Seth's Blog

Driving Traffic to Your Site

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:42:00 -0400

Driving Traffic to Your Site

If you build it, they will come doesnt always apply to the Web world. So now that your site has been built and its been sitting around in cyberspace for awhile, how do you get people not only to find you but to keep returning?

Making sure that people have and are reminded of your URL frequently is one way to make sure that they are aware or dont forget that you have a Web presence. Just as you include your business name, phone number and/or address on most things that come out of your office dont forget to include your URL as well. Heres a quick checklist of places not to forget to include your URL:

Email signatures of all employees
Invoices
Letterhead
Return address on printed envelopes
Business cards
Advertisements that you run
Any other print or promotional material that contains your company name and contact information (catalogs, flyers, postcards, etc)
Mention it in your phone systems hold message or on your voice mail. Remind people that they can order, find FAQs, and/or email on your site.
Make sure your sales people and customer service reps are always pushing people to the site. Remind customers that they can see examples of your work on the site or point them directly to other information posted that would be useful to them.
Does your email address contain your URL? Instead of having a generic email address (ie joe.smoe@hotmail.com) invest in one that contains your URL (ie joe.schmoe@fulgen.com).

Other suggestions to keep customers and potential customers returning to your site:

Make sure all publicity sources (ie newspaper articles) have and include your URL in the article
Keep the content on your site fresh and new so there is always a reason for people to return. Some ways to do this would be to feature special events that you are holding or are a part of, keep a list of awards received, post press releases that you have sent to the media and any articles written about your company, write your own articles or blogs on your site that gives people information about your service, products, or industry, and run sales or specials on your products or services (these can even be Web only sales).
Incorporate features on your site that change on a regular basis. For example, make the content on your homepage or a section of your homepage into an area that you can feature seasonal products or ideas, run sales or specials on products or services, or feature new or upcoming products. Be sure to change it on a consistent basis whether it is daily, weekly or monthly.
Make sure that your site is listed or advertised on related websites with a link (ie associations, chamber of commerce, etc)
Create a section of your site that brings existing customers coming back. Maybe a customer section that is password protected where they can find information pertinent just to them. This might include files that you would normally exchange over email or an area for them to pay their bills. For instance, when you log onto the sites to pay your electric bill, phone bill, credit card bills, etc visiting their site in order to log in allows them to feature new products and services on their homepage or site that you might find interesting as an existing customer.
Be sure to look for areas on the site where you can cross promote your other products and services to remind people of what you have. Upon check out in their order confirmation email, perhaps give them a coupon for a discount on a future purchase made within a certain timeframe. Sites like Amazon are great at cross promotion and provide great inspiration for ideas of your own. They do a great job of letting you know that "if you like this product, you may also like this".
Dont forget to gather names and email addresses both on your site, at tradeshows, over the phone, etc so that they can be added to your mailing list so that you can later send them direct mail or email to encourage them to visit your site and purchase again.
Ask your customers often if they have visited the site, what they thought about it, and how they used it and then make adjustments to the site accordingly.

If youd like suggestions on how your specific site could benefit from some additional marketing please email me at jen@fulgen.com.

Rebuild the Flash V2 Components?!

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:42:00 -0400

Eep! 20 days... no entries!

Disclaimer: This is a really flash specific entry.

I've been working with the flash components for about 3 years now (and I've been working on this blog for 3 weeks now ;) both with the v1 components, then later the v2 components.

After beating my head against walls night after night trying to get these things to work for me, I think I can tentatively say I've got a grasp on them. But, it's been a long uphill battle. After all the confusion and hair tearing, I gotta say it, I love these friggin' things. We've been building applications in flash that interface with .NET or Cold Fusion web services and in this scenario, for this they simply kick ass. Despite my acquired affection, however, it started to become more apparent that for me to use these with complete confidence, I've got to fix the things that trip me up time and again.

I set off in a pursuit to recompile them with my own custom "fixes" that would help me love them better. I read articles on their structure and looked through the classes, but it seemed like anything I did to them didn't fix some of the basic problems I was having. They are very well integrated into each other, and I simply couldn't tell what to cut out. I've grown to use the "throw out everything and start brand new" method of programming sparingly these days. You can burn many more hours redoing something and rethinking decisions that were previously made and still end up with only moderate improvements if you aren't completely sure what you're building or understand why the existing codebase is in the state it's in. So I figured this might be the perfect opportunity to get my hands dirty developing components. So I decided to rewrite the whole codebase.

The problems I hope to fix are:

"Adding a list box makes my movie 65k?! What the @&&$$?!"?? ?

