Friday, November 18, 2005

Managerialism vs. Management

I'm with Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling on the dangers of managerialism, but thought I would just pick up the thread on poor management and associated demotivation.

The news that unhappy workers suffer more ill health is probably not surprising to many, but it struck a chord with us, partly because we are happier working for ourselves than we were working for someone else, but partly because it makes the timing of the release of Richard's ebook: the laws of motivation fortuitous. The ebook talks about how to help people stay happy and motivated and it's free to download.

...[Read More]

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Technology developments and some new sites

Firstly, the traditional update on new live sites:

We're proud of the free motivation ebook - it looks fantastic and everyone who reads it is free to forward it to their or host it themselves and so we hope it will spread.

As well as these new sites, we have been keeping ourselves busy wrestling with some new technology. We are fighting text-encoding with an attempted iso to UTF migration for content manager (don't hold your breath) to enable us to deploy websites in even more languages than we can at the moment.

The final bit of new technology this week has been the configuration of a webcam for Flower Sanctuary. It's currently working on the test website and we are just waiting for a long enough network cable to enable it to point somewhere more interesting than the stairwell before we put it live. It's very exciting - check back here for updates when it goes live.

...[Read More]

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Flower Sanctuary - a few firsts

Flower Sanctuary is live (tagline: Bringing Flower Design to Life). It's taken a while, but it's given us a couple of firsts (or it will over the next couple of weeks).

First bit of flash live

The introduction to the Flower Sanctuary website uses flash to convey the particular brand they wanted, all based around the Arum / Calla lily that forms the core of the Flower Sanctuary brand.

Webcam

There is a webcam coming soon - to allow people who order flowers for the Finchley Road area but who live further afield to see the shop they are buying from. I'm sure there will be more to write about as we implement the cam, and it's something we're looking forward to.

...[Read More]