Business Report

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the February 2016 Objitec business metrics and progress report.

We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on, or even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

As a reminder the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company include…

objitec.com : This site, used for tracking metrics and other company related activities. Will provide links to all company products and activities.

online-booking-system.net : For marketing only and for now will just be one or two pages that direct traffic to planit-bookit.com.

planit-bookit.com : Main product page. Incorporates all the different business sectors in which PlanIt-BookIt is implemented or would like to be established in. Aim is to drive content to this site via well written and researched articles that are relevant to the sector in which bookings could or would be made.

There were no new articles published on PlanIt-BookIt this month as we focused more on making the site look even more professional than it already does. The new changes to the site are expected to go live in the next few days. So watch this space for more information in next months report.

The analytics traffic is still mainly trending the right way. This sites traffic has returned back to the levels we were seeing back in December. Online-booking-system.net’s traffic is down but is of little concern at the moment as most of the traffic to this site was coming from dodgy links anyway.

The core marketing site PlanIt-BookIt has seen another healthy increase in traffic. Almost doubling for a second month in a row!

The PlanIt-BookIt application is as healthy as you’d expect with 1,208 monthly sessions. We should expect this number to increase as we bring on more customers to the product.

Metrics

Continuing with the metrics that we initiated last month in order to track progress. The following table shows our latest measurements…

The small effort in social media (PlanIt-bookIt twitter account and Facebook page) at the start of the month has had a positive effect on these numbers.

Plus great that a new customer has signed up.

Development

We did quite a lot of new development effort on the admin module this month. Including adding an option to download a membership list to Excel. We also added an ability for attachments to be uploaded and sent out with any member correspondence.

There is a also a new documentation and notes section within the admin module. Administrators can upload documents that are specific to the club or business. Such as a legal document for example – these can only be viewed by administrators. Also documents that need to be shared by all members can be uploaded by the administrator and then viewed by individual members from the main PlanIt-BookIt system. So a sports club could upload a league table or competition results for all to view.

We have also added a notes section if as an administrator you just want to record some quick notes about your club or business.

We’ve added some details to the help about how the ranking system works for customers who have the ranking system enabled.

And this month we also improved the search system in members directory – If you searched for someone’s full name it wouldn’t bring back any results unless their display name matched their full name. This has now been fully resolved.

One of the biggest development efforts this month is that members can now renew their membership directly online using PayPal. PayPal charge 3.4% of the transaction fee plus 20p to the club or business owner. A reminder is displayed in the system when membership is close to renewal.

Pricing Page

After lots of experimentation and trials we decided that the pricing pages available to us via WordPress themes or plugins were just not good enough for our requirements. For that reason we decided to build our own. This was a completely new stand alone app that we built – with the apps sole purpose to enable new customers to sign-up for PlanIt-BookIt.

Our pricing page is dynamically generated from a pricing table we store in the database and it can have one through to a maximum of four pricing columns. Prices and features can be displayed in (GBP and English) or (USD and American English).

The application dynamically re-sizes itself to accommodate the number of pricing columns and features available and it also dynamically re-sizes itself depending on the screen display size of the device it has been run from. Hopefully it will result in even more customer sign-ups!

The other clever piece of this system is that it uses the users ip address to determine if they are from the UK or not. Non UK users get the American Dollars page displayed to them. Two currencies should be adequate for our needs.

If you business or organization takes bookings or offers memberships and you would like to trial our software free for two months then please visit PlanIt-BookIt to sign up. Thanks!

New Business

On Tue 21st of February we had another equestrian center sign up with us. We’re also in discussions with two other business who are interested in using our software.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the first Objitec business metrics and progress report of 2016.

We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on, or even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

As a reminder the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company include…

objitec.com : This site, used for tracking metrics and other company related activities. Will provide links to all company products and activities.

online-booking-system.net : For marketing only and for now will just be one or two pages that direct traffic to planit-bookit.com.

planit-bookit.com : Main product page. Incorporates all the different business sectors in which PlanIt-BookIt is implemented or would like to be established in. Aim is to drive content to this site via well written and researched articles that are relevant to the sector in which bookings could or would be made.

