Normally I have a bit of a thing against developers conferences, because they often discuss code (which is a pain if you haven’t written it yourself and is out of context in my opinion) or they discuss technologies that are so far in the future it will be two years before you can actually use them in the real world….

However, this was different! Not a line of code in sight, an informal atmosphere and only a sprinkling of tomorrows web… I feel having attended the conference I might get back to channelling my inner geek (particularly after Rob Hawkes presentation on WebSockets in HTML5!).

Venue: I’ve got to admit to being a little dubious about this! A cinema screen for a conference? It did work for the most part, a fantastically large screen tiered seating all made sense. Networking was restricted to loitering in cinema corridors so was quite difficult in places.

The Line Up

I’ve included what key parts I took away from the speeches and a link to their slides (if available). Videos would be great if @webdevconf release them (I don’t even know if any were taken) as my notes certainly don’t do justice to the speakers!

09:30 Neil Dennis from Strawberry Soup 

Neil discussed how his company was setup and things he wished people had told him right at the beginning. The presentation should be just above but the key thing I took from Neil’s presentation was that they started out really small in a garden shed (I’m surprised they survived that given the state of the shed in slide 6!). They sold their first site on eBay for £300 for 3 pages and have grown from there, Strawberry Soup is now a team of 15 in 3 locations in the south.

Neil went on to discuss the fact you don’t need a business plan, but was quick to add that planning is really important. Rather than some pie in the sky objectives they took some real objectives and then worked backwards with smaller goals to get there. They used just the assets they had and didn’t get venture capital or investment (much the same as I did at BetterWebSpace), and always had a months to live spreadsheet (how long they could survive if no work came in) – this was an idea I really liked but remembered quite quickly that the Business Health Check report in my KashFlow accounts already gives this and some other useful information.

One of the biggest pieces of advice that I took away was the advice not to trade services to save money. Generally it will end up costing you in the long term!

Neil advised on some projects that had gone very wrong because they pretended to know more than they did. Remember you’re the expert, you’ve been hired as such and make sure you know when to say no to a project!

The majority of Strawberry Soup’s work comes through creating mockups and pitching to companies they want to work with, they then work on a 30% up front, 30% on completion of the design and the last 40% on completion of the whole project.

Having sound backup in the form of legal and accounting (particularly when employing) was discussed, Neil mentioned gridlaw (I think that’s the right link!) according to my notes but I can’t remember the context! They also use Harvest for time tracking.

10:15 Rob Hawkes (@RobHawkes)

I’d been particularly looking forward to Rob’s presentation on Tomorrow’s Web and Future Technologies, and he certainly didn’t disappoint. I’m not going to go into too much detail here as Rob’s slides speak for themselves and so much of the HTML5 stuff is changing still at the moment.

Things that really interested me from Rob’s talk were WebSockets which will remove the need for Ajax to poll through JQuery as it will allow the browser to open a bi-directional pipe between the browser and a server. The list of uses for this is immense, multiplayer gaming (in the form of Rob’s Rawkets), realtime analytics (gaug.es). WebSockets are usable already but are in flux, if you plan on using them consider using socket.io as a fallback option.

Rob went on to discuss WebRTC (RT Audio and Video in the browser) which Mozilla already offer in a plugin form for Firefox called Rainbow. Ericsson Labs already have a demo of this working, but the key thing about this is that it will open up P2P audio and video in the browser once communication is established, a server is probably needed for connecting two parties together but then they would no longer need the server.

Other  interesting parts of all this HTML5 stuff, were the Fullscreen API (and it’s security concerns), WebSMS API, WebNFC API, Device API and the Vibrator API (this seemed to be the most popular – I can’t imagine why!) for controlling the hardware in a computer/phone. All of these are forming parts of Boot to Gecko to create a full OS.

All in all, Rob’s talk was an inspiration of what is coming tomorrow, it’s not here yet but we can get involved and start playing with it! I’m also quite tempted to buy his book: Foundation HTML5 Canvas: For Games and Entertainment

11:30 Ben Bodien (@bbodien) from Neutron Creations

Ben’s talk entitled “How I Learned to Stop Panicking and Love My Job” struck a chord with many of the attendees, whether Web Developers or not.

