Can I Destroy The Job I Love?

A typical web development agency is not highly scalable. Even at capacity, revenue is still linear compared with how much the project is costing to deliver. This is a property of most bespoke service-based businesses, as they involve direct customer interaction and a unique set of tasks for each project.

Recently, I discussed some of the attributes of our profession with fellow web developer and CUBE member Jonathan Lister. One thing we agree on is that web design and development is a craft and will remain that way for some time [1].

The problem with crafts is that they are hard to scale. At WeMakeWebsites, that doesn’t stop us trying though.

When scaling a task, the underlying requirement is to reduce the knowledge and effort required to complete it whilst maintaining the same quality of output. For example, we use 37signals Highrise so we can keep track of the organisations communication without everyone having to communicate a summary of his or her own communications to everybody else through some other method. We use deployment scripts so that each website release can be run with one command making the process easy and relatively error-free [2]. The extreme alternative to this would be to type out every command for each release, which would require a) knowledge and b) effort from every individual required to perform the task.

A good portion of management doctrine over the past 200 years has focused on how to deskill labour, standardise it, and then make it repeatable. The ultimate aim is to replace skilled labour with unskilled labour, which is more abundant and hence cheaper. The background to this movement was the industrial revolution, which focused on how to increase the output and decrease the cost of manufacturing tangible goods.

This was the age of “the average product for the average consumer”, as Seth Godin describes it, and it was a race to the bottom. In recent years, we’ve become used to cheap food, furniture and many other commodities. Indeed, it is now often cheaper to buy an item new than to have it repaired (which would require disproportionate labour cost).

In the post-industrial society however, new jobs have been created that require vocational skill that cannot be standardized so easily. In particular, there are relatively new specialist occupations such as marketing, product design, financial engineering and software engineering [3]. Whilst the last two are questionable in their claims of engineering discipline, they are nevertheless developing professions that have created significant value in their respective industries [4].

In a service-based business model, I think attempting to make the service scalable is one of two modes of successful business model. Nassim Nicholas Taleb once wrote that he’d never be a dentist. Not because of all the grotty tooth stuff and a lifetime of staring into gaping traps, but because “At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists because these professions are more immune to randomness.” He elaborates on this point further by describing the winner-takes-nearly-all dynamic of highly scalable industries, where the main winner is a candidate that fits the market cycle and then undergoes some favourable exposure to external forces.

Many online companies with household names are in the scalable group: Google, Facebook, YouTube. Outside of information technology, this dynamic still applies: hedge funds, fast food franchises (the parent organisations, not the restaurants themselves) and footballers are all examples of where the winners in an industry win BIG – this is because there is a non-linear relationship between skill or quality, and reward. That’s not to say that Facebook or Thierry Henri aren’t any better than their competition. It just means that the reward of their success is disproportionate because of the dynamics of their industry. The difference between the financial success of Facebook and its nearest competitor is significant; the difference between Facebook and its 10th biggest competitor is immense.

As long as web design and development remains a craft, the highly scalable route to success will achieve limited results. Nevertheless, it might be possible to standardise the web development process so much that it can be outsourced to relatively low-skilled software engineers. I think the output quality of this approach would be limited, and would involve reducing the role of a ‘good developer’ to someone that can pick apart each project in to chunks based on the development skill level required for each, and then outsource each component to appropriately skilled engineers. So the answer to the original question is No, I can’t destroy the job I love. For two reasons: I don’t want to and, currently, it’s not possible to do it, or more specifically, to do it well.

I suggest the most effective way to be more scalable as web agency, is to adopt the franchise model and create a repeatable process and excellent QA methods. An agency could then expand internationally, setting up firms, hiring people and implementing well-evolved standard processes, before moving on. This would work for the same reason that, whilst restaurants are not usually highly scalable businesses, restaurant franchises are.

Aside from scalability, I believe there is another mode of strong business model for service-based companies. It is to create a service that is scarce. How would this work for a web agency? There are over 300 million results in Google for web design [5]. That’s not an industry with scarcity. Except it is - why? Because the quality of the services out there is questionable. Or average. Quite a few are good. Then what is scarce? Premium web designers and developers that know how to understand and meet clients’ requirements are scarce. I won’t go in to detail on the method here, but the principle is sound; work on your reputation and you will be rewarded. Service businesses are valued mainly on their intangible assets, and reputation absolutely has to be one of the important assets alongside knowledge and experience [6]. I believe the three pillars of knowledge, experience and reputation provide a stable platform for a successful web agency.

