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.

Over the last 8 months quite a few people would have bought .tel domains and many are probably wondering if they made a wise investment or not. I’ve read a lot of coverage in the last few days that might suggest buying these domain names was not a good move – and my anecdotal observations are that I tend to see more bad coverage than good. So, what’s the deal?

Let’s assume first that .tel domains are like equities. And, so, if this were a financial advice post, it’d only be right that I declare my interest, which is that I have a varied portfolio of .tel domain names on which I spent about £3,500. When I brought my domain names I saw it very much as like buying stock. I diversified the sectors under which I brought names, both in terms of the business areas they relate to and the way in which I might monetise them. I also realised it was a punt, and that the value I might get back on these in the future would depend on the potential the investing community saw in it. Like stocks, some domain names are better than others, but I was interested to see last week that marketing.tel sold for €850, which would have been double its original purchase value. So, for the original owner, that worked.

Of the bad coverage I’ve seen, and, based on some of the feedback I’ve elicited myself, an observation again is that those who are slating the domain are also missing the point about what it is that makes .tels different. If the negative article you read mentions .mobi and .tel and waste of money in the same paragraph, then you need read no further. The two are not the same thing.

I think telnic could have done a few things better with the roll out of this technology, but I’m not going to list those here, or even berate them for it. At the end of the day, I didn’t effectively invest into telnic because of its ability to market itself, I did so because of the strength of, and the differentiating factor of, its technology. A few days ago, telnic won an award, but it’s not mentioned the fact on its website. But then I didn’t hire them to be my PR agency!

At the moment, I think its too early to say if the money I spent on .tel domains was a waste. In my opinion, what will make the difference is the level of take up in the developer community to launch applications which deliver on a need. Telnic’s launch of an API from the outset is key to this. VHS as a video format was not invented for Porn. But Porn made it win the battle against Beta. Likewise, where the community takes (or doesn’t take) .tel will define whether my money was wasted or not. Its not down to telnic, in my opinion, to build adoption. It’s down to developers to adopt.

Going back to the theme of investment, my initial financial outlay aside, we’ve not over the last 6 months given as much time over to .tels as I thought perhaps I might when I first brought my names. There’s just not been the buzz around it required to make it worthwhile. As a business, we focus where we see the most value, and if we get it wrong, we move on. For a while, this has just not been a prio. If buying a load of .tel domains was a mistake, it won’t be my last.

However, in the last few weeks we’ve had some downtime in which we’ve been able to dig a little into the API and we’ve come up with a way to automate the service we built at www.miggletel.co.uk. We’ve had some interest in this from various domain owners in the past – but it was the lack of an automated back-end which cooled the interest. In the coming weeks we’ll be blogging a bit more about our solution, learning more about .tels as we go, as well as talking a bit more about what we’re doing with the domain as a whole. Watch this space. And, in the meantime, if you want to tell us about good or bad .tel apps and coverage you’ve seen, or want to tell me about the best (or worst) return you’ve ever got out of a similar investment, do let us know!

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.

‘A clutter-free website is essential to the user experience’ is the fifth of Alick’s website fundamentals.

Just a few years ago, a Flash-based website containing all the bells and whistles a web designer could conceive of after four double lattes was seen as the web design zenith. It was an exercise in showing off, often accompanied by a distinct sense of panic in the user as they found themselves thrown into a pool of whirling effects with no navigational conventions. Designed to ‘engage’, the end result was often a slow moving, frustrating turn-off.

The current mantra in web design is ‘usability’. Most of your visitors will have a specific target in mind when they access your site initially – are you helping them get there quickly, or are they distracted by a slow loading splash page, pop-ups, ’sparkly’ banners and irritating videos or voiceover?

Although you may regard your website as a work of great beauty, every word and pixel honed to perfection, users just want to know where to click to get what they want. When designing for the web – less is most definitely more!

* Optimise your site structure so navigation is clear and logical

* Make pages easy to scan, using carefully chosen sub-headings and bullets to break up large areas of text

* Use white space to guide the viewer to important ‘clicks’ and create an organised presentation of information on the page

* Edit your copy ruthlessly so every word adds value

* Follow labelling conventions – whilst it may be cute to ‘drop us a line’, a busy user will be looking for ‘contact us’.

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.