Ben brok this down into:

1. Planning
• Breakdown tasks into smaller parts not just “design a website”.
• Have targets with dates assigned them it’s easier to rectify slips earlier on.
• Write down a plan, it’s something to refer back to and see how you did. It doesn’t have to be reams of paper, just something!
• Don’t over-engineer a GANTT really isn’t necessary most of the time! So use basic flexible tools.
• Always check back on your plans and update them – they are a working document.
2. Task Management
• Track time inward vs task outward.
• Always put a time next to a task, that way if you have a spare few hours you’ll be able to see what you can achieve.
• Put tick boxes down the side, that sense of satisfaction is great, personally I prefer a big black line through the item or in the case of my workflowy lists, the fact they just disappear and the list gets shorter
3. Goals
• Have goals that focus on the longer term of who you are and where you are going.
• In the same way as a racing driver focus on the next apex and you will steer yourself towards your bigger goals automatically.
• Make sure your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time framed).
4. Self Maintenance (and no this is not a euphemism for something else!)
• Get enough sleep
• Drink plenty of water
• Eat properly
• Take performance enhancing drugs (by this Ben means vitamins, nothing illegal!!)
• Get some Exercise.
5. Post Project Analysis
• Always do this, so you can learn from the project.
• Make a list of what made you Happy? Proud? Excited?
• Make a list of what made you Bored? Frustrated? Want to crush baby squirrels with your firsts? (Ben had since advised me on twitter that he has never hurt a squirrel!)

12:15 Elliott Kember (@ElliottKember) from Riot 

There are no slides available for Elliott’s presentation, and they probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense if they were here! Elliott’s erratic style is both entertaining and educational so I’ve tried to capture some key points from his presentation titled “Ship It”.

• Learn from people, they all have experiences. Elliott has come from HTML CSS -> PHP -> CodeIgnitor -> Rails and had a reason for doing so everytime. Reasons you can learn from!
• When creating things don’t create ghost towns, use existing data. If, when you launch your site, your two users only have each other to chat to they’re going to get bored pretty easily.
• Show people, don’t tell them – you can’t put on your website “It’s cool” it’s up to the user to decide that.
• “Haters gonna hate” – there will always be people who hate what you’re doing. Live with it.
• Elliott believes you shouldn’t define what you are interested in. You should define what you aren’t interested in and then be interested in EVERYTHING else. It will make you an interesting person!
• Negotiation was something that Elliott clearly enjoys – the psychology of fear and hate that make negotiation work.
• You should always do things you hate and learn from it.
• Don’t let your current job title define you, if you’re a “PHP developer” does that stop you dabbling in HTML? Perl? Ajax?
• Getting lost is good, you’ll learn from it.
• Teach others, it will force you to learn something completely.
• Elliott also touched on the reason Riot wear hats (it involves alcohol) and Rubber Duck Programming

14:30 Paul Annett (@nicePaul)

Paul is currently Creative Lead for the Cabinet Office, primarily redesigning direct.gov.uk (and boy does it need it given some of the demo’s he showed us!). His slides aren’t available as they were primarily videos with him talking, but he covered a lot of good information from their acceptance testing. The key points are below:

• Optimise your site for the common case, hiding complexity.
•  They stop supporting a browser when less than 3% of users are using it. That means IE6 is out!
• Find the Do Quick and make that easy for users to do.
• Set clear expectations
• Don’t be subtle, in acceptance testing many users didn’t understand e.g.
• Look at what context switching a user might do and make that easy for them.
• Users tend not to scroll down, but those that do probably won’t scroll back up to find the search box!

15:45 John O’Nolan  (http://john.onolan.org/ - @johnonolan

This was the talk of the day and provoked lots of reaction and interest, “Designing Emotion –  Becoming a Puppet-Master of User Experience”. John’s slides are available but are not advisable to open at work (John was clearly practicing what he preaches and invoking emotion) they are available here.

John talked about how all users are fickle and that their obvious actions can easily change based on their current state of mind. Aspirational Marketing (such as the “Marlboro man”) we are now mostly immune to. Designing for emotion can earn you serious money.

You should think about what products people want, he cited that the original Apple iPod was not the best product on the market at the time. There were bigger and better MP3 players, but Apple sold it on “1,000 songs in your pocket” – anyone could understand that!

