Google has recently made good on it’s promise to penalise slow web-sites. By inference, they are going to reward fast loading web sites. In the old days of hand-made web-sites you could (not) easily get a code monkey to tailor your code in such a way to speed up the loading process. However, with web […]
Named after Charlie Parker, WordPress 3.8 “Parker” was released at the end of last week. Uniquely so far for WordPress, this was a parallel development stream that has been running since 2012. It’s mission was to bring the administration of WordPress kicking and screaming into the mobile and flat-design world. In fact, unless you administrate […]
Everyone has a Twitter feed these days. Not all use it well. I thought I’d share how we use it, and who for. Not that I am claiming we are the world’s best, but we’ve had great engagement – particularly during 2013. We’ve had an inactive corporate presence on Twitter for a few years now […]
The closed-shop phase of web programming is coming to a close – rather quickly. It’s the combination of universal adoption of open source frameworks and platforms such as WordPress and the wide availability of cloud-based services to manage everything from web-hosting to SEO reporting that is driving the shift. It is, however, presenting a challenge […]
It’s almost on us. The season of excess (where the average Brit manages to put on 2kgs in the space of a week or so) starts shortly. We’ve already published our working hours and just like to remind clients that the last day for standard change requests and project work is THIS FRIDAY. We’ve got […]
Read More… from Happy holidays, seasons greetings. Bah humbug!
Sounds funny that, why would we restrict ourselves to just one platform? Surely WordPress is not the answer for every web-site in the world! We’ve been working with WordPress for over 4 years and, yes, we’ve found lots of scenarios and client problems where it doesn’t fit – in that case we politely decline and […]
Amazon have, in our opinion, always offered the best solution for cloud-deployment of services, including web-sites, and one of the primary reasons was the speed with which you can start, stop and upgrade your capacity. However, Amazon have again raised their game and added automated scaling. This is neat and gives you two approaches, by […]
It’s been a year since we took the huge step of completely virtualising our workplace. We’d embraced home working since we started in 1996 but at the end of 2012 we made the giant leap of getting shot of our office space. It’s been quite a year so I thought I’d reflect on how it’s […]
Happy Christmas and a Cracking 2014 Well, it’s that time of year again. As per normal, the team are taking a well-earned break from the Friday before Xmas thru to the Monday following the New Year. This extends to over 2 weeks, and whilst we still provide support over that period it will be at […]
Read More… from Christmas, December/January support and working hours
As promised back on November 10th, “We’re committed to keeping our clients protected from bad things on the Internet” and as a result all contract supported clients have now been upgraded to VNX4.2 which includes the latest WordPress 3.7. Over 70 upgrade cycles were executed out of hours during November with a total of 2.5hrs […]
Read More… from Upgrades completed: WordPress 3.7 and VNX 4.2
In a recent post, we talked about how stable and reliable Amazon AWS services were. This is a quick note to illustrate this in hard numbers: 53 live web-sites 39,432 live hours during October 9hrs of downtime, 99.9998% uptime 71 outages, 58 from the bottom 10 servers 6 of the worst 10 are hosted on […]
Read More… from Server Wall of Shame – still using dedicated servers?
“Social media is the future”, screams the (slightly) ignorant parrot. Social media and, specifically, the sharing of information (links) amongst groups of like minded folks (social networks) is as old as the hills. However, the feeding frenzy around this space is getting ridiculous. Poor old clients are being conned into thinking they must “leverage the […]
As we charge down to the end of the year, we expect the ticket volume to fall away and, sure enough, total new tickets in November was 137 taking the total number of tickets to just over 1,300 for the year. First response was truly impressive with 97% of new tickets being responded to within […]
WordPress Migration. Unless you’re lucky enough to be updating your WordPress platform, the harsh reality is that migrating to WordPress will involve moving content. Maybe a lot of it But do you really need to move it all? If you have 1,000 pages of information going back to 2005 you should really ask yourself if […]
Read More… from What is “Page valuation”, and why it’s important
So far in 2013 we’re handled just over 1,300 client support tickets. When you write it down like that it’s sounds pretty impressive but break it down and it’s about 1 support ticket for every working hour. A rather impressive 94% are picked up within our 1 working day standard response window. Our client SLA […]
Read More… from Support, zombie tickets and continual improvement
Ever visited a company website and discovered nothing but sizzle? Pages of corporate speak and static marketing-speak tell you nothing about the character of the business and, surely, the absence of life and changing content makes you think “hey, you guys just don’t get the web”. Web sites should educate, entertain, engage and even inspire […]
It’s only a few years ago that businesses signed-up to multi-year contracts and invested 10s of thousands of pounds per employee to provide just the very basic business tools. To support these services, we then invested further 10s of thousands of pounds in server and communication infrastructure. It was normal then. It’s nuts now. We […]
It’s okay to feel nostalgic, to hark back to the good old days when cameras required film (in packs of 36) and took 2 weeks to get processed. It’s okay to appreciate the horse and how romantic it was before the car came along. I’d also encourage a love of retro vinyl and even collect […]
There has never been a more challenging time than now for websites to rank for keywords and drive essential traffic […]
Read More… from SEO: lessons in keywords, content and spreading yourself too thin
We’re committed to keeping our clients protected from bad things on the Internet and as part of that process we’re upgrading the first batch of 15 client sites to the latest and greatest version of WordPress. These are being upgraded well outside of working hours (3am), so sites will have minimal disruption – expected to […]
