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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Our content management system eWrite Lite allows a website owner to collect data on visitors to their site, the usual stuff such as browser agent, ip address, top pages, time on pages etc. Our email marketing software eWrite Messesenger allows the owner to collect data too such as what links the recipients clicked upon in the email, if they forwarded it to a friend etc.

This data isn’t anything new or exciting but I got to thinking recently about other data these programmes could give. I have been considering adding a facility to our products that a user could enable or disable which would send anonymous statistics to our server that we could make available to anyone that may have a use for it.

This combined data would contain information such as; number of pages on a site, how many new pages created per week, how many pages edited per week, how many combined visitors per week to the sites, what browser agents are visiting the sites, what IP addresses are visiting the sites, what countries are visiting the sites, the average time spent on a site by a visitor, do the sites have a blog, what’s the average number of recipients on a business mailing list, what is the average Google page rank, what’s the average position on Google SERP, what web robots are visiting the sites and much more.

This information would not betray the users privacy in any way. It would not give away any private information about the users or their mailing lists.

Is this information of use to any organisations? What would be a good format for this information?

As a developer Im quite aware that I should have begun to use version control a long long time ago to develop our apps.

More than once I read about and tried to use CVS or SVN. The learning curve to set these systems up on a server is probably not too steep but I was continually dissatisfied and turned away from it.

I wrote my own version control system at one point using PHP to monitor changes in the files and collect any comments in the changed files. The PHP code could also upload the changed files to the users servers. This worked quite well for a time but I was worried about security and I had a tendency to get bogged down in the development of the system itself instead of what it was supposed to do to help me in my daily work.

Earliy in September I came across SpringLoops and found they offer a free version of their source code management tools. Their free version allowed me to create 1 repository so I signed up and created a repository for eWrite Lite.

I installed TortoiseSVN on my desktop machine and on my laptop and got used to downloading and updating the code from both locations and getting familiar with the terminology.

I’ve read plenty of tutorials and blogs where developers encourage the use of version control. More than once a developer would write “Use version control, you can thank me later”. The smug feckers were right. I’ve been using SpringLoops and TortoiseSVN for a few weeks and its allowed me a freedom to concentrate on the development of the software rather than fiddling around with my own bad habits.

I used to have HP servers in the attic running Ubuntu Server with Apache, PHP and mySQL to host, develop and backup everything I was developing. I sold off all the servers, replaced a dodgy router and ran CAT5e 100MBPs cable through the building rather than using a wireless connection.

On my desktop machine I use WampServer to deploy a development environment of Apache, PHP and mySQL in Windows XP. I can write and test the code on my local machine and use TortoiseSVN to commit the changes to SpringLoops and deploy the stable versions to customers sites.

Im still learning my way around SpringLoops and version control abilities in general. I’ve upgraded to the ‘Field’ package on SpringLoops to allow for more repositories and servers to deploy to.

The packages that are available are more than enough for my needs in some cases but lack a little in others. For example the ‘Field’ package Im using now has 10GB of space, 100 protects and 20 servers per project. The space and projects are way more than I need, but the servers per project are important to me, I need more.

The next package up allows for only 30 servers. I emailed SpringLoops to ask if there were customized packages available. They seemed helpful at first asking what I would need. I asked for at least 50 servers per project and far less space and projects. I’d be more than happy with 10-15 projects and 2-5 GB of space. I didn’t get any reply to that, they probably think Im joking. I’ll contact them again shortly to see if they’ll allow it.

Developing with SpringLoops for the past few weeks has been great. I’ve been able to develop the eWrite products much faster, commit changes to the server and deploy these changes to clients sites with just a couple of clicks, It is far far faster than FTP. I wish I had joined the version control party sooner, the eWrite software and my time are all the better for it.

When we meet new customers for the first time they often have existing websites that they would like to improve upon. In this case, we can import their existing website pages into a database and install eWrite behind their existing website where they can log in and edit their pages when ever they like.

However, up til now, for new customers with no existing websites we have had no default website structure to provide a user to begin creating their website. We have found it is useful for a user to have a plain website to start from. The idea is that a user would use this default structure and become familiar with using eWrite while we or some other designer works with them to create a professional looking website.

The image below shows the new default web page template that a user begins with when they have set up a brand new website with eWrite Lite. Almost everything on that page can be edited by the user. When installing eWrite Lite, the user is asked a few questions such as business name, website address, website description, business keywords, website owner and so on. This information is used to install eWrite Lite and create the default website.

eWrite Lite default template

The user can then log into eWrite Lite and begin creating new pages. Links to these new pages are automatically added to navigation panel on the left. Other items on that page can easily be turned on or off by the user. For example if the user would prefer not to show the page created / modified date they can simply disable them.