Design is not just about look and feel, but how your product will be used. Think about what people will do with your product, and design for that – look at how it will impact someone’s life. John briefly discussed the website TheFunTheory showing a video from it and discussing the fact that if you make something unexpectedly fun – people will use it.

John moved on to how emotions work, James Lange theory was that:

This was abandoned in the 1950′s in favour of cognitive theory:

Neurobiological theory is now the more accepted view:

We know three things about emotions:

1. Emotions always have a subject.
2. Emotions are caused by things which are overtly positive or negative.
3. Emotions lead to action.

You need to be noticed, if customers don’t feel happiness they won’t come back, if they don’t feel anything – they won’t even remember you. Make your customers feel an emotion!

John went on to say for me what was the most important:

“When you consider your customer’s emotions

AND design their behaviour.

You are creating an experience.”

John touched on the customer service experience of people like Zappo’s and how they create their WOW factor and brand advocacy. He also discussed the fact that customer complaints are awesome and that you’ve provoked an emotion and reaction, if you can then turn it into a positive for that customer they will become your biggest advocate. If you do all this right your users will make money for you!

16:30 Paul Boag (BoagWorld - @BoagWorld)

Paul is one of three founders at headscape and run a web design podcast, his talk about “Getting down to business” was all about the habits of freelancers and how they need to establish good work-life balance.

Paul’s slides are here (I couldn’t find a way to embed – if you know better let me know!).

Paul talked a little about what success is, and how we define it.. I particularly liked the quote from Winston Churchill:

“Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”

We eventually go the classic “Work to live, don’t live to work”.

Paul discussed the bad habits of freelancers who work long hours and compare them to each other as a badge of honour when really they should be a badge of shame. We should all establish better working habits to take control of our working life.

There are four pressure points for businesses/freelancers:

1. Bringing in business (Sales!)
• Your work will not speak for itself, sell it!
• Work out where the next pay cheque comes from and plan to make it happen.
• Look at who you are targeting, they won’t find you – seek them out!
• You should never be too busy to market your services.
2. Dealing with clients
• We offer services to customers, not products – we need to act like it.
• Clients are not the enemy, work with them to reach an end goal and educate them along the way.
• Regularly update customers, if they want updates every hour do so.
• If you don’t keep them updated they may hate the finished product! It’s a journey to a finished product take the customer on that journey.
3. Feeling out of control
• The culture of freelancers is obsessed with hard work and long hours with endless checklists. Make time for your friends, family and of course yourself!
• Each day should have a beginning and an end. Those times are movable, but they should happen. Start the day with a list of what you are going to do and end it reviewing those items and planning tomorrow.
• If you check your email client every five minutes that’s 22,000 interruptions a year (and that accounts for holidays which you take of course?). Paul recommends we check email twice a day. I can’t see that happening for me but turning it off to get things done is something I’ve tried this week!
• He suggested a service called “AwayFind” which can alert you about certain things happening in your inbox – I plan to look at this in some detail!
• Paul suggests working in 25 minute sprints, followed by 5 minute breaks and spread those across the day to your most productive times.
4. Too much work
• There is nothing worse than turning away great work because you are already working on something mediocre!
• Hire someone to do the mundane or the things you dislike doing.
• Working with other freelancers kills your margins and nobody wants to become a project manager!
• Either hire against your weakness or clone yourself!
• Hire someone to do your admin or answer your calls.

To sum up…

All in all a fantastic event by @alexolder and one I hope to attend again in future, not a line of code in sight – but could do with some improvements on the networking side of things!

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I had my annual Testicular Cancer checkup at the beginning of the week, after 5 years you think they’d get easier (they don’t and neither do me and needles!). Actually it was five-and-a-quarter years but I won’t go into that rant about appointments. I know, I know, it’s unusual for me not to go into a rant, but I have good reason….

I won’t be going back! After 5 years in the clear, I’ve officially been discharged from Oncology!

They aren’t closing the door I hasten to add, I can still contact them if I have a problem but my time of building up nerves and worry every 3 months, 6 months and finally a year, to each successive appointment is now over.

If I’m brutally honest, I’m still a bit shocked. I’d expected another appointment with a year interval or two years and we’d agreed at my last appointment the way forward was up for discussion this time. However, they simply checked I’d found my lump last time and decided that I know my body better than they do and therefore I was safe to go it alone!

