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 those three years, as well as how those learnings will shape what we do for the coming year.  In this final post I talk about how miggle will start to align itself around what is one of its key advantages.  Being based in Brighton & Hove.

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.

Today we’ve launched two new sites, both focussed on .tel domain technology.

miggletelDirectoryBuilder

The first is the miggletelDirectoryBuilder. This enables .tel owners to collect directory submissions from free and paying customers.

Directory subscribers can not only submit listings to a .tel directory, but they can amend them as well. Directory owners have the ability to review all listings before pushing them live.

Premium listings are paid via PayPal, debit or credit card.

The current directory using miggletelDirectoryBuilder is brighton.tel, You can see this in action here.

If you’ve brought a .tel domain name with a view to building a directory then this could be the perfect product for you.

Full product details can be found here (PDF).

miggletel.com – Miggle Ltd’s commentary and analysis on the latest in the .tel space

miggletel.com is a site which showcases the latest .tel products and services from miggletel, as well as the best of what we’ve seen from the wider .tel development community.

It includes articles on our own insights into .tel directory, as well as a summary of the most interesting blog posts and tweets we’ve seen each day.

We know there are already plenty of other similar great sites which are talking about .tel and we’d be keen to flag these up to our users from miggletel.com in exchange for similar links from your site, so if you’re running something similar, please 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.

I’m writing this on the bus. I have to say I left the debate early and thought I’d post my opinion on it all here.

Digital by design was a sort of industry vs academia debate that focussed on the design needs of the industry and the contribution the unis make to generating talent.

It came at the end of a careers fair and portfolio clinic, something miggle.co.uk would have been keen to be involved with. When millions of UK web users engage with content we create every day, when staff of ours move on to the likes of Yahoo! or MSN as their next move, when what we specialise in leaves us fairly uniquely positioned in the town, notwithstanding my own experience in small business mentoring and having written one of the town’s leading colleges first web design course you’d think, from a strategic point of view, we’d be a good fit. But that’s clearly just one way thinking on my part. And it’s slightly unrelated, so rant over…

Anyway, the point I wanted to make was related to Andy Budd, Clearlefts’s Creative Director. He was talking about himself as an example of a generation of web practitioners, who were self-taught, starting as they did at a time when there were no web based courses. I’ve seen some of Andy’s first designs, and they’re a world apart from those churned out by the leading company he’s built up today, so he’s a clear example of someone who’d learnt well on the job. One key point he mentioned was a survey in which 75% of 19 year olds had said their education had been no help in them getting a job – and he was comparing this also with the lack of relevant skills he saw coming out of the unis. I’d be interested to see what the same 19 year olds say in 10 years time by the way.

As a largely self-taught practitioner myself I can definitely see a value in my education – but I think mine came at a time before unis were obsessed with churning out people with what it considered were vocational skills. My education I think was just about giving me a broad all round understanding and interest in the world around me. Those skills helped me to be a self starter and it’s actually those fundamental skills I find lacking in many people we interview. That’s not a fault that can be laid at the feet of the unis – its more the fault of a fundamental shift in what education, even from an early age, is all about.

At the end of the day, great designers will shine through somehow. If the unis can’t churn them out, they’ll find a route elsewhere. One academic guy mentioned that design based courses were hampered because they sat in humanities. If they sat in engineering he ventured it could all be different. That’s a fair point. We currently have an intern at miggle with an Astrophysics degree. He didn’t learn to be a web developer, but the thinking processes he can apply to online engineering are spot on. There are some things the unis will always be able to do better than others – science and engineering I think are good examples.

The biggest irony of the evening to me was that one of the design experts from the industry was talking all about the need for unis to focus students on details, not the big ideas, while sat next to another expert whose Flash based site didn’t work on an iPhone. But that’s just pedantic detail on my part, and I only make it because I see it as slightly ironic we missed out again to be able to make a contribution earlier in the day to the industry body we always do our best to support.

So, if there’s anyone reading this who was at the event who missed out an a portfolio review, please feel free to get in touch with me, I’d be happy to help out.

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.

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.

Time flies. Here I am, wrapping up my day’s work when it suddenly occurred to me we’d not posted here for almost 2 weeks. This was never supposed to happen! Mind you, that’s because we’ve been pretty busy these last few weeks, one on finishing off some projects (a couple of e-commerce builds in our CMS) and two, on trying to establish more process around the business with the aim of helping us all work more productively.

This latter part, making the most of your resource, I think is one of the biggest challenges of running a small business. There’s always so much to do and there is never enough time. Having a laser focus on what’s important is key in addressing the ‘there’s too much to do’ part, but also, knowing exactly where the time goes in the first place is also important. The more clients and projects we take on, the more 5 minute jobs we seem to accumulate.

In the last post, Jo wrote about the new support tool we’d launched to help prioritise the ‘to do’ list. What we’ve now started to do is measure the time we take more granularly – and to do this we’re using toggl.com. Toggl is great. It’s free and you can sign up with a Google Account – with the premium versions having some nice tie ins to Google Calandar. Using Toggl you define your Clients. Clients have projects and projects spawn tasks. Tasks can be created by anyone who shares your workspace, and they manage these via a browser, or via a widget that’s available for Mac/PC/Linux. We’ve not yet plugged Toggl into billing, or used features such as the RSS output that, theoretically, could be used to communicate progress on projects to stakeholders or clients – but first up, it will give everyone a clearer idea of where the time goes and that in itself will provide some useful learnings. Like it took 18 mins and 8 seconds to write this post!

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.

The migglesupport system is a new tool designed to help our miggle customers request features or amends to their website, ask for help with content management or report any problems.

Simple to use, clients will log details of their query as a ticket in our system and it will be instantly assigned to the appropriate member of the miggle team to address. Clients will then receive phone and / or email updates as the issue is dealt with.

Check out the new site: migglesupport.co.uk

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.

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 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.

Buddypress screengrab

>> What is BuddyPress? See Alick’s previous post.

Before starting to install BuddyPress you need to use WordPress MU. Once uploaded onto your server you will be guided through the installation. This includes the standard email and database details but you are also asked whether to use sub-domains or sub-directories for each user’s blogs, e.g. blog.example.com or example.com/blog.

On the first install I went for sub-domains, everything installed correctly. We could have multiple users and access each control panel but there was a problem trying to access everyone’s blogs. As I installed WordPress MU onto a shared server blog.example.com gave a ’shared ip’ error. You will only be able to use sub-domains on a dedicated server.

Once re-installing (you can just delete wp-config.php!) I chose sub-directories, wow! Huge breakdown. WordPress MU gave a redirect loop error, I couldn’t even access wp-login! After searching through a few forums I started to find this was a common error.

The solution:
Many forum users say to ‘clear your cookies’ which in a lot of cases seems to work. Other people suggest modifying the SECRET_SALT so WordPress generates a new code – SECRET_SALT is auto-generated by the install for wp-config.php.

But the one I found to work was by bradleyland.net. Basically just delete wp-config.php and do the setup again. From what I can tell this resolves both the solutions above so if you have tried one and it didn’t work, try the other too.

Installing BuddyPress
Once WordPress MU is up and running BuddyPress is fairly simple, I didn’t have any errors getting this to work first time. The read-me.txt file is useful but it doesn’t tell you every step, I would suggest following their online guide.

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.