October
11
Some of you may know that I run a Chinese takeaway and delivery shop in Lancaster, UK with my partner and her brother. My role is strictly ‘front-of-house’, customer service, chief geekster and go-and-get-stuff-from-Preston’er (among other things like doing the weekly books and tracking the cost of goods sold etc)
I can’t for the life of me go in the kitchen where it’s all fire and wok but, I can do all the other great things like come up with great marketing ideas, develop online solutions for advertising, answer the phone and understand the myriad of different accents you get when you run a delivery orientated business in a two University town.
Pretty Vs Useful
One of the things that was inevitable for me to do was, The Website.
Now, I class myself as a developer not a designer. The difference? read more… »
Blog Tools, Business Software, Wordpress, ecommerce
chinese delivery fired wok marketing modification order online restaurant takeaway template web design
April
22
I had reason to call the people at TomTom today to ask why they didn’t have the facility for businesses to add their details to the TomTom POI database. I can navigate to a POI on route with my tomtom 910 and it has all macdonalds restaurants already included out of the box so it seemed reasonable to assume that there was a mechanism in place for people to submit their business details to TomTom so it would be included in everyone’s TomTom software (when it gets updated).
The guy at TomTom said it was a good idea and will pass it on to the marketing department. I know that there are 3rd party POI lists out there but you need to actually download and install them yourself but I think that it would a good (and maybe profitable) thing for TomTom to have a constantly updating business POI list for restaurants, hotels and bars etc that are included in all new products and updates.
related: tomtom POI for speedcameras
Business Software
poi tomtom
January
23
If you’re ever in need of a quick and professional 3d object design, you should definitely check out Milan Antovics’ portfolio.
This guy made me a logo to my exact specifications within hours of me asking, all the way through the process he sent me updates (usually within a couple of minutes of providing details) and was able to send me every kind of format of picture that I could want.
Here’s the final design.
Awesome! You can see more examples of Milans 3d work at his 3D Portfolio Site and in most cases, you should be able to get a completed project done for less than 100 USD! how’s that for value?!
I got in contact with Milan initially through GetaFreelancer.
I have used GAF before and I have found it to be very easy to post a project, within minutes of being posted there were quite a few responses and bids from prospective freelancers. You have your own private message board so you can stay in touch with each freelancer.
When you have someone you want to do the work, you put the fee into escrow ready to release when the project is finished.
Easy peasy freelancing!
Business Software, Reviews
design freelance logo outsourcing
October
25
Here’s a great way to add a shopping cart to your Wordpress blog so you can sell products directly from your site without the user having to go to an external site. If you offer products for sale on your blog, it’s much nicer for your customers to stay on the same site that they see the products on.
This plugin is simple and powerful, it uses AJAX for some parts of it and it seems to work just dandily on the blog I have installed it on. Here’s how you do it…
[expert instructions]
Download plugin, upload to plugins directory, activate it.
Visit the ecommerce tab and set options for country and currency, edit categories, edit checkout options, edit gateway options, add products.
sell!
[/ expert instructions]
[Hand hold instructions]
First, get yourself a copy of the WP Shopping Cart plugin and upload it to your plugins directory, go to you plugins page and activate it :
read more… »
Business Software, Making / Made Money, ecommerce
ajax ecommerce shopping cart tutorial
October
2
Here’s a handy little formula to add up a column or row of figures and only show the result if it’s a non-zero.
[html]=IF(SUM(D4:E4)>=1,SUM(D4:E4),”")[/html]
I find it hard to pick out positive numbers in a whole list of values if there are a lot of zero numbers. Look at the two following examples..
if there are a whole lot of numbers in use like when you’re looking at a stock list that goes on for pages and you’re looking for what is left amongst a lot of zero quantity items, it’s really easy to miss the numbers. But, by using the IF function of Excel you can test the normal formula and only output a result for whatever value you want. ie.
[html]=IF(logical test,if true,if not true)[/html]
the example below uses this
Business Software, Code
conditional Excel formula if
September
5
Here’s a cool little thing to represent values as a simple bar graph without having to go to the trouble of using Excel’s graph function, it really helps to give you a good quick reference on the values.
It’s simply a case of using the formula command “=REPT(“|”,F4)”.
=REPT is the command, the next option is what to display and next is the cell that you wish to represent. All REPT does is REPEAT a given character as many times as the value of the cell specified.
Very useful!
Business Software
