Cowboys and web customers

Is that the advice, just to clear the deck and say here’s what’s been done, go off somewhere else?

Yes, and sometimes it may not mean going off somewhere else. Sometimes it’s a matter of stopping and saying: ‘How did we get here and what really is the problem, what are we trying to solve?’ And then move on together or move off and start again. But it just seems to me if you’re in trouble, you’ve got to stop digging that hole and a lot of the time they don’t.

What are the new things that people want in their marketing and websites? What’s hot?

I think what I’m seeing is a lot more commercial focus on an outcome, which is a damn good thing. The days of vanity publishing are gone, although you still see the odd brief coming out of marketing groups around brand experiences.

I think generally people have an understanding of what the web can deliver and they want to be able to measure those things and measure an outcome. I think we’re seeing a lot more sort of lightweight open source style web development where people are happy to use modules that are pre-built rather than building everything from scratch.

We’ve just completely rebuilt on open source and it’s been great.

I think time is the essence now. I think there’s a general understanding from clients and that’s the most challenging thing because web developments have got, in some respects, more complex. But actually the strategic issue at the heart of all web development is time. Because if you’re going to go away and spend eight months scoping a web project and another eight months finishing it, by the time you’re finished, your competitors have moved on, the industry has moved on, the needs of the customer have moved on and you’re in trouble.

How often should you get a new website done?

We tend to encourage people to think of their website as a living, breathing thing and rather than stop and do the web developments every couple of years, to migrate the website through an ongoing series of changes and optimisations as you understand your market better, as you understand your customers better, as you can see changes to the needs of the customer.

What’s new with search?

I think the uptake of search, the importance of search and the focus on search is the one thing I’ve noticed change in the last six months. For example, you could talk to people about search engine optimisation six months ago and everyone just yawned and went “oh yeah”.

But we’ve got two web developments that we’re working on now where the actual domain model and search engine optimisation will be the heart of the way that that project develops.

Simon, you started your career in marketing and then went into corporate communications before starting HotHouse. And you have since launched OurPatch…

I’m involved in an original publishing initiative. We’re building a network of websites for rural and regional Australia. We figure rural and regional Australia has been forgotten by most of the other publishers and there are some unique needs in those communities and we’re building what we hope is the civic centre for the internet age which will have business information, community information, discussions, local events and we’re rolling that out. I’ve got 176 of them covering most of rural and regional Australia.

Are they rolled out yet?

Yes, they are there. We are in the process of filling those sites with content and that’s an ongoing process. And we’ve built it from the search engine’s back. We’re delivering a lot of traffic to that website entirely off the back of the search engine marketing work that we’ve done and that’s actually going really well. It’s been such a learning experience for me.

I mean the publishing business is, as we know, tricky. But we were able to test for ourselves a whole pile of concepts and thoughts that we had about web development that no client would ever let us test.

We’ve built that very, very quickly with an onshore/offshore model. So we have the design and technical direction here and the programming is done offshore. We adopted an agile process for that so much like some of the early Web 2.0 sites like Flickr. I think Flickr said they were doing 18 code releases a day. We’re not doing 18 code releases a day but we do a number of code releases every week.

What’s a code release?

We change the functionality of the website on a weekly basis, based on what our users are doing and what we need and rather than stopping and spending three months doing something, we’ll do a little bit of work every week and release those changes to the users of our website and monitor.

What’s the revenue model for OurPatch?

We’ve got a number of revenue models. We’re selling advertising to national advertisers so national advertisers that are looking for a rural and regional market can use OurPatch as an advertising model.

We’ve got directory listings for local businesses so they can buy a premium page in their local area and we’re also expanding our services now to include some small websites for rural businesses. We’re reselling search in rural and regional Australia. So we’ve got a number of revenue streams.

How much revenue is coming from that?

We’ll do close to $1 million over the next 12 months.

What are your costs for that?

We have an extremely lean model. Look you know what publishing is like; you know how hard it is.

So how many uniques have you got coming to those sites a month?

I’ve got 140,000 uniques coming to that website every month. Which is a good number.

That’s definitely sellable. So what are your long-term plans? You don’t seem like a man who just focusses on one thing at one time.

I’m easily bored. Look I’ve really enjoyed this industry. It’s been interesting, it’s been very dynamic and it appeals to my sense of: let’s look at the next new thing. So it’s really hard to say. I used to love it when people say: ‘So what do you think the next five years looks like?’ I mean, who knows?