In today’s day and age, the internet is what our entire lives revolve around. Whether it’s kids gathering information for homework, shopping online or using social media, the internet is very prevalent in our daily actions. Of course the explosion of the online world has brought about much competition among companies to create the “best” browser. During the 1990s Netscape became the pioneers in web browsing. After Netscape came Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera Software’s Opera,   Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. Since then it has been an ongoing debate as to which web browser is the best. In this article we will take a look at Mozilla’s Firefox.

Mozilla seems intent on taking the lead as the best browser as is evident from the speed with which the company is updating their browser versions. In 2011 they have released four improved versions of their browser one after the other, continually aiming for the best. It seems as if they have created a quick update cycle of their own where every few weeks we see a new version ready for download. From the looks of it, one would say that Mozilla might be overdoing it, but who’s to say? This rapid release of improvements may make them the undisputed king of internet browsing one day.

Only one month after releasing Firefox 6, Firefox 7 was released. Six weeks later, Firefox 8 was released. Firefox 7 was a major improvement from the previous versions where we saw major significant changes in all the right places. With Firefox 7, Mozilla introduced a better handling of RAM. This was enabled by a new feature known as “MemShrink “ which enables one to run the new Firefox with 25% less resources of the operating system as compared to its predecessor. Along with improved CSS3 came better support for MathML. There were also numerous small changes including hiding the ‘http://’ in the url.

With Firefox 8 Mozilla does not give us many drastic changes. It presents small modifications to Firefox7. Firefox 8 has been promised to be a sophisticated and highly refined version. The interface of this new version is almost the same as the previous one. It cannot be said for sure but it has been estimated that Firefox 8 has a 10,000 add-ons for the users. This may be a step towards a much more personal browser experience. For those who fear about unwanted add-ons the good news is that Firefox 8 has come to their rescue. Following in the footsteps the Windows Explorer 9, Firefox has introduced the feature of add-on notifications. You can now easily add or disable add-ons from one screen.  Also add-ons by an undesired 3^rd party are by default disabled. An amazing fact is that the Firefox 8 is being reported to be 20% times faster in processing speed as compared to Firefox 5. The awe-inspiring part of this is that the two browser versions were introduced only 5 months apart. WebGL support has been improved in their latest version. Many stability issues which had been experienced in the earlier versions of Firefox have now been fixed with this new version.

It is not all good news as Firefox 8 just a few days after its release is facing some criticisms while being under very strong scrutiny. Among the criticisms is a slower start up speed than other browsers and no built in flash or PDF reader. But no verdict can yet be passed as the new web browser is still in its Alpha phase. We’re confident that we will see improvements with it in future releases.

It is still a question as to whether Mozilla can prove itself to be the best amongst all web browsers out there. With competitors like Google and Microsoft, winning this race will not be a piece of cake. But with the determination Mozilla has demonstrated this year with releasing new and improved versions one after the other, success may not be all that far away from them.

Our Process

Peacock Production Studios has a specific workflow in place to make sure that quality assurance is a priority. Utilizing communication portals and repositories, we are able to effectively communicate each step of the way. The basic flow is for the developers to make their changes and push to a testing environment, called stage, which mirrors the production site. Once the changes are in stage, our QA department will perform thorough testing and provide instant feedback to the developers, if necessary. After testing in stage is complete and everything is working properly, these changes will be pushed to the production environment where the public is able to see and use the updated software. Once “live” in production, thorough testing needs to be done immediately to ensure the file deployment took hold and that there are no issues in the live version.

Definition of Quality Assurance

Now that you understand Peacock Production Studios quality assurance process flow, it’s time to look into exactly what goes into QA. Updates to websites can be as simple as changing a phone number or as complex as modifications to a complicated shipping calculator. While we can’t possibly cover everything that needs to be tested in this article, there are a few major items we will discuss. First, a testing checklist needs to be defined based on the technology being built. Our example will be the launching of a new ecommerce website. Our process involves having our QA department work closely with the development team at the very beginning of a new build. We want to catch any issues early during development; things that could potentially be carried throughout the site if not caught early and lead to longer delays down the road. Depending on the site, the order of testing may be different, but there are several common things to check. We will take a look at those now.

Functionality Testing

Functionality testing for an ecommerce site involves checking all of the links on each page of the website to ensure they direct to the proper page, testing all submission forms on the site and to make sure that customers are able to add products to the cart and checkout. The most important component on an ecommerce website is the shopping cart. During this process, correct calculations of taxes, duties and surcharges needs to be tested. It is also very important to ensure that all product options, like color and quantity, are following the order throughout the checkout process. Finally, thorough testing needs to be done to ensure that any shipping carrier APIs are connected, working and bringing back correct results.

