I’ve Got Myself Employed, the Future of London Made & This Blog!

As of a few months ago I was in the planning stage of how to expand London Made. Over the years we have been getting far more work than we could take on and I felt it was time to expand. Interestingly enough, it was a job offer that changed that.

I’m not one to be in employed. In my 13 years of working on the web I have only spent 8 months in employment at Hashrocket. However, when I was approached about the oppurtunity of working with Mark Boulton Design I had an initial gut reaction that it was something that I would love to do.

I have learnt a lot from reading Mark’s blog over the years and already had been following some of the team on Twitter. Their knowledge and passion very much spurred me into thinking that it would be an awesome place to work. Exciting projects, passionate people and great knowledge. I am very stoked.

However, London Made as a consultancy will obviously be closing down as it becomes the umbrella for my startups and mobile apps. I would not say I was not a little sad, but it definitely is a choice that I have no regret.

Because of having work hours, I now aim to be able to update this blog far more too. I also have plans for speaking among other things.

I move to Cardiff on Saturday and start work on Monday. It’s exciting and I can’t wait to start.

If you want to work with me, I’ll still be available, along with a great team. Just go to Mark Boulton Design’s Contact Page and fill it out.

Why The UK Startup Scene Is Doomed

Background

A year ago I was talking a lot about my startup, the processes and the issues I encountered so others may learn. However, you may have noticed that my talk then went dead. I was entangled in the web of bureaucracies with the bank.

The process for receiving payments on a website (other than services like Paypal, which we all know is not a good idea) goes as so:

Register a business (Ltd, LLC, etc)
Open a Business Bank Account
Open a Business Merchant Account
Sign Up For A Payment Gateway
Sign Up For A Billing System (if 4 doesn’t include)
Implement the billing system into your application.
Profit!

I was stuck on step number 3. I had a Ltd company that I was giving license to use my idea. (I kept this separate from my other businesses if I wanted to ever invest more in it.) I had a business account (in fact I had one set up in less than a week.) But the Merchant Account is where I was having trouble.

My 2 bank options were Barclays or Lloyds TSB.

I first chose Barclays. They somehow lost my paperwork and so I decided that Lloyds would hopefully be less problematic.

I already had a business account with Lloyds so next I needed to apply for a Merchant Account (3) with them. Not as simple as you would think so I decided to enlist the services of my father (a Chartered Accountant and long time business account holder with Lloyds.) After jumping through some hoops they came to me with an offer that I could use their service if I give a deposit. This is a commonplace technique and I was aware this would be the case. However, they asked me to put a deposit of £50,000 ($81,000.) I kid you not. I had already put decent money into building the business but I had no where near that to put as a deposit. With some further negotiation, they said they would halve it. I grumbled but it was the only way I knew how to further the business and not see my initial money go to waste so I accepted.

After months more of email tennis, unprofessional letters (Most of my letters from them contain my name and business name spelt in random variations) they told me that they had some ‘suggestions’ for my website. At first these were to update the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Most were reasonable although some just didn’t make any sense or fit into my business model at all but I figured this was acceptable until they then started telling me I had to change the content on the front page. Items that were of no concern to the banking. (Even though, I was paying them a large deposit to protect them). I was getting web design advice (read: do it our way or forgo our help) from bankers. It was time to look into other options.

Resolution

Since it was my idea licensed to a company I have the ability to license globally without issues. So I decided that the best place I know for launching a product quickly is America.

I Tweeted out that I was trying to sign up for Citibank but I had no social security number. Within a few days I was phoned up by an Assistant Vice President Business Banker who was going through me with the steps to launch my business with them.

She was (and continues to be) absolutely amazing help. I am currently waiting to hear back about the Merchant account and it looks to be completing any day now. (Then I sign up for a Payment Gateway.)

I’ve almost launched a business in America without a Social Security Number, without an American address or phone number and without once stepping foot on American soil. And with only a £3100 ($5000) deposit.

No wonder you have places like San Francisco, filling over the brim with innovatives when banks do everything they can to put up road blocks. Making the experience frustrating is a sure fire way to make people repeat it less. You just simply don’t see the level of entrepreneurs in the UK as you do the US in my experience and I feel that is not helped with the bureaucracies.

