We're testing out Zendesk (Zendesk.com) for a support/ticketing system for our clients and ongoing project support.
Sticky Wicket Designs is always looking for ways to improve upon are already exceptional customer support. We see this as the next logical step. When we're available, online chat is available as well.
Overtime this will also assist us with building a knowledgebase for our clients to reference as well.
You should give it a try by clicking on the 'Support' tab (right side of the page) and sending us a message.
]]>We are very excited for Northern Development (www.northerndevelopment.bc.ca), a client since 2007. They were named 'Technology Provider of the Year' for 'Invest in Northwest BC' web portal (www.investnorthwestbc.ca).
We had the pleasure of working with Northern Development and Concept Design Ltd. (www.conceptdesign.ca) to develop this web portal. SWD served as project lead and back-end development on this project, with Concept Design providing all of the creative design work.
The project began in July 2011 and was officially launched in October 2011.
Some of the features of the final solution included:
In addition to Invest in Northwest, we've also completed two additional community web portal projects for Northern Devopment:
The final community web portal in the series, Cariboo Chilcotin-Coast, is scheduled to come online in the coming weeks.
Congratulations to Northern Development and our working partners, Concept Design Ltd. for such a great job on this invaluable project.
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We've decided to illustrate our process for new clients and prospects. It's not always obvious as to the steps involved to design and build a website, be it a new site, a redesign or adapting a prexisiting template. This is what we came up with.
NOTE: the PDF actually links through to the examples, facebook & twitter accounts and to various pages on our website.
Click to view/download the PDF:
» SWD Development Process
It is with great pleasure that I welcome Jesse Phillips to this otherwise team of one. It's been a long time coming, but it was time to get some help onboard here.
He's a good fit and I'm confident my clients will find working with Jesse to be consistent how Sticky Wicket Designs does things!
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Approximately four years ago I struggled within my business with all things related to the books and record keeping. It was common to forget to send out a bill, to forget to log hours, and to neglect to send out periodic reminders on overdue receivables. I'd worked with a bookkeeper in order to keep the office paperwork in order, but I myself was intimidated and frustrated with the bloated accounting software that I was using.
On a whim, and based on a some positive reviews within my industry, I heard about FreshBooks, an online service for time-tracking, expense tracking, and invoicing. Within the first three months there was a noticeable difference in my outstanding receivables... for the better.
Support Team — I've had a few occasions to contact their support to find out the best way to do something. They're always incredibly prompt and responsive to my requests and have to be the most friendly support people I've ever encountered.
Recurring Billing — I offer hosting and domain name registration services to a few of my clients, so the recurring invoicing comes in extremely handy. You can setup monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, annual, bi and tri-annual billing easily within their recurring invoicing service. The term of the recurring invoice is also customizable, so it can end on a certain date or be set to never expire.
Payment — Although most of my payment experience within FreshBooks is with PayPal, there's a multitude of payment gateway options (I'm currently making the switch to Beanstream for this - another great Canadian company).
Time-tracking — Tracking my time is critical to remaining successful with my business. I can quickly setup new projects and allocate the relevant tasks as well as setting a budget for time to spent on the project. This way I can easily see if/when we're getting close to exceeding the budget so I can alert my clients and make any necessary adjustments in order to stay on target.
Multiple invoice recipients — over the years I've run into several scenarios where a billing contact leaves a company, is on holidays, or just isn't very good at sending invoices along for processing. The ability to set multiple recipients has eliminated a lot of frustration on my end.
Control panel landing page — without question this is one of the biggest contributing factors in turner the corner with my business. I get a snapshot of: recent activity (invoices sent, clients logging in, payments processed, invoice totals for the last three months (broken into billed, received, outstanding), expenses totals for the last 3 months, timesheet totals for current week & month, and a project dashboard with graphs to indicate project progress in relation to budgeted time.
Unbilled expenses & hours — this is a *new* feature added recently that allows me to pull in any unbilled expenses and hours for a given project on a recurring invoice. So, I no longer have to remember to generate a month-end invoice for site maintenance work that I perform for some of my clients. (I can not express how happy this makes me!)
FreshBooks has created a fanatic in me! My business looks and performs better as a result of my using their services.
If you're interested in checking them out, be sure to let them know just where you heard about them, in fact, using this link will let them know that I sent you (and they will show me some gratitude too)
» Check out what FreshBooks can do for you!
When I started out in this business I have to admit, I did not think it would be high-stress, emergency type work. Over the last 10 years I've found out otherwise.
There's no getting around it, sometimes things go wrong for businesses/organizations with websites. Here's a few of the scenarios I've run into.
By no means does this cover every scenario, but these particular instances come up a least a couple of times a year for me.
All is not lost, but it does take some time and in some caases a great deal of effort to forensically sort things out and get you operational again, so, just be prepared to pay for someone's time to help you out with this sort of thing.
I wouldn't want to make a career out of this kind of work, but I do take great pleasure in helping a new client get out of a pinch and into a solution, and relationship, that will serve them well for many years to come.
