I have 2 clients at the moment who both have .com domains registered with budget - and in one instance, extremely well known - hosting companies / domain registrars. All each of them need is that .com redirected to their website that is running on the .co.uk.

I do not believe how difficult that is proving to be!

The first company don’t respond to emails, and if you ring either say a) they’ll call you back in 10 minutes, never to be heard from again, or b) they’ll do it right away and 2 days later still haven’t.
The 2nd - and well known, search-engine-topping - company are sending my client (and myself) round and round in circles by a) telling her she can access her domain control panel through her old account but then not having the domain listed there, and b) telling her via a support ticket she will be emailed the correct login details, just to be emailed a message saying ‘please log in here… we look forward to your business!’ without a username or password in sight. And when I just rang them I was informed ‘we are a budget hosting company and so we don’t offer telephone support’. Well if you don’t, you should make up for it in other ways!

We always urge our clients to come to us when we have a problem or a query, and not be embarrassed or self-conscious to pick up the phone and just have something explained/looked into.

2 weeks ago I lost hours and hours trying to get a .co.nz redirected, with the New Zealand registrars eventually claiming it couldn’t be done because my client didn’t have a dedicated IP address! Each response though had a different answer, addressing different issues! If companies would just read support questions properly they’d probably half their work load and double their customer satisfaction!

So - don’t go with a company who don’t offer customer support, and don’t think that the cheapest option is always the best! In the case of hosting it’s often cheaper for a reason - that reason being no one to help you when you hit a problem.

Outsourcing to India is nothing new. But today alone we’ve been cold called by 3 companies, all based in India, wanting us to outsource technical development. I’m not sure if this is good news or not really, but I do know it’s very annoying to have the same conversation over and over again! The only experience I’ve had of outsourcing to India didn’t go particularly well, so while I understand all the benefits (which I’m also continually being reminded by sales people on the phone), I’m still very reticent about the idea. That combined with my own frustrating experiences of dealing with some of the large outsourced support centres used by the likes of BT and Dell.

One thing I do find interesting is the increasing use of extremely English sounding names in the approach emails though, perhaps an attempt to sound less foreign and scary to little UK companies who might be put off by dealing with a foreign person. I’ve even had an email this week from an Indian company that are visiting the UK in the next couple of weeks and want to meet up with us to learn about “our unique India-Based Managed Service Proposition, the Virtual Offshore Development Centre”.

So Indian companies really seem to be upping the offensive… Should we, as a UK based services industry, be worried? Or should we be embracing this new pool of affordable talent and just let them do all the work?

Personally I think the time taken up today alone, trying to get off the phone to cold callers and deleting emails I don’t have time to read, puts me off the whole idea completely. But then perhaps if I outsourced all my work I’d have all the time in the world!

Probably the most commonly requested requirement for a website is the ability for the client to add and edit pages. It sounds such a simple requirement, but in reality it’s really tricky to get the balance right between functionality, flexibility and the level of technical skills required.

There are literally hundreds, probably thousands of CMS platforms out there. Some are very generic such as Drupal and Joomla, and can be molded into practically any kind of site.

Both Drupal and Joomla are open source applications, built by an army of mostly unpaid contributors who continuously update the codebase, adding new features and extra functionality. These applications are great in many ways, but personally, from a coding point of view I find them far too generic and bloated for most situations. While they do provide pretty much everything under the sun in terms of functionality, they include this at the sacrifice of usability. In some ways they are almost too clever for their own good and can be taken straight out of the box and setup by anyone with enough patience to learn how everything works.

There are other content management systems out there which are more job specific, and in some ways I think this approach makes them actually more usable. We’ve created several websites based around the Wordpress blogging platform. I love Wordpress, it’s a highly supported package and you can have a new blog up in a matter of minutes. This blog you are reading right now is powered by Wordpress. Plugins are freely available and themes applied quickly and easily giving you a brand new website in no time at all. I actually prefer using Wordpress as a platform for certain types of websites as it just about gets the balance right between functionality and usability, but even then I don’t think it’s perfect.

As a web developer who builds websites for a living it’s very difficult to put myself in the place of the average small business owner. Unlike us they live and work in the ‘real world’. Logging into and updating a website is something that needs to be so simple, quick and intuitive that forgetting how to do it just isn’t a question, because it’s so obvious.

