I’ve been hearing a lot of mentions about Pinterest recently, posts appearing on Twitter and Facebook, and blog mentions from the likes of Mashable and Design Newz. At first I resisted having a look, I have so many profiles floating about on the internet, some that I use regularly and some that I genuinely forget about for months on end. But after a friend personally recommended that I would find it useful I decided to take a tour.
From Mashable: “Pinterest describes itself as a “virtual pinboard,” but others call it a “moodboard site” because it’s so visually stimulating. Pinterest users can “pin” an image or a link to their profile, sharing something that they find beautiful, dramatic or inspirational.
So I signed up, created four initial pinboards and got pinning. The user experience is great, the language is friendly, and it is very very easy to become absorbed when filtering subjects close to my heart. Pinterest has already become a source of daily inspiration for me. It is so easy to find relevant imagery to what I am currently drawing / designing / researching / daydreaming, I can envisage endless pin boards acting as scrap books for each project I work on – be it for work or pleasure.
A potential personal advantage I have identified is to start circulating my own work. It is much easier to share imagery with strangers, and a ‘repin’ is just as quick as a ‘retweet’ on Twitter, with the added advantage that the pin will not disappear off the timeline within minutes. For brands this could be a really useful tool for spreading viral ads and promotions, as long as they’re funny, cool or cute!
My verdict: Pinterest will certainly waste more of my precious time, but it will also reward me with easy access to snippets of information for my work life and personal life. Although I did feel the need to create a board for “Things I have” before “Things I want” gets out of control
Technology giants Google, PayPal, and the Founder of LoveFilm said “yes” at recent panel discussion. Our MD, Luke Aikman, was invited to join them.
Being asked to comment on the “future of technology” is something my team do every day: online, with friends and with the increasingly well-networked people we meet. This, however, was different. Being asked for your view over a canapé is one thing. Being invited to share it alongside LoveFilm founder William Reeve, Google’s principal corporate, Debu Purkayastha, and Paypal Europe CFO David Clarke is a different challenge entirely. It took about five seconds to accept the offer.
Why is there so much buzz around technology?
Thanks to massive speculation about Facebook’s valuation, this was the night’s $100bn question. However, UK entrepreneurs should forget about trying to emulate its success, according to LoveFilm’s William Reeve. In his experienced view we shouldn’t even try to compete with, let alone beat, our American tech cousins, but should instead focus on building sustainable, scaleable businesses at home. LoveFilm and Zoopla were examples given. Sage was also mentioned as Sage’s international success William considers, is down to early planning for an International market. Unlike North America, the UK is limited, so companies like Sage begun with international architecture in mind; they weren’t locked to one country’s accounting practices.
It’s similarly good news for UK start-ups too. The cost of capital might be cheaper in California, but the business success rate is said to be higher in the UK. Here if you have a plan that shows you have a real business – that is, one that talks about revenue and profit – it’s not impossible to get funding. The tax breaks around EIS make early rounds tax efficient and with increasing success stories in tech, there is an increasing number of sophisticated business angels looking favourably on companies previously regarded as high-risk.
There’s another huge factor driving the pace of change and it’s something that affects everyone: the economy. As times become even tighter for individuals and for businesses, cost efficiency has become paramount. In the consumer world, this is generating a huge surge in popularity for comparison sites like confused.com, and in our use of ‘free’ entertainments such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
The more that we use the internet the more we’re all generating new innovative opportunities for consumers and for emerging businesses. For instance, Loccit, an online service we’ve just launched, captures all the memories being loaded every day onto sites like Facebook to create a user’s private diary that’s safe for years to come.
In the business-to-business world, new technologies are automating processes. The inevitable downside is the reduction in jobs as computers begin to undertake roles such as data entry. But there is also a significant benefit as technology-based jobs and products and, critically, access to markets are now becoming open to all.