BIG AS HELL. My basic belief is that if people are going to be using flash in applications, it should be as light and small as possible. Flash is built to be lightweight! Unfortunately in it's early days it developed this reputation for "Loading 30KB/10MB for the Intro" and I think it's a reputation we need to forcibly overcome. It's always bothered me that simple vectors, code, and text take so long just to load. It is really disheartening to us filesize misers to add a combo box to a movie and have it jump up to 65k or add a simple button and have it jump up to 25k without even adding one sweet alpha graphic.

"LOOOOOADDDD DAMN YOU!"

Loooooooooongg load times. I can watch a component draw itself. I can understand this happening with components that have several thousand pieces of information in their dataProviders, but not on the load of the actual component itself.

"Hmmm, I wonder if it's done compiling ... nope, not yet."

When I use that import statement on the component class, the compile times become so long that my easily distractable mind is already working on something else by the time my movie compiles.

"I like the listbox, but the look needs to change ..."

Skinning. It would seem to me that skinning should be as simple as saying "here's a theme in my library or an swf in an accessible folder that I want to use for my button but retain all of the methods and properties of my button. Currently to skin, you have to open up an fla file copy the correct skin, change it, and put it on the first frame of your project so that you import it, then you... it's just not easy. It should be easier than it is.

For the LOVE OF MARY... can I just remove that component?!

Ignoring the MovieClip Object. The movie clip object is a great object! It does everything! It seems like the components are trying to reinvent the movieclip object in favor of component object, which can be a bit confusing for everyone who's familiar with the beautiful movieClip. Why can't I remove the component with removeMovieClip?

I'm sure that the developers who made these components faced every single one of these problems and have continued to face them on a regular basis based on the comments that I've read in newsgroups about them. I really love these components. I love them because of all of the data goodness that they give me access to. However, I think the process can be refined and tightened up a bit to alleviate my stress and give me a few more years back to the end of my life.

It seems like every developer I've talked to who is using these components has their own fix for them (they came out 3 years ago fer chrissake), but nobody has posted a real, live, actual, solid, realistic replacement for them. Those that are public usually have a price tag associated with them, and have their own set of incompetencies to learn and deal with. So, feeling totally frustrated, I set out to create a set of UI components that would be:

Easy to Skin ... I mean REALLY easy. Every part of the component should be easily changed and not just with code, but with your mouse too. I'm really into tactile touch. I want to put a label where I want to put it and see that I'm putting it there.
Lightweight. small small small. These codechunks should be so small that html navigation graphics load slower than they do.
Usable as a MovieClip. I love that movieclip!
V2 Architecture. I really dig with the listener broadcaster event model. Plus I'm already using v2 components in my current clips, so if I build new components, I want to very easily be able to switch them in without having to rewrite code for existing method calls. So all the methods and properties have to mirror the V2 components.
FREE. I really like the *concept* of open source. I don't like the idea of having to pay for something that already comes free with flash. If you purchase a compiled component that has a bug in it, or should work in a slightly different way than it's meant to, and you don't have the source code then you have to rely on the company for the fix (which I've had to do). Release your components! Make 'em FREE!

Definitely pretty lofty goals, I must admit. The problem with components is the same that you have with most software, they work great until they don't. The smallest thing can stop you from using your nifty little V2 Replacements. Scenario:

A: I have my button that I've just created as a component that I'm extremely proud of! I want to use it in an application that I'm building that is using existing V2 components, however, when my component is on the stage with the other components, it breaks both of them, and they both just sit there as empty boxes when compiled.

B: I have my button that I've just created as a component that I'm extremely proud of! I want to use it in an application that I'm building that is using existing V2 components, however, it won't focus like the other components focus.

The moment you run into either of these scenarios, you can either a) not use your component, or b)rebuild all of the V2 components that you're using before you can use a single one of them. If you find yourself in that scenario, you've just dropped into the world of building crapware. Custom components should work with everything in flash, including V2 components. I've run into all kinds of stupid problems like these with previous components that I've built or bought.

I've been working on it all for the past couple months between projects, and with the help of some very good component resources ( person13.com, actionscript.org, and www.ultrashock.com), I've built the keystones of our new component set that will be available for public download, source code and all.

They aren't posted yet because they haven't been fully tested so I'll post a code example for you to check out and see where we're headed. Click the button in this flash movie:

Ok, so why is this even remotely cool? It doesn't actually DO anything! Well, actually it does. It does quite a bit with only a small amount of code:


var displayedTheme = "ThemeMM";

myButton.click = function(){
	
	if(displayedTheme == "ThemeMM"){
		
		myButton.template = "ThemeXPButton";
		myCheckBox.template = "ThemeXPCheckBox";
		myRadioButton1.template = "ThemeXPRadioButton";
		myRadioButton2.template = "ThemeXPRadioButton";
		myRadioButton3.template = "ThemeXPRadioButton";
		MC_Back.attachMovie("MC_XPBack","MC_Back", 1);
		
		displayedTheme = "ThemeXP";
		
