The Sussex Internship Programme will provide 100 internships at a wide variety of games, web, software development, animation, TV, e-learning, music, film and advertising companies.

Interns receive a 30 day work placement, additional training, access to top industry professionals and a grant. Participating companies get carefully selected top notch graduate talent and support in making the most of them during the programme.

Here at miggle.co.uk, we’re proud to be a part of this and are looking forward to being able to work with the latest graduate talent available. Specifically, we’ll be looking for someone to come in and develop some product features for us using APIs which are available from the providers of various technologies we rely on.

The Sussex Internship Programme is a partnership programme led by Wired Sussex and the University of Sussex. If you’re interested in the programme you can find out more from clicking on either of the links in this post.

This position is now closed – thanks to all who applied

miggle.co.uk, a Brighton based Internet Business, is looking to hire a part-time production assistant.

This position would be an ideal summer job for a student who is interested in a career in the Internet, but applications are invited from any candidates who have:-

* A passion for the internet
* Some experience in building web pages
* An eye for design, with some experience of industry standard web design tools
* A good understanding of Microsoft Office products
* Good written English skills.

Duties would include:-

* Content management – updating some internal miggle.co.uk websites and those of our clients
* Assistance with marketing and promotions
* Compiling reports on internal sites and client site performance.

Starting immediately, this position is initially offered as a 3-month contract and would be based at the miggle office in Brighton. The hours would be 8 hours a week, as two mornings, two afternoons or a full day. Extra hours may also be available. Homeworkers and tele-commuters need not apply.

Depending on the ongoing success of the business and the performance of the employee there is scope for the contract to be extended. Salary £5.75 per hour.

Please let me know if you’d like to take this further, attaching your CV if you have one and let me know why you’d be interested in the opportunity.

A decent website, SEM and social media marketing strategies are valuable, cost-effective tools which can help a nimble company be heard above the crowd, and as such should make sense for small business owners. If only!

If only it was easy to get some small businesses to see that a poorly search engine optimised (SEO) website with accessibility and usability issues a-plenty will never fully represent what online can do for them. Unfortunately, investment in a sub-standard site has generated so little return, they now see improvements as just throwing away more cash. This conservatism is a BIG obstacle when communicating with potential new clients – as, time and again, we have to prove that if they had a site that worked harder, it would lessen the need for other, more time and cash intensive offline solutions.

It’s far easier to sell to our larger clients than the mercurial small business owner who knows exactly what he’s got (or not got) to play with. It’s just as well we’re a diversified business – if we were solely focussed on the small business market I think we’d find that the level of effort we have to go to in making a sale, resolving objections, educating on benefits and solutions, placing a focus on both pre-planning and on-going online marketing would obliterate any profits.

That’s why, I think, the only businesses that have really succeeded in selling online solutions to small firms are either one-man-bands who can keep their costs at a minimum or big companies who can bring scalable solutions to market.

The problem with one-man-bands is that no matter how good they are, they don’t bounce off buses, and thus don’t come with built-in business continuity planning (BCP). Also, even if they don’t get run over by the bus, they are often unable to take their clients to the next stage if their clients’ business online demands grow beyond their capacity to deliver. (Perhaps I’m doing some freelancers a disservice here – those who, in the first instance, ensure that they supply their clients with a BCP compliant solution.)

The problem with the scalable solutions offered by the bigger players is that they offer little in terms of differentiation, can be difficult to customise and throw up all sorts of issues in their T+Cs – such as, who owns any registered users?

The small B2B website market presents real challenges for miggle. I can no longer match the price of the man who works from the back bedroom, or offer out our technology at a price that can compete with those who can sell similar in much higher volumes. We still get work though, because we can sell ourselves on service and dedication and are getting increasing numbers of pitches and projects through word-of-mouth. The extent to which this is a foundation on which we can continue to work with small businesses on their websites is, I guess, what makes it exciting. Which is why I set up a small business 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.

As of this morning, Google has another rival in the search engine stakes – Wolfram Alpha. Designed to fill the slot between Google search and Wiki online encyclopaedias, is Wolfram Alpha god’s gift to the fact checker or just another also-ran?

