An office computer usually deals with simple tasks – e-mail, spreadsheets, internet, word processing, etc. You don’t need a cutting edge machine, unless you’re engaged in specialised work like video editing or game development. A cutting edge machine will, admittedly, take longer to reach obsolescence, but you’ll pay a huge premium for an extra year or two of useful service.

My usual rule of thumb is to buy a mid-range machine for €500 to €700 and plan on replacing it every four years or so. I find this the optimal duration – it translates to a cost of €125-€175 per year, per machine. The 4 year span usually coincides pretty closely with a new Windows operating system release, and upgrading a year or so after a new version of Windows is released will bring you new features and abilities. Of course transitioning a user to a new machine and operating system is disruptive, but you have to upgrade sooner or later, and keeping up to date with technology will pay dividends, and help you avoid incompatibilities when exchanging files with clients. Ultimately, if you are spending time waiting for your computer to respond, then you computer is costing your business money.

If you have a machine which seems to be heading for senility prematurely, there’s one upgrade that is cost effective and can rejuvenate the PC – a memory upgrade. Upgrading other components, such as motherboard, processor, graphics card, etc. will usually be expensive and may yield only a marginal improvement.

Today I added a couple of sticks of RAM to a work machine that was performing below par. It exhibited the usual symptoms – slow responses and almost constant hard disk activity. After adding the new memory, which cost less than €10 including P&P, the machine was far more responsive, and it took only five minutes to install.

Installing memory is a piece of cake, but only take it on if you know how to be safe around electricity and are comfortable rooting around in the innards of your desktop. You need to ground yourself to avoid damaging the memory and internal PC components with static discharges from your body. When handling the RAM, avoid making contact with the  gold contacts and pins on the memory chips – try to hold it by the sides. The RAM will only fit in when inserted the right way round. Fold out the clips and loosely push the stick in, so it is correctly aligned with the slot. Take care not to put pressure on surrounding cables and disconnect them.  With the memory aligned, push it home, simultaneously pushing the clips at the sides. It may take a bit of pressure, and you’ll know when the RAM is fully in.

If you are buying a new machine, you’ll often get the hard sell on an extended warranty. It may not be worth it. I usually take my chances with the minimum warranty, and you may be surprised at the limitations in the small print of the extended warranty of something does go wrong. So long as you have a comprehensive backup strategy in place (and if you don’t start one right now – seriously!), a hardware failure might mean a few hours of data loss and a dead computer. You may find it more cost effective to skip the warranty and pay for the repair if or when it happens. Modern PCs are pretty reliable – the hard drive, DVD Drive and fans are the bits with moving parts, and thus are most likely to fail, but they are very likely to last 5-6 years (i.e. beyond the normal working life of a midrange machine).

It has occurred to me lately that twitter is improving my writing skills and helping me express myself better. When limited to 140 characters, the tendency is to resort to text speak or to use several tweets to communicate one idea. Neither solution is elegant, and neither will endear you to your followers. So every couple of days, I’m faced with the challenge of communicating a big message in a small space.

The first order of business is to decide whether it is possible to communicate the gist of the message in 140 characters. You won’t fit a book review in a tweet – certain messages are just too long to be expressed in a tweet. In these situations, write a blog post and tweet the link. Don’t be tempted to blog every little snippet – challenge yourself. Try to tell a story, describe something in detail, summarize a conversation within the confines of the allocated characters. Jot down the salient points – try to express them in a couple of sentences, and then edit them down to size. Here are a couple of other ideas to help you.

Expand your vocabulary

We’ve all heard how teenagers brains have been ruined by text speak,  poor education, and mind altering drugs. Fight the decline of the English language. Use a thesaurus. A appropriately chosen word can replace  a pedestrian collection of several words. Vow that any time you encounter a word you don’t know, that you’ll write it down and look it up in a dictionary later. Read a book in a genre you would usually avoid – I suggest raiding the classics.

Edit yourself mercilessly

Every superfluous LOL means 3 fewer characters available for your tweet. Strip out unnecessary adjectives and reorganise your sentences so that they are more concise. However much you might be tempted to cut back on punctuation, please don’t. A comma only costs a character, but it makes your tweets so much easier to read.

