But finally we have our beautiful new website! Here’s how we did it.
At the end of last year M-Sparc in Gaerwen launched their Skills Academy scheme to place people in North Wales looking for work in digital and technology sectors in local businesses who could give them an opportunity to practice and hone their skills. 3X Software Ltd were lucky to be able to take 2 skills academy applicants: Graham Scott-Taylor and Sarah Boyle who could work on our graphic design and marketing respectively. Here was the chance for us to have some dedicated staff working on our website with a fresh outside perspective!
Graham completed a course in Graphic Design at Manchester Metropolitan University and has run his own business in the UK and the USA since 1996, having lived in the US for over 14 years. His areas of expertise are graphic design and professional photography as well as logo design and website development.
After being put in touch with 3X by the Skills Academy Graham has been working using his graphic design skills and experience to refresh both the logo and branding for the business in order to present a clear image of what the company does.
Sarah is a self-taught digital marketer who started out experimenting with marketing and copywriting in her own businesses. After deciding she wanted to pursue a career in digital marketing she applied for the skills academy so she could gain some industry experience and was placed with us at 3X Software.
Sarah has been able to get to grips with all the technological jargon we use and has helped us make sure that we’re communicating effectively with our potential clients in a way that they understand. As well as ensuring our website content is all relevant and concise she’s been helping us get to grips with our digital marketing strategy.
While Graham worked on the look and feel, Sarah tackled the content. Essentially there were three main tasks that needed to be tackled in order to achieve our vision of a simpler sleeker website that can help us to attract new clients and demonstrate our expertise.
As our company was founded in 1984 and our website was long due a refresh there was a lot of content that wasn’t applicable any more.
The brief for Graham was to streamline the existing recognisable 3X logo, cleaning it up and removing anything that was added from the company merger with Karova.
Before deciding on the final version Graham decided to develop a few completely new versions to test out. Most were a clear departure from the existing style but in the end the 3X team decided they wanted a subtle change which led him back to the original. The golden rule of logo design; clients don’t know what they want but they always know what they don’t want.
So Graham got to work improving the existing design in both colour and styling to give it a more modern sleek look. He experimented with variants on the logo with dots and without and ultimately settled on a simple blue with white outline complemented by red in the website theme a subtle but definite improvement.
Although we’re under one business we actually have a lot of expertise in different areas so we previously had 4 different websites for our different services and offerings. Our main 3xsoftware.co.uk dedicated to our general expertise in software development, 3xsw which focussed on our IBM RPG skills, a sub-domain for our plugins and a dedicated Postcodes4U website for our address lookup service.
It made sense to keep Postcodes4U and our e-commerce plugin sites separate but the other 2 could easily be combined into one central website that showed all of our software development expertise in one place demonstrating the breadth of our skills.
Graham got to work redesigning the website using WordPress and Divi with our new logo and theme while Sarah and Karen our director got to work on the content and structure. It was also a chance to make sure our website was also optimised for mobile sites.
A lot of the content on our websites needed refining, editing or throwing away! Our website definitely collected a lot of extra content that we weren’t using anymore in the 10 years we’ve been attempting our website refresh. Sarah went through the content with a fine toothed comb and got to work understanding and translating all the techie jargon us software developers are so used to using!
The result is a clear structure that describes our services in a way that’s easy to understand. Although we’re able to undertake complex software development tasks our clients need to be able to understand what we can help them with.
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It might feel like finding the resources and talent to use this platform is impossible and there’s little new talent coming through that can specialise in this area. However there are a number of experience companies out there still working within this industry providing specialist support like ourselves.
A lot pf people think the platform only supports RPG & Cobol, however this isn’t the case. In addition to those languages programs can be written in Java, PHP, C, C++, Python, Perl, REXX, Pascal, Smalltalk, SQL, Basic, Fortran, Ruby, Javascript and PL/1. You can also run a number of platforms on it – Linux, AIX and Windows environments can all be running on it at the same time.
The following technologies can also be run on the platform – a native HTTP server, Apache, Tomcat and others, meaning it’s a server for web pages and web development. CSS, HTML and Javascript can be used for web pages too.
Why spend money to move away from something to do the same job? Instead you can spend that budget on increasing your market share.
Find out more about how we can help you with your IBM Power I platform or contact us to have a no-obligation chat with our knowledgeable team.
]]>Businesses are starting to think about resources for the future. If you are getting concerned about your RPG resources contact us for a quick chat and we will see what we can help you with. You can also read more about how we can help you with your RPG needs.
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Is it to save costs, or help your company keep up with innovation? Are your employees demanding more mobility, or do you need to access greater compute resources?
You need to spell out clear and specific goals and ROI for migrating your application.
Things to consider:
Does your legacy app continue to provide strategic value to your company? The old adage springs to mind, if it’s not broken don’t fix it. Will a replacement continue to provide value for the foreseeable future or will it nee d to be replaced again in 5-10 yrs?
