A new site for Fitness First for culturebank

First up has been a project we’ve delivered for culturebank, a business I’m involved with along side miggle.  Working to objectives and creative direction provided by the rest of the culturebank team we’ve built out a solution for their latest client Fitness First.  Based on WordPress, with a high level of bespoke customisation layered on top, this site lets employees of their Australian business upload work related success stories and experience supported with videos and photos.  Uploaded videos are encoded on the fly into a Flash player format and photos are rendered into galleries.  Stories that relate to specific job functions appear on pages which additionally pull data in real-time from a feed on Fitness First’s recruitment site.

A Product Plan for Collections Trust

Our friends at Talk Web Solutions have recently launched the new Collections Link website for the Collections Trust (CT).   Our involvement here was to work with CT to build out the initial product requirements which delivered on CT’s core objective of being able to host a site which allowed best practice in collections management to be owned by the people who manage our nation’s libraries, museums, collections and archives.  More and more clients are asking us to help scope their projects before they commit to build.  It’s a sensible strategy we think.

A new web site using Mod-X

We built out a new site for local Brighton business Complete Property Services.  Having built a number of sites for small businesses in the last year in our recently launched miggleCMS, we wanted to roll out something which was built in a different content management system to extend the range of solutions we can offer to clients.  At the time of building Complete’s website, miggleCMS wasn’t as an open source solution and for good business continuity planning (BCP) the client here specifically wanted something that was.  We felt given the brief and the design objectives Mod X was the ideal solution for this.

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.

You’ve got your market sussed, done your research and you know who your competitors are.  A key part of that process is planning your web design and development project in detail. No one would build a house from scratch without consulting an architect and a surveyor, but too many people will commission the build of websites without defining a plan, largely because they see skipping this stage as a cost saving. It rarely is.

The value of having a Product Requirements Document (PRD) - get like for like quotes!

Planning your website product requirements is something you do after you’ve defined your brief, or your market objectives but before you start the build.  Given all the things you want to achieve with your website, the product requirements document – or PRD  – describes what product features are required to deliver on those objectives.  This document can then serve as a basis from which potential suppliers can quote – returning to you a proposal which details what technology, process and solutions they’ll go through to deliver on those product requirements, which in turn deliver on your wider business aims.  You should then, when reviewing supplier proposals, be able to compare like with like – knowing they’ve responded to the request for the product you want built, as opposed to the product they want to build for you!

Different suppliers will suggest different, innovative ways of delivering on the PRD.  Some might propose solutions you’ve not thought of before.  This is fine.  Just ask,  ‘Does what is on offer deliver on my product requirements and thus my objectives?’

Who writes it? And what’s in a PRD?

Some web companies might propose writing this document for you – often as a chargeable stage, maybe specifying that you should perhaps use it to get comparable quotes by which you can assess the quality of their own price and solution.  Or, in commissioning a project, you might decide to engage an external consultant who can help draw this up for you and then help in managing the acquisition of a supplier.

A good PRD should start of with a face to face meeting with the writer, who will note down your objectives, read through research and explore your market requirements.

The document they write should summarize these and then go on to describe:-

- the environment in which the project needs to be delivered (i.e. web and/or mobile),
- the scope of the deliverables (i.e. what’s required and what isn’t – as well as the time frame and budget of you have it)
- the different types of users that will use the website (i.e. customers, clients – not personas as such – these would have ideally been defined in your earlier research),
- the journeys those users will go through (i.e. buy a product, download a document),
- the features that will be required
- the standards to which the product will be built

You then review it, and when you’re happy that it describes the product that will meet your aims, you can then move on to finding the team that will build it for you. 

If we write the PRD, we don’t have to be the company that then builds your site.

The process often works best if we don’t quote for the development stage because it means we can write the most objective document possible so that your shortlist of suppliers can all quote from the same information. At the start of the planing process you can specify if you’d like us to quote for the work once the planning documentation has been created – we’ll also let you know if we’d be interested in the work, as quite often, we’ll plan projects that exceed the resources we have available, but it’s possible, using the PRD as an effective tool, that we can move you to the next stage of helping you source the best supplier.

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.

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.

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.