-
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.
-
If that sounds like something you're into, you can subscribe to blog updates via RSS or email, or follow me on Twitter. You can get in touch by leaving a comment or through email at
Category Archives: User Experience
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 that you’d have to be crazy not to be regularly reviewing and improving how you ship. The Study Like most online retailers, we didn’t have a good understanding of how accurate our shipping quoting system was. We use the FedEx API, but there are scenarios … Continue reading
Simple Solutions to Simple Problems
If you’re a Windows user, do you ever use Notepad? If so, how often? My guess is that you use it and that you use it frequently. At least I know that my partners and I do. Why though? We all have Google Docs access. We all have Open Office Writer installed on our computer. The answer lies in it’s simplicity. It opens super fast, doesn’t auto format any of my text, and saves tiny .txt files. I use it for quick to-do lists, to write SQL statements, and to type blog posts. There are countless examples of this in … Continue reading
Why Don’t All News Sites Have This?
The other day I noticed that SportsIllustrated.com has an awesome feature on all of their stories: a bulleted list of “story highlights” in the upper-right hand corner of the page. SI.com is owned by CNN, so CNN also has the same “story highlights”. I’m actually surprised that more news sites don’t have this feature. I normally scan 95% of the articles I click on just to pick up the key points that they have so neatly summarized for me up on top. For most stories, that’s all I want. Brilliant!
Why The Release of IE8 Matters (to us at least)
Yesterday Microsoft finally released the latest version of the Internet Explorer browser, IE8, which can now be downloaded from Microsoft’s official site. Hopefully within a few weeks it will get pushed to people via Windows updates and the majority of people using IE7 right now will be upgraded to IE8. Why do I say hopefully? Because for us there is one little feature that will drastically increase the quality of the new Detailed Image – CSS table support. Let me explain. Way back when I started doing web design, people used tables to lay out pages. They worked great … Continue reading
Integrating Customer Reviews into our Cart
Several months back I built an email follow-up system for Detailed Image that sends an email to our customers two weeks after their purchase. In addition to checking in with them to see if they received their products in a timely manner, it also asks them to write a product review for each product they ordered. The email provides direct links to the product review pages for the specific products. However, the reviews were intentionally buried a bit on the site. We wanted to have a substantial amount before making them part of the buying process, as so many successful … Continue reading