TCRM build a wide variety of sites from brochure sites like Neath Florist Dolly Bach’s or e-commerce sites like Elvis Jumpsuit supplier ETA Supplies they put together to a high standard using techniques we’ve practiced and refined more and more with each site we do. But every couple of sites we get a request to do something we haven’t done before and made part of our “toolkit”. It can range from a new questionnaire system to a different e-commerce model.
Bespoke web design is not an easy process to schedule and too easy to underestimate. Open up any book on software engineering and there will be a chapter detailing the horror of project over runs. Things can get so bad that the developers involved start questioning their chosen career path. They look longingly at the hassle free lives of the people serving them their cheeseburgers and begin to believe they won’t look that silly after all in those little hats.
I believe that the most fundamental reason for bespoke web design taking so long is that programming is a complicated business. There is no escaping that fact. And the more people get online and use web sites more frequently, the higher their expectations are. A simple data capture form is complicated enough. A well written SQL script to write the table is an art in itself. Then the HTML form to capture the data. JavaScript to validate the input. PHP to process the input and well formed HTML to display a result. On top of that it needs to be well tested. The phrase, ‘Can I just have a form for doing this,’ always sends a shiver down my spine. There is no ‘just’ when it comes to programming. It takes time and effort to get even the simple things done properly and along the way you will wonder how long it takes to get those little stars on your name badge.
Friday, 25 February 2011
Friday, 7 January 2011
TCRM and the New Year
Happy New Year to all! And as we are already into the second week of the new year and things are starting to get back into some sort of order, I thought it was a good time to look back and reflect on the past year and what this one has in store for us. So let us down the last of the mince pies together before they go out of date and look with anticipation into 2011.
E-commerce looks like playing a big part for TCRM in the next twelve months. There are three reasons I think for this .Firstly, thanks to the rapid increase in online buying over the last few years, more and more people are seeing the benefits of shopping this way and feeling more comfortable about doing so. This creates an increasingly visible customer base which sellers see more and more potential in.
The second reason for the growth of smaller e-commerce sites is the recession. With increasing numbers of people out of work, or needing to generate a bit more income, people are looking to set up their own businesses and see an e-commerce site as the most efficient way of doing so without the need of the high overheads of physical retail premises.
Third is the range of goods and services on offer. While at first it was just primarily goods bought on line in digital versions of shops (ie putting books and CDs in an electronic shopping basket) the e-commerce sites are becoming increasingly varied. One of my favourites at the moment is the Tesco.com photo centre. Upload images from your camera into online albums, cut and rotate as you please, select your print types and pick up your photos next time you’re in store for a pint of milk and some cheeseburger components. It’s this variety which broadens the appeal of e-commerce and TCRM currently have a site in the works where you do not buy physical goods, but a service. A life changing service at that. Stay tuned to TCRM Facebook and Twitter pages over the next couple of weeks for details.
That brings us nicely on to social media, and regular readers will notice how unusually slick that link is for me. Social media is here to stay but I think there will be a less hyped up approach to social media and a maturing of the techniques used as it becomes an accepted part of personal and business life. It will be another box to tick when putting a site together rather than selling a site solely on the fact it is a social networking site.
But one area that does look to be growing is that of mobile computing. The uptake of smart phones such as the iPhone and the Android powered phones, as well as the new tablet market led by the iPad, means that more and more people are accessing the internet from a small mobile device rather than a traditional desktop computer or laptop. Web sites will need to be optimised for these devices, or at least be written with this sort of use in mind. The touch screens of these devices offer new challenges to web designers, and with touch screens looking to make an impact on desktop machines (the next version of Firefox will have multi-touch capabilities) it can not be ignored. Personally I am hoping that we skip the big touch screen phase and go straight to motion capture control like in Minority Report and, with the release of Microsoft’s Kinect, seems to be getting closer. See here and here.
So there’s my brief glimpse into the new year. Please feel free to comment on whether I’ve totally gone astray, missed some important things out or should change my name to Nostradamus. I’m looking forward to the year ahead and all the challenges it has in store for TCRM. At the very least it should make for an interesting read for you.
