vjcoop - Techivity

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Former Projects

September 21, 2011 vjcoop No comments

Here are a few of our former projects, done before our last portfolio update.

	Kent Smith Architects – Kent wanted more than just another blogging site; he wanted a site with unusual design (courtesy of APRiori Creative) and video capabilities. Using WordPress as a foundation, Techivity helped Kent make sense of hundreds of blogging plugins and resources to get what he needed.
	silex Technology America – silex needed a new web site, a fresh look and feel, with a management system that would allow them to keep track of their extensive pages of content while providing the ability for people throughout their organization to maintain separate pages.
	BelleHavens – BelleHavens is a destination club where members can spend time in fabulous locations, staying in million dollar homes. VorpalJack updated their online reservation system, provided marketing analytics, SEO advice and provides hosting and technical management services.
	Heirloom Passages – Specializes in producing beautiful, heirloom quality products to memorialize important events. VorpalJack provided this startup with a web presence, consultation and online store at a price they could afford.
	Icon Remodeling – A full service design-build firm comprised of certified, quality-oriented staff that reflect innovative ideas, comprehensive services, and attention to detail. VorpalJack helped Icon to identify what site map would best serve their business and developed a web presence for Icon that includes a FAQ, a portfolio, and information about Icon and the services it offers. In addition, VorpalJack trained their staff to update and maintain the site themselves. We are especially proud of the custom engineered slideshow plugin that displays Icon’s portfolio while giving them a user-friendly GUI to update the slides any time they want.
	Corda Technologies – The global leader in interactive data visualization software and solutions. VorpalJack converted Corda’s site from over 1000 individual HTML pages to a template system that greatly simplified maintenance. Using custom software, VorpalJack processed more than 1000 content pages to fit within the new templates and added new flash driven and HTML content to reflect new product lines. Best of all, the entire project was delivered ahead of schedule and under budget.
	Fulcrum Biometrics – Fulcrum Biometrics is a leading provider and distributor of multiple biometric identification technologies. Fulcrum needed a new website with an online store. VorpalJack provided Fulcrum with that site, a customized template, menu system and training that has allowed Fulcrum to mange and update their site on their own. VorpalJack continues to provide technical services to Fulcrum on a regular basis, helping them maintain and manage a very active and successful site.
	Atto Solutions – Atto Solutions is the premiere provider of freight auditing services for companies of all sizes. VorpalJack built a user friendly web interface to allow Atto Solutions’ customers to enter account information, pay bills and view extensive reports showing detailed shipping and cost information. Our database stores millions of records for Atto Solutions customers to review their freight expenses and ensure they are not over-spending.

Portfolio none

What is the difference between Marketing, PR and Sales?

August 8, 2011 vjcoop No comments

As small to mid-size business and non-profit leaders, many of you have to wear multiple hats, providing technology advice, marketing strategy and engaging in sales work supporting relationships. This is for you.

I was watching a video by my sister Payson Cooper, who has cultivated a nice skill-set in strategic marketing, and I thought she articulated something more clearly than I’ve ever heard it before, so I wanted to share it with my audience.

So what is the difference between Marketing, PR and Sales anyway?

Professionals blur the lines between these disciplines, its not surprising that small business entrepreneurs who have less time to specialize do the same.

Here’s what Payson had to say:

Marketing is identifying what problems you solve, how you solve them, and getting that information in front of the people who care. This covers everything from strategic marketing, where you are thinking about your audience, what problems they face, and how you can solve them, to lead-generation marketing, where you identify people who care and pass them to a sales team.

PR (Public Relations) is defining information to help third parties understand what you do and who cares about it. This is very important because it provides your potential customers with a third-party, relatively independent, perspective into what you have to offer. Its dependent on marketing, but entirely different. It supports sales, but is different. This is identifying industry experts who have credibility and giving them what they need to make an impartial evaluation of your services and
offerings, so that the folks who listen to them get to know about you and what you can offer.

