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.

One of the great things about running your own business is the opportunity it provides to get involved in other projects. And I’m really excited to announce my involvement in Culture Bank.

Culture Bank enables organisations to project their unique culture to the world, pulling together all the great characters, events, stories and experiences that make it so using social media.

My role in the team is primarily to look at how we can move the technical solutions Culture Bank relies on to the next level. I also expect I’ll be able to add some of the experience I’ve got in building audiences and online engagement to the mix too. At the end of the day, it’s really the engagement that we can build for clients through Culture Bank that gives our solution its value. That’s what we’re selling.

This in turn comes back full circle to my technology role. The Culture Bank pitch is not a design or technical led exercise. It’s no more a technology operation than arranging a bus to ship your staff from the city to the campus is an automotive one. The benefits and outcomes are the key.

So, my challenge is to find the infrastructure that delivers what’s required in a way that enables the choice of what we use to take a back seat in the decision making process a client makes when they come to us. For it to be a given that it works. For it to be about the application of social media not the applications that power it.

I’m looking forward to hopefully being able to write more about the adventures we have with this all in 2010. If in the meantime, you want to find out more, just 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.

With the year drawing to a close I’ve been taking a look at some of our search traffic over this year, as well as how our blog has performed. The two are quite closely linked. Why? Because a blog post, which is written with relevant keywords in mind, as far as titles, excerpts and content goes is a great way of getting traffic into the site. As a business, we may not have found our niche yet as to what we want to blog about, but it’s clear some things work better than others. So what are they?

Sharing knowledge

Ian has written a couple of posts this year on his experiences with both Cufon and BuddyPress. These have attracted a lot of traffic. They help establish a level of authority in an area and they open up an opportunity for dialogue. We should do more of this sort of writing.

Commenting on current events

Two of the most successful posts we’ve written this year are on the back of two pieces of news, neither of which are directly related to our business. The issue of whether businesses need TV licences for their PCs and the effect of Swine Flu on business continuity. When there is interest in a specific area, weighing in with our opinion adds to the overall commentary and again encourages a dialogue.

Establishing our own voice

Blogging for miggle is not really a core activity. Yes, there’s a real value in it, but it’s part of what we do to talk about our work, our business, our opinions and experiences. All stuff which is good to write about, but which needs to find its rightful place alongside getting client work out of the door. So, finding our own voice as part of that takes a while, especially when we have more than one contributor to the blog. However, when we’ve written from the heart, the posts have done well. Like when I wrote about the person who tore down our sign!

Our traffic from search (well, we only looked at Google….)

In terms of what insights our search traffic has given us as to what potential customers are looking for, there are two big things we’ve seen, each of which have been supported by enquires coming directly into our office.

Monetise my website!

Firstly, site owners want to find ways of monetising their web traffic and online audiences. There’s a big ‘moon on a stick’ element to this in that they want ‘A list’ advertisers via a solution where the inventory is sold directly on their behalf in a way that gives them control over copy. Even so, its a legitimate business objective which there is a big demand for.

I think I might plan my next bit of web development!

Secondly, the number of businesses that are showing a desire to understand their audiences and align their product requirements against the market objectives they uncover via a process which plans iterative developments is growing.

And finally….

The best, completely unrelated search term, on which we got a click this year was ‘Where can I find a bedroom in Hove I can rent by the hour.’ It’s reassuring to know, that if miggle were to go belly up, that there is a business opportunity here I can investigate.

Beyond that, our ten most popular blog posts this year have been:-

1. .tel domains: time to get excited (We’re still waiting for that excitement!)

2. Part time Production Assistant (Blogs are a great way to get company news out like this)

3. Building .tel websites

4. Why needing a TV licence for your work PC is a nonsense (a follow up post ot a bit of news that could affect businesses like miggle)

5. Recycling your audience (One of a series of web tips from miggle – althogh it got traffic from people looking for recycling websites)

6. Peopleperhour – the good the bad and the ugly

7. Building social networks in open source CMS

8. Use any font on your website with Cufon

9. Vacancy for a web producer

10. Online advertising space

Thanks for reading and commenting.

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.

‘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.

I’m not at all sure it is. I’d say, from the BBC’s point of view it’s a great distribution deal. But if I were trying to provide a competitive service, I’d really wonder how I was able to compete. What are ITN supposed to do in the face of this? Give their content away? Maybe they won’t even be able to give it away. For example, if I was head of content at one of the newspapers which is now aggregating BBC video, why would I need ITN’s content? And, if to compete, ITN needs the distribution, then surely it pays newspapers for it.

I would have also have thought that the BBC’s intention to make its content available to other UK based websites isn’t something it’s chosen to do. I’d say it’s something in which it has no choice. What it gives away free to the big four groups it has done today, surely it has to do for everyone – nationals, regionals, TV, radio and mobile. If I start up miggle news tomorrow, surely I’d be entitled to it too?

