I read this interesting article by John Naughton yesterday in the Observer about the impact of handheld devices on Internet usage, versus the more traditional way of using the web via a browser.

It got me thinking about how that might impact what we do at miggle. Ever since we started development, in 2007, we’ve been ensuring sites we build for clients provide a presentable experience on mobile browsers. That’s a long way though from being able to claim we deliver usable mobile solutions. We don’t. Why? Because clients have not asked us to – and up to now we’ve not seen the value of pushing them as a ‘must have’ when we’ve been making that trade off between ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’ as part of the work we do on defining what a client gets for their budget.

Were we to do this though, that would only scratch the surface. Building a site that renders well on a mobile web browser is one thing – but will that in itself work for users of handheld devices?

With the rise of the availability of, and usage of apps – each of which provides a tailored point of access to data on the Internet, we’re more likely to see the overall percentage of browser based web use of the Internet fall in share – even though figures for both web access and app access to the Internet are growing rapidly.

For clients then, this means, I think, that their mobile strategy needs to be one of distribution – and that this distribution is increasingly about exposure on social networks, which more and more are used by people on the move, with engagement in these networks being built by users declaring where they are and what they are doing. And this is usage which is driven by Apps.

In the face of that, a client’s website sure needs to look good in a mobile browser – but only because it’s an end point. The focus therefore needs to be on being found in the first place. As the web becomes more handheld, thus it will become more social, more app based – and in the medium term at least, available only, in large part, at the behest of the ultimate publisher – currently Apple. The importance of the app in this regard will only rise.

I’ll close on some stats. A year ago, a client of ours – who are definitely running a business on which their location is the key driver in anyone using their service – had handheld usage of their site account for 1.14%. A year on, it’s 4.98%. So, it’s more than quadrupled. By comparison, usage of that same client’s site by users of Microsoft IE6 is 7.24%. Which means mobile web usage in this instance, something everyone raves about. is just 68% of usage of a browser everyone is trying to quietly forget. (Which does make sense – IE6 is the past – but of course no designer should be taking a call on dismissing 7.24% of a businesses addressable audience….)

What I don’t know is what level of engagement users are having with that business through Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare for example. If I did – that 4.98% would be higher for sure because it’d be clearer on how to drive it.  That’s not a level of ignorance I, or my clients, can afford to have for long and the way in which it develops will have a fundamental effect on how miggle moves forward as a business.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

About a year ago I wrote a post advising that people planning a web site should resist the urge to buy hosting and email services at the point they buy their domain name.  Why?  Because those kind of decisions are often best made after you’ve worked with your web developers to define what kind of online services you required.

But there’s also another watchout I think is worth adding and that’s about ownership of your actual domain name.  If someone has brought a domain name on your behalf you should check that you or your company are named as the registrant.  You can find this out by going to a site like www.who.is and seeing if you are listed by typing in your domain name.  It doesn’t matter so much if you don’t manage the administration of your domain, but if you’re not listed as the registrant, then should you ever want to try and move management of that domain elsewhere you’re starting at a disadvantage.

I’m not going to offer any advice here as to the legal position of being/not being the registrant of a certain domain name, so would welcome any comments on that, but I know from experience when we’ve done redesigns for businesses and tried to move administration of a domain over to miggle so we can manage the DNS, it’s been a bigger headache when the actual registrant is not the business owner.  Especially as, often, the registrant is the web designer from whom the business is planning to move management of the site away from.

I can’t think of any good reason as to why your web developer would be registrant of your domain.  So, if you find that to be the case, ask them to change it.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

It’s been a while since we’ve been able to make any significant updates to our website, as we’ve been really busy with some exciting projects for clients, so here’s a round up of the latest miggle news.

A new site for Fitness First for culturebank

First up has been a project we’ve delivered for culturebank, a business I’m involved with along side miggle.  Working to objectives and creative direction provided by the rest of the culturebank team we’ve built out a solution for their latest client Fitness First.  Based on WordPress, with a high level of bespoke customisation layered on top, this site lets employees of their Australian business upload work related success stories and experience supported with videos and photos.  Uploaded videos are encoded on the fly into a Flash player format and photos are rendered into galleries.  Stories that relate to specific job functions appear on pages which additionally pull data in real-time from a feed on Fitness First’s recruitment site.