Sales is the process of overcoming natural objections to purchasing your services or products. Isn’t that a nice description? When you have something to offer, those interested will have natural questions and objections. Why would this help me? Do I need it? What is included? How much is it? Why is that a fair price? Sales is the process of helping a potential customer answer those questions.

So there you go; a nice, discrete separation of Marking, PR and Sales for the small business executives and entrepreneurs among you out there to use when you need to strategize.

I am in training the first couple of weeks of August, when I return Techivity will take a look at some of the new services Google has made available.

If you found this post helpful, and want to take a look at what Payson offers in marketing strategy, take a look at her site. She and I approach things a bit differently, but her strategies are quite effective. As usual, feel free to post a comment, or contact Techivity for consulting services.

Social Networking, Strategy none

I Guess 1&1 Make Zero

June 14, 2011 vjcoop 2 comments

I don’t often do this, write a recommendation to avoid someone’s hosting services, however, this example of incompetence is so strong that I feel I need to say something.

I was helping a client migrate from shared hosting (as in shared with other unconnected businesses) on 1&1 to their own hosting solution. We moved the domain to the new solution, leaving name service pointed to the 1&1 hosting, to protect the clients active email boxes, until we could make a careful planned migration of the email, hoping to avoid interruption.

A few weeks in, 1&1 deleted the remaining hosting account. Yep.

They just deleted their customers digital property, without asking, checking anything, or keeping a back-up. Worse, they defended the action by saying we should not have moved the name registration, which demonstrates a complete failure to understand basic concepts about how name registration works. What we did, was basically the same as having a domain registered with Godaddy and hosting it somewhere else. Millions of accounts are set-up that way.

So, my client lost email service in the middle of the business day, for a whole day while we moved DNS, and lost correspondence.

All 1&1 had to do was check their logs, or name service, to see live data in the account.

Deleting your customer’s property, without contacting anyone or checking anything, then telling the customer they are in the wrong, is just horrible customer care.

I am sorry to have to say; Don’ t host with 1&1, just don’t do it. Their disrespect for this customer was frightening.

Strategy, Tech Notes none

Recommended: Live Drive

May 24, 2011 vjcoop No comments

A technical recommendation; a long-time client just lost several months of medical data from a crashed hard-drive and has to re-enter it from printout. It will cost them $1000’s. I hate to see that.

If you are *not* running a web-driven backup solution then go set one up now; they are reasonably priced, effective and protect from exactly this problem. Here’s my favorite. I am paying about $17 a month for over 350gb of backup and online storage. There are plenty of other services, I researched quite a few, and in my assessment, this one was the best.

Live-Drive is cost-effective, easy to set-up, works on both mac and pc, and allows web-based access to files.

http://www.livedrive.com/?tid=3XJRWCF7

Once installed, it has a pretty easy to use control panel with two major services:

The briefcase service maps a web-folder to your computer as a network drive, works with mac or pc…or even FTP, so if you use Linux (like I sometimes do), you can set up a script to ftp to it as well.

Plus, there is a web interface on livedrive.com that will allow you to access, download or even view some files on-line. So, if you are ever at a client’s site, or friends, and forgot something, its there if you can get to an internet connection.

We are most interested in the back-up services. They are pretty easy to configure. At install, a wizard will walk you through set-up, and if you ever need to change settings you can open the “live drivecontrol panel” from your start menu and modify the backup settings in the services tab.

Click the “manage backup settings” you will get a file tree. To make sure that you get proper back-ups, you need to know where your various software stores the information you want to back-up. In current windows software most information is stored under the user directory under “appdata” but some older programs (like the medical billing program this client uses) store data in directories off the C: drive or elsewhere. You can usually find out where data is stored by looking in the software’s preferences or settings. If you have trouble, contact the vendor, or let someone like me know, who can probably find it by remote desktop if needed.

The first back-up may take several days to run, so just leave the computer on, after that, it runs small changes and goes much more quickly.

