Web Technik

The history of Web Technik goes back a little before its formation in 1994 and is something of a history of the WWW. Web Technik was probably the first web site design company operating in the region and one of few in the UK.

My background

For many years I was an IT manager at Midland Bank (now HSBC). I was involved in communications technology there and in a private capacity, being a home user of communications technology such as BBS (bulletin boards) and the now long defunct Prestel. When the internet became available outside the original academic and military userbase I was an early adopter. At that time internet filled a similar role to BBS and Prestel but far more versatile.

Our start in creating web sites

I was experimenting with internet technologies before the WWW was “invented” as a result of Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the web page building language HTML.  Before that there was a raft of tools like ARCHIE, IRC,  email, GOPHER, VERONICA, UseNet, FTP.  Those still exist but many have fallen into disuse outside the technical community.
Things improved immensely once the first credible web-browser, Mosaic Netscape (later renamed Netscape Navigator and is the origin of Firefox), became available.  The first browsers were text-only, to view images the PC would need to open a separate image viewer program but it wasn’t long before improved versions were able to display images too.

I created a simple web site for my wife’s then employer just as an exercise, they paid a small amount which we used to buy the domain name sheffield.co.uk and some web-space.

My work at the bank was in related programming and communication technologies.  There we set up a working party in the Bank of myself with representatives of the Bank’s data networks and IT security teams as we found we were all being asked about the internet and were keen to present a consistent set of responses.

Microsoft had seen the opportunities the internet was opening and initially attempted to respond with a proprietary and very expensive competitor (code name Blackbird).  That fell flat but their launch of MSIE (MicroSoft Internet Explorer) “legitimised” the internet in the eyes of business leaders. MSIE was also intended to destroy the competition, it was free (at the time Netscape Navigator V2 cost about $50 per PC). MSIE included additional proprietary features, presumably to stymie competitors lacking those features.  As web developers Microsoft offered us free software to build web sites as long as they made use of the proprietary features and included the wording “Best viewed with Internet Explorer”. We declined as we felt internet standards should be adhered to and proprietary features were an attempt at wresting control and damaging competitors.  In any case the proprietary features were largely trivia (like the scrolling “marquee” HTML tag).  In those days we had to test every web site we built with several different browsers to ensure the site worked consistently in all cases.
Microsoft persisted with Internet Explorer for many years before eventually adopting the same underlying “engine” as Google Chrome for their new browser “Edge”.

The Bank had initially dismissed the internet as a fad for nerds and geeks. That changed when a student pressure group set up a web site critical of the banks (specifically Lloyds and Midland) for providing financial services to organisations the students disapproved of.  The marketing department was concerned and felt a response was needed.  Rather than discuss with IT they chose to use an external agency to create the Bank’s first web-site. They charged an enormous figure for a small and unimpressive web site. My response was that I could have done the job in an afternoon but without the coding errors. I was challenged to prove that so I did.

When I told Wendy, my wife, always rather more entrepreneurial than me, she said “If you can make that much for a half-day’s work we need to be doing the same” and promptly set up a business.

There were few organisations ready and able to spend £thousands on something they didn’t use or understand but still, in the early 1990s even charging £100 for a half-day’s effort was more than a competent programmer would earn at the time.

To use the internet back then you needed a PC, at a typical cost of around £1000, a modem (£200) and a software bundle (£100). The modem plugged into a phone socket, but many phones were hard-wired so you’d need BT to change to a socket.  The earliest dial-up modems had download speeds of 300bps (bits per second – roughly 30 characters). By the 1990s speeds of 1200 or 2400bps were affordable and 9600bps available but expensive, the speed of change was fast reaching 56kb by the end of the ’90s, even then a photo could take several seconds to download. My current broadband connection is gigabit (1,000,000,000bps) that can download a 2 hour high definition video in half a minute. When we started the number of websites globally was only in the thousands (now there are over a billion) and few businesses or consumers had the necessary equipment to view web sites.

Another cost-barrier was domain names for the web-address. When .co.uk names became commercially available it was at a high one off cost for life rather than at present an annual fee. If I recall correctly that fee was £200 making the cost of a website significantly more, the total being prohibitively high for businesses taking a risk on a new technology for a still unproven benefit.  As mentioned above that was the view taken by Midland Bank initially too so it’s easy to understand the reluctance of struggling small businesses.
Our purchase of sheffield.co.uk meant we could provide businessess in and around Sheffield with an address like sheffield.co.uk/business-name for a nominal fee.   Later Nominet reneged on the “name for life” deal and require an annual fee but it was much lower and we migrated users to their own domain names.
By the way we still own sheffield.co.uk but make little use of it, it is a highly desirable and sought-after name and is for sale – serious offers will be considered.

It was very difficult to make a sales-pitch when few businesses had heard of the internet, far fewer had access or even a PC. We decided that the best approach was to work on the basis of making small affordable web sites with a view to growing with those customers as awareness of the advantages and opportunities evolved.
The only way we could demonstrate web sites in a potential customer’s offices was by using a local copy of the site on a laptop because very few had an internet connection or even a modern phone socket we could plug modem into.

