It’s been a while since we’ve been able to make any significant updates to our website, as we’ve been really busy with some exciting projects for clients, so here’s a round up of the latest miggle news.

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.

At miggle we have recently started a project using WordPress. The client wanted their users to be able to make posts from the front-end without needing WordPress logins. After many searches we found TDO Mini Forms (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tdo-mini-forms/). A very highly customizable plugin – perfect as a starting point for our goal.

TDO Mini Forms has two main options:

• Form Creator – Where you setup your form fields.
• Form Hacker – Where you have more control to customize the form fields.

One function the client wanted was a drop down list where users could select their location.

When setting up the drop down list through the form creator, it only allows you to include X amount of categories by putting their IDs. This was good to start with but what happens if we want to add more categories? We would need to update the form every time, adding in the new category ID.

This was not ideal for us – We needed the locations drop down list to be dynamic. Over to the TDO Mini form hacker!

With PHP and WordPress’s wp_dropdown_categories() function we can pull in the categories dynamically.

Quick Tip:

Here is the updated code to pull in categories from a category parent.

<p><select name=’location' class='tdomf_location' size='1'>
<option value="1"<?php if( (is_array($defcat) && in_array(1, $defcat)) || ( 1 == $defcat ) ) { echo ' selected="selected" '; } ?>>Please Select</option>

<?php
/*
Setup our dropdown arguments.
The arguments allow us to get the child elements of our parent (location)
With a depth of 1 e.g. if we had parent > child > grandchild it would only get our child level.
*/

$args = array(
'echo' => 0,
'hide_empty' => 0,
'child_of' => 5,
'orderby' => 'name',
'style' => 'none',
'hierarchical' => 1,
'depth'  => 1
);
// Create the drop down list
$select = wp_dropdown_categories( $args );
// Only pull out the <option.....></option> tag (remove <select…></select>)
$select = strip_tags($select, "<option>");
// Display results on the screen
echo $select;
?>
</select>

By using this method our client can continue to add or delete categories allowing the drop down list to dynamically update without needing to update the TDO Mini form’s creator as well.

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 know what it is you want to do online.

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.

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.

If you have a great idea for a website, one thing you’ll probably want to do is to secure an appropriate domain name as soon as you can. This is a good idea. Domain names are quite inexpensive, so it doesn’t matter if you buy the name in advance of starting work on your site. All you need to ensure when you buy the domain is that you have the option to have full control over the DNS. Don’t worry if you don’t know what this means, just ensure you have that option. 123 Reg are a good company to use, as are LCN.

What I’d certainly advise though is that when you buy your domain name that you don’t buy any web hosting or email services with it, even if the deal on offer looks like a steal. Instead let this be something your web developer takes care of for you. They will be in a better position to work out what exactly you require and then they can edit the DNS of your domain to point to the service they provide.

Finally, if your web developer suggests you use a hosting package, which is their own, or on which they are a reseller, don’t equate this to a financial advisor trying to sell you the products they recommend just to get their hands on the commission. Most web developers make next to nothing on hosting. The margins are too small and to compete your web developer would need to be selling in volume. It just won’t be their core business. It’s more likely that, if they recommend a host, it’s because they are comfortable with and have evaluated their services and they know that to deploy your website on the host once it is built will save them time. Which should save you money.

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.

peopleperhour.com is a kind of ‘ebay for projects’. Potential customers post projects they need doing and then interested suppliers will bid on them.

How we use it

I’ve been a user of peopleperhour.com (PPH) pretty much since it launched. I tend not to bid for much on it, but I do like keeping an eye on the sort of projects that get requested through it. It’s a great way of staying abreast of what sort of solutions businesses are after.

I also use it for sourcing freelancers for one off projects which require skills we don’t have within our full-time and part-time staff – but I limit that to marketing or copy related requirements. That’s not to say I wouldn’t source design and development through it, but I think to do so ups the level of risk to a project.

While I’ve only ever won a couple of projects through PPH, the contacts I’ve made through the network have generated quite a bit of business in the past. Our two biggest development projects in 2008 came from people who’d found my PPH profile in Google and then gone on to Google my name.

Although PPH aims to limit suppliers providing contact details to providers in advance of a deal being made I think in reality it does (or at least has done in the past) quite a poor job of monitoring this – probably because to clamp down on this is a really hard issue to find a scalable solution to. When they are unable to do this, it creates an unfair playground. I always try and bid by the rules, but I’m often up against others who don’t, and if they slip through the net then this can be in their favour. Thus, I’m quite lucky that there is, as far as I know, only one Alick Mighall (practice singing this as a football chant…) and thus, for those who Google my name, they’ll tend to find both me and my business anyway.

