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Big Attic House

Since February 2000.

Background

BigAtticHouse focuses on building solutions based on the problems that plague your business.

Ann, Michael, Basil and Mia Johnson moved to the sleepy little town of Chenoa, IL in 1999. The house, a large victorian that has more-or-less been there for about 160 years, had the first walk-in attic seen by ever Basil (at the time age 3). Used to living in an apartment, he was amazed by the space and being able to play in his own back yard. During the fix-up phase, he asked "Can we go play at the big attic house?", and the name stuck. Even before they started the business, they would answer the phone "BigAtticHouse." You'll see the Big Attic House lurking behind the tulip tree in the photo at the right.

The Big Attic House



In February 2000, Ann and Michael decided that they'd had enough of the "corporate-monkey" lifestyle, and decided to carve their own future. The ups and downs of business ownership are nothing compared to a supportive spouse. The BigAtticHouse model is based on removing the pain from daily business, and providing the greatest long term value

The BigAtticHouse Model:

  • "Find the Repetition" (Death by a thousand papercuts) Every user has some repetative task that they don't even realize they waste time doing each day. Re-keying data, print-and-type, and cut-and-paste form letters are all good examples where your business is bleeding to death by nickles and dimes. Frequently these are necessary processes that were acceptable losses when you have 10 customers, but overwhelming when you have 100.
  • "Find the Pain" Your users have to force themselves to adapt to your current software. We'll hear "dammit!" from our more vocal customers, or a resigned "It's ok, I'm used to it" from others. Here is where software can be created to ease your employee's workday, and allow them to feel like they can accomplish their jobs - instead of fighting the machines.
  • "Iterative development" Why spend six months building the wrong solution? We can get a simple piece of software to fix one single problem, and then build on it from there. In many cases, you can start seeing a difference in just a few weeks.

Our Core

  • Michael Johnson Senior developer, Michael has been coding since 1996. His focus has primarily been Internet technologies. Starting with building custom socket clients and servers, he's built systems in C, Delphi, Visual Basic, Visual C++, C#, Active Server Pages (ASP), and PHP. Systems experience has ranged from various *Nix and linux systems to the range of Windows desktop and server machines.
  • Ann Johnson Customer Relations, Records and Bookkeeping, Ann also provides a practiced eye in user interface designs. Ann has also assisted in customer interviews where having a programmer performing the interview might affect the design.
  • Our Developers BigAtticHouse has a wonderful group of over 12 developers available for your projects, for contracts onsite - or offsite development. We've been nurturing this network since early 2001 to provide our customers with uparallelled service.