Search Results for "technology"

Junior Developer

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WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

We’re looking for a full-time junior developer to join our team to create effective solutions for issues our customers face. We’ll build engaging websites, help our customers improve workflows, join their systems together, and apply your creative coding skills to build plugins that fulfill specific needs for e-commerce, learning, and project management. Your goal will be to provide customers with tools they love, support our community, and have an amazing work-life experience.

You will love this job if:

  • You are a developer that enjoys creating meaningful solutions
  • You enjoy working remotely, whether from home or your local hangout. 
  • You have an inclusive outlook and value your peers
  • You value free time and freedom away from work for family, friends, and personal life.
  • You work well with others in collaborative environments.
  • You are self-driven, motivated, and love making life easier for people through your work

Job perks and benefits:

We promote personal and professional growth. We are committed to our team’s future, freedom, and time.

As a junior developer and an employee of Real Big Marketing, you will be guaranteed the following benefits:

  • A minimum starting salary of $43,000 USD plus all benefits below
  • 401K with a 3% employer match 
  • Access to learning material, including books and education sites for professional improvement.
  • Free licenses to all of our products.
  • An equipment and technology allowance to ensure you have the tools you need to do well at your job.
  • A dedicated mentor and training to help you learn and grow at Real Big Marketing.
  • Unlimited and fully paid sick and bereavement leave.
  • Unplugged bonus of $250 for taking a week off of work and fully disconnecting.
  • Flexible vacation with fully paid and required time-off minimums.
  • Annual travel budget for conferences, co-working, and other work trips.

Our values and commitments

We are a small team and a 100% bootstrapped company that has grown carefully and gradually over the last ten years. We have done that by being committed to our values and our people.

We are committed to equal pay and we value transparency. We value the time of our people and we believe in setting realistic expectations. We know that families always come first, and we prioritize diversity and inclusion.

What you will do:

You will work alongside our existing development, product, and support teams with a dedicated mentor. Your primary responsibility will be to coordinate support requests and to work as a member of our development team to build features and tackle bug reports for our products, including:

  • Work with clients to troubleshoot issues
  • Handle and resolve bug reports on GitHub
  • Develop features and enhancements for products
  • Create templates and themes and workflows
  • Test Pull Requests and Alpha/Beta versions of software via GitHub from team members and 3rd party developers
  • Work in PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and potentially other languages
  • Communicate with the team on challenges, bugs, and features to help fulfill customer expectations
  • Write and update user-facing documentation

What you will need:

  • A penchant for helping people
  • Intermediate skills in: PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, WordPress, HTML, CSS.
  • A code portfolio. Link us to your GitHub account, upload a .zip, or both.
  • Proficiency with Git and GitHub.
  • Ability to set up a local environment for testing PHP code.
  • Excellent communication skills with written English.
  • Ability to work remotely with all the necessary tools (internet connection, etc).

An average day at Real Big Marketing:

It doesn’t have to be crazy at work. We strive to embrace a core ethos of calmness. To set the stage, here’s what an average day at Real Big Marketing can look like:

  • Start your workday at a consistent time. 
  • Say hi to your colleagues in Slack when you start your workday.
  • Review tickets that may need your attention.
  • Share your playlist at The WaterCooler
  • Dive into your favorite IDE and a local instance of WordPress to make progress on some assigned GitHub issues.
  • Join a colleague or two online for a brainstorming or mentoring session.
  • Share your ideas on GitHub issue threads.
  • Share a picture of your pet in Slack whenever you feel like it.
  • Take breaks for meals, exercise, reading, etc.

If you would like to work at Real Big Marketing and wish to apply for this position, submit an application

Lowry Solutions

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Lowry Solutions

Decades of Innovation

Since 1974 Lowry Solutions has implemented technology innovations nationwide with over 10,000 customers. Lowry is the premier AIDC system integrator and provider of simplified traceability solutions.

