Objitec Business Metrics & Progress Report July 2017
A warm welcome to the July 2017 business update, which is also very late thanks to a hectic summer! 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.
Here is the Google Analytics report for July.
Nothing major to report with regards this months analytics.
Metrics
The following table shows our latest measurements.
| METRIC | June 2017 |
July 2017 |
COMMENT |
|---|---|---|---|
| CloudApp Traffic | 82 | 90 | No complaints from customers |
| Objitec Traffic | 14 | 14 | No effort, no keyword focused content |
| One Pager Traffic | – | – | Wasn’t been tracked at this point |
| PlanItAdmin Traffic | 23 | 289 | First full month of data |
| PlanIt-BookIt Traffic | 236 | 262 | No effort |
| PlanIt-BookIt App Traffic | 3349 | 3685 | Ponte in full swing |
| Sign-up Page Traffic | 9 | 11 | Relatively stable |
| @planitbookit Tweets | 84 | 84 | No effort |
| @planitbookit Following | 72 | 72 | No effort |
| @planitbookit Followers | 71 | 71 | No effort |
| @objitec Tweets | 66 | 67 | This monthly report gets tweeted |
| @objitec Following | 24 | 24 | No effort |
| @objitec Followers | 26 | 26 | No effort |
| Comments across all sites | 0 | 0 | Need to add some quality articles |
| Customers | 10 | 10 | No change, but do have a new trial |
| PlanIt-BookIt Facebook Likes | 5 | 5 | Mainly a placeholder for now |
| Objitec Facebook Likes | 2 | 2 | Mainly a placeholder for now |
Double Bookings
Starting last month we were having a few instances where we were seeing double bookings and in some very rare cases treble bookings, but only for our new customer Pontefract Squash & Leisure.
This was kind of worrying as we had never experienced this kind of issue before with any of our other customers. At first we thought that it might be just bad luck from the large number of people trying to book the same peak court at exactly the same time. So we spent weeks double checking every line of code and adding extra checks to the code. None of this worked, double bookings were still appearing.
It wasn’t until I started working on the new code for fitness class bookings that we realised exactly what was wrong. As part of the development process I was displaying the capacity and availability of each class directly to the screen. Strangely, each time I booked someone new on to a class the availability wasn’t decreasing. This led us to look at a section of code that we hadn’t looked at before and that we didn’t think was relevant in terms of double bookings.
It turned out that I had initially set up one piece of Pontefract incorrectly. Withing the booking system we have an attribute called scale. Scale can be used for example if you had a really large person who required to book two seats on an aeroplane – that persons scale could be set to two which would mean he would take up two resources. Conversely it could also apply to a baby who is sat on a parents knee. The baby would take up no resource so their scale would be set to zero.
I had accidentally set the scale for all Pontefract users as zero. The only reason the system worked at all was due to some additional controls that we had built into the user interface.
Anyway I was glad to find it, and as soon as we changed the scale back to one we never saw another double booking again! Phew!!
O’Donoghue
This month we had a small issue with a member named O’Donoghue. One bit of our code we’d forgot to trap the single quote. As a result O’Donoghue wasn’t displaying in member search correctly. Single quotes if not trapped can cause all kinds of problems for programmers as they are used to specify the start or end of a string of characters. It was an easy fix, which we put live immediately.
Also not trapping single quotes can leave your site open to a certain type of hack called a sql injection. So it’s quite important to ensure that they are handled correctly.
Facebook News Feed
On the home page of PlanIt-BookIt we display a news feed that links directly to our customers Facebook page. Customers find this useful so that they can communicate important information to their customer base.
Occasionally Facebook update the feed to a newer version. The latest one stopped our links from working correctly. So this month we put a fix in to update the code so as to work with the latest version of the Facebook news feed.
Automatic Court Lighting
One of our future projects is to enable the automatic switching of court lights from the booking system. The idea being is that if the court is booked and paid for then at the appropriate time we will use software to trigger a relay which automatically switches the lights on.
The big hurdle with this however is that we weren’t exactly sure what switching mechanism to use. So I set about emailing court lighting companies. Only a couple responded to my request. One response I received from LED IDEAS though was excellent. They provided me with details of exactly what we need to purchase and they even sent us a link to a site where we could purchase them directly.
