But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout, I’ve decided to use an off-the-shelf theme.  I’m now using Khoi Vinh‘s Basic Maths WordPress theme.

Why?

Well, it’s a lovely theme, for starters.  The typography is pretty good.  The archives page is brilliant (check it out) and should be the standard bearer for all themes archive pages.

But the real question for many, I suspect, is why I’m not using an interconnect/it designed theme.  Well, for starters, interconnect/it hasn’t produced an off-the-shelf theme in years.  It’s just not our business.  So rather than use a product of ours, we’d have to spend good and valuable time on creating a new theme.  And, well, why would we want to do that?

Lots of reasons, actually.  I could have a theme coded at the office that really shows off what we can do.  But the problem with that is that there’s not much need.  My blog is not an important one.  It isn’t about WordPress (most WP related content will be on our company site, not my personal one) and it just doesn’t get much traffic.

I run a business.  Its purpose is to make money, employ five people, and, with a bit of luck, turn a reasonable profit.  Its job is not to service my ego or make me look good.  A really good theme costs the equivalent of around £10k-£20k of chargeable time to design, code, test and implement.

Given that we’re turning work away, I thought “why bother?”  And decided to go shopping for something.

So What’s It Like?

It’s actually quite weird using somebody else’s theme.  I actually tried a few out and here are the things I learned that will hold us in good stead.

Themes don’t do enough to make life easy.

No really, they don’t.  One of interconnect/it’s biggest challenges is making sure that WP is as easy to use for clients as possible.  This means following standards, but it also means using some little tricks that help out – for example, registering and setting plenty of different image sizes, and setting/over-ruling whatever the media settings say.

Migrating WP content really sucks.

There’s a fundamental flaw with the default WP export/import.  If you have inline images, although the importer has the ability to download and attach the image in your new site it won’t change the links.  And if you do a search and replace, and your image sizes have changes, your lost.  Totally – the img tag will point to a file that doesn’t exist.

So what do you do?  Well, usually if I’m moving a site from one server to another, even switching domains, it’s a non-issue.  I have my tools.  But if you’re starting from fresh and working like an end-user would then you have to go through every single damn post in order to fix the images.  Every post with an image in it.  That’ll take a while.

If you’re really geeky, you’ll sort it, but it takes time.  Way too much time.  This kind of stuff needs to be sorted and it’s something we may look into as a contribution to the WP project.

Some Plugins Leave Lots of Crud

The reason for a reboot was that I felt that my site’s DB had been filled up with all sorts of crud.  Lots of plugins create tables, leave options, and so on.  Surplus tables have little impact, but they clutter the place up.  But options, lots and lots of them, do have a minor performance hit, and they add up.

Other plugins leave hooks, don’t deactivate properly and so on.  And over the years, I’d been through an awful lot of plugins.  The site hadn’t been redone since WP 2.0 had been set up on it.  I felt it was getting sluggish.

So… there are beautiful and amazing themes out there, and WP is wonderful, but there are little things that could make life just that bit better.  Better migration tools, a better system of managing images within content and their migration, and a better system for activating themes so that image sizes are better handled.

Is it a lot to ask?  Well, we’ll see what we can do about that!

I think I like this one best (below the break):

Too short to photograph.

I consider myself very lucky to have this just behind my desk and it has to rate as the best view of any office I’ve worked in.  You’d think the office would be very expensive, but it’s not, thanks to the way the Liverpool Science Park has been set up and funded.

I can think of worse places to work….

Presentation

Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff.  I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.

I also got to mix with some very interesting, talented and cool people that know a heck of a lot of stuff about what we’re working with.  In this conference were, potentially, the next generation of web creators.  People who will make things happen.  And this year, more than last, there was a real buzz at the potential of WordPress, its markets, and its uses.

Presenting at WordCamps

I’ve never actually done a formal presentation in front of more than about ten people before in my life, and even then only perhaps four five in my life.  I’m a techie – I would do technical discussions and demos, but never with Powerpoint and a laser pointer.  I did do an unconference show and tell at Barcamp Liverpool last year where about twenty to thirty people turned up, but that wasn’t planned… it just kind of happened.

