Brooklyn Plantology by Lapide , Brooklyn NY

Pretty stoked about this Brooklyn NY Garden Center site which we just recently launched, but it is about 95% wrapped up. Lots of challenges creating this particular site.

We have built into the programming, that several times a year the main background and the actual Lapide logo will change to reflect the season/promotion that Brooklyn Plantology is having at their retail store.

I think they will get a lot of visibility with this site, and will also have success with learning to make as full a use as possible of the cms/website admin/user editability system.

The drop down menus turned out really well on this site. Also, the homepage flash slideshow should be able to be updated by way of the CMS/website admin since it is dynamically generated based on what pics are active in a particular gallery. Sort of a challenging build, but it is solid cross browser!

Stop through and take a look if you get a chance, and make sure to sign up for their Brooklyn NY Garden Center Mailing List.

Big Changes Let's Grow!

Some interesting and unexpected staff changes are happening at LandscaperWebsites - Porterware - Pest Control Websites beginning Monday 12.13.2011!

Amber, our Account Manager / Project Manager / Office Manager has accepted a job offer with another company two weeks ago, so Friday was her last day. It's the end of an era.

She leaves some pretty big shoes to fill. Amber began working for the company about a month or two before I did approximately 3 years ago, and has been responsible for developing most of the accounting processes, as well as being the "front end" contact with incoming and established clients. Needless to say, there will be a length of time between her leaving and most of our 300+ clients becoming used to dealing with other people, Amber having been their contact for so long.

On the upside, we have now hired someone who will be focusing on pretty much just the accounting and accounting processes as his main job duties. Amber spent some time with him on Friday trying to get him up to speed. Huge amount of information to try and process in a single afternoon. The transition may be a little rocky, but we'll hope for the best of course.

Yet another suprise is the company also hiring a young lady that we had interviewed around the same time as Bill, who we really liked. We had asked her if we could keep her information on file and give her a call if we had something open up, which we followed through on, and she seemed very anxious to join our team. From what I understand, she will be focusing on being the "front end" of the business, working incoming and outgoing calls. In between calls we will start her out on some help desk tickets so she can get to learn our system, then hopefully she can split duties between being the client liaison and design/development.

My personal role will be changing as well. I will still be doing development, but tentatively I will also move into more of a project manager roll. Very excited about the possibilities that may introduce. It will involve a lot of getting on the phone with customers clarifying how our sites work, and exactly what they should expect, which can be pretty rough depending on the customer, but I am trying to embrace and attack it. I believe that a developer, who KNOWS how the HTML/CSS/VB of our sites work will be able to convey a very accurate picture of what a particular customer will be getting, what type of customization is within reason, and what won't work. A huge them of mine is -setting accurate expectations-

Monday, all of the email communication that came in to Amber will now be forwarded to Myself, Chris, and the new accounting guy. We are all going to get CRUSHED by the weight of it at first.

I'll miss Amber. We all will. I feel like as we worked together we really tried to look out for one another, (which is not to say we did not have our fights), and I can only hope that the next two employees have the same sort of outlook. At the same time though, I am very happy for her to have found a job that seems like a good fit for her, and is moving her life goals in the correct direction.

Technical Update will have to wait til next post.

The New Guy

Pretty stoked that we hired a new developer/designer/SEO person! Double stoked that we were able to hire someone who was referred to us by Deyon, my former instructor for the Website Design program at Lanier Technical College. I think we hired Bill at the exact right moment. We're not completely crushed with builds at the moment, as we will be in about 8 weeks when the landscapers start to examine and update their marketing programs. There is a decent window for him to get up to speed on our CMS/admin system, and file/folder structure before the pressure ratchets up. Half the battle when you are the new employee is finding out where everything is, and knowing what resources are available. So far he is doing excellent, and is also bringing some new ideas to the table.

A few sites have gone live over the past few weeks. One other thing that is happening is that the designs for the site are getting more complex to build out. Right now I am making an extra effort to pay attention to image file sizes, since I had some issues with slow load time on a particular site. Really trying to stay away from transparent PNG's. The designs that are happening sometimes necessitate them though. I have gotten 2 sites recently that were not design3d in house, the clients hired a graphic design company to make the wireframes and screenshots. Interesting challenges!

Crawl Grassperson

We recently launched a site for Grassperson Holiday Lighting-Lawn Care-Landscaping-TX which has been live for a little opver a week, but was last crawled on 10/23/2011, so the search results are now all pointing to dead links. Not knowing when Google will crawl a site after launching is always a source of frustration because the customers want an answer from US. This isn't as big an issue when the customer did not have a previous site.

