I know of a lot of companies, local/national/international, that swear by outsourcing full projects. "You just pass on the work and watch the money roll in" they tell me. "It's so easy I don't even have to work 9-5". Ya, right!

At Dragnet Systems we're busy working away on the next instalment of our excellent online store software for businesses. We have added some new features to the basic store package that make it a very desirable piece of software to help any business make an impact selling products online!

We're also readying a new site update for EasyHouseExchange.com which will let customers know what new properties within their chosen swap locations have been uploaded into the site.

We have a busy release schedule this week as we're launching 3 new sites. Not only that but we have some pretty huge updates to the newly released online stores we recently launched.

First up we have KerryWayCancerWalk.ie. This is a new website for the Kerry Way Cancer Research group who work closely with the Cork Cancer Research Centre to help raise funds for (not surprisingly) cancer research. This is no small charity group. The event attracts people from throughout Ireland and last year they managed to raise €119,880. What's even better is that 100% of all that money goes toward cancer research. This is a fantastic group and Dragnet is proud to have designed and sponsored the website for this event.

Next up is MunsterBentleyHire.com. This is a nice, simple brochure site designed to help get Munster Bentley Hire online as quickly as possible. This site contains just a few paragraphs and a very easy contact form to fill in for enquiries. No mess, no pointless animations, just information - fast!

Finally we are launching Westmann.ie in the next few hours. By the time you read this the site should be live. Westmann is a large business from Galway who specialize in product display installations. This site was designed to offer an easy way to show the really nice imagery of the customer's product installations. A nice feature of the site is actually behind the scenes. This client decided to go with our email marketing solution to help them control and target their email subscription lists. With close to 20 filter groups, this client can easily and quickly send the right information to the right group of customers.

In other news HouseofBeth.ie has received some small changes to its online store software to help make it more user friendly. On the basket page the customer can now update their quantity by using a drop down which will auto refresh the total price. Previous we had a textbox and required the end user to update their basket manually. The new process helps speed things up for the end user. There was also some minor text updates and new images added to the homepage.

Solgar.ie was given a brand new promotional tool. This promotions tool has some pretty neat features. The options are available include fixed price discounts, percentage based discounts or freepost promotions. Promotions have start and end dates and can be setup manually or run automatically. It's very slick but very intuitive to setup and manage for end users of the store software.

Well it took a little bit longer than any of us hoped but we finally went live with the House of Beth online today. The main cause of the slowdown was gathering the data for the shop. The site launches with over 1500 products and 29 Departments. The launch of the store marks the second store in as many months using the new Dragnet Systems Online Store Software. This software is proving quite popular for us and we have already signed up another 4 websites to use it over the next few months. This site also used Realex Payments as the payment provider. In the next few days I will post up a sample C# script on how to get that system working for anyone else looking as Realex don't provide any asp.net C# code for their 'Redirect' style of payment.

This website also features a new promotions tool for offering discounts to customers either automatically or manually. This tool is very flexible and allows the site admin to offer either a percentage based offer or a fixed amount offer that can be used multiple times or as a once off.

In other Dragnet news I'll be launching a new charity website in the next day or two called KerryWayCancerWalk.ie. I'll chat more about that as soon as the site launches.

We're working full steam ahead on houseofbeth.ie at the moment and will be hoping to go live with this later in the week. This is another store built on our Online Store platform. What's great about the site is that although it has many of the underlying features of our store as highlighted previously on my blog it looks completely different. For us this is fantastic as it highlights the flexibility of our software and sends a clear message to anyone thinking about an online store to give us a call to see how we can adapt the software for their needs. When this site launches it will have close to 1500 products that span over 15 departments. Just like Solgar.ie this site will be extremely easy to navigate through and find products for the end customer.

The screenshot used is from an early alpha build this morning. As soon as the site launches I will post again with proper links, etc.

It might been a bit slow to start but EasyHouseExchange.com is finally firing up! We have had a few calls from television stations about the site after our mention in the Sunday Times yesterday. If we can get onto even a few of these shows then the publicity it would generate has the potential to be massive. We had over 250 people register with us over the weekend alone and 75% of those people signed up to put up their properties online. Thanks for the support guys, without your properties this site would be nothing! With the recession biting at everyone's heals it makes more sense to advertise your property online and with Easy House Exchange people can easily setup their account and upload properties in a matter of minutes. No waiting, no fuss and, until June 01, no fees! It's a no brainer!

