Websites are no longer optional for businesses. If you’re in business, you have to have a website. What’s more, you have to have an up to date website– one that shows your business in its best light. Simply put: if you don’t have a website, you have to get one; if you have an old, outdated website, you have to get a new one.

Whether you respond to this news with glee or dismay, you’re bound to be wondering what the bottom line will be.

The price of a website is a particularly difficult question, because the price ranges from practically nothing to a whole lot. However, there are some predictable factors that will affect the price.

• What exactly do you need? A simple five-page website telling the world about your company will be less expensive than a site that allows you to interact with your customers. A simple design with your logo and corporate colors is going to set you back less than an elaborate design with animation and new custom illustrations. Most of the cost of a website will always be time, so you can figure that anything that takes work will cost you. At Clevertech, we specialize in identifying the problems and opportunities precisely so that we can create a solution that does exactly what you need it to with the fewest possible resources — but not less than you need.
• Who’s doing the work? A student, a friend, or an offshore expert may be able to do the work for a lower hourly rate. A more skillful designer may be able to do it faster, and thus less expensively, even at a higher hourly rate. And a firm with high overhead has to charge you more, to get the light bill and the janitor paid. At the same time, your brother-in-law or the neighbor’s kid may not have the specific skills you need to get the job done; few individuals are equally good at content, design, and development — and those few aren’t working for peanuts. Our approach is to make careful choices from a broad range of solutions, including crowdsourcing and our own team members, so that we have the exact skills to create the site you want, at the best price possible.
• How much can you help? Do you have good content that will work well for the search engines and for your human visitors? Do you have good photos on hand? As with anything that takes work, it will cost you more to have your copy written, videos made, or photos and illustrations created. Starting from scratch increases the cost of your website — but it can also increase the quality and therefore improve your results. At Clevertech, we like to build your site with an interface that lets you make your own changes and updates. This can add up to big savings over the life of your website.

These are the elements that will determine the price of your website. At Clevertech, we have a constantly-growing library of pieces we can use to build your site. We know where to go for open source and crowd-sourced elements, and how to fine-tune them to give you a custom experience. We know how to analyze the needs of your business so we can put the available resources toward the right things.

This means that we feel confident in saying that we can provide you with the best value in the long run. Not the cheapest price, necessarily — we’re not a discount outfit, and we insist on quality. But we can help you determine the best way to use the resources you have to reach your goals.

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It was an ordinary day. I was at the library with my daughter. She couldn’t find the book she was looking for, so we asked the librarian.

“All the copies are checked out,” she said with a sad smile, after checking the shelf. “Sorry.”

It wasn’t a satisfying answer.

Partly that’s because I’m a developer. Bits and bytes are easily replicated, and that’s what a book is, in essence. It just doesn’t make sense for it to be “out.”

Partly, too, it’s because I have special memories of librarians. When I was a kid, I’d go to the library and ask the librarian what to read for my age. She asked a few questions and I left with 10 books at a time. So where was the suggestion for a good alternative to the book that was out?

The solutions for books being out is an e-Reader — a Kindle or an iPad. Books can be downloaded to these devices in moments, and they’re never out.

The solution for the librarian who thinks “It’s out” is enough of an answer is to put the expert knowledge of a librarian into the software for the device.  The technology exists — companies like Amazon and Netflix use heuristics to recommend new books and movies to their patrons, and so could e-Readers. For kids, they could offer guided paths for exploring books – kind of like your own highly expert librarian.

It should keep track of how often they read, and how long, and maybe even how quickly they turn pages, since that’s an indication of how easily they’re reading. If the kids aren’t reading on a regular basis, it should entice them  with comics and graduate them to better books. If they’re avid readers, it should challenge them with more difficult book suggestions.

That’s the device all kids should have.

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Web 2.0 — the interactive side of the internet — has amazing capacity for streamlining, simplifying, and even enriching your work life. The right tools and plugins can keep you on track, build accountability into your day, reduce the time you spend on repetitive tasks, and give you the benefits of organization whether it comes naturally to you or not.

Notice I said “the right tools and plugins.” You can also spend untold hours trolling the web, trying to find the best tools for your needs, figuring out how to use them, and then coping with incompatibilities. Especially if you’re the CEO or CFO rather than the CTO, the learning curve can seem too steep and the apparent complexities can drive you back to pencil and paper.

