They required a new website and although we couldn’t persuade them to take on our new logo (running joke). Due to elevating costs of changing the logo e.g. vans, equipment and clothing had already been branded with the existing logo. Despite this, both us and the client are really happy with the new website.

We also provided expertise in brochure design, leaflet design and business card design. We will add to this blog in the coming weeks with some pictures of the final end products.

You can check out the TDR Construction site here TDR Surface Repairs or read our portfolio piece on TDR here »

Up until recently solar panels have remained expensive and thus despite the governments incentive tariffs not managed to gain much traction as an attractive residential prospect. However with the growth of the industry picking up and technological advances, manufacturing costs of the panels have dropped and are lowering consumer installation costs, making the government incentive tariffs a sound investment.

Some investments, given the right parameters are offering a protected return of up to 22% year on year. Much better than your high street banks right? It is of course dependant on the sun deciding to shine in your area, the angle of your roof, and the direction your roof faces amongst other factors.

The system we have built for the Marble Construction Group advises and estimates your potential for renewable photovoltaic energy generation, the investment required, payback time of the investment, and profit. Our client is extremely happy with the market leading tool that we have built for them, including not one but two sets of data sources. Making it more versatile and more accurate than using the standard data supplied to most Solar Panel Installers.

An example system install might cost around £10,000. The government will gurantee it’s incentive rates for a maximum period of 25 years without further approval. On a due south roof in the south of the UK it is estimated I will make 3,068kWh @ 43.30p per kWh.

3,068 kWh x 43.30p = £1,328.44p is my first year benefit. Continuing at this rate it would take me 7.5 years to repay the system install. With a further 18 years of profit. For the purposes of demonstration and not assuming any losses and other assumptions I would stand to make 18 x 1,328.44 in profit over the remaining 18 years. Which is a total 25 year benefit of around £23,911.92.

Not bad hey? There are many more factors than those of which I have portrayed here, but why not try it for yourself at Marble Solar.

You can also read more about this project on it’s portfolio page Read more about Marble Solar project →

Coda : Text Editor, from Panic.inc

A large part of any web developers armour is their text editor which they spend hours looking at everyday. None of them are “pretty” but its the capabilities which are important, this is why we have chosen Coda.

Coda is so much more than a text editor as with it comes the ability to transfer files, manage sub version, access terminal and write cascading style sheets. In addition to this comes a number of plugins which have been written by other Coda users making it even better!

Click here to download Coda »

Transmit : A classy FTP/SFTP Client, from Panic.inc

Now up to Version 4 this incredible FTP/SFTP client is just stupendous, and if your an avid Coda fan, it’s even better!

If you need to transfer files. Maybe to an FTP or SFTP server, or the cloud via Amazon S3, or using WebDAV. You maintain a website, do backups, or upload photos. Transmit will become your most valuable FTP client.

It would be doing Panic & Transmit a Crime if we didn’t also mention what a beautiful app it is! Well crafted and stable, it’s a real joy to work with.

Download Transmit now »

Now although we love Panic and it’s what we actually use Coda & Transmit to good effect in our regular working day, it goes without saying that there are alternatives.

Textmate : Text Editor / IDE, from Macromates

Textmate is one of my favourite text editors to write up quick function ideas within, and I have to be honest I think that it’s an absolutely awesome Text editor.

Where I think it falls down is project management, Coda and other more powerful text editing software have a bunch of features which from time to time will definitely persuade you they are superior. Needless to say, I use Textmate alot for writing smaller functions and snippets of code down and I think it’s great. However for bigger projects I will generally stick to Panics, Coda.

Download Textmate now »

Espresso : Text Editor, from MacRabbit

We’ve not had a great deal of experience with using MacRabbits, Espresso, but from what i’ve seen of Version 2.0 it’s look really good and definitely becoming a big player. A little excerpt from their website:

Espresso turbo-charges your workflow with the perfect blend of features. Speed through day-to-day edits with extensive language support, contextual completions, powerful smart snippets, and Zen actions. Use the Navigator and code folding to prevail over the most complicated documents. Watch your web pages update in real time with live styling, visualize and inspect your layouts with X-ray, then push the changes to your server with Sync or Quick Publish. Oh, and did we mention CSSEdit 3 is built in?

