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Making full use of constructive criticism

Published August 26, 2011 by Joe Brightwell

I began my first full-time job as a designer back in 2004 for a real estate company in Rotorua. The fast pace of the real estate industry meant I had to learn to code and design in a quick and efficient manner, but unfortunately since I was the sole designer (in fact I was the sole “IT guy”), I had nobody else to learn from, bounce ideas with or even discuss the latest happenings in print or web media.

Over the next 5 years at that job, I worked on a number of projects and received a lot of feedback and criticism. Unfortunately not all of it was constructive and the opportunity to improve and upskill was virtually non-existent.

Fast-forward to today, and I am working alongside some of the best people in their fields here at Eventfinder. By surrounding myself with others who are more experienced than I am, together we can critique, refine and improve whatever project we are working on. My co-workers have been in the game for a lot longer than me, and they have seen trends come and go, but ultimately standards never go out of style.

As a web designer, it’s hard to break out of my usual habits when designing a particular product or coding in a particular manner. To receive constructive feedback from my co-workers is extremely important so that we can release products that are modern, user-friendly and efficient at what they do.

I firmly believe that receiving detailed responses for any piece of work I produce is an opportunity not to be missed. Constructive feedback from others (no matter what their computer skills are like) can show another perspective that I might not have thought of. I often design and code with my blinkers on. It has challenged me to take that project to the next level; it can point out areas where I have made mistakes, it has motivated me to learn new skills; and perhaps most importantly it has improved my communication skills. And of course, a slice of humble pie always helps too. All of these things are essential for anyone to be successful in their respective field, particularly web designers.

Eventfinder will soon be releasing another major new product, and throughout the entire process (between 3 to 6 months) I have attended numerous design review sessions and development meetings about this particular product’s progress and direction. This presented a huge opportunity to not only take on the biggest project I’ve ever been given, but also a fantastic chance to receive feedback on my design and coding style, and improve upon it as much as possible. We continually worked in a positive feedback loop throughout the project build to give the best results.

Luckily here at Eventfinder my co-workers are extremely talented and professional at what they do, and since they’re so closely involved with the company’s direction, they immediately understood the goals I was trying to achieve with this particular product. They were able to provide the right kind of unbiased and actionable feedback I was specifically after. There were numerous open-ended questions and a large amount of valuable and detailed comments that were articulate and defined.

With the right attitude I put aside my emotions and pride for the moment, realised my shortcomings and used their valuable feedback as motivation to improve the product, learned a few new skills, and pushed myself to levels I’ve never reached before.

Thankfully my co-workers were extremely honest, and while there were a few surprises, on the whole their responses were positive and supportive with no malice or ignorance whatsoever. Everybody gave their educated and detailed opinions so in the end, we could collectively fulfill our goal of building the best product possible.

In the past I improved my designs solely based on inspiration from other designers because I was working on my own, but here at Eventfinder, I am constantly finding inspiration from my co-workers’ constructive criticism and valuable feedback. Thanks team!

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More Developers, Less Salespeople

Published July 28, 2011 by Michael Turner

I was down at the local mall grocery shopping a couple of years ago when I saw a pack of tweens power-shopping. It wasn’t that we were deep into the GFC that made me laugh, it was the slogan emblazoned across the t-shirt of the ringleader.

It simply said, “More Me, Less You”.

That triggered an epiphany about the ticketing market, which Eventfinder had at that time just entered. The dominant players in Australia and New Zealand are Ticketek and TicketMaster, and their attitude towards clients is most definitely “More Me, Less You”.

Fast forward a couple of years, and Eventfinder has provided an integrated ticketing and marketing platform for over 1,500 events. We’re the platform of choice for large scale events like The Food Show and the Whitianga Scallop Festival, tours by iconic Kiwi bands like The Feelers and Anika Moa, to comedic acts featuring (of all people) Gary McCormack and Tim Shadbolt.

The operative word there is “choice”. The reason why organisations large and small choose to use Eventfinder’s ticketing and marketing platform is because we know it’s all about “Less Me, More You”.

