Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

Zarr is one of the newer types of business where we don’t have any stock to hold, and virtually everything we do is electronic. We keep post to a minimum, we don’t have a fax, we use email as much as possible.

The solutions/sites that we develop are of course electronic too, and each site is effectively a computer program generating the webpages. Even all our brochure websites are more than plain HTML in that they have forms allowing users to make enquiries, menus dynamically show depending on where you are in the site - and we also have visitor statistics that record what each user does such as are they returning visitor etc.

Each website we develop has a core “framework” of code that we’ve spend a long time developing, and its a flexible solution and we put this functionality into each site. As an example, we have a ecommere ‘module’ that some customers assume we develop it each time for them - when infact weeks or months of work has gone into it in the past and we are reusing that previous work. It make take X sites for that to pay off, but you can also compare it to buying a car - the car hasn’t gone through all the EU emmissions testing, NCAP road safety tests each time - instead each car manufacturer spends millions of R&D, ensures it passes all the tests and then each car sold helps to make of £X of the R&D investment.

The program code that we use is our intellectual property and its well guarded and secure within our business. Due to events in previous weeks and months, for any employers out there, I would strongly recommend you do the following to guard your intellectual property as much as you can - and it this applies to any intellectual property:

• Ensure that there is a clause in employee contracts so that anything they develop whilst working for you is copyright to you.
• Put copyright messages into the intellectual property in as many cases as you can - so in the case of programming code, put it into each file.
• Make sure that employees know that they are not allowed to take intellectual property offsite, and what the consequences are if they do - eg. gross misconduct.
• If employees are stupid enough to send intellectual property by email, ensure your company email is monitored/archived.
• Switch off USB ports on PCs so that people can’t use USB pens to copy files.

If you have grounds to believe that intellectual property has been stolen, or taken without permission, suspend employees immediately on full pay while you investigate. and once you have investigated, if you think they have, go through the formal disciplinary process, plus call the police and report it as a crime.

Thats all I can advise for now - if it helps you then fantastic!