Ponderings and Wanderings

When you kid gets Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD) do not worry TOO much. This is NOT any relationship to hoof and mouth disease (HMD) found in animals. This is further confusing because the abbreviations are quite similar.

End of short cryptic post……

When building a site, campaign or environment there is always the temptation to develop custom code or suites of services that can be provided for multiple clients.  In most instances, this is not the best solution. Here is why I often like to use packaged solutions to provide functionality where such offerings are available from third-parties.

• Solution is provided by a company with the service as their core product with thousands of sites using the tested technology support with an ongoing product roadmap and dedicated product management, development and support teams. This is really the core difference that I think should drive such a decision.
• Frees up agency/company technology teams for more specialized and important tasks to provide solutions that truly require custom services.
• The real cost in the longer term is usually lower for the client and the agency.
• Setup can usually be completed by less expensive generalists thus freeing technical staff for projects requiring their specialties.
• Technical issues can be resolved by a dedicated product service team with own set of monitoring and alerting tools across thousands of campaigns.
• The services can be based upon and evolve from best practices and needs from a larger pool of users.
• The services are clearly packaged and productized including complete easy-to-understand setup documentation and details.
• Setup and adjustments are usually much quicker (and less expensive)than with custom in-house development.
• Reduces agency/company overhead as no longer the requirement to maintain code base and service long after the solution is a focus.

Am I right, wrong or have anything else to say?  Let me know in the comments.

First, I love WordPress.  I run my blog using WordPress on my server and have found it trouble free with a helpful community and unlimited possibilities via the available themes and plug-ins.

However, for those cases an ASP managed service is called upon, I do not find the paid services of WordPress.com (or other WordPress MU based services) to be up to snuff. The lack of the ability to edit the theme files lead me to require an alternate solution.  Sure, WordPress.com allows for CSS editing that may be applied to the available templates.  However, this is simply insufficient to create the robust solutions I find my clients need. 

This lack of template editing in Wordpress.com leads me to recommend the services from TypePad.  TypePad provides unfettered access to create, modify or add template files as well as any number of CSS files.  This has enabled us to do things like switch out the comments engine or add forms via third-party solutions. 

P.S.: If installing your own blog software or in need of a simple CMS for your own server I still recommend WordPress. 

Agree, disagree? 

Every account/project manager knows that one of their greatest challenges is to balance client desires with budgets.  We always endeavor to beat client expectations while maintaining profitability. 

Of course, in any project things can get out of control very quickly and profits can fly out of the window faster than a stock broker during the great Depression.

A certain expectation for scope creep should be built into any project.  A 5% budget allotment is not uncommon to cope with creep. 

We can then help a bit by being sure we set expectations, limits and best practices that tie directly to profitability such as:

• Limit changes in staff assigned to the effort.
• Avoid the temptation to add features not specified in the architecture but available in a CMS.
• Do not let page counts increasing beyond those specified in the contract or approved site map. This is one of the most common paths to overages.
• Avoid having a Web site that is not completely integrated to the CMS forcing changes by tech or design resources that could otherwise be performed by a producer.
• Do not perform content entry, editing and formatting of text or images when originally assumed to be performed by the client.
• Limit additional rounds of design, content or site reviews that can each be expected to add 5% to the cost of a project.
• Manage delays in schedules, approvals, reviews and other deliverables.

Working with numerous advocacy we are always looking for effective methods to rally support and provide opportunities to take action on behalf of the campaign.  Whether targeting congress, candidates or simply gathering supporters, petitions are certainly a mainstay of these campaigns actions.

I have used a variety of tools such as Convio, Kintera, The Soft Edge, CapWiz and others for such petitions and letter campaigns.  These are important tool sets that enable the organizations to have a great deal of control and to capture contact details to build a database of constituents.  These are great methods to activate current contacts and grow a list of supporters.  However, it still calls upon the need to direct people to the organization’s Web site. 

An addition of services from free petition sites can be used to add a broader reach. Certainly, this is not the best method for the core value of build a constituent database.  However, using these variety of services can help extend the ability to reach many people beyond that your own Web site marketing efforts.  You might not obtain registrations from all of these petition senders - but you will activate more people on behalf your cause.  Certainly, offer a signup to your information stream via these services - but do not expect many signups. Do expect more petitions to be distributed.

Here is a list of free petition services I have found.  I have not used all of them so please investigate each before you use the services.

Facