For this he had Duncan Bannatyne calling his workplace to ask why he had been ’slagging him off’ in public and mentioned the thinly veiled threat of what he thought of ‘UK libel laws and Twitter’. Was this really the best way to go? Surely it’s yet another example of heavy-handed businesses taking things personally when in fact they should be doing their utmost to please their customers and accept that not everything they do is 100% perfect and that there is always room for improvement.

The result of this encounter is a lot of negative PR and Matt finishes off his article with this:

As it is, an opportunity to generate some good PR has been wasted.

A suitable outcome would’ve been to get back a reply from Duncan Bannatyne saying that the situation was getting sorted and that Bannatyne’s Gyms were sorry for any inconvenience caused. That would’ve been a great bit of PR in actually getting a tweet from a multi-millionairre, who takes the time to listen to his customers, and does something about it.

If businesses want to succeed then they should take things less personally, be a little less trigger-happy in threatening lawsuits, and instead look at where the real problems lie, and improve their customer service.

Nothing else to add…

My hours this week have been:

Sunday: 10am-12:30am = 14.5 hours

Monday: 8:30am – 3:30pm + 5pm-12:30am =14.5 hours

Tuesday: 9am – 5pm + 6:30pm – 11pm = 12.5 hours

Today: 9am – 5:30pm +6pm-9:30pm  = 12 hours

So there we go 53.5 hours done already this week, bad enough when fully fit but when you’re ill it’s even worse, but it seems like I’m almost fully recovered. Ideally I would’ve had some time off but at this crucial time of year that just wasn’t possible and I had to work through it which probably meant a usual 48 hour bug instead turned into a 6 day illmess  which coupled with stress and anxiety meant very bad things for toilets everywhere and has meant I haven’t eaten much (not always a bad thing as I’ve lost a bit of weight!).

So I’m feeling better now and am a lot more relaxed too as proven by the shear fact that I’ve been able to leave work early and was home by 10pm this evening.

I don’t get overtime at work but get to take time in lieu so in a couple of weeks I should be able to have a day off here and a half-day there and try and get my hours back down.

Anyway.. I’m off to relax for a bit before getting some well earned rest, and then it’s back to work again tomorrow with dreams of the weekend.

Things are getting quite busy and hectic at work as our new students will be arriving soon and so there’s a mild panic in knowing that for the next month it will be busy busy busy and I’ll be back to working days and evenings and getting worn-out. But I have had a nice calm summer without the students and so am suitably relaxed for it.

Anyway.. that’s enough from me.

Image used under CC by Cayusa

I was reading an article in today’s Independent in their ‘Business Start Up’ and it featured a selection on entrepreneurs telling a brief account of how they got started and how to succeed in the current financial climate. It was all very interesting, and it’s something I would love to do, but without the motivation or even an idea for a business it is something that will never get off the ground. Yes I do have ‘ideas’ but deep down I know I have nothing substantial which I could truly believe in and put all my effort behind. My past is littered with potential ideas, domains registered, but nothing more. It ends there.

Anything I can currently think of is already being done by someone else and more successfully than I currently could manage, so there is no point in entering that market, but I would love to clear my head, have a good think, and even have the basis of an idea, a solid idea, that at some time, maybe a long time away, I could commit to give my all to. But alas, that is where I fall down. Ideas…

One big idea. Something I could genuinely do and eventually make money out of. There’s plenty of things I could do and make little if any money out of, but in a world where bills have to paid and I have to eat that is not an option. One BIG idea, that’s all I need.

One other thing is that I’ve spent quite a lot of time at my ‘real job’ working on a new website for the Students’ Union. We currently pay a company £6,000 a year to provide us with a website and frankly that’s taking the piss. The contract was signed in the dot.com boom when everyone had to have a new website and for the past few years I’ve been counting down the time to when our 5 year contract ends (May 31st 2008). At work, although it’s not in my job description, I usually take charge of the computing side of things, and so I came up with an alternative plan of instead creating and running the website ourselves and then using the £6,000 p/a to invest in the site through either getting someone to maintain it (maybe a part-time job for a student) or using the money to promote the site or invest in new software etc.