Recently, I’ve had some useful wins with PPH – in that I’ve picked up some good work and found some useful freelancers – so I’ll continue to use the site.

Too many poorly conceived projects and low quality providers

So, what’s the bad and the ugly? Well, its two worst points are probably not PPH’s doing as such – even it does create the environment in which this happens, and those are a) a lot of poorly conceived projects, and based on the number of bids that many of these projects get, b) too many providers bidding at prices, at which I believe, it’s not possible to do a good quality job.

On the projects front, I think the team at PPH have done a better job at filtering out the really stupid requests. It’s a while, for example, since I’ve seen projects like ‘e-bay clone required – budget, less than £250′. However, I do still see a lot of projects, in which the brief details a project which surely can’t be done within time the quoted budget allows. What’s this down to? Project owners knowing that there are people out there who’ll code for food? Or who realise it’s a buyer’s market? Or is it just a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of time a quality job might take? I think its often the last point. Price competition can be a good thing, I’ve no issue with that. My beef is really about the time it takes to do a good job.

This project here – for a business directory – is a good example. Basically, the client is looking for a business directory to be built, similar to a competitive example, which is quoted, which will have a CMS, so that they can add their own listings, ad serving, so they can monetise it, some static pages and the directory needs to be searchable. Oh, and it needs to be delivered ASAP! The budget is less than £250.

Ok, so lets take PPH’s commission out of that, and that leaves us with £225 which we’ll then divide by the minimum wage in the UK – a rate of pay you’d usually associated with unskilled labour – about £5.75. That gives 39 hours to deliver the project, assuming that there are no costs such as hosting, domain purchase etc. That 39 hours has got to cover the development from end to end, starting with clarifying the client’s ‘brief’ – defining some kind of spec from that and then nailing down in writing what exactly will be delivered, to designing, coding, getting sign off, testing and bug fixing. Why would any developer worth their salt bid on that? Well, as it goes, 20 have. And there are still 11 days left until the bids close.

For all PPH’s good points, I don’t see how having projects like this, or a network of providers prepared to bid at such rates can be in anyway a positive thing for the network, or for the wider industry as a whole. Fair enough – PPH is a network that allows project owners to circumnavigate bloated agency fees. It also allows project owners to consider quotes from providers who are based outside of the UK and thus are able to do things more cost effectively. Both these are good points. But if that’s at the expense of creating a perception where actually web development is easily done, for peanuts, or in an unfeasibly short amount of time, then that’s a bad thing. Buying an online service is like buying any other. You still get what you pay for. But I think many people think this just doesn’t apply to online.

I’d be interested in thoughts on this. I’d be even more interested in seeing similar examples of what a £250 solution looks like to a project briefed similar to the one I’ve quoted.

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.

‘Any page on your website could be a potential customer’s first experience of your brand’ is the fourth of miggle’s website fundamentals.

If your search engine optimisation (SEO) is working correctly, most new users will find your site via a web search. The page they click through to may not always be your homepage, so every page on your website needs to be able to effectively direct users to all the other important areas in your site if required.

Clear navigation and an ‘intuitive taxonomy’ – a logical method of organising your content in a menu structure – will generally achieve this, but you can further ‘recycle’ your users, i.e. move them through to important pages on your website, by adding links to other relevant pages at the foot of each page and within your website copy. Every time you write a new web page or blog post think ‘What do I want the user to do next?’

Good examples can be seen throughout The Cooden Beach Hotel website – and on this website, in the links within this blog post copy and effective cross-linking within our own 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.

It was great to see Yahoo! launch their new version of the home page in beta last week in the UK. Here at miggle, we work closely for Yahoo! on their ‘Front doors’ day in day out, so clearly we’ve got a vested interest in saying the page is great. But that’s really what we think.

During my time at Yahoo! homepage launches were a big part of my life – this is the fourth one I’ve been involved with in one way or another and so I’ve seen first hand how it’s changed and the reasoning behind the changes.

