So I’ve starting getting the plan together and as always these things are never as easy as they seem no matter how clear everything is in your head.

I find that just as I go looking for inspiration around the web for design, layout, marketing trends and other creative processes, why should this be any different?

So here’s a (not too comprehensive) list of sites and articles that I’ve found useful so far over the last week

• First up Guy Kawasaki in general this blog is great, but specifically…
• This particular post, The Art of the Executive Summary
• Venture hacks, almost essential reading
• Johnny Martin’s guide to business plans Part 1 and Part 2
• Sample Business PLans

Ok, like I said, it’s not too comprehensive, but really the most useful resource is people you know and the people that they know. I’ve been getting some excellent advice and hope that it continues. Thanks guys, you know who you are.

If you have any other interesting resources please let me know

We now have quite a few clients, each one has ftp details, email addresses, at least one website, a blog, a forum, contact forms, multiple domains, etc… The problem has become not only how to store and access all of this information, and make it available to clients efficiently, but also how do we make it easy for us and the client to monitor all of this web based information?

So we came up with Simple Web Management aka SWiM.

SWiM allows us to monitor all of our clients in one central place, it also allows them to login and get access to the information that we have stored on them, keep it up to date, and get an “activity stream” of everything that is going on with their online presence.

Tom has built in a rocking API so that SWiM is basically modular; applications can be added on a “reseller” level, client level and website level. As an example we are just finishing a Wordpress application that  allows you to monitor multiple blogs in different locations all in one place, along with contact form responses, Shopify sales, etc…

We ported over our current clients about two weeks ago and have noticed that the frequency of client interaction has gone up significantly. We now know which websites get updated the most, which ones sell the most products, which get the most contact form responses etc and best of all the clients get all of this too…

We are now getting ready to open up to other people to test so that we can improve and extend SWiM - head over to the beta sign up page to sign up, get a few screenshots and get involved.

We’re now part of “The Web People“, there’s more of us, bigger offices and the same high quality output.

We’ve just finished our first site as the Web People, Allergy Test UK, which uses the simpleWebeditor and has an integrated Wordpress blog, it’s more of an update than a redesign, allowing easy manipulation of content.

We’ve got some big things in store for the the coming months, least of which is SWiM, our client management system…

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.