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First and foremost, Christmas is not here yet. We have two more months before we have to sit down with our most annoying relatives. Phew.

But, if you’re in retail, you’ll know how important the next two months are. The next two months pay for the rest of the year. If they go well, you’ll be in great stead for 2018. If they go badly, you might get your P45 in your Christmas card.

If you have physical stores, you might be advertising temporary vacancies to help cope with the rush. Good thinking, Batman.

Your online store might not have the capacity it needs.

There are four factors that influence the capacity of your online store:

1. The number of people who visit your website
2. How they interact with your website
3. Your online store’s coding
4. The servers that host your online store

If you use Google Analytics, (1) and (2) are really easy to find so you should definitely do this now.

Log in and select your store and go to Audience > Overview.

Drop down under Overview. You’ll probably see Sessions selected. Choose Pageviews.

On the right hand side, choose Hourly.

Then, hover over the graph and you’ll see the number of pageviews per hour.

Select your busiest period. This might be your Black Friday or Christmas sale from last year. Find the busiest hour or the busiest day.

To make the maths easy, let’s say there were 36,000 pageviews in that hour. There are 3600 second in an hour, so divide that number by 3600 to get your pageviews per second. In our example, we arrived at 100.

We then need to adjust this number for your projections this year. If you’re spending more on advertising this year, you might want to add 20%. If you’re spending less, you might want to subtract 20%. It’s better to overshoot than to undershoot, though, and it’s worth adding a buffer in case your estimate is a bit out.

The number you arrived at is the number of pageviews per second that your store and hosting need to be able to accommodate so your Christmas card contains an awful joke and not a P45 (I’m not selling this well, am I?)

Armed with your pageviews per second, your developer and hosting company (or Coherent… just sayin’) will be able to run tests to determine if you’re already in good stead or if you need to make changes so your online store doesn’t fall flat when you most need it up and running.

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The photocopier is broken again. Ugh. At least their phone number’s on my recent calls list from yesterday…

.. Ring ring .. For sales, press 1 ..

.. This is really adding insult to injury ..

.. For accounts, press 2 ..

.. I need to remember the menu options for next time ..

.. For support, press 3 ..

.. At last! ..

.. We record all our calls ..

.. That’s great. So do we. …

.. All of our agents are busy .. doo doo .. doo be doo .. Your time is valuable to us ..

Sound familiar? Of course it does. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way.

Self-service portals and apps are huge win-win opportunities for you and your clients. Your customers can get the information they need when they need it (even if they’re photocopying their face at 4am after a classic work night out). You don’t have to employ people, to help to one person at a time, who probably knows what they need and doesn’t want to have to phone in.

That person might even click a button that the customer could have clicked themselves. Efficient, huh?

This sort of workflow belongs in the ’90s. You just have to let go!

That photocopier problem could have been solved with an online troubleshooter. It could also have been solved with an in-app chat that would allow one staff member to help several customers at once (some companies take this to the extreme which is why they seem to have just woken up). In-app chat would also let the customer take photos of the problem. How much quicker would that be?

Whatever systems you have in place now might be great for what they do but if customers can’t help themselves then there is a tremendous opportunity to improve your customer experience and lower costs at the same time. It’s what we do as software developers. We create software that could become part of your website, or could be a mobile app, to plug into whatever systems you have now and deliver extra functionality.

Even if your current systems are decades old black boxes, even if you’ve never worked with software developers before, we know our stuff and we can make it easy for you to deliver the service your customers expect. Call us!

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Bureaucracy isn’t just the domain of large corporates. Even as a young, hip software development company, we have it. In this post, I want to describe how we use automation and bespoke software in our own workflow.

Systems we use

We use several off the shelf systems:

• Xero for accounting,
• GitHub is a key part of our software development workflow,
• Harvest to fill some of the gaps in Xero,
• Dial9 for our phone system,
• Matomo for website analytics,
• Kayako (legacy) as a support desk / shared inbox.