Our business is young but this has been a kind of manifesto. We believe that by offering a premium service we can exceed our clients’ expectations and build a portfolio that we’re proud of in the process. In future, we’d love to take our business elsewhere by setting up agencies in other locations that can benefit from everything we’re learning right now. Let’s see what happens.

Footnotes

1. More detail on the reasons for this in Jonathan’s post.

2. We’ve had a high level of success using Capistrano for our Drupal deployments and I will write up details of our recipe for this in another post.

3. The effect of these new vocations can be seen in the current employment crisis in the US where, despite emerging from recession, the unemployed are still struggling to find employment. A major factor in this is a shift in the number and skill-level of new job openings, which tend to be in industries that require higher levels of qualification and vocational training than the jobs they’ve replaced. This is a consequence of the successful strategies of many US and UK firms, who positioned themselves at high value parts of the value chain, whilst outsourcing ‘difficult’ or capital-intensive processes like manufacture. One textbook example of this type of creative destruction is manufacture, in which low-skill manufacturing roles are replaced by a smaller number of highly-skilled engineering roles, tasked with automating factories and increasing output. To exacerbate this effect, manufacturing companies in many developed countries have moved the remaining low-skill roles offshore, to countries where employment costs are lower.

4. Whilst I know it is debateable if the fiscal antics of our major banking institutions have created positive value, it can’t be denied that these companies have accrued significant wealth as a result of their value propositions. Whether or not this value is correctly distributed between the customer and the business, or whether it even exists, is a different question.

5. I usually abhor this type of statistic but, since it’s just a casual indicator to aid my point, I’ll leave it in.

6. Toyota, a company whose brand equity is built on trust and quality, will surely know that this is the real cost of the worldwide publicity surrounding their recent product defect problems. However, even Toyota’s response to the accelerator pedal defect in many of its Prius models was beyond what was required of them and is an early attempt to heal their wounded brand.


Alex O’Byrne is co-founder of and lead developer at WeMakeWebsites.

This post was originally published in February 2010 on TheCube blog.

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How To... Get the First Few Clients

This is the first in a series of How To posts that we’ll be publishing, aimed at startup web agencies. We’re not sure if it’s a bit pompous writing this as we’re only 6 months in, but it’s based on our experiences dealing with real problems that startup agencies find themselves with and so we might as well share what we’ve learnt so far.

The Number One Problem when starting any business is getting the first few clients. Your first clients are important because they provide a chance to prove you can deliver on your promises, in addition to providing a foundation for your portfolio which can be used by future prospects to gauge your capabilities. Of equal importance, they will be paying you, which is an absolute priority during those first few cash-tight months, especially if you are bootstrapping.

So how do you seed your portfolio when you’re new? As with most business advice, we can tell you what worked for us, but it might not work for everyone.

First off we tapped our personal networks and looked for people we knew that needed websites which we could build quickly and for a discount, or sometimes free. At this time, both Piers and I were both working full-time so we weren’t desperate for cash. Building the first two or three sites allowed us to prove that we weren’t a couple of clowns (at least, in a professional sense) and that we could deliver on our promises.

We also arranged a promotion with a local charity organisation that supports small to medium-sized craft businesses. We offered a discount to their members in the hope they would distribute this to their members. They did, and this brought at least three deals our way, which was great news as at this point we still had an empty portfolio (even the sites we were building for free weren’t ready yet).

The final channel for ‘seed clients’ was gumtree, which has been an unbelievable source of business for us. Believe it or not, some of our biggest clients found us on gumtree. To give you an idea, two £5 ads on gumtree have brought us perhaps £10k of business.

I think the success of our gumtree campaign is based on most Londoners’ trust of gumtree as a source of genuine offers of or requests for help. The tone of our ad was casual and just explained, with honesty, that we were a startup and needed a selection of early clients to build our portfolio with, and that we were offering a discount. Even if you’re not totally sure this route will work for your company, there’s no reason not to try it for £5. There are plenty of other classifieds-style sites that may be more appropriate for you depending on where you’re based.