Update: The reason we did not go for Paypal first was handling the transition from Paypal subscriptions to a different payment gateway would be a pain. We didn’t want two sets of funds. Knowing possibly we would probably not get our hands on the Paypal funds for a good 5 months.

Tame Your Wild Inbox With A Few Easy Steps

The secret to my latest productivity spurt has not been increased amount of caffeine but because of a new pledge to myself to tame my inbox. I thought it would be a lot harder than it was but there was a few principles that I had to keep in mind.

I tried out every Mail program anyone could recommend for OS X and after a few weeks in each I have learnt which app and which systems work.

I started by breaking down my daily influx into statistics (not including Mailing Lists or Spam). On an average day I get a couple of hundred emails.

35% are personal emails. Friends emailing, Facebook messages, etc.
10% are people asking for help or advice.
5% is random mailings. (Not spam, but newsletters from products I use)
45% is Twitter, Dribbble, Facebook Comments or other social notifications.
5% are receipts or invoices.

Out of those, I would generously suggest that 40% warranted a reply and about only 10-15% were time sensitive. So on the assumption I received 200 emails today, 30 need my immediate attention. Chances are 20 of them could be resolved within 3 minutes each too. This is already starting to look more manageable!

What You Need To Recognise

1. Most Emails Aren’t As Time Sensitive You Think

I used to have my software checking for mail every 5 minutes. When something new came in I stopped what I was doing, answered it and got back to what I was doing. I used to feel good for keeping my mailbox somewhat lean but more often than not lots of emails piled on top.
If something is incredibly time-sensitive there is a good chance that whoever sent it will contact you by phone or IM instead. If you get it as an email, then it’s unlikely important and if it is, it’s such a small percentile then it’s not worth checking every email and losing focus to find that one exception to the rule.

2. Emails are a secondary activity

It’s nice to see who’s just followed you on Twitter but if you’re hearing an alert all the time it will break your concentration. It will stop you doing the best work you could be doing. Emails should be a secondary to work, not on parallel.

Could you honestly imagine reading your snail mail the same way you check your email? No, neither could I. You most likely read them at the start of the day or finish your tasks and then read them. One thing at a time. If people want to get ahold of you they will.

3. It’s not rude!

Like me, you are probably worried about offending people if you aren’t quick with your replies. It is not rude to reply to someone half a day later. They are most likely busy and understand. A structured work process makes everything work better. Your mind is not thinking about the UI element you are about to design or the test you are about to make pass. You can focus on the task at hand.

If it’s someone who you want to invest in you, then you should probably be as diligent as possible but I think they can respect that you are just trying to get work done. They will be wanting you to do the same thing.

4. If in doubt, wait.

If you feel you need a break then spend those 5-10 minutes sorting out through your emails. Organise what you can into your folders (I’ll speak more about this later) and reply to any that will take you only a few minutes to reply to. Draft anything that’s taking you too long and if you’re in doubt if it will take you 2 minutes or 5 minutes, wait!

5. Organization

This is in fact one of the most important rules. Have a clean structure to organise your messages into. I have the following:

Smart Mailboxes
- Unread Messages: Default (All unread messages waiting to be organised.)
- Notifications: All messages from the notification folder and its subfolders.
- Lists: All the mailing lists I am subscribed to.
On My Mac

ASAP: Things I should reply to within the day.
Waiting: When I’m waiting on another person’s comments before I answer.
Saved: Concert tickets, support responses or other things I’ll need later.
Important: Things that I should reply to but aren’t as important as ASAP.
Notifications

Newsletters: All notifications that don’t have a folder.
Separate folders for Dribbble, Facebook, Flickr, Google+, LinkedIn, Shoeboxed, Tumblr and Twitter.

Reciepts: All invoices and receipts I get. See later for a nice rule I have set for this.
Archive: Anything i’ve read in the other folders gets archived.

Tips & Tricks

Remember Asap!

Remember to check ASAP twice or thrice a day to make sure all the messages are cleared out. If after 3 days in a row you are not replying to an email, put it in the Important folder. Check the notifications only once or twice a day.

Less Alerts

Rather than having your emails come in every 5 minutes, put it to every 30 minutes. You will save yourself a little battery life and be less distracted.

Notifications folders

I let Mail catch these for me so that I don’t have to filter them myself. This alone made me a lot more productive.

