We launched another great site for ITW Texwipe at http://www.texwipe.com! This site seamlessly blends the functionality of Hannon Hill’s CMS (the Products, Industries and Technical Data menus) with a full-featured ecommerce store (the Buy Texwipe menu), with shared navigation and design. This is the first project that integrated both products at the same time and, thanks to hard work by pretty much everyone on the software dev team at one point or another. 

Other interesting features of the site:

• Ability to “hide” pages from different geographical regions, based on the “region” selection of the visitor in the footer.

• Transition of transactional applications from old system to new
• Email verification required to place order

 

 

The Beacon Staff wrote nearly 200 blog posts in 2011!  So we are highlighting our Top 10 and want your help to identify the “Beacon Blog Post of the Year”.  Please check them out and leave a comment telling us which one you enjoyed most and why.  Some of these were actually written in 2010, but received enough views in 2011 to make the Top 10 List.

Top 10 Posts by Views

1. Slick Pop-up Video Player using GreyBox & Flowplayer by Thomas Brinegar

2. Google Analytics Event Tracking in a Template File by Eric Westerman

3. Google AI – Artificial Intelligence is the future of Google Search by Jeff Pickle

4. Robots.txt “Disallow” and “No Index” Meta Tag: What ‘s the difference? by Andrea Cole

5. Best PPC Call to Action Keywords by Jeff Pickle

6. Instant Messaging in the Workplace by Annette Fowler

7. XSL for Formatting pubDate from RSS feed by Tiffany May

8. TOMS Designs More Than Cool Shoes by Rick Boccard

9. 100 Call to Action Keywords for ad campaigns by Jeff Pickle

10. Facebook Developer Tools – URL Linter by Tiffany May

 

 

 

 

Please note Beacon will be closed on Dec 23, Dec 26, Dec 30 and Jan 2.

IMPORTANT DATES
12/23/11 (Fri) – Beacon Closed for Holiday
12/26/11 (Mon) – Beacon Closed for Holiday
12/30/11 (Fri) – Beacon Closed for Holiday
1/2/12 (Mon) – Beacon Closed for Holiday

*Most of the Beacon staff checks their email regularly, but if you have an emergency, please call Beacon PCS at 336-232-5699 or 888-893-0843.

Thank you and have a happy holiday from your friends at Beacon Technologies!

The Google Spirit stood among the search results, and pointed down to scroll. Scrooge moved his mouse, trembling.
The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new direction in its solemn algorithm.

“Before I draw nearer to that link to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of rankings that Will be, or are they shadows of rankings that May be, only.”

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the search results by which it stood.

Scrooge paged and paged downward, trembling as he went; and following the finger, finally found a familiar link within
the list of the neglected websites bearing his own company name, Scrooge & Marley.

“Am I that person who ignored the move to social signals.” he cried, upon his knees.

The finger pointed from the listing to him, and back again.

“No, Spirit. Oh no, no, hear me. I am not the person I was. I will not be the person I must have been but for this decision.
Why show me this, if I am past all hope.”

“Good Google Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these results you have shown me, by an altered organic marketing approach.”

“I will honor Web Marketing in my heart, and manage it all the year. I will live in the meta-tag Past, the link-building
Present, and the Social+ Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may ascend from the depths of this list.”

Happy Holidays From Your Friends at Beacon Technologies!

 

{Original Excerpt from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens}

 

Cards of Holidays Past…

We’re proud to announce the release of the Greensboro Housing Authority redesign!  As always, Beacon was right on-time with our deliverables, which is always our goal.  The client chose a soft launch date of December 1, 2011 because they wanted to show the new site to their Board of Directors at their annual meeting that day.

Their Web site was designed and constructed in-house several years ago, which meant that it was time for a completely new look.  The site also had content that was very out-of-date, so the client took it upon themselves to do a complete rewrite of the content, and restructure the site to be more intuitive.  Also, they wanted to get away from having to update the site by-hand using HTML, and wanted it in a content management system.  Finally, they wanted a new Web hosting partner.

Enter Beacon:

• We provided them with a brand-new graphical design;
• Developed it to display perfectly in multiple browsers;
• Implemented the new site into Cascade Server (content management system) to allow multiple users to update the content with an easy-to-use solution;
• Incorporated a new search feature;
• Imported approximately 60 pages of content, including 20 fact sheets about each of their properties;
• Transferred their Web site to a shared hosting package here at Beacon.