Your first few clients can be a challenge to find but things will get easier once you’ve seeded your portfolio and can refer future prospects to completed projects. It is also an important learning process, as it will be the first time you work as a team with others at your agency and figure out what tools and processes work for you.

If you have your own experiences in this area please feel free to leave a comment.

In the next How To we’ll be discussing how to set up your business administration, so you’re not overwhelmed when you have a line of clients knocking at your door after all your successful seed work.

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Drupal UK Maintenance Evening

The Scream, on the slide in the photo, says it all: what inescapable misery this nihilistic tragedy of human existence is. Existential issues aside, human civilisation has another problem on the horizon - upgrading from Drupal 6 to 7. Granted, the magnitude of said problem is pale in comparison, but I’ve heard stories, tormented stories, from developers and managers alike, of the upgrade process between versions 5 and 6. At WeMakeWebsites, we started using Drupal around 4 months ago, hence we ramped up the learning curve on a stable version of Drupal 6 and have so far avoided the community-wide disruption of a Drupal upgrade.

Back in December, the Drupal UK group organised an evening of presentations on the subject of Drupal maintenance, upgrading and security. The shared knowledge on offer was fantastic, there’s a lot to be gained from a couple of hours discussion with other Drupal experts, who can offer advice on best practices and discussion on the future of the system. The audience was varied, a mix of developers and project managers from the public, private and non-profit sectors, all stakeholders in this increasingly important component of the web operating system.

Robert Castelo, Neil Cameron, Chris Maiden and Jakub Suchy all performed presentations on subjects such as general maintenance and specific security best practices. The quality and tone of the presentations were excellent. One theme of the evening was the importance and benefits of upgrading to Drupal 7, whilst the technical topics revolved around how best to go about the process itself.

One other observation: I have never seen so many pizza boxes in my life (except for a house of musicians I visited once in Greenwich, where they had made all their living room furniture from empty pizza boxes which had accumulated over what can only be described as a 2 week carb marathon). I have to say that this event was only sweetened more by the stockpile of pizza and beer on offer.

Thanks to Code Positive and Sun Microsystems for organising the evening, WeMakeWebsites will be there again next time to soak up more knowledge and to give some back in return. The Drupal project is quickly turning in to the new poster child for open-source economics, adding value to organisations that need a high-quality industrial-strength content management system, whilst allowing them to contribute some of their output back to the community for mutual benefit.

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The E-Myth Summarized

A while ago I read Michael Gerber’s E-Myth, and thought I would summarise the idea, along with a few of my own thoughts. The book is great, and there are many pieces of advice for small business owners, although I found conversations with a fictional ‘Sarah’, the owner of a troubled pie shop, to be tedious and full of unintentional innuendo. In one a chapter on customer service, Gerber recalls his stay in a near-perfect hotel in which the maid leaves a note on his pillow “If there is anything I can do for you, day or night, please don’t hesitate to call”, that’s actually written there, on page 191. Whether or not this suggestive message is testament to the hotels dedication to customer service is left unanswered. I’m constantly willing him to make a move on Sarah, but instead he insists on mentoring her with the rhetoric of his E-Myth. Well, I’ve cut through the chunks of blubber, here’s what I took from the remaining meat.

Make Your Business a Machine

The premise of the E-Myth is that the problem with small and medium sized business is that, in many cases, the owner is the business. Gerber’s first belief is that your business should be a system of standardised processes, all of which are executed by individuals following documented roles. The book provides a simplified version of Scientific Management, whereby business owners are encouraged to treat their business as a franchise - even if they only have one shop/office - in which the idiosyncrasies of the individual can be limited. This is how companies like Subway and McDonald’s have grown their businesses globally whilst controlling the quality of their service.

The secret is to automate positions wherever possible, and failing that, ensure that roles are fully documented and effectively interchangeable. In the same hotel example mentioned above, the brightening of the garden lighting is automated to increase at night, whilst staff in the hotel follow a definitive “Operations Manual” when cleaning rooms and checking in guests. The advantage of this is that the business does not become dependent on any one individual, and secondly, that the actions of the individuals, and hence the business itself, become more predictable.

