After nearly three years at the offices in Slater Street, we’ve reached the stage where we need better, more professional facilities than those offered by simple office rent.

Slater Street is a characterful place in the middle of Liverpool’s Artistic Quarter. It also has lots of bars and some amazing people. But with that comes noise, occasional mess, and relatively few facilities.

Liverpool Science Park Innovation Centre 2

Liverpool Science Park

So, to celebrate our continued growth, to give us quieter on-site training facilities, conference facilities and a stronger infrastructure, we’ve made the decision to move into Liverpool Science Park, Innovation Centre 2.  This will give us high quality, flexible office infrastructure, access to Liverpool University’s expertise, and much more besides.

The Future

This is all a part of plans for the company.  Interconnect IT has had a successful 2009, with a growth in revenues anticipated to be approximately 75% over 2008 and the same growth for the 2010 financial year.  We have established ourselves firmly in the News & Media sectors with clients such as Informa Group and Telegraph Media Group.  We are also growing our Intranet business and developing new intranet technologies to help business improve their internal communications.

Our success means we need more space, more people and more ancillary services such as a staffed reception, on-site training and conference facilities, modern phone system and more.  Liverpool Science Park provides this, along with excellent business support facilities.  That coupled with being able to work closely with other leading technology companies in Liverpool gives us a very bright outlook even in these difficult times.

– David Coveney, Director.

If you’ve been involved in WordPress over the past few years you’ll have seen it change from being an excellent but limited blogging platform into something on which you can build much more complex websites.  We ourselves have been involved in some pretty sophisticated uses of the system – for example, over at Telecoms.com which makes extensive use of various elements of WP functionality as well as having quite a lot of custom code bolted in. Read more

This is a real-life burglar... still easier to identify than a hacker, sadly. Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution Picture by Jofus.

There’s been a big fuss lately over the latest WordPress hacks that have targetted older versions of WordPress.

And in my view, they show the less pretty side of WordPress and some people in the community… but not all of them.  The attitude has been a straight “upgrade your blog and you’ll be secure.”

Well, I have news for you.  They’re wrong. Read more

You know that over-clocking experiment?

We had an interesting failure recently. The server for one of our larger clients, who have their own high-spec dedicated server arranged, went down. We got the alert by text, and swung into action.

Well, more accurately we had called the hosting providers and told them to fix it.

They gave no solid reason or explanation as to why the server had died, but within in an hour things were normal enough.

Or so we thought…

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One of our clients is the Georgia Energy Efficiency Programme with their website at http://energocredit.ge – and nice people they are too. Now, Georgia, in case you don’t know, is a small former USSR state between Turkey and Russia. Relations between Georgia and Russia have never been brilliant, and there’s a lot of complex politics going on which I won’t go into here.

Well, with the Olympics diverting the world’s attention, Russia stepped up hostilities. The attacks on the city of Gori aren’t really that far from where our clients are in the capital, Tbilisi. And it’s weird. We’ve worried about clients going bust (happened twice already in the company’s history) and we’ve worried about clients that are undergoing upheavals. But we’ve never worried about them being in danger of military actions. And that’s an altogether different feeling.

So here at Interconnect IT we’re wishing all the best to our Georgian friends, and following the blog of their British team leader Helene Ryding. It’s an interesting insight into what it is to be in a country that’s under attack.

Very quietly we’ve been building something quite special for WordPress. Let’s just say that we’re not the first with the concept, nor, I’m sure, the last. But it’s going to be about the most professional set-up. And we’ve done almost all of it with WordPress based technology.

What is it, exactly?

Well, just at this moment, we’re not saying. There’s been hints out there, and it’s not a huge secret, but we’re not ready to make any big announcements just yet. Look out for clues in our forum posts around the place, and in some of our work.

Really I had to post simply to explain why we’ve posted nothing on the blog for over a month. There’s been that internal project, but also some very interesting projects for clients. All of which has conspired to keep us with our noses on the grindstone. Soon we’ll look up and return to normal. Maybe.

The current crisis in the world’s banking industry is causing my quite a bit of concern right now.  Our web technology business is small but growing.  When businesses are doing well they’re more likely to spend money on items such as web design and web applications and we believe we’ve benefitted from that over the past year or so.

But what happens if our clients and potential clients start to suffer as a consequence of an economic downturn? Read more

Actually, that’s a contentious one. We don’t really hate US software companies. Just some of them. Adobe in particular is winning no prizes for its pricing policy.

See the image below:

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