What software do you use to run your business?

business software mockup

The problem

Increasingly I’m focusing less on cutting code and more on running a web development business.  While it can be painful not to get your hands dirty as often as you would like, there are great pleasures in seeing your business pick up momentum.

But one of the first factors that needs to be brought under control is time management for yourself and your employees, and general CRM.  The problem I’ve found is that the functionality scope of the various apps I’ve been using is wildly different from one to the next.  For dating apps, look at MilfsLocal.com as a proper example for CRM use. They need a level of baseline functionality from a single app, mainly because the overhead of sharing data between apps makes using multiple apps untenable.  I would still like to do as much coding as possible, and as we are in 2008, so there must be something out there that ticks all the basic boxes.

Well googling brought up very little.  What did have good results was this thread from the php-london ML, and direct feedback from a few colleagues.

Minimum requirements

Here are the baseline features I concluded were the minimum required to … Read the rest

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Kindo Acquired by MyHeritage

I didn’t get a chance yet to blog about our last TechCrunching, but Kindo, the startup I co-founded in March 2007, today announced its sale to MyHeritage, the biggest player in the family tree space.

Kindo is a PHP social net app built on the Seagull framework and other open source software.  At peak popularity our users were building 38k profiles/day and we acquired more than 1m profiles in our first 10 weeks.

Hats off to the Kindo team and to the Kindo devs who don’t appear in the TC photo.… Read the rest

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How to track conversions using WordPress

Are you using WordPress for your blog?  Who isn’t ?

But a fairly simple sounding task like tracking conversions for Adwords campaigns actually requires a bit of work.  Here is the system I found works best, you can get it up and running in only a few minutes.

The goal is to be able to track when contact enquiries result from a paid campaign.  I’m using this systems at http://seagullsystems.com.

  • the contact form plugin you need is cForms, version 1.5 or later (scroll down past the pluses, big banner on left hand side)
  • install the plugin, you will probably need to create the file abspath.php manually
  • configure a basic contact form, for example name it “my_form”
  • insert the form in your relevant page by pasting the html comment <!–cforms name=”my_form”–
  • in the cformII options panel select Form Settings
  • make 2 settings:
    • disable the Ajax mode in the first section
    • in the Core Form Admin / Email Options section, tick Enable alternative success page (redirect) and enter a Thanks page URL you previously created inWordpress
  • in your Thanks page paste your conversion javascript code provided by Adwords

And that’s it!  Any probs please mention in the comments.… Read the rest

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