Trench Webfare
Today I was skimming through the A List Apart article entitled “What I Learned About the Web in 2011” and it got me thinking about whether or not the forerunners in our industry are fighting the same war as the rest of us?
Clients
Today I was skimming through the A List Apart article entitled “What I Learned About the Web in 2011” and it got me thinking about whether or not the forerunners in our industry are fighting the same war as the rest of us?
Through Twitter, Blogs and Conferences we’re constantly told that it’s our job to educate our clients; teach them how best to interact with our community to not only help ourselves but the clients and other webbies they may work with in the future.
Yet it’s not always so easy. The spoken word can be easily forgotten and sometimes external forces work against your best efforts to have both the time and situation to put your client in a hypothetical classroom.
But maybe Mr Boag has come up with the perfect solution to our woes, something that can educate the client in the early stages of a project without taking time away from the designer and minimal time for the client. Paul has created a small factsheet that he and the Headscape team will be using for their prospective clients and have been kind enough to provide it freely for others to use.
Yesterday I received an email from a client whose friend was having trouble with their current web development company. Without naming the site or the people involved I can say that the friend is a person who has been in the public eye and the site is a small ecommerce website.
The current web company takes months to fix any problems, such as those involved with the ability to purchase online. A small text change is being quoted at £175, and once agreeing to allow the site to be moved they quoted £10,000 to hand things over, but apparently not an exact copy of the site due to not wanting to give away ‘secret code’. Doing so will apparently open them up to hackers.
As some of you may know the cost of VAT is increasing in the UK on January 4th, less than a month away. A couple of years ago this would have been alien to many, certainly in my lifetime the VAT had never changed, it’s always been 17.5%, right? But with the recession it’s yo-yo’d up and down the last couple of years, with the change always coming at the most inconvenient time of the year.
So with the fairly widespread coverage and lengthy time to prepare most companies will surely be well covered to deal with the change in VAT next month. Unfortunately for us this is a little idealistic. After previous experience the bright sparks at Bronco decided to act early rather than wait for the inevitable phone call on the 4th, our first day back to work after 2 weeks off, asking us to make the necessary changes to their ecommerce website.