One of the irks with our current website provider is that if we wanted anything else added then it would always cost extra e.g an online shop would cost £2,000 just to implement it, which meant that we never developed the site fully. It just ticked along and was a disgrace.

I’ve now created a site using the Joomla CMS, and have installed all I need for free. In fact the only thing we’re paying for at the moment is the hosting (around £8 a month) and the domain name (around £3 per year), and that’s all. I’ve done all the work myself, and hopefully it’ll be ready to roll in a few weeks. It’s not just been a case of building the site though, as I’ve had to write all the content too which is quite time consuming, but will mean that it not just a case of re-hashing the old site, but actually a new site with completely relevant information on it.

I am proud of it and it seems to be working fine, but until the site goes ‘live’ we’ll have to wait to see what the feedback is. The site will also need to be promoted to attract visitors back which will be hard, especially as it’ll be in the second half of the academic year when students are less succeptable to new things.

I’ll keep you updated on the site and maybe you’ll get to have a sneek preview! Excited eh?

Update: See the site here.

I’ve had a cold for the past week as well as a bad back, which I think means that I’m getting old, and I really can’t be bothered to be working. Doing nothing was brilliant, and I’d love to do it full-time!

I’ve mentioned previously the limitations I’ve had with hosts, especially as most of the sites I built depend on MySQL, which is not supported very well with my current 1&1 account. I tried out Heart Internet which proved a wrong choice as unknown to me I couldn’t host multiple domains on the account which is pretty rubbish (read that post here) and so I quickly cancelled that, and soon I came across A Small Orange. I opted for the ‘tiny’ package as I was hoping to utilise the unlimited mySQL databases and link them into sites I host on my 1&1 account. wrong.

If you are having a single site on ASO then it’s fantastic, but there are incompatability issues with me linking to mySQL databases there from my 1&1, which is a bugger considering that was the whole reason for going over there. I’ve done plenty of reading up but haven’t found any real solutions and so I’m in a quandry again and my hosting accounts are in severe need of a good tidy up.

I’m coming to the conclusion that I may have to actually have to try some more hosting accounts and see if they fit the bill. I will have to sign up for a month which will be yet more money, but if I find a solution then I’ll be a happy man and it’ll be worth it.

I’m considering buying reseller hosting which will give me a lot more control over the sites I run and in the end make each account easier to manage as I’ll be able to customise what is available on each account and keep track of the bandwidth etc used by each site I run. It will also give me the opportunity to sell webspace to people if they need it as I can assign cpanels to all the accounts and specify what is available to each package(which will also help with income.)

The company I’ve been impressed with so far, and who I looked at a while back are HostGator and their reseller plan. It all looks very good, and as it’s a US company I should get a favourable deal due to the weak dollar ($24.95 a month / £11.82 in real money.)

If it all looks fine then I’ll set up the arduous task of moving all.. yes ALL…my sites over to it, and then cancelling the hosting with my 1&1 and ASO accounts so that everything is in one place. I will keep my domains hosted at 1&1 as they are very good for the .co.uk domains which I don’t think are available on HostGator, but that should make things a lot tidier.

Of course I will probably find a flaw with HostGator and have to switch over to somewhere else!

I think that if I really am serious about building websites then and see this as something longterm then I may as well bite the bullet instead of pissing around with cheap and cheerful solutions.

btw. I made a new site the other day as a favour to a friend (took only an evening to do) and you can see it here. It’s again built with websitebaker CMS and I’m quite happy with it. There are a few bits that might need to be fiddled with, but all-in-all it does the job.

I’ve also started work on my own site, but will have to put that on hold again if I do get the reseller account as it will change slighty. Also, if I get the reseller account a fair bit of time will be spend migrating accounts, so it’s not worth havign a site up offering webdesign if I don’t actually have the time to do it.

I’ll try and get a break here and there, and shuffle off, but I’ve got to basically be around all the time.

I will be moaning more later! The good thing about this is that if I put the legwork in now, then it’ll help me out throughout the year with the Freshers and getting the know them all.

Anyway… off to work now. Laters