We are currently working on another new online store for a well established (30 years!) local company called Ballgarvan Stone Craft. Ballygarvan Stonecraft and Paving Company have been at the forefront in the production and development of a diverse range of innovative landscaping products and associated services.

They were very interested in setting up a new online store for their customers and wholesalers to purchase through and were mighty impressed by our online store software and how suitable it can be for their needs. We are customizing a brand new store template for them and also throwing in some cool features like a garden estimating tool where people can get a rough price on how much it will cost them to get their garden work done.

We have helped the client collect their product images and in the process of building the store to their exact needs now. We're looking to launch the site for mid month so I will blog again once this goes live.

We have just launched another online store using our 'super amazing online store software ®' for The Blue Haven Group based in Kinsale, Cork. This version of our store uses our colour picker and sizing tools so that customers can order clothing as well as food hampers and other Blue Haven branded merchandise.

As part of our services to help get the Blue Haven Store up and running we helped the client with product images and product entry so that they would be ready to launch for the bank holiday weekend. So if you'd like to grab a piece of Kinsale for someone you know, or even if you'd like to keep it for yourself, head on over to bluehavenstore.com and check out what's for sale.

I know of a lot of companies, local/national/international, that swear by outsourcing full projects. "You just pass on the work and watch the money roll in" they tell me. "It's so easy I don't even have to work 9-5". Ya, right!

At Dragnet Systems we're busy working away on the next instalment of our excellent online store software for businesses. We have added some new features to the basic store package that make it a very desirable piece of software to help any business make an impact selling products online!

We're also readying a new site update for EasyHouseExchange.com which will let customers know what new properties within their chosen swap locations have been uploaded into the site.

We have a busy release schedule this week as we're launching 3 new sites. Not only that but we have some pretty huge updates to the newly released online stores we recently launched.

First up we have KerryWayCancerWalk.ie. This is a new website for the Kerry Way Cancer Research group who work closely with the Cork Cancer Research Centre to help raise funds for (not surprisingly) cancer research. This is no small charity group. The event attracts people from throughout Ireland and last year they managed to raise €119,880. What's even better is that 100% of all that money goes toward cancer research. This is a fantastic group and Dragnet is proud to have designed and sponsored the website for this event.

Next up is MunsterBentleyHire.com. This is a nice, simple brochure site designed to help get Munster Bentley Hire online as quickly as possible. This site contains just a few paragraphs and a very easy contact form to fill in for enquiries. No mess, no pointless animations, just information - fast!

Finally we are launching Westmann.ie in the next few hours. By the time you read this the site should be live. Westmann is a large business from Galway who specialize in product display installations. This site was designed to offer an easy way to show the really nice imagery of the customer's product installations. A nice feature of the site is actually behind the scenes. This client decided to go with our email marketing solution to help them control and target their email subscription lists. With close to 20 filter groups, this client can easily and quickly send the right information to the right group of customers.

In other news HouseofBeth.ie has received some small changes to its online store software to help make it more user friendly. On the basket page the customer can now update their quantity by using a drop down which will auto refresh the total price. Previous we had a textbox and required the end user to update their basket manually. The new process helps speed things up for the end user. There was also some minor text updates and new images added to the homepage.

Solgar.ie was given a brand new promotional tool. This promotions tool has some pretty neat features. The options are available include fixed price discounts, percentage based discounts or freepost promotions. Promotions have start and end dates and can be setup manually or run automatically. It's very slick but very intuitive to setup and manage for end users of the store software.

Well it took a little bit longer than any of us hoped but we finally went live with the House of Beth online today. The main cause of the slowdown was gathering the data for the shop. The site launches with over 1500 products and 29 Departments. The launch of the store marks the second store in as many months using the new Dragnet Systems Online Store Software. This software is proving quite popular for us and we have already signed up another 4 websites to use it over the next few months. This site also used Realex Payments as the payment provider. In the next few days I will post up a sample C# script on how to get that system working for anyone else looking as Realex don't provide any asp.net C# code for their 'Redirect' style of payment.

This website also features a new promotions tool for offering discounts to customers either automatically or manually. This tool is very flexible and allows the site admin to offer either a percentage based offer or a fixed amount offer that can be used multiple times or as a once off.

In other Dragnet news I'll be launching a new charity website in the next day or two called KerryWayCancerWalk.ie. I'll chat more about that as soon as the site launches.

We're working full steam ahead on houseofbeth.ie at the moment and will be hoping to go live with this later in the week. This is another store built on our Online Store platform. What's great about the site is that although it has many of the underlying features of our store as highlighted previously on my blog it looks completely different. For us this is fantastic as it highlights the flexibility of our software and sends a clear message to anyone thinking about an online store to give us a call to see how we can adapt the software for their needs. When this site launches it will have close to 1500 products that span over 15 departments. Just like Solgar.ie this site will be extremely easy to navigate through and find products for the end customer.

The screenshot used is from an early alpha build this morning. As soon as the site launches I will post again with proper links, etc.

It might been a bit slow to start but EasyHouseExchange.com is finally firing up! We have had a few calls from television stations about the site after our mention in the Sunday Times yesterday. If we can get onto even a few of these shows then the publicity it would generate has the potential to be massive. We had over 250 people register with us over the weekend alone and 75% of those people signed up to put up their properties online. Thanks for the support guys, without your properties this site would be nothing! With the recession biting at everyone's heals it makes more sense to advertise your property online and with Easy House Exchange people can easily setup their account and upload properties in a matter of minutes. No waiting, no fuss and, until June 01, no fees! It's a no brainer!

In preparation for the increased traffic I have setup Gzip on the server to compress the pages and save on bandwidth. I noticed about a 35% speed increase in page delivery on this and with our new online store software which is great. EasyHouseExchange.com is a well optimized site as it is so I am confident our server can take the hit in traffic in its stride. Over the next few weeks we will be gearing up to release some new features onto easy house exchange and we are completing our next online store for a furniture company called HouseOfBeth.ie. After this store is completed we are starting our marketing campaign to tap into the online store software market so stay tuned for some massive developments with our online software software over the next few weeks!