Fit it in 140 chars, then try for 125

If you’ve composed a masterpiece in 140 characters, others may retweet it, but by including the @<your twitter name>, they’ll have exceeded the 140 chars and your retweeted message will be truncated. Allow them the space to retweet, by aiming for 125 characters per tweet.

Conclusion

Fitting big ideas in small places won’t revolutionize your life, but it will sharpen your thought process, broaden your vocabulary, and help you in everyday conversation.

Many people hate the idea of being a jack of all trades, and want to excel in one or two areas. A common pairing is web design and a CMS framework like Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal. Typically these people will become an expert on their platform, learning about all the available plugins and hacks, and maybe even how to write plugins of their own.

Sooner or later, a project will come along that doesn’t mesh with the expert’s tools. There is a saying: “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.  Zen Cart makes a lousy CMS. CMS Made Simple’s blogging module can’t compete with Wordpress (I know, I’m using it on a personal site!). Wordpress doesn’t work well as a social networking site. I am not criticising any of these excellent tools, I’m just noting that they each have a core focus: E-Commerce, general purpose CMS and Blogging, respectively, in the examples cited above.

The decision isn’t always simple, because site requirements aren’t always simple. Take for example, a recent project we dealt with. It required a brochure site, with a booking system, one CMS page and a blog,  in that order. We could have done the lot in one of a number of CMS platforms, but each solution we looked at presented a serious compromise with one or more of the requirements. In the end we decided that we would custom code the brochure site, the CMS page and the booking system, and port the overall theme to Wordpress for the blog component. This solution resulted in a more intensive development cycle, and cost a little more, but ultimately it matched the client’s requirements exactly. The client is delighted with the end result and is coming back to us in the new year for more features.

If we had developed the system on one platform, I honestly feel that the client would have needed to adapt their business to the constraints of the system, rather than the other way around.

If you are contemplating a new web system, do ask your provider about the nuts and bolts. I am reliably informed that it is a torturous experience to be locked up in a room with me for a couple of hours, while the painful process of deciding how the system will function is decided. I know however,  that this process saves hours, days or even weeks in the long run.

Use the right tool for the job, folks, and if your provider tackles every job with a Stanley knife and that tool for getting stones out of horses hooves,  you might want to be a little concerned.

1) Aesthetics

Mos CMS systems come with a WYSIWYG editor allowing you to format and manipulate your text and images in many ways. Unfortunately, some people use this power to fill every page with bold italicised pink text on a yellow background in one inch high letters, using the MS Comic Sans font. 9 times out of 10, it is best to keep your pages understated and consistent, using different levels of headings to improve readability, and moderate use of images to brighten up long pages of text.

2) Limitations

The WYSIWYG editor has more in common with a basic word processor than a desktop publisher application. Don’t expect pixel perfect positioning, 3d text, or anything too fancy. If you have specific requirements for design/functionality, you may need to bring in your web designer to meet those needs.

3) Noblesse Obligé

A loose translation is “With power and prestige come responsibilities”. A CMS gives you the power to inflict your musings on an unsuspecting public. While it is important to update your content periodically, don’t post if you have nothing to say. Furthermore, it is very easy to add a page here and there, and slowly turn your site into a meandering unstructured mess with lots of pages but little relevant content. Spring clean regularly. Finally, never ever post after consuming alcohol!

4) Editing

Editing your own content may well end in tears. We’ve all got a couple of words that we constantly misspell, and if you created the mistake, there’s a good chance that your brain will not see it as a mistake when you re-read your content. It goes without saying that you should spell-check your work, but resist the urge to publish right away. Save a draft and ask somebody you trust to read it and parse it for grammar errors, political incorrectness and bad writing in general. Don’t forget that your online content can be a great source of material for your offline printed marketing.

5) The Content Black Hole

There is little point in coming up with great content if nobody is going to read it. Let people know when you add new content. Make use of Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, discussion forums and any other resource at your disposal to promote yourself. In general people are happy to receive relevant links to useful information.

