This group of flag football players in Edinburgh have played flag football for years and want to encourage new people to start playing the game.  There was a need for a simple, yet effective site in order to promote the game and the ease at which it can be picked up.

Solution

It was decided to use a content management system to allow for simple maintenance of content.  Wordpress does this in a simple way that is easy to pick up and has the advantage of being free to use.

The only area of the site that needs regularly updated is the date of the next game.  To make this easy to do, a Twitter feed was intergrated into the site.  This means that by updating the Twitter site - which the group uses already - the site can also be updated.

As the target demographic is primarily male, aged 18-40, there was licence to use some modern techniques without risk of confusion.  This allows the use of YouTube videos, integration with Wikipedia content and the addition of sharing content with social networking sites such as Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon etc.

The primary goal of the site is to entice people to get in touch so an AJAX based (no page reload on submission) contact form was used to receive and process submissions.

The group need only attract a small number of players to be considered a success so the site has been created as landing point for a campaign on social networking sites through pages and groups on Facebook.

The web site is to be combined with a small-scale print campaign by graphic designer Steve Russam targetted directly to american football fans through a local amateur team directing them towards the web site to engage with the group.

The choirs previous site had been only for five years and was in need of a refresh.  The purpose of the relaunch was to bring the site up to modern standards both technically and aesthetically.  This was done by implementing a modern content management system to allow specified individuals to login to a secure admin area to maintain the content themselves and make it easy to do so.  The Wordpress software makes it easy to present content in a way that suits the choir.

Aesthetically, the design was to be clear, modern and usable.   The site has been designed to highlight Cadenza’s musical abilities while promoting upcoming events that the choir is taking part in.  It is a simple structure that is intended to remove distractions and render the site simple to use.  The site has been built with accessibility in mind, and the design is also usable without images and styles.

Tracking was of interest too, and an analytics solution has been installed in order to track visitors and visitor activity on the site.  This will be used to inform future design and content decisions.

In the 21st century, a quality web presence is essential to supporting the aims of any charity and especially a newly registered charity.

The goals of the site are three-fold:

1. Provide support for families of children affected by Fanconi Anaemia;
2. Provide resources for clinicians regarding inforation on Fanconi Anaemia;
3. Promote and raise funds for research into Fanconi Anaemia

These aims let to some intense site architecture discussion about how to present relevant information to three audiences with different needs and interests.  Creating a central site with distinct sections was settled upon as a way to maintain a consistent brand across all areas.

Branding played a key role in this project.  It was essential that the branding should be enforced and consistent considering the vast array of worthy charities in the UK.  An inconsistent brand image would send mixed messages to potential donors and supporters.  Brand colours and logo were supplied and the quality of these quickly informed an effective online identity.

Establishing the charity online will take time but an extensive search engine optimisation programme has made good inroads into the niche areas the site fills.  As the site develops and its reach expands, it is hoped it will be able to shoot above its size.  Analytics software has been set up to track traffic levels and monitor which avenues have been successful in attracting visitors and donations.  This is regularly monitor and has informed decisions about the future direction of the site.

Attracting support is an aim of every charity.  To help that, social networking has been utilised with the creation and promotion of areas on popular sites Facebook and LinkedIn.  This has led to a rapid expansion of the number of people known to the charity with an interest in Fanconi Anaemia.

The site has been built using the Wordpress content management system which allows for the management of the site from any internet connected computer in the world.

In additional to being coded in adherence to recognised web standards to comply with disability discrimination legislation and guidance, the site has been built to be aesthetically pleasing yet simple.

With regard to content, the needs of this small business have been taken into account. The need to highlight recent work has been catered for with a sliding content box on the front page that scrolls through the latest five pieces of work without using more screen real estate than necessary. Additionally the benefits for regularly updated content are realised through the use of the interesting reading box. This is easy to maintain by linking to a Google Reader account which allows the company to easily share articles of interest through the web site using Google’s technology.

There is space for in depth articles relating to web design, development, internet marketing for the purposes of search engine optimisation.

Steve Dalgleish of esspeedee commented on the new site “It was time for a refresh. The new branding and design gives a fresh new look in this fast paced industry. This design is simple yet elegant, clean yet functional. I am hoping this will further improve our search engine rankings for our key search terms”.

esspeedee decided on using LimeSurvey, an open source product that has developed over a number of years. This allows advanced surveys to be created quickly and efficiently through a web based interface. As a fully featured research tool, LimeSurvey can handle multiple groups, over 20 different types of question catering for virtually all possibilities and conditional questions.

Additionally, LimeSurvey creates a graphical summary sheet that allows the client to monitor the number of results returned and allows decisions to be better made on whether additional mailouts are necessary. At the end of each survey, a detailed spreadsheet of results allows in depth analysis to be performed.

The system has been successfully used on a number of occasions and has fully met the research needs of Eden Scott.

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.

esspeedee chose to implement the Wordpress content management system and use a prebuilt template from the open source community in order to have the site ready for launch as soon as possible.

It was a requirement to be able to display photos from party nights at the bar on the site quickly and easily. With this in mind, an integration with the popular Flickr photo sharing service was chosen. Flickr allows the bar staff to easily upload photos which are replicated on the site.

The Voodoo Bar site is an excellent example of rapid site development.

BarVoodoo.co.uk

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.