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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Browser & Usability Testing…Without Going Insane
One of the most challenging aspects of web development is browser testing. There are literally infinite combinations of devices, browsers, operating systems, and settings (font-sizes, cookies, javascript), especially when you’re doing a responsive design like we did with LockerPulse last year and more recently with Detailed Image last month. Here’s the process we’ve adapted. It doesn’t cover every situation, but I think it does a good job of covering the most important situations without taking a ton of time and effort. In a sense it’s an ideal balance between thoroughness, time, and money. Step 0: Write Good Code, Test as … Continue reading
Part-Time Jobs Within The Job
When you run a small business there are all sorts of job functions that you become responsible for simply because there’s no one else to do the job. Usually these things only take up a few hours here and there, but they have moments where the time commitment spikes and they become like a second job, a part-time job within the job. Such has been the case with managing our insurance for the past six months or so. I’ve become the de facto point of contact for all of our insurances – health insurance, property insurance, business insurance, life insurance, … Continue reading
A Randomly Selected, Potentially Awesome Post From 11/14/2010
New LockerPulse Features – Search Engine, AJAX Crawling, and Custom Wallpaper
Over the past two weeks we released a couple of important features for LockerPulse. As I touched upon when I returned from my trip, we’ve got a few interesting opportunities in the works so I’m spending as much time as I can building out the software. The first thing we tackled was a custom wallpaper feature. Users can now upload a background image of their choice, or choose from our various background images. This is one of those things that doesn’t appear to be that important, but when you’re using the site multiple times per day it adds a nice … Continue reading
The Data That Drove Our Responsive Design
In my last post breaking down the new Detailed Image, I wrote the following about our responsive design: If you haven’t figured it out by now, this was the main driving force behind this project. Mobile and tablet usage on our site has skyrocketed, with Safari on iOS becoming our #1 browser/OS combo. It’s a trend that’s only going to continue. We needed to up our game. This will be the topic of my next post where I’ll dive into some of the data. We cut the project down significantly so that we could release ASAP because every day we … Continue reading
Breaking Down The New Detailed Image
Over on The Detailed Image Blog I wrote a post outlining the features of the new DetailedImage.com. I copied that post below, and then added in some additional thoughts about each feature in italics. — Yesterday we were extremely excited to unveil our new DetailedImage.com website. Our goal is to provide you with the simplest, fastest, and most secure shopping experience in the industry. Let’s take a look at what’s new: The Design We’ve kept the important functionality where it’s familiar – navigation on the left, search box up top, My Account and Cart information in the header – while … Continue reading
The New Detailed Image is Here!
This morning we launched our new Detailed Image site. The largest improvement is the responsive design: take a look on your computer, tablet, and phone. We’re still working out a few minor kinks. The homepage just has a placeholder Ship & Save graphic that will be replaced with a nice big sale in the coming days! More to come soon…
Almost There…
We’re almost ready to launch the new Detailed Image site. The planned launch day is Saturday, April 20th. We’re putting the finishing touches on everything and then later this week we’ll start testing pretty heavily. It’s nice having an entire team of people to test. Last year prior to launching the revamped LockerPulse we found quite a few little bugs by having our employees use it for a while. An e-commerce site is a little tougher to dogfood than a sports news app. But given the amounts of money exchanging hands on any given transaction, it’s also much more important … Continue reading
The Little Things That Win Customers
Somewhat surprisingly, today we shipped out a record number of orders as a part of our Spring Sale, beating even Cyber Monday 2012. I took a shot of the package pile towards the end of the day: As our FedEx pickup arrived we were literally sprinting around the warehouse trying to pack the last few orders. The interesting thing is that we didn’t have to do that. On our busiest day ever, we had already packed up every order that came in after 12:15 PM, which is our “guaranteed” same-day shipment cutoff time. We had run our afternoon batch around … Continue reading
A Post About Not Posting
My posts have come to a screeching halt lately. I don’t think I’ve ever gone a month without a post since I started blogging back in 2005 so I didn’t want to start now! Mike and I have been pushing really hard to release the aforementioned new version of Detailed Image. As a company we’re probably devoting close to 40% of our time right now working on new site related tasks. Things are busy for me personally right now as well, so I’m pretty much ripping through my day-to-day work tasks as fast as possible and then spending every remaining … Continue reading
Our Caching System, Guide Improvements, and the Exciting Next Step
Continuing the theme from Adding To The Foundation [Of Our Cart] and A Better Search Experience on Detailed Image, I recently wrapped up a few more important features. Caching One big opportunity for improvement on any database driven website is caching. Let’s take the example of our sitemap. When someone used to land on that page, it would run a database query to extract the product name and URL of every product on our site. If it’s hypothetically accessed 100x/day, that would have been 100 queries. They’re not particularly taxing queries, but there are hundreds of similar scenarios happening simultaneously … Continue reading
Why We Still Pay For Health Insurance In Full For Every Employee
Last month I had a dentist appointment. The dental hygienist – who I’ve known for my entire life – was asking me how business was and we eventually got on the topic of health care costs. I mentioned that our plan was being canceled and we had to pick a new plan for 2013. After quite a bit of research we were able to find a pretty good new plan. Of course, it’s still significantly more expensive than the old plan and has significantly worse coverage. Since we set up our health insurance in early 2007, costs per employee have … Continue reading