Making an Exhibition of Yourself

On Tuesday we had a stand at an event organised by Redcar and Cleveland Council's Enterprise Team. I'm always a bit sceptical about the benefits of doing this - does the work that comes in justify the costs of exhibiting? My experience is that this is borderline if you take into account costs for stand, print costs and staff time.

This one was a little different as we didn't have to pay to exhibit. We did have to get some new printed materials though but this needed doing anyway and provided the stimulus to get ourselves organised for this, including some great new banners designed by Peter and printed and delivered by Smooth Print (www.smoothprint.co.uk).

Has anything come from it? We've got one small contract that has covered our print costs, got a couple of other leads and made some new contacts - so that makes it a successful half day. Would it have been worth it had we been required to pay a few hundred pounds to exhibit? Probably not.

The jury is still out in terms of exhibiting, at some point we'll do a paid for stand at a larger event and then carefully analyse the costs and benefits. Does anyone else have a view on this?

My New Routine

I have recently read a book, don't be shocked, entitled "The Leader Who Had No Title". It's fiction but is simply aimed at getting people to be what the title says. Now I'm not claiming I am some kind of leader but it has a straightforward message and guide to changing the way you view your life and what you do and it simply hit a nerve with me. Essentially it has the following points (though espoused rather more eloquently than me):

• Stop being a victim
• Honestly look at the challenges you face
• Confront them and take the necessary action to overcome them
• Continually make small improvements to everything you do and it will over time make a fundamental change to your life 

So quantitative change becomes qualitative change for any of you students of Hegelian Dialectics out there (that bit isn't in the book),

I now have a new regime in place, up at 5am (OK 7am on weekends), classical music on the headphones, bit of reflection, do a journal, focus on the day, bit of reading all before getting to work. Going well so far, much more focused and productive at work, generally more positive and in a much better mood but it has one downside, I'm shattered by 10pm.

Luckily on Thursday when I popped over to Saltburn for a comedy gig, Mark Steel was excellent and very funny so I easily got past the 10pm deadline. (And there's a comedian who will understand the Hegelian Dialectic.)

I shall reflect on this new routine in a few weeks and let you know that it's still gong well.

A Bad Week Or A Good Week?

It has been "one of those weeks" where lots of things have not gone as well as hoped for. A number of issues have cropped up, some business, some technical and some personal meaning the week has not gone as well as expected.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

It may sound crazy but it's good and here's the reason why.

If everything simply goes swimmingly well as a small business and as a person then you're just pottering along in your comfort zone and things will be OK. But if you want to be great then there will be setbacks and challenges (and that sums up this week). It's all in your mindset how you deal with the setbacks and challenges.

The week has thrown up a few obstacles on the path to being great. Obstacles are just pointers to the fact that you need to change your route in order to reach your final destination. So what this week has shown me is a few changes I need to improve my business and personal life, nothing drastic, just small improvements that will make a difference. And lots of small incremental changes over time make a huge difference.

So now I've been all philosophical I'm off to make some of those changes - if you don't act on those changes you may as well not know you need to make them.

Client Knowledge and Designing for the Web

A few interesting conversations this week regarding web projects we're working on at the moment that illustrate some of the issues in providing a user experience that meets the client's needs.

We have been working on a website for a local company and the draft design has turned out to be fine but requiring a few small design tweaks which is the norm. But this is often the point where translating the customer requests into design becomes problematic and in this particular instance two requests are problematic for different reasons.

One request was for a particularly tacky and annoying effect with some text. Technically it's straight forward to do but NOBODY should have that on a website unless it is a website showing some effects that you really shouldn't have. Ultimately the client gets what they want and we can only advise but the jury is still out on this one. There are websites we have created that clients are very happy with but our credit says "hosted by" not "created by" as we're not very keen to have people thinking that's what our websites look like!

The second request for an alteration shows the misunderstanding many have of how websites are displayed and the request was along the lines of can you make that section 5 centimetres high. Those of you who are tech-savvy can chortle now. The height in cm is dependent upon your screen size, screen resolution, etc and will be different on different devices. A similar point comes in more commonly as something like "my logo is a different colour on my PC and my friend's laptop, can you make sure it's the same on all screens as I'm not happy with that." Unfortunately our quest to ensure that there is only one screen type with fixed settings available for every web enabled device has failed, sorry folks.

Another website we have worked on has a very wide range of users adding details via the user interface which means users with very different levels of expertise. There needs to be a level of very basic IT skills to use any website, and we've just change the UI this week to make it more basic, but there are also people wanting more complex functions. There's a difficult balance to be had but due to the nature of the site we're going for simplest interface we can to capture the information required. It's a massive compromise with a site like that and essentially we're trying to make everyone "sufficiently satisfied" as it's impossible to make everyone happy, certainly at this stage in the project. Given more time and a bigger chunk of development cash there would be more opportunity to develop alternatives for different user levels, if all goes well that may happen in the future.

