We have just launched a new online marketing website, The Online Marketeer. We have only just started it and just written a couple of articles but check back soon for more! Where as the company blog serves tell people what’s happening with the company, and what’s going on in the web design business we hope that The Online Marketeer will be a place where people can learn all about the marketing aspects of what we do.

We have recently been advertising a positing for a freelance PHP developer to join our team. So far the response has been great with dozens of applicants and we have contacted a couple. The problem now is finding the right person from all of these applicants!

As you may not have know already we always hire freelancers – fitting the right person to the right job. Not only is this cheaper than hiring a team of full time web designers and developers, a saving that gets past on to the client, it also means we can hire for specific tasks. For example a client may ask for a flash website. This is not a request we get often as we prefer sites that perform well in search engines, however if a client does specify this we can pool together an ad-hoc team geared towards flash development. For the one or two projects that require flash in a year, we could never justify the £30K salary of a flash developer since the earning potential would be so low. What other companies do is try to make their designers and developers do a bit of everything: jack of all trades, master of none. This is far from ideal and you really should be hiring experts to developer websites on a bespoke basis.

We are currently developing a free company website service. It has occurred to us that in the current clime, many start-up companies are simply not in the position to afford the design and build of a bespoke website. We hope to help solve this problem with CompanySite.org.

Although there are other free website services available on the net – most of them are extremely unsightly and barely function. We hope to rectify this.

The site will be funded mostly by advertising but there will also be a premium service for those that wish to have a website at an affordable price.

It’s all very hush hush at the moment, so I can’t reveal too many details except that we hope to have the system completed soon.

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.

We just launched NME.

“NME provide a national electrical and building maintenance service custom-built for the foodservice industry. The service portfolio encompasses a range of services from leaking taps to electrical safety testing, all available in one place within a controlled budget.”

We recently launched aggora.co.uk – a site for a company that are a “specialist innovator in the provision and delivery of catering equipment solutions to the foodservice industry.”

AGGORA have some really big clients under their belt including BT, Vodafone, Sainsbury’s, Goodwood Race Course, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Oxford University to name but a few.

I am really pleased with how the site has turned out, no small part of down to our designer Dave who has done some great work for us lately.

It’s not often one of your clients’ gets on TV – especially not such a big and well known program. We designed the popular betting website for Richard Dunwoody and his team last year. It has changed a bit over the last year or so but the basic design is still pretty much the same.

There is a lot more movement and advertisements on the site than we usually like to deal with but betting is a very particular field with certain requirements. Once the site was designed the client was given full reign and is fully responsible for the content. All in all the process was a steep learning curve for Voodoochilli, a difficult but very rewarding challenge.

Richard of course is accustomed to being in the lime light, he’s been to the south pole, appeared on a host of TV programs, and of course he’s won the Grand National twice!

Sites we have built have appeared on the TV before as well as in a host of magazines and papers, but it’s always great to see one of your sites or clients in the media. Web designers and developers are not given much praise generally and we tend to work in the shadows so we like to see our cutomers doing well.

Jumping on the proverbial band wagon, I recently started to use Twitter. I quite like this format which is limited to just 160 charters, microblogging I believe it’s called. It suits our busy lifestyles just to write a few sentences when something comes to mind. I find it interesting that it uses 140 characters instead of another number, say 200. Presumably this is because of the fact that mobile phones are limited to 160 letters, and this leaves enough space for the entire message to be sent by text. I find this curious because with all of the advances in technology since SMS messaging was standardised in 1985, why hasn’t this number increased? I think we can safely put this down to profit for the network providers. Twitter itself is highly compatible with mobile devices. Using SMS technology you can update your Twitter page from anywhere. I’m working on a website at the moment that will also need to be updated vis mobile devices. It occurred to me that not only was 160 characters not enough, but that nearly all phones these days are web and email compatible anyway. I believe SMS technology will one day become redundant, I believe this regardless of the statistical fact that people are sending more and more texts each day. The simple fact is that a SMS message, whilst convenient is and expensive and limited way to communicate. An analogy is the BBC licence I have to pay for here in the UK. It seems to me that with more and more people using the internet to be informed and entertained, as well as the constant increases in broadband speeds it’s only a matter of time before we can get all of our television programs online. It’s a cheaper, more modern and more diverse way of communicating. This is not to say that the BBC will cease trying to charge people for the privilege.

