Some great new features!

OK, so I know I mentioned earlier this year that I probably wouldn't be updating this section of the site with any news until the beginning of next season, but I found the time to add some features that I have been wanting to implement into the ordering software and I thought I would share them.

These features will be available starting at California Finals in a couple of weeks in Sacramento.

Album Manager/Multiple Albums per Customer
When I originally wrote the software, I gave customers the ability to have more than one album, but I never had the time to put an interface on it. I've finally been able to do so! Basically, this will allow you to create multiple albums/sets of favorites per account and move back and forth between them very easily.

This will allow you to do things like gather your favorite images by event or, if you have more than one athlete competing, create an album of Favorites for each athlete, rather than mixing the two.

The Album Manager can be reached via the 'My Account' page.

The Album Manager interface is a simple one, with a panel for each Album you have in the system. You can copy albums, rename them, add new, delete and set which album is active (that is which album will receive any new Favorites you mark or which will act as your source for images when designing collages).

Album Control while Viewing Images
Not only have we added the capability of multiple albums, but we have added a quick access album toolbar to the thumbview section of the system (that's the section where you view images from games, mark Favorites, etc.) Right from the thumbview, you can quickly change your active album (so you can switch which albums Favorites will be added to very quickly) or you can even access the Add Album interface very easily.

Album Control in the Collage Editor
Not only have we added quick Active Album switching to the Thumb View, we have added it to the Collage Editor as well! You can easily switch between active albums right in the collage editor, making it very simple to get to your images while designing your collage.

Large Collage Preview
Speaking of the Collage Editor, since we added the ability to preview the collages right on screen, we knew the next question would be, 'Can we see it bigger?' and we get that question A LOT. And the answer is well ... I guess so. :)

Right now, this is only partially implemented, but we have added a 'Large Preview' option for our most popular collage, the 5 Image (01) design. (We'll be adding the other designs as time goes by, but we might not get to them this season). Simply click the Large Preview button at the bottom of the screen (see the above screen shots) and you will be taken to the Large Collage Preview!

Well, that's it for now - a few more additions to our software to (hopefully) make it easier and more fun for you to use out at tournaments.

A few updates.

I posted a few comments/notes regarding how some of our improvements performed at the recent California Kickoff.

You'll see them noted in a burgundy color below!

So what have we been up to?

A surprising number of people enjoy keeping up with what we're doing and areas that we're changing or proving. So I thought I would create a section of the site that would be dedicated just to things like changes in our photographic technique or gear, or advances in our software, etc.

So, if you, too, like hearing about what we are up to, drop by here from time to time. I can't promise I'll update it all that often (probably about once a year, just prior to each season as it's the time between club seasons that I really get a chance to evaluate the season, workout new directions or solutions and make changes).

So ... what's new this year? Read on.

Scheduling Improvements.

Scheduling. Ugh. An area of a great deal of hairpulling and frustration not only for you, but for us as well.

We are implementing a major change in our scheduling policies, effective immediately.

Our goal this year is to completely do away with the photography request taken during the tournament itself.

Instead, we have implemented the ability right on this site to place a photography request for any of the tournaments we are scheduled to photograph this year.

This year we also intend to - at as many tournaments as possible - take over the game schedule information gathering so that families don't have to stress so much about it.

Our goal is to integrate with the tournaments that we work with so that we can read scheduling information right from them so that we can build a schedule with just: Tournament Name, Team Name, Athlete # from the families.

We then hope to use the staff that used to be so tied up in scheduling to help more customers at the booth!

[Update: The ability to pre-schedule pictures is proving to be very popular. From the feedback I have received, the concept of moving to this method of pre-paid schedules has been approved by all I have talked to. One of the nice by-products of this new policy is that it builds excitement for the upcoming tournaments in the staff. Knowing that we are attending a tournament to photograph for families who really want our pictures is a great excitement builder for the tournament. So if you haven't put in your request for pictures this season, we suggest you do it as soon as possible! -mh]

Booth Improvements.

