Blog

5 Star Net Releases New Softball Bats 2.0 Website

2010-06-28T14:03:58Z

Softball bats 2.0 code-named “New Attitude”

The result of the project was to increase market-share on a domain that’s been around since 2003 with a great selection of products, awesome customer services, and a small following of devote customers by creating a new attitude.

The design team attacked the “New Attitude” concept and came up with a bunch on new features and new looks.

Some of these new ideas were incorporated into the final design that was deployed June 23, 2010. Here are some screen shots of the versions along the way.

2003 - Our first design in classic ASP.

2005 - Our second design using ASP.NET.

2010 - Our new design with MVC.

The next part highlights some updates and design decisions we made while building the site.

For Marketing, we’ve setup the home page so they’re in total control of what appears and what does not via an administration product manager. We’ve removed pesky categories that are a heirarchical nightmare, and while they are popular, we got the idea to drop them and just show filters. Why? Many of the categories were filters and visa versa, which was seen as redundant so it was easily removed. In addition to filtering there is search and a bat coach for navigation. The bat coach asks simple questions that new players understand and the coach then provides a list of products that best matches the user’s questions. All of these navigation elements drive the customer to a products grid, or products list landing page. To this, we’ve added sorting and combined with filtering, we feel our softball bat “slicer and dicer” navigational elements, for finding the “right” bat, are the most comprehensive in the market.

Many other improvments were also installed for Pro Athlete, Inc. For example, the ordering system for Softball Bats 2.0 is integrated into the current Pro Athlete, Inc system so training was minimum. In addition to allowing major credit cards and Google Checkout, we’ve also added PayPal as a payment option. Chartbeat, Google Analytics, Google Analytics Transactions, Google Base, Silverpop connectivity, jQuery, Google Website Analyzer, Google Webmaster Central, Google Adwords, Google Rich Snippets are other important tools, technologies, services that were used in building the site or for getting statistical information about the performance or success of a particular choice.

We are now running on the website using model view controller framework for ASP.NET, called MVC. It’s your typical three-tier design, but with MVC, the UI is a lot lighter. There is no viewstate hidden value that has to be passed back and forth to retain form state. Microsoft really tried to simplify web development with ASP.NET, but there are trade-offs with Web Forms and the code could get bulky real quick. For purists, that sucks. With MVC, we have so much more control over the output pipeline. MVC is running on IIS 7, a windows 2008 machine, with standard gzip compression turned-on. With the redesign, which means more css and less html, we were able to drop the size of the pages from 140k to 25k. We are also utilizing the existing content delivery network for images which drastically increases the speed of the test.

In addition, the MVC framework with jQTouch provides us with the ability to quickly generate a mobile web application for Pro Athlete, Inc. See sample screen shots below.

Difference between Multi-Social Retailer, Mono-Social Retailer, & Non-Social Retailer

2010-06-04T14:17:02Z

There are many ways to classify a retailer based on the sales channels they use. There is a "brick and mortor" retailer, the "catalogers", and internet-only "pure play" retailers. I'd like to take the concept of labeling the retailer based on the sales channels they use, but instead apply a label to the social channels a company uses to communicate and obtain feedback from customers. A company who engages in a multi-social relationship with their customers uses more than one social networking apparatus. A company who engages in a mono-social relationship with their customers uses one social networking apparatus. A company who does not engage in a online relationship with their customers is a non-social retailer.

An example of a multi-social retailer can be seen at diapers.com, or more information about this concept can be found at the internet retailer.

Creating a Management Dashboard Using Google Docs

2010-05-30T18:52:02Z

It's never been easier than now to create a simple management dashboard using the free Google Application Suite. After setting up some objectives, strategies, and action plans for our fictious company in a Google Doc, I'll show you how to use Google Sites to tie it all together. Finally, I'll use a Google Spreadsheet to keep track of the data and formulas for all the calculations. Let's get started.

Go to www.google.com and login. If you do not have a login, create one using your an email address, and you'll have access to all the tools I using for the article.