For now this feels weird, great and a whole mixture of emotions, I do wonder how it will feel in a years time when I’d have been expecting a checkup, but only time will tell..

This marks a serious turning point in our lives, I say our because I’d only met my wife 6 months before I was diagnosed so we’ve done this all together and I can’t thank her enough. Despite a few problems over the years, Emma is 7 months pregnant and our little one will be here in mid-May.

This really is looking like a fantastic year!

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The first regular monthly event was attended by just 7 of us, who despite the potential to have very geeky and boring conversation spent a few hours over a pint chatting about all sorts of random things!

@AntHodges was chief organiser and at one point we discussed how many Twitter users there are in Swindon, one website viewed suggested 4,000 users with Swindon as their location field, and we managed seven…. Ho hum.. Admittedly I think the vast majority of accounts on Twitter are idle, a few tweets and then forgotten about…

My Twitter list of locals has 166 members (currently) – now if they all turn up next month we’ll need a bigger bar area!!

It was good to meet (in order of appearance):

• @AntHodges
• @EleanorCollins
• @GrahamMack
• @dreambasestudio
• @TiggerSwindon
• @TimAlmond

So if you’re in Swindon, or even visiting around the date of the next Swindon Tweetup (@SwindonTweetup), why not pop along for a drink and a chat?

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I’ve been a customer of the company I ordered it from for several years, they’ve not always been the quickest to deliver (particularly with my EEE PC as I had one of the first into the country!), but generally I’ve been happy with them – so happy that I became an affiliate of theirs. Not so much to make some cash, but when I did refer people to a product they were selling I’d earn something from it – something I was happy to do…

Now I’m not so sure!

I ordered on: 28/04/2010 17:45 and immediately received my confirmation email:

“… expected to be delivered within 2-5 working days. Please note that in most cases, delivery is faster than stated as we want you to start enjoying your purchase as soon as possible.”

Great I thought, today is Wednesday, I could have it by Friday at their minimum, most likely Saturday though which would be really handy for the bank holiday weekend so I could play with it whilst we were visiting family, and as they say I’ll be able to enjoy my product as soon as possible!

Saturday arrived and there was still no sign of anything, so I logged into their website -

“Status: Processing”.

Processing? What’s that all about? You’ve had the order for at least two whole working days and nothing has happened with it!? We live in an “instant” world these days. Amazon are probably partly to blame they get things to you like lightning, heck I think they’d teleport them if they had the chance!

I thought I’d ring their customer services line and check on the status of the order, hmmm closed on weekends, and this is a bank holiday weekend! Right then that will be a job for Tuesday, but it will probably turn up on Tuesday and although I haven’t had it over the weekend at least it will be here for the wedding the following weekend!

I submitted an email support enquiry anyway, and was surprised to find them working on bank holiday Monday:

“I can confirm your order has been received and is progressing through our system as normal. The stock allocation process will begin shortly, if not already.”

I replied, telling them I really needed it for Friday – it was of the utmost importance.

Tuesday arrived and I got a response,

“There has been a slight delay with the order however all appears to be on track.

Under the present conditions, your order is expected to be dispatched within the next two days. A dispatch confirmation email will be forthcoming as well with the tracking information once the order has been shipped.”

Hmmm… I couldn’t really complain could I? Much as they say they’ll get it to you quicker than their quoted delivery time, Thursday would still put them inside their 2-5 working days (even excluding the bank holiday where they appeared to be working!).

Wednesday arrived, status? You guessed it “Processing”. I emailed and rang! They assured me they were looking at my order right now and it would either go out that day or the following,  Thursday… Hang on I’m supposed to have it by Thursday! At least if they dispatch it with Royal Mail it will be next day before 12 so I’ll have it Friday lunchtime – before I head off to this wedding mid-afternoon.

It’s now 12:00 Friday… I’m packing up the car, and I have a notice from their couriers… Not the couriers fault I know, but they’re coming from Gloucester…

“Your order is out for delivery today and is due to be delivered between 16:39-17:39.”

Argggh! That’s it then – it will be next week!

Like I say, maybe our expectations of mail order have been raised in recent years with companies raising the bar quite regularly.

