Tweak Day

Tweak Day was born from my frustration I had in not being able to service our clients with small jobs and requests. What was happening with our job system, was smaller tweaks and requests were being pushed back and done after major jobs or when we had time or after hours. We could never give an estimated time on how long it would take to complete a task. Now, every Friday is Tweak Day. All the small jobs, chasing up the odd matter, ringing and saying hi to clients is done on a Friday. If a job is urgent we have an 'acceleration plan' for that, but most clients are happy to wait the normal course to get their jobs done. This way no one suffers - especially with the acceleration plan. Urgent jobs are usually done out of office hours and incur a higher fee, but it means customers that have current projects underway do not suffer. To us Tweak Day is becoming our customer day - well every day is our customer day - I mean that on Friday's every MerlinFX employee has to wear a clients tshirt or cap etc. All day. So if you have company T Shirts and you're interested in giving them to us, we're happy to wear them for you. Contact me for sizes - I take 3XL - I hope you have one size fits all :) I am a mountain of a guy!

A word about Spam

Is this familiar to you: Viagra now, free games + win cash, \/lagra works excellently for your problem; People are winning Big every day.; Start Winning Now!!; Overwhelmingly important information.

We all see it and we all have tasted the ugly part of the web that is spam. Spam email, sms, telemarketers or just getting hassled walking down the street. Why do they do it, when they know we hate it? Because it works. Send out enough at such a small cost and the chances are someone will bite.

Well I have a few tips that can at least stop those annoying emails and marketing calls.

Whilst SMS spam is not as prevalent yet as email, just be careful when replying to messages you are unsure of. It can cost you a few dollars. Just delete them. If it happens a lot, contact your carrier.

Some tips:

Get more email addresses.
But doesn’t that create more headache? Bare with me. The current email you have now probably gets a lot of unwanted mail. The reason to use a number of email addresses is simple. One for work, one for friends and perhaps one for everything else. I have about 10. All for different things. All on the one mail client all with filters and rules that plonk them is their rightful place. Outlook is better at this than Outlook Express.

Filters
Apart from tweaking your mail client junk mail filters. The later versions of Outlook are pretty good. If you still have the settings set to high and still getting grief. There are a number of anti-spam and anti-phishing programs you can use. I normally just use the Outlook Junk Mail Filter set on High and adhere to the rest of the points here and get bothered very little, if at all with Spam.

Keep the email safe
Don’t go blindingly adding your email to websites when you buy things or enter competitions. Set up a yahoo, hotmail or gmail accounts for that.

If setting up an email account for your work. Eg: myname@mycompany.com.au; try and choose a name that is hard to guess. Spammers use programs to guess email names and then add your domain on the end of it and send mail. They can even check whether the email was received or whether it bounced. These programs will usually guess first name, general names eg: info, accounts, accounting, orders, sales and so on. Try and use difficult to guess names like: mycompany_accounts@mycompany.com.au or myname.surname@mycompany.com.au

Some people use graphics with links to email. Sorry, the spam bots can still read the code. Plus how ugly does that look on a site the text looks different to the rest of the copy. It really looks like amateur hour.

Spam bots
These nifty little buggers (Spam Bots) scan the net for new websites, follow links and read code and locate email addresses. MerlinFX encrypts all email names so whilst a human can read an email, the spam bots cannot read the encrypted code and move on. If you do not use MerlinFX services, insist on having your email encrypted.

India Calling!
Whilst this is not about spam, it’s equally annoying. Well here is a way that is fun and will get you removed from the lists. Now I know someone is trying to make a living here, but my time is precious and rather than hanging up and being rude, turn the tables.

Ask them for their credit card details and/or their accounts dept. When they ask why, advise them that even though they intend to send someone over to make more money for you or streamline your business or whatever; advise them that your time is precious and you charge by the hour. The rate is $xyz (make it $100 for arguments sake) and say it is charged at minimum 2 hours.

This happened a few weeks ago. First I hang up. They ring back a week later. Second time I said this:

Daniel: ‘what’s your credit card details?’
Caller: ‘why do you want that?’
Daniel: ‘If it’s such a great service, you won’t mind me charging you for my time.’
Caller: ‘No, wait, what!, but it’s free!.’
Daniel: ‘I don’t care. My time is precious. I only have a certain amount of it and I intend to bill you for it.’ Caller: ‘OK, sorry for wasting your time.’

They have not called back. :)

I have a friend working on an anti-telemarketing device. That’s one of its features. I will keep you informed as new developments happen with this.

Warranty, Tweaks, Bugs, Maintenance & Support

What a mouthful, but I think as our business grows and the levels of complexities in the software and web world increase, MerlinFX will do its best to educate its clients as best we can. This blog for example is the perfect way to keep you informed of what we are up to and what technologies will affect your business.

