Toby Parkins, director of UKNetWeb and Headforwards, explains the changes below:

I’m pleased to announce that UKNetWeb Ltd will be merging with Headforwards Solutions Ltd over the next 3 months.
Very little change will happen to the type of work the UKNetWeb team do currently, but by becoming the new Headforwards Special Projects Division the team will be able to expand on their current offering. They will also experience further professional development and career satisfaction by working alongside other Headforwards developers, which will lead to them creating more amazing software.

In the past 5 years since Headforwards started it has grown significantly by mainly focusing on larger scale outsource software development.
Earlier this month it decided to offer shorter scale project development services. As these sorts of projects are identical to the work UKNetWeb is currently doing it made perfect sense to simply merge the team across.

At this point I spoke individually to each member of the team and then held a collective discussion and tour of the Headforwards main offices at Pool Innovation Centre. The decision to either remain separate, or to merge, was offered to the team. They considered this and unanimously supported the merging option.

What does this mean? The team will carry on working on all projects as before.
There may also be some further team expansion in the next few months to increase capacity as needed. The current Headforwards teams are dedicated to existing clients so whilst we won’t be switching people within teams, we are currently recruiting 42 more people.
This will mean we have the largest range of jobs of any company in the Southwest giving us the greatest opportunity to find new people to join the existing UKNetWeb team.

At some point the team may move offices as this will enable much needed renovation work to be carried out at The Engine House. This will also allow us to review infrastructure and implement some further cloud based solutions and drive forward efficiency.

The future is looking bright. Headforwards is planning to expand to over a 100 people in the next 6 months and with a larger marketing resource we’re looking forward to expanding our range of services.

Thank you for your continued support.

The post Exciting changes for UKNetWeb appeared first on Special Projects Division.

The event, run in collaboration with Tech Southwest, was a fantastic showcase of the high caliber businesses and individuals working in the tech sector here in Cornwall. Over 140 people had booked to attend!

A combination of stands from various businesses, talks and break-out workshops made for a great afternoon of networking, knowledge sharing, learning and of course biscuit eating!

In between the main talks there were 3 workshops, all of which had great attendance. ‘Find your voice’, led by David McGuire and Fiona Campbell of Radix Communications, ‘Design a degree 2.0’, by Toby Parkins and Lyssa-Fee Crump from Headforwards, and ‘Mob Programming’, run by two of our team; Joe and Andy.

Mob Programming : A whole team approach

Mob programming is an approach to software development where the whole team is working on the same thing, at the same time. This is something we give great value to here at UKNetWeb. Every Friday we have a mob programming session – fueled by pizza! You can read more about the idea behind that here.

Here’s Andy’s take on how the workshop went.

We’re not certified mob programming professional coaches (I’m sure you can get a certificate in Mob Programming) – so we talked about how we went from Mob Programming being a fanciful idea, to getting a foot in the door with “Mob Fridays”.

We then went on to recreate one of our Mob Fridays (even though it was only Thursday) around a Scratch based Hide and Seek game.

In the space of about 10 minutes there was a good flow going, and by the end of the session pretty much everyone in the room had been involved in the task of improving the game.

What was great for us, was to see a bunch of strangers, some programmers – some not, who usually program in a variety different languages, working as a team. They managed to solve 6 out of 8 Gobo tasks (Gobo is the star of the game) in the backlog. It really validates the value of the practice.

Thank you to Software Cornwall, and especially Lyssa-Fee Crump, for organising such a fantastic and inspiring event.

The post Mob Programming at Software Cornwall’s Business Connect Event appeared first on Special Projects Division.

Beacons are not new. We started experimenting and researching beacons in 2012. However, up until recently they have really only worked within closed app based eco-systems. So in order to make use of beacons you need to ensure users have apps, and that they have them switched on, and the beacons are in the right place, and, well, there’s just been too many hurdles to jump through.

