I’m really excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the Pair Up web conference in London on 8/9 April on the future of web advertising.  PairUp is a conference for everyone who works (or wants to work) in the world of the web.  It’ll bring together well known names and pair them up to talk with some of the hottest teenage talent the web has to offer.

Clearly, I’m no longer hot teenage talent…  Anyway, I can’t say too much yet about who I’ll be paired up with, other than the fact I think it’s a fair chance they’ll be closer to my 18 month daughter’s age than to my own.

I’m really excited about the opportunity this is going to provide to meet new people with fresh ideas, and I think the fact we’ll pair up in this way is particularly relevant to the talk my partner and I will give.  Because whatever the future of web advertising brings, advertisers will always want something new and original. New and emerging talent pools are a great place to fish for that.

One of the things the conference organisers want me to touch on is how web advertising got to where it is today.  Of course, there’s been a tonne of developments and innovation since the web started, but some key constants have always been there.  Advertisers buy audience,  Sales execs are driven largely by short term targets which often create conflict with product people and lack of a good sales operations process and advertiser programmes can make it harder to make a decent profit selling inventory on your terms.

But what about the future?  I’d be interested to know what people think.  What’s the best way for an advertiser to get their message across today?  How does that vary across devices? What constitutes the most effective KPIs (key performance indicators)?  Is the web a branding medium, a direct response medium, or is it a platform for local and niche audiences?

Finally, as a site owner or publisher what opportunities (or obstacles) are there to you monetising your website?

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.

When I work on any online project, I always try and apply the same process to it, whatever the size of the undertaking. This process is based largely on one I used at Yahoo! In my experience, the trick to being able to use this successfully is to apply it in such a way that you don’t get bogged down or overwhelmed by process. For example, in some projects one of the stages detailed below could be a conversation, in another, it might be a 50 page document.

Stages of the Process

In most instances, we’d expect prospective clients to come to us with 1 and 2 below:-

1 Ideate

What’s the core creative idea for the site?

2 Define Market Requirements

What are the requirements of the website? (in essence this is similar to what is covered in the miggle.co.uk client briefing form) What’s the market? Who are the competitors? On what criteria will the website be judged a success? What do budgets and timescales look like?

You can find more information on writing your brief here.

Stage 3 and 4 depends on the size of the project. If it’s a straightforward build in a content management system (CMS) and we’ve got a clear idea of content and hierarchy then often 3 and 4 is no more than us knowing the CMS tools comprehensively and squaring off that your requirements are met by the functionalities of the tools.

However, in larger, or bespoke projects, 3 and 4 can each also be extensive pieces of documentation. In my opinion the client should aim to be leading on as much of point 3 as possible – or calling in experts to help.

Point 4 is then the role of the company you choose to do your work. The bit in-between is the process you go through to select your supplier.

3 Define Product Requirements

Scope the product features that deliver on the concept and the market requirements.

4 Define Functional Specification

Detail how the product will work, detailing how and by what technologies the project would be delivered.

5-8 will be lead by your development team – with appropriate sign-off for clients happening during 5-7

5 Define Development Plan

Build this into a plan, which includes full costs and timescales.

6 Build

Execute on the plan.

7 Test

Test the solution.

8 Deploy

Deploy solution on production servers.

Finally, as the client, you need to work out if the project achieved on its objectives. So, there’s often going to be either between stages 8-9, or after stage 9, the plan by which you market your new development.

9 Evaluate

Measure the site’s performance against the criteria laid out in market requirements and get ready to ideate again.

How similar/dissimilar is this to processes you might use. I’d be interested to find out. Also, if you were looking at this from a client perspective, what do you think are the relative strengths and weaknesses of the process – and what would you change? I’d be interested to hear.

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’ll often get calls from businesses looking for quotes for a website. While they’ll have a good idea of what they want, to define a price and timescale, the devil is always in the detail. That’s why we’ll always ask for a brief. However, often the response we’ll get is, “We don’t have one” or “We don’t know where to start in writing one” – so if that sounds like you, maybe this post will be of some use.