One of the things that wears us out most at tournaments is the setup and teardown of our booth. It's tedious and time consuming and too often we've been up until 4 in the morning, just a few hours from tournament start, still setting it up!

Cabinetry
So, this year we've been working on methods of speeding up setup and teardown. John (Dad) who's always been pretty good with woodworking has had an excuse to dust off his tools. He has built us a series of boxes that we have used to store all of the keyboards, monitors, mice and terminal boxes we use for our viewing computers. We're hoping that setup time for viewing stations will drop by an hour or two with this new arrangement. Similarly he is currently designing checkout stations with integrated printers, monitors, cash drawers, cellular credit card terminals, etc. Everything we need for a checkout station ... and on wheels so that we can roll it in, open it up and get going.

[Update: We tested a few of the new cabinets at the California Kickoff tournament - they worked great! For that portion of the booth, setup and teardown was much faster. Jason and Dad are working on the next six cabinets now. -mh]

Lastly on the woodworking side, another project we hope to be able to tackle before the season really gets going is the creation of a cabinet for our processing and webservers.

Between these three projects we can cut hours off of our setup time.

A digital projector.
Amazingly enough, we commonly get questions such as, 'So what is all this?' or 'Are these computer for browsing the internet?' Even with all of our samples and such, there is still initial confusion as to what our booth is and who we are. So I am purchasing a digital projector and screen that we hope to integrate into the walls of the booth and keep a continual slideshow of images and answers to common questions going - including common 'How do I ...?' questions regarding the use of our ordering software.

[Update: The projector and 100" screen came in late last week. We've watching movies on it. :) It looks GREAT! I tested a slideshow with it and we're very excited about setting this up at tournaments. -mh]

Printed booth walls, banner style.
We've been wanting to do this for years and I'm really hoping this is the year for it. NoDinx always makes me jealous when I see their booth as they do what I've been wanting to do! I want printed booth walls that have samples of our work, options, prices, how-to, etc. all printed right on them.

Free standing promotional banners.
Unless people walk right by our booth, they often don't know that we're there or where to find us. So we plan to have a few of these printed and on display at every tournament wherever possible to make sure that people know exactly where to find us.

We're hoping that this year you will see a much different booth look that what we have affectionately termed our "ghetto-booth" of years passed.

Software Improvements.

So that's some of what we are planning to improve the appearance and flow at our booth.

I, personally, have been working on the software side of things extensively.

I hadn't actually planned on it, but I'm the guy who has had to write a good portion of the software that we use. The software used to make this website is something that I wrote. The software used to display galleries of work online is a piece of gallery software I wrote.

But the biggest pieces of software - by far - that I have written is the software we use to track, manage and produce all of our orders as well as the software our customers are most familiar with, our onsite ordering and viewing software.

Updated Interface
I have been working on that extensively to re-vamp the interface to make it more streamlined and easy to use. Last year's fairly cartoonish look is gone in favor of a much more subdued, easier to manage and expand upon Cascading Style Sheet based interface. This is nothing groundbreaking to anyone that works in the web-based software field, but I had to start from scratch learning all of this!

One handy interface change is the move towards a scrollable interface. In the past I thought it best to try to maintain all information on the screen at one time. But that limited us to only three thumbnails at a time. Every time you zoomed an image or asked for another page of thumbnails, that hit the server for data. So, I have changed over to 12 images per page of thumbnails and switched to a method of zooming that the browser handles, meaning that the overall load on the server should be lower and, thus, make the system more responsive overall.

At the same time, I have greatly expanded the feature set of the system itself.