This month we wrote and published one new article on planit-bookit.com…

24 Squash Tips That Will Help You Improve Your Game Today

As you can see from the analytics traffic below. The articles are slowly beginning to increase traffic on our core sales page. PlanIt-BookIt.com which ultimately should be a good thing.

Towards the end of this month we additionally added analytics tracking code to the PlanIt-BookIt application. Which you can now see is the last entry on the chart below.

Traffic to our main site has almost doubled – so all is looking good there.

Metrics

I used to work for a large American Corporate giant that was obsessed with metrics. Using metrics to track progress is so much ingrained in to me now that I simply had to add some to this report. These may change over the months to come and I may add new ones or drop some that don’t appear to be adding much value.

This is quite a lot of metrics, so like I mentioned earlier we may not continue to use all of these. However, giving them a quick glance over now it’s cleat that we need to put some sort of social media strategy in place.

Development

We’ve been quite busy on the development front this month. We smartened up the My Account section, adding tabs and a configurable additional info section plus a section for adding notes.

We now display to the member on the front page of PlanIt-Bookit if their membership has expired or if it is close to expiring.

We also had a bug this month which took quite a while to find. Occasionally people were getting thrown out of the new ranking system. It turned out that we had forgot to close one of the database connections. All is fixed and working well again now though!

Also with the ranking system we had a number of members submitting scores for the wrong activity or simply submitting the wrong score. So we decided to stop the activity from defaulting to anything and to implement an undo option. The undo option took quite a bit of effort as it required us changing the database structure. Instead of storing the rankings of the player we changed it to just store the differences gained or lost from a new result. Doing so meant that we could simply role back a result with a simple click button request from the member…

We added an option for people to search the members directory and we added (as you may have noticed from all of the uploaded screenshots) our PlanIt-BookIt logo to the application. Clicking on the PlanIt-BookIt logo takes you directly to the PlanIt-BookIt web (sales) page.

We also added a Membership menu option where you can view your current membership including start date, end date and renewal price. A future goal will be to enable the member to renew their membership directly from this page.

This month we also started work on a new sign up and pricing page. Which so far is looking like this…

This page is going to be linked to from planit-bookit.com possibly via a pricing page first. XXXXX will be replaced with a dynamically generated display of the customers selected plan. This page automatically adds details into our login and client tables and encrypts sensitive information.

We updated our new plugin functionality too this month so it only makes one initial call to the database.

And finally this month we also started detailed tracking of all our tasks in an agile SCRUM type fashion using the tools available to us as part of our Microsoft subscription.

PayPal

At last we got PayPal successfully working with payments coming through.

New Business

On Tue 5th of January we went live with memberships at the equestrian center.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the last Objitec business metrics and progress report of 2015 and a Happy New Year for 2016.

We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

As a reminder the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company include…

objitec.com : This site, used for tracking metrics and other company related activities. Will provide links to all company products and activities.

online-booking-system.net : For marketing only and for now will just be one or two pages that link to planit-bookit.com. In the future we could write a few posts that include the ‘booking’ keyword on this site. But it’s main aim will still be to direct traffic to planit-bookit.com.

planit-bookit.com : Main product page. Incorporates all the different business sectors in which PlanIt-BookIt is implemented or would like to be established in. Aim is to drive content to this site via well written and researched articles that are relevant to the sector in which bookings could or would be made.

This month we wrote and published a number of squash based articles on planit-bookit.com. These include…

• Squash Deception: Top 12 Tricks To Deceive Your Opponent And Send Them The Wrong Way!
• Want To Start Boasting About Your Squash Boast? – Yes Then Read On

The goal of these articles is to hopefully get people who are members of squash clubs to the site who could also be potential customers to PlanIt-BookIt as a court booking system. A secondary goal is just to increase general traffic to the site which in turn should also increase brand awareness.

