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Sign up to learn more
“We love freelancers, to find out why, sign up for free to learn more”
“We can offer you the best extreme ironing forum on the planet, sign up to learn more”
“This service will rock your knickers off, sign up to learn more”Why do certain sites suggest you sign up to learn more about the service? In an age of open information and tour’s to anything that’s worth signing up for, it’s time all sites adapted these techniques to give power to their statements.
I want an extreme ironing forum and you say your forum is the best, give me five reasons why to back up your statement and you’ve probably sold me. Tell me to sign up to learn why, and I’ve gone onto the next forum in the search results list.
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BT Business, you’re not worth the money
For the newcomers, BT Business provide the broadband and phone line for businesses, with the key promotion being that you get much better support.
I don’t want to get into a rant, but in my opinion BT Business represents one of the worst organised companies I’ve ever come across. To back this opinion up, here’s only a select few of the problems I’ve encountered so far in my 7-8 months with them:
- Four times larger bills than normal broadband users
- The only apparent reason for this being English speaking customer service representatives who answer within ten minutes and not Indian speaking customer service representatives who answer with two hours (both on 0845 numbers)
- Having to be forwarded to a different department at least once every time I ring up because there are only 2-3 numbers listed on the back of each bill, and the website is utterly useless at suggesting what number to call
- Being forwarded to the wrong department 50% of the time
- Despite originally ordering from one sales guy, I have two separate accounts: one for phone and one for broadband
- They both have different people to ring up separately to change any details
- For each there’s a department that will change your address, a department to change your card details, and a department to change your company name. Not to mention the sales, faults, technical and other useless departments for each of these accounts
- Engineers that come out to install the broadband are from a different company altogether, Open Reach
- They have to deal with Indian call centres
- They can’t directly ring up BT and put in an order for anything, but they can ring up and say they’ve completed a job
Back when I was much younger, BT used to be a company I looked at in awe. Now days it seems they’ve done everything they can to ruin what was a fantastic customer experience ten years ago.
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Rolled launches official blog Sausage Roll
My company Rolled Limited launched our official blog recently. This means that JHuskisson.com will go back to my opinion and articles on freelancing/general issues and Sausage Roll will become the official company blog about client launches, job openings, hostile company take overs and occasionally, articles that will help our clients and/or companies like ourselves.
Changes are on going at Rolled and we have several great announcements over the next 1-3 months as we develop into a tighter team, establish our new brand and client services. Don’t hesistate to subscribe to the Sausage Roll RSS feed to get instant updates, or subscribe via e-mail for a morning e-mail after we post anything up.
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Quick notes about sending job applications
About 90-95% of applicants to job applications I post up elsewhere find my blog somehow and compliment me on it in the opening paragraph of their e-mail. Given this I thought I’d throw some nugget-sized wisdom bombs in front of the eager young eyes of those applicants so they can better their application, or not bother at all.
- If it says full-time please for the love of god don’t apply thinking it’s a freelance position. It just isn’t, ‘full-time’ and ‘freelance’ are two entirely different job types.
- No, you can’t apply for the full-time position, waste an hour of my time talking to me and then say “so here’s the thing… I work with three others guys in…” - stop - your a company already. Next.
- The same goes for ‘White Label’ services. Go away.
- Applying because you like Rolled’s (or my) sense of humour? Show some of your own, it knocks you up the queue significantly. If you are going to talk like a robot, attach a video of you dancing like one to up the comedy level and recover that dreaded generic application from the dead pile.
- Adding to the point above, show some personality. It’s very clear when you are using a template you’ve pre-prepared or slightly editing one.
- Address the actual job, If I say I want x and x from a Wordpress Developer, please tell me if you can do any of those x’s. It’s almost the point of the e-mail, the introduction and background paragraph’s are meaningless unless a paragraph addressing the job and your talent to do x and x appears. If you can do x and x extra that’s brilliant, but address the original issues.
- “I’d like £65 an hour and I can work 9-5, I’m just out of University and have done some work for a company in London”. Use some common sense with your rates, especially if you are straight out of University or College with little experience.
