As people are now looking to employ I thought it would be helpful to overview the general costs involved with employing someone in the UK and how you can factor that back to an hourly charge.

Some Assumptions

1. As most of my readers are within the IT industry, I've based these figures on hiring within our sector
2. For simplicity's sake, someone who is over 21 (minimum wage and the factors vary when employing someone younger).
3. The employ won't earn over £844 (around £44,000pa) to avoid needing to account for different NI values (refer to Directgov for more information)

The calculations

I've created a spreadsheet for you which calculates the hourly cost for employees on various salary levels. It should be fairly self explanatory, if it's not, leave a comment and I'll explain as necessary.

Download: Hourly_Rates_Breakdown.xls

Other costs to consider

Once employed, there are a number of other costs that haven't been factored into the spreadsheet:

Downtime

It's unlikely that your employee will be working at full capacity (if they are you should consider employing another!) so it is important factor in some downtime within your calculations.

First Year

Although the process of employment doesn't have to be too costly by using free job sites and pre-written employment contracts, there is still an inherent cost with employing someone.

Think carefully about what you'll need to buy for the new employee -you will need to give them somewhere to work (i.e. a desk), something to use to do the work (i.e. a computer) and importantly somewhere for them to sit!

On-going

As everything in business needs to be broken down to a monetary value so here are some other things that you will need to factor into your calculations:

• Office space -apportion the employee's area of the office's rent
• Stationary -pens, paper and ink all costs
• Telephone
• Training/course fees
• Electricity
• Software and licenses
• Business insurance (if this is your first employee this is likely to increase substantially)

Conclusion

Breaking the salary down to an hourly charge should help give you confidence in being able to afford the additional resource. If you're working flat out at £50ph and finding that work isn't getting done, you can in theory employ someone at around £25,000pa and by keeping them busy still earn £55,594.66 (approximately!) yourself without needing to do any work. I'm sure you can see that by adding to your team and keeping them busy you can very quickly start growing your business.

It's also worth noting, when making a considerable investment such as employing someone, it would be wise to have a contract written specifically for your role.

 

Update: I've already had some great feedback on the spreadsheet courtesy of Sean Ronan from Active Pixels. He added a new table "Weekly billable hours needed to break even". This breaks the total cost of employing someone down into the weeks they can actually work. As they're unlikely to work 52 weeks a year, it works out the number of weeks based on the other information you entered. Great idea, thanks Sean.

A while ago I posted a quick one question questionnaire to gauge how much people were charging for the "average" Umbraco install. This was partially to settle an internal debate but also for an post I've not had time to post yet so in the meantime I'll post the results.

Having a quick look at the results you'll see that 64% of the people that answered (around 100) charge £2,500 or less for a "standard" install with a whopping 96% of people charging less than £10,000. I'll explain how this can be used for pricing your Umbraco packages soon!

I came across a really interesting method of spamming Twitter on Friday, presumably for SEO benefits but it was intriguing so I thought I'd share. I came across it on a Twitter account that was setup under one of our client's name: @RomanOriginals.

We're currently in the process of claiming it from the spammer so here's a screenshot of how it looked when we found it:

 

So what's the scam and why's it interesting?

From what we can see, winslim.com has signed up to one of our client's regular email shots and is harvesting links from it. When an email goes out, they then tweet the subject line (this is usually less than 140 chars), "shorten" your url and throw it onto a twitter stream registered under the company's feed.

Although it appears to be a standard URL shortening service, if you look at the request/responses using Fiddler you will see that each one of the winslim.com links e.g. www .winslim.com/3CShT4H (I've popped a space in there to stop it linking to them) kicks the user over to a winslim.com product promotion page (winslim.com/winslim/SweetDeals/SweetDeals.jsp?d=d) which then redirects the user to the original url!

Although unscrupelous, I still think this is a very clever method and suspect we'll see more spammers doing it shortly so if you've not already registered your company's official Twitter username, it's worth doing it now!

It's taken some time to get here and there's still more to add as I think this is a pretty big topic but I thought I'd get started. I wanted to keep the session more focused on the selling points of Umbraco and how people pitch Umbraco to the clients than selling techniques which on the whole we managed to do.

The first thing I stressed was that I wasn't going to teach you how to sell or selling techniques as I've never found that hard selling works -though I'm not saying it doesn't, I just prefer to educate the client into the most suitable solution (even if that isn't us).

There were a number of questions that were raised and I'll answer what I can here, if you were at the session and I've missed something, please let me know and I'll get it added:

1. What are the key selling points of Umbraco
2. How do you pitch Umbraco
3. Do you tell clients it's open source (or use that as a sales point)?
4. How do you price Umbraco
5. Once you've won, what do you ask your client
6. How do you support Umbraco
7. How do you get around the question of "What happens if you get hit by a bus?"

What are the key selling points of Umbraco

A couple of the attendees came up with better 30second sales pitches so I'm sure they'll post those up shortly but here's a few I remember:

• It's easy to use -you don't need any previous computer experience
• You can edit any page's content yourself at any time
• It's highly flexible and lightweight
• It's search engine friendly
• It's open source (this really can be a selling point at the right time)

Do you tell clients it's open source (or use that as a sales point)?

We do and we don't. Again it really comes down to who you're pitching Umbraco to. Where the client has had issues with developers not releasing source etc then it's clearly a selling point.

Generally we do tend to explain to clients that we will base their website on an open source project that we then build on and customise further to suit their needs and that by using best practice methodologies, any developer can in theory pick up the system and continue to develop it (even if they have no experience of Umbraco).

How do you price Umbraco

This question was asked in a couple of different ways throughout the session and it's a topic in itself (see the article I wrote a while ago about pricing your work).

If you look at Umbraco in the right way you'll see that it's actually rather easy to price as there are a few components that you can sell either individually or together:

• Installation and configuration
• Customisation
• Hosting
• Support

All you need to do is work out a minimum cost for each component and then that will give you a core system cost.

Once you have your core Umbraco costs (don't forget to factor in your license costs) you can then alter the costs accordingly for your client -and this has to be on a case-by-case basis. 

How do you pitch Umbraco

This is easy, there are so many selling points to Umbraco that regardless of what the client is looking for, as long as it's CMS based, Umbraco will have some benefit you can overview to the client.

When pitching Umbraco, we have found educating the user as to the benefits and what the client should be looking for in other systems. If you do this, then the majority of the time, the rest of the competition falls by the wayside.

If the client is a large corporate it's always worth mentioning that it offers much of the functionality that SharePoint does but with little of the cost (or setup pain!).

Once you've won the contract, what do you ask your client

The first thing to do is to get all the information you need to complete your contract (or at least tell your client what you'll need and when). You should know what you'll need already but we tend to ask for:

• Design inspiration (websites the client does and doesn't like -and why)
• Logos and other source imagery
• Text for the website (you'd be best to load the initial content during training but get the client to think about it while you're developing or you'll never get there!)

Next, you'll need to make sure your paperwork is in order. Once you have agreed the general premise of your contract, it's important that you confirm all deliverables (what you'll be doing for the client) in a work order with the client. This avoids an ambiguity on what you'll be delivering and when. This doesn't need to be pages of text (though sometimes it needs to be) but avoids disagreements later.

You should always request signed work order and deposit (we request a minimum of 20% regardless of project spend) at a minimum before starting any work.

Once you have the signed work order (you sign one for the client to keep and keep one yourself), you can start thinking about the project. If it'll take longer than a week to deliver, I recommend you provide the client with rough timescales, this will have the added benefit of helping you focus your mind.

How do you support Umbraco

This is something that Paul Sterling addressed through another session and if he doesn't write up his notes I'll make a few notes in another post.

How do you get around the question of "What happens if you get hit by a bus?"

Although this was asked a couple of times throughout the session, I avoided answering it a little due to a conflict of interest. For the past few months we've been working hard on a new system called Crisis Cover which has been designed to help you with this exact question.

Crisis Cover monitors you to ensure that you're still around and if you don't respond to a number of alerts, it will contact your clients informing there's something wrong.

I'll post more information about Crisis Cover, but if you're interested in getting involved with the beta, leave me your email and I'll get one sent out.

In Closing

There is a lot of information about selling and business in general in my previous post "Business start-up advice" which if you're starting out, I really recommend you reading as it should give you a really good start (and includes example Service Level Agreements, Contracts and other useful documents).

This came through in my email today and it made me smile:

I've had a couple of situations recently where clients have suggesting "tricking" the user into either remaining subscribed to a service i.e. a mailing list or rammed some sales info down their throat whereas we advise to go the oposite direction -if someone doesn't want to read your email, why pay to send it to them? Just because you send it to them, doesn't mean they're going to read it.

Then while booking some tickets this evening I came across FlyThomson's take on it. I was going to blog how I thought their prices were reasonable, or how their checkout process upsold well etc but instead I get to the very last stage and after having "Still no change, the seats are the same price"!"/"The price you see is the price you pay" throughout I noticed that when selection any form of "grown up" payment card I get charged £10!!

The only cards it turns out that don't charge you are Solo and Visa Electron. So much for the "Still no change."

Why try and bamboozle your customer? Ok I had to pay it but I wouldn't now recommend you.

 

 

Thanks. Why didn't you state that at the start?

There's going to be a series of articles shortly that go into my attempts of using social networking to build your business but I thought I'd get this one out into the blogosphere first.

What with the recent onslaught of "celebrities" onto Twitter such as Stephen Fry (who incidentally p'd a lot of people off the other day while over-posting), Chris Moyles and David Allen to mention a few, it got me thinking whether Twitter can actually be a negative thing for you and/or your business. I'm not referring to the tremendous time you lose reading and responding to the numerous posts (Tweets) but more about the transparency issues you'll run into.

Those of you who know me in person know that I don't tend to bite my tongue (not always a good thing I can tell you!) and instead tend to speak openly and honestly regardless of the situation, so for me I don't really worry about what I Tweet, IM, e-mail or SMS as it's usually saying the same thing (unless I'm tired and losing my mind!). I have however noticed that's not true for everyone.

For me, Twitter, MSN and these other social-status update services such as Facebook bring a whole new layer of complexity to those who want to "skive" -who hasn't seen the notorious Kyle Doyle email. It's not so much full on lies like Kyle's that I'm referring to but more the little ones like saying you couldn't complete some work because of xyz and then having posted a message on Twitter along the lines of "sod this I'm off to the pub". When your employer (or even friend) see's that, if it doesn't immediately annoy them, it will certainly plant the seed of doubt in their mind.

I've been seeing this "phenomenon" for a while, it started with MSN status updates, then Facebook and now the worst of them all -Twitter. For goodness sake, just be honest, if you lie these days you're so much more likely to be caught out and that really can ruin your reputation -or at least lose you business.

Listening to Stacey update our answer machine messages today and Darren Ferguson posting on Twitter asking how to write project synopsis' got me thinking about KISS and that people knew what an answer machine was there for now and they didn't need a load of drivel about the fact that we're not here, leave a message, that we'll get back to them as soon as possible, they're just waiting for the beep (a lot of the time these days the provider then explains what to do to re-record your message etc -incidentally, have you ever used that? I've not) so why get in their way.

Although it's not something we've done yet, I'm thinking of changing the company message to something like "You've got through to The Site Doctor, we're not in, leave us a message or email" and that's it. Short, sweet and simple. I'm tempted to go as far as "The Site Doctor is closed, here's the beep" but that might be too blunt.

Why should they differ? People know what they're there for, get them straight to the point and don't fluff around it. BTW if you're interested to know what I think makes a good portfolio write up, again KISS and say as much as possible while writing as little as possible -the client doesn't generally care what technology you're using (9/10 they'll say they want PHP when they meant ASP.Net FWIW) as that's generally gobeldygook to them anyway.

It's also important to keep it as short as possible (unless you're not aiming at them reading it i.e. SEO). The readers not interested in how much trouble you went to, just make sure the following is mentioned (if it's true)!

• How they found you, this can be subtly  e.g. "Acme Corp contacted The Site Doctor to." or "Acme Corp was referred to The Site Doctor" -says all it needs no?
• Overview what the general spec was e.g. "We were commissioned to do ABC"
• Overview any successes that you had e.g. "We achieved everything Acme Corp asked of us within the timescales and budgets outlined"
• Without getting too techy, overview how it works and what they can do with it
• Use your company name once or twice but not every time, it's not necessary

As I said, our portfolio doesn't always follow this at the moment but we're working on it. A better example is our paper brochure where we only had 50-100 words per project.

Have you made any New Year's resolutions this year? -That's a question I'm sure you've been asked a dozen times already this year. New Year's resolutions have always amused me, the thought that people wait around for months to make (often) big changes in their life has baffled me.

If you run a business you'll know that it's important to review, assess and action a huge number of factors pretty much on a daily basis, if you don't, your business is likely to be slow to react to changes within your market place and so struggle.

I think its human nature to have a point to focus on whether it's the beginning of a new year, a holiday, even the recession but why wait until the end of the week? Or even better when you identify a problem? Surely that would be better?

That said the New Year and the recession are giving companies (including The Site Doctor) the perfect opportunity to clean out the deadwood within their businesses and reassess everyone's roles.

What do you do? Do you review weekly, monthly or annually? At The Site Doctor we have weekly meetings to review the previous week's successes, failures, evaluate next week's goals and more importantly to identify areas that require attention. This doesn't need to take long but it allows you to react quickly to emerging issues and limit the impact it could have.

If you're being hit by the recession (my sympathies go out to you if they are affecting your business) then you should be asking yourself "If I had reviewed our current position sooner, would I have been able to spot any warning signs?". I rather suspect if you are on top of your business you would have been able to.

If I were you, I'd look to make my New Year's resolution this year to not need one next year because you action the issues as soon as they arise.

I was looking for an adjustable 4 hole punch today so I thought I'd quickly pop onto Staples' website thinking they might have one I can buy and then I was faced with this monstrosity:

I know they've got a large product catalogue to share but why make it hard for me? Where's the search box I ask you! I actually had to think to find what I suspect is the most useful thing on their site.

Why make the user think? Make the search box BIG bright and bold so I don't need to think about where to find what I'm after.

I've been sitting on this for a few weeks now -mainly due to my own laziness but I thought I'd finally pad it out a little. It would appear that Google have release a new method of ranking your own results for certain terms:

Once you've promoted a page you'll notice a little green arrow to the right of the title link and the results will come back in this order every time you search on that term while you're logged in.

At the moment I think it's just stored against your profile but I would imagine at some point in the future they'll start monitoring what everyone else is promoting and adjusting their results accordingly.

What I'm interested to know about is how it affects SEO, I can't imagine they'll add too much preference to the promotions otherwise we could be in for another Google Bomb situation where your competitors promote or demote your site.

Do you really want what you do to be classed as "it'll do"? At the moment it would appear that a lot of businesses are happy to say "It'll do" rather than put that extra mile to "It's excellent".

We've been avoiding "it'll do" like the plague for over a year now and although it's not always easy is so much more rewarding and produces a much better end product. I don't think this applies just to work you produce, what about a job advert or your working environment?

We've just started looking for new offices and staff, in both cases and we wanted more than "just another job" or "it's just another office", I want people to love working with and at The Site Doctor so we've been working hard to make it a reality. Finding THE office in THE location doesn't cost that much more (perhaps another month looking and a few extra quid) and making our positions that little bit more enjoyable won't really cost a lot more but will make our employees enjoy working with us and ultimately more loyal.

Does it really cost you more? I don't think so no. Getting a really special office will make you feel happier at work, feeling happier at works means you're more creative, being more creative generally results in being more productive. Feeling appreciated and enjoying your role will also increase the likelihood you'll want to rock up at work each day and do more while you're there so in both cases, going the extra mile will pay off.

What about marketing campaigns? Well it's the same thing, who talks about an "OK" viral advert? What buzz surrounds something "that'll do" in contrast to one that really goes the extra mile like the advert from Nike a while ago? I wonder how much more it cost to produce that against how much it cost to produce one of the awful run-of-the-mill TV adverts that are around at the moment?

Ask yourself, do you really want to settle with "it'll do"?

We've had an irritating issue recently with our accounting system, when creating the custom invoices.

Basically, every time we tried to create a custom invoice with Microsoft Office Accounting the entire application would crash for no obvious reason.

Checking the exception's stack trace it would talk about get_item which lead me down one path but the answer was actually (and irritatingly) more simple than that -we had a couple of merged cells in the footer of the totals table. Silly I know but it made all the difference!

So if you're getting a crash with Microsoft Office Accounting when creating your invoices, check for merged cells first!

This came through to one of our clients today, I thought I'd share it as I've not seen it before and it made me chuckle. Note the placeholder: <Online since>

Thought you might like to share it with your clients :)

Sometimes it's the little things that keep workers happy so when I saw the little surprise that online conference callers Powwownow do with their cards I thought I'd share.

When you sign up at www.powwownow.co.uk you get the option of being sent your number on a card to hand around to your friends, clients and anyone else. It comes through the post in a little card holder (mine was missing our spare cards but hey). If you rip it open, on some of the folds, they've put jokes for the people putting them together! Look:

Just like the jokes on lollipop sticks -costs next to nothing (in this case I would imagine it was free) but makes that works day just a little more entertaining :).

It's important when going into any meeting with a client that you prepare (everyone know's the old motto "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail") but how can you do that? First of all, consider what sort of meeting it is, find out who's going to the meeting and why they're there. Once you have this information you're good to go.

The first client meeting

Although you may be a little nervous at the first couple of meetings, this is perfectly normal, just remember that they've asked you there so they're interested in what you have to say -after all, you're the expert!

It's very likely that they client will want to know more information about your company (not you!) so having a short synopsis of your company that can act as a base is very important. For instance, The Site Doctor has something along the lines of:

The Site Doctor specialises in creating bespoke web based applications centred on your business requirements. We work with some of the world's largest and most successful organisations in both the public and private sectors as well as a wide selection of SME's.

By combining specialist technology skills, with excellence in design, usability, accessibility and a unique business management process, we are able to deliver results-driven solutions including websites, intranets, Content Management Systems, enterprise portals, business applications and extranets.