Focus on your objectives

A good web design company will just want to know about your business objectives. From this, they can recommend solutions.

Our briefing form, which is based on one used by Clearleft, with a few other objective based questions thrown in, is all about trying to find out about your requirements, as well as who your audience and customers are, who you compete with and what kind of image you want to create online. Beyond the actual brief, we’re also aiming here for you to tell us all about your business. You know your company best, so that should be an easy thing to do shouldn’t it? Aim to talk to us in your language, not ours, and let us come back to you for points of clarity if we don’t understand some of your objectives.

And really, that’s it…

Is it? Yes, pretty much.

However… listing your objectives alone won’t get your website built. There may be other important stages that need to be covered too – such as user research for example. In any case, your site will only get built once you’ve agreed that the solutions proposed back to you in the web company’s response make sense and deliver on your objectives.

That can be a difficult thing to ascertain, because it may not be obvious to you initially, as the client, how the solution that’s been proposed delivers on your business needs. But the extent to how well your prospective development partner assists you with that stage will be one of the key criteria you use in trusting whether or not they are the company to work with. Then, beyond that, even with the solutions agreed, depending on the scope of the site, more detailed work may need to be done on specifying exactly how your site is built.

So the brief is just the first stage then?

Yes, it is. And its worth is weight in gold.

A good brief is a uniform document you can take to a number of potential providers, meaning the proposals you get back will be something you can compare like for like. Many companies will give you that initial response for free. However, if more detailed planning needs to be done to specify exactly what the solution might look like, then it may be that this in itself becomes a chargeable stage of the project. It really depends on the size of the project overall, but a good prospective provider will always let you know to what extent the planning you’ve done in the brief gives them the info they need. You can read more on planning your web design project here too.

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.

One of the great things about running your own business is the opportunity it provides to get involved in other projects. And I’m really excited to announce my involvement in Culture Bank.

Culture Bank enables organisations to project their unique culture to the world, pulling together all the great characters, events, stories and experiences that make it so using social media.

My role in the team is primarily to look at how we can move the technical solutions Culture Bank relies on to the next level. I also expect I’ll be able to add some of the experience I’ve got in building audiences and online engagement to the mix too. At the end of the day, it’s really the engagement that we can build for clients through Culture Bank that gives our solution its value. That’s what we’re selling.

This in turn comes back full circle to my technology role. The Culture Bank pitch is not a design or technical led exercise. It’s no more a technology operation than arranging a bus to ship your staff from the city to the campus is an automotive one. The benefits and outcomes are the key.

So, my challenge is to find the infrastructure that delivers what’s required in a way that enables the choice of what we use to take a back seat in the decision making process a client makes when they come to us. For it to be a given that it works. For it to be about the application of social media not the applications that power it.

I’m looking forward to hopefully being able to write more about the adventures we have with this all in 2010. If in the meantime, you want to find out more, just get in touch.

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.

With the year drawing to a close I’ve been taking a look at some of our search traffic over this year, as well as how our blog has performed. The two are quite closely linked. Why? Because a blog post, which is written with relevant keywords in mind, as far as titles, excerpts and content goes is a great way of getting traffic into the site. As a business, we may not have found our niche yet as to what we want to blog about, but it’s clear some things work better than others. So what are they?

Sharing knowledge

Ian has written a couple of posts this year on his experiences with both Cufon and BuddyPress. These have attracted a lot of traffic. They help establish a level of authority in an area and they open up an opportunity for dialogue. We should do more of this sort of writing.

Commenting on current events

Two of the most successful posts we’ve written this year are on the back of two pieces of news, neither of which are directly related to our business. The issue of whether businesses need TV licences for their PCs and the effect of Swine Flu on business continuity. When there is interest in a specific area, weighing in with our opinion adds to the overall commentary and again encourages a dialogue.

Establishing our own voice

Blogging for miggle is not really a core activity. Yes, there’s a real value in it, but it’s part of what we do to talk about our work, our business, our opinions and experiences. All stuff which is good to write about, but which needs to find its rightful place alongside getting client work out of the door. So, finding our own voice as part of that takes a while, especially when we have more than one contributor to the blog. However, when we’ve written from the heart, the posts have done well. Like when I wrote about the person who tore down our sign!

