An Introduction

Today is a crisp 2nd October 2009 in the 'buffice' which is what we call the ex-city bus that has been renovated into an office (sometimes also referred to as the “Global International Corporate Head Quarters”). I am going to take this time to start to explain about what clickcreations is 'under the bonnet' and who the family are behind this project.

Mrs. clickcreations (also known as Bertie) has been in Italy with her father for the last five days. This leaves me at home alone with our four children, two goats and mix of poultry. The glorious solitude of Monday has transformed into into what I call the “all alone void” of today's Friday. The “all alone void” is that strange demotivating blankness that you get when you are used to being surrounded by people and activity and suddenly it all stops which can only be combated with loud Hip Hop music. You'd think that someone who managed to live in a spot in England that is at least a mile in any direction to a neighbour would relish the loneliness, and do I sometimes, but humans are complex creatures of many contradictions.

To combat these all alone blues I am listening to Plan B, a hard London Hip Hop band, really quite very loud. The advantage of having neighbours too far away to complain is that you can listen to music really loudly. Sometimes I think it bugs the pheasant hunters that occasion into the woods around the house. Some Hip Hop mixed with Music Popular Brasil, country, folk, blues and jazz doesn't quite create the right ambience for that authentic British countryside shooting experience. If you want the real modern countryside experience it should probably be more techno than hip hop. But I hate techno, and the game keeper doesn't even bring me pheasants any more so tough for him.

I like Eminem and I like Plan B for the same reason that I reason that I like folk and some country and some jazz and some blues: it feels honest and from the heart. It is probably much the same reason why I hate techno: there is no soul in it, no heart. It is just beats per second. Techno is the love people feel on a holiday romance: a passing and artificially induced feeling as much to do with the environs as the person themselves. Good Hip Hop, good folk and old school Blues and Jazz are the passionate love that develops over time with a partner.

All art and all music is artificial, that is what it does: it reproduces something we think or feel or experience.. the real thing is, well, the real thing. Art, including music, is its expression. If Bob Dylan performed under his real name of Robert Zimmerman, that dusty highway feeling be lost, but what Bob Dylan does really well is transform himself from an urban Jew with Eastern European roots to an all-American cowboy with liberal leanings. And he does it well, he does it authentically, because even though Bob Dylan is the persona and not the person, the persona comes from the heart in a way that your average situation comedy character does not.

The type of authenticity that I've always looked for in my life is the authenticity of Bob Dylan, of Eminem, and of Plan B. It is also the core of what we are trying to do at clickcreations. There is a fine balance in creating authenticity in a product, the temptation is always there to regress to something happened a hundred years ago, as if something that happened a hundred years ago was somehow more authentic that something that happens now. Things haven't, and don't, chang that much, nor do we change that little. The beautiful contradiction of humanity is that we are constantly in flux, yet fundamentally rarely change individually or collectively. Victorian England was as unauthentic to the age before it as we now are to Victorian England.

The authenticity that I am striving for is summed nicely in the phrase “down to earth”, because that is what we as family (clickcreations is a family run business) try to do, quite literally. Our “down to earthness” included a lot of earth. Most of the year its just mud. We keep chickens and ducks for both eggs and meat. We have a couple of goats. We try to garden, although I'd be lying if I said we ever had much success. We are not 'self-sufficient', nor do we want to be. We are curious: what is milk like when you squeeze it yourself? If we raised chicken for meat, can we bring ourselves to dispatch them? Is free range chicken really tastier than caged? How do you dress (pluck and gut) a chicken? How do you make cheese?

