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 freejobsites 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 commentDavid 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 alltheother articlesaboutThe Public (I ran out of words so hereare afewmore), 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!

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.

 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?