(www.cpi-homes.com)Halder Consulting in conjunction with Rick Costello, the Web Site Profit Doctor, launched a turbo-charged Real Estate Sales Application in Las Vegas Nevada.

One-of-a-kind in design and function, www.CPI-Homes.com is a lead-capturing, intelligence-gathering powerhouse.

Featuring New Home Construction, Hi-Rise Condos, and Standard MLS Home Listings for the Las Vegas Area, the application automatically builds a "prospect behavior profile" on each of its visitors. Once the visitor converts to a lead, the historical profile is labeled as a "Prospective Home Buyer." Naturally, savvy real estate agents (our customers) use the collected intelligence and built-in reporting tools to quickly sell property that best matches the prospect's interests.

Currently, and with a thin advertising budget, www.CPI-Homes.com produces 60-70 active property buyers per month and is expected to support over $6.3 million dollars in real estate sales by 2008 (a six month period).

(www.ccclife.org) Christ Community Church originally had a web site that was difficult to manage and maintain. They needed a cost effective solution to simplify the structure of the site to make updates easy for staff and volunteers. Due to cost and time constraints a good content management system was initially out of the question. Enter Halder Consulting.

 Easy updates
The site had already been designed by staff at the church, but drop down menus, newsletter subscription requests, and rotating pictures in the interface necessitated the skills of a web development company. Using the layout already designed, a flexible web site was built using included templates. This allows for extremely efficient updates to the interface (i.e. an update to one file updates every single page on the web site). Documentation was then provided to walk beginners through updating content on the site.

 Ticket requests
Because of the quality of the workmanship on the site, the church also wanted Halder Consulting to create a system to collect ticket buyer information. The resulting admin screen is seen to the left. The page is accessed via a secure SSL link and is password protected. Once access is gained, an administrator can view pending ticket requests and after processing the card, send one of three messages (declined, accepted, sold out) to the requester. The requester also uses a secure SSL form to enter the sensitive ticket purchase information. The information is not sent via email, but the administrator is notified via email that a new request has come in. This ensures that the information is never sent or received unencrypted and keeps the credit card information safe.

This page also allows an admin to add new events and delete old events out of the system. Pricing based on age and volume discounts can be handled by the system. This is a very cost effective method of secure web forms combined with manual card validation.

(www.aurorachamber.com) The Greater Aurora Chamber of Commerce is actively involved in building up businesses and creating an environment conducive to business in Aurora. They have a web site hosted by a third party and wanted the ability to quickly post their own updates to the home page. For a low cost, they were able to purchase a flexible, graphical content management utility solution developed by Halder Consulting.

 Content Management
Here we see the interface for updating the homepage content on the Greater Aurora Chamber of Commerce web site. This tool was built to show where the edited page would be placed on the actual home page once it was saved. Many options are available such as creating bulleted lists, free-form table creation and placement, selection of font styles and colors, and uploading pictures. This tool has proved valuable to the chamber as they can ensure any number of timely updates to the home page at no additional cost. The tool is implemented and maintained on a server apart from the 3rd party hosting company because of the limited scripting support provided by the chamber's hosting package.

(www.WebSiteProfitDoctor.com) This client is an online marketing company dedicated to helping businesses learn how to use their web sites to cut costs and build profits. As such, they had designed a web site detailing the products and services and chose Halder Consulting to code the site and bring their strategies to life. Recognizing that we offer complementary services, Rick Costello has partnered with Halder Consulting providing a full service marketing, design, and development team.

 Surveys
This screen shows several interesting aspects of the site. Along with the standard navigation links at the top of the screen, you will notice a drop down navigation menu. Underneath this menu, a random picture appears to give the site a fresh look each time it is loaded. There are also three random surveys which appear as the user moves to various pages. One such survey is visible on the right. When users vote, the results are stored in a database to be tallied when desired. You will also notice envelope and disk icons just above and to the right of the page headline. These features are found on each page and allow the visitor to send the page to a colleague or bookmark the page for later use.

 Contact Forms
This particular web site features a progressive contact form. After the visitor enters their initial contact information, they are invited to enter more information to allow a more tailored response to their specific needs. The information is stored in a database and also emailed to one or more salespeople to follow up with the visitor's request.