As well as developing major applications, our skills in marketing and communications ensures that we deliver a consistent message across a number of interactive communication channels and also integrate your objectives within an off-line environment.

Since establishing The Site Doctor, we have encouraged all those involved to participate in the relevant online communities to not only improve their own knowledge and expertise but also give something back and help further other's careers.

To be fair, this monolog changes depending on who we're meeting and the general feeling of the meeting, for instance if you're addressing a panel then we might leave off the SME part and replace it with a list of your clients as they're more likely to be interested in your larger work.

Whatever your monolog is, it should be short and concise (I can digress somewhat sometimes when introducing The Site Doctor), make sure it's no longer than 2 minutes as if they want to know more, they'll ask.

Make sure you've prepared a short list of questions for the client either about themselves or the project they have in mind, some of these you might already have answers to so prepare questions on the responses. Here are a couple of standard ones:

• What are you looking to achieve with this project -do you have any goals/objectives already defined such as number of visitors, % increase in sales etc?
• Similar to above, a good question is "What would make you consider this project a success?" -then link it to their targets above
• Do you have any literature, designs or mood boards that would help with this project already prepared?
• What are your timescale's for this project?
• Are there any events or meetings that you would like to have this project completed in time for (99/100 there's a trade show coming up that they forgot to tell you about without being prompted
• Have you thought about a budget for this work? (They'll most likely say no, you tell us what it'll cost and we'll decide -there's a way around that which I'll blog about later)

If you manage to get this information (and any other relevant information) you're off to a good start with your project! Don't fret too much though if you can't get all the information or you don't manage to get the budget from the client the first time around, there are ways around it.

The most important thing about the first client meeting is that both parties feel at ease with one and other as this will form a good base to build the project on. If you're liked by the client they're more likely to do business with you -especially if they have to pitch you to their superiors.

My next post will blog about the project meetings and client feedback/sign-off meetings. At some point I'll blog about my successful networking tips and how to get a budget out of a client but that's enough for today!

What do you say when in your first meeting? Do you have any tips for what to say in meetings? Leave me a comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

We've recently (and somewhat oddly) had a lot of dealings with Yellow Pages. In the past when asked, I've suggested people shouldn't bother with paying to be listed within the Yellow Pages -especially if you're an IT related company. This was purely based on my experience of stupid numbers of callers wanting an e-commerce site for £50 and the fact that I've believed for a long time that it's quickly losing any useful market share thanks to the likes of Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Now however I've got several reasons not to.

A little history/background for those of you who aren't aware who, or what Yellow Pages is

Yellow Pages has for a long time been the place to find the telephone number of a local company. It neatly organises everything from your local kebab shop to your nearest funeral parlor (not saying the two are linked!).

Yellow Pages ran into a problem a few years ago that I don't think they ever really realised/addressed -this little thing that wouldn't catch on called the Internet. Although they launched a website somewhere around 2001 they were (IIRC) more interested in competing for the 118* directory service (btw how many variations are there? 35ish? -How many do you remember!). Then, by the time they started to realise the potential of the web over the premium rate call lines, they pricked their ears up.

But instead of following suit on the web by opening their service up as widely as possible, they decided to dig their head into the sand and take the same course of action many large corporate do of "We're so big, we don't need you piddly client, you need us", and this leads me to believe Yellow Pages (and to a large extent) yell.com will soon be a thing of the past (thankfully some might say).

So what's my gripe? What've they done to me?

Nothing is the simplest response but that's also what they've done trying to satisfy a couple of our clients. I'll refer to two of these to argue my point, both SMEs, for arguments sake we'll call them Company A and Company B.

Company A

Company A spends approximately £5,000 advertising in Yellow Pages each year. This equates to about 20% of their turnover (a fair chunk of it!). Company A has also had a website for the past few years. Originally developed by Yellow Pages, but updated by us in 2003.

Ever since the website was created, Company A claimed that the majority (est. 80%+) of their custom came from Yellow Pages so each year, when the Yellow Pages rep gave them a call happily invested yet more money.

Recently though, Company A decided to redesign their website as their old one wasn't snazzy enough anymore. Despite fairly heavy traffic and our objections, the decision was made to turn off the existing website (rather than replacing it a temporary holding page) while the new site was being designed and developed. This was only going to take a month (it took a little less than this). But in this time, Company A found that his bookings for the next month or so were massively down on the same period last year. As soon as this was realised, a holding page was put online with a telephone number but it served to prove a point -Yellow Pages' share of the "record search" industry is depleting.

I realise that it's not always as cut-and-dry as I've made it out to be here (mainly for simplicities sake) but the most of the traffic to the site originates from keyword searches on the service rather than the company name or direct traffic (suggesting that they're not looking at Yellow Pages and then coming to the site).

Further to this shock, Yellow Pages originally registered the domain name for this client but despite having fully paid all his accounts, Yellow Pages are yet to release the domain name into our control (we've been chasing them since 2003). This is despite several promises (both verbally and written) that they would release the domain. Needless to say this was unnecessary aggravation over something quite minor.

Thanks to the trouble caused over the domain (and apparent lack of interest from Yellow Pages -despite a huge spend) Company A is now looking at completely stopping their advertising with Yellow Pages.

Company B

Unlike Company A, Company B has historically had a much smaller spend. Usually opting for the smallest advert in a single directory because very little business has come from previous adverts. Company B is in a fairly competitive industry but features prominently.

This year when the Yellow Pages sales rep came calling, they explained to Company B the reason they'd only seen a very small return on their investment was because they were advertising in very few of the Yellow Pages directories. To get more sales Company B should advertise in two other directories and pay for a premium listing which would ensure his company was always on the first page within his area. This sounded reasonable -and logical (advertise in more places, get more enquiries) and as Company B had had a few good months trading decided it was a good investment.

For the first month or so Company B checked on their yell.com listing every few days, sure enough there they were on the first page. A couple of months on and several hundred pounds later however, something wasn't right. Where Company B had previously had 2-3 enquiries in the same period this year they'd had none. Company B asked us to look into their online position as far as Yellow Pages' yell.com was concerned and despite being promised a first page position on certain areas/phrases, they were rarely appearing inside the top 40 enhanced listings (there are currently 47 listings).

Somewhat concerned Company B decided to monitor the situation and started to monitor their position regularly (and we did too). Between all the visits, they were lucky if their result showed up in the results for the areas they serviced -let alone the one they were based in! Having spent over 3 times what they did the previous year, Company B felt somewhat cheated by the sales person so decided to complain.

The customer services rep was somewhat dismissive of Company B's claims and told him that he was appearing in the searches but despite this, they would have their sales team look into what he felt he was sold. The sales team phoned back and informed Company B that they'd only paid for an enhanced listing -which meant the advert wouldn't always be on the first page and there was no way the salesman would have said this as this would cost several thousand pounds. Company B however remembers the salesman stating this so asks us to talk to them about not appearing in the results as when asked, the rep started "talking technical".

When I called to discuss the account I was meet with a very pleasant lady "Sarah" who was the technical sales person who after spouting a little crap about web metrics explained the situation:

After this she hung up (I kid you not). Ok the easiest way out of the conversation by Company B hit the roof when they heard.

We're still awaiting an explanation but have mysteriously started to appear on the first page more often-than-not. Clearly they have some weighting system at play...

So what's my point?

I don't think I really have a point, I just felt like a rant but here are a couple of other reasons why I think Yellow Pages sucks and won't be around for much longer:

Enquiry rates down

I heard another advisor talking about some analysis he had been involved in with a local company. For the past few years they had been recording every enquiry to their firm and aggregating the statistics for comparison at the end of the financial year to decide on whether to advertise next year.

These are the approximate number of enquiries per month:

· 04/05: 110

· 05/06: 80

· 06/07: 40

· 07/08: 32

Their service is not seasonal and the competition has not changed dramatically over the years (certainly not enough to warrant the change seen here). Furthermore their turnover had been increasing. Oh, and the advert for comparisons sake was always the same.

I'd love to get hold of some statistics on Yell.com and Yellow Pages enquiries in general to see if this matches the general trend. Google Trends suggests it's started to drop a little.

Prices staying the same

Despite massive competition online, Yellow Pages are still charging a fair whack for their service and have no intention of changing this. I think as soon as the smaller advertiser cottons on to the fact that they can run a pretty intense pay-per-click campaign for the same amount of cash and reach a larger audience Yellow Pages will be in some serious trouble.

Non-recyclable

Would you believe it? In this day and age, for some reason our recycling people won't take away your Yellow Pages? I tried putting it out a few times but each time they lifted it out and put it back in the box for me.

I expect there's some logical reason for it but I know very few households now that keep the heavy directory so where do they all go? The tips? Disgraceful!

That said, I think I do have a point. I think Yellow Pages is a very good example of a company that has disgraceful customer service. Taking the two (I have more) examples mentioned here I think the issues could have easily been rectified:

Company A: Transfer the domain into the control of the client.

Company B: Simply apologise for the misunderstanding (no-one said they were sorry for the misunderstanding, instead they just made out that Company B was stupid) and if needs be, offer some form of discounted service next year.

I can only hope that Yellow Pages reads this and realises they're going to seriously P off their loyal customers in time to save themselves, but I don't think my blog is important enough for that to happen yet, sadly.

If you're asking me in the future. Steer clear of Yellow Pages and talk to us about some Google AdWords advertising.

I've been an advocate of buying goods online for quite some time now but have been astounded at the level of service received recently that leads me to believe that buying online is slowly removing the benefits of buying in a store.

A little background: My camera broke (again) the other day. I've returned this model to Amazon before and wasn't aware that if the item has a problem again, they don't replace it, they just refund the cost. An interesting policy -especially as my problems were not related, but a nice surprise.

As I packaged up my old camera to return (a very painless process I might add) I got looking around for a replacement. Checking out the online reviews, I found my 3 favourites to pottered off to Jessops to check them out. The lady at Jessops was very helpful, pretty much confirming everything I had read online. So it came to deal time, I don't mind paying a little extra in store to get the item the same day and to do a little bartering.

Today was not to be my day though, it turns out the only one left in stock was the show model, normally a good way of getting some extra money off but not this time, it wasn't for sale. Bare in mind this was Saturday, the fastest they could get me the model I want (a mainstream camera not overly in demand) was Wednesday! So off I went home and bought it online on the Sunday. It arrived Tuesday at 9:15! What an exceptional service (thanks UK Digital Cameras).

Then, on Monday evening (around 2100) I ordered my new number plates from Demon Plates expecting them to take a few days to be made and posted (so they should have arrived today) but instead, they arrived on Wednesday! Amazing.

Don't get me wrong, I think stores have a place, its's still nice to pop into a shop and pick up the items you're interested in. There's definitely still something in feeling the item before you buy but service wise online stores are really starting to take over.

All I can say is keep it up guys, you're doing the industry a great service! I hope our ecommerce website owners are as efficient.

This started out as a response to a comment and then I thought it might be better as a post in it's own right.

In his comment David Conlisk said:

First off Tim very well done on providing some excellent information on the site. I've just spent my first afternoon as my own boss reading your business start-up advice and it's been excellent (it's called research, not slacking off!)

One question I would ask you about this post is what about market rates? I am going from being a contractor on an hourly rate to being a limited company. I never considered working out a base rate like you've done, instead I spoke to as many people as possible in the marketplace to gauge what the rates are and I price accordingly. Of course this works fine for more corporate clients, but I doubt I could charge smaller companies similar rates. Let's hope I can make a good enough impression on my corporate clients to keep that kind of work coming in!

Keep up the good work,

David

Hi David,

Thanks for your kind words, I'm glad to hear you found it of use.

In regards market rates, it's one of the oldest debates in the book AFAIK and has a rather unhelpful answer of "You should charge what you feel comfortable charging". I'll try to improve on that a little as it's always hard but in essence it's true. Basically from experience I would keep it as simple as possible, have as few rates as possible for all clients, just make sure you feel you're worth the rate in your own mind.

Although you need to keep an eye on the "market rates", you'll find your rate will determine the type of client you work with. Being the cheapest on the market is not necessarily a good thing. One advantage of offering a freelance service to other development companies is that we get to see what happens when your prices are rock bottom -take it from me, more often than not, it's more hassle than it's worth. When you have someone going el-cheapo all the way you often find they're overly picky about every aspect and require a lot more management time (that's not to say those paying higher rates aren't, I guess you just notice it more).

As long as you're reasonable with your rates, clients who are willing to pay your rates, will use you (they may complain a little but it's unlikely) but at the end you'll both be happy with the work produced. As long as you believe in yourself -and your rates, this will be conveyed to your clients so if you know you're value for money you will be able to justify it to any client (corporate or otherwise). It's up to the client to decide whether you're value for money.

Believe it or not the service industry is not the only industry to set it's fees and then get them negotiated on -Stacey used to work in Debenhams a few years ago, for those of you who don't know what Debenhams is, it's a large department store in the UK, they sell items for a set fee, everyone knows this but regardless of this she still had people trying to negotiate on the fee. Be open to negotiation but don't be silly about it otherwise the client may always expect a discount of that level (so stick to no more than a 10% variation).

Don't worry about having clients not use you because of your rate, as long as you're around the market rate there will be a client for you. At the end of the day, you can't realistically expect to service every prospect that comes through your doors -sometimes you just have to say "sorry that's the price".

I'm not saying charge £1,000ph when the market rate is £10ph as that's just silly but I would say your base rate shouldn't be cheaper than the market rate or more than 3 times the market rate (unless your service really is that good and you're bogged down with work [I did have a link for here about an ?SEO company charging $1,000ph and still being too busy but I can't find it atm], in which case go for it!).

Tip: How do you find out market rates? That's simple, find a couple of companies who offer similar services, to a similar client base who are a similar size to you, call them up and just ask them what their daily rates are. Call 10 or so companies and you should have a few prices to compare :)

Another tip: Always ask for an rough idea of their budget -even if it's just a range, this will give you a good idea of they're realistic or not.

And one more: Don't forget your rates don't need to be fixed. If you find you're too busy, increase your rates a little, if you're too quiet (whereas everyone else is really busy) then you may need to look into how you market your business, your presentation skills and finally possibly reducing your rates.

A word of warning: I would avoid dropping your rate "for the nice client" as the majority of times you'll end up regretting it, either because it gets out of control and you get frustrated because "you're doing them a favour" whereas they feel they just negotiated your service rates down (and so should be getting the same level of service. Remember, it's business, you don't need to do anyone a favour, charge what you feel is fair for your time and you'll always enjoy your work :)

On the flip side of this, if you're lucky enough to get a large corporate, make sure your rate is their market rate as we've lost work for being too cheap (and in my eyes we were already overcharging for the workload).

It's easy to be busy and cheap, but being a busy fool is no way to live!

HTH

Tim

It's gift time again (for me that is!) -yey! But when I was checking out on Amazon.co.uk earlier today I was a little puzzled by this...

On the product details page it said £4.45 shipping (correct me if I'm wrong)

But then when you check out it's suddenly £7.36. I was checked in by this stage so did Amazon think I was prepared to pay for Express Shipping? I tried to change it to default shipping (as they often upsell) but I couldn't.

.most odd.

If you've had the chance to catch any of the UK news recently (or even glanced at a paper) you'll no-doubt have heard about the fantastic new art gallery that was due to open in West Bromwich last year this weekend -The Public.

Unlike all the other articles about The Public (I ran out of words so here are a few more), I'm not interested in flaming the fact that they've placed a £32 million £52million (they went over budget) art gallery in one of the Midland's most deprived areas, or the fact that they're looking to charge around £7 for entry but instead the fact that they can't even get the simplest of things right -despite an astronomical budget.

Despite having gone over budget, and delivering late, they couldn't even manage to get their website online. In this day and age with such fantastic and resilient hosting providers such as Rackspace, there really is no excuse for having your website offline.

Fair enough, an "Under Construction" message could have been an amusing pun while The Public was being constructed but it has been constantly offline for the week before it's launched is simply unforgivable. Regardless of who developed it, I hope there were serious ramifications.

Despite this massive cock-up, I'm looking forward to avoiding the £7 entrance fee and checking out the futuristic art gallery this weekend (free entry). I'll upload my photos to Flickr if I'm allowed to photograph in there, if not the guardian has a nice collection of images. At least I know there the female toilets are complete.

Now I just need to find out when it opens.

.shame the website is still offline ;)

Since our recent feature on CSS Mania, we've had it pointed out to us that The Site Doctor is getting featured all over the place. The most recent two relate to our new brochure -more notably The Site Doctor branded stressballs which are apparently protect against MRSA.

The first feature was in an industry magazine (PRW) check out a photo of the article here. The second feature was from EPPI (you can see it online at: http://www.my-catalog.at/37483_eppi62/ -Pg 76). Ok neither actually talk about The Site Doctor but at least our logo is getting out there!

Thanks to Mark Bailey from the UK stressball manufacturer -Urofoam for letting me know about these two.

If you've seen The Site Doctor mentioned somewhere leave me a comment, I'd love to hear!

After months of  painstaking work I can FINALLY reveal what we've been beavering away on -our new brochure with a twist. If you're involved in marketing at all you're probably already aware how hard it is to print interactive designs. Regardless of that, we needed some way of advertising so we got our thinking caps on.

The brief was simple: we needed to come up with a way of marketing our bespoke design and development services. Being a creative company we also wanted something that stood out from the other 1,001 West Midlands based web design companies. It should also reflect the attention to detail and quality that goes into our web design and development.

Our target audience was to be high end management so the brochure had to be quick and easy to navigate, have clear calls to actions and require minimum effort to read (unlike my blog!!).

As all "good" ideas^* start with a pen, napkin and one too many coffees, we trotted off to our favourite Costa for a brain storming session and here's what we came up with:

^* not all good ideas do but some do but it's a good excuse for a coffee.

We went through all sorts of ideas ranging from having themed TicTacs produced, to sending out branded bottles of wine, most of the ideas were dismissed because they had either already been done or would just be binned/eaten and forgotten. We needed something that stood out.

For those of you who can't understand our scribbling's, we decided upon a brochure with a twist (or two).

