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.

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.

We’ll often get calls from businesses looking for quotes for a website. While they’ll have a good idea of what they want, to define a price and timescale, the devil is always in the detail. That’s why we’ll always ask for a brief. However, often the response we’ll get is, “We don’t have one” or “We don’t know where to start in writing one” – so if that sounds like you, maybe this post will be of some use.

Focus on your objectives

A good web design company will just want to know about your business objectives. From this, they can recommend solutions.

Our briefing form, which is based on one used by Clearleft, with a few other objective based questions thrown in, is all about trying to find out about your requirements, as well as who your audience and customers are, who you compete with and what kind of image you want to create online. Beyond the actual brief, we’re also aiming here for you to tell us all about your business. You know your company best, so that should be an easy thing to do shouldn’t it? Aim to talk to us in your language, not ours, and let us come back to you for points of clarity if we don’t understand some of your objectives.

And really, that’s it…

Is it? Yes, pretty much.

However… listing your objectives alone won’t get your website built. There may be other important stages that need to be covered too – such as user research for example. In any case, your site will only get built once you’ve agreed that the solutions proposed back to you in the web company’s response make sense and deliver on your objectives.

That can be a difficult thing to ascertain, because it may not be obvious to you initially, as the client, how the solution that’s been proposed delivers on your business needs. But the extent to how well your prospective development partner assists you with that stage will be one of the key criteria you use in trusting whether or not they are the company to work with. Then, beyond that, even with the solutions agreed, depending on the scope of the site, more detailed work may need to be done on specifying exactly how your site is built.

So the brief is just the first stage then?

Yes, it is. And its worth is weight in gold.

A good brief is a uniform document you can take to a number of potential providers, meaning the proposals you get back will be something you can compare like for like. Many companies will give you that initial response for free. However, if more detailed planning needs to be done to specify exactly what the solution might look like, then it may be that this in itself becomes a chargeable stage of the project. It really depends on the size of the project overall, but a good prospective provider will always let you know to what extent the planning you’ve done in the brief gives them the info they need. You can read more on planning your web design project here too.

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.

We’ve spent a bit more time today on one of our .tel domains, brighton.tel.

One thing that I wanted to find out since we last looked at these was how are the sites doing stats wise. To explore this, we’ve been downloading our log files and looking at these in telSAP, which was the best of a few of the stats solutions we looked at today. This is an obvious, but pretty key step required to measure how effective the sites turn out to be.

Another thing I’ve read a lot about is how well these domain names get (or don’t get) indexed by Google. brighton.tel is currently not in the top 100 search results for the search term brighton on Google, Bing or Yahoo! Nor, at present, should it be, considering how much work has been done on it. However, we are finding that there are some searches on which brighton.tel gets first page Google ranking on keywords that are part of the subfolders on the domain. This is really encouraging.

Finally, we’ve made use of the back-up feature that telnic have recently launched. We used this to download one set of data from one of our .tels and upload it to another. Basically, that XML DTD acts as a template we can now use to manage bulk uploads to .tels, which is handy.

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.

‘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.

It was great to see Yahoo! launch their new version of the home page in beta last week in the UK. Here at miggle, we work closely for Yahoo! on their ‘Front doors’ day in day out, so clearly we’ve got a vested interest in saying the page is great. But that’s really what we think.

During my time at Yahoo! homepage launches were a big part of my life – this is the fourth one I’ve been involved with in one way or another and so I’ve seen first hand how it’s changed and the reasoning behind the changes.

A brief historical functional overview of the Yahoo! homepage, which up until at least the start of 2009 was the single most visited web page on the planet, goes something like this – and in many ways mirrors the history of the web:

• At the start, it was all about links in the directory, which dominated the page
• Then the directory became searchable
• Rather than drive traffic to competitors, Yahoo! started building and acquiring its own products like Yahoo! Mail and Finance
• Yahoo! started publishing latest news on its homepage
• With so many people on the site daily, the media value of the page soared. Yahoo! led the way in offering advertisers truly unique opportunities on its homepages worldwide
• As the web broadened, Google Search became ‘the killer app’ – portals no longer could offer the same standard as the pure plays, for example, everyone knows eBay – but do you remember Yahoo! Auctions?
• Entry points to the web changed. The Hotmail homepage was a more valuable destination than the MSN homepage, because more people started their web sessions there. Internet toolbars became so important that companies like Microsoft started to embed search functionality into the chrome of the browsers and desktop.
• Thus, a page like yahoo.co.uk had to have value as a product in its own right. Editorial engagement became more important as homepages became the place to find out about what cool stuff was happening on and offline. The directory disappeared.
• Web2.0 and social networking took off. The web became a more customisable place. Mobile phones became more important as a platform. The personal assistant on the last version of the Y! homepage showed where front page evolution was heading.

