As most people are aware, we’re fortunate to have Hull City as one of our major clients - from the programme, the CITY mag, the teamsheets to tigerleisure.com, we’re responsible for the clubs marketing with Rob Smith, the Marketing Manager.

We’re relaunching tigerleisure.com to coincide with the new home kit launch - it’s going to be a busy few weeks but an exciting one as I’m working with the club I fell in love with over 25 years ago!

I’ve decided to keep a development diary of the ups and the downs of the build and the progress from photoshop to the web - hopefully it will be an interesting read!

So I spoke yesterday as part of Hull Business Week at the KC Stadium on the topic of “Driving Traffic to your Website”. Kind of focused on the big two - SEO and PPC - with honourable mentions for social networking sites.

Had a pretty good turnout and had a good response after the event with a fair percentage of the audience wanting to speak to me after we’d finished.

If you were there, thanks for coming and listening to me - I hope you found it useful!

If you couldn’t make it, keep your eyes peeled for the next event as it won’t be long before I’m doing something similar again….

What’s the topic I hear you cry?!

Well, it’s SEO, PPC and driving traffic to your website.

I’ll post some slides up here after the event but hopefully you’ll all pop down and see me!

I’m thinking that I might move my email over to use Google Apps - does anyone out there use it? What’s the good and the bad points?

I’ve stuck the same question as above on Twitter - will see what sort of responses I get back and post them here as updates!

UPDATE 1: Seems to be a great tool according to my twitter feed. Going to give it a go.

UPDATE 2: All done - good so far, the SPAM filter is particularly impressive!

Had a great response to my article on Boagworld (see this post). Thanks again Paul.

If anything though it showed the current power of Twitter - my followers rattled round pretty quickly on the day the article went to press and it’s been retweeted A LOT (again, nice).

I’ve also posted a few tweets about job vacancies at Strawberry and had a pretty good response.

So, is Twitter just a tool for us geeks to communicate or will it/already is a serious method of communicating?

I’m away on a stag do and in my role as Best Man, I shall ensure we have an afternoon booked for the discussion of Twitter and Social Media and it’s impact on non-geeks.
Actually, I best not….

Paul Boag kindly has published one of my articles on his site - and let’s face it, it’s one of the more widely read Web Development sites. So thanks go to Paul for allowing me to write for his site….

You can read the article yourself here: http://boagworld.com/business_strategy/5_common_ecommerce_mistakes/

As “regular readers” now, we’ve been doing loads of work on several ecommerce projects recently.

I wanted to make the basket link a bit more interesting and came across qTip - a frankly quite brilliant bit of kit. We’ve used it on a few sites now and it’s got great reactions from us, from our clients and from the site users/testers.

The guy who wrote is called Craig and in the early stages of development, Craig answered emails quickly and got us using the tooltip to it’s maximum potential.

I cant recommend it enough to be honest - check out the link below:

http://craigsworks.com/projects/qtip/

Recently we’ve been incredibly busy at Strawberry Towers. We’ve tried to get extra resources but without any real success (if you’re reading this and you’re a web monkey and want a job, email me - contact details in footer).

This has lead to the problem of having (for example), 3 things to do at once, with 3 different clients all clammering for their work to be done first. (This is an example, could be 5, could be just the 2 things….)

So, how do you handle this when it happens?

I went through a phase of trying to get all 3 done at once - which failed. All that happens is that you end up doing a half arsed job on all 3 items of work as you’re rushing, which in turn leads to:

- Rework as the functionality isnt quite right
- Rework due to bugs
- Quality standards going out of the window

The end result? Whilst you were trying to please all 3 clients, you end up having a mental day tied to the computer and end up with 3 clients all not quite satisfied and 3 things still on your “to do” list.

I think I’ve found the solution finally, and whilst it’s so simple, and so obvious, I think it’s one that’s easy to forget:

DO ONE THING AT A TIME, DO IT WELL, DO IT TO COMPLETION AND MOVE ON TO THE NEXT THING!

First of all, explain the situation to the clients - generally, they understand. Secondly, decide the most time pressing job and get on with it. Do it, and tell the client when you’ve done it. Keep the other 2 clients informed on when their work will be completed. Complete job 2 and move on to job 3.

The end result is a bit different:

- Quality upheld and rework kept to a bare minimum
- Clients kept informed and happy (I accept this might not always happen!)
- You actually complete a task and see the “to do” list shrink.

Obvious and simple, yet I think sometimes easy to forget.

Comments welcome!