SimpleWeb

We’ve just completed a website for local short term property letting company Hambledons, which utilises various cool features from our SimplewebEditor.

With the design we focused on the luxurious; with a confident style that immediately let’s the user know exactly what the site is about. We utilised their recent brand overhaul and made it the centrepiece of the site.

Placing the booking form on nearly every page to makes sure that the visitor knows what is expected of them at all times if they choose to proceed, and while this seems a little risky, the response so far has been an improvement.

Hambledons are very happy with the simplicity of editing the content and the ease at which they can upload and display images in such a pleasing manner (the zooming rocks).

Overall a happy customer with a useful website that’s improving their business. lovely.

We’ve just put live a major update to the simpleweb content management system.

This latest release sees the inclusion of the new version of TinyMCE 3, bringing more control, improved performance, tighter integration and generally more pizazz!

As always, every site in our ever increasing portfolio of small business websites has been updated to include the new functionality.

Just saw this really great tip over at makeuseof.com. A lot of us use Gmail these days, we recommend it to all of our clients under the guise of Google business. It never ceases to amaze me what you can find in Gmail.

This particular tip is so simple, just a full stop anywhere in your email address, as many times as you like… So if your email address is johnsmith@gmail.com you can have john.smith@gmail.com and you will still receive mail - which then allows you to give out different email addresses to different people and not have to worry about multiple accounts/pop boxes/etc.

Using Gmail’s filters you could filter john.smith@gmail.com for work and johnsmith@gmail.com for friends… Read the full article at makuseof

The important thing about SimpleWeb for us is that all of the websites we design use the same technology. The benefits of this for both us and the customer are massive.

For our customers:

• Up to date. They get regular updates to their content management system. Hopefully this encourages them to keep their site(s) fresh and up to date.
• Peace of mind. They can be sure that there are very few bugs in the system because we’re using it for many customers.
• Rapid response. Any problems that do occur will be resolved very swiftly due to the widespread use of the system and our desire to keep everyone happy.
• Value. As all of our customers use the same technology, they all mean the same to us regardless of how much they happen to be spending. No one gets neglected or given lower priority because of the amount they spend.
• Fun. For those customers of a more geeky persuasion…. they get new toys to play with as part of our normal costing.

For us:

• We get to give all of the above to our customers. That’s good for business, makes us happy, and let’s me sleep a bit better at night knowing all of our technology is consistent.
• Speeds up progress. It’s great to release a new version of our system knowing that lots of people will immediately benefit from it.
• The software is well considered. Due to the large quantity of web sites, we won’t just blindly release a feature or update. We have to give due care and attention to the benefit or impact of a release across multiple web sites.

All of this is a bit of a shift from previous web businesses I’ve been involved with. What a lot of web development businesses will do is build or implement a different piece of technology for every website that comes along. This is minimized to a certain degree with open source software such as Wordpress for blogging or OSCommerce for e-commerce, but inevitably, these companies end up with a huge amount of websites all running different versions of software. Every time there is an issue with something, time is spent resolving it for particular customers and when the problem is resolved, the process of rolling it out to any effected sites is difficult and problematic. In this situation, sadly, priority is generally given to those customers with the biggest spend.

So how do we keep things up to date?

Well, without giving too much away, we have a release process that has several different versions of our system. These include.

• Working copy - this is the current version we’re working on and it contains any new feature implementations and improvements.
• Pre-release copy - once we’re happy with our working copy, we move it to pre-release, where we test our existing websites with it. There generally aren’t too many issues but due to the complexity of the software, and the fact CSS and XHTML is a bit of a minefield, problems can occur. If we find any issues, we fix our working copy and put it back in to pre-release.
• Release copy - this is what we ‘roll-out’ to all of our customer’s sites. If a new release includes critical updates we’ll update all of our sites very quickly. The typical down-time for a web site whilst it’s being updated is minimal. Less than a minute. Due to this though, normal updates are rolled-out over night when things are quiet.
• Previous release copy - although we keep every version of the software we ever build, we have an easily accessible pre-release version that we can roll back a web site to should any unexpected issues occur.

