Archive for January, 2010
Spec work for web developers
As a company edgeofmyseat.com don’t need to do a lot of responding to tenders. We sometimes help our design agency clients with their pitches but it is fairly rare for us to get a RFP direct to us. However, when we do get sight of these documents – perhaps because we have been approached directly to do development work for a company that already has a designer on board – I am often very surprised at the amount of work they expect us to do at a very early stage. Just to be able to have the “opportunity” of pitching for the work.
The main issue I have with these tenders is that they directly ask, or at least insinuate, that what should be submitted is an entire proposal for the development of the application. They often ask large numbers of very detailed questions about technology, approach and the finer points of how we would recommend certain features be implemented. To fully respond to these documents would take a couple of days of time for a senior developer – if we were to really do our response justice – essentially a couple of days of free consulting for the company putting out the tender.
As far as I am concerned this is as much spec work as asking design agencies to pitch with concepts. So when we are asking to put forward a proposal for these jobs, then our response tends to be a polite “no, thank you”. Even when the work looks interesting and very much the sort of project we could do well.
If an agency is spending a lot of time responding to tenders then they have to recoup that cost somehow, in our case it would mean having to charge a higher hourly rate for all jobs to cover the non-billable time used in responding.
In addition to the amount of non-billable time these proposals will consume, this work is in reality free consultancy for the person or company requesting the tenders. They can start the process with very sketchy ideas as to how their application should work, get 10 companies to present their concepts and suggestions and take all that knowledge, research and understanding with them to the final build – without paying a penny. When your input is ideas and experience it would be very difficult to prove that the information came from you, it isn’t the same as someone stealing a design concept. There are the occasional instances where an agency could cry foul over an idea that was so unique it would have been unlikely to have also come from another source, but these are unusual. This post from Solid State Group makes for interesting reading.
When it comes to clients with whom we have an existing relationship we are always happy to discuss ideas and approaches prior to a project beginning – that is all part of a good business relationship. However I will not give away days of consultancy to every company who turns up with a large document and a distant promise of a profitable job.
We have found that often these vague proposals expecting a lot of work are because the end client does not have a clear idea of what they want to do. With projects we have taken on we have found that a good approach is to suggest an initial stage of consultancy work. We work with the client and their designer to come up with a specification for the work, often producing wireframes of functionality; making suggestions for approaches and technology; essentially bringing our experience as developers to their ideas. At the end of that process that work is handed over to the client – along with a quote for our development services if we were to continue and build the project. However if they decide to then take the work elsewhere, there are no hard feelings, we have been paid for our consultancy work and we would hope that our years of experience will help to get the project off to a good start.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article we are fortunate in that most our our work comes via long-term partnerships with the design agencies we work with, or from people who have already decided that we are the company they would like to work with. I know that many companies do get a lot of their work via responding to tenders and I would be interested in hearing how other people manage responding to RFPs, and balance that with billable work, and not giving away a lot of consultancy time for free in the process.
On self-promotion, lies, and being a woman
I read with interest Clay Shirky’s post, A Rant About Women and a response by Tom Coates – Should we encourage self-promotion and lies.
Clay’s premise is that, “not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks”. Now I’d hope that most people, male or female, wouldn’t like to be described in that way, but lets get past that statement and look at the examples of the type of behaviour we are discussing. Clay describes how he got started in theatre design, and had to essentially lie about his abilities in order to get his foot in the door. However he then backed the lie up with hard work – running off to learn the drafting skills he knew he needed to be able to back up his initial statement that his skills “were fine”.
So here’s my story. Aged 20 I had quit dance and wanted to get into backstage work. I’m in the West End of London, I’ve got no money, no track record and the master carpenter at the show I want to work on says, “so you’ve crewed before then?”
I hadn’t, I had done a bit of rigging, a bit of stage management as part of my courses and while working for small theatre productions as a choreographer – in small teams when you aren’t on stage you are doing some aspect of the technical side of things. However something on the scale of a West End show, or even approaching it? No. I hadn’t even seen a West End show. However, I knew I was physically strong, a quick learner and I knew about theatre so I said yes. I worked that show for 18 months. A lie, one that got my foot in the door, but I worked hard to make sure I followed through with the skills to back it up – just as Clay did with his story of getting into theatre design.
I had the confidence of youth during that period of my life, however I can think of many examples all through my career where my decision to say, “I can do that” when I had absolutely no track record, has worked in my favour. When I got my first IT job, when I wrote my first book, when I started my business – I wouldn’t have got anywhere had I not looked at projects, knowing I had never done anything like it before but said yes, knowing that I could find out, that I could do a good job.
