Yeah right. We had one in the office that we were using for milk and lunch stuff but it was mine and I needed it at home so it disappeared. While up at Asda getting our morning MacDonalds we decided to get another but we had walked up so we had to carry it back. It´s only three quaters of a mile but it was bloody hard. Anyway, back to the point.
While we were up there we had the usual morning meeting and today´s raised a few interesting things for me to do next year. The meeting was about how we were going to grow the business next year and therefore had a strong marketing and sales focus. Since it was me (IT and Web), the MD (Marketing focused) and our new Market Researcher, there wasn´t too much for me to input from a marketing point of view. When this happens I tend to switch off slightly but keep one ear open in case there´s anything that crops up that might be a technological problem or something where I can provide some technology to make the job easier. Today´s meeting raised two interesting challenges for next year.
The first was that as a company we should always present ourselves in a professional, capable way, not purely focused on "gettin the sale". As such we decided to improve our support for the websites. This will involve replacing the "Contact us" page on most of the larger sites with a "help and support" section. This will be basically be a set of FAQs with contact forms that will be routed to the relavent person if the answer isn´t there. Also I plan on implementing an AJAX "chat" system similar to an instant messaging program so they can ask us for help as and when we are online.
The other challenge will be to shift onto a dedicated server for one of our main projects. It´s currently not launched but still receives a fair bit of traffic. The only problem is that it´s already pushing the database on our shared hosting package. Looks like a lot of messing about with root access and then a few sleepless nights with DNS getting all the domains shifted across with the minimal of downtime.
Interesting couple of months after the holidays then.