E-commerce looks like playing a big part for TCRM in the next twelve months. There are three reasons I think for this .Firstly, thanks to the rapid increase in online buying over the last few years, more and more people are seeing the benefits of shopping this way and feeling more comfortable about doing so. This creates an increasingly visible customer base which sellers see more and more potential in.
The second reason for the growth of smaller e-commerce sites is the recession. With increasing numbers of people out of work, or needing to generate a bit more income, people are looking to set up their own businesses and see an e-commerce site as the most efficient way of doing so without the need of the high overheads of physical retail premises.
Third is the range of goods and services on offer. While at first it was just primarily goods bought on line in digital versions of shops (ie putting books and CDs in an electronic shopping basket) the e-commerce sites are becoming increasingly varied. One of my favourites at the moment is the Tesco.com photo centre. Upload images from your camera into online albums, cut and rotate as you please, select your print types and pick up your photos next time you’re in store for a pint of milk and some cheeseburger components. It’s this variety which broadens the appeal of e-commerce and TCRM currently have a site in the works where you do not buy physical goods, but a service. A life changing service at that. Stay tuned to TCRM Facebook and Twitter pages over the next couple of weeks for details.
That brings us nicely on to social media, and regular readers will notice how unusually slick that link is for me. Social media is here to stay but I think there will be a less hyped up approach to social media and a maturing of the techniques used as it becomes an accepted part of personal and business life. It will be another box to tick when putting a site together rather than selling a site solely on the fact it is a social networking site.
But one area that does look to be growing is that of mobile computing. The uptake of smart phones such as the iPhone and the Android powered phones, as well as the new tablet market led by the iPad, means that more and more people are accessing the internet from a small mobile device rather than a traditional desktop computer or laptop. Web sites will need to be optimised for these devices, or at least be written with this sort of use in mind. The touch screens of these devices offer new challenges to web designers, and with touch screens looking to make an impact on desktop machines (the next version of Firefox will have multi-touch capabilities) it can not be ignored. Personally I am hoping that we skip the big touch screen phase and go straight to motion capture control like in Minority Report and, with the release of Microsoft’s Kinect, seems to be getting closer. See here and here.
So there’s my brief glimpse into the new year. Please feel free to comment on whether I’ve totally gone astray, missed some important things out or should change my name to Nostradamus. I’m looking forward to the year ahead and all the challenges it has in store for TCRM. At the very least it should make for an interesting read for you.
Monday, 13 December 2010
TCRM and the Big Chill
Us Bridgend Web Designers are a sturdy bunch, but to label the last few weeks as a little nippy would be something of an understatement. I don’t think I’ve layered up and put on an extra pair of socks as often as this ever. The TCRM office isn’t the warmest of places first thing in the morning normally but I’ve been expecting to find penguins nesting under my desk lately. And not just your run of the mill penguins either. These are hardcore birds who think the arctic is for the wussies.
Anyway, despite the cold it’s been a busy an interesting few weeks here in TCRM, hence the late arrival of this blog entry. Sites have been launched and PCs fixed, quotes delivered and changes implemented. PC repairs are one area that seem to have picked up recently and many of the machines coming in are suffering from virus or malware problems. Adequate virus protection costs nothing but a little time and effort with AVG being the leader in this respect. I’ve been using it for years and haven’t lost any data, been plagued with pop-up windows and rogue services which site there hogging resources and stopping other services from playing with the toys.
Another way of avoiding the problem is exercising a little care over what is being installed on your machine. Remember you don’t have to install every tool bar and little app which comes your way. People won’t point at you in the street and mock you in a mildly hysterical way if you don’t have the Instant Chat 5.0 Cool Smiley Pack installed on your messenger. Plain and simple is the way forward. You’ll be much more productive with a working simple machine and we can help you by putting effort into other areas for you such as web design.
With more cold weather on the way it could signal more ill PCs coming into the office suffering with viruses, but as long as you wrap them up nice and cosy with the latest free virus software and don’t expose them to the chill of unfriendly software, they should be good to see you through the winter.
