Well House Consultants Training and Hotel - 2008 news
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-01-01 15:29:59 - Graham EllisA Happy New Year everyone!
2007 was a busy year for us - our busiest yet - with our public courses, private courses at Well House Manor and on site private courses all thriving - and we start the new year with a busy schedule with a few places available on most courses. Our business hotel enjoyed an excellent first year too, with many returning guests and "booking by recommendation" becoming something of the norm.
So I'm not messing with a winning formula this New Year's day with any big announcements for 2008. But I would like to tell you of a few refinements and updates which will help us move towards results - for our customers as well as ourselves - that are as good (or even better) in 2008 than they were in 2007.
• Computer Equipment
We have a new fleet of laptops that will be available for delegates to use on ALL of our courses - public and private - in the UK and Western Europe. We're finding that an increasing proportion (but not the majority) of our delegates prefer to use their own laptops in place of, or in addition to ours, and they'll continue to be welcome to do so throughout 2008 - connecting in to our networks and making use of our servers and internet connection as required.
• Software
Delegate's laptops are running Windows Vista, with Cygwin installed to provide a Linux look and feel. For users who prefer to work in a full Linux / Unix environment, they're dual boot ... with a choice of Novell SuSE, Red Hat Fedora or Ubuntu distributions. We also have Apple laptops running Mac OS X.
The subjects we teach - especially the programming languages - don't actually change all that quickly. You wouldn't want them to - after all, you want to safeguard your code development, don't you? So we have loaded our systems with the latest generally available releases, with significant older versions also to hand where they are still in common use. Major new generally available releases will be loaded through the year, but we do not track minor releases where they make little difference to the subject being taught.
• Course Subjects
We have run Java courses for many years, but with the wide variety of other providers available for public courses in this field, and our own setup being designed to handle niche subjects, we have been running private courses only on Java for the last year or two. However, many of our customers want to return to us to learn Java and - taking the most appropriate of our modules - we are introducing the following two public courses:
Java Bootcamp - An intesnse 4 day introduction to programming in Java.
Java Programming for the web - 5 days covering the "bootcamp" schedule plus databases, servlets and JSP
Java-related (for staff who will be deploying Java applications written by others) we continue to offer Deploying Apache httpd and Tomcat which is a two day course, and a five day course for users running Tomcat on Unix or Linux systems and new to those operating systems too - "Deploying Java applications on Linux and Unix".
But Java is just a very small part of our business! Our "bread and butter" programming courses are in Perl, PHP, Tcl/Tk and Python. Outside the programming area, our other courses include Linux and Web server topics and the MySQL database. To complete the list, less frequent courses are offered on C anc C++ and on Ruby
• How the courses run
We continue to run courses in three ways - public courses at our training centre (schedule), private courses at our centre (great for groups of 3 to 8 trainees) and on site which is ideal for a larger group of up to about 12.
We still write and maintain all of our material (and that's NOT about to change) and the course is presented by one of the people instrumental in that writing and maintenance - and who is a full time employee (and that's not about to change EITHER!) Group sizes on our public courses are limited to 8 delegates to ensure that everyone has plenty of time for questions, and more than enough access to the tutor if they need extra help. That's something else that won't be changing!
Delegates are welcome to attend our public courses on a residential or non residential basis. As most delegates choose to stay with us (and a lot of the others say "I wish I had known / how good your rooms are"), we are now listing the public course prices showing residential first ... it adds £60.00 per night for bed, breakfast, a room to what has been described as 4 star quality, unlimited soft drinks and coffee, unlimited internet access ... which we feel is a real bargain. And it means that you can continue practicals in the evening if you wish, socialize with other delegates, and save yourself the need to commute to our training centre.
On private courses on site, all you need to provide is a room and the students, and we'll do the rest - equipment (UK / Europe only) , notes, projector, tutor all arriving about an hour before the course starts on the first morning.
• Hotel
Well House Manor has become a popular overnight stop for visitors to Melksham coming to meetings as local businesses in the area. Our high quality rooms, bundled breakfast, internet access, etc, price us out of the "cheap bed for the night" market - but then that's not a market we ever intended to service, and before the lull over Christmas we were getting full on at least a weekly basis.
"Making business a pleasure" is our motto on the business hotel side, to which I might add "quiet quality". No major announcements here, but do note that if you want an early breakfast or a lift to or from the local station, or advise on what's what locally, we're happy to oblige.
• Events
At Well House Manor, we let our training and meeting rooms out to other companies and organisations - from training sessions, to interviews, through committee meetings to customer presentation sessions. We've been surprised as the widely differing range of uses our facilities have been put to - with groups sizes from 2 to 50! Please get in touch to let us know about your requirements and we can advise accordingly.
• Prices
We review our prices, annually, on 1st January. But they don't inevitably go up year on year, and this New Year's day (2008 in case anyone find an archived copy in years to come) I'm delighted to announce that we've held all of our prices, save for the expenses we charge when running a private on site course - these particular items are priced to reflect costs such as fuel and the cost of us staying away, both of which have risen sharply.
So that means:
Hotel rooms - double occupancy £95.00, single occupancy £80.00
These are the rates per night, including breakfast, internet access and VAT.
1 day course - £410.00 (residential), £350.00 (day delegate)
2 day course - £720.00 (residential), £600.00 (day delegate)
3 day course - £1030.00 (residential), £850.00 (day delegate)
4 day course - £1340.00 (residential), £1100.00 (day delegate)
5 day course - £1650.00 (residential), £1350.00 (day delegate)
A second and subsequent delegate booked on the same course (running same dates, same purchase order) attracts a discount of £100.00. These course prices do NOT include VAT.