Christenson Photographers has had a web site for a number of years but it was felt that with competitors updating their web sites, it was time to revisit their web presences in order to remain at the cutting edge in this competitive sector.

Aesthetics were important in this brief. Wedding traffic depends strongly on a slick, professional looking site but without compromising the quality of the content. The use of high quality photography was essential due to the subject matter. Luckily Chris was able to supply a vast library of top notch images to use around the site and to create example galleries of previous work.

One of the two central purposes of the site is to provoke enquiries. As a result, a solid mechanism for soliciting and tracking responses to web lead generation was built into the site which allows the client to monitor ongoing progress with enquiries.

The second purpose is to display and sell prints to newlyweds and wedding guests. A password protected photo gallery was implemented that allows Chris to upload photos to the site and gives users the option to purchase images directly from the site. Being a small business with limited resources, there was little incentive to implement a full e-commerce operation so the Paypal shopping cart was implemented instead that fulfils the business’ need.

esspeedee decided to use the open source content management system WordPress due to its simplicity for end users to maintain. Additionally, WordPress provides the flexibility to implement all the functionality that Freewheeling were looking for.

The Coppermine photo gallery solution was implemented to host photos of Freewheeling’s work. This was closely integrated into WordPress and with the addition of Lightbox technologies gives a modern and professional look.

esspeedee produced a clean design that highlights the profiles of the group members and their work. It excels at re-use of content which is essential in creating a “sticky” web site that encourages visitors to remain on the site and click to more pages.

Working in a large business means there are huge volumes of content stored across a number of disparate systems. Document management, practice management, knowledge management, customer relationship management and internal staff all have their own systems for storing information. Having these separate systems, in a best of breed approach is great, you get the power and functionality of the best system in each category. However, when you need to access this data together it gets time consuming opening up each system individually.

This is where the idea of an enterprise portal comes in. An enterprise portal essentially accesses each system and drags out relevant data and presents it together in a single area. This means, for example, for a specific customer you would be able to access information about the customer and contact with that customer, documents relating to their business with you, bills send and paid by them to you, who in your organisation has dealt with the customer and do this all without leaving one application.

It sounds tricky, but it’s not as hard as it sounds.

Microsoft provides Sharepoint to its Windows Server 2003 customers as a free download. Although there is a paid for version of Sharepoint, the free Windows Sharepoint Services covers 90% of enterprise portal functionality. Sharepoint on its own can do so much, it is in effect a content management system. However, you can add on and develop your own extensions to this product.

This is where Handshake comes into play. Handshake have developed a product that can access almost any database source and (while respecting security permissions) bring data back into Sharepoint to display to the user. The benefits of using Handshake are pretty clear – rapid development; respect of security and ease of use. For the business I’m working in, Handshake provide ready built connectors to much of the software we use already which means that much of the hard work is already done and that the correct data is being extracted already.
I’m about to install Sharepoint and Handshake in an enterprise, and am thoroughly looking forward to the experience.

I am a touch concerned about Sharepoint’s lack of respect for web standards and accessibility. I feel that web standards should be used a lot more by Microsoft as it improves peoples ability to access information from multiple sources (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Mobile browsers, screen readers etc) but Sharepoint is almost exclusively Internet Explorer only. It’s encouraging to see well known and respected developers such as Cameron Moll beginning to experiment with Sharepoint so hopefully the future is brighter in this regard.

Over the past months, I have been looking to challenge myself. As a result, I have been developing a content management framework primarily for my own amusement, but from talking to people, it appears there is a demand for a content management solution build for small businesses.

While there are many great content management systems around, both open source and enterprise level, these tend to be either solely for web content management (ie building a web site), or hideously complex which can be more suitable for medium to large businesses. There is a void when it comes to small businesses (under 100 staff) that want slightly more than a web site from their content management solution, but less than full blown enterprise capabilities.

Now, I’m under no illusion that my content management framework in its current iteration is of little use for many small businesses, but I’m keen to turn it from a pet project into something more useful. It’s almost at a stage where I can release a public beta version to allow people to take a look, play around with it and feedback as to what could be useful to them.