Download Espresso Now

MAMP : Local Development

MAMP is an abbreviation of “Macintosh, Apache, PHP and MySQL”.

An absolutely must for any developer. If you want to design and build your own websites, but don’t want to be tied up with loads of remote hosting, then you MUST develop locally. It’s the biggest key in the cog to higher productivity.

You will relish at the speed, marvel at the flexibility, and revel in the rewards. Developing locally mixed in with some great source control is simply an absolute must for anybody.

More to come on Source Control.

Download MAMP Now

Sequel Pro : MySQL Database Management

Sequel Pro is a relatively recent tool to Bytewire but has been a revelation to the way we manage our Databases. Its a fast, easy and reliable method of managing both Local and Remote databases.

Gone are the days of making continuous errors in Terminal or opening phpMyAdmin in a web browser tab. Sequel Pro provides user interface simplicity with the power to give you full control over your MySQL databases. The recent addition of Tabs to Sequel Pro now means you can even manage more than one database at a time.

Click here to download Sequel Pro »

Wunderlist : Task Management

Wunderlist allows you to manage projects which will help you and your team to stay focused. Ever unsure about what to do next, just take a look at your Wunderlist! With Wunderlist you can even share your lists with your colleagues helping ensure everybody is clear of the projects requirements.

In addition to this Wunderlist is available on Windows, Mac and Linux with apps available on iPhone, iPad and Android meaning that wherever you are, you can be in control and stay up to date with your project.

Click here to download Wunderlist »

AND of Course.

Mac Terminal : Terminal Emulator

Sometimes also referred to as terminal.app, this is adn will become your essential sidekick as a budding Mac developer. I don’t think I can actually even start to explain how useful this tool will be to you. It is what you make of it, but personally I use it everyday for Source Control, Server connectivity, and a whole host of other things.

There is no need to download this, it come’s with Mac OS X by default. You’ll find it in your Applications directory. I’d recommend dragging it to your toolbar and keeping it there!

These are just some of the tools which we use at Bytewire to aid our work. If anyone has any other excellent tools which have changed the way they work as a web developer drop us a comment.

Few of us knew him in person, and even fewer of us knew what he was like away from his working life. Yet, his work, passion, and innovation has touched so many people in so many ways that you feel a sense of duty to give him an almighty send off.

So we thought you know what, he definitely deserves a blog post from us too.

The funny thing about our story is, not so long ago, we weren’t Mac users, we’d never heard of Steve Jobs, and we didn’t really care (call us ignorant if you will). We we’re happy in our own little world of Craposoft and Windows, well at least we thought we we’re. We knew Mac’s existed (go us), but we never really saw the point in a big change up, or the benefits of using them (after all there’s gotta be a reason Windows is the most widely used operating system in the world, right?). So there we we’re in the early days of our company formation, running some cackhanded Dreamweaver and FTP setup, thinking, well we’re pretty snazzy and all that, we can make websites. Oh boy, oh boy.

Until one day we got hit by a bus…..the end…..just kidding. It was nothing like getting hit by a bus, infact actually what it was, is, we met another company. They had been going many years more than us and had alot more experience, 10 years infact. Shortly after meeting them we went and spent some time at their offices, for the first time in a little while, we felt out of our depth (probably the understatement of the century). Techniques and words we’d never even heard of, Macs, server rooms, and daunting advanced business management advice. It was a mind boggling experience.

Anyhow, shortly after we started to work together, and as part of that partnership we we’re (quite literally) forced to buy iMacs. “Oh sweet jesus” we thought at the time. I even remember to this day, some classic quotes that soon followed:

“I’ll give it a go, but if I don’t get on with it, i’m selling the bloody thing.”

“Why do all of the UI buttons on an open window have to be on the other side, how annoying!”

Ell even remembers me saying this:

“I’m so fed up with it (after only the first day), i’m strongly considering putting it on eBay.”

In all honesty the first week of switching platforms was tough, but, let me tell you right now, persistance, most definitely paid off, in a big, big way. Now we use Macs everyday, for everything, they are fantastic, and we absolutely love them. We honestly couldn’t imagine having to go back to using a windows computer on a daily basis, EVER (insert fanboy slander here).

