Congratulations to you, reading this. You’ve made it through 2020, the biggest collective gutterball of a year that I can remember.

It’s been a challenging year for all of us. In my case, my mother died this year and my sister and I are primary caretakers of my aunt who’s trapped in a retirement home during a pandemic. I’ve been for the most part house-bound to try to be personally safe and socially responsible. And more plugged into media more than ever during the most socially divided America in my lifetime. All while trying to keep a business afloat while many others have sadly crashed and burned.

But on the plus side personally, I have great family and friends. I’m lucky to have a bubble of my closest and favorite people while others are having to deal with more isolation. Business here at Plannedscape is having a solid, average year despite the tough economy; those of us who work in technology for the most part are having a little better job security through the pandemic than in other industries. And in my other life as a musician, I released an album worth of new music I love.

All in all, I’m doing ok here now that I write all of that down. In that spirit, I want to offer two free hours of Plannedscape consultation time to whoever wants it. (In most cases, I’ll be doing the evaluation, though it might also be coming from Brad or somebody else here, depending on the nature of the request.)

Just contact us and mention this article.



The Gift: Two Hours Of Free Review

We’ll give two free hours of review, no matter what your needs are: Web design, security/backup protocols, code review, desktop apps, dynamic data, workflow/processes, DevOps, documentation, etc.

Without hurting ourselves patting ourselves on the back too much, one of our best strengths here is our ability to come into an existing situation and make big strides on easy fixes that make a big impact.

OFFER DETAILS: This offer is good through January 15, 2021. (Although if you’re reading this on the blog after that, let us know and we’ll see what we can do; we can at least give you some advice in a 20-30 minute phone call anytime.)



Could You Do This Yourself? (Spoiler Alert: Yes)

Everything here is pretty standard, best-practices stuff that you could study and learn about for free on the web. We are even happy to point you in the right direction on what to study or even what to search in Google to be on your way. That’s always for free.

But we do believe that once we’ve talked - or what we’re betting on with also offering a couple of hours of free consulting time - you’ll see the value in hiring us later, should the need arise.



Website Review - What We Would Look At

We use lots of analytics tools (you can/should be using the free/Google ones yourself) to quickly point out where your trouble spots are. From there, we can break those reports down into what really would increase speed and capacity, while ruling out time-consuming but low-impact items.

Our team also would be spotting security vulnerabilities, troubling design, SEO quality, user-experience issues, optimization on mobile devices and a few other things in our checklist.

From there, we’ll make up a to-do list or report, which is everything we do normally to audit a site when we begin with a website client (when we are carrying out the work).



Other Work - What We Would Look At

A lot can be gained just by looking at code or current databases. After 20 years in software, it doesn’t take us long to look at code or database schema and know if a potential client is in good shape or headed for sure future trouble.

If a project doesn’t make immediate sense to us, Step 2 is trying to look at your internal documentation. Most companies and projects have every intention to document their code and processes well and almost all of them fall short.

Lots of the time, it’s just the simple act of having an outside source look at what you’re doing to give you the jumpstart and motivation to do what you always kinda new you should do, but didn’t.



If You Don’t Need Us ...

This post is a bit of an ad for our services. But we hope you don’t take it that way. We just want to remind you that your site, project or business can always be doing better. Every organization everywhere has room for improvement.

Just take this as an end-of-year call to arms to take a good look (or ask for help) at how you can improve.

Meanwhile, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and congratulations on putting 2020 behind you!