Escape to the country

Hello from deepest darkest Rutland: England's smallest county; beautifully rural, nicely quiet and with only a whiff of silage.

Yes, ATSF and its domestic staff (Elaine and I) have moved. Time for a change.

So, you are no-doubt asking, how's the connectivity? For haven't we heard that Rutland (and rural UK in general) is basically end of the queue when it comes to handing out bandwidth?

It's been an interesting couple of weeks and we spent one of them with only a slow GSM data connection on my iPhone as a means of getting online. BT (bless them) had my new phone line waiting when we arrived but, for some unknown reason, Demon (my ISP) weren't able to order my broadband until the phone was active and then it was going to be another week. I have a suspicion that if I had ordered BT broadband then they could have been synchronised but I need a static IP address and I've been a Demon customer almost since they started. There is a local contender, the very interesting Rutland Telecom, but they can't help me at the moment. In the end I had a hurried conversation with Demon ordering the broadband while I was literally in mid-move part-way up the A1.

As an aside I should add the Rutland is being connected in the next 12 months, by enthusiastic payers like Rutland Telecom and, presumably even BT, so I may yet see fibre to the bathtub around here. At least, Demon tell me that my local exchange (Cottesmore) will be unbundled in March.

The email about the broadband arrived bright and early after exactly a week. I had some trouble setting up the wi-fi (stone walls do not a good RF path make) but finally got it all sorted. The ADSL connected up once I sorted out the new login credentials and I was back online. I have to tell you that coincidentally the past week has been just about the worst for spam that I've ever had. I call it being spam-bombed. When I got to my mail on the computer I downloaded over 1500 emails of which only about a dozen were real ones. Talk about wheat and chaff!

At this point I decided to check my bandwidth. I'd checked earlier with both BT and Demon online and found that the speed should be about 7.5 megabits so when I did a real speed check I was surprised to see it hitting 2 megabits. I'm only 100 metres from the exchange (and 50 from the pub). Reading the small print on an email Demon sent me (dug out from beneath a pile of that spam) I found that I had been put on a package with the ominous letters '2000' in the title. A capped package? Nobody told me. After a somewhat assertive call from me they are looking into it.

Meantime, the hosting company for one of my main clients decided to move machines between data centres. (Experienced readers will see what's coming.) On restart both of the computers holding the main databases failed and when one was replaced and rebuilt my database didn't seem to be working. Without an online connection, I spent a frustrating time on the phone to the weekend support desk but between us we could find nothing wrong. Nothing in the error logs. It turned out that there was nothing wrong: the database was fine; the problem lay elsewhere. It was what we used to call finger trouble back in the BBC.

You'd think that moving in August would be uneventful? How's your week been?

iMedia support and maintenance

Web support has grown into an industry segment of its own since the early days of the Internet. There are dedicated companies offering support and maintenance contracts with promises of monthly contracts, inexpensive support packages and fantastic customer service. How do your offerings match up? Support and maintenance used to be seen as the dog-end of the business. It didn't offer the creative incentives of new development, the bringing together of different disciplines and their diverse needs, or the cache of meeting and working with new high-profile brands.

However, support and maintenance are the backbone of the industry. They give the solidity of income in the longer term to an erratic, creative, dynamic business. Sneer at them at your peril, particularly in these leaner business times.

The businesses that have got the balance right between developing new business and then keeping the clients satisfied with ongoing support and maintenance are the survivors today. But the competition from dedicated support businesses is growing. Perhaps you need to re-evaluate your packages for support and maintenance so that your clients see more benefits. Often, you don't need to do so much to make big differences to them: clearer, transparent, regularised billing, faster guaranteed response rates and so on. There is still a balance for you though so don't promise what you can't deliver. Do you have the right staff on hand for the weighting of the type of work you get? Do you invest as much in training up the support staff as your other employees? Do you demonstrate that you value the work they are doing?

Clients needs do grow and change. Often it is the support employees who recognise that the clients' needs have shifted because they are asking for more serious maintenance/changes to their iMedia applications. Have the estimated hours of support and maintenance changed significantly for some of your clients? Could you use this information to have a valuable conversation with them?

Often support employees feel unable to approach the management levels to flag up what could be a potential re-work/re-vamp rather than maintenance. That could mean business opportunities lost! Are the processes in place for your support team to flag such opportunities? Where is the line for your company between re-work and support and maintenance? Are you very clear about this? Are your clients?

We all get complacent, but this is precisely when our competitors notice a weakness before we do. Worse, our clients notice their costs for maintenance have spiralled and they only want to blame someone else rather than see they have asked for more and more. They might use it as an excuse to move companies. It won't take a lot of time and effort on your part to take stock of your support and maintenance contracts and the feelings of your staff but it might well save you lost contracts.

Website maintenance issues

Website maintenance is yet another area that has developed into a business segment of its own in the iMedia industry in the last few years. We used to remind you to check with your clients how and when they might want maintenance done, so that you could cost it into the deal for the initial project, but maintenance issues have grown as businesses have recognised the value of regularly updating their content and services because their users expect this.

It used to be recommended that companies take notice of their websites more seriously for updates on look and feel factors every 6 months. However, as web access has become the first point of interaction with a company, the onus on updating has increased too. Therefore, maintenance means more time, more costs, and more resources.

What then does website maintenance cover? If you are offering a maintenance service you would have considered this carefully. It might well cover the following:

• Editorial updates for content
• Changes to services/products offered
• Advice to users in the form of newsletters, blogs, announcements, offers, calendar of events etc
• Seasonal promotions etc
• Redesign of look and feel
• Changing images to give update appeal
• Review of search engine optimisation
• Checking on submission terms/timings
• Analysis of web logs and recommendations

How many people will be involved? Well, that depends on the site, of course and the type of activity needed and how often, but, you'll find this resource from Shane Dillily useful; an abridged Chapter 2 from his book, The Website Manager's Handbook 2006, called Website Maintenance, very useful in answering that type of query.

Have you researched how your competitors are offering their maintenance services? You need to keep an eye on what's being offered and how much it costs. The Websiteaday company have split their maintenance offers into three: Pay-as-you-go, Basic, and Advanced packages.

This might make you think how you are offering maintenance services. Do you give an SLA (Service Level Agreement) to your clients detailing what you will and won't provide for the money? Do they ask for one? These are recommended at Small Business Website Maintenance so you may well get asked for them.

It is hard keeping on top of everything in this business but to survive you do need to charge fairly and offer the type of service the clients want. Lots of food for thought then...