(www.prayer-journal.com) This free online journalling application is under continuing development by Halder Consulting. The project began as a personal personal prayer journal and has expanded into a tool to help others chronicle their own spiritual journey. With a fully developed security model and search functionality, this application contains elements to build a friendly community of users. Work is underway to build in more functionality and to make the application more user friendly

 Browsing
Here we see a screen showing the user browsing through various public journal entries. They may also choose to view just their own journal entries, journal entries they have subscribed to, or use the text box near the top of the screen to search for entries with specific keywords. At the bottom of the screen are navigation controls to move forward, back, or to a page in the list of journal entries.

 Managing Security
Access and security is an issue for people keeping journals. They may have some entries that they want to share with the world. Other entries they may wish to share with a select few or keep private. The Online Prayer Journal offers all of these security features by allowing users to create familiy groups. The screen on the left shows the family group manager where users can add or remove people from groups, create, or even delete groups. Once a group is made it is a simple task to give that group permission to read or respond to your entries.

(ForestPro Planner) Various system modeling techniques had been developed for Caterpillar's Forestry division to simulate forest systems and calculate cost, efficiency, and productivity. The systems were originally contained on various Excel spreadsheets and a preliminary Java applet. Caterpillar was looking for an application that would be easy to use and promote their business. Partnering with Halder Consulting, the development team created a web-based application to allow sales personnel to create detailed plans customized for each customer using a combination of Crystal Reports, Cold Fusion, Oracle, and JavaScript.

 Proposal Screen
This screen shows the sales proposal entry fields. There is a free-form text area to enter any comments and a detailed proposal for the customer. Below that entry field is a list showing the various machines that have been selected and how productive each machine is. There is opportunity to manually enter this number, or to calculate it based on a formula for the machine. This information will be displayed in the reports and used in further calculations within the reports to determine revenue and efficiency. Click on the image to see it full-size.

 ForestPro Report
Here we see a portion of one of the report pages. Using Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise we can view the entire report online, print it at a local printer, or export it to a local file on the hard drive in a number of popular document formats including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Rich Text (RTF). The graph on this page compares the productivity of all the machines in the system. Machines working on the same task are shown as different colors within the same bar. There is also a table showing the cost of each component of the system by productive unit. Click on the image to see it full-size.

This power company located in Northwest Indiana had developed advanced techniques to determine the cost of supplying electric power to their customers. These costing techniques were being used in a variety of spreadsheets, databases, and applications. Halder Consulting helped them to plan a new application accessible by intranet to combine the various systems and techniques. This reduced redundancy and lessened the potential for operator error as well as making system backups much simpler. The overall effect improved efficiency tremendously. The application was developed using Cold Fusion 4.5, Oracle 8i and JavaScript, and was later migrated to a Cold Fusion 5.0 Server Farm running on Sun Solaris.

 Energy Purchase Entry Screen
The screenshot on the left shows an entry screen very similar to a spreadsheet. It allows traders to enter detailed information about energy trades that will affect the Nipsco power grid and track energy cost and scheduled flow. This form includes some fields that are calculated as the data is entered. Once the form is ready to be submitted, extensive error checking is done and the user is informed of any potential problems with the transaction or system. These trading transactions are then immediately available to the energy schedulers who can adjust the generators as necessary. This spreadsheet format is very flexible and rows can be cleared or copied with the click of a button. The date control at the top allows the traders to set up schedules for recurring power transactions. Click on the image to see it full-size. Note: Sensitive information has been blurred to protect the client.

 Costing Calculation Screen
Shown on the left is a screenshot of the costing calculation screen. For each hour of the day costs and prices need to be determined for the various energy loads. The calculations draw information that has been entered into the application and interfaces with three external databases to automatically retrieve information tracked by computer and entered in at other locations. There is a large amount of data crunched by the server while the browser client monitors the progress. In the left center of the screen, you will see the summary of the information gathered during the validation phase. If the data is successfully validated calculations may begin. The right column displays the tasks that the calculations must carry out. As each task is completed the word Done appears next to the task. The chart in the lower portion of the screen shows data gathered from Nipsco customers and is also used in the calculations. Click on the image to see it full-size. Note: Sensitive information has been blurred to protect the client.