I was listening to an interesting podcast this week on SmallBizPod, it was an interview with Brad Burton of 4 Networking – and he quite rightly says:

“People buy from people before they buy products or services.”

He’s right, maybe next time I’ll pay a little more for the product and order it from Amazon (or even, perish the thought… go somewhere to buy it in person!), as I know what kind of service I’ll get from them! Maybe I just expect too much!

I was “slightly annoyed” when I started this rant, I’ve got to the end of it and realised exactly how annoyed I am!!! Hmmm I think I ought to chill out a little before getting the car!

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The author of this video clearly thinks that traceroute tells you how many people are looking at a site! Worryingly this continues to the point where he tells you that less than twenty people are currently viewing google.com (if that’s the case they’ve seriously lost some popularity!!).

The funniest part is that he does all this with so much authority.

For those that don’t know (and that’s fine so long as you’re not broadcasting the fact by pretending you do know, and being wrong), tracert (or traceroute) is used to determine all the IP addresses you pass through on your way to a server, usually there are a few “hops” within your own ISP, followed by some across the internet and then a few in the server’s datacenter, before hitting the server itself.

We use traceroute to check that packets of data are getting through to a particular server and if any of those packets are taking considerably longer than others, essentially it’s a diagnostic tool – NOT a way to view the amount of people logging on to Google!

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We’ve had almost a week of it now and I have some observations…

1. This country will never, ever, be prepared for this. Even people from countries that are used to digging their cars out of four feet of snow say it’s difficult in this country because we are just SO unprepared.
2. By law in many countries you have to clear your path and pavement in front of your home and business, doing this would reduce the risk of people slipping on pavements (they don’t grit them, so if you’ve driven to work on wonderfully gritted roads you fall over getting out of your car!).
3. Weathermen either don’t know how to react when reporting a high of –1, so they either act sarcastic or smug! Neither are appropriate – where’s that “Barbecue Summer” you promised?
4. Stockpiling helps nobody (except yourselves!) and if it thaws you’ll go out again and it will all go out of date – what a waste of money!
5. Britain does still have a sense of community and combined whinging seems to get neighbours talking!

Rant over – I’ll leave you with a photo of an igloo I found on my way home the other morning…

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As usual, I’m always on the look out for a bit of a business opportunity and when one appears I give it serious thought, so last week when I spotted a website for sale for £995 I asked for further details.

The website in question was an information site in many ways, with Google Adsense Ads, Amazon links and Clickbank links… Sounds just the sort of thing I’m interested in and when I found out it had been making close to £2000 in the last six Months that really grabbed my interest!

I’m the sort of person that likes to mitigate as much risk as possible, and having just read Theo Paphitis biography this week I was determined to make sure this was the right deal for me! A few questions later and the seller had produced me a nice little spreadsheet that suggested he had only ever spent £200 on advertising… £2000 in six months, I’m very interested – so I asked him for some proof of those numbers.

At this time the price dropped to £695, great! I enquired about escrow and asked for the proofs I required… The seller agreed to escrow payments and provided me with a Word document of his bank statement – how very trusting.

I went a little further and did some research on the domain name, it appeared to only have been registered a month ago! The explanation for this was that he had just renewed it… I hate to say it but owning a hosting company the alarm bells started to ring!

I’ve asked for screenshots of Google/Amazon or access to the account (I’d accept doing it over VNC or Netmeeting) it’s not forthcoming, I’ve gone back to the bank statement this morning and noticed it includes very few other transactions than the one I’m interested in (does this guy spend no money?). The seller can’t produce statistics on visitors for me…

It’s a shame as I was genuinely interested, and would have been interested if it was making a lot less too…
(Oh and it’s £500 now!)

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The hosting business is about to become a limited company, I’ve gone part time at work, I’ve demolished my Mum’s garden and somewhere in the midst of that I’ve found time to book a holiday!

I’ve got a busy couple of weeks until we’re away so don’t expect too much (see what I’m doing, apologising before I don’t post!) until my accounts are out of the way – I’m automating lots more this year to try to stay on top of them (he says very hopefully!).

The automation has taught me a lot though – I maybe ought to look for other people that need their Quickbooks life simplifying!

