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.

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.

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.

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.

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.