Ruth Smith's Blog

What exactly does PSD to HTML mean?

Ruth Smith — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:02:45 GMT

This is a funny term if you are not in the industry, and what industry does it even belong to? Let me tell you in my blog what it means.

Firstly you need to work in the world of Information Technology (IT) and that is quite a broad area. Strictly speaking you’ll be a designer or work for a design house, not so strictly speaking you will work for a software development company, web design agency, be part of a development or web team within a company, or freelance and work for yourself.

PSD is a Photo Shop Document, a file that contains image layers that are embedded within the document and the instructions (settings) that allow you to view the images exactly as the designer wants you to (size, colour depth and tones etc). These are often what design houses use to draw up the ideas for a client’s website; they will show them to the client to gain some feedback on their interpretation of the customer’s designs and ideas for their website or web pages. It is a really quick way of pulling designs together without spending hours on software development.

HTML is hyper text mark up language. It is not a programming language though it is a set of mark up tags and HTML uses these tags to describe web pages. Web browsers (like Firefox or Chrome) read HTML documents and do not display the HTML tags but use the tags to interpret the content of the page and show us pretty web pages.

Now I did say I was going to tell you what that expression ‘PSD to HTML’ means. I work for a bespoke software development company and we work with many design houses that send us their PSD files which we use as our source files and then turn them from static images into living web pages. Basically design houses love to design and we being a web development company love to develop.

Together we deliver great results that keep all companies happy, design houses and web design agencies send us their PSD and assets for each page, we use Sitefinity CMS and a number of other software development tools and applications to build beautiful web based applications that simply get wrapped up in a funny term ‘from PSD to HTML’.

Are there any other industry related terms you have heard that you’d like us to explain? Please do leave your feedback for us and we will try and answer your questions.

Outsourcing IT Services Within The Uk

Ruth Smith — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Many UK companies are now considering outsourcing IT services within the UK. Some of them are doing it in addition to their offshore outsourcing developments, while others are simply supporting the economy by involving themselves with local suppliers. In the previous blog I was discussing about advantages & disadvantages of offshore IT Outsourcing. A few days back we interviewed some of our clients regarding their experience with offshore and onshore outsourcing providers. This blog will include some of those interview responses.

One of our clients Steve said “Driving from Surrey to Maldon is much cheaper than taking a flight to India. Sometimes we need to bring the developers onsite to show them what our other applications are like and what quality and style we prefer. We need to give them proper training before handing over the responsibilities. Companies which are relatively smaller like mine could never afford to do it with someone from overseas.”

According to another client Erick, it is very important to have feedback from the outsource providers. From his previous experience he observed that developers from overseas do exactly what they are told, they are never comfortable to give their own opinion if the client is wrong. This is due to the cultural difference and there’s very little which could be done to improve this.

“If we are allowing someone to work on our back office solutions, we have to be sure that they comply with the data protection legislations. I can never have peace of mind letting someone from a different country handle all our sensitive information. If we do not have the resource in house, I would rather hand over the work to someone who is bound by the same law as us.”- said one of our clients from a government agency.

“When I outsourced my first project to a company in New Delhi, I had really high hopes. The agents brainwashed me saying that the developments costing £300 a day can be done for £10 a day in India. It did sound too good to be true, but I fell for it. I was not aware of all the hidden costs at all. The exchange rate of Indian Rupee had a big impact on my profit. I was really disappointed as the quality of the work was not what I expected. I have a feeling that the biggest barrier was the language. Even though they were fluent in English, they had trouble understanding my English accent and I struggled to understand their strong Indian accent too. At the end of the day, I had to hire a local agency to clean up all the mess they created. If I could go back in time I’d outsource from a local company to save all the trouble I had.”

The truth is, no one makes 200% profit by outsourcing work abroad. Why not Share your offshore outsourcing stories with us. We might include them in our next blog!

Advantages & Disadvantages of Offshore IT Outsourcing

Ruth Smith — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:12:36 GMT

Following our recent white paper on Outsourcing, this blog series will discuss more about outsourcing of Information Technology. Previously the conflict was between doing the job in house or outsourcing. Nowadays, outsourcing has become such a hot trend that the conflict is between choosing onshore or offshore outsourcing.

Offshoring is simply the exporting of business functions to another country. Currently the major players in offshoring are India followed by Philippines and China etc. Offshoring has been very popular mainly because of reduced cost and tax. Some of the advantages of offshoring are-

Cost: Cutting cost and taxes is the main reason behind companies embracing offshoring. Companies can save on labour cost, employee supervision and management cost, office space and equipment cost and so on.
Exploiting the Time Zone Advantage: Offshoring gives companies the advantage of exploiting the time zone by receiving round the clock benefits.
Flexibility: Offshoring provides the companies with certain flexibilities including eliminating hiring and termination costs in the UK.

Lately Offshoring has been criticized due to jobs moving out of the UK resulting in job losses. Despite the advantages and cost benefits that offshoring offers, it involves risks which need to be considered in detail otherwise the disadvantages may dominate the benefits. Factors to consider-

Political climate: Political climate in foreign countries is a big source of uncertainty as these can be unstable at times. Changes in government policies can increase the expense.
Differences in work practices and culture- A huge difference always remains in the work practice and culture which are hard to overcome
Hidden costs: Often the hidden cost like fluctuating exchange rate and legal costs are difficult to calculate in advance. Differences in currency rates affect the profits.
Communication Barrier: It is often difficult to communicate with companies in other countries that speak a different native language. Face to face meetings are very expensive to conduct and video conferencing may not always be convenient due to time difference.
Finding good offshore partners: It can be hard to find a good IT provider based on the reviews on their websites and few teleconferences. It is not easy to make a good judgment without proven track record of working for other international companies and authentic references.

Despite of many challenges and drawbacks offshoring outsourcing will remain an attractive solution to many companies. We suggest companies develop strategies to overcome the risks to reap the maximum benefits of offshoring or consider onshoring for saving money and complimenting work flow.

Google+ Pages for Companies

Ruth Smith — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

The latest kid on the Social Networking block, Google+ has just opened its doors to businesses.

If you go to the Create Page link now for your business you may be able to create your own listing for your brand or business. This gives the social marketer another way to connect with their potential audience, along with Facebook pages, Foursquare checkins and all the others.

There are a few caveats to creating a page: not everyone has access to do so yet, but should be available by the end of the week (that's why there isn't a Light Speed one yet at the time of writing!). Also like a Facebook page they have to be created by someone who already has an account. However watch out - at the moment each page can only have one admin. You can't spread the responsibilities around yet.

How will you use your Google+ page to reach your audience?

Update: we managed to make our page! Find it here