We work with:

CRM Applications

• SugarCRM
• Salesforce
• vTiger CRM
• BrowserCRM

CMS – Content Management Systems

• Joomla
• Drupal
• WordPress
• Code Ignitor
• Custom CMS Applications

Ecommerce Systems and Shopping Carts

• CS Cart
• Zen Cart
• Magento Ecommerce
• OSCommerce
• Virtuemart
• Ubercart
• Yahoo Stores
• X-Cart
• BigCommerce
• and more!

In addition, we also provide day-to-day web application support services for mission critical systems. We currently maintain dozens of ecommerce systems on a daily basis – providing critical support to our customers (and, in turn, their customers as well) by providing high availability to our staff of designers, integrators and front-end coders as well as server administrators, security experts and programmers.

We have offerings that nearly every budget – from ad-hic “on-demand” services at an hourly rate, to monthly retainers that allow us to offer very cost effective rates for programming & design assistance.

Our Seattle SugarCRM Developers design & develop in person or via remote – the following types of Sugar CRM projects:

• Installing Sugar CRM to a server environment for deployment
• Securing Sugar CRM and protecting customer data
• Integrating forms, web to lead or other SugarCRM website integration
• Importing data into Sugar

Sugar CRM & Salesforce help an organization coordinate and track their sales cycles for prospects, leads, marketing, sales, deployment, support and management. CRM users (e.g. management) can monitor and manage campaigns and inbound leads (opportunities) across multiple marketing channels and direct qualified opportunities to the correct  salesperson or team to handle them. All the while they are able to track the effectiveness; monitor their sales pipeline, provide business process automation (BPA) and mine intelligence from their various sources of data. With CRM you waste less time with “unknowns” in your sales and marketing process.

CRM is also used for customer support, allowing your support teams to access historical customer information quickly and efficiently.

CRM is valuable for executive, who can use advanced reporting and forecasting tools to view their enterprise the way an executive should – the complete picture and not a series of small reports.

For more information – contact us today.

The look and feel of Plyboo Bamboo Flooring is fantastic. Unlike cheaply made box store alternatives with suspect origins for their supposed “earth friendly” manufacturing processes – Plyboo works to have their products certified and demonstrated to truly be clean and green.

Plyboo is the cleanest and greenest bamboo flooring & plywood on the market. Until now,. you had to go through special dealers or architects to access this product line. Have you even been to an Aveda salon? Much of the woodwork in a standard Aveda salon is made with Plyboo’s line of Bamboo Flooring & Bamboo Plywood.

Our catalog system we created represents a multi-faceted wholesale, retail and installer pricing system with a large system for delivering resources, custom CS-Cart shipping modules, a CS-Cart Estes freight module and add-on.

The project consisted of: Custom CS-Cart programming, payment integration and advanced SEO header, TITLE or product-specific information.

We also made use of custom couponing and discounts, an AJAX-based rotator and did some creative for the advertisements. After launching their site we also created some Google shopping feeds and got the entire site re-indexed. All typical SEO work that many SEO specialists just seem to not be able to follow through with.. mainly because they’ve never touched a line of code in their life.

A Content Item is not strictly a Web page. Content Items can be single-use, existing only on a single page, or they can be global, existing in a certain place on every page in your site. They can exist only in a certain category of pages or only when a user requests them. Instead of managing your Web site by dividing it into separate pages, Mambo divides what you create into Content Items and then creates pages based on how you want those Content Items organized.

As you create content for your site, you’ll spend a great deal of time at the Content Items Manager screen. This is where you create, organize, edit and publish your content items and pages.

The Content Items Manager is not just a list of the pages in your system. You can make things happen to multiple pages at once, like assigning them all searchable tags. You can set the pages to “publish”—that is, make them visible to the users. You can assign pages a section or category, so you have a map of the types of content your site contains. These and more are all crucial features, but the first and most important is the creation and editing of content itself.

Creating a Content Item

In the top right of your Content Items Manager screen, there is a row of gray icons which control editing functions. Click “New” and it will colorize to show that it is active.

You will see an editing screen with title and category attributes as well as two large text-entry fields. The first is “Intro Text” and the second is “Main Text”. “Intro Text” is the first visible part of the Content Item and it is mandatory. It is something of a misnomer, because many Mambo Content Items consist only of Intro Text, with nothing in the main body. The term Intro Text refers to the fact that this part of the content is the first that the user sees. Many Content Items are small enough that it doesn’t seem necessary to separate them into these subcategories, and many larger Content Items are simply inserted entirely into the Intro Text field, leaving the optional Main Text blank.

Using the WYSIWYG editor

In Mambo, you can edit all of your Web pages using the same interface. Templates, Static Content Items, the Home Page, and every other Web page document is primarily written in the same file format.

The TinyMCE Editor is your Web page editor and creator inside Mambo. It is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which, instead of showing you the HTML code, shows you how your item will look to your visitors as you change it using TinyMCE’s graphical tools. (Within TinyMCE, you can always directly edit the HTML code if you feel it is necessary.)

Hovering your mouse pointer over TinyMCE’s banks of icons will display a short explanation of each icon’s function. You might find the style similar to Microsoft Word and other typesetting programs.

If TinyMCE produces a page that looks different in your browser than it does inside TinyMCE, it can sometimes help to save the item, start another, blank item, and, using the first item as a reference, manually recreate it. TinyMCE is a lightweight, limited Web-based editor, and after extensive editing of the same page, it can get “glitchy”. If you encounter consistent problems, then your content needs the attention of a Mambo administrator.

Content Item Tabs

Just to the right of your TinyMCE editor window, there is a set of tabs which allow you to control the page’s attributes. You can add static images, background and word-wrapped, as well as other, more advanced publishing parameters. Some of these have to do with what the user sees and some of them are for your site’s internal organization. None of the information in the tabs must be manually specified.

