Summersault Blog

Richmond, IN – Summersault co-founder Mark Stosberg announced today that the new maps of bicycle routes in Richmond are available. The maps were created by Stosberg and others as a guide to bike commuting and safety in the Richmond area, and sponsored in part by Summersault.

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RICHMOND, IN — Summersault is pleased to be a sponsor for the recent March for Babies walk in Richmond. Summersault sponsored the Early Learning & Family Literacy Center team, coordinated by Emily Christian, wife of Summersault developer Matt Christian.

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RICHMOND, IN – Summersault, a leader in database driven website solutions based here, marks its 10th anniversary on Aug. 15 with a $10,000 donation to support technology education and sustainable business practices.

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RICHMOND, IN – Richmond is putting in a bid to host a 2008 Presidential Debate or Vice-Presidential Debate, and Summersault is doing its part to help. Summersault co-founder and Principal Chris Hardie was asked to serve on the Debate Bid Steering Committee, consulting on issues of infrastructure and facilities needed to host the events. Summersault is also working closely with the Economic Development Corporation of Wayne County to evaluate ways to use the technologies of the Internet to win the debate bid and showcase our community.

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Why should you sign a contract with your web developer before they begin work on developing your web site? In a world where expectations are often fluid, it’s a simple way to prevent misunderstandings. Contracts protect both you and the developer by stating, succinctly and clearly, what work will be performed.

In his article “Web Design Contracts: Why Bother”, Nick Gould expands upon six items that should be detailed in that contract. Those include:

• an overview of the services that will be provided,
• a process description of those services,
• deliverables,
• ownership,
• pricing
• payment terms

It’s best for both parties if everyone is clear about what is and what is not included in the proposal. If you don’t understand something in the contract - ask!

RICHMOND, IN — Local website developer Becky McKimmy has joined Summersault’s staff as its new graphic designer and developer. McKimmy brings a wealth of knowledge and experience about design principles, site implementation processes, and effective communications to the Summersault team.

“I am very excited about working for Summersault. Their commitment to sustaining local communities through technology is outstanding,” said McKimmy. “I am delighted to lend my skills as a web developer to their already talented team.” Read the rest of this entry »

Writer and prolific blogger Dave Pollard has a post up about when not to use e-mail, in response to people asking him how to reduce inappropriate use of e-mail in their organizations. I don’t agree with all of his rules (for example, I think it’s fine to send a group of people a link to a document/policy/site update instead of waiting for them to be notified via RSS or regular browsing), but find Dave’s points useful to consider.

What do you think?

Today, the Palladium-Item published Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter’s recently released “safe online shopping tips.” I thought I would comment and expand on these tips, especially as they relate to Summersault’s experiences with online commerce.
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When Summersault first started out, one of our goals was to try to help not-for-profit organizations take advantage of the technologies of the Internet when they might not otherwise be able to do so. Of course, we were thinking about all of the cool things we could do for them on their sites to help level the playing field and get their image and message out to the wider world…we weren’t always thinking about the fact that this goal doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a good business model for a tech startup. Many of the groups we wanted to help didn’t have the budget for even the simplest web presence, and on the other hand, there were a good number of non-profits out there with plenty of funds but with technical problems we had no interest in working on solving.
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It’s a pretty common problem: you have an image on your website that’s attractive or useful to someone else - a logo, a photo, a cool piece of art. They build a web page hosted somewhere out there that makes a reference to your image. Now every time a user visits that person’s site, the user’s web browser loads up the image from your site, using up your bandwidth and, in many cases, displaying it for purposes you hadn’t really intended - sometimes called “hotlinking”. The other day I found someone who was using a 6MB image from my personal site as a background image for theirs - and they were apparently pretty popular, so it created a lot of large requests on our webserver. Recently one of our hosting clients and longtime friend of Summersault, Justin Simoni, was having this happen so much that he was regularly exceeding his bandwidth quota and incurring all sorts of hassle. So, we tackled the problem head-on, and even though there are lots of references around the net on how to limit this problem, none quite seemed to document the particular method we used. I’ll do that here in case anyone else finds it useful.
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