One of the benefits this brings is the ability to share problems and ideas with those you wouldn’t usually. Last Friday, I decided to sit and work next to Steve, one of our top flight developers. He turned to me and said “I’m having some troubles working this out, can you take a look”. Now most of the stuff Steve does is way over my head, so he started to explain what his program was doing line by line. “Ah!” said Steve, “don’t worry, I’ve spotted it, thanks bear”.

Had I not been sat next to Steve, he’d have never asked and probably spent the next half hour scratching his head.

Part of this move to cloud based computing has included forming a new habit encouraged by Martin, our CEO, to keep inboxes as clear as possible. A clean, uncluttered inbox leads to a clean uncluttered mind.

Inboxes can be horrible places. If you get an influx of new messages that need to be dealt with, you can get flustered and even get a bit stressed with having to deal with that as well as all your other daily duties.

There are a number of effective ways you can deal with email. One such way is to set aside 2 time slots each day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, where you do nothing but sort your inbox, responding, deleting, filing etc. This allows you to keep on top of your mail and ensures clients aren’t left waiting for responses.

I happen to be quite lucky that most of my email tends to come in the form of notifications from Basecamp, the collaborative online application we use to manage our projects, so my inbox is very easy to keep on top of. Whether you receive 10 emails a day or 200, sorting through your inbox and leaving it empty allows you to stay on top of things and keeps your mind focused.

If you’re from the HIPPO school of design, then questions about

• layout
• colours
• images
• copy

can all be answered by the gut feeling and instinct of the HiPPO. The clue is in the title: you are making business decisions based on opinion.

With a brand new, start-from-scratch  site then you have to use a mixture of HiPPOing, things you’ve read about, and your own personal swipe file of what’s worked elsewhere.

But once you have something up-and-running then you need to start a Kaizen process of continual improvement. This includes challenging your HiPPOs:

• Is this the right place for a form?
• Is this a good headline?
• What is the best colour for this button?
• How about this image – do we need it?

And you find answers to these questions by scientific methods like A/B split testing – not by HIPPOing.

There has long been a dynamic tension in ICT between getting a job done, in a commercial context, and getting a job right, from a technician’s viewpoint: the outcome is compromise.
Now, for the first time in 25 years, I’m in a team where quality matters so much and the ambition is so great that the business response is to produce the best in the field. Smart people, thinking-caps on, and the best tools. But, as they say, “Don’t watch the tool, watch the hand that wields it.”

I’ve built and maintain a secure network and the development environment for a talented team to roll out consistently good stuff.
It’s so refreshing where everyone is striving for the top. It’s exciting to question conventional wisdom. It’s challenging, too, to have my entire skill-set audited, updated, improved. But it really is the only way to travel!

So, got a problem, got an issue with how we’ve dealt with you, got a questions about how and why we do stuff. Contact our gaffer, he’ll do his damned best to sort out the problem, whether it’s about support, build, deployment, customer service, consultancy, invoicing / accounts, data protection or a plain old simple complaint about something that is broken.

We do have dedicated teams to deal with different problems and issues, so it’s also worth having a look at the contact section.

You can call him on 0845 051 4228 but in almost every case you’ll get a quicker, more fuller, response using email. Or you can leave a comment on this page and it will be passed onto him.

AOL Advertising -  Incorporating Advertising.com, Platform A and Buy.at
ATP Advertising – Providing key design skills
CheetahMail – Providing email whitelist services
Home James -  Providing PPC, SEO and SEM
Rackspace Hosting – providing 1st class, high-availability hosting for our client-base
System Minds -  Providing design and UI services

Additionally Connected work tactically with a wide range of organisations to provide such services as SMS, mapping, click-to-call, CRM and call-centre products and services.

Never wishing to stand-still and knowing that VITES™ currently offers a 2 or 3 year lead in thinking and technology, Connected are striving for even more greatness. In 2009, Connected openly published the 2 year development plan for VITES™ showing a strong commitment to ongoing R&D with a £250k budget and further resources in the form of management, quality control and deployment/release tools.

Quality

2010 is the year of quality for Connected – a number of specific initiatives headed by John Hyde in Q3 2009 will spearhead this drive in 2010 to ensure our clients get the very best service and a VITES™ product they want and can use. Listening intently to the needs of the clients is a cornerstone of our development planning and Connected continue to listen to the needs of it’s clients.

Open Source VITES™?

Yes and yes! Targeted for limited Open Source release in 2010 is a number of the core applications found in VITES™. This will be a limited release to early adopters who show they have the in-house technical, UI and testing skills and Connected are inviting applications to join the Alpha programme.