In preparation for the increased traffic I have setup Gzip on the server to compress the pages and save on bandwidth. I noticed about a 35% speed increase in page delivery on this and with our new online store software which is great. EasyHouseExchange.com is a well optimized site as it is so I am confident our server can take the hit in traffic in its stride. Over the next few weeks we will be gearing up to release some new features onto easy house exchange and we are completing our next online store for a furniture company called HouseOfBeth.ie. After this store is completed we are starting our marketing campaign to tap into the online store software market so stay tuned for some massive developments with our online software software over the next few weeks!

Dragnet Systems Limited is proud to launch its new flagship online store software. Our software has a number of benefits to businesses:

• No nonsense, simple to use interfaces for your customers and your site admin team.
• Excellent reporting tools showing you what products were sold in any timeframe you choose, view all sales for the last 30 days, view all sales for the last year, etc.
• Reminder emails automatically sent to customers. Useful technique to get your customers to return to your site.
• Promotions tools giving you the flexibility to offer your customers discounts.
• Auto image resizing for product images uploaded. you don't need to worry about resizing your images, our software will manage it all.
• SEO friendly page links. Site fully optimized for Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.
• Email Marketing. Your customers can easily sign up, and opt out of email marketing on the site. You have total control over the email's sent to your customers. Includes filters to effectively targeting the right people.
• Site optimized for speed. Sites load insanely fast and fully tested with over 100,000 products and orders in the system - it's fully robust!
• And much much more!

If you think you might be interested in taking our store software for a spin simply contact Dragnet Systems today and see how this software could help your online business succeed.

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This ends my shameless plug ;) Sorry about that, I'm just very excited about this new product!

I've been very busy the last few weeks working on a new store for Here's Health in Patrick's street, Cork. This new store has given me a great opportunity to work on some new and interesting technology that I've been itching to try out.

The site should be launching by the end of the week all going well. Here's a quick overview of some of the nice tech I managed to implement:

• Extension-less URL rewritting - the store uses SEO friendly URLs for its pages so instead of calling products?ProductID=XX we can call the page using something more meaningful like products/department-name/product-name
• PayPal XML integration - This is the last item I am working on at the moment. I'm setting up the site to use PayPal's SOAP XML integration for a 'seamless' paypal integration system. We get the benefit of letting PayPal handle the payments but we can use our own styling.
• A brand new store edit tool that gives you full control over all aspects of your store. Full control to add in new departments, new sub departments, new products, featured products, most popular products, and much much more! It's all extremely easy and visually a delight to use. We've spent countless hours tweaking usability for the store and there are many powerful options for reporting including export to excel options, powerful site search options to find products or orders, quickly see at a glance how many orders you have pending,  or how many orders you have completed. We have over 8yrs experience with online stores so I think we have a very good idea of the types of things you will need for your store ;)
• ASP.NET Charting Controls - Sticking with our site admin tool for a moment, our dashboard panel is full of cool and interesting charts - view the last 30 days of orders, the last 12 months of orders, your stores top 10 items sold on the site, etc.
• Website Optimization - I have spent as much time as possible to ensure that our system is as streamlined as possible. We use ajax.net calls properly and help cut down on the traffic sent to and from our server. A cold page call, i.e. the first time your on the site takes only 3.5 seconds to load the site. If you return to the site you should see the web page almost instantly - roughly 0.4 secs. I must setup GZIP on the server yet so that should help speed things up for end users too. We have also tested the system with 100,000 products and 100,000 orders in the database and this has almost 0% impact on pulling the data to display to the user on the front of the website.
• Website security - I have setup proper database encryption on sensitive user data and locked down database access permission. Both server side and client side validation is on all textbox entries on the site and we also ensure that all textboxes are html encoded before the data within it is used.

All in all, I'm really excited about the new store software we have built up here. We have had a number of recent enquiries from people who are looking at getting something similar setup for their own shops so we might be onto a winner with this one (hopefully). We have also laid out a full development road map of features we will be adding in to this software over the coming months. I'll be blogging about some of these features and how you can implement them into your own sites over the next few weeks so stick around!