Anyway, despite the cold it’s been a busy an interesting few weeks here in TCRM, hence the late arrival of this blog entry. Sites have been launched and PCs fixed, quotes delivered and changes implemented. PC repairs are one area that seem to have picked up recently and many of the machines coming in are suffering from virus or malware problems. Adequate virus protection costs nothing but a little time and effort with AVG being the leader in this respect. I’ve been using it for years and haven’t lost any data, been plagued with pop-up windows and rogue services which site there hogging resources and stopping other services from playing with the toys.
Another way of avoiding the problem is exercising a little care over what is being installed on your machine. Remember you don’t have to install every tool bar and little app which comes your way. People won’t point at you in the street and mock you in a mildly hysterical way if you don’t have the Instant Chat 5.0 Cool Smiley Pack installed on your messenger. Plain and simple is the way forward. You’ll be much more productive with a working simple machine and we can help you by putting effort into other areas for you such as web design.
With more cold weather on the way it could signal more ill PCs coming into the office suffering with viruses, but as long as you wrap them up nice and cosy with the latest free virus software and don’t expose them to the chill of unfriendly software, they should be good to see you through the winter.
Friday, 12 November 2010
TCRM and Life in a Small Business
Us Bridgend web designers are really in the grips of autumn now. The evenings are darker, the skies greyer, the jumpers thicker and the leaves are piling up on the pavements. Those leaves are also being dragged into our office at an alarming rate. It eventually got to a point when enough was enough and Kevin was forced to drag the vacuum cleaner out. So there’s the owner of the company, hoover in hand, cleaning up the leaves on the carpet while Andrea and I looked on (it was a good time for a coffee break). But it got me thinking how different life is in a small company compared to a large organisation. As with everything, there are good points and bad points.
Kevin and I have both worked in very large organisations and after working here for over three months now I can tell you that the differences are huge. Where as before we would pick up the phone and call facilities management department to send a cleaner around to our office, we have to clean ourselves. Though there is something to be said for getting down and dirty. It does keep your feet on the ground.
One of the biggest differences is the importance of our effort. If we all don’t put 100% effort in every day, the business suffers. There is no one else to blame, to fall back on, or to wait on. It’s our responsibility to give the customer the best possible websites and after sales service we can. I always thought I had a pretty good working ethic, but this is something else. Never before have I been in a job where you look at the clock and think of how little time I have left to get things done. It’s working flat out all the time, but at the end of that day I more often than not feel that I have at least done a good day’s work. Though we may have lost some of that comfort zone you experience in a large company, that feeling of doing a making a difference does make up for it.
Kevin and I have both worked in very large organisations and after working here for over three months now I can tell you that the differences are huge. Where as before we would pick up the phone and call facilities management department to send a cleaner around to our office, we have to clean ourselves. Though there is something to be said for getting down and dirty. It does keep your feet on the ground.
One of the biggest differences is the importance of our effort. If we all don’t put 100% effort in every day, the business suffers. There is no one else to blame, to fall back on, or to wait on. It’s our responsibility to give the customer the best possible websites and after sales service we can. I always thought I had a pretty good working ethic, but this is something else. Never before have I been in a job where you look at the clock and think of how little time I have left to get things done. It’s working flat out all the time, but at the end of that day I more often than not feel that I have at least done a good day’s work. Though we may have lost some of that comfort zone you experience in a large company, that feeling of doing a making a difference does make up for it.
Friday, 8 October 2010
TCRM and the Moving Goalposts
One of the most fundamental problems that people can have when designing websites, and software in general for that matter, is the lack of a goal. ‘What am I trying to achieve?’ is the question that needs answering the most for it is one of the most influential. It guides the development of the site or software by providing a framework to design choices. You can ask yourself the question, ‘Which option will help me achieve my goal?’ and all of a sudden, choices become clearer.
Writing anything without everyone, including yourself, having a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve is just asking for trouble. If you are trying to create a slick business site, you’ll want to steer clear of smileys and gimmicks and make it feature rich with good reporting tools. If you’re creating a popular social site, then you’ll want to spend real time and effort on the commenting engine while not worrying too much about every possible field an event can have. When you’re planning your ping pong club’s pub crawl, you don’t need to specify whether the facilities include an overhead projector and the number of available network points. Just the name of the first pub and what time the drinking starts.
