Web Essentials 05 - Less Than A Month To Go

Well, there's less than a month to go before Web Essetials 05 kicks off in Sydney. Last year's event was fantastic - I learned quite a lot - and I could have listened to Dave Shea and Doug Bowman all day.

Looks like a great program ready for this year too. I'm really looking forward to hearing Kelly Goto's part on Workflow. Always looking for better ways to get things done. Might even have to get a book signed while I'm there ;)

While there's a billion online tutorials on CSS, HTML and the like, I have found very little useful info on project management. I always had the goal (and still do) of putting something useful on here. Perhaps after this event I'll be more inspired to write.

(I've got to spend all day Saturday sitting at Sydney Airport waiting for my flight home - not much else to do during that time!)

I Finally Made My Own. Sort Of.

After however long it's been since I upgraded from Wordpress 1.2 to 1.5, I have finally created my own theme!

Well, sort of. There's still lots of the standard theme here, but I reckon I've done enough for now. I'll finish it off next month. Or year. Or something.

Or more likely ditch the whole thing and start from scratch!

Hanging on to user preferences and data

Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox makes a few interesting points discussing The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying.
Important issues from a developmental point of view:

• Set longer expiry dates on cookies used to track visitors


• Hang on to preferences, shopping basket contents, wish-lists etc


• Don't delete landing pages designed for specific campaigns

The number of people who don't buy on that initial visit, but still convert later is really surprising. It might be a good idea to give people who choose not to purchase other options - bookmark this page, sign up for a mailing list, or some other way to help them remember to come back to you.

Keeping an Eye on Your Milestones

The milestones feature was a nice introduction to NetOffice - but it was missing an easy way to get an overview of your upcoming milestones, and which ones you've missed!

I've added a hack for the NetOffice home page that lists your upcoming milestones underneath your projects and above your tasks. It lists them in date order (I'm too lazy to make it sortable).

Once a milestone has been reached and completed, edit the task and untick the 'Milestone' option. Then mark the task as complete. (Or you could just delete it I suppose - it's not really much use any more in this environment anyway.)

You can see I have a few milstones here to chase up and mark off...

To install, make a backup of your /general/home.php page and unzip this one in it's place.

You'll also need to open your /languages/lang_en.php file and add the following to the bottom of the list:
$strings['my_milestones'] = 'My Upcoming Milestones';

Download ZIP file, 6719 bytes.

Enjoy!

Upcoming tasks with weekly times

Another minor adjustment to NetOffice 2.6 reporting.

This one replaces the standard report (where you select project/user/stats/dates etc).

• The "Published" column is replaced with "Estmated Hours"


• Each time a new week starts, the estimated hours for that week are totalled and displayed.

The Resource Usage custom report is quite good for reviewing hous spent, but this one is to prevent you from allocating someone 356 hours worth of tasks in a week! (I'm not quite that bad, but I have a habit of just piling work up on people!)

Anyway, just unzip this and drop it on top of your old reports/resultsreport.php file.

Download ZIP file, 3941 bytes.

As usual, make sure you back up your old file first so you can go back to it if you like.

Enjoy!

Reinstalling Outlook 2003 - Missing Email Addresses

Had to reformat my computer over the weekend and reinstall everything, as does happen from time to time. This morning, went to send an email and Outlook didn't recognise the name I entered in the "To" field, much less complete the email address.

I checked my Contacts folder - everyone was in there. What's the go???

After a bit of exploring I found the solution. (For Outlook 2003, anyway.)

1. Click Go and then Folder List


2. Right-click your Contacts folder, then left-click Properties


3. Select the tab "Outlook Address Book"


4. Add a tick to "Show this folder as an email address book"


5. Click "Okay"

It's an easy fix once you figure out where they hid it!

Our Latest Project: an Email Newsletter Manager

We have had a number of clients asking us about sending email newsletters of late. We checked out a number of alternatives, but they were all either too expensive, too complicated, or both.

So we decided to write our own solution!

Currently being beta-tested, I'd like to introduce Email Marketing.

We've aimed to keep this a simple as possible while providing some useful reporting features as well. If you're interested in hearing more when we release to the public, let me know!