Get bigger results by staying small

One of the things that annoys me about people in general is their inability to listen. Most women are a case in point; they never listen to what you tell them. They hears words, rearrange them in their head and twist them into what they want to hear. Politicians are another example. They never listen to what the public actually want. They pretend to listen in order to gain votes but then just do what they want to do, rather than doing what the majority of voters want.

 I’m guilty of not listening myself from time to time. If, for example, somebody talks at me for more than thirty seconds without actually involving me in the conversation, I switch off. I can’t help it - it’s a defence mechanism. I also tend to stop listening to people when they start talking complete bollocks. So it was I found myself doing this the other day when I was at a social gathering. I got talking to some chap who apparently did the same sort of job I do. The only difference was he works for a big London agency and I actually work for a living. He spent ages telling me how he’s been working on some big project for the last eighteen months involving lots of acronym-type things that I’ve never heard of and how the change control and project management and schemas and methodologies and blah blah blah something with involving a flux capacitor have been causing him something or other.

 I found myself thinking about the difference between what he does and what I do and the only difference I could find was his job involves a colossal amount of bullshit. To put it into perspective, over the last few weeks I’ve launched two new websites. In other words, two people have asked me to build them websites, I’ve designed them, coded them, had them approved by the customer and launched them onto the world wide web. Most of the time was spent going backwards and forwards with the customers to make sure I was building exactly what they wanted and waiting for them to respond. The build process itself took a few days.

 So why do big companies take so long to do anything? It’s because they make things so complicated and, the more complicated something seems, the more they can charge for it. That means the chap I was talking to the other day probably earns three times what I do and no doubt drives an expensive car to make up for having a small penis. The other reason is big companies have a lot of people working for them. I, for example, take a phone call directly from a customer, do the work myself and liaise directly with the person who wants the job done. Developers who work for big companies have to go through their manager who probably has to go through their manager who needs to go through an account manager who then liaises with the client’s account manager who goes through their manager who goes through their manager who was probably told by a third party consultant to get the work done so, consequently, doesn’t have a clue. The time spent simply exchanging messages is immense and it’s really a pointless waste of time and the number of people doing jobs that aren’t really needed just strikes me as being pointless.

Here at Datapartners we like to keep things simple. We are also very honest. We may not be able to talk convincingly in Bullshitese or confuse people with jargon in order to convince them to spend more money than necessary for a website. We actually pride ourselves on this. If you come to us for a website, we will do our best to find out what you want, give you an honest quote that is probably ten times less than a big London Agency would charge, get it built in a tenth of the time and then strive to build a long-term relationship with you and continue forward in partnership. This is the Datapartners way!

It's good to be responsive

As a web developer, it is my job to keep up to date with the ever changing and constantly evolving internet industry. Whether it’s researching some stupid new legislation devised by an impotent politician whose only experience of the internet is porn, or learning about new programming languages, SEO tricks, social networking fads and what is new and in fashion in terms of design.

The internet industry moves very quickly. Technology moves at an alarming rate and tastes and fashions change too. Basically, if your website is over 5 years old, you might as well not have one. With desktop monitors getting bigger all the time, mobile browsing becoming more and more popular and social media/apps changing the way people use the internet, tastes and requirements have changed significantly over the last few years.

Largely because of the dawn of mobile browsing, responsive websites have become the new “it” thing. When I first heard the term “responsive website”. I had absolutely no idea what it meant. I assumed it just meant a website that was interactive or did something responsive based on a user’s input, which is what 99% of the websites I’ve built over the last 13 years have been.

It actually refers to a site that dynamically adjusts its own layout depending on the size and type of browser that it’s being viewed on. So for instance, if you looked at it on a big desktop monitor and then shrank the window, you would see it realign itself and change right before your eyes. It’s very clever.

This is good because it negates the need to create a separate mobile version of a website which means it is more economical for the customer and means I don’t have to build two different sites.

Of course it also means everything that was built prior to the dawn of responsive sites is now out of date. This is annoying because, having spent the last couple of years redesigning our suite of apps and control panels to match our company branding and website, I now have to recode most of it again to accommodate the responsiveness. Of course this does also mean that we can now offer our clients the chance to rebuild their sites and, in the process, make them look nicer too (because, let’s face it, what may have looked good 5 years ago almost certainly looks rubbish now).

So if you don’t want a tired, dreary and unfashionable website but want something new, exciting and responsive, Datapartners can can help. Below are just some of the sites we have started to rebuild as responsive. Check them out.

www.eddiehall.com

www.thegearshop.co.uk

www.evolvestore.co.uk

www.mastersort.com

Keeping your privates private

A property developer has recently bought the house across the road from me and has been attempting to build a second house on the plot of land that it sits on. Needless to say, I, along with most of the other neighbours, have vetoed this. There are a number of reasons. Firstly the plot is only big enough to fit a shoe in and would look ridiculous. Secondly, it would inevitably be rented out to a bunch of drug dealers or benefit cheats and, quite frankly, I don’t want the lovely quiet street I live in occupied by scumbags. Thirdly the building in question would look right into my bathroom and I don’t like the idea of a bunch of scumbags who are high on cocaine watching me getting all soapy and wet in the shower. No one wants to see that.

There is a reason I bought a house with four walls and a roof. It’s the same reason I lock the toilet door before emptying the contents of my stomach. It’s called privacy. I guard my privacy quite tightly and get really rather annoyed when people attempt to take it away from me. It’s why a lot of people are annoyed with Facebook and its ever-changing privacy policy that appears to be determined to make everyone’s details public.

Of course the internet industry is one where someone always has access to someone else’s personal information. Take my business: A lot of my customers run online shops so whenever someone buys something on that shop, their details are saved in a database that I have access to. Technically I have the power to see names and addresses of their customers. I also run a lot of my business off Google. I store most of my company documents on Google Drive, I use Gmail, Google Calendar and pretty much every other product. Technically, someone at Google could see all this information too. Does it bother me? No. Why? Because I chose to place my trust in Google in the same way that my customers chose to place their trust in me.

It’s all very well and good people complaining because Facebook violates their privacy but, I’m sorry, when you voluntarily sign up to a free service that is solely designed to share information with other people, you can’t really complain when the information that you voluntarily shared is shared with people. That’s a bit like breaking the speed limit in a car and complaining when you get stopped by the police. You chose to do it, therefore accept responsibility for your actions.

Of course transparency is they key to trust. I recently uninstalled an app for my Samsung Galaxy because of this:

Do you see the problem here? It wants to modify my calendar, send emails to people without my knowledge, read my confidential information, delete the contents of my memory card and know my exact location. Errrr no thanks. I just want to look at a map of the London Underground on my phone. I don’t want my phone being taken over by hackers.

Now, if I had accepted these terms, I couldn’t rightly complain when the developers of this app hijacked my phone and started sending photos of underage chickens to MI5 any more than I could complain if a drug addled pervert took photos of me showering and sold them to Big Boys in Boots magazine because I didn’t object to them building a house that looked into my bathroom. That is why the house isn’t being built.