Extreme examples of web design problems yes, but it does highlight the approach you need to take. Lack a clear vision and every feature that catches your eye can get thrown into the mix and you’ll find yourself knee deep in features, which all cost time and effort, and in the end you really don’t need. Worse of all though, you’ll be at risk from feature creep.
Without a clear vision at the start your system will grow and develop a life of its own as you try and find your way. As the system reveals itself you’ll gain a better understanding of what you want so feel the need to add more features. This is fine if you’re writing a system or site for yourself in your spare time. But if you’re contracting out the work or working with your IT team to put the system together for you, you’ll soon have a disaster on your hands. Code will be need to be rewritten or thrown out all together, designs trashed, object models broken. Programmers don’t like doing this at the best of times. Having it forced upon them by others is the equivalent of someone telling a builder they have to alter the house they’re halfway through because the buyer wants the kitchen to point south. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into it and no one wants to see it lost in vain. This tends not to happen so much in the building trade though because everyone can see how much work goes into a house. How many times have you been asked, ‘Can I have a button which does this?’ After all a button is only a small thing isn’t it? Also, builders have really easy access to sledgehammers.
So in order to stop us Bridgend geeks or your fellow geeks coming at you brandishing their pencils which have been sharpened to a very fine point, work out what you want to achieve before you start putting the system together. Much blood, sweat and tears will be saved.
Writing anything without everyone, including yourself, having a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve is just asking for trouble. If you are trying to create a slick business site, you’ll want to steer clear of smileys and gimmicks and make it feature rich with good reporting tools. If you’re creating a popular social site, then you’ll want to spend real time and effort on the commenting engine while not worrying too much about every possible field an event can have. When you’re planning your ping pong club’s pub crawl, you don’t need to specify whether the facilities include an overhead projector and the number of available network points. Just the name of the first pub and what time the drinking starts.
Extreme examples of web design problems yes, but it does highlight the approach you need to take. Lack a clear vision and every feature that catches your eye can get thrown into the mix and you’ll find yourself knee deep in features, which all cost time and effort, and in the end you really don’t need. Worse of all though, you’ll be at risk from feature creep.
Without a clear vision at the start your system will grow and develop a life of its own as you try and find your way. As the system reveals itself you’ll gain a better understanding of what you want so feel the need to add more features. This is fine if you’re writing a system or site for yourself in your spare time. But if you’re contracting out the work or working with your IT team to put the system together for you, you’ll soon have a disaster on your hands. Code will be need to be rewritten or thrown out all together, designs trashed, object models broken. Programmers don’t like doing this at the best of times. Having it forced upon them by others is the equivalent of someone telling a builder they have to alter the house they’re halfway through because the buyer wants the kitchen to point south. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into it and no one wants to see it lost in vain. This tends not to happen so much in the building trade though because everyone can see how much work goes into a house. How many times have you been asked, ‘Can I have a button which does this?’ After all a button is only a small thing isn’t it? Also, builders have really easy access to sledgehammers.
So in order to stop us Bridgend geeks or your fellow geeks coming at you brandishing their pencils which have been sharpened to a very fine point, work out what you want to achieve before you start putting the system together. Much blood, sweat and tears will be saved.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
TCRM and Compliant Web Design
Microsoft have just announced that Internet Explorer 9 beta is now available for download. Amongst other things it boasts integrated web search tools, HTML5 compliance and a shiny new slimline interface. That’s right, this means this brand spanking new product is offering what it’s competitors currently do, but the main event though is the collective sigh web developers around the world, and Bridgend Web Designers in particular, are making as they foresee more blood, sweat and tears to make their websites compatible with the software giant’s latest offering.
In the ideal world all browsers will follow the agreed upon standards to the letter and us developers can plan our websites to the standard even before the new browsers are written because they will all act as set out in the standard. In this world cheeseburgers are also free.
