E-Commerce

Scott Coughlin, a 24-season veteran of Alaska's salmon, herring and halibut fisheries, came to Freelock for help getting his site done. We picked up the pieces of the development project, yet again, and implemented the design, functionality, and enhancements in record time. As part of this site, Ubercart was used for purchasing memberships to the site. A clean crisp design highlights the user profiles for job seekers in the fishing industry.

Scott is now rolling on his next project with Freelock. Check back for details!

Littlestar Prints is one of our favorite sites. It combines some powerful drag-and-drop photo editing in the browser with e-commerce. We got to use both of our favorite software packages--Drupal and the Dojo Toolkit.

With Littlestar Prints, customers can upload photos from their desktop, zoom, resize, crop, and do some color changes before embedding them into beautiful professionally-designed cards.

Just the other day I got a request for proposal for hosting, complete with a statement that they knew of some hosting that would cost $15/month. The implication being that they were looking for a hosting proposal that would not exceed that amount.

Right off the bat, there's a problem here. Just the cost of paying the salary of an employee to assemble a proposal would likely exceed half a year of the total revenue at this rate! Expecting somebody to spend the time to bid on such a service at that rate is... well, ludicrous. We would lose money to even bid on the job.

Freelock computing is, in my experience, unique in that they have assembled a comprehensive, well-rounded team of technical specialists yet they function on a high level together as a team. The Freelock team is adept at speaking in human, non-technical terms  when discussing projects with laypeople.

Throughout the development process we inevitably came to many decision points in terms of which direction we would continue, and Freelock was always instrumental in counseling us through the merits and liabilities of the choices in front of us.

Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups. It's a decent analysis of current payment services that offer a hosted recurring billing solution, if you don't have a merchant account or want to handle your own e-commerce. If you're writing a software-as-a-service platform from the ground up, and would like to outsource the payment side of things, these are good options.

Another large scale project by Freelock Computing, the Organic Materials Research Institute tested our abilities to work with a variety of sources and the Drupal system. The project brought their old public facing website built on PHP to the Drupal CMS and is still synced nightly with their internal master database built on Access.

Chris Wilson over at Slate claims that the new Whitehouse.gov move to the Drupal content management system is the "triumph of hope over experience," basically slamming Drupal as not up to the task for a variety of, well, silly, ignorant reasons. He points to a migration of Recovery.org to Sharepoint as evidence.

We've built custom shopping carts, as well as implemented several different open source shopping carts, including Zen Cart, OS Commerce, VirtueMart with Joomla, and Ubercart in Drupal. We've also built SOAP servers to allow manufacturers to take orders from distributors. We've built payment gateways for several of these systems, and imported products and images from other content management systems and existing online stores.

A web site is an essential marketing tool of a business. These days, especially in the Seattle area, people will check out your web site before doing business with you. The work you do with a graphic designer like Peter Mckinnon can have a big impact when someone decides whether you're the right fit for what they're looking to buy.

Just having a web site, however, does nothing to get customers beating down your doors. People need to find your web site somehow, amidst the millions of other web sites out there. For small, local businesses, they don't find your web site online--they find it from your business card, a sign on your car, word-of-mouth, or all the rest of the traditional ways people market their business.