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Wanted: UK WordPress developer, UK Front-end developer
Before frustrated subscribers ask - yes, they’ll be a dedicated Rolled.at blog for this stuff eventually. I figured I’d post it up here as I’ve always received replies and better people as a result of posting here rather than on job boards.
I’m looking to bring a Wordpress developer and a Front-end developer for the team. We have a constant stream of Wordpress development and are looking to work with someone based in the UK. He or she must have:
- A sense of humour, and a love for Wordpress
- A love for a good sausage roll (the food - someone explained to me the other day it’s a very bizarre sexual position, but let’s not get into that now)
- Inside and out knowledge of the Wordpress template system
- A knowledge of too many plug-ins to count
- Ability to search or even build a plug-in to suit a specific need
- Ability to solve problems rather than create them
- Set pricing on a job-by-job basis, or a monthly fee to keep you on full-time
- Ability to manage and meet several deadlines. Perfect knowledge of English (I’m looking for UK based people here) and someone who can communicate with clients via IM or e-mail very well.
For the front-end developer position I’m looking for:
- A sense of humour, and a love for CSS/XHTML
- Ability to create XHTML Strict code in any situation, without falling back to Transitional
- Ability to produce hack-less CSS compatible with IE6, FireFox 1-2, Safari and Opera
- Ability to go further back in the browser time-machine if neccesary
- Ability to re-write existing terrible ‘want to slap the person who did it, table based’ code into ‘nice and pretty’ mark-up
- Ability to manage and meet several deadlines. Perfect knowledge of English (I’m looking for UK based people here) and someone who can communicate with clients via IM or e-mail very well.
If I fail to receive a application by Monday-Wednesday (depending on when I have time), I will post it around several job boards instead. Applicants should format their e-mails to me as such:
- Hi, I’m -x- from -x- and I love Sausage Rolls.
- Here is why you should hire me: -bullet pointed list-
- Here is my rough set per-job pricing and/or my monthly/weekly hiring fee should you want to choose between the two
- Here’s what I can bring to Rolled which no-one else can
- I love you man! -x- (Ok this one is optional)
Looking forward to seeing what I get in my inbox Monday morning.
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A quick note on the CV
Out of the past 20-30 designers I’ve received CV’s from only one has been designed well enough for me to get a good impression of the designer, and it wasn’t created in Word. It was two pages and contained links to his recent work, some thumbnails and was fully branded.
It didn’t contain: his education background as far back as when he attended Nursery, his grades breakdown and ten pages of reading material padded out with lots of stretched truth to do with what they did at their last job. Example:
McDonalds - Senior Beef technician
Lead a team of three people processing and preparing beef for use in gourmet food ate by thousands daily. Designed a unique technique of packaging that is used for top customers to this day.Translation
Was in a team of four saying nothing, doing nothing but unpacking pre-shaped burger meat and passing it down the queue. Figured that spitting just underneath the cheese in annoying customers burgers before packing them could never be found, and that tip is now passed down through remaining staff to new staff to this day.Essentially:
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Stop blabbing on, don’t send 100 URL’s with no explanation but send four or five latest pieces of work with explanations for each. Realistically I don’t have ten minutes for each applicant, so if your e-mail or application contains more than a minute or two of reading then it’s not going to get read. -
O Designer, Where Art Thou?
I (and Rolled) are looking to bring in a designer we can use on all our design work, from designing the Rolled site and internal client management system to working directly with our extensive client portfolio, with some household names awaiting us appointing someone for the position.
We need someone in the UK or Europe, possibly willing to communicate with clients directly over the phone, input ideas, deliver wireframes and initial rough ideas quickly and provide us with a range of design styles from ‘web 2.0′ to clean and minimalist. We also need someone who can take an existing brand and create a site using that brand’s logo and colour scheme easily over an existing base.
The role involves a huge workload and will be more than likely heading towards a full-time position in the future. If you currently run your own design company or work as a freelancer we are happy to take on board any existing clients and have them deal directly with you. There is also a possibility that clients will want a designer present at meetings - in which case Rolled will cover all expenses involved. We don’t wish to ‘partner’ with any company or group of individuals - we strictly want this to remain within Rolled.
The role is urgent and needs to be filled with a week or two at most. So send any examples of your work, why you would like to work for Rolled and why you think you’d be a good fit - and some rough pricing information to jay@rolled.at if you are interested.