Event promoters have long desired a platform where they can not only reach and transact with consumers, but maintain control, have complete transparency, manage the customer relationship, and not get completely shafted by the company that sells the tickets.

Which brings me to my point. How did a small start-up like Eventfinder (we currently have a total head-count of 8 people) disrupt a market dominated by such entrenched incumbents?

I believe it’s because we have more developers than salespeople. In fact, we only have one super-sales-guy. He sells everything from banner ads, premium placement on the home page and newsletter, while also taking care of ticketing contracts for those too large to use our self-service model. I think he’d sell me given the opportunity (and I suspect the asking price would be quite low).

Our development team of four (five if you include me. I don’t code anymore, but I’m still the product strategist) is focused on innovative product development, all day every day.

Our products are available to everyone, not just the few who have to use a specific ticketing agency because the venue is contracted to do so. Event promoters use Eventfinder because they want to, not because they have to.

Here’s an example – in response to a blog post by Lance Wiggs around a year ago, we streamlined the consumer transaction process to the bare essentials. This resulted in more sales, higher conversion rates while still maintaining the opportunity for the promoter to re-market to their customers.

This kind of innovation has meant that the dominant duopoly have been pitching our clients, sometimes with even lower pricing, to lure them back. When the competition is trying to win back business by lowering prices, you know who has the better product.

My take on this is that their salespeople (More Me) are up against our technology platform (More You). Of course I would love to scale the business quicker by employing more salespeople (perhaps an upcoming funding round might solve that), but so far I’m happy that we’ve taken the path of product cycle innovation to get where we are.

It also means that when we roll out yet another major new product in a few weeks from now, the competition’s salespeople will probably find their standstill product is just that much harder to sell.

So here’s to the More You, Less Me approach. It seems to be working quite well.

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Symfony Upgrade

Published June 13, 2011 by Sean Yao

As an online event calendar Eventfinder relies heavily on its technology stack, which is why we put so much energy into making the product as robust as possible. We have dual application servers and database servers in order to provide highly available services to our 250,000 monthly visitors; we have a monitoring program running 24/7 which notifies our engineers immediately when any services suffer an outage; and when it comes to development we use Symfony, a battle tested open source PHP framework which speeds up our intensive daily development work.

Recently we spent around three months in total upgrading Symfony – in other words we spent three months optimising the product under the hood instead of building new features.

We were keen to do this because we knew we would gain a number of benefits such as better performance, more security, faster future development and less server resource consumption (lower memory usage). However upgrading the framework also slows down new feature development – which is also very important to us – considerably so the question is, is that worth it? Obviously there is no simple answer to this question but we think the optimisations will have a positive and permanent effect on the product – and comparing the time the work consumed with the increased capacity for long term growth of the business the work is well worthwhile.

There are several things that made the upgrade process time consuming:

First of all the upgrade procedures are quite complex, it’s not like upgrading your Firefox browser where you simply click a button, up pops a progress bar and you just sit back to wait until it finishes. The Symfony framework has been constantly updated and improved by its development team and the new version has a significant number of API changes, which means the connections that bridge the Eventfinder code and the core of Symfony have changed. Unfortunately, for most of those changes we can’t just do a search and replace – they require manual review beforehand.

Secondly we have a large and complex product including features covering Event Management, Ticketing Management, Venue Management, User Registration, Live Feeds, a Friends System, Mailout Queues, Forums and a lot more. They all have independent and/or combined functionality and the standard upgrade procedures wouldn’t guarantee a project like ours which has such a large code base would work as expected after the upgrade, so it requires a massive amount of regression testing and bug fixing afterwards.

The final and most difficult obstacle was that we couldn’t completely shut down new feature development while the upgrade was in progress. Instead we branched the project with a duplicate copy from our source control trunk for the upgrade, and continued standard development work on trunk so the upgrade and new feature development could both progress in parallel. In this way we wouldn’t miss any urgent business-critical development tasks while the upgrade took place. Every day we merged in the new development from trunk to the upgrade branch, then we would upgrade the new development code as well – in this way we kept the conflicts due to code change minimal, and it was easier to merge the upgrade branch back to trunk when work on it was completed.

