Silicon Sparkblog

For our first year in business, I am amazed and honored by the projects we’ve had the opportunity to work on. We’ve got several things cooking here – but the latest project to go live is that of Sauce Labs.

This is a company that is founded by the original author of Selenium, the open source web test automation software. Since I’ve spent so much of my career doing web applications development and go-to market, I’ve seen Selenium in action and know that the ability to simultaneously test across browsers is critical—especially when something new like a new release of Firefox or Internet Explorer or even a new operating system like Snow Leopard comes out. Problem is, Selenium while hugely popular, has never had any proper commercial backing and maintenance. So updates to ensure it test correctly across the same updates it is supposed to cover can be problematic. So when we had the opportunity to work with the Sauce guys to help take them to market to fix this problem, we jumped at it.

http://saucelabs.com

Today, we’re launching a new download, Sauce RC which is basically Selenium IDE & RC wrapped into a nice installer with a host of bugfixes to ensure it works across the latest browsers (even last week’s Firefox update!). But where the Sauce products really gets interesting is their Sauce OnDemand hosted test automation cloud. Here, you can use your Selenium or Sauce-based test scripts, upload them to the cloud and run against 10 popular browsers. Being a cloud-based service, you pay by test minutes that are incredibly affordable. Instant access to test infrastructure that you don’t have to maintain. What web application software development company wouldn’t want to have access to that?

There’s a lot more to come to continue building the Sauce portfolio of user services out, but for now I’d like to congratulate the Sauciers that invited us to be a part of this project – John Dunham, Jason Huggins, Steve Hazel and of course the always helpful rock of our development Santi Suarez Ordoñez. And of course – to the Silicon Spark team – Joanna “I will be one with Github” Duff, and Shannon “Python doesn’t scare me” Dunn. Great job everyone!

Summer was not slow for us here at Silicon Spark. One of the projects we took live is The Dwyer Law Group. If the name sounds vaguely familiar, it is – LoopFuse’s CEO Sean Dwyer referred us to the project at his dad’s law firm, after we took the LoopFuse site redesign live earlier this summer. A law site was a first for us, but we were up to the challenge – see for yourself:

The Dwyer Law Group new website

As for how we got there—first, we needed to find out what content we had to work with. And frankly, it was gold. Matt Dwyer is a board certified personal injury lawyer rock star. His firm has one of the highest winning and money awarded per plaintiff in the southeast. He’s recognized as one of the top trial lawyers in America—and his results speak for themselves. We needed to reshape the messaging to speak more to victims, and assure them that they were going to be taken care of well with Dwyer Law Group, but that wasn’t hard. Its always easy to sell something worth having.

Next, we turned to the website look and feel itself. We looked at lots of law sites, trying to capture the tone and feel of these sites and see what worked. Reality is, we saw lots of sites—but everything looked somewhat dated or amateur. We’ve been used to businesses that really use their website as a tool to drive business. Matt Dwyer knew he wanted that too—his son explained the power of that to him and he jumped at the chance to have us figure that out. We came up with a new design that places strong personal imagery that victims can relate to, loaded headers with keywords, and tailored text to suit victim need, as well as introduced a sidebar concept that assured visitors of their reputation, ability to garner high monetary awards, and to ultimately contact Dwyer Law Group. There was some obvious attention to SEO that needed to be done, and we’ll be looking to turn on adwords regionalized shortly, but for now—the site is out there for the whole world to see. Hope you never have the misfortune of a personal injury, but if you do… it should be a lot easier to find the best lawyer in the southeast to represent you.

All the sparkplugs here at Silicon Spark have been busy the past month. We’re working on several of new websites, whitepapers and some juicy press releases. One project in particular went live last week, and I thought I’d share. About two months ago, Matthew Porter reached out to me to help with his website. Matthew is the CEO of Contegix, a popular managed hosting provider. I personally worked with Contegix back in my Hyperic days–they were both a customer as well as a vendor for us, powering the RHQ project with Red Hat and also Hyperic’s CloudStatus. Contegix is an awesome partner to have – their service is unparalleled in the industry. And their customers are their biggest fans and best publicity ever, in fact they just recently won the Linux Journal’s Reader’s Choice Awards due to such a passionate following of their customers. So, when Matthew called asking for help to create a new website – we jumped at the chance.

With the exception of the legaleze for their acceptable use policy and service level agreements, we re-wrote the whole site, changed the layout and really brought them an updated, slick new look. Over time we’re going to be adding more components to the site such as a screenshot gallery for the managed applications, more diversity/offers on the right sidebar, and definitely more information and details on their upcoming cloud release. For now – check out how cool this website is-and tell us what you think!

Redesigned homepage for Contegix.com

Redesigned solutions sections on Contegix.com