Objitec Business Metrics & Progress Report November 2016
Welcome to another double month addition of our business update. This time I missed last months update due to the shear volume of coding work we have on at the moment. As usual we make these reports public in case you would like to comment or have any advice you’d like to share with us. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.
Google Analytics And Google Search Console
The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company. Although that said we don’t really bother with the online-booking-system.net web site anymore.
As I missed a month, here are the Google Analytics reports for both October and November…
Below is the data for October showing a slight increase in the traffic to this site and increases to the PlanIt-BookIt web site and application usage.
And the following report is the one for November…
This site is getting little traffic – which I guess is kind of expected given that currently we only publish this report on it. The PlanIt-BookIt site has had another increase and so has the usage of PlanIt-BookIt.
Metrics
The following table shows our latest measurements.
| METRIC | SEP 2016 |
NOV 2016 |
COMMENT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Objitec Traffic | 12 | 8 | Not great! |
| PlanIt-BookIt Traffic | 121 | 232 | Great! |
| @planitbookit Tweets | 30 | 30 | No effort this period. |
| @planitbookit Following | 129 | 56 | Dropped people who didn’t follow back |
| @planitbookit Followers | 37 | 50 | Decent increase. |
| @objitec Tweets | 42 | 45 | Little effort this period |
| @objitec Following | 33 | 37 | Slight increase |
| @objitec Followers | 30 | 35 | Slight increase |
| Comments across all sites | 0 | 0 | Need to add some quality articles |
| Customers | 7 | 7 | Little change however have got some enquiries that we’re pursuing. |
| PlanIt-BookIt Facebook Likes | 5 | 5 | Not promoted this FB page yet. |
| Objitec Facebook Likes | 2 | 2 | Not promoted this FB page yet – although did slightly update the banner of the page. |
SalesTalk Is Re-Branded!
During one of our strategy discussions we decided to re-brand our SalesTalk product. So far the product has two distinct areas of functionality. Firstly a call diary and secondly a costing module. The call diary is loosely related to sales and the costing module has no relation to sales. In the future we plan to add further functionality to the product that also has little to do with Sales.
So instead we’ve decided to use quite a generic name of cloudapp but to postfix it with our Objitec company brand. So… all of our apps except for PlanIt-BookIt will be accessed going forward via http://cloudapp.objitec.com. Specific customer functionality will be triggered based on what they have opted in to and this will be determined at the point of sign on.
While the link works immediately we still need to remove the product name and logo from the product itself. It’s on the to do list!
CloudApp Development – Costing Module
A number of changes to our costing module were requested by our kitchen manufacturer customer this period including…
– Changing the wording used for items and templates to components and units. We’ve made this change of terminology so as to be configurable by client.
– One of the big issues we had with the costing module was the costing of edging. Edging is the thin strip of material that (you’ve guessed it) goes around the edge of the chipboard. It’s generally only used on edges that would be visible. So for example a side panel of a kitchen unit may only have edging on the front edge whereas the top panel of a stand-alone unit may have edging on the front and each side.
We initially designed the system so that edging would just have to be manually added to a job, which was not an ideal solution. Edging is dependent on the width and depth dimensions of chipboard. So in order to design a costing system that could be used in other industries and not make something that was only specific to the kitchen industry we decided to introduce the concept of a linked component.
The image of the screen where you can add linked components is below. This shows a top panel with 3 strips of edging that are dependent on the base component and additionally the side edging is a different type of edging than the edging at the front of the panel.
PlanIt-BookIt Development
And in terms of changes to PlanIt-BookIt…
– We had a customer contact us who was having issues in terms of taking membership renewal payments via PayPal. After checking the log of the payment notification that was sent from PayPal back to our site we noticed that they had their email in PayPal with a capital first letter and not in our system – so we were rejecting it as an incorrect payment. We’ve now sorted out the casing going forward and so shouldn’t experience this issue again.
– Our new member sign up process had got some old school validation messages as can be seen in the image below…
So we updated it to a more modern footer validation message block…
– We also added a link on the front page of PlanIt-BookIt for new member sign-up. We’d had some feedback from our customers requesting for this to be more obvious to prospective members. Not the greatest of image grabs below, but it’s good enough for you to get the idea!
– We also enabled customers to optionally have terms of membership which have to be read and accepted before sign up…
– The bulk of the development has been completed for enabling events within PlanIt-BookIt. The event can be viewed and signed up for online both by members and non-members and can be paid for via PayPal.
Other
We installed office 365 so that we can now access our emails, etc. even from customer computers. Wasn’t the easiest of things to set up!
New Business
We’ve had one sign up of our two month trial of PlanIt-BookIt memberships this period and we have also had an enquiry about us writing a booking system specifically for the executive car hire market. And then additionally we have had a request from a charity who run a children’s adventure playground for a system that can record kids in and out of the park. So looks like we’re going to continue to be busy, which has to be a good thing!
