We’re just about settled in to our lovely new office last month on Oakfield Road just off Whiteladies in the heart of Clifton Bristol. The light is good, we have more space and we nolonger have a shop-front so people don’t come in looking for paint or iPod repairs!

Things I’ve learnt from moving:

Simpleweb has a new website. Hurrray… It’s built using the Yahoo YUI CSS grids/fonts framework and of course our very own Simple webtoolkit, allowing us to have incoming RSS feeds from okcool, video from Blip.tv, and splendid contextual editing of all the pages, while still being accessible to all.

We’re very happy with the design of the site and now over the next few months we’ll organically grow the copy into something that represents not just where we are now, but where we’re heading and how we’ll get there. I’m not quite sure why it is but when you’re building something for yourself it always seems to take longer, is this true of every profession?

We’re very happy to see both Bristol Wine & Food Fair and Attix Lounge Bar already performing very well in Google rankings, only a few months after their launch.

A large part of this is down to the quality of the semantic markup we use on all SimpleWeb web sites. We are very committed to ensuring that all SimpleWeb sites are indexed quickly by Google after launch and will be adding further services for web marketing in the future to strengthen this and give our customers a competitive edge over the competition.

Bristol Wine & Food Fair performance on Google.co.uk

Number one for the search bristol wine and food fair

Within the top three for the search bristol wine fair

Within the top four for the search wine and food fair

If you’re in to wine and food (and who isn’t?) and you’re after something to do in Bristol in July, then this looks like it’s going to be a great event. I for one will be attending, pint glass in hand!

Attix lounge bar performance on Google.co.uk

Number one for the search attix lounge bar

Within the top three for the search champagne bar bristol

Within the first two pages for the search cocktail bar bristol – I’m interested to see how long it takes on this one before it appears above the rather excellent Hausbar

I haven’t yet been to Attix, but with Park Street so close to our office it won’t be long. I’ll make sure to blog about the place when I know more.

Have you ever written a blog post, press release or tutorial not really thinking about who is going to read it?

I have. Recently.

Last week I wrote a post for the okcool blog “quickly” announcing two new small business websites that we’ve just completed. I didn’t think about the copy, the audience or even the medium itself.

Re-reading the post a week later after a friend pointed it out to me, I realised how badly I’d conveyed not only the work that we’d done but I’d failed to mention how happy both clients were.

This is because I just wanted to make sure that I’d ticked off my “write post about website” to-do list item and that the achievement of crossing something off of my list was of more importance than my readers gratification and to a certain extent my business.

So… What now?

A re-write…

The first sentence is the most important, if we can get the reader to the end of it then we can worry about the next one, and so on.

We also need to know who our reader is. OKCOOL has quite a techie following but now that we syndicate the Simpleweb posts by RSS to the Simpleweb site itself, a lot of readers will be potential customers.

The new version, while still not up to par with a professional copywriter, certainly offers more information and is easier to read.

You can see the original post here, and the re-written post here

You judge which you think is better.

What does a slick new champagne bar and a large wine and food festival in Bristol have in common?

Both sites have launched in the last few weeks and both clients are very happy with the results.

First up, ATTIX the new Bristol based Champagne Lounge Bar, wanted an expensive looking site with lots of white space and strong use of spot colour to match the interior of the venue. They also wanted to ensure that it was very easy to update the pages as they’d had problems in the past with keeping a site up to date.

ATTIX have since got back to us letting us know that the website paid for itself in the first two weeks (through bookings) and that they are very happy, wishing to extend the site with additional features already.

Finally, The Bristol Wine & Food Fair, an upcoming wine and food festival in the heart of Bristol. Chris and Mike from Bristol Event Management wanted a stylish website that would reflect their ambitious plans to the sponsors, exhibitors and ultimately the general public. A lot of the functionality of the site has been “muted” until nearer the time. So look froward to being able to buy tickets, browse the exhibitors, meet the Chefs’ and lots more.

Mike recently sent us a really nice note stating that he “wouldn’t hesitate to recommend us”, which is all that we could ask for really.

We wish both sites and businesses every success in the new year.