So thank you, Steve Jobs, for that.

Not only that, but Apple has been in my life since the iPod, which at the tender age of 17 I had managed to persuade my parents to fork out for the first ever generation 32gb (remember the one with blue / orange backlights? Boy it was sexy), amongst my friendship group, I was cool (well it more than me was cool). The iPod was a piece of technological genius and totally, totally turned the industry on it’s head, and being a huge music fan, I still to this day love every minute of it.

We’re also big users of the iPhone, which brings with it so many cool things like, the app store, mail, mobile browsing, un rivalled UI, syncing with wonderful macs, and the list goes on and on.

So thank you, Steve Jobs, for that too.

The weirdest thing of all about our story is, that until last night, I hadn’t realised what an amazing man Steve Jobs actually was. As I sat their and read the news coming in through my twitter stream last night, I felt compelled to just watch as many videos of Steve in public as I could. And with each one I watched, I felt, more and more attached to this Tech legend. He was more than just the face of Apple, he was a calm, smart, knowledgable and frank guy. Everything that he delivered in his speeches, he delivered with a sort of relation to his own life & experiences, that i’ve never really seen before, even more so since the things he had battled so hard, for so long, had finally got the better of him, this very evening. It kind put everything he was saying into perspective. And with everyone I watched, I felt more knowledgeable and compelled to watch more. By the time it hit 2am I felt a real sense of personal loss, but some of the thing’s I had heard and watched him say, had touched me forever, perhaps this was his calling? His purpose in life? Not to personally touch my life, of course. But to touch the life of others like me all around the world.

Apple under the healm of Steve has touched the hearts of many, improved the lives of many, and added real quality of life to many more, including ourselves. For that, we are eternally grateful.

The world has lost an amazing man, and so young too, it’s a huge shame, and he will be sorely missed as a man, as CEO of Apple, and a Dad. But what a legendary legacy he is leaving behind, and long may it continue. After all thats what he would have wanted.

Our condolences go out to his friends and family.

Steve is lost to us all in flesh, but will never be forgotten in soul.

Rest in peace
Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

One of the most touching videos I watched, and an absolutely must watch for anyone.

As the “need” for a website continues to grow, the question of “how much does a website cost?” continues to be thrown around. Businesses and individuals alike are continuously trying to gain an online presence. However, not everyone knows where to begin, those that don’t, will struggle to understand the principles behind a website and the online market. Struggling to understand the market will likely cause you to have no real idea about the cost of buying or running a website. If you have never purchased or run a website how are you supposed to know how much they cost, right?

Simply put, you won’t, and why would you? Much like all goods and services being sold in the world, they are worth only as much as you can gain in value from them. Be it personal gain or financial gain, everything is given a value in monetary terms in pretty much the same indexable fashion. In many cases websites are a business tool and can generate far more revenue / exposure / leads than they may cost to build. And here is where we as design agencies add value. Just like BMW would boldly state its car was better than a Morris Minor or a Ford Fiesta. We’d state that our website is beyond and more than a £19.99 website. Get where were heading with this?

Why are websites are so hard to put a price on?

Websites are difficult to put a price on because they are very often built to spec, each additional thing will have a monetary cost already decided by agencies like ourselves, but how many etc of each and to what extent they are being used is decided by the client (you) each time you come along.

Specifically tailoring anything to anyone’s needs in any industry, takes time and guess what folks, people in any industry will want paying for their time. Differing levels of complexity is often another good reason for the difficulty in cost.

Not only that but peoples time will be valued higher depending on the level of service, experience and implementation you feel you require. In the website world, you could pay a young freelancer £250 to make your website, or pay a professional company with alot more experience £1,000 and in alot of cases (no offense or generalisation intended here) the professional agency will (or at least should, if you have picked the right one) do a better job. Now don’t get me wrong that is by no means meant as slander to a freelancer, their are and will always continue to be some absolutely fantastic freelancers out their, we know first hand, we work with some of them. But you get the point right? Professional services carry professional prices.

