OKCOOL

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.