Go to docs.google.com and create new spreadsheet. It will open by default. First thing is to set a goal. For our fictious company, XYZ Corporation, I've set a sales goal of $1.2 million, which is 16.7% higher than last year. I enter this value in one of the cells in the Google Docs - Spreadsheet.

Now we've setup a sales goal, let's add our sales plan to a Google Site. During your first visit, you'll be asked by Google Sites to setup a site so you'll need to provide a name and template. I just picked a basic one from the list that was offered at the time this article was written. I called it Company XYZ Corporation and create a new page called CEO Plan.

The mission, objectives, strategies, and actions plans for acheiving 16.7% growth must be added now. You might be asking yourself, why am I just now developing the mission, objectives, strategies, and action plans for the current year? The mission, objectives, strategies, and actions plans must be determined and strategized in the previous year by the decision makers way before the new starts. If this cannot be acheived in your business, there are greater issues you must deal with.

Here is the mission and the objectives, strategies, and action plans for XYZ Corporation in a Google docs that I am going to cut and paste to the CEO plan page.

Next step is to setup a spreadsheet to track sales. Go back to the spreadsheet you used to set the sales goal, open it, go to a new tab. Here's a very basic, scaled-down version of my sales spreadsheet. I'm tracking the instore and online sales separately and adding one line per date and a total column.

Now, I need a spreadsheet to track customers.

Now that we have the goal I going to transfer the mission, objectives, strategies, and action plans to the new Google Sites page. Next to the objectives, I've added color-coded bullet points that I can click on to see the detailed spreadsheet graph of what's going on with each strategy and action plan.

I've setup a new page for Objective 1 and Objective 2 and linked to yellow and red bullet points to these pages. Clicking on the yellow ball takes me to the first objective page. I've created a chart in Google Docs Spreadsheets, and published the chart which produces an image tag that I can embed into the html of the Google Sites objective one page.

The final page appears like this.

As the Google Docs Spreadsheets continue to update, so does this image, dynamically.

Now that's a management dashboard that works. All built using open tools and ideas easily found on the Internet.

5 Star Net Communications L.L.C. Joins Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program

2010-04-21T19:45:52Z

It's Official - 5 Star Net Communications L.L.C. (5 Star) today announced it has become an authorized reseller of the Google Apps™ suite of communication and collaboration tools. 5 Star plans a phased rollout starting with its current customers who been asking for the solution, and then ramping up a fast track service aimed to decrease implementation time, increase adoptability using 5 Star's Adoptarank™ system to determine adoptability success before starting any project, and a solutions knowledge base for "cookbook" solutions to common questions with Google Apps.

Is Microsoft Office a pain for your organization? Is your mail server costly, limited and slow? Email is a service like electricity. Just plug-in and go. Can you get your email at home, without VPN, or on your phone? Switch to Google Apps and these problems will go away. Users will gain ultimate flexibility, your email now in hand of experts, updates to software are automatic and cost nothing, document collaboration now enabled instead of document collision, training minimal since it's a Google-designed product, other features like Google Sites, Chat, Groups and the App Marketplace with third-parties selling Software-As-A-Service, and ultimately the organization will require less to do more.

The Google Apps reseller program along with 5 Star Net's add-on assurance services to improve implementation, and offer follow-on services, provides a no-risk opportunity to take your business to the next-level using Google Apps. With the addition of Google Apps Marketplace, an apps store for your company, there's no reason your business cannot achieve its goals using Google Apps. Contact us at http://www.5starnet.com today for your assessment.

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Google and Google Apps are trademarks of Google Inc.

