Category: Uncategorized

Nothing should end up here, but sometimes, it does.

Are Muslims the New Jews?

How the Middle East might see us if they were as selective as we are

A lot of the Middle East is progressive, modern and sophisticated. You have freedoms and rights, life is good and so on. Yet some selective reporting does a fair bit of damage to the image we have of them. If you saw such selective views of the West, we wouldn’t look good either.I was a little uncomfortable with some entries on b3ta, so wanted something to try and show balance. Not to say I’m the only one who feels that way, of course….

The thumbnail below links to a higher quality file for those who want something sweeter:

 

Ataturk v. Nixon, Dubai v. Hull, Hijab v. Prostitute, Lebanese Youth v. British Youth, Turkish Magazine v. US Gun Magazines

Web Design in Liverpool

As some of you may know – I work for, and for that matter, head up, a small web consultancy in Liverpool. The company’s Interconnect IT

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.

Interconnect IT

Ok, so you’ll see a new category now under the Asides category. That of ‘The Company.’

And what’s it going to be about? Well, it’s going to cover the tribulations, stresses and joys of building up our web design company, Interconnect IT. The updates won’t necessarily be regular, lucid or sane, but they might be interesting. I won’t even be putting them in the highlight’s category so they show as headlines – you either have to come looking, or you need to subscribe to the RSS feed to this site, where the posts will always show up.

Realistic Pricing

One of the hardest things in business is to come up with a price structure that works. You can easily underprice yourself, convinced that what you do is actually quite easy, and end up trading like mad without actually ever making any money. I had an interesting case this week, where a chap running a fitted furniture company in Liverpool was interested in a website. He’d seen some nice sites from rival firms. Unfortunately he didn’t have an internet connection, so we couldn’t review them together, and the 3G broadband dongle for my laptop is still to arrive. Anyway, we discussed why Interconnect IT is such a great development company, and why he should consider us for a site.

And then there was a risk of it all going downhill. When asked what sort of budget he’d thought of, he came up with the figure of £250. Given that no web design company in the UK can charge less than £45 an hour, he was obviously believing that a site built to professional standards would take about 5.5 hours. Let’s break that down:

Initial meeting – 45 minutes.
Design and layout typography for a simple header and logo – 30 minutes.
Colour pre-defined template to match branding and export for css – 30 minutes.
Create new client directories, copy over notes and so on, make copies of client code – 30 minutes.
Obtain images, with permission for use and prepare them for the six pages required – 1 hour or more.
Purchase domain (finding a suitable name, and get approval) – 1 to 2 hours.
Set up server for the domain, e-mail addresses, security and so on – 1 hour.
Upload server side software (all our sites are dynamic), activate any plugins and so on – 30 minutes.
Option setting on the software – 15 minutes.
Insert supplied text, images and so on, and lay them out smartly – 1 hour.
Test the site on three Windows, two Linux and two Macintosh browsers – 1 hour.
Invoicing, chasing the invoice, banking it and so on – 1 hour.

Now this is for a very very basic site where we’ve done a minimal amount of custom work. As soon as demands grow, so does the time. And we’re also ignoring the development cost of what we’ve done in the past, yet we’re sitting on at least nine hours work for something really quite simple. That gives us £27 or so per hour. And we haven’t even talked about the cost of our server, office, equipment and so on.

We’ve worked it out, and we could actually do about fifteen of these sites per month. Our costs, if we were all earning minimum wage, are about £4000 a month. So we’d lose £250 a month, whilst earning minimum wage.

So what this chap was basically saying to me was that he valued our services at roughly the same level as shelf stackers in a supermarket.

But here’s one thing I’ll admit… it’s not his job to work out the value of what we do. It’s ours. And it’s our job to convince clients that what we do is both highly beneficial to their businesses, and very difficult to do well.

Halton Bathrooms

So – the experiment worked. I’m now second on any Google search for Halton Bathrooms. And front page for Widnes and Runcorn Bathroom searches.

So what does this mean? Well it shows the power of a:having what’s considered a trusted site with no spam, a long history, and plenty of content and b:the benefit of structuring things correctly. It also shows that for surprisingly large niches there’s still plenty of organic SEO capacity available.

Ok, now you may well be asking what on earth this is about. Why would I be writing about Halton Bathrooms on a blog that’s mostly devoted to my motorsport and travel stories?

Well, it’s an experiment. There’s actually a company in the area called Halton Bathrooms and Kitchens. Jolly nice bunch they are too – in fact, they did my bathroom. But it’s not really about them. It’s about seeing what the search engines think about my website.

WordPress.com and the badminton club

Basically it all started a couple of weeks ago when I helped a badminton club which I play with sometimes to get themselves a website. They don’t have much money, so I suggested a freebie site with WordPress.com, and off they went. Simple, free, and quick to do. I also wrote a quick feature about it on this site, in order to promote their activities a little and to get the search engines to pick up the link.

And that’s where it gets weird. Try searching for Halton Badminton on Google (you can just click that link there) and this site comes up top at the moment. The WordPress.com site comes nowhere.

So what’ll happen if you search for Halton Bathrooms soon? Will you find their site, or this one first? Where will I come on the listings? What about Widnes Bathrooms? Or Runcorn Bathrooms?