LandscaperWebsites Week In Review 10/3 - 10/7, 2011

We have finally launched http://easylogokits.com/. It was the last thing that we did at work before leaving on Friday, which was the best possible strategy for launching this site. Unfortunately, EasyLogoKits turned out to be one of the most incredible examples of "scope creep" I have ever encountered. The tough thing about it is that the scope creep really wasn't the fault of the client OR us...it was more the fault of accepting a job that had more variables than either of us thought.

When originally presented, this was supposed to be a site that took a user through a very quick, easy, linear ordering process for one of 5 different "Logo Kits" which contain various apparel and promotional items that would be embroidered or printed with the customers logo. When we were presented with the job, the client made it seem as though they really wanted to just harvest the customer data quickly, and would work out any unresolved issues such as missing form fields, expired or incorrect credit card info, shipping address different than billing address, etc, upon reaching the customer by phone to "confirm" their order. Along the way, however, as the site owner was able to see and go through the ordering process as we built out the site, she continually asked for more and more of these potential issues to be addresses by the site itself. Of course she was not wrong for wanting the site to adhere to certain behaviors, but if she had been clear about exactly how thorough she wanted the site to be from the very beginning, we would have quoted her a much higher price, and would have braced for a much higher amount of development time.


We could not wait any longer to put the site up, and I am hoping that by launching it on Friday, and no major mishaps occuring over the weekend, that the client will start to adjust to the site being launched and shift her focus to marketing the site/business and making it work for her, instead of worrying about potential "mistakes" that a user to the site could make, like leaving the state out of their order etc. Remember, this was supposed to be a conduit leading to a follow up call to their customers...a call that is necessary since although the order entry is all done via the site,  shipping cost has NOT been included in the calculations the site makes, so they HAVE to make phone contact with the customer to completely close the deal.

There really is no easy way to tell a client "Uh, if someone is going to order even your least expensive product, which is $1500, they probably aren't going to enter info into the form fields sloppily" . That being said, I do intend to add form field verification across the site, but we HAD to go ahead and launch, otherwise while waiting for verification to be added, she probably would have asked for several other "last minute" items to be done to the site. Items that to her seem like not such a big deal, but in reality take a considerable amount of time to do. Somebody had to draw the line, so I did. We bent over backwards to make this site, but without making the launch decision, it might have NEVER went live.

On the upside, it IS a pretty cool site, and both me and my boss learned a lot by dong a job that was so far outside of the box for us.

Now we have other problems, which also involve "scope creep". In order to prevent thinking about them on my day off, I will save those issues for another post.

Now get over to EasyLogoKits.com and order some awesome embroidered logo / printed logo promotional items for your company.

Javascript Drop Down Menu Fun

Today I used a javascript drop down menu in a different way than I have before. It is viewable by clicking CHECKOUT in the upper right on EasyLogoKits.com.  The drop down I use is an awesome, flexible, free script that you can find HERE.Usually this menu will contain 2 or more text links, with a background rollover color, or a text rollover color, but I have adjusted the styles so that it appears more like a "pop up message" or "tooltip" than a menu of links. This required a combination of working with the style sheet specifically for the drop down AND using some inline styles in one of the .js files.

In the future, if I need to get this same effect I will try to lookup a tooltip type script, but for this specific application I had to use something I was familiar with and expand on it to meet my needs. Overall I am pretty happy with the results.

LandscaperWebsites Week In Review 8/22 - 8/26, 2011

Wow, what a week.

One of the upsides was launching  this great Marietta GA Landscaping website for Lifescapes Inc. This client still has several things that they would like to have done to the inner pages of their site that will require quite a bit of customization, but we were able to go ahead and launch the site in the current state.

We also launched this very clean Norcross GA Lawn Care website for SimplyGreen. One of the features I like about this site is that we added .net form validation on all of the forms. This is a common feature on many websites, but is not normally included on our forms unless the customer asks specifically for it, and then only if they have one of our upper level site packages. We can include form validation on any level site, but for lower levels it will add to the cost. For this particular site I used simple validation which just verifies that the form field has had input. We can also do more complex verification...for example, making sure that an email address is actually formatted as xxx@xxxx.xxx.