Usability Testing

Usability testing involves making sure that the navigation is easy and consistent for the user. Content needs to be proofread and the search feature returns relevant results. Usability testing is in essence making sure you provide a good experience for people coming to the website. In other words, is it user-friendly? In reference to an ecommerce site, it is vital that visitors to your “store” are comfortable moving about and can obtain pertinent information easily. The more comfortable they are, the more likely that they will make purchases on your site.

Cross Platform Testing

In an ideal world for web developers there would only be one universal browser and one operating system. Of course, this is not the case and compatibility testing is an extremely important part of quality assurance. It is vital for developers to write code that is cross browser compatible. Some applications are dependent on browser settings, especially if you are using AJAX, javascript and the latest version of CSS. Once new code has been pushed to stage for testing, our QA team will typically check these changes in the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. We even check the previous version of Internet Explorer, since it is the most common browser. QA will also make sure the changes are working in the latest two versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple iOS.

Mobile Testing

As more and more people are making purchases using their smart phones, mobile testing is becoming a vital component of quality testing. As part of our QA process, we ensure that the functionality works and the layout looks good on mobile devices like the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Another important product to perform mobile testing on is tablets, like the iPad. With all of the various tablets on the market today, it is nearly impossible to test all of them, but it is necessary to check Apple and Android devices, at the minimum.

Security Testing

The final step in performing quality assurance is to make sure that the website is secure. This includes testing all contact forms and make sure that all validation and captcha is working properly. SQL injection is a popular security risk and building strong forms is crucial for any ecommerce site. Also important is to make sure that all security certificates are up to date and that the user is directed to a secure URL (https://) when providing personal information like address and payment method, particulary credit card information. Many end users, rightfully so, will not purchase products if the site doesn’t appear secure.  Although Peacock Production Studios always encrypts sensitive data, it is essential to security test for ecommerce compliance such as PCI or SET.

Conclusion

As you can see, quality assurance is an integral component of any successful website launch or upgrade release. Without thorough testing, end users can become frustrated, be given incorrect information or worse, not be able to purchase products at all. Peacock Production Studios values quality assurance and devotes the time and resources necessary to ensure that our client’s websites are performing at peak levels. While QA is not the most glamorous task that we perform, we understand its importance in building functional, easy to use websites. In order to have a successful ecommerce website, customers must feel comfortable navigating the site and trust that their information will remain secure. We hope this article has stressed the importance of thorough quality assurance in relation to building your customer base. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us.

QR Code

I recently posted a QR code on my Twitter account and I had many people ask me why I linked to a picture of a barcode. Although popular in many countries, marketing by QR code has not yet caught on in the US. I am of the opinion that it soon will and when it does, it will become one of the most effective marketing tools in the digital world.  QR codes are non-intrusive to consumers; easy and cost-effective for marketers to produce; and they allow companies to effectively target market and drive consumers directly to their message.  Chances are, you have already run across a QR code and didn’t even realize it. This article is meant to introduce you to QR codes and how they can be utilized.

QR codes are similar to what you may have seen stockers using in grocery stores. They contain information that can be easily scanned. Unlike grocery barcodes, QR codes are 2 dimensional and are able to hold a lot more data. Creating your own QR code is simple. There are many free sites that will auto generate a QR code based on the content that you supply. For example, to create the QR code shown above, I simply went to a website offering this service and put in our website URL and immediately there was a .jpeg of the code.  In order to read a QR code, all you need is a Smartphone with a camera. Some mobile operating systems, like Nokia’s Symbian and Google’s Android, have a QR code reader preinstalled on your phone. If you own an iPhone you will need to download an application, many of which are free. Once you have a reader installed, all you need to do is aim your Smartphone’s camera at the code and the “hidden” message will be revealed, directing you to whatever content the marketer wanted you to see. Hopefully, you now have a basic understanding of what QR codes are and how to read them. Next, we illustrate a few ways that QR codes can be used in your marketing campaigns.