In fact, the old barriers to entry are falling quite fast. Even just a few years ago most businesses had to resort to specialists to undertake even routine digital work. Anyone can put a basic website online in just a few days now. And from there, learning to create basic software, web applications and databases is a testing, but now very possible leap. Granted, you might need some basic level of skills, but getting a ‘proof of concept’ into the world has never been easier. Where opportunity exists, so does competition. Some of the world’s youngest brands are eclipsing the oldest and biggest. Technology is now accessible and affordable and there are more and more highly skilled people working in it. The stronger the competition the greater the excitement: the greater the buzz.
What are the Tech trends that we can’t afford to ignore?
In our debate, the big conversation leaders were social and mobile.
Social media is now not only mainstream, but is also being adopted by generations that less than 15 years ago were scared of mice. In fact, the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is women over 50. Twitter and Facebook have also become important personal and business channels of communication. In the US, it seems as if half the billboards link the product they advertise to a Facebook page rather than a website. Mobile web traffic has increased by more than 80% in the last 12 months, and many businesses are fighting to keep pace with the demand for quality content delivered through the mediums that people want to use.
For young technology businesses like Nudge, this is all good news. There is a big opportunity for challenger businesses to win in the mobile space as larger, slower tier-one brands struggle to move and adapt quickly enough. This is especially true, in my opinion, of large B2B professional services organisations, particularly those reaching out to the consumer. The opportunity in social and mobile is extraordinary. Mobile search statistics are also worth a quick mention. More than 75% are local based searches. If you run a business focussing on a local area and you could do with some increased foot-fall, don’t ignore these stats. The future is here and the competition is not as large as you would expect.
And finally, would we invest in Facebook?
Inevitably, someone asked the question – and it was perhaps the only one that split the panel. William Reeve, Google, and PayPal, all wanted to see the figures before committing. Fellow South-West panellist – Mark Farmer, serial entrepreneur and founder of Eden Ventures – and I both said ‘yes’. Although, I am pretty sure we’d both do some ‘light reading’ before sending any serious capital due West.
A client of ours called a few minutes ago and said, “we’ve just found a clone of our website!”. This was a little surprising as their website had been live for less than 48 hours! So … we took a look. Low and behold it had been ripped off … and really badly! Here is exactly how we found the criminal and what happened next …
1. First Do A WhoisLookup
All domains are registered with a registrar. Unless you purchase anonymity, you can be found. Just go to http://www.whoislookup.com and enter a domain name. In our case, the domain to use was www.globaldirectorsnetwork.com.
The site instantly returns who owns the domain. You will generally get the phone number, email address and mailing address. In our case, the results were:
Bill Anderson
33 Adelaide Street
Stamford Lincolnshire
PE9 2EN
2. Quickly Double Check That It’s Not Just Ludicrous Coincidence
On the offending website, click View > Source. The source code of the web page will pop up. Normally when a site is ripped off the perp will change some of the code, even just a little to try and get a way with it. A complete idiot will change absolutely nothing. In the case of this complete idiot, not only was none of the code changed, but the perpetrator ‘hot linked’ to our proprietary code.
Hot linking is where one website references the code and resources of another. It is theft of the code, the bandwidth, processing power and RAM. In this case, the perp hot linked:
This is perhaps the stupidest mistake there is, as it puts the case beyond any shadow of a doubt … Shame for Bill.
3. Use Google To Really Find The Criminal
Google is a fabulous tool. We found out everything we needed to know about Bill, from all of his contact information to the small things like he has three kids and enjoys family activities, amateur video, personal computing, public speaking, exploring the Internet for commercial opportunities (Note to Bill – that’s a nice way of putting it, don’t you think!), designing (Note to Bill – We’re a fan of your wonderful design Bill, well done) and writing Internet pages in html, business strategy, NLP, travel.
You don’t need a screencast on how to use Google, but take a look at the sites. Knowing the context of this post makes the content in many of them hilarious! The best part for me being Bill’s reference to his consultancy practice’s proposition being “Harnessing the power of emerging technology…”, looking at the design of that site, the context of that post and the fact we just caught you in less than three minutes, well, [enter your own end to this sentence here!].
