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.

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.

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.

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.

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.