Wow, the New Year seems to have only started and already we’re in March! So time to do a quick update on what’s been going on in the world of clickstream!

Like a lot of businesses, we faced 2009 with a lot of uncertainty. Compared to other years, it was very difficult to make plans around budgets, staffing, expansion, consolidation so there’s been a certain amount of treading water to see what way the market is behaving before making any major company strategy decisions.

With 2 months gone by, I’m pleased to see that new business enquiries are strong which is encouraging. Unfortunately for some of the businesses making enquiries though, the need to develop or improve their web presense is being triggered by a downturn in their fortunes and a change of online strategy is being adapted to try and stimulate their own business.

Hopefully, a lot of companies now approaching us will benefit from the knowledge we’ve built up over the years and we can help them ride out the current situation. Certainly, we would very much believe that any investment in web holds the best potential for business development.

In terms of existing clients, we’ve tried to be proactive with as many as possible by sitting down with them and discussing their web strategy for the year ahead - these discussions always tend to be productive. In a strange way, the difficult environment has made our clients more focussed on their web goals and it almost makes our life easier. When the client has very clear goals, we tend to get very clear direction and as any designer or programmer will tell you, that is exactly what they like!

One interesting development with one major US client occurred last week when I took a phone call from a New York-based Executive Director. We had developed a major project for his Institute during 2008 which launched last Summer. The project had a global educational audience and the launch was a great success. However, due to 2009 budget constraints, the decision to outsource the task of site maintenance to India was taken at the start of the Year.

But following 2 weeks of site crashes, domain names being pointed at virus-ridden servers, lack of response to urgent communications and so on, the phone call came asking us to take back control of the site.

It was heartening to see that this client belatedly realised what they were getting when using an Irish company - and that Irish companies can compete globally once they are offering a premium service!

So with the assurance that if you offer a quality service, your business can still prosper in difficult times, and so we face 2009 with cautious optimism!

PS - We hope to bring you news of our Birmingham operation soon. More pieces of puzzle falling into place each week with an April launch of operation expected

Tags: benefits of quality web design service, birmingham web design, Outsourcing, web industry 2009