A Product Plan for Collections Trust

Our friends at Talk Web Solutions have recently launched the new Collections Link website for the Collections Trust (CT).   Our involvement here was to work with CT to build out the initial product requirements which delivered on CT’s core objective of being able to host a site which allowed best practice in collections management to be owned by the people who manage our nation’s libraries, museums, collections and archives.  More and more clients are asking us to help scope their projects before they commit to build.  It’s a sensible strategy we think.

A new web site using Mod-X

We built out a new site for local Brighton business Complete Property Services.  Having built a number of sites for small businesses in the last year in our recently launched miggleCMS, we wanted to roll out something which was built in a different content management system to extend the range of solutions we can offer to clients.  At the time of building Complete’s website, miggleCMS wasn’t as an open source solution and for good business continuity planning (BCP) the client here specifically wanted something that was.  We felt given the brief and the design objectives Mod X was the ideal solution for this.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

At miggle we have recently started a project using WordPress. The client wanted their users to be able to make posts from the front-end without needing WordPress logins. After many searches we found TDO Mini Forms (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tdo-mini-forms/). A very highly customizable plugin – perfect as a starting point for our goal.

TDO Mini Forms has two main options:

• Form Creator – Where you setup your form fields.
• Form Hacker – Where you have more control to customize the form fields.

One function the client wanted was a drop down list where users could select their location.

When setting up the drop down list through the form creator, it only allows you to include X amount of categories by putting their IDs. This was good to start with but what happens if we want to add more categories? We would need to update the form every time, adding in the new category ID.

This was not ideal for us – We needed the locations drop down list to be dynamic. Over to the TDO Mini form hacker!

With PHP and WordPress’s wp_dropdown_categories() function we can pull in the categories dynamically.

Quick Tip:

Here is the updated code to pull in categories from a category parent.

<p><select name=’location' class='tdomf_location' size='1'>
<option value="1"<?php if( (is_array($defcat) && in_array(1, $defcat)) || ( 1 == $defcat ) ) { echo ' selected="selected" '; } ?>>Please Select</option>

<?php
/*
Setup our dropdown arguments.
The arguments allow us to get the child elements of our parent (location)
With a depth of 1 e.g. if we had parent > child > grandchild it would only get our child level.
*/

$args = array(
'echo' => 0,
'hide_empty' => 0,
'child_of' => 5,
'orderby' => 'name',
'style' => 'none',
'hierarchical' => 1,
'depth'  => 1
);
// Create the drop down list
$select = wp_dropdown_categories( $args );
// Only pull out the <option.....></option> tag (remove <select…></select>)
$select = strip_tags($select, "<option>");
// Display results on the screen
echo $select;
?>
</select>

By using this method our client can continue to add or delete categories allowing the drop down list to dynamically update without needing to update the TDO Mini form’s creator as well.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

You know what it is you want to do online.

You’ve got your market sussed, done your research and you know who your competitors are.  A key part of that process is planning your web design and development project in detail. No one would build a house from scratch without consulting an architect and a surveyor, but too many people will commission the build of websites without defining a plan, largely because they see skipping this stage as a cost saving. It rarely is.

The value of having a Product Requirements Document (PRD) - get like for like quotes!

Planning your website product requirements is something you do after you’ve defined your brief, or your market objectives but before you start the build.  Given all the things you want to achieve with your website, the product requirements document – or PRD  – describes what product features are required to deliver on those objectives.  This document can then serve as a basis from which potential suppliers can quote – returning to you a proposal which details what technology, process and solutions they’ll go through to deliver on those product requirements, which in turn deliver on your wider business aims.  You should then, when reviewing supplier proposals, be able to compare like with like – knowing they’ve responded to the request for the product you want built, as opposed to the product they want to build for you!

Different suppliers will suggest different, innovative ways of delivering on the PRD.  Some might propose solutions you’ve not thought of before.  This is fine.  Just ask,  ‘Does what is on offer deliver on my product requirements and thus my objectives?’

Who writes it? And what’s in a PRD?