The First idea was to make the brochure quick and simple to navigate -like the websites we develop so we decided to go a little Avant Garde (off the wall/pushing the boundaries) and opted for a coloured tabbed navigation system, the idea was taken in part from an Argos catalogue which uses colours to separate the sections. I felt combining the tabs and colours would ensure the brochure was quick and easy to use.

The next issue we addressed was how to get the reader to open the brochure, it sounds silly but getting someone to open the brochure (let alone reading it) is pretty hard to do so we decided to offer the reader an incentive and what was better than our new stressball? Why not put one on the front of the brochure?

I've jumped a few stages in our thinking but here's the final product -a brochure with a stressball attached to the front, mimicking a pill packet (complete with foil on the inside to get the pill out), coloured tab page navigation and loads more.

Exciting times as all our hard work is finally coming to fruition -our branded stressballs have arrived and they look AWESOME! I really couldn't have hoped for a better looking outcome if I had tried, they're unbelievably cool (that or I'm unbelievably sad!) but take a look for yourself and see what you think! (You'll have to excuse the photography)

They were delivered in a massive box -I don't think I've seen so many pills before! All exciting...

I've watched pretty much every series of The Apprentice (the UK version with Sir Alan Sugar) and to an extent have enjoyed them all. I've got a horrible feeling that The Apprentice is going down the same route that Dragons Den and Big Brother seemed to take -that is getting contestants that are more interested in controversy and fame than anything else.

What I don't like about this current series is that there doesn't seem to be any form of comradery among the contestants, all of whom seem to be overly cut-throat and self-absorbed, this is of course to be expected in any competition but at times it's a little OTT.

I can't remember which episode it was but recently I was amazed that ?Claire refused to help the project manager with the pitch. Ok I completely agree that he should have asked her to do it in the first place but that could easily be put down to big headedness or stubbornness, surely she wants the team to have the best chance at winning?

What's worse is that seems to be playing the TV game not the business game, not firing clearly incompetent candidates and instead keeping them in and teaming them up with their nemesis'. that was clear from almost the first episode which IMNSHO detracts massively from what the show is about.

Putting the rivalry aside for a moment, what's even more concerning is the quality of the candidates. I know a few people have blogged about how stupid some of them are and mocked how they're surely not Britain's best business minds (ignoring the fact that if they were Britain's best then why on earth are they going for a job only paying £100k) but come on! I'm not the sharpest tool in the toolbox but even I know that sending cards to "save the environment" is a ludicrous idea and don't even get me started on getting some guy down the market to "bless" a chicken...

Personally, I feel that Sir Alan (who appears to have come the government's entrepreneur advisor) is setting an extremely bad example for how to do business (and I've felt that from previous episodes where he criticises the losing team for not blagging something for free -ok you can do it a couple of times, but blagging won't really create a sustainable business). Sadly, this mix of candidates really doesn't do anything to improve that opinion, it'll be interesting to see how things pan out...

Despite all the doom and gloom surrounding the pending credit crunch, we're hiring as work is piling in and we need help :). So if you're a developer, designer, sales person, marketing guru -or you're just plain bored check out The Site Doctor's vacancies page for the great posts currently up for grabs!

Not sure why you should come and work with us? There are way too many reasons to list in one go but here are my top 5:

• You'll have a great boss (ok I'm a touch biased)
• We have 20% time (every Friday we down tools and do something cool -that doesn't relate to the main projects you're working on at the time -more about that another day)
• We're committed to your development and will fund courses etc
• There are bonuses to be had for referrals and working hard!
• You get your Birthday as an additional bank holiday so you never need to worry about booking it off again!

Oh and there's free Tea and Coffee -so I guess that's 6 reasons to get in touch.

For more information about the posts available (more being added later this week) check out The Site Doctor vacancies page.

Thanks to Gareth and The Register for this one, it had me laughing for a good long while.

After the last design debacle (the London Olympics 2012) logo, you would have thought someone would have thought carefully before making the image public but here's the latest logo for the UK's Office of Government Commerce (OGC):

Other than being just plain boring it's ok right? Yeah, I thought so too until I was told to rotate it 90 degrees clockwise...

Brilliant! I'm still laughing!

Just goes to show (once again) that going with a large digital agency to create your brand identity isn't necessarily a good idea...

Having just rebranded Avant Garde hair salons (see the new logo here), I'm now checking our design. Nope all looks good so it's "Big Guys" 2 - "Little Guys" 0

Can't wait to see what the next government logo is...

One of the quandaries I've had for a while with The Site Doctor is our name, it sounds silly but I've lost count of the number of times I've had to spell out "site", it may not be too obvious why at first glance but there's two common spellings of "site" -one relates to websites, building etc, the other opticians (sight). Silly eh!

It has never really bothered me in the past but now that I have Stacey working with me we run into another issue -not only does she have a difficult to spell surname (Shapcott), people use so many inflections of "Stacey" it's comical. So this week I've taken it upon myself to sort this and have gone all out creating email aliases (we used to just have name@, name.lastname@, initiallastname@) but Stacey now has Stacie, Stace, Stacee and numerous other counterparts.

In an effort to make life easier for our clients, we've also got a few more domain names that point to our main domain name which include:

www.thesitedoc.co.uk

www.thesitedr.co.uk

www.sitedoc.co.uk

and my favourite:

www.thesightdoctor.co.uk

A little overkill perhaps but for the sake of £20 I thought it was worth it ;)

Moral of the story: Don't have a long winded name that has words that sound similar to others in it ;)

Today is Stacey's second day and change is already abreast, Monday was somewhat quiet on the business front with Gym, Hair Cuts, Lunch, Shopping and numerous phone calls but today things have really started moving -the first port of call was going Ltd:

Congratulations...

We are pleased to advise you that your company, THE SITE DOCTOR LTD has been accepted for incorporation by Companies House

To my foreign readers this means that my West Midlands based web design company The Site Doctor is now officially listed with Companies House -we've got a certificate 'n everything...

Although it was a "real" company, now the main benefit is If The Site Doctor Ltd was to go bankrupt, each shareholder is responsible only for the amount they have invested in the company -so if The Site Doctor Ltd was to go bankrupt (which I hope it doesn't!) I won't lose our house!

Watch this space as The Site Doctor Ltd and it's new branding will be launched later this month...

I'm always up for a laugh and a challenge -especially where business is concerned, without pushing yourself I think your company will just shrivel up and die. This time however I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew -which may very well result in public humiliation, women's clothing and the most bizarre gym session ever!

While "playing" squash the other day with a mate of mine -Ian- who runs Avant Garde - a hair salon based in my local gym Next Generation and I jested about challenging each other to increasing our turnover to (for me anyway) ridiculous heights for the tax return 08/09 and so began the turnover challenge 2008.

The aim of the game is simple -we have to turnover more than £x00,000 in the next tax year. For a little more fun we decided to add in a forfeit for the company who earned the least. What's the forfeit I hear you cry! Well that's what's up for debate at the moment but basically it should be:

• Fun!
• Suitably humiliating to make sure you don't want to lose!
• Non-financial
• Non-harmful to us (i.e. no tattoos, piercing's etc)
• Non-harmful to the businesses
• Non-harmful to others
• Legal!

We've come up with a few ideas but I thought I'd throw it out there for other ideas as I'm sure something amusing will come up! My fav's so far:

1. A gym session in women's clothing: miniskirt, sports top and high heels (knowing Ian he'll wear the panties too!)
2. Do a parachute -though I think that's something I want to try anyhow...
3. Paragliding/Snowboarding/Other etc in the nuddy
4. (Me) -become a hairdresser (Ian) -learn to code

The thing I like about the gym session is that it's scaleable i.e. "for every £10k difference in turnover, the other has to run for another minute on the treadmill..."

If you don't think that's a hard challenge, put it this way, to meet the target we've both got to more than double our turnover. If neither of us make it I suggest you get a weeks pass at my local gym -Next Generation April 2009!

You've got until April 1st 2008 to get the forfeit ideas in...

After our recent issues with Fasthosts (or as they are now fondly referred to in the office - Farcehosts) I have made the conscious decision to move away from them completely over the forthcoming months (probably years). We no longer have any clients on their hosting platform but we still have circa 300 domain names registered through various accounts through their sister company UKReg.

Due to the authority's charges, we can't just transfer all these domains away as it'd cost us a fortune (and possibly one we can't recoup) so I'm going to do it as they expire. In our search to find an alternative provider someone suggested we check out the new kid on the block - Heart Internet. According to those in the know on Underscore they are a bunch of guys who used to work at 1&1 and decided they could do it better.

So far I've found their service to be great -and value wise they're cheaper than most providers which is a bonus. As with most of the providers these days it's all managed through their easy to use online control panel which is pretty straight forward. If you're on the lookout for great value or cheap domain names give Heart Internet a look.

BTW if you're wondering where Heart Internet's .co.uk domain names from 9p is, check under the transfer fees. Still £2.59 is a great price for any .co.uk!

If you've found this article through a Google search I expect like me you've read a plethora of articles and blog posts that vary from saying how amazing the Aeron is, to how the Aeron is an over-priced relic of the burst dot com bubble of the 90s. Well this one is my take on Herman Miller's Aeron.

Before buying my Aeron I decided to make use of Herman Miller's trial Aeron, this isn't something they make you overly aware of so if you're thinking about getting a new office chair, contact your local representative (or the Herman Miller website) and ask if you can hire one for a month. It'll cost you somewhere around £40 but it'll at least allow you to see what you're getting before outlaying £400+. The trial Aeron took a little getting used to which I've put down to the fact that my posture in the old chair was seriously bad but after a week or so I was sitting very comfortably indeed.

One of the simpler things I liked about the Aeron was the fact you can raise it up higher than many other chairs, this is important for me as my desk is 4-5 inches too high which means I'm always sitting incorrectly. By raising the Aeron up a little more I was able to sit with my arms flat on the desk reducing shoulder and back ache considerably. Another aspect of Herman Miller's Aeron chair that I liked was the fact you could adjust the resistance of the back, again a simple; but important feature, it takes a little trial and error but you can get the balance just right so it lifts you up into your position but doesn't stop you from leaning back to relax (or in my case kick back when you do something right).

Rather than having a cushioned fabric seat, the Aeron has a mesh that stretches a little to offer the same comfort padding does but without the worry that in 2 years time, the padding turns to something more like cardboard (which is one of the factors that prompted my search for a new office chair). The downside I've found with this mesh is it overly aerated which in my case means my bum is kept very cool (and back which is a good thing as sweatiness is reduced to a minimum) -great in the summer but in the winter brrrr!

The main downside to having the Aeron is the price, as I wanted a grey one, I had mine imported from the States and paid a premium but you can pick up the basic spec chair for around £400 (and probably less if you do a little bargaining), baring in mind the 12 year warranty these chairs carry it should in theory outlast 3-4 £99 type office chairs and look after your back in the meantime. Being somewhat of a scrooge, I looked at it from the POV that the difference between what I would spend on new £99 chairs in the warranty period of the Aeron would only be a matter of £200 or so which equates to around 5p per day. That's got to be worth it :)

On the whole though I really like my Herman Miller Aeron, I feel it has really helped my posture and although I didn't really suffer from back ache after a long day (probably down to my canoeing) I feel that the small investment short-term will pay off in the longer term. I consider the chair a luxury and so wouldn't splash out on it if I were a start-up as there are far more important things to get sorted first! That said, if you're planning on spending long hours in your chair from the outset maybe it is worth the expense from the start.

It's worth stating at this point that in addition to trying out the Aeron, I also tried out Herman Miller's alternative offerings and a number of alternative office chairs but I didn't find I got the same comfort.

I did a lot of shopping around for a suitably cheap(er) supplier and was surprised to find out that the supplier just down the road from me was able to offer the cheapest price by far (ignoring delivery etc) so check out Creative Box in Birmingham, Kate from Creative Box in Birmingham was more than helpful and patient in answering my 101 questions so I'm sure she'll be able to help you out too.

What I have found the most incredible about Stacey leaving her job to come work with me is the fact that you soon start to find out how people perceive your business. I try not to talk to people in too much depth about what's going on with The Site Doctor as generally when people ask "How's the business going?" I've realised they don't want you to reel off how much debt you're in (they're not sure whether to pity you or whether you're asking for money) -or how much money you're making (which is just seen as gloating) but with something as momentums as this people start sticking their oar in...

Although after talking it through with them people can see that it's going to make life better all round (and hopefully richer in the longer term -not just financially) the initial reaction is generally one of amazement that we'd even be considering it what with the company being so "small". People find it very hard to comprehend that although we work from an office at the back of the house, the business earns enough to support the two of us.

I realise they don't mean to be insulting in anyway and they only have our best interests at heart but sometimes the cliches rule through -I think my favourite comment was from my mother who after listening to the reasoning behind the move (which included making a saving as we won't initially need to get a larger office to accommodate the new staff) said that we would need to get an office straight away, "a flag ship office" as she put it.

A little bewildered as to why she would say such a thing her response made me smile even more "it will appear more professional to the outside world". I admit, getting an office is on the cards for next year however the fact that in the 5 years we've now been operating I know of only one occasion when we've had a client ask to come to our offices so why incur such an expense merely for show? Of course what she meant to say however was "it would appear more professional to the family" ;)

I should add at this point that I love my mother to bits but I am still astonished at the assumptions people make about a business based on what they see (rather than hear).

Last year was the first year we sent out presents to clients and it went down a storm though choosing the presents is somewhat awkward -especially when it comes to wine, what if they're a red wine drinker or a white wine drinker etc?

Anyway I digress, as usual we've started receiving gifts from companies and as usual we've had one or two "we're not sending out cards this year, instead we're donating the money to xyz" or "we've spent the money we were going to spend on you, on a goat". A little un-PC I know but -gee thanks.

What a ridiculous thing to do, it really gets my goat (pun intended) when people do this, it's so pretentious -and doesn't impress me in the slightest, they'd be better not to bother -or- donate and not tell me. Why, instead of not spending that £1.00 on a card "saving the environment" don't you pay your bills by BACS instead? That way you would avoid sending a small cheque in a huge envelope with your complement slip etc? Surely THAT would be making more of a contribution?

All these donations to me just say "We've not got the time or inclination to get you something personal so we won't bother". Further more, Stacey and I donate to charities on a monthly basis anyway -to charities that we care about. Some of you may remember the Cheshire Ring Race we did for charity for example.

As I mentioned earlier, this year we were donated a goat -ok it's supposedly gone off to a family in Africa somewhere but quite frankly they should have saved all the donations up and gone over there and helped out, now THAT would have got my attention. Having been on a charity aid project in The Gambia myself I know that would mean a lot more to the locals than (apparently) being sent a goat.

Anyway, enough ranting, if you want a nice Christmas hamper or bottle (or two) of wine for your friends, family or client this year check out the Wine and Hamper Gift website for some ideas.

I don't know whether it's just I've had my head in the sand for the past few years or whether there really is an influx of autobiographies hitting the book stores, either way after finding time to read Duncan Bannatyne's book I thought I'd try another -"Gerald Ratner: The Rise... And Fall... And Rise Again" which I only bought out of curiosity but have found to be most interesting.

I don't know why many people read these sorts of books, I guess there are some looking for that "golden ticket to the riches" but I like to find out where someone's come from and what sort of attitudes businessmen have to life. One thing is for sure is that most of them want to write books¹ ;)

I realise the book is his take on the events that passed (my mother is still insistent that he MUST have said the jewellery was crap as otherwise the press wouldn't have pursued him as ferociously) but either way what I found most interesting are the values that he learnt along the way.

One can only feel sorry for what he has been through -regardless of whether he was seen to be "flash with his cash" when he had it or not (to be fair who wouldn't be if they could be), to see that he's managed to recover from it is a real achievement.

Until recently, when asked the "If you could meet one person who's alive" type question I would probably have said Peter Jones as he always came across as an entrepreneur with a little gusto and flare about him but recently -perhaps just due to the producer's discretion I've gone off that idea and would much rather share a beer with Gerald Ratner. I wish him and geraldonline.com all the success in the future.

The book is an easy read and can easily be picked up and put down as needed so if you've not had a chance to read it, pick up a copy of "Gerald Ratner: The Rise... And Fall... And Rise Again" your local book store (or Amazon if you live in the sticks!).

¹ For those of you interested, I have already got my book underway, it's going to be an epic -and exciting- tale of woe about my raise to fame (and hopefully without fall...). I think I'm going to name it "Coming from nowhere to go somewhere". I wish I could say you can pre-order it somewhere but you can't -if you want a copy email me and I'll add you to the list (you'll probably be the first...)

Well it's been a hectic few days what with breaking the news to everyone and getting things in place but we've finally got Stacey's management to give her a leaving date -February 8^th. It's still a fair way off but a lot better than we were expecting (sometime in March) so we can't complain.

I just hope the new office is in place in time -let alone the new website (still very much in development)!

I don't know if any of my readers are familiar with Fasthosts' recent security problems that hit the press a couple of weeks ago but I couldn't help but laugh at a conversation I had with them the other day. Baring in mind they had a breach in their security which meant that all passwords had to be reset I was astonished to get this email about an FTP login issue.

Is it just me or is that a little nuts asking a user to send their username and password in clear text just after a major breach in security? I thought my response was very measured:

Some of you have already heard about my miss fortune with the office flooding. It's thrown things up in the air somewhat at a time when I could really do without it.

The bonus however is that I get to have a nice new office fitted (hopefully on the insurance) but that's turning out to be a saga in itself. As with any large expenditure we've gone out and got a few quotes from companies such as Sharps, Neville Johnson and some other smaller companies to get an idea of costs etc. To say there is a wide range in the price is an understatement -they range from £1,000 to over £16,000! The office is only 9ft x 9ft which means it'd be £1,777 per square foot! How nuts is that!!

Anyway, I thought people might like to see what I'm thinking about having fitted atm.

Now that Stacey is soon going to be working with me we ideally I need to cram (and it is a matter of cramming) two people into the office space and I think the solution of having the two terminals sitting back to back but offset like this will work nicely. The other problem I have is the size of my screens, at the moment they measure 115cm wide and my old desk meant I was sitting too close to them and would end up with screen burn but this design should allow me to sit far enough away.