At Clevertech, we’ve discovered that a lot of our clients have this experience. We build custom software to streamline business systems, but we also see a need for individual work systems. Sometimes that means a custom solution, but often it just requires a guide through the thorny thicket of Web 2.0.

We can be that guide. Give us a call, and set up a one-on-one meeting or register for one of our group sessions. You’ll see increased productivity, reduced stress, and enhanced capacity.

It’s a great way to start the new year.

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As the web matures,  certain common sense practices become best practices.  For example, it is common sense to realize that people have conversations around topics. Online business conversations around topics may center around a specific event or a specific transaction. Being able to compose and view messages, files and to do lists related to this topic all in one place is very powerful. In fact, we’d say it’s best practice as well as common sense, and we have been applying this best practice very successfully for our clients.

One of our clients experienced a lot of frustration with a web form of this kind, though. This client’s critical business conversation was about investments. On the website we developed, each and every investment in the portfolio  has a dashboard that allows messages, files and to-dos to be associated with the investment. We can resize graphic files and display them on the screen as well. It combines efficiency and attractiveness, keeping all the data on the topic readily visible.

Many of these graphics came from Excel, since like most financial shops this client’s is full of Excel wizards. Here was the cumbersome process to get an Excel graph into this nifty web system:

• copy the image
• paste into a program like MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop
• save the image
• upload the image

Lots of steps. Since they performed this task so often,  it became frustrating. What would be the ideal ? Copy and paste! Copy the chart in Excel and paste it into the web upload form. In the highly technical post below, we share how we conquered the security issues around sharing your local clipboard with your web browser so that a painful process became a breeze. You can also cut to the chase and go straight to the demo.

Technical Implemetation of Clipboard Copy – Web Form Paste

Years ago you could use Javascript’s object.getData() method with a data type of “Image.” You could set the object to ClipBoard, copy and paste, and browsers allowed it.

However, modern web security standards no longer allow Javascript to interact with any operating system’s clipboard. You can still override the behavior of your browser and allow clipboard access to websites, but this can leave your machine open to hacks, viruses, etc… It counts as risky behavior on the part of your machine.

What’s more, most users are not that savvy with editing browser profile policy files or advanced options. And many offices forbid overrides anyway. So that’s not really a user-friendly solution.

Where does that leave us with this request? Client-side programming still has to be the solution, but normal scripting is not a possibility. Basically, what we need to do is mimic the usual copy, paste, save and upload routine behind the scenes for the user. In my research I found two solutions:

1. Write an ActiveX control that will grab the clipboard image, create a file on the clients machine and then upload it.
2. Write a Java applet that will grab the clipboard image data, create jpeg encoded image data and send that data to a server side script for processing.

The ActiveX control required creating a file on the client’s computer. That’s a solution that could lead to more problems than it solves. Admittedly, I prefer Java anyway. So here’s how we did it…

First, we needed an applet that, when triggered, would read image data from the client’s clipboard and create a jpeg encoded image — just like most of the pictures you save on your computer.

You can download all the code for that applet at Clevertech’s Clipboard to BrowserCopy-Paste Solution.

Without having to do too much heavy lifting I was able to find open source Java code on the net that grabbed image data from the clipboard and created a jpeg encoded image. Unfortunately, they all seemed to be written for php and were sending un-encoded data streams to the server. I was writing for a ColdFusion server, and I quickly found out that ColdFusion did not like the data being sent — and promptly crashed the page. Obviously, some tweaks were needed.

In the end, I opened a connection to the server from the applet, mimicked a form-data submit with a content-type: image/jpeg and sent the image’s data base64 encoded (which ColdFusion liked). The applet then waits for a filename to be returned.

After that we needed a catch or action script on the server to process the image data and return a filename. In the code you will see “shootImage.cfm.” Basically, we get the http request data (form-data sent) and parse out the data beginning after the base64 transfer encoding tag as follows:

• Create a unique file name, since we have multiple users.
• Write the data in binary to the file.
• Finally, set a session variable with the file name created for possible future use and output the file name for the java applet to grab.

