From September 1st, Connected are throwing their doors open to any creative types

What? Yup, we’re opening 1,500 sq ft of cool office space to anyone who wants to use it

We already have quite a few friends and clients who use our office space and we thought, “to hell with, invite everyone In”

Great minds thinks alike, CONNECTED for FREE

We’ve got FREE ultra high-speed Wi-Fi, hot desks, huge LCD screens, sofas, colour printers (A3/A4), usability testing suite, a great library, parking, a massive conference table for 18 people, breakfast bar, all-day cafe (not free, sorry) plus an art gallery to refresh tired creative juices.

You will also have access to some of the best brains in the web marketing world, for FREE

We’re running this experiment until the end of year so why not drop us an email, find us on LinkedIn, visit our Facebook page or just drop in and say hello.

We’re open from 10am every working day. Our coffee pod machine is a Krups Dolce Gusto so bring along a pack of pods, mine’s a Cafe Lungo.

Even if you are not strictly creative in terms of pretty pictures, maybe you are just creative from an entrepreneur point of view, maybe you simply crave the company of bright, link-minded, people.

1. Corporate babble – meaningless waffle about “management teams”, “strategic partnerships”, “proactive solutions”. Sometimes “stakeholders” creep in as well. If you hide the company name then these pages would fit any organisation from NASA down to Rotherham Pet Supplies Ltd.

If you are a me-too company with a me-too website then this style will suit well.

2. Heroic personal story in the Victor Kiam genre:

“I made my first Badass Snow-Board from a sheet of titanium I found in a dumpster…”

People love stories and this type of page can be a back-up if the rest of your site is failing to tell the company story with layout, images, and copy.

E-commerce hot-shot Johnnie Boden tells a great story without even mentioning what he sells:

“After five burglaries, one office dog, nine Christmas quizzes, twelve nights spent in the warehouse…”

Every other page on the Boden site is selling the dream – and this page tells us that Johnnie is living the dream as well.

3. The missing about-us page. Amazon don’t have one. Neither do Apple. Zappos? Zilch. All rely on the rest of the site and the power of the brand.  And they want you to get on and buy something – not read empty spiel.

How many real-life shops have a museum of company history? Photos of the directors? Maybe they use the space for better things…

“So what”, I here you cry, “we’re not in Germany”. But we are, sort of, in the Federated European States of Brussels so how long before the privacy boys start raising the issue elsewhere in Europe. The problem stems from Google acquiring unregulated information from the German people and shipping that data to the US for analysis and use is some ill-defined and opaque manner.

I hope to see the end of Google’s information monopoly in the next few years and, besides, most forward-thinking organisations already realise the importance of owning their own information and shy away from service-led offerings such as GA.

A good place to find out a bit more about Google’s less-than-transparent approach to the web is GoogleWatch.

Remember. “We are moving to a Google that knows more about you.” - Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking to financial analysts, February 9, 2005, as quoted in the New York Times the next day.

Thanks to GoogleWatch for the use of the logo above, which is a comedy item and not to be taken seriously.

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.

Changing from an ugly and ill-formed email-based system into a simple, fast and cloud-enabled application has reduced costs, increased control and brought a whole host of really important improvements to how we work.

It’s not just us!

Seth Godin, a kind of visionary in this new world actually makes the radical suggestion of “Do not approve any project that isn’t run on Basecamp“. That is, I’ll grant you, a little extreme but as the the post is aimed at “catch-up” audiences he’s probably right – we’d certainly agree with him.

ps: If you do sign up using the link above then, thanks, we get a small reduction in our monthly bill, ta x