Over the past few years, Mike and I have come up with a pretty good design and development process. I think the new Detailed Image site is proof of that. I mean, we built a pretty awesome e-commerce platform from scratch in less than five months while still performing most of our day to day [...]
Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
New to DI: Ask a Pro Detailer, Weekly Free Product
After spending most of January getting rid of things (Tastefully Driven, Amazon, and international shipping), it’s time to start rolling out some of the new stuff.
For the second time in less than six months, we just unveiled a major change to the Detailed Image home page. The intent is to have a little more uniformity [...]
How I Handle Customer Service on a New Feature
Graceful error handling is something that all good web developers pay attention to. There are too many weird scenarios out there for everything to work perfectly. Too many browsers, too many flavors of operating systems, and too many people that will do things that you never could have dreamed of.
When we were developing the new [...]
The Making of WoodyPaigeQuotes.com
One of our biggest initiatives moving into 2010 is to really evaluate all of our sites and all of the functions within those sites and decide what is worth the time and what isn’t moving forward. Clearly, one of the things that did not work was the Tastefully Driven forum.
Except one thread that did [...]
Simple IP Geolocation Using Javascript and the Google AJAX Search API
I recently started looking into IP geolocation/geotargeting for some projects. By “geolocation” or “geotargeting” I mean serving different content to users based upon their physical location as determined by their IP address. Now, as we all know IP addresses are far from perfect so the best you’re going to get seems to be ~80% [...]
So You Want to Learn How to Program?
When I guest lectured at James Madison a few weeks back I was asked a couple of questions from students interested in learning how to program. I get those questions in various forms all the time. I decided to write a post about how I’d recommend going from nothing to programming a [...]
One More Little Shipping Improvement
Oke had a good suggestion for our shipping estimate feature in the comments on yesterday’s shipping post:
The only thing I will add is to also place the actual day with the date the package will get to the destination. In that case, people wouldn’t have to look at the calendar to see which day it [...]
Our Exhaustive Shipping Project – What We Learned and What New Features We Added
Today we launched some really cool new shipping features on Detailed Image. They were a cumulation of about a month long shipping project that we took on. It was really the one big thing that we wanted to make sure that we got done before the holidays. Shipping options are just so important to customers [...]
Z.ips.ME Launched!
After URL shortening service tr.im closed and then re-opened this week due to the public backlash, I thought it would be a good time to release Z.ips.ME, the URL shortener for PHP & MySQL that I started working on a few months back.
We’ve been using it internally for our Twitter accounts and it’s [...]
Understanding Competitive Advantages
Compared to our e-commerce auto detailing competitors, we have a lot of competitive disadvantages: less space, less available cash, less employees, and less control over vendors and distribution. It can be frustrating and intimidating when entering a new industry. The incumbents will try to use those things to crush you (or at least make your [...]
