As a business miggle.co.uk is fully committed to using and supporting open source software wherever it can.  We believe open source solutions, when implemented effectively, offer customers and users the best possible options in terms of balancing unique requirements, with leveraged R&D, in an environment where BCP (business continuity planning) issues are largely taken care of.  It would be counter to our believe in that approach to continue to keep our CMS, miggleCMS, as a proprietary tool.  Nor would doing so be in the best interests of the BCP requirements of our clients who use it.

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.

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.