If you don’t like LiveDrive, use something, just make sure you back-up your work.

Tech Notes Strategy, Tech Coaching, Website Strategy

Western Folklife Center: Joomla 1.5

May 17, 2011 vjcoop No comments

Western Folklife Center is a long-time client. When they first approached us in 2007, they were working with a store system that couldn’t handle their orders, using a content management solution that didn’t work for their needs and had trouble making any edits to their site.

We helped them evaluate open-source alternatives, plan a project to update their web site of over 900 pages, and migrated their web management system to Joomla 1.0 with VirtueMart for their store solution. Since then, we have updated their site to Joomla 1.5 and added a wide range of resources including Google Analytics, custom web forms and custom templates for both their main and their Cowboy Poetry Gathering microsite.

The Western Folklife Center site is a good size site; over 850 pages, multiple integrated systems, 3 custom templates, photo galleries, forms systems and VirtueMart. Also, a microsite within Joomla that uses Joomla’s multiple template capabilities.

Western Folklife Center is a really cool non-profit organization; they help archive, celebrate and store the folklore of the western United States. Their site includes cowboy poetry, exhibits, artwork, podcasts, radio shows and more. Go check ’em out! They are one of our on-going clients who has a contract with us for maintenance and management.

Portfolio Google Analytics, Joomla, Web Marketing, Website Analytics, Website Tracking

What happened to customer service?

March 30, 2011 vjcoop No comments

I’ve been dealing with a hard-drive crash in my Dell laptop the past couple of days and its opened my eyes to what I consider to be a serious issue in the technical industry. The tech industry has become central to our culture, part of our identity in modern times. So what happened to the customer service?

For example, in the past 2 weeks for my Dell Inspiron 1545 I needed a new keyboard, hard-drive and restore disk. So, what do I do? Go to my account on support.dell.com, login and start digging around…when I cannot find anywhere to download the operating system software, and no replacement parts link, I try to open a chat window.

They want me to pay for out-of-warranty chat (oh and don’t try this in IE 8, all the dell support links break the 2nd level in). I try to call support; they transfer me 3 times taking up 40 minutes until I get to a guy that says he can only help me if I give him a credit card and approve a $35 fee. Finally, in frustration, I hang up on everyone and call in to Dell sales. They give me the Dell replacement parts line. This fella wants to know the part number off my keyboard to send a replacement, and I have to pay for the operating system disk to restore my machine.

Uncle. You win Dell, you’ve got great hardware, good prices, but I don’t ever want to have to talk to you again. Ever. I’ll have to, I’m sure, but you wasted enough of my time giving me the run-around when I was just trying to buy stuff from you to keep my machine working.

My dell is now using a $62 after-market SATA drive that I bought at Software & More around the corner from here (great guys, if you need computer stuff in Salt Lake City, go to them, they are honest, forth-coming and respectful) and its running Ubuntu 10.10 while I try to figure out what to do about the Windows 7 license printed on the bottom of the machine that ought to give me license to an operating system nobody will give me…

Granted, there’s no chat or phone support for Ubuntu (unless I pay for it) but there are literally 100’s of forums full of people eager to help me with anything…the big computer companies don’t even have community pages.

There’s something very wrong here. In an industry that is leading our culture, talking to a major player, I couldn’t in 2 hours of time get a sales rep to help me. What does that say about where we are headed? That a major industry player cannot even successfully sell me a component I need to keep my machine running without putting me off to 3 different team-members, in 2 countries, over the course of 2-3 hours?

Dell, Gateway, Microsoft and any other big boys listening, you gotta wake up. I think it was Heinlein that said, “You can tell the decline of a civilization by the ways its people treat each other…”

Doesn’t bode well folks.

Then again, Software & More, the neighborhood store…the sales rep said to me, “Hey, if you have any trouble, call us back and come back in, we’ve a tech right here…I’m sure he’ll talk to you about any issues you’ve got.”

