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.

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 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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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?

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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2 weeks ago I created an advert on Facebook for the Moviestar.ie Irish Web Awards 2008. The aim was to attract more people to the awards.ie site and to continue to learn about the advertising platform on Facebook.

The ad ran for 2 weeks from August 19^th til September 2^nd. The ad received 128,259 impressions and 87 clicks. When I set up the ad, I put aside 50 Euro ($73 US). The ad summary shows me that the total spent overall was €38.25 ($55.44 US).

The first 2 days of the ad saw it being clicked on 9 times a day, dropping off to average about 6 clicks for the rest of the 2 week period.

New ads seem to get plenty of clicks for lower impressions. Sundays also seem slow enough, higher impressions for lower clicks based on this ad and my first ad. I specified that I would pay $1 for a click, I wanted to spend a maximum for $5 a day to users 18 years and older in Ireland.

My initial ad for eWrite which spent a maximum of €10 a day seems to have received more than double the impressions, peaking at over 37,000 compared to over 14,000 for this ad. This Awards ad received more clicks which resulted in lower cost per clicks of $0.64 US compared to $1.82 US for the eWrite ad. Having a larger daily limit doesn’t necessarily result in more clicks.

Impressions in Blue. Clicks in Red.

The facebook ad manager summarises the daily stats by week. It would be handy if they could allow a summary for the entire length of the ad too. Had to patch it together myself. Here it is below:

It would be handy to know if any of the clicks resulted in nominations (now closed), sponsors or people subscribing to the awards.ie blog.

All in all, another useful experiment with facebook ad manager. So far it seems that a longer running ad, with a smaller daily budget works well. Some time in the near future I will be creating a new ad for eWrite on Facebook and tracking the clicks to see if users continue to use our demo of ewrite products or continue to buy from our online store that will soon be open to the public.

If you’ve found any of these Facebook Ad related posts of any use or tried anything like this yourself, please let me know!

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• Facebook Needs Some Work on Ad Relevance
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On Tuesday July 15^th I created my first ad for eWrite Lite on Facebook. I started this after reading Damien Mulleys post ‘Facebook Ad Competition - Best Irish Facebook Ad Campaign‘ and decided I’d give it a go.

Paying for it popped to mind, that was sorted quickly enough by adding the VISA Business network Application. Thanks to a link from Damiens blog to Alexia’s blog describing how to get 100 Dollars free to advertise in Facebook.

I logged into Facebook and added the VISA application on the 13^th. The next day I received a nice email from Facbook Ads Team telling me I have received a coupon code and directed me to enter this into the Billing section of the Ads Manager.

I went through the steps of creating an ad for eWrite Lite. Damien also had this covered with a ‘How to advertise on Facebook‘ guide.

I specified that I would pay 1 dollar for a click, I wanted to spend a maximum for 10 dollars a day and run the ad for 10 days to users 18 years and older in Ireland.

So heres the eWrite Lite advert I created:

This was actually my second attempt. I didn’t like my first one, so I created another, shorter and more to the point.

That day, I also moved my site over to Blacknight.ie hosting so I could use a Linux based server. Quite stupid timing on my part, many of the first clicks from the Facebook ad would probably have received a blank site. Didn’t last long though.

So enough background, heres the graph of clicks from Facebook to eWritelite.com over the 10 day period:

Visits to ewritelite.com according to Facebook ad manager

July 15th : 10 Clicks

July 16th : 9 Clicks

July 17th : 4 Clicks

July 18th : 6 Clicks

July 19th : 4 Clicks

July 20th : 3 Clicks

July 21st : 4 Clicks

July 22nd : 6 Clicks

July 23rd : 10 Clicks

July 24th : 3 Clicks

July 25th : 3 Clicks

Heres the graph of impressions for the same period. The peak on the 23^rd is 37,327 impressions.

The spike in impressions and resulting clicks on the 23^rd is most likey due to Facebooks new interface design opened to the public that week which now shows 2 ads on a page rather than 1.

Heres an image of Facebook.com referrals from Google analytics for the same period. They don’t quite match up wth the clicks that Facebook show to the site.

Visits to ewritelite.com according to Google Analytics

July 15th : 5 Visits

July 16th : 7 Visits

July 17th : 2 Visits

July 18th : 5 Visits

July 19th : 4 Visits

July 20th : 3 Visits

July 21st : 2 Visits

July 22nd : 3 Visits

July 23rd : 9 Visits

July 24th : 2 Visits

July 25th : 3 Visits

—

July 26th : 1 Visits

July 27th : 1 Visits

I don’t get the difference in the Clicks from Facebook and the visits recorded by Google. I certainly don’t get why there are visits to the site from facebook after the ad campaign finished. Not complaining though.

Facebook billing reports 10 dollars taken from my accound each day of the ad. Shouldn’t it only take 10 dollars if I’ve had 10 clicks that day? It also shows I have 20 Dollars left in my account a few days after the campaign ended.

Lessons learned

Don’t move the website to another server at the start of an ad campaign.

As a result of all the clicks from the Facebook ad, I recevied no enquiries from interested people. This is a sharp reminder for me to really focus on the website content and get the eWrite Lite Demo back up and running for users to experience the content manager.

Advertising on Facebook works, just make sure there is something on the receiving end for visitors to consume or interact with.

Conclusions

I’m going to advertise on Facebook again as soon as I’ve made some improvements to ewritelite.com

I’ve added the ‘Twitter Updater‘ plugin to Wordpress to post updates of new blog posts to the @ewrite twitter account. If I have it set up correctly, this blog post will trigger the first update.

I’ve turned off the option to post updates if I edit a post or save a post, I don’t think they’re very useful.

Don’t forget to follow @ewrite on Twitter!