Giving Thanks To All of Our Clients For a Great Year
This holiday season we wanted to look back at our client list and send a thank you to all of the the companies we did work for over the past year. It has been a great year and we look forward to continuing to work with you long into the future.
THANK YOU!
Fusion Developers
Cybatrol, Inc. - view site
ServiceFirst Solutions - view site
FDIS Denver - view site
Wag Hotels - view site
Atlas Advertising - view site
Beabout Company - view site
Grand Peaks Companies - view site
Banner Property Mngt. - view site
The Cable Center - view site
My Wedding Workbook - view site
National Gift - view site
Robinson & Henry PC - view site
PGM Integrated - view site
Master Build Architects - view site
PRO Hardware - view site
Otten Johnson Robinson Neff + Ragonetti - view site
Refresh Energy Group - view site
Xylem Interactive - view site
Sexton & Co. - view site
fusiondevs asked: What can FD do in the Restaurant industry? We have locations accross the country and need assistance setting up our mapping services.
We have a great deal of experience with Google maps integration as well as location database tools. We would be happy to discuss your planned updates with you.
Pagination is such a common feature across the web these days. Anytime you visit a site with much content at all you will encounter it. If you are unfamiliar with pagination a good example site that uses pagination is digg.com. When you visit digg.com, scroll down to the bottom of the page and…
Get Integrated.
There are all kinds of services out there for integrating your content/services with the cloud. If you have a need for managing data, communicating with your customers, and gaining new leads - consider moving into the cloud. One way to define cloud computing is simply the use of existing public systems to manage the data you need to manage. “Cloud computing users avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) [in exchange for operating expenditure] on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use.” (wikipedia). The flexibility and pay-for-play style of intgration services can really get your campaign or IT solution off the ground quickly with very little risk.
Fusion Developers can help you build a custom solution and allow you to leverage free and SLC (super low-cost) cloud services that may be just what your strategy requires. As part of our service, we can pull together all of the most innovative technologies and help you to navigate all of the technical jargon to get you the right solution at the right price! Below is a quick list of some of the integration tools available:
Email Newsletter Integration
- Constant Contact
- Exact Target
- Mail Chimp
- Vertical Response
Shopping / Product sales integration
- Shopping.com
- Google Base / Froogle
- Amazon
- Ebay/Ebay Stores
- Yahoo Stores / Yahoo shopping
Cloud Storage Solutions
- Amazon A3
- Yahoo YQL
Mapping & GIS
- FusionMaps API
- Google Maps (v2, v3)
- Bing Maps API
- SimpleGEO
Electronic Commerce
- PayFlow / PayPal
- Authorize.Net
- Paymentech
- FirstData Gateway
Social
- Tumblr
- Plaxo
To learn more or to get some help click over to our integration page
Why is User Experience Design Important?
A programmers guide to web site planning: PART I
When I start a project I always start with a programming road map. The same approach should be taken on the design and planning steps too. This planning process is generally called user experience (UX) design. The practice of UX is growing quickly as a premium agency service and often differentiates successful projects from those that fail.
To illustrate the need for user experience study and design I will use an illustration and a comparison using a great programming framework called Fusebox. Fusebox was created a decade ago and was inspired by the java struts framework for Java development. Fusebox uses a home electrical panel metaphor as a way define sections (circuits) and pages (fuses) in an online web site or application. It was developed to help programmers organize their thoughts and structure their programming in a top-down approach. As a programmer, I really thrive when I can think in these terms.
To further the metaphor of a web site or application as an electrical system, a closed loop circuit can be viewed as a round-trip process for your web site user. When a guest enters the room in your home they will interact with lights, electronics and the heating blanket (if they live in my part of the world.) When planning for your guest you will want to make sure that each item the room is placed appropriately. The switch for the lights must be just the right height and location so that they will not fumble around and trip over the bed. The clock radio should be placed on a small table next to the bed for ease of reach.
User experience design is the process of defining all of the necessary tools your web site guests need to be comfortable with your brand, and your product. And, as a programmer I will be WAY more effective if I know exactly what you need your application to say and do for your guests!
If you want to learn more about user experience design and our services contact Fusion Developers today.
Continue to Part II of this series:
Is anyone going to actually use your web site?
Why I NEVER use computed values in a database
Whenever designing a database, it is critical to keep a few things in mind. How you start your database design can make, or break, the performance, consistency, and reliability of your system. One of the more often made mistakes is that of designing computed fields into your database. Computed fields are those that are stored values that depend on the values in other tables or columns of the same table. How can that be so bad?
Unlike a spreadsheet, database field values cannot be based on a function such as =SUM(A1+B1). The static values in a table are separate and have no direct relationship. If a computed field has a dependency designed into it, there will be a field that it is dependent on. If one of the fields change and the other does not there will be an error in the system. If there is a way to prevent this type of error, than why do programmers continue to use computed values?
There are great opportunities to use computed values in many systems. The easiest examples are in an order total or a grade point average, for example. These are the types of fields that are easy to store in a single value for later reference.
There are good reasons to store these values for historic purposes, but what about the dependent values? The values that make up these numbers. I argue that these values are the fields needed. If we store both we immediately engineer fragility into the system. The only real value is the grade received, or the final product price and quantities, not the GPA or the order total. Those aren’t the real values.
I will write more about this in future articles.
by Bill King
