I got talking to Percy Stilwell about this (a friend and colleague) and we decided it was time the world had a better resource planning tool. So, Resource Guru was born. It’s a web app that will revolutionise the way companies schedule their resources. It will be a fast, simple way to schedule people, equipment and other resources online. Customers will pay a monthly subscription fee and there will be no long term contracts. As the clever people at 37signals say, it will be “Easy On, Easy Off”. The interface will be beautiful and we think people will love it.

The app is launching later this year but, in the meantime, you can head over to resourceguruapp.com and sign up to be the first to hear when we launch. So, what are you waiting for? You could even win an iPad 2 if you forward it on to friends or colleagues.  I’ve worked on a lot of prize draws and you’ve got seriously good odds of winning with this one :)

Going off the rails

You’re three quarters of the way through your project and the deadline is looming. You look at your project plan and your milestones and you realise that there’s no way you’re going to hit the deadline at the pace you’re going. The project is going way off track. Every project manager finds themselves in this situation at some point in their career (sometimes over and over again). Conventional wisdom says that you have the following options:

• Get agreement from the client to shift the deadline
• De-scope the project or deliver in phases
• Get the team to work longer hours (oh no, do I really have to get the whip out again?)
• Add resources and have parallel workstreams

While this last option might sound good on paper, it’s not always a good solution. Web projects are often very complex and frequently the solutions are completely bespoke for each client. This means that resources that have been working on the project for weeks often have a huge amount of intricate knowledge about the project that only exists in their heads. Sure, you can have lots of documentation but, inevitably, there are things that just don’t find their way into the documentation. And if you’re working on an Agile project, you may not have much documentation at all. This means that any new resources that you add to the project will have to go through an “on-boarding” process – getting up to speed with all the intricate details before they start work. If they don’t get up to speed first, they can end up going down the wrong path, disrupting the team and generally doing more harm than good.

Precious time

The trouble with “on-boarding” new resources is that it takes time – the very thing you’re trying to save. Not only does it take up the project manager’s time and divert him from his normal activities, it also takes time away from the other resources who have to explain all the intricacies of the project – all those things that live only in their heads.

Too many chefs

Another problem with adding additional resources is coordinating who does what. Sometimes it’s easy to divide a project into isolated tasks that can be easily distributed between resources. But sometimes this is not quite so easy. I think this is especially true when it comes to programming. It’s just not that simple to throw another programmer into a team and expect him to start making a positive difference. There is so much inter-connectivity in web development and it all needs to be very carefully coordinated with each person knowing exactly which piece of the jigsaw they are working on. Get this wrong and you can end up in one hell of a mess.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that chucking additional resources at a project never works. I’m just saying that it’s not always that simple and needs careful thought and planning. Sometimes it’s just better to get that whip out ;)

A late update

After writing this post, I came across Brooks’ Law which is apparently where the phrase “nine women can’t make a baby in one month” comes from. Strangely enough, Brooke’s Law relates directly to what I was saying and says that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”. Brooks explains that there are 2 main factors that explain this:

1. It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive. Brooks calls this the “ramp up” time (what I called “on-boarding” above).
2. Communication overheads increase as the number of people increases – which relates to my “too many chefs point”.

So, the fact that I came up with a very similar idea independently obviously proves that I’m a genius! ;)

When my brother won a photography award from Hasselblad, we wanted to put his high res photos on his site so people could see some of the stunning detail produced by the Hasselblad camera he used. We wanted similar zoom functionality to Deep Zoom but, as Mac users, we weren’t that keen on having to rely on Silverlight – a Microsoft technology. What’s more, I wasn’t sure what kind of market penetration Silverlight has and I didn’t want people having to install a plugin just to see the images.

Thankfully, there is an alternative – OpenZoom. Instead of Silverlight, OpenZoom uses Flash to achieve a very similar effect. The penetration of Flash is something like 98% which means that the majority of users won’t have to do anything to see the images. Setting up OpenZoom looked a bit complicated to me so I used something called OpenZoom Tango which works with Zoomify in Photoshop to make the whole process really easy. You can see the results here – www.marcrogoff.com/hasselblad.php.

• Fully customisable
• Unlimited number of products
• Multiple photos with ability to zoom in
• Good SEO functionality
• User friendly content management
• PayPal integration
• Discount and coupon functionality
• VAT functionality
• Order confirmations by email
• Google Analytics integration
• PHP or compatible with a PHP site

Researching the market

I looked at quite a few products including Magento, Interspire, Pinnacle Cart and Shopify before finally settling on CS-Cart. I was particularly impressed by the Ajax functionality when you add a product to the basket – a little message comes up telling you what’s been added to the basket along with options to check out or continue shopping.

