threehv

Advertising is a weird thing.

A lot of people hate it.

Mainly because it’s built for money, to make money.

Most advertising is shit.

This is because the triggers that push people’s buttons can be discerned through experimentation, and they’re normally not the prettiest things.

But it doesn’t have to be shit.

It can do its job, whilst entertaining you, whilst getting out of your way, whilst being relevant to what you are doing.

There’s nothing wrong with letting people know what you do, what you have, what you would like them to see.

As long as you do it the right way.

3hv has had a good innings, with some great clients, fantastic staff and a whole load of ups and downs. But, now, it’s time to move on.

We’re going to make advertising better.

It’s no secret that the office phone is often switched off. Please just leave a voicemail and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

The reason for this is because programming involves juggling a lot of information that needs to be held in your head at the same time. Programmers call this “flow”, sportsmen call it “being in the zone”, and even a thirty second interruption knocks you out of that productive state. The worst of it is that it can take fifteen to twenty minutes to return back up to speed, so that quick call actually has a very high cost.

The trick here is that when you manage programmers, specifically, task switches take a really, really, really long time. That’s because programming is the kind of task where you have to keep a lot of things in your head at once. The more things you remember at once, the more productive you are at programming. A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping zillions of things in their head at once: everything from names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility functions that they wrote and call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they store their source code.

I’m going to do something that is probably considered heresy amongst the people I know.

I’m going to stop reading Hacker News.

It’s a great place, full of very smart people; some of whom have actually been there and done that.

But unfortunately, it’s also falling prey to GroupThink (which is why I stopped reading Slashdot all those years ago).

“Measure everything” and “A/B test your way to success!”. Well actually I hate statistics – they do nothing for me – and I’d rather go with my instincts.

“Fail early, fail fast”. Boring. I’d rather go out in a huge fireball over the night sky. Or even better, be an actual success.

“You’ve got to be lean”. Don’t tell me what to do. Toyota make dull cars. Reliable, but dull. Not stylish, not beautiful. Money-making but dull. That’s what lean gives you.

This marks the end of phase one of threehv. Now is the time to start over…

While building stuff for clients is great, there’s nothing quite like launching something yourself.

Which is why I’m really pleased to announce the new way to buy pick ‘n’ mix sweets (like you used to get at Woolworth’s) – Click ‘n’ Mix. An ultra-simple ordering system and your bag of sweets is delivered directly to your door. Or get a subscription and stay stocked up all month.

Apple never had a huge range of different systems, so reducing the variation and streamlining its manufacturing was probably more palatable than it would be for others. The traditional PC OEMs insist on a kind of pointless diversity, which means that they sell relatively low numbers of lots of models. They have no option but to stick with less highly integrated, less efficient processes. And this impacts their entire supply chain; it’s set up to produce commodity parts assembled in standard ways, not specialized custom components.

Read the whole article about Intel’s Ultrabook initiative.

Exciting times – my other company PizzaPowered is pleased to announce the closed beta for our first software product.

Measure is a tool designed to scan your website and point out errors and potential warning signs. From broken links and missing images, to more subtle problems, like duplicate page titles or missing “alt” tags – all of which are important when looking at search engine optimisation – and just for making sure that your website is performing as well as it should.

Measure is still in closed beta at the moment, but we’re ironing out the bugs and it’s not too long till we can look forward to an official launch. If you’d like to give it a try, just get in touch.

The latest in a series of related systems for Telescope Studios has just gone live.

The EShot Order system allows Telescope to build email templates and upload your products. You can then log in, pick a template, a subset of your products and a list of customers. The system builds your mailshot for you, giving you a preview of how it will look before it is sent out – and then once confirmed, it is sent to your recipients.

Extremely easy to use and simple to manage, the EShot Order system is the absolute quickest way to promote your products online and boost your sales!

It’s been a busy few months at 3hv Towers.

Not only have we grown from a simple one-man freelance operation into a micro-agency (myself, one programmer and one designer/developer), but we’ve been working hard on our new integrated eCommerce platform – codenamed Marquez.

The first incarnation of this has been developed in close conjunction with Telescope Studios in Leeds and is designed to integrate with a centralised products database.

Cooks of Bedford have the honour of being the first of these stores to go live – with many more planned for the coming months.

Each store has an unlimited pool of products, each defined with multiple variations and price breaks. This data can be synchronised from an external source (in this case, from Telescope’s custom “Coupons” platform) and maintained within the store. Payment is done through Paypal, although more gateways are planned, and customers have a full order history. Of course, VAT is fully dealt with, as are shipping costs (including thresholds for free delivery). Plus the design is fully customisable – Telescope are offering two standard designs, but the possibilities are endless.

All in all, the new stores offer everything a retailer needs to start selling online. If you’d like to know more then get in touch today!

The Trade Counter Promotions site has been live for a few weeks now.

Built upon 3hv’s own ecommerce base (codenamed Marquez) on the Radiant platform, it communicates with a central database to ensure that all product entries are up to date, with data feeds coming straight from the suppliers.

Will Jessop organises the North West Ruby User Group (of which our own Leeds Ruby Thing is an offshoot).

He recently joined 37Signals as a sysadmin – and unfortunately his first week also coincided with a load of downtime on Basecamp and Campfire. As many of us depend upon their services, this prompted many of us to instantly put two and two together and scream “Damn you Will Jessop!”

After a business lunch (honestly, we were discussing code and software design for PizzaPowered) at Mr Foley’s we decided that “Damn you Will Jessop” needed building.  Luckily, Will’s first piece of deployed work was to add an API to the 37Signals’ status feed – perfect for our needs.

So a few days later, after a bit of HTML and Javascript coding – Damn you Will Jessop was born.  It shows a picture of Will when things are going well and an angry Caius shaking his fist as soon as 37Signals reports an error.

This caused a fair amount of laughter in the NWRUG IRC channel – and Will even mentioned it to his colleagues, who thought it was funny too.

Stupid joke sites like this may take up a couple of hours of our time, probably when we should be doing something else.  But it made me smile, a lot, and with that, work needn’t seem such a chore.