Developing eWrite

Yesterday in the Celtic Ross hotel in Rosscarberry I given the opportunity to talk to Soho Solo West Cork. Thank you to Calvin Jones for inviting me to talk to the members of Soho Solo.

The title of the talk was ‘Take Control of your website’. Originally I intended talking about Content Management Systems (CMS), to describe what a CMS is, why a business should consider using a CMS for their own website and to show popular CMS’s available on the web including our own CMS called ‘eWrite Lite‘.

A colleague, Pat Hough from World Class Solutions gave me plenty of great advise on the structure and the focus for giving a presentation. Without this advise I would most likely have jumped right in to the technical aspects of CMSs, talking about programming and databases and I would have lost the interest of the audience and provided no real value for their time.

Giving a broader overview of how useful a website can be to a business, I focused on my experiences with many businesses this year. Below are the notes I used to guide myself through out the presentation. They are brief bullet points to myself to ensure I stayed on the right track.

I am posting the notes here so that they might be of further use to the members of Soho Solo. I hope the notes can be used as a reminder of the talk, the questions and the discussions that followed regarding the benefits and opportunities of a website powered by a content management system.

As always, feedback is definitely welcome!

- - - - -

Take Control of your Website.
Soho Solo, Celtic Ross hotel, November 12th 2008.

Section 1 : Introduction (1 Minute)

• Hello. My name is Gordon Murray, I am the software developer for eWrite. We are a web development company based in Cork.
• I am responsible for developing our software, support and promoting our eWrite products wherever I can.
• I will be talking today about how a business can get value from its website.

Section 2 : Typical scenario I encounter (2 – 3 minutes)

• The usual scenario I come across when meeting with businesses is a business with an old website, designed by a friend, a friend of a friend or a relative
• Their website is online though performing no useful function for their business
• More than likely they have little or no control over their website to make any kind of changes at any time
• To make any changes they will need to contact the original developer who may have moved on to something else
• This developer is either unavailable or costly to make even the most basic change
• The website is either invisible to Google and other search engines, or is not displaying well on Google, MSN, Yahoo or other search engines
• The site may look old, unprofessional and may not display well in modern web browsers
• The owner is unaware of the traffic visiting the website, if any
• This website isn’t making money or performing any useful function for the business
• More than likely is it costing the business money to maintain even though its not doing anything for them

Section 3 : Things a website could do (3 minutes)

• A website can be a very valuable recourse to a business
• A website can present the details of your service or product
• A website can be a brochure to provide information to a person searching for your details such as contact information or pricing
• Provide ongoing information in the form of news or a blog
• Develop a community which provides your business with an avenue for feedback or customer support
• Become a resource to collect visitors contact details such as email addresses for email marketing
• And of course, Sell a product or service directly for money

Section 4 : Real world examples of Sections 2 & 3 (5 minutes)

In relation to functions a website can perform, some of our own clients are practical examples of these, for example:

• One of our clients is a Cork based company, a sole trader selling ornaments made from bog oak
  • They have an online catalogue of products to sell, mainly targeting the American market
  • They receives orders online several times a week
  • The process is almost fully automated, it makes money while the owner is asleep
  • The owner receives the order details by email and ships the product
• Another client of ours based in Dublin
  • It is a website for an official organisation magazine
  • They provide a public section of the site which is mainly contact information
  • The real function of the site is for its members
  • A private blog for announcements
  • A private forum for their members to discuss topics
  • Regular Polls and Surveys getting feedback from their members
• Another client based in Dublin is an charitable organisation spanning 11 countries
  • Their website contains reports and stories from these countries
  • They send a monthly newsletter to thousands or recipients all over the world
  • They have Public and private forums for active discussions both private and public
  • They have an online donations facility receiving several Euro, Sterling and US dollar donations each month

Section 5 : What eWrite does in relation to sections 2,3 & 4 (5 minutes)

• eWrite has provided the software and support for these businesses to perform these functions with their websites
• We keep the running costs down for essential purchases such as a domain name and web space for hosting
• We provide our Content Management System called eWrite Lite which allows you to update the content of your own site in your own time
• We provide Email Marketing Software called eWrite Messenger to allow you to email hundreds of users and record feedback
• We link your site with several useful free tools such as Google Analytics so you can clearly see the visitors to your site, where they are coming from, what pages they visit most and for how long
• Access to our graphic developers network to create a new website to fit YOUR budget
• We can provide customised development of a product or service
• Our software is designed to give you an easy to use interface to manage your site and services.

Section 6 : Conclusions (1 Minute)

• I hope that some of the points here are useful to your business and gives you an idea of what is possible
• I hope that I have given you some ideas as to how your website can be a useful resource for your business
• Thank you to Calvin for inviting me along to Soho Solo to talk
• Thank you all for listening to me.

