By Martin Gilliard

Hello and a warm welcome to our first business metrics and progress report of 2018.

We make these reports public so that you can share and learn from our success and failures. Please feel free to comment or provide us advice in the comments section at the end of the post.

Traffic

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

I’ve decided to change the traffic reports slightly once again. From now on I’m going to show the traffic year on year. Comparing traffic to the same period in the prior year will be more meaningful as similar fluctuations due to holidays, etc. will apply.

CloudApp

Relatively constant use from a couple of customers.

Objitec.com

This is the traffic for this site and it’s not great, however it has at least started trending a little higher than this time last year

Online-Booking-System.Net

This is the traffic for our one pager marketing site. It’s showing a healthy gain in traffic.

PlanIt-Admin

Apart from holiday periods the traffic is relatively constant.

PlanIt-BookIt.Com

This is our main marketing site for PlanIt-BookIt and it looks like it’s had its highest number of visitors ever last month. So all good!

PlanIt-BookIt

Our core booking system product PlanIt-BookIt has had a healthy increase of traffic. Another record last month with traffic topping the 5000 visitor mark!

Sign-Up

Nothing much going on here so this needs some attention over the coming months.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

Executive Car Rental

This month we have built the bulk of a new executive car booking and management system.

The system enables customers to book cars, drivers to log their current availability and company owners to accept or decline jobs, allocate drivers to jobs and view driver availability.

We have one customer already signed up to this product. We hope to start marketing this system to other executive car companies in the coming months.

EV Survey

The owner of the electrical vehicle survey business has gone a little quiet on us, so we’ve halted any further development on this product for now. We did get it to a stage where you can create a full working survey and it has functionality to display questions that are dependent on what answer was given to the previous question.

We may restart development of this again at a later date as it might be a useful product to add to our portfolio.

CloudApp

We had a call from one of our first ever customers. They use our CloudApp product to manage their customers and orders. The system calculates when it expects a customer to make a repeat order. This enables them to be pro-active and call the customer when repeat orders are expected.

Unfortunately they are behind on the calls that they need to make and therefore the order diary / reminder page had grown to quite some size and was therefore taking quite a while to load. We resolved the problem by implementing numbered paging for them. So now the page loads quickly and they can flick between one page of overdue customers to another.

Spring Manufacturer

We’ve verbally agreed to do work for a small flat spring manufacturing business. As a result we’ve started work on a new web site and a new system for customer, quotes, job tracking, over stock and order deliveries. For now we are calling the product job tracker.

Spent some time on going through different designs for their new static web site.

PlanIt-BookIt

One of the squash clubs that use PlanIt-BookIt is a members only club which has no reception. When a member joins the club they receive a key fob that gives them access to the club. PlanIt-BookIt enables non members to pay and play. Some people were trying to use this facility and then finding that they could not gain access to the club to play their game. We changed the code to make guest bookings optional by client. For clients who opt out of guests paying and playing a message is displayed instead with instructions on how to become a member.

New Business

We’ve had an enquiry from someone who is looking for some software related to the gambling / sports industry. Plan to meet with him to find out more sometime in February.

By Martin Gilliard

First off, and a little late I know but I’d like to wish you all a happy new year!

We make these reports public so that you can share and learn from our success and failures. Please feel free to comment or provide us advice in the comments section at the end of the post.

Traffic

The following link is a reminder of the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company.

I’m changing the way we show traffic going forward. I have decided to use the graphs displayed within Google analytics and to show the last 6 months compared to the 6 months prior.

CloudApp

We only have a couple of customers using CloudApp at the moment so the traffic remains relatively constant at around the 80 per month region, with an expected holiday period decline in December.

Objitec.com

This is the traffic for this site and it’s not great. Monthly traffic varies from a low of around 10 per month to a high of approximately 50.

Online-Booking-System.Net

This is the traffic for our one pager marketing site. As you can see, it’s only been used properly for the last 6 months and it’s showing a slow but steady increase in traffic.

PlanIt-Admin

We’ve only been monitoring traffic on the admin system for PlanItBookIt over the last 6 months. And traffic tends to remain in the 200-300 per month region.

PlanIt-BookIt.Com

Our main marketing site for PlanIt-BookIt has had a small increase in traffic over the last 6 months. Peaking at around 600 per month in November. Still more work is required!

PlanIt-BookIt

Our core booking system product PlanIt-BookIt has had a healthy increase of traffic over the last 6 months with traffic now peaking at close to the 4000 users per month mark.

Sign-Up

Traffic to our sign up page is still way too low, peaking at around 10 per month and providing us with next to no conversions at the moment.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

Computer Problems!