The miggle team have been playing around with it this morning, so now we all know that Ian has the same birthdate as miracle weight-loss child actor Josh Peck and the temperature at the time of my birth was 18C. Great, so far so very specific.

Unfortunately, when Paul asked me to find out who Newcastle will play for their last match in the Premier League of this Premier League season, Wolfram drew a blank on both ‘Newcastle FC’ and ‘Newcastle Football Club’. Founder, British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram, has admittedly gone on record as saying that data in the search engines is very US biased at the moment. Suspect he’ll be concentrating on cracking the American market, with projected usage spiralling out from there.

Very keen on the timelines provided with information about a person or an event, but it would have been good to have the capability to plot Bruce Willis’ timeline against that of his new young wife, Demi-lookalike, Emma Heming. Where’s the list of his film and television roles?

Also, what will happen when facts are disputed? One of Wolfram’s sources is listed as Wikipedia – not always the most reliable for online research. And how about the legendary? Wolframming ‘King Arthur’ just brings up a list of cast members from the 2004 flick. This search engine is obviously not one to mess with myth.

I’m enjoying a fresh experience so I’ll reserve judgement until Wolfram starts catering to a Brit audience. Looking forward to hearing everyone else’s feedback in the blogosphere.

This position is now closed – thanks to all who applied

We’ve got an open vacancy at miggle. There are a number of ways in which we might fill the role – either part-time, full-time, as a job share or via a few regular freelancers, possibly on a retainer or as a buy out of an existing client base. This last option might suit someone who is self-employed, but feels they have got as far as they can on their own and would like the benefit of being part of a more established company where they’d get a chance to both work alone and as part of a team.

What I’m looking for is a good all round web producer. Someone who has:

* A broad knowledge of a range of skills – most likely HTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL, Flash, Google Adwords/Analytics and ideally a knowledge of some open source software as well as experience of using various APIs
* Experience of managing content – doesn’t really matter in which CMS, but an ability to write good SEO copy and an interest in a broad range of current affairs would be useful
* A real passion for the web – someone who actively uses social networks and has an understanding of what social media can do for businesses and consumers.

We can offer the right person a range of interesting projects to work on for both large and small businesses within our team of 11 people, with five of us based at our office in the centre of Brighton. Interested? Please get in touch with me, Alick, giving an outline of your experience, what you could bring to the miggle mix and what you feel you could get from working with us. Lastly, let me know on what terms you’d like to be involved.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

The new sign outside our office lasted just three days

I got a call from one of the team today to tell me, that for the second time this year, one of the signs we’ve got outside our offices has been torn down.

I think when the first sign got vandalised, we probably all thought this was the random act of some clueless idiot. However, I guess, it now having happened a second time and us seeing to be the only business in our office block who have been targeted in this way, we’re going to have to put this down to being the act of someone who for some reason has decided to have a crack at us.

I just want to use this post to say, “Why do you bother?” If you have some kind of problem with miggle, then let us know what it is. If it’s a competitive issue, then bear in mind that we’ve got more avenues to winning business than the signs we post outside the office. We know that operating the sort of business we are in Brighton puts us in a crowded market, but the sort of companies we know we are competing against are savvy, respected and talented enough to win work on their own merits. We welcome that kind of competition – it’s part of what makes Brighton such a fantastic centre for new media. None of those firms would resort to these kind of tactics.

Anyway – undeterred, we will get the sign remade. The idea behind it was from one of the new guy’s in the team, it’s the first bit of work he’d done for us and he was looking forward to see if it worked. Our designer who put it all together takes a great deal of pride in her work – it’s a disappointment for her too. Neither of them deserve to have had their efforts trashed by you. Grow up.

We’ve logged the incident with the Police and I’ll pay a small sum as a token of our appreciation to anyone who helps us make a claim or get a conviction against the person who did this, and who probably will so again until we find out who it is. And, of course, if any one reading this wants a free consult on web design – please feel free to get in touch.