The NetCircle – Now hiring PHP Developer in Shanghai

We’re proud to announce that we’ll be hosting BarCamp Shanghai 2009. This year, BarCamp is part of the geeks on a plane tour, which is co-organized by our friends over at Web2Asia.

What: BarCamp Shanghai 2009
When: Sunday, June 14, 11:00am – 05:00pm
Where: The NetCircle HQ

What is a Barcamp?

Being an Online Marketeer I analyse what I do and how I buy too, so that’s what happened:

1. The Helium Cowboy Artspace Newsletter arrived. It’s a cute Art Galery in Hamburg, modern, charming, interessting artists (I love Alex Diamonds stuff)
2. Iopen the Newsletter and try to click on: “Special online offer | Buy a Hoppek T-shirt, get a Lavagina 2-Magazine for free” I might have clicked anyway cause I’m totally the right target group, but 1. I love all kinds of “special” T-shirts 2. who can resist to get something for free 3. being familiar with Boris Hoppek’s stuff I was plain curious. Well, it doesn’t work as it’s a headline not a link, but the link is close by so I don’t have enough time to get annoyed and just switch to something else.
3. Here I am, on the website. It’s a limited edition but not exactly what I want, the price 25€ is pretty good to me especially for the bundle. Let’s see what else they got: -Oh there’s a Alex Diamond link in the navigation -Um, the catalogue is sold out and the T-shirt is no longer available in my size. -Anything else? I’m in the buying mood. -special editions? -nah – books? – Oh! Moki by Mume looks great, absolute must have, for 5€ super must have4. They got me: I happily click the shopping cart button and think about buying more, assuming there are some costs for sending it. Well the 10€ Boris Hoppek Calender looks great. It’s May – anyway. Shoppingcart.
4. Ok, I’m done, what’s next? The buttons says “Checkout”. Checkout? If I click it and my Shopping cart ends up empty or whatever? I want to have a clearer wording of the button, but I’ll try and here it happens.
5. I’m sitting here all willing to pay, my bankcard, my credit card ready and get to a PayPal Payment page where it says “sign in to PayPal“. There are many reasons why I don’t have a PayPal account, but normally there’s an option for people like me. No there isn’t, I use PayPal or I can keep my 24,50€.
6. Wait! 24,50? I want to buy stuff for 15€, I’m forced to use PayPal and have to pay 9,50€ on top? That will – unfortunately – not happen.

I’m pretty sure they have a good reason for the whole PayPal thing, as I have my reasons of not buying anything now. Good news my dearest Helium Cowboys, if I’m in Hamburg again I’ll stop by and buy something.

Bad news for every Online Marketeer, even for a fan willing to pay you’ll find pages everywhere where you just don’t get through with your wish to buy. That’s the super advantage the shop round the corner has, what makes for example the World of Warcraft Gamecards so useful. Well, unless you are in Germany and it’s impossible to pay with creditcard, but thats another story. Here we are again with my favourite subject of designing for ROI, usability, testing, aso.

Alvaro Videla, one of our developers here at The NetCircle, developed FireSymfony and released it in September 2009. FireSymfony is a Firebug/Symfony extentions that allows developers to see their Symfony debug toolbar as part of the Firebug extension, which leaves the page layout unchanged and also brings more UI improvement.

Alvaro is frequently updating the plugin and is working on new features for the upcoming versions.

You can get the current version at Mozzilla’s Firefox Add-on directory. For updates on the progress of the development, check our website, visit Google Code or contact Alvaro directly on Twitter.