Website Updates 2-17-09

Based on the feedback that everyone has sent in and the analytics we have gathered so far on our site, we've made the first round improvements to Dreamsocket.com. In short, we have added media framework demos, live support chat, code highlighting, and extra company info.

Media Framework Demos

Interactive examples of our media framework rose to the top in terms of most requested features. Not only did we get a lot of inquiries about it, but the site logs also showed a high percentage of users were clicking our in action section within the Media Framework product section. The section previously only showed projects where we had used the product. However, we felt safe in assuming that due to the large amount of inquiries on viewing examples users were expecting to see examples here. To address this, we broke our "in action" section into two subsections: examples and solutions. The new example section houses a visual demo of the main MediaDisplay component along with its source code. All we did was pull one of the tests included on the framework and put it live on the site. Not only can you interact with the example and view its source to see how our framework works, but you get a first hand look at what the examples included in the product look like. This section will definitely grow in the future as we add more examples to the site.

Code Highlighting

Since we are posting code all over our site it only made sense to integrate a module make our posted code look pretty. After some short research, we opted to integrate the Geshi syntax highlighter into our system. It is actually the same module that I use for my wordpress blog, so they have different flavors of it if you are interested in using it yourself.

// align the stage to the top left of the flash movie and do not scale it
this.stage.align = "TL";
this.stage.scaleMode = "noScale";

Live Support Chat

We added two new ways to contact us for those looking to have real time communication. In our store front we added a live support chat widget. It is a simple flash widget from Digsby that lets you hold a chat session with one of us directly on the page. Second, we created an AIM IM account (dreamsocket) which is a floating account that any of us here can use.

I think it goes without saying that when people are buying or interacting with something you have built they will have questions. They could do this asynchronously by asking questions via a contact form or making a forum post, but it lacks instant answers. Personally, I felt really strongly about creating a way for us to have real time communication with our customers. It allows us to provide answers to question prior to purchase or just get feedback from people in general. That type of interaction can really help make us a better company and give us the info to build better products.

More Company Info

In our company page we added links to our company and personal social networks. You can find our YouTube link and my blog, LinkedIn, and Twitter info. We have a FaceBook site and others in the work which I'll post more about later.

Future

We have a lot of great ideas here for other enhancements and would love to hear ideas from all of you. Hopefully together we can really make our site a helpful resource :)