Keith, Christopher and I made the journey to London yesterday to visit Internet World at Earl's Court. This is a show for all things webby and was split into five sections:
In some ways we were a little disappointed. There was no stand-out, wow factor technology that made us think "that's really clever". Maybe it's just a sign of these hard times.
This part of the hall was crammed with the SEO (search engine optimisation) and email marketing crowd. Some of the SEO companies were looking for partners, which made sense, others seemed to be on the lookout for customers. This seemed a bit odd as most visitors were like Silkmoth and more than capable of carrying out their own SEO campaigns.
This section was full of systems to create retail websites. Our view is that these work well and are cost-effective for many types of product but often do a bad job of selling products that have any level of complexity (tyres for instance!). Where there are specific requirements on account management, for instance, these systems can struggle to deliver the desired user experience.
Where to start with this one? Essentially there were plenty of systems that will deliver your forum, message board, user group, instant messaging. Nothing to help you come up with that Big Idea that is needed to make it a success though!
For me the most surprising part of the show. Content Management is definately growing and there are more players than ever. Some very good and some not so good.
We met the guys at Kentico at last and it was nice to put faces to names. We spoke about projects that Silkmoth would be undertaking with Kentico CMS in the near future and how the guys might help us.
I had a demo of EpiServer which was interesting. It's marketed as a high-end CMS and is very slick. It seemed to be particularly strong on multi-lingual sites. However, I didn't see anything that made me worry that choosing Kentico was the wrong decision for us. In fact the EpiServer licensing fees more than made me feel comfortable with my choice!
As any Silkmoth customer knows, we host and manage all of our own equipment at IFL in Manchester. Apart from the leggy blondes, in tight shorts, this part of the show had nothing to offer us. I was there for three hours!!!
A number of our customers will have received emails from WorldPay recently. The emails talk about some changes that are being made to the service as a consequence of WorldPay rebranding under RBS.
There are two important dates; 23rd April 2009 and 28th May 2009. Here's what's happening on each:
This is the brand launch of the new service RBS Business Gateway. All WorldPay logos will be changed to new RBS ones and all references to WorldPay will also have to change to the new name.
The WorldPay support service will apparently answer the phone as "RBS WorldPay" instead of "WorldPay"! The colour scheme of the merchant interface will also change but there will be no change in functionality.
Payment notification messages will now come from @rbsworldpay.com
Here's what you need to do:
Where the WorldPay logo is displayed on your site together with the cards you accept, this will be changed on the launch date. You do not need to worry about the "payments powered by WorldPay" logo.
A month later and we're told that RBS WorldPay will be making some technical changes. Essentially they are changing the domain names of their service. We will be informed of the exact changes closer to the time and Silkmoth will do what is necessary to update sites.
It may seem like a strange question but we're seeing more and more companies using blogging tools to create the official/corporate web presence for their business.
There's a gamut of blogging tools out there and most of them are free. All are straightforward to use and come with a gallery of template layouts and styles to choose from. There's no software to load on your PC and you can manage your content from anywhere in the world.
So on the face of it you get a lot for very little. But if you do use a blog for your only web presence does it make you look a bit cheap?
Well done properly I don't think it does make you look cheap. You have to think carefully about your content. You can't rant in the way most people do with blogging. You'll have to adjust your template to include links to blog posts that are important (about us, contact us etc.), so that they can be easily found but that's pretty much it.
So why do I think this is acceptable when only a few months ago I would have poo-pood the idea? Well I think surfers are changing. In many cases surfers are looking for substance over design. If the content is right then the colour schemes and imagery are almost secondary.
Also, the mindset of a blogger is to keep posting new content. We've built many, many websites with our content management system (Wirenet) that are updated very infrequently by the customer, despite having the tools to do so.
So where does this leave us? Should we all turn our websites into blogs? No, you need to look at what your website has to do for you. If it's eCommerce then a blog will not do the trick. But getting into the blogging mindset and updating your content frequently is a good idea. Allowing your customers to add comments to your site can also be a good idea - but I would recommend moderating the comments first!
The elves are back...