Curiously, it’s very polarised — we either work with smaller one man band companies like Jason Nevin who runs a house removals company site who are looking to switch technologies, or big corporates and government agencies such as Shop Direct, The US Mission to the UN and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

I’ve been thinking about why there’s such a big dip in the middle of our client base — 90% of our business is groups with over 500 staff or with fewer than three.

The Gap

Small, one man companies tend to involve highly motivated individuals.  They understand the important of their skills, and they know that in the tech sector they have to always stay up to date.  Large corporates tend to understand this too, and have allocated training budgets to make sure they keep up to date.  Government departments are often a little slower with new technology, but they too need to keep efficient or tax payers will kick up a stink.

And WordPress is a very efficient platform for running many informational websites.

But why are medium sized companies not coming to us in nearly such large numbers as micro enterprises and large corporates?  Let’s see…

Budgets

I’ve noticed that medium companies often have people who are extremely good at what they do, but I do find that there are often significant skills gaps.  I’ve dealt with someone from a school (medium) who didn’t realise that you don’t have to close an application in Windows in order to see another application.  Each time she cut and paste she’d open one document, select the text, close the document, then open the receiving application and paste the text there.  Productivity, as you can imagine, was pretty poor.

I think a lot comes from budgets — many firms around the 50 people size aren’t always able to make good money.  They have to be careful where they spend it — they’re not big enough to have training departments who make sure everyone is up to date, and they’re usually busy.

Culture

Another thing with smaller firms, I believe, is that they’re often started by individuals with a lot of skills — these are flexible folk who can teach themselves and learn quickly from books and the internet.  As they grow they try and hire similar people, but eventually there comes a point where a lot of staff are there for the job.  They need training because they aren’t going to go to the trouble of autodidactism.  They have a job to do, and they’re going to do that and no more or less.

At best, they’ll get on-the-job training.

Our Marketing

We don’t do a lot of it, to be quite frank.  But perhaps our website, approach and costs simply don’t ring true with people in medium sized companies looking for WordPress training?  Do we need to get advertising in business magazines, such as those sent out by the FSB?

Summary

I suspect that the truth is that a company always needs to look at the skills of staff, but as they reach a certain size they have too much going on to give it much thought.  Once they break through that difficult 50 man barrier things seem to start to change again.

But how do we change this?  I’m not sure we can, easily.  Governments often give generous grants, and around here we have Skillworks which helps a little, and we do get local approaches — however, the person paying still has to pay a significant contribution and specialist training is never all that cheap.

Do you have any ideas of how skills can be improved in small to medium sized enterprises?  Should we be marketing our courses more proactively?  What about scheduled classroom courses that keep things at a lower cost, albeit needing more time from the attendees?  I’d love to hear your thoughts — especially in the field of WordPress.

Anyway, tonight I just thought I’d have a look at some graphs.  And hey, there’s a bit of a shock… my own site, this one here, is getting slower.  Here’s the graph:

Now, what you’ll notice is that generally everything looked nice and brisk until early August 2009 when there was a marked deterioration in performance.  Then it plodded along just fine until December 2009 when it got worse again.

Is It WordPress Bloat?

I wondered what had happened to cause this — I’m especially shocked that a page load is now so slow.  I haven’t changed the theme in use for at least a year, and the plugins are generally ones I use elsewhere.  So I did a bit of thinking, and then it dawned on me when I found this list of release dates at WordPress.org:

The dates correlate exactly with the worsening performance of this site.

Now, correlation absolutely does not relate to causality.  At upgrade time I usually take a moment to review plugins, upgrade the theme, etc.  It could be that an upgrade or change to one of the many plugins in use here that has caused the slowdown.  I know it’s not traffic to my site — that’s been flat for ages, with only the occasional blip.  The server is a dedicated machine running about fourty sites that we manage, but the load is generally quite consistent and impact on different websites is fairly well managed.

But I’m a speed freak.  I like it when a website zings into view.  I love fast cars.  I love computers that don’t dither.  I love telephones that respond instantly.  So I hate that response times are now below 1s.  That’s not on!

So I’m going to try to find the cause of this slowdown — I’ll be running some experiments on this site, profiling queries, checking the database over and so on.  And I’ll document it all as a way of showing you how we at Interconnect IT do our performance tuning.  Whether I document it here or there I haven’t decided yet — I think it would make a good case study for the site.  We’ll see!  Watch both sites…

note 1 — deactivated Twitme on 03/02/2010

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.…

This was my 40th birthday present from Romana.  The hope had been to see the Northern Lights, something I always wanted to witness.  Sadly the weather and conditions meant it wasn’t to be.  But I still appreciated the trip and the unique experiences — it was a great gift!

I’m not going to extol the virtues of Iceland too much here — it’s a small country, with a rich culture and heritage.  It’s definitely one of those places worth visiting if you get the chance.

One note, though — I expected to be hungry, but it turns out there’s six vegetarian restaurants, and most (but not all, by any means) restaurants offered fairly decent vegetarian options.

PS — some pictures are rather grainy as I had to push the camera somewhat.  This is one dark country!

And mainly because tomorrow I go to see Sean & Em to celebrate the 1st birthday of their young son Matthew.

I’ll try and be quicker next time, but in the meantime, enjoy the pics:

Loved every minute of it.

My friend Gordon was there with his economy special — a BMW 325 he picked up for a mere £400.  A spot of (very light) preparation later and out he went.  On snow and ice tyres, because that’s what was fitted.

Below’s a full set of pictures of both cars (unedited and unchanged) taken by the lovely ladies at Fresh Orange Photography.

That’s going to have to stop, because today I just saw something scary.  An entire spider family, with big mummy spider sitting in the middle.  O_0

Cleaning time is about to start. Sorry little fellas, but you’re moving out! Your mum too. The lot of you, in fact.

Also realised just how many bands from this era were called “The” something or other.

How things change…