Several Beacon staff members made this project a success:

• Wendy:  Without much direction from the client, Wendy put together a design that they liked on the first try, which is phenomenal.
• Stephanie:  She was instrumental in getting the project off the ground, attending the initial meetings and providing meeting notes, the business requirements, and proposed site hierarchy.
• Zed:  He was thrown into the fire, as this was his first development project here.  He developed the front-end HTML/CSS/jQuery, and implemented the site into Cascade Server (which he picked up on very quickly), and entered most of the content.
• Tiffany:  Provided assistance and training to Zed.
• Justin:  Project Management and Cascade Server documentation & training.
• Beacon’s Technical Support Group (TSG):  And finally, no site hosting transfer is complete without the efforts of TSG, specifically Caleb and William, for setting up the hosting and troubleshooting some DNS issues over a weekend.

This is another high-quality design to add to our portfolio, and another non-profit site we can be proud of.   Thanks to everyone involved!

Before

After

Greetings from the 2011 Beacon Holiday Party.

 

Beacon Technologies, Inc. is expanding its team and seeks qualified candidates for the following positions.  Please click on the link to learn more about each specific opening.

• Account Executive / Sales Representative
• Senior IT Project Manager
• .NET Developer

 

To Apply: send resume via email to: operations@beacontec.com

ABSOLUTELY NO WALK-INS or PHONE CALLS! Otherwise, your application may be rejected.

We are very pleased to announce the NewBridge Bank redesign is complete.

Here are some highlights of this site:

• Rotating flash piece on home page
• Contact Opportunities – It was important to NewBridge that visitors be able to interact with them in many different ways. To accomplish this we implemented the following:
  • Our Banking Professionals application
  • Contact Us by Email
  • Contact Us by Phone
  • Locations
  • Connect with Us – Social Media
  • Social Media  – Icons in the footer and LHN, as well as a Social Media page showcasing the investment that NewBridge has made in that area
  • Product detail pages — Added additional product detail pages to their site so users have required information at their fingertips
  • SEO-friendly site
  • Integrated product demos into site

BEFORE

AFTER

Many thanks go out to Wendy, who provided a great design. Many thanks to Miral for developing the site and putting it into Cascade Server, Gary for handling all of the database work – specifically for developing the awesome banking professionals application, as well as the locations application, Thomas and Keana for their assistance during the content phase of the project, Nicole who provided Web Marketing feedback and analysis, and last but not least, Wayne, William and John whom all had a hand in the launch of this site – thank you for your assistance!!

We launched a new ecommerce site yesterday at http://www.tpgseminars.com. This site uses the newest version of AspDotNetStorefront . This site is slightly different in that its products are actually continuing education classes that required by the state of New York for tax preparers and accountants.

The site features the following:

• Multiple static content (topic) pages that can be updated by the client via Admin site
• Dynamic filtering on Live Conference landing page (by date, location, and topic)
• Opt-in mailing list that can be downloaded by client via Admin

Thanks to Tiffany May and John Wallwork who did the primary development on the site and to Wayne Van Zandt and Caleb Pruitt for assisting with launch yesterday.  Also, thanks to John Scaramuzzo for client support.

One of our recent enhancements to the Beacon website included integrating components of our blog into the content of the site. This is visible on the homepage under the “Blog” tab and shows the three most recent postings on our WordPress blog. Additionally, we decided to include links to recent blog links by categories or topic on the page. For example, the SEO Management page would produce blog links that fell in the SEO category. This is applied throughout the site on interior pages, which is effective for SEO as each page will be updated with every blog posting we create (given the post falls in the category of the page displayed).

The blog feed on the homepage was much easier in comparison worked like this:

XSLT Format used in Cascade:

This is a simple ASP literal that will be the populated by the blog feed.

<xsl:comment>#START-CODE<asp:Literal id=”litFeedReaderBlog” runat=”server”/>#END-CODE</xsl:comment>

VB for CodeBehind File:

VB CodeBehind File (.pdf)

This small set of code basically links to page with RSS feed, in this case, the general RSS feed for entire blog. The part shown in red needs to match the URL of the RSS feed to your particular WordPress site. The part shown in green is a relative path to the XSL file you will use to format the output. Lastly, the part in blue needs to match the ID of your ASP literal so the codebehind knows where to place the output.

Most WordPress sites use the following schema to the feed: http://sitename.com/rss

Example: http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/feed

The above linked RSS page acts as the data source for the VB CodeBehind file and uses an XSL file (shown below) to format the output to the page. Because this RSS page is updated and managed by WordPress, the output is always up to date with the blog.

