Jan

Web/social media presence for Small Business on no budget?

Here’s a little secret…..having an easy to access and regularly updated website and social media presence is not the domain of the richer SME’s and larger corporates, never has been, you don’t need to employ content managers or developers, you can, to a reasonable degree, simply do it yourself.

I’ve long been an advocate of DIY web, purely because to buy in the skill can be expensive. By that I don’t just mean aforementioned staff, I also mean a site provided by a third party. History, as well as my own experience, is full of examples where a “proper” commercial website has cost a shiny shilling.

Where given the chance I do take the DIY approach a stage further as I have some prior commercial development experience so can add bespoke databases and scripts to sites, but what I add in geekyness I struggle to make up in design etiquette and time usually causes problems, hence the current (soon to be previous!) amount of CMS in the ISSG site.

But it seems the old commercial obstacles; pressure to keep headcounts low and staff wage bills much the same, as well as a desire to be seen to have a “professional” presence, overrule the need to actually spend some time in development of content. Seen it a million times….

This is not about lamenting the past though – let’s ignore the fact that a commercially bought-in website often ages very quickly (a lot of commercial developers only offer remedial changes only, so if you’ve not got the CMS ability built-in….) and can be very expensive.

We are no longer in the good “old” days of the 90s where a developer pitching a bespoke site for £75,000 loses out to another one that pitched it for tenfold! Nope, the austerity is gone and so are the big money sites – I’ve got nothing to prove it but I bet that company who eventually did pay three quarters of a million now have their own internal developers!

So, in part due to some recent conversations about a local charity but extending that to small business, I plan to produce a lightweight guide to how to setup a basic, but functional web presence, but also extend it into the burgeoning world of social media.

Let’s start off with a caveat here – you may have heard the expression “Content is king” this is the single most important thing! It might go against every trend there is, keep it simple, keep it short, etc, etc, but no…..on the web, waffle.

You may have also heard something about SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, if you’re very unlucky you may either; have worked with an SEO or possibly even have one working for you now (if you do you have my permission to fire them today!) – The thing is that yes, what they do does work – but in essence what they do is flip a web search and perform it on YOU!

Huh, what? Yep, seriously. I mean like all things there are going to be some really great SEO firms out there – you know, they charge you peanuts and are constantly helping you improve, but the chances are that after the initial round of meetings you get a report once a month a few paragraphs on how your ranking has improved or why it’s not.

Binning our SEO was one of the first jobs here, they were largely ineffectual, missed a few glaring issues with the existing website(s) and the market is such a specific one that our web presence, no matter how unprofessional would do the job on its own.

With the changes due to the way search engines work code will work harder to interpret your search criteria and AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms will try to better understand what it is that you’re searching for. This sort of seismic shift happens on a regular basis in computing, with the small stutters forward in processing power, regular operating system updates, core software version updates, etc.

In fact in some cases it’s accelerating. We support PCs (well, until recently anyway) with operating systems from DOS (I know) through to Windows 7, one of my recent drives has been to obliterate anything older than XP, and a lot of the XP machines are now gone/updated to Windows 7 (no Vista here thank you!)

So the computer industry is used to change, regular and often frighteningly “complex” (Office 2003 to Office 2007 anyone??) and yes, sometimes the effect on the users is not anticipated, but we are getting off the point here somewhat. The point is that it’s very possible to get bogged down in singular thinking or the thought that “its fine as it is.”

With regards web presence let’s look at it. Everyone could and probably should have a website, email address, etc. But the local plumber down the road, you know the guy with the slightly rusty blue van, he won’t need to be too in-depth about his services beyond his normal patch – a Law firm in Sydney won’t care that he can come out to fix leaky pipes 24/7, but you would far rather call him on his mobile to report a leak than drop him an email. BUT the small firm on the local industrial estate that manufactures replacement imperial valves and (can if required) ship them worldwide and that Law firm over the other side of the world we spoke of….their building is 250 years old and still has many original features.

You get the idea. And yes, sad as I am to admit, this is straying close to the marketing function, but the Information Technology / Systems field has evolved and grown and in a lot of cases is the glue for a lot of businesses these days – if they realise it or not.
The first stage in deciding just how much relevance or reliance you place on your web presence is to work out just how appealing your product or service would be to who and where those who are! And that is most definitely a marketing function.

Consider previously referenced charity. A local (to Cornwall) site of scientific interest – fabulous equipment in some cases examples of machinery that simply does not survive elsewhere IN THE WORLD! These guys have people from all over the globe travelling over to see them and their exhibits. So the worldwide relevancy is very high, and therefore a web presence is essential.

