Reddybrek.com

RentacarIreland.co.uk launches new low cost Irish car rental site with Dragnet Systems

Filed under General , work

Building on the success of RentcarIreland.com a new sister site has been created especially for the UK market. This new site offers Hertz branded rental cars at a lower cost due to saving deals between Rentacar Ireland and Hertz. The new site also brings some new functionality in the form of dynamically updatable site headers, improved email marketing filters and new event guide for what's on in Ireland.

Check out the new site over at RentacarIreland.co.uk and let us know if you manage to drive away with any good deals! (man that's a terrible pun....)

How do you make a great online store?

Filed under General , work , Online Stores

We've had such a great success lately with our online store software. Our decision to build our own software from the ground up instead of just buying off the shelf has proved to work hugely in our favour. What's interesting is the angle we took when developing our software. We focused not only on the store customer's user experience but also the our client's experience for managing their store.

One of the best things about our software has to be the ease of use of the admin tools. These are the tools that let the store owner manage products, manage orders, manage email marketing, etc. When we were researching the current online stores out there we noticed that the admin tools were one of the main weak spots for many packages out there. Those tools are either very easy to use but don't give enough options to fully manage your store or the opposite, too many options all hidden away in obscure locations and very difficult to work with. This baffled us. Why would a web company spend so much time developing a nice store front end only to have it impossible to use without training by the store owner?

Our interface for our online store software uses common sense. All tools for dealing with products are stored under the heading 'Products' in our system. Product info is not scattered all over the place under 'Reports' or 'Export Details'. It's all located under one heading because this is what the client expects.

Buttons should also say what it is they are going to do! I'm always shocked when I see buttons with the word 'submit' on them. A button should say what the action is it going to perform is - 'Save Product', 'Update Product', 'Delete Product', etc.

Simple things like asking for confirmation before deleting a product can give our clients the confidence that they can't break their new store or give visual feedback after an update so that they know their details were saved. If your client is going to delete a department then be sure to make it clear that any products that depend on that department would also be removed and ask for confirmation if they would like to continue or not. If they choose not to continue then give them a message to let them know their action was cancelled. If they actually did delete the department and all the products within that department then once the action is complete tell the end user that everything was successful.

We actually pride ourselves on having online store software that is so easy to use that no training should be required. When delivering the new store to our client we given them a run through all the site features, explaining in detail how everything works, answer any questions they have and leave them with a nice and simple 'How To' guide so they can get stuck in. We also keep our contact details in plain view for the client when they use our system. If they should ever have a question they can easily send an email or phone us for instant assistance. We don't hide our contact information because we're not afraid of giving support when it's needed.

So how do you make a great online store? You focus on the end user experience! Just don't forget that you have two end users. Your client who will be managing the store in the admin area of the site and the customers to the site who will be using the front end. If you cut corners on the admin tools your client will not be confident in using the site and will be contacting you all the time for assistance. If you cut corners on the front end of the site then you will never help drive sales through the stores! It sounds so simple but it's amazing the number of products out there that get this wrong!

Of course this is only one side in making a great online store. Marketing plays a huge role in getting your store out there and driving sales to your site but this is a topic for another day!

I'd love to hear your stories about your experience with online stores below. If you know of any good stores let me know and if you know really bad ones then it's time to name and shame!!

Friday Funny 26 June 2009

Filed under Friday Funny , General

Oh man, this guy takes special place in my 'Nut Job Hall Of Fame' (no pun intended). Still funny though :)

updating iPhone 2G from 2.2 to 3.0

Filed under General

Just like I did previously, I have managed to update my iPhone with the new OS 3.0 software and remain unlocked. Currently you can unlock all iPhones except the new iPhone 3GS (but this should be available in the next few weeks, click here to keep up to date on this on the Dev-Team Blog). Because I am using an old first gen iPhone model it was a really straight forward to update.

I hit up iClarified as before and followed their instructions to download the jailbreak/unlock tool - http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=4302 - install was simple and quick to do. I think the whole process took me just under 30mins from start to finish but you will need to allow for some time when downloading the files required for this.

Just make sure you sync your iPhone before you run the update so you can do a restore once you're finished and restore all your contacts and data. My iPhone 2G is now running on Meteor without any problems. Enjoy!

Ballygarvanstonecraft.ie gets closer to release and reddybrek.com gets twitter feed plug in

Filed under General , work , Online Stores

I have updated my blog with a simple feed showing the latest entries on my Twitter feed. There's also a simple 'Follow Me' link so feel free to add me to get all the latest....er....random thoughts from my head! I would like to update the design used on my site but I haven't the time lately and the current BlogEngine ones are so boring (apart from this one obviously!). If anyone knows where to get new Blog Engine designs please let me know.

I've been busy in work the last week working on the new Ballygarvan Stone Craft online store that will be launching very soon. This store builds on our tech from our previous store releases and adds in some nice new features that we're all looking forward to playing with once done.

