Paul's Almanac

Having now notched up over ten sport website designs/builds across two major football codes, I'd like to think I have learnt a thing or two. It's not really rocket science, but there are a number of key differences from typical corporate websites or e-commerce based websites. One of the interesting things I have found is that not all sport properties create their website's the same way. One of the key reasons for this is that it depends what department within the organisation is in charge of the website. Sometime's marketing takes the lead, or alternatively marketing/public relations, and in other scenarios I have seen commercial operations or IT take the lead on developing the site. On top of that there are typically external organisations involved that influence the site design and objectives. This can include; design agencies, rights holders, sponsors, media agencies, and miscellaneous consultants (always a favourite option in sport). This can often cause interes...

Looks like this people are still interested in my opinion on Cloud Computing! Alexandra Cain has written an article in the December edition of CFO Magazine, following on from an interview she did with me. My comments follow on from my experiences implementing a new hosting environment and a SaaS based Anti-SPAM solution at work. If you had read some of my previous comments about cloud computing, you will remember one of my bug bears is the lack if tools available from cloud vendors for IT Pros to work out how much resource their on premise app uses and hence what resources would be consumed in the cloud and at what cost. At a recent Microsoft event for Web Devs, I was very please to learn that one of the pricing options being rolled out in March for Azure was a subscription model, where you can purchase X amount of compute power for $Y. At least this helps IT Managers know how much a month they are spending on Azure. It still not allowing us to reap the cost benefits of the cl...