We’re upgrading our helpdesk system, we currently use ‘kayako’ which is incredibly full featured, but sadly also incredibly complicated to manage.
The current main options that meet our needs (simple, fast, easy and fully integrated with email) are tender and zendesk.
My initial findings posted below.
European EC2 monthly pricing in US$ and British £. We’ve been looking at hosting options recently and this is looking more attractive than the £50k/annum we’ve been quoted for a small vmware cluster.
Think I may try this for our services :) > 37signals valued at $100 billion
http://ping.fm/slTvE
student builds a toaster to highlight the effect of mass production we take for granted. takes 9 months costs $2k! http://ping.fm/PI2I1
secured microblogging for the enterprise will be huge. Yammer looks good, cubetree looks even better.. http://ping.fm/rzqyf
Markus Frind works one hour a day and brings in $10 million a year. Knew I was doing something wrong… http://ping.fm/rWV7g
I’ve managed the build for hundreds of websites, and am always getting asked for tips. Here’s a collection of things to be aware of when you’re engaging with an agency or a freelancer.
1 - Copyright
Make sure you own copyright to any custom code & design, and get the photoshop .psd graphics, not just the jpegs.
2 - CMS - content management
The content management system for your website is key. If you get a good one, you’ll have to do very little custom coding, and custom coding is what makes websites expensive. I strongly recommend you choose one that has widespread adoption, you don’t really want to be a guinea pig, if the agency folds/f*cks off, then you can be left with an expensive, non working site. Do not go with a system that is owned by one agency, go with a standard. More on this here
3 - Maintenance/Warranty.
Get a maintenance contract in place, with good response time guarantees. If this isn’t cost effective, just ensure you get say 3 months of free bug fixes after launch. If you go with an well adopted CMS, then it will be easy to find freelance developers, and do the maintenance yourselves, which is much cheaper in the long run.
4 - Browser Compatibility.
Many corporates are still on IE6, so you need IE6 and higher (including 8), Firefox 2 and higher. etc. Make sure this is in your agreement, IE6 is a real pain to code for. I’d suggest go for a minimum screen resolution of 1024x768.
Probably worth coding a mobile iphone/blackberry version as well. This shouldn’t cost much extra.
5 - SEO & Adwords
Unless you want to be really clever, I’d stay away from pure flash sites - they don’t get picked up easily by the search engines. Make sure you can add descriptions and titles to your pages, and that you can create landing pages. An agency can manage your adwords spend for about £80/month -this can save lot’s of time, and get you some traffic quickly. SEO and Adwords is a big topic, do some homework, or pay someone to do it for you.
6 - Hosting
Make sure you own the host & dns directly, you can give the agency login details.
If you’re in Europe, get a European based host, to avoid falling foul of data privacy. Rackspace are good but expensive, Serverbeach look good. For smaller sites Memset.com are good, and do good virtual hosts from about £20/month ( linux miniserver).
Again, make sure you pay for backups, raid storage and unless you’re techie, fully managed support. The hosting will also get you email addresses.
Use a 3rd party service like monitor.us to make sure your site’s working - it will ping you a text if it goes down.
7 - Keep it Fresh and Fast
Make sure someone has time to update the site and answer questions quickly!
Links
http://www.cmsreview.com/ - reviews of current CMS systems
I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years, and it’s not that different from the unsustainable nature of what was happening during the dot-com boom, where people in Silicon Valley could make enormous sums of money, even though what they were peddling never really had any signs it would ever make a profit.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Silicon Valley is still not a huge, critical, important part of our economy, and Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the ’70s and the ’80s. It just won’t be half of our economy. And that means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy. And I actually think that’s healthy. We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design.
| — | Barack Obama (via Signal vs Noise) (via featureorbug) |
When you’re building a website, the content management system is key. If you get a good one, you’ll have to do very little custom coding, and custom coding is what makes websites expensive. I strongly recommend you choose one that has widespread adoption, you don’t really want to be a guinea pig, if the agency upsets you/folds/f*cks off, then you can be left with an expensive, non working site. Do not go with a system that is owned by one agency, go with a standard.
There are hundreds of options, from commercial systems like Opentext & Microsoft CMS, to open source like Drupal, Wordpress & Joomla. I would recommend an open source solution that has widespread adoption. With open source you don’t get left in the shit when the vendor changes their product, business model, gets bought, or goes bust. (I learnt this the hard way, years ago we invested loads of time into Macromedia’s Spectra. Then they dropped it) . Open source also means no licence or cpu fee’s.
A good way of testing adoption is to go to elance.com and search for the technology. At the moment, sharepoint yields 700 developers, Drupal 1,300 and Joomla 3,500. For you that means you can find a developer to take the site on for $10 - $20 an hour, way cheaper than an agency. If you fall out, you can find another developer easily.
In the open source CMS market Drupal, Wordpress & Joomla are the most popular - check out the links below - you get a lot of plugins like job boards, discussion, real time chat, FAQ’s, surveys etc. Many high profile sites use Drupal (e.g.: MTV UK, BBC, the Onion, Nasa, Greenpeace UK, Kleercut ) so I’d probably go with that if I was building a community site. For our site at Projectfusion.com we use Wordpress, as it’s a simple site, and wordpress is super easy to use and setup.
Links
http://www.cmsreview.com/ - reviews of current CMS systems
http://askville.amazon.com/pros-cons-Joomla-Drupal/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=6833886 - old review of Drupal and Joomla
new projectfusion.com site has dropped our bounce rate from 90% to 50%, and we just got our first sale from it. Yay!