(NB – Please copy and paste into your browser and remove the ‘YYYYY’. We didn’t want to provide Bill any positive SEO impact!)
Bill is a busy boy isn’t he?! Well done on all your successes Bill!
4. Use Your Knowledge of Javascript To Embarrass The Perp
Bill hot-linked to our site, which means that we can use the javascript file to completely control his site. Now remember, one must have a sense of humour about these things and it is Christmas. We decided to create a Jib Jab using the folks that worked on the site and have them sing Christmas songs to Bill on his site. Merry Christmas Bill!
Check out the video:
5. Call The Perp And Explain You’re Going To Sue Him … And Video Yourself Making The Call
Bill is such an outstanding business person, that his details are all over the Internet. He is also exceptionally diligent and his whois records are accurate and up to date (well done Bill!). This all means that giving Bill a call is relatively easy.
Well … 2 hours later, it appears it is not easy to call Bill. I have, in my quest acquired his mobile number from a colleague of his and he doesn’t even answer that. I’ll try again in an hour and if no good, send him an email.
Just got hold of Bill – apparently the whole thing is a ‘joke’ … but is completely unknown to the owner and certainly the whole thing was without any permission from us. So, this is our ”joke’ back!
6. Expose The Whole Thing Online
Then write a blog post and ensure that naughty Bill doesn’t do anything silly ever again.
To finish the post, we would like to thank Bill for giving us an incredible laugh.
Nudge’s latest iPhone app, Loccit, has been listed in the Top 100 Apps of All Time by Stuff Magazine!
Nudge have published many iPhone apps over the last year, many of which we contractually can’t talk about … but this one we can!
Nudge span out (VC backed) Loccit last year and has been developing the product for quite some time. We launched a beta a month ago and, much to our amazement Stuff Magazine found it. Not only did they find it, but they rated it as one of the top 100 apps of all time! This is definitely something we are celebrating here at Nudge. We have become experts in mobile development over the last few years and are not an agency that goes out looking for PR and awards, but, to sit next to Facebook as one of the top 8 Social iPhone apps of all time (ahead of Twitter, amongst others) is a huge accolade.
Thanks to our fantastic team that are continually making this happen, and thanks to Stuff Magazine.
Loccit is a product that is more than just mobile focussed. It is a brand new Social Media service that is designed to keep your memories safe. Forever. We’re very proud of it at Nudge. Go and check it out.
If you are looking for an agency that is an expert in Social, you could go one that can demonstrate the ability to Tweet and update a Facebook page. Or, you could come to Nudge, an agency that has built a whole new social platform that integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Calendar, Last.FM … the list goes on.
If you are looking for experts in mobile, both Stuff Magazine and we believe, we’re the best in the business.
If you understand the power of social (some facts below), you should be ambitious and aggressive in your social strategy. If you’re feeling ambitious and aggressive, you should work with Nudge.
Mobile Stats
54% increase in mobile internet usage in the last 12 months
91% of all mobile internet usage is to socialize
1.08 Billion smart phones are now in use
By 2014, mobile internet usage will overtake desktop usage
Half of all local searches are made from mobiles
86% of mobile internet users are online while watching TV
More than 1/3 of Facebook users use Facebook Mobile
50% of Twitter users use Twitter Mobile
200+ Million YouTube videos are viewed on mobile devices every day
Women aged 35-54 are the most active group in mobile socialization
Social Stats
One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook
Facebook user’s spend 15 hours and 33 minutes per month on the site
More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook
30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month
People on Facebook install 20 million “Apps” every day
YouTube has 490 million unique users who visit every month
Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month
Wikipedia hosts 17 million articles
Wikipedia authors total over 91,000 contributors
People upload 3,000 images to Flickr every minute
Flickr hosts over 5 billion images
190 million Tweets per day occur on Twitter
Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users a day
Google+ has more than 25 million users
Google+ was the fastest social network to reach 10 million users at 16 days (Twitter took 780 days and Facebook 852 days)
On ‘Blog Day’, I’m a constant offender; I seldom get one in. But since I get into work earlier than most, I have the pleasure of being able to share with the world wonderful emails like this:
“Hi,
I’m going to be in about 20 mins late this morning because Ben set his alarm clock to sound like ducks so instead of waking up I dreamt about quacking.
