UPDATE – Go and check out this page on our main site for more info about our growing co-working space.

Some White October blog-worthiness happened yesterday. The first coworker to use our space setup his netbook on Wednesday morning and had the whole downstairs area to himself. Hope to see you back next week, Paul.

We first blogged about making our surplus office space into a coworking space a few months ago, but we recently upped the ante by putting in some desks and chairs and getting some other bits from a certain Swedish furniture emporium. We’re not approaching Philippe Starck levels of interior design just yet but we plan on gradually improving the space; the plan is to install a meeting room in the near future, and  a couple of sofas for you to hang out on too.

Eventually, we want the space (we really must think of a name for it) to be somewhere for freelancers, two-person start-ups, tele-commuters who crave human contact etc. to drop by for a day or two, do some work, and meet a varied bunch of interesting folks from a variety of fields.

We’re still interested in hearing from interested coworkers. So if you know someone, please let them know that they can register their interest with us.

Here’s some pix of what it looks like at the moment:

The photo at the top of the post is from The Library of Congress on the Flickr Commons.

The first was some First Great Western sleeper tickets to get me to London for a client meeting. I spent quite some time choosing the tickets (it’s a complex business anyway) then working through the checkout process. At the end, I’m pretty sure I briefly saw the Verified by Visa thing appear in a frame only to vanish to be replaced by the page hosting the frame in the frame. How recursive. I got angry then started all over again (yep, my basket was empty) with another card (one with which I’ve always managed to duck around the Verified by Visa thing by carefully clicking the tiny ‘No thanks’ button).

The second purchase was my exciting new Android phone from T-Mobile. Another lengthy checkout process (since it involves a credit check etc.) only to be presented by Verified by Visa. Everything actually appeared to go through this time, although I got no acknowledgement email from T-Mobile. Later that day, they contacted me to say the card verification on the purchase had failed. I phoned them and a nice chap took my details again and pushed everything through. I got the impression that failure at the Verified by Visa step was not uncommon.

I’m clearly not alone in my hatred for it. Plus, it seems as though it fails massively in its attempts to add any security anyway.

So what can we do? As consumers, we need to moan and whine to to the e-commerce businesses we buy from. And they need to moan and whine to the 3D Secure providers to sort out their system and provide better, bullet (and user) proof e-commerce integration. I’ve never had to implement it, but I’m  willing to bet that it’s a complete nightmare, with poor documentation and very little support so e-commerce developers rush to fit (using nasty hacky javascript and frame solutions) and forget.

It’s no good spending time and money improving e-commerce to increase sales if a third party payment system mucks it all up for users at the end.

UPDATE – Go and check out this page on our main site for more info about our growing co-working space.

We moved offices this weekend and over an awesome post-move burger in Atomic Burger on Saturday we started talking about what we were going to do with all the space we’ve now got.

One option that we’re actively looking into is renting out desk space, but a few people have suggested that we provide more flexible desk space via a coworking model where freelancers and individuals can rent desk space by the day.

We’re not sure whether we’d be able to make enough to cover our rent this way, and there are also other legal and insurance considerations we need to look at, but the idea of a creative space for designers, geeks and anyone else to drop into really appeals to us.

The plan…

We’re going to look at the technicalities of this over the next 2 weeks, but hopefully we’ll be able to run a trial during March to see if it’s going to be sustainable.  If it’s a success, then we can keep it going.

Sign-up and register your interest please!

One big question we have is how much demand there is for desks, so it would help us if you could register your interest in desk space now.   Then of course we’ll let you know how our plan progresses and when the desks become available.

View Unit 3, The Gallery in a larger map

Our new address is:

Unit 3, The Gallery
54 Marston Street
Oxford
OX4 1LF

Our telephone numbers have stayed the same.

The new office is a much bigger space than we had before, and we’re actively looking for small companies or individuals who would like desk space – get in touch if you’re interested.

Some photos of the empty office before we moved in:

One way is to keep contact forms short and snappy with a small number of fields. Usually that’s how things start off but often after a while we see more fields creeping in (presumably to gather more ‘marketing collateral’).

Here’s a study which backs up what seems like the obvious assertion that fewer fields will mean more conversions.

Via Luke Wroblewski‘s Functioning Form.

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/08/the-accidental-incubator.html

(via http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/08/13.html)

For a small(ish) dev team like ours, even with all that advance notice, it’s somewhat  difficult to plan around a developer disappearing for 2 weeks at an uncertain date. The way we’ve dealt with is it is by keeping me off large projects and instead management have been throwing me various bugs, fixes and discrete small jobs as they crop up. And I have been careful to keep everyone updated on where I’m up to and to keep all my code checked in all the time in case I have to drop off the radar at short notice.

Two things have helped a lot through this – developer flexibility and code flexibility. The model of having one developer owning a client, project or piece of work wouldn’t work. All of our developers have to be able to pick up anything at short notice whether it’s adding a new module to a beautifully crafted MVC site or changing the URL of a link buried away in a static legacy site.  And our code and systems have to support this too (particularly since some developers – like me – work remotely).

Right now, as we make vague plans for possible health problems across the team, knowing that we have this flexibility can only be a good thing.

My phone stopped sending texts last week, giving a fairly terse error. My phone is a Palm Centro, so it’s unusual. The first place I turn for help with it are always forums on the interweb. That’s what I did. The error code it gives, it turns out, is a carrier/network error. That signalled bad news to me: I was going to have to phone T-Mobile and ask for their help. I knew that this would be a nightmare: I’d have to wait a long time, they would want to ask me lots of questions about the error and the phone but they wouldn’t know anything about the Palm Centro since they don’t sell it (I bought it sim free for use on any network).

Lo, I had to wait about half an hour, the chap started asking me all about my Nokia N61 (an awful phone I’d ditched within about 2 days of getting it from them) and didn’t know anything about the Palm. He wasn’t interested in the fact that I’d done the research on the error which had concluded it was a network problem. He said that the network where I was was working fine and suggested that since the phone wasn’t one they sold or supported, I’d have to find another phone to test my sim in and/or try another sim in my phone. I’d have to do all the work in other words.

Well, fair enough I guess. I haven’t done anything more yet (apart from continue to have to phone people who send me texts to explain that I can’t reply). But then, the kicker. Today, T-Mobile sent me a text. It was a survey asking me how I rated the help I got from the support call. A text, yes. I had to reply…by text.  So whilst I desperately wanted to reply “1. Not at all” I couldn’t of course. Brilliant. Clearly it’s an automated system which would happen for every support call. But then, wouldn’t a lot of support calls tend to be about problems with texts or the phone generally? Wouldn’t it make sense for the customer service dude to be able to set a flag to say: “Don’t send this person a text to survey their satisfaction with my call – it won’t work”?

For me, T-Mobile have added insult to injury. They’ve failed to help me and then rubbed my face in it. My contract is long over. Maybe the quickest way to sort my problem would be just to jump ship…

“We have lots of inbound requests from customers around the world.

“We have no announcements for them today, but we continue to get those requests.”

Brilliant. To paraphrase: Yep, loads of people are asking us about it. We’ve nothing to say, go away.

Read here on the beeb.

Well slides, cable cars and baths full foam cubes are all well and good but I think Joel Spolsky does things better over at Fog Creek. There, the cash is spent (rather than Google-splurged) on private offices for programmers, the best ergonomic chairs and desks (height adjustable, easy to stand up to work – something my back could really use), a decent library and a shower for cyclists.

There’s a slideshow of shots from their new office here and some words from Joel about it here.

NB: this is in no way a comment on the White October offices which are indeed very nice :) (and I work from home anyway so I can roll my own facilities).