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December 2010 Archive

Day rates suck

Every single day, we find ourselves as an agency, telling people what our day rate is. In most cases, for people, this is a race to the bottom, the challenge of finding the cheapest development shop out there to get a certain piece of work done. People often believe that if someone is charging £500/day, whilst someone else is charging £600/day then the cheaper option is the best one and will save them a shed load of money. Well, funnily enough, it’s not that simple. For instance, let’s imagine for a minute that you don’t care what technology your idea is built in, you just send out some tenders. Two come back – a Java shop with a day rate of £400, and a Rails shop with a day rate of £750. The Java shop is an offshore setup, with unlimited developers to throw at your job, promising a quick turnaround. The other, the Rails shop, is local, and has a really nice portfolio (but still costs nearly twice the price). You’d love to employ them but you just can’t afford that rate so you plump for the cheaper option.

Six months later, you’re broke. You’ve just spent twenty grand on some Java work but it’s not finished, and you’ve got no way of moving forwards as you’ve got no more money. However, looking on the bright side, you know that you’ve not sunk nearly forty grand into the same project with the other company.

Except you’re wrong.

What you failed to realise is that everything you’ve assumed in the pricing of your job is incorrect. You’ve assumed quality is a constant, i.e. that the number of bugs is consistent between different agencies, and that performance is identical. You’ve also made a even more fundamentally bad assumption, and that is that a developer only achieves a certain amount in a certain amount of time.

They don’t.

Take the above example. Rails is a much more productive tool to use for web development than Java, and a Rails developer could reasonably expect to outperform a Java developer by as much as 100%. Add into this that Rails developers tend to unit test much more so than others it all starts to add up.

So, you go back to the Rails shop.

“Oh yes, we could have turned that project around in 22 days, which would cost you £16,500″

You slowly, and quietly, start to cry.

The moral of the story is this – day rates, for development work, are irrelevant. You, as a customer, don’t want to buy time from a development house. You want a development house to produce you a ‘thing’, whatever that ‘thing’ might be – and you want to know how much it costs. It doesn’t matter how much a day of developer might cost you. What matters is how much can be achieved and what level of quality might be achieved.

So, next time you’re out there looking for a development house for your next project, ignore day rate – it’s irrelevant. (And remember, we use Rails)

Posted by Neil Middleton on 09 Dec 2010

Regurgitating Search Engine Optimisation

Fairly often, we at Monochrome come across ‘search engine optimisers’. These people are there to provide a service to companies that sits somewhere between the technical, the marketing, and the design.

Essentially the brief is simple. Take a website (either at concept stages, or already live) and tweak it so that when a user is looking for a relevant term on one of the major search engines, the site in question will appear near the top of the organic search results.

There’s a number of tried and tested ways of doing this, plus a wide variety of old wives tales that some people believe make a difference. However, search engine optimisation is fairly simple and straightforward, and not something that a lot of people need spend a lot of time on. Once you’ve got the basics in place you’re pretty much good to go, as long as you keep your standards up and keep doing what the search engines like you to be doing.

However, one thing that is becoming more and more apparent is the quality of these services that other people provide and the approach that is taken. From the various optimisation companies that I have come across, the vast majority follow a standard path. This will initially consist of the running of some sort of tool that spits out graphs and tables of how your site might be performing on some varying measures (which might or might not be relevant), and they then chuck all this into a standard document that get’s sent to the client.

You’ll always get the standard fare – Meta tags, page rank, canonical URLs, H1 tags etc etc etc. You’ll also find that most of the data is already available to you via tools such as Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Now, this initial work could cost thousands depending on the agency and site in mind (bigger client, bigger bucks), but ultimately the work required isn’t drastically different. SEO is SEO.

What comes next is the monthly cost that the vast majority charge – for instance, charging to tend to the garden of keywords that you might be targeting, or ensuring your markup is up to par. Other than that, it’s pretty much rinse and repeat.

So, why do companies blindly pay this money out? Essentially you’re paying the vast majority of SEO’s to cut and paste into a word document, and provide you with a few snazzy graphs. You’re then paying well over the odds for a couple of hours of maintenance. If developers charged the same amount, we’d all be laughed out of the room.

The biggest problem is the charging model. Every SEO company I’ve ever met charge via the standard mechanism. However, their benefit to the site varies, so why do we not have these companies charge by results?

You engage with an SEO in order to raise the profile of your site and achieve some other objective – increase traffic, increase leads, increase conversions, raise brand awareness. You have ideas on how much you want to achieve your objective by – page views up by 25%, conversions up by 10%. Therefore, why do we pay SEO’s regardless? Surely we should only pay these people if they achieve what we wanted and to a satisfactory level? After all, you wouldn’t pay a interior decorator if he only painted half a room, would you.

So – search engine optimisers – do yourself a favour. Find out WHY the client wants to talk to you, WHAT they want to achieve and WHAT sort of budget they might have to try and do this. Only once you do this will you truly be able to add a worthwhile service to your client that they will be happy to pay for again and again.

