There are many benefits to having a ‘Live Chat’ option available to your clients. First and foremost, it allows them to contact one of your representatives quickly, and with little effort. If no representatives are available (lets say it’s the middle of the night), then they have the option of leaving a message (which is then e-mailed to an address of your choosing).

Aside from the initial cost of setting up the ‘Live Chat’, there are very little, if any, maintenance costs. At Storm Code, our ‘Live Chat’ setup allows you to manage the Online Support you provide to your customers from any computer. You don’t need to outsource your technical support. You can run it easily from within your office.

In times of economic trouble such as this, it’s important to keep costs low. Take for example phone support. Not only does it tie up a phone line, but the person who is giving the support is pretty much incapacitated. They have to give their full and undivided attention to the person they are speaking with. With online chat support that is not the case. Computer users are used to multitasking and switching between several chat windows and e-mails. A user giving ‘Live Chat’ support can handle multiple chats at the same time, there-by increasing the amount of support available.

Demonstrations of the ‘Live Chat’ are available. Feel free to e-mail us with any questions, or if you would like a demonstration.

MySQL was first released in 1995 and has since become one of the dominant web based database management systems (DMBS). PHP, Ruby on Rails, and ASP all support MySQL. Wikipedia runs on the MediaWiki software which is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database. MySQL is used for running many of the popular content management systems such as Joomla!, WordPress, and Drupal. For more information on MySQL history and documentation please visit Wikipedia

A database is integral for creating a dynamic website. Having a database supporting your website allows you to have features and functionality like user registration, blogs, statistics, content management, photo galleries, video galleries, searchable content, product tracking, e-commerce, and much more.

These days most web hosting providers (including Storm Code) offer MySQL as a standard feature of your web hosting package. Some providers offer unlimited MySQL databases, while others limit the number or size of the databases.

Creating a database is as simple as clicking a few buttons. The simplicity ends at that point though and the real work begins. Modeling out the Information Architecture of the Database takes both time and knowledge. A database must be normalized to prevent logical or structural problems, and normalization must be taken into account during the modeling phase of the database design. Normalization can be very tricky for an inexperienced designer and can cause severe problems and limitations in the future if not done correctly. For more information on Database Normalization read up at Wikipedia.

At Storm Code we have a team of experienced designers that understand the pitfalls and production delays caused by bad database design and we know how to avoid them. We have experience designing databases in many areas including but not limited to Real Esate and Automotive sales. If you are interested in speaking with one of our Project Managers about your existing database or a new project please refer to our Contact page.

Two examples of websites that rely heavily on AJAX are Google’s Gmail (www.gmail.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com). Without AJAX, it wouldn’t be possible for Gmail to update your inbox at the rate it does and Facebook wouldn’t be able to list completions to your friend search before you hit search.

Not only does AJAX allow you to create more dynamic pages, but it saves on load time. Instead of sending a request to the web server and then displaying the page the server returns, AJAX allows you to make small requests from the web server and then use Javascript to display that information on the page without having to reload it.

Load time isn’t the only thing you save by not having to reload the entire page every time a users wants to interact, it also saves you bandwidth. If your website was created with AJAX in mind the reduction in bandwidth usage compared to the same site without AJAX support would be significant. There are no figures to offer on actual bandwidth saved as every website is different. However, if a web page that is five kilobytes is reloading itself every time a user has to send one kilobyte of information, and the page that is reloaded is the same with the addition of just a success or failure message based on the users input, you would be saving four kilobytes of bandwidth every single time a user enters said information. If you have a thousand users that all use that page a single time using AJAX would save you roughly four megabytes of bandwidth and save your users precious time.