A brief historical functional overview of the Yahoo! homepage, which up until at least the start of 2009 was the single most visited web page on the planet, goes something like this – and in many ways mirrors the history of the web:

• At the start, it was all about links in the directory, which dominated the page
• Then the directory became searchable
• Rather than drive traffic to competitors, Yahoo! started building and acquiring its own products like Yahoo! Mail and Finance
• Yahoo! started publishing latest news on its homepage
• With so many people on the site daily, the media value of the page soared. Yahoo! led the way in offering advertisers truly unique opportunities on its homepages worldwide
• As the web broadened, Google Search became ‘the killer app’ – portals no longer could offer the same standard as the pure plays, for example, everyone knows eBay – but do you remember Yahoo! Auctions?
• Entry points to the web changed. The Hotmail homepage was a more valuable destination than the MSN homepage, because more people started their web sessions there. Internet toolbars became so important that companies like Microsoft started to embed search functionality into the chrome of the browsers and desktop.
• Thus, a page like yahoo.co.uk had to have value as a product in its own right. Editorial engagement became more important as homepages became the place to find out about what cool stuff was happening on and offline. The directory disappeared.
• Web2.0 and social networking took off. The web became a more customisable place. Mobile phones became more important as a platform. The personal assistant on the last version of the Y! homepage showed where front page evolution was heading.

And now, in 2009, we have a Yahoo! homepage that allows users to see the news headlines from the Guardian alongside its own news product. A page that actively encourages users to add their favourite sites to the left hand nav bar rather than big up its own portal offering. Yahoo! has recognised that setting your online status is a key part of any user’s identity when going for a surf on a highly personalisable web – even though its as easy to update your Facebook account from the Y! page as it is your own Y! profile.

Is this simply Yahoo! admitting defeat? I don’t think so. I think this is a good strategic move on their part, allowing users to create their own ‘starting point’ on the web. If Yahoo! ever had a raison d’etre, wasn’t this always it? Is the new homepage evolution or revolution? Let us know what you think.

The new home page still does everything that Yahoo! has always done well – pointing users to fresh and interesting content and brilliant products such as Y! Finance and Mail – but also recognises the fact that the Internet has moved on from the dominance of portals. That in itself gives every web publisher the opportunity to think about how it can leverage Yahoo!’s audience to drive engagement in its own products. If you want to think about how that could work for your business then drop us a line.

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.

In the third of our blog posts explaining miggle’s website fundamentals, we take you through our thinking on the importance of a website homepage in establishing your online brand and inspiring trust in your users.

Express yourself
If your business already has a strong offline brand, keep online life simple for both your business and your users and maintain consistency within all your promotional activities. It may be tempting when you think about site design to go for a hot new look, but a radically different ‘epersonality’ could hinder rather than help your business. Think carefully before letting your web designer take you off on a path which diverges too much from your existing identity.

Don’t be seduced by flashy effects
Animation rich sites may create a powerful first impression, but return users to your site will just want to be able to get to the pages they need quickly and easily. Your site exists to do a good job for your business and customers, its primary function is not to add diversity to your design team’s portfolio. Remember, the amount of time a customer will spend on your site versus the other sites they use online is minimal – so don’t make them have to work hard to get what they want by making things more confusing than they need to be. And definitely don’t make them have to download any special plug-ins to view the page. Inexperienced users won’t know how, experienced users are likely not to bother. With e-commerce businesses remember people shop online to save time as well as money. Think of your homepage as a haven for users – a reassuring place where it’s easy to find exactly the information needed.

Demonstrate openness
Your homepage should provide easy access to an ‘about us’ section with detailed information on the business, online portfolios / examples of your work and profiles of staff members – all these aspects indicate transparency and openness and can help give your business that ‘human touch’. If you are running an e-commerce business, easy links to returns policies and customer care are also important.

Provide valuable content
A site that reads as a business card or promotional pamphlet gives users little reason to revisit. Thinking about how you can offer advice, tips, news or promotional offers will keep you homepage fresh.

Think carefully about advertising
If you are going to accept any kind of advertising or sponsorship online think first about how the appearance of other brands along side you own will effect customers perceptions of your business. Good advertisers/sponsors will provide good mutual brand association, poor ones will diminish it.

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.

A client of ours asked us if we could produce the product photos for her miggle designed and developed ecommerce site, due to launch in July. What does she sell? Tiny, shiny body jewellery – the sort that smudges if you look too hard – and lots of it. A fiddly job if ever I’ve come across one.

Ever willing to rise to a challenge, I dredged up what remained of my studio memories from back when I studied Editorial Photography here in Brighton many moons ago. With various members of the team drafted into polishing and blu-tak duty we set up quite a functional little studio in a corner of the office with a lovely pink backdrop to match her site design and give the body jewellery some ‘zing’. After plenty of experimentation, we’re pretty chuffed with the results. What do you reckon?

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.