5 Starnet Now Offering Google Apps Migration Fast-track System

2010-04-18T14:23:48Z

5 Starnet Communications L.L.C. is proud to announce that it's now offering a Google Apps Migration Fast-track System.

Is Microsoft Office a pain for your organization? Is your mail server costly, limited and slow? Email is a service like electricity. Just plug-in and go. Can you get your email at home, without VPN, or on your phone? Switch to Google Apps and these problems will go away, plus, new features are available. Users will gain ultimate flexibility, email now in hand of experts, updates to software are automatic and cost nothing, document collaboration now enabled instead of document collision, training minimal since it's a Google-designed product, other features like Google Sites, Chat, Groups and the App Marketplace with third-parties selling Software-As-A-Service, and ultimately the organization will require less to do more.

Check out Google's cost saving page, then Contact us to get your personalized assessment.

A New Convenience When it Comes to Buying A Baseball Bat.

2010-03-26T18:20:41Z

JustBats.com offers a wide array of methods to find baseball bats and softball bats like search, category navigation, bat packs, bat wizards, with filters to refine the results even further. With so many baseball bats and softball bats to choose from it still could be difficult for an inexperienced bat buyer to choose, so we've designed, developed, and implemented a new gift card system to make it easy to buy a bat. We are very proud of the finished product and the features it offers. Here's a photo of the three printers that are used to create the gift card finished product.

The JustBats.com Gift Card system is flexible and easy to use. You can select to email your JustBats.com Gift Cards or have them physically printed and personalized with your special message. Up to 500 characters or 15 lines of text is allowed and is conveniently printed on the card along with the card face on the front for a professional fit and finish.

You can even order a whole bunch for the team at one time. There are many beautiful gift cards, hand-selected by our graphics design team, to reflect the history and depth baseball that runs in our veins and how we try to exemplify that at JustBats.com.

JustBats.com Gift Cards can easily be purchased and delivered quickly via email or mail. It's the perfect gift for the batter looking for the bat of his or her dreams. And, who knows, it may help them get the big hit in the game and bring in the winning run. We get stories like that all the time. From little leaguers to the big kids that play past retirement. It does happen.

To make it happen for your kid, big or small, check it out JustBats.com Gift Cards.

Memoirs From a Google Apps Migration

2010-03-16T15:46:47Z

Switching over to Google Apps for domains does have many strong points, but there are some things to consider before proceeding.

Being able to use the Gmail interface in Google Applications, compared to outlook, is a breath of fresh air. Receiving a flood of email and using Outlook for email management can be very slow at times and that's counter productive. Some people may enjoy that morning break, but it drives me nuts. Having an exchange server does nothing to speed thing up searching or rules processing if all your mail is local. Gmail was designed to excel with speed, especially with searching, which it does very well.

Now, from a management perspective, our mail server still exists, but is simply a smtp relay to Gmail. All of the real mail server "guts" now sit on Google's infrastructure and is managed by Google Engineers for about $50 per person, per year. That is very valuable to our organization.

Having docs in the cloud is not new for me since I've been using Gmail and Google Docs for many years. I use the collaborative features in Google Docs to "work in tandem" with others to complete a project task or write a document. I especially like to attach an analytics id to certain, high-visibility documents to monitor the activity. The work turns into a fun exercise to experience this collaborative feeling in action. Trying this with a Microsoft product will only leave you with an error - file locked by john doe.

Using Google Docs Forms is handy for gathering poll data or working collaboratively for entering data. If you have organized or migrated a website before, then you can respect the the cleanliness and organization of content as you move it around or set it up. You can also enable your customer to assist with the data entry using Google Docs Forms.

Having an integrated chat tool, like Google Chat embedded in the Gmail interface, makes it real easy for employees to communicate. The chats, by default, are stored in Gmail search history, so they can be retrieved just like an email. Some of our employees extend the chat to their cell phones, so they can stay in touch even when they are away from the office. Mail and calendar can also be extended for mobile devices.

They even have Google Groups, for discussions, Google Sites, for simple website generation, and Google Video, for hosted video. These features have not been used for anything production, yet.