There’s a lot of work around in the web industry at the moment. Everyone I know in the industry will testify to this. This is making it very easy for freelancers to pick and choose the projects they work on. The work is plentiful and lucrative – why work for anyone in full time employment?

I’m wondering if this could in fact spell doom and gloom for a lot of small web businesses?The only real options for them might be:

• Get lucky – find the right people at the right price and keep them on board with perks they won’t find freelancing.
• Move up the ladder – charge significantly more so that they can afford to keep a regular pool of freelancers busy.
• Go pop – as profit margins narrow and then vanish as freelancers ask for more money. Inevitably, this would lead to more freelancers going in to the market.

Obviously, if this happens, where will the freelancers then go?

They’ll be stuck working for large organizations, lots of corporate shit to deal with, lengthy payment settlement (I’ve previously heard of someone going bankrupt recently because his largest customer switched their payment terms from 30 to 90 days). In short, they’ll be back to square one. The cake will be all eaten, and it will be time to bake another.

I suspect what will happen in parallel as freelancers see this happening is they start to form small businesses themselves. And the cycle will begin again!

I have freelanced before so I know most of the benefits, and I’m certainly very familiar with all the draw-backs. Here are a few reasons why I choose to be part of a company instead:

1. I’m stronger in a team. Working with the same people on a regular basis allows me to identify and improve my weaker areas and it also lets me feel I’m contributing to the skills of others.
2. I’m building something. It’s difficult to get rich as a freelancer, if you take yourself out of the picture, you probably don’t have anything to sell. As a company, everyone involved should be pulling in the same direction so that, at some point, we are worth far more than the sum of our parts.
3. It abstracts me from a lot of the problems. I do feel that I came off slightly better in this area. Mark takes a lot (ok, perhaps an understatement!) of the hassle out of running a company. He takes care of everything I wasn’t good at when it was just me. This leads me to focus on the stuff I am good at, which is hopefully beneficial to both the company and myself.
4. You will have bad days. Some times your brain just can’t get on the job. It’s helpful to have people around you that are trying to get to the same finish line. Don’t leave a fallen man behind and all that!
5. It’s fun. We have and are being presented with projects and opportunities that just wouldn’t be available to us as freelancers. It really feels that we are building something that could stand alone without us. Slowly, but surely.

I think we’re all in a good place right now in the web industry but I do hope that a bit more talent comes in to the industry that can see the benefits of joining a small business.

I’d like to think that most company founders are not actually evil and just out to make money out of their staff. I know that anyone with the right skills and enthusiasm to pull together with us at the moment could see big rewards in the future; but it’s difficult finding the right people.

For the last month or so we have been involved in a large scale overhaul of a public facing website. The site in question was pushing the 1000 page mark and contains plenty of large PDF documents.

Unusually for a site of this size there has been very little in the way of server side script (apart from an integration with Google search that we’ve done – love google!), it’s all been HTML.

When we put the new site live, there was a very high demand for it and some of the documents that were available. Unfortunately, the dedicated server it was on ground to a halt! It was frustrating because we weren’t hosting it ourselves and had no access to the box, we were told that the server was running fine, but clearly it wasn’t.

When we thought about the problem for a while, it was fairly obvious what was happening. The server itself was almost certainly fine because there was little or no server side processing to do as it was all static HTML. It should have been able to serve up 100’s of pages a second without an issue. Nope, the problem was purely bandwidth.

It’s difficult to tell exactly how high the demand was initially as it wasn’t our server, but we suspect that, within a few hours, there was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 requests for a 10mb document. Even spread over a 1 hour period, this meant anything from about 3mb to 30mb a second was trying to go through the server. Assuming the server had, at best, 100mbit throughput from end to end, this just wasn’t going to happen.

My first thought was to throttle IIS to only allow a trickle of data per connection. This might have solved it but would have resulted in painfully slow downloads for the users and without knowing the actual demand, it was difficult to gauge how heavily to throttle each connection.

Our solution was very simple, and it offered immediate resolution. We moved all of the key documents on to the Amazon S3 storage platform. With S3 you pay for what you store and transfer and there’s no limit on how much you can store or transfer. Also, being Amazon, there is no shortage of bandwidth.