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Why learning web development at college is good for you
I constantly hear people complaining that they aren’t getting what they want out of college, that they can do it alone and that they don’t want to be taught ‘behind the times’ ASP and that their college needs to be brought into the ‘current day teaching techniques’ - so here’s why I think all that is a load of crap.
With your teacher(s), you will more than likely deal with the hardest client you’ll ever have
With my first web development project at college we had to develop a random concept web site into XHTML/CSS. I submitted a div tag/CSS layout and was promptly asked where I took the code from and why I was trying to cheat in my college class. To which I explained that I had been developing outside of college for some time prior to joining the course, which wasn’t met by believing eyes.
You see this type of interaction with a teacher is what teaches you the fundamentals of dealing with bad clients, bad contractors and bad customers. Do you blow your lid and call the teacher a fool? Or do you politely explain you’ve got x years experience playing with sites beforehand?
If the teacher has past experience running their own company or doing client projects then they’ll be even further of a problem to you. They’ll teach you how old fashioned some clients can be by being old fashioned themselves - why aren’t you using tables? Does this validate to HTML 4.0 standards? Why aren’t you including food costs in your client billing breakdown?
Learning ASP isn’t all that bad, especially if you are in it for the money
There’s more money in ASP and there’s more real jobs available. The type where you sit in a company and develop all day long. The language teaches you structure, and gives you a first hand view of what it is like on the other side of the fence should you be a PHP/Ruby on Rails type of guy. Why is it a bad thing to be able to start a PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument with ‘well I’ve worked with ASP before, and…’?
If you’re good, you’ll learn to teach
I spent a lot of my time helping out my friends with problems at college, my grades suffered but at the end of the day but I gained a good knowledge of what it is like to teach. Today this is applied to how I can teach clients about how Rolled’s process works, how we teach them Wordpress or basic XHTML for post formatting in their CMS.
At the end of the day I finished basic tasks in less than a minute, and spent the rest of the hour helping people out and learning from it - just because you’re finished with something doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to do.
Presenting
I was useless at presenting when I first started on my college course, a nervous wreck when standing in front of the class. If your course includes presenting and you’re asking why - I honestly don’t know what you’re thinking.
The talent of being able to react to an incredibly tricky question from a teacher in front of 10-20 people and not look like an idiot is something of a secret that you can take to your grave. Putting passion into something you have no passion about when presenting is also another talent that few have, especially when it’s all put together the night before at 4am after getting in from a night out.
It teaches you how to place graphics, what fonts work and what don’t, how to present one idea but how to present another - and at the end of the day, it’s practice for pitching if you are to be in that position later on in life.
In conclusion
Stop whinging - stay in college and get your degree/diploma. College can teach you many things you wouldn’t learn outside of the boundaries until it’s too late. Do you want to present to a client having never done it before? Deal with a bad client for the first time on your newly acquired project? Have work go entirely dry and not have those Junior ASP programmer positions to apply to? Lose every PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument because you have no facts to use to back up your side of things?
At the end of the day it’s college, it’s not an experience many get more than twice for two to four years of their life. Suck it up, learn from it and experiment as much as possible whilst you can.
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Good Morning Nottingham
(Click the image to download the original 1.1mb image)Waking up at 8am this morning as my MacBook Pro blasted out the alarm I set after getting up just three hours earlier to check on the progress of a client project, I noticed one thing - Nottingham looks good today. The image above is around 40% of the view from the window directly in front of my desk as I sit fully moved into my new apartment in Marco Island.
As a side note after a disappointing re-launch of another popular site from my past, the Cubic Flow team have done an excellent job of their come back for the third time. The things their team produces excites me and I hope to see much more beautiful art and graphic design from them in the future like they produced with their first magazine release.
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BT Business support - worthy of a lawsuit
So around three weeks ago I signed documents and put down some of the deposit to hold my new apartment in Marco Island, located in the Nottingham City Centre. All utilities are automatically arranged for me besides my phone and broadband, and the apartment requires a BT phone line for every broadband provider, so I decided to just go with BT for the broadband and get it done with.
