Our thinking

Every year September comes to an end I feel slightly sad as summer is well and truly over. ‘Summer’ in the UK hasn’t seemed to happen the past few years but as a consolation September is usually quite mild and not too rainy. As soon as October comes around though it’s a sure sign that winter is on it’s way, especially when the clocks go back later this month.

After a few very hectic months we’re scheduled to be just as busy this month, as there’s seemingly no let-up in the amount of work we have. It seems like most companies have gotten over the shock of the recession and – after panicking for the first half of the year – have now realised that life goes on and consumers are still buying things. Certainly we felt the impact in the first half of this year when many of our clients postponed their projects whilst their organisations reorganised themselves to cope with the recession.

Throughout the summer we’ve had a lot of large and very complex projects, almost all of which we’ve now delivered on. These have been replaced with a number of quite short and straightforward usability testing and web design projects, which we’re quite happy about. Whilst the larger projects are the most interesting, they’re also the hardest work, so it’s nice to slow the pace down a bit by working on some bread and butter type projects (you can see a selection of our current projects on this site).

So other than doing work for our clients, we’ve been getting out and about a lot, attending Accessibility 2.0, Netimperative’s Twitter or Bitter and Sticky Content’s 10 birthday party, to name a few events. I also presented at the ARK Group’s, Great customer services on a budget, which was good fun. It had a public sector focus and it’s always interesting to talk about how local government can improve their online communications. Our latest poll is asking you to vote on which sector has the least usable websites and unsurprisingly the public sector has already taken a lead against its peers.

We’ve also now released the results of our most recent poll, where we looked to find out what the key factor in purchasing a CMS is. Coming out top were ease of use and functionality/feature set; surprisingly though, price and security ranked low down the list. V3 and CMSCritic have all picked up on this.

This month also saw the first month that we’ve run our training courses in our offices. For the past few years we’ve run the courses at Happy Computers who have always looked after us very well. The venue may look a bit like a play school (with plastic farmyard animals sitting around their offices) but it was certainly a good environment for training. Anyway, we’re now fully set up in our offices for the training and everything seemed to go well.

We’ve got more training to follow in October, as well as attending (and presenting at) Ecommerce Expo – if you’re coming down then be sure to swing by our stand. If you happen to be an IMRG member then you’ll also get to see a lot of us as we’re presenting at both their Mobile Commerce Workshop on 8 October and travel workshop on 29 October. Finally, we’ll be publishing our annual ecommerce usability report, which is always very popular. Last year’s report had 2000+ downloads so hopefully this year’s will have some interesting results (and maybe a new winner?).