Lastly, we need a user interface page that is going to load the applet, call it on when the user hits “paste,” and display and upload the pasted image. You can see the full contents of this page in the code linked above.

There will still be security issues denying the applet access to the clipboard if the jar (the executable file) is not signed. We have included a signed jar with the code that uses Clevertech’s signature.

In the end the clients got their request and we now have a new cool little tool in our arsenal. This code has been tested and is in use by several of our clients in one form or another. Try it out yourself, if you like. If you have any issues — or don’t have the time or desire to try the do-it-yourself route — contact us, and we will help.

The key here is the Return On Investment. At Clevertech, we put ourselves in your shoes and look to maximize efficiency so that your company gets the most out of its staff resources. This tool is a great example of pushing the technology envelope to allow company staff to do more with less.

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Jason Fried from 37Signals posts about Nature being the ultimate designer.

Reading his post, I have to say that Jason sounds religious. And I agree with him completely.

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PC World reported the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics: Charles Kao for his work in fiber optics and Willard Boyle and George Smith for their invention of the CCD. In his report, David Coursey says,

In honoring these three today, perhaps we can also honor all those who make our technology-based lives possible.

Better, we can recommit ourselves to supporting basic science and research–hard thinking–that is so out-of-fashion in much of society today.

At a time when we need more answers than ever before, we should be concerned about how many people are capable of asking the questions and putting what they discover to use for the good of everyone…

Let’s honor these scientists by supporting math and science education and, perhaps, in another 40 years we’ll be honoring a new generation of American scientists for their life-changing achievements.

Coursey has a point.

Most of us accept modern technology, whether it be the lights that appear when we flip a switch or the charge-coupled device which we might not be able to  recognize when we see it, as though it were magic of some kind. We don’t understand it, or attempt to understand it.  Even those of us who apply these marvelous discoveries may not think much about the science behind it.

It’s fine to encourage partnerships between business and education, and to look, as we at Clevertech do every day, for the ways in which we can use technology to make working life easier and more profitable. But we also have to recognize the value of pure science.

“If tachyons do exist,” a scientist in one of Sidney Harris’s great cartoons announces to a colleague, “and if they do go faster than light, then I’m determined to find something that goes faster than tachyons.”

This attitude — the determination to learn and discover whether there’s any immediate application in view or not — can’t be lost without losing also a myriad of future applications of the kind of discovery this attitude brings about.

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It’s true: sometimes people resist new technologies. But even those who embrace them sometimes have problems making best use of them.

In the 1700s, guns were fairly inaccurate. It was possible for soldiers to line up across from one another, fire all together, and miss most of the people on the other side.

By the time of the American Civil War, guns had become much more accurate. On some level, people knew this. They hunted with more modern guns, after all, so they knew that they could aim and shoot pretty well. And yet quite a few field commanders lined their soldiers up across from each other and fired. They must have been astonished to see how many men were lost in this way.

Fairly quickly, the soldiers caught on and began to use the tactics of guerilla warfare — not unheard of during the American Revolution, but quickly to become the norm during the Civil War.

Without the stress of approaching death, many people fail to adjust to new technologies. You may know people who routinely print out emails, or print and file copies of electronic invoices. You may know people who call to ask whether an email has been received. You may even know people who keep track of data with multiple unintegrated programs or paper ledgers or Post-It notes for that matter, recording the same data many times, in many places, for many people.

Chances are you — or your staff — are doing some things by hand that your software will do. Chances are you’re repeating some actions when there’s no need or benefit for doing so.

And chances are, it isn’t a matter of life and death, as the failure of soldiers to grasp the changes in weaponry can be. But it may well be a matter of ROI, productivity, or job satisfaction.

Look around your office and see if there are places where your office culture is lagging behind your available technology. If you have trouble finding them, Clevertech can help. If in fact your technology lags behind your culture, we can help with that, too.

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We love technology. Just in principle. Technology offers the promise of a better life. True, sometimes it only delivers a better life in the sense of having a truly cool new gadget, but this is one version of a better life.

Here are our recommendations for TV shows for those who love technology as much as we do. Sometimes the tech stuff in these shows saves people’s lives. Sometimes they’re just enviably cool and possibly imaginary gadgets. No matter.