Now we’ve successfully upgraded to the new Symfony along with all the latest versions of the LAMP stack components (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP), NginX and JQuery running on our HA servers, and the entire Eventfinder platform is benefiting from the cutting-edge technologies and shines inside.

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Sorry, This Event Has Been And Gone

Published June 7, 2011 by Greg Bryant

You probably haven’t noticed, but we recently solved a pretty big problem affecting annual events on Eventfinder.  The problem was that the previous year’s events by the same name were being displayed above the upcoming event in Google’s search results.  For example, if you Googled “Auckland Food Show” the top ranking result from eventfinder.co.nz was the 2009 event, not great if you’re trying to sell tickets to the 2011 show.

We had tried a few things to fix this.  Perhaps surprisingly we didn’t try removing the previous year’s events – at least not as a rule – mainly because it would have left no results for that event in Google’s search index.

One of the things we did try was lowering the priority tag of past events in our sitemaps, which we thought would be a pretty strong hint to search engines that we wanted your upcoming events to show first.  All things being equal this should have worked, but things aren’t equal as Google strongly favours older pages, not just because they often have more incoming links but also because they are probably the original source of information and therefore authoritative.

But then, in early 2010 Google announced they would be rolling out what they call Rich Snippets for events.  The idea is that by including standardised machine readable markup within the HTML of your event’s web page, Google would be able to incorporate that information into their search results – allowing users to better decide if the result was right for them.  In the case of events, that means information like dates and locations.  It sounded promising, we’d already been including just that kind of standardised markup on our event pages using microformats and we expected this meant that Google might now prioritise upcoming events.  But our expectations were not met, last year’s events continued to out-rank the current event.

Then earlier this year we had an email from Google, they’d noticed our hard work and asked for some small additions before they started using our microformats in their search results.  We obliged and on the 18th of April we started seeing search results like this:

Notice the light grey date and location under the page title – Google has extracted that from the microformats we include within the event pages.  More importantly it also changed the order of the results, showing the current event above and often instead of the past event.

Essentially Google’s search is now aware that our event pages represent events in time when they calculate their relevance to a user’s search.  If two event pages have similar content, the one representing an upcoming event will usually display first.

The only negative side effect, and this is probably only a negative to us at Eventfinder, is that since Google has been date aware we have seen a 17% decrease in past event page views.  Past events account for approximately 6% of our page views, so it’s not too bad and certainly worth it to ensure that up to date event information is easier to find.

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March Traffic Stats

Published April 6, 2010 by Michael Turner

March was a record traffic month for us. According to Nielsen, Eventfinder ranked 26 for Total Traffic with 239,216 unique browsers. A certain well-known ticketing company ranked 41, so we’re quite pleased we can honestly say we’re the ticketing services company with the highest consumer audience.

We attained a record high of 22 for domestic traffic, a feat we’re particularly proud of considering we spend next to nothing on marketing. We are constantly surprised in the growth in the market for event information, as we achieved these records while distributing our content far and wide.

Of the Top 50 websites for domestic traffic, Eventfinder distributes event information to seven of them (rankings in brackets) – Yahoo!Xtra (2), MSN (3), Stuff (4), NZ Herald (5), Metservice (8), AA Travel (31) View New Zealand (39) and Jasons (43).

Top 10 Events by Page Views for March 2010 (Eventfinder):

  1. Royal Easter Show, Epsom
  2. Disney on Ice, Christchurch
  3. Grease The Musical, Auckland
  4. The Kingsland Festival, Kingsland
  5. The Pixies, Christchurch
  6. Rebel Souljahz, Otaki
  7. The Sound Factory, Ellerslie
  8. Kumeu Scarecrow Festival
  9. The Food Show, Christchurch
  10. Rent The Musical, Auckland

The Royal Easter Show is predictable, but the Rebel Souljahz surprised even us, and we’re doing the ticketing for the gigs. The Scarecrow Festival was another surprise inclusion considering the big-name acts that didn’t feature as prominently as most people would expect, like Crowded House (number 24).

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