Now, what they actually produce is very limited, it’s very much a visitor attraction, so no complicated e-commerce required. There’s a possibility that buying tickets online might be relevant, but this isn’t Disneyland (other theme parks are available!) It’s more of a turn up, pay, stroll around. Geeky science types by appointment.

And so a perfect “customer” for the sort of presence I’m talking about here. And this is a neat place to tie things up for now. I’m going to break the guide up into sections, but the plan is to, eventually, compile it into a PDF for free download, but for now here’s an idea of what I plan to cover, in order.

Content (what, how much, where), Website (setting up, managing), Social Media (What, when, how often), Communication (types, seriousness, reliability) and anything else I can’t think of now.

References;
http://mashable.com/2012/03/22/google-semantic-search-seo
http://www.webpronews.com/ceo-says-seo-a-waste-of-time-2007-02
http://www.binkd.com/social-media/seo-companies-waste-of-time/
http://reciprocalconsultingblog.com/search-engine-optimization/6-seo-tactics-waste-your-time/
http://www.webmarcom.net/blog/bid/37862/Why-SEO-Is-A-Waste-Of-Time-And-Money-Tips-To-Improve-Conversions
http://mashable.com/2012/01/13/google-search-plus-your-world-seo/

119 days ago Short URL Comments

General/Industry/Internet/Postaday/Postaweek/SEO/Solution/Technical

Nov

A reliable business-class internet service, in Cornwall?

UPDATE 21/12/12

As enjoyable an experiment this has been the Bonded service really didn’t give any real significant improvements over what we had in place already, an extra cost implication as well as the addition of extra equipment to support/maintain, so in the New Year we’ll be sticking a pin in that and waiting for the “next big thing” which seems to be studiously doing it’s utmost to ignore any part of Cornwall that I require it to be in! I’m told that 2013 will be the year……we shall see!

——

It’s been documented before, but I have some complicated issues in the current job! We have a heavy reliance on a solid, working, Internet connection, but also a limited amount of money with which to provide one. Of course not an unusual situation, but as I’m reminded on an almost daily basis, legal requirement, or lifeline service provision means that we _must_ have a working system!

My view is to get leased lines out there as the SLA levels match what our requirements are – I’ve looked at small scale stuff, like MPLS from BT, and large-scale stuff like a full leased line solution. All of these have been presented as business proposals but all have stalled for one reason or another. The last visit was a bonded solution that is in use elsewhere on St Mary’s, but even that proved to be cost-prohibitive!

All being well 2012 is the year that our various departments will take responsibility for their budgets from the top down – so I will be including the cost of reliable Internet connections as a minimum – in an effort to provide the company what it requires.

Then the latest offering from Eclipse appears and is finally a product that we might be able to take advantage of – it’s almost like it’s designed for businesses that are unable, for whatever reason, to stomach a proper connectivity solution. At what equates to £50 per line for the setup cost and £100 per month (f0r 50gb data transfer) the service costs a similar amount to a standard business ADSL service – intriguing.

I shall be firing out a couple of emails over the next couple of days to try to figure out if we can actually use it – it’s lucky that we have a dearth of extra phone lines on our sites isn’t it?

http://www.eclipse.net.uk/bonded-dsl/product-and-pricing

Code that makes me smile – more sql, disctinct/paging

Another part of the ever-ongoing project is to find a way to add a CMS function to the timetables.

Now we really should (and almost certainly will in the future) simply API data from our bookings and reservations system onto our site, so this solution is more of a stop-gap, but it does give me an excuse to fiddle with code, and anyone writing an excuse to help me refine it!

So, in essence we break down the list of flights/sailings into categories, for the ship it’s a little different hence; general, special, tidal and gig weekend sailings. So a database with a category field was created, my plan was (rightly or wrongly) to page through the recordset as many times as there were categories, the reason? So I can display them in sections on the page.

The CMS page is more or less the same as you see on the site http://www.islesofscilly-travel.co.uk/timetable_sc3.asp the main difference being that each row is a form, and each field is editable and has an update and delete button.

I’ve also added some (hopefully) intelligence in the page(s) that records will not display past their advertised date (much like the offers page) which keeps the whole thing nice and clean, and hopefully will mean that we can update as we go.

