Getting Started

Thursday, 28 January 2010 17:00

Over the last few weeks I have spent a lot of time thinking about beginning this blog. I want these articles to be relevant and current and at the same time be able to reflect on over 20 years of experience, designing, building and supporting software solutions. I might even get round to writing about floating on the stock market and why being a public company is so important to us.

When only a cliché will do

I try to avoid clichés because, rather by definition, they're just not very helpful at explaining things. Having said that, over time I have collected a large number of expressions that I find myself using that seem to crop up again and again when talking to clients. I've thought it would be fun, and probably a useful way to start writing my musings, to talk about these clichés here.

"People who live in glass houses [really] shouldn't throw stones"

It always amazes me how easy it is to criticise:

This website is terrible.
I can't find what I'm looking for.
Who built this thing?
What were they thinking?
Why is this all so difficult?
This is rubbish.

Not very constructive, I agree but probably the thoughts I regularly have when looking at old systems or websites. Of course there are always many reasons why things have ended up like this and I plan to write about some of those reasons in future articles. The key issue for me though is that I think people have probably thought much the same about our own corporate website. We've always felt that we've been too busy to take the time on our own website and in that regard it's rather unfair of me to criticise anyone elses!

To avoid the accusation of "throwing stones at glass houses", we embarked upon a completely new approach to building our website. We started thinking about the different types of visitors, what they would be trying to find out and how we could make this easy for them. [We'd like to hear your comments so please let us know what you think]

Say it as it is

We are a very technical group of people. I have a computer science degree from Cambridge University and most of the team have similar qualifications. Part of what we do really is difficult. Understanding how to make technology work (ours and other people's) is a big part of what we do. If you go to the About Rubicon section, you will see that we are still a leading supplier to the Financial Services sector.

"Practice what you preach"

We realised that we often help organisations to engage with their customers through their websites and customer portals but we haven't been good at doing that for ourselves. Today we have the beginnings of a new website and I look forward to it growing, changing and most of all helping our prospects and clients to engage with us.