So I’ve taken on a challenge that must be executed to exact precision. Designing a coupon system for the Drupal E-Commerce CMS. Why? Because I’ve found the stock contributed module for Drupal which does coupons is poor.

Not to take anything away from the tremendous effort to design a free module, but the design doesn’t fit a real e-commerce solution. The coupon system is limited to single custom coupons without any concept of “promotional codes.” This limits the usefulness to handing out coupons when we want a customer to buy from us and only want them to receive a discount, in-store credit for video game trade-ins and a few other limited areas.

A real coupon system needs to have promotional code support along with the ability to add custom code names (i.e. “MAY07SALE”) or a partnership with another company whom you wish to use their name (i.e. GoDaddy’s “digg” promocode for diggnation). The coupon system lacks expirations dates– they last forever, not really great for promotions. Lastly, a coupon must be able to work on one or more products but not your entire inventory. For example, “10% off copies of Need for Speed Carbon this week.”

(more…)

So yesterday we were on digg for our recent launch of client site SimplyFired.com. Obviously we are really proud of the work we did for them and don’t mind the attention, but what is with the Digg user base? Don’t get me wrong, it is nice to see that some people actually read our little article and hopefully other small design and development firms can take something away from it, but the vast majority of comments seem to be from people that don’t even click over to read.

I suppose this is all due to use of social voting that was implemented into the site via Pligg, but that is only a small part of the site as a whole. What about the design, the blog, the implementation of code and project management? In reality, that was the point of article which apparently went unnoticed. I also wonder how much of a fuss would have been thrown if users had no idea it was pligg. I suspect there still would have been some groans, but nothing to the degree of some users we saw.

(more…)

So today the Media Crumb team, with the help of Simply Hired’s Ops team, launched Simply Fired.com into the wide open space of the web. It was a two month long process for MC and something we really enjoyed working on. It is not often that a design & development firm can say they have worked for truly helpful and forward thinking clients such as Simply Hired so we thought it would a perfect case study for the new MC site and blog. So if you ever wanted to know what is takes a small company like ours to build a “web 2.0″ (what ever that means) type site, check out or little case study of Simply Fired.

(more…)

Wow, after only 2 years the site is about to hit 9,000 registered members! This is quite a feat considering the specific niche that 2old2play services. We are so happy to see that everyone still enjoys one of my own personal favorite places on the net. In the near future we have some plans that will both shock and surprise you, so I cant wait to push them out ASAP. Anyway, thanks to all the people that work on 2o2p. Without the mods, staff, and most importantly the members, the site would simply not exist. Here’s to another 9,000 more!