Our latest insights

What is Agile Software DevelopmentAgile software development (such as Scrum) is about collaboration with a focus on a disciplined approach to project management. Frequent inspection and adaptation are implemented to ensure that each stage of the p...

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is big for any company. It is big in implementation, it is big for productivity and most of all it is big on returns for those smart enough to use it to its full potential.Many directors have recognised this and em...

As a business, you may be unaware that you could claim certain tax credits for a process improvement via the use of technology? Most companies are, so let's examine what exactly is R&D tax credit and how we can make it apply to you.

What is ...

When you think of that question you will either have a picture in your head of the large, toothy reptile species long extinct or something that is outdated or obsolete due to failure to adapt to changing circumstance. Maybe you don’t see yourself ...

Tech companies are taking overAccording to a recent report from government-funded advocacy body Tech Nation, the digital tech sector in the UK is currently booming.Turnover of companies in the digital technology sector grew 4.5% last year, while G...

How many of you can relate to this?Your IT systems are running slow. Everything feels clunky and outdated. You’re repeating the same thing over and over again. It’s taking forever to get the job done.Or perhaps you recently upgraded your hardware,...

The word 'Why' is part of a group of interrogative words that ask a question:Where? - What? - How? - When? - Who?Why? - Which? - Whom? - Whose?In business, 'Why' has to be the most powerful one of them all since most of the other interrogative wor...

This week, the list of suppliers for the UK Government's Digital Outcomes and Specialists Framework was released. And we're delighted to announce that Initforthe made it on that list, for both the 'Digital Outcomes' and 'Digital Specialists' parts...

Did you read our previous Big Data blog that focused very on marketing data available to you and how to exploit it?As a follow up to that, we thought we'd show you a couple of examples of how you can capture and use data within your business, to i...

A great idea will always be a great idea and it doesn’t matter who has the idea first. What matters is who does something with that great idea first. After all, it’s not a great idea until others know about it and start solving problems by using t...

The old adage “you never got fired for buying IBM” has a lot to answer for, but let’s be positive for a moment to start with.Although I’ve never used IBM, I am sure their stuff is great and it has certainly protected a lot of jobs over the years. ...

In our last blog, we dared to suggest that the customer isn't always right. Yet we survived to talk some more!During that particular post, we listed 13 steps that the developers at initforthe go through, to help customers work out exactly wha...

‘The customer is always right’. An age-old adage that I’m sure most of us have used as leverage at some point in our lives as consumers. And also may have been the diplomatic, lip biting recipient of as business owners.For many years this was cons...

We recently produced an app (built in Rails 4 with a Postgres database) for a client who wanted an app-wide, full-text search. The search had to retrieve records of different classes, rank results by relevance to the search-term, and be fast.There...

There are tens if not hundreds of languages and frameworks the developers at initforthe could use when we build our websites and web apps. So why do we choose Ruby? Ruby on Rails, or Rails as it's more commonly known, is a server-side web app...

We recently took a project over from another developer. For one reason or another, they'd chosen what's known as a NoSQL database: MongoDB. The reasons why could be endless, and when it was chosen, it might have seemed like a good idea. It turned ...

Video is the new darling of the web, and there are some lofty claims made of it too, the most notably inaccurate of which is that it provides SEO benefits. It's not the video itself that provides SEO benefit, but hosting it on YouTube (Google), an...

Here at initforthe, we’ve worked in lots of different industry sectors, not least in property. One of the things we’re paid to do is help companies to improve their processes through the use of technology.What could be done that isn’t being done?W...

When they come to us, our clients trust us to produce a solution that fits their needs -- they very rarely mind what we use to implement the site or system they've asked us to build.In addition, we provide hosting, so the client doesn't have to wo...

When planning out new websites, one of the first things we do is ask for analytics logins. We do this so we can find out what platforms existing visitors use, so we can start to get a gauge of how mobile-centric they are, and whether they use newe...

We're back with another article highlighting an important aspect of any digital project. This time, it is one that should happen before any work is actually undertaken on the project itself.A business case is fairly straight forward. It is the pri...

There is a lot of discussion happening in the industry at the moment surrounding mobile technology. Most of it seems to be centred around the iPhone, but it's important to remember the other platforms as well that haven't quite had the hype that t...

We’ve known about Akamai, who’s been long regarded as the leaders in CDN technology for some time now. As of a few weeks ago, there’s a new kid on the block.Amazon has released CloudFront On the 19th of November, Amazon released CloudFront, a...

To a developer, ‘it doesn’t work’ is an all too common dialogue between someone looking over the site - usually someone non-technical, and definitely someone who hasn’t read up on reporting bugs effectively.“The site doesn’t work.” “What do you me...

It’s maybe an unfortunate consequence of the web being so instantly accessible that the development process is often forgotten about when dealing with clients and their expectations. I’d like to put forward some suggestions and reasoning behi...

Part 3 is here on our hosting blog series, and it takes a few forms that I’ll discuss.What is virtulisation?Virtualisation is the process of taking a physical computer and dividing it up so that it thinks it has lots of computers inside it, each d...

In our second part of our hosting blog series, we’re looking at Dedicated hosting, and what it means.What does dedicated hosting mean?Simply put, dedicated hosting means having hardware dedicated to one website or one application. Nothing else sit...

There are so many ways to host your app, so we've broken that down a bit.This article is part of a series of 3 blogs, that goes into the details you need to make sure your website is hosted on hardware that makes sense.Understanding your websiteI’...

Mr, Mrs, Sir, Professor (or Prof for short). Esq., MSc, MPhil. Some of us use them, and some of us don’t. So how do you like to be addressed when someone you don’t know emails you, or writes to you, or welcomes you to their site? John, Sarah, Mrs ...