I'll probably remove it shortly but the program that I used to layout the room has a 3D export that you can checkout at: www.thesitedoctor.co.uk/office/

Ok, so the attempt at drama failed! Believe it or not Stacey had the guts to do it, she handed in her resignation so it's only a matter of months/weeks before she's working with me full time right? Well we're not sure...

Turns out that when she handed in her letter of resignation her boss refused to accept it (being the diligent worker that she is I can completely understand that!) and instead he told her that he was going to put it in his drawer and not mention it to anyone to give her time to re-think and discuss it on Friday.

So the question is, will Stacey give in and chose the route of more money and/or less working hours over working with me? Well the suspense is killing me -probably more than you but I doubt she'll stay as she's already made up her mind and has started to get excited.

As far as the risk element goes -which is what I think would put her off- she's realised:

1. There's enough work for her to do here
2. If there isn't she can get another job
3. She's chartered which means companies are screaming out for her skills so she can do agency work...

All good in my books but we'll have to wait until Friday to find out!

I can only imagine how the conversation went:

Stacey: "Please accept my resignation, here's a letter explaining why"

Boss: "No, sorry, I won't. Nope, no way, you can't"

Stacey: "Well I am, it's not you, it's me"

Boss: "Tell you what, lets hide this letter and pretend it wasn't written, I won't tell if you don't"

Stacey: "I'm still leaving"

Boss: "Tell me what you want that'll make you stay -more money? Fewer hours? Less work..."

Stacey: "Nothing, I'm leaving"

Boss: "Well, have a think, lets not rush into anything"

Stacey: "I've been thinking about it for months, I'm leaving"

Boss: "Lets discuss it on Friday, have a think about what you want/need and I'll sort it"

Stacey: "Fine whatever makes it easier for you. I'm still leaving"

Ok so today's quite an exciting -and pretty scary day. After a few months of speculating, Stacey has finally decided to hand in her notice and come and work with me full time. It's scary because although I know it'll make her much happier and drive the business forward but it also means that the business will now be the bread winner (main household earner) so there's no more time for messing around!

I think it'll be quite an interesting time both for us and for others worried about doing the same sort of thing so I'm going to try and keep a fairly up-to-date diary of the events, trials and tribulations here.

The main concern from Stacey's point of view is that as it's a web development business she can't add anything to it which I personally think is tosh as there is a lot of non-specialised work involved in running a business which she will be able to do and there are many paid aspects of our work that she can get involved with as well.

Anyway, here goes, lets just hope she remembers to hand in her notice ;)

As part of the company's branding overhaul, I'm currently reviewing The Site Doctor's business plan to make sure it still fits in with where I want the business to go and what I would like to achieve and Stacey (our latest and greatest employee yet) asked the simple question "Why are you doing it?".

It's a good question and one I wanted a witty but honest response from but I couldn't think much further than "To make money" and "To improve our lifestyle" -both of which are perfectly valid I know but I would have liked something like "To make the world a better place through a variety of events aimed at improving people's outlook on live", complete tosh of course but hey.

So why am I in business? Why did I setup The Site Doctor -other than because I felt it was my calling and a quicker way to a better life? It's certainly not the money otherwise I would have given up a long time ago and it's certainly not the social status being a web developer brings so why do I do it? Personally part of it for me I think is to prove people wrong, this isn't the main motivator and I realise may not be the best reason but a part of me wants to be able to show all those people that told me I was mad when I first started talking about it they were wrong and they're the silly ones for suggesting otherwise...

Are you in business yourself? I'd love to hear why you do it, why you get and work hard -often for little initial reward. What drives you?

Recently, I've had the opportunity to go to a couple of interesting talks on business courtesy of CIMA and every time I've jumped at the opportunity as you never know what nugget of information you may pick up.

Last week I went to a talk by Simon Farnsworth on how to grow a business -something I'm very interested in at the moment. Simon Farnsworth was the CEO of Floors-2-Go and helped the company grow from a small family run business (which I found out was started in the West Midlands) to a PLC and then finally to a management buy out in 2006.

The talk itself was interesting buy not quite what I was expecting (which seems to be the theme of many of these talks at the moment) as it focused mainly on his career since leaving school rather than how to grow a business but it was non-the-less interesting.

One thing that he said amazed him was the fact that many of the businesses he has got involved with didn't even have cash flow forecasts before he started. He said this to a room of chartered accountants, most of whom were aghast (as to was he) to hear this however I for one have rarely had an up-to-date cash flow forecast and in fact it's only been within the past 6 months that I even bothered working on one. Why do I not have a cash flow forecast I hear you ask? Well that's simple; time.

A cash flow forecast is something that as a sole trader you don't really worry about if you've got a good head for figures you should have a pretty clear idea of what's in, coming in, and going out so the sums are easy. Ok as you grow your business and have other employees working with you the going out part may be a little less under your control but you should still have a good idea of what's going on so the time required to keep an up-to-date cash flow forecast is better spent else where i.e. making sure the "coming in" part is growing as large as possible ;)

I can understand why an accountant finds it incredible that an SME doesn't have a cash flow forecast as it is something that's very useful and more importantly allows you to see how much money you can draw from the business. Perhaps it's something you should look at doing once a week or month alongside saving your tax ;)

One thing I felt sorry for Simon about though was how he talked about the business. Since the management buy out he has been removed from the position of CEO and told us about how he had been made to remove nearly the complete board of directors because when you remove a company from being a PLC you have to replace all the non-exec board members (another thing I didn't know). Simon has clearly put his life and sole into the business only to be thrown to the wayside without even so much as a thank you.

There were a number of amusing ditties however from the talk including how Floors-2-Go managed to acquire the renowned orange Ferrari that I've seen around a few times (these were taken at the cinema):

Or how he had an ASBO against him for littering the streets with all the Floors-2-Go balloons and leaflets.

Simon Farnsworth is now CEO of Amber Windows which I couldn't place at the time but I realised there is a big bill board just up the road from here with it on. He seems a nice chap and I hope he can move on from Floors-2-Go but I get the feeling that'll take some time.

It was recently that time of year again when my bank balance takes a massive hit as various premiums are taken out for things like car tax, car insurance, house insurance etc so I get a little anal about finding the best deal.

This year, my target was to get my car insurance below £1,000 which seeing as I'm now (boo-hiss) over 25 shouldn't have been an issue but I had a feeling it wouldn't be an easy feat seeing as I drive a sports car, heck I like a challenge so off I set.

As I didn't have an issue with my current insurer I thought I'd see what deal they could offer me so they were my first port of call. I knew what they had sent through the post (over £1,500) which I thought was a little steep so I'd give them a chance to knock it down. Success! They took over £100 off -only another £400 to go!

I then went through Money Supermarket's online insurance comparison site to see what else was on offer. It came back with a few closer to £1,200 so I started calling -once again I called my current insurer who came down to £1,100 so I called the next cheapest on the list (£1,200) and told them if they could match the other quote I'd be interested. They of course did and came in at around £900 which was pretty dandy!

This went on for a while, every time I got a quote I would call around each company and give them the chance to "beat" the other one until I was batting between two companies -one being my previous insurer. After careful negotiation I ended up paying just shy of £600 for my insurance and actually ended up with a higher miles allowance than I did at £1,500 -despite what you're thinking, the insurances were otherwise exactly the same! That's a whooping £900 saving for a little phoning around!!

This got me thinking, are we regularly unknowingly paying more for our goods/services? I tend to barter out of principle if I can, usually just as a challenge but is it the same as banks have gone with financing¹ in which case I wonder what other companies are doing it? I know companies often factor in a small % to accommodate the discount requests etc but does that mean we should barter for everything?

¹ I've found when looking for funding, if you want £100 and ask for £100 you tend to get £75 as the bank assumes you have over-inflated your request to accommodate their % reduction so the next time you go in, you ask for £130 instead and so it goes on, each pre-guessing what the other person is after in an environment of distrust leaving those people who don't want to play "the game" (or don't know about "the game") out of pocket.

While at the recent Startups Live event I got asked a question that I really should have been prepared for "Why should we use you?". At the time I was tired and hungry (no excuse I know) and so I was a little thrown.

I think it's important to look at networking as a form of job interview but without the job at the end of it. What I mean by this is you should have a set of questions, answers and interesting topics to discuss¹ prepared before you go into the event.

¹ Make sure you know what you're talking about though -you never know, they may know you're bull-shitting which isn't a good start to an ongoing relationship!

I've steered clear of a fair few networking events in the past on the basis that they're often pissing contests but networking itself is an important part of any business and so shouldn't be avoided. So how should you answer "Why should we use you?". This is a silly question in my eyes because as the purchaser you have the power, you should already have a list of criteria on what you're looking for from a supplier. I can understand if you're looking to find out whether my list matches yours but you're most likely going to get the same responses:

• "We're the best" -you're really going to take your word for it?
• "Just because" -they clearly don't care about their company, do you really want to do business with them?
• "We've got a proven track record" -fair play, good response, now you've got to do your research

Either way, whatever response you get it's most likely going to be a conversation killer and so, not something you want to ask while networking, if you want to ask this, I would keep it for an initial meeting.

So how did I respond? "That's a good question" -not a good response by any means but Stacey has come up with a superb answer in my view, put the ball back into their court and respond with

Why do I like this response? Well because it's honest and gives the client control, you could baffle them with sales talk till the cows come home but if they don't like you or get on with you then doing business isn't going to be fun (and business should be fun!). Get rid of the question and move onto something more interesting, save the grilling for the initial meeting!

Seeing as I don't seem to have time to post my long, beautifully formatted posts at the moment -and that I don't think people really care whether they're beautifully formatted or not- I'm just throw this one on...

Last night I went to the first in a new round of Startup Live events. I've come across them in the past but never paid much attention to them as I thought it would be another '99 venture capitalist haunt and I wasn't really interested in wasting my time with it. The event however was better than I was expecting. Well, it was and it wasn't.

Sadly we got there a little late (what's new!) and missed the start of Tim Smit's talk however I really have to complement him on his talk, it was absolutely brilliant. It was probably one of the best -if not THE best- and most inspirational talks I've heard in a long time.

For those of you who aren't aware who Tim Smit is, apart from having a great name and having been involved in the Lost Gardens of Heligan he's the founder of the Eden project. Tim Smit is clearly very passionate about the work that he's involved in which is really conveyed to the audience during his talk and I really do recommend you go and see him if you have a chance as you won't regret it.

I think one of the most amusing things about the night was the speaker from Natwest who was clearly there to show how friendly and accommodating Natwest are but ended up demonstrating how far out of touch he is with their actual processes which was a shame as he really could have pulled the audience in and had them all signing up there and then.

Other than Tim Smit however the majority of the event was pretty much as I expected which I was a little disappointed about but I guess that's the way it goes. At the end of the day, if you can come away with one small nugget of information/inspiration the event was worth it. Luckily last night Tim Smit was able to produce the goods ;)

When running any business, there will inevitably be a time when you need to ask a client for permission for something, whether it's to use their name as a reference or to bill them for a service. These letters are always tricky, get it wrong and your client will be able to avoid taking action on your request, get it right and you'll be able to reap the rewards of success (or so I'm told!).

I had one such occasion recently and thought it may be of use to share my experience/findings with others. Take a look at these two emails (semi-fake), one got what it was after, the other not. Once you've read them, I'll explain why and how you should word something so you can get what you want (which is most likely money!).

Example Email 1

Example Email 2

It should be fairly obvious which one got what it was after but incase it isn't, the second email got what it was after (an SLA of 10 hours a month) but why?

Lets look at the two emails in more detail:

Does the reader really care what you feel? Unlikely. Do they care about avoiding unexpected invoices? Most likely yes but would they be worse off paying the odd (semi) unexpected email? Probably not as if you're an ethical company you'd keep them up to date with their time usage at any time...

This first call-to-action required the reader's input for something, if (and this is most likely the case) your reader is either a business owner or executive, their motive to respond is almost nill as it's unlikely they're going to want to respond to your request just so they can give you money.

You may also notice that there's no penalty to this first request, it's open ended i.e. if the reader doesn't do anything, he's no worse off -in fact, he's actually better off!

Now lets look at the second email:

Although similar in wording and still expressing what you would like to happen, you're not over complicating the issue and remaining factual.

Notice that this time, the call-to-action is reversed, instead of asking for action to do something, you're asking the user to action something if he doesn't want it to happen? This may only read like a small difference, but it's a massive difference from your POV.

The second thing to notice is the deadline (or penalty) -this time, if the reader doesn't respond by the given deadline, the action will go on regardless of whether they have given their input.

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 So there you have it, two ways of writing what looks like the same email but with two very different results, just remember, next time you want something, tell your client it'll happen if they don't do anything -I'm sure you'll get more success!

One of the reasons I'm fanatical about Rackspace as a hosting partner is that if you're unsure about something, you know you're able to ask an expert and get a top-notch response to your quandary.

I was recently speaking with another host who was talking about greylisting their emails -in short this is the process of rejecting the first email from a given email address/server and waiting for it to be (automatically) resent by the server later as unlike genuine email servers, most spam servers do not try to re-send an email if it's rejected by a server. We're not able to greylist our emails so I thought I would check that our spam filter settings were up-to-date.

The guys at Rackspace had a look through our spam filter settings and recommended we disabled the statistical filters as they were somewhat outdated technically and increase our connection checks -more importantly, deleting the email after it fails a number of checks. Historically I've been adverse to deleting emails on the server as there's no way to recover them so I asked how accurate connection checks were and thought I would share their easy-to-understand response about what the connection checks do.

Stacey bought me a Canon IXUS 950 IS for my birthday which needless to say I was more than chuffed to receive, it's a fantastic camera with enough bells and whistles to make it more than just a happy snappy camera but not too many to make it cumbersome to transport so you can ensure you have it to hand when that un-missable shot is coming.

Problem was, on the weekend it developed a fault -Canon's dreaded E24 error. It's predecessor lasted about 4 years before a rainstorm when it decided to start (understandably) complaining for a while but the IXUS 950 IS hasn't had any (recent)¹ abuse so I called Amazon fearing the worst but hoping they would replace it as this would appear to be a software related fault.

¹ About a week after I got the camera I did drop it but that was mid July.

I first of all emailed them using their online panel as it was out of it's 30 day no-quibble return period but didn't get a response. A little inpatient I decided to call them yesterday and I spoke to a very helpful representative named "Donncha" who assured me that despite my mishap with dropping it there should be no issues in returning it no offence Donncha but I've heard that one before so I didn't hold my breath. He told me a courier would come and collect the camera tomorrow (today) and a replacement would be with me in 3-4 days.

A little later I received -what I assumed was- a collection email saying Royal Mail would be around at some point, I wasn't expecting what happened next. At approximately 10am our usual Royal Mail parcel guy arrived to collect the camera, then, about 5minutes later, another parcel delivery man arrives and drops off the replacement!

I have to take my hat off to you Amazon in this instance, that's superb customer service!

We've officially been using Chip and Pin in all stores since around February 2007 in the UK which has made life a lot easier in many ways but ever since it's introduction, I for one have had concerns over the claims that it's safer. I agree that it is (or was) harder to find out someone's pin number but has it made shop assistants more complacent?

Stacey and I have a joint Egg Card -I know, what WAS I thinking ;), anyway, these two cards look identical and even had the same pin number and as a result, we recently got them mixed up. I can't say for sure when it was we got them swapped around but one thing for sure is that it was a good couple of months ago. Ever since, we've both been using the wrong card without being questioned, at a guess, I think this has gone on for around 4 months and I only noticed the other day when I looked down and read the name on the card when I was paying online.

This for me is pretty concerning, ok it's because I know the pin, the shop assistant assumes I'm the card holder and doesn't check the name (which the used to when they were forced to check the signature -if they bothered checking that of course ;)).

I think it's also easier to find out the pin too as people aren't overly cautious about entering in their number, I've even seen an old lady in a wheelchair type her pin in on the terminal which was on the desk while she remained lower down in the wheelchair, allowing anyone within about 10m to read what she was typing in. She then promptly put her card back in to her bag and hung it over the back of her wheelchair -where any unscrupulous person could come along and "borrow" the card. It's not just the elderly however, even the young allow other people to read the pin.

I would be interested to know the statistics in crime reduction, I wonder if they're as high as the government were predicting or whether these predictions failed to include the main weak link in the system -us.

On the whole however, it has made life easier and I like Chip and Pin despite these (human) errors, to an extent I think it has made it harder for the criminal to steal (though before he had to learn the signature) but I think people need to be more cautious.

If you're a semi-regular reader of my blog you'll know that I'm a great believer of having goals and targets to meet when you setup in business. As I mentioned in my mini series on starting up in business, these targets have to be achievable and quantifiable.

Recently however I have had a couple of pretty zany ideas passed by me which, at first sight may sound completely nuts and unachievable but I've been left wondering why that is. I have always felt that The Site Doctor is a foundation for something larger but quite what that is I have no idea at the moment but one idea that's readily stuck with me is one that Rich Davies and I merely jested about -buying a big, expensive yacht and sailing it around the Caribbean for the rich and famous.

I've put this idea to a couple of people since and every time they've laughed. I can understand why they see it as a joke but why should it be? When I first setup in business I had a surprising number of people assure me I was mad and it would never work so why should this idea be any different? Ok the investment involved is on a scale way out of the league of The Site Doctor but I still don't feel it's unachievable if the time and effort is put into it.

 

What do you think? Is thinking big just a waste of time in your eyes or is it more speculative than wasteful?

Stacey and I were enjoying our last meal in Croatia last night when the subject of where we "go" next came up. I've never hidden the fact that I want to be wealthy, in fact I would imagine many who know me would go as far as it's what drives me. This is true in a sense however you will notice I used the word "wealthy" rather than "rich" or "loaded".

What many people seem to do is confuse what I mean when I say I want to get wealthy (or sometimes rich), I don't mean I want to have stacks of cash sitting in the bank or a huge number of shares under my belt, what I in fact mean is I want to enjoy myself, ok I need cash to do that but it's more important that I -and those around me- are happy.

