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.

So, what does this actually mean?  A new site usually comes with something different, and in this case we didn’t want to disappoint.

WordPress Focus

New site, new features, new challenges

One of the biggest changes you’ll see now is that we’re focussing more strongly on our WordPress practice.  We’ve always believed in WordPress as a CMS, and have used it as such for both our own and our client sites since 2006, but it’s only recently that the market has caught up with us.  We were the first UK practice to be approved for listing on Automattic’s WordPress Consultants List, and we believe that we’re either the country’s leading WordPress developers or very close to it.

More Products

We’ve also added some new products to our site:

1. A wider range of WordPress related training courses
2. Google Adwords Packages
3. Web Development services

There is, of course, more to come online in the coming year.  If you’re wondering what, just watch the news section of this site…

More Information

There’ll also be more information on this site.  We’ve created sections for a Portfolio and for Case Studies – the Portfolio part giving a light view of our work, while the Case Studies section gives in depth coverage of our selected items of work, showing how we did the work and the advantages that we’ve brought to our clients.

Client Section

Clients, and those on support contracts, will have access to our new Client Section which uses the excellent Mantis Bug Tracker.

Whizzy Bits

We wanted to get a lot of information onto our home page without overwhelming visitors with a large amount of text.  This is beneficial from the point of view of search engines, but also gives visitors quick access to a lot of information.  So we’ve used lots of lovely jQuery to make this an interactive space that gives prominence to the latest content whilst making other content still easy to find.

Telecoms.com is considered to be the telecoms industry’s leading news, opinion and analysis website. It is produced by the Telecoms & Media group within Informa plc – a major operator in the information business with over 8000 staff in over 40 countries.

Thanks to Interconnect IT’s significant WordPress skills and extensions, coupled with the system’s ease of use, it was quickly decided that this open source software would be an excellent fit for the requirements that Informa Telecoms & Media had listed. These ranged from support for multiple contributors with varying access rights, tagging, category templates, sections and so on.

The added functionality that Interconnect IT brings to WordPress, including a multitude of news specific widgets, quick and easy section page creation and so on helped create a highly flexible website that can easily grow without a need to repeatedly involve the developers. This strength helps to give Telecoms.com an advantage in being able to quickly respond to changes in the business environment they work with.

Matt Horsford, Head of New Media at Informa Telecoms & Media said “Interconnect IT were one of the few people in the UK able to deliver WordPress functionality to the level we required. The project ran smoothly and we were impressed at the way Interconnect IT understood and executed our requirements with very little need to make further changes.”

The visual design of the site was carried out by Coast Digital.

Media Orientated WordPress

Interconnect IT believe that WordPress’s underlying structure, coupled with the correct theme and our own custom plugin set makes for a platform that is excellent for media outlets such as Informa. David Coveney, Director of Interconnect IT said “The semantic and chronological structure of WordPress content was originally designed for blogging, but it also perfectly matches the needs of media organisations who have a lot of news to present. The wide range of ways in which media can be presented, coupled with the multitude of RSS feeds available makes for an immersive, high performing news website.”

WordPress is currently used by many large media groups for blogging, with some starting to exploit its power for news websites. The largest growth sector for WordPress is likely to be in news websites for both small and large organisations. Early adopters such as the New York Times, CNN and our own clients at Politics & The City (run by June Sarpong MBE) have shown the real benefits in using this technology. Telecoms.com have shown great foresight in adopting WordPress for their own site and should gain another advantage over their competition.

Willows Mallorca are a Mallorca based property management company who came to us over two years ago for a budget site.  They’d taken over the company but the web presence they inherited wasn’t suitable.  The site we created then was basic, but carefully built and with good search engine performance – in fact, the results were remarkable.  Willows Mallorca have since grown to a team of seven staff, with a showroom office, and high-flying clients.  It’s been estimated that as much as 70% of their work came through their website.

Following that kind of performance, it’s no surprise that they wanted to stay with us!  Our belief in high quality along with great value mean we very rarely lose a client.

