Category: Business

The art of eating (out)…

Posted on by chris

The estimable sil gives sage advice on dining out with the family. Wise words.

We dined out last Friday too, at a local Italian restaurant. Very tasty it was, and if everything goes according to plan it sould be a profitable evening. Why? Well, they don’t have a website, and after the meal I was chatting with the owner who said he has two other restaurants without websites, too. “Hmm, I know a man that might be able to help you” I said, offering him one of my cards.

I’m not usually one to spout about projects I’m involved in (yeah, right), but this one really got me interested. For one this the restaurant is fantastic, and it’s always a pleasure to design sites for high-quality proucts or services. For another the place had character and characters. Not just a charming interior, but entertaining, engaging and vibrant staff. Just what you need in an Italian restaurant.

So, all in all the perfect canidate for a great website and blog.

Confessions of a web entrepreneur…

Posted on by chris

As a way to ease me back into writing more meaty entries than the frivolous ones I’ve been doing recently, I thought I’d collect my thoughts about entrepreneurship on the web. While the title may apply to me, I can’t help but feel I’m a bit of a fraud entrepreneur, because I don’t drive round in a flashy sports car, have meetings with venture capitalists or work on a Mac from a converted warehouse*. The fact is I work for a large firm, drive a people carrier, and spend my evenings juggling baby bottles and washing up.

* Actually my house is a converted warehouse, so maybe I get some points for that.

In the midst of this average 9-to-5 life I manage to run a secondary existance. Chris the entrepreneur, building his web empire. And what does my empire look like at the moment?

Firstly there’s my web business. I treat that website as a sort of online scrapbook; full of jottings, experiments and random thoughts. And, occasionally, that is enough to attract people to me and ask me to help them get the best out of the web.

Secondly there’s my project management software. It’s free, and while that may not sound like the perfect way to make money I continue to develop it for three reasons. 1) I need a project management system, so I’m scratching my own itch. 2) Other people are starting to use it, and that makes my name known. 3) Eventually I may start charging for doing customised versions.

Thirdly there’s the Wiblog thing, a friendly blogging community. My thanks go to Dave who started the Wibsite and gives me freedom to chop and change all the technical things whenever I want. And thanks to the Wibbloggers, too, who are supportive and encouraging.

Fourthly there St Gaudéric, a website about a tiny village in the south of France where I often go on holiday. While the textual information on the site is, to be frank, non-existant (I’m finding it hard to muster up the brainpower needed to translate French documents to English), the pictures are pretty nice. Eventually this site may be used to provide email addresses, blogs, image galleries and advertising to local people.

Then I have one, two, three, four other projects which I’ll tell you about eventually. It’s not that I want to keep them secret, it’s just I have nothing decent to show you yet.

So I’m trying not to fall into the trap of believing any myths about web businesses, instead just making sites that people want to use. And while all my sites so far go for what could be described as niche markets, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Stastically speaking…

Posted on by chris

For the last few months I’ve been getting more and more interested in website statistics program. While one of my clients uses the excellent Mint it’s not the right answer for everyone. For instance, it doesn’t handle storing multiple sets of stats for diffeent domains in the same database therefore making it useless for the Wiblog system.

So, last January, I did what I usually do in these situations and ‘rolled my own’. So part of the new Wiblog system is a pretty tasty stats package that shows you not just the usual stuff (number of visitors by day, wekk, month, favourite pages, number of comments per month etc) but some other interesting stats such as popular search terms that brought people to your Wiblog, and even the ability to follow a particular users travels around your Wiblog.

But that’s not enough for me. Oh nosirree. I want to offer the power of usable statistics to my clients. So I’m developing a centralised statistics server that will gather data from all the websites I work on, and send regular reports.

The problem is that Javascript, which is the technology I use to do this cross-site stuff, has limits on how you can share data between different sites. While there are some solutions for these security limitations they aren’t quite ehat I’m looking for. So, again, I’m rolling my own. I’ll post the answer here when I’ve finalised it. In the meantime if anyone else has his the cross-site XMLHTTPRequest problem (you’ll know what it means if you’re geeky like me) then please add a comment with details of how you fixed it.

Dot net, dot schmet…

Posted on by chris

Anyone who’s used a Microsoft Access database in anything approaching a serious application knows that Bill Gates made a serious mistake expecting people to use that “database”. I use the term in it’s loosest sense. Hey, maybe I’m biased as I’ve had some horrific experiences with the dreaded .mdb files.

But one of the bains of my working life may have just got a little easier with the discovery of this little Access query analyser tool by Jeff Key who seems like a knowledgable guy. Well done Jeff for making this cool little utility, even if it did only take you 45 minutes (including 15 minutes for the icon!).

However it brings me onto something which has been bothering me for a little while. That whole .net thing. It’s not that I think it’s bad, after all I use the incomparably wonderful SharpDevelop to write little Windows apps using .net and I love that. Suddenly I feel like I’m (almost) a proper programmer.

It’s the attitude of several of the large web houses I’ve investigated that seem to think the only worthy technology on the web is .net, specifically asp.net, that bothers me. Why? What’s wrong with PHP? Or Ruby on Rails? Or Python (good enough for Google)? Heck, I still spend large parts of my day using classic ASP which works absolutely fine for 95 percent of what I need it to do.

So why the constant hankering after the latest bandwagon? Well, partly it’s because some companies are afraid of falling behind, so they try to keep ahead of the curve all the time. That’s OK, but sometimes you need to stick with what you know and become an expert, rather than jump on the latest thing and make a hash of it.

Some companies don’t understand the technology that well, and so pick the newest thing on the shelf. Using asp.net for a simple 6 page brochure site? That smells dodgy to me. Use the simplest technology possible that gets the job done well, I say.

And, I have to admit, sometimes asp.net is just the right thing to use. It’s easier than Java and Perl, admittedly (even though I Just Don’t Get It). And it’s been used to create some very good web applications, even if it is still too easy to let the IDE do it for you and end up with a dogs dinner of code.

Horses for courses, maybe. I’m sticking with PHP for now, and if I move to developing much in anything else anytime soon it will be RoR or Python (or both). Bill G can keep his over-complex framework in my view, at least for web development.