But the curiosity goes further than that, not only do we want to know how to raise our own foods, even we are also just as happy to head out to the local cafe for a fry-up, we also wanted to get the bottom of this whole “business” thing. With the typically “leap before you look” blindness that me and Mrs. clickcreations often use to start an adventure, we started hatching our `escape into reality` strategy when P was born and Mrs. clickcreations was forced to give up her design job with a fancy London agency. Mrs. clickcreations started with some freelancing, doing jobs here and there while I continued to work as a programmer, manager and all around technical guy for ITV then the BBC. Mrs. clickcreations' freelancing soon reached critical mass, and once we had enough money to live, albeit very cheaply, in France for a year I quit my job and off we went with three kids and a bus (not the buffice, this was a different one) to the foothills of the Pyrenees to see if we wanted to make a permanent life there. After a year there the older children where hating France, the taxes where high, and Mrs. clickcreations was preggers so we returned to the UK, put our London house up for sale and, after spending half a year and living and working on yet another bus (not the buffice, nor the bus we took the France!) we found the place we are in now, situated nicely in the woods, not far from Great Torrington in North Devon.

For most of this time both of us worked as a team of freelancers, with Mrs. clickcreations doing design and Mr clickcreations (that's me!) doing the technical side of things. Freeclancing has its advantages, but it has its disadvantages as well. Often the Freelancer simply ends up an underpaid employee with no job security, having to work to someone elses schedule. It also means that a lot of time has to spend pitching, proposing, and costing things up, then sometimes an equal amount of time chasing up payment. One doesn't have to be in business long to realise two things:
1.There are a lot of sharks out there, people who will waste your time, take your money, and don't deal in good faith.
2.Integrity is paramount to doing business. Despite the all sharks out there, if you don't deal with people fairly and justly you end up screwing yourself in the end.

I can thank my parents for starting the important lessons about integrity early in my life, because it took a number of bad incidents (sometimes involving the police!) as a teenager before the penny finally dropped, thanks to their way of using equal measures of guilt, punishment and reward to keep me on the straight and narrow. I can also thank my first real boss, Norm Henderson, who not only gave me my first chance when I was a newly qualified IT guy but also taught me that not only can you can run a business and have integrity, you cannot successfully run one without it. Bob Dylan has a line “to live outside the law you must be honest”; that line applies very well to business. When you run a business you never live outside the law, but you do sometimes have to tip toe right up to the edge of that cliff and walk along there for a while in order to make it work, but as soon as you “go down the path of dark side, forever it will dominate your destiny” (as Yoda said to Luke in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back).

As I look at the rather healthy amount of money owing, and the rather shabby amount actually in the bank account, I am reminded that 'security' and running a business doesn't always go together. And this leads me nicely back to Freelancing. Freelancing is a yo-yo of boon and bust, lovely in its own right, but we decided that it was time to do something beyond simply customizing websites for £1000 to £5000 a go. We also thought back to the people who have approached us over the three or four years we freelanced, who desperately wanted a website by simply didn't have £1000+ to pay for it. Some of these people tried making their own website through the various “create yerself a website” tools that out there. Some did really well, but most others didn't and ended up spending a lot of time, effort and sometimes even money for very little result. The key, our business coach Chris Kaday (http://www.chriskaday.co.uk/) keeps telling us is to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort and that is what our clickcreations packages are aimed at: both for us, but also for our clients.

The clickcreations as a product was born: our idea is to combine the need people have for an expert who understands the complexity of search engine optimisation (being found on google), hosting, domain registration, design, and layout with the affordable “create yourself a website” options that already exist. clickcreations is exactly that: we create a website for the customer, and (if they want) put the initial content in, they then have access to this website and can change the content with clickcreations' content management system without worrying about effecting the over-all look and feel of the website. All our websites and the domains are hosted on our own servers.

Our approach to selling clickcreations is the same as our approach to life: down to earth. We don't pretend we are a huge corporation, but we act like the best: we are professional, efficient, and deliver on time. We act with integrity. If a customer isn't happy, we try to fix it, and if we can't fix it, we'll usually offer a refund Our servers are all housed in a professional data centres, we have people on back-up so if we can't do something someone always can. And it is for this reason that I am starting this blog, so we can honestly and forthrightly let those who want to know where we are as a business and what we are doing.

At the moment, our product has running for just over a year since it was 'soft launched', and now we are working with Chris Kaday (our business coach) to hard launch clickcreations and bring it to a larger audience. Over the coming months we are going to launch into new territory for us: how to market clickcreations to a mass audience. We know we've got the right product, and the right price. The question now is how to tell the rest of the world what we have!

Stay tuned!