Website Design, Hosting & SEO Specialists in Portsmouth since 2004
01
The Idea
A virtual office to keep costs down to offer an easy and affordable web solution specially for the smaller and home based business.
02
Development
We were the first in the UK to offer an 'all in' website design, management and hosting package for a nominal monthly fee in 2004.
03
Launch
We have been operating since 2004, growing with our clients and adapting to the ever developing and changing technology.
Virtual Office
As well as to keep costs down, being able to take our office to our clients with the ability to work from, and for anyone, anywhere in the world was another of our goals. To us this was the true meaning of an online business. This meant getting rid of the need to send and receive paper, which we wanted to do anyway for environmental reasons, and adopting the use of internet telephony (VOIP) instead of the traditional landline.
Paperless Office
A virtual office should not have any need to use paper at all, communicating electronically was (still is!) the point of the internet after all! There was no longer any need to be cutting down trees to communicate, but back in 2004 being paperless was still a new concept that would take many years to be widely accepted.
We started our conversion to paperless in 2005 by sending all communication to our clients by email instead of post, and asking them to make payments online instead of by cheque. By 2012 most of our clients had converted, with just a few exceptions each year still sending payment by cheque but… in response to our email, so we were half way there.
In 2019 we received our last paper payment. Online transactions are now the norm and our clients no longer expect from us, or send us, anything in paper format. Until a few years ago HMRC, Companies House, local government offices and banks were the only other organisations still sending us paper! These days pretty much everywhere offers you the choice to receive paper or emails for their communication with you. So we think, now that the big organistaions have caught up, it is safe to say…
...we are really now 100% paperless.
VOIP
In 2004 even mobile phones were still in their infancy with the transition to smartphones yet to take place, but finding an affordable online telephone solution was, surprisingly, not that difficult.
Skype, which was also in its infancy having been released in 2003, quickly became an essential tool for us. Beginning with a special handset plugged in to a PC, until 2007 when Apple (TM) gave us the iPhone and the ability to connect to and surf the internet on the go.
This put us another step closer to our goal, so thank you Steve Jobs! We have many obvious reasons to be thanking Time Berners-Lee and Bill Gates too, for without them we would not have even started but we digress…
When Skype introduced online local numbers that would ring on a smartphone APP our conversion to VOIP was complete. By 2012 we had stopped using a traditional landline for voice communication with our clients.
The savings and benefits for having done that are huge.
Rebranding
We began life in 2004 with the name Starflash and rebranded in 2006 to register Webmadness as a Limited company. We felt, at the time, that Webmadness better represented the true chaotic nature of the internet and the speed at which it was developing and changing, and this still rings true today!
Work Ethics
Our Team
