The Kalexo web site got another update today, with a Flash animation that gives a better impression of what Kalexo Teamwork is about. We’ve also added live support capability, so you can simply click to chat with someone at Kalexo. The changes follows us adding the ability to give site feedback last week.
For the technically minded, you might be wondering how we did it. It turns out to be a relatively straightforward thing if you use the right tools. The web site was steadily improved over the last few years, so it is hard to say how much work really went into it overall.
The Flash animation was authored via Swish Max, which is a fantastic tool for the non-flash guru. It comes with a whole bunch of preset animations that are pretty easy to use. I used Adobe Fireworks to do some image editing and cleanup. Screen shots was done with the Snipping Tool, which is a free and included in Vista. I think that most people don’t even realize that this nifty free tool exists – I did not know about it, and used to use Snagit a lot, but I think the latter is overkill if you are doing image cleanups in Fireworks anyway. Developing and producing the Kalexo Flash animation took about 3-days.
The demo video on the Kalexo home page was produced via Final Cut Express for video editing, LiveType for some titles, Camtasia for screen recording, and Microsoft Powerpoint for some animation sequences (PPT is great for some types of animation work, but you don’t get the control you have with Flash). A lot of stock images and videos came from iStockPhoto. Sound was recorded with a Samson Studio C01U Microphone (which I can’t recommend because of persistent audio level issues). Producing the demo video took about a week, and involved both a Mac and a PC, with shuttling Quicktime movies to-and-fro via a USB memory stick.
The Kalexo website itself is powered via Joomla, a popular content management system. The site template is from JoomlArt with some modifications. We run a lot of custom Joomla plugins on the site, too many to mention here. Even though you don’t have total freedom to create a maxed-out corporate web site via Joomla, it has a lot going for it if you don’t have designers on staff. We often tweak the site “live” to see how things turn out – there is a lot of configuration options, and the collection of off-the-shelf plugins (most of them free) are amazing. One neat plugin is the light-box type functionality which overlays a window over your web site, and is popup friendly.
The live support capability is Live Help messenger from Stardevelop. It allows you to monitor who visits your web site in real-time, and visitors can initiate a chat with a click of a button. A windows application on your desktops allows multiple operators to stand by. One nice thing is since you install Live Help on your web server, you only pay for a software license and there are no monthly fees. However, you need to be tech savvy to install it, since it involves database work, editing HTML, and sometimes some PHP hacking
The feedback capability is from Kampyle – it shows up as a little triangle in the bottom right hand corner of the browser, which when you click on allows you to rate the site and enter comments. The feedback goes into a database which you can access online. Kampyle has a free plan which does pretty much everything you need to get started. Implementation was a breeze (again, you need to edit HTML). The only thing that I wished for was that the free version included email alerts when feedback is left.
I am sure that I forgot a whole bunch of other tools that we use to develop the web site. There are so many options available to do this type of thing, so I hope this post will point DIY-types in the right direction. Please feel free to write me with questions.
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