“So where are the designs?” The question came about ten minutes into a pitch, from someone plainly looking forward to this part of the meeting. But what we didn’t have was the audience, the goals, the analytics or any customer research. They hadn’t given us that information, so instead we’d brought a plan, a set […]

A business rang us a fortnight before their new website was due to go live. It wasn’t our build. The designs had been signed off months earlier, the pages were finished, and the thing was in its last round of checks when someone from their customer service team asked a question nobody else had thought […]

The call tends to come a few days after the win. The agency has every reason to be delighted. The idea at the centre of the pitch was bold and the client loved it. Every visitor to the campaign site gets a short film made just for them, with their name, their suburb and their […]

“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 this is what website maintenance covers. Software isn’t an appliance The reasonable expectation, and 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 […]