	}else{
		myButton.template = "ThemeMMButton";
		myCheckBox.template = "ThemeMMCheckBox";
		myRadioButton1.template = "ThemeMMRadioButton";
		myRadioButton2.template = "ThemeMMRadioButton";
		myRadioButton3.template = "ThemeMMRadioButton";
		MC_Back.attachMovie("MC_MMBack","MC_Back", 1);
		
		displayedTheme = "ThemeMM";
	}
	
}

myButton.addEventListener("click", myButtonLO);

What are you looking at? First things first, the filesize for this movie is 12.8K. This means, that I've added three components to my flash document AND added an XP skin for each of the components and I'm still at 12.8 K. If you add the V2 button, checkbox, and radiobutton to a typical flash movie, you're looking at a movie of 30K. If you add skins, then you'll add at least 5K more. so we've basically cut our file size down to almost a third of it's size. If we keep doing this with all the components, we're looking at drastically dropping the filesize of your flash movies that use components without losing functionality or changing your code at all.

Runtime Skinning? Yep, they do that. You can skin a component at runtime with nothing more than this code:

myComponent.template = "somemovieinmylibrary"

OR this code:

myComponent.template = "someswfmovieinafolder.swf" So what's a template? It's a 14 frame Movieclip that you can slap on the component codebase. The fourteen frames represent the possible states of a button component. They are:

up
over
down
selectedUp
selectedOver
selectedDown
focusUp
focusOver
focusDown
focusSelectedUp
focusSelectedOver
focusSelectedDown
disabledUp
disabledSelected

Here is the XP button Skin:

That's a pretty neat trick, but why would I want runtime skinning? Well, runtime skinning allows for you to better adjust the appearence of your apps without losing any of the methods that are associated with the component. Say if you are creating a calendar application, and you would like to signify a date as being different from the other dates, but you would like it to *behave* the same way as the other dates, skinning that particular date with a custom skin in your library would be easy to do. just build the date skin with it's states, apply it to the calendar, and you're done.

What if you would like to create an application that detects whether a person is on OSX or XP and show the components in the specific style of the operating system? Wouldn't it be nice to have a folder of skins on your site that you could simply open up and change the look without having to worry about the functionality or touching your main flash file? Ahh that would be soooo nice...

Or, how about the fact that skinning is suddenly really easy to do :) ?

This style of skinning works very well for button type components, but how would you skin a list box, or a combo box or ... the DATAGRID?

Eeverything that you interact with is simply either, a) a button, or b) a collection of buttons. A list box consists of the following buttons:

ListItem
scrollBar component - which consists of increaseArrow, decreaseArrow, barBackground, thumbScroll (wich consists of top, bottom, back)

See where I'm going with this? The simplebutton is really the psuedo base class of everything you interact with.

This is not a novel concept and I didn't make this up. The methodology is already there in flash, I'm just reinterpretting it to make it easier to skin components without having to get bound up in the drawing API, and using flash the way I'm used to using flash: build a movieclip, give it functionality. Anyway, this is all I'm going to post for right now. I'll keep posting updates, and hopefully soon, I'll have a releasable component set for you to test out on your own.

Welcome!

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 11:08:00 -0400

When a client came to me the other day and said "We want a redesign but we checked out your client list and a number of your links were broken..." I checked it out and realized that since 70% of the client list had changed, it was probably a good time to post the new redesign that we have been working on for the past month. Flaws and all.

We're pretty darn excited to get our latest work up here for your perusal. We've been pretty busy over the past ... er... ahem... three years since the last redesign, but you'd never know it because we simply haven't updated our site. What is that they say about the plumber's pipes? Well, Fulgen's plumbing has needed an overhaul for a long time, and it's finally here.

So here it is: Fulgen.com version CSMXXPXT4.0! We hope you like it!

Just a couple things to note about the new site:

The addition of blogs is a pretty ambitious move for us. On a regular basis we're whipping through code, vectors, and photoshop files in a flurry only to collapse at the end of the day (if it ends) with cold beer in hand and a blank stare. So the idea of "I'll also keep a blog" is somewhat daunting. However, we have developed a number of really cool things over the past couple years that definitely warrant sharing with the development community and blog readers as well, so it's something that we decided was necessary to do.

In the next couple weeks I'll post some new flash components and classes free for you to use at your discretion. More on that later.

The photography that you see all over the site is pulled from the official Fulgen photo bank (our vacation photos) and shot by expensive high-end professional photographers with only the best equipment (us with our ditital cameras). We're open to any aspiring photographers should you want to send us photos of your own that you'd like to see on the site. We'll give you credit for them!

I think that should do it for right now. I'll post early next week with sone delicious downloads for you to check out.