I will be blogging more in the future about specifically how we manage these releases.

What’s coming next?

Our development time line is fairly extensive and feature rich. There’s plenty of improvements to what we have now and lots of cool new features planned. I’m excited.

An imminent update will be the release of a new version supporting TinyMCE 3. This is a big update to the CMS as the core editor has been almost entirely re-written. It’s a lot smaller, nicer to look at, and more tightly integrated for a better all round experience. There were some major issues getting this new version of the editor in (I will blog more about this soon), but I’m happy to say it’s all finished now and we’re moving on to our testing. A release should follow shortly for all existing customers.

Simpleweb has a new website. Hurrray… It’s built using the Yahoo YUI CSS grids/fonts framework and of course our very own Simple webtoolkit, allowing us to have incoming RSS feeds from okcool, video from Blip.tv, and splendid contextual editing of all the pages, while still being accessible to all.

We’re very happy with the design of the site and now over the next few months we’ll organically grow the copy into something that represents not just where we are now, but where we’re heading and how we’ll get there. I’m not quite sure why it is but when you’re building something for yourself it always seems to take longer, is this true of every profession?

We’re very happy to see both Bristol Wine & Food Fair and Attix Lounge Bar already performing very well in Google rankings, only a few months after their launch.

A large part of this is down to the quality of the semantic markup we use on all SimpleWeb web sites. We are very committed to ensuring that all SimpleWeb sites are indexed quickly by Google after launch and will be adding further services for web marketing in the future to strengthen this and give our customers a competitive edge over the competition.

Bristol Wine & Food Fair performance on Google.co.uk

Number one for the search bristol wine and food fair

Within the top three for the search bristol wine fair

Within the top four for the search wine and food fair

If you’re in to wine and food (and who isn’t?) and you’re after something to do in Bristol in July, then this looks like it’s going to be a great event. I for one will be attending, pint glass in hand!

Attix lounge bar performance on Google.co.uk

Number one for the search attix lounge bar

Within the top three for the search champagne bar bristol

Within the first two pages for the search cocktail bar bristol – I’m interested to see how long it takes on this one before it appears above the rather excellent Hausbar

I haven’t yet been to Attix, but with Park Street so close to our office it won’t be long. I’ll make sure to blog about the place when I know more.

Have you ever written a blog post, press release or tutorial not really thinking about who is going to read it?

I have. Recently.

Last week I wrote a post for the okcool blog “quickly” announcing two new small business websites that we’ve just completed. I didn’t think about the copy, the audience or even the medium itself.

Re-reading the post a week later after a friend pointed it out to me, I realised how badly I’d conveyed not only the work that we’d done but I’d failed to mention how happy both clients were.

This is because I just wanted to make sure that I’d ticked off my “write post about website” to-do list item and that the achievement of crossing something off of my list was of more importance than my readers gratification and to a certain extent my business.

So… What now?

A re-write…

The first sentence is the most important, if we can get the reader to the end of it then we can worry about the next one, and so on.

We also need to know who our reader is. OKCOOL has quite a techie following but now that we syndicate the Simpleweb posts by RSS to the Simpleweb site itself, a lot of readers will be potential customers.

The new version, while still not up to par with a professional copywriter, certainly offers more information and is easier to read.

You can see the original post here, and the re-written post here

You judge which you think is better.

What does a slick new champagne bar and a large wine and food festival in Bristol have in common?

Both sites have launched in the last few weeks and both clients are very happy with the results.

First up, ATTIX the new Bristol based Champagne Lounge Bar, wanted an expensive looking site with lots of white space and strong use of spot colour to match the interior of the venue. They also wanted to ensure that it was very easy to update the pages as they’d had problems in the past with keeping a site up to date.

