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!

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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.

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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This is a small but effective addition to our eWrite products added this morning.

We often create small applications for our customers, items such as order forms or any other interactivity a user wants to put on their website. These items need an interface to allow the owner to manage them.

Ewrite can now detect any applications we have created and puts a new menu button into the top of the main interface. This new menu item called ‘Apps’ shows any applications we have created for the user and automatically links to any relevant sections of the application.

This allows an eWrite user to access any apps we create for them from within eWrite so that they don’t have to note or remember several URLs, usernames or passwords.

This also allows the applications we create to inherit the style, security and resources already available within eWrite which reduces the amount of code and files needed in these applications.

The applications are also stored in such a way that when eWrite is updated from SpringLoops and it won’t negatively effect the installed applications.

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..

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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A new forum has been set up at http://www.ewritecork.com/forum/.This forum is to encourage ewrite users and members of the public to discuss or comment on anything to do with eWrite.

If you have any questions or comments about ewrite, nows your chance! Get posting, any and all suggestions are welcome.

In the very near future, the ewrite software will be available to buy online, so this forum will be especially useful to people out there downloading and using ewrite.

The forum itself comes from PHPBB2. Its a particular favourite of mine used by many sites out there. They have a more up to date forum, version 3 which has more facilities and is a little sleeker looking, I prefer version 2 though becasue I know my way around it.

A few weeks ago, a web service called Toddle was the focus of a Tuesday Push. This gave me the opportunity to sign up to Toddle and see what it could do.

In a nutshell, Toddle allows you to create great looking email newsletters very quickly. I saw that Toddle newsletters could be imported into Campaign Monitor and I wondered if eWrite Messenger could do the same.

With Toddles permission we have created an import feature in eWrite Messenger which allows you to import the newsletters you have created into eWrite Messenger. From here, you can send out the newsletter to anyone in your address book and monitor the readers.

Im very happy to be able to work with another Irish company, to be able to bring another great Irish product to eWrite users. Thanks Toddle!

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Interested it seeing eWrite Lite up and running with page of your website? We’ve created a demo of eWrite Lite allowing users to enter their existing website address and log in.

eWrite Lite will grab a few pages and images from your site so you can experience editing your own work in eWrite Lite.

Thanks to Matt Hart for helping me greatly improve an existing eWrite Lite demo.

For some time now I’ve had the luxury of having many of the websites using eWrite CMS on the same servers. This has allowed me to develop the eWrite CMS in the model of software as a service (SAAS).

The eWrite content manager was located on our own website. Clients could visit our site, log in and view their own pages for editing. In the background eWrite would update the ‘remote’ database with the updated content.

With the newer eWrite Lite, I continued this approach as long as possible to allow for easier development and maintenance on my part.

For various security and connectivity issues I will be moving eWrite Lite away from this approach and following the approach used by Wordpress. eWrite Lite will be a set of files a user can upload to their site, run a setup wizard which will create a basic website and log the user into eWrite Lite to begin creating their first pages and managing their files.

It will mean a little more work for me deploying new files or updates for eWrite Lite to users websites, but Im looking forward to to the change in approach.

Until now, eWrite was quite limited in getting users to be on servers we could control. With this new approach I will be making it as easy as I can for a user to pay for eWrite Lite, download a copy and install on their site quickly and easily.

Wish me luck!

I’ve had eWrite Forms running for a good few months now. In short, it’s a service which allows a website owner to replace any form on their site which is being abused by spam messages with a form protected against spam.

It was basic, providing only a few forms. A newsletter signup form, a contact form and a guestbook form. It also needed a website to use PHP on their site to allow them to integrate a form.

This was clearly quite limiting and I’ve been planning up updating this for some time. This week I was supposed to travel for a few days. Partly in relation to work and also to take a day or so for myself for some well deserved rest away from the computer.

Instead, I had an idea to stay home and try to catch up on a couple of projects. I spent a couple of days giving eWrite Forms some attention.

It now allows a user to sign up (for free) and easily create basic forms simply by ticking a few fields which they want to use.

They are provided with a short snippet of Javascript which they place on their site to display the form. The Javascript is much the same as the JS used by Polldaddy to embed Polls and Surveys on a site.

A user can create as many forms as they like. Any form they create is monitored by eWrite forms and prevents it from sending spam to the website owner using plenty of techniques including a users personal white list and a personal black list.

A user gets an email each week showing how many messages passed through the system and how many of them were spam. The legitimate messages pass through to the user as normal and the spam messages are stored in an admin panel where the user can log in at any time to review and release messages if needed. They can also customize the look of their forms using CSS to make it fit in with their site design.

Im especially pleased with these improvements but theres plenty more to add to it. I’d like to charge a small amount for this service, but Im unsure whats an acceptable price.

Some improvements underway are:

• A paid version which will send the form to the owner instantly (The current messages are scanned hourly)
• An RSS feed of messages received from a form.
• A way for the owner to customize the ‘thank you’ message when a form is submitted
• The ability to add any type of field a user wants to a form
• Better Javascript form validation.
• Import/export of emails addresses to and from the white list and black lists

Any ideas or suggestions from bloggers out there? Know anyone that has a website with a form thats sending them spam?