Anyhow, I digress. As I was saying, Stacey and I were talking about how we were going to get our incomes to a level that would support the somewhat luxurious lifestyle we have imagined for ourselves when she said "The people with stacks of money have inherited it". This -in many cases- is true, people such as Paris Hilton for example haven't "done" anything to get the money, it has been -or will be- inherited.

That got me thinking, does that run true in today's society? Of course there are people who have inherited serious sums of cash but there are also a large number of self-made -and young- millionaires cropping up all over the place. A few that sprung to mind almost immediately are Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergy Brin (the Google Guys), Richard Branson¹, Sir Alan Sugar, The Bechams, Duncan Bannatyne, Peter Jones² and more recently the plethora of web 2.0 start-ups that are getting sold off for millions.

¹ Ok, I know many say that he was given a pretty good start by his father but you still have to have something to make it work

² IIRC Peter Jones (from BBC's "Dragon Den"/ITV's "Tycoon") was also bankrupt a few years ago

So it got me wondering -disregarding those who were able to make a serious amount of money through "lucky breaks"³ in technology and successful "celebrities"- has the birth of the Internet made making large amounts money a whole lot more reachable?

³ Personally, I think it takes more than just being in the right place at the right time (which undoubtedly helps), I think you also need to be able to spot the opportunity and have what it takes to grasp that opportunity.

This has to be my laziest post yet, it's just a paste of the press release but I'm to excited at the thought of free beer to re-write it ;) -Hope to see you there, shout if you're going.

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Chinwag Joins Forces With Top Software And Media Brands For Supersized Digital Networking Party

The UK digital media industry is gearing up for a soiree of grand proportions in July at Chinwag's Big Summer 07 networking party (http://bigsummer07.chinwag.com).

Giving the bash an extra boost - and supporting the inventive and fun entertainment programme, plus the lavish refreshments on site - are Chinwag's three party partners: Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/), Channel 4 (http://www.channel4.com/), and Purple (http://www.purple-consultancy.com/).

The free event, to be held at the historic Imperial College Union in Kensington, London, will be the largest-scale bash of its kind for people working in the digital sector, with the party encompassing 5 large rooms and the enclosed quadrangle, allowing a total capacity of 2,000 revellers at any one point in time.

Hosted by new media community Chinwag, it will to bring together professionals in web, mobile and other interactive media to make useful connections, celebrate the return of the new media sector as a sustainable growth industry, and mingle in style in the sunshine of a London summer's evening.

Dominic Eames, editor, Online, at Channel 4 New Media said: "Channel 4 is always open to new ideas from the New Media community and is delighted to support Chinwag in this event.

Toby Thwaites, managing director of Purple said: "Having worked with the team at Chinwag for a number of years I am delighted that Purple are able to support what will undoubtedly be the Digital event of the Summer"

Sam Michel, Chinwag MD and founder said: "This is a great opportunity for the new media industry to do some "First Life" networking. The UK scene is buzzing with life, and it's great to bring everyone together en masse."

"The party takes place on July 5. More details will be released in the forthcoming weeks with promotional activities, partnership with brands, and innovative use of social networking tools and technologies such as Facebook and Twitter included in the mix."

More information & registration: http://bigsummer07.chinwag.com

About Chinwag

Chinwag aims to be a connecting rod for ideas and talent across the new media industries. Having provided Internet-based community forums, websites, email newsletters and consultancy for the new media sector since 1996, its website (http://www.chinwag.com) will be re-launched in July, aggregating information for the digital industries and updating its community focus. In February 2007 the Chinwag Live events series (http://live.chinwag.com) was launched. Topical panel discussions founded to cast light on issues and trends affecting the new media industries, the monthly sessions have also gone on tour to Internet World and Ad:Tech.

In addition, Chinwag publishes Chinwag Jobs (http://jobs.chinwag.com), the leading recruitment website for online marketing, digital media, web, design and technical positions. It is used by the BBC, MySpace.com, Yahoo!, Amazon, Vodafone and the majority of recruitment agencies who place staff in the sector.

Chinwag - Connecting New Media People

Site: http://bigsummer07.chinwag.com

We’ve gone around in circles at The Site Doctor trying to decide the best method to calculate project costs and timings, historically I would look at the project brief, have a think about how much I wanted to work for a client and then I would –in effect- pluck a figure out of the air.

As your company grows however you will need to think about a more scalable, resilient solution that reduces the chance of under quoting and I think we have a fairly nice solution so I thought I would share it :)

Firstly, read up on how to set your base rate (see: Pricing your work). Once you have calculated your base rate, you will need to download this spreadsheet when offering the client various options, each option is given its own row on the summary table which is calculated off a dedicated sheet of times.

The formatting is fairly simple and mainly for your own use but basically the main areas of development (i.e. the front end, my account or admin areas) use a grey background. The sub sections of these (i.e. Product management) use a yellow background and all other items have a white background, the main reason for this was when you have a large project it made it a lot easier to identify where you were. The top columns are not set but they’re just what we most commonly use, you can alter these as needed on the summary sheet.

How to use it

1. Add all your site elements (usually based on your sitemap) into the first column, separating each one out onto its own line.
2. Go through each item, estimating the time required to complete the task. Remember that the spreadsheet is using decimal hours:
   • 0.02 = 1 minute
   • 0.08 = 5 minutes
   • 0.17 = 10 minutes
   • 0.25 = 15 minutes
   • 0.33 = 20 minutes
   • 0.42 = 25 minutes
   • 0.50 = 30 minutes
   • 0.58 = 35 minutes
   • 0.67 = 40 minutes
   • 0.75 = 45 minutes
   • 0.83 = 50 minutes
   • 0.92 = 55 minutes
   • 1.00 = 60 minutes (1 hour)
3. Switch over to the summary page and update the hourly rates to your rates
4. Et voila you have your project’s estimated cost :)

You’ll be surprised how quickly project costs mount up when you use this method but it does ensure that you don’t get caught out, if it is still too costly for the client, why not show them the breakdown as it quantifies your efforts nearly. If that doesn’t work see how tweaking your hourly rate or removing the timings works out but don’t be a busy fool ;)

Project time estimate spreadsheet

After a somewhat hectic week last week, with most of it being spent on the phone (which is becoming a more regular occurrence) I asked myself “has all this time on the phone been wasted time?” Well, I spent time talking to clients, developers, friends and family and this is important. Although it may cost you a little development time, talk is cheap (that’s what the telecom’s companies want to tell you isn’t it?)

Rather than looking at it negatively I think it’s best to look at it from another point of view, I could have spent developing some weird and wonderful new creation for a client however, this phone time was doing something else –it was promoting my business. Admittedly the business couldn’t survive if we all spent all the time with the phone glued to our ear, but once in a while I believe is a good thing.

Why am I looking at it like that? That’s simple, if you make time for your clients, friends and family in any context it shows that you care for them beyond a pay check and at the end of the day, if they need some development they’re more likely to think of you in a good light.

What do you think? Do you feel time spent on the phone is wasted time or a business investment?

I can’t recall how I came across FreelanceSwitch because it was one of those links you see on a mailing list, open to read later and forget to read until a couple of days/weeks later, but nevertheless FreelanceSwitch is well worth a read as they have a tonne of massively useful advice and they seem to be adding stacks more!

Scott Wills also posted an interesting read on getting the price for your work right. This article on pricing your work, Scott briefly touches on how to set a base rate for your work but concentrates more on estimating your time etc so if you’re interested in calculating your price or calculating a base rate for your work, have a read of my article on pricing your work (see: Pricing Your Work) as I feel it covers calculating a base rate for your work in more detail. Scott's article can be found here: The Price is Right on FreelanceSwitch.

FreelanceSwitch also gave my article on business start up advice a shout the other day which was most flattering –I hope I’ve managed to pick up a few additional readers! Hello if you're new :). You can read the list of other useful links and see mine at: Linkswitch -a roundup of great links across the web 3.

The long and short of it is to keep an eye on the FreelanceSwitch website at: http://freelanceswitch.com/.

If you’ve ever been involved with running your own business or indeed any start-up you’ll know long hours are sometimes a necessary evil to meet the demand or even just getting things in order. Well for quite some time now I’ve been wanting to work out whether it’s better to work early in the morning or late at night –I’m quite happy at working either but is there a better option.

Recently I’ve needed to work long hours to get a couple of systems completed and get back on track with a couple of projects so decided there wouldn’t be a better time. I did want to do something clever like monitor the number of lines of code I write or something equally measurable but to be quite honest I didn’t have the time and I couldn’t be bothered to spend hours searching for a solution so it’s all finger in the wind stuff…

Late Nights

Firstly I tried late nights. As I mentioned in my business start-up guide (see: Business start-up advice) I’m very strict with getting up –I get up when Stacey does, see her off and then I’m in the office from around 7:30am/8am (please don’t call then –I like to have a little “quiet time” to sort things out ;)) and I work until she gets home –usually around 7pm now she’s in her new role. When doing the late nights I’d go in at around 7pm, have a drink and a chat, a bite to eat, perhaps all in all an hour or two’s rest before returning to the desk for a couple more hours.

What I found with working into the night was that by the time I got back into the office I was already fairly tired from the day that had preceded (which a lot of the time is unpredictable as far as clients are concerned!) so my productivity for these additional 5/6 hours was lower than during the “normal” working day, then when I got up the next morning I would be pretty shattered from having little sleep (I still had to get up at 6:30am) which meant the next day was somewhat of a write off. So although I managed an additional 5 or 6 hours of lower productivity work, I also lost time the next day so it was semi-even.

Early Mornings

After testing working late for a couple of weeks I decided to try getting up early –initially I would get up at 5:30am as that would give me an hour or so before Stacey was awake, then 10mins waking her/refilling my tea and then another hour or so before breakfast and seeing Stacey off. I tried the 5:30am start a couple of times and could see the productivity difference almost straight away. As I was starting after a good nights rest (I could finish earlier and even get to bed earlier if I wanted!) I was fresh and ready to go again so I decided to start getting up at 5am, that way I could have nearly 4 hours of uninterrupted time before clients started calling.

By getting up at 5am you avoid the jet lagged feeling at the end of the day, oddly enough this still comes at around the same sort of time so you don’t really lose out there and the 4 hours or so before other people make it into the office which means you get an additional 4 hours of uninterrupted time.

The other advantage was if you had a deadline to meet you also had the evening available to work into –again at a fairly similar productivity level to when you get up at 6:30am.

Conclusion

Although I’ve not done any productivity level testing I know for sure that getting up in the mornings is far better without a shadow of a doubt, having the uninterrupted time where you’re fresh and alert means the development is a lot faster, unlike in the evening/night, no-one is online just “chilling” which a lot of the time can be distracting in itself, you’ve also got the added advantage of having a full nights sleep if required or working late into the night if you need to hit a deadline.

Despite my findings I still know a lot of people that stay in the office late into the night thinking that it’s of benefit but one thing I found was not only was your productivity lower, your likelihood in making mistakes was higher –which you’d just have to correct the next day. A lot of the time they were simple things that had you been paying attention/been awake for you’d have sorted!
Another thing I would like to look into at some point is whether morning or afternoon coding is more efficient and whether you can use that to structure your day better as from this “investigation” I’m inclined to do more adminy type work in the afternoon as I tire and leave the development to the morning (that is my 8 hour morning… ;))

FWIW I really enjoy getting up before everyone else, watching the sun rise and then having an evening to go to the gym and have been getting up early now for a fair few weeks –and don’t see it changing anytime soon! I think any earlier than 5am however may well be detrimental.

Seeing as I’ve had a number of posts recently that were, well, er slating/pointing out terrible customer service and/or service in general I thought it was about time I posted about the guys that did it right in my eyes (that and a couple of seriously cool programming things I’ve found/done –but those can wait!).

If you read my recent post about Fasthosts and how they’ve been going down hill for the last year or so you’ll already know that we’ve signed up to one of the worlds greatest managed hosting companies ever –Rackspace. Not only that, we also recently became an official Rackspace partner which I’ll come back to in a moment.

We got our first dedicated server with Rackspace nearly two years ago as part of a large project we had in the pipeline, although cost was a large factor in our decision, we took into account other aspects of the service such as how our enquiries were handled, the reputation of the hosting company throughout the development community etc. Rackspace although they were one of the more costly solutions for our requirements came off best all around. Even before we were signed up, Rackspace’s customer service was second to none, they were quite happy to discuss the more technical aspects of our requirements and even worked closely with us to identify the most suitable solution.

One thing that I really liked about Rackspace before we signed up was the fact that they were very open and honest –where the sales person didn’t know the answer, they felt perfectly at ease to say so and pass you over to one of the technical support staff who always knew the answer. From my POV, not having someone “guessing” the answer is incredibly important –even more so when mission critical applications are being put in place.

One thing that was very important to us when signing up was scalability, at the time, the requirement for the server was relatively low (the application was still in the pre-development stages but we knew we had to get a dedicated server in place before it got to the develop stages) so it was a risk that we needed to take but we also needed to limit the risk involved. Rackspace were able to offer the backbone (and supporting evidence) that we were looking for. They were quite happy letting us have a smaller solution to start with which could then easily be upgraded when we needed to –within a maximum of 24 hours notice!

Another key factor was the on-going customer help and support, not having any real-world prior experience in managing a server I was adamant that whoever we hosted our server with had to also be able to offer us the technical support we would no-doubt be needing –not only with getting started but also looking to the future general day-to-day cock-up’s. Rackspace has a motto of “Fanatical support” which although many companies claim similar was clear they really believed in. Unlike many other hosting providers out there Rackspace had dedicated support specialists in the various aspects from Window Servers, Linux/Apache Servers to IMail specialists. This has saved our bacon on many an occasion. Although you may get through to someone who is specialised in another area, if they don’t know the answer you’re put through to the next available support member almost immediately. It certainly beats speaking to some spotty teenager who kinda knows what you mean when you talk about the web but is more interested in the Yankee dollar for a day of picking up the phone and pissing people off.

Since signing up with Rackspace, having our dedicated server managed by Rackspace has been a dream. Like I’ve said, they are expensive but that cost is more than compensated by the complete lack of stress I have when dealing with them, the solution they recommended has met our needs perfectly so I’m pleased we’ve not been spending out unnecessarily. On top of this, Rackspace’s motto of “Fanatical support” is an understatement, their customer service and support is second to none without a shadow of a doubt. I’ve called them at some very odd hours and there has always been a friendly understanding voice at the other end… “that’s ok Tim, we can restore that folder you deleted before your client notices…” ;)

In the two years I’ve been with them I’ve had three issues with the server:

• A HDD failure –not sure what it was beyond that, IIRC it was just a dodgy disk (manufacturers fault). Rackspace notified me of the issue, replaced the HDD and ensured all the data etc was how it should be in the space of 15minutes! As the RAID setup meant the server continued to be operable while Rackspace were sorting the issue I wouldn’t have known if they hadn’t had called me.
• Power loss for approximately 1hours. Shortly after our server was moved into a new data centre we lost all connectivity. When we called Rackspace about the issue we were told that a capacitor had blown between the server room and all power supplies. We later found out that they had used a new company to install the equipment and they hadn’t checked it all in as much detail as they perhaps should have done. At the time we only had a couple of sites on the server so I wasn’t too concerned about it but Rackspace refunded something like 10% of the entire month’s hosting bill for the inconvenience.
• Failed firewall. This only happened the other day but the firewall died for some reason, at first they thought it was the PSU but on replacing that it still wasn’t rectified. All sites were down for about 40minutes while it was being sorted. Not great but unavoidable and at least they sounded genuinely concerned. I was even kept in the loop throughout and knew exactly what was going on –right down to “the tech is running to the storage area now to get the PSU… …now he’s running back” (I don’t think my comment of “Run forest RUUNNN” went down as well as I had hoped!).

On top of those issues Rackspace have also helped us out on countless occasions where we weren’t quite sure if we were going about something the right way or we’d messed something up, I’ve only had to use the restore facility once IIRC but that was simple, within 20mins I had restored around 3GB of files to their state from the night before.

Mainly through sheer laziness and not having a re-useable statistics package on the dedicated server (I don’t need it as we analyse the raw logs) until recently the majority of our web sites remained on a Fasthosts shared server account and seeing as a shared server account has many limitations in regards what you can do with your programming and the terrible customer service we’d been receiving we recently transferred the majority (not all) of our web sites away from Fasthosts onto our shiny Rackspace server.

The transition was so simple and easy it was an absolute pleasure. You manage your DNS settings through their online portal which also has a very detailed and easy-to-use support ticketing system. Once setup in the portal you setup the domain on your server and away you go so I’m one happy bunny. They even helped install (unsupported) software for statistics analysis (without any additional charges) and helped me remove the quotas I had applied to the C: drive by accident. As if that wasn’t enough Rackspace even took the time to talk through some of the finer points of server management with me.

What’s this about being a Rackspace partner? Well, you may think that my judgement is swayed by the fact that we were recently asked to be partners with Rackspace but I really wish I’d written about them before this because they are genuinely a superb company and I don’t want you to think that I’m just saying that for the commission (though that is an added bonus I must admit!). If you want unparalleled customer support and a managed hosting solution that really is there all the time for you then choose Rackspace –I’m yet to fault them (and having seen what it gets me, I can’t fault them on the price as it’s well worth it for the help and support they’ve offered me in the past).

In many ways, Rackspace and the Rackspace support team are very much part of my team, I know they’re always there and unlike other people in my team are always happy to hear from me (at the start of the call at least!).