In order to get this happening I envisaged two aspects; 1) cycling through the recordset more than once 2) splitting the page down by category

To start me off I wanted a list of categories, this can be done by getting a “disctinct” set of data from a recordset

Select Distinct categoryname
From tablename

This yields a short list of distinct categories,next thing was to loop through them, but I also wanted to put a drop-down list on each row (in case we decided to change a category) so I added the list to an array, but in trying to cover off all of my bases I wanted the array to be dynamic;

So, I created a variable to count the number of records and used the following code;

number_of_records = 0
DO WHILE NOT recordset.EOF
number_of_records = number_of_records + 1
recordset.MoveNext
Loop

That gave me the magic number, then we reset the recordset and populated the array. The script moves to the first record, creates an array based on the number of records we’d previously counted (I had to use ReDim here, not 100% sure why!) then loop through the recordset adding the categories into the array.

Recordset.MoveFirst
ReDim list_of_categories(number_of_records)
Dim array_id
Do While Not Recordset.EOF
array_id = array_id + 1
list_of_categories(array_id) = Recordset.Fields.Item(“categoryname”).Value
Recordset.MoveNext
Loop

Ok, so that’s populated our array. Next job is to cycle through the full recordset (remember the first recordset was only a DISTINCT list of categories) and acutally display the details per category. For this I had to use a second version of the recordset.

Recordset.MoveFirst
Do While Not Recordset.EOF
Which_Category = (Recordset.Fields.Item(“categoryname”).Value
<in here we have some html, table headings>
Do While Not Recordset2.EOF
If (Recordset2.Fields.Item(“categoryname”).Value) = Which_Category then
<display the data – as it matches the current category we are looking for>
Else
<do nothing>
End If
Recordset2.MoveNext
Loop

So, this moves through each category type (Recordset) and cycles through the whole, non-DISCTINCT, recordset to display all records in a given category, before moving on to the next. Once complete we have a list by category of all records.

Now, the clever bit (at least for me anyway!) is that I added in a form to each row, and, using Dreamweavers built-in application objects, added an update record script. At the end of each row there is the previously mentioned drop-down list that allows you to change the designation of each record if required. And by using the code that checks if a record is part of the category I also set the selected option correctly.

This gives us inline editing, bundled with my multi-purpose delete record script and we have a powerful CMS page that will deliver the required content.

Reading it back now I barely understand how it works! But that it does is enough!

727 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

ASP/General/Industry/Internet/Postaday/Postaweek/Solution/Technical

May

Adventures in Sharepoint – email setup

Ok, cheeky post but too much wordage for twitter – just a quick post to say that I have configured incoming/outgoing email on my SP application, and normally I’d reproduce the whole lot here but today I’ll just provide you the two excellent links that helped 100%.

http://sharepointgeorge.com/2010/configuring-incoming-email-sharepoint-2010/

And

http://sharepointgeorge.com/2010/configuring-outgoing-email-sharepoint-2010/

Many thanks must go to Sharepoint George for those!

742 days ago Short URL Comments

General/Industry/Internet/Postaday/Postaweek/Sharepoint/Software/Solution/Technical

May

Code that makes me smile – sql comparisons

Ok, just a brief one, but important, for me, nonetheless!

I have a page on our site that displays various special offers – the CMS part is coded so that each offer is an entry in the a database, the form contains two date variables, offer start and offer end dates. The idea being that you can input a special offer record in advance, it will appear on the day the offer starts and disappear the day following the offer ending, as the advert says…We do a similar thing on our vacancies page, the only difference being that some offers do not have end dates.

Why have this? Isn’t it just overcomplicating? Sure, you could just enter a date far into the future, but that adds to the guesswork, so the section was designed to allow a NULL date entry on the end date field which would allow the record to stay on the site indefinitely, the problem? Constructing the SQL statement to let that happen….well it may be simple to some, but here’s my solution!

SELECT *
FROM specialofferstable
WHERE offerenddate >= date() or offerenddate is null
ORDER BY offerstartdate ASC

The problem was having the SQL select records that were in date OR nulls, of course I was trying =null and variations thereof, until I found a simple tutorial on SQL statements that showed the way. Hyper advanced SQL it may not be, but Dreamweaver says it’s advanced and I’m happy to have figured it out!!

http://www.firstsql.com/tutor2.htm

748 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

ASP/General/Internet/Postaday/Postaweek/Problem!/Software/Solution/Technical

rikzblog

Filed under Internet …

Web/social media presence for Small Business on no budget?

A reliable business-class internet service, in Cornwall?

Code that makes me smile – more sql, disctinct/paging

Adventures in Sharepoint – email setup

Code that makes me smile – sql comparisons