We are finding that to provide a valuable service, sometimes the line that seperates warranty, bug fixes, maintenance and free consultancy –are very much blurred.

Let me explain. A MerlinFX Warranty is where for a period of time after a project has been completed, exhaustively tested by us and you that everything is working as it should to the design and technical specification document and the final proposal. After this period, if changes / tweaks are required that were unforseen and falls outside of the warranty – we have a right to charge you for the time to resolve this.

If it is a bug that we did not pick up, we will fix it.

If for some reason you require a certain process, function, activity etc to be changed, we refer to these as tweaks, where you will be charged. Other forms of tweaks could be major additions – which also have a timed charge.

Maintenance, mentioned in a previous post, is the changing, updating of the application as required by feedback from the users, changes in technology and integration with other systems. This all takes time and will be charged accordingly.

Support covers pretty much all the above and on many occasions we do help our clients with software and computer issues that fall outside of the scope of our original agreement. This could be answering questions on why Outlook doesn’t work to fixing a network issue. Whilst we can help you with these issues, the bigger we get the more customers we have – the harder it is for us to service. We do it because we’re such nice guys. Providing this service for free takes us away from working for the clients paying for jobs to be done.

Unfortunately for us this is not good business practice, great for you because you are effectively getting free support. Sadly this has to come to an end, but it’s not all bad news for you. Like I said, we’re nice guys! We are endeavouring to add a knowledge base of common issues and allow you to proactively learn and seek a solution to your IT issues that fall outside of our agreements. If you do not have your own IT department, this is the next best thing.

You can decide to pay for Support on an hourly basis or purchase Support Blocks for various amounts with discounts attached. You can save even more by logging your job via our new Job System. Every feature that will be included in our system will be available to you as a full web application you can use in your own business. If you are a client of MerlinFX, access to the knowledge base is free.

So yes, you can create Knowledge Bases for your business. Suppliers, contractors, investors, clients can all log in and view your content, procedures etc. There is a lot more to it, but that’ll be giving too much away!

Consultancy. The bane of our creative existence. As web professionals we stay ahead with the latest web trends and once we get a handle on your industry, your business and how your customers like to work with you – then we can provide solutions. This can take the form of spending numerous hours preparing documents, technical specifications, research, travelling and more importantly providing ideas for you. Some of this cost is reaped from the job cost, but lengthy, complex solutions require many meetings / consultations. It is impossible to project how many meetings it will take. Adding a cost to this will allow you to prepare adequately for meetings, keep to a strict agenda and effectively reduce costs – for both of us.

Much of the time our clients enjoy free consultancy. This is about to change as well. The catch phrase of yesteryear, ‘free quote’ may work for the electrician; but building a complex ebusiness web application to suit your business and clients and then making it easy to use – isn’t done in 3 minutes. The other benefit you get is our experience in our industry. The web is in a consistent state of flux. What took 50 lines of code now takes 5; what was in is now out; what was expensive to implement is now cheaper. As web developers we have to stay in touch with the latest. We spend a portion of each day researching the latest web developments in software, hardware and how these will make our products better or create new ones. We send our programmers to training courses. We integrate the latest technologies into our own systems before we pass on the benefits to you in the way of ideas. Often we tweak the products at no cost you as well.

Depending on the size of the project and/or frequency of meetings, liaising with the client, if it falls into the area where we are providing you with solutions and ideas before a project or the next stage of a project begins, it may attract a consulting fee.

We will keep you posted on these developments.

Google vs Microsoft vs Firefox

It is interesting to watch the global struggle of companies that once had a strangle-hold on your browser, office tools etc start to see the cracks in the delivery of their systems. What I am talking about here is Google releasing a beta version (yes another beta something) called Google Spreadsheets. Sure Microsoft are working on Office Live, a hosted Office solution, but will it have the simplicity and ease of use that Google is renowned for. Microsoft is also getting into search with its' beta: Windows Live. You thought Google was simple. Microsoft is bringing cool technology to search and enroaching into areas of search that traditionally Google has been in. Windows Live looks very promising. Also the Firefox browser which now has a staggering 11% of the browser market looks to become a dominant competitor with the current majority stake holder, Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

I am beginning to really love this browser. There are so many plugins and developers building tools that extend the normal functionality of the browser - all the time. I forsee that in the not too distant future, the browser will become a quasi new OS for computers. PC's will just become storage devices (with the web eventually taking over that component too), applications will be hosted online and all your content will be easily accessed from any location at any time either via pc, pda, blackberry, mobile phone or ipod (yes why have they not developed a wireless or web ready ipod - I want to have my entire music or video collection on tap anywhere I am - my own private radio station).

Certainly interesting times ahead for the web which can only mean exciting hosted web applications for customers.