We’ve been swamped here at Web Apps, ever since our open day. Yes it was a great success, the Mayor turned up, as did a good chunk of the local press and local business leaders.  We’ve been swamped because of what they all saw – the future.

Let me start by apologising for being somewhat remiss in my duties, when it comes to blogging about our move.  For those following the transformation of Windsor Works, you will know we are now in our new home.

    For a growing IT company education is so much more than a sound bite or a political manifesto; for us it really is about our own future.  In the early 1980s the BBC revolutionised the role of computing in the UK with the BBC Computer Literacy Project.  In 1981 they released a TV series “The Computer Programme”, for which they wanted their own hardware to demonstrate.  They put together what was (at the time) a cutting edge specification and approached numerous UK computer builders, settling in the end on a bunch of students in Cambridge called Acorn Computers.  Later that year the first BBC Micro was released onto an unsuspecting country.

I’ve left this blog to last, not because it’s the last part of the jigsaw puzzle, but because it’s the most important piece.  When it comes to security AcuWeb has some ground breaking features that are going to make it a dream for 3rd parties to integrate to, whilst maintaining the ease of use that is a core design feature.

I like to think blogs are like London busses, you wait ages for one and then a whole host come at once.  I’m sorry about that, it’s just about prioritisation, keeping everyone informed is right up there for me, but so is doing boring Chief Exec work, like kissing babies and shaking hands (to be honest it’s really only the latter, but hey I’m not complaining!)

Sure, you want AcuWeb because it gives you a web booking engine out of the box for your shiny new installation of Acumen 9.  But did you know it gives you as many web booking engines as you want?  No?  Well it does.

Obviously we’re talking a lot about AcuWeb at the moment as it races towards it’s beta release, but AcuWeb is only half the story.  We made a commitment to Kelworth customers that we were serious about Accoman/Accowin and we meant it, which is why we’ve also been working hard on Acumen 9, the new version of the system that has the horsepower to drive AcuWeb.

There’s lots of new features under the hood of AcuWeb that are designed to make your life so much easier.  The one we’re most proud of is the way you get pictures onto the website, and how you maximise the impact of your property pictures.

We started the fit out work at the Windsor Works on Monday 18th May, and I thought it would be a great idea to share some photographs of the progress as we go.  Seeing as I have to go onsite every couple of days, I take the opportunity to snap a few pictures.  As most people are never going to see the site in it’s ‘raw’ form, they might appreciate being able to see the transformation in progress!

One of the biggest challenges facing small companies is maintaining their website.  The ability to manipulate HTML directly is not a common skill set, nor should it be.  For that reason, most companies engage a web development company to produce and publish their website.  In many cases, that’s where the relationship ends, and that flashy new website quickly starts to age and the Google ranking quickly deteriorates as the content becomes increasingly less relevant.