People

The technical team was substantially strengthened in 2009 with the addition of Charlotte, Aaron and Doug and 2010 will see another 3 technical people joining bringing the team up to a total of 12 people.

Account support has also seen similar growth in 2009 with another 2 slots planned in late 2010. This is raising our account support game and allowing the clients better access to ideas, technology and resources.

Sales & marketing

The current client profile is largely unchanged over the last couple of years and the relatively high entry to market remains the same. Connected are looking to broaden the appeal of VITES™ to both smaller and larger organisations and to do this is developing a lower entry cost and a more flexible deployment model. Watch out for developments in the this area, 2010 is an exciting year.

Since 1997 Connected have championed the clear commercial benefit of balancing the needs of function and form in the online world. The key driver is to improve the commercial success of a client’s web strategy and help create lean and profitable web strategies that are reliable, sustainable and market-leading. This is an uncommon approach in a world of “me too” agencies and plagiarism-driven organisations. The end result shows dramatically improved online commercial success and real leadership in our clients markets.

Connected focus on the engine of sales and marketing – the heart of most businesses – the machine that creates the wealth for organisations and feeds the sales process. Building and keeping this machine working at its optimum capacity requires a broad and deep set of skills including consulting, web development, strategy planning, testing, UI design, business intelligence and advertising management.

How do we do this?

Take a team of bright Internet savvy people, mix in a large measure of commercial know-how, another dollop of idea generation and a sprinkling of magic dust.

If you are reading this then you will know that most internet communication (web, email, etc.) is poorly-planned, not visitor-centric and shows no real understanding of how the mass/one-to-one market has changed over the last few years. So, Connected start by removing the barriers to trade, improving the calls-to-action, creating a better environment for the visitor to work with and using personalised and dynamic delivery to get the right message to the right visitors at the right time.

Going forward we apply a “kaizen” (Orig: Jap; “Good change”) methodology of continual improvement. We embark on a sustained campaign of bettering the current site. This involves trialling and testing a large number of variations. The compounded effect is dramatic results: dramatic improvements in conversion rates and dramatic jumps in performance. This approach also has the rather useful side-effect of acting as a quality improvement process.

Who do we do this for?

A wide range of UK organisations from small sub-£5m specialist retailers to large £500m international companies. The only real qualifier, if there is such a thing, is that we work with ambitious, focused organisations that have the will to make it online and the vision to see that much of the old-world thinking has already become extinct.

We define our corporate social responsibility as:

Environment

We actively measure the scale of impact our operation has on the environment and
are committed to exploring ways of reducing the impact of everthing we do. We have a policy to drive towards carbon neutrality through a planned CO2 reduction and carbon-offset credits with further initiatives to improve our environmental footprint by the reduction in waste and energy usage.

Marketplace Leadership

We run our business in a way that marks us out as a world-class provider of services and a preferred partner to do business with. Our aim is to develop long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.

Workplace

At Connected, we are committed to offering our staff and partners a rewarding and challenging workplace. We want to become the best company to work for and strive to provide facilities, programmes and support to reach that goal.

Community

We work hard to be good corporate citizens, we work to support the sustainability of both global and the local communities in which we operate and actively encourage our employees, staff and suppliers to consider the needs of others and involve them selves in public service.

The highest standards of Corporate Governance and Health & Safety, underpin everything we do.

Connected are not a web-design company and therefore keen to avoid the the generic “web design” tag that is too frequently and loosely applied to companies in this field. Connected focus on the engine of sales and marketing and therefore engineer fits in better with our business.

What is digital engineering?

This covers 2 mains areas; functional design and continuous implementation.

Functional design

The creation of mechanical design (a blueprint, or prototype if you will) using the extensive learned skills and experience Connected have. This forms the starting point of the new site and strategy. The new design is designed to meet the current and projected business needs of the organisation with a view to being scalable and flexible across an extended life.

Most of the components come from the tried and tested bucket, the uniqueness for each organisation is how they are glued together. Using tried and tested greatly simplifies the design/build process and largely removes any associated risk of failure.

Continuous implementation

Converting the outline mechanical design into a working web-site using a third-party design company to provide the “look and feel” elements inside the functional constraints of the design plus a healthy dose of good practice. Once live the work doesn’t stop there – the site goes through a constant cycle of improve/test and test again.

This Kaizen cycle of small and continuous improvements is what defines our approach. The true leaders in all fields of information, technology and manufacturing have had a policy of continuing to strive to improve. Put simply, it is not possible to create great solutions and then leave them on the shelf, they need re-working, and re-working, and re-working.