Controlling Content Item Hierarchy and Visibility

Content Items aren’t “live” until you “Publish” them. You can create and edit Content Items within Mambo without showing them to your Web site’s users until you click their Publish icon in the Content Items Manager. But choosing which Content Items to Publish is not as simple as clicking the ones you want. Your pages exist in a hierarchy, and what you do to documents at the top affects everything below them.

Most of the documents at the top part of your Content Hierarchy came with your Web site and your Mambo installation. Such things as Templates and your navigation system do not need editing, and they are all “Published” by default. But you can create your own level of hierarchy, by making Content Items depend on other Content Items. Because of this type of organization, it is important to remember that if you want to Publish a Content Item, you must make sure that all items that the Content Item depends on are Published as well.

…continued ….

Your new Web site is powered by a piece of software called a Content Management System (CMS). What would be a group of technically demanding, tedious tasks is automated in a CMS, allowing Web site administrators to handle a greater workload. Within the interface of a CMS, you can easily change the look and functionality of your site, as well as change its content and its database of users. Your Web site uses a CMS called Mambo.

This document will help you familiarize yourself with basic Mambo capabilities and tasks. There is a great deal of other documentation on the subject, ranging from interactive Flash tutorials to hefty books. This document is designed to communicate the essentials, quickly and simply. It does not cover advanced operations or Mambo installation/configuration. You will find it the most useful when using Mambo to manage your Web site.

Definitions

CMS: Content Management System. This general term refers to a piece or suite of software dedicated to “managing content”, specifically on the World Wide Web. These systems are versatile and extensible and have a much easier learning curve than manual Web site maintenance. Mambo is one of the most popular.

Database: Generally refers to a mass of content stored in a retrieval system. The database software that Mambo uses is MySQL. MySQL organizes and stores the content of your website, and Mambo talks to MySQL when you talk to Mambo.

Frontend: This refers to the Web site your visitors and users will see, your “storefront”.

Backend: This refers to the Mambo interface that you and other maintainers of your Web site will see.

Element: This is an umbrella term for an addition to Mambo. Elements can be Components, Modules or Templates.

Component: A major element of your Web site’s frontend or backend functionality. Frontend Components can include such things as online stores, discussion forums, or media galleries. Backend Components include the default WYSIWYG HTML editor and the database administrator tools.

Module: A minor element of your Web site’s frontend or backend functionality. Modules can include such things as calendars or context-sensitive help.

Template: A type of page your site includes. Mambo templates can be used to generate new, finished pages with great speed and efficiency. Types of pages might include search pages, user profiles, or submission forms.

Administrative Backend

By default, the URL for your Web site’s administrative backend is http://yoursite.tld/administrator. This should present you with a login page into which you should enter the administrative username and password with which we have provided you.

Once you have logged in, you will see the Admin Interface. There will be a number of menus at the top of the page body. Most of the options in these menus are self-explanatory, and many are outside the scope of this document. Most advanced options can be found in the menus.

Basic administrative areas can be accessed through the group of icons in the central panel. Site-wide preferences can be accessed via “Global Configuration”.

Setting a name
From the Admin Control panel, click “Global Configuration”. The tab highlighted should be “Site” and “Site Name” should appear as an option. Change any of these as you wish. Your changes will not take effect until you click “Save” or “Apply” in the gray icons in the top right corner of your browser window. They both apply your changes permanently, but “Save” also takes you back to the Control Panel after saving.

..continued…

The Mac OS has the ability to mount DOS and Windows CD-ROM’s on the Finder’s Desktop. This is made possible by the Foreign File Access and ISSO 9660 File Access extension files in the System folder. Turning these extensions off in the Extensions Manager control panel disables the Mac’s ability to read PC CD-ROM’s.

Reading Windows CD-ROM doesn’t necessarily mean you can open the files on the disc, play PC games, or use Windows software. The ability to use mount Windows CD-ROM’s is useful only if your Mac applications can read the particular Windows files in question or you can convert the files to Mac format with MacLinkPlus, QuickTime, or other translation software.

That being said, if you experience problems simply browse directly to the files you want to work with and bypass any autorun or non-executable file in the Mac environment or even any HTML-based navigation that is provided as an extra means of navigation.

For opening the Flash Files, open up the correct resource/data fork in your Macintosh copy of Flash. Pick the wrong one and it just errors on you … look for .fla.. it is a dead giveaway.

Granted, our owner just moved back there after living in Seattle for 12+ years and commutes his way to downtown Everett – however – we do love working for our Skagit-based businesses and clients.

Several of our staff grew up in Burlington .. so it is still near and dear to our heart.

Recently we’ve worked for:

Janicki Industries - New Website, CMS, Custom Database Development and Integration – complete SEO campaign.

McCann & McCann, Lawyers – New Website, SEO Optimization work.

Morrow Construction, Inc,New Website, new Blog, SEO Optimization work.

We are currently working on 4 new projects ranging from a large, well-known Commercial Builder to a small professional practice that wants their site to show up on searches better and to stand out from their competition.

Another Everett Web Development project was for Woodmonsters, Inc – a CS-Cart deployment that had a custom reseller & affiliate program developed as a special CS-Cart add-on. We also integrated CS-Cart with a freight module from Roadway, Inc / YRC and modified the template displays to be able to sell flooring on a per square foot basis – yet have it add the correct number of boxes based on back-office data into the shopping cart.

This allowed our clients to add an unlimited number of independent resellers of their product line and have all checkout and fulfillment flow through their shopping cart from start to finish.

If you want to talk to us about your next project – just contact us here.