Not too long ago I had a chat with a graphic designer who told me about that amazingly easy to use CMS that will leave all developers sooner or later unemployed but I did not feel that threatend to try it out until recently that I needed to come up with a solution for a models agency website that required only a few pages to be frequently updated, consisting mainly of text and images. I thought to try that miraculous thing, whose name reminded me of Sushi, that allows non developers to offer CMS solutions to their clients just out of curiosity and because I found it totally uneccessary to install a big full-on CMS or write a bespoke one.  By nature I am not easily convinced that things are as great as they sound, and in every case I try to discover imperfections and disadvantages so I make my life a bit harder than it deserves to be. However, in the case of CushyCMS, I was taken by great suprise and started being worried about graphic designers taking over the whole world being able to offer complete web sites with both great looking front-ends and functional back-end solutions.

The big advantage of Cushy is that it is very fast to set up as it only requires registration (which is free), rather than any sort of installation. It is ideal for small web sites that users want to update text and images in some parts of their site e.g. news, events or even the homepage. The only thing the designer has to do is to provide the FTP details of the site, specify which parts and pages will be editable and who is going to edit those. Cushy will then create the WYSIWYG editors and the CMS is up and running! I have never come across any CMS that can do the job so quickly, absolutely stunning!

Unless your client has a big site with lots of different content types, it is not really worth installing one of the big CMSs such as Joomla or Drupal. But even if this is the case, you would be better off developing a proprietary CMS that does exactly what your client’s requirements are, rather than install an all-in-one solution that will result in unnecessary server processing, slow response times, let aside bugs that are very hard to find and fix given that those applications have been written by so many different people using totally different coding styles.

Wordpress is getting more and more popular as a CMS lately apart from being an excellent blog platform. It is much more light-weight and clean compared to Joomla and Drupal and with the recent release of the Pods framework it can easily(?) turn into a powerful CMS. What is great about Pods is that you can create and display your own content types, and even build relationships between them, unlike Cushy, which make it really powerful while at the same time it retains all the Wordpress advantages: simplicity, SEO benefits, excellent plugins that increase functionality without having to tweak the actual code (normally). No wonder Wordpress won for the first time the ‘Best Overall  Open source CMS’ award in the 2009 Open Source CMS awards.

You need to bear in mind though, that Pods is made for developers who are familiar with PHP.  For non developers, there are a few alternatives s that can help significantly turning Wordpress into a CMS but with some limitations. The most interesting ones are:

• Custom fields built in functionality – assign custom fields to a post (requires editing templates / php files).
• More fields plugin – add extra (custom) fields in the write/edit page – more powerful than custom fields.
• WP-CMS Post control plugin – control your admin write options and hide unwanted items from content authors.

There’s many other interesting light-weight open source CMSs for small websites many developers claim they are easy to use and set up such as XOOPS, concrete5, SkyBlueCanvas, Perch and MODx. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to try them yet but once I do I will write another post about them.

Whether you call it a downturn or a full-blown recession, there is no doubt that these have been tough times for UK companies. Either by good planning or good luck (quite possiby the latter) we’ve remained extremely busy and are continuing to expand.

What the slowdown has done is educate us about client attitudes to web development and their wider internet strategy. Because when money gets tight, companies have to spend money on the things they believe are important. And some cases, those priorities don’t include web development.

As things have got tougher, we’ve encountered lots of companies looking for web design bargains of the “my brother could do this for £200″ variety. Unfortunately, they seem to be making the assumption that [company + any old pages on the net = massive profit]. Given how long the web has been around and the (blindingly obvious) difference between good and bad sites it’s a little disheartening that some firms still can’t see the potential for web developers to add real value to their web presence.

Thankfully, the slowdown has made a number of other companies realise just how integral their web strategy is to the success of their business. They understand how a usable, well-integrated site can give them a huge edge over the competition (both through the ‘front-end’ increasing sales and the ‘back-end’ cutting administration overheads). And they understand they need a company that knows the web inside-out to help them achieve this.

And, just occasionally, there is the ‘eureka’ moment. Like the lovely chap who thought his site wasn’t selling because of the font face it used (and wanted us to do a ‘quick and cheap’ fix). And who, when we explained the ‘slightly’ more significant issues of a chaotic information architecture, reams of unreadable text and a truly eye-popping colour scheme, just got it.

So, we’ll keep on providing insight rather than being tempted in to high volume, low-cost ‘code monkeying’. And if anyone really does have a brother (or sister) working from their bedroom who can develop a web site for £200 – we’ve got enough potential clients to keep you in business for years to come!

So as many bloggers have noted Google have now announced that they will incorporate tweets in real time into their searches. I guess they were never going to leave it all up to Microsoft who earlier announced the same deal for the Bing search engine.

It will be very interesting to see exactly how the tweets will be incorporated – and particularly how it will compare to Twitter’s own search facility. Presumably Google will be cross-referencing as much data as possible to show results that are relevant from a wider perspective ? Microsoft have the head start and it will be very interesting indeed to see how the two giants compare.

This could really change the face of “search” – since with Twitter there is a lot of “signal velocity” and there should be enough signals to make out a meaningful melody amongst the noise (ah tweeting was such a good term for it!) The search engines will start to pick out the landing domains and URL’s in people tweets which gives us yet more reasons to be chirping.