Gerber offers practical tips on this, the basis of which is to work ON the business, as well as IN it. For example, creating an organisation chart from the very birth of the business, even if at that point there are more roles than employees (there’s no reason why one employee can’t have two roles). Each role should have specific, documented responsibilities, with an employee assigned to each. A business can be engineered just like any other machine - by refining the organisational structure and processes - whilst the roles themselves get done.

Employees Should Believe In The Strategic Vision

Gerber does a good job of explaining the role of strategy. He explains the values of a consistent strategy for senior managers, whilst at the other end of the hierarchy he uses it as a motivational device for the interchangeable workforce he has created.

On an ideological level, Gerber touches on his belief that the cure for consumerism is englightment through meaningful work. Work, in this sense, is the execution of the standardised routines that make up the business. I struggle to see the E-myth’s compatibility with this philosophy, since the potential for successful enterprise is based on a demanding and dynamic free market - which is one of the strengths of consumerism, despite it’s other downfalls.

I also had a few problems with the quasi-self-help tone of the book, Gerber seems to believe that people take from their job what is already within themselves, so that people who find work “boring” or “tedious” are hence only guilty of the same qualities of character. I’d say this is a fallacy, as I’m sure there are plenty of people with boring or tedious jobs who find self-actualisation in other activities; students or parents working part-time, for example.

On the positive side, I found the practical examples and themes themselves helpful, and the success of the E-Myth franchise is testament to the effectiveness of Gerber’s advice.

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23 Website Optimisation Tips for Faster Page Loading

For all the developers in our audience, here is what I think is a definitive list of optmisation tips for websites, with a focus on Rails apps. Email me if you think I’ve missed any ( alex@alwaysmaking.com ).

With all performance fixes there is a trade-off between getting your site to load quick and making it maintainable. Also, remember not to optimise too early, make sure you know your site works and that you are improving actual bottlenecks rather than wasting time.

Page Rendering

1. Ensure that any JavaScript that can be executed after the main page content has loaded is in the footer of the page. This will include Analytics JS and any AJAX requests.
2. If you’re AJAX request is less than 2k, use GET, it’s quicker. Try cache AJAX responses where possible.
3. Don’t scale images in HTML, make sure the image is the correct size on the server. If an image is going to be displayed 100px wide, save it as 100px wide

Optimising Assets

1. Use an External CDN for loading client-side scripts or images available from other sites (e.g. Yahoo YUI libraries or Google-hosted jQuery libaries), refer to them directly rather than storing them locally on your server. This means that users who have visited sites that use the same scripts will already have them cached in their browser.
2. When releasing JS and CSS to prod ensure that it is minimised (i.e. remove whitespace, comments etc.) using tools such as http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/   Some CMS software can do this for you in production, such as Drupal.
3. Optimise graphics for web (In Photoshop, Save for Web)
4. Use CSS sprites, which involves combining multiple images in to one graphic, and then cropping the image in multiple areas (explained in point 1 here: http://www.leemunroe.com/optimise-website/). By loading only one image from the server, the number of HTTP requests is significantly reduced.
5. If you have multiple local css or javascript files, consolidate them in to one large CSS and JS file. This cuts down on HTTP requests which introduce unnecessary overhead. You can do this easily in Rails, as explained here: http://maintainable.com/articles/rails_asset_cache
6. Gzip what you can if you’re using Apache (http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/07/high_performanc_3.html)

Caching

1. Try and cache in memory rather than in the file system. This will work if you have a server with plenty of RAM. I was once on a training course where the bloke claimed that if accessing RAM takes 1 second (obviously in reality it is much less) then accessing the equivalent data on disk would take 3 months. Whatever the figure, cutting out the mechanical bottleneck of accessing the disk is certainly going to speed up your load times.
2. iPhone specific-tip: keep assets under 25k otherwise they will not be cached on iPhones

Database Access

1. Use indexes based on the where clause of common queries on each table
2. Analyse tables regularly. Our tables get analysed and hence re-indexed everynight, so the tables perform better more of the time.