Feedback when an item is added to the basket

There were a few other things like one-page checkout and a good looking admin section that helped to persuade me. A user-friendly admin section is essential if you are going to be handing the site over to a non-technical client. After all, they will have to live with it for years to come.

Customisation | the good and the bad

The installation was fairly easy and I was ready to start building a beautiful lingerie shop. The default themes were a million miles away from my signed off designs so I had a lot of work to do to get the shop looking just right. CS-Cart is based on the Smarty Template Engine which sounded easy to use (even though I didn’t know much about it). It’s always hard to tell how difficult it’s going to be to customise software like this. Ultimately, you have to just bite the bullet, buy the software and dive into the code.

Initially, I was under the impression that it would be really easy to move things around on the screen. For example, I wanted to move the shopping basket icon over to the right hand side. You would have thought this would just involve a few clicks in the admin section and a few CSS changes – WRONG! It actually involved delving into multiple .TPL Smarty template files (of which I knew virtually nothing). After a few hours and a few trips to the Smarty documentation website, I got it working. But, I have to say, it wasn’t easy and I certainly don’t think it’s an elegant system to make changes to.

CS-Cart does have quite a nice “block” system in the admin where you can drag blocks of content around and create new ones with custom content. However, if you need to make extensive changes, you will find yourself hacking around in multiple Smarty .TPL files (which is not my idea of fun).

One thing that’s quite useful while your customising the cart is a button labeled “Enable customization mode”. This turns on a set of markers in the front end which help you identify which Smarty template files relate to various parts of the interface. This helps you identify the files you need to change.

One frustrating thing was that the changes I made weren’t being reflected in the front end. It was only when I discovered that there’s a template cache that needs to be cleared that I actually saw my changes. This didn’t seem to be documented anywhere and should really appear in a big red font in the documentation to avoid major frustration and confusion.

There could be a lot more CSS classes on the HTML elements in CS-Cart. There were lots of things that I wanted to style but simply lacked a class that you could target. This was frustrating and unnecessary. It cost me quite a bit of time because I ended up having to hack around in the unfamiliar Smarty template system trying to figure out where the classes needed to be added. My advice to the CS-Cart team is stick classes on absolutely everything!

Features and functionality

Getting closer with Magic Zoom plugin

CS-Cart is a mature product with lots of great features. You clearly get the feeling that it’s been evolving over the years and a huge amount of work has gone into it. You certainly wouldn’t want to try and re-create this functionality from scratch unless you have a massive budget. A couple of features that I particularly like are “One page checkout” and “Guest checkout” (which allows people to check out without registering).

One thing that was missing for me was good image zoom functionality on product images. The functionality you get out-of-the-box is a bit clunky. Luckily there is a plugin called Magic Zoom Plus which came to the rescue.

Quirks

There were things that surprised me about the CS-Cart back end. For example, they have “global options” which you can set for product options, eg you could add one global option called “Size” for trousers and another global option called “Size” for shirts. However, the problem is that both of these options appear with the word “Size” in the back end which means content managers won’t know which one is for trousers and which one is for shirts. There were a couple of minor issues like this that surprised me seeing as it’s such a mature product.

Documentation and support

The CS-Cart support was really good. You get 30 days of free support and then you have to pay a fairly small monthly fee to keep it going. I found them to be really helpful and prompt with their replies. There’s no way I could have completed the customisation without their help.

CS-Cart also offer a custom development service which seemed to be reasonably priced when I got a quote for something. It’s good to know that you can fall back on this if you get really stuck.

Documentation was also pretty good and they have a good forum where you will find lots of answers.

Good software but . . .

My experience with CS-Cart wasn’t too bad. There were times when I wondered if I’d made the right decision but, in the end, it worked out pretty well and we got loads of great features at a very reasonable price. However, I did rely heavily on their support.

Will I use it again the next time I need a shopping cart? Well, I can’t help feeling that there’s something better out there – something easier to customise, something more elegant in its construction. I really don’t like Smarty Templates – probably because I haven’t read their documentation. Then again, I don’t want to read their documentation – ideally I would just like to be able to customise it with my existing knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP.

I thought long and hard about what to use as a platform for the site and, after lots of research, I chose WordPress. It’s got great SEO (search engine optimisation) credentials, is ultra-simple to set up, is free and has a huge ecosystem. By that I mean loads of developers doing interesting things with it including building useful plugins and  add ons.

Getting up and running quickly was important to me and one of the great things about WordPress is the themes you can install. These will give your site an instant look and feel and there are some really great ones out there. I found a theme on Themeforest called Synthetik which I used as the basis for the site. I’ve had to hack it around a bit but it got me up and running very quickly.