Sorting Images by Athlete
We've long been asked if there was any way to view images of just one athlete without having to go through each image individually. The answer was always no - there is simply no way for the software to automatically know who is in each image. And the software still can't automatically detect what athlete is in each pictures. :) However, we've added a feature that allows one person to go through the images just one time and note which athletes are in each picture. The system will then group the images by athlete so that, if you are the parent of #5, you can view only the images with #5 as the subject of the picture. Additionally, the software now allows you to enter a roster as well, so that the team can be listed not just by jersey number, but by athlete name. We're hoping this will reduce greatly the time you have to spend browsing the images and help you focus on your athlete.

We feel your pain when it comes to wading through hundreds of images!

[Update: This was tested at California Kickoff and families really liked being able to see the images of just their athlete. However, doing this ourselves is very challenging as we don't know all of the faces on the team and the jersey numbers are not always clearly visible. So we'll be looking for alternative ways to accomplish this at tournaments. -mh]

Categorizing images and Pre-Designing Collages
We've long known that one of the toughest things for parents and athletes is visualizing what is possible with the images. More than one customer has commented that, if there was just some way to separate the jewels from the dross that it would be much easier for families to purchase images. That wasn't anything new to us (we knew that! :), but we've never had a viable solution. But this year we do: taking the Sort by Athlete idea one step further, I added the ability to categorize each image based on a scale of 1-5 to state how good the image is, what its contents are (Action, Portrait, Huddle, Cheer, etc.) which direction the player is facing, etc. I further taught the ordering system how I personally design collages so that it can take that categorization data and use it to design collages for athletes! If the family likes the collage, all they have to do is click the size they would like to order, right next to the collage itself. Additionally, if they want to, they can modify the collage to replace images, etc.

[Update: Families really seemed to like this feature onsite at the California Kickoff. I didn't photograph much at that event, staying at the booth to watch over the software during this debut appearance and to help Dad out, since we were really short-staffed. I did the image sorting and categorizing and collage pre-designing to see what the flow is like and if it is realistic for us to be able to support that at large tournaments where all photographers are going full blast. What I can say is that it's going to take some serious effort to make this feature broadly available. It's definitely time consuming. I added some features at the tournament to make things easier, but if an athlete from each team can sort their own team by athlete, that will cut huge amounts of time off and make it much more realistic. So we'll be offering some freebies for that help! -mh]

Live Collage Preview
A long standing question regarding collages is "Do I get to see this now?" Due to the extensive amount of work that goes into every collage, the answer has always been, "No". But I knew there had to be a way for me to be able to show at least a basic preview of the collage (of course cropping, color correction, retouching, etc. could not be previewed as that is all custom work) and that was always planned for the software. I just didn't know how to go about it. After a good deal of pondering, I was able to solve the problem (turns out the Cascading Style Sheets I mentioned earlier are incredibly useful). We now have fully dynamic collage previews - you add the image to the collage and the preview will be updated to show the image in the position it will be in the final collage. It's pretty slick! :)

[Update: California Kickoff was our debut for this new interface feature - it was very popular and made designing collages a very simple and fun experience. As a designer, it made having me design collages for customers a much easier and more visual experience. Families were able to quickly see EXACTLY what I was talking about when I suggested a design. -mh]

Screenshots
For those curious about the new interface, I have included a few screenshots below ...

Example 1 & 2: The updated athlete list - broken out by athlete name and jersey number as well as selections of Collages, Best of Images and All Images broken out by athlete. Also, the predesigned collage interface displaying a collage we have designed and making it available for purchase.

Example 3 & 4:The Live Collage Preview and redesigned Single Print order page.

Example 5 & 6:The updated cart with package display and an updated User Account page.

Checkout Improvements.

This is actually a combination of software and hardware improvements ...