We addressed the full scope of requirements including helping to set up PCs and modems, tutorials, securing domain names and providing hosting and email. As a result some of those bold “first movers” had some fantastic successes,  many found unexpected new export markets for their products one landing a £6m contract as a consequence!  Another has grown from a small Sheffield shop to become the UK’s main retail supplier of their category of retail goods seeing off some well-known competitors who were slower to act.

We quickly found that my wife, with my technical assistance when not at my day job, and working from a spare bedroom was not enough. In 1996 we registered Web Technik Ltd having recruited Pauline then Sue to help. We moved into commercial office space and added more staff. As I was only involved occasionally, just for the more complex technical issues, it was effectively an all-woman business, that was undeniably an advantage when trying to sell the concept to skeptical businessmen.

Web Technik grew bigger. The business was progressing well, adding more staff and moving to progressively larger offices.

What went wrong

In 1998 Wendy became unwell and after months of ill health she died in early 1999. Without the driving force behind the business, we were haemorrhaging money. With my day-job two young kids and an elderly mother needing my support I was operating at full-stretch. I had offers to buy the business but not sufficient to pay the overdraft. I had to scale back, having to make the difficult decision to make some staff redundant and move to more affordable office space.

We kept going for a further 15 years but never recovered our market-leading position.  We were no longer one of very few in the country but now one of many in Sheffield alone.  In 2014 a combination of Pauline wanting to retire, Sue having had an accident leading to very lengthy treatment and recovery time I decided it was time to pull down the shutters.

We had responsibility dozens of client’s web sites.  I ensured continuity of service for them by paying all my suppliers for up to a year ahead. I had expected our clients to move away. Only 3 did in the first few weeks and I was continuing receive enquiries. Initially I continued to provide ad-hoc support for existing customers but free as I had no way to change them. To put things onto a more secure footing I created another business to provide continuity of service and a basis on which I could charge for ongoing tasks.  Work kept coming in so we quickly had cash in the bank to continue operating. I was concerned about those with ecommerce sites, with daily turnover into the £thousands. I felt it was unwise for them to be reliant on a one-person business so I helped them move to alternative providers.

I continue to provide support, web hosting and domain name services under the auspices of lasertechnik.co.uk and still have customers dating back to the mid 1990s. I still get business referrals and build new web sites.  My motivation is that I have a unique skill set based on a long career in IT and with the internet since the earliest days.  For me, IT isn’t a job but a vocation.  I get satisfaction from using my knowledge and experience. My customers benefit from my, perhaps unequalled, knowledge base and also with no employees or office space overheads, my charges are highly competitve.

There have always been problems with web site designers. The “cost of entry” to becoming a web designer is virtually nothing, there are no meaningful qualifications, there’s free software and inexpensive hosting, you can run a business from a spare room. As a consequence there are now tens of thousands of individuals and businesses offering web services. Most have a very limited skill set and many quickly discover it’s too difficult and not very lucrative so they move on. Those who stay are seldom interested in the small-budget ongoing maintenance and support tasks just wanting the more lucrative new builds and redesigns. The result is that many businesses at least disappointed with their designers at worst left completely in the lurch. I doubt there are many others in the UK who’ve been creating and maintaining commercial web sites since the early 1990s and still actively involved. Several times in the past I’ve helped people who have found their website disappeared overnight, the designer had both domain name and hosting in his own name and he cannot be contacted.

I mentioned “inexpensive hosting”.  That raises the question why are some of my former clients being charged many hunderds of pounds a year for hosting by their new provider when hosting can be found for very little (or even free). The differences lie in a number of areas.

Performance – there are numerous technical features of hosting service that contribute to the speed of your web site, web site visitors are impatient and will move on if responses are slow.

Features – There are loads of possible features, the better hosts provide a full suite as standard, others either don’t offer them or do so at additional cost. Many hosts compete on the basis the same a set of headline features like amount of disk storage space, number of email accounts included. “The devil is in the detail”, is that “cloud” storage, is it backed up, is the backup resilient and stored for long enough, is it high speed disk, can you take on-demand backups. Another issue is bandwidth, that’s an indication of how many visitors can view your website each month. Small businesses need not be too concerned but things can change overnight. We hosted the country inn where Tony Blair took George Bush for lunch.  The website traffic suddenly went stratospheric as all the world’s media looked it up. We had provisioned for such peak demand so no problem. Most of the cheapest web hosts advertise “unlimited disk and bandwidth”.  That’s an undertaking nobody can guarantee. The small print will probably say something like “subject to fair use policy”.   

Support – Ideally 24×365 manned by a human who can actually resolve issues.  That has a big cost implication.

Service availability – The host should also have a “service availability” page hosted separately so when there’s a problem with their own systems they can post updates. We’d all like service availability to be 100%. It’s not going to happen.  For a massive premium you can get to “five nines” (99.999%) availability but even that will probably have an exclusion for “scheduled maintenance”, if you run a global financial institution you’ll want five nines but, well, you read the news. Most SME websites can tolerate an occasional couple of hours off-line. 

Content Delivery Network – this is a system that improves website performance and availablity.   Some hosts offer a limited basic version (perfomance) as standard or for an additional monthly fee it can deliver a copy of your website content even when your own web host has gone offline.