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 three years, as well as how those learnings will shape what we do for the coming year.  This is the second post, in which I talk about the importance of editorial content management to miggle, as well as how lack of planning, or an over- reliance on full service agencies, can be bad for business continuity planning (BCP).

Editorial content management

We’re in the editorial content management business because we understand what it is that web audiences want, alongside our clients’ business objectives in this area and we are able to link the two. Where we’ve been able to effectively demonstrate this, we’ve found we’re able to develop the business relationships we have into other areas of work. For this to add value to both client and supplier, the client ideally needs to make the sort of investment in our services that allows us to deploy the best, most cost-effective resources we can.  Retained business over the long term.  Where we can make it work that way, then this area clearly remains a priority, although we fully understand that for every business this isn’t always easy to do.

Our work in this area is daily – genuinely 365 days a year. It’s where our highest profile clients come from and we wouldn’t get the work we do if we didn’t acutely understand client objectives or weren’t able to deliver to time and to budget every time. We know this is a powerful sell when we go to clients in other business areas.  We want prospective clients to recognise that we understand their audiences and that our solutions will not only do what it says on the tin, but that the tin will be delivered before its best before date.

The full service agency doesn’t really exist. Everyone knows it.

Sometimes we find client decisions are not made on ‘how much can you do it for’ but ‘can you do it’ – often to a timeframe where the project plan has gone AWOL, if it even existed in the first place.

It’s easy to go to a full service agency when you’re spending someone else’s money. You know they’re a middle man, but you don’t care as long as there’s someone at the end of the phone and/or to take out for an expenses lunch.

In some respects, this is a reasonable enough approach, you need a single point of contact. But there’s no reason why in 2010 we need to uphold the myth that this is delivered by full service agencies alone, which have these unfathomable depths of skills and resource.  Because they don’t.  My belief is that when your agency is dependant, beyond its key ’suits’, on a transient bunch of freelancers and contractors, then it cannot deliver future proof, business continuity compliant solutions. It can offer short term solutions that will work in the short term. That’s it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in three years of miggle it’s this. The Internet is too broad an area for any one agency to claim it can offer the full breadth and depth of services required continually by your business. If it could, it’s cost base would be so large it would not be able to win any business profitably.

If you don’t let experts plan your online developments your project will fail.

The best case studies I have had in three years are unfortunately the ones I can’t publish.  I expect every business like ours is the same.  They are the ones where potential clients came to us with big ideas, who nodded sagely in agreement at meetings when we talked about the benefit of planning their projects, but who retrospectively decided that the JFDI approach was actually the best. In one case, 18 months on, one of those sites is still a holding page, the business jumping from Powerpoint presentation to development with no interim stages, all because they weren’t prepared to spend what would probably amount to 10% of their project’s over all cost to plan out the project sensibly.

Fortunately, we’ve found, in these tough times, that the best clients to work with have been those who see that effective execution can be done at speed without charging towards the coding team like a bull at a gate.  More like those please!

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 has just celebrated its third birthday and I’d say, on balance, that those first first three years have had far more pluses than minuses.  In this post, I look back at some of what I’ve learnt in that period, as well as how what I’ve learnt will affect our strategy in 2010.

Focus Focus Focus

While we can describe all of our services under web, publishing and media, miggle’s hunt for work has historically been done on a fairly scattergun approach. We’ve genuinely had a crack at anything that’s come our way, but this is not a sustainable approach! So, to move the business on to the next level it’s clear we need to have a tighter focus around our products and services. While the business has never had a quarter in which it didn’t turn a profit, there are areas we’ve been involved in where the profit margins and the opportunities for recurring revenues don’t stack up.

Supplying design and marketing services to small businesses

Being able to supply a quality service to small businesses of up to 10 staff has always been a dream of mine and we’ve won a number of contracts on that basis, where we’ve been able to deliver, I hope, a service to businesses which has given them a clear return on their investment.

However, at just 15 years or so, the Internet industry is still in its relative infancy and as yet there is not a widespread understanding amongst businesses of all levels as to what constitutes an effective, value for money, hard working, quality website.  Thus too many decisions are made on the basis of cost alone.  For small sites of less than 10 pages where cost is the key determining factor I think we’ll be declining to offer quotes or proposals.

Of course, for the small business clients we have, we’ll continue to provide a service to them all the time they are happy to have us do so. After all, they had a choice when they gave us their business, and for many, that was based on the service they felt they would get from us.  So, we don’t want to let those firms down and we’re still committed to wanting to see those businesses get the most out of online.  We also want to work for those who appreciate that building the profile of your business on line is not something that can be achieved with a static website.

Better Business Continuity Planning and a Choice for Small Business

Helping our current small business clients with their own business continuity planning is one of the key reasons why we’re shortly going to make our proprietary content management system. miggleCMS, available under an open source licence – giving those firms that use it more choices than otherwise being tied into miggle.  Also, with our CMS available in this way, other small businesses, for whom we may no longer be able to offer a service to will get the opportunity BYOD (bring your own designer) and use the same code base we’ve used to provide small business solutions up till now.  More on that soon!

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 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.