Our traffic from search (well, we only looked at Google….)

In terms of what insights our search traffic has given us as to what potential customers are looking for, there are two big things we’ve seen, each of which have been supported by enquires coming directly into our office.

Monetise my website!

Firstly, site owners want to find ways of monetising their web traffic and online audiences. There’s a big ‘moon on a stick’ element to this in that they want ‘A list’ advertisers via a solution where the inventory is sold directly on their behalf in a way that gives them control over copy. Even so, its a legitimate business objective which there is a big demand for.

I think I might plan my next bit of web development!

Secondly, the number of businesses that are showing a desire to understand their audiences and align their product requirements against the market objectives they uncover via a process which plans iterative developments is growing.

And finally….

The best, completely unrelated search term, on which we got a click this year was ‘Where can I find a bedroom in Hove I can rent by the hour.’ It’s reassuring to know, that if miggle were to go belly up, that there is a business opportunity here I can investigate.

Beyond that, our ten most popular blog posts this year have been:-

1. .tel domains: time to get excited (We’re still waiting for that excitement!)

2. Part time Production Assistant (Blogs are a great way to get company news out like this)

3. Building .tel websites

4. Why needing a TV licence for your work PC is a nonsense (a follow up post ot a bit of news that could affect businesses like miggle)

5. Recycling your audience (One of a series of web tips from miggle – althogh it got traffic from people looking for recycling websites)

6. Peopleperhour – the good the bad and the ugly

7. Building social networks in open source CMS

8. Use any font on your website with Cufon

9. Vacancy for a web producer

10. Online advertising space

Thanks for reading and commenting.

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.

Today we’ve launched two new sites, both focussed on .tel domain technology.

miggletelDirectoryBuilder

The first is the miggletelDirectoryBuilder. This enables .tel owners to collect directory submissions from free and paying customers.

Directory subscribers can not only submit listings to a .tel directory, but they can amend them as well. Directory owners have the ability to review all listings before pushing them live.

Premium listings are paid via PayPal, debit or credit card.

The current directory using miggletelDirectoryBuilder is brighton.tel, You can see this in action here.

If you’ve brought a .tel domain name with a view to building a directory then this could be the perfect product for you.

Full product details can be found here (PDF).

miggletel.com – Miggle Ltd’s commentary and analysis on the latest in the .tel space

miggletel.com is a site which showcases the latest .tel products and services from miggletel, as well as the best of what we’ve seen from the wider .tel development community.

It includes articles on our own insights into .tel directory, as well as a summary of the most interesting blog posts and tweets we’ve seen each day.

We know there are already plenty of other similar great sites which are talking about .tel and we’d be keen to flag these up to our users from miggletel.com in exchange for similar links from your site, so if you’re running something similar, please get in touch.

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.

OpenX, the freely available ad server management system is a great product – of that we’re in absolutely no doubt. Innovations, such as the creation of the OpenX Marketplace and a recently announced strategic alliance with Microsoft add to what is already a great solution for publishers who want to take control of monetising their own inventory.

There are of course products out there to rival it – like DoubleClick/Google Dart – but the ease of entry for OpenX makes it an obvious starting point.

For the last 18 months we’ve been running OpenX on our own server. We’re yet to upgrade to version 2.8, which is required for Marketplace – and once we’re there I’ll be interested to see how broad the marketplace is. I expect that it’ll be heavily skewed towards US advertisers – Marketplace is only really going to work for our clients if it can credibly compete on a local level with Google – notwithstanding OpenX’s ability to work with Google Adsense anyway – and for that it will need UK advertisers in its marketplace.

If you’re thinking of using OpenX for your business, what route should you go. OpenX offers 3 options – a free Community Hosted, Enterprise Hosted and then the option to install the software on your own box and go Community Download.