Problems Solved

Robust Cross-site Search

We developed a custom website for Lowry Solutions that showcases their services and their catalog of over 82,000 items. We also implemented a custom, cross-site search using Algolia that brings together relevant results from both a .net subdomain site and the primary WordPress site. This improved user experience has generated a significant boost in conversion.

View This Project!

Pricing

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Pricing web projects is challenging. There are so many variables, technology is always changing and every client’s needs are unique. Because of this, every project we undertake requires initial investigation. We will look and listen very closely to get a clear understanding of where every client has been, where they are and where they want to go. In the end, we will be able to provide a clear recommendation which we believe will address the issues at hand in the most appropriate and realistic way possible.

This is why we don’t have anything on our site which can answer the question “How much will my project cost?”. Every situation is so different that we have to discuss everything in detail. If we don’t, it is likely that we will not deliver in the end an optimal solution to the problems we need to solve.

However, for those who are really interested in getting a better sense of what they should expect in terms of cost when working with an agency like Real Big Marketing, we’ve put together the following information. It is important first to note though that this information is simply a guide and not an estimate.

Project Pricing Guide

Less than $1,000

This is a modest budget but we can still work together. You can expect us to provide basic consulting and even some basic project discovery to help ensure you make informed decisions and avoid costly mistakes.

If you’d simply like some advice, feel free to schedule a call so we can learn more about what you need help with and truly add value.

$1,000 to $5,000

This budget range is great for things like extensive consulting, detailed discovery phases and very small projects. These projects can include things like basic programming tasks, design phases, code reviews and migrations.

$5,000 to $10,000

With a budget over $5k, you can expect us to be able to help you with some full projects that have a limited scope such as the development of a basic website or sometimes a new robust feature to add to an existing website.

$10,000 to $20,000

In this budget range, we are able to take on fairly sophisticated, complete projects. You can expect us to create a robust website complete with some unique features.

$20,000 to $50,000

You can expect in this budget range to work with us on a complex, custom project which could span multiple phases. Large websites with unique feature requirements, many users and a high volume of content will typically fall within this range.

$50,000+

For budgets in the high five figure range you can expect to engage us for multiple large projects. It is likely that we will be working together in an ongoing capacity and will be helping you develop robust solutions which set you apart as a leader in your industry.

Billing

Payment methods

When payment is due, we will email an invoice to the assigned billing department. We prefer payment by check but in some cases will accept payment by credit card.

Payment Schedule

For most projects, we will invoice multiple times. For short projects, we will schedule a payment to start and another payment upon completion. For projects that last several months, typically we will schedule payments for each month. These payments are also usually timed with the completion of project deliverables.

www.jccmi.edu

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Thank you for requesting an analysis of jccmi.edu. We’ve completed our hands on review and here are all the problems, issues and opportunities that we found. Technical analysis was completed with several tools including those available through pingdom.com, yslow.org, and builtwith.com. Interpretation of that data along with a comparison of the current site design to commonly accepted best practices was completed by Steve Bennett, Kyle Maurer and Joel Worsham.

Site Performance

A fast loading site is extremely important. Site visitors and search engines expect sites to load quickly and to be able to navigate to subsequent pages without unnecessary wait times. It has been proven that visitors to sites will visit more pages, interact with more features and even purchase more products on faster sites. In addition, many search engines including Google tend to rank faster loading sites higher in their search results.

The jccmi.edu website is not experiencing debilitating load time issues but there is significant room for improvement. After all, a site can’t possibly be too fast.

Site Speed for jccmi.edu
Site Speed for jccmi.edu

We tested the site for speed on Friday and today. Your website’s load time was between 5.39 and 1.98 seconds and its Pingdom score, a third party testing service, ranked your site 69 out of 100. In English, these numbers tell us that you pages load slowly, sometimes very slow.

To facilitate better load times, we would recommend first implementing multiple levels of caching, reducing the number of images and replacing them with sprites and css elements, using a content delivery network or CDN to transmit images, along with minifying and concatenating scripts and stylesheets to compress data transmission across the web.