Customer experience one:
I go onto the website and look at the ‘total broadband’ residential package, it says it requires a phone line. I order a phone line on the website and go to order the ‘total broadband’ package, but it requires a phone number and an active line installed. Thankfully they have a helpline number for this sort of thing so I give it a ring.*Sixty minutes wait later*
“Sorry the Total Broadband package has to be ordered with a phone line at the same time through us, otherwise we can’t arrange it to be installed. You have to cancel your phone line in order to order the broadband”
“OK, so can you do that for me?”
“No we can’t, we only process orders here - I can forward you to the people responsible”
“OK”
Ninety minutes wait later - I hang up and decide to give the BT Business guys a ring and pay the extra for better support (very clearly advertised, as 24/7). To put it bluntly - the phone didn’t even ring, someone picked up and processed my order and within forty minutes I had a BT Business phone and broadband package ordered and my new business phone number. One tidbit I did learn from this call though - it takes three months to process a residential phone line order that is ordered on-line, so I wasn’t going to be hearing from those guys anytime soon.
So about two weeks ago my wireless in my current living arrangement goes missing in action, but only with my Mac’s. The Xbox 360 and all four PC’s in the house all work with the router, but all of a sudden both Mac’s (an iMac and a MacBook Pro, both the latest Intel models) can connect to the network but can’t get the internet from it. It’s now at a point where I can stand directly next to the router with my MacBook Pro and not see the wireless network. We tried everything, but ultimately the router isn’t giving any love to my Mac’s and everyone else gets the internet just fine, so it was time to move forward the moving in date for my new apartment along with that beautiful BT Business broadband and phone I had ordered.
I should mention here, that I tried out my newly acquired Nintendo Wii yesterday and that can’t get the internet from the router either.
Of course to do this, I would need to use my newly paid for BT Business support service to see if they could move forward the installation of my phone and broadband. Three hours later I learned:
- BT Business ‘after sales support’ doesn’t exist - there is no option 4, it just forwards to option 2, which is residential support.
- Residential support takes an average of 20-40 minutes to pick up and is always Indian
- Residential support gives you a nice constant ringing sound with an annoying computer telling you you’re in a queue and that they are ‘very busy’
- Business support has classical music whilst you are waiting, which is almost always under two minutes
- Every single department only has one thing they can do with a computer, to do something else they have to forward you to another department where you have to re-explain things all over again
- Half of the time you are forwarded to the wrong department
- If the computer asks you for a phone number to be put in and to go through the options, in ten minutes it *will* ask you to start all over again - whether you are ‘in a queue’ or not
- BT Business support doesn’t know that because you are a BT Business support customer you are forwarded to another section of the BT Business support team and for every particular extra task will gladly forward you to BT Residential support without even thinking about it half of the time.
- Of the thirteen people I spoke to during those three hours roughly eight or nine were residential support engineers, clearly defined by being Indian and having the ringing tone during the waiting time.
- The only way to get someone to put you ’straight through’ to the correct department or to get your problem sorted out, is to clearly point out in a agitated and clearly annoyed manner that you have just spoken to x amount of other people in the last x minutes/hours and you are ready to x someone’s x if they don’t help you soon
In the end my phone installation has been moved forward from Thursday to Monday, but the broadband can’t be moved what so ever. So here’s praying that there’s a BT OpenZone network or - god help us - an open network for me to use for that week until BT comes along to install things.
In closing, BT’s Business support is terrible and is too merged with the residential support to make any slight bit of difference to my support needs in this situation. Their Indian support is just as terrible as everyone else (Virgin/NTL for example) - though it is free and not a 0845 number. That said, in other situations BT Business support do have direct lines that aren’t merged with residential support and hopefully I’ll never have to lose another three hours of my life like that again.
Update:
I’m into the new apartment, the BT Business hub arrived before I moved in so I picked it up and plugged in for fun ready for when they come to activate the lines etc. It’s Saturday and my Internet isn’t supposed to be put in until Thursday - but here I am, accessing it via the ethernet point whilst the hub is connected to the ADSL line.Update two:
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The phone installation guy says they normally activate lines up to 3-4 days in advance of ‘installing’ the broadband at the exchange. So I was lucky enough to get it put through early and have it installed 6 days early.