Checkout Improvements
An area I have not been satisfied with in the past is how long it takes for a customer to go through the checkout process. On the one hand, we love the opportunity to chat with you. However, the 10 people in line behind you are impatiently checking the time, tapping their toes and staring daggers at your back as they wait - as if the delay were your fault! A good portion of the checkout time required was the time it took to adjust a cart so that the total amount and contents reflected one of our various packages. Last year, as we came down to the wire on the launching of the 2006 season, I simply did not have time to add a package capability to our cart, so I had to have the staff manually add all of the items of a package to the cart and then manually discount to get to the correct total. This year I have been able to create a packaging system that - with one click - will allow the staff or user to add a package to the cart. All proper items are placed in the cart and the total reflects the package price, not the price of the individual items.

[Update: The new package interface performed really well. Checkout time was markedly decreased with the new features. I'm excited to put them to use at a large tournament. -mh]

Additionally, rather than using the extremely dated method of taking paper imprints of credit card information (we have a standard, land line based unit in the office but it's a pain to bring onsite with us), we are looking to upgrade to cellular credit card processing units. So not only is the time consuming process of taking an imprint a thing of the past, but so are the billing problems of yesteryear. It has not been uncommon for us to end the year carrying several thousand dollars on our books of product delivered but not paid for - due to the fact that our billing was often delayed by our travel schedule and - by the time we tried to bill - the card was expired, over the limit or cancelled due to theft. So, we can now bill right on site and get it done faster than before!

We are also integrating a laser printer into each cashier unit. That way, the cashier doesn't have to share a printer and wait for other invoices, or fliers, or schedule sheets to print. I also hope to have the opportunity to re-format the invoice so that, for 80-90% of purchases, an invoice will print on 1 sheet. Last year, many invoices were three pages long with a lot of unnecessary data. This will also reduce printing time.

Our goal is for your checkout experience to take no more than 2 minutes.

[Update: Again the California Kickoff was the test event for this. The new checkout interface (which was completed in a mad, 24 hour push during a 46 hour day leading up to the tournament!) worked out very well and really does speed things up. With the addition of cellular credit card swipers so that we don't have to take card imprints, checkout should be even faster still. -mh]

Faster Order Processing ... We hope.

Every season we face a great challenge. We're a small family business. We consider ourselves an art-house of volleyball photographic work, providing family artwork that will hang on your walls for decades to come.

As such, we are dedicating to providing the highest quality possible. Each season I agonize over whether or not I'm just being foolishly stubborn and should simply give up the idealized concept of delivering higher quality work and go with what is fast and easy. Then I toss that idea out the window and concentrate on simplifying other areas of our operation, while either maintaining or - better yet - improving our quality.

One of the major issues is that the same staff that books and plans the events, the same staff that drives to events and sets up the booth, the same staff that takes the pictures and helps to sell them is also the staff that does all of the processing. And, when you are on the road four weeks at a time, it is extremely difficult to keep up with the processing workload. (Oh and that is, of course the same staff that writes the software and designs the booth, etc. We're a multi-talented bunch. :)

So, this year, instead of four staff driving, two will drive and two will fly. The two who fly will gain days of processing time by literally not being on the road so much and will be responsible for doing as much processing as possible while on the road. Additionally, the driving staff will pitch in when they can. We're purchasing some high powered laptops so that we can do this easily right from our hotel rooms ... or, better yet, the local coffee shop that doesn't mind us hijacking a table for days at a time. I swear we'll buy gallons of coffee and dozens of muffins, just let us work! All told, we've calculated that there will be the opportunity for 51 man-days of processing during the trip. Hopefully we can turn that into finished orders as quickly as possible. (But no guarantees at this point. We're still quoting 10-12 weeks for all orders placed at any tournament during the major Qualifier road trip.)

[Update: The three new dual-core laptops came in today! We have them configured to be real top-performers. We now have a full complement of four of these high-powered machines to make processing on the road much, much easier to accomplish. Of course, my MasterCard is now feeling the burden ... :) -mh]

Of course this means no rest for us. Our 8 week stretch of on the road shooting will literally be 64 days of non-stop work. And that doesn't count local the tournament we'll have the weekend following our return home.

So, do us a favor would you? Buy some pictures! Thanks, we really appreciate it. :)