We specialise in dynamic websites, online stores and E-newsletters.

the old New Wine web site was one of our first projects and had been live for around 18 months so Sarah and I got together with the staff at New Wine to create a slicker, cleaner interface which works better with the professional marketing communications that New Wine have off line. So thanks to Lucy and Ali at New Wine for helping out with the re-design too. The new site was built as part of our ongoing Support Agreement that we have with New Wine and follows our ethos of not simply building a site and leaving our clients to work it all out for themselves. We meet regularly, advise and listen to how the web site can be improved and continue to engage it’s users. This helps the sites we build stay fresh and leads to a great on-going relationship for all parties. Take a look.

The first thing we do for our Search Engine Optimisation clients is set them up with a Google Sitemap, which is a little file that contains a list of all the pages on your web site. Google then checks this file and looks to see which ones you consider to be the most important and when you updated them last. It then uses this information to go off and look at your web site and put the correct pages from your web site in it’s search results. It’s a great idea and gives some quick wins without a huge amount of server configuration, and of course if you’re clever you can use the list of pages to give your users a site map too. If you’re really intrigued this is what a sitemap file looks like!
It had led us to neglect the other big search engines a little because Yahoo and Msn didn’t have a similar method, but not now! What makes this particularly news-worthy is the fact that Yahoo and Msn didn’t go off and write their own system but instead have chosen to adopt Google’s! Of course they added a a few updates to the system but now it is possible to let all the major search engines know which pages you have on your web site. The new collaboration is at www.sitemaps.org - it doesn’t look that great but it’s a very powerful system.

Once again Dan Etheridge, the web designer at Soul Survivor, has managed to create a rather cool looking new splash page for their site. As part of our ongoing Support Agreement with them, we built a tiny little application in about an hour which would pull in a random set of flash images on to their page. This means that every time you visit their web site you get to see a different set of graphics… very nice and the kind of thing that’s great to maiintain user interest in your web site. And if Dan wants to have a new set of images to greet new users he simply uploads them to a folder on the server.
Take a look (and refresh your browser).

We caught up with NMK too late to catch their excellent summer event called Content 2.0 but I’d spent many an absorbed tube journey listening to the podcasts of their talks. We’d been looking for another chance to join in and found out about their latest Beer & Innovation talk covering Aggregators and Upsetters. The venue was great, downstairs in the Albannach just off Trafalgar Square, and the line-up intriguing and the audience very well connected. These Beers and Innovation sessions are a mini-conference in a bar with a panel of 3 speakers given 5 minutes to talk, followed by a lively q and a session. Last night we heard from Paul Pod from the about-to-be-launched Tape It Off The Internet give us the low-down on why he created his web site. His refreshing down to earth approach about the issues of content aggregation (TV guides and show downloads) and the challenges of making his wbe site pay were delivered in his unique style. Richard Anson from the review web site Revoo showed the business way through this with a nice solid model of capturing and selling independent customer product reviews to online stores such as Currys and Dixons. Although he seemed to be going a little against the web 2.0 grain by making it a closed service and charging to aggregate these reviews to big business.

Harder to place and more opiniated and controversial was star blogger Umair Haque who tried to give us the low down on where the industry was going and why web 2.0 sites such as friendster failed so miserably. We met up with some great people from all parts of the industry, and one of the common topics of conversation seemed to be people wondering why all the online innovation is happening in the US and not here, some say size of audience, some say it’s down to the ease of V.C. funding, and by the end of the talks I was wondering if it was just an English personality trait: no-one seemed capable of agreeing with anyone else!

Part of Clear Left’s professionally run package of facilities at D.Construct was a back-network, an event intranet in-a-way. Unfortunately I was a bit slow getting my info in but amusingly you can see my personal profile page here. Ok nothing very special you may think but look closely and there are two pictures of me (OK one of the back of my head) at the bottom of the page. I didn’t add these, in fact I didn’t even remember them being taken.

The social network example of this is the photographers tagged them as containing me and uploaded them to flickr. The back-network system when showing my profile page checks flickr for photo’s which have me (and d.construct) in the tags and then present them at the bottom of the page. Not rocket-science I know, just a flavour of where we’re all heading.

P.S. Even more amusing is someone’s comment added to the flickr original: “Former Multimap employees, still arguing about its future.”

It’s been under beta test for a while now but Soul Survivor have just gone live with our template based event booking tool. It’s got an administration area which let’s their people choose the field validation, it’s template based which means their web designer (Dan!) can customise the look and feel, it’s integrated with secure hosting to take credit card payments, and delivers files (nash not XML) back to their legacy internal database. It’s running securely under ssl too. Take a look here.

Soul Survivor are one of our favourite customers since they took our Content Management System for Soul Action, use our E Newsletter system to deliver about 30,000 email newsletters every week, and have taken our Open Source Support Program which gives them support and development time each month.

Following Google’s long standing problems in policing adwords campaigns and switching off non desirable or trademarked names we’ve decided to officially release our Brand Track product to a wider market. It’s currently being used by Avis to monitor the use of their Brand Name across all the European markets and across Google and Yahoo search engines. We’ve decided to open up access to this product in the UK for a £200 per month subscription with a supplementary monthly charge per keyword. Multi-engine, multi-keyword Pan Europe is POA depending on your particular requirements. More on Trade Marks in the search engine market can be found here. Head to Brand Track and sign up on the right for more details:

Brand Track — dedicated to brand monitoring and protection.