December started with a bang, almost literally. My computers hard drive died on me. Nothing was lost as we remote desktop to secure servers to do all of our important development work.

I purchased a new solid state drive to put in my works laptop. It was a relatively simple install process. Bit timely restoring apps back on to my laptop though.

EV Survey

Spent a lot of December working on a project for a potential new customer. The project is an Electrical Vehicle pre-charge point fitting survey. Which sounds a mouthful but it is simply an app that asks questions prior to an electrical engineer going to fit an electrical vehicle charging point.

It asks questions to determine if the person requiring the fitting is eligible for various grants and it also helps to determine how difficult the installation will be by asking for the location of the fuse box and other pertinent information.

New Business

We had no requests for new work in December. We continued to create working prototypes for our electrical vehicle charge point installation company and for our executive vehicle hire company.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the October 2017 business update. 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 October.

Nice to see the PlanIt-BookIt marketing site continuing to trend upwards.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

PlanIt-BookIt

This month we had an issue that took us quite a while to work out what had exactly happened and then ultimately solve.

A member of a club tried to book a squash court against another member. However, instead of selecting member he chose guest and therefore was presented with a guest payment screen.

Realising his mistake he backed out rather than paying a guest fee. This action still shows the booking however it’s flagged as provisional and removed after approximately 30 minutes. On this case though the individual updated the booking so as to be against the member he originally wanted to play. The system however kept the provisional flag and therefore the updated booking was still removed. Confused? Yes, so were we!

Later some other user booked the same court and the both parties turned up to play at the same time.

What we did to fix is prevented provisional, unpaid bookings from being updated in the future. Instead all they can do is cancel and if they don’t cancel then their booking is removed anyway as it’s provisional.

Another change we made to PlanIt-BookIt this month was the ability to view event bookings from the MyBookings form.

PlanIt-Admin

In a small number of cases members were receiving the same club correspondence multiple times. It turned out that this bug was happening where a family was sharing the same email address. We fixed this so that only one of the same email per email address will be sent out in future.

New Business

Nothing much to report this month still putting ideas together for two business that have approached us. One is a executive car hire company who wants a system to manage jobs and job allocation. The other is an electrical vehicle charging point fitting company who needs a system to survey customers prior to installation.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the September 2017 business update. 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 September.

Our main PlanIt-BookIt marketing site is still trending up. We even had someone from the US sign up this month, however they went a little shy on us when we contacted them to assist with the set-up process. Next time!!

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

PlanIt-BookIt

This month we published to live some back end changes that we had made to PlanIt-BookIt. Most of the changes had little impact on the end user but they just simplified some of the back end code.

Also we completed a little more work towards enabling fitness class bookings from within PlanIt-BookIt.

University Riding Clubs

This month we decided to offer the equestrian version of PlanIt-BookIt for free to any University riding clubs. The university of Manchester have already started using it as a result.

Ponte Squash Club

On setup of Ponte squash club we had only allowed club bookings to be made up to 90 days in advance. This wasn’t enough to enable them to book all of their metro and Yorkshire League fixtures. So we extended their future bookings from 90 days to 250. However, in doing so, I accidentally deleted all their club bookings that they had made so far. All 1600 of them! Aarghh!! Luckily was were able to recover all of them from our daily backup. I don’t intend to make that mistake again though!

Marketing

This month I started to make some effort at last with Marketing. To enable this site to get a little more traffic I decided to publish my efforts and learning directly. So to start with I have two web pages… 1) Marketing Strategy which will detail our overall marketing strategy for Objitec and 2) Marketing Planning Process which is a link to our Marketing Plan. I have little knowledge of marketing so all these efforts will be guided by a number of books that I have sourced and deem to be useful for my purpose.

New Business

As previously mentioned, we’re now offering equestrian PlanIt-BookIt for free to University riding clubs and as a result we have signed up Manchester University. We’ve had some interest from a company for a new system to handle the bookings of electrical vehicle charging points. We’ve also had a company contact us who contacted us about a year ago with respect to a booking system for Executive car hire. Then finally we’ve had some interest for a simple web site for a walking football club. So quite a positive month in terms of potential customers.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the August 2017 business update. 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 August.

Our main PlanIt-BookIt marketing site is trending up which is a good sign, as is the sign up page however as yet we still haven’t had a customer sign up directly from the web site.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

Fitness Classes

August was mainly taken up with family holidays, however we still managed to complete the bulk of the coding for the fitness class piece that we had been working on.

Left to do is enabling an administrator to book people who call up onto classes and to provide the administrator the ability to cancel people from a class.

By Martin Gilliard

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.

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.

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the June 2017 business update, which is 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 June. Recently we added a couple more sites to the analytics, namely online-booking-system.net a one page marketing site and we also added our admin app a separate application for administering PlanIt-BookIt.