• Leverage is a stylish show about a bunch of thieves who get together to deliver justice to bad guys, always with sleek devices. Our favorite is Hardison, who often proclaims that it’s “The Age of the Geek, baby. We rule the world.”
• Burn Notice is an updated MacGyvor with spies, violence, and somewhat crazed women. The characters on this show, enjoying Miami in their rayon shirts, take ordinary objects and make them into lethal weapons and surprisingly effective spy gear.
• How Stuff Works on the Discovery Channel is a nonfiction contender which mixes history and technology in a heady concoction. Admit it, you want to know how iron works, and even if you already know how beer is made, you’ll admire the camera work.
• Mythbusters gives viewers a chance to share in the innocent pleasure of real, highly competent technophiles who get a chance to confirm or disconfirm urban myths.  Their glee when they blow things up (which they do at every opportunity) is contagious.
• Timewarp slows ordinary things down to the point at which they become an entirely new experience, and MIT’s Jeff Lieberman is there to interpret everything for our complete viewing pleasure.
• Numbers has mathematicians explaining basic things to one another in a way that would, in real life, be offensive.  Apart from that, it’s a smart crime show with unusual depth of character and relationships.
• The Big Bang Theory is at the other end of the spectrum, being a situation comedy based on popular stereotypes of physicists and engineers, but we have to admit that we find it funny. Don’t watch it in mixed company– shoo the liberal arts majors out before it comes on.
• Modern Marvels shows you the coolest stuff out there. From the skinny on James Bond gadgets to the newest sports gear, engineering disasters to weaponry, Modern Marvels bring you maximum detail.
• Popular Science’s Future Of is an in-depth examination of the future of security, sex, superhumans, and all kinds of other stuff with Baratunde Thurston. Mini-documentaries with interviews show all the wires and buttons and everything.

One of our IT guys responded to this topic with, “My People don’t watch TV.” He admitted that he watches these programs on his computer. We think maybe he’s too literal-minded.

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Is it time to differentiate your business from the others? In today’s economic climate, commodities will suffer.

You might not really be selling a commodity. But if your customers — or potential customers — perceive your products and services as commodities, you may suffer anyway.

Tailoring your business systems to the exact business requirements of your company allows you to gain a competitive advantage by differentiating your business from the competition.

An exclusive Manhattan caterer used a Clevertech custom software solution to provide a special experience for their customers. The system took care of all their business needs, and at the same time offered a special interactive menu that reinforced the image of the caterer as a cutting-edge firm.

When you can say, “Our service is faster and better because we have special software that allows us to automate some decision-making according to our special 12-point system,” you show your clients that you’re savvy enough to make use of technology and valuable enough to rate an exclusive custom software system.

At the same time, your custom software is designed for your business, so you can enjoy the smooth functioning of a system designed for the way you work. And when things change (for example, when your business grows as a result of that differentiation), there’s no need to change to a new software package that might be a slightly better fit. Just have Clevertech back in to tailor your business systems to your new business reality.

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These days, businesses are working on running leaner. You may be looking to automate systems and maximize productivity. There are online programs that can help. Here are a few of the ones we like:

• Microsoft Office Live integrates with MSOffice, lets all project participants share workspaces for a given project, and gives you a place to keep all your documents.
• 37 Signals has a whole suite of productivity apps, including TaDaList, Basecamp, Backpack, and several more. They’re versatile, robust, and easy to use.
• Freshbooks is an easy invoicing application. It tracks time and integrates with some accounting programs. Billing Orchard and SmartPay are others.
• Zoho is another productivity powerhouse.
• SugarCRM helps keep customer relations on track, with some sophisticated reporting options.
• Remember the Milk is a to-do list. We find that it works well with GTD. Nozbe is designed for GTD.

All these applications can be useful. If you only need one or two for your business, and then you’re satisfied with your systems, then you’ve got an economical solution.

If you’re tired of cobbling things together and having them not quite work the way you need them to, or you don’t have time to bother with things that aren’t going to work quite the way you want them to, or if you’d need half a dozen of the programs listed above in order to meet your needs, then you’re the kind of business Clevertech is designed for.

We build custom software systems for businesses serious enough to need custom systems. Call us at (516) 869-4970 today.

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