Archive for November, 2009

Pink bricks?

building websites For those who are not in the business of website development, understanding the different technologies can be a bit of a challenge.

I think the single most important thing is that your website should be written in XHTML/CSS and not inline styles and tables. There are a whole bunch of reasons (which I go on about A LOT). But for anyone buying a website then this is a good one…

Let’s imagine that you had commissioned a builder to build you a new room in your house. On day one he asks you to decide what color bricks you should use and explains that he is using a new technique where the bricks are on display instead of the usual plaster and decoration. It would be quite tough to decide what color your room should be forever. Ideally you don’t want the interior design of your room being built into the actual fabric. You’ld expect the bricks to be strong and buildings compliant and then to add the design later. Right?

Well it’s a bit like that with websites. XHTML are the bricks and the CSS is the interior design. It is possible to completely redesign a website by swapping the CSS file.

If your website is table driven and using inline styles then to change the design of the website is a lengthy process since effectively you have to remove each colored brick and swap it for another color.

Website Design | 24.11.2009 20:49 | No Comments

Geek Post – Our CMS!

We are really chuffed with our SMART CMS. We designed the system just over 3 years ago, it took about 6 months of in-house development to bring to market and now we have over 150 websites using it. Some are large with over 100 pages and some are tiny 5 pagers.

The system was designed by myself. In a previous life I was a Development Manager for Thomson Reuters, managing a small development team and working closely with other managers. I have a degree in Computing (2:1) followed by 10 years or so real life development and managerial experience in software.

During my time at Thomson Reuters I was in charge of a number of (.net, ASP, AJAX) applications that streamed real-time data from the stock market on to secure website apps that would allow traders to drill down and derive meaningful stats/data/chart. It had to be reliable, quick, light and very user friendly.

When I started on the design of SMART I took my knowledge of large applications and really thought about how we would need SMART to work in the future. We wrote SMART from scratch in PHP/MySQL and AJAX. I’d not used PHP before but realised that it was the way forwards. I wanted the websites that SMART created to be light using plain XHTML/CSS. I didn’t want to have 150 versions of my CMS physically deployed with the clients website (what a nightmare for updates!). It was important to be able to offer the CMS to clients as an add-on, if they did not want it then I wanted the websites they had purchased to be as good as any written by hand and totally portable on their own servers.

So how did we do it? (GEEKS ONLY PLEASE!)

Well we have a central online database storing all client page data. Clients can login to SMART and update their data at anytime. Websites can be previewed or made live. What this effectively does is to recreate the website from scratch and send it via FTP over to the satellite and dependant website. It’s a bit like cloud computing except i’d not heard of it at that time!
We have developed a number of data and page types and a huge array of XHTML templates. We can update the templates and know that when a client presses make live next that they might not notice that their website now includes a new tag which we have discovered is good for Google – it is magic. Effectively their source code will always be updated to be compliant and work with newer browsers, and their design will look the same as ever.
The templates live in plain text files on our server with placeholder tags for database driven or data functions. Our website writer code zips through the DB and then converts these plain text files into valid XHTML files.
The websites themselves are purely designed in CSS. That is to say under the hood the raw XHTML is basically the same. All images, CSS, XHTML and any JavaScript (we try not to use any) etc all live on the clients own hosting. So if they cancel their SMART license they still have a valid website.
We can essentially change or update the CMS in anyway we like and have total control over it – if a client wants a calendar app on their front page – they got it!
We also had to consider the development strategy – we had three developers, UI (ME!), backend (Ria) and “website writer” (Chris). All these elements had to talk to each other so had to be written in units. We also needed to consider the order in which we worked so that we would have something to show clients and could get some working sites up and running before certain features were available.

The benefits to our clients are

Fast loading websites which are easy to host
Website code that does not go out of date
Flexibility in page layouts and content types
No fear of being tied in or loosing their website if they move suppliers
Search engine friendly websites
Our CMS can grow with them
SMART is being updated with new features all the time (this week we added an RSS feed and a new easy method to allow for multiple options with Romancart)

SMART was developed to be user friendly and most of all search engine friendly and personally I think we ticked all the boxes!?? I still pinch myself when I think of how great this has been for our business.

So – if you read this far then you are probably a developer, if you left after the first paragraph – then that’s cool this blog was not really written for you. If you are a developer or designer and are looking for a CMS to offer to your clients then perhaps you would like to get in touch. SMART is well tested and we’ve sold a few licenses already!

CMS | 23.11.2009 23:23 | No Comments

What is a website?

Ok so this might sound a bit like a silly question, but stick with me for a moment.

Try to think about your own experience of websites. Perhaps online banking, booking a holiday, researching about a new gadget for the kitchen or looking for gifts. In all cases when you use the internet you are doing so to find information or to perform a task. The best websites are those that allow you to do this efficiently. Put too many hurdles in your way and you will move on to another.