Caching data would also reduce the likelihood of occurrences such as this which we encountered several times while viewing the jccmi.edu home page:

broken-home-page-info

 

As you can see in this screenshot, the data for the home page’s news and events is being dynamically generated on each page load. This results in some cases where the raw code is output to the screen briefly and then replaced with the correct data and is due to the way the data is being generated and the fact that it is not “cached”. On several visits to your home page, the correct data did not appear until more than ten seconds after the rest of the page had loaded leaving us with what you see above.

Modifying how this data is generated would address this issue but the most appropriate course of action would be to implement several layers of caching so that the data is not being dynamically generated for every single page load. If you have questions about this, please consult your webmaster and/or get in touch with us.

Further reading:

User Experience (UX)

Website Slider Usage

Perhaps one of the most interesting design elements our customers ask for is a slider. It’s widely perceived as a tool that enhances the experience of the site visitor, allowing for the delivery of significant amounts of information in a very valuable space, right above the fold. What we’ve learned, and what has been proven though multiple studies, is the exact opposite. Sliders hinder usability and diminish return on investment. There are very few use cases where a quality designer would recommend their use.

Typically it comes down to the following; too many calls to action, too many ideas, too many elements, all in one space. The human mind is incapable of using this information effectively and moves on to the static elements. This doesn’t mean that a graphic can’t be prime design element which enhances the call to action. It does mean that scrolling/sliding elements are not useful in achieving the goal.

Further reading:

(Disclaimer, we did not title these articles.)

Text embedded in images

Years ago we used tools like Photoshop to present artistically styled, aesthetically appealing text on web pages.  It was standard practice to create and present images containing text on a site. Today, advancements in website creation tools and web browsers provide more effective options. Now text can be placed on web pages and then styled to present the same visual end product but without requiring the use of images.

JCC Image Text
Text in images can now be made user definable via the content management system. CSS can then be implemented to standardize design of the element. This makes the copy searchable and indexable.

 

Here are a few reasons why it is NEVER a good idea to embed text inside images:

  • Text inside images cannot be read by search engines and as a result, no SEO value is added to the page
  • Images slow down the loading of your site
  • People with disabilities using devices such as screen readers will not be able to read the text
  • Visitors on slow connections may be unable to load the images or may simply not see them due to their slower loading times
  • Text inside images cannot be auto-translated for visitors wishing to view the page in another language
  • Text inside images cannot be scaled and re-sized appropriately based on a user’s screen size which means many visitors will struggle to read the text
  • Updating the text in images requires editing the original image file, uploading it to the site and replacing an existing one which is considerably more maintenance work than just changing the text on the page
  • Users who increase or decrease the zoom on their browser will see a reduction in quality and readability of the text inside images
  • Maintaining aesthetic continuity across the site is more difficult when using images where the colors and fonts cannot be easily modified or inherit the styling of the rest of the site
    Users cannot select, copy and paste text that is embedded in images

On the jccmi.edu site, text can be found embedded in images in numerous places. This is an important issue and should be corrected.

Further reading:

Mobile and Handheld

One area we found intriguing was a minimal effort exerted to make the site useful to End Users on handheld devices. It was intriguing because we see a trend indicating that over 50% of users are on hand held devices.

Making the jccmi.edu domain present differently to different screen sizes is referred to as responsive design. Responsive design has become the standard for providing one website on multiple plaftorms or devices instead of using a separate mobile site. Making sizes and shapes adjust to fit a device is powerful, but it’s not enough to simply change the way things look. It’s also prudent to understand what choices, data, and/or information are made available to each type of device. Successfully pairing these two sets of changes will provide the College and the End User with a more valuable interaction.

JCC-Site-on-5inch-screen
jccmi.edu presented as in a 5″ screen.

This is a critical change which should be addressed to improve satisfaction levels for both internal and external customers of the college.

