“After several misadventures with unreliable and unqualified website developers, working with Nik has been a breath of fresh air. He is professional, extremely knowledgeable and is quick to address any issues or concerns.”
Ken, Basically Me
Shop Basically Me is an online clothing store that sells to retail customers as well as wholesale customers.
The website is based on WordPress and uses WooCommerce for the online store. The store is customized to support both retail and wholesale products and ensures that only wholesale customers with a login can see & purchase wholesale products at wholesale prices.
Tower61 originally came on board to work on some performance issues – the website was running very slowly. Once up to speed we added some new features including:
Mobile Optimization – customers can browse products and shop on their PC, tablet or phone with a seamless Basically Me experience across all platforms.
Social Media Integration – beyond the usual social icons on the website each product also has their own social icons allowing products in the store to quickly be shared quickly by customers. Finally Tower 61 added support for Twitter Product Cards and Pinterest Rich Pins in order to better promote products via social media.
Native Blog – to ensure customers stay on the Basically Me website we moved the blog from tumblr onto the website itself. When creating new blog entries links are automatically posted on Tumblr, Twitter, & Facebook making it easy to keep everything up to date and everyone informed.
Product Tags / Recent Products / Related Products – the addition of these simple features help shoppers find what they are looking for and makes the site competitive with other much larger online clothing retailers.
Infinite Scroll – no more clicking through pages of products, once you reach the bottom of the page more products are loaded automatically.
Search Engine Optimization – Tower 61 took significant steps to strengthen Basically Me’s SEO to help grow this new online retail business.
Google Merchant / Google Ads – Basically Me products are automatically taken from the website and published on Google Merchant making the products available inside Google Ads allowing advertising campaigns to be based around products as well as keywords.
Screenshots
Shop Basically Me Retailer Locator
Basically Me product catalog, including tags and recently view products
Blog page
Shop Basically Me on Mobile
Basically Me Product Page feature quick social buttons, tags, recent products, related products, and more…
Home page with prominent social icons, large images, and featured products.
The CitizenPath Immigration Document Services concept was developed by immigration attorneys. CitizenPath makes USCIS forms easy to complete and provides the information needed to avoid common immigration pitfalls.
Tower61 was involved from the beginning and played a significant role in the design and implementation of CitizenPath. Tower61 continues to support CitizenPath providing new content, SEO optimization, performance enhancements, social media services, and online advertising guidance (Facebook and Google AdWords).
The CitizenPath website is very straight forward and is based on WordPress with a custom responsive theme. It includes many original design elements and graphics, created by Tower61, to match the overall CitizenPath brand. There are also a number of custom CSS/Javascript features including:
Social Media (Facebook, Google+, Twitter) providing ways for people to follow CitizenPath on their favorite social network
The largest part of the project was the USCIS Forms themselves. Basically there were 3 steps to implementing each form.
Read and understand the purpose of the form and design a workflow for the user to complete the form online
Implement the online form using FormAssembly. This was then embedded seamlessly into the CitizenPath website and includes support for collecting a fee from the customer.
Taking the customers online answers and using them to populate the USCIS PDF Form. Without going into all the details the solution was implemented in PHP and used the FormAssembly API to generate and XDP file (PDF content and Adobe XML Forms Architecture (XFA) resources packaged within an XML container) which can be download and opened using Adobe Acrobat Reader.
PHRF is a handicapping system that uses the perceived speed potential of a yacht as the basis for a handicap. This handicap is used to determine a winner when different types of boat to race against each other, much like a golf handicap for a group of different skilled golfers.
In essence when sailing in a PHRF race your are actually racing against the clock. In order to know if you’re winning during a race you have to know everyone else’s PHRF rating and then measure the time difference between the boats at a known distance from the start line – not an easy task. All too often sailors have to wait at the Yacht Club until the Race Committee publishes the results in order to find out who won.
Version 0.1 of PHRFulator allows you to build a table of boats with different ratings and calculate the time between them at various distances from the start line. Using this table on the race course will allow you to know which boats are supposed to be ahead of you or behind you and by how much giving you a “live” ranking.