Rackspace, Rackspace, Rackspace, oh how I love ye! If you’re thinking about setting up a server with Rackspace let me know and I’ll put you in contact with people that can help I definitely recommend Rackspace as your hosting partner even if it's just for an easier life :)

Oh, and if all this wasn’t enough –they even send you a bunch of freebies for being a customer and a 12month congratulations certificate! –Cheesy I know but it’s the thought that counts! –and I use the free 256MB key they sent me as part of becoming a partner to store my blog posts on the go now* so thanks for that. Note to any supply company -I (and I think anyone else out there) LOVES free stuff so send it over... ;)

*Yes I know I could have got several hundred 1GB disk keys for the price I pay on hosting but then I wouldn’t get to talk to the lovely support staff ;)

As part of my mini-series on Business start-up advice I posted a simple accounting database (see: Finances (VAT, Accountants etc)) but today I realised I had just uploaded the mdb which won't be served by IIS so I just wanted to let you know I've uploaded it as a zip (incase you were one of the people that tried to download it).

Example Microsoft Access Accounting Database (21KB)

I recently released a mini-series of articles with a load of great business start-up advice (also available to download as a PDF) in which I talk about how the government is really going the extra mile for SMEs at the moment, helping them out in a load of different ways -really trying to encourage entrepreneurship within the United Kingdom. This was something I believed until I got my tax bill.

The deadline for your self-assessment tax return is fast approaching and the government kindly sends you an invoice for your last tax return, mine arrived just before Christmas and to my surprise it was 50% more than I submitted. Seeing as I was off to Cornwall I decided I would deal with it on my return.

I've never had an issue with paying tax, in fact I've always been proud of the fact that I've needed to pay tax, my logic is simple: if I need to pay tax, it means I'm earning! The more tax I pay, the more I've earned. See my logic?

In the past, through claiming back expenses etc my tax bills have always been relatively small and although I seem to recall something called “Payment on account”, but it was IIRC an optional payment so next year the amount you have to pay is smaller. This is a good idea. As a small business owner I do put money aside for my tax bill but that’s always been 25% of each invoice. So what’s my issue?

To me, payment on account seems like a half-arsed attempt by the government to help self-employed people out, while getting a couple more quid in the process, the issue however is I feel they’ve focused more on taking more money than helping out the self-employed people. The idea is simple: You submit your tax bill for the previous tax year, they take an additional payment (payment on account) which will go towards the next tax year, this payment is estimated on their data for you -in this case your tax bill. The first payment is due with your current tax bill, the second in July of the current tax year. Thus splitting the next year’s tax bill into two more manageable payments. -Bollocks does it. Please excuse my French but this is not at all thought out and this is why:

I would consider myself to be one of the more sensible self-employed people when it comes to saving for tax, admittedly the first couple of years I was in business I paid the tax bill with a project we had on at the time but now I do put money aside for it with every invoice (now 50% of every invoice inc VAT goes aside). So come tax return time I have a nice chunk of cash to pay for my tax bill (always more than it needs to be because of expenses etc). I then follow the governments recommendation and fill out my self-assessment tax return online in plenty of time -a word of warning, I live with a chartered accountant who helps me out with this, it’s not something I just do on my own ;). In January I have the invoice for the bill and I pay it out of my savings, anything left I can use as I wish. All good so far! As far as the government is concerned I have followed what they’re recommending and that should be it. Payment on account however throws this into turmoil. What the government IMHO neglects to tell you is that you’re going to have to pay 50% more than you’re expecting in the first year you go over their threshold.

What I don’t like about that is they’re encouraging a lot of self-employed people to complete their own return online (best to do this with an accountant really) and save for their bill but by not telling you about this additional payment they can in theory put someone out of business over night -and there’s nothing you can do about it. Take the average self-employed business owner with a turnover of £50,000. Assuming no expenses you should expect to walk away with around £38,300 (using rough maths). Cool, so you’re good and put £11,700 into savings in preparation and use the rest to pay the bills, buy a holiday, a car etc.

You think all’s dandy until at the end of the year you get a tax bill for £17,550 with a further payment of £5,850 being required in July. That leaves you with £26,600 remaining rather than the initial £38,300 you were expecting. Why? That’s simple -payment on account, the tax office say "Well, you earned £50,000 this year, so you’ll do that next year so we’ll take that money from you now, that way next year you’ll already have some money on account -helping you out. Don’t worry though, if your tax bill for next year is lower, we’ll refund the money." -there are so many issues to this statement but I’ll come back to those.

I've made a graph demonstrating the two differences. The light red segment is the amount you will need to pay in the July following your January tax payment, the dark red section must be paid in addition to your main tax bill.

Take my industry -the IT industry. It’s not unknown (or an infrequent occurrence) to have a large project (i.e. £100,000) which you can complete within a financial year. If you're already working in the sector and this £100,000 contract is your reason for going it alone this could be a serious issue for you. Ignoring how you take this money, by the end of a single fiscal year you take £100,000:

• Turnover:£100,000
• Tax Allowance:£5,000
• Taxable Income:£95,000
• Tax at 22%:£7,700
• Tax at 40%:£24,000
• Expected Tax Bill:£31,700
• Expected to you:£68,300

In the event you’ve taken £100,000 for a project you’re likely to spend a fair amount of that on things like credit cards, niceties after having gone without for a while etc, so you spend a fair whack, perhaps put a chunk on your mortgage, buy a house or invest a fair chunk. Say you get the payment a couple of months before the tax year ends so you take the time off and relax a little, basically using a fair amount of the money, but you’re ok as you’ve put £32,000 into savings in preparation for your tax bill. When it comes to filing time however you’re told that you owe them an additional £15,850 with your current tax bill followed by another payment of £15,850 in July. Starting to see where my issue lies?

If you didn’t spend anymore of that £68,300 than you absolutely had to and some how had the additional £31,700 available you’re fine, but what if you decided to treat someone special, or invest the money where it’s not readily accessible, what can you do? I called the tax office to talk it through with them as I didn’t want to pay this payment on account as it would mean that things would be a little tight until the end of a current system development. The representative had absolutely no concern or understanding for my situation, when I asked her if I could spread the payments a little I was told that interest would be charged on the money if I didn’t pay it and a fine would be incurred. Furthermore she told me that this payment on account was ok because it was tax on money we had already earned (the payment on account is in theory for the current fiscal year), I did think about pointing out that a business’ earnings are not the same as a worker’s salary as they are frequently sporadic and go through highs and lows -in the case of The Site Doctor, the majority of our year’s income comes in during the final fiscal quarter.

There were a couple of things I didn’t like about the representatives statement/government’s perceived understanding of the situation:

1. Great they are trying to help you out with your business -hopefully making the next tax year’s tax bill a smaller payment (or not at all if you think about the logic) but how does making it a forced payment without making it very well known about help?
2. It assumes that your business’ monthly turnover is the same as an employee in that your entire year’s earnings are the same (or similar) each month with no seasonal fluctuations. I know there are some more established businesses which do have a regular income but The Site Doctor certainly doesn’t. As already mentioned, The Site Doctor has the majority of the year’s earnings paid in the final fiscal quarter -after you have to pay your tax bill!
3. They say they’ll refund the money if your next bill is lower than the last so it’s ok. But taking the example of the £50,000 turnover above, that’s a years worth of interest on £11,700 you’ve just lost potential interest of £936 or £2,536 in the example of our £100,000 contract. Can you afford to loose out on that?
4. This can in theory put someone out of business, as it happened, I had to pay this bill mid contract when normally I wouldn’t have had any money for a fair while, to make things worse Stacey was having a short sabbatical. Luckily we had the money in savings but if we didn’t we would have without a doubt found it hard to pay.

The solution?

I don’t like bitching and moaning about things without having some form of solution and I can understand that the government wants to get this cash into the bank and after the first year or two it makes things better for them but for goodness sake make the payment optional, perhaps offer a monthly payment option without penalties or at least inform people about this so they can make provisions for it. Had I not found this out before this tax year I would be in serious trouble. Of course, having a tax specialist do your books should have highlighted this for you -and it goes to show that just because they’re an accountant, if they’re not a specialist they may not know about something that can break the bank (I’ve got no blame for Stacey before you wonder!).

Note: These figures are derived from my own experience so please take professional advice on the matter as for all I know, there may be a sliding scale (I would hope there is) otherwise the government is killing businesses left right and centre. I’d be interested to know if anyone else knew of/has experienced this issue.

I rate good/great customer service very highly when it comes to retaining clients and obtaining new clients so it always make me laugh at how some companies value their customer service and more to the point wonder how they’re still in business!

The other day I had a couple of conversations with Fasthosts that I simply had to share. A little background though –we’ve been with Fasthosts for a couple of years now, I think we originally signed up in 1999 through 4as1 and I know we were one of their first customers. Since then we’ve registered around 300 domains with their sister company UKReg without a problem.

More recently however I’ve been feeling less easy about their service. Firstly they started charging for things left right and centre –ok, they’ve got a business to run, next they started to overload the servers (ok it’s a shared server, I can live with that), to combat the overloaded servers they started moving domains –I’m guessing higher demand sites onto their own boxes. That was ok, except they gave you no advanced warning and seeing as a fair few of the sites in question would reference MS Access databases elsewhere would cause us no-end of update fun.

Then their support went down hill to the extent that we often had to wait for ages until the phone was answered (listening to “you are 17th in the queue”). At this point we had just opened an account with Rackspace so had the view to slowly move the domains over. That was until I got an email saying they would now be charging for a number of services that were historically free which cut into our margins –making them negative. That annoyed me somewhat so moving the sites away from Fasthosts was moved up my priority list.

When we first signed up with Fasthosts they were the dogs, cheap hosting with all the bells and whistles –we had a Windows account which meant –unlike others at the time we had free use of ASP and all sorts but now all they seem interested in is the Yankee dollar rather than customer retention.

The other day was the straw that broke the camels back in regards my tolerance of Fasthosts. I had two fairly simple questions and it wasn’t easy to get a straight response to either. The first related to a domain I was adding for a client, they don’t use it but have access to a personal control panel which allows them to manage their emails etc. The control panel although a little outdated does the job. The catch however is recently you need to pay for use of Fasthosts’ control panel or you can build your own through the API. I didn’t need half the stuff included in the “Standard Bundle” and only wanted Fasthosts’ personal control panel so thought it would be best to ask which package I needed:

Massively long delay before a response finally comes

Great! They’ve removed the control panels I highlighed (and only those ones!) but they were just the ones in the next month! In fairness, after a few more emails I did get the past invoices refunded as well as a fair few future ones taken off the account but it makes me very concerned as to who else is still paying this charge... I would never have questioned it as they did send a mailshot out saying they would now be charging for them etc. Most odd

Conversation 2 – SQL Server Express

As I’ve already mentioned, we’ve been with Fasthosts for around 8 years now (that’s at least £7k in the basic fees in case you’re interested) and for most of that we’ve had use of a shared SQL Server. When we signed up it was SQL Server 7 and although we’ve requested it nicely we’ve never been upgraded and so it resides on a very outdated machine to which we cannot connect using the new SQL Management studio.

This shared SQL Server costs us £35pm and as we’ve only got 3 active clients using it, bringing in a total of £300pa I felt that is a slight waste of money so my plan was to use SQL Server Express in place (they’re relatively low traffic sites and MS Access was out of the question as they made use of various stored procedures).

As you now have to pay extra for an ASP.Net account I thought I’d ask support to find out what the situation was...

I felt that was direct and straight to the point, not asking anything too complicated to which one may expect a yes/no answer? Right?...

Ok, I know sometimes I’m a little slow but “appropriate authentication method” that had me seriously confused, the only thing I could think was he was referring to Management Studio. Not only that I know for a fact that we’re on SQL Server 7…

Ok, so perhaps my question wasn't clear enough, I thought that's what I asked, I thought (clearly incorrectly) that SQL Server Express was now released as a standard update through Microsoft updates -so they've disabled that. Perhaps I should have been a little clear in pointing out the fact that I HAVE a shared SQL Server account with them and that it was unsatisfactory but hey I thought they'd check what services we already had with them.

Ok, so as this point you can tell I was slowly quickly loosing grip but this next one just finishes me off...

Feel like you’re on a roundabout? I gave up and spent the weekend fast-forwarding my server transfer schedule.

Ok, looking at those few emails perhaps it is a bit extreme to close down our account with them but this is a monthly occurrence, I would say all in all this set of emails took around 2 hours of my day which to me is time I could be billing a client so I think it’s justified.

As it happens they did me a favour, by forcing my hand (or annoying me to the extent I did something about it) we're now finally on Rackspace and our sites are a lot more speedy :) Happy Days!

I’ve always been adverse to getting a BlackBerry for a few of reasons:

1. I don’t get away from work much as it is so I felt having emails on my BlackBerry on the go all the time would be one step too far.
2. The size of the BlackBerry –they’re ridiculous, I like my phone to be as small as possible so it interferes with my life as little as possible.
3. I’ve heard horror stories about the increase in bandwidths to manage the email push.

Then while we were looking at new contracts over Christmas Stacey picked up the BlackBerry Pearl which was small and sleek and suggested I gave it a go. As she didn’t want to change from her V3 we agreed I’d give it a go for a month and if I didn’t like it I’d have her free upgrade (a Sony Ericsson w810i).

I’ve had the BlackBerry Pearl for well over a month now so I thought I’d share my findings in case anyone else is thinking of getting one.

How does the BlackBerry “work”?

There are plenty of tutorials for the BlackBerry and far more advanced information on how the BlackBerry actually works but I thought it may be worth over viewing how it’s configured and the basic concepts.

BlackBerrys use something called “Push” Technology to retrieve emails, your email client (Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird etc) classically collects email from a server by contacting the server and getting a list of emails and then downloading the emails. BlackBerrys on the other hand have the email sent to it from the server.

When you first get your BlackBerry you have to configure your email accounts with your BlackBerry’s ISP (in my case O2), you supply them with server details for your mail account (POP3 settings). Your ISP will then periodically check your email account and collect the new email messages which are then encrypted and sent (or pushed) to your BlackBerry (in a similar way to an SMS message). The BlackBerry then decrypts the email and allows you to read it. Simple eh :)

My thoughts on the BlackBerry Pearl

Things I like about the BlackBerry Pearl:

• It’s size –it’s no larger than a lot of the other phones out there at the moment, in fact it’s smaller than my old Motorola V3 while it was closed (though it’s about 5mm longer)
• It’s synchronisation with Outlook. I used to have a Palm LifeDrive to manage my calander, address book and tasks etc and a separate address book on my V3 which didn’t sync correctly with Outlook so the three were nearly always different –that and I hated having to carry around the LifeDrive as it was just extra bulk... The BlackBerry Pearl however seamlessly manages it all which has meant that I’ve started managing my to-do list a lot more efficiently as well as my address book.
• The size and clarity of the screen.
• Today Plus theme –an extra download but well worth it as it summarises all the info you need to know at a glance on the home screen.
• Battery life –quoted at around 8½ hours talk time I’m certainly getting at least this. A lot of the time I plug it in via USB while I’m working which charges it but I’ve had a couple of weekends away recently which has meant it’s not got charged and it happily coped with the (for me) heavy use without an issue.
• The complete call log of all incoming and out going calls on a user basis –this is great for me if I need to know how long I spent speaking to a client etc (I tend to use my mobile for most outgoing calls as they’re all free ;)).
• The degree of customisation (though this is also a downside as it is somewhat complicated).
• The fact you can customise what the side buttons do.
• The standby button –why it has a keylock I don’t know as it gets in the way of the standby button.
• The voice dialler –that’s awesome.
• VoiceRecorder+ (a voice memo recorder for the BlackBerry Pearl from ShapeServices – www.shapeservices.com)
• The fact you can add delays into the number dialling to quickly and automatically navigate the IVR options for systems you regularly use.

Things I dislike about the BlackBerry Pearl:

• It’s pretty complicated. Unlike most phones these days each application has it’s own settings and finding where they are is sometimes a real PITA.
• You can’t set ringing profiles to activate at certain times of the day.
• You can’t send SMS messages from it through your computer.
• It doesn’t ring and vibrate at the same time.
• The ringer is a little quiet at times (though people suggest drilling holes in the back of the casing sorts this).
• The key lock which sometimes gets in the way of taking the phone out of standby –I expect there’s a way of turning it off but I’ve not found it yet.

All in all I think the BlackBerry Pearl is a superb phone and I’ll certainly be keeping it. I’ve setup a filter to ensure I don’t get spam coming through on it but I still get between 10 and 50 emails a day on it, the data transfer is still low (it’s still under 100KB) but I don’t surf the web etc.

O2 offer a deal at the moment where you can have unlimited data for £10pm on top of your bill, my thinking is if I start to use more than £10 of data a month I’ll upgrade but atm it’s all good. In regards the additional load on our mail server I’ve not noticed anything significant but I’ll analyse this in a couple of months as the calls should be clear. To avoid spam emails I’ve setup a separate mail account that the O2 server collects from, then from my main email accounts I forward any that are sent directly to me and without my spam filter’s headers added to my GMail account which then filters pretty much everything else missed by my server’s filter before forwarding it onto my BlackBerry account. I realise this is a slightly long winded method of managing it but it has meant that 99.9% of all spam has been ignored. There have been a couple of emails missed (i.e. where I’ve been CC’d) but I can live without having those on the go ;)

I had an issue when I first got the BlackBerry Pearl that all numbers would be dialled with the prefix of +44 and the leading 0. As it happens, the fix is pretty simple:

1. Open the call log
2. Press the menu key (the BlackBerry icon)
3. Choose “General Options”
4. Choose “Smart Dialing”
5. Change the country code to +44

I’m still somewhat shocked at how well the series on business start up advice was received, I was expecting one or two hits on it but so far I’ve had over 1,000 visits to the article which is pretty shocking as this blog in its entirety was only getting that a year(ish)! I’ve also had some fantastic feedback which is very touching so those of you who have got in touch thanks!

Ok, following the posting of my recent business start up advice mini series I was asked by a number of people to post it as a PDF which I’ve finally managed to do. It’s rather long I’m afraid weighing in at around 26 pages so it should keep you busy giving me time to write the additional articles!

Download the PDF version of the complete business start up advice article here (27 printed pages including a 1 page feedback form - 189KB).

What an awesome event, I was originally in two minds about going to the latest conference installment from Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman (and all the other dedicated people involved with the other DDD events) but boy am I glad I went.