(Store Locator) Lemstone Corporate Headquarters has used Halder Consulting on several projects. In order to lower costs and migrate users easily to new Microsoft platforms, Halder Consulting recommended that Lemstone migrate from a Novell Server to a Linux server. This recommendation was implemented and the data was copied to the new server. Samba, the Microsoft file sharing Linux implementation, was used to give each user access to their own share. As the users began to place more and more files on the server, Lemstone wanted the advantage of backing up this storage. Halder Consulting installed and configured AMANDA (amanda.org) to back up this server storage and additionally configured the software to backup data located on all machines across the network. After improving security and stability, Lemstone invited Halder Consulting to help create a store locator on their web site that they could easily update themselves. The initial pages were developed in DreamWeaver and were very graphic intensive. For each store added to the locator, six to eight images needed to be edited. Halder Consulting re-designed the pages using HTML and CSS to create pages that only require one or two changes per store which can be accomplished with a standard text editor in a few minutes. Halder Consulting continues to provide network maintenance and support.

 Store Locator
The Lemstone Store locator allows customers to jump to their state using a drop-down list. They are then shown all the stores in their state by town name. By clicking on the name of the city the customer will see a screen with the store owner's picture and information on the store including address and phone number. Cascading Style Sheets were used to make the page load more quickly and to allow changes to be made easily by Lemstone Corporate employees. Click on the image to see it full-size.

(HayStraw.com) This web site is devoted to selling reasonably priced, high quality equestrian products to customers online. The site was designed by the owner, who contacted Halder Consulting to program the back-end session and order processing. HayStraw.com uses 128-bit security to authenticate customers and protect credit card transmittal. Halder Consulting handles the hosting of the web server from its network and also provides onsite technical support services. The web application is coded in Perl and includes session management, autoresponders for lost passwords and order confirmation, flexible delivery instructions, and realtime delivery scheduling.

 Customer Login
Seen at the left is the Customer Login screen at HayStraw.com. This screen contains many of the types of functions programmed into the backend. The Create Profile button takes new customers to an empty customer profile layout. If they are a returning customer they can enter their e-mail address and password and verify their customer information that they had entered in the past. When a customer forgets their password they can enter their email address into the appropriate field and press the Forgot button to receive their password by email. Click on the image to see it full-size.

(houseofspeed.com) House of Speed provides speed training for amateur and professional athletes. New navigation buttons were needed for this web site and Halder Consulting was contacted to provide them. A blank button matching the old green marble background could not be found, and House of Speed decided to go with a blue marble color scheme instead. The Micrografx Windows Draw package was used to create new blue marble buttons and background graphics. Halder Consulting also provided customer training and software recovery after an email virus was activated on a House of Speed computer.

 Home Page
Blue marble buttons and background images were created to replace the old design of the web site. The new images were designed to be small for fast load times and take up less real estate on the screen than the old images. Blue marble headings were added to each page to enhance the look. Links were also added to House of Speed's online store, as well as external links to other products in order to implement cross marketing strategies. Click on the image to see it full-size.

Eakas Corporation is a company that builds and paints molded plastic car parts. An inventory control system had been written in Microsoft Access that would import customer part forecasts from flat text files and print out weekly and daily reports detailing the number of parts required. Halder Consulting was brought in to enhance and maintain the application. The first order of business was a restructuring of the Access file into two files: one to contain the data and the other to contain the programming. Other enhancements have been an interface redesign to standardize with other Eakas applications, written documentation complying with ISO standards instructing users how to use the application, the capability to import multiple flat files with the press of a button, adding new reports for paint forecasting and shipping data, and adding routines to import new types of flat files. The client is now able to easily see forecast trends to pro-act to changes in customer demands. The client also reduces inventory by ordering material based on the paint/plastic forecasts.

 Report Form
This is a screenshot of the main selection screen with a report selected. On the far left are buttons that perform imports and open other forms for data entry. The list box has a report selected which has brought up the form allowing the user to select the criteria used to filter data on the report. There is a date control which allows users to enter or select the date range using a calendar. There is a multiple list selection box containing the colors that should be shown on the report. A paint supplier can be created from this list and saved for later use. The user also has the option of previewing the report on screen or just printing the report directly. Click on the image to see it full-size.

 Order Entry
This screenshot shows the main selection screen with the order entry selected. Instead of importing a flat file, the user can choose to enter information manually. This is used when the customer does not order in large quantities and does not send this information electronically. New customers can be created on this screen. Part numbers can be selected or typed into a mixed drop-down list. Weekly quantities are entered manually with one month showing per screen. This has added flexibility and control to the application. All data can now be captured. Click on the image to see it full-size.