I guess the main thing to comment on here is the big increase in traffic to PlanIt-BookIt itself. This will be due to a new and rather large customer beginning to trial PlanIt-BookIt to manage their court bookings, events and membership.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

New Customer Trialling PlanIt-BookIt

This month Pontefract Squash and Leisure started trialling PlanIt-BookIt. This was excellent news for us as Pontefract to squash is like Wimbledon to tennis. They have produced two world ranked number one players and they have many professional squash players coming through their doors on a daily basis for the top level coaching that they offer on site.

The trial took a lot of effort to get working just right. This was mainly because a) Ponte is so large with over 1000 members and b) due to the fact that you don’t actually have to be a member to play at Ponte. They offer a pay and play facility. Payments are built into PlanIt-BookIt but that said we’d never actually implemented them on a court booking basis. So we had a little bit of work ensuring payments was all working correctly.

Court Release

Other changes we made included how courts are released. Generally we release courts on a court by court basis at the exact time of the court and a week or two in advance depending on the requirements of the customer. Ponte requested an additional 15 minutes to enable people who book the same court regularly to be able to book just before going on court.

Mandatory Fields

This month we also made the mandatory fields on sign-up a little bit clearer by displaying them with a red error type border which clears upon completion.

Registered Contact / Member

Prior to Pontefract all of our customers were member only establishments. So we made a small naming change to the naming on our booking modal from Member to Registered Contact / Member.

Fitness Class Prototype

Pontefract also have a full gym and fitness classes, so this month we created a prototype for how fitness class bookings might work…

By Martin Gilliard

A warm welcome to the May 2017 business update, which I’ve been a little late publishing this month but that’s mainly because we’ve had so much other work to do! 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 May.

Nothing major to report in terms of traffic. This sites traffic is very low, however at the moment it only stores these reports. There are no keyword focused articles. New PlanIt-BookIt customers have started to drive the applications traffic upwards, which is to be expected. The rest is pretty consistent.

Metrics

The following table shows our latest measurements.

Demoed PlanIt-BookIt

Gave a demo to a customer who’d enquired about PlanIt-BookIt. It was the strangest demo ever with about ten people from their committee asking me questions in an empty bar. To make things even more difficult the WiFi didn’t extend to the bar so I ended up tethering the app to the data on my phone – which made the demo somewhat slow. Note to self, for future demos, have a PowerPoint presentation of the app available as a back-up!

I think the demo went well though. I received lots of positive feedback and they appeared to be really interested although the chairman explained to me that their committee moves really slow and therefore not to expect anything from them quickly. Will wait a couple of months and chase them up to determine if they’re still interested.

Events

The events email reminders were causing confusion for one of our customers. They had planned a club squash tournament and put the start date of the event as the last day of the event – the day the actual final would be played. As a result, all the people who had entered the competition got a reminder about the event on the day of the final. This caused a little confusion for some, with some even thinking they might even actually be playing in the final. We decided email reminders for events aren’t really necessary anyway so we took an executive decision to remove them.

At a request of another customer we also increased event categories to ten.

PlanIt-Admin

We added some new functionality to the membership section of PlanIt-Admin. To be able to cater for family memberships we added the ability to link multiple members to one or more accounts. Meaning Joe Bloggs could link his wife Mary Bloggs and his two kids Joe and Kate Bloggs to his membership. We did this so that only one would have to renew their family membership in order for all of them to be renewed.

Unfortunately the change did cause a little confusion for our existing users. They were fine with it once we had explained the new changes however, we still may have to simplify the process a little.

The admin front page has a lot of large buttons displayed on it. Some of these buttons were of little or no use to most of our court booking customers so we made a decision to simplify admin by removing some of them. The simplified version now looks like this…

Also in admin when you go into bookings we made it easier to see courts that had been cancelled and we simplified Sessions by only making club sessions available to book / change rather than the core sessions that are bookable from within the system. Even this explanation sounds confusing so you can guess how confusing it must have been for our customers!

User Guides

This month we created a user guide for administrators to show them how to make club bookings for say team matches, coaching or court maintenance, etc. To read the guide please see How to make a club booking

New Business

It was a good month for new business this month with two new customers signing up to use our products.

We also started a trial period of PlanIt-BookIt with a large squash and leisure centre this month and so much effort was put into getting them ready to start their trial. Setup isn’t usually a complicated process it was just this particular customer needed a few things adding to meet their particular requirements.

During May I sent out my first ever sales prospect email to a small, relatively local tennis club. The email was rejected but at least I got a very nice and pleasant reply back from the clubs chairman. So was quite positive and I shall certainly be sending out more in the future.