The year past and to come

So, we've made it through yet another year. Yay us!

In the past year, our work has tended towards phone development; mostly on Android phones, but with one project (AAFinder for Alcoholics Anonymous) for Android, iPhone and Blackberry. Mostly, the phone projects have been for internal use in companies.

The largest publically visible phone project we built is a form-builder app (Fieldmotion) that, in one case, literally converted an office full of stress-filled managers into a solitaire-playing chatting area almost overnight.

For 2014, we forecast that a lot more companies will start developing their own apps (contact me) for management of their teams.

We have a number of projects planned for this year. The first one to be released is a contacts manager based on some work we did with the Hillgrove Hotel, which lets you keep in contact easily with large groups of people, through whichever contact method they supplied you with (we currently have email, address, Facebook, and will be adding SMS before release).

The second is a project I've been planning for years and am finally going to sit down and build - an odd-jobs market which is based on your exact location, how far you are willing to travel, and works a little like Freelancer.

Our prices in 2014 are much the same as they were in 2013:

• brochure website development: €450
• online-store website development: €800
• website hosting: €10 per month
• custom work: €30 per hour

There is a misunderstanding about the Web Development work we do.

Web Development is not purely about the marketing of your website. Yes, web design is about marketing, but web development is about making use of the Internet.

As an example, a project we are currently working on lets companies set up postcard campaigns. The companies choose a postcard design, upload a bunch of addresses, pay the delivery fee, and the postcards are automatically created and sent to the printers over the web, ready to print and post.

In this case, there is no "website" in the traditional sense - instead, we're simply automating a tedious job so it's pretty-much "one-click". In fact, it literally /is/ on-click. The printer looks at the incoming batch, and clicks Print. I went out to the client's warehouse recently to watch them print a batch before we installed this, and there was a tedious job involving 3 separate computers before anything was printed. We have boiled all of that right down to a single click. Again, if you want us to do this for you, contact us.