The same problems exist with QR codes and other app “install first” technologies. The theory was great and everything worked well at prototype phase. But in reality, a very low percentage of users installed the apps or could remember where their QR code reading app shortcut was located on their mobile device.

When we first started investigating Beacons and the Physical web, our eyes started rolling, imagining every (over eager sales driven) “marketer” plastering spam across the airwaves with 100s of BUY ME NOW style messages every minute. We imagined walking down the street and realizing that our phones had crashed due to the overloading of spammy beacon driven junk arriving on our devices.

Whilst Google appear to be planning on integrating this technology onto all of their Android users’ devices, they are doing it in a very unobtrusive way. All people will get is a small, top bar notification on their phones. No annoying vibrations, alarms or beeps that would simply cause people to disable the notifications. The notifications only become useful when users decide they want to explore the local area’s “physical web”.

It will be interesting to see how this technology develops.  And what happens with Apple iPhone? Will they position to oppose the Google technology, or will they work with their own iBeacon technology alongside?

The post Beacons and the Physical Web appeared first on Special Projects Division.

Heatmapping is a valuable tool to have in your arsenal when analysing the behaviour of visitors to your site. It is hard to be objective and successfully guess what users do when on your site. Heatmapping allows you to see where they’re clicking, or touching the screen, and at what point you may lose them.

Being able to see this behaviour means you can start to consider changes to your site. Changes which will improve the user experience, and increase sales and conversions. (You can read more about heatmapping and see an example of it on our earlier blog post.)

Attendees were from a variety of Cornish businesses. Not only current clients of UKNetWeb, but also past colleagues and other members of the business community.  Everyone came away keen to take action from what they learnt.

Comments from attendees

“A really interesting introduction to heatmapping – what to look out for and how to use it as a valuable web maintenance tool.” – Emma Lydon, PFA Research

“A highly informative seminar, will definitely put heatmapping to use!” – Brian Hart, Moonlife

“Extremely useful seminar that was informative, engaging & thought provoking about our current digital marketing activity” – David Callaghan, TRAC Services

If you missed out on today’s seminar, all is not lost! High levels of interest mean we will be repeating the seminar next month.

Sign up here and you can join us on the 5th of February to learn all about heatmapping and it’s use in website optimisation.

The post Website Optimisation Seminar – January 2016 appeared first on Special Projects Division.

Friday night saw us join with the teams from Evolution and Pixxcell to celebrate Christmas at The Driftwood Spars where we had a fantastic 3 course meal. The wine was flowing, crackers were being cracked, poppers being popped and at one point a Secret Santa gift had to be confiscated. It turns out door alarms are not a quiet gift to give!

Thank you to everyone at The Driftwood Spars and to the whole team for an excellent evening out!

As Christmas is fast approaching the office is getting quieter however some of the team will still be in the office until Christmas eve.

Our support system will be monitored throughout the whole festive period so if you have a technical issue over this time please contact us via http://support.uknetweb.com  as phone messages and emails will most likely not be seen until we’re back in on the 4th of January.

All of us would like to say a big “Thank you” for sharing an excellent 2015 with us.

Instead of Christmas cards this year we will be making a donation to St Petroc’s society who works tirelessly to help the homeless here in Cornwall.

We hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and here’s to a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2016!

Don’t forget about our free Heat Mapping seminar on the 15th of January – discover how to optimise usability and conversion rate. Book your place or take a look at our previous blog for more information.

The post Merry Christmas from UkNetWeb appeared first on Special Projects Division.

An issue often faced is, however, how do you tell whether or not your potential customers are fully engaging with your content? Is there a way of knowing what routes they are taking to buy your products? Can you make the site easier for them to navigate?Are there any dead spots or dead pages on your site?

Traditional tools, such as Google Analytics, perform well in providing a huge array of metrics about page visits, bounce rates conversion rates and so on.  The only limiting factor with Analytics is that it does not provide an easy visual and easy to interpret user analysis.