XSLT used by CodeBehind File for Output:

XSLT File (.pdf)

This XSL will limit the number of posts displayed to the most recent 3 posts (First 3 listed on RSS page–Code shown in green) and will output it in a way to provide a linked title, the author and date, as well as a snipped from the article itself and ‘Read More’ link. We used JavaScript to clean up some of the output that the RSS feed delivers, such as the [...] text and cleaned up the way links were displayed in the snippet.  You can visit the blog feed page and view source to get the XML data that will be processed by the XSLT.

So, if you followed all that and put it into practice, you get something like this (after styling):

Now, to implement category control, we needed to add an additional Data Definition within Cascade on every page that would set the category. We used a simple drop-down that had an entry for every category we have on our blog. Notice below that the data-definition values need to be URL-friendly. The reason for this is that the modified blog feed with category control will integrate this category to the blog’s general RSS feed. We are going to pass this category information to the codebehind file for processing by sticking the data definition value into the ASP literal’s text attribute. All interior pages would use the same codebehind file as to avoid the need for a new configuration type that would need published with each page.  The only maintenance that goes along with the blog feed is adding new ones to the data definitions as they are created in WordPress.

The code and logic above was primarily followed for the related links, but had to be modified to fit the following specs:

• Have Cascade output a text attribute on the ASP literal containing the category to be used (grabbed from data definitions) which would be passed as a parameter to the functions used in the original VB Codebehind.
• List out 3 of the most recent blogs (just linked titles, somewhat simplified from homepage output) from the blog category set in the data definition. If NO data definition is set for the ‘blog category’, use the ‘Section’ data definition value (which shown above is required on all of our pages.) The section value is a fall-back to one of the three parent categories on the blog: Web Development, Web Marketing, and Web Hosting.  Notice we can’t just use the values of the ‘Section’ data because it does not match the URL structure on WordPress.
• If there aren’t 3 posts for the blog category that has been set in the data definition, retrieve what posts are available and then use one or two posts the parent category (depending on how many needed to make 3 posts).

At first, the solution Justin and I had come up with, was to make the VB smart enough to recognize when less than 3 posts were output and go out and grab the remaining from the parent category. The issue with this was that the parent category of any category might list already output postings by the sub-category (since they are listed in order of most recent). Therefore, we had to heavily modify the codebehind file in a way that it would ALSO recognize not to output duplicate posts from the parent category.

XSLT Format and Template Changes in Cascade:

Every page needs to get the codebehind file.  In Cascade, this is accomplished by adding the following to the template:

<!–#START-ROOT-CODE<%@ Page Language=”VB” aspcompat=”true” AutoEventWireup=”false”  CodeFile=”/rightColumnBlogFeed.aspx.vb” Inherits=”_Default” %>#END-ROOT-CODE–>

We saw that http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/feed shows a listing from all categories (10 of the most recent being shown).  We can change the URL to include one of our categories, say… Web Marketing — just by changing the URL to http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/category/web-marketing/feed.  Notice the RSS feed is then modified to fit the category and still listed (as defaulted in WordPress) by most recent posts.  The XSLT file below was used to select either the post category or section for outputting the text attribute of the ASP literal.

Modified XSLT File (.pdf)

Changes in VB Codebehind & CodeBehind’s XSLT

While I’d prefer not to share our exact source code, here are the modification necessary to the templated file above to prevent duplicate stories from being output.

• The ‘BuildFeed’ function had the first parameter changed to the ASP literal’s text value.
• The XSLT file got dutplicated, one to output 3 posts and one to grab the full page of posts generated by the RSS (10).  Both had ‘~’ characters appended after each list item.
• The BuildFeed function would fetch what posts it could from the blog category, if there are less than 3, it would record the titles of the categories found and load them into an array (This was the reason for ‘~’ character being added–Parsing values was a bit easier this way using the split function.)
• The BuildFeed function would then visit the parent categories RSS page and compare post title with those in the subcategory recorded in the array.  If they matched, it skipped the post, otherwise appended it in with list to be included.  Because we didn’t have any categories with less than 3 posts, I was able to just switch my XSL file used by the codebehind to output only 2 posts–and the VB would take care of the rest and use the 10 post page parent.  Controlling the output this way made it much easier to debug and test that the proper number of posts being output from the parent category and subcategory feeds.