Don’t get me wrong. I think the BBC is magic. Its content is fantastic and it does some brilliant things online. It’s got a fantastic, well known and trusted brand. We all own it, we all know where to find it. That to me is all there should be to it.

In terms of content there is only really, in the UK, one credible competitor to the BBC. The newspapers that are associated with that group, who’ve recently suggested that their content online is something they might charge for, were not included in today’s announcement. Why is that I wonder?

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 fight for credit crunch business, grabbing the attention of your target audience can be extremely difficult. To paraphrase Alick in his previous post – A website is just the beginning – you can’t just hope for online business to find you.

The solution? An integrated business blog and subscribable RSS feed, like our very own miggleblog. An inexpensive, simple tool, it can give you direct access to millions of prospective customers worldwide.

The benefits of a blog:

Reach more people, and make money
The likelihood is that only your existing customers will read a news section on your website. With a blog you can reach out and find new prospects. Google’s Feedburner is an invaluable tool that can help you publicise your RSS feed content and make it easier for people to subscribe. By participating in the FeedBurner Ad Network, you can make money from your pearls of wisdom.

Build customer relations
It’s far harder to get business from new customers than it is to get more business from your existing customers, so keeping in touch should be one of your top priorities. An interactive blog is a friendly and fun way to keep your existing customers up-to-date with all your new offers and products, so that your business will be at the forefront of their mind when they need your products or services again.

Better search engine rankings
The migglemedia team always recommend that a business blog be hosted on the main business website, as the more people that read your blog and link to posts on it, the higher your website will appear in the search engine rankings.

Bring in more traffic
Google search loves frequently updated websites, therefore a blog can bring in a surprising amount of new traffic to your website through natural search terms. Blog posts are rapidly indexed by the major search engines and can be extremely profitable.

Start a buzz
Blog about your new products, drop hints about forthcoming events, publicise your research – grab the attention of the press! Blogs are increasingly quoted and cited in the mainstream media, and as such are a great way to score free publicity for your company.

Become ‘the guru’
If your business occupies a niche sector of the market, why not share your knowledge via a blog and build a reputation as a go-to person?

Test your ideas
Thinking about a change of direction for the company or expanding into a new range of products? Blog about it and let your customers tell you exactly what they want from your business.

>> How to profit from social media

>> Drive user engagement with a newsletter

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.

This is the next post in Alick’s series on our miggle website fundamentals, “a functional website is just the starting point for an effective online business”.

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I always have this vision of a guy – maybe back in the 1930s at the height of the last depression – sitting in his office, elbows on desk, head in hands, staring at his brand new telephone and waiting for it to ring. He’d heard that all his competitors had got a phone and thought if he got one too, the business would come. So he got it installed, but never figured out why it didn’t ring.

I see a similar thing happen with business websites. How many can say that their site’s working for their business the way they want it to?

For the purposes of this post, we’ll assume your website is a great website – focussed on the needs of your audience and/or current and future customers, providing the features or functions that match those of your competitors in a way that makes it easy for users to get what they want and encourages them to come back for more. But we’ll also assume that its not delivering the return on the investment you wanted – so why is that?

In most cases it’s because too much focus, time and money was placed on the build and the design – and not enough thought given to what time, money and resource would be required to get it seen.

The common problems we see are:

* The front page never changes
* No new content gets added
* No promotion of special offers
* Worse still – as a combination of neglect on the three points above, out-of-date content is featured on the website
* Broken links – or searches on Google link to pages that can’t be found
* Offline advertising and literature are not referencing your website
* No money is spent on online advertising and marketing.

They exist because:

* No one within the business ‘owns’ the website
* No budget has been allocated to the website
* Somehow the business believes that because everyone can access your site, everyone will.

They can be mitigated by:

* Allocating a budget within your business to promote your site
* Ensuring someone has the skills and the time to make updates to your site to keep it fresh, accurate and reflective of your business
* Having a clear plan of what you can reasonably expect from your site.

Our most successful small business clients have got themselves to the stage where their sites have paid for themselves. In every case, it’s been because they’ve been prepared to spend at least the same again as they spent on the build to ensure their online investment returns with interest.

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.

Recently we’ve seen various UK ‘Winter Wonderlands’ in the news. Families have paid handsomely, expecting magical snow kingdoms; only to be met with dank fields, skinny animals, jerry-rigged displays and disgruntled staff.

These businesses had gone a great job of driving an audience to their attractions, but had neglected to consider what their audience would want once they’d arrived.

There is a crucial lesson here that can be applied to all online businesses: Do not waste time and money increasing traffic to a website that is not ready.

Your metaphorical bucket may not have a hole in it, but if it does, then there’s no sense in pouring in more water. And, if there’s already water in it, then it’s worth trying to keep it there.

The migglemedia team start the process of building audience by appraising your site, analysing your stats and looking at the behaviour of your users. Checking for leaks, in other words. We make sure your website is water-tight before encouraging you to invest your marketing budget on audience building.

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.