Saturday, August 27, 2011

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!


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