Think of buying a website as an investment in a similar way that buying a house or a car would be. And much like the latter, the larger or more complex the requirement, the higher the cost. There are varying levels of websites which have differing levels of complexity. This level of complexity has an overall effect on the cost of the website, the higher the complexity of the site, the more man hours required to build it and thus the higher the cost. For example a company website which consists of 5 information pages, is much less complex than a e-commerce website, which is selling thousands of items each day. And that slippery scale of complexity can spiral out into almost any direction, with particular areas of expertise being needed for different projects.

That wasn’t difficult to differentiate I hear you say. Well thats not all! Having a website created with your information on is fine, but what happens in 2 years time when your office address changes? Or you change the focus of the company slightly which needs to be reflected on the website? Then what do you do? Always think longterm.

The answer is change it yourself, but in order to do that your website needs to be built as a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is designed to simplify the publication of web content allowing the client to keep his or her website up to date whenever and wherever they want. This would therefore enable any novice user with basic computer knowledge, to adjust the companies address or edit a paragraph of text on the homepage, without the need for the web developer (us).

I have seen a website for sale for £19.99?

There are a number of companies in existence, which offer the world but deliver nothing, therefore you need to be careful and wise (think yoda) about your choices. Be sure to investigate a number of different options and compare them, look at their portfolio, read any testimonials and view the websites they have created. You will soon build up a picture of who they are and what they offer, and whom offers the best service. If your still unsure, find a local website design company (just like us) and pay them a visit to discuss your needs.

The more planning you do regarding your website the easier it becomes to convey your idea to the development team / agency responsible for building it. By planning in advance you will avoid any additional costs and delays in getting your website live.

Much like buying a car make sure you do your homework, don’t walk into an interview empty handed and if you do be prepared not to commit to anything on the first fly by.

Ok, I understand, now how much does it cost?

There really is no clear cut answer to this. It completely depends on what you want, which will determine the complexity of the website, which in turn produces the cost. It will also determine the sort of agency you need to go to and what agencies are around that can provide the service that you seek. Here at Bytewire we try and remain transparent with our costs, keeping you informed every step of the way. We try not to have any hidden costs or fees and try to always produce our finest work. We feel this is important especially if it is your first website venture.

You can take a look at our services, as a design and development agency we offer anything from E-Commerce websites to Content Management Systems right the way through too Search engine optimisation and Logo Design.

We take of our clients every step of the development process, from the initial meeting all the way through to the after sales service, we’ll be helping you and your website venture make a difference.

We are aiming to write a small series about the costing of website design over the coming weeks, if it interests you, keep a look out for part 2.

At Bytewire we take pride in our honest and transparent approach, and we put hardwork and expertise into every website we build. Below we’re going to try and condense down into 10 pinpoint reasons, stating why, you should come to us for your next web development or design project.

1. Our expertise in web development our second to none and range from brilliant design right through to complex development projects such as web games and e-commerce systems. We can cater for very little customisation and server side programming or utterly loads of it (whatever you need to throw at us).

2. We’re friendly and helpful, at the end of the phone 9am-6pm all week, at local rate calls and available for emergency help across the weekends, helping to ensure that your website stays up and running all the time.

3. We’re building great, gorgeous, web standards compliant websites, using the latest technology.

4. All our prices are 100% transparent, what you see is what you pay. We pride ourself on this approach, it makes it very easy for the client to judge the cost of the project. We will inform you of every cost and why it is what it is every step of the way.

5. We don’t just offer great ground up website builds, we also offer hosting, and email management. As well as SEO, illustration, UX and UI design, and professional advice. See our services

6. Our clients will get access to all of our experience and we will always look to provide the very best solution we can to absolutely all of our clients. We also like to think of each project as a process, we’ve got a thing or two to teach you and likewise you probably have to us. So we like to try and keep you as involved as possible every step of the way. Who knows we might even both learn something from the experience?

7. We have strong partner links to direct scalable hosting which means we always have the right hosting solution for you, regardless of spikes in your traffic or lulls, scalable hosting is proven to be the most cost effective. Scalable hosting in short means that when you have more visitors on your site and thus more load on the servers (more page requests etc) the server will scale up and just charge you for the extra usage, and likewise when there are lulls or few visitors it will charge you less because you are using less. Think of it as a Pay as you go service, if you will.