Better start tweet-deck up… happy tweeting everyone.

Over the past eighteen months, we’ve built more and more of our projects in ruby frameworks (rails, merb, and sinatra). It’s been hugely exciting for our coding team – new technology, new tricks to learn, and the whole ‘geek-cachet’ of being on the bleeding-edge.

And, whilst a change in the technologies underpinning  our sites normally elicits a disinterested ‘meh’ from those of us with ’softer skills’, our UI, design and SEO staff are hugely excited about the move as well.

So, what makes a non-programmer excited about a programming language and its associated frameworks. It’s not that it’s a ‘miracle tool’ for non-programmers – Rob still spends half his working day rolling his eyes as I ask (for the 25th time) how to add a ‘foreach’ loop in Ruby. What’s revolutionary is the way it enables us all to work closely together on a project and deliver a much more holistic and integrated solution to the client. (It’s also no bad thing that it has also slashed the time it takes for us to develop complex web applications).

To be fair it’s not all down to Ruby alone, but also the simultaneous adoption of an MVC (Model, View, Controller) workflow and ‘git’. MVC isn’t unique to Ruby frameworks, but it is much easier to incorporate than it would be with a PHP-based workflow (yes we know about Cake). Git is a robust versioning control system that leaves SVN for dead. In adopting MVC and ‘git’ we have effectively separated the work Simon (Major Model), Rob (Captain Control) and myself (Vice-admiral  View) do on a project.

Pre-Ruby, we used to design a site’s look and feel and then code it (mostly to stop designers and programmers cursing each other as the latest version of a template got overwritten for the fifteenth time). Now that we’re all able to work on a site at the same time without tripping over each-other’s ‘virtual toes’, we’re actually finding more time to talk to one another, brainstorm on the job, and refine the shape a project as we go along.

The end-results is that we are much more agile in how we build sites and applications. It’s effectively one giant ‘mix-in’ with ideas bouncing round at a million miles an hour and new features being discussed, prototyped and rolled out in hours. And the client benefit is huge (at least for those clients that ‘get’ the whole agile methodology). They’re benefitting from a cross-disciplinary team working together and building in great features that weren’t even the scope (and for for no additional charge at that). How could it be any better?

Talk to us to see what ‘agile’ can do for you.

We’ve been offering Search Engine Optimization to our clients for more than 12 months now, with some pretty good results (e.g. ‘holiday accommodation in Sitges’ for Outlet4Spain). So Simon and I thought it was about time we applied some of our new-found SEO mojo to our own site. And that’s where the trouble started, because there’s no easy way to optimize for ‘joined up thinking’. Let me explain…

When a client comes to us for help with SEO, we ask about their business. Once we know what they do, it’s usually pretty easy for us to build a list of key words and phrases to target. But, when we started keyword analysis for our own business it became pretty obvious things weren’t so clear cut.

In the olden days (somewhere about 1995) it would have been easy – we would have been optimized our site for the search term ‘web designers’. But the explosive growth of the sector and the desire for companies to carve out their own niche within it  has muddied the waters immensely.

Whilst we still call ourselves ‘web designers’, optimizing for the term increasingly seems to be bringing in the sub-£2000 first-time site brigade. It also misses the core of what we do – working with a company to shape, build, maintain and develop their web presence over the long term. We’re web strategists, we’re user-experience experts, we’re SEO specialists, email marketeers and UNIX hosting gurus. Optimizing for any one of these dilutes the  big picture – and devalues the ‘one stop shop’ approach we believe is so vitally important to making the most out of the web.

So, if anyone knows how to optimize for ‘joined up thinking in web development’ we’d love to hear from you. Until then we’ll just have to press on with the keyword-rich blog entries

Twitter is one of the those internet trends that bitterly divides those with nothing better to than comment on internet trends. Is it really just a “chorus of minutiae from morons” or is it “the next killer-app” . In all probability it’s neither, but it could it have positive uses for business? And what exactly is Twitter anyway?

Twitter is a service that lets the world know what you’re doing (via short messages of less than 160 characters) , and lets you ‘follow’ what other people are up. Depending on whether you’re generation Y or generation z, you can think of it as either broadcast SMS or your Facebook status on steroids. Some 6 million people now  tweet – among them Stephen Fry, Britney Spears, and John Cleese.

At first glance, tweeting and business don’t seem to offer each other much. But hold on a moment. That’s exactly what people used to say about blogging and business. But numerous companies and senior employees are now using blogs as a very efficient way to inform and interact with customers (a trend we first noted a couple of years ago).

While we’re still not convinced tweeting will be as revolutionary, we’ll be adding it to our site as part of our upcoming redesign. We already see it offering some benefits and hope we’ll uncover some unexpected postives as well. In the short term we’ll be using it for:

• Publishing system status updates that don’t merit a global email alert (e.g. a small percentage of client sites running slowly due to transient technical issue) 
• Communicating our availability (e.g we’re all on company training today – call our mobiles)
• Alerting clients to general internet / tech developments that don’t merit a whole blog entry
• Letting clients know about promotions / discounts in a way that less intrusive than a mass email 
• Showing first time visitors that our site is something we care enough about to update regularly 

We’ll let you know how we get along with twitter once the new site is launched. Until then we’ll be tweeting at http://www.twitter.com/osbornebrook