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.