This time I decided to take it to the next level and rather than driving down and back on the day I’d drive down the night before with Stacey and stay over in a local hotel. This worked really well, not only did it mean I was awake for all of the seminars but I could get some work down the next day too ;)

Anyhow, back to the day, for once I had the foresight to choose the seminars I was going to attend before I arrived and decided not to attend all of Scott Guthrie’s talks mainly because of the following I knew he’d have but also because of the great alternatives available so here’s my breakdown of who I went to see and what I thought of their talk:

Microformats - HTML to API (Glenn Jones)

Read Glenn Jones' blog post about the day

GlenN Jones (not Glen Jones as was listed in the schedule ;)) presented a very interesting talk on microformats, it’s not quite what I first thought it was (for some reason I thought it was some form of HTML applets but lets not go there!). Microformats are certainly something I’m going to look into in the future but as Julian Voelcker has pointed out quite how practical they are to use in a CMS situation I’m not sure.

I think from an SEO point of view and also from an information sharing POV they’re very interesting and I’ll certainly be integrating them into various sites for testing purposes sooner rather than later (in fact if you check out my about me page they’ll be there with the new update coming soon … now I just need to re-work my tag output* using IISMods' URLRewrite).

*Glenn pointed out that  when using the rel=”tag” attribute the last “word” in the associated URL should be the tag itself -something I didn’t know but will be sorted as atm it’s along the lines of “CategoryView,category,Business,Business%20Start-up%20Advice.aspx” etc which isn’t very useful.

I think in principle microformats are a good idea for something like a blog or a semi-static site where the developer (or someone with knowledge of microformats) has control over the content but how you could role them out in a client managed site is a little more complicated and something that will need some more thought -do you offer buttons to insert the code markup for them? Can you offer nested content easily etc.

The other thing about them I’m not too sure about is (miss)use of the abbr tag -again that was only something I picked up in the talk so may have missed the point, I’ll need to look into it further.

Either way it was an interesting insight into a new concept that I’m going to support if I can :). Check out the main microformats site at: www.microformats.org

Glenn Jones is also the developer behind the back network site that was used to link all the delegates together, it’s an interesting concept that once again promotes a social network on the internet which is all the rage at the moment but also allows you to interact with other delegates before the event -this is something I’d have done had I had more time before the event!

Download the slides to the Microformats - HTML to API talk by Glenn Jones

Web Accessibility: What, Why, How, and Who Cares? (Bruce Lawson)

Read Bruce Lawson's blog post about the day

Making web sites accessible is something I’ve been interested in pretty much since I got involved with ASP.Net 1.1 and I get endlessly tired of hearing fellow ASP.Net developers complain that you can’t make web sites accessible using the ASP.Net platform -balls can’t you, ok it’s not something that comes out of the box and at times is a little awkward but a lot of it is just common sense and consideration.

Bruce Lawson’s talk was a breath of fresh air, it was great to see someone having the courage that I’m yet to muster (well, more the time but hey) to convince my fellow developers to make their sites accessible.

Why the hell shouldn’t your site be accessible to all? It’s not all about money, in my mind it’s just about being fair to others -following (as ever) Google’s moto of don’t be evil. I liked Bruce’s method of presentation as it was far more personal than the usual “you should care because it’s the law” or “you should care because you’re missing out on a ton of money”, when asking the question “who cares?” -using his words not mine- he said “rather than quoting facts and figures at you trying to convince you, -my mate Theresa does”. I think this in itself was a different method of engaging the audience and I certainly felt it worked.

The talk wasn’t particularly in depth (which baring in mind the audience I expected) but I felt it was enough to plant the seed of interest with those that weren’t otherwise that aware or interested about accessibility. I hope that they’ll now actively encourage fellow developers to take action -not necessarily by redeveloping their past sites as many clients can’t afford this, but by giving some consideration to accessibility in future designs -i.e. DON’T use buttons for menu systems!

I can’t hand on heart say all our sites are overly accessible but I’m learning and I feel each new site we’re involved in is that little bit more accessible. Bruce did share a very useful site called “Blind Webbers” where you can get in contact with screen reader users -I’ll certainly be checking that out with the new design for The Site Doctor, for others interested Bruce sent me the link: http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_message.php?id=9019. I’m thinking I’ll see what they think of Miss Mays adult store -could be a good introduction!!

The point that made me laugh the most was his demonstration of using “Click Here” as link text, his demo was simple but effective -you can check it out on his site: http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/index.php/2007/webdd-conference-slides-and-questions

One thing I do need to think about is the order of elements on the page, i.e. at present this blog layout has the menu appearing before the content -mainly because that was the quickest way I could get the layout sorted, but I think I need to re-order it so the menu comes last -that said I do have a “Skip to content” link at the top -how effective it is I’ll let you know. Another thing I also want to pass by Bruce is image replacement techniques as I’ve tried a few now and I’d be interested to see how they perform on screen readers and the like.

Download the slides for the Web Accessibility: What, Why, How, and Who Cares? talk by Bruce Lawson

Quick and dirty Usability tests - one week, no budget, and no usability facility (Zhivko Dimitrov)

Read Zhivko Dimitrov's blog post about the day

Again, interested in making my sites as user friendly as possible I thought that this would be an interesting talk but it wasn’t quite as it was portrayed -instead he went into how they perform remote usability tests with a budget. None the less it was a fairly interesting talk.

Zhivko is from Telerik and clearly has a fair amount of experience in usability testing, I was hoping he’d have some good ideas on how to offer usability testing on no budget but sadly he didn’t. There were a couple of interesting points raised however that I don’t think I would have thought of -firstly the re-use of testers, if you use a tester more than twice within a year they’ll start to know what you want them to say rather than what’s there. The other point raised was if you’re using remote testing, you loose the non-vocal indicators of frustration such as a furrowed brow or someone scratching their head.

Zhivko’s opening demo however was a recording of a guy trying to find a grid component on their competitors site, despite the fact they spent a fair amount of time laughing at the guy in the background I thought this was a great example of a poorly designed site and how important it is to highlight your site’s calls-to-action which is something that I’ll have to remember while optimizing our newest SEO client for online poker The Rivercard -one of the issues we have already highlighted is that many of their download links are below the fold of the screen which reduces the chance the user will click the link.

Download the slides from the Quick and dirty Usability tests - one week, no budget, and no usability facility talk by Zhivko Dimitrov

Connecting Design to Real Business Value (Brandon Schauer)

Visit Brandon Schauer's blog

As with Zhivko’s talk, this was another talk that wasn’t quite as it was portrayed by the title, but I was pleasantly surprised by the content. Brandon Schauer’s talk was more about business modeling and how analyzing the current business method can be improved with a little thinking (and design) -ok that’s obvious ;) but his methods were nice.

I found the talk incredibly interesting -especially following my mini-series on business start-up advice, I thought this was a really well timed and interesting talk. Some of the ideas he offered were simple and to the point so you can apply them to any business, the issue I have with it though is whether I can apply it to any of my clients -I’d love to take the time to go through Miss Mays adult store and help them improve some of their business processes but they don’t have the money to invest and sadly neither do I.

I do however think that I can apply some of the concepts he was talking about to an example business which in turn could then be a starting point to discuss business improvement with clients. This however will take a little time and I think Stacey will need to be involved as this is what she’s primarily trained in. Although I love developing and I don’t think I’ll ever get away from it (certainly not in the foreseeable future anyways) I am getting more and more interested in business analysis, it’s not something that I’ve really got any experience in yet (having only been in business for a few years) but perhaps one day it’s an alternative career path I can choose…

Either way, Brandon’s talk was well worth seeing and if he’s ever at a future conference I attend I’ll certainly make the effort to see him talk.

Download the slids from the Connecting Design to Real Business Value talk by Brandon Schauer

WPF/E (Scott Guthrie)

Visit Scott Guthrie's blog

For the final talk I decided to watch Scott Guthrie’s talk about WPF/E and boy what a talk it was! I almost didn’t get in as we were hearded in like cows (which was most amusing I have to be honest), the woman stopped me right on the entrance -I think much to Julian Voelcker’s delight as he’d managed to get a seat. Luckily though the women on the doors (yes women -not burly bouncers!) took pity on us poor, desperate geeks in admiration of some Yank they didn’t know and let us line the sides of the auditorium -which meant I ended up getting a front row (floor) seat.

The talk was one of those “look at what’s coming” type talks but with a twist, it was something that I can see being of real use -and more than that gave you the urge to try it out. WPF/E looks like a really exciting new technology -even if Julian does think it’s just the same as Flash. As I don’t particularly like flash I think this will be a nice introduction to our development arsenal. That and the possibilities are far greater than those offered by Flash -especially where data interaction is involved.

Scott Guthrie did show an impressive demo of WPF/E which can be seen at www.vista.si -it’s one of those “wow, I can’t believe I’m seeing what I’m seeing” moments, the site is basically a replica (working replica) of Windows Vista -but on the web. It even works with Firefox!

The interesting point that I picked up on is their method of rolling out the WPF/E platform to users, rather than offering the usual Windows Update installer, it sounds as though it’s all going to be done in the same way the flash play is -a small (1.1MB IIRC) file will be downloaded the first time you visit a site that requires WPF/E and that’s it!

I do have concerns over the accessibility of WPF/E but Scott Guthrie did assure us that later versions of WPF/E will be made more accessible. At the end of the day however, I guess it’s just the same situation as entirely flash sites -those that want to offer them, have to offer an accessible alternative (and as Bruce Lawson pointed out -NO, IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE UGLY!).

It was also nice to see Scott Guthrie talk as there are so many blog posts around the net talking about how they saw him, now I can say that I’ve seen him talk -somewhat sad but hey!

The slides aren’t yet online but I’m sure Scott Guthrie will upload them to the Scott Guthrie's presentations page soon enough!

In summary

I always take a conference as a whole -there’s always going to be at least one talk which isn’t quite what you expected, if you can come away with at least one nugget of information that you didn’t have before -or- with a little of that zest for doing what you do back again it was well worth attending. In this case I got a real buzz out of most of the talks and have plenty of things to try out -now I just need to find the time!

And if all that wasn’t enough to get your juices going and wanting to do some more development, I (I think for the first time ever) won something in the raffle -I was in the queue hoping for the book on accessibility by Bruce Lawson but actually won a years subscription to ComponentArt’s Web.UI component set -I’m well chuffed at that, now I just need to find somewhere to use them!! Oh, I shouldn't forget the free copy of Microsoft Expression Web we were given, and the T-Shirts and, and... :D

I did get to meet up with a few people off the MsWebDev list but sadly not all -Mickey, I’ll have to say hi next time. The one thing that did amaze me was how long the lunch was, I don’t recall any of the DDD events being that long.

If you went and you’ve not already done so, you should go and leave feedback on the event -it’s the only way they can improve it ;) so go leave your feedback on WebDD (http://webdd.co.uk/Feedback.aspx). Apparently you can also review it on the back network site (http://webdd.backnetwork.com/reviews/editreview.aspx

If you missed out on WebDD 1, hopefully there’ll be a WebDD 2, I’ll post any news I have as soon as I have it -for my one blog reader that is :)

A couple of people have been looking into new PCs recently so I thought it may be of use for me to post what I've got (and to use as a point of reference in the future!). This is fairly old now (nearly a year infact) but it's still doing me proud :)

• Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI SE (101701)
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Dual Core 2.0ghz 512Kb/512Kb Cache (094640)
• RAM: Crucial 1GB DDR PC3200 400MHz (65719)
• Graphics Card(s): 2 x Gainward BLISS GeForce 6800GS 512MB PCI-E (105525)
• Primary (system) HDD: Western Digital 74GB "Raptor" 10k RPM SATA/150 8MB Cache (55454)
• Secondary (work) HDD: Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATA2/300 16MB Cache (94403)
• Tertiary (music etc) HDD: Seagate Baracuda V 120GB SATA (115417) -added from old system
• Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (97577)
• Case: Antec P180 EU Aluminium Super Miditower (91721)
• PSU: Antec NEO HE500GB 500W Modular PSU With 80mm Low Speed/noise Fan 18db (99137)
• VGA Cooling:  2 x Zalman (VF900-CU) Active VGA Cooler (110237)
• Sound card: Creative Audigy 2 (Taken from the previous machine)
• Speakers: Altec Lansing ADA-995 -absolute beasts, I can't turn them above 10% while in the office, the sound from them is superb if you can afford them (Taken from the previous machine)

As for how it goes? Well, awesome is an understatement, it's a real step-up from my old machine (a Dell Dimension 8300 as featured in Computer Buyer August 2003) and I would say I'm an above average user. I've not tried measuring the noise levels produced from it but more often than not I have to check the lights on the keyboard to make sure it's on in the morning.

If I were re-building the system again, I would however swap the motherboard for the deluxe version as my chipset cooler fan has been a little noisy in the past (however ASUS replaced that free of charge for me). I'm planning on replacing it with a passive cooler though as this one sometimes rattles.

The upgrade to the Zalman VGA coolers are an absolute must, I've routed the speed controllers out through the front of the machine which allows me to control their speed easily without altering the case at all. The difference in noise level is phenomenal and I rarly run them above the minimum setting. My VGA cards from memory (I've taken off the temp monitor) were running around 30C while playing Need For Speed Most Wanted on max graphics settings.

Before Christmas we pitched to develop a web site for a friends new idea, we didn't get the project sadly. However last night I got a mailer stating that it was launched so in an effort to help the site get into the rankings a little more and to show no hard feelings (GRRR) I thought I'd post a link here :)

Good luck Filip and Kon! I hope it works out for you.

The mailer he sent out is too wide to fit on here sadly but here's the spiel (typos and all :P)!

I love sushi so a while ago I signed up for the Yo! Sushi mailing list and now I get all sorts of little discounts coming through, I thought I'd share their latest offering with everyone else. To get 50% off at Yo! Sushi, go to their website and fill out the form:

http://www.yosushi.com/sale.php

I know the sushi purists out there will start going on about how it's not "real" sushi, but it's good enough for me -and tastes that little be sweeter half price ;)

Now go, entertain and impress your clients at Yo! Sushi with your discount -I won't tell!

As part of a forthcoming series of articles I covered the importance of adhering to a routine. This was something that I've always done and always felt is important but quite how important I didn't realize until this month.

This month Stacey is having a few weeks off work while she's waiting for all the CRB checks to come through before starting her new role as Senior Management Accountant at the Birmingham City Council which she really deserves after a few really hard years studying to become a Fully Qualified Chartered Management Accountant with CIMA. Anyhow I digress.

As I've got a fair amount of work on at present, I knew I wasn't going to be able to spend time with her for all the time she had off but I decided having a few late mornings wouldn't hurt. How wrong could I be? The most disruptive thing this month so far has not been Stacey wanting to do things (which I thought it would be) it has been the semi-lack of routine.

For the past 3 years I've got up with Stacey around 6:30am and got into the office after seeing her off (usually around 8am but in recent months due to lack of motivation for her job this dropped to 9am) and then I would work until her return at around 7:30pm. This gave me a good 11 hours office time a day.

What I've found however is with the lie-ins etc over the last week is how your mind gets into a routine. When you disrupt the routine i.e. by getting up at 9am, your brain suddenly finds it harder to get into gear with what you're working on.

This disruption basically means, where it used to take me 10-15 minutes in the morning to gather myself for the day ahead (turn on computer, check emails, think about where I got to the night before etc) it's taking me closer to 30 minutes. I'm also finding I'm getting distracted a lot easier! This week, we've started getting up at 8am, then starting work around 9am and already I've been at least 50x more efficient (though still going to bed around 2am means I'm getting increasingly knackered!).

I'll stress again now, if you're planning on working for yourself in the future: have a routine and stick to it!

My mobile contract expired just before Christmas and because of the issues I was having with Orange earlier this year (Seeing Orange) I decided I’d take my business elsewhere.

Every year we go through the same charade trying to find a new contract, something that has what we want at a reasonable price and every year the sales people completely ignore what you ask them. This year however SERIOUS took the biscuit and we couldn’t help but walk out laughing.

In our local shopping centre The Merry Hill Shopping Centre (aka Merry Hell) we have all the usual names within walking distance (in fact IIRC Phones4U and Carphone Warehouse are next to each other) so we spent an hour or so wandering around them all, having being seduced by the adverts for Phones4U I thought we’d give them a go.

First of all we were accosted by a guy on the door who, once we’d got past all the pleasantries asked what we were after. Having gone through this routine a couple of times already today I reeled off: “We’d like two separate contracts, one 2-300 minutes £20-25pm and the other 5-600 minutes £30-35pm. We’re not too worried about the amount of texts we get as neither of us text much so show us your best (cheapest) deal”.

The guy then asked me what phone I currently had, quite how that was relevant I couldn’t figure out. He then asked to see my current phone so I gave it to him mainly out of curiosity as to why he wanted to see it. He had a look at it and then told us he would take us someone that’d sort us out.

He then walked us over to some kid sitting behind a desk and told him that we were looking “for a contract* that has lots of minutes and texts** and could this guy help us?” I couldn’t help but laugh as they both had cheap matching pin stripes on.

*We were looking for two
**We didn’t want any texts

The representative then started taking details like our names, phone numbers, postcode, names (again) and then he started wanting things like home phone number by which time we were growing impatient, trying to work out the relevance. So Stacey subtly asked what relevance it had to finding us the cheapest deal. He went a little quiet and then proceeded.

Looking a little lost I thought it would help to repeat “We’d like two separate contracts, one 2-300 minutes £20-25pm and the other 5-600 minutes £30-35pm. We’re not too worried about the amount of texts we get as neither of us text much so show us your best (cheapest) deal and we’ll sign”. Sadly though it didn’t help, he just mumbled something about cutting to the chase and then told us he would get his manager to help us find the best deal.

So over comes his manager to help us, but instead of acknowledging we were there she decided to talk to the sales guy (loud enough so we could hear), he pointed out the notes he’d made on the form emphasising that we’d not given him many personal details or told him about our current contracts though why that’s relevant seeing as I told him what we needed.

