What blogging I have been doing has been on the A Liverpool Web Designer blog hosted at WordPress.com - in there you’ll find various technology articles.  Including my proud little post where I worked out how to blog properly on WordPress from an iPhone.

What else has been happening?  Well the Elise has been sitting in the rain, doing nothing.  I’m rather ashamed about that, but I’m trying to get into my head that it’s time to start using it more.  With less track time in the past year than at any point for five years or more, I’m feeling rusty and slow.  Not only that, but driving a fast car is losing its appeal.  Time to change that.   Soon.

I’ve also been fiddling away with some other experiments, some of which have shown on this site - for example, blogging from a Nokia N95 (or many other Symbian phones), Facebook connections and so on.  That’s meant that I’ve been rather diversified.  Which could be bad, could be good.  Personally I just think it’s a sign of learning and progress.  There’s a lot going on in the world and if our company, Interconnect IT, is to succeed in its ambition of being a technology led company, we need to understand what people are doing with technology, what they want to do, and how they do it.  We also need to understand their problems, the hurdles they face, and so on.

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.