Now I have to be honest and say that I was all set to pay my £2.  It’s a legitimate business expense, and I reckon we could manage £104 per year; I know I’d use it, too, because I currently visit The Times once a day, and often more.  However, perversely, this is what put me off.

I’ve been aware for a while that I probably spend too many work hours reading The Times and The Guardian online, and as I was filling out the order form I suddenly thought ‘hold on, if I DON’T buy it I can still read The Guardian, save £104 AND have more hours in my day’.  If both The Times and The Guardian had implemented paywalls on the same day, I may well have signed up for both; I’d definitely have paid for at least one.

Which brings us on the the game theory.  The question here is: does the news industry as a whole hope to charge online readers for access one day?  If so, then the best time for any one organisation to introduce a paywall is on the same day as their competitors, because if everyone removes their free offering simultaneously, their combined readership had no choice but to stump up some cash, or stop getting their news fix online. The other side of this idea, though, is that remaining free when your competitors start charging is likely to increase your readership at the expense of theirs.  Classic game theory: if the players work together they all win, but if one breaks the convention they stand to make huge gains at the expense of the others.

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.  You have to admire a ballsy move from Murdoch and co. – however I wonder how many other people will take the opportunity to impose a bit of discipline on their online life and take The Times out of their bookmarks.

This was brought home to me recently when I was drawing up a proposal for a client who plans to set up a new business networking group, or more accurately, a network of networking groups.  Our M.O. involves a lot of upfront business analysis, so it was clear that the optimum solution involved much more than a simple website with some card payments for bookings.

The business model involved 6-8 groups, each with 20-30 members attending a monthly meeting.  ‘Directors’ would be recruited to run each one, in return for a percentage of the profits.  Visitors would also be welcome; the incentives to pay for membership would include a reduced meeting fee, inclusion in an online business directory, and access to a private members forum.

My proposal had the web-based software running everything, from the regions containing the groups, down to an automatic reminder when people’s memberships were due to expire.  Members and visitors would be able to buy online, and members could amend their directory listing as required.  Directors could log in and view their delegate lists, and the system would calculate their commission each month.

A ‘back-of-an-Excel-sheet’ calculation showed that if they managed to fill 6 groups with 20 members, they’d make about £38K a year after venue fees and directors’ commission.  The cost of writing the software from the ground up came to just under £12,500; a third of their profits in their first full year.  Another way to look at it; if the website convinced 40 new members to sign up, it would have paid for itself.

I’m still not sure if they will go ahead with the system as specified or will ask us to chop out a lot of functionality in order to bring the price down.  The essential elements are the member directory, a payment option for visitors, and the forum – these things directly or indirectly bring in money. 

All the other things, such as membership payments, meeting and attendee management, director access, commission reporting and  membership reminders could be handled manually.  These are the things, of course, that will help the business to scale; for example, if members can sign up and pay online, you could double (or treble/quadruple) the membership without needing more staff to proccess them.

This is where we get back to the idea that websites reward ambition, because our £12,500 system would work equally well with 60 groups, each with 30 members (profit: £540K), or even 600 groups with 40 members each (profit: £7million).

I’ve seen our WebShop software turn over £10,000 for one client and £400,000 for another; the difference in the price they paid us was negligible.

That’s why my current focus is on finding ambitious clients who put the web at the centre of their plans.  They see that a really good site may cost them nearly as much, or maybe more, than an employee for a year, but that a) they only have to pay once, and b) their site can work harder than a human ever could.

So far, we’ve found several clients whose plans we could turbo charge with a hard-working website:

• The cruise holiday specialist whose site processes 60,000+ data items every day
• The sales recruiter who needed 40+ industry-specific sites to publicise different jobs
• The global travel network who needed social networking tools to facilitate communication between local experts and travellers
• The ultrasound manufacturer who needed a multi-lingual CMS to map the different products, technologies and applications they work with.
• The teacher training company whose website takes booking and manages their trainers – and who now have three times as many trainers as they did when we redeveloped their site

If you’d like to be added to the list, and have a cunning plan that involves the web, feel free to get in touch and see if we can help.