However while a lie or self-promotion without anything to back it up might work to get your foot in the door, I don’t believe it to be something you can build a career out of doing repeatedly. You will be found out. If you are found out at the point at which you have proved yourself, it is likely that people will forgive the lie, however if you get known for being the sort of person who will say anything to get the gig, who is all mouth and no action, you will find that pretty soon no-one will believe a word you say.
I also think that there is a difference between the ability to use a lie to get your foot in a hard to open door, and the kind of ongoing over-inflation of one’s abilities and skills that Tom describes in his post. If you get your foot in the door and then knuckle down and get on with the job in hand, contribute something, create something, then you have proved your confidence in yourself has substance and you will be respected for that. If your reputation is based purely on what you say about yourself, that is a fragile place to be in terms of any kind of longevity in your career.
Despite my ability to blag my way through firmly closed doors every so often, I’m no great self publicist. I prefer doing to talking and sometimes need a bit of a push to remember that self promotion to one degree or another is important in any career. However I’m not too worried about that, ultimately I’d rather be thought of as a doer than a talker, and perhaps that is because I’m a woman. If so, that’s ok.
Choosing web hosting
One of the great mysteries of life as a web developer is the number of people who are willing to spend several thousand pounds getting a site or web application developed, only to then want it to be deployed on the cheapest of cheap hosting.
At edgeofmyseat.com we pride ourselves in developing efficient, scalable applications. Our CMS framework has been developed to be able to run on almost any PHP hosting, but just because something can run on cheap hosting doesn’t make it a good idea to get cheap hosting. There is more to selecting hosting than if it meets the minimum requirements of your application or script. Rather than just have a rant about dodgy hosting I thought I’d write a bit about how to go about choosing decent hosting, and the sort of solutions we recommend.
Ask around
Where hosting is concerned a good recommendation is a positive sign, especially if the person making the recommendation has used the host for a number of years.
It is always worth doing some searching using Google on a hosting company name. If people are having trouble with a host then it is likely they will be posting in forums or on their blog about it, so a bit of research can prove very interesting. If you see a lot of bad experiences with a particular company it would be wise to look elsewhere. Twitter is another good source of information, particularly as people tend to post to Twitter in real time when they are having problems, even if they might not write a lengthy blog or forum post about their trouble or positive experience.
Cost
It is possible to get some very cheap webhosting, which is fine if you are setting up a personal site or something for a friend, however if your site is at all important to you or your client’s business it is worth remembering that you do indeed get what you pay for. If you want to have support available and to have any issues fixed quickly it is worth paying a little bit extra for that.
Support
Find out how the host deals with support. Some hosts may have email only support which you may be happy with but if you prefer to be able to phone make sure the host offers this. If you know someone who uses the host find out if they have ever had to contact support and what the experience was like.
Up to date servers
Check the versions of software the host uses on their servers. If a host is using very old versions of languages it may be that their servers are not very up to date and so might be less secure. You may also run into problems installing scripts that rely on up to date versions.
Uptime guarantees
Many hosts offer an ‘uptime guarantee’ usually as a percentage, a ‘100% uptime guarantee’ means that they guarantee your site to be up 100% of the time. These guarantees tend not to mean a lot. They generally will offer compensation if your site is down for longer than their guaranteed amount – however you usually have to have contacted the host to say that your site is down before the timer starts. Not a lot of good if your site routinely disappears off the net at 2am! Also the uptime guarantees tend to come into effect only if the server itself is down and not if any external problem is effecting connectivity.
I tend not to take a lot of notice of uptime guarantees when selecting a host, I would far rather choose based on reports I hear from other users as to how good in practice the host’s uptime and support when there are problems is.
Hosting resellers
Be aware that many companies offering hosting services are in fact resellers for larger companies. It is possible for anyone to take a server with a large hosting company and begin to resell space on it, without very much knowledge or experience of hosting at all. If you site goes offline and you contact your host, you may find that they actually can’t do anything about it, as they just have to contact the larger company’s support and raise a ticket there. In this situation you just end up with a middleman between you and the people who can do something about your problem.
Virtual server hosting
For many years shared hosting – hosting your site on a server where you have an account for a single site – was the only cost effective way of hosting all but the largest websites. A site on a shared host may share a server with hundreds of other sites. You will typically have a certain amount of space allocated to you and will be unable to make any changes to the server configuration or install any additional software.