Because of a small budget, we decided to use a lightly customised version of iThemes iCar theme which fit the purpose just right.  A few plugins and modifications later, and the site was quickly up and running.  We created some suitable graphics, selected some photographs, and with just a day or so’s work turned around the site from basic blog, to professional online presence.

Quickly produced, yet effective.

Danbar Drilling are Geothermal Drilling Specialists based in Lancashire – they needed a theme built which emphasised their professionalism and high quality approach to their work.

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.

A developer has just done a nice little piece on spellchecking. In 1984 it was ferociously hard. In fact, if you wanted a decent spellchecker in your custom application you had to pay dearly for the priviledge. Today it can be accomplished in a few lines of code.

It means that what was once going to cost you £100k to add to an application is now a few pounds.

Similarly, when we develop we offer up lots of wonderful functionality at incredibly low cost, because we’re just pulling in something that’s already been done. But if someone asks us for something custom, the price leaps up. They don’t always get it.

So here’s how we do it:

Step 1

We don’t know if the problem’s been solved before, and we don’t know how long it’ll take us to solve it either, so we give what may be considered to be evasive responses. We need time to research. Someone has to pay for that. Depending how interesting this research is to our business model, we may subsidise it. Otherwise, the client pays.

Step 2

If we find the problem’s already been solved, we still need to test the solution to make sure it applies well to the client’s requirements.

Step 3

If all is well, and the solution is found quickly, the client gets a call to say “yup, no problem, it’ll take us x amount of hours.”

But if we found no solution, we have to estimate how long it’ll take to develop the solution. And that’s hard in a commercial sphere. People don’t expect to spend much on R&D – they just want solutions.

So we do spend a lot of time trying to get people to understand the difference between solutions, and development. Just like a DVD player is a £30 piece of kit if you buy one from Sanyo while it would cost millions if you tried to make one your own from first principles. It shocks folk, but it’s an important message to get across that all developers need to take on board and to pass on to clients, or they end up stressed and trying to do the impossible on very low budgets.

But let’s assume you’re dealing with a typical, decent developer who doesn’t take the long route, or dangerous shortcuts.

There’s some nice research covering this, such as Boem, Abts Chulani [2000] which is worth reading if you’re interested by this kind of stuff.  But it’s heavy going, and doesn’t give a nice neat figure for lay people to understand.

So now I’m going to give the answer that many want to hear:

For each line of code produced in a 3GL non RAD environment the cost of your development is likely to come to around £20-£25 per line of new code.  And about £100 per hundred lines of re-used code.

Doesn’t sound too bad… that includes testing, development, refinement, code reviews and so on.  It’s based on the idea that most good developers can produce around 50-100 lines of code in a day if left alone and in peace.  Some produce reams of code, but it’s often poorly optimised and thought out and likely to bite back in years to come.  The cost also takes into account the design of that code before anyone touched a computer, and the various support staff required.  If a developer is working entirely alone and is self-supported with his PCs and the like, then his productivity drops so the project takes longer, but the cost shouldn’t change too much.

And don’t forget that cheap code is often bulkier than expensive code.  Which means nobody can look at a 1000 line program and actually say “Oh yeah, that’s £20k’s worth.”  Somebody needs to assess the quality of that code.

What we will say is that in general, if we’ve written you 1000 lines of fresh code (ie, no cut and pasting or reuse) it could well have cost you £25k by the time it’s fully tested and delivered.  A really big project, like, say, implementing a worldwide global payroll system for a major corporation may have five million lines of code and a final bill (including analysis) of around £125 million.  Not at all unreasonable, believe it or not.

So yes, code is expensive.  And that quick report you’d like us to knock up?  Maybe it’s not so quick.

To save costs it’s worthwhile looking at RAD (Rapid Application Development) methods, but in that you’ll end up with slower, more bloated code.  However, it can be a perfectly adequate approach and we use it all the time for simple data management back-ends and the like where performance isn’t that critical.  Sometimes we’ll generate 20,000 lines of code from a three hour job… but it gets the job done.  Albeit a little slowly!

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to raise awareness of their need for a new home by the end of July.  If you, or anyone you know, has the capability to offer some real and useful help then they’d love to hear from you.  IT industry firms are probably the best candidates.

Visit the Museum of Computing’s website…