Further reading:

Accessibility

We ran the site with a screen reader active. The results were intriguing. The reader caught the name of the site and began to work through the header, but stopped working in the side navigation and body information. Accessibility has become a hot button and one that deserves attention. Here are some supporting articles for further thought:

Conclusion

Your website is rich in content, but is not responsive to screen sizes. It would enhance the site visitor’s experience to determine what should be presented and how it should look on mobile/hand held devices.  

On desktop machines, the site is relatively easy to navigate. However, there are numerous opportunities to improve and a few issues that should be addressed in the short term. 

The site is built on ASP.net. WordPress has come leaps and bounds in the past 5 years. Organizations such as Spring Arbor University have migrated completely to this platform and enjoy a great deal of flexibility, not just in pricing, but also in the ability to create and manage content at the departmental and staff levels.  

We’d love to discuss these and other topics relating to your site in greater detail with you. If you would like to have a conversation with us to clarify what we’ve outlined above and elaborate further so that you can take action, please don’t hesitate to call or email us:

Phone: (517) 414-2003

Email: kyle@realbigmarketing.com

What Data Should You Ask For on a Landing Page Designed for Seniors

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Senior Citizen working on the internet
Photo courtesy Elvis Pelt

We are planning an upcoming CPG promotion and determining what data is need to move forward with inbound marketing as one component of an integrated strategy. Success means motivating parents and grand parents to buy a retail item, especially online; an item designed to help children grow.

A segment of our target audience contains senior citizens, who are not as well represented online. We’re buying lists for direct marketing. Those are easy to use and packed with data. However, our desire to have clients purchase online is dynamically opposed to their desire to be there.

As of 2013 The Pew Research Internet Project states that even though Seniors continue to deepen their use of the internet, nearly a third do not use it at all.

We’re aware that this group will require alternative means of order placement, and those channels exist. This discussion is in regard to optimization the conversion rate for seniors that do visit the site.

How much do I need to know about my customers?

“Everything” is a cumbersome, clunky response that’s ill conceived especially with this demographic. Many media articles would have you believe that big data is the only way to unlock success. Consider these four points:

  1. Mental Models and age groups
  2. Protection of consumer data
  3. Friction to completion
  4. Testing means change

Make it familiar

User experience (UX) engineers rely on what are called mental models or intuition of how something works based on previous experiences. Hypothetically this is why your grandparents can use a complex object like a car or a microwave but have a lower representation on the internet. Their mental model of a remote control is extensive and familiar whereas their comprehension of the internet is less robust.

Consumers have their guard up for good reason.

The same media outlets telling you that data is useful are the same media outlets warning consumers about the nefarious reasons data is collected and evil corporate intentions. With good reason. Spam and exploitation are two of the biggest consumer fears coming from black hat marketing. These are people who either believe their tactics are perfectly ethical, even though they’re not; or worse, they know they are horrible and do it on purpose.

Keep it simple

There’s also a school of thought among marketers about friction. Basically, that adding questions or complexity to a workflow also ads friction toward completion. More questions therefore equals fewer respondents.

Narrow it down

There are a million data points you could request: name, email, address, children’s names, etc. Narrow it down to optimize the response rate. Segregate your data into groups; required, useful, and extra. The only required field to communicate for inbound portion of this campaign was the purchasers email address. Personalization of the message could come from first and last name, so they were useful. Everything else, like physical location and other demographic data could come later so it’s extra.

Always Be Testing

There is middle ground. By clearly defining the data needed versus the data that’s wanted you’ll quickly identify the items To test on the form. For our example we’ll start with Email address required and the first and last names will be available to fill out but not required. The form gathers the necessary information but is simple enough to remove friction. From there we’ll begin split A/B testing to produce the highest conversion rate.

Marketers are testing and pushing against the hypothesis that seniors prefer not to go online. Our team believes that there are tools we can use to overcome the obstacles. Moving mature clientele online is just the first hurdle. Once there, It’s our responsibility to bolster response by; making the workflow familiar to other situations where they have ordered products, protecting their data and demonstrating that trust both visually and in our actions, keeping the workflow simple, asking for little more than what’s required, and continuously testing.