“Should we be doing something with agents?” We’ve been asked some version of this a lot in the past year, usually by someone who has just come back from a conference or read a board paper. It’s a reasonable question. The word is everywhere, the claims made for it are large, and very few of […]

A woman in her sixties is trying to book a service on a website. She’s used a screen magnifier for years and manages perfectly well on most sites. On this one, the form labels sit above fields in pale grey, and at her magnification the label and the field it belongs to are never on […]

There’s a person in a lot of Australian businesses whose job, for about an hour every morning, is to look at one screen and type what it says into another. They export orders from the online store into a spreadsheet, tidy the columns, and load them into the accounting system. Or they take the enquiries […]

“The site’s built and it works. What am I paying you for every month?” It’s a fair question, asked far too rarely, usually because people feel they ought to already know. You shouldn’t have to guess what you’re buying. So here’s a straight answer about what website maintenance actually covers. Software isn’t an appliance The […]

There’s a moment in most projects where a client watches a demonstration, sees the thing they imagined working in front of them, and says some version of: “That’s it! That’s what we wanted! How long until it’s live?” And the answer is six weeks, and the room deflates. It’s one of the most predictable points […]

There has never been a better time to buy business software, and never an easier time to buy the wrong one. Open a browser and you can have a new CRM, inventory system, job scheduler, accounting package or full ERP running by lunchtime. There’s a subscription for every function a business could name, and several […]

Most of the businesses I’ve watched go through a security incident have said a version of the same thing afterwards: “why would anyone bother with us?” It’s the right question with a slightly deflating answer. Nobody did bother with you. Nobody sat at a desk and picked your company. A program went looking for a […]

“I asked ChatGPT and it said this should take about a week.” An AI software estimate turns up in our inbox more often now, and I want to be clear up front that it’s a completely fair thing to do. If you’re about to spend real money on something you can’t personally evaluate, getting a […]

A business rang us a few years back, one we’d never worked with, because their booking flow had stopped working overnight. Nothing had been deployed, nobody had touched the code, and the site was otherwise perfectly healthy. We were looking at a codebase we’d never seen, hunting for a change nobody had made: a service […]

Somewhere in the last few years, a curious thing happened. Business owners who’d never written a line of code in their lives started arriving at conversations already knowing they needed a “React app” or a “headless setup” or a “single-page application.” The terms had entered the water supply. The technology had become the assumed starting […]