Harvest integrates nicely with Xero (which is why we use it) but apart from that, there’s little integration between our systems.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter much. Integrating our phone system with our accounting system wouldn’t help much. We had a few challenges, though.

Challenges

1. “He said, she said”
   Most of our customers are an absolute pleasure to work with (thanks!) but every so often, we had to trawl through emails and phone call logs to find out if we’d made a mistake or if a customer was trying to pull a fast one. It was sometimes so time consuming that we would just assume that we made a mistake even if it meant the company made a loss on a project.By integrating with our phone system, we can quickly find out who spoke to whom, when, and what was said (i.e. the recording) on a timeline simply by clicking on a customer’s name. The timeline also has emails and meeting notes, and everything is searchable. A very detailed audit trail isn’t for everyone but for us, it occasionally saves a lot of time in “he said, she said” scenarios.
2. Keeping data in sync
   Xero has a list of our customers, invoices and payments. Harvest has a similar list. Dial9 and Kayako have address books that, if they’re accurate, make it easy to know who’s who. By keeping our Dial9 address book up to date, we can see the caller’s name on all of our phones. Because the right person can pick up the phone, we rarely have to transfer calls.By integrating Harvest and Dial9, our phone system’s address book is always up to date. Every time we take on a new customer, their name pops up on our phones when they call without us having to fiddle with the phones or Dial9’s address book.
3. A single pane of glass
   We’re a small company and mitigating the risks that small companies face (such as cash flow) and making sure that we’re doing the right things to grow our company (such as making sure our marketing budget is well spent) are hugely important. We track loads of KPIs from search engine ranks, to Adwords clicks, to the number of customers with whom we work in a given month, to our website’s traffic, to aged debtors, to projects that are likely overrun and so on.All of our KPIs are always up to date and visible on one page. Really. It wasn’t hard, either. All of our systems had the data we needed inside them but, because every company’s approach to reporting is unique, the data we needed in the format we wanted it in took some time to get to. Now it doesn’t.
4. That feature we needed
   One of the big drawbacks of off the shelf software is that if there’s something you want it to do, that it doesn’t do (say, because most of their customers don’t need it), it can feel like you’re paying for something that doesn’t fit or that you’re tied in to it.For us, the feature was retainers. A lot of our work is on retainer – if customers commit to a certain volume of work, it gives us the stability we need to grow our company and in return, we can get things done more quickly and be more flexible. Harvest’s concept of retainers didn’t fit out own so we decided to layer bespoke software on top of Harvest to use Harvest’s invoicing, time tracking and project functionality but keep a separate log of retainers.
   5. Correlating data
   One of the greatest advantages of connecting systems is that you can see data from different systems on the same table or the same graph. We correlate our marketing spend with our website traffic and our monthly revenue which allows us to quickly see how well our marketing is performing.

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The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is all over the news. Whilst the deadline of the 25th of May 2018 for UK businesses to be compliant might seem like a long way away, many businesses will have to make substantial changes before then to avoid hefty penalties. It is hard to overstate the differences between the already complex and important Data Protection Act (DPA) and the GDPR and the impact it will have on businesses and consumers.

Who does it apply to?

The GDPR will have an impact on every business and consumer with any EU presence. It “upgrades” the protections enshrined in law by the DPA for today’s digital world, thereby offering more protection to consumers and placing more responsibilities on businesses.

What about Brexit?

The Government has, with unusual (!) clarity, stated that the changes in the GDPR will continue to apply after Brexit.

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What is it?

Bespoke software is a very broad descriptor that encompasses a large range of products. Essentially, it is any custom built piece of programming featuring sets of instructions, which enables specific tasks to be carried out automatically.

For example, consider a used-car dealership. To keep up with today’s market, at the very least the dealership will need to have a well designed website listing all available vehicles and details. Now imagine a customer visiting this website. What will make them more likely to get in touch? Some applications we might include in our software are:

• The ability to filter available vehicles according to the customers needs
• An online booking system where customers choose a viewing time that fits your diary online.
• A live chat option, where customers can speak directly to your team while browsing the site.

