Iarfhlaith Kelly – Code agus Craic

2008 was a great year for me. I doubled my income, I grew my business, I made some great friends, I learned a lot and I had a blast while doing it. Here’s a quick review of where I got my business from during the year.

This colourful graph is a hand drawn representation of where all my business came from in 2008. The main nodes off of me (in the middle) are:

• College / School
• Business Networking
• Friends / Family / Neighbours
• Web Traffic
• Mums Design Business
• Damson Technologies

The exercise produced some interesting information. For instance I discovered that out of the 60 clients I had in the last year, 40% of them originated from contacts I made through my mum’s design business. However, these 24 clients only accounted for 27% of my annual revenue.

I also discovered that my most lucrative deals in the year originated from contacts I’d made through Damson Technologies. Fin and Donal don’t know this yet, but a whopping 48% of my revenue in 2008 came from businesses they put me in touch with (thanks lads!). A few other interesting stats resulting from this graph are that I get a healthy amount of business from my website, about 18% of the total, and that the areas with the most referrals from existing customers were contacts originating from family or friends.

A Referral Continues To Be The Best Path To New Business

This brings me to my main point, which is that I now know I can get business from anywhere. This graph is relatively even and I can see that I get business from all areas of my life. And even better then that, over half of the business I got this year was a referral from a referral!

Some people poo poo the idea of using your friends and family as a source of business, but I think if you ignore these then you’re ignoring the best possible source of business you can have. Now I’m not suggesting that you lean on those closest to you to support your business, that’s just plain wrong. But what I am suggesting is that you use them and the people they know as a platform for launching your network of business contacts.

Word of Mouth Is Still King

Even in this day and age, the best source of new business for almost all small businesses is still word of mouth. Despite all the talk of viral marketing and using technology to grow sales, nothing but nothing seems to beat good old fashioned word of mouth for gaining new business (obviously though, word of mouth can happen online too!).

One final thing that strikes me about this graph is how many links there are. Over 70% of the business I got in the last year originated through referrals from existing clients. Long may this continue! I’m really interested to see how this graph evolves over the next 12 months. Where will my next big chunk of business come from? Will it be from a referral? Or possibly some web traffic? Who knows, maybe even from this blog!

This year I didn’t have time to write the following blog posts. They’re all still in draft and will more than likely stay that way now. So here’s what you won’t be reading from me any time soon.

Does Your Company Inspire Others

I didn’t have time to write a post titled ‘Does Your Company Inspire Others’ where I discuss the traits of an inspirational thought leader and the importance of networking with like minded people.

Five Reasons To Ignore Tenders Forever

I didn’t have time to write a post titled ‘Five Reasons To Ignore Tenders Forever’ where I announce that I am now refusing to take part in public tenders as I feel they’re a race to the bottom, where cost is given precedence over value.

FOWA Dublin 09 – New Venue Please

I didn’t have time to write a post titled ‘FOWA Dublin 09 – New Venue Please’ where I congratulate Ryan Carson and his crew for choosing Dublin as a conference location but request that they change the venue because Liberty Hall is a cesspit that should have been demolished years ago.

How To Prototype A Web Application

I didn’t have time to write a post titled ‘How To Prototype A Web Application’ where I discuss the importance of understanding the end user, proper wireframing, agile programming, and the stress the value of starting with the interface first.

Solving Real Business Problems

I didn’t have time to write a post titled ‘Solving Real Business Problems’ where I encourage developers to use the hundreds of frameworks, web services and existing web apps to help solve their clients problems instead of pitching the expensive bespoke solution.

The Cost of Success In Ireland

I didn’t have time to write a post titled ‘The Cost of Success in Ireland’ where I analyse how others will perceive your success once you’ve achieved it and cynically ask will they admire you or envy you, will they hold you up as a champion or drag you back down.

The Work Life Balance Of A Web Developer

And finally, I didn’t have time to write a post titled ‘The Work Life Balance of a Web Developer’ where I discuss the challenges of working in isolation and the importance of meeting others in your industry on a regular basis.

I didn’t have time to write all these posts, and more. Maybe next year I’ll have time to write more posts and abandon less of them.

BookMeetingRoom.com is a Software as a Service web application made by the guys over at Active Online.

From their site they describe it as so:

With BookMeetingRoom.com, it’s easy to keep track of room bookings for your organisation all in one place. You can view availability and make booking reservations effortlessly, share reservations across your organisation and track usage.

It looks like a great tool, and something that would be very useful for medium to large offices and shared office space facilities, but I can only guess that from the promotional site’s blurb and the nice screenshots of the application that accompany it. The reason I’m only guessing is because I didn’t sign up for a test account.

No Non-Expiring Trial Account

One thing that really surprised me about this web application is that there’s no non-expiring trial account. Instead, there’s an offer of a 30 day trial. On the face of it, this looks quite acceptable, just another way of letting a prospective customer check out the nooks and crannies of the software before they decide to put their hand in their pocket. But when I looked a little closer I realised I had to provide my credit card details to sign up for this 30-day trial just in case I wanted to extend my usage of the application beyond the 30 days.

I’m surprised the the guys behind bookmeetingroom.com decided to use this approach for account sign-ups. My first impression was that they’re trying to trick me into entering my credit card details so they can charge my card on the off chance that I forget to cancel the account at the end of the trial (assuming that I decide not to use it). It felt as if they were asking me for a little too much too soon.

As a general rule of thumb, whether I’m buying online or in a bricks and mortar shop, I won’t hand over the cash unless I know what I’m buying. So, when I’m asked for my credit card details before I’ve even seen the product (even if I’m not going to be charged immediately) little tiny alarm bells go off in my head. I begin to wonder whether my card will get charged anyway, or if I’ll have a similar experience to the one I had with the eFax guys when I tried to cancel my free trial with them.