After the slightly difficult process of updating the live site (it was of course still being hammered while we were trying to make the update) everything was resolved almost instantly and since the change the site has been performing well. In the last few days we have seem usage from S3 reach almost the 50gig mark… and it’s cost about £3!

Thanks Amazon!

You may or may not know that in the states their is currently a court case against Target from the National Federation of the Blind. Target’s website isn’t accessible and it looks like not only will they lose but they may also set a precedent…

As Techcrunch rightly points out, Californian start-ups with their new fangled Ajax wizardry will have to be careful of their implementation. Of course they should not be so lazy in the first place and get it right from the beginning… Yes it does take extra thought and planning, but the benefits of an accessible site are enormous.

Hopefully this will start to get other states/countries/companies on the case too, but please don’t do a quick fix like showcase cinema’s – please, please, please don’t.

We’ve spent so much time pretending that we really are cool with this music industry lark that we’ve forgotten to mention the other stuff that is happening around here at the moment. SimpleWeb has some cool things afoot and we’re getting ready to test them.

The first thing that we’re getting ready is the new SimpleWeb website, the current site frankly, is piss poor. It was rushed and designed as a last minute job, which usually seems to be the case with small businesses of all types. We always seem to sort ourselves out last on the premise that there is always something ‘more important to do’. We all know that’s bollocks but we all seem to do it, so we’re in the process of remedying this. The new site is cleaner, leaner and shows off who we are and what we do.

Secondly we’re getting ready to beta test our “website and client manager”. We needed a way to manage clients and their clients, all of whom manage websites, email addresses, domain names, etc… There’s nothing worse than being a small agency or sole trading designer and keeping all of your client and web information in an excel spreadsheet and forgetting to update it, losing it, updating the wrong one, forgetting what changes you’ve made and countless other paths to client doom. So we’ve created a way to manage all of those things from one simple interface, while it’s primarily intended to look after SimpleWeb sites built and hosted by us, it can be used by anyone to keep track of what’s what in their website design business, all for free.

Testing begins next week once the basic stats module has been finished. We’ll then begin rolling it out to our existing clients and get as much feedback as possible. We’ll then start looking at changing the look and feel of the interface as currently it shares a striking resemblance to Basecamp, which is no bad thing in my book.

We’ve had a few posts on ok cool about SimpleWeb and I’ve been asked a few times what’s it all about, so here goes.

SimpleWeb Ltd was set up by Tom and Mark earlier this year to fill a few gaps in the now quite mature website creation market.

The first of these is the “my friend makes websites, he’ll do it for you for a few hundred quid” type sites. More often than not for a small business these turn into an absolute disaster. Your mate’s mate creates you an ok looking website in about four weeks, sticks it on Fasthosts (GoDaddy, etc), charges you three hundred quid and then disappears into the ether. When you want a page changed or a new email address; if you can find him (or her), they’ll charge you a silly amount and take two weeks to do it. Sounds familiar?

As SimpleWeb we figured that we could remedy this.

Let’s create the simplest online “page editor” that we possibly can, offer full hosting, email, domain name, a few getting started guides and offer it as a package for a fixed easy to swallow fee.

Small business’s get a quality product that’s future proof, easy to update (themselves), affordable and still get a certain level of support they could never get from “your mate’s mate”.

So far we feel that we are delivering on this promise and have a fair few happy customers. Our “page editor” is becoming quite sophisticated and is already doing things that nobody else seems to be doing, it’s still early days and currently only works in Firefox, but it is progressing nicely. Tom and his super techyness has even solved a problem that the clever people at Tiny MCE couldn’t, allowing almost perfect wysiwyg in a browser; which we should see added into Tiny MCE distribution in the future…

The only problem with this process driven solution is the design stage, no matter how much a client is paying, whether it’s £500 or £5000, it still has to look and feel right for the client… If we offer them a template, they feel that their individuality has been comprised. If we completely custom design from scratch we affect our profitability. The solution here we feel is in the law of averages and clever code and XHTML management.

The other main gap that we see is for freelance designers and small to medium sized agencies, but I think that I’ve written enough for now, I’ll save that for another post…