Cheers,
Bella”
… This is why I love Nudge. The banter throughout the day is why I love the Nudge Team.
My mate Colin had been going on about how awesome skydiving was for the past year and his constant ramping on about it every time we went for a beer, which of course is a regular event, was starting to do my sweed. I decided to do it just to shut the annoying tit up and got booked up for my AFF (Accelerated Freefall) Level 1. Most people do a tandem first time they jump, but I didn’t like the thought of having another man strapped to my rear so I thought I’d go solo and pull my own chute. The AFF course consists of 8 Levels which upon successful completion puts you a step closer to achieving BPA ‘A’ license. Once you have achieved your BPA ‘A’ license you can jump at all drop zones that are open to the public worldwide.
There were four of us heading down to the drop zone that day, myself, Colin who has been jumping for a while, Andy who was doing a tandem and my brother who was coming along with us to watch. Powered up on a dirty breakfast from the garage to nuke the pound a pint night we were all suffering from the night before, we hit the road with The Strokes on full volume.
We arrived at Netheravon drop zone in Salisbury at 8:30am. I grabbed a cup of tea and shortly after heard my name called out over the base loudspeaker. Yeaa buddy!.. time for 6 hours of ground school! Ground school familiarises you with the mechanics of the equipment you will be using, how to control and position yourself in free flight and most importantly, the safety and emergency procedures/drills.
I was introduced to my instructor ‘Bish’ who was a military lad and had over 2500 jumps to his name, with only one malfunction, which was reassuring to hear! Since Netheravon is a military base many of the jumpers there are from different parts of the military, but mainly army and paratroopers.
Ground school kicked off with a brief on how my equipment (Parachute rig and altimeter) worked, that was followed up with some questions to check if everything has sunk in.
Next up we took a full rig into the hanger and Bish went through the stages of unpacking it and explaining how it deployed and inflated. Bish explained the potential nuisances that can occur after deployment such as line twists, collapsed end cells and how to deal with these if they occur. He also showed me how to use the toggles to brake, flare, turn and collapse the chute on landing. This was again followed by a round of questions to ensure I had absorbed everything.
We then left the hangar and headed back to hut where we starting going through what was required of me to complete the AFF Level 1. The next 4 hours was spent going over and over the jump and emergency drills. If you don’t know what is meant by a hard arch, you will do by the end of ground school and you’ll be shouting ‘LOOK, LOCATE, CUT AWAY, RELEASE, ARCH’ in your sleep! A hard arch is pointing your belly out and bringing your arms and legs as far up/back as you can. This changes you centre of gravity from your head to your centre torso and stabilises you in free fall.
The AFF Level 1 jump procedure goes a little like this:
Instructor 1 shouts ‘Are you ready to skydive?!’
I shout ‘HELL YEA!’
Instructor 2 moves to outside of plane door, I follow and take a crouching position half in, half out of the door and instructor 1 stands inside to my right
Turn to the right and shout to instructor 1 ‘CHECK IN’ and wait for his nod
Turn to my left and shout ‘CHECK OUT’ to instructor 2 and wait for his nod
Look up and out at the propeller and shout ‘PROP’
Raise yourself about a foot up and shout ‘UP’
Lower yourself again and shout ‘DOWN’
STEP OUT and hard arch
Right about now you will be requiring a new pair of pants.