Rails Specific

1. Use Timed Fragment Caching to simplify caching a page fragement for particular time periods e.g. 1.hour.from.now (rather event-driven expiration e.g. when a new post is added, when a user signs in) - http://www.ruzee.com/blog/2008/07/timed_fragment_cache-on-rails-21
2. Cache models using acts_as_cached (http://errtheblog.com/post/27)
3. A couple of Ruby tips for good measure: Always use regular expressions over expensive loops. It’s often possible to remove some slow loops all together by restructuring code.
4. Avoid dynamic finders like SomeModel.find_by_*, use SomeModel.find_by_sql to query directly instead
5. Question the use of helpers i.e. do you really need a form helper for a static form or can you make do with the pain of writing the html once?
6. Use eager loading for models with has_many relationships (http://railscasts.com/episodes/22-eager-loading)
7. Automatic asset minimisation - http://davetroy.blogspot.com/2007/12/automatic-asset-minimization-and.html
8. Use Rails’ excellent Page/Action/SQL caching helpers http://guides.rubyonrails.org/caching_with_rails.html

Use Yslow to identify bottlenecks

1. Use firefox add-on Yslow (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369)
2. It requires Firebug, which if you don’t already have it, is a good tool to have anyway (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843)

Do you have any more? Feedback welcome.

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How Good Leaders Can Make Bad Decisions

I’ve just got round to listening to an interview on Harvard Business IdeaCast with Sydney Finkelstein, an expert in ‘Strategy and Leadership’. The discussion was on how good leaders can make bad decisions. He described a series of cognitive biases - deviations in judgement commonly attributed to evolutionary reasons – that can be responsible, here is my take on what he said:

Don’t rely on experience

Just because you made the right decision once doesn’t mean the same course of action will work again. A series of memory-related cognitive bias emerged as our ancestors learned to react to situations using information from previous similar encounters. In the African Savannah, this would have a high success rate, but today the world is a complex and fast-moving place with problems that aren’t always suited to our human reasoning, which evolved in very different surroundings.

In technology fields, where paradigms change quickly, this is more relevant than ever. Technology managers must continually re-assess their assumptions and question the degree to which their experience is relevant to a situation, and use other sources of judgement appropriately. This may include staying in touch with new technologies or using junior employees as a source of information and an invaluable decision-making resource.

One contemporary example of is the way in which bank CEOs like Dick Fuld had previously steered their banks through difficulties in the 90s but struggled to deal with the crunch of the late 00s. On the other hand, John Thain, briefly CEO of Merrill Lynch, prepared and successfully executed the sale of the bank to Bank of America Corporation, and in doing so dealt with a new challenge in a way that ultimately worked. Today, Merrill is a part of BoA, whilst Lehman is bankrupt.

We’re all influenced by Self-Interest

Often obvious, sometimes sub-conscious, there’s no doubting that common economic theory attributes the outcome of many decisions to self-interest. It’s also worth noting here that accepted forms of self-interest in one domain can be unacceptable in another. During the banking crisis that Thain dealt with, he continued to take large compensation and even approved the infamous $1 million refurbishment of his office. This self-interest may not have been conscious, particularly in an environment like Wall Street where this behaviour is could be considered normal. Managers should question their decisions from the perspectives of other stakeholders.

Don’t make up your mind too early

Sometimes the decision maker has already decided the course of action, even if new evidence emerges that contradicts the action. A form of confirmation bias is present, in which the decision maker sees evidence that confirms their decision whilst neglecting evidence that contradicts it. The Head of Operations during Hurricane Katrina refused to accept the danger of the situation – after the event he actually testified that this belief was reinforced by a TV report he saw showing people in one part of New Orleans partying. He gave the evidence supporting his initial belief disproportional weight, in spite of the deluge of official information sources available to him that claimed otherwise: that the protective measures were failing and lives were at risk.

Beware of emotional attachment

Yahoo refused to sell out to Microsoft in 2008. Some put Jerry Yang’s stubborn resistance of the takeover down to his emotional attachment to the firm, as one of its founders. A few months later, Microsoft and Yahoo did form a partnership, but it’s estimated that the delay in forming this combined organisation cost Yahoo shareholders in total around $30 billion dollars in share value.

Emotional attachment is complex, and emerged as a mechanism for building relationships with our offspring, partners and communities. Today, the same chemicals react to material objects and social constructs like companies. The organisation is a totally rational construct, with one goal: to make profits that please shareholders. The decisions of an individual can hence contend with this simple agenda, as other factors of human-relevance are brought in to the decisions. On this point I’m ambivalent; it would be a travesty of human endeavour to discard our emotions as a disadvantage. Think about climate change: to the organisation, it only becomes an issue when it begins to affect the availability of natural resources, or the sales potential of products due to a changing zeitgeist in which people consider the environmental impact of their actions more, including which companies they buy from. So in this case, I’m saying that we shouldn’t attempt to cover over our human imperfections, because they are imperfections we should be proud of. The point is that sometimes it’s better to move on from a situation, without procrastination, and get on with it.