8. We get the job done, having now had years of experience dealing with many different clients, within our own exploits and our customers, we are more than confident we can service your needs and better more, do it well.

9. We have a great little office which you can come down to and work with us or, simply come over to see us and we can be very flexible about the times of these meetings, or, you can just pop in and chat to us while we work (whatever floats your boat). But believe me when I say its mightily useful to be able to drop by and speak to your web designers in a friendly and easy environment, rather than developing a poor relationship with them or where by its difficult or not logistically feasible to drop by for a face to face chat.

10. Bottom line, we’re experienced in the field, we’re good guys and we’re here to help clients who want to be helped. So let us help you and prove that we’re worth every penny that you invest with us. We work hard to make sure our customers see rewards and gains in the ways they would expect from their websites. Achieving clearly defined goals and targets along the way. In doing so we get a great sense of achievement everytime we help YOU do something great! So let’s do something great together.

If your in the Chelmsford, Essex area or particuarly near us and have a current website design or development project / even if it’s just at an idea stage, feel free to drop by and we can have a chat about your ideas and perhaps offer our own to build upon yours. Who knows perhaps that little chat might come to benefit us all in the near future?

If your not local, or just don’t have the time to get down to us, drop us an email at hello@bytewire.co.uk or telephone us on 01621 856628.

When we say simple, it’s mega simple really. For every person you refer to us that ends up becoming a client of ours, no matter how big or small. We are offering a straight up £75 cash reward.

No quirks no qualms, just £75 in your pocket.

Why would you refer a client to us?

It’s quite simple really, we will provide extremely high levels of professional web design and development services at a reasonable cost. Not only that, we’re very good at it. We can help you with existing and new setups whilst also providing professional advice on any problems or queries you might have.

If you’ve got a friend, colleague or even just an acquaintance why not refer them onto us and see what we can do for them. You never know it could be the easiest £75 you’ve ever made.

This was quite interesting because what it would enable us to do is continuously develop and push changes to our framework from each and every individual site we make separate from the core Controllers, Models and Views of the individual sites / projects that the Framework was deployed on.

To help visualize this here is an example directory structure of the framework.

We’re fairly new to Git and having used SVN in the past, it was quite a jump, however we’re pretty in love with Github and the whole approach. So naturally we decided we had to make this work, after a few days of brain racking and scrobbling the two choices became evident.

Choice 1

Clone the Framework into a the workspace for a new site, and add to the Frameworks repository add a gitignore on folder application/ which is where anything unique to each site will reside. Also move the assets folder from the root into the application and add a .htaccess redirect for any URI string starting ^assets/blahblah to application/assets/blahblah which allow direct access to stylesheets, images and javascript using a simple /assets/images/bob.png call.

Due to the application folder being ignored by the frameworks repository, you can then ‘init’ a new git repository inside the application folder and work on your site completely separate from the framework and commit, pull and push as you wish without effecting the cloned framework. Whats also handy is you could if you so wanted add changes to the framework and push them right to the main repository which also works well for us when the framework is still very much in development.

Choice 2
The second approach was to utilise the advantage that our Framework can be installed into sub directories and thus we can specify the location of our core folder, right in our index.php file. This would allow us to make our directory structure relatively similar to that of before, but something more like this.

Now what we would do here is set in our config within the application folder

	define('EXT', '.php');
	define('DS', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR);
	define('ROOT', dirname(dirname(__FILE__)).'/Fury-PHP/');
        # this is the important line
	define('SYS', 'lib/core/');

Now onto the important thing, we would Git init in the root but add the Framework into lib via git submodules, this would allows us to manage the source of the Framework right to its main repository but also allow us to commit and update the submodule without effecting our application instance. The only problem being you now would need a index.php and .htaccess file added per application, which isn’t such a bad thing in fairness.

We’ve not decided what approach we prefer the most, so we’re most likely in true testing practices going to try out both methods putting them to use in real life examples and see how we go from there.

We might post a follow up to this post to let you all know how we get on. Nevertheless we hope this post might be helpful to anyone running a similar Framework and wanting to continuously improve and develop it across multiple websites and projects.