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.

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.