We’re beginning to see a healthy increase in traffic to our main sites so all is looking quite positive.

Development

This month we made a small improvement to the ranking system. We added a numeric player position and the display name. We had to add the display name in order for people to differentiate between two players with the same name. Display name is unique by client.

Steve had an idea that we might ultimately want to start thinking about selling planit-bookit in terms of various options or plugins that are available to purchase. Also we’ve had an inquiry about just using the membership piece of the product. So for these reasons we’ve added some behind the scenes code that enables different functionality of the application to be available based on what the client has set up (or at some point in the future paid for). The plugins that we have coded in so far include:

• “signin” – Which will come with all packages
• “membership” – For customers who have members
• “bookings” – For customers who take bookings
• “rankings” – For customers who take bookings and their customers play a sport in which a result can be recorded.

We also intend to have…

• “opponent” for bookings that require an opponent listed such as squash, tennis and badminton bookings. We’re just starting work on this piece now.
• “workflow” workflow will be for bookings taken for businesses such as mobile hairdressers. In this type of booking scenario a client would request a booking slot and then the hairdresser would either approve, reject or suggest an alternative slot via an email based workflow. The idea being that the hairdresser could suggest an alternative slot if the client was located quite distance away from the client of the booking immediately prior.

We also did quite a lot of behind the scenes coding on the main view bookings form of the application. This form houses most of the business rules for the application and is therefore quite complicated. In an attempt to make it a little more simple to understand we moved a lot of the business functionality into an extended class – techies will understand! Apologies if I’ve lost the rest of you!!

We have a separate admin module for PlanIt-BookIt which is very much work in progress. We added a mail out client to this system to enable administrators to send out correspondence to past and present members.

We began work on modifying the memberships section of the system so as to be able to accommodate clubs and organisations that are only interested in membership. To start with we have added some additional functionality for collecting additional info of members. We generate this form dynamically based on meta data which we store in a control table.

We also completed some more development on the PayPal integration piece this month.

New Business

The person who contacted us in terms of selling a membership piece of the system wants to get it live in an equestrian club, so all the development efforts this month will be focused on getting that piece of the system working independently from the booking system.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the Objitec business metrics and progress report for November 2015. We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

Slight change to our site list this month as we decided to drop the squash.planit-bookit web site. It would be way too complicated having a different web site for every market sector that we enter. So instead we have decided that we are going to focus the bulk of our content marketing efforts on planit-bookit.com

Given all my recently purchased (and some handed out) business cards had the squash.planit-bookit url on them we set up a permanent redirect with our hosting provider from squash.planit-bookit.com to planit-bookit.com.

PlanIt-BookIt will now contain a menu option for each market that we are in / want to be in. So for example we intend to have a sports menu with sub menus such as golf, squash, tennis, football, etc. And perhaps in the future we may also have a Beauty menu with sub menus of beauticians, hair stylists, etc, etc.

So the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company now include…

objitec.com : This site, used for tracking metrics and other company related activities. Will provide links to all company products and activities.

online-booking-system.net : For marketing only and for now will just be one or two pages that link to planit-bookit.com. In the future we could write a few posts that include the ‘booking’ keyword on this site. But it’s main aim will still be to direct traffic to planit-bookit.com.

planit-bookit.com : Main product page. Incorporates all the different business sectors in which PlanIt-BookIt is implemented or would like to be established in. Aim is to drive content to this site via well written and researched articles that are relevant to the sector in which bookings could or would be made.

Interesting Google analytic’s results this month. The planit-bookit site in which I have focused most of my efforts on has gone down in traffic. This web site has increased slightly which is what I’d expect and then online-booking-system.net has had a massive increase. I guess it’s still early days!

Watch this space in future months reports to see if I can get the planit-bookit traffic increased.

Web Site Improvements

Did some experiments with a new landing page type look and feel for the online-booking-system.net web site. Idea was to copy a multitude of other sites which appear to have a rather nice image with text and a sign up today button placed on top.