Ease of use

My primary focus in developing this has been ease of use. Working in an medium/large scale business, it’s obvious the range of technical skills the staff have. Any solution build has to be straight forward to use otherwise people just won’t other – result: wasted investment.

Developing software in an enterprise, the way we work is the speak to people around the organisation and find out how they work, where the problems lie in their daily lives, how they would like to access data. This allows us, as a team, to analyse how technology can support their work, reduce bottlenecks in their day and generally improve productivity. It’s a simple idea, but one performed all too rarely. Working on this project outside the enterprise, I am not developing for one group of people, so I’ve drawn on my experience in the enterprise, but also from speaking to people outside of work, how they use information and how they would like to use information.

I’ve worked hard to make the system as intuitive as possible which has turned into the following features:

• Edit content in place – rather than enter through a dedicated administration area, users login and if they have sufficient permissions (ie access rights), they are able to click an edit button and edit the content without leaving the page.
• On screen validation – One of the things I hate about web forms is that if you miss a mandatory field and submit the form, it comes back to tell you that you have completed the form incorrectly but doesn’t tell you where. What I have done is provide instant feedback on forms. If you select a field and move on without completing it correctly, it will instantly tell you. Similarly, if you submit the form without completing all mandatory fields, you will be alerted to this fact and taken to the point you need to complete some information.
• Only available functions displayed – It’s irritating being presented with a who variety of options only to find you aren’t able to access them as you don’t have enough rights. Why show these options? It makes no sense. Only show functions that user is allowed to access – it reduces frustration and results in a better user experience.

Any interface is only useful if it is simple and easy to understand. I have made every attempt to use simple words concisely to describe all functions. It’s all easy to amend though as different firms will use different terms and it is essential to tap into that familiarity to gain user acceptance.

Types of content

I’ve build this system in a modular way, so that the basic underlying framework can easily be expanded to cope with new types of content and cater for any need. Currently, I’ve only set up a small number of types of content, but there are plenty more planned and this can be expanded as user needs change.

Modules currently developed include:

• Knowledge – this allows for submission of knowledge either in text form, or via a document attachment. This is keyword searchable but can also be classified against a taxonomy (which is easy to add to). Both the text record and attached documents are versioned and can be rolled back if necessary – this is a real bonus when it comes to risk management, imagine if someone managed to make an unauthorised change or accidentally deleted a file. By versioning this information, it is simple to return to a previous version.When staff find useful information, they have the ability to bookmark it for future reference, which is made available to them in future. There is also the ability to save useful search results pages and export them to other formats such as email or Excel spreadsheets.This module is ideal to create a bank of knowledge about a particular subject matter to build up a library of information that all staff can share and contribute to. It increases the firm’s knowledge.
• News – It is essential for all firms to keep up to date with developments in their own industry. This module can either be set to track industry news automatically, or staff can add news stories they think are important and of benefit to other staff. Effective current awareness is a big step forward in knowledge distribution around the firm. It can provide information that can be passed to customers or demonstrate the firm’s knowledge.
• Events – This can be used in two different ways. 1) it can be used to highlight upcoming events in the firm to an internal or external audiences and 2) it can be used to develop a training schedule for the firm, with upcoming training seminars and courses highlighted. It could be easily amended to cater for event registration and delegate lists to automate the process.
• Staff Directory – for larger small businesses, it is essential to know what others in the firm do. A staff directory can store more than basic contact details, it can store qualifications, specialisms, languages spoken, all in a searchable format. This can be invaluable in helping to solve problems as you can quickly search for the person within the firm with the relevant experience.

Conclusion
Without a doubt, there is a long way to go before it’s ready to be used in a work environment, but I think it is important to highlight the gap in the market, and the problems with existing small business software, that does pack in too many options, that does not function intuitively and that actually hampers management of the firm information.

This software is still very much in development (it’s getting some tough user testing at the moment which will hopefully remove a number of bugs as well as adding new features and simplifying the interface further), but I’m very interested in hearing from you if you run a small business and have information management needs. I’d love to speak with you and find out how you could better use your information and if you have ideas on how technology can support those ideas.

While it is a piece of software I’m developing, the underlying driver for me is to produce something that is useful and can increase productivity. To that end, this is developing into more of a business project and not as a primary focus, a technology project.