Reality is a grim dark world filled with quirks, workarounds and those little CSS bugs which turn a simple menu update into a eight hour slog, by the end of which you question your career choices. I had to deal with one such bug this week. PDF files created on the fly using PHP are a very powerful tool and a useful addition to any website. Even though the file itself is a PHP file, by specifying in the header that the content of the request response is a PDF file, the browser treats it as such. Well this is how it’s supposed to work, and does work like a dream in Firefox. IE doesn’t play by the rules. Rules are for whimps and IE is a big boy with long trousers and everything. IE just looks at the filename in the URL and goes from there. If it sees that the URL ends in .php, it interprets it as a PHP. You can see the problem here. The only working solution for our PDF writer is to create a temporary PDF file and redirect the browser to that. It’s just these little workarounds and fixes which can suck up the effort.
Because of these bugs developers have to react to new browsers coming out instead of planning for their release. Developers have to wait until they get their grubby little hands on the browsers before they can write websites for them as we need to see what quirks and how closely the standards have been adhered to.
Unfortunately, for web design companies like TCRM, it just is not possible for us to stop whatever we are doing and expend effort in getting every one of our sites up to date and debugged with the latest browser versions. If it’s not IE 8 it’s Firefox 4. Then Chrome etc etc (though Kevin isn’t the fan of Chrome I am). The most stable and cost efficient solution is to aim to be compliant in the last-but-one version of a browser. The knowledge base has grown so fixes are available for most major bugs and the industry as a whole tends to work in the same direction. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best solution for the mess out there.
In the ideal world all browsers will follow the agreed upon standards to the letter and us developers can plan our websites to the standard even before the new browsers are written because they will all act as set out in the standard. In this world cheeseburgers are also free.
Reality is a grim dark world filled with quirks, workarounds and those little CSS bugs which turn a simple menu update into a eight hour slog, by the end of which you question your career choices. I had to deal with one such bug this week. PDF files created on the fly using PHP are a very powerful tool and a useful addition to any website. Even though the file itself is a PHP file, by specifying in the header that the content of the request response is a PDF file, the browser treats it as such. Well this is how it’s supposed to work, and does work like a dream in Firefox. IE doesn’t play by the rules. Rules are for whimps and IE is a big boy with long trousers and everything. IE just looks at the filename in the URL and goes from there. If it sees that the URL ends in .php, it interprets it as a PHP. You can see the problem here. The only working solution for our PDF writer is to create a temporary PDF file and redirect the browser to that. It’s just these little workarounds and fixes which can suck up the effort.
Because of these bugs developers have to react to new browsers coming out instead of planning for their release. Developers have to wait until they get their grubby little hands on the browsers before they can write websites for them as we need to see what quirks and how closely the standards have been adhered to.
Unfortunately, for web design companies like TCRM, it just is not possible for us to stop whatever we are doing and expend effort in getting every one of our sites up to date and debugged with the latest browser versions. If it’s not IE 8 it’s Firefox 4. Then Chrome etc etc (though Kevin isn’t the fan of Chrome I am). The most stable and cost efficient solution is to aim to be compliant in the last-but-one version of a browser. The knowledge base has grown so fixes are available for most major bugs and the industry as a whole tends to work in the same direction. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best solution for the mess out there.
Friday, 10 September 2010
TCRM and Web Design Paradigms
So what sort of programmer are you? Do you sit there with your pad of paper working through the logical process of the website drawing arrows, boxes and those little annotations with curving little pointers all over the place? Or are you from the rough side of the geeky tracks? Do you play it fast and loose by hitting the code first and hacking away until you get something that works?
I belong to the former category. The idealist programmer. I like to think and plan through every aspect of the site before even thinking about producing one line of code. I like the boxes with arrows pointing to other boxes, lists of functions sorted by category, and roughly draw entity relationship diagrams complete with crow’s feet. When I do start to code I like proper indentation, good naming conventions and nicely written comments all over the place. But us idealists tend to produce at a slower rate, more concerned with how good the program is rather than the fact it is completed.