The alternative to shared hosting was to take out a dedicated server. This would mean having an entire physical computer at your disposal running your website. This would be far more flexible as you could make changes to the configuration of the server and the software hosted on it but is expensive and most sites do not need the amount of space and resources that an entire server would give them.
In the last few years a new type of hosting has begun to emerge. The Virtual Private Server gives you what appears to be an entire server to yourself, however you are in fact sharing one physical server with a number of other virtual servers. The benefit over regular shared hosting is that you have your own version of the operating system and software running on your virtual server and so can make changes to the configuration and host multiple sites on the one server. In addition, a virtual server set-up should guarantee you a certain amount of system resources, in comparison to shared hosting where you compete for resources with other users of the same server. A virtual private server also offers better security than shared hosting due to the separation of the individual virtual machines.
Most companies who offer this type of hosting offer it with control panel software installed to make managing your server easy even if you don’t have systems administration knowledge. This software will help you to set up new sites on your server and will usually allow you to schedule updates of the server software or configure what services are available to individual sites.
Virtual Private Servers are a great option for designers and developers as you can set up demonstration versions of sites for clients before they go live, perhaps hosting them on a subdomain. If you have a policy of not handing over files until the client has paid you then this means the client can view the work as a complete website and approve it before it is moved onto their server.
Hosting recommendations
I’ll wrap up by recommending a couple of companies that we have found to be excellent hosts.
We tend to advise clients to take out a virtual private server package for all but the smallest sites. The advantages are certainly worth the small additional cost over good quality shared hosting. We recommend Memset, we have been using servers with them for many years now and their service and pricing is excellent. If you are looking for shared hosting we have found NSDesign to be reliable, and several of our Perch customers have been happy with hosting with NSDesign.
Share your dodgy hosting pain, or your recommendations for excellent hosting in the comments.
Looking forward to 2010
A little late, I thought I would kick off the new year here on rachelandrew.co.uk with a round up of last year and some hints as to what I might be up to during 2010.
Despite the recession 2009 was a good year at edgeofmyseat.com. We launched our mini Content Management System, Perch, at the end of May and the success of this little product, designed to fulfill a need we had, has been quite amazing. In addition to Perch we have had our best year yet for development work, with several sites launched on our main CMS framework, a web application currently under development and are working with some great clients.
On the writing front my CSS Anthology third edition was published. Having a third edition of a book of mine on the shelves makes me feel almost as old as the fact that my daughter will turn 13 this year. Technical book release cycles are pretty short, but even so a third edition seems quite something. Right at the end of the year I published an article on 24ways. I am more choosy about my writing projects these days, writing books and magazine articles is incredibly time-consuming, and while I do enjoy it, the projects have to really excite me these days to make me want to consider giving up the time I know they will take.
So to 2010. In terms of the business I think Perch will be a big feature of life at edgeofmyseat.com this year, as we continue to work with the ideas our customers have brought to improve the product. The feedback from customers has been great and our challenge now is to add features to the product without taking away from our initial goal of it being incredibly simple to install and get started with. On the services side of the business I hope that we can continue to build relationships with design agencies and individual designers who want to do web stuff well, and really want to work in partnership with us to produce the best possible end result for each job.
2010 should see me writing a lot more here as I have foolhardily signed up to project52 – committing to add new content to this site at least once a week in 2010. We’ll see how that goes, however with taking on fewer writing projects of late I feel I have to some extent got out of the habit of writing. Something like project52 might just be the push I need to start publishing things here regularly again. The business articles I posted last year were well received so I may write up some more of the things I have learned in almost 9 years of running edgeofmyseat.com. I have also been working on another book project, this time something that I will probably self-publish as an ebook. Watch this space for more news about that as I hope to be able to start talking about it in the coming months.
I’m hoping to get out of the office a bit more this year, lining up a couple of speaking engagements, and also attending more events. As something of an introvert I do tend to use the excuse of being too busy with work or with driving my daughter around to avoid going to social events or conferences however I always do, “enjoy it when I get there”. I just need to remember that fact when I am coming up with an excellent reason why I can’t go into London for something interesting that is happening!
In my personal life I am fortunate to work with my husband and to be able to arrange my work hours and location to spend time with my daughter. I should never forget how lucky I am to be in that position. At times I feel like my daughter’s social secretary but she has some lovely friends and it is a joy to see them all growing up and becoming a really friendly and confident bunch of young people. In addition to spending time with her I hope to do more photography in 2010, experimenting more with Macro photography and my new interest of Digiscoping. Perhaps I’ll write up some of my photography experiments as part of project52.
