We’re in the position where by the majority of the time a client will come to us asking us to provide them with what they want. It’s not often someone comes to you with a brief marking out 100% of what they want, feature for feature. When in this position we’re in a position of trust to advise them exactly what’s best and to provide them with the best we possibly can.

“Because it’s what the client wants” is an unfortunate consequence of not enough dialogue and an unwillingness to provide better alternatives to a proposed solution which is lesser than you’d normally want to provide.

For web users everywhere, please, stop using this excuse.

Tags: clients, dialogue, discussion, poor excuses

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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.

Tags: discussion, little things

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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:

1. BT Business ‘after sales support’ doesn’t exist – there is no option 4, it just forwards to option 2, which is residential support.
2. Residential support takes an average of 20-40 minutes to pick up and is always Indian
3. 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’
4. Business support has classical music whilst you are waiting, which is almost always under two minutes
5. 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
6. Half of the time you are forwarded to the wrong department
7. 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
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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:
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.

Tags: bt business, discussion, support

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1. Remember me!

Why doesn’t it forward me from the log-in form if I’m already logged in?

2. Backpack has a better calendar

I want to be able to set events, not milestones. I don’t want to have to tick off a milestone when staff member X comes back from holiday – it should just happen.

3. Why are write boards and the chat still separate?

It’s a separate product, we know that, but why is it kept separate on the product that is the overall offering of all the products offered by 37 Signals? I’d certainly be annoyed if the to-do lists where still kept separate like this. I feel it removes from the overall together product by keeping these separate, especially in terms of making it feel like it’s a single product.

4. No education in Textile

I feel this is the only part of Basecamp we as users have to teach our clients and people we invite in to use the system with us. The helpful small guide that was there a while back has been removed, luckily there’s guides out there on the internet but it would be nice if users had the chance to know that Textile was being used, and have a quick guide on how to use it available.

Tags: basecamp, discussion, web apps

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Visit DaringFireball for the backstory.

Tags: discussion, flickr

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• Every single ‘web 2.0′ tutorial written by a 13 year old with no clue has been puked up all over the layout
• David Cameron hired someone with no previous experience in web design to design a web site for him

Now, with the budgets of the elections I expect so much better than this from (what I hope is) my future prime minister.

I have to say it’s brilliant that Mr Cameron is taking the steps of a blogging online and podcasting. But with a design like that (and coding like that, I must add), it may as well not be online in it’s current state.

If part of the aim is to appeal to younger voters (like myself) via the internet – then the way to go about it isn’t to publish the site using a layout that looks like that. Apart from the raw content and views expressed on the website I really can’t see how the older generation would like this website either.

Edit:

A scaled screenshot of the site, for archive purposes:

Tags: david cameron, discussion, little things, politics

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Today Fubra became the third official mirror for php.net. A contact of mine works there so I quickly visited the site, only to see the site completely and utterly messed up in Safari – with minor bugs in Firefox and Opera. Naturally I point these out, since this is a company wanting to build ‘web 3.0′ and if they do they need to approach web 2.0 properly by meeting web standards first.

Here’s a view of what the site looks like in Safari at my normal browser size (which fits 1024×768 based sites with some extra padding either side):

So let’s get onto the vision:

Fubra is a ‘new media’ company. It’s our goal to create and publish great content and then to monetise that content through advertiser relationships.

We set ourselves apart from our competition by designing, building and managing our own infrastructure, which means the buck starts and stops here.

We are passionate about enabling relevant connections between our advertisers and the people who use our web sites every day.
- Brendan McLoughlin (Managing Director)

And my problem with the actions I just experienced with my contact/the guy sitting next to him who coded the site.

I mentioned the site bugs to which I received a ‘can we get a screenshot?’
’sure, ‘.
A few seconds later.. ‘what version of Firefox is this in?’,
‘no that screenshot is in Safari’,
‘oh this is on a Mac then? Cause if it is, he doesn’t care’, (referring to the person next to him, who coded the site)
‘yeah it is, in Safari’,
‘Safari sucks ass’
… and they go on to say they won’t fix it.

The ‘contact’ of mine is now blocked from Instant Messaging as a stand off for web standards. And I’m disappointed to say that this continues through several of their websites.

For the companies without Mac’s, here’s how your company can allow itself to be cross-browser compatible

Tags: discussion, fubra, little things

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This is the results so far of a poll on a story about Virgin threatening to sue Sky because they are being ridiculous over the payment discussion involving Sky One, Sky Two, Sky Sports News, Sky News and Sky travel.

Now is it just me, or would that number be considerably lower if us UK LOST, 24 and Battlestar Galactica fans could just buy the shows on iTunes in the first place? And yet today iTunes receives yet another update that only particularly benefits American users.

That said – why in the UK are we being sold Apple TV? Unless we are running a music shop that shows music videos all day long, or we have managed to find 100 video podcasts to watch of quality amongst the 5-10 or so that exist on the internet… there’s really no point in the device over here.

