1DayLater - The Blog

Rocket Ronnie Redesigns...

You’ve probably noticed that Paul has been running the blog on his own for the past few weeks, this is because I’ve been knee deep in a big rejiggle of the 1DayLater service. Now, the goal of 1DayLater is to turn a typically mundane task (keeping track of your business activities) into something enjoyable and rewarding we must do two things:

1. Make it easy to use - check!
2. Make it as good looking as possible - errr..

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had some excellent feedback on how the service looks, but we’re not satisfied, not at all. It needs to be beautiful, stunning and clear to new visitors what service we’re offering - this is where Ronnie Atkinson comes in.

Me and Ronnie actually go back about 10 years - when I was dabbling with code, Ronnie was nudging pixels. We honed our skills together by toying with various projects and websites as kids, we even did our first professional work together at my Dads multimedia company aged 15 or so. Immense.

Oh I’m getting all nostalgic… Anyhow, I’m very happy to introduce Ronnie as a temporary member of team 1DayLater! For the past week we’ve been working together on a major redesign of the homepage, and as daft as this may sound, I’m bloody proud of his work - it looks stunning! I can’t wait to roll out the new design.

Ronnie works for Foundry Media, they’re an excellent full-service design agency based in Newcastle. You have seen their work around.

Oh, I have other news, but you can wait… right?

2600 hits and 915 new users - in 1 day

Words cannot describe what has happened here at 1DayLater yesterday. Here’s a clue..

But first,

This is what happened the day before

• woke up
• Had my cereal (Weetabix)
• Made cuppa (Yorkshire tea)
• Went to office
• Discovered this nice little article on Webworkerweekly
• Checked the site stats

I THOUGHT- “Oh 60 signups this morning - cool”

I SAID - “Here David, check this out man, 60 signups not bad. Nice article too, the editor really seems to have done her homework”

The next day

• Woke up
• Had some toast
• Made a cuppa (No Yorkshire so chose second rate Typhoo)
• Went to office
• Read my emails
• Checked the site stats

I THOUGHT “pnaaarrf?!”

I SAID “Davrnod….pnaaarf?!”

Turns out this is what happens when you get noticed by lifehacker. Lifehacker are one of the worlds most influential sites giving daily tips on how to ‘get things done’. They currently rank in the top 1000 sites worldwide, very cool indeed

And don’t be fooled, those other ‘little blips’ were actually also epic days including when we were featured on Techcrunch Europe. They’ve just been dwarfed by Lifehacker!

So a big welcome to all our new users. Please get in touch if you have any questions or just want to say hello :)

Take care,

Paul and David King

Surround yourself with skilled people

Some advice I was given recently was “Don’t do it all yourself”, a great piece of advice I think every business owner should take to heart. Which is why when it comes to dealing with law or accounts it’s wise to enlist the help of a pro.

As brothers, David and I are generally very trusting with a shared optimistic outlook on life and people. We find life is just nicer that way.

But with the occasional unscrupulous shark about and a service that can be used anywhere in the world it’s time to call in the legal team. And lovely local lawyers Mincoffs have stepped up to the mark.

Paul King (1DayLater), Antony Hall (Mincoffs) and David King (1DayLater)

So this past week we’ve been making sure that the 1DayLater terms and conditions, privacy policy and reseller agreements are all top notch. Legal banter has been flying around like you wouldn’t believe.

Why go to so much trouble and expense? Well the way that we collect and protect our users data is very important to us, as you might imagine. We take every possible care to make sure that information remains private and secure at all times. So these documents are just as much for our customers benefit as they are for ours!

Antony Hall, Mathew Foster and the rest of the Mincoffs team come highly recommended.

1DayLater phone & desktop applications

Some months ago we surveyed our beloved 1DayLater users to find out what the most-wanted features were. A mobile phone application came out on top, with a desktop application not far behind.

We’ve decided to kill these two particular birds with one stone. And enlisted the help of some local pro’s to help us do it.

Twisted Studio are a digital design house operating from the heart of Teesside’s Digital City. They are versed in all the latest creative and interactive technologies, and whats more, they’re big on data visualisation.

Now here at 1DayLater we LOVE coming up with cool and innovative ways of displaying data. So as you might imagine they’ve already won us over! But apart from that we’d really urge you to use their services because they’re a great bunch.

Here’s what we can expect for 1DayLater over the next month or so:

1) Phone applications for the following platforms:

• Android
• i-phone
• Blackberry
• N-Series

2) ‘Adobe air’ cross platform desktop application
(serving as a handy reminder to log your time, money and mileage)

Assuming everything goes as planned we should see these start to emerge in February, with the desktop application coming first. I can’t wait to give our customers something really special as I get the feeling they’re going to dazzle us.

Paul