Island Web Works

The last couple of weeks we’ve been using the beta version of MIGTurbo 1.9  in the office - trying out new features and hunting down bugs. 

I always find it interesting to see a product go from development to a ‘live’ test environment and with this release it’s been no different.  After a few days testing we had a rather substantial list of (albeit minor) bugs to go through.  In addition to the typical ‘but why would anyone do that?’-bugs, there were also a good few interesting suggestions on how to improve the user interface. 

With version 1.9 we’re trying to both move MIGTurbo forward with some exciting new features whilst at the same time keep all the existing users happy with the familiar environment they said they liked.  In fact, with the default settings you’d be hard pushed to see any immediate changes at all.  Sure, the branding has changed slightly, and there are a few minor layout differences, but in essence it’s still good old MIGTurbo!

Regarding the new features, I think the one that will excite people most will be the customisable tab layout.  In 1.9 every user can have their own personalised layout, giving the administrator the option to optimise MIGTurbo for different types of work tasks.  Another great new feature is the Firefox browser support.  Until now MIGTurbo has always been a Microsoft-centric software, and although that’s still true ‘under the hood’ we are now inviting non-Windows users for the first time - great news for Apple fans!

We’ve now swatted all known bugs but will keep running it in beta for the next week just to be sure. If all goes well we are aiming to go gold on Friday 13th!

Andreas MIGTurbo, Uncategorized MIGTurbo 1.9

Developing a Web Site can be great fun and an opportunity to show the world what you can do in a modern and accessible format. But before you get started, it’s important to consider how to develop your requirements of the site. Have a look at these 10 tips to help you get started:

1. Appoint a Project Lead for the web site. This helps you form a coherent project with a central point of contact and responsibility. It helps us because we know we can talk to them and use them as a “channel” into the business.
2. Have you thought of the “back office“? Many sites, particularly e-Commerce sites, require support behind the scenes to track stock, monitor user submissions to the site and more mundane issues such as who is responsible for receiving contact requests from the site.
3. Make sure you have a clear purpose for your web site. Is it a brochureware site where visitors can find out what you’ve got to offer? Is it an extranet site that extends your internal business system(s),  helping both you and your customers? Or is it a e-Commerce site that needs to make a profit in its own right?
4. What is the site’s target audience? Are they young, old, professionals or casual shoppers? This will help decide what kind of user interface is appropriate, and what design style will work best.
5. Keep in mind increasing legal requirements for accessibility for hard of hearing or partially sighted users who may require larger text/contrasting colours or browse using alternative platforms such as braille or speaking browsers. 
6. Do you have a marketing campaign for your new web site? Remember to add your web site to all your stationery, outgoing emails and branding to embed your web site address (URL) into the minds of your [potential] customers.
7. How will the site be maintained? Will it be updated regularly? If so, you can use a Content Management System to manage your own content, such as our ACTMaster CMS.
8. How will you measure the effectiveness of your site? We can help configure statistics and analytics to help you quantify visits, but this goes hand in hand with less quantifiable analysis such as asking your new customers if they found you through your web site.
9. How interactive will your site be? While techniques such as Flash are great for users who have it, some information is better presented in a page of text - especially for optimising for search engines.
10. Having a look at how other sites look and feel can help a lot. A great starting point is our Portfolio of recent sites to help get some ideas and form a starting point for your own site.

Andreas Web Site Development Accessibility, Flash, Marketing, Tips

It’s Friday again, and what a glorious Friday it is! The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the mountains white with snow. Hopefully this weather will keep for the weekend as well. But, this being a weekday, we’re still all stuck in the office, working through our seemingly never ending lists of projects.

This week I’ve been playing around with our blog settings, switching to the iNove theme and changing the colours around a bit. I also thought it would be nice to have our mug shots as avatars next to our posts, but then Stephen had the good idea of using silhouettes instead. So, faced with the usual protests (”No! I can’t have my picture taken today!”) I’ve been taking profile snapshots of my colleagues and then photoshopping them into silhouettes. I think it turned out rather nice in the end.

Nathan has been getting far too excited over Scott Hanselman’s essential .NET Developer Tools. If you’re a developer (.NET or not) this is a list of tools well worth looking at. It covers .NET, XML, Debugging, Launching, Viewing, Editing and pretty much anything else. It’s like a sack-load of Christmas presents for a developer.

Charles is busy evangelising why CRM is ‘too strategic to abandon in recession’. He found a research article by Gartner which highlights how customer relationship management is too strategically important for businesses to abandon in the recession. As the recession deepens, however, companies are looking to drive greater efficiency and lower the costs of their CRM projects. Gartner believes that CRM is seen by many businesses as an important tool in the worsening economic environment, as it minimises customer churn and the value of each customer. The survey found that the CRM projects concerned will primarily focus both on improving customer retention and increasing wallet share. Gartner found that while there had been a shift in thinking about new CRM initiatives, the news was far from bad. “The responses to this later survey [December] indicated that, as expected, some budgets for CRM initiatives were negatively impacted, but the latest survey results showed that their earlier budget allocations for CRM initiatives largely remained in place,” said Chris Pang, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Stephen has reluctanly had to uninstall Internet Explorer 8 from his machine for the time being. The latest release, although more compatible with existing web sites than the previous Beta 2 release, seems to be more unstable with frequent crashes and other issues. Hopefully the final release due this summer will have addressed this.

So there you have it. Another week gone. As usual it’s been both challenging and rewarding, making you look forward to a couple of days off but also feeling rather excited about what next week will bring. Have a good weekend, people!

Andreas Friday Feeling Gartner CRM survey, iNove, Internet Explorer 8, Scott Hanselman