Given that we’re offering PlanIt-BookIt free for the first 2 months and that setup is a process that (at the moment) will require our assistance to complete we have decided to direct the sign up button link to a page entitled “We would love to work with you” – which includes a nice image of Toronto’s skyline, a little bit of info about what we’re offering and then a sign-up contact page.

[bctt tweet="We're offering PlanIt-BookIt for free for the first 2 months"]

We also did a similar set-up for the planit-bookit.com web site. Although with different images. For PlanIt-BookIt’s main web site we used a nice image of a computer that we found.

And then same for the sign up in terms of directing to a contact us page however this time we found an image of a pretty girl…

Pretty girls are always good for sales or at least so I’ve been told!

Social Media

We now have a twitter account… @objitec please follow us and I will try my best to follow all back. I have added a click to tweet plugin on the main PlanIt-BookIt web site. This clever little plug-in allows your readers to easily tweet your favorite quotes. Hopefully with the goal of ultimately increasing overall traffic to your site.

We also have an Objitec Facebook page and a PlanIt-BookIt Facebook page. Neither of which have been pushed out to friends and family as of yet but would be very grateful if you could like these pages for me.

Development

This month we got to a point where the player ranking system was working. However after extensive testing we were slightly unhappy with some of the results that the system churned out. Players losing 3-1 got penalized more for losing against higher ranked players than lower ranked.

We spent some more effort modifying the code and eventually got it to work just right. We also decided to keep track of a players previous rank, that way we’d be able to roll back rankings in case of any dispute between players.

We went live this month with the new ranking system and it went down well with the members of Rothwell Squash Club. Only comment we did get was that players could only submit scores the day after they had played. This wasn’t ideal as most people want to submit scores as soon as they have finished playing. So we added a fix in for that and additionally displayed whether a player had a provisional ranking or not.

The algorithm we used was a slightly modified version of the ELO ranking algorithm which I believe was originally created for chess players. This algorithm suggests that a ranking is provisional until 20 scores have been submitted. However we set it to 5 as we process the algorithm once for every game won and lost. So if a player won a match 3 – 2 then our routine trundles off to the algorithm 5 times for one match score submission.

Below is a screen shot with how the rankings look after some early use…

One slight bug was reported… The ranking systems submit score modal pop-up doesn’t work too well on an iPad running Safari. Interestingly it seems to work fine on the many other platforms and devices running Safari that we tested it on. A few Google searches reveals that modals moving and re-sizing is a common problem on iPads running Safari. We managed to fix it in the end by simply adding style=”min-height:1000px;” into the form tag of the page.

Business Bank Account

We were planning on not opening a business bank account just yet. Instead the plan was for our customers to pay directly into our PayPal account. However both Steve and myself wasted lots of time on the PayPal set up process and are still unable to get it to work correctly. What a poor sign up process for such a large business. We had issue after issue…

• Our customer was informed that they couldn’t pay without a card even though they had linked and confirmed their bank account.
• Email confirmation links failed to work.
• Uploading proof of business documents failed to name just a few of the problems.

Next step is to call PayPal support if that doesn’t work then we will look for a new payment provider.

Meanwhile we decided to bite the bullet and we opened a business account with HSBC. They didn’t have the best deal but we all had previous dealings with the bank so thought this might be an easier option for us.

New Business

This month we had an inquiry from an Astro Turf (all weather) pitch. They want a booking system for football teams who book either the full pitch or half a pitch in 1 hour sessions. The manager of the association who runs the pitch said he’d get back to me after he’d spoke at his committee meeting. Sounded quite positive though.