It is a fairly common and easy job for us to develop websites with this functionality. But there are many more advanced operations we can incorporate.

Market research and advertising

• We can develop personalised systems that track things like how the customer reached your site, what pages they spent longest on etc. and produce statistics, graphs and diagrams analysing this information, so you know where to focus your advertising.
• We can create a system that modifies your listed prices according to the length of time an item has been available and how frequently it is viewed.

• When a customer books a viewing we can store their name, contact details, budget, vehicle preferences and payment method for future use.
• We can automate advertising, so that emails advertising specific types of vehicles/services are sent to the relevant customers at pre-programmed times.

Billing and accounting

• Whether you want to integrate a current system or develop one from scratch, we can make it so that the data you have collected when arranging viewings is automatically entered into your billing software.
• You may also want to consider incorporating an accounting system, so that billing transactions are automatically added to your accounts when a purchase is made through the billing system.
• We can customise accounting systems to synchronise regularly with business bank account statements.
• When a sale is made we can develop software that automatically updates the inventory on your website, removing the sold item from your listings.

Server management and security

• We are experts at managing servers, ensuring they are capable of running web applications reliably.
• We can organise automated backups so that your website and data can be recovered in case of hardware failures or infection.

Essentially, what develop automated systems and integrate all these processes so you don’t have waste time re-entering data, or performing long-winded menial tasks like manually inputting every transaction into your accounts. You have all the information you need at the click of a button.

We believe that almost all businesses can save substantial labour time by automating processes like those mentioned. This saves you from spending money on additional administrative staff, and frees you up to focus on your areas of expertise and passion.

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As your online presence grows, you may start to consider the pros and cons of buying/renting hardware and using cloud services for your hosting. All of these options have pros and cons and this article will provide our view on the realities of this decision. We offer cloud servers and dedicated servers – find out more about hosting with us.

Buying Hardware

If you buy hardware, you can get exactly what you want. Choose the chassis, choose the motherboard and then start adding more components. If you need a storage server, buy a large chassis and add lots of disks. If you need a compute-intensive server, buy a small chassis and put a 4 socket motherboard in it. The choices are endless.

This is an excellent choice for those whose infrastructure spans a large number of servers. Why? Because buying 100 servers has economies of scale over buying 1 (and buying 1000 has economies of scale over buying 100). Intel openly publish the “tray price” of their CPUs (i.e. the cost to buy them in bulk) and you probably won’t find those prices at any retailers. It’s the same for other components too.

It’s not just the immediate economies of scale though. There are also economies of scale co=locating your servers. A rack is cheaper than 46 co=location packages and also gives you physical access (so you don’t have to pay for remote hands). You can co=locate tools and spares, for which many co=location providers charge extra. You can connect your servers over a private network and reduce your bandwidth cost, especially if you co=locate a backup server and do backups over the private network.

Renting Hardware

Renting hardware can offer almost the same level of control as buying hardware. Sure, you don’t get physical access, but many large dedicated server providers now have very advanced control panels where you can add extras, take remote control of your server, reprovision your server and so on so there isn’t always a need for physical access.

Not owing the hardware might seem like a bad financial decision (if you draw a parallel to renting a home) but in reality it often isn’t. Consider the following hypothetical yet realistic example where the server provider can take advantage of their economies of scale. Of course these economies of scale don’t apply if you need an usual server configuration.

Owning: £5000 upfront (needs upgrading after 3 years), £50/month to co-locate, 5 remote hands requests at £75 each and 3 disk failures at £100 each. Total: £7475.

Renting: £200 per month all inclusive. Total: £7200.

It’s also a lot more reassuring than worrying about who will be around to do a drive replacement in a faraway city in the middle of the night.