Sorry for the rant, but this rubbish with Sky and Virgin would never have happened if the shows weren’t so centralised onto one network in the first place. In America they have the ability to view online, iTunes, TV and TV recording to watch it from. Over here? Just Sky One, oh – and the ability to watch online, if your a Sky customer.

Note: I’ll be returning the blog back to it’s interesting state once my incredibly busy rush that has come on lately has calmed down – possibly when the new JHuskisson.com launches.

Tags: apple, discussion, sky, virgin

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How far is too far with the media? They seem to be willing to go to sick lengths for stories. I haven’t been so sickened since I heard about an Italian newspaper printing a picture of Princess Diana lying dead after the car crash that killed her on their front page.

And was it just as wrong for Superficial to put the video up?

Tags: discussion, media

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Changes include a new ‘download movies/tv shows’ service for broadband users (something I’ll certainly be looking into), ‘no limits’ broadband (something previously promised by NTL), a much much simpler website and from the looks of it – real HDTV support. I’ve also noticed their policy fully supports companies making lawsuits against their customers such as ‘illegal’ downloading and that Virgin will support them in any way they can (something that NTL stopped a while ago, since the time of ‘the letter’ coming in the mail).

Beforehand the website had become so cluttered for use that made no sense that it not only was it annoying to use but you had to click 3-4 times to get to a page that you wanted – and that’s if you where clicking in the right places.

Here’s five things ‘Virgin Media’ needs to do to revive NTL out the dark ages:
- Make the broadband stable. It needs to stay up 24/7 and not have constant ‘down time’ for ‘maintenance’ at eight hours a time. Support your users and give us real ‘uncapped’ downloading – no hidden messages when the user downloads too much one month.

- Revive the promises of NTL from their Digital department. We hear about ‘new 200gb boxes that let you record and all this jazz’ every time someone comes out to replace one of our NTL digital boxes (which is once a year, at least). I want to see some of this in action.. I want to see these boxes and have the company show me that something is happening rather than just talking about it. Up until now those ‘jazz boxes’ have been in testing for two years.

- Hire some decent programmers for the digital service – or just use Telewest. Telewest merged with NTL a while back and we’ve not seen a single benefit from it. However, Telewest offers instant channel browsing, a real guide system, smaller boxes, better remotes, instant on-demand, teletext… shall I keep going? The point is, Telewest have done something great with their software on their boxes, NTL haven’t – why isn’t this something all customers are experiencing?

- Stop closing NTL customer support buildings. My mum used to work at one and this building has shut down 10 or so departments out of 12 or so since she left. Not a direct reflection of her leaving but merely a showing of how little NTL has valued customer support that comes from this country. We are now shipped to India where people don’t know what ‘E4′ and ‘The family movie package’ actually is – which makes our calls three times longer and ten times more frustrating.

- Bring the Virgin brand in with force. Give us a sleek red box with the Virgin brand that becomes the purple cow of boxes underneath the television, give us something to say ‘Virgin have come into the digital market’ and don’t stand still with the innovation and improvements for four years like NTL have done with their ‘Jazz boxes’

- Number six (isn’t there always one extra?) – improve the damn interactive service. Why can’t NTL users press Red when it says so? Sky customers can.. I can only presume this is because it’s a bad platform behind it. We can on E4.. and recently BBC, but not really anywhere else.

Tags: discussion, ideas, virgin

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comment by bing1978

what a pointless artical. Forest are ina win win situation. If they get hammered ppl will say it was going to happen. If they lose by afew goals they will be called ‘plucky’ and ‘unlucky’. a draw will be ‘heroic’. a win ‘unthinkable’

Forest have to get promoted this season – the game is now just about Money, a draw would be great, just equals more money.

This site is getting worse

Great comment bing, we’ll get you out of the 70’s in no time. Anyone got any comments on the game pre-match?

Tags: discussion, goals

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The site can cover ANYTHING you wan’t, just post it :)

Your help is more than appreciated

Tags: discussion, questions

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Without further ado, I give you Photoshoptips.net (click on thumbnail below for full screenshot):

Tags: discussion, opinions

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Tags: discussion, predictions

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I already know of Google Adsense, Revenue Science and Yahoo’s.. (though i’m not sure what Yahoo’s system is called)

So guys and gals, post the advertising systems you know of! Preferrably they need to be easy to integrate, not limited to certain countries (A few limit themselves to just America..) and if they are available to only a certain age range, please post that too :)

Tags: advertising, discussion

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The official announcement:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html

This means proper Flash integration in programs, and possbily extra flames from the bonfire with Fireworks, Freehand and Director jobs already taken within the Adobe suite.

InDesign, GoLive… maybe they’ll get an upgrade? Who knows…

Also for people who think “Oh no Adobe owns Macromedia now”; Microsoft and IBM where both in the running for buying Macromedia. So don’t complain too much, you might have had to learn .Net programming just to colourise a photograph!

Tags: discussion

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