Category Archives: manage

Have you noticed? There’s quite a buzz about on the web at the moment. For me it started a while back with Gmail, went on to the things 37signals were doing, fell into Ajax, bounced into Web 2.0 and has now just exploded.

New websites/webservices are launching every day. Here’s my list of personal discoveries for just for the last two days:

• ingesti
• eyespot
• scanr
• riya
• click.tv
• peermind

I haven’t checked, but you can guarantee sure as holes is holes that each site will have an RSS feed. And if you sign up you can probably get a personalized RSS feed. But now that you have all those feeds what can you do with them? Look no further for I have the solution…

• mikeywil on SuprGlu

This is currently concatenating content (9/10 for alliteration) from my blog, my bookmarks, my wife’s photos, and a list of blogs with comments I was following. It’s nice. With those feeds it shows a snapshot of me on the web.

But it might also be useful for a team to join up all their blogs and images together. Alternatively it might be used by a team to stay in touch with a range of external sites that refelct their shared interests. For a large website that has many feeds available this could provide a snapshot of activity on the site. Someone on the forum points out it might help fight censorship in China. There are quite a few possibilities…

But, one question – and a question that keeps cropping up for me: what is the business model? Remember hearing this question before? Yup – that’s right, it was during the last dotcom bubble.

So, how do suprglu plan to make money?

The answer may be Google ads. To be fair to suprglu they’ve not said that this will be the case and their site shows that they’re trying to avoid it, but they will need some form of income to keep it going.
Which prompts the next question: how can every new startup gain enough ‘land’ in terms of users/viewers that they can make enough money from PPC advertising?
The answer for many of the services is the ‘give away a bit for free, but then charge for the full service’ model. This is good – but doesn’t fit all. How will this ‘a bit free’ model work for suprglu? I guess at the moment it’s just an interesting environment where plenty of people are trying plenty of things, and some will make money whereas others will be bought by Google!

Three Tenths Of A Second . . .
Originally uploaded by evilgreg3000.
Some rights reserved.

Well, a good team is a good start…

My list of things involved in looking after an institution’s website.

• Feedback form – every page has a link which captures URL and user info and sends via a form.
• Issues tracker – I think that email should be kept clear of day-to-day site issues and update requests. So, a web-based issue tracker which automatically receives the feedback and other system notifications (such as additions to database-generated pages) would be a good idea.
• Project management software – web based tasks etc. Sharepoint was good for this. A basic but easy to use system that allows lightwieght project management.
• Weekly Work-in-Progress meetings.
• Structure page – very useful for internal people to see the departmental structure.
• PageBuilder – this is a (bespoke) utility that builds pages – fast template rollout and prototyping is crucial
• Menu system – standardise by giving the webauthors an easy to use system that makes their job easier
• Web stats – got to be able to see what’s happening
• SEO stats – WebCEO is good idea, but seems flaky in execution.
• Tools: All the usuals (macromedia/adobe suites, even Frontpage!) and Xenu link checker. Firefox plus extensions.
• Hardware: Colour laser printer, blutack, whiteboards, two screens.
• Test bench – old PCs and macs with appropriate browsers

…more to come I’m sure.

How about running a workshop for web authors to help them make a better page. Don’t try to teach them lots of rules, but instead get them to bring along a page they’ve already done, and then work on improving it.

Start the workshop by providing a pile of Lorem Ipsum text and some stock photographs (allow for some images of people, some building shots, some clipart, and perhaps some nature). Then show how these can be re-arranged on the page to make a good website – clear headings, chunked content, pleasing use of imagery. Show how image choice can make a difference, show the effect of cropping images too. Show also how bullets, subheadings and the like can make text more legible. Add some inline links too and perhaps an image caption and a box out section of text.

Then, let them loose on their own pages and help them on a one-to-one basis to make similar changes to the page they brought along.