Taken from :neil_middleton

Posted by Neil Middleton on 15 Dec 2010

Don't make User Experience an after thought

Around 6 to 7 years ago, User Experience (UX) was a term a lot of marketers weren’t aware of or familiar with and those that did often viewed UX as an afterthought.

We might be guilty of stating the obvious, but Apple have been the leader in changing the way we consider a users experience. UX is now at the forefront in terms of the way we plan and manage application projects, and this is a growing trend across the industry, especially within in the last 2-3 years.

Software vendors have taken their time to invest in this area when creating solutions. However, market leaders such as Salesforce.com have proven that the return on investment is there to justify additional user experience design and testing. Microsoft invested heavily in UX when creating Zune, their MP3 platform, and is considered by many reviewers to have a superior interface to its obvious competitor. Unfortunately, this is not nearly enough to draw attention away from the market leader, Apple. Who would have thought Microsoft would become a follower? They were so used to being in front that they forgot to look at what was behind them…..a topic for another time perhaps.

I believe the recent surge of attention to UX has been driven by the availability of good user research and UX specialists available in the UK. We are, after all, a world leader in design. Neither discipline was readily available a few years ago, but with significant growth within the telecoms and digital markets, designers have focused their attention on expanding their user experience knowledge which in turn means agencies can now recruit the right resource. This means that you, the customer, has an application that meets user expectation, creating both brand and customer loyalty.

Posted by Adrian Munn on 17 Dec 2010

Introducing Boxfile - Sign off made simple

It’s a fact of modern life that projects don’t always go the way they should, be it for lack of time, budget or a scope that’s too large and complex. Another major reason for projects going awry is that of misunderstanding. It happens every day, and every single one of us at some point has done some work for someone without fully understanding what was required, and thus had to waste time doing more work to make things good again.

And if that’s not happened to you, you’re a dirty liar ;)

So, what do people do to get round this? Well, for starters we collectively hold a belief that a signature will make everything good. We believe that a note from a client saying “Yes” makes it all good, and we’ll never waste time messing about getting things wrong (again).

Unfortunately that’s not what happens. Most small business get their agreements in a completely haphazard way. Some come in the form of a verbal OK, some come in as an anecdote in an email, some come in by carrier pigeon. Those that have a process for sign off are by far and away in the minority. And what’s more, when that sign off has been gained, more often than not, it’s not as safe as you might like, simply because the proof of the sign off isn’t worth the paper that it’s not written on.

So what?

Well, put yourself in the position of a client. You’ve been dribbled some designs and requirements from your agency, but notice that something you need isn’t explicitly mentioned. You recall that the only agreement you’ve given was as a side comment on phone call so you go for broke. You phone up your agency, and proclaim that you DID want your site to have facebook integration, and yes, it is a definite requirement that’s been mentioned lots of times. Yes, you’re also aware that this will add 30% to the project cost, but you did (wink wink) mention it and thus won’t have to pay for it.

Bugger

You, the agency don’t have anything explicitly stating facebook integration would or would not be included so what do you do? Do you refuse and ask the client for more money, and potentially risk pissing them off and losing them? Or do you take it on the chin and bear the cost of the work, because you can’t prove the client never asked for it and you don’t want to lose them or the project?

All this costs money.

Well, imagine this. Imagine that you were able to store documents in a location, and know that when the client has signed off that you have a read-only store of what the client has agreed to. Imagine that you can turn round to a client and say “Sorry Bob, that’s not mentioned in the documents you’ve signed off, so that’s an extra charge…”. Imagine being able to take that snapshot that a particular user agreed to a particular set of information and be able to prove that to anyone that’s interested at any time.

Well, this is what we’ve been developing over the last few months, and what we’re now launching as Boxfile. Boxfile was built internally to solve this exact problem as it was one that was biting us on a regular basis. As a web agency we found that nearly every project would have something come up that could have been completely bypassed by simple sign off processes. We’ve now been using it internally for a while and feel that other people could benefit from it, so we’re opening it up to the masses.

In short, Boxfile is a dead simple sign off system. As a user you can create projects and documents, decide which of your users & clients can see what, and choose who can sign off what and when. Once signed off, it’s then locked down so nothing can change, giving you the information you need, knowing that it’s safe. With the added ability to upload files, and comment and discuss documents it’s also pretty good at becoming a project document repository – something that we use it for internally.

So far, there’s no real limits on what you can put through Boxfile, whether it be a file, or simply a textual statement, we’ve seen it working for us, and now want you guys to benefit from the same.

Boxfile consists of three pricing plans, all of which give you varying levels of data storage and project limits, but don’t worry, it’s not too expensive starting at only £9 per month, which is a damn slight less than it costs to sort out sign off nightmares. If you’re not completely sure about it, sign up and use the 30 day free trial that we give you. If you’re not happy, cancel within the first 30 days and we’ll not have charged your account a penny.