So phones are not a sensible candidate for the rent/lease commerce model, but the model works well for many online products. Up until recent times,  games were a physical isolated medium that you bought from your game store and played alone on your console or PC. As online gaming became established, companies like Blizzard figured out that they could charge people for a game like World of Warcraft, and then charge them again once a month for the privilege of going online to play it. Smaller game companies followed suit with smaller browser based games, that either levied a recurrent fee or allowed you to accelerate your progress by using real money to buy game credits which could be exchanged for in-game items. This is the fastest growing sector in the games market, and games like Evony have enjoyed viral growth in recent times.

Websites are changing too – literally. Back in the day, it was enough to have a website. Chances were that your website would be the only website representing your trade category in the local area. Unfortunately, those days are long gone. You need a website with good content that is constantly updated and optimised for the search engines, if you want people to visit your website and ultimately their money to you instead of your competitor.

We are frequently asked to suggest improvements for websites which were built in the last decade and never changed since. Such a website will not do you any favours. A potential customer will recognise the unmistakable hallmarks of  neglect, and return to Google, leaving the “Copyright 1997″ notice blinking folornly on a pink background, below the animated “under construction” image.

All the evidence we’ve collected suggests that a website which is maintained and promoted brings in new business, and pays for itself very quickly. Having said that, a website with all the bells and whistles can cost quite a bit. This is why we now offer our customers a pay-as-you-go plan. In essence, we agree a specification for the site with the customer, in conjunction with a maintenance and search engine optimisation plan. This arrangement means that the customer doesn’t have to worry about a large initial payment, and can rest assured that a modest monthly fee ensures that their website will be kept up to date and performing well in the search engines.

SuperFantastic

My client asserts that they were billed for their domain renewal but not for hosting. They didn’t take too much notice at the time, and settled the bill in a timely manner. The next thing they knew, their website was down. On contacting the host and paying the bill,  the website remained down.

Most reputable suppliers have the ability to suspend an account for non-payment, so that the website is still on the server but will not be shown to the general public. In this scenario, the hosting can be unsuspended on payment, and the website is available again. The company I dealt with yesterday immediately deletes your website. If we had not maintained a backup for the client, they would now be facing the prospect of having their website redesigned from scratch.

I attempted to get the site back up an running and it soon became apparent that while the hosting had been paid for, the account had not been unsuspended so I couldn’t access the control panel or upload the website files. I duly opened a trouble ticket, and noticed that I could not view the details of the ticket after submission. Indeed, I could not view any of the tickets I had submitted on my client’s behalf in the past. A number of hours later, the ticket had disappeared off of the system, zapped by magic or by human hand.

At this point I called support. The phone rang for an indeterminate period before being answered. On asking for support, I faced another long wait in complete silence. The tech support guy was ratty and unapologetic and the whole experience left me stunned.

James Jordan

It almost seems like the web development industry is partially exempt from the recession, which is all the more interesting given that there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence which suggests that spending on traditional advertising is down.
Newspaper job cuts

BBC Job cuts

weegeebored

My observations are based on personal experience, discussions with peers, and various snippets gleaned from the web, but it does seem that design/development houses which keep on the bleeding edge of web technology are maintaining or growing their business in these troubled times. With a little confidence coming back into the property market, I’m optimistic that we’ll begin to see growth in many other sectors by the end of the year.

1. People are accustomed to free content on the net
2. If you charge for content, chances are somebody else will provide similar content for free, using the advertising model to make a few bucks

So whats changed?

The economy

epicharmus

Online advertising spends are down – most anecdotal evidence suggests that people are cutting back on all advertising.

Bandwidth and content production costs are spiralling – YouTube is losing 100’s of millions of dollars because their bandwidth cost is increasing faster than their advertising revenue. Rupert Murdoch has announced that he intends to charge for online access to the News Corporation’s collection of newspapers.

Venture capital is running dry – outfits like Twitter might have viral growth, but this growth is linked to growth in costs, and with no viable moneymaking plan, benefactor purse strings are tightening.

The Mindset

*madalena-pestana* – half of me

We’ve gotten used to buying stuff online. We trust in https and SSL and reputable payment gateways. Micropayments are becoming more popular, and nobody bats an eyelid at the thought of buying  an MP3 or an iPhone app for a buck on iTunes. The easier and more secure these payments become, the more acceptable it will become to pay for content. A couple of cents for the day’s headlines, 20 cents to audition the new Coldplay album, a Euro to watch the lastest episode of desperate housewives in high resolution. The key to the new mindset is a small amount of money for an instantly accessible product/service via a secure, quick, easy mechanism.