Cloud

There are several myths about cloud, its performance, its reliability and its scalability. Put simply, cloud is great for small deployments but as you start to approach the need for a dedicated server, you won’t be able to do the same with the cloud at a similar cost. There is a very simple reason for this:

To provide a large cloud server with a certain specification, a quality provider will usually allocate resources on a physical server with slightly more than your virtual server specifications (so you’re paying for more than you can use). This is because the software that creates the virtual server uses resources too. That software is often the cause of a lot of problems, too. Virtualisation software can be highly complex, needing experienced systems administrators 24×7 to deal with mishaps, further adding to the cost. There are software solutions out there to take away some of the complexity but most of these are also very complex themselves and require a lot of investment and room for price variation due to vendor tie-in. It is for this reason that I would advise anyone in the market for an important cloud service not to rely on a company whose whole virtual infrastructure is dependent on their business relationship with a particular vendor. We have known a particular vendor to increase the price of their software tenfold where affected clients were told via a mailing list.

Again, cloud is great for small setups but with the added complexity, you won’t get the performance/cost ratio of a dedicated server.

Claims are often made about the cloud’s scalability and reliability. Scalability may be useful where you need to grow significantly very quickly, then back again, often. This is a rare occurrence and most often, if you compare the cost of a dedicated server to match your largest demand with a cloud server that offers the scalability you need, you’ll find the former is more cost effective. Discussions with one hosting company revealed that one client’s obsession with scalability pays for their whole cloud infrastructure.

Reliability is a hot topic too. Many cloud technologies claim to have automatic failover resulting in essentially zero downtime. CloudHarmony has impartial, accurate uptime statistics for all of the major clouds and all of the major clouds have more downtime than a many dedicated servers. This again, is due to the complexity. More software, means more complexity, means points of failure. Interestingly, many of the cloud providers that people associate with reliability (because of their marketing and higher prices), have uptime similar to, or worse than, the cheaper providers.

Compare this with a dedicated server. We tend to recommend Kimsufi for a cheap place to store backups. Our 10 euro-per-month Kimsufi has been up for over a whole year without any downtime at all. If you need more reassurance than that, look at the same company’s enterprise servers, which are still reasonably priced and come with financially-backed SLAs, RAID and redundant power/network supplies.

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Your accounting system is at the heart of your business. Whether you use Sage, Xero, Quickbooks or something else, there is a wealth of data about your suppliers, customers, financials and KPIs in it. One of the key advantages of Xero specifically, is that it’s cloud based. Being cloud based makes it easier to link it with other systems and to get data out of it in your preferred format.

However, as your accounting package, Xero or otherwise, can’t encapsulate everything you do, it’s common to have other systems with overlapping data. Maybe you use Office365 or Google Apps (Gsuite) for the address book but when a customer moves to new premises, you have to update both systems.

Advantage 1: Keeping Xero in sync

Bespoke software development opens the door to synchronising data in Xero with any other system. This includes Xero’s official integrations – but also proprietary systems, legacy systems and systems that don’t officially connect with Xero. Bespoke software can help you to keep using your other systems – or to use a system that doesn’t officially integrate with Xero – and keep them in sync.

Advantage 2: Reporting

The wealth of data in Xero, Sage and other accounting systems can be hard to extract in the format you want. Let’s say that your KPIs include:

• The number of customers with whom you work in a given month,
• The amount of value generated by each individual,
• Your monthly profit and turnover growth,
• The ROI on your marketing spend.

Your accounting package holds the keys to this data – but you might have to download a spreadsheet from it, copy and paste in other data from other sources and do some manual analysis. Whilst there is something to be said for manual analysis, there is also a lot to be said for keeping up to date. Bespoke software can provide you with a single pane of glass for your important metrics, presented how you want them to be presented.

Advantage 3: If-this-then-that

Aspects of what you do will undoubtedly be complex. However, it’s likely that some of your processes could be encapsulated by a simple order of events. For example, “when the Xero invoice has been paid, send the equipment to the customer”. Keeping abreast of when each invoice has been paid and ensuring that the correct information is conveyed to shipping could be time consuming. However, this sort of repetitive work can often be simplified or automated entirely by software.

