We’ve previously helped Informed Choice (ICL-IFA.co.uk) with their website, and was sent a message via twitter, from Martin Bamford, stating that his company had been mystery shopped by the Financial Times’ publication, FTAdviser.com.

His company was scored across a number of different sections, one of which being “email / web presence”. The website that we helped develop was rated 5 out of 5, and helped push their overall mystery shopper score to 31 of a maximum 35.

We want to give our congratulations to Martin Bamford and his team at Informed Choice for doing a sterling job.

Recently i’ve been finding that a lot of modern sites are using subtle textures to add depth to their designs. I’ve taken a few moments to pick out a handfull of designs that use lovely subtle effects :

one.Twenty.Seven

The one.Twenty.Seven site uses really nice texture in the background, which reminds me of used chalky slate. This could be deliberate as once upon a time designers would have “roughed” up their work on these older mediums. Personally, i think it’s a very well thought out design, with some great touches.

Camp Kintail

Notice how this site utilises textures to make it feel wild, outdoors and adventurous. The textures used in this design aren’t over-the-top, and add a real feeling to the design. Great job!

Douglas Menezes

Another arty site, but everything works perfectly. The textures in this design make the doodle look as though they are hand-drawn onto paper. Simple, but very effective.

Well I hope these have given you some inspiration for your next design / project. Feel free to comment this post below :

I was having a discussion the other day with a fellow web developer about different options available for paying for web apps. At the moment, the common trend is to offer monthly payment plans with fixed allowances / features. Once someone nears the end of their plan, they simply upgrade to the next.

Back in 2007, Paul Farnell wrote this article on Carsonified about “How to price your web app”. It details a few ideas on how you could charge / price your web baby.

I’ve taken a moment to analyse what the pros and cons of this method are:

Pros

• People know what they’re paying on a monthly basis.
• People can upgrade when required
• Usually these systems come with a free limited account

Cons

• Although extra plans exist, you cannot assume the customers would be aware of their options to upgrade
• Any notices / mentions of the ability to upgrade can appear to “chase” the user to upgrade.
• People might pay for more than what they want to use. For example they might not use all their allocated allowance for the £20/month plan, but might have grown out of the £10/month plan.

Now, i know that a lot of systems out there have pay-monthly plans, but here at codepotato we’ve been thinking of ways of combating the problems with pay-monthly web apps. A few of the alternatives to “pay monthly” are:

• Fixed fee plans (1 plan suits all)
• Pay as you use (used in cloud computing / online storage systems)
• Top-up and go (used on the Envato marketplaces, like themeforest)

Would welcome any comments you have on this matter, and whether you are aware of any pro’s / con’s that i’ve missed.

Welcome to 2010!

Having not kept to our promise of updating the codepotato website in 2009, i feel i am not on a good foot to promise that i’ll keep it updated this year, but i’ll certainly try.

2009 was a good year for us. Many relationships have been built with some pretty damn cool clients, some small, some big. The best bit is that we just keep growing.

We hope that in 2010, we can continue our rate of growth with two new products. One is a very simple, but useful CRM system and the other is something i cannot talk about. These products will be pay-as-you-go, meaning that if you’re not a heavy user, you won’t pay as if you are.

More on this later, but for now, from all of us at codepotato, Happy New Year!

Gareth

Welcome to the updated [codepotato] site. We will be posting regular articles / reviews here, so check back soon.

Remember to sign up to our RSS feed too, so that you’re always in the know.