The uses of QR codes as a marketing tool are limited only by your imagination. I recently ordered a Papa John’s pizza and there was a QR code on the box. Curious, I scanned the code and was taken to a video of Papa John himself discussing the quality of the ingredients in his pizza. Another company utilizing QR codes is Best Buy. On their products price tags is a QR code that when scanned will take you to a page with more detailed information about that product, including reviews, comparisons to similar products and specifications. One of our clients just used a QR code in their catalog to direct their customers to a specific product page on their ecommerce website.  Customers who were savvy enough to read the scan were offered 20% off of their purchase. These are just 3 real life examples. As I mentioned, the applications for QR codes are limitless. Listed below are just a few of the possible uses:

Business Cards – recipient scans the code to import your contact info directly into Contacts

T-shirts – wear a code on your shirt to promote your website, storefront, whatever

Campaign Signs – people can scan to volunteer, donate or see candidate speak on issues

Real Estate Signs – instead of tear offs, direct to listing on website or a virtual tour of house

Product Packaging – link to video with assembly instructions

Hopefully by now your mind is wandering with all of the great things you can do with a QR code. They are an inexpensive way to effectively market and they can also reduce costs substantially. For example, if you are a retailer and have a QR code which links to a video with assembly instructions, you can reduce the number of calls into Customer Service and the number of returns. Large corporations, like Ford, Best Buy and Verizon, are implementing QR codes into their marketing mix. Many of the ads in Times Square are also utilizing QR codes to direct people to sites containing more information on their products or as a call to action, signing a petition for example. Data shows that that there is heavy Smartphone use during the shopping process. It is estimated that 79% of Smartphone owners use their phone to help with their shopping and 70% use their phones while in a store.  These numbers are only going to continue to increase. If you are a small business owner I strongly encourage you to experiment with using QR codes. They truly will be impactful to the future of marketing. If you happen to have a Smartphone with a reader installed, click on our QR code above. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know.

SECURITY UPDATE: http://mashable.com/2011/10/20/qr-code-security-threat/#comments

E-mail: info@peacockproductionstudios.com

Website: http://peacockproductionstudios.com

Twitter: @peacockstudios

Facebook: Peacock Production Studios

We thought long and hard about what we admire about Microsoft and it was difficult to really come up with too much. We like their Windows 7 OS and Xbox Kinect. We like that every other one of their releases is typically good. We also like the fact that they are willing to partner with small, up and coming vendors. As mentioned above, Microsoft (and founder Bill Gates) has been extremely gracious in their charitable endeavors. Domestically, they seek to expand the educational opportunities and access to information technology in poor, rural communities. Globally, they seek to enhance health care and reduce extreme poverty.

When you’re as big an entity as Microsoft, you are going to have many detractors, whether based on reality, fear or a little of both. The Geek in us considers Microsoft to be “the man” and we don’t always want to follow the man. In fact, sometimes we would like to stick it to the man! The number one complaint is that half of their releases are worse than the previous release. I don’t have to convince the Vista and IE9 users of this. Perhaps a major reason for this is because their releases are driven by the marketing team, not the development team. This can lead to rushed launches. Often times, Microsoft’s “releases” are still in beta testing stage, which forces the end users to be the testers. Another issue is their susceptibility to viruses and security vulnerabilities. This is of course in relation to their software being cross vendor compatible, but it would be nice to have a little more security and reliability. It is annoying to have to download patches and service packs after every new install, as well as every month. Our final complaint is that there is no “WOW” factor for any of their new releases or products (other than Xbox Kinect). Instead of looking forward to new releases, we ask ourselves will this help fix issues with the last release. If not, we will probably just skip this one and wait for the next.

What can we expect in the future from Microsoft? They recently announced their latest operating system, Windows 8. Along with the release of Windows 8 will be their latest browser version, IE10. (Microsoft Windows 8 video). Going back to our “every other release is good theory”, Peacock Production Studios eagerly awaits IE10 and we are skeptical of Windows 8. We will test their latest version of Windows, as we need to stay up with Microsoft’s current technologies, but we are confident that Windows 7 will remain our OS of choice. We hope this article has provided some insight into Microsoft from the view of web developers. In the end it comes down to this – Microsoft is simply too big to ignore.

E-mail: info@peacockproductionstudios.com

Website: http://peacockproductionstudios.com

Twitter: @peacockstudios

Facebook: Peacock Production Studios

When developing a website from scratch, the first step in the process is to design a logo. A logo can be colorful or gray, playful or serious, simple or complex. Depending on the style that is selected by the client, it will drive the layout and “feel” for the website.  The directive for the logo design of PicnicTables.com was pretty straight-forward. The client was looking for a simple, colorful design. The obvious choice was, you guessed it, a picnic table! After many iterations, the green and yellow color scheme was chosen in an attempt to capture the feel of the outdoors.

The logo was designed in Adobe Illustrator in a vector format so that it could be used for marketing campaigns, print advertising, etc. It is extremely important to create your logo in a format that is easily transferrable across various media sources. The logo is the first step in creating a company’s brand and we strive to make it as easy as possible for our clients to use their logo in whatever marketing campaigns may arise in the future.