I see too many websites with the following issues

Too many moving and scrolling images or moving text flying around
Old and out of date content, including dead blogs or outdated price list
Fancy drop down menus that are hard to click on or worst still – just do not work! (If you must have one then please do provide a text only alternative).
Loads of text which goes a bit like this “We have been established for 15 years and have do many clients” bla bla
No easy to find contact info
No quick summary of what you do and who for. This needs to be on each page so that people land on your website (might not be the home page first) that they can decide if they want to stick around.
Dinky text that makes me have to squint
No thought at all into layout of the copy, with text just plonked on the page
Silly splash screens that “welcome me to the website” before I can actually read the content.

Your website needs to focus on your content, the information you want your visitors to know. Content that is bang up to date, relevant to the visitor, easy to digest and easy to find. It’s not called information technology for nothing you know….

Website Design | 23.11.2009 17:17 | No Comments

Who buys your stuff?

One of the first stages of designing a website involves really understanding our clients brand and market (as well as their competitors!). Only a handful of times have clients come to us armed with a branding guide and a real sense of their own target market. They might know their product inside out and back to front – but when we ask who the target market is we frequently get answers like “old people, people who visit the website, mums, children, people who want building work, anybody really” etc.

How can we create an effective website, one that works for you and your target market if you are unable to define it yourself?

Lets say that you provide jewellery making classes at children’s birthday parties.

So who’s your market? Children, Girls?
Lets go a bit further: what age are your parties aimed for? between 5 and 12.
A bit more: so are your parties expensive? Yes, about £20 per child.

So now we have “Girls aged between 5 and 12 with reasonable wealthy parents”. Right?

Wrong. The product is aimed at the children but the children are not buying them. Your online marketing campaign in unlikely to reach the children directly at all. Your market is working mums, cash rich and time poor. (unlike me – cash poor and time poor !!). So whilst the product needs to appeal to children it needs to be marketed online primarily at the mums. The Mums need to know why they should purchase from you, why their little princess will adore the jewellery birthday party and mums need to know how much time and effort it will save them in organising that special day.

We can even take this a bit further. I presume that you can only deal with parties locally? So lets include that in your list too, we are left with a website that is aimed at appealing to “local working or affluent mums of girls aged 5 to 12″. Now that is much easier for us to work with both in terms of design and also in terms of SEO and should be easier for you since you now have a better idea how to market your website online.

So – who is your market?

Digital Marketing | 17.11.2009 22:03 | No Comments

Interesting question…

I was asked by a client this week “Why do you request a deposit before providing mock ups” – to be honest she sounded a bit put out when she found that this was our standard T&C.

Well…

We’ve been in business for over 6 years now. When we we starting out, websites for start-up’s were not usually too complicated; logo, banner, menu, some text and a footer. We didn’t have a large portfolio at the beginning and we were happy to spend half a day mocking up a design for a potential client so that they could see what they would be getting. The problem was that spending half a day on a design just on the basis of a telephone call was not really getting the best results.

We were mocking up websites without first seeing the clients content.
Sometimes the client would be happy and sometimes we’d get it completely wrong.
Getting the mock up wrong could cost us the sale and at best we’d have to rework it before the client would sign up.
Loosing half a day of time cost money.

We stopped creating mock ups in advance of payment around three years ago.

We now have a large portfolio of work that clients can look through before making a purchase and even the most basic of websites being created now are much more complex that those on the market 6 years ago. Start-ups require a custom look and feel, SEO, update tools, logo, branding, blogs, shopping carts etc. Building websites has never been so complex and involved (which is great for us because we love it!).

In order to get the best results for your website project, we need to complete the following tasks before even putting pen to paper (yes we do often start with pen and paper).

Lengthy conversation/meeting with the client to understand there business and their website requirements.
Write up on the lengthily conversation which is reviewed by the client.
Los of research into client competing websites and target market.
Review the any existing branding and marketing materials.
Review the clients content. For example often the client might suggest a fairly flat website like a word document with static pages, and we like to make them more interactive. We might converts pieces of content into banner, calls to actions, widgets and side adverts.
Plan the website structure.
Sketch the layout.

see left- A sketch form a current website project in progress.

(Ok it’s basic, but I have filtered through the clients content and decided which bits are the most important and given them priority and focus on the page. It might look cryptic to you but is accompanied with a meeting with the graphic designer and also a report on the findings of step 1-5 above)

All in for a 5 page website this ground work usually amounts to 3-4 hours and this is before one of our graphic designer gets their hands on it to convert my scribbles into a gorgeous website.

Once the design is proposed we like to work closely with the client to tweak it to make sure that its 100% correct.

In short its best to create a mock-up with the full requirements, our clients content and full commitment.

Website Design | 17.11.2009 17:05 | No Comments