Conceptric

Summary of Business

  1. How do you market a generalist?

    This is a problem I came across recently as a client who’s an artist explained that she wanted to grow her online presence. However, when I explained that we needed to present a consistent image of her work, she expressed concern.

  2. Trust over documentation

    Are job descriptions worth the paper they’re written on? The modern workplace changes rapidly. Keeping these documents up to date for every employee is a full time job and my experience is that most companies don’t. But is it a viable basis for structuring and managing an organisation anyway?

  3. Designing a website

    I’ve been thinking about the key processes involved in design a website; I can feel another series coming on. The first step, and the one were it usually falls apart, is to determine what the site’s meant to do and how.

  4. Destroying your business through growth

    Is growing a business always going to lead to disaster for your loyal customers?

  5. Realigning Conceptric

    After a few informal projects, Conceptric is taking on a more business like persona. It’s becoming my freelance trading name, and as such needs a little reorganisation.

  6. There’s more to Web Applications than selling

    I’m frequently surprised by the number of organisations that could benefit from Web technologies, some have moved beyond the billboard website stage to including Internet retailing. Bringing the Social Internet inside your organisation can tap resources you may not have realised you had.

  7. The Information Analyst?

    In most organisations, information is collected into an impenetrable heap. Good intelligence is a prerequisite for sound decisions, and these become much more valuable as the economy turns down.

  8. Consuming the future

    Economically speaking we’re going through a bad patch, but it will get better, and when it does what will the world be like?

  9. Why I like to be Agile

    I’ve practised traditional project management techniques in Heavy Engineering, studied their use in Software Engineering, and found problems throughout. Why am I so interested in Agile techniques?

  10. Purposeful technology

    Information technology projects frequently catch the headlines, but usually due to spectacular failures. The problem usually results from not asking whether the system is needed at all.

  11. What is computer literacy?

    We all gratuitously refer to computer literacy, but what level of capability does this represent and how do you get it?

  12. Corporate sterility

    I’ve just spent some time customising a few icons on my desktop. After a while it occurred to me that I could have been doing something productive instead. But what’s productive and what’s not? My partner, Clare, works for a medium sized company that has grown significantly over the last few years. A couple of [...]

  13. What’s a website

    This is a short and simple article about the way a website is put together. The diagram below shows three components that are necessary to build a functioning website. The domain name. First you need an address at which your users can find your website. Your domain is your identity on the Web, so it’s [...]

  14. Where do I start — part 2?

    The commitment has been made and development can begin, but what exactly are we developing? Guess what — more questions. Who’s going to control the website? Projects need a single point of contact to operate efficiently. Decision by committee, whilst the most democratic approach, rarely provides the reliable and rapid response needed during a development [...]

  15. Where do I start?

    Asking a few simple and relatively obvious questions at the beginning of a project can save a lot of wasted time and effort. In web development the first, and most important, question: Do I need a website? It seems a simple question doesn’t it, but it’s not as simple as it first appears. There are [...]