Website heatmapping is a useful tool for identifying weak spots in your website, it’s design, function and usability. Heatmapping shows where visitors click their cursor on desktop devices and where they tap their finger on mobile and tablet devices.  The more clicks and taps in an area, the more the colour around that area changes as if looking through a thermal imaging camera.

Our brains are more able to identify with this colour overlay than seeing the page overlaid with metrics such as percentage clicks or page visits.

We can quickly interpret such issues as whether visitors:

• Click on elements that aren’t links.
• Are being distracted from clicking on calls to action.
• May be looking for information on your site which is missing.
• Realise there is more content further down the page.
• Are being provided with the best experience on all devices, desktop, tablet or mobile.

To fully optimise your users experience and engagement and therefore to boost product sales or other forms of visitor conversion installing a heatmap tool is a necessity.

UKNetWeb is happy to provide this service, to install heatmap tracking and to either let you analyse the results yourself, or help guide analysis and recommendations for you.

Contact us for more information

The post Heatmapping – optimise your sites usability and conversion rate appeared first on Special Projects Division.

We would recommend you find out if your other internet service providers have been effected. We know Gmail and Yahoo mail have both said they have been but there will be many more.

Changing passwords frequently is extremely good practice, especially email and other important services which unlock other services (Google and Facebook accounts allow access into many other services using OAuth).

At this point in time Facebook, Apple and Twitter have not announced whether or not they are affected.

The post Heartbleed Password Security appeared first on Special Projects Division.

Over the past few years we’ve noticed the approach is remarkably similar between producing a website and a more complex web/cloud hosted application. Both have aims and objectives that can be written down in advance, and both have specific details that become more apparent as the project develops. This is the key reason why projects become increasingly problematic. It’s not until you get further into the project that the real detail becomes clear and the value of the specific requirements becomes clear. At this point often there is no budget left for such extra work.

A lot of extra time is then spent trying to work out ways of adding all the extra requirements into the project, with the lowest budget possible. The big emphasis will be on the big launch and go live day when everything has to be completely, 100% finished, never to be touched again.

The pressures this approach causes will reduce production quality of content, code and design.

Flexibility – an Agile methodology will ensure that manageable changes can be made throughout the project. It’s expected that change will be required as project stakeholders get closer to the detail.

Quality – partly through better approach, but also through having a less stressful approach, with better time management and a steadier workflow, each person involved in the project can deliver their contribution in small chunks instead of big large ones which typically have more problems.

Speed to Deliver – if you are building the first version, with the knowledge that you can introduce more requirements into the next version a few months later, then you don’t have to cram everything in. This means you can release more quickly, learn from seeing a working version, and through having greater understanding create new ideas for the next version. The whole process speeds up as a result.

Cost – large projects exponentially grow in budget because of the contingency rule. If you estimate a 10hr task you will be 10% accurate. If you estimate a 100hr task you’ll be around 25% accurate. A 500hr task is likely to have a variance over 50%. Small project chunks ensure more focus and less wastage.

These benefits are ones we’ve consistently seen through a number of projects. There are many others as well. Talk to us to find out more.

The post Agile Benefits appeared first on Special Projects Division.

2013 is the time for Mobilie Optimised Web. Taking action and moving websites to mobile optimised platforms and designs is becoming a necessity.
This presentation by Toby Parkins looks at the stats on mobile usage and how important it is to have a Mobile Optimised site. Also covered is the need to use analytics in planning your designs. The presentation finishes with some examples of responsive design and menus.

Contact us to discuss how we can get your site mobile.

The post Mobile Optimised Web 2013 – Time for Action appeared first on Special Projects Division.

This ebook has been prepared with one simple objective in mind – to explain the best methods and approach to using the Internet for marketing and communication purposes.

Four leading experts in online marketing have come together to share ideas and best practice about making the online specialisms work with a website, how to make the most of them and how businesses can get them working together to create maximum return on investment.

Make the most of this opportunity to obtain cutting edge information – download it now!

Simply fill in the simple form below to download your ebook.

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