A few months ago we thought we saw an opportunity to migrate from Community Download to Community Hosted. The benefits seemed obvious:-

Plenty of ad impressions

Free Hosted offers a 100 million ad impressions per month. You only need to pay (by virtue of moving to Open X Enterprise Hosted) if you need to exceed this – the idea being I guess, if your level of ad impressions isn’t generating the cost of the monthly fees (which start at $999) then you’re doing something wrong.

Enterprise does offer telephone support as part of the contract – the only version that offers any structured support beyond the forums.

No need to worry about version upgrades or your own server management

An appealing benefit to us at the time was that using Community Hosted meant that we didn’t need to upgrade our server’s OS to facilitate an upgrade from PHP 5.1.2 to PHP 5.2 to make the move from OpenX 2.6 to 2.8. While the free hosted version makes no guarantee of uptime, we logically reasoned that OpenX hosting their own software should be able to make a better fist of it than us (not that we’ve ever had problems ourselves)

The reality was somewhat different…

Communication

When problems occur with OpenX Community Hosted, you need to go to the site and find out the status yourself. Which means, if problems occur, you’ve usually been alerted to it by your client, not your service provider (aka OpenX) which is not ideal.

Support

The only support comes via documentation and the forums. From time to time OpenX staff or super-users will chip in, but there’s no reliable structured support – or even the option to buy in as a premium service, unless you go Enterprise.

Time Zone

The bulk of Community Hosted seems to be managed on the US west coast. The timezone has two impacts. If problems arise, in the UK, you’re on your own till 4pm. Often, from 4pm, the admin tools can be hard to get continual access to because of demand. I have to say, both of these observations are anecdotal.

The conclusion we’ve reached

We’ve now gone back to deciding the best way for us to use OpenX is to go the Community Download route – even though that means we’ve got to do a fair amount of work on a server upgrade to get there. Businesses can run OpenX on a dedicated server, with regular back ups, for a cost of £150 month plus whatever admin time needs to be costed, to a service level of at least 99.5% uptime. This is significantly cheaper than a starting price of $999 per month, for an extra 0.25% guaranteed uptime and support for going with Enterprise Hosted.

The downside is of course that you’re taking on support and liability for a product that ultimately you don’t control – but the experience from using either Hosted version versus Community Download is at least the latter is one you can set your own internal SLAs around with your clients.

With a community of over 50,000 publishers its easy to see what OpenX are struggling to maintain support of the Community Hosted version – but they should remember that, for many people, this route will be their first experience of the solution. After our experience of Community Hosted, I’m not sure I’d trust OpenX to provide me with decent service for Enterprise, even though I guess this is where all their resource goes. OpenX would do well in my opinion to take a leaf out of WordPress’s book with regards to offering a hosted and downloadable product side by side.

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.

I’m writing this on the bus. I have to say I left the debate early and thought I’d post my opinion on it all here.

Digital by design was a sort of industry vs academia debate that focussed on the design needs of the industry and the contribution the unis make to generating talent.

It came at the end of a careers fair and portfolio clinic, something miggle.co.uk would have been keen to be involved with. When millions of UK web users engage with content we create every day, when staff of ours move on to the likes of Yahoo! or MSN as their next move, when what we specialise in leaves us fairly uniquely positioned in the town, notwithstanding my own experience in small business mentoring and having written one of the town’s leading colleges first web design course you’d think, from a strategic point of view, we’d be a good fit. But that’s clearly just one way thinking on my part. And it’s slightly unrelated, so rant over…

Anyway, the point I wanted to make was related to Andy Budd, Clearlefts’s Creative Director. He was talking about himself as an example of a generation of web practitioners, who were self-taught, starting as they did at a time when there were no web based courses. I’ve seen some of Andy’s first designs, and they’re a world apart from those churned out by the leading company he’s built up today, so he’s a clear example of someone who’d learnt well on the job. One key point he mentioned was a survey in which 75% of 19 year olds had said their education had been no help in them getting a job – and he was comparing this also with the lack of relevant skills he saw coming out of the unis. I’d be interested to see what the same 19 year olds say in 10 years time by the way.