I am putting the finishing touches to two brand new servers that we ordered for a huge project we are working on for the next few months. These servers are running Microsoft's 64bit versions of Windows Server 08 and SQL Server 08 software so I'm looking forward to getting stuck into this and messing around with all the new IIS 7 features. Currently this new project is under wraps but when it launches it is going to be plugged into one of Ireland's largest websites so we expect huge traffic from day one. Sorry for being such a tease about this but NDA's are signed so can't say much else at this point.

I have also been messing around with Linq To XML for this new project. I have found a lot of sites explaining Linq To XML but when it came to actually writing the code to create some real world XML it was difficult to find good examples so I will post up some tutorials over the next few weeks on how to read and write XML for real world projects using Linq.

So all in all it's been an exciting few weeks in work with new projects and looks like things are going to get even better in the coming weeks!

Friday Funny 12 June 2009

Filed under General , Friday Funny

Even though I'm really excited about Left 4 Dead 2 there are some people out there that are disappointed that Valve is releasing this so soon after the first game which came out in winter '08. I think the video below highlights the silliness of those fanboys perfectly ;)

How to reset the primary key value in SQL Server

Filed under General , SQL

Usually when testing a database I fill it with loads of dummy data. This helps both me and the client see what their site will look like once real data is in their system. Just before the site goes live it's always a good idea to remove the test data, especially if you have user accounts with test as the username and password!

However, if you delete the contents of a table then you will notice that the primary ID values will continue to auto increment from the last number that was in your table. So if you had 100 rows of temp data and removed them then the next entry to the system will be 101. This should not be an issue for your database or code but sometimes it's nice to reset these values too. In SQL you can do this by running the following command:

DBCC CHECKIDENT (tablename, reseed, 0)

Tablename should obviously be the name of your table that you want to reset the primary key value in. It should be pointed out that this code isn't just for resetting to zero. You could put 350 as the number in place of 0 and SQL would start the next entry in your table to 351.

As you can see setting the value of a primary key is quite an easy thing to do within SQL.

Loop through all radio buttons in your form using C#

Filed under C# , General , work

There have been times when making forms with radio buttons that I have used ASP:RadioButtonLists but recently I was working on a project that required me to have a lot of radio buttons on screen within a nicely styled grid. I could have taken the easy (but messy) way out and simply done an 'if statement' to check through each radio button but that would have been impractical because of the number of radio buttons on the page. I also didn't want to hard code any radio button names because that would have been too messy to manage going forward.

What I decided to do was setup a control box around my groups of radio buttons and then use a for loop to loop through all of the radio buttons to see what one was checked before passing to the next page. Below is the html and C# code I used to accomplish this task. It's a nice and quick way of looping through radio buttons on your form. I have just used generic naming below, obviously you should always name your controls with proper meaningful names ;)

HTML:
If you have different groupings of radio buttons then be sure to wrap your radio button groups within an ASP:Panel. This will allow you to target just those radio buttons within that group to check which items were selected.

	

		

			

			

			
item name 1
			

			Price: €10.00
			
			
			
link
		
		

			

			

			
item name 2
			

			Price: €20.00
			
			
			
link
		
	

C# CODE:

foreach (Control SelectedButton in Panel1.Controls)
{
  if (SelectedButton is RadioButton)
  {
    if (((RadioButton)SelectedButton).Checked)
    {
      string RadioButtonSelected = SelectedButton.ID;
      break;
    }
  }
}

Friday Funny 05 June 2009

Filed under Friday Funny , General

What other web company can say they have the same name as a movie featuring Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd? The Dragnet movie came out in '87 but I don't think I've ever seen it. Does anyone know if it's any good because this looks hilarious?

How to access a variable from the web.config file using C#

Filed under C# , General

The web.config file can be a handy place to put site wide settings like the website name or contact admin email address. The steps below will let you use your web.config file to store and retrieve those details. This example will show you how to set the website name in the web.config, create a class to access that name and display the name in page title.

First up we need to store the values in the web.config file itself so open up your web.config file in your project and locate the <appSettings /> tag. You want your appSettings element to look something like this:

<appSettings>
    <add key="SiteName" value="My New Site" />
 </appSettings>

So now you have the name for your site set in the web.config. But how do we actually get this information into our pages? Well the good news is that it's quite easy! I'm going to make a new class called 'sitesettings.cs' in my App_Code folder and inside in that put the following code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web;
//this will allow you to pickup the web.config values
using System.Web.Configuration;
/// 
/// Gets the website settings stored in the web.config file
/// 
public class WebsiteSettings
{
public WebsiteSettings()
{
}
//get the web site title
public static string SiteTitle
{
get
{
return WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SiteName"];
}
}
}

Once you have the code above saved as a new class you can access the values within your .aspx.cs pages with ease. For example, if you want to print out the website name as a page title you simple need to include the following line in your code behind page (this example is for an aspx page that uses a MasterPage):

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//line below will read the site name from webconfig
//and display "My New Site - home page" in your browser window title
Master.Page.Title = WebsiteSettings.SiteTitle + " - home page";
}

Obviously this is only a quick example of what you can do but it can be a handy way to store some of your site settings like the site name, url links, admin email address, etc.