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This is an example of a resilient architecture at AWS. Everything is replicated so that the store is online even if an entire data centre goes offline.

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We often work with clients on speeding up their website. Great results are achievable but focus needs to be put on the right areas as there are a myriad of reasons why your website could be slow. Recently, we worked with a client to speed up a customised WordPress website by implementing heavy caching with Nginx and extensive tuning for HTTP2 and Google Pagespeed. The result is that real visitors at a significant geographical distance can see the page in less than 0.6s and Google Page Insights and GTMetrix are both very happy. However, the extensive nature of the work to get every possible millisecond for as many visitors as possible, highlighted several important points.

Myth #1: Small images should be combined into sprites

A few years ago this was absolutely true. Today, almost every major browser supports HTTP2. This means that, between a server configured to use HTTP2 and a browser with HTTP2 support, several files can be downloaded simultaneously over one connection. Furthermore, this is faster than downloading one large file.

Myth #2: Load x first, then y, then z

Also related to HTTP2, because files can be downloaded simultaneously, it is no longer a case that certain types of files should be loaded at a certain point (e.g. Javascript last). A good developer should now aim to load as much as possible as quickly as possible and make anything that would otherwise prevent the browser from rendering the page, asynchronous. On a waterfall chart, either on a web browser or GTMetrix, you want to see several rows that look identical toward the top.

Myth #3: You need to spend more on hosting

I am disappointed that website speed is so closely aligned with server size and hosting costs. We have successfully moved high traffic websites to smaller servers and made them faster at the same time. Part of it is the configuration of the server, that should aim to make efficiency savings, and part is the software itself. If your software: WordPress, Magento or anything else, is badly coded (think about plugins in particular – the ones you downloaded without paying much attention to ;)) then the additional hosting costs to achieve a better speed can be very very high. It is better to deal with the problems in the code so that the server doesn’t have to do as much work.

Myth #4: You need a CDN

I am generally in favour of using a CDN. However, it is not the secret sauce that it is sometimes made out to be. A good rule of thumb, is if your website is fast for local visitors but slow for international visitors (and you have enough international visitors for this to be a problem), then you should consider a CDN. Be aware that CDNs introduce more complexity as they need to cache your content so your website needs to tell the CDN when content has changed, and needs to reference the CDN on every page. A CDN is relatively unlikely to improve the speed of low traffic website or one where the geographic distance between the server and the users is already fairly small.

Myth #6: Google Page Insights will tell me how fast my website is

Tools like Google Pagespeed, Pingdom Tools and GTMetrix need to be interpreted properly. I despise the fact that they make it so easy for website owners to see what appear to be problems. Google Pagespeed does not take into account HTTP2 much, if at all. There is debate as to whether Google rankings correlate to this tool but as for real visitors, I wouldn’t think about it much. GTMetrix is a very advanced tool that takes a lot of different factors into account – it is a very good tool. However, again, despite its bells and whistles, it needs to be interpreted properly. Your score on GTMetrix is not always representative of how users see your website.

On a side note, Qualys SSL Labs test also needs to be interpreted properly. This test gives you some (actually very good) information about the security of your HTTPS configuration. However, what is neglected to mention, is that not having a top score is not necessarily a problem. Why? Because in some cases, using the latest ciphers will cause problems for users in locations where, for example, Windows XP is still widely used (there are some!). Equally, a very strong HTTPS setup can damage the performance of your website as more CPU power is needed to handle crytography

Myth #7: Always enable Gzip compression

Following on from my aside about HTTPS encryption using CPU, gzip compression uses CPU power too. If your website is busy and your server’s bottleneck is the CPU, enabling gzip will take CPU resources away from the server’s normal activities and have a good chance of making it slower. If you simply want to tick the “gzip?” box on online tools, which I discourage until there is substantial evidence that Google rankings depend on this, enable it at level 1, the lowest level. Level 1 is substantially better than nothing for page size, and not that much different to any other level relatively speaking. It does, however, use much, much less CPU time to compress and extract.

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