Conor O’Neill, the driving force behind Corks Open Coffee asked if I would be interested in helping the ongoing organising of Cork Open Coffee.

The OpenCoffee Club was started in London to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow

I jumped (as much as one can via email) at the chance. Im not the only one who thinks Conor’s energy is amazing with his various involvments. It isn’t fair however to expect him to continually drive energy into Open Coffee every second week. He has asked if myself and Ciara Crossan could share the load with him, each of us taking responsibility for an Open Coffee every 3 sessions.

This week on Friday the 7th I’m the point man and Open Coffee is in Luigi Malones, Emmet place, Cork from roughly 10am to 12pm.

Hopefully Ciara and I will be able to match Conor’s energy and his ability to stand up and kick off the session each time. Im usually the quiet one so It’ll be good for me to be shoved in front of people to talk from time to time.

Thank you Conor.

Oh, if you have any groovy new technology or something interesting to demo to the group, let me know. I’ll be sending out the reminder email soon and I could mention it in the email. I could bring along the new Asus EEE desktop version but I don’t think it would go very well in Luigis.

There are going to be Massive changes around here… nah, only kidding. See you Friday.

Soho Solo West Cork have invited me to talk at their next meeting in West Cork.

Title : Take Control of your website

Venue : The Abbey Room, Celtic Ross Hotel, Rosscarbery.

Date / Time : Wednesday 12 November, 12:30pm – 14:00pm.

I will be talking about content management systems and what CMS’s are available to new and existing website owners. A business can effectively keep their website up to date without incurring the cost and potential lenghty waiting period for a developer to update their own site.

I will go through a couple of case studies of businesses eWrite has helped this year, allowing them to regain control of their websites and make changes in their own time.

I’ll be taking the opportunity to show off our own eWrite Lite software and showing how easy it is to use for any non technically minded people to manage their website.

Don’t forget to register using the Soho Solo contact form, its free for Soho Solo members and new members are always welcome.

Thank you to Calvin Jones for giving me this opportunity to talk to the members of Soho Solo.

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Website Design Cork are running a short survey on blogging and social website usage. I took the survey just now, some very good questions and I’d love to see the results of this.

If you have a blog and have 30 seconds to spare, take the Website Design Cork blogging survey. Spread the word about it too if you can.

On Monday the 13^th at 9am, Tom Keane, Co-founder of Nitrosell will talk to members of Open Coffee and Soho Solo in the National Software Center in Mahon in Cork.

Tom Keane is an engineering graduate of University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin and has over twenty five years experience at a senior level in the software business. Before co-founding NitroSell, Tom worked as a Software Engineer and ICT architect for leading software companies, including Motorola, Ericsson, Compaq, and Accenture. During 2007 and 2008 Tom was a member of the prestigious Microsoft S+S (Software plus Services) Partner Advisory Council, which met regularly in Seattle to discuss and advise on Microsoft’s strategic new cloud computing products, campaigns, competitive positioning and go-to-market strategies. Fellow council members included CEOs and Presidents of companies including BT Tradespaces, Best Buy, Siemens, EMC/Conchango, Mamut, WebTrends, and Telus. Tom is an experienced presenter and regularly gets invited to speak on emerging technology and entrepreneurial matters.

NitroSell “makes it easy for Retailers to increase their profits by extending their business with online multi-channel sales solutions”. NitroSell customer numbers are increasing every month and currently just under 400 retailers are running NitroSell eCommerce that web-enable 900 retail businesses across the US, Europe and beyond. The number of NitroSell registered end-user accounts broke the 2 million mark in Sept 2008 and over 600,000 individual products are for sale across the NitroSell WebStore base which attract over almost 2.5 million unique visits per month.

Tom will be talking about how he grew his business and raised the neccessary funding.

I’m looking forward to listening to Tom and thanks to my co-worker John Fitzgerald for plying Tom away from his existing work to come and talk to Open Coffee.

Thank you also to Conor O’Neill for pulling Open Coffee, Soho Solo and the National software center together for Tom to talk to us.

Ask not what Open Coffee can do for you..

A small pat on the back today as I look back over September for some small victories.

• 888 visits to ewritecork.com
• 703 absolute unique visitors
• 122 referrals from prominent Irish bloggers
• 52 people used the eWrite Lite Demo
• ewritecork.com has reached Google Page Rank of 4, was 1.
• 2 new ewrite lite users, Amharc Alainn and Energy Cert.
• 2 award nominations awards.ie and it@cork.com
• Finally began using SpringLoopgs and TortoiseSVN for version control and deployment
• Collected about 200 business cards from networking

I’ll be having a drink this evening and a cigar if I can find one.