One thing that I don’t yet understand on Twitter is why people follow me that I have never met and have no interest in. I think that people must just go though people’s lists and press the follow button without giving it a seconds thought. I guess it’s one way of promoting their own accounts. If someone follows me I do check them out and if I find what they have to offer an interest I will add them, I will not do it however just to promote my own Twitter account.

The other day I received an email from Google. A small transcript is below.

Dear site owner or webmaster of voodoochilli.net,

While we were indexing your web pages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en_GB. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Often, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

It goes on to say that they are going to remove my site voodoochilli.net from the index for at least 30 days.

Within 30 minutes of being alerted to the fact that one of my sites had been hacked I managed to remove the spam and change my passwords as well as other security precautions to stop it happening again. Still, it didn’t matter, my site has now had all 35 thousand pages removed from its index without any notice. Now, you may wonder why the title of this blog piece says “for no reason”, after all there was spam on my site, right? Wrong. There was spam on www.voodoochilli.net’s home page, but not on any of the other pages which make up the majority of the site, and more importantly from a business perspective there was not any spam on my completely unrelated company website http://design.voodoochilli.net

I am completely furious with Google. For almost 10 years I have been sticking to Google’s guidelines and being a good boy. I have worked really hard to get my sites indexed in Google. And one day, one of my most popular sites eventually gets a very minor spam attack (3 words and a link) which was a long time coming considering the site gets tens of thousands of visitors per day, and Google deletes all of my hard work just like that. It kind of makes you wonder why Google would take such a hard line. Sure spam needs to be fought but 30 minutes notice and a deletion of thousands of pages and my company website as an additional punishment? Come on! Other people might be considering paying Google for advertising at this point in an attempt to keep traffic levels high. Well it just so happens that we are inundated with work right now, and if anything need a little less to come in so it suits me just fine. I will however be looking at our advertising strategy in the future and will be looking at alternatives from Google in regards to adwords and adsense. The combined revenue that Google sees from my company is substantial and I don’t think I have exactly been rewarded for being a good customer.

I am also angry about the fact that they deleted all of the pages from Voodoochilli.net. There are currently over 8,000 registered members on that site, each with their own portfolio, their own little website and sub domain. Should they get reprimanded because some jerk managed a bit of sql injection on the home page? Because in 10 years there was one and only one successful attempt to put spam onto the site?  It’s not like it was hurting anyone anyway. I once received an email from Facebook that directed me to someone’s profile that was hijacked. I am sure the same email was sent to hundreds if not thousands of other people and would have been reported. I don’t see Google deleting all of the pages there for over a month. Most likely the admin team would have received a polite call from Google telling them about it and advising what action to take. We have all seen spammy comments on Wordpress and Blogger hosted blogs. How mcuh would it have cost Google to call me before dexinging my site? Fifty pence? How about just an email with a days notice? I suspect they would have been sued if a site like Facebook, MySpace, WordPress or Digg was just deindexed like that, sites that often get spam placed on them. That’s the problem here. Voodoochilli.net is a pretty big site, but we are small fry when compared to the people that Google really don’t want to piss off. All I can do is have a little moan here and halt advertising with Google. Well my moan is over and I do feel slightly better because of it. I just hope someone from Google actually reads this and learns from it. Remember your mantra, Google -  “Don’t be evil”. Maybe its time your had a big long look at yourself as I’m seeing ideals being broken.

How have you been through the recession? It seems to me that being small, efficient and most importantly smart helps during times like this.