If you’re interested in more in-depth examples, you can get the book on Amazon here. Making tough decisions is always going to be difficult and never 100% rational – after all, we’re only human. Being aware of potential biases that affect our judgement can help us reach a more objective and potentially better decision, although whether or not a more instinctive approach to management could also work is an open question.

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7 Developer Quotes for Monday Morning

Granted these aren’t all quotes from developers, but anyone who has worked with software will relate to them. I’ve put credit where I’ve been able to, email me if know who said the ‘anon’ quotes…

“Nine people can’t make a baby in a month.”
— Fred Brooks

“Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?”
— Anon

“Better train people and risk they leave - than do nothing and risk they stay.”
— Anon

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight”
— Bill Gates

“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time…The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”
— Tom Cargill

“Software and cathedrals are much the same - first we build them, then we pray”
— Anon

“The hardest part of software design … is keeping features out.”
— Anon

Plus, a bonus one:
“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” “
— Albert Einstein

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Dixons capitalise on the brands of their rivals

Whilst waiting for the tube on my way home last week, I was drawn to the above advertisment for Dixons.co.uk.

Firstly, as someone called Piers, I was mildly offended at the association of my name with snobbery (ok, so maybe it is a bit of a pompous name, but I didn’t choose it! Thanks mum).  Once I’d got over the attack on my monicker, however, I took another look at the poster and fully appreciated its brilliant use of a rival company’s brand.

The campaign is the work of ad agency M&C Saatchi and features three posters each using the familiar fonts and colour schemes of popular London department stores - Harrods, John Lewis and Selfridges - cleverly tapping in to the zeitgeist of shoppers using high-street retailers for advice on products before buying them cheaper online.

As well as no doubt boosting the traffic on dixons.co.uk, M&C Saatchi’s play on the instantly-regonisable identities of Dixons’ rivals serves as a testament to the strength of Harrods, Selfridges and John Lewis’ brands. It is a reminder of the power of good branding and how important a strong brand can be for your business.

Take a look at the full series of posters here.

If you’re looking to create an identity for your business or are looking for a re-brand, get in touch.

 

Note: Since it’s launch, the campaign has certainly caught the eye of a number other people, notably John Lewis who have reacted somewhat unfavourably!  Who knows how successful the campaign will be for Dixons sales, but the press attention certainly won’t do them any harm.

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How Visitor Analytics Can Help Your Business

Figuring out who your customers are is an important element of market research. With a website, you are able to access all sorts of metrics on who your site visitors are and how they found your site. This information can be useful in managing the direction of your website, or maybe even the direction of your business.

At WeMakeWebsites, we integrate all our client websites with GoogleAnalytics, which gives them access to in-depth visitor metrics. For example, you can see the popularity of your site over time:

One of the key metrics available is the source of your traffic. In GoogleAnalytics, these traffic sources are broken down in to three categories:

• Direct links: those that typed in your url directly
• Referers: those that found a link to your website on another website
• Google: those that found your site via google

For each category, you can drill down in to more detail. In this example, we can see that the website is getting traffic from all three categories pretty much evenly.

You can also view what search terms people typed in to Google to find your site. This is useful in determining what it is that brings people to your site.

GoogleAnalytics can also tell you from where in the world your visitors came. This might be useful for focusing your content, for example, if you only sell your products in the UK but are getting a lot of international traffic then maybe your site content should focus more on the local aspect of your work. Or you may even use this information as a starting point for researching what other countries your product is popular in.

One other section we’ll talk about is the Content breakdown, from which you can see the pages on your website that are most popular. They are grouped by section, so below, you can see that the gallery section of this website is the most popular.

By drilling down further you can see the individuals images. If you have a product catalogue on your site, this information could be used to determine which products are popular and hence investing time in.

We hope this quick introduction will have given you some insight in to the useful metrics that your website can provide. If you haven’t already got a website, you’re in the right place - get in touch and we can discuss your requirements.

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