Anyway, feel free to grab my RSS feed and watch this space for news and info from yours truly :)

As you might have guessed, the site helps people organise hen and stag weekends. It’s packed with advice on where to go and what to do. There’s an extensive destination guide so if you don’t know where Riga is or what there is to do in Tallinn then head on over to the site and get the lowdown.

One of the main aims is to help people whether they want to go through an organiser or just do things themselves. For those who want to do it themselves, there’s a huge directory featuring thousands of suppliers. Whether they’re looking for a surfing company in Cornwall or a pole dancing class in Bristol, they’ll find it there.

The site has seen steady growth over the last few years and is now getting over 300,000 unique visitors per year. We have a very long to do list and we’re hoping to take the site to another level in the very near future.

In the meantime, if you have a stag or hen weekend to organise, please go and take a look.

Old Fred & Ginger Site

The new site featured a slideshow of full screen photos on the homepage (taken by my brother Marc Rogoff). The large photos gave visitors an instant impression of what Fred & Ginger is all about. These could be changed whenever a new range is launched which helped to keep the site looking fresh. There were also three promo boxes which could be used for different promotions and messages. The site has now been taken over by other developers and I no longer have anything to do with the current design.

Content management was important so the site was built using WordPress. It was a heavily customised version of the Sandbox theme – my favourite starting point for custom WordPress sites.

Users could sign up to the Fred & Ginger newsletter and this feeds straight into the Campaign Monitor subscriber system. Campaign Monitor is one of the best email marketing systems I have ever come across.

The shop was powered by a customised version of CS-Cart which is a very mature piece of software that has been evolving since around 2004. It’s extremely feature-rich and I especially like the functionality when you add an item to the cart – the visual feedback is good and allows you to go straight to the checkout or carry on shopping. The off-the-shelf version needed a huge amount of changes to get the look and feel just right.

Fred & Ginger shop with “added to bag” message

Country Selection Page

As Senior Producer, I was responsible for development and delivery of the website. This project involved a number of challenges including the following:

• Language – the site needed to be delivered in Spanish, so much of the content was produced in English first and then translated. The timing of translation and development was therefore carefully coordinated. As with all foreign language websites produced by English speakers, this process is further complicated by graphical assets containing the target language.
• Localisation – each country needed a slightly different version of the website to accommodate local content. This added to the overall complexity of the website.
• 3rd parties – the development was a collaborative effort and responsibilities broke down as follows:
  • The Edge – responsible for overall project management, creative vision, creative assets, documentation, content, testing, event production, artists liaison etc
  • Accenture – programming and hosting
  • Wunderman – local agency in Latin America responsible for translating and localising content, content population, competition management and email deployment
  • Global Vision – South African company responsible for Diageo database development and data management
  • Diageo – clients including Diageo project manager
• Diageo guidelines – Diageo has extensive digital guidelines and processes which have to be complied with. This complicates the project and extends the timeline.

As the project manager, my responsibilities included:

• Budget forecasting and management
• Project scoping, planning and specification
• Scheduling and timeline management
• Creation and approval of project documentation, eg technical specs, sitemaps, wireframes, copy decks etc
• Information architecture (in this case I acted as the IA)
• Resource planning and coordination – developers, designers, copywriters, freelances etc
• Brainstorm and creative process management
• Client liaison and expectation management
• Change and risk management
• Management of third party relationships

Product Page

Elton John Photos Page

As Internet usage increases among Nescafé’s target audience, the Web is becoming an increasingly important communications channel for the brand. The new website therefore needed to be more engaging for consumers and support brand campaigns in 2007. The creative concept needed to support the brand statement ‘Nescafé It’s All About You’. To achieve this, new content was created over and above product and promotion information. A creative concept had already been developed based on moods. The idea was that the site would reflect and accentuate the mood you’re in.

As the project manager, my responsibilities included:

• Project planning and specification
• Information architecture and project documentation
• Resource planning and coordination – developers, designers, copywriters, freelances etc
• Managing brainstorms and creative processes
• Setup and management of video/photo shoot including brief
• Liaising with clients and managing expectations
• Sourcing and managing third party relationships
• Timeline and budget management
• Change and risk management

The site was already in production when I was recruited as the Project Manager. My role included the day to day management of numerous production tasks including the development of a bespoke CMS to manage the high volume of content. I was also responsible for briefing and managing a third party supplier to carry out extensive functionality testing.

Intune Motor Section

As the project manager, my responsibilities included:

• Day to day management
• Resource planning and coordination – developers, designers, copywriters, freelances etc
• Liaising with account team and managing expectations
• Managing third party relationships
• Timeline and budget management
• Change and risk management