Next laptop I buy will probably come from those guys, even if its a bit more money.

Maybe its just the big boys with the cultural issues around customer service…that would probably be ok with me.

Strategy, Tech Notes none

MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter

February 15, 2011 vjcoop No comments

A quick post about the audience found at each of the major US social networking sites to share how they can work for you! Each of the major social networking sites has developed its own niche, audience and purpose. Use social media to reach an audience that cares so you don’t upset your potential customers or waste your effort.

MySpace has developed into a kind of hip culture site that is ripe with music, art and pop news. The home page for MySpace connects up to hulu, has music info on it and other popular media. If you are looking for people who are into music, who are interested in connecting and finding this pop and artistic, then MySpace is a good spot to do that. Most of the clients that I know who use MySpace to connect to their customers are dance clubs, social venues, musicians and other artists.

LinkedIn is a much more professionally oriented service, in fact, their home page talks about creating a career fast-track and getting more out of your professional network. LinkedIn provides tools to connect with business professionals, provide references, promote services and so forth. Its great if you want to connect with and promote to business professionals.

Facebook is a fairly generic social media resource and it has a huge audience. Most of Facebook is used to connect and promote around our own lives; major events, projects and relationships. There are games and resources for having fun, but in my experience, Facebook is mostly about being able to publicize who you are, who you know, and what you like. Its a great place to build and manage a natural network; the friends, family and associates you know, and if you have a product or service that is appropriate to present to family and friends, this is a good spot.

Twitter is all about small burst information on a wide range of subjects, thus has a wide audience. With Twitter, its about building up connections with your networks, connections that are interested in quick updates and advice from you. With Twitter, your emphasis ought to be what you offer and whether or not you can build an audience that’s interested. If you can find an audience interested in your professional advice, news tips and other quick notes then you should try using Twitter. There are some good courses out there about using Twitter, like the one my sister Payson Cooper put together.

As with pretty much any marketing effort, using social media appropriately is all about understanding who you are trying to reach, where they hang out, and articulating what you can offer them.

Social Networking none

When to pick WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or another web system?

November 17, 2010 vjcoop 19 comments

There are so many Open Source systems for websites out there, that I thought I would take a moment to explain a bit about when to pick each one, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons. There isn’t one “solves it all” type system, so if someone is telling you that, its because they would rather work with what they know, than what you need…

We’ll talk about a few of the big boys here (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal being the most obvious), and a few of the up-and-coming (ModX and Concrete5) here. Basically, when selecting an open source system to run your website there are several things to take into consideration:

What does your site need to do for visitors? What features do you need, like a store, or login system?
Who will manage the site? How much will ease of use impact them?
What growth can you anticipate? What features might you want down the road?
How important is custom design and layout?

If you want a site that primarily communicates to visitors, provides information, you are not too concerned with additional features, like a web store, mailing lists, forums or providing custom information to a selected group, then that’s one set of requirements, if you need a site that provides login, user accounts and gives people information customized just for them (like a site that looks up account information for them), that’s a whole other set of needs. Throw design and layout control into it, and it can be hard to pick the right system.

Picking the wrong system can hamstring your web site functionality, cost you $1000’s and delay you significant calendar time. As with most of our posts, if you would like some help, just contact us. We do requirements gathering and analysis, and can help make sure you pick the right system.

Here’s our take on a few different systems – don’t get caught listening to a technophile who loves one particular system and thinks it can be used to solve every problem. That’s not reality.

WordPress: Fantastic blogging system that’s got a bit of content management to it and literally thousands upon thousands of plugins, themes and extensions that allow it to do more. At its core, WordPress is designed to do one thing and to do it very well, manage a blog. Its concepts and design from the ground up is focused on managing posts and communicating about posts. It does that exceptionally well, and if that’s the core of what you want, posting information in a blog structure, WordPress is your platform, hands down. If you want something else, like control over page organization, user control to limit access to areas by group, changes in how information is presented, or a site that’s not generally “blog-feeling” then using WordPress to do it can get complicated and feel like a hack. For ease-of-use in setup, WordPress is a good pick. They’ve made plugin management and site management simple enough for a novice, but with that ease of use, comes limitations; its very hard to make WordPress do stuff differently. If you expect to run a site that communicates information, where posts can serve as news updates, you don’t mind that information model, and ease-of-use is a factor, go with WordPress.

