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!!!
The elves are back...