Sunday 18 February 2007

Anglia software developers - how far afield do we go.

I thought I would write a little something about my marketing findings and the way that standard search engine optimisation (SEO) seems to be pulling solutions away from geographic locations. This is also generating new problems for customers who are looking for a bespoke I.T. solutions provider and would prefer to find one near to them.

altFusion is based in Anglia (offices in Cambridge and Peterborough). I would say that only about twenty five percent of our customers are actually based in the Anglia region however. Currently there's the Cambridge Professional Academy based in Cambridge, The Edge Agency based in Elseworth, BEA building and clay products based in Huntingdon, and St Edmundsbury and Uttlesford Councils.

This doesn’t usually produce a problem in that we can work remotely, and would only need to meet the customer once to gain their trust and then we can be left to work and communicate through the internet to build their bespoke applications.

Some solutions do require more travelling. We have had to travel to places like Westminster and to the Welsh National Assembly a lot more for researching and systems implementation.

As I have said earlier, some customers might want to find a solutions provider that lives close to them as it gives them a piece of mind that they can visit any time and keep more of an eye on their solution/application to aid them with their project control. But with the communications revolution at the stage where it is now, it allows the same trust and control to be built up no matter how far apart the solutions providers and customers may be.

One main example of the way this may be hurting customers finding providers is; recently I received a request from a company in Leeds who used an American website to find a UK software application programmer. The website was taking bids in dollars only - so was meant for USA contracts to be advertised and found.
The truth is that their solution was a simple back office product using Coldfusion and MySQL, and chances are there would probably be a solutions provider that could of done it for them that are based within 2 or 3 miles of their offices.
It seems a shame that they now have to pay this USA company royalties and go through their Escrow payments system, and lose more money to try and find their solutions provider, when they are probably working to a set budget for the whole software application anyway.

One very good way that I like of getting around this problem is the Google Maps directory, and the Microsoft Local directories of companies. I believe that this will revolutionise the way that customers can find people to provide applications, programs or anything really. I would like to see more of gmaps and MS Local being used in other areas of the web say in things like ebay bids, so that you can know how far away something is from you visually and instantly, to see if you would rather collect it yourself, than pay the delivery charge.
I think that wanted ads and requests would also benefit from these mapping services greatly so that you can request something and specify a radius from a central point of where you would like that request answered. This would make the sourcing of solutions providers vastly more efficient for the company with the problem, and then the money spent on a solution could be spent more on its development rather on the advertising and procurement process.

I do have a lot of experience with writing Google gmaps solutions, and I guess I could easily write something to be used with that to answer this problem, but I am dubious at the moment until the great war of who will come out on top has been answered: Google maps or Microsoft Local.

Just as a footnote, I think that Yahoo have lost out on this war. I have seen their local directories, and I tried to get my company listed with them, but they say that their directory listings for the UK are taken from the BT phone book listings. When exploring this further and seeing if I could get us listed with BT so that in turn we could then get listed on Yahoo local directories, I found out that it costs over £300 per year to do this. For this reason I think Yahoo will only ever have a local directory of large businesses with a large marketing budget.
Google’s free way of sending you a PIN number to your location to prove that you are where you say you are will allow them to stay secure, not get full of spam companies and will allow them to keep a FAR more substantial listing of all businesses.
Microsoft take their UK local listings from Thomson Local which allows a free listing so they will also keep secure and allow smaller businesses with low marketing budgets to keep local listings on there.

So my conclusion is there may be an area where bespoke systems can still solve local searching of different things, adding to the functionality of Google maps and/or Microsoft Local. Hopefully I can start to identify some of these and see if I can be one of the providers of these systems. I think for a company's potential customers trying to procure services, then steering them away from a normal search engine and results towards this geographic search could be a benefit to them as well.

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