It’s been really hard lately keeping up with all these blogs I run lately let alone do much personal work. This is a shame as I have quite a lot I want to get done! The reason for this, believe it or not is that we have been inundated with work. A client of mine believes this is because smaller companies like ours are very attractive during times of financial crisis as our overall costs are lower than bigger companies with larger overheads.

Although it is true that by being competitive a company is likely to survive where more bloated companies cannot, I do not believe this is the only reason smaller companies are doing well right now. I think it all has to do with people being smarter with their money. Companies need to make money – this we all know, and when there is a downturn in the economy it becomes harder and harder for the majority of businesses to keep going as at the end of the day they are all affected in some way by the the demand and disposable income of the general public. When times are hard it affects the average family quicker than anyone and this has a knock-on affects to nearly all business. People just don’t spend as much when they are feeling the pinch.

So with shrinking advertising budgets due to lower turnovers what should a business do to survive? Keep pumping more money into the same methods of selling? Or try something smarter? It really does amaze me that some clients approach me with successful businesses that have only recently considered getting an online presence. A website can not only act as a non paid salesman for a company, it can also be used as a tool to increase efficiency and do many of the tasks that normally take a lot of time, money and effort. Why post or fax documentation that is needed before a sale when your website can email it straight to your customer, for free and within minuets? That’s just one example, and I am sure you can think of loads yourself, you get the point, I think this kind of thinking will benefit companies prepared to adapt to a changing financial climate. It’s survival of the smartest.

Today I closed my account with Facebook. I could write a dissertation on the reasons I hate Facebook so much, but to keep things short and sweet I thought I would write a little list. Even closing my account was hard: it is closed apparently, but I can reactivate it meaning all my data is still stored on their servers. So essentially its not closed, its just not visible. Anyway, to the list:

1. The “You have not registered yet” message. God this annoys me big time and its the number one reason I have closed my account. How presumptuous is that? You accidentally mistype your password or use your other email address and the site assumes you have never registered with Facebook before. Who is that stupid? I can imagine it now: “Hmm I was sure I was a member…maybe I was getting mixed up with Ebay – they are both websites after all?”

EDIT: Maybe the facebook team were listening to me as they have got rid of this

2. Vampires. Bloody vampires and Ninjas. At first I thought it was different, kind of interesting, but now I realise pressing a “bite” button on a website just doesn’t do it for me.

3. The amount of email. No wonder Facebook gets so much traffic – the sheer amount of emails about said vampires gives my spam filter a hard time.

4. People contacting me I was hiding from. Well OK, its a social networking utility, but I don’t like it when cousins I didn’t like as a kid start sending me messages.

5. Vulgar fun wall pictures and video clips. Maybe I’m alone on this one but in my mind a good user experience isn’t spending half an hour deleting badly drawn pictures of dicks.

6. It’s a waste of time. Facebook is inherently addictive – this is the sites main purpose, to keep you coming back. Its not really about connecting people, its about traffic. I have spent way too many hours of my life on that website and I want them back!

7. Integrated applications. Facebook comes with a cool little API allowing developers to create web applications that integrate into the site. The only problem is most of them are buggy. Every time I try and add a little app someone has written it always says there was an error.

8. Privacy concerns. They have a hell of a lot of data about people, their names, their friends, photos, which school they went to, where they work – the list goes on. There are 1.7 billion photos of people for god sake! A good hacker could make a lot of money…But its not that I’m worried about. As they put it: “We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.” Responsible is a lose term and open to personal interpretation.

9. I didn’t think of it. Enough said.

10. Gifts, pokes and all those other stupid little things that make it annoying!!!

My account is finally closed and I won’t be logging on again! Oh, I just remembered all of my photos are stored on there and I need to get them back…

EDIT: I’ve had to open it again…God damit! It seems people I know now use the site to actaully organise things like weddings and events. Who’d thought…