Kevin on the other hand, belongs to the latter group. The pragmatic programmer. He sits down in front of a screen and starts coding until a solution is reached. The resulting source is not pretty to look at (indentation is for wimps), can be hard to follow and naming conventions go out the window. I once saw someone’s code (not Kevin’s) in which they had called a variable ‘variable’. It’s that sort of thing that makes me and other idealists like me wince. However, it tends to be the quicker method for getting out the first version and usually results in a working product. Not pretty or elegant, but by god it works! They are pragmatists after all.
So you have an idealist developer from Bridgend and a pragmatic developer from Neath. Neath Web Design verses Bridgend Web Design! You would think that this difference of approaches would lead to many arguments, a lot of yelling and stamping of feet and sulking in the office. When I first thought of writing about this subject I though to call it ‘TCRM and the Clash of the Paradigms’, but the further I got into the content of the post the more I realised how this just wasn’t the case. There are very few actual clashes. No raging arguments about function names and third normal form and almost nothing more than a raised eyebrow when it comes to generating JavaScript using PHP echoes (I don’t care. It’s fiddly, difficult to debug and looks bad). Very odd.
It turns out that the best of both worlds for a development team is somewhere in the middle. Staff a team with idealists and you’ll be knee deep in relationship diagrams without a single line of code written with only two days of the project left. Fill it full of pragmatists and you’ll end up with lots of undocumented code that’s difficult to debug and almost impossible to move forward to version two. Get a nice mix and good things start to happen with your products. The pragmatists drive the project forward and the idealists insert a bit more structure. Pragmatists will rein in the idealist’s ever expanding requirements so version one is delivered and the idealist approach will mean version two takes less effort.
It is important to know what sort of programmer you are, and what the other members of your team are like. Would you say you are happy with the balance or is it too in favour of pragmatists or idealists? Don’t be afraid to mix it up. The results are pleasantly surprising.
I belong to the former category. The idealist programmer. I like to think and plan through every aspect of the site before even thinking about producing one line of code. I like the boxes with arrows pointing to other boxes, lists of functions sorted by category, and roughly draw entity relationship diagrams complete with crow’s feet. When I do start to code I like proper indentation, good naming conventions and nicely written comments all over the place. But us idealists tend to produce at a slower rate, more concerned with how good the program is rather than the fact it is completed.
Kevin on the other hand, belongs to the latter group. The pragmatic programmer. He sits down in front of a screen and starts coding until a solution is reached. The resulting source is not pretty to look at (indentation is for wimps), can be hard to follow and naming conventions go out the window. I once saw someone’s code (not Kevin’s) in which they had called a variable ‘variable’. It’s that sort of thing that makes me and other idealists like me wince. However, it tends to be the quicker method for getting out the first version and usually results in a working product. Not pretty or elegant, but by god it works! They are pragmatists after all.
So you have an idealist developer from Bridgend and a pragmatic developer from Neath. Neath Web Design verses Bridgend Web Design! You would think that this difference of approaches would lead to many arguments, a lot of yelling and stamping of feet and sulking in the office. When I first thought of writing about this subject I though to call it ‘TCRM and the Clash of the Paradigms’, but the further I got into the content of the post the more I realised how this just wasn’t the case. There are very few actual clashes. No raging arguments about function names and third normal form and almost nothing more than a raised eyebrow when it comes to generating JavaScript using PHP echoes (I don’t care. It’s fiddly, difficult to debug and looks bad). Very odd.
It turns out that the best of both worlds for a development team is somewhere in the middle. Staff a team with idealists and you’ll be knee deep in relationship diagrams without a single line of code written with only two days of the project left. Fill it full of pragmatists and you’ll end up with lots of undocumented code that’s difficult to debug and almost impossible to move forward to version two. Get a nice mix and good things start to happen with your products. The pragmatists drive the project forward and the idealists insert a bit more structure. Pragmatists will rein in the idealist’s ever expanding requirements so version one is delivered and the idealist approach will mean version two takes less effort.
It is important to know what sort of programmer you are, and what the other members of your team are like. Would you say you are happy with the balance or is it too in favour of pragmatists or idealists? Don’t be afraid to mix it up. The results are pleasantly surprising.
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