Elite Internet Consultants, Trainers and Programmers in Yorkshire?

Because so many of our clients are international companies with bases in the City of London and South East England, we are frequently asked the question: "If you are that good, why are you based in the Leeds/Bradford area?".

The implication, that anything of quality eventually graduates to London, typically reveals a questioner who is either a foreigner, a Londoner, or from one of those sleepy provincial towns whose cultural life makes London look like a cosmopolitan metropolis, i.e. someone who can only identify one international city within the UK.

Whilst we find such misconceptions irritating, we can’t ignore them, so here are some of our favourite answers to the question:

1. Quality of Life - no member of our staff lives more than 10 minutes away from:
   • Open countryside:
     • Our main office is close to Bradford city centre. We are surrounded by moors, open countryside, great walks and the kind of places that others travel long distances just to experience on holidays.
   • International quality entertainment
   • International quality shops and markets
   • International quality cultural life
   • Decent schools
   • etc, etc, etc.
2. Delivering Internet and Web Services rarely requires geographical proximity — the vast majority of our consultancy work in London is done better via remote access (secure shell) from our fully equipped offices than it could be in ad hoc onsite facilities.
3. Technical Skills: — the neighbourhood (West Yorkshire) probably has the largest concentration of open-standards computing skills in Europe.
4. Cost of Living: — IT professionals up here have 40% more disposable income than their London counterparts.
5. Low Labour costs: — because a high standard of living doesn't require high salaries.
6. Transport and Communications: — Leeds and Bradford sit slap-bang in the middle of the country, on top of the junction between the UK's main North-South and East-West communication routes (A1, M1, M62, Cross-Pennine and East Coast Mainlines). Many of our southern-based colleagues are, for example, unaware of the fact that Leeds is England's second biggest financial centre and that its wealth was founded on finance, commerce and trade rather than merely ’dark satanic mills’. Our offices in Little Germany in Bradford were constructed with no expense spared by wealthy wool merchants when Bradford was the wool capital of the world and we take such wonderful architecture almost for granted. Oh, and you can't beat the curries either (after a pint or two in arguably THE best pub in Britain, The Fighting Cock).