But I could also appreciate the benefits of putting myself out there in front of a room full of my peers.  So in a fit of enthusiasm I volunteered for two presentations – WordPress in the Enterprise, and WordPress for News and Media.  I expect one or even both might be dropped by the organisers.  I have no history or background in public speaking.

Both got accepted.

Damn!

But it had some great potential too.  I could play with approaches and actually ‘test’ the results.  So what did I learn?  Read on:

1. L-Shaped Rooms are Tricky

The main room for the event turned out to be L-shaped… or, a better description, V-shaped, with the presented at the bottom of the V.  At this event three rooms were in operation, a large L-shaped room with up to 150 people, a medium sized rectangular room for up to 70 people, and a small boardroom type for about 15 people.

I had expected my first presentation on the Enterprise to be the tricky one – it’s not a fascinating subject.  But it was in the medium sized room, and it proved very easy to get engagement with the audience.  In the L-shaped room you’re trying to look in two different directions.  It’s almost impossible.

2. Consider an Assistant for Demos

One can work the computer, the other can talk.  Saves awkward silences, and it’s something I’m going to try in a future talk.

3. Get in Early

I did one of the first, and the very last, formal presentations of the event.  I noticed that in the first everyone was wide awake and very enthusiastic.  By the end of the conference people were flagging.  Getting and keeping attention becomes trickier at this stage.  You also have the advantage that nobody ever wonders off from the conference at the very beginning – it’ll never be fuller!

4. Start Funny

In the Enterprise talk I started with a humorous quote and in the News & Media I started with a pithy quote.  The funny one got the mood lifted and people in a cheerful mood.  It gave me a chance to relax and settle into the presentation.

5. It’s a Great Audience

I was dealing with fellow geeks.  People in the same situation as me.  It was, frankly, the best audience I can imagine.  The few presentations I’ve done before have been up in front of a board of hardened and cynical directors, or senior management, or people who have tough deadlines to meet.  This was a whole lot more relaxed.  Nobody’s going to consider firing you because of a minor mistake.

6. Get Engagement

I noticed that speakers who asked for shows of hands, asked questions of the audience and so on generally had a better applause at the end than those who didn’t.  It doesn’t take much to engage your audience, but I’ll admit that it’s trickier when you can only look directly at half of them at any one point.

7. Be Prepared

At conferences opportunities come up.  Have business cards, listen to people, smile a lot.

8. Freebies

You can’t believe how the mood of a room lifts when you hand out gifts.  Good gifts though.  I remember the really rubbish calculators we got given in my ICI Systems days.  What geek in the world needs a calculator?  So I handed out the penknives we had made for Spectacu.la and they went down a treat.

9. Matt

I finally met Matt Mullenweg at the weekend.  I’d promised him a beer months ago in reconciliation following our (now seemingly minor) argument over WordPress’s take on the GPL.  So I bought him a pear cider and had a good chat.  He’s an affable chap, easy going, says ‘awesome’ a lot (but he’s American, so that’s normal) and has clearly listened to the concerns of WP developers about how they’ll make any money.

Funny hat tho’ ;-)

Summary

An ace time, basically.  I’d like to say hi to everyone I met, but I’m scared of missing someone – so instead, let’s just say I look forward to chatting and, hopefully, working with some of you in the not so distant future.

Here’s to WordCamp UK 2010!

If you use WordPress professionally, or with a great deal of enthusiasm, WordCamps are a great way to meet with other users, developers and designers who really understand the system.  There are useful presentations, social events and activities based around the event.

I was there last year at the Birmingham WordCamp, with James, and our company Interconnect IT was one of the sponsors.  This year we’re waiting to see how finances work out before throwing in sponsorship money, but I’ll definitely be there again and I’m likely to be presenting on the issues surrounding bringing WordPress to the enterprise space.  Because corporates love WordPress too…

This year’s event will take place on the 18th to the 19th of July at the Future Inn Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales.

For more information, you can visit the official WordCamp UK Site.

pdf

Well, we’re going to try!  WordCamp is a small, informal conference all about WordPress and its people.

