Slow but steady

Been making steady progress on TixPix version 2.0. I have the new homepage about 50% complete and the new "Events" page also about 50% complete. Hope to have those both complete by mid Feb. After that I'll need to complete the ticket listings page followed by the listing "Details" page. Also in parallel I'm working on my seating chart prototype interactive viewer.
All of this minus the seating charts should be complete by the end of March.

TixPix MVC

So... it's no secret that TixPix was developed using Asp.Net. This is evidenced by the use of web-forms. A design decision has been made to utilize Microsofts newer technology which is ASP.NET MVC 4. Hopefully this will streamline development with a better separation of concerns between the data model and the UI and the business logic.

Life's Priorities

So, while I would love to continue developing TixPix.com as my full time venture, there has been a pleasant shift in priorities within my personal life that will undoubtedly affect the amount productive working hours in each day and week that I can devote to TixPix. That being said, I am still fully committed to the completion of TixPix 2.0. I believe the new version of the site will be much more well received than the first version, it will simply take a little bit longer to get there than I was anticipating.

Shifting Strategies

By far and large the most important goal of 2013 is to generate a large amount of inbound traffic to TixPix.com. The main reason that TixPix traffic is currently suffering is that at present the homepage has the appearance of low activity. For example if you walked into a retail store and noticed that they had less than 5 items for sale in their whole store and it seemed like the aisles had no other customers, then you're likely to turn around immediately, leave, and seek out a store with better inventory with more active use.

Additionally the other problem with TixPix is that currently all visitors must register before they can truly utilize the site. To support the goal of increasing inbound traffic TixPix is going to remove the registration/login process from the site for version 2.0. This will lower the commitment that a user must make when visiting and using TixPix.com. Lowering the users commitment increases the probability that a user will browse around longer and be able to find what they are looking for, get what they need and leave without ever disrupting the flow of their browsing/search experience. This in turn will help improve return visitor statistics and increase search engine page rank, while also spurring word of mouth advertisement.

2013

The holiday season was enjoyable. I haven't touched any TixPix related development work in the last two weeks because I was enjoying some much deserved holiday time while on travel with the family.

Yesterday, I got back into the swing of things. I met with one of my co-developers and we went over some of the new code for the TixPix 2.0. I was pretty impressed with the results. I cannot yet reveal at this time the details of the code, but it is awesome.