We also have had an inquiry from someone who would believes she can get us a number of customers just for the membership piece of PlanIt-BookIt. We said that we will offer her a commission in return for any new business in this market.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the Objitec business metrics and progress report for October 2015. We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

As a reminder the sites we manage as part of the Objitec company include…

objitec.com : Used for tracking metrics and other company related activities.

online-booking-system.net : For marketing only and will be focused on all things related to online booking.

planit-bookit.com : Main product page. Links to all the different business sectors in which PlanIt-BookIt is implemented.

squash.planit-bookit.com : For squash clubs and squash members. Includes a sign up page for squash-planit-bookit and also lots of useful articles directly geared at squash club members.

Very little in terms of traffic this month as we have focused more on further development of PlanIt-BookIt (see the development section further down in this report).

Rothwell Squash Club

Our first customer Rothwell squash club has been extremely pleased with their new booking system. We have received lots of positive comments back from both the members and the club committee. People are really pleased with how well it works on mobile devices and generally how simple it is to use in comparison with their old system.

Landing Page

After experimenting with many plugins and looking at various landing page themes we determined that it was unlikely that we were going to get a decent looking, highly functional landing page for free. So we decided to build our own in ASP.net.

Below was the best free option we could find using a WordPress plugin called Easy Pricing Tables Lite by Fatcat Apps and it’s not bad but we just thought it might be a little too basic for our needs.

Here is the one we built ourselves using ASP.net. To be honest we had a lot of help! We re-used the excellent and freely available code provided at bootsnip.

I’m hoping that you will agree that this version looks much better!

Payments

The next consideration was online payments. We’d seen a lot of landing pages directing people to pay using stripe online payments.

So we set about experimenting the use of stripe. Our test card details page looked like this…

Looks pretty good we thought and the pricing for stripe is excellent when compared with the likes of PayPal. However, using stripe would mean we would in fact have to take the card payment details from our page and we thought that that might leave us open to possible liable claims, etc. It may also mean that we would need PCI compliance. So in the end we decided that our best option, given that we don’t want to be seeing credit cards on our payment page is to use PayPal even if it is a bit more expensive!

Development

We have had a big pause in development of our ranking system. The reason being was that we didn’t like the fact that when using the ELO ranking algorithm if a lower ranked player plays a higher ranked player and loses but still gets a game from them they don’t get any reward for that. Steve had an excellent idea though and that was to apply the ELO ranking to each game that was won within a match.

All the user interface for the ranking system is now built. Just a matter of getting the algorithm to work exactly as we want it and to do some rigorous testing. So hoping to go live with the new ranking functionality in the next week or two.

We had received a comment from one of the members regarding the forward and backwards date buttons on the view bookings sheet. They weren’t displaying on tablets or smartphones. Originally we had chosen specifically to not display them on smartphones as we thought it would look too cluttered on these devices. We did however want them to be displayed on tablets and after viewing a competitor product on someones smartphone which had forward and next date buttons I decided I also wanted them on PlanIt-BookIt for smartphones. In order to correctly display on the various different display formats out there, we make use of an excellent framework called Bootstrap. After quite a lot of tinkering with the rows and 12 column format that this framework adopts we successfully managed to enable the buttons for all devices. The picture shows the resulting changes, with the date buttons displayed and correctly working on my Android Galaxy S6 smartphone.

By Martin Gilliard

So I can track progress I have decided to implement a monthly metrics report. I am making these reports public so that others can learn, comment or even advise me on how to improve. I welcome all your comments at the end of this post.

Google Analytics And Google Search Console

One of the most important first jobs when considering metrics is to implement Google Analytics. To do this I installed the super simple google analytics plugin on each of the sites I plan on tracking and then added each as a property to our analytics account in the admin section.

Also Important is to add all the sites (properties as Google calls them) to the Google Search Console. This is relatively straight forward once you have all your sites added to Analytics as verifying ownership is just a simple matter of clicking a verify with analyticis button. I also like to add XML sitemaps into Google Search Console to do this I use the functionality available in the Yoast SEO plug in. Note: Remember to add yoast prior to publishing any pages or posts otherwise they don’t get included in your sitemap.