Drupal: This is a *great* content management system and its track record is undeniable. Large scale sites like whitehouse.gov (yep, them), economist.com (yes that one) and fastcompany.com (no? Ok, so you’re not a business geek) run Drupal. It performs well, has an excellent cache system that sustains performance on large scale sites, has against 1000’s of extensions and has user-access control that can be find-tuned to allow person A to edit this set of pages, and person B to edit those without touching each other’s work. But the interface is confusing, the information model is challenging, and you need to understand code and website basics to install themes and extensions. In short, its a professional’s CMS. You can have someone set it up for you, but unless you know what model-view-controller (MVC) is and know how to link a CSS file to a PHP template file, you’re likely going to have trouble upgrading, extending or re-skinning it. Its a favorite or us freelancers who set sites up for clients, because content entry can be easy enough, and its very flexible, powerful and robust. If you expect to run a large-scale community site, need customizations, user access control, a powerful system that can handle large-scale sites, and you anticipate having good tech skills, go with Drupal.

Joomla: For a long time, Joomla was our “favorite” content management system at Techivity/VorpalJack and with good reason. Joomla bridges ease-of-use between Drupal and WordPress, provides good site control over things like menus and objects on a page. The template system is easier to customize than WordPress, the administration interface is more intelligible than Drupal, and there are again 1000’s of extensions and templates out there. Again, it does have weaknesses. It has a limited user-access model, so its very hard to control access to content items or other resources on a user or group basis. The plugin and extension management system, while easier than the one in Drupal, is much harder than the one in WordPress. Performance-wise it does well enough, but its not tested on the large-scale sites the way Drupal is – but ease-of-use…well, I’ve had clients whose computer skills were very limited managing their sites in Joomla. If you need a content management system that provides more customized ways to organize and present information that WordPress, is easy enough for the uninitiated, and you are not concerned about controlling information by user, Joomla is a great choice.

Here are a few of the up-and-coming cms and website systems. As a whole, the issue with this group is that there’s not enough community support yet to have the quality and breadth of extensions:

ModX: A great content-management system with really health engineering design, careful management, and next-gen tools, ModX is a bit confusing (like Drupal) on the admin side unless you code websites, then its a dream come true. Uses Smarty for its template system, so if you don’t know what that is, you won’t be skinning it. ModX is a good choice if you’re hacking together a website for a client that is a basic site, but has to be custom organized, and its a great choice as a foundation for acustom system.

Concrete5: Much like ModX but a bit easier to use, Concrete5 is a wonderful cross between open source and commercial. The core system is free, but you can buy extensions right in the admin interface. Its easier to use than ModX and Drupal, maybe even easier than Joomla, but its speed and performance comes into question on sites with higher traffic, so be wary of choosing it for a major site. Again, a great system to hash something together for a client.

Ok, there’s a perspective. Come talk to us if you want advice.

Strategy, Tech Notes Drupal, Joomla, ModX, Website Planning, WordPress

Google Apps: Your Free Collaborative Office Suite

September 7, 2010 vjcoop 1 comment

This post is about getting set up with two incredibly useful tools; Google Calendar, Google Docs and gmail.

Google Calendar allows you to have a calendar that syncs with most mobile phones, can subscribe and share event information with other calendars, sends reminders and notices and is completely free.

Google Docs allows you to create and manage documents online, including spreadsheets and forms, you can share them with others and it keeps a complete revision history. Again all free.