Some web companies might propose writing this document for you – often as a chargeable stage, maybe specifying that you should perhaps use it to get comparable quotes by which you can assess the quality of their own price and solution.  Or, in commissioning a project, you might decide to engage an external consultant who can help draw this up for you and then help in managing the acquisition of a supplier.

A good PRD should start of with a face to face meeting with the writer, who will note down your objectives, read through research and explore your market requirements.

The document they write should summarize these and then go on to describe:-

- the environment in which the project needs to be delivered (i.e. web and/or mobile),
- the scope of the deliverables (i.e. what’s required and what isn’t – as well as the time frame and budget of you have it)
- the different types of users that will use the website (i.e. customers, clients – not personas as such – these would have ideally been defined in your earlier research),
- the journeys those users will go through (i.e. buy a product, download a document),
- the features that will be required
- the standards to which the product will be built

You then review it, and when you’re happy that it describes the product that will meet your aims, you can then move on to finding the team that will build it for you. 

If we write the PRD, we don’t have to be the company that then builds your site.

The process often works best if we don’t quote for the development stage because it means we can write the most objective document possible so that your shortlist of suppliers can all quote from the same information. At the start of the planing process you can specify if you’d like us to quote for the work once the planning documentation has been created – we’ll also let you know if we’d be interested in the work, as quite often, we’ll plan projects that exceed the resources we have available, but it’s possible, using the PRD as an effective tool, that we can move you to the next stage of helping you source the best supplier.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

The Sussex Internship Programme is widely recognised as one of the most successful internship schemes in the UK, delivering valuable experience to participating interns and real benefits to the companies involved. It organises placements with a broad range of companies in Sussex.

The scheme offers grant-supported, work-based training and experience to recent graduates with placements in media, environmental, engineering and a range of other sectors.

Here at miggle.co.uk, we’re proud to be a part of this again and are looking forward to being able to work with the latest graduate talent available.  Specifically, we’re looking for an online marketing intern.

The Sussex Internship Programme is a partnership programme led by Wired Sussex and the University of Sussex. If you’re interested in the programme you can find out more from clicking on either of the links in this post.

I’m running in this coming weekend’s Brighton marathon for local kids’ charity Amaze.  Due to an injury I’m well behind on both my training and fundraising – so any sponsorship I can get is going to act as a special incentive to get me round, which is now my only realistic target!  If you think you can help, then please click here.

As a business miggle.co.uk is fully committed to using and supporting open source software wherever it can.  We believe open source solutions, when implemented effectively, offer customers and users the best possible options in terms of balancing unique requirements, with leveraged R&D, in an environment where BCP (business continuity planning) issues are largely taken care of.  It would be counter to our believe in that approach to continue to keep our CMS, miggleCMS, as a proprietary tool.  Nor would doing so be in the best interests of the BCP requirements of our clients who use it.

The world does not need another content management system (CMS).  I truly believe that.  But, like many web businesses we found ourselves in a position three years ago where it made sense for us to have our own CMS to provide a solution to small businesses, which we didn’t feel we could easily or efficiently achieve with what was available at the time, to the flexibility we wanted.  Three years on, we’ve now used miggleCMS on over 30 sites, from simple brochure ware sites, to e-commerce solutions with stock control.

No single CMS will ever fulfil the needs of all web requirements.  It’s often a case, when choosing a potential CMS, of looking at product requirements, distinguishing between ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’ and making the appropriate trade-offs if required.  Because of this, we don’t think there’s any more developments we need to make right now to miggleCMS, because to do so, in our opinion, would put us on a path where basically we would be starting to re-write Joomla.  Which is pointless.  At that point, we’d be better off just using Joomla.  But by opening miggleCMS up as an open source product, our opinion on that becomes just one opinion.  Others may look at our code and think there are areas in which it could be improved or developed on.  Maybe add an Ajax front end, maybe a deeper depth of categorisations, maybe the addition of payment provider support beyond Paypal?   Also, because pages can have modules attached to them, there’s scope for this to have additional functionality added without the need for a full re-write.  Modules could be written in the same sort of way plug-ins are for Wordpress.  By throwing this over the fence, we leave it to the open source development community to decide.