On that note, congratulations to the good people at 4 Paws Bakery, www.4pawsbakery.ca, on their new site and for taking that leap of faith to go with a very well established hosted solution in Shopify.com.
]]>It's with great excitement, pride and pleasure that we're announcing the launch of InvestNorthwestBC.ca. The project was spearheaded by Northern Development Initiative Trust, and was delivered with Concept Design Ltd tackling all of the design related work.
Some of the highlights, and challenges of this project include:
In the end I'm extremely pleased with the final result and the ability for each of the 10 editors that currently have access to the site to easily maintain and add additional content without the need for a developer's involvement.
The provision of training videos that are linked directly from within the CMS system has minimized the need for regular support and/or troubleshooting.
]]>We're excited to launch the revitalized website for Heather Sadler Jenkins LLP. This was primarily a redo of the visuals and the content of the site. The end result is more becoming of Prince George's largest law firm.
]]>In the last couple of years I've begun recording video tutorials for clients of the systems that I most commonly deploy for their projects. Generally I try to keep these on the shorter side (under 10 minutes) and focused on a single task that they'd typically be performing on their site.
The latest one was just posted to YouTube today, and focuses on editing tables using the TinyMCE editor that is the default WYSIWYG editor in CMS Made Simple.
Earlier this month I also published a couple of videos for Shopify.com, focusing on Products & Collections management.
]]>Working with the good people at Concept Design on a great site for the great people at Phoenix Medical Imaging.
In addition to providing information to their clients, one of the primary objectives is recruitment of qualified personnel to their team.
» Visit the new site at www.phoenixmedicalimaging.ca
]]>Working with the good people at Concept Design on a great new site for Creekside Properties, a new development at the end of Malaspina Avenue (Malaspina Ridge).
The site is targeted towards realtors and potential buyers, with a focus on providing easy web-based access to all the supplemental material necessary for potential buyers to review the specs and to also submit offers on the properties.
» Visit the new site at www.creeksideproperties.net
]]>Just posted a new video on using the Guestbook module in CMS Made Simple (CMSMS).
This little 6 and a ½ minute screencast covers the basics of using the Guestbook module for your site visitors on your CMSMS powered site. The tutorial is targeted towards editors, NOT developers.
Highlights include:
There's a new entry on our development blog, 'CMSMS - Guestbook Module'. It is also available for viewing from YouTube (but it's not quite as crisp) - view it on YouTube.
]]>Just posted a new video on using the Gallery module in CMS Made Simple (CMSMS).
This little 8 minute screencast covers the basics of using the Gallery module for your photo albums on your CMSMS powered site. The tutorial is targeted towards editors, NOT developers. Highlights include:
There's a new entry on our development blog, 'CMSMS - Gallery Module'. It is also available for viewing from YouTube (but it's not as crisp) - view it on YouTube.
]]>Very excited to announce the latest site launch at Sticky Wicket Designs for the great people at Maui Diamond Sea Sports - Diving Charters.
A beautifully redesigned site now fully integrated with a content management system to allow them to easily and efficiently keep things up to date on their site. But don't take our word for it, check them out at www.mauidiamond.com.
]]>'Mastering Flickr: A Practical Guide' is a great little article written by John O'Nolan and featured on Webdesigner Depot.
Some of the key points of the article are listed below:
An excellent read especially if you've ever pondered how you can get the most out of Flickr.
]]>Once again the crew at Concept Design knock out a great site redesign, this time for Porter & McMillan Insurance Brokers of Prince George, BC.
The site itself is 4x's the size of their previous site with far more focus on the needs of site visitors this time around. We got to work our magic with the coding and content management system integration once again with some custom coding requirements to top it off.
» Visit the new site at www.porterandmcmillan.com
]]>We're pleased to announce the addition of an inquiry form, primarily for new clients, in order to help them provide the pertinent information to enable us to provide a more accurate quote on prospective jobs from the get go.
If the time is taken to provide thoughtful, accurate answers to the questions, this can often save us both at least one meeting from the initial consultation process. In the future we plan to add a PDF version of the form/questionnaire that you may use regardless of which company you're approaching about doing your web site.
We invite you to try it out it!
» Go to Web site Inquiry Form
Another great project with our friends at Concept Design, some fun challenges and enhancements on this CMS enabled site. Features include, but are not limited to:
View the new site at www.edynamics.com
]]>This is a notice of scheduled network maintenance being performed on Saturday, July 17th at 7:00 PM PT (GMT -08:00). We have scheduled a maintenance window of three hours starting on 7:00 PM Pacific Time (GMT -08:00). Unfortunately, due to the complexity of this maintenance work we expect to lose our network connectivity intermittently with a total network outage of no more than 2 hours to be expected. Thus, all servers and services will be affected as well.
NOTE: only a handful of clients will be impacted by these updates.
]]>After a three year hiatus from updating our own site (yes, it's been that busy), we've finally made some changes to the site. Included in the changes are:
There is more to come, but was getting anxious to finally launch this. By all means let us know what you think ({mailto address='info@stickywicketdesigns.com' encode='hex'}).
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