Just attended a thought provoking workshop, led by the extremely knowledgeable Gordon Dick.

I wont attempt to regurgitate its content (hopefully Gordon will run something similar for us in the near future) but here are some of my take-aways from the session:

• You cannot improve unless you measure. (As Peter Drucker observed).
• The source of raw data needs to be reliable, repeatable and trustworthy.
• Repeatability can be as useful as absolute accuracy, particularly where you are looking for trends.
• The granularity (really appropriate description for the industry!) of the data become important when you are looking for small incremental gains.
• Big Data cause big data management issues!
• Disparate sources of data need to be consolidated.
• Ideally, the data need to be (automatically!) processed into actionable insights about the operation, to unlock its real value.
• Real-time reporting, allows for timely intervention.

​Looking forward to the next chapter Gordon!

We agonised long and hard about the re-design and in the end, we realised that we had been looking at things completely arse-about-face.

The real leg work in developing websites is not making things look pretty, load correctly, SEO black magic, link properly etc but in content creation.  This means either educating you web designer deeply in all aspects of your business or generating the content yourself for him to format. In both scenarios you end up with a major investment in time and money.

After flirting with 3, I must say, well respected web design companies, we decided to use a web based platform and create ourselves. We chose Weebly because of it's e-commerce platform capability but others are good eg Wix.

Professional web designers may poo-poo what we have done, but for a relatively small business with simple requirements and a need to communicate quickly and economically, it seemed the perfect solution.

It even has blog capability, as you can witness from this post, which was typed on my phone and automatically embedded into our website.

Don't you love it when things just work...