William Cameron | Beyond the Keyboard

Key performance indicators are becoming common in large corporations as a way to measure and monitor the success of key activities. But they can also play an important role in any sized ecommerce business. A KPI — key performance indicator — is simply a measure of some process, event, or activity. An example is checkout abandonment, when shoppers exit before completing an order. This KPI should be monitored closely by all ecommerce businesses. If it is typically 10 percent and suddenly goes to 15 percent, that may be an indicator that something is broken on your website, like your SSL, your shipping estimator, or your credit card authorization. By monitoring that KPI daily, you will mitigate the risk of losing business if something breaks. Establishing KPIs KPIs differ among businesses. For example, large corporations monitor the time between orders and final payment, striving to reduce that cycle. For an ecommerce business, checkout abandonment is an important KPI and lowering tha

There is a question going around about whether a PHP function should return a response. Is a function (or method), that does something and doesn't return anything any good? And I personally think - no its not good. A function should ALWAYS return something. Even if its true or false, $this or mysql_insert_id(). The main reason being that, if a function simply executes and does its thing, without returning anything, there is no way to verify if that function has executed successfully. If a PHP function call returns null once completed, but also returns null if there was an error of some sort, how does the developer know if it ran ok. Simply returning true, so you can verify if it ran as intended, or even throwing an exception is some form of return value, so if there is an issue this should be picked up by the developer and they can rely on their code working as intended.

Well it's been 1 year to the day since I launched this Blog and I've done better than I thought with posting some information people might find useful. Not the highest traffic site in the world yet, but hey, it's my own little space and if you're here - Thanks for visiting. Where's the Cake?

Do web project specifications exist? And is it possible for a project to actually come in on budget, time and with all the promised features? Some camps argue that the Traditional Waterfall model just doesn't fit the bill, and Big Design Up Front (BDUF) cost too much.

Ten Tips for Constructing an Agile Database Development Environment that Works