Aspden IT

Teign Music Redevelopment

Case Studies

Wednesday, 04 February 2009 08:05

Since the initial development of a 'front of house' branded website and a customised OScommerce webcart for Teignmusic, the web has grown and matured, as has their business.

The original site facilitated their needs but they wanted to make more of a statement. Their frontpage had to have more than static content, it had to bring live product feeds to the visitor straight away and deliver a fresh look and feel. Teignmouth is a close knit, vibrant town with a lot of local bands. Teignmusic is at the heart of that, and their site needed to reflect that. At the same time, their business reaches all parts of the country due to their large range and 

Luckily they still retain all their original development files and artwork which was developed by Aspden IT, so we were able to extract all content easily and start to prototype their site redevelopment.

With the CS4 toolset at our disposal and our expertise with Flash, Dreamweaver and photoshop we were able to build some quick slideshows, mockups and banner ideas, which allowed the team then to really explore where they wanted to go. With such tools as screen sharing we were able to interact with them in realtime in some cases.

With our adoption of prototypejs and scriptaculous libraries we can build very responsive and interactive widgets on the site. A news ticker was thrown together, and we built some interactive rollovers using Event.observe which not only looked great but also added more spider friendly content. Firebug was used extensively to tune site performance and continues to be developed.

Their SEO update is due to the fact we are adapting their standard 'content' to shine as well as their products do; these are provided as datafeeds which get searched in a different way by google, often resulting in multiple SERPs. For some products, with competitive pricing we can get two links above the No1 search rank even if we don't rank high for the actual search.

For their content management we have intergrated XML feed reading capability from their blog service, allowing any of the staff to edit and maintain the site and have trained them in updating their product catalogue. Twitter and other services allows their site to be changedevery minute from wherever.

Custom MySQL queries pull random, related and special offer products from their ever expanding product ranges. This underlying knowledge of oscommerce and tricks enable us to blend the cart system better allowing for fewer clicks to purchase.

The javascript utilises the Google.com Content Delivery Network meaning the page benefits from caching and compression of the javascript.

 We continue to work with the team building auction functionality, POS information screens and youtube video tutorial, the later we hope to launch in March.

 Peter Williams, the director at Teignmusic in Teignmouth commented: 'Not only do we get IT support and indepth technical ability, we get a wealth of experience in delivering a business over the web. Aspden IT has worked as part of our team during our incubation and startup and continues to be invaluable.'

Aspden IT can design and program your website with a skilled team of mysql specialists, php developers and designers. What is more we are able to consult and develop your IT infrastructure at the same time.

Our flexible business models also attracted Teignmusic: 'We pay a retainer for their services and we can save this up so that our larger projects can benefit from some initial prototyping, or we can get incremental changes along with IT support on a site visit.'

 Teignmusic monitor their site with google analytics reports and custom goals. They continue to see a 10% month on month increase in site visitors and build their customer base by 5% a month, which is double the standard ecommerce site. 

Network Trouble Shooting

Case Studies

Sunday, 23 November 2008 15:40

If there is one thing that i can guarantee when i go to resolve some networking issues it is that i am not the first. There are tell tale signs that appear, usually only on some machines. And then i hear that someone can access the server but not the internet and others can get on google but not the server.

This is a classic scenario that screams DNS problems - simply put the service that changes easy to remember names into computer addresses. The worst thing is, it is very easy to fix the internet 'to work' - at least for a time - but understanding the network is the key to allowing both the servers and the network able to be found.

For as little as a few hours such issues as this can be resolved, a good quality Router and some time building a network map. Ofcourse the difficulty comes as the number of computers on your network increases. A good maintenance plan with Aspden IT will mean that over time your network will become a well documented simple system.

 Let Aspden IT take the stress away from managing your network, look at the benefits:

• Simple faults can be remedied over the phone.
• Outside suppliers need to install software - we will make sure you are up-to-date and make sure your systems are installed properly
• Looking to build special functionaliyt - SMS systems, bulk email - We know the tricks!
• Looking for help working from home - Remote access systems are our speciality!

Package Deployment Tricks

Case Studies

Sunday, 07 September 2008 13:01

Software rarely comes packaged cleanly, rather it is packaged to work for the most general case. For example, it will likely come with an outdated version of Adobe Acrobat Reader or the required version of DirectX. If you are lucky, these are just on the disk as a resource, in the extreme they are chained installs, which will slow down your installation or corrupt your system.

The tools which i have attached. 

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
Msi Clean Up	Utility to remove entries from the windows installer database.	293 Kb

Amtek - Laptop Disaster Recovery

Case Studies

Sunday, 07 September 2008 11:55