On that note – I have a list as long as your arm to start and I want to settle down with a beer this evening – so I shall catch up with you all soon…

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photo credit: Andres Rueda

As many of you know I run my own company and we’re in the proceeds of moving everything over to a limited company (for a variety of reasons but it’s just started to get a bit bigger than we expected!). This is great news and means we’re doing really well however I’ve hit a pretty major stumbling block today.

We’re in recession (or just coming out of it, depending on who you believe!), but it’s note really affected my business. If anything it’s been quite good for business, which is something we should all be pleased by.

In the process of the business moving to a limited company we’ve had to re-apply for pretty much everything (as a limited company is a legal entity in it’s own right) but my big stumbling block today has been WorldPay (the payment processor).

WorldPay

We’ve been with WorldPay for about 5-6 years, the rates aren’t that great (in fact we get a better rate through PayPal!) but we’ve been loathed to change since they’ve been very reliable during that time.

I completely understood when they said they needed me to re-apply for an account in the limited company name and promptly filled out all the details for them whilst being assured that my new account would function in the same way as the old one.

They’ve asked for far more financial details than they did when I applied all those years ago (and the numbers I’m giving them are considerably higher). Yet in their wisdom today they’ve come to this decision:

As you may already be aware where goods and/or services are paid for by credit/debit card, the card processing company becomes jointly liable with the merchant under the card scheme rules (VISA, MasterCard, etc.) for the provision of those goods and services.

During our assessment we look at many factors including the age of your business, its net worth and the goods/services you are intending to sell online in relation to the perceived risk of chargebacks*. It is designed to help us understand and determine the potential exposure for which we may be jointly liable.

On this occasion in order to proceed with your application we have found that we will need to apply a reserve to your account. The reserve level will initially be set to £2500 and represents additional security that may be required to cover our potential exposure.

Once you begin to trade, the reserve amount will be accrued from funds due to you and then, providing the reserve level has been met, we will transfer the remaining funds to your bank account in accordance with our standard terms.

£2500? What’s that all about (believe me I have asked and am awaiting a decent response), I put more business through PayPal than I do through WorldPay meaning that this is likely to take several months to accrue – during this time they won’t pay me a penny!!! This is ridiculous, and then on top of that I’ll need to pay transaction charges on each transaction (so it will take longer to hit the £2500!). That’s £2500 I could be investing back into the company… No company in their right mind can justify that surely?

Needless to say I’m looking elsewhere whilst they await my response!

The Economy

What’s all this got to do with the economy? Well I read an article this morning about starting up business on the back of a recession and will try to get around to listening to the show on listen again this week and one fact stuck with me all day….

We’re losing 120 small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) every day, but for each one of those around 11 are starting up. That’s approaching half a million new SMEs in 2009.

I’m not surprised businesses are going under when payment processing companies are doing the above. I also have a concern about how the new ones will survive when companies like WorldPay ask for this in their starting up costs!

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photo credit: Caveman 92223

My problem is this, if I’m on a pavement I expect to be able to get to where I need to – that’s what pavements are designed for isn’t it?

I get tired of people wandering and dawdling in front of me, and bumping into me from the wrong direction (clearly it’s wrong as it’s not the direction I’m walking in!!!). This was proved more than ever several weeks ago when I attended a fund-raising event my sister was taking part in, thousands of people dawdling or walking in the wrong direction!!

My Proposal is simple, we create a set of rules for pavements!

I’m not proposing that if you want to walk in one direction you can only walk on one side of the street, but it’s not far off that idea, and obviously if an accident were to happen with the below that could be a contingency!

It’s simple:

We paint a line down the middle of pavements everywhere (see there’s jobs there for someone!), OK not everywhere – just busy pavements (a system of A-pavements and B-pavements is now forming in my mind!). If you want to dawdle with your ice-cream or bag of chips you dawdle close to the shop windows where you can gaze into the shops. If you want to move quickly you move closer to the line down the middle.

The same principle applies on the other side of the line except that dawdlers are actually closer to the line so they can still see in the shop windows. I know what you’re saying – what if they want to see closer? That’s easy – they should move past the window of interest, indicate appropriately (hand in the air or something) and cross the lane of A-B walkers in their fast lane to join the dawdlers on the other side – passing the shop again or even stopping to enter the shop.

photo credit: Toni_V

Rant over – Thoughts?

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