PLugins

I strongly suggest you buy the Act-On plugin. It’s great for keyboard users to move their emails about. It powers most of the movement I do in Mail.

Reciepts

I have an Act-On rule that really is a great help to my accounting.

On CTRL+SHIFT+9, move the message to the Reciepts folder, forward the message to my Shoeboxed account (through their email) and then Mark as Read.

Mac Os X LION

If you are on Lion, remove the sidebar and put “Unread” and “Notifications” in the bookmark bar. It makes everything a lot cleaner.

Is there any tips you recommend that I haven’t expressed? Let me know! I’d be curious to streamlining my process even more.

What My Week Has Entailed – July 29th 2011

This has been an extremely busy week for me. I’ve almost finished a client, I’ve launched 2 toy projects, made my efforts of another public on Github, I’ve posted 4 new dribbles of which 2 are websites I’ve launched. And a lot more. I thought I’d write a post of what I’ve done this week and what I’ve seen elsewhere. So…

Toy Projects

Lorem-Ipsum.me

Realising that my current process for getting Lorem Ipsum is not as quick as it could be nor reflects the media I am generally designing for (blogs, not essays), I decided to create a new Lorem Ipsum generator. Within a few hours I pushed live my Lorem-Ipsum generator, complete with its own mini-API and Copy To Clipboard link.

iOS Viewers

Finding switching between my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad to test websites got rather a frustrating process. After seeing a tutorial on how to make simulators, I decided to expand the idea further and then packaged it up neatly with custom icons.

Dribbble

1796 Foods

My best friend is on an incredible food quest to eat 1796 ‘must try’ foods. It’s an incredible undertaking that affects her daily life and almost into her 20th month she’s just reached 519. I promised her I would redesign her blog as a way to commend her for her efforts. This is a sample of the sidebar.

London Made – Reimagined

I decided that I wanted to see what I would come up with now if I redesigned London Made. It was not a commitment to redesign but I am pursuing other styles and options. This is what it would look like if I went for a textured dark version.

Website Launch

The Angel Inn

After many decades running a huge pub, my parents decided to retire. Many years later they felt the need to get back into business and since have moved and bought a new pub.

I built them a website (although it is a little rough around the edges) and launched it for them. All the photographs are also taken by me. You can check it out at angelinnpetworth.co.uk.

Zach Inglis

I’ve relaunched this site as some of you will notice. I wanted to focus again on the content and less about the superfluous fluff that most blogs link to. Whether or not the design will stick for long or not is another matter, but I felt it was much better than the last.

Ruby

Taco Truck

I feel the Rails Project Template system doesn’t work in the way I feel it should. So I have started to write a replacement (built upon Thor.) It is designed under three assumptions:

The people responsible for the gem, know the best way for integrating it into your project.
Syntax changes. Methods and methods of installations are different from version to version. If you have the recipe for v1.5 of a project committed into the repository and a different one for the v2.0 release and people want to use 1.5 instead of 2… That’s not a problem.
People don’t want to have to maintain Template files. When they do that, they end up not saving themselves that much time.

It is nowhere near done yet. I have worked outside in, building the main structure behind the system (using Testing-First principles of course.) I had barely programmed in almost a year prior to this and wanted to get back on the wagon so I set myself what felt like an impossible goal. You can view the efforts so far on Github.

Lorem-Ipsum.me Gem

The gem is a simple way to use the Lorem Ipsum API (the Gem is only a few lines of code itself.) To use, just add gem 'lorem-ipsum-me' to your Gemfile and call with LoremIpsum.generate. Check the Docs for what attributes it accepts.

About.me

I built an about.me page for anyone who wants to add me on social networks. Feel free to do so.

Introducing Lorem-Ipsum.me

Yes! Introducing a second toy project. I’m having quite a productive day off. I built this little Lorem Ipsum generator as my current method took too long. I want to go to a URL, press a button and have Lorem Ipsum on my clipboard so I decided to do that.

I’ve written the Lorem Ipsum generator from scratch so please excuse it if there are errors. If you find any, do let me know though. I’ve also tried to do a ‘blog’ generator for Lorem Ipsum. Most people don’t blog 15 sentences per paragraph on their blog and so I have reflected that in the mode. The design itself was as paired down as possible. There’s no header or superfluous fluff.