The High Quality Users

Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong though. Perhaps the reason there’s no free non-expiring trial is because it’s just not commercially viable to maintain free accounts, even if they are only small restricted ones. What this approach certainly guarantees is that there aren’t any accounts in the system older then 30 days that aren’t fully paying customers. The result of this means that the user base is extremely high quality and there aren’t hundreds (or thousands) of old abandoned accounts taking up valuable space in the database.

The Best Approach

I can’t decide what I think the best approach is. On one hand I still have a bad taste in my mouth from when I tried to close my eFax account (who use the same sign-up strategy), but on the other I can sympathise with the desire to have a high proportion of paying customers on the books.

Either way, bookmeetingroom.com really does like a great product and the fact that it’s Irish owned just amplifies my good will towards it. The best of luck with the product guys, but maybe you’d consider changing your sign-up strategy?

UPDATE – Since writing this post, Jeremiah Ryan from ActiveOnline, the company behind BookMeetingRoom.com, contacted me and enquired further about the issues I had with the service. Soon afterwards he announced (see comments below) that they would be lifting the mandatory requirement to include your credit card details as part of the sign up process for a trial account.

When a company doubles in size in a single day (from one to two!) some major changes need to be made. The way I run every aspect of my business has been turned on its head. Now you would think that all this change would be tough and stressful, and… you’d be right. But it has also forced me out of my comfort zone and I’ve had to completely redesign how I develop code for client projects.

When I was a one-man-band, it was all very simple. It was just me, the client and my pc. All the code I wrote was saved on my hard disk and when a project was finished I’d simply upload it to either a test site or a live site via FTP. Perfectly simply, but, not anymore. Now that I’m developing projects in collaboration with others, I need a new system.

Source Code Control Built In

So, with the help of the ever patient Adrian Skehill, I have completely changed how I manage my code. Out with Dreamweaver, Filezilla and Register365, and in with Aptana, Subversion, Ant, Hudson, and VPS Hosting (care of Blacknight).

The introduction of version control has made an immediate difference. No more risk of overwriting each other’s code and with the added advantage of being able to roll back to any previous state makes version control a must-have for development teams, and highly desirable for lone developers.

Forcing Myself to Change

I’ve dabbled with version control before, but found it failed to catch on for two main reasons. The first problem was that I setup a local repository which meant that I could only commit from that machine and it also prevented others from collaborating on the code. The second reason it didn’t last was because committing to the repository was a separate action from uploading changes to the web server. The result was that I often forgot to use the version control system.

So, to tackle this I’ve found a way to force myself and my team to use version control. Here’s what I did:

I stopped using Dreamweaver and adopted Aptana instead. Aptana is built on the well known Eclipse IDE and has been created with the web developer in mind. It has a strong emphasis on providing support for web technologies such as CSS, XHTML, PHP and Javascript (including jQuery). These features make Aptana a very real alternative to the ubiquitous Dreamweaver, but where it really comes into it’s own is in it’s integrated Subversion support. Using a plugin called Subversive, I can commit to the repository directly from Aptana.

I setup hosted version control. Using my new VPS account on Blacknight, I installed a hosted Subversion system. Now I can commit updates from any machine with an Internet connection. Also, a nice side effect of this is that my valuable source code is backed up multiple times a day to a remote location.

I integrated Subversion with my deployment process. Rather then committing separately to version control and then uploading the same code to the web server through FTP, I installed a continuous integration system called Hudson. This is a fantastic tool that monitors all my repositories for changes and automatically uploads the newly committed code to the test server (and lets me deploy to a live server with a single click).

The Finishing Touch

I’ve been using this new development environment now for a few days and so far it’s been a dream to work with. Everytime I commit my changes on my development box to version control, Hudson picks it up and updates the test site so the client can review them. It also shoots off an email to me and my team, so that everyone’s kept in the loop.

As a finishing touch to this new system, I took advantage of the available plugins in Hudson and setup automatic Twitter notifications every time a new project is built. For this, I setup a dedicated Twitter account at http://twitter.com/webstrongCode. So now, every time one of my projects is updated I can read about it through Twhirl!

Overall I’m delighted with how these changes have affected my daily work. My code is easier to manage, and more secure. Plus it’s collaborator friendly and most importantly it’s setup in a way that will ensure I maintain this new approach for years to come.

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I always love hearing how other developers and designers work day to day, so if your approach differs from mine please let me know!

I’ve had various things hosted at iarfhlaith.com over the years (since 2001). Sometimes it was a personal site, other times a photo gallery, but mostly it’s been an under construction page.

Being a web developer, I think it’s only right that I’m a little more active on my own site. Granted, it’s one of the only sites I can work on that I won’t get paid for (unless I pay myself somehow) but I think there’s something far more important on the cards: blogging, and all that comes with it.

Blogging has become part and parcel of the digital professional, and I think it’s time I gave it a shot. From what I’ve read choosing the right blog topic is as important as actually writing the stuff. So to give you a sneak peek, or to save you some time if you don’t think you’ll be interested, here’s what I’ll be blogging about:

• Web Design
• Web Based Technical Stuff
• Software Engineering
• Gadgets I Like and Gadgets I Don’t Like
• Interesting Stories I’ve Heard
• Travel Experience
• Social Commentary
• Reviews of Gigs, Movies, Plays, Shows etc.
• Scouting Ireland

I know this list includes a wide range of topics, but I’m sure over the next little while, I’ll find my voice and the whole thing will become a little more focused and coherent. But until then I’ll blog about whatever I think is worthy. If you think it’s rubbish you can always leave a comment to that effect, either way, I’d love to hear some feedback and for others to get involved.

More posts on their way.