Wordcamp UK 2008 was held in Birmingham last year.  The current list of nominated venues are in Liverpool, Cardiff and London.  Read the pdf attached below, and see what you think.  Feedback would be great, but if you really want the WordCamp to take place in Liverpool on the 18th and 19th of July you’ll need to pipe up on the official mailing lists.  More info at Tony Scott’s blog.

St. George's Hall, Liverpool - not the likely venue. Pic by Me.

An infinite blogger.

I don’t talk much about business on this blog, but I’ve decided to share what I’m doing to increase my productivity at work.  So far these changes are making a great deal of difference.

1. Dump timewasters like the StumbleUpon or Digg toolbars from Firefox for any work related PC.  I love it, but it’s there for entertainment.  This is my work PC and I can’t afford the easy distraction.
2. Use Twitter more.  I know it sounds like a potential distraction, but by being selective about who I follow I find it adds to my community connection – and that can make me more productive, rather than less.  Don’t be offended if I don’t follow you back – it’s just that what you’re twittering about isn’t connected to what I do, even if it’s very interesting.
3. Declutter my online life.  That means unsubscribing from mail-lists that I’m not really that interested in, and filtering the rest for reading when I’m not busy.
4. Declutter business.  All companies have to deal with them – the small clients that constantly ask you lots of niggling questions which never actually lead to a sale or any real income.  Work out a way of politely dumping them.  You could consider referring them on to someone who’s just starting up and who needs the small clients.
5. Implement proper time-tracking.  Use a simple grid sheet where you can quickly mark units of time against clients and jobs.  That way you can establish where you’re wasting time and money.
6. Turn off IM except for a short period each day – especially if you have chatty friends.
7. Use larger monitors.  I now use a 24″ screen at the office and a smaller 22″ at the home office.  Both are dramatically more productive than smaller screens.  And they’re not even especially expensive these days.
8. Use your laptop like a desktop computer.  By that, I mean get to your desk and connect it a full size monitor (see point 7!), keyboard and mouse.  Use the laptop screen as a secondary screen if you like, but that’s all.  I don’t care what anybody says, but a laptop alone is always less productive unless you’re single-tasking most of the time – and in today’s connected world that’s rare.
9. Learn to use Outlook.  There’s a lot of great productivity features in there.  Outlook 2007 is especially neat and brings the game on.  Office for the Home or for Small Businesses is pretty cheap these days and well worth it.
10. Actually, learn to use MS Office properly.  It’s got some amazing tricks available to you.  Excel can gather data from websites and keep it refreshed, so you can use it in your spreadsheets.  Access can make up the basics of a decent CRM system in no time at all.  And if you get a decent MS Word template your documents can be clearly structured and indexed in no time at all.  In fact, if you join at Spectacu.la their WordPress User Guide has all the styles in it that you could ever need for a comprehensive document.

That’s enough for now, but needless to say that a little investment can reap incredible benefits to your work life.  Yes, you’ll need to devote a little time and/or money, but if you gain more of both within a short while then everyone’s happy, no?

My site isn't so desolate (nor beautiful) as this one in Sofia, Bulgaria - by niv at Flickr - credit and link at the bottom of this article

Some of you may have noticed that this blog hasn’t been updated properly of late.  Not much fresh content, no motorsport reports… in fact, not much at all.

Well, there are reasons!  First off, work.  And more work.  Basically, early on this year I realised that we simply weren’t making enough to get by, let alone to prosper.  So it became time to actually knuckle down.  I stepped up my networking efforts – getting out there and meeting people, letting them know who we were.  In the end a chance meeting with Matt Wardle, formerly of Black & Ginger, led to us doing several pieces of work.  In a way, that was the start of a path where we learned how marketing and building a small business actually works.

