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Customer: J. J. Kent
Problem: They needed a way to allow customers to build charm bracelets right on the screen.
Solution: We built them a DHTML-powered tool that allows customers to do just that.
URL: http://www.myitaliancharm.com

J. J. Kent is led by a dynamic, intelligent, and business-savvy team. They saw the handwriting on the wall around 2000, and started to retool all of their efforts toward web microbusinesses.

One of these online ventures is selling Italian charm bracelets–a highly popular gift item with endless possibilities for customization and personalization.

However, their first implementation was a static one done in Flash. Because there were so many options available for each bracelet, the Flash file grew to an unmanageable size that was hurting their business.

We built them a DHTML and ASP powered site that allows users to drag and drop individual charms onto bracelets. Some of the charms have nonstandard heights and widths, but we built them a flexible and fast system.

J.J. Kent’s Italian charm microbusiness is one of their fastest-growing, and they add new site features and product lines every month.

Here’s a quote from Jeff Hebert, their designer:

Triple Dog Dare took the design and implemented it flawlessly. They provided key insight in the design process that helped focus our goals, then followed up with fast, effective coding and customer service. Since launching the new Italian Charm site they coded, we’ve increased sales by 100% and doubled our conversion rate. Ongoing support has been fantastic, too, adding functionality with the same speed and panache as the original applet. We now have the largest collection of Italian Charms on the Internet and have moved from a sideline business to one of the pillars of our company. We would highly recommend TDD to anyone who has a vision for dominating their Internet market!

We are extremely proud to be a partner in their success.

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To the unitiated, regular expressions look like gobbledegook. I have to admit that even after 10 years of playing around with them that I still find them amusing (and sometimes frustrating). What are regular expressions? Technically speaking, regular expressions allow you to define patterns to match and extract data.

For example if you wanted to match all first names in your customer list that started with the letter T, had 6 letters in them, and ended in a consonant, your regular expression (in Perl, anyway) would look like this:

m/T\w{4}[^aeiou]/;

In other words, match:

* a capital letter T
* followed by four “wordish” looking characters
* followed by any of NOT a,e,i,o, or u (i.e., a consonant)

That regular expression would match Thomas and Trevor, but not Timmy (not enough letters!). Given their extraordinary power, regular expressions are used by a wide variety of Web programming languages to complete an astounding number of daily tasks.

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