Voodoochilli Design

It seems that with inflation growing and allegedly set to rise dramatically over the next financial year along with VAT at an all time high, many companies are increasing their rates in an effort to make ends meet. Our overheads including costs for phone, hosting and internet services have gone up considerably over the last couple of years. We are desperately resisting the urge to increase our prices in line with the trend and have managed to keep our rates fixed as of 2009. The main problem for us is not these spiralling costs, but rather short term, but expensive cash flow issues caused by some clients that pay late. On any project we have many costs which we have to pay for upfront (staff, general overheads, wages etc.) and when we are paid late this means we have to borrow from the bank to ensure we can pay all of the costs associated with that particular project. This accrues interest and astronomical fees which are not accounted for within the original quotation of work.

Like most web design companies we do charge a late fee which for us is currently 13% per month and this does cover many, but not all of the costs involved in short term borrowing. Anyone that has gone overdrawn will know that short term, unauthorised loans can be very, very expensive. It really is the case that going £20 overdrawn can sometimes cost hundreds of pounds if not dealt with quickly, and these fees seem to be higher on business accounts. This problem is exasperated on very small projects whereby the 13% fee only accounts for a very small percentage of the borrowing costs. Even when late payments result in minor borrowing from our own working capital overdraft, this can still be costly when combined with the efforts and time required to chase up the payment.

We were recently interview by Advanced Photoshop Magazine for an article about creative self promotion. The article talks about various creative ways of promoting your work including our chilli sauce which we sent out to many people including the editors at Imagine Publishing. There is a nice big photo of our sauce in the article and a decent mention so we are pleased with the outcome.

We have been featured in this magazine a few times before, along with others, but it’s always nice when a marketing campaign proves to be successful. The sauce campaign was a big hit with our clients as well an it brought in some extra work which is always nice. We will have to think about our next promotion very soon!

If you want to read the article for yourself, the magazine is out now and can be brought from any decent UK magazine store such as WH Smiths or online.

Every web designer that I know (and I know quite a few) is frequently asked “how much does a website cost?”. The question is a complicated one since it depends on many factors. I like the analogous question “how much does a car cost?”. The answer depends on whether the vehicle you want is a brand new Ferrari or a 1972 Robin Reliant. Website costs vary just as much, and some people will build you a website for £400 and others will charge you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds depending on who you hire and the specifications of the brief.

When I first started working as a freelance web designer, about 10 years ago, I was extremely naive. It was only several years later that I realised just how much I had undervalued my own position as a web professional. I was building websites for just £500 each and earning less than the minimum wage. To be fair, I wasn’t very good initially – and counter to popular opinion it takes a long time to become a professional web designer. Regardless, it didn’t seem right that after spending over 6 years in further and higher education that I should be earning less than a bin man. (No disrespect to the bin men, they are the smart ones for they didn’t spend a decade training how to do their jobs before receiving their first pay cheque.)

What was the point of all of that work, and even worst, the tens of thousands of pounds of debt I had acquired paying for this so very expensive education. Even as a lone freelancer and with my then minimal overheads my earnings did not cover my bills and I supplemented my income with a (better paying) part time job. It didn’t occur to me that I was actually worth more than £5 per hour, after all I loved building websites. In time as I become more experienced in the art of running a business I gradually put my prices up to cover my expenses and make a marginal profit in-line with the local competition. I was eventually able to rent an office and take on staff whilst continuing to offer a constantly improving service at a reasonable price.

Wow. We have literally been rushed off our feet the last month or so. At one point, we even had a sign on our website telling visitors that we were no longer taking on work! Drastic action indeed. Luckily though we have have made some major progress with our existing workload as well as taking on a new designer which has helped greatly. Two sites have been launched in the last week alone and I will write a more detailed update when I have some spare time! Back to the grindstone!

Last Thursday was a very stressful day for many web designers in the UK, and we were no exception. In fact, I would argue that we had a worst time than most. Bluesquare, based in Maidenhead, is one of the UK’s largest datacenters. For those that don’t know a datacenter is a large complex of servers – literally home of the internet. On Thursday last week, an incident involving a fire alarm and strict safety protocols resulted in the datacenter being shut down. Twitter was a hive of activity with reports of fire brigades and less serious ones such as people claiming their websites were on fire. Regardless, millions of websites were offline for several hours.

Although many people found the whole incident rather amusing, this was not the case for us. Not only were all of our websites offline for over 5 hours – we were being represented in a rather important meeting at the time. Teams of people from the UK, Romania, Slovenia, Greece and Germany had all flown to Athens along with members from The Culture Programme of the European Union who were funding our latest project. They would have collectively travelled thousands of miles, and instead of viewing the private beta of our website, would have witnessed a rather dull “Server not found” page. We were not happy. More importantly, they were not happy! Several feverish and rather expensive phone calls later and we managed to explain that there was nothing we could do and it was simply a case of waiting it out.

BlueSqaure - one of the UK's largest datacenters.

Eventually, with no sign of the site coming back online any time soon, the meeting was postponed until the following day. It didn’t end there though! Halfway through the demonstration of our website  the internet cut out due to ISP strikes in Greece! In the end, the meeting finally concluded and most of the partner countries involved in the project got a fairly decent look at the website.

It is a fact that with technology, sometimes things just go wrong and there is nothing you can do about it. It is just life and you just have to take the rough with the smooth. At the time it may not seem like things will get better but they generally do. The internet outage suffered by us and many web professionals was a freak incident not likely to happen again any time soon, and we can happily say that all of our websites are up and running smoothly (including this one) and the project mentioned above is progressing very nicely and should be launched in a couple of weeks.

Recently we sent out about 100 bottles of hot chilli sauce to our existing clients as well some to potential clients we would like to work with. Feedback has been very positive and it has also generated some new work which is never a bad thing. As well as tasting lovely, each bottle has a special code on it that enables existing and new customers to a 10% discount on their next job with us. We still have a couple of bottles left that we will be sending out to a few more potential clients.

Check out more on our chilli sauce page.

We have just launched a new site for our clients, www.familidrugsupport.com. The redesign holds a special importance to our company as it was in fact the first commercial website built by founder of Voodoochilli, Harry O’Connor way back in 2003. For years he has wanted to redesign the site encompassing a more up to date approach to web design, both visually and technically and we are all very pleased with the results.

The site was actually built with the aid of our 50% charity discount, halving the project cost. Contrary to the beliefs of many in the web design industry, charities have very limited funds and offering a discount can sometimes be the difference between a charity having a professional designed website or not.

The new site features a brand new design, replacing the now very dated one that was online since 2003. People can now make donations via PayPal, connect using various social sites such as Facebook and more. However, the biggest single upgrade has been the addition of a custom built Content Management System allowing staff at FDS to update the content themselves, keeping it fresh while at the same time reducing long term costs.

We are pleased with the results and hope people continue to find the site a useful resource.