Wait until you have stabilised and check your heading and altitude
Shout altitude to both instructors and wait for acknowledgement from each
Do three practise pulls by bringing your left arm forward so you can read your altimeter and your right arm back to grab a firm hold of your pilot chute toggle
Perform a stable free fall from 12,000ish feet to about 6,000 while responding to any hand signals from instructors and checking your heading and altitude every few seconds
At 6,000 feet wave off with your arms to show you are going to deploy parachute, reach back and throw your pilot chute out hard to the right
Count 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000
Look up and check your chute asking yourself the questions, ‘Is it big and rectangular? If not, can I land it? Do I have any nuisances? If so deal with them’
If the chute has a serious malfunction you immediately look down and locate both cutaway pad and reserve handle. Pull down hard on the cut away pad and then do the same with the reserve handle and follow this with a hard arch.
If all goes well you won’t have had a malfunction and will be sailing under canopy at about 4,000 feet!
Check altitude again and all round awareness
Check left and pull down left toggle to turn left
Check right and pull down right toggle to right
Pull down both toggles and hold for 5 seconds, do this twice
Move to holding area which is the area above your specified landing zone
Have some fun swooping around for the next 3000 feet while overlooking the beautiful Salisbury countryside!
Head full throttle towards your landing point and about 10 foot off the ground flare the chute and land, preferably not on your arse!
So, how did it go?! It was honestly the most exhilarating ride I have ever experienced. I’ve done some crazy stuff, or at least I thought I had, but nothing had compared to stepping out of a plane at 13,000 feet. The initial few seconds were complete sensory overload with an adrenaline rush like nothing else. After a few seconds realization kicks in and it’s a bit like ‘Sh*t the bed what am I doing, right yep ok arch, check alti..’ and you are going through your drills. One thing that I distinctly remember was the sense of speed I got as we fell through some thick cloud and the noise from air blasting past your ears at over 120mph. Free fall lasted about 45 seconds but felt like it went in about 10! Before I knew it I had waved off, thrown my chute out and started counting 1000, 2000.. and then WHAM.. chute is inflated and you go from 120mph to about 20mph dangling by rope at 4000 feet. I sat there for a couple of seconds looking down thinking “This is quite high to be dangling from these bits of rope, haha’. The few seconds after the chute inflated was actually the scariest part of the jump for me, looking down I think a bit of vertigo kicked in! I went through my canopy drills before moving to my holding area. I was a little concerned that if I did turns that were too aggressive I would collapse the chute but ‘Bish’ assured me I wouldn’t and to have some fun trying it, so I did! I played about for about 10mins before I was coming in to land. The wind had picked up quite a lot and ‘Bish’ had got on the headset as he wanted me to land slightly differently since there was risk of the strong wind blowing me out of my holding zone. I flared as instructed by ‘Bish’ at only 3 feet from the ground and landed so softly I over compensated and fell back on my arse! The wind then got hold of my chute and started to drag me so I pulled one of the lines in quick to collapse it. I stood up, wrapped up my chute and said to myself ‘what the **** did you just do David?!’ I was so buzzing from all the adrenaline I burst into laughter and stumbled over to check in. To summarise, it was the maddest thing I have ever done and experienced. Sometimes I look back and think I must have been absolutely nuts to do it, so I’m booking my Level 2 in for July haha, rock on!
It’s festival season and with so many choices out there people are now checking festival websites more and more to tell if it’s the one for them.
As well as account management for web, I moonlight in festival organisation and have been noticing the importance of a good festival website a lot more since I have been able to understand what a website needs to convey to an audience, and how important that first impression is. A website is the face of your business and it will be viewed more times than if people were stepping through your office door.
Line-up is an important factor when choosing your festival but as long as there’s at least one or two acts on the menu that people will want to see, then the rest of the line-up doesn’t matter too much. People don’t just see festivals as a place to dance but as a place to be at home, on holiday and involved.
Most people will check a festival website to get the feel of the festival and ask questions like:
Will I like the atmosphere?
Will I like the people?
Will there be enough things there to keep me occupied when I’m not dancing?
