Objitec Business Metrics And Progress Report October 2015
A warm welcome to the Objitec business metrics and progress report for October 2015. We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.
Google Analytics And Google Search Console
As a reminder the sites we manage as part of the Objitec company include…
objitec.com : Used for tracking metrics and other company related activities.
online-booking-system.net : For marketing only and will be focused on all things related to online booking.
planit-bookit.com : Main product page. Links to all the different business sectors in which PlanIt-BookIt is implemented.
squash.planit-bookit.com : For squash clubs and squash members. Includes a sign up page for squash-planit-bookit and also lots of useful articles directly geared at squash club members.
Very little in terms of traffic this month as we have focused more on further development of PlanIt-BookIt (see the development section further down in this report).
Rothwell Squash Club
Our first customer Rothwell squash club has been extremely pleased with their new booking system. We have received lots of positive comments back from both the members and the club committee. People are really pleased with how well it works on mobile devices and generally how simple it is to use in comparison with their old system.
Landing Page
After experimenting with many plugins and looking at various landing page themes we determined that it was unlikely that we were going to get a decent looking, highly functional landing page for free. So we decided to build our own in ASP.net.
Below was the best free option we could find using a WordPress plugin called Easy Pricing Tables Lite by Fatcat Apps and it’s not bad but we just thought it might be a little too basic for our needs.
Here is the one we built ourselves using ASP.net. To be honest we had a lot of help! We re-used the excellent and freely available code provided at bootsnip.
I’m hoping that you will agree that this version looks much better!
Payments
The next consideration was online payments. We’d seen a lot of landing pages directing people to pay using stripe online payments.
So we set about experimenting the use of stripe. Our test card details page looked like this…
Looks pretty good we thought and the pricing for stripe is excellent when compared with the likes of PayPal. However, using stripe would mean we would in fact have to take the card payment details from our page and we thought that that might leave us open to possible liable claims, etc. It may also mean that we would need PCI compliance. So in the end we decided that our best option, given that we don’t want to be seeing credit cards on our payment page is to use PayPal even if it is a bit more expensive!
Development
We have had a big pause in development of our ranking system. The reason being was that we didn’t like the fact that when using the ELO ranking algorithm if a lower ranked player plays a higher ranked player and loses but still gets a game from them they don’t get any reward for that. Steve had an excellent idea though and that was to apply the ELO ranking to each game that was won within a match.
All the user interface for the ranking system is now built. Just a matter of getting the algorithm to work exactly as we want it and to do some rigorous testing. So hoping to go live with the new ranking functionality in the next week or two.
We had received a comment from one of the members regarding the forward and backwards date buttons on the view bookings sheet. They weren’t displaying on tablets or smartphones. Originally we had chosen specifically to not display them on smartphones as we thought it would look too cluttered on these devices. We did however want them to be displayed on tablets and after viewing a competitor product on someones smartphone which had forward and next date buttons I decided I also wanted them on PlanIt-BookIt for smartphones. In order to correctly display on the various different display formats out there, we make use of an excellent framework called Bootstrap. After quite a lot of tinkering with the rows and 12 column format that this framework adopts we successfully managed to enable the buttons for all devices. The picture shows the resulting changes, with the date buttons displayed and correctly working on my Android Galaxy S6 smartphone.