Evaluate your legacy application to determine if it contains critical data that may be too sensitive to move. You also need to understand how moving and storing critical data during a migration will impact your business. Assess the security threats of migrating an application and run through the various scenarios that may result from a data breach. If the security implications far outweigh the benefits of a move, you’ll know that the application is too sensitive to move especially to a cloud-based solution
Let’s get straight to the point: will the application perform better in the new solution? In some industries, such as insurance and banking, the applications were developed decades ago and they are processing huge volumes of data and some solutions won’t be able to handle the amount of data you need to process. A simple “lift and shift” of data from one system to another does not guarantee higher performance.
Take a look at all the existing components of your application, as well as any dependencies it has with other systems. Do you even know what they all are? How will migration impact these dependencies?
Consider how your other applications integrate and the complexity of each integration. Can the systems continue to work together, or will performance be compromised? What extra measures will you need to take to successfully integrate other systems with your new proposed application. Are they cost-effective for your business?
Are there industry regulations you must comply with that will prevent you from moving the application.
Heavily regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and government must comply with regulations regarding data security, privacy, and confidentiality that require specially managed security and storage.
We have many years of experience with legacy systems and making them fit for purpose for a range of businesses. Find out how we can help or get in contact to discuss your maintenance and upgrade needs for your legacy system to ensure your business is running effectively.
]]>Many people will look at the title of this article and think to themselves ‘the AS/400 doesn’t exist anymore’. Others will look at it and think ‘hey, the forward slash between AS and 400 is missing’. All of them will be right of course. But very few of them will realize an ‘AS400’ is not ‘the AS/400’. A simple analogy in plain English covering over 3 decades worth of IBM’s adventures in the world of midrange computer systems can explain why.
The article talks about regardless of the fact that RPG is 60 years young the language is still so relevant in today’s computer industry. There have been many languages come and go but it looks like RPG is here to stay. Its as relevant today as it was when it was introduced back in 1959 on the IBM 1401. You can still find programs running today that were written over 40 years ago. There aren’t many programming languages that can boast that.
At 3X Software we have always loved this language and are proud to have worked with it for nearly 35 years ourselves. I think the thing that makes it so remarkable is the backwards compatibility it is truly amazing.
You can read the full article here and check out how we can help you with your RPG needs.
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I disagree replacement solutions end up costing 2-3 times what the original budget was and they still don’t meet the needs of the business.
It is considered that legacy applications are more difficult to maintain and they also require much of the IT department’s attention. This is true to a degree but maintaining a solution can be cheaper than a replacement and you know what it does and how it works. The beauty of the IBM midrange platform is that is you can then take the best bits and integrate with new technologies to take advantage of innovation.
It is considered that while legacy and custom while custom-built solutions sound nice on the surface, this approach comes with multiple problems. Due to limitations found within your legacy applications themselves, certain features cannot possibly be added to some legacy apps. Building modern features into an old foundation isn’t even an option for some companies. This ISN’T the case for IBM Midrange solutions. This platform is happy to run legacy applications that could be 20 yrs old alongside the latest technology without any hiccups.
It is thought that since most companies don’t have the skills or the time to customize their legacy applications, it often requires outside consultants…which drives the cost up. This is wrong you will find that the developers skilled in RPG are competitively priced and have years of business expertise that the newly skilled technicians can only dream to have. Even if the cost seems a little high their business expertise can save thousands in the long run.
This isn’t true with the IBM midrange platform you can have the best of both worlds.
People don’t like change. When you replace legacy systems — don’t underestimate resistance. Replacing a legacy system asks a lot of impacted business units and users. Even a successful legacy replacement project can be highly unpopular.
]]>You know your system so you know what you need to do!
I am guessing your problem is probably due to lack of resources to work on your legacy applications. Your IT team probably all want to work on the new stuff, they don’t want to be tied down to the legacy “old fashion system”. The new technology is where all the exciting work is but it’s the legacy system that has got your business where it is now, its trusted and its reliable and has probably served you business for 20 years or more.
There are companies out there like us who can build value added add-ons to your solution to meet these requirements. By doing this It’s less risk to your business and a short-term cost.
]]>You may be able to breathe new life into older applications. In some cases, your business can modernise an application’s internal design while retaining its functional equivalency. Application code refactoring allows an application to be modified so that it can interface more effectively with other systems based on modern technologies.
If your system does the job you want it for but you are being pressured to introduce something more modern then you can give your existing applications a new look. There are screen-scraping and web facing tools available to give your users a modern-looking application, and lets you integrate some modern features into the scraped application. Since it doesn’t replace the old application, screen-scraping is relatively quick. This approach scrapes the information off of your legacy applications, and displays it as a graphical, browser-based interface. It makes old applications look new, without actually replacing the application.
Another option is to extend your system. This approach involves gradually extending and surrounding your legacy applications with modern web applications. The end result: truly modern applications that still integrate with your existing business logic and rules.
This combines the best of both worlds. You create a modern web application (built on modern architecture) that integrates with your existing business rules and logic. It lets you call the same code as you were calling with the legacy application, but on modern architecture. This approach lets you slowly extend and surround your legacy applications with modern web apps, eventually replacing them altogether.
In my opinion, this is easily the best option. It lets you breathe new life into existing applications that the business has already invested in while slowly moving towards your goal of new, modern apps. It lets you work at your own pace, completely eliminating the risk of replacing your legacy apps altogether.
We have many years of experience supporting clients with their legacy systems. Get in touch to find out how we can hep you modernise your legacy system.
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