Is it kid friendly?
So; that all-important home page of your festival site needs to convey the personality of the festival in one quick blink of an eye.
I myself have been pulled in by festival websites before and I have bought tickets based on the personality I picked up on when I first entered the site.
Here are some examples of websites that match their festival personalities:
From the opening page you can tell that this festival is lively, opinionated and swaying towards a circus environment. The age range would be 12 upwards. This is exactly what it says on the tin.
This website’s homepage tells me that it’s going to be beautiful, interesting, verging on magical and slightly unreal. From ages 0 – 100. Again; this is exactly how I have experienced it.
This website is in the style of a magazine and reminds me of the feel of Ibiza. It tells me it’s going to have a commercial line-up and is for older teens and young adults. You will be awake all night!
So yes, a festival website is almost as important as the line-up itself.
If you run a festival or indeed anything festival related you should be asking yourself what personality your current site is projecting and also what you want it to project. Do the two things match? If not, time for a change perhaps?
I have been painting two life size gorilla sculptures as part of Bristol Zoo’s mass public art event; “Wow! Gorillas” The event is all about bringing together residents, visitors, schools, artists and businesses for a fun and engaging shared experience for the whole of Bristol.
After submitting designs for the project in February, sponsors were invited to browse the entries and pick their favourite. My design ‘the City Gent’ was chosen by medical insurance company 425 Direct we worked together to tailor my cheerful city gorilla to suit their brand. We have renamed the finished Gorilla ‘Cheeky Check-up’ he’s had a fine reception from fans of Emily Trotter Illustration on facebook!
A few weeks after my first commission I was contacted by Bristol Zoo to ask if I would consider painting a second Gorilla. My response of course, was yes please! The Bristol Rovers FC wanted to commission an artist to create a special design incorporating their logo, branding and the passion of their fans. Bristol Zoo recommended me for the task as I have worked with them on several projects over the last few years, including three large scale murals, more information on the first mural can be seen in this news article.
I met with the Bristol Rovers and their sponsor Jelf Lampier and together we agreed to dress our gorilla in their team strip. I suggested painting the fur and face in the team colours and as a homage to the pirate in the Rovers logo we all thought an eye patch would be a fun idea! The name of the Gorilla was decided by the fans who were invited to vote for their favourite, the winner is ‘Irene’, from the Bristol Rovers song ‘Goodnight Irene’.
I painted Irene in the Galleries Shopping Centre, Bristol over the bank holiday weekend. It’s always a great experience painting in public, even more so when you’re painting a life size, furry blue gorilla with an eye patch!
Both gorillas are now painted and varnished, and waiting to go out on display for ten weeks this summer. There are about 60 gorillas in total, all painted by local artists, all to be positioned around Bristol and surrounding areas from July 4th. ‘Cheeky Check-up’ will be displayed in Queens Square, Bristol and ‘Irene’ will be displayed on Gloucester Road, Bristol.
Bristol Zoo will be printing a map with a trail to see all the gorillas, for updates on Wow! Gorillas be sure to follow @BristolZooGardens and @EmilyTrotter on Twitter!
Disclaimer: As well as Nudge Digital, I’m also a Director of Network EQ (www.networkeq.co.uk), a hosting company specialising in managed virtual servers. My views may be biased but I’ve tried to present a fair and balanced point of view.
As web developers we rely on web hosting, the same way taxi drivers rely on cars and surgeons rely on scalpels. Hosting is one of the many tools we use to do our job. There seems to be four camps when it comes to hosting and developers:
Bargain basement hosting – Cheap shared hosting accounts, usually in America. This solution is usually the preserve of the bedroom developer, they’re buying the cheapest hosting they can find in order to keep costs to a minmum. Usually ends in disaster and causes a lot of stress for the developers and client.
It’s not my problem – Let the client worry about hosting, it’s their site after all and developers shouldn’t have to mess around with such trivial things as hosting. Some clients will insist on this approach, but the chances are your client wouldn’t recognise a hosting package if it hit them in the face and I think it’s part of our job to help them out.
