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.

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.

OK – I’m not trying to panic anyone here, or be a doom monger, but now that the UK’s Chief Medical Officer has said that by Autumn, this WHO declared, level six pandemic, could amount to 10,000 new cases a week, then its probably time to think about what your contingency plan is as a business when swine flu strikes. It’s not a case of IF your office will be hit – but WHEN!

After all, lets face it, we Brits are not the most resilient bunch when illness strikes. I can think of plenty of times in my working career where I’ve been able to see the tumbleweed blow through offices, as a mass bunch of sickies get thrown, with staff self diagnosing the sniffles as flu. So, it’s key you have a plan to cope. Many businesses will have a good BCP in place. However, if you are reading this thinking ‘What’s BCP?’ then read on. And then when you’ve finished, go and see your boss and ask him how your company’s BCP will handle a drought of fit and able bodies in the office. If he/she looks at you blankly, then here’s an opportunity for you to score a few brownie points.

In layman’s terms BCP, or Business Continuity Planning, is all about what processes you have in place to address the fact that what can go wrong, will go wrong. Because worst case scenarios rarely happen, few businesses take the time to consider what they’ll do when disaster strikes. A solid BCP plan should cover many areas – and how to cope when your business is suffering from staff shortages due to sickness is definitely one.

I remember in a past life putting the basics of BCP in place when we realised that the Queen Mother would not go on for ever. Operation Fishbone it was called, Her Majesty having had what was past form for choking on bones and us being aware that the next one could be one heimlich manourvre too far. As it was, she soldiered on for another six months, but a few days after we’d devised the plan, two planes flew into the World Trade Center. We were well prepared to cover the event editorially. Judging by the speed at which our competitors sites went down, we were probably one of the few that were.

The point of this little anecdote is this: Even if you think the panic over swine flu has been blown out of all proportion, that’s not a reason not to think about BCP. After all, a process that works for the flu will also cover you when snow falls in London again and no one can get to the office. This winter just gone, the current clients for whom we provide a BCP service via migglepublishing were able to pick up the phone and know that we’d be able to kick in with coverage when the bad weather ground everything to a halt.

We’re able to provide that coverage because our clients see the value of investing some time and money into ensuring continuity of service and they can thus rest assured that there are people across various locations who have access to publishing tools, training in how to use them and a good understanding of what sort of content works for your business – these FAQs will give you some idea of how that process works. If you want to find out more about how we can help you with being a cog in your BCP machine just get in touch. And if you don’t, be prepared anyway. Nothing stays the same for ever – its the nature of impermanence. Disaster is imminent. Make sure you can cover it, not be swept up by 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.