The final reason we’ve done it is because miggleCMS has been a useful tool in helping small businesses, with 5-10 pages, get decent looking sites online cost effectively.  Now that as a business we’re moving away from that market, beyond providing existing clients with better BCP options, this CMS, like so many others, acts as a code base to which you just need to BYOD – Bring your own designer!

So, if you’ve not clicked through already, take a look at miggleCMS.  We’ll do the best we can to support it and it’s development.  And we’ll always look to provide a paid for service for those who’d like help in running it or managing content within it.  We’ve taken some care and time over documenting what we’ve written, and we’ve built some tutorial videos too.  You can also take a look at the kind of sites we’ve built in it here, or on these showreels.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Miggle.co.uk are looking for a web producer with strong editorial skills and extensive experience in the online market in Ireland to work on a prestigious contract with one of its major clients.   Working for one of the world’s top web brands, your extensive knowledge of current affairs will ensure that you provide users with content covering the most important stories in Ireland and beyond.

Based in London, this a high pressure role and you’ll often be working alone monitoring multiple news feeds and covering breaking news, so it’s vital that you can work effectively on your own in a fast-paced environment.

You will also be required to improve the overall user experience for Irish users, adapting UK specific pages to your market by leveraging your knowledge of the local online landscape. This coupled with your impeccable grammar, spelling and punctuation will ensure that only the best available content reaches the client’s massive high value audience.

Person specification:

• Experience of content writing for websites, magazines or newspapers in Ireland
• Impeccable grammar, spelling and punctuation
• Excellent news judgement ability
• A broad interest in current affairs. You will need to be able to talk about the latest in news, sport, lifestyle, money and entertainment
• Extensive experience of uploading content on to a website and using a CMS
• Good experience of Photoshop or similar
• An ability to work well under pressure in a fast-paced environment
• A clear understanding of major online publications’ audiences, product offerings and business models
• The job will be based in London.  The ideal candidate will have recent experience of having lived in Ireland

This role is offered on an initial six month contract, with a break clause at 3 months.  The hours will most probably be 37.5 hours a week across weekdays, but there may be some requirements to work mornings, evenings or weekends, as either part of the regular hours or as overtime.  There will be opportunities to work overtime hours from home.

To apply, e-mail your CV with an indication of your pro-rata salary expectations to: opportunities@miggle.co.uk.  When applying, please indicate where you heard about this role.

No agencies please. Really!

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

We’ve just celebrated our 3rd birthday and so I’ve put together a set of three posts looking at what we’ve learnt in those three years, as well as how those learnings will shape what we do for the coming year.  In this final post I talk about how miggle will start to align itself around what is one of its key advantages.  Being based in Brighton & Hove.

Brighton & Hove is a genuine, world class, digital hub.

If we can plan an effective project for a client, why would we pretend to be a full service agency when we could instead help clients manage delivery through a network of specialist businesses? They still get their single point of contact, but they get an open process, based on sensible technology, managed by specialists, which is genuinely built for the long term. Brighton & Hove can offer this and miggle can potentially base its future around focussing delivery so clients benefit from this.

What does this mean for miggle.co.uk?

It means leaner costs for us in the future – at least in the short term. Over the last 9 months we’ve been cutting back on costs to enable us to work in a more efficient way and to offer a high end service to those businesses who see the value in working in an open culture. There are several philosophies underlying this.  The continuing surge in social media and the rise of local content (and its tie ins to mobile and geo-enabled services) makes right now one of the most exciting times to be working for a small Internet business.  The professional challenges open here are vast and the opportunities become wider and so much more tangible when there’s a chance to collaborate with other people and small businesses.

But there is a more important, over-arching, defining lifestyle reason too. The prime objective for wanting to cut back and focus is because the current scattergun approach to winning work just wasn’t going to work on a personal or family level over the long term. That’s important to me. My clients and my staff are of prime importance to me and my business – but I run miggle, first and foremost, for the benefit of me and my family.

What does it mean for clients?

It might mean you hear us say ‘No Thanks’ a few more times to offers of jobs – but we’ll always try and back that up with a recommendation or suggestion as to how that request can be delivered.  But hopefully, for all of our current clients, who’ve been the key behind our growth so far, and those we’ll hopefully win in the future, it’ll mean that miggle will be better placed to help the web work harder for their businesses – which was the key behind setting up the company in the first place.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.