Things I really like about Google Apps. It's under the Google.com domain and not Gmail.com, so you can be logged in to both at the same time. Sure, you could connect the accounts too, but I keep mine separate because I can. For people who have used Gmail, they know the spam filtering is the best. Plus, it's fast, about 90% (disappointed - more about this later) of the time. My calendar is now so flexible I can view and update it using many mail programs on mac or pc. I can add my personal calendar and view and update it in the same space. I can schedule a meeting and see everyone's schedule, just like exchange. It shows meeting room schedules too. It's very mature and well done. Not once has Google Calendar been slow. Google provided a team of people to assist us in the migration doing much of the account leg work. We were also able to migrate all our old email from Microsoft PST files to Gmail. They have a team of people monitoring our email and their system. New features are rolled out and upgrades are made without my team being concerned about it. Most of all, they give you a phone number to call when you have an issue.

Things I don't like about Google Apps. Depending on the size of your organization, it can take some time setting it up, but Google does offer a team of people to help. They did, at least, we when migrated in late 2009. If all your requirements are not met, you may need to find permanent replacements since the Google Apps platform is new, and somewhat, limited. Heavy Outlook uses who have many folders and rules, will have to rebuild everything in gmail. Is that the fault of Google or Microsoft? In all fairness, there is no easy way to export this form Outlook so importing is out-of-the-question. The only slowdown occurs when Gmail can get slow about 10% the time, which happens about 90% of the time when sending new mail. Setting up Google Apps can be different for mac users vs pc users, so have a plan for both if you support them. Overall, I have few complaints and the team is energized with the new features and options of this cloud based service.

Customers Need An Array Of Navigation on e-Commerce sites

2010-02-23T14:51:10Z

Don't assume navigation is one-size-fits-all. Just because your site has top-level navigation, breadcrumb trails, history lists, tags clouds, a search box, and footer links you can't assume it will be successful. Of course, content is king, which Google tells you here (Best SEO advice anyone could offer by the way), but this is not about content. It's about navigation. Navigation on e-Commerce sites. Our research has concluded that there is so much room for new, product-driven navigation on the web today.

A statement like that needs a little backing up to support it. Let me illustrate. Diapers.com is growing by leaps and bounds in sales and product depth, just search around for case studies and you'll see what I'm talking about, and the navigation is evolving to support the changes. Selecting a product category on the top-level navigation returns a page that includes left side filter navigation which has values dependent on the product category level. This is slowly becoming the standard on e-Commerce sites, but there is so much more. When I create an account and login, then I'm able plug family members, but the function is limited. Sure, I can enter gender, age, and return to the home page and be shown targeted products.

How about being even more obvious about it. Help me so I can help you attitude. What if you could enter current weight and height, or allergies, or very unique health preferences that allow the product selections to be targeted in new ways? Even asking questions as to what toys my daughter plays with to begin developing a persona to better assist product targeting could be done. Then, when I shop for my daughter, the whole site could change and only display products for a two-year. Even the filters would adjust. It's a mode I can toggle.

On our website, JustBats.com, we offer category drill-down navigation, top-level navigation, search, a bat wizard, and filter-based refinement. We've come this conclusion about navigation due to the bat wizard to be very popular. People need help buying products on the web and the old navigation methods are just not going to work anymore. Understanding your products to a level where you can ask several questions and know what a customer needs reminds me of customer service in a small-town hardware store. That's a good feeling to some, but being able to find the product quickly and easily is a good feeling to others so investing in this type of navigation can greatly benefit new and existing customers.

These new micro-targeted navigation elements are coming to a website near you very soon.

Softball Bats 2.0 New Attitude.

2010-02-13T20:23:18Z

5 Star Net Releases New Website For Thiel Sports Inc

2010-02-11T16:58:29Z

Scott Thiel is beginning to develop a following in the Sports Management market. This new website will start the foundation of success and provide an ability to move his agency to meet his short and long-term goals. We started with just a basic information page and as the business grows, so will the website. Please check back for updates.

We are always encouraged and energized when assisting young, start-up organizations. The passion that Scott Thiel has for succeeding in the business of Sports Management is evident when working with him.

Here's the screen shot of the website.