If you’re a web studio company boss, a project manager for a web design company, senior web designer, or even freelancer; i.e. someone that can answer questions on behalf of your company, on its policies regarding Usability Evaluations, it would be very helpful if you could take a few minutes, and click here to complete the survey.

The results of the survey will be published in the form of a report, so if you’re interested in reading the report, be sure to subscribe to the newsletter on the last page of the survey.

Thank you very much.

I originally purchased the domain danielhollands.co.uk back in November 2011 when I was working for Propeller. I’d heard on the news that someone famous had their name’s domain name cyber squatted, and had failed, legally, to take it back for themselves. (Whoever it was can’t have been that famous, however, as I don’t remember who they were.)

Although I highly doubted that anyone would want to cyber squat my name (other than, say, someone else named Daniel Hollands), for a fiver each year, I might as well get it just in case.

Although this isn’t the first time I’ve hosted something on that domain (for the past year or so it’s had a copy of my CV which used a third party template), but this is an important launch for me for two reason, first; the site’s code is all my own work, and second; all the aforementioned code is available for all to see on Bitbucket. (I did consider moving it to my GitHub account, but Bitbucket has served me well, so I figured, credit where credit is due.)

Anyway, I open to feedback, so please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments below

Back story

Back in May, shortly after setting up a Google Apps account (to help me manage email for the various domains that I own), I had the idea to write an article on the blog explaining why it was awesome, and why anyone running a small business should use it (i.e. it was Gmail for your own domain, you had up to ten mailboxes for free, compatability with other Google services, etc..)

Google drop the bomb

Fast forward to the second week of December, during which time I was on holiday in Iceland (no I didn’t see the Aurora Borealis, but I did go spelunking), and the news broke that Google will no longer be offering their free plan to new subscribers.

The news continued to reassure existing customers that it would have no impact on them, and that they’ll be able to continue using the service for free – which of course was a big relief for me personally, but a huge disappointment as I knew that I’d no longer be able to offer it as a solution to my customers.

So what now?

So what do you do if you’re one of the unlucky ones that took too long to get an account set-up? Thankfully the answer to that question can be found in an article on Lifehacker.

For the most part, I’m only be interested in the email hosting facilities, for which the article offers a couple of solutions, including that of sticking with Google Apps (after all, $50 per user per year isn’t too expensive, considering everything you get for the money), which I would happily recommend to my customers that can afford it, but for anyone looking for a free lunch, depending upon their needs, I think I’d recommend Zoho Mail or Outlook.com:

Zoho Mail

Zoho offer a single domain with up to three 5GB mailboxes, which (importantly) features two-way mobile sync functionality (which I think it fancy talk for IMAP). You might be slightly put off by the fact you might have never heard of Zoho before, but they offer a wide range of business apps, and reportedly have seven million users.

Outlook.com

Outlook.com offer a very generous 500 mailboxes for free (far more than many of my customers are going to need), and I believe that you’re able to host multiple domains with them, but they don’t offer IMAP (although it is apparently coming soon). Being a Microsoft product should also put your mind at rest in relation to stability (and the fact that they’ll hopefully not be going anywhere for a while).

Watch this space

At this time I’ve not yet used either of these services, so I can’t yet give any opinions on them, but as I intend to try them out with future customers as soon as possible, I’ll come back and update this post accordingly once this happens.

The name Alicia is of Old German origin, and the meaning of which is “noble, exalted”.

As an Alicia, she joins the ranks of famous Alicias, such as Alicia Keys, Jodie Foster (who was born Alicia Christian Foster), and Hurricane Alicia (although, hopefully for her mother, she’ll have a less destructive force than the latter).

I’ll be heading down to Kent at some point in the near future to meet baby Alicia (and give her my traditional greeting of a manly handshake), but until then, here are some photos.

I don’t know about you, but I’m quite keen on hosting a Summer Code Party.

Huh?

The basic idea is, starting on the 23rd June, all over the world groups of like-minded individuals get together and do something Web related. The aim would be for these individuals to learn something new about the Web, improve their design and development techniques, and hopefully use these newly learnt skills to contribute towards the evolution of the World Wide Web.

I’m so totally down with that idea I get excited at the though of it, so much so that I want to host a party of my own in Leamington Spa – but before I start to make plans…

…I need to know if other people are keen on joining me.

What’s the big idea?

Mozilla (the guys behind this initiative) have suggested three types of event that could be hosted:

• Kitchen Table
• Hack Jam
• Pop Up

Personally I’m most interested in hosting as Hack Jam, as I think this could be a good way of getting some of my web-related ideas started, but I’m totally open to suggestion, and would be happy to go in whatever direction the majority wanted to go in.

Sounds good, what do I do?

If this sounds like something you’d want to get involved in, let me know. You can post a comment below, use my contact form, or even contact me on Twitter and Facebook.

Thank you.

(PS, even if you’re not interested, your friends might be, so please retweet on Twitter and/or share on Facebook, and help me make this happen)