My hunt for the perfect CMS has led me down many paths over the years, but perhaps inevitably it’s my love of coding and building applications that has resulted in the development of our own solution, SimpleCMS.

SimpleCMS Unique Selling Points (USPs)

• Admin can view the website they want to update rather than having to use a separate admin interface.
• Updating pages is as easy as clicking an ‘edit’ button whilst viewing the page in question.
• Add pages is as easy as selecting ‘add page’, selecting if it’s a top level or sub page, giving it a title and entering the content.
• No restriction on the page type or content. Your page can be anything you like, it’s up to you. You aren’t restricted by any particular format or content type. Although all default styles are controlled by the globally defined style sheet.
• Pages instantly appear in the menu for the rest of the world to see. There’s nothing complicated or confusing to worry about.

SimpleCMS Is Ideal for

• Small business brochure or content websites that follow a basic page/sub page format, and need to be quick and easy to update.

SimpleCMS Isn’t

• In any way confusing or complicated to use
• Going to be the perfect solution for more complicated websites, ecommerce stores or social networking websites.

I think if you try to make a piece of software all things to all people it will inevitably end up being overly complicated and confusing and there’s just no need. If you keep it simple, quick and easy you can take the pain out of updating a website.

If you’re interested in having a play with SimpleCMS take a look at the demo website and have a play. I’m sure you’ll find it really quick and easy to update the pages. Don’t worry if you mess up the site by editing and deleting pages. It will reset itself every hour on the hour, so go for it, just don’t write anything rude please! Anyone found spamming will be hunted down, so play nice please.

If you have any suggestions send them this way.

Bookmarks are very handy for remembering sites you like, but wouldn’t it be really neat to let your users create a proper icon on their desktop that links directly through to your website? Or even a link in the Quick Launch bar right next to the start button. Using Gears this is now totally possible as this tutorial now explains.

I’d be very interested to hear how you get on with this, what you think of Gears - both the idea and the actual reality of what Google has developed, and if you can think of any other alternative approaches for doing the same thing.

We were extremely proud to be commissioned to build the website for the StreetChance supported by Barclays Spaces for Sports campaign recently; a partnership between Chance to shine, Barclays Spaces for Sports, Cricket for Change, Positive Futures and the Metropolitan Police Service. The initiative is a three year project, initially being delivered across ten London boroughs, using cricket to engage young people in areas affected by youth crime and anti-social behaviour.

But such a project means a press launch! At which time the website had to go live! So it was quite a nerve wracking few minutes as the seconds counted down to 10.00am on the morning in question. Everything was already to go - a simple ftp file-rename and it was all there… but I had visions of everyone at the official launch in London having their watches set a few minutes early, and turning to display the website to the national press… just to be greeted with a holding page.

But luckily that wasn’t the case at all! And since the launch the initiative and the website have received great feedback and compliments!

The entire site was put together in just under a week - which when images and content has to be sourced too, is quite a feat. Luckily the clients appreciated the tight deadline and the designers turned a great design around extremely quickly, giving us time to code it nice and neatly!

Our friends over at Wibfilm are leaving this Saturday to start their ambitious cycle ride round the coast of Ireland and in the process no doubt testing the theory that you can live off Guinness for 2 weeks!

The trip will be starting on the 11th of August 2008 and should take 14 days with on average of 87 miles a day, our intrepid explorers will be loading up their bicycles and doing their best to stay off the Guinness, whilst trying to raise the princely sum of £1500 for charity (NSPCC).

We think this sounds like a great trip and wish them all the best. If you’d like to show your support and help them reach their target, visit their sponsorship page here:
www.justgiving.com/theIrishring

Good luck guys, just remember to keep on pedalin’!

Wow! I absolutely love these new DELL computers! And I defy anyone not to think they look stunning and crave one for their desk!

Dell claim it’s their greenest, most “power-efficient consumer desktop”, as it uses 70% less power than a regular desktop and has an 87% efficient power supply. Meanwhile the packaging is made of 95% recyclable materials.

The one problem I can see though, is choosing between the 6 colour cases and the bamboo one…

Get yours here.