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The Sheffield Apprenticeships app is the quickest way to find apprenticeship vacancies in Sheffield. You scroll through a list, click on a vacancy and then if you’re still interested, go directly to the Gov.uk Find An Apprenticeship website and apply. The app does exactly what Apple recommend in their app developer guidelines and solves a problem; young people can see at a glance the apprenticeship opportunities in Sheffield.

What makes a good landing page for an online service or application? I decided to look at the home pages of three successful online services and pick out the things that seem to represent good practice.

Duolingo is an app (and website) for learning languages. It’s popular, easy to use and can be a source of ideas for any organisation that is thinking about creating an online learning platform and putting training online.

Learning in Duolingo is personalised - the app delivers small chunks of language training that are carefully matched to a learner’s current level of understanding. Lessons are short and there are a lot of quick tests/questions. A learner in Duolingo gets regular feedback and you don’t unlock the higher levels until you’ve cracked the earlier lessons.

You don’t need a degree in computer science to become a software developer. You just need a plan, some effort and an aptitude for solving problems. The demand for software developers is as high as ever and good developers are in short supply - that means great salaries and plenty of vacancies. You can make the move if you really want to.

Our Sheffield Apprenticeship Twitter account (@SheffApprentice) uses the Twitter API to automatically Tweet out information about apprenticeship vacancies in Sheffield. The Tweets are scheduled - 6 individual apprenticeship vacancy Tweets and two summary Tweets every day.

Using the Twitter API is straightforward. You create your Twitter account, sign-up on the Twitter developer portal and then create your Twitter app. Creating the Twitter app generates your authentication tokens. That whole process takes just a few minutes.

The learning management system market is hard to navigate. There are hundreds of different systems and it’s difficult to make a choice when so many have similar functionality.

It must be easier to find a learning management system/VLE for a school. Schools are a niche and most will want something that has less rather than more functionality - ease of use will be a key school requirement.

I wondered a bit more about freemium pricing models after writing the last post. Freemium is where part of your software as a service is offered for free. Users sign up, they use the application for free but then have to pay for more premium features.

Hubstaff looks fairly typical. They have a free first tier. You sign up, use the free service and then upgrade to one of the paid-for tiers.

Scalable pricing is important because it’s a way of getting more revenue from bigger customers while at the same time you still keep your smaller customers. There can be more profit in the revenue from the customers who pay more, particularly if the cost of customer acquisition is the same for all customers.

There is an EFSA API (application programming interface) that allows you to search live apprenticeship vacancies (in England) and then look at the details of an individual vacancy.

The API is easy to use and there’s good supporting documentation - developing a simple location based search interface is relatively straightforward.

A lot of small businesses start out with MS Excel. They are run on spreadsheets - information about customers, products, quotes and sales spread across multiple workbooks. Valuable data is inconsistent, almost impossible to query and often never backed up.

Sooner or later someone decides to look for a new, more scalable solution. They want a cloud based system that:

• Can be configured or tailored to fit the business.

• Is safe - there’s no risk that it’s going to disappear (with the data).

• Has low ongoing support and hosting costs.

• Is a good long term investment. A platform for future development as the business continues to grow.