Back in the swing of things
So after some major overhauls I have started using this blog and some other web projects as a way to stay in touch with the web development space.
My commercial development work at S1 is all Java based and seldom has anything to do with web technology let alone a GUI.
So in my spare time I plan to keep this blog updated and try to hone my WordPress skills. I have started a small consulting business on the side to help small/medium companies with general IT stuff. Mostly this has been free advice to friends and relatives but lately I have started trying to provide some basic web and email services to companies that can’t afford the rip-off prices of digital agencies.
I am often amazed at:
- How many companies put up with terrible IT operations when they are dragging the whole company down.Paying for decent IT services shouldn’t be considered a grudge purchase. Gone are the days of jack-of-all-trades System Administrators that install, configure and administer all the IT systems in a small company. Between email, accounts, CRM, sales and all the other departments that are almost completely digital these days the complexity has just grown too much for one person to know enough to run everything.
If it’s not part of your core business, outsource it. Don’t force your employees to endure terrible services that prevent them from effectively doing their work. I often wonder how many CFO’s consider the cost of their employees losing email for half a day vs the little bit they saved by trying to run their own mail server.
That said, make sure you get what you pay for and only pay for what you need, which brings me to my second observation.
- How IT services companies are still praying on the naivete of their customers.How many small companies outsource their email and website setup to someone that persuades them they need a collaboration server like Sharepoint or a complicated mail server like Exchange. Take nothing away from those products but they are not targeted at little 10 person companies.
My biggest bug-bear are digital agencies that try to persuade their clients they need to pay more than R50k for a simple website when they could easily design a good theme for WordPress/Joomla/Drupal and be done with it.
Some times the custom functionality that customers want warrants the huge price tag, and I think there the agencies are spot on but I’d venture that 90% of small/medium size companies don’t need anything that those platforms don’t already offer.
So that, and my web tech withdrawal has inspired me to get back on the blog and start some little projects.
I have already lined up my first customer for website setup and hosting and I’m hoping to get some more soon, if you know anyone with a small company that needs a website let me know.
I have used Google Apps on the hopebailie.com domain for some time and I must say, I love it. So much so that I went and got myself setup as a reseller so if you want email with your website, voila. What I love about Google Apps is that everything is online. All you need as a small business is an internet connection. With the Premier Addition of Apps you can even use Outlook to connect to a faux-Exchange server and sync mail, calendar contacts and all. I’m a fan, can you tell?
Another little project I have started up is a URL shortening service like bit.ly and tinyurl.com. I discovered 2 really nice domains for this (http://sp.or.tz and http://sh.or.tz) which I registered and I am in the process of developing the application for them.
I’d like to add some features that aren’t available with the other services like crawling the destination URL to get some tags and detect if there is a mobile friendly version to redirect visitors to when they are on a mobile phone. (I have Blackberry and hate following Twitter links because they always load huge page that is terrible to read.)
I also want sp.or.tz to be sports focused and have some sports specific features like fetching results/fixtures from guessable URLs.
If you have any ideas or suggestion for the services pop them in the comments.