Calm Down!

chantrybee

Of course, the majority of content on the internet will remain free, supported by the raw energy of enthusiasts and the advertising dollar. We will pay for better quality content, exclusive content, and content with some sort of value add.

For a year or more, I’d been telling anybody who was interested that I didn’t get twitter, for the usual reasons:

• You can’t post anything useful in 140 characters
• Nobody is interested in the minutiae of my day
• The signal to noise ratio must be very low
• It’s just another way for people to spam me

Ultimately, curiosity got the better of me and I signed up for an account. The initial experience was a little underwhelming. I assimilated the jargon and commands – the replies, the retweets, the direct messages. I agonised as to whether I needed to reciprocate @viagradood’s advances and follow him. I marveled as celebs tweeted in realtime while they pumiced their corns.

Eventually, I started to filter the wheat from the chaff by installing tweetdeck, a nifty little app that allows you to manage your account and concentrate on the people who are posting valuable information. I also started to monitor my own tweets for quality before submitting them. There’s no harm in the odd frivolous tweet, but ultimately you need to justify your existence to your followers.

I’ve learned a little over the last 100 tweets. I’ve made a few tentative connections. I’ve posted requests for information that have fallen on mostly deaf ears. I’ve laughed at some humourous tweets. I’ve wasted quite a bit of time. I’ve had fun. Twitter is not going to change my life, but it is another tool in my internet swiss army knife. It’s the one right next to the little doobery for descaling fish…

Torley

This virtual world experience (with or without the procto-pod) has been touted as the future of the internet by authors and future technologists for years, even before anything we would recognise as an internet existed. So why isn’t it here yet, how close are we, and how desirable is the dream?

In real terms, we are light years away from this immersive experience. The main barriers are bandwith, computing power and the technology required to bridge the gap between the data and the avatar-isation of that data.

Torley

In terms of the interfacing technology required to make us believe in the virtual world, we have come some way. VR headsets exist. Some say they are effective, some say they cause seasickness. We’ve almost cracked it with surround-sound technology. Thats the good news, the bad news is that nothing exists to fool our other senses yet. Smellovision has been just around the corner since the 60s, and I can’t see it arriving any time soon – the same goes for any taste-on-demand technology, and tactile feedback systems are still primitive. We have vibrating joypads and steering wheels with opposing force and vibration. You can even buy a system which modulates a fan’s speed from the speed of your virtual car to get the wind-in-your-face feeling. Ultimately these gadgets fool us slightly for a few minutes and we generally disable them once the novelty wears off.

Windows 7 is taking cues from Apple, and it does appear that we may see a renaissance in computer input interfaces, with multi-touch screens and gesture based interaction offering a potentially more elegant solution to the keyboard ( a device that was deliberately invented to slow down the typist) and the mouse.

What about the requirements for the visual system? Second Life is probably the closest we’ve gotten so far, and that feels like wading through jelly at the best of times. But even Second Life is just a small construct within the internet. Every node has to be painstakingly constructed, from a limited palette with rules and regulations. What we seek is an interface that converts the entire world wide web into a 3-d world, and we are only starting to dip our toes into more graphical representations of the web with sites like spacetime.com.

Torley

One of the biggest challenges is going to be finding a way to map the structure of the internet to a virtual geography. If we have a building representing Spiralli Business Solutions, the building might be on the corner of Web Development Street and Print Design Boulevard, but we would then need another office on Brand Merchandising Avenue, forcing our customer to traipse from one office to the other if they require multiple services from us. Now think about the number of services offered by a company like Yahoo, and this model starts to creak at the seams. We could offer virtual doors that portal us from one location to another, but that is not a feature of the real world, and would therefore be a probable source of confusion. The real world and the internet are based on two very different and perhaps even incompatible models.

Perhaps we need a new model. I’m picturing a system like papervision as the engine, with a layer between it and the web in general.  It is this layer that will make or break the system – how do we provide an abstraction of the internet that lends itself to an intuitive 3d environment?

For the moment, file the virtual world internet away with the hover car and the self cleaning house, to be revisited in a decade or so.