ATTIX have since got back to us letting us know that the website paid for itself in the first two weeks (through bookings) and that they are very happy, wishing to extend the site with additional features already.

Finally, The Bristol Wine & Food Fair, an upcoming wine and food festival in the heart of Bristol. Chris and Mike from Bristol Event Management wanted a stylish website that would reflect their ambitious plans to the sponsors, exhibitors and ultimately the general public. A lot of the functionality of the site has been “muted” until nearer the time. So look froward to being able to buy tickets, browse the exhibitors, meet the Chefs’ and lots more.

Mike recently sent us a really nice note stating that he “wouldn’t hesitate to recommend us”, which is all that we could ask for really.

We wish both sites and businesses every success in the new year.

We’ve spent so much time pretending that we really are cool with this music industry lark that we’ve forgotten to mention the other stuff that is happening around here at the moment. SimpleWeb has some cool things afoot and we’re getting ready to test them.

The first thing that we’re getting ready is the new SimpleWeb website, the current site frankly, is piss poor. It was rushed and designed as a last minute job, which usually seems to be the case with small businesses of all types. We always seem to sort ourselves out last on the premise that there is always something ‘more important to do’. We all know that’s bollocks but we all seem to do it, so we’re in the process of remedying this. The new site is cleaner, leaner and shows off who we are and what we do.

Secondly we’re getting ready to beta test our “website and client manager”. We needed a way to manage clients and their clients, all of whom manage websites, email addresses, domain names, etc… There’s nothing worse than being a small agency or sole trading designer and keeping all of your client and web information in an excel spreadsheet and forgetting to update it, losing it, updating the wrong one, forgetting what changes you’ve made and countless other paths to client doom. So we’ve created a way to manage all of those things from one simple interface, while it’s primarily intended to look after SimpleWeb sites built and hosted by us, it can be used by anyone to keep track of what’s what in their website design business, all for free.

Testing begins next week once the basic stats module has been finished. We’ll then begin rolling it out to our existing clients and get as much feedback as possible. We’ll then start looking at changing the look and feel of the interface as currently it shares a striking resemblance to Basecamp, which is no bad thing in my book.

We’ve had a few posts on ok cool about SimpleWeb and I’ve been asked a few times what’s it all about, so here goes.

SimpleWeb Ltd was set up by Tom and Mark earlier this year to fill a few gaps in the now quite mature website creation market.

The first of these is the “my friend makes websites, he’ll do it for you for a few hundred quid” type sites. More often than not for a small business these turn into an absolute disaster. Your mate’s mate creates you an ok looking website in about four weeks, sticks it on Fasthosts (GoDaddy, etc), charges you three hundred quid and then disappears into the ether. When you want a page changed or a new email address; if you can find him (or her), they’ll charge you a silly amount and take two weeks to do it. Sounds familiar?

As SimpleWeb we figured that we could remedy this.

Let’s create the simplest online “page editor” that we possibly can, offer full hosting, email, domain name, a few getting started guides and offer it as a package for a fixed easy to swallow fee.

Small business’s get a quality product that’s future proof, easy to update (themselves), affordable and still get a certain level of support they could never get from “your mate’s mate”.

So far we feel that we are delivering on this promise and have a fair few happy customers. Our “page editor” is becoming quite sophisticated and is already doing things that nobody else seems to be doing, it’s still early days and currently only works in Firefox, but it is progressing nicely. Tom and his super techyness has even solved a problem that the clever people at Tiny MCE couldn’t, allowing almost perfect wysiwyg in a browser; which we should see added into Tiny MCE distribution in the future…

The only problem with this process driven solution is the design stage, no matter how much a client is paying, whether it’s £500 or £5000, it still has to look and feel right for the client… If we offer them a template, they feel that their individuality has been comprised. If we completely custom design from scratch we affect our profitability. The solution here we feel is in the law of averages and clever code and XHTML management.

The other main gap that we see is for freelance designers and small to medium sized agencies, but I think that I’ve written enough for now, I’ll save that for another post…