Behind the scenes, eWrite lite also creates an XML sitemap for search engines like Google to index your site. A RSS feed is also created for those who would like to keep up with changes to a site using their favourite RSS reader.

Search engine optimisation is also catered for by ensuring users fill in proper page names, page descriptions and keywords when creating or editing pages.

The aim is to provide a new user with a solid base to start their new site. I would love some feedback from web developers on this default template approach. Do you use something similar?

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.

I’ve been thinking of adding a ‘Tip of the day’ sort of note to the dashboard of eWrite Lite that a user sees when logged into eWrite.

With eWrite providing many useful tools to manage a website, I’d like to be able to give users handy practical tips on an ongoing basis in relation to their website content.

Short and useful tips such as:

• Don’t forget to add an email address or phone numbers to your contact information page to allow customers to contact you directly
• Why not place a Google Map on your contact information page to help customers find your business, use http://www.communitywalk.com
• Try to avoid writing your email address on your site. It will prevent web robots from collecting your email address and sending you spam. Create an image with your email address instead.

Can anyone think of a few more ?

The eWrite Lite business cards, designed and printed by TheLogoCompany arrived!

I was nervous about how they would turn out. There are many good things happening at eWrite at the moment and I wondered if I was going in the right direction getting a specific card for the eWrite Lite software.

eWrite Lite Business Card

The cards look great! The front is crisp and glossy with a matt back containing my contact details. I have 498 of these (My parents took one each) that I’ll be passing on to anyone that even looks my way from now on.

TheLogoCompany asked for a testimonial to put in their forum which I happily wrote. They sent me on the logo designs, business card designs, letterheads, compliment slips in more graphic formats than I know what to do with.

Here is a screenshot of eWrite Lite as it current looks. (Click to enlarge)

Existing clients log into eWrite Lite by going to www.ewritecork.com and logging in via the client login on the top of the site. This may soon change, but thats for a later post.

The screen shot shows the main ‘dashboard’ which is visible when a user logs in. To get back to this screen from any other section a user need only press on the eWrite Lite heading or the little Home image along the top.

This dashboard provides a couple of quick links to various items. The first cool thing is the screen shot of users own website. This is updated any time the homepage of the site it changed. The ability to update this thumbnail is thanks to Picoshot and Thumbalizr.

Next to the screenshot a user can see the total visitors to their site today. eWrite Lite has its own scripts for recording the traffic to the site but also uses Google Analytics to provide much more information and graphs.

Following this there are 5 of the most recently edited pages, these provide a quick link to open the page for editing using the TinyMCE editor. When a page is updated an RSS feed and Sitemap XML file are updated.

Below this a user can see the limits placed upon eWrite Lite. Its limited to 100 pages and 200MBs of storage for images, videos etc. Since eWrite Lite works on the clients exiting hosting these values could change.

On the right the latest couple of blog posts are visible. It is the eWrite News blog which a user can use to keep up to date of eWrite related news or developments.

The poll thats there are the moment is to see if existing users would like to be able to edit their images within eWrite Lite. Ever since I met Walter of Pixenate I’ve been interested in embedding Pixenate into eWrite if possible so that a person could make some changes to their images. It would save them using Photoshop which they probably won’t have with them if on the road.

The main menu on top has 3 buttons representing the primary areas. ‘Content Editor’, ‘Media Manager’ and ‘Support’. When pressed each one has a drop down menu containing only 2 or 3 items each.

The Content Editor section allows a user to open any existing pages or create a new page.

The Media Manager allows users to view all exiting media files such as images, video & audio and upload new files.

The Support provides a link to the eWrite Lite online manual which is currently being worked on to show short tutorial videos on how to use the various aspects of eWrite Lite. It also opens the client’s contact details so they can keep these up to date.

Future development plans

Overall, the plan is to keep eWrite simple and useful but there are still plenty of things I want to do.

Some future goals include stream lining the interface a bit, making moving back and fourth between sections a bit smoother so that a person could being writing a new page, move to another section to read another page perhaps and go back and continue editing the page they were working on.

Im also very interested in the current Mozilla Prism work. I would like to have eWrite Lite available on the desktop for a quick link or to be used offline and sync the pages when online later on.

So thats eWrite Lite as it currently stands. Its just a tad over 3 MB.

All comments and criticisms are welcome, and if anyone would like to meet or see eWrite in action on their site, let me know.