When I work on any online project, I always try and apply the same process to it, whatever the size of the undertaking. This process is based largely on one I used at Yahoo! In my experience, the trick to being able to use this successfully is to apply it in such a way that you don’t get bogged down or overwhelmed by process. For example, in some projects one of the stages detailed below could be a conversation, in another, it might be a 50 page document.

Stages of the Process

In most instances, we’d expect prospective clients to come to us with 1 and 2 below:-

1 Ideate

What’s the core creative idea for the site?

2 Define Market Requirements

What are the requirements of the website? (in essence this is similar to what is covered in the miggle.co.uk client briefing form) What’s the market? Who are the competitors? On what criteria will the website be judged a success? What do budgets and timescales look like?

You can find more information on writing your brief here.

Stage 3 and 4 depends on the size of the project. If it’s a straightforward build in a content management system (CMS) and we’ve got a clear idea of content and hierarchy then often 3 and 4 is no more than us knowing the CMS tools comprehensively and squaring off that your requirements are met by the functionalities of the tools.

However, in larger, or bespoke projects, 3 and 4 can each also be extensive pieces of documentation. In my opinion the client should aim to be leading on as much of point 3 as possible – or calling in experts to help.

Point 4 is then the role of the company you choose to do your work. The bit in-between is the process you go through to select your supplier.

3 Define Product Requirements

Scope the product features that deliver on the concept and the market requirements.

4 Define Functional Specification

Detail how the product will work, detailing how and by what technologies the project would be delivered.

5-8 will be lead by your development team – with appropriate sign-off for clients happening during 5-7

5 Define Development Plan

Build this into a plan, which includes full costs and timescales.

6 Build

Execute on the plan.

7 Test

Test the solution.

8 Deploy

Deploy solution on production servers.

Finally, as the client, you need to work out if the project achieved on its objectives. So, there’s often going to be either between stages 8-9, or after stage 9, the plan by which you market your new development.

9 Evaluate

Measure the site’s performance against the criteria laid out in market requirements and get ready to ideate again.

How similar/dissimilar is this to processes you might use. I’d be interested to find out. Also, if you were looking at this from a client perspective, what do you think are the relative strengths and weaknesses of the process – and what would you change? I’d be interested to hear.

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.

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.

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.

An active community of users can be great for increasing engagement on your site and for your business as a whole. However, it’s no longer a case on the Internet of ‘build it and they will come’. The community elements of your site need a hook and they’ll need a certain level of effort to start them off and to keep them running.

Users will ‘pay’ to join your community using personal data as the currency. You need to give them something back of value that they can’t get elsewhere. Unmet needs on the web are hard to find these days!

Another point to consider: though you’re building community elements to benefit your business, the dialogue and the interaction is owned by the members. They may not behave as you hoped and they may take the conversation where you never dreamed they would. This can be as much opportunity as threat if you manage it correctly.

If you are going to build a community, what’s your hook?

The best community sites have hooks. Flickr has pictures, YouTube has video, LastFM has music, Yahoo! Answers has questions. Facebook, Bebo and Twitter are built around people – the various tools they supply being able to allow people to share interests. Blogs are built around certain subject matter, forums help people resolve problems.

Between them, all the sites above have millions of users. Those users have to manage many different profiles, as well as the usernames and passwords they use to manage email, online banking, telephony services, etc. If you build another network you are throwing something else into the mix – something else to remember and you’ll be competing for online time against bigger players. That doesn’t mean that you should not try and build the community tools your site needs – but if you think you’ll struggle to make those stand out in a crowd, think about how maybe you could become active within existing communities. Your existing and future customers are already active there after all – and there are great opportunities to use these sites as a pool from which you can fish users.

Which existing community sites could you focus on? Where are the most appealing audiences?

Think about your own use of social networks and communities. Of the sites you use, how are they making money – and how have they made money out of you? Do these communities offer direct revenue generating opportunities, or are the way they contribute to profits more subtle than that?

How will building a community add to your bottom line?

Let’s imaging for a moment that you could invite all the users of Bebo – a site popular with kids – or Facebook to your house or office. Think of what provisions you’d have to make. It’s the same online. Your community needs to be managed, maintained, listened to and catered for. If they don’t – back to the offline analogy – they will trash your house and leave and it’ll look in a pretty poor state for the next set of visitors.

How will you keep the community alive, engaged, entertained and legal?

If you read your news from bbc.co.uk, chances are you’ll go back everyday if you like the coverage. If you meet your life partner on match.com, you’ll never use the site again. Both sites have delivered, but only one retains its customers. The one that can’t needs to be able to continually drive awareness of itself, while always appearing fresh.

What will be our response when our community members don’t play ball and do the things on our site the marketing team promised they would?

The migglemedia team can help you address all the factors you need to take into account before venturing into the world of online communities and social media websites.

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.