Host in-house – Some developers have servers in their office; while I agree this can be a good approach for certain situations (e.g. if you have a Subversion server), if you’re hosting production websites on internal servers it’s going to end in tears as your internet connection probably isn’t as fast as a data centre’s, you probably don’t have UPS (and you definitely don’t have diesel generators) and if it breaks at 3am who is going to fix it?
Do it properly – This is the approach we take at Nudge. We have reseller and affiliate accounts with a hosting company who know what they’re doing. Yes, it’s more expensive than the other options but it’s more reliable and more likely to end up with happy developers and a happy client; saving you time and money in the long run. The hosting company looks after keeping the servers running and we look after making the websites and earning affiliate commission.
Here’s a few reasons why having a good hosting partner is really important:
A good hosting company will help you figure out your requirements and help you troubleshoot problems (such as Apache configuration or PHP modules). Obviously you need to roughly know what you’re doing, but there’s a big difference between talking to someone who can’t pronounce Apache in an Indian call centre and speaking to a geek who can write bash scripts while standing on his head blindfolded.
Test machines are really useful during development, and this is much easier to achieve with virtualisation. If you’re trying to replicate a problem on a customer server you can just take a clone and then play around with it. Or if you want to test out a new platform (e.g. Plone) then you can fire up a server for a few weeks to play with it. So make sure you choose a hosting company who offer virtual servers.
As web developers we all know how important speed is when browsing websites. Make sure you choose a hosting company based where the website audience is based (for most of us this probably means the UK). Choosing a cheaper provider abroad will mean all your hard work optimising images, minifying JavaScript and implementing caching will be undone by the huge latency between the server and the website users.
I think it’s important to choose a hosting company who you trust for support, that way you can happily send your customers to them for support queries. This means you don’t have to spend your time troubleshooting hosting issues and acting as a middle man between your client and the hosting company. It also means your client will likely get 24/7 support rather than 9-5 support. Dealing with support queries and recurring billing isn’t something you should be doing as a web developer, so outsource this to your hosting partner.
You should probably choose a company that matches your values, especially if you’re referring clients to them. This way, if your clients like working with you then you then they’ll also like working with the hosting company, meaning everyone is happy!
Finally, make sure you’re earning affiliate commission from all the clients your refer. Most hosting companies have partner programs aimed at web developers, so ask them if you can earn something back for all the customers you send their way.
Surf the net looking for companies, or ask around and find out that you mate’s cousin’s dad drinks with a bloke who knows someone who will do it for a hundred quid.
Both of these avenues are fraught with danger, you should always consider more than cost alone. Just remember the old adage – ‘pay peanuts, get monkeys’.
Let’s consider some points;
Location; Do you want someone local, or someone who is prepared to travel to meet you? This means regular meetings, where you can maintain an overview on what is going on, provide input on the next stage.
Reputation; are they going to get around to finishing your site? Is the quality going to be there? Will they be able to maintain your site? Will they provide you with a complete solution (SEO, advertising, hosting, and updates), there is more to development than just banging out a couple of pretty pages. Also consider if you like them, you don’t want to work with someone you don’t like.
Charges; is the price that is quoted the final cost, or will little sneaky stealth charges find their way onto you bill? The aforementioned services (SEO, advertising, hosting, and updates) may be extra.
Skill; can they make exactly what you want? Many ‘bedroom developers’ use ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions and just add plugins – this is just jigsaw making, my five year old could do that. I’m not saying that open-source packages are bad, but a skilled developer will be able to customize it to fit precisely what you want and handle the problems when things go wrong.
Professionalism; will you get a contract? This will ensure you know fully what you are getting and you get what you want. Will you be provided with some form of project management? Being provided with details on timelines, risks, budget, and progress can reassure you that your system is being developed to the right standard any saves wasting time (and therefore money).
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