GMail is old-hat these days, but when combined with these other two, it allows you to connect contacts to appointments, sync contacts to your android phone and desktop automagically, and Google has been adding new features.

The first step is to create a google account to use calendar, docs, etc…this also has the benefit of giving you access to google analytics (as discussed in our getting started with Google Analytics article).

Here’s what you can do with a Google Account:

Access free Google products (i.e. iGoogle, Picasa Web Albums, Blogger, orkut, Google Groups, and so much more)
Add a Gmail address to your Google Account (does not affect your existing account but adds features)
Use Google AdWords and Google Checkout

This doesn’t have to be a gmail account, but those are free, easy to forward to another box, and make a few things easier, so the instructions on those are below as well. The link to create a new google account is:

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount?continue=http://www.google.com/&hl=en

That form is pretty straight-forward. You do not need a gmail account to create a google account, you can use your current email. Fill in the form, you’ll get an activation email sent to the email address used.

Once you get the activation email, and click the link in it, you’ll be able to add your mobile number if you like – that’s useful especially if you have a Droid phone! Either click “Manage my account settings.” on that validation page, or just go to https://www.google.com/accounts/Login to sign in to your account with your email address and password.

You will see the Google account services window:

We are going to set-up Google Calendar and GMail first – remember that although you already have an email account, having GMail will allow you to use GMail contacts, which will sync with your android phone automatically (as will calendar).

Google Calendar

Click on the link on the bottom that says “More” – that will take you to the huge list of free Google Apps you just got for yourself. On the right-hand side there is an area entitled “Communicate, Show & Share”

We will talk more about all of these tools, because they are incredibly useful, but for now, on the right hand side, click “Calendar” which will lead you to the first of the Calendar set-up pages:

Fill in your name fields, location, and DO select the right time zone, that’s important for getting appointments right and sharing across calendars. The next screen you see will be your calendar. We will do a separate post on using Google Calendar to highlight some of the features and settings, for now, you are set-up. Try clicking on a date and time – that will let you create your first event.

Configuring GMail for Contact Use

Ok, now lets get GMail set up for contact use, so you can add contacts and link them to appointments. To keep this simple, click on the word “Mail” on the upper left:

Which will take you to the GMail setup screen. Again, its a form, pretty straightforward – but here, I highly suggest you click the “Check Availability” button to save yourself some time. You’re going to have to pick something that is unique. For example, “techivity@gmail.com” is already taken.

The password field should be filled in with the Google Account password you just set-up. The next step is an account verification step where you can get a phone call or a text message to verify. Email allows too much fraud on free accounts, so tolerate this with some pride knowing Google’s at least trying to provide good anti-fraud practices.

Oh, and you will have to enter the verification code they give you, so if you pick phone call, grab a pad and pen.

Once you enter the verification code, you will see an entry-way page to your new GMail account. You can spend some time with those videos and instructions, or just click “Show me my account” and get going.

Now, as promised, here is a quick note on how to forward GMail to your original address, so you can just use contacts and don’t have to check GMail separately.

On the upper right side, click on “Settings” to open the settings window
Towards the center, in the first yellow/orange area, click on “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”
Click the button that says “Add a forwarding address”
Enter your original address into the pop-up field and click “Next”
You will get a confirmation email, go click on that link
Go back to the settings page and reload it
Now you will see your forwarding email
Check the box that says “Forward a copy of incoming mail to” and tell gmail whether you want it to keep a copy or not
Click “Save Changes” down at the bottom

Forwarding GMail Steps 1-5

Ok, now anything that goes to your new GMail account will forward to the original email, you don’t have to check both accounts. To be sure you got it right, send the GMail box an email from your other account and see if it comes back to you, if it does, you got it, if it doesn’t, go back in and try again, or give us a call and we’ll help.

We will get more into using and configuring Google Apps in future posts, because its a lot of great and free functionality for small businesses and non-profits!

Tech Notes Google, Google Analytics, Google Apps, Google Calendar, Google Docs

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