And now, in 2009, we have a Yahoo! homepage that allows users to see the news headlines from the Guardian alongside its own news product. A page that actively encourages users to add their favourite sites to the left hand nav bar rather than big up its own portal offering. Yahoo! has recognised that setting your online status is a key part of any user’s identity when going for a surf on a highly personalisable web – even though its as easy to update your Facebook account from the Y! page as it is your own Y! profile.

Is this simply Yahoo! admitting defeat? I don’t think so. I think this is a good strategic move on their part, allowing users to create their own ‘starting point’ on the web. If Yahoo! ever had a raison d’etre, wasn’t this always it? Is the new homepage evolution or revolution? Let us know what you think.

The new home page still does everything that Yahoo! has always done well – pointing users to fresh and interesting content and brilliant products such as Y! Finance and Mail – but also recognises the fact that the Internet has moved on from the dominance of portals. That in itself gives every web publisher the opportunity to think about how it can leverage Yahoo!’s audience to drive engagement in its own products. If you want to think about how that could work for your business then drop us a line.

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 third of our blog posts explaining miggle’s website fundamentals, we take you through our thinking on the importance of a website homepage in establishing your online brand and inspiring trust in your users.

Express yourself
If your business already has a strong offline brand, keep online life simple for both your business and your users and maintain consistency within all your promotional activities. It may be tempting when you think about site design to go for a hot new look, but a radically different ‘epersonality’ could hinder rather than help your business. Think carefully before letting your web designer take you off on a path which diverges too much from your existing identity.

Don’t be seduced by flashy effects
Animation rich sites may create a powerful first impression, but return users to your site will just want to be able to get to the pages they need quickly and easily. Your site exists to do a good job for your business and customers, its primary function is not to add diversity to your design team’s portfolio. Remember, the amount of time a customer will spend on your site versus the other sites they use online is minimal – so don’t make them have to work hard to get what they want by making things more confusing than they need to be. And definitely don’t make them have to download any special plug-ins to view the page. Inexperienced users won’t know how, experienced users are likely not to bother. With e-commerce businesses remember people shop online to save time as well as money. Think of your homepage as a haven for users – a reassuring place where it’s easy to find exactly the information needed.

Demonstrate openness
Your homepage should provide easy access to an ‘about us’ section with detailed information on the business, online portfolios / examples of your work and profiles of staff members – all these aspects indicate transparency and openness and can help give your business that ‘human touch’. If you are running an e-commerce business, easy links to returns policies and customer care are also important.

Provide valuable content
A site that reads as a business card or promotional pamphlet gives users little reason to revisit. Thinking about how you can offer advice, tips, news or promotional offers will keep you homepage fresh.

Think carefully about advertising
If you are going to accept any kind of advertising or sponsorship online think first about how the appearance of other brands along side you own will effect customers perceptions of your business. Good advertisers/sponsors will provide good mutual brand association, poor ones will diminish 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.

An example of a font rendered with Cufón

This week, a client asked us to programme a site mock-up which included non-web-safe-fonts.

In the past, I would have had to “slice” out the text and reference the particular font along with a similar replacement from five or so web-safe-fonts or create non-SEO friendly images to replace text elements.

Over the last few years, applications have appeared which allow developers to render non-web-safe-fonts using Flash. However, on the recommendation of Jeffrey Way, I decided to try Cufón, a new development which uses Javascript. (One of the reasons we decided to use the Javascript application rather than the more established Flash applications is that there are better options for the user if they don’t have Javascript turned on.)

Rather than render the text using Flash like sIFR and FLIR, it uses a mixture of canvas and VML to render the fonts. The process has been amazingly simple.

Here are some pros and cons I found while implementing Cufón:

Cufón pros
* Lightning fast
* Easy to install
* Up and running in a few minutes
* Allow CSS editing and :hover states
* Can use multiple fonts for different elements
* Search Engine Friendly (SEO)
* Not dependent upon a server-side language.

Cufón cons
* It’s Javascript dependent. If disabled, the default fonts will be used
* The text isn’t selectable.

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.