiard tables. As opposed to simply having a flash presentation that would show how a table looks, each flash configurator references the database and incorporates the latest pricing and styles information, thereby allowing the system to be up to date with inventory levels, available options, and cost. Another example is our Virtual Room Designer product that is able to display various products and surfaces based on what is currently in the database (which can be changed at any time by anyone with appropriate administrative permissions).

These are just a few examples of how flash programming can be more than a simple “pretty presentation”.

Let’s start out with the way it shouldn’t be done and why:
Many site owners decide to copy the entire site and change all of the images/menus/text by hand.  The main reason why this is a bad idea, is because you essentially end up doubling the amount of administrative work involved in the maintenance of the site.  Each time a new page gets added, it now needs to be added twice.  Each time a new product is available in the store, it needs to be added twice.  If you are taking online orders, that’s two systems that you have to reconcile as opposed to just one.  There are other issues such as it taking more time to release new functionality, apply bug fixes, and so on.  I’m sure there are other ways of doing it wrong, but this seems to be the most prevalent one.

The right way of doing it is by having one site that lets the administrator edit text in all supported languages. This applies to products, menu names, regular text, etc.  The administrator simply selects the language they want to write in, selects what they want to translate, types the text in the text editor and that’s about it.  The system has a centralized database that stores all content on all languages.  When someone clicks on the “Spanish” version, for example, it just displays the content that has been marked as Spanish.  In other words, it’s still just one copy of the site but depending on a user’s selection, it displays the appropriate language.  The main benefit of this system is that it allows the administrator of the site to change any block of text at any time in any language or even add new languages without having to copy the website.  As an extra step, if the various languages are targeting different audiences in different countries, the domain type of the site can be configured to automatically display a particular language.  In other words, www.intechnic.es can be made to automatically display everything in Spanish.  This is actually the way both of the Intechnic sites are set up.

This is yet another example of how a custom business automation system can help a business save money.  It makes sense that the company that builds business automation systems created one for itself as well.

In my opinion, the main focus should be on “what do I need to make my business better”.  I say forget about the buzz words (a lot of them are important because they represent specific functionality or services, but not for this stage), the official proposal requests, and so on.  The first step is to list out your objectives (as opposed to saying that you just want a ‘better site’).  For example:

• My website’s design is outdated and therefore is not as affective of a marketing tool as I would like it to be

• I have a full time person managing my inventory levels between my main online store, my eBay store, and the warehouse.  I need to automatically synchronize all three so I can stop spending money on a full time position.

• My company has high overhead costs for project management because we don’t have a centralized project management system.

If you need help with these, you can always hire an online business strategy consultant.

Once that list is ready, the next step would be to contact a website development / business automation company (hopefully us!) and see if they understand your needs and what the cost would be to do what you need done.  Then compare that cost with what your expenses would be if you don’t do anything…it suddenly starts making a LOT of sense…

My point is that as a web development company, we have to have our sites work in all major browsers and that’s really like answering to 4 different bosses who all want something different. Otherwise, you end up with a great site or a business automation solution that only works for some people. As an example, when we released this version of intechnic.com, I would say that about 30% to 40% of all quality assurance time went into cross-browser testing and getting everything to look and work the same way. Now imagine all web development companies having to do it for all sites that they develop. Let’s not even mention new versions of browsers that come out that may not offer the same exact support that their previous versions did.  This becomes even more of an issue when dealing with e-commerce web sites and enterprise 2.0 solutions that depend on accurate accounting and secure information management.

I would equate this situation with music companies making 4 different formats of music CDs that constantly change and the CD player manufacturers having to support the formats and any changes to them. Sounds over the top, doesn’t it?

I’m being redundant, right? Many of my lawyer friends would say that a lot of today’s lawsuits would fall under this category, but I thought this particular one was very interesting. Apparently a law firm wanted to stop another site from linking to it if the link name was anything other than the law firm’s domain name or company name. In other words, if I were to draw a parallel to Intechnic’s site, it would essentially be the difference between this “Intechnic Corporation” and “Web Development Services”, the latter of which, is what they did not want.

To me, it does and does not make sense at the same time. The site linking to them (as far as I can tell) was not, in any way, malicious. They linked because they found the information useful, the same way I would link to, for example, Enterprise 2.0 Solutions, if I had a site that talked about that topic. In this scenario, both I (the site owner) and Intechnic (the owner of the page I linked to) win because I get a link with useful information, while Intechnic gets a referring link that helps search engine optimization.

Going back to what I presume was the rationale behind the law firm’s actions. They may have been afraid of something called a “google bomb”. Because of the way search engine optimization works, if I link to a page with a particular keyword (see my web development services link above), google will display that page in its results when someone searches for that set of keywords. Now imagine if I were to have one thousand sites link to a page using the words “there is no place like home”. Well, that site could be about how to properly inflate car tires, but since so many people link to it via that set of keywords, it would end up showing up under the search results for “there is no place like home”…along with Kansas, The Wizard of OZ, Dorothy, and the evil witch. Now imagine someone doing the same thing but with words that you wouldn’t want your business associated with…

In any case, I think they over-reacted, but that’s just my opinion.

We were faced with this exact issue when deciding on a course of action for one of our clients that needed a mailing feature built into the administrative console of their business automation system.  We ended up deciding on a fairly straightforward solution that involved the following features:
1.      If someone opted out, their information would be automatically skipped during any subsequent mailings (which is normal) but their information would also be sent to the account representative responsible for their account so as to let them know that the customer was no longer interested.
2.      More importantly, we set up a scheduler that sent several emails per minute for duration of the entire month.  This allowed us to stay under the radar of the recipients’ mail servers and made sure that all customers received the news
3.      We tracked how successful (conversion rate) the mailing was to determine if customers were clicking on the links in the email (which they were).

All in all, it’s a great way to send legitimate correspondence to a lot of people that indicated that they had wanted to receive it in the first place.