Once the logo was selected we had a visual marketing brand to work with.  In order to help brand establishment, we styled the interface to match the chosen logo. Due to this being the first website of many for this client, the design was created with these other websites in mind in order to maintain a consistent feel. There are a number of different ways to create Websites. While some may choose to hand draw a concept and then start coding HTML, we take a more graphical approach to the design and layout using Photoshop. The designing of the interface is very important for usability. If a visitor to your site can’t easily locate your content or if the layout is confusing to them, they will leave your website. With any new design, you must plan ahead. This will enable you to adapt to any changes that arise quickly and easily. PicnicTables.com in particular has many products and images. With that in mind, special attention during the design process was given to facilitate fast loading pages. Also, knowing that there would eventually be “sister” websites, we focused on creating a design that would work across multiple products.

After the website design was complete we then cut the design into web based code using HTML, CSS & jQuery.  Using well-defined Meta, h1 and h2 tags, the code was written to be search engine friendly.  During this process, the basic colors for the website were created. Again, using the selected logo as our guide, we created the site in green and yellow to keep a consistent feel throughout the website.

PicnicTables.com is an e-commerce website so during the construction of the site, particular focus was given to creating a shopping cart. The shopping cart for PicnicTables.com contains many features, including credit card processing, real-time shipping rates, order receipt page and e-mail and the flexibility to modify your product.

You may think that after a website is developed and pushed into production that the work is done. This is definitely NOT the case. As PicnicTables.com attracted more and more customers, many enhancements were requested from our client. These include, but are not limited to:

Promotion and Banner Management

Dynamic Content

Product Search

Google Analytics Tracking

Sitemap.xml

Testimonials

Reviews

Canadian Shipping

As of the time of this posting, all of the above enhancements have been completed except for promotion and banner management. One of the next major upgrades includes promotion and banner management.

Even if you have the coolest website in the world, it doesn’t do much good if potential customers can’t find it. In order for a business to prosper on the internet, they must be ranked high in search engines. Early in the development process, Peacock Production Studios pays close attention to optimizing websites for search engines. By utilizing dynamic sitemaps, static product page names and keywords (along with our trade secrets), we make your site attractive to search engine spiders. While nobody can guarantee a #1 ranking, we constantly are working on maintaining a search engine friendly site. Currently, when you search “picnic tables”, PicnicTables.com is third^th result in Yahoo and 6^th result in Google. These are impressive rankings considering all of the businesses that sell picnic tables. In fact, PicnicTables.com is ranked higher than Lowe’s and Target!

In closing, PicnicTables.com has been a huge success. As with any successful Ecommerce site, there are continuous upgrades and enhancements. Not only are these upgrades requested by the client, but you must stay ahead of the technology curve and try to beat your competitors to the latest and greatest features. Again, PicnicTables.com was the first franchise Ecommerce  website we created. We have successfully mirrored this site for 9 other franchise sites.

Please visit our site and provide any feedback you may have – both good or bad. http://www.peacockproductionstudios.com/

We updated or Facebook page with a lot of new portfolio pictures. Please visit our page and “like” us. We promise not to add too much noise to your timeline. https://www.facebook.com/PeacockProductionStudios

Thank you for your support!

PPS Team

We at PPS use ColdFusion as our primary programming language and consider ourselves CF experts. We have over 10 years of experience using CF and are always staying on the cutting edge of its technology. There are many benefits to using ColdFusion, chief among them ease of querying databases, ability to write applications much quicker and works across multiple operating systems.

With ColdFusion, you can build websites that do things such as:

• Allow users to upload files
• Create/read files on the server (for example, the files that your users upload)
• Have a “member’s area” (i.e. via a login page)
• Have a shopping cart
• Present a customized experience (for example, based on users’ browsing history)
• Create a “member’s area” (i.e. via a login page)
• Send emails (for example, newsletters to a mailing list)
• Schedule tasks to run automatically (for example, your email newsletters)
• FTP files to/from another server
• Publish web services
• Much, much more

Bing features

-       Daily changing of background images

-       Video thumbnail preview (hover over video thumbnail and video will start playing)

-       Instant Answers (example: enter favorite sports team in search bar and today’s scores, results and schedule will appear)

-       Math Calculations (enter a mathematical equation in search bar and Bing will calculate)

-       Local information (type in city and current weather, flights, maps and attractions will appear first)

-       Related people search

Bing has been criticized for being slower to index websites than either Google or Yahoo.