Well ex-colleague Richard Rutter’s company Clear Left managed to put on a fine event at Brighton’s Corn Exchange today: to summarise it was a day conference to discuss best practices for developing web applications. Note web applications! With the advent, and the marketing noise, of social networking, web 2.0, blogs, and flickr the internet has started it’s slow but sure transition from a document delivery mechanism, i.e. static web sites of text to sophisticated, feature-rich web based applications.

Let’s face it what’s the point of building your event booking system, or calendar so that it can only be accessed from your company’s office: why not build it using current web technologies and ensure that it is inherently available 24-7 across the internet, can be scaled to deliver it’s funtionality to a global audience, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

Ok so it’s only an emergent technology,it’s early days, with the primary examples of flickr and google maps. But these feature rich applications have been made available to developers like ourselves so we can integrate them into our applciations for you. OK not specifically very exciting per se but if Google can build such a slick web based Calendar application then why can’t we deliver similar functionality to you using similar technology. Well we can and have.

The d.construct running order included:

Web Services from Amazon - you know they offer you unlimited online data storage for anything and virtual servers for a very very reasonable cost. They are also in the process of releasing the most interesting product on the internet ever - the Mechanical Turk. The Amazon mechanical turk allows you to programmatically use human beings across the world to solve problems for you. Say you need to recognise if a picture contains a human face for example, you have two options, 1. write a complicated artificial intelligence program to determine the attricutes of a face or alternatively you use the mechanical turk to emply humans at very low cost to determine it for you and then return the results.
Web Services from Yahoo - they offer the ability to integrate photo sharing, mapping, and their search technology into your site. Well! Unfortunately they’re a little late - we’ve already built this functionality and shipped it with the Mewburn web site and I’m afraid it uses Google functionality. I really appreciate the effort Yahoo are making to win over the techie developer market, they’re showing up to events, they’re speaking, they’re releasing stuff to our community and they are sponsoring our activities: Google aren’t. It’s just Yahoo have got a few years to catch up on.

The Joy of API - an overview of some of the available web services from a pure wow or cool point of view, unfortunately there were a few key admisions - namely Google and Ebay.

Flex My Mash Up - Aral Balkan showed us how the new Flash plug in is going to enable us to build amazing new feature rich applications that run from the internet. Applications that go far further than your normal web application - they can deliver a really responsive intuitive experience from searching properties for sale to mixing live video and audio. Oh how I wish we had the time and energy to investigate this delivery platform - Flash has come out of it’s accessibility douldrums and is back with avengeance.

Accessiblitiy and Web 2.0 applications - basically Derek featherstone told us that if we build our applications to deliver usable solutions, following te existing guidelines we’d be half way there to delivering web applications to the partially sighted or blind users. And if we take this methodology and go one step further and really think about how our users would use our web application without sight we’ll be fine.

Understanding Folksonomy - I was really excited about this talk and looking forward to categorising and tagging our products and the web sites we have developed for you. However the actual logistics were a little dissapointing, only 4% of internet user understand tagging. the top level analysis of this talk was that if you are a big business you can gain vital market insight from the Folksonmies people tag your products from but erm that’s about it.

Designing the Complete User Experience - Jeffrey Veen, one of the major interface gurus from Google took us through his development process. Basically the story is simple: be strong; stand up to your internal politics: for your web site to succeed you must deliver what your users want not what your CEO wants and you mut consult your users early in the project and frequently - otherwise how are you really going to know what they really really want? Jeffrey’s project management evangilism followed on nicely from Marcus’s talk last night about Agile Project development: please please remember it is far cheaper and cost effective to change your projects (and take on board user feedback) early on in the development process rather than after launch!

Overall clear left’s D.construct conference reinforced our beliefs in project development, our techniques and our delivery, and on top of that it meant I got a great day out by the sea side and gained two free t shirts too!

I arrived late to the monthly php london meet after a day putting the finishing touches to our Brandgauge project for Unique Digital (more details coming soon) - the pub based event for php programmers. This had the disadvantage of being left near the door rather than cosily sitting at a table for the pre talk networking - although this meant i got to meet an outsourcing consultant and the IT advisor for The University of Hertfordshire.

The event was well attended and the talks fascinating, Marcus Bointon spoke on xdebug - a powerful tool to make our (and your) web applications quicker and more responsive. Followed by the other Marcus’s talk on the Agile development process - one that is dear to our heart: decide on the most important functionality and deliver junks of it quickly and effectively: rather than spec out a mammoth project and wait 2 years for it’s inevitable failure (for examples of the latter see any Government project - NHS Software System, Tax Credits, Air Traffic Control Software, The Census Web Site). For examples of the former see NASA’s launch of it’s first rocket and the order “if anyone in the room doesn’t know what they are doing don’t do anything.” followed by the Britsh Navy’s order after the loss of their Flagship The Hood - “Sink The Bismark”. The moral of this story is close to one of our first customers hearts - “The Encounter Business” have published books about telling stories to make people change their way of thinking. There is a time and a place for different methodologoies and the ones to choose must be based on your experience - chose the correct method of operation for the appropriate time, client and project.

We’re pround to announce the Asymmetry CMS powered Meburn Ellis web site at www.mewburn.com - the content of which is completely managed by their in-house editors.

Snazzy features include:

• fully css driven html
• sophisticated pdf search engine
• site search engine - including Google “did you mean” spelling suggestions (see bit on API’s coming soon)
• an amazing personnel gallery
• optimised to be gobbled up and indexed by search engines
• pages prebuilt and optimised for a faster more responsive user experience
• and dynamic flash integration

We love the site and hope you all do too.