The manager then spent a couple of times ticking and crossing the form and told him that we didn’t have one of the phones. Rather than telling us they then started muttering to each other again before she nodded to him and told him to suggest it. Rather than telling this herself somewhat like a parrot he repeated exactly what she’d just said, then they decided to confer a little more and again he repeated that they weren’t sure they could help us as we know what we wanted. Throughout the 5mins the manager was there, she never once made eye contact or spoke to us directly without using her puppeteer of a sales person. She then mentioned something about going away and she’d be back (hardly audible) and left us wondering what was going on.

I think the best of it all was when the sales guy felt it would be a good idea to make some small talk while waiting for his manager to return so he asked whether we were at Merry Hill shopping. Instead of then listening to Stacey’s response his eyes wandered around the shop –clearly not paying any attention to us so I said a couple of times “Stacey, he’s not listening to you” –the fact that he didn’t notice while we were talking to him demonstrated that. It was the most bizarre situation I’ve ever been in, to top it all, he waved to a friend and then a few moments later actually got up and walked away WITHOUT SAYING ANYTHING!! I still can’t believe how un-believably rude that was and I’m just glad that we got up and walked out.

Funnily enough, I have to agree with what Stacey has repeatedly said since about Phones4U –the weird people from the adverts are really the sales people…

I’m still wondering why sales people don’t take on board what you’re telling them instead of trying to sell you something that’s clearly unsuitable for your needs or just irritating you so much that you just walk out. If one of the three sales people we spoke to at Phones4U had actually listened to what we were saying or even interacted with us normally they may have got their £70 commission.

Anyways, I ended up getting the phone I wanted at the price I wanted but obviously not from Phones4U! Perhaps this is a more realistic logo?

I’ve never really been happy with the look and feel of this blog and felt that it needed jazzing up a little –especially now I’m getting more and more hits on it but life got in the way and as ugly as it was it did however do the job.

Over Christmas though I decided it was time to bite the bullet and cut to the chase etc and update it. The blog was running on DasBlog v1.8 so while re-working the theme I would also update it to the latest version v1.9.

This is the final result, it’s still a work in progress as I would like to improve the XHTML compliance but as usual time got the better of me so that’s something that will have to be fixed later. It’s certainly an improvement over the old blog though don’t you think?

Over the next few weeks/months I’ll finish editing the source to improve it’s compliance and also update my photo album so it’s more in-line with this site. Don’t forget www.thesitedoctor.co.uk is having a revamp in 2007 too.

So, worth the effort? Here's the old layout:

I had an interesting chat with Chris from Jump'in Jacks'bouncy castle hire about marketing his new business Mad Hatters party shop (website coming soon I hope!!) in the newspaper. Basically he’s taken out an advert with a local paper but I don’t personally feel he’s gone about it the right way. Seeing as he’s not the first client I’ve spoken to about this in the past month (Miss Mays adult store to name another) I feel I should explain why I feel he’s made a mistake.

The scenario*

You want to promote your new fancy dress shop to the local market. You decide the local (free) paper is the best method so you take out an advert in your local paper that is along the lines of:

*This is similar but not exactly the same as Chris’ scenario ;)

What’s the problem?

I’m not a marketing person but common sense tells me there are a few issues with this scenario but primarily you have no way of evaluating its success. How will you know whether it’s worth spending that £x again?

What should you do?

When planning on promoting your business in i.e. the local newspaper, a little research wouldn’t go amiss. Firstly work out who you want to target with your advert, then work out what the best medium to contact them over is and then research that medium itself.

Taking the scenario of a fancy dress shop that would like to capture more local trade, the local paper is a good place to advertise. The first problem I foresee is; locally we’ve got at least 3 different newspaper publishers and each has its own main catchments area, more than this, I know at least one has a dedicated paper for each area. With a little research you can work out which paper is most suitable for your establishment. Remember that you should identify the local paper for your establishment not the local paper for your residence as unless you live above your shop, you’ll most likely find out that they’re two different papers…

Depending on your budget I would recommend running a single campaign in each local publication. How you go about this is up to you, if you’ve got time, select a different paper each time until you’ve had at least one advert in each (you could run two different areas at the same time but having two adverts within one area may mean you’re advertising to the same person twice which would be an unfair test), you’ll then be able to judge which paper had the best return. Make sure you use the same advert for each paper to make it a fair test! It’s also worth noting that it’s commonly recognised that people need to see an advert three times before it registers with them.

Once you have your chosen publisher it’s time to design your advert, you’ll obviously be restricted by budget but get the biggest area you can afford (within reason), for a voucher promotion something A5 size should be more than enough. If you can afford a designer give them the brief and have them mock something up. They should be able to do something pretty decent that can be reused for around £100.

When you’re designing the advert, don’t just throw on your contact details and think that’s enough. You need a clearly defined call to action, this could be anything from a discount to a competition. The idea is to get someone into your shop so give them a reason to go there!

It may also be suitable to gather some data about your customer, many people don’t mind giving you a little information about themselves if they’re getting something cheaper (or free!) so take advantage of that* -you’ll be able to use it for direct marketing or customer analysis later.

*Also look up the rules and regulations around Data Protection.

Ready to go? Not yet. You still don’t have any way of telling which campaign was most effective. Most email campaigns now include something called a beacon image which tells the campaign manager that you’ve opened the email, sadly you can’t get this information from the newspaper but you can track the conversions by adding some form of identifier to the voucher. In my example below I’ve added a tracking code “EP19120310P” it’s perhaps a little overkill but it basically stands for: “Example Paper 19th December 2006 10 Percent Off”. This is important as when you come to analyse the conversions you’ll quickly be able to identify not only which paper it came from, which date but also the offer. Using something along these lines will enable you to track different offers in different papers (or even the different offers in the same paper), by varying the offers you’ll be able to identify the best conversion.

Now you’re ready to go, get the advert placed and on the day of publication get hold of a copy and check out your location, see how you stand out in the paper, if you feel your advert doesn’t stand out as much as the others on the page, work out why, is it the use of specific colours? Or perhaps theirs is in a better font –make a note of it for the next advert!

Finding the ideal combination of paper and offer will be trial and error but as long as you have a method of tracking, analysing the results and quantifying the conversions it shouldn’t take you too long to establish which campaigns pay off and which are just costly.

This is just a quick mock-up using the same area as above as an example, I’m neither a marketer or designer so I’m sure there’s plenty of flaws with this (hint: post a comment on them)!
Original:

New:

In summary

• Research your target audience
• Identify the best publisher to use
• Plan your advert and clearly outline your call to action
• Add some method of tracking to the advert
• Analyse your results and adjust your future advert(s) accordingly

Thanks to Doug Setzer from 27 Seconds Inc for these thoughts, he doesn’t blog (yet) so thought I would be interested in posting it –not sure why as it would seem he’s my only reader…!

I tend to agree with Doug on this one, I remember seeing Code Smith in action at a previous Developer Developer Developer day and although it does look, I have similar concerns as Doug, IMSHO I'm concerned it makes the developer lazy and forget his roots. IIRC many generators offer the ability to make your own templates but again, by doing so, how much time do you really save?

Not being a code generator user* I’m also somewhat biased but I’d be interested to hear other peoples thoughts.

Tim

*That said, I do have a number of “tools” that I user to generate the repetitive code but these mainly rotate around Excel and are specific to my coding methods.

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The decision to use code generators is a long and tricky decision.  I'll admit from the start, my slant on code-generation tools is against them.

For one of my other clients, I use a simple code generation application that they provided to me (the guy wrote it).  It does a decent job and for their coding style, it works out fairly well.  It takes a very simplistic template and can output (to an extent) customizable code.

The problem that I have with all code generation tools is your ability to make changes.  Very rarely do you know all of the data, or the extents of repeating data, or the nuances of the code that you have to develop.  So - how does the application handle changes?  In my case and this (very) simplistic code generation tool - plain and simple, it doesn't.  I have to hand-code changes (.NET, ASP.NET and database procedures).

And the last thing - the nuances of the code that you have to develop.  How well does a generic tool handle special situations?  Again, I know a free/custom-built tool is a far cry from a $500/$2000 tool - but, anything that is outside of a simple CRUD/1-table procedure and again, I'm hand-coding.  I can honestly say, 50% of what I'm doing is "special" and doesn't fit into cookie-cutter boxes.

The code generator that my customer gave me did exactly that - it generated code for a database.  It was up to me to build the pages and it just gave me an easy database access API.  I like this more than tools like Iron Speed because nothing is being done "for" me, I can control the code it outputs and nothing, nothing is "behind the scenes".  With Iron Speed, they're doing a LOT "for" you.  My fear is what happens if it breaks?  Who do you call?  Where do you look?  And, the purist in me - what does their code really look like?  Are they doing poor-design things that ultimately give you performance woes?

Unfortunately, with tools such as this Iron Speed - the only way to know if it'll work for you is to make the plunge, spend the $500 for the pro. version and see how it goes.  You can help get yourself a glimpse, looking under the covers by downloading the trial and putting together some little apps in a month.  And, I see that they have a public support forum:
http://sjc.ironspeed.com/tool/mb/ironspeed

See what people are saying they love? what they hate? etc.

And, of course - Google is our best friend:
http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=8421
http://www.developerreviewed.com/ironspeedreview.htm
http://www.angrycoder.com/article.aspx?cid=10&y=2003&m=6&d=8
http://aspadvice.com/blogs/ssmith/archive/2006/04/26/IronSpeed-and-My-Custom-Reports-App.aspx
http://www.411asp.net/func/review?tree=411asp/software/aspcodee&id=5642310&rid=

I hope this helps - it's a lot to digest, but generally what I'm seeing is that it's good for small/simple apps.

-Doug

After the fun and games we had with IE and sorting out an old CSS design for www.technikfloor.co.uk on Friday when I saw this pie chart I thought it was an excellent summary of a modern web designer’s life.

Personally I feel my Teal coloured slice is smaller but hey!

Originally posted at: http://www.dangerouslyawesome.com/2006/07/02/throwing-a-wobbly/

The tendering process can be a daunting when you know what you’re doing, but what about if you don’t know what you’re doing? I’ve tried to summarise the process for those of you who haven’t gone through it before have also covered some of the finer points. This is in follow-up to my last article about How to price your work.

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I felt I often came across nuggets of information that someone else out there may find useful in some small way and that I should share the information where possible. I also wanted a place to store all those little gems that I’m forever forgetting. That and I am forever asked similar questions that I think the “masses” (all three of you) would like to hear about.

For quite some time I’ve been writing sets of articles that I was hoping to raise the profile of The Site Doctor with but as with many things in atm it seems they’ve been slow in getting finished. I have however been collating the various snippets together and collaborating with a number of sources and nearly every time I speak to a new “source” I get asked the same question “why would you want to write about this stuff –it just increases your competition”.

That never fails to make me chuckle to myself (not at you mind), I say why not? No offence but if we’re that unconfident in our knowledge that a few articles about common (and often simple) issues people run into that will suddenly make my competition take over then so be it, but personally I like to feel I’ve got enough knowledge to share and not feel threatened –perhaps the wrong tack to take but hey!

I also feel that by sharing the information with other people (not just developers, there’s stuff here for everyone) that in my own small way I’m making the web a better place –even if I’m not personally writing the code something here may have influenced you –even if it’s just answering a simple question you’ve been tearing your hair out over such as “Do pineapples grow on bushes” –yes they do, you can see photographic proof here.

Anyways, that’s my 2p worth, if you don’t feel secure enough to share your findings that’s up to you!

I had a meeting with a lovely new client today and part way through the conversation they mentioned that the had been looking for my mobile number online, when typing my name into Google though you’re faced with an abundance of the messages that I leave on mailing lists all over the globe, I wish I could say that they stumbled across one of the messages in which I was helping someone but sadly it was one of the *few* where I was asking for help.

It left me thinking about how careful you have to be when sending out any sort of correspondence. We’ve only recently started blogging and it’s taken some soul searching to start -for two reasons primarily, the first is if people see a huge number of posts while you’re doing their project -does that mean you’re not doing their project? The second was because of the nature/tone a blog can take -should it be kept strictly business or have a personal aspect, should you discuss ideas you’ve come up with to help others or should you not let the client/the competition know how you worked something out?

Rather than operating under some guise like Eremo or BigTed on a public blog network, I decided that it would be better to have complete transparency as in reality we really don’t have anything to hide but we do have a lot to share, we’re often finding quirks in our environment or useful applications that someone else is bound to come across and they would be grateful of our post.

In regards the aspect of blogging during a client’s project, every developer knows that sometimes you hit a problem in your code and you really don’t know which way to turn. When getting to that point I’ve always encouraged people to take a step back, surf the web for a while, go outside for a walk and you’re bound to find the answer as soon as you come back. In addition to this, so far nearly even blog post I’ve made has been out of office hours and although Craig hasn’t really started his blog yet I expect the majority of his will be the same -so fear not oh dear client, we’ll get back to your project forthwith!

For some reason though I never thought I would see the day that I was being Googled, which is odd as I know there are many egomaniacs out there Googling for their name every day! I knew I was out there but it makes you think about all those archived mailing lists that are just waiting to be found!

Despite being found on Google, I’m not going to change the stance we take on mailing people, I like to think that we’ve always been open and honest with every business transaction we’ve been involved in but I don’t want the client to be left with the impression that we’re incompetent. At the end of the day, there’s bound to be something they’re unsure on and could do with a few pointers from someone that’s "been there and done that" so to speak, so when it’s not us, I like to think we’re able to offer the experience.

Update: I was thinking about this after posting it and thought it would be a good test of our SEO skills to keep the "good" messages associated with The Site Doctor and me (Tim Gaunt) at the top of the Search Engines!

There are two questions I get asked a lot by people who are thinking about becoming self-employed and even those already running a business. The first is How do you get the work? –this is something I’ll blog about in more detail later as the second is what I want to talk about today and that’s How much should I charge?

When setting out, this may seem a really difficult question to answer but in actual fact it can easily be calculated out and it’s critical to the success (or failure) of your business. When we first started out, I was plucking figures from thin air, when someone asked my how much a website would cost I decided a figure that I felt would compensate me for the time input. This is not what I would suggest doing!

Now that we are considering outsourcing work with the view to employing some new wonderful people to help out on the creation of our sites I felt it was time to work out a base rate from which we should quote. After some pondering I feel I’ve come up with a solution that can easily be re-used on any business.

Firstly, add up all your expenses (equipment, software, phone, ISP, rent, taxes, etc.) –it’s worth taking some time over this to make sure you include as many expenses as possible. Then add what you would like to get paid (your yearly salary). Finally, because you would like to grow your business add some profit (somewhere between 10% and 15% is about right). The figure you’re left with is the turnover you company is aiming for.

Now you need to work that figure back to an hourly rate. Lets assume you want to allow for 4 weeks holiday -you’ll have a potential of 48 working weeks available to you. Now, assuming you’re going to be a slacker and only work a 40hr week, following on from my previous post of how much time was spent on non-development work, we have to assume that we’ll be spending 16hrs of our 40hr week on non-development (yes we do have to take this into account –you’re still working!!)

This leaves us with 24 billable hours every week, this equates to 1,152 billable hours a year. To calculate your hourly rate, simply divide the required turnover by the billable hours.

Let’s try an example:

Expenses
Server Costs: £100pm = £1,200pa
Rent: £1000pm = £12,000
Phone Bill: £29.99pm = £359.88pa
Electricity: £40pm = £480pa
Total Costs: £14,039.88

Salary: £100,000
Profit: £114,039.88 + 15%
Required Turnover: £131,145.90

[Hourly Rate] = [Required Annual Turnover] / [Available Annual Billable Hours]
£131,145.90 / 1152 = £113.84
So in our example, your hourly rate should be £113.84

Notice in my example I have included the server costs which, in many cases will be covered by clients but what happens if they don’t pay or you don’t fill the space? You’ll have to pay so factor it in and any space you sell will be additional profit which you can choose to pass back to the client or save to reward your staff!

This figure should is a base rate, it is always worth factoring in the client when estimating on the work, for example, if you have a large corporate client, many of them will expect to pay a higher hourly rate and odd as it sounds are concerned when it’s too cheap so offset these clients against the smaller clients. Remember: you can be turned down for being too cheap as well as being too expensive!

To clarify that point a little further: If you have a small client who cannot afford £115ph and a large client who is happy with £175ph development costs, for every hour you work for the large client, you can afford to offer the small client a reduction:
10hours @ £115ph = £1150
5hours @ £175ph + 5hours @ £55ph = £1150

So when estimating work, look at it on a yearly basis –having business is better than no business, just don’t be a busy fool.

As a closing note, I would like to add that if your hourly rate sounds too high for your clients, you have to think about what they’re getting –You! You may be expensive but as long as your work is of a high standard price doesn’t matter. The alternative is to find areas to cut your expenses (or take a salary reduction!) so I know which I'd rather do...

I hope you’re starting out in business and when you do I hope you make it! Good Luck.

Update: I should just add, the figures in the example are not real world (or ours) they're merely for demonstration!

Update 2: I feel I should also point out that although we have a base rate that helps us estimate on work and allow us to quickly determine how profitable the project is, we rarely work on an hourly basis as we prefer to quote on a project basis -something which I'll write about another day.

After a somewhat hectic week on the phone I asked myself “has all this time on the phone been wasted time?” Well, I spent time talking to clients, developers, friends and family and this is important. Although it may cost you a little development time, talk is cheap (that’s what the telecom’s companies want to tell you isn’t it?)

Rather than looking at it negatively I tried to look at it from another point of view, I could have spent the time developing some weird and wonderful new creation for a client however, this phone time was doing something else –it was promoting the business. Admittedly the business couldn’t survive if we all spent all the time with the phone glued to our ear, but once in a while I believe is a good thing.

Why am I looking at it like that? That’s simple, if you make time for your clients, friends and family in any context it shows that you care for them beyond a pay check and at the end of the day, if they need some development they’re more likely to think of you in a good light.

Out of interest I decided to work out how much time I spent on non-development hours and I was somewhat shocked, in the average week I would estimate that at least 2 days is spent on non-development work, that includes phone calls, invoicing, letter writing, emailing etc. It's a staggering ammount but, all part of running a business.