WWWalker's Clients Portfolio

    

See also Portal Details | Types of Jobs | Marketing | Highlights of Business Projects Timeline | Customers by Industry | Countries and States

Dwight Walker, our director, also has visited many states in Australia as well as countries in South-East Asia and Pacific in the 1980s before WWWalker was founded.

Types of Jobs

We do portals, network support, technical writing and publishing work such as indexing and editing and ebook publishing, library consulting and cataloguing, software, mobile apps and music lessons for small to medium businesses, professional groups, government agencies or individuals that do not have the staff and don't want to hire someone full-time and outsource to us to do the job online or with some visits to the site.

We used to write, deliver and publish Web indexing and Linux online training to USA, UK, Canada and Australia but closed that area in 1998 due to copyright infringements of our material undermining our incentive for developing this business. There was no way to stop people buying and distributing our materials for free which gave us no reason to continue. See 'research' for more information.

Many Web development jobs we are asked to do are disaster jobs - jobs that have stuffed up big time and need someone to bail them out. If a person has been through say 4 other developers or been working on a project for 4 years, this is a sign this is a problem job. Also attempts to clone at a much lower price another product is a sign of major underquoting and cost problems ahead. Endless putting off of doing a proper specification is also a sign of major costs head. We are moving away from such risky work in 2008 onwards to save our business losses but it has meant very slow growth as momentum was lost trying to save money. Music has given us a break and kept the wheels turning.

In Orange NSW where we were based from 2005-2007 and 2009 onwards and to a lesser degree in Brisbane from 2008 most jobs are for infrastructure - setting up broadband and networks - and occasionally Websites. It is too primitive in the bush and most people are not even up to scratch with a good internet or mobile connection. Large parts of the outskirts of Brisbane have inadequate internet speed or wireless internet coverage but there is little chance for us to use our Orange experience with wireless internet in Brisbane due to lack of capital.

Canberra is much more sophisticated and smaller so is a good target for our business to do Websites or networking from 2009 till 2013.

Queensland Government launched open data policy in September 2012 to which we have developed transport mobile application using Translink feed in 2013 and salt table helper mobile application using Dept of Natural Resources and Mines groundwater open data in 2014.

IT business has slowed down tremendously since I moved to Brisbane area in 2013 but music teaching has kicked in since 2016.

Customer Base

In 2001 I built several Web portals for small businesses in Western Sydney, NSW, Australia using Linux and Windows languages and database servers. One of these was for a tradesman customer who was much better than white collar businesses as he knew what he wanted and the job stayed on target and I was paid on time and adequately. I made less but lost less so won! The white collar person wanted more than he could afford and was a huge risk to my business so I had to write off extravagance on his part to stay in business.

As of 2004 onwards, our customers have all been Australian businesses and professional societies but in the early days around 1998 we did a lot of business with international professional societies, small businesses, professionals, government agencies, manufacturers, community groups and sometimes consumers in USA, Canada and UK.

That has all ended now due to intense competition and risk since the dot com crash which squashed our industry and dropped prices to difficult levels. We have moved out of community work as it is too risky. We much prefer dealing with businesses and professional societies than consumers as consumers cost too much to service and make us little profit or repeat business and often make a big loss.

In 2007, we did a little exporting to Australians in Indonesia. To grow overseas work, we use cloud infrastructure and upgrade our capabilities to handle the higher demands of overseas companies. In 2010, the Indonesian business had closed due to the Global Financial Crisis.

Since 2005, Australian migrants form a large part of our customer base which has its good and bad points - more energy but more thrifty and risky.

Since 2013, we have used Queensland and NSW open data to create transport, groundwater and robotics mobile apps thus entering the world of big data and data mining to achieve valuable insights into managing agriculture, cultural events and elderly health.

Marketing

The question everyone asks me is how I get business. It is by word of mouth, White Pages, classified directories and Google. I rarely get business by mainstream marketing - I am a niche player, not a huge mainstream company - a boutique IT service provider.

White Pages listing for my business at my Brisbane registered office led to a customer in Sumner Park QLD in February 2010.

We are not big but what we do we do really well and can beat bigger companies due to much better service - we punch above our weight because we are savvy.

Those that expect us to do everything for them may be sadly disappointed as we are small and cannot pump endless resources into them for a low return on investment like a big company can with their 1000s of customers. We have to be selective and make sure we can do the job, not bust ourselves in the process and make some money out of the deal.

We definitely cannot waste endless money on a customer and get away with it. We have to ditch dead-end jobs. Running a microbusiness is a very disciplined, tight process. We seem to go through a series of new products or services that then die not long after as people lose interest. Internet work is very fickle, with customers chasing each new fad and keeping us on our toes.

Advertising in the paper or Yellow Pages gets me no business to speak of, just tyre-kickers. People are too distrusting of new players. I have to win people's trust by contacting them for a period e.g. emails, phone calls and visits, so it takes months to get a new customer. I get a very low hit rate as most people find I speak too much jargon and go find someone else who can deal with lay people.

Despite this and constant battles with people trying to rip me off, I have survived but have had to compromise sometimes and dig in for the long haul. We are much more successful with more savvy, trustworthy customers of which I rarely find any.

Since 2016, all customers come via our music teacher ad. Web design online ads in Yellow Pages and Pocket Books got no jobs.

Highlights of Business Projects Timeline

Customers by Industry

We work with small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in the following industries:

NB: Any sites without a link have been redeveloped by another developer or gone bust or we don't want to give that information away.

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