10 Jul 2009
I’m currently in the process of trying to roll together a few hosting accounts of mine that have unnecessarily been running for the past few years as I’ve discovered ‘better’ services but not bothered rolling the old accounts over to. I’m probably losing around $700 a year because of this, and basically killing any revenue from hosting for other clients by making the whole process so unmanageable.
It’s frustrating, because it’s self-inflicted, relatively fixable, and a prime example of terrible stewardship on my part. It trickles out of my account in minor transactions of around $20, and I just don’t miss the money as much as I should. The problem is, if the transfer gets screwed up, various people dependent particularly on email (less so websites — they can withstand being down for a period of time, but for most clients of mine email is THE crucial application) cease to function until the DNS mends itself.
For this reason, I’ve not been brave (foolish?) enough to entrust the task to a service such as ODesk or RentACoder, even though either has the potential to totally take the headache away for a pretty minimal cost. I know that the odds of something going wrong between the exposure of core hosting passwords to strangers, in a process that is the web equivalent of a heart bypass, are pretty unacceptably high to simply palm off to some stranger for a chunk of change. Part of the problem is the kind of business continuity capabilities faced by many of my clients aren’t such that service notifications provide any particular benefit: it’s not as though they have any particular remedy for ‘scheduled maintenance’ in terms of notifying clients, as, unlike larger businesses, their websites are not frequently visited as first point of contact for vast numbers of existing and prospective clients of their own, and public apologies or notifications are meaningless.
Similarly, the scope of client education for such a minor undertaking is itself quite formidable — this sort of outage is highly occasional and the clients are so varied that there are no particular processes in place for dealing with it. Micro web agencies aren’t generally well equipped to do this sort of thing, simply as a byproduct of the nature of the provider/client relationship. In my work with larger businesses (especially where SaaS is a core offering) where the relationship is less provider/client and more embedded (i.e. I don’t end up functioning as an external party!) we have of course formulated plans for continuity and notification, but this cannot be the case as simply or readily for smaller, more fragmented organisations.
These issues have produced something of a perfect storm, where minor recurrent losses are the path of least resistance in a situation that requires a fair amount of (non-financial, tangible and intangible) investment to correct course. This, combined with the fact that I don’t have enough clients to justify writing migration code, and the general awfulness (particularly the glacial slowness)of WHM/other proprietary host management software, has meant I’ve yet to embark on an exercise with little visible benefit. Over 50% of this task is stuff you can’t outsource, or at least shouldn’t: client education and maintaining relationships.
Small business owners: how do you balance this need for process improvement and cost saving with the reality of day-to-day busyness and your obligations as a provider?
08 Jul 2009
The Government of New South Wales, Australia’s largest state and economy and home to over half a million ASIC registered businesses, has recently failed on the web front. This is not the norm, hence my writing about it.
Their website, License.NSW, currently offers only business name registration services as of this new financial year (July 1st in Australia), while all other licensing types that it used to provide for have been moved to the rather attractive new website, NSW Government Licensing Service. Both are purportedly operated by the Department of Fair Trading. Domain name confusion aside, the upgrading of all licensing types except for the one most useful to the bulk of NSW citizens is bizarre.
Consider that figure of the ASIC registered companies alone — that excludes all non-incorporated businesses in NSW — and divide by the three years for which their NSW business name registration is valid. There are over 160,000 individuals using the old website every year, or about 450 transactions a day.
As a general rule, Governments in Australia do an excellent job of at least attempting to provide a good web presence. Our federal government has setup as part of (ironically) the Department of Finance and Deregulation regulations for Web Publishing, and recently launched Government 2.0 Taskforce (taking much from recent developments in the United States particularly) — they’re not clueless.
That’s why it’s doubly disappointing to see bad policy decisions impacting technology rollout. Back in 2003, when the first License.NSW site was launched, business name registration was the first service to go live. Now, for whatever reason, it is the last and only service not yet integrated into a NSW-wide, inter-departmental licensing system.