The first thing to acknowledge is that making your website work harder is a pretty inexpensive thing to do, all things considered.  We approach all of our clients with the same question: What do you need?  If we can deliver the perfect solution for hundreds rather than thousands of pounds, we will.  Our overriding mission is to build a long-term trusted partnership with all our clients.

Second, many of the new customers contacting us have been aware for months, or even years, that their website was a weak link in their marketing strategy, but had not got round to fixing it while the work was flowing in. When you sense that things might be about to dry up, it makes you even more sensitive to the things that are hindering you in the marketplace, and for a lot of people their website was a ‘tick in the box’, somewhere between getting business cards printed and placing an ad in the Yellow Pages.  Those sort of sites simply won’t do any longer.

Finally, there is an appreciation that the web is an increasingly large part of people’s lives, that decisions about the quality of your company are made based on the quality of your website, and that a poor website can do real damage to your business.  If your customers are spending more time researching the options, and less time spending their money, where are they doing that research?  Overwhelmingly, they will be checking out the options online, so it is essential that you can compete in that environment.

In amongst all this has been the realisation that we need to be a proactive part of our customers’ web strategy; a trusted partner that they can rely on to guide them through the many possibilities the web offers.  This takes time, something that I was short on in the latter part of 2008, while we grew our customer based and delivered some exceptional websites.

So, the logical conclusion was to hire another developer.  Not just any developer, of course; ideally I’d like to have cloned myself (!) but actually the opportunity arose to hire a better, more experienced developer than me.  I jumped at the chance, and on Monday 19th January 2009 we welcomed the latest member of the team to PM Towers: Derek Sorensen.

Derek has already made himself invaluable, writing back-end code for our two biggest projects, which have to pull in data from a number of different providers and turn them into something sensible.  I’m very excited to have him on board, and to see the difference that a first-class developer can make to a development team.

If you have a business challenge that would benefit from a web based solution, give us a call on 01908 239971; we now have an even bigger development team to help deliver exactly the solution you need.

Now I see on TechCrunch that AT&T has bought Wayport, a US WiFi hotspot operator, in a $275 million deal.  I wonder if that will prove portentous for the UK, where mobile carriers are still trying to recoup their £22 BILLION investment in 3G licenses.  If the operating costs are significantly higher than WiFi, will we see the same thing in the UK?  And if so, who are the big players in the WiFi hotspot market?

The Cloud already provides a similar service for O2 and Orange (although they levy a monthly fee, unlike AT&T), while the others are either doing their own thing (T-Mobile) or ignoring WiFI altogether (Vodafone).  If WiFi continues to grow, while being much cheaper to support than 3G, will we see the incumbent carriers invest more heavily there?

Should be interesting to watch, in any case.

Google surveyed the shopping habits of 263 millionaires (shoppers 25 to 64 with an income of more than $1 million [emphasis mine]) and 730 ultra-affluents (net worth of $1 million, household incomes of $250,000 or more for married couples).

Given that the usual definition of millionare (‘A person whose wealth exceeds one million units of any currency’) would cover all of these people, I feel almost sorry for the ‘ultra-affluents’ whose million-dollar net worths and quarter-million incomes just don’t cut it any more.  I wonder who is going to break the bad news?

But hold on a sec:

Rich people work for their money, and the richer they are, the more likely they are to work: 89 percent of millionaires work full time. [emphasis theirs]

Now that is just plain wrong.  Surely, if being a millionaire means anything at all, it means that working full time is a distant nightmare.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that I don’t want to be a millionaire at all.  After all, you are earning more than $1million per year, and by definition you lack the imagination to do anything else with your considerable resources than turn up for work each day. 

No, from now on you’ll find me slumming with the ‘ultra-affluents’, thanks.