Most of you are probably on holiday already and it’s coming close to the time that I pack it in for the year. Unfortunately, there is no rest for the wicked busy, and there are still some active developments on the to-do list.
We’ve officially moved out to Waterfall and no longer occupy office space with the SA Web Design crew, but I’m sure we’ll continue to work together on a number of projects we’ve collaborated on over the course of 2008/9. Waterfall is a beautiful place and as you can see in the pic above, my new workspace is really inspiring (for me anyway).
This post is really something to explain whats on the cards for 2010 in a work sense, both for myself and for anyone interested in working with us.
Greater focus on security
This year has taught us some important lessons in web security not only in a local sense. The fact that Twitter got hacked twice in 2010 tells me that its becoming more and more necessary to employ more stringent security measures across the board.
Considering that we work quite heavily with third party content management systems, there will be a far greater emphasis on locking down any vulnerabilities and employing a more structured update regime.
Seeking relationships
The past 5yrs of business has seen a large number of projects pass through our production line (over 150 projects) and it has become clear that the vast majority of success stories are the clients that we have an on-going relationship with. In this vein, we’ll be looking into bundle service offerings which will run over a number of months. Some services to expect early in 2010:
- Web consulting (analysis of your needs, technical requirements, project scoping etc.)
- Website analysis & strategy
- Design & Redesign of websites
- Content creation and management
- Online advertising and search engine optimisation
- Social media strategy, implementation and monitoring
- Email broadcasting
- Customer data collection campaigns (see our latest viral campaign offering here)
- Analytics and reporting
- Online training
Each one of those topics has a number of sub-categories but listing them all here would be tedious and a waste of yours and my time. Needless to say, the best thing to do is just pick up the phone and call us or drop us an email and find out if we can help you with your online presence.
Allchorn Rebranding
One of the great things about working predominantly in the online medium, is that its not too much trouble to visually re-invent our brand every couple of years. 2010 will see a new look for Allchorn Design. One which we’re quite excited about and one that is still technically on the drawing board. Above is an early preview mockup of how it might look.
All in all, as usual, a new year approaching is exciting, and I’d like to wish everyone a fantastic Christmas and awesome new year!
In my role as a web design consultant, I often need to do a fair amount of research into a specific client’s needs. In that research, I tend to come across a lot of really cool technology and parts of it that enhance a website in really useful ways.
Having worked with content management systems both proprietary, home grown and open source in the past, I’ve taken a little time lately to step back and look at the pros and cons of each. Let it be known that while I’ve been heavily involved in the development of a home grown CMS in the past, and am a big advocate of the proprietary system Realm Platform, I do use WordPress and Textpattern, so I am not necesserily bias either way.