There is also an API. You can grab text/XML/JSON from it. (Though it’s fair usage. I’m paying for this out-of-pocket.)

Go check it out at http://lorem-ipsum.me

Introducing iOS Viewers – View your current tab in Safari on the iPhone or the iPad.

Having been frustrated with checking my iPhone and iPad for any new site I create many times in the past, I set out trying to think of an easier way to do it. With serendipity this morning just as I was pondering I saw a blog post detailing how to create an Automator iPhone webkit simulator application and realised how this could be the solution to my problems. I followed the tutorial and then modified things for my own needs.

I like to keep things as simple and easy to use as possible so I decided that each one would be easy to differentiate across orientation and device. As I had already created a new Automator app, something I had little experience, I decided that I would make some pretty icons. I’ve never created icons before so I was really enjoying the idea of the challenge. After creating an icon that had the some dimensions and look as an iPhone I decided I wanted something more standardised and thus set on creating these hybrid icon/devices you see.

If you have any feedback, be sure to let me know as a comment. Reports are coming back saying it’s Lion only. Sorry.

This is available for everyone to download and enjoy. Please share the blog post URL, not the download URL though.

Viva la Content

For the last few weeks I’ve realised more and more how I need to start blogging again. It’s a common thought with me. A few days ago I realised how over run my blog had become with widgets, links, or other information and I realised if I was going to blog again that I want the focus all about the content.

So I removed everything I saw on the page, drew a narrow grid and slowly added more as I saw need for them. I then went a series of reiteration. I

1. Design Page.
2. Remove stylesheet.
3. Go to step 1.

It was not necessarily that I was unhappy with what I had done (although it wasn’t what I was hoping for) it was more of a case of I started anew with the lesson’s I had learnt from the last redesign. Slowly things stuck. The centre alignment, the yellow behind the subscribe link.

I chose a picture I took while in Canada as the background. I felt that the most important thing on the page is the post, secondary is the discussions and third is the Subscribe. So I kept those the most important things. I wanted to add more links in the navigation but I felt that if people really wanted the other information, then they can find that.

I want to get back to blogging and I think this is the way to do it. Focus on the content. I hope you continue to read and give feedback. All is welcome.

New Personal Blog

I just started a new blog for the personal posts I just do not want to post here. Things like Recipes, Video Game Tips and Opinions.

If you are interested, head over to zachinglis.me and Subscribe now!

Want to be better at your job? Be a hybrid

In most industries, you are asked to do one thing, and do it damned well. Those industries usually need months of full-time training to get anywhere near another discipline but in our industry of the web, we have the fortune to be able to learn outside our current role easily and at our own pace.

Being a hybrid (knowing many aspects of the web including web design, front-end development and programming) means that you have a better understanding of two fundamental factors of running a project:

What your client needs, over what they want.
What your employees or contractors are going through.
What future problems will arise.
How to save yourselves and your clients money.

Since early in my career I have marketed myself as being a hybrid. I know it gives me a very unique position to run my web development company well and grants us the ability to put out the great work we do. I also know that my startups are going to benefit from it.

While I would consider myself skilled in my multiple disciplines, you need not be to gain the advantages. Knowing a subject very broadly will give you a tremendous edge.

The Bad Client Tax: The Rate Increase That Hurts You

My last post on Clients From Hell had me thinking about ‘Bad Client Tax.’ For those not in the know: Bad Client Tax is when a web designer or developer increase their rates up to 50-100% extra because they know that the client will be troublesome. This is an activity I have never partaken in because I find a few major flaws in it other than the obvious unethical issues.

My pontification is if you truly suspect a client is going to be bad, enough that you would essentially screw them over with your pricing, why would you work for them? Not only is your client probably aware of what you are doing, already hurting your working relationship, but they now have higher expectations of you and are more likely to bad mouth you.

Even if you are desperate for the work, you have already decided they may not pay you and they will ask for more work than they are willing to pay. The time would be better suited to getting better work that you are not apprehensive about.

Great client relationships are essential in being the best you can because the happier you are with the client, the better work you are going to do. It is simple psychology.

Bad Client Tax hurts everyone, including you. Do yourself a favour, choose who you work with depending on how you connect with them and how much you like their idea