Sites With Analytics Tracking Added And Their Purpose

objitec.com : This web site – used for tracking metrics and other company related activities.

online-booking-system.net : A site for marketing only that will be focused on all things related to online booking.

planit-bookit.com : Our main product page. Links to all the different business sectors in which PlanIt-BookIt is implemented.

squash.planit-bookit.com : For squash clubs and squash members. Includes a sign up page for squash-planit-bookit and also lots of useful articles directly geared at squash club members.

And they’re all relatively new sites at the moment so not expecting too much in terms of traffic just yet…

First Customer

Our first product squash.planit-bookit is fully live with our first customer Rothwell Squash Club. So far the feedback from the members has been highly complimentary so need to plan on putting a testimonials page together soon. We had a few teething problems on launch day (Sunday 23rd August) as the reset password page had not been published to the cloud, however that was quickly solved. We also had a few small issues in the first 2 weeks in terms of members not completing their bookings. We have since made the booking process easier to use.

PlanIt-BookIt Logo

We needed a nice affordable logo for our PlanIt-BookIt product. My two business partners and myself have non-existent graphic design skills. So we made use of fiverr.com for our design. The resulting logo is displayed on the left. Which we’re very pleased with given our $5 outlay!

Business Cards

I personally play a lot of team squash so we decided it would be wise to print a set of business cards which I could hand out to the players I meet at all the away games. I used VistaPrint for this purpose and the resulting business care is on the left. I erased my cell phone number from view to the world!!

Landing Page

Quite a bit of effort was placed on getting some basic form of landing page together so that new customers can sign up to squash.planit-bookit. The page however is very basic so we might need to invest in a designer or a landing page theme. The focused effort in October will be to drive traffic to the landing page through content marketing. A quick brainstorm with myself for possible content ideas has resulted in the following potential titles…

1. Can’t drop, won’t drop – help me please!
2. How to create and run a mini league / box league or a squash ladder. (Free ladder with planit-bookit, giveaway a free excel template)
3. Want to start boasting about your boast? – yes then read on.
4. Top 5 tricks to deceive your opponent and send them the wrong way. (Add a funny one – wear a skirt?)
5. A free complete guide on how to run a squash handicap competition.
6. Want to play team squash but a little nervous about starting then read on.
7. Playing while completely legless! (story about 1 legged squash player)
8. Squash players like to boast about their length! (importance of long game with occasional attacking boast)
9. Squash players like to do it against the wall! (importance of keeping the ball tight to the wall)
10. Want more junior squash players in your club? How to introduce a junior program.
11. How do I play against a hard hitter?
12. How do I play against a front of court wizard?
13. What to keep in your squash bag.
14. I’m a squash beginner – give me the basics please!
15. He’s fat, old and unfit. Why is he beating me?
16. Squash games that three of you can play on one court.
17. My opponents not turned up – what routines can I practice on my own.
18. All the squash gear and no idea!
19. He’s a pensioner and his serve is almost unplayable. How to serve like a top pensioner
20. Let, Stroke – what’s all that about?
21. How to improve your squash.
22. X Squash tips that will help you improve your game today!
23. My racket skills are pretty good. What I need help with is some tactics…
24. I’m addicted to squash – do i need intervention?
25. Ouch! my Achilles Heal is killing me, what can I do about it?
26. Always getting injured? Here’s some stretches and pre game warm up sessions that might help.
27. The squash backhand as hard as a diamond!
28. Like to swing? How exactly to play a forehand.
29. Post match analysis over a pint in the bar!
30. How cold is your court!
31. How much do I hate playing that one individual
32. The best squash sites and blogs on the web
33. The best squash books available on Amazon

Development

This months development efforts have been focused predominantly on getting the administration portion of planit-bookit up and running. Additionally we have however done the bulk of the coding for a squash ranking module which will be a core piece of functionality for squash clubs. Enabling club members to be able to submit their scores and achieve a ranking score against other members in the club. The code behind our view bookings page is quite complicated, so we have also put some effort towards simplifying that code this month.