On Tuesday I actually had to take the day off due to car trouble. That day was spent taking not one, but TWO cars to two different shops. Fortunately the scarier of the two car issues actually worked out well, and the other came together nicely. One of the nice things about landscaperwebsites.com is that I can connect to my office desktop remotely and still get work done from pretty much anywhere, so I still managed to get a few things done even though I wasn't physically on site.

I started two new site buildouts and continued with a third, plus slugged away at Easy Logo Kits, which is coming along nicely but is behind schedule. Chris Porter has done an amazing job on the back end coding of this site. When it is complete it will be a great solution for a business that wants to take secure payment info, but not actually do the payment processing from the site. I will explain more about this later when the site is launched.

Thursday was a tough day. My dual monitors shut down 4 times, each time requiring me to completely restart my computer, then open up all of the programs and get back to where I was before the blackout, which takes about 10 mins each time. After the fourth time we opened up the comp and discovered that the fan on the video card had stopped working. Not good. I have 3 years on that machine and I know very well, so when I have to move to one of our other machines to work, it always takes more time to do everything. But I pushed on, and jokingly said to Chris P..."When you go to get the new video card, I won't be upset of you return with a new Windows7 machine attached to it".

The next morning when I got to work, there was a brand spanking new Win7 tower of power waiting for me, which Chris had already set up with a more current version of MS Office than I had been using, Fireworks CS5, Dreamweaver CS3, VisualWebDeveloper 2008 synced to our shared network drive for local files, AND it was already working on the dual monitors! WOW! The new rig is s sweet. It reminds me of my favorite computer of all time, the WOPR from the 1983 film War Games. Spent the rest of the day pouring over Easy Logo Kits to get the site in a state where the client could replicate the user experience from their end to make sure that the flow of their process felt correct. This was a great way to start getting the new, yet to be named Win7 rig up to speed. All I needed to do was configure my email on the new Outlook and install Filezilla and we were rockin!

LandscaperWebsites Week In Review 8/15 - 8/19, 2011

Lots of challenges this week.

One of my most recurring challenges is getting people to understand he limitations of what can be done for their website as far as organic SEO. We offer several levels of SEO programs, each one a little more thorough. The phrase "Search Engine Optimization" itself though tends to be a little misleading. A lot of our clients are under the impression that we can simply enter a few lines of code which will get them first page results for an extremely broad range of keyword terms and phrases. This results in spending a lot of time explaining to them that it just isn't that easy. Some clients accept this more easily than others. That being said, we have had a decent level of success with our SEO efforts. A site that I am currently working on SEO for is SureGreen Lawn Care, providers of excellent Lawn Care for Chestertown MD, Easton MD, St. Michaels MD, Middletown DE, & Dover DE.

Another interesting challenge we have had is working on a site that is outside the realm of landscaping and lawn maintenance, for a client who specializes in printed/embroidered apparel and promo items called Easy Logo Kits. This site will allow customers to make purchases of pre-configured  promotional packages, and wil accept their credit card info, but instead of completing the transaction, the info will be encrypted and forwarded to Easy Logo Kits for processing at their facility via their payment system. To the customer who orders from them, the site will appear to have completed the transaction, but Easy Logo Kits requested that the ordering process be set up this way so that they could make contact with the customer before the transaction is actually processed. There are several reasons for this which I will not go into here, but were well thought out components of their order processing strategy.

Having only two developers working, and one of them being away for trade shows several days this month has backed up our job cue exponentially, but I am trying to slug out jobs as fast as I can. Hopefully next week will e very productive.

Hello, I am the Landscaper Websiter

My name is Robert Ashton, and I am a website developer at LandscaperWebsites.com. As of November 2011, I will have been with the company 3 years.  I am still relatively new to website design & development, so I am learning all the time. I'm a graduate of the Lanier Technical College Website Developer Certificate program, which was a great introduction to the world of HTML & CSS. After graduating from the program I applied for an internship at Porterware.com which is the parent company of LandscaperWebsites.com, GreenIndustryWebsites.com, PestControlWebsites.com, and BuildingProWebsites.com. Once the length of the internship was completed I was asked to stay on and have been there ever since.

At LandscaperWebsites.com we create professionally designed sites which feature a simple proprietary content management system, and several online tools that are geared specifically to the landscaping and lawn care businesses. You can view an example of one of our sites by visiting this Cumming GA Lawn Maintenance site.

This blog will be used for me to log and celebrate successes, as well as provide a feedback platform for suggestions, and occasionally vent about the challenges of developing websites for landscapers. If you see any content here that you would like to contact me directly about, please feel free to email me at landscaperwebsiter@gmail.com