It’s actually, I guess, an exercise in how a website becomes important. This one’s been going for years, is well structured, and probably has hundreds of quality links coming in – including two from Wikipedia. And given that my job is running a web design company over in Liverpool (well I might as well link that too!) I and my colleague James should know a thing or two about how to make a page get picked up by the search engines.

I’ll post a little more in here, on this post, in about a week when I know what Google’s done to it. If it has, I can see quite a few technological asides about things we’re trying to do appearing in here.

Badminton Near Warrington

I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen that having a web presence is free and simple, and doesn’t need to be opaque to the search engines. It can be standards compliant, easy to find, and well structured. You can change the content as and when you like. You can add pictures and so on. And it’s all free.

A recent example of this is one of my preferred Badminton Clubs’ website – my company builds websites professionally, so we’re not in the habit of giving them away. But these are custom jobs, for firms that need reliable websites which often generate far more money than they cost. But a small club doesn’t need the fine control of a commercial organisation. So I pointed Halton Badminton‘s chief chap Bob Redmond, to wordpress.com and we spent a couple of hours together as I showed him the ropes.

And now the site’s there and the search engines will soon pick it up. Hopefully it’ll soon attract the traffic it deserves – these are great clubs for anyone interested in badminton around Widnes, Runcorn or St Helens – and a fair few folk from Warrington turn up as well. For more details head to http://haltonbadminton.wordpress.com

Anatomy of a Traffic Jam

I’ve just spent far far too long doing these two illustrations. The first shows a traffic jam that’s a problem, caused by people not using up all the road. The second shows what happens if the two self appointed guardians of the road move up a little, don’t block people, and if other road users don’t all try and keep to the left.

Basically, during busy periods, it’s much much better if people use all of the road. Yet in Britain it’s a common scene to see a mile of empty right-hand-lane prior to roadworks. Consequently the traffic jam is far longer than it needs to be and, in many cases, the jam will go far enough back that it blocks a junction – causing a lot of people extra delays and frustration.

So let’s all try and help others on not by obsessively queueing politely in traffic jams, but by using as much of the road as possible.

Anatomy of a traffic jam, part one of two

Anatomy of a traffic jam, part two of two

Footnotes

Since the page went up I’ve been made aware of the following two links which are very interesting and have animations of some traffic problems:

Wave motions and how to prevent them
How increased spacing helps improve merging

Thanks to brangdon @ cix for those.

I’ve resized the images slightly in the browser to help them fit better on this theme.  If you want to view them full size or in better quality, right click (or do whatever Mac owners do) on the image and click ‘view image’ to see the full unadulterated version.

I’ve also added this post to the Campaign for Thinking… just because…

Being a b3tard…

I have a thing about the b3ta.com site. It keeps me tickled in those quiet moments. The fact they mentioned my botfly incident in their newsletter meant this site’s traffic and ranking improved a fair bit for a while, and occassionally I post answers to the question of the week spot. A couple have made it to the ‘best of’, which is nice.

And today I thought, let’s do an image for their ancient monument new uses image competition.

Nazca landing

And below is a link to a desktop version of the image, if you want it.

Nazca landing desktop version

And on the side of one hill, near the lines, is this little fella – image modded a bit to improve contrast. Sadly can’t easily see that he’s actually waving. Maybe he knew something about the lines?

The Astronaut

Oh, and in case you’re not a combination Star Wars/travel/geography/conspiracy geek – here’s the explanation, though it’s less interesting than working out for yourself the reasons behind the picture:

1: It’s the Nazca lines – an amazing place in the Atacama desert, in southern Peru. You can get a nutter in a light plane to make daredevil passes at ridiculous turn rates over the lines in order to get you the best views. It costs just $50 a person.
2: It’s the Millenium Falcon – Hans Solo’s space ship in Star Wars.
3: A surprising number of people think that the lines were put there as landing strips for aliens – and they do indeed look like desert runways. More likely is that the local population were into water worship and the lines relate to where water comes from. They obviously also had a fair amount of time on their hands whilst being pretty good at planning and geometry. Some of the lines would be difficult to set out with modern equipment.

New things and more

As many of you know, I’ve been working terribly hard with James (and now Jon) on building up the web design side of our company – Interconnect IT and it’s all coming along fine.

But I kept thinking… we need whizzy. Good, compatible, easy to use whizzy. Now there’s nowhere better to test these things out than on a personal blog. So this site has always been something of a testbed.

I’ve now added two new features and they’re testing out quite well:

Slightbox – a way of displaying images in a nice, modal window in front of the page content. Use the arrow keys or mouse clicks to go between images, and x to close.
Google Maps Mashup – locating posts geographically on a map. So you can see where I’ve been, or where a post relates to.

Both the above use some nice code, with almost no effort to get things working with this WordPress theme, provided by osCandy and Cyberhobo.

Everybody benefits from the people who do the hard work of writing and supporting GPL plugins – which are free to download and free to use. As a thank youto GPL, our company, which uses many GPL products, is planning to release some of our custom plugins which we use for clients, into the public domain. Could be interesting – it’ll be our first open releases ever!