Today is the day when our colleague Raul is celebrating his 26th aniversary. We wish him all the best in life!
Throw up the confetti!!!

Okapis

We are currently developing two applications at Okapi; one with Ruby on Rails, and one with Django. While Ruby on Rails the most popular Web Frameworks these days, there is a ever growing Django following, which was open sourced about a year after Ruby on Rails was.

I found Django thanks to Kristopher Tate, CTO & Founder of Zooomr.com. I was looking for a framework that was FAST, and I had been on Zooomr.com quite a bit and really liked how fast the pages rendered. I was also looking for something that was built on Python, because a large part of Google and Facebook use Python. They too are some of the fastest sites on earth. So I pinged Kris one day on Skype and we had a nice chat about web frameworks. In the end, I was sold on Django; I had never heard about it before, but if this 18 year old hacker genius recommends it, I better get on board.

The main differences between Ruby on Rails and Django is simply the languages behind them. Rails is (obviously) built on Ruby, whereas Django is built on Python. Rails was born out of BasecampHQ.com, Django was born out of Lawrence.com. When put to speed tests, Django clearly beats Rails.

I think one of the main reasons Ruby on Rails took off and Django really hasn’t is because of how much better Rails has been marketed. 37signals, the company responsible for creating Rails, is a design studio that is famous for simple, elegant, usable design. Django never really had a innovative design studio/person loudly backing it. Zooomr is very innovative, but I have never once read an article talking about Zooomr’s use of Django.

As I said earlier, Okapi is currently building two applications. The one using Ruby on Rails is a simple time tracker for freelancers and small design studios. People will be able to use this to track all of their invoices, instead of wasting time with an Excel spreadsheet every time they are done for the day on a certain client. More on this application soon. The one using Django is a Client Management System for Moreno & Associates; a client of ours that we are currently rebranding. We have been talking about modifying the application and commercializing it, we will let people know if we do.

Overall, the two frameworks have been nothing but amazing for everyone on the team that is using them in development. We look forward to using Ruby on Rails and Django in the future for clients.

At OkapiStudio we always stay in touch with the latest trends out there related to web, print, motion and many other aspects of our daily business activity. Not long after the Web 2.0 boom, people are already starting to talk about Web 3.0 and its semantic aspect, about software acting like a service and other things related to this unprecedented fast and efficient evolution of the technology.

The Rails framework for Ruby, created by David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner with 37Signals (I am sure Sam will dedicate a few posts to H. H. himself), aims to increase the speed and ease of web development. You will find Rails associated with many true Web 2.0 applications.

We did research on both Ruby and Rails for a few days. Working on a Mac OS X environment, we found the installation to be a true quest and fastidious process. While on PC you have a fast installer, on Mac there is an entire process that involves spending a few hours in front of a black command prompter terminal. And if you start installing it don’t do it at 3 AM, please be fresh, do it in the morning, without too many things on your mind. I messed up the installation process 3 times on my machine before getting it right. There is a great aspect to this though, Apple will start shipping Rails with it’s next version of OS X, Leopard.

After browsing two Rails books we started the tutorials. I personally didn’t write any line of code and felt that after the experience with the installation process an even harder process will begin. I was thinking that perhaps we’re just wasting time and we should focus our energy on other aspects of our business. And i couldn’t have been any wronger.

Not even one hour later, Gabi, with a big and amazed smile on his face was having a first fully functional Rails application working. Nothing fancy, just some basic input of information into a database, with editing and sorting and a couple of other features. It was “magic”, this is the word the Rails guys are using, mostly because you use few lines of code and commands to trigger so many processes in the background that generate fast results.

And i will explain this magic by an example so you would understand even though you never wrote a single line of code in your life.

A few days later, working on a timesheet application we initially planned to have developed in PHP, our fellow programmer Corneliu was stating “it would have taken me 3 days to do the code for the same functionality you did in Rails in just 3 hours”. We’ll post the first screenshots of an incipient Alpha release in a few days.

We appreciate Rails because it truly stands up to it’s promise to ease and speed up the web development process.

While thinking of today’s blog topic, I came to realize that over the last 5 years, even though we had many web related projects, we hardly ever had a client performing email marketing activities. I’ve seen people underestimating the power of this fantastic tool. Or simply they never took time to understand how it really works as they did with the other tools and techniques they are currently using (i.e. print campaigns, newspaper classifieds, press releases). You could compare it to the offline direct mail, only far less expensive and with greater and faster response rates.

But I would place it in the Customer Relationship Management aspect of your business. Mainly because it is a clear 24/7 channel of communication to your prospects and customers. It helps profiling your target base by allowing the gathering of as much information as needed about them. It provides instant feedback, it helps creating a bond with your products and services and it shows results in real time.

This won’t be a post about 25 Email Marketing Terms You Should Know, but rather a first introduction towards a larger subject we are planning to discuss with our clients.

If time permits, you can start your knowledge quest searching the internet for email marketing terms or case studies, and if you don’t know where to begin, a good starting point would be Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing book. I’ve seen many experts recommending Seth’s book as an Email Marketing For Dummies kind of approach.

And permission is all it takes to get you started. It is offered by your prospects and clients that raise their hand and say “Yes, I am trusting you with my email address”. From this moment, you start to cultivate and grow a relationship between your company and your client base over the Internet, being ethical, clear and precise and following the guidelines and best practices of email marketing communication.

Do some research, it is actually easier than you think, and then follow three simple steps:

First, you need to realize that on the internet the money is in the email list. Follow the best practices, and start gathering email addresses from your prospects and customers. Segment them in categories for a better communication (i.e. males vs females, Product A customers vs Product B customers, and so forth). You will not want to send the New Spring Catalog for women to the males in your list if you are a fashion company that caters to both.

Second, start building a relationship with your email list. Don’t let it turn cold, start communicating. You need to recognize there are many occasions within a year time frame when you can touch base with your clients. For example up-selling after each new purchase, announcing the new models catalog or a new product launch, the 10 days summer sales period, coupons and discounts, gathering feedback regarding a product or the company, invitations to company events or announcing company news, why not sending your best wishes for the client’s birthday. I am sure you can think of even more. Craft your message and send it.

Third, test your communication and track your results. See who opened the message, who responded to the offer, how many sales it generated and many other important aspects that reflect the reaction you are triggering on your customer base. See what you are doing the best and what needs improvement.

You really have to care about your image on the internet and make sure you are constant in both your online and offline communication, this pertains to your email marketing strategy as well.