Category: Web development

Happy drivers

Posted on by chris

On the box the other night I caught the latest Skoda advert, proudly displaying their new tagline ‘Manufacturer of happy drivers’. It’s a great ad (using unexpected sounds appeals to me); you can see it here. And what a fantastic change it is for such a large company to put the focus so much on the customer, not on the "brand" or product. Of course, it could all be moonshine, but companies nowadays should be wary about talking what they can’t go walking. If you see what I mean.

As the wise people know, creating passionate users – in other words happy, satisfied customers – is the an important key to being successful long-term. Being the only, or cheapest, or most powerful will work for a time (being all three will work for a lot longer) but if you want people to stick with you even when your competitors get plentiful, cheaper, and have more features, you’ll need people to be – not just happy – but passionate about you and your products/services.

A quick real-life example. I was in a restaurant about an hour ago and while I was waiting I overheard a conversation between a couple and a gentleman at the bar. The gentleman asked the couple if they visited the restaurant often, and the couple said they went every week. In fact the gushed about how much they love the place (it is a great restaurant) and I’m sure that gentleman went away with a very positive impression of both them and the restaurant.

How much do you want people to be passionate about what you do, so much so they act as a salesforce and evangelism team all by themselves? It’s worth the time and trouble to make them happy, I think.

You may have notice I didn’t link to the video on the Skoda site itself, but it’s a shining example of how to get it wrong (in fact their main site is a mess as well). It’s a shame, because not only is their site design very simple (and rightly so, it’s a refreshing change from the Flash-heavy monstrosities you normally get with car manufacturers) it’s actually been done relatively recently, as the use of .Net technologies testifies to. Don’t tell me it’s impossible to create a decent, web-standards compliant website using .Net because it is – I do it every day at my new company. They may be in the mood for creating happy drivers, but creating happy browsers is obviously not high on their list of priorities.

A new job

Posted on by chris

I have a new job, as I announced late last year. I actually started a couple of weeks ago, and so far it’s going very well. Eventually the website will have something on it, but for now you just get a nice logo (made a bit more Web 2.0-ish by me).

Figure Out logo

I would tell you what we’re doing, but it probably wouldn’t interest a lot of you. Still, we got a little write-up in the Money Marketing magazine. 2Plan is the company we’re building software for, by the way.

The directors were unavailable for comment, but Steve my fellow developer had this to say:

Are you going to make a cup of tea yet?

Which is nice, I think you’ll agree.

End of year roundup…

Posted on by chris

This is a traditional new years eve for me, involving a couple of bottles of beer, Jools Holland and watching hundreds of fireworks explode across the valley. Living at the top of a hill with such a good view is great by day and by night.

This last year has been pretty noteworthy on a number of fronts. For one thing our son Reuben was born, we got officially hitched, and we made a new home for ourselves here at The Mill. I also did some major things at work, the biggest of which was handing my notice in – I start my new job in a few days time. All in all 2006 will remain in my memory for being the year I felt I’d finally come out of the tunnel into the light, started a new path properly and left the past behind. It feels good, and I have high hopes for 2007.

There’s be a lot of changes around here over the next few weeks, but I’ll let you know about all those as they happen. I’ll just finish 2006 by thanking you for reading and wish you all the very best for the coming year.

Thought processes…

Posted on by chris

I’ve been really busy lately, hence the lack of posts. I won’t apologise as by now you’re probably really bored of me writing “sorry I haven’t written anything in a while” posts. Instead, I’ll give you this brain-squelcher of a problem I’m currently solving. It might seem simple, and it’s something that a lot of web developers have to do a lot, but the complexities when you get into the nitty-gritty are pretty … complex.

So what is this? Well, you know when you’re placing an order online and you get to a page where you have to type in your address details? My page does a little bit more than that; you can log into your account from there, and supply a password if you want to create an account as well as placing your order. Let’s think about some of the possibilities for processing this page.

1) If the user is logging in, is their username and password correct?
2) Is the users supplied email address valid?
3) If the user is just placing an order, have they filled in the required fields (address, email address etc)?
4) If the user is just placing an order and their email address belongs to a registered account, do you display a message to say this order has been placed on behalf of their account and also send them a password reminder email?
5) If the user wants to create an account, have they filled in the required fields?
6) If the user wants to create an account, have they supplied a valid password (and password confirmation)?
7) If the user wants to create an account and their email address already belongs to a registered account, do you display a message to say this order has been placed on behalf of their account and also send them a password reminder email?

And then of course there’s all the usual filling of the form with the users details if needed, checking the form has actually been submitted (is the request POST), protecting the database from rogue input and all the rest of it.

Something I think the job of a developer is as much about thought processes as it is about technology.

What to get the man who has everything…

Posted on by chris

Silly Season is among us, and you need look no further for proof than the swarming hordes who are currently marauding over every retail outlet in the country searching for that “perfect” gift. Oh, in case you’re wondering, the perfect gift for me this Christmas would be to make Christmas last for just the 12 days it’s meant to, rather than the 4 months it seems to. Hah bumhug, or words to that effect.

Earlier on today I found myself in a rather up-market place which stuffily calls itself a “lifestyle shopping location“. Amongst the replica antique Japanese furniture and pricey glass vases I found…

Mr Site. No 'h' in there, no sireeThis. Yes, ‘Mr Site’ hits a store near you. Immediately my stomach lurched as I thought of the endless possibilities for hideous code, but, surprisingly, the actual website is built with standards. Things could be looking up. Until you take a look at the source code of a sample Mr Site site. It’s not so pretty.

But then again if someone is going to spend 30 quid on a boxed product that offers them the chance to have their own website with no technical jargon, full standards compliance isn’t going to be top of their lists, is it? I bet pretty much all Mr Site customers don’t even know there are international standards by which website should be made. The fact is they shouldn’t need to, but Mr Site sure as heck ought to – and they ought to be making all the efforts they can to mke sure their customers sites are build as well as they can be.

The really strange thing is that pretty much everything they are offering for a fee (£2.49 a month for the second year onward, yes: every month, which is [calculates] £29.88 per year) you can already get for free. Blogging and site content management – check. E-commerce system – check. Forums – check. You get the picture.

The problem is, while all these services us geeks know well and love, the rest of the world hasn’t. They are more likely to see and use a boxed product from a shop that offers all this in one easy package than do the legwork to find and then use all these different (but better) services.

Which brings me onto my idea. Why don’t we – the Open Source community – do the same, but better? For a small fee we could produce a website that will help people; ordinary, non-techy people; to set up a WordPress (or equivalent) website with a Vanilla (or equivalent) forum, a photo gallery, a Shopify site (or equivalent, using their WordPress theme) on a friendly hosting company. We get to increase the user base of our products, and much more importantly break out of the geek-savvy market into the real world more.

So just like Ubuntu has taken some of the best open source software and wrapped it up in a friendly OS package, we could do the equivalent for the web. Bring high-quality, open source software to the masses.