And so it started.  In Spring I built the back-end to an activities site by B&G called Liverpool Active City.  I don’t feel it’s as busy a site as it should be, given the budgets behind it, but our side of it works reliably, so I’m happy.  That was followed by a frantic summer with Politics & The City – James (my colleague) coding late into the night, and me swearing and cussing over the SUN server that we got lumbered with.  Not being a SUN OS expert I found there were plenty of traps waiting for me.  We went live with hours to spare, and I even managed to arrive at the launch party.  Late and bedraggled, of course, but hey….

We then deliberately avoided taking on large works in order to implement a new WordPress Themes Club.  This club, known as Spectacu.la and with that as its domain name, was a massive project for us and involved lots of tricky work to build a secure, reliable and easy to use platform.  The themes for it needed to be built too.  That was James occupied, basically, from August to the end of November.  In the meantime I did the smaller works (I’m not a web coder by nature – it drives me nuts) and that’s established a rather nice platform for us to hopefully monetise our WordPress skills in a non-consultancy, and therefore highly scalable, way.

And that’s led to us winning a contract with a FTSE250 corporate to replace one of their leading websites with a WordPress based site.  This is a relatively large job for us – but it signifies the scale of interest in the WordPress platform we chose to specialise in.  And you know… it’s going to be brilliant.  We have James, who as a WP coder just rocks, and Mike Little is now working with us too.

And of course, there’s the re-design of this site.  Over the years it’s accumulated a lot of content and I felt it was time to use a theme suited to this – breaking things up into sections and providing easier navigation options.

So, that’s a big part of why I’ve been quiet.  Motorsport has taken a back seat, as have most of my other interests.  The business is now on a far stronger foundation, however, with a good, regular income stream and finally a little bit of money in the bank.  And while travel has taken a real back seat this year, in spring we’re planning a trip to Mexico.  Watch this space!

[Photo credit:  Niv]

We actually use the WordPress platform ourselves – it’s pretty darned good. If you host it on your own site it’s great from a customisation perspective. Yes, there’s limitations, but you can choose to either work within those limitations, or you can blast them to smithereens with good code. We started with blasting, but since chose to go for a more straightforward approach – treating WordPress as a blogging platform, and leaving the heavy lifting websites to the big CMS systems. Seems to be simpler that way.

It’s a funny business, working the web. We know all sorts of cool stuff to make things work very well for clients, but persuading them of this is proving to be something of a challenge. I had one chap recently who had probably seen too many of those adverts that offer websites for £50 or £100 and so thought he could have something pretty sophisticated for £250.

Well here’s the truth… we could do sites for £250. We could even do very sophisticated sites for that price. But we’d need to sell thousands of them, to the same kinds of business. Why? Because no matter which way you do it, if you’re selling original work you’re going to be spending a fair bit of time on it. Few businesses in the UK can get by charging less than £20 an hour, so that would mean the site would have to be completed in about 12 working hours. That means everything, the sales/consultation meeting, the installation of the site, the configuration, purchasing the domain, developing the theme (or, if using an old one, re-jigging it for the client), editing the content to fit, finding images, laying it out and then testing on various browser, with various operating systems.

Website Workload

Web design, let’s face it, is hard. Browsers are truculent and buggy, standards a mess, and accessibility (ie, can anybody view your site, whether disabled or otherwise?) is an issue too. Try and get one thing right, and another thing will break. In the past I could quite cheerfully put together simple but hard to maintain websites. They worked, everything looked ok, and people made suitable noises. But by jove, adding anything meant a lot of pain.

Now we build sites that are driven by databases, wrapped up in sophisticated stylesheets, and managed by increasingly complex pieces of software. The expertise required to get it all just right is significant, yet the rewards appear to be diminishing.

So we have the answer – improved efficiency. I think that increasingly web designers will concentrate on industry niches in order to make the time it takes to build a website. After all, if a dentist needs a web presence then by and large he’s going to have pretty much the same things to say about teeth whitening as any other dentist. Similarly, many design cues will also be more popular within one industry.

It’s only like cars – the very first were quite random in design, built with specific clients in mind. As time passed, the market became ridiculously competitive. To survive, there was a need to generalise designs… and to productionise them. Software, like websites, is a little different, but this is effectively what has to happen now in the web industry. Work out how to do a lot, in as short a time as possible.