Notably, the new website states a capacity target of December 2009 of 250 people online simultaneously. Managing 1.7 million licenses (most of these annual) across a variety of license types should require a capacity of less than 200 simultaneous users/hour. In light of the fact that they are hoping only for 25% use of the service over offline means, and that figure drops to a meagre 50 simultaneous sessions. Even accepting usage at peak times of the day and (financial) year, it’s probably not a question of capacity, even including the additional 450 transactions a day business name licensing would contribute.
At the very least, assuming it takes only ten minutes to process each additional application manually (fairly generous, I think!), the savings of around ten full time employees required to manually keep on top of things should pay for the systems development cost! Assuming employees only cost $50,000/year each (conservative considering compulsory 9% superannuation in Australia, plus office space, leave entitlements, etc.), if only a quarter of users register online that’s a recurring saving of $250,000. If I ran the Department of Fair Trading, I’d be giving whoever runs the licensing side of things a pretty big kick up the backside to spend at least that amount to get more people registering online. It WILL pay for itself — particularly seeing how this part of your Department operates on a user-pays system. Currently, offline registration comes in at $152, generating at least $24 million in revenue annually. If you can kill the offline processing costs and keep the bulk of that revenue — or reduce costs and stimulate innovation and investment in NSW — it would surely be irresponsible not to.
As a user and tax-payer, therefore, I demand change here.
At present, the hideousness of the website and the half-half state of online license registration and renewal in NSW is a pretty large disincentive. As for change management, for a service people return to use once every three years, there’s no great need for concern over keeping users on board. You’ll have totally forgotten how it “used to” work by the next time you need to use it: this suggests that any resistance is purely internal.
Here’s the reason for noticing this at all: it’s not the norm. In general, Government in Australia actually does an excellent job of producing websites. There are good, clear guidelines developed by intelligent, well-respected web practitioners, and, when these are heeded the results are globally of a high standard.
Additionally, it grates when all the clichéd stereotypes about glacial public services are revealed to be true: it’s not as though this is a project of minor benefit, or for which there is no obvious financial benefit. Just do it. If you’re seeking a vendor to make it happen, use the NSW Government’s efficient eTendering service… or send me a message once I’ve jumped through the hoops and registered this new business name & associated company!
Only half-joking.
08 Jul 2009
My friends over at EvolvedHD just launched a new website for their burgeoning event production empire down in Victoria. It’s a clear, clean microsite with a clear presentation of services offered and an effective call to action with contact information prominently featured on every page (there are only four!)
Notably, the site is very wide (>1200px). As the web evolves we are observing an ever increasing standard width for desktop versions of websites — for some, this poses current issues as individuals gradually shift to widescreen platforms. For others, it represents the inexorable march away from old technologies towards the new!
While this poses certain problems for mobile clients, etc., even these devices are increasingly capable of either linearising or providing useful interfaces (multi-touch, etc.) for making screen content accessible in mobile contexts. Here, the need for good information architecture cries out even louder than technical considerations. Browsing the Internet mobile is an arduous task on even mobile websites, so the best thing you can do as an author is reduce the necessary depth of content to make information rapidly accessible for all user agents.
In the case of the EvolvedHD website, the inclusion of contact details at the top left of every page effectively fulfills all likely applications of their website in a mobile context.
Consider more than just the desktop when designing your website. Increasingly, even low-depth websites are being called upon for mobile access as people seize the convenience of anywhere, anytime Internet. Stop making your users jump through hoops, and start giving them what they want, sooner. It’ll do wonders for your Internet-based business.
08 Jul 2009
Continuing today’s observations about a small website, consider that web users read almost all of a page only if it is 25 words or less.
100% of you should’ve made it through the above: at least some of you stopped reading after the first sentence!
06 Jul 2009
Bold/italic text is one of the few parts of Microsoft Word styling that designers actually lament the loss of when transferring content from Word into InDesign. Word styles are generally poorly used/abused, and accordingly the default is to throw them all out when importing text. Here’s how to avoid losing the baby with the bathwater.
In InDesign, press ⌘+K (Ctrl + K) to bring up the Preferences dialog, then click through to the last pane, “Clipboard Handling”. At the bottom of this pane, under “When Pasting Text and Tables from Other Applications”, set Paste to “All Information (Index Markers, Swatches, Styles, etc.)
Some Word styling will now import — watch carefully to make sure nothing too stupid finds its way into your pristine InDesign document!