Summersault Blog

Sometimes I have to remind myself that just because we want to try to be all things to our clients doesn’t mean that we can be. Of course, for any given project, the conversation about what’s possible, and on what timeline, and at what cost is never a simple one. The bigger the project, the more complex that conversation becomes. It can be easy to over-promise and under-deliver if you’re not extremely careful.

Several years ago, we began using parts of the “Extreme Programming (XP)” software engineering paradigm in our development process, with the goal of improving our time estimates, better understanding what we were able to deliver to our clients and when. I’ve not found any part of XP to be more useful than the way it describes the interactions between these four variables:
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Ten reasons to work at Summersault:

1. Our mission is to build and sustain communities using the technologies of the Internet. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
2. We offer flexible scheduling, so you can arrange your work around your life, instead of arranging your life around your work.
3. We’re always working with interesting tools and technologies.
4. We pay 100% of health insurance for full-time staff and competitive premiums for spouses and dependents, including vision and dental benefits.
5. In-depth performance reviews provide you with concrete professional goals and feedback on your successes.
6. We have a volunteer and community service program that compensates you for being active in the community.
7. Our employee wellness program helps you to stay healthy.
8. We offer paid vacation time, up to four weeks per year.
9. We regularly recognize outstanding contributions that our staff make, in the office, to our clients, and out in the world.
10. We’re locally owned, and we give back to the community.

Interested? Check out our current openings.

A friend recently noted that 4 of the 5 web-based applications he uses on a regular basis to manage his life are officially still in “beta” status. While I think this has become a fairly standard practice for many web application providers, I hope it’s one that we still treat with some healthy skepticism and concern.

At Summersault, when we develop software applications, beta is certainly one of the stages that the software goes through, but it’s not a stage we would ever turn the public loose on. Generally speaking, here are the stages of our software life-cycle:
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Just today, we’ve received two reports of our clients getting mailings from organizations claiming that payment is needed in order to maintain or renew services related their hosting account or domain, and in both cases, the mailing was just a scam. These mailings often come in the format of an official order form that appears to be important and time-sensitive, and so it scares the unsuspecting domain owner into sending a check rather than risk losing their website.

We’ve written here before about the horrors of domain management on the Internet, but this is a particularly troublesome practice, and adds a whole other layer of complexity and hassle to an already difficult and complex system. In another recent case, one of our customers did have their website go offline briefly because they’d sent payment to the wrong organization and ignored the notices from the real domain authority - yikes! Here are a few tips to avoid being swindled by these notices:
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I’ve been waiting for a while now to see what Google was going to do with their acquisition of JotSpot, the collaborative wiki site that a number of non-profit organizations I’m involved in has used to organize our internal information. In my opinion, the long wait was a big risk to take on Google’s part…I used to send people to JotSpot all the time. when Google acquired it and stopped accepting new accounts, I still sent people there, saying “I’m sure it will reopen soon, it’s worth it.” Eventually I stopped sending people there at all, and encouraged them to use other tools or to go to the trouble to set up their own intranet with software like Mediawiki, the tool that powers Wikipedia.

Well, as of today, I’m pretty sure I know where to send people for creating free, powerful internal websites: Google Sites, the new incarnation of what was JotSpot.
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Creating an engaging website that keeps your users coming back over time can be an exciting challenge. One way to take on the challenge is to add a feature that encourages real-time human connection: a live chat room. Assuming that meeting in person isn’t possible or logistically easy, a chat room on your website can help bring your community of users together, allows you to be more efficient in your conversations, and creates a sense of freshness and relevance on the site itself.

This weblog entry will help you get a chat room installed on your site for free. Getting a feel for how to best manage a chat room once it is up and running…well, that’s a weblog entry for another day.

There are three main technical approaches to putting a chat room on your website:
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In a service business, it can sometimes be difficult to measure the true level of satisfaction that our clients experience. The testimonials they offer say a lot, and even after all these years its still surprising that so many of our clients consider working with us to be a relief from the norm of some poor customer relations practices in the technology industry.

Even so, it’s nice to be able to turn to cold hard numbers to see how we’re really doing, and one area where we do have those figures handy is in the customer satisfaction survey we ask every person who contacts us for technical support to fill out. Here’s what the numbers say from recent months:
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As I did with the release of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, I thought I would share a few notes about my experience in upgrading to the latest version of the Mac operating system, 10.5 “Leopard”.
If you just want to hear about all of the good stuff I’m experiencing as a result of the upgrade, you can skip to the bottom line.
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Today’s edition of the Palladium-Item has an article about the unveiling of the new website for the City of Richmond. The article has an error about the version of the website that was replaced with this exciting new launch - it does not replace a site created in 2001.

In 2003, Summersault was hired to create the new City of Richmond website and in October 2003, the new site was launched. The Palladium-Item published a story about this on October 9, 2003, with the headline “New city Web site offers cleaner look.”

In 2005, the City replaced the Summersault-built site with a completely different version created internally, and that is the version referenced in the article as not meeting the information technology needs of the City or the design and functionality expectations of users.

Given that it was fairly widespread knowledge that Summersault had created a previous version of the City website, we have asked the Palladium-Item for a correction clarifying that it was not our earlier work that was so much in need of replacement as a part of the recent effort.

Congratulations to the City on the launch of the new site, and congratulations to Programming and Micros for a job well done.

We received a bit of mail today from the organization “StoresOnline.com”, which is hosting two marketing events in Richmond, Indiana on December 11th at the Holiday Inn. Their pitch is that if you attend their 90-minute “conference” presentation about how to make money on the Internet, you’ll get a free meal, a free personal organizer, and priceless knowledge. It seems that the reality behind the free offers is a bait and switch scheme, which has been documented extensively on sites like TheRipOffReport.com. The reports include some heart-wrenching stories from people who invested quite a bit in StoresOnline.com (Aka Imergent Inc Aka Inetseminars.com) thinking they were going into a legitimate business, only to find that the promises made to them were empty ones, and that when they asked for a refund, they were referred to lawyers or not even called back at all. Yikes!

In general, even though the popular narrative about the Internet boom is that lots of people are making money overnight, remember that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and so on. Never hand over your money to anyone promising you big bucks through Internet commerce just because they’ve got a flashy presentation and give you free food. Using the technologies of the Internet to build your business takes good planning, solid partnerships, and technical expertise - there’s no substitute, and especially not in the form of a 90-minute sales pitch.