As a largely self-taught practitioner myself I can definitely see a value in my education – but I think mine came at a time before unis were obsessed with churning out people with what it considered were vocational skills. My education I think was just about giving me a broad all round understanding and interest in the world around me. Those skills helped me to be a self starter and it’s actually those fundamental skills I find lacking in many people we interview. That’s not a fault that can be laid at the feet of the unis – its more the fault of a fundamental shift in what education, even from an early age, is all about.

At the end of the day, great designers will shine through somehow. If the unis can’t churn them out, they’ll find a route elsewhere. One academic guy mentioned that design based courses were hampered because they sat in humanities. If they sat in engineering he ventured it could all be different. That’s a fair point. We currently have an intern at miggle with an Astrophysics degree. He didn’t learn to be a web developer, but the thinking processes he can apply to online engineering are spot on. There are some things the unis will always be able to do better than others – science and engineering I think are good examples.

The biggest irony of the evening to me was that one of the design experts from the industry was talking all about the need for unis to focus students on details, not the big ideas, while sat next to another expert whose Flash based site didn’t work on an iPhone. But that’s just pedantic detail on my part, and I only make it because I see it as slightly ironic we missed out again to be able to make a contribution earlier in the day to the industry body we always do our best to support.

So, if there’s anyone reading this who was at the event who missed out an a portfolio review, please feel free to get in touch with me, I’d be happy to help out.

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.

One of the things I like most about the new Yahoo! Frontpage is how it can act as your starting point on the Internet, as opposed to just your starting point on Yahoo! Nothing massively ground breaking in that, but to change it to that was a fairly big move for Yahoo! I think. After years of trying to keep the traffic within its network, it instead worked out how it could use its FrontPage to compete, at a product level, with the likes of iGoogle, as well as make its homepage something you could personalise, rather than have a sub-product for personalisation (My Yahoo!)

One of the enablers of this new strategy are the FrontPage Apps. If the Yahoo! FrontPage was an iPhone, then, er, Apps is its App store…

FrontPage apps can be built using YAP, the Yahoo! Application Platform. We’ve spent a little bit of time here in building and developing our first one – which we called ‘Your Yahoo! Birthday‘ We basically wanted to show that we could take Yahoo! registration data and work with it – so we came up with the ‘Yahoo! Birthday’ idea. Basically, we grab the date on which the logged in Yahoo! users account was created and then apply this to a few URLs which use that date.

Unlike our first app outing, I think the best apps for the FrontPage I think are going to be ones that drive engagement – i.e. present a reason to use them regularly, ideally every day. Enough, ideally, for people to want to add the app as a key one within their FrontPage experience.

Also, apps which utilize info Yahoo!’s user data base, to maximise the experience of logged in Yahoo! users are likely to be more engaging. However, its not fully clear to us as yet how much data from the Yahoo! UDB is accessible.

Finally, partners looking to build apps who can either make data available as RSS, or who can provide specifically engineered modules for inclusion on a Yahoo! app are likely to have more feature rich aps as a result.

Would be interested to hear what other experiences other developers have had with the platform so far.

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 spent a bit more time today on one of our .tel domains, brighton.tel.

One thing that I wanted to find out since we last looked at these was how are the sites doing stats wise. To explore this, we’ve been downloading our log files and looking at these in telSAP, which was the best of a few of the stats solutions we looked at today. This is an obvious, but pretty key step required to measure how effective the sites turn out to be.

Another thing I’ve read a lot about is how well these domain names get (or don’t get) indexed by Google. brighton.tel is currently not in the top 100 search results for the search term brighton on Google, Bing or Yahoo! Nor, at present, should it be, considering how much work has been done on it. However, we are finding that there are some searches on which brighton.tel gets first page Google ranking on keywords that are part of the subfolders on the domain. This is really encouraging.

Finally, we’ve made use of the back-up feature that telnic have recently launched. We used this to download one set of data from one of our .tels and upload it to another. Basically, that XML DTD acts as a template we can now use to manage bulk uploads to .tels, which is handy.

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.