George is my Friend

OK he's not, but he was very accommodating in letting me have my pic taken with him at the end of the photo opportunity for Cleveland Police and the Police and Crime Commissioner launching the Give It A Go website and also the app which will be public soon.

It's nice to finally get this in the public eye as it's a bit of a scoop for Tad Web Solutions to be creating a web-based application and associated mobile app for a high profile project. It could lead to developing this project for a wider audience and also gives us some proof of a big project that we have developed thus making it much easier to get other big projects.

So here's the main players, George Friend (Boro's player of the year for you non-sporting people), Barry Coppinger (Cleveland's Police and Crime Commissioner), Sgt. Peter Graham (the man with the vision for the whole project who we have worked closely with), my Samsung and our app (alpha testing version and working well) on the phone.

So organisations can register at: http://cleveland.giveitago.net/orgregistration.php which is also going to have some major updates over the next week. The public launch will be in summer.

I'm off now to enjoy some family time over the Bank Holiday weekend but in the meantime why not Give It A Go?

Should You Cut Prices To Get Business?

My answer is a resounding NO.

Why? We are a service industry and we provide a very good service. Our charges are largely based upon the time we spend to create the project our client wants and our fees are pretty much bang in the middle for a quality web agency (which suggests maybe we should charge more!).

There are some costs that we incur for every web project  namely domain, hosting and usually a small number of stock images. Yes we're not cowboys, if we supply the images you will have a legal right to use them - no unexpected demands from Getty Images or similar, though that has happened on a couple of occasions where clients have supplied their own images!!

Some projects have extra costs incurred such as professional photography, video, animation, graphic design, licensed plug ins, mobile app fees, etc. and these are obviously passed on to the client. Larger projects, e-commerce sites and more complex projects may have significantly higher hosting fees due to space, bandwidth and/or security requirements and again price reflects this.

But other than that it's based on a pretty accurate estimate of how long we will spend working on the project - and when we get the price wrong it's somehow never in our favour and we honour our quotes.

Do we ever lose the opportunity to get contracts as we're too expensive? Yes, it's cost us a couple of contracts in the last year since I significantly increased prices. They were both bottom end contracts amounting to a couple of days worth of work. On the other hand, before increasing our prices a year ago we lost a few potential large contracts because we were too cheap and the assumption was that the quality would not be up to standard. We now get more higher end work, same daily rate as bottom end projects but larger longer term contracts meaning less new clients are required for the same return.

Can we compete on price at the bottom end? No. I used to try but when some student is knocking out sites from their bedroom for £100, there's no way we could compete. However, we do get plenty of opportunity for new customers when their cheap option has disappeared leaving them with an out of date site that no longer works properly on a domain registered to the web designer not the website owner. (but I digress).

So why am a rattling on about this now? We recently bid for a smallish website with a local company who got 2 other quotes. I received a call saying we were a couple of hundred pound above the other quotes and if we could drop our price to match they would give us the contract. Now even though we're busy there's a natural tendency to do that to guarantee the job.

My response? After a little thought I simply replied that we give genuine quotes that are not open for negotiation unless an alternative is required that requires less work on our behalf. The quote is what we will charge for the work requested and we would very much like to work with the client, but if they felt that they would get BETTER VALUE elsewhere then we understand and they should make the choice that they feel is the best one for their business. If that isn't us we hope they get a great service from their chosen provider and we would always be happy to help them in the future if we were able to.

The result? We got the contract. It's about the value proposition not the price - taken me 2 and a half years of running the business to learn that lesson!!

So now for a Saturday of watching Matt play in Boro Colts final game of the season, in fact his final Colts game, and then off to watch MFC's last home game via a beer or two in the Star.

Hoping for some exciting publicity next week but I'll bore you with that after the event - should be in Tuesday's Evening Gazette I think.

Another Long Weekend, It's Becoming a Habit

OK This one is a long Bank Holiday Weekend meaning 2 more 4 day weeks, and yes that generally still means doing a full week's work but with only 4 days in the office.

So there's work to do this weekend. This includes chasing up clients with overdue payments, a constant issue, doing some planning, getting the Middlesbrough Midweek Cricket League site ready for the new season with fixtures, etc. online, getting the accounts up to date and doing a few tweaks to the mobile app for the Cleveland Police and Crime Commissioner. Last but by no means least is putting together my 10 min slot for our BNI chapter on Wednesday (and putting the door prize somewhere where I won't forget it this time).

Not all work though. Off to watch Matt play for Boro Colts at Billingham today which will see the temporary return of some of the lads from elite academies as well. Should be a good catch up with some of the parents as well. Tomorrow got a meet up with family and Monday, weather permitting, a walk on the Moors with Jane.

Should be a good weekend.