Ambitions for October include getting a demo of eWrite Messenger online for people to try, cleaning up the ewritecork.com content to better explain our products and services, bringing in more money to eWrite.

I started this blog with the intention of being as open as possible about what Im doing with eWrite, warts and all. Still learning how to do this.

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On the 9^th of September eWrite was the focus of the Tuesday Push. Several great blogs wrote about eWrite which resulted in 122 referrals so far according to Google Analytics.

Heres a chart showing the URLs and how many referrals they directed to ewritecork.com from September 9^th to September 30^th.

Thank you again to each person who wrote about eWrite in their blog.

If you were to spend 1,000 Euro of your own money on your own business, what would you get?

At the start, spending your own money on the business isn’t unusual. If you were past this point or if some extra money landed on your lap, what would you spend it on?

There are a couple of things I would like to spend money on for eWrite. Sometimes its hard enough to get money out of a business to move things on fast enough.

Im considering spending this amount of money myself, currently Im thinking of the following items, I won’t mention their price but in total they are roughly equal to 1000 Euro.

• Paying for a logo recently designed for eWrite
• Paying for a set amount of time for a writer to improve the content of our website.
• A paid account with SpringLoops for better version control of our software for a few months.

Other items I have considered spending money on are BNI membership, travelling to items such as Future of Web Apps in October.

Have you spent your own money on your business in the past? Do you recommend it or advise against it ?

Very very happy with this, eWrite has been nominated in the ‘Best New Web Application/Service’ category in the Irish Web Awards.

The others in this category are:

• Pix.ie
• PutPlace
• Locle
• Mortgages and Loans
• Nooked
• Our Memory Of
• BookMeetingRoom.com
• Next Action
• Url.ie
• LouderVoice
• Twitterfone
• Zignals
• Album Shopper
• Edenbee
• PropertySwap.ie
• Poll Daddy
• Decisions For Heroes

Very pleased to be nominated along with all these other excellent apps, many I use myself.

Im betting on Decisions for Heroes or PutPlace.

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I have been trying to collect rough numbers on the number of businesses in Ireland, how many have  websites and email addresses. I was thinking of sitting on this information for a while, being in no particular hurry I was happy to collect the information over time.

Reading a recent post on Damien Mulleys blog regarding innovation vouchers from Enterprise Ireland, I’d like to sum up what I have so far and see if this information would be good grounds to apply for those innovation vouchers to continue collecting useful and relevant information for eWrite.

Number of businesses in Ireland

I started with Goldenpages.ie. I used the search engine to search for results located in each county of Ireland and added up all the results. In total it shows 122,199 businesses altogether in Ireland. I may yet go through the results in detail to record the number with websites and email addresses.

Moving on to business.ie, I added up all the businesses in the Business Lists broken down by area. This produced a result of 367,687. This turned out to be inaccurate, it didn’t occur to me at the time for some reason that many businesses would overlap into more than one area or county.

I contacted the people behind the scenes at business.ie and a very helpful member of staff provided me with more accurate details. Their database includes 100,609 trading companies and organisations in Ireland.

Businesses with websites and email addresses

45,569 of these companies include email addresses and 23,781 with websites. If these figures are roughly accurate it means just over 45% of businesses trading in Ireland have email addresses and a mere 24% have websites.

I wanted to know how many of these email addresses were @eircom or even @tinet.ie email addresses. I have to pay for that information though, so I haven’t gone down that road yet.

I have been trying to contact other organisations including CRO, CSO, IBEC, Small Firms Association (SFA), Irish small and Medium Enterprises association (ISME) but they either haven’t responded to me or don’t have any information in this area.

I will contact Enterprise Ireland too, but I might hold off and apply for Innovation Vouchers instead.

Irish Blogs

While I was thinking of Irish businesses with websites, I wondered about the numbers of blogs out there too. I contacted Irishblogs.ie. Again I was met with a very open person willing to give a complete stranger some useful information.

Irish blogs aggregates roughly 2,500 blogs. Only 3% of those blogs are updated daily. 34% update their blogs just over once a month and 31% update their blogs more than once a week.

Summary

The real information I’m after is, out of that 24% of businesses with websites, how many of them have access to update their own site whenever they like without the need to contact someone outside their company?

I have many many more questions, I wonder will this research be appropriate grounds to apply for the Enterprise Ireland Innovation voucher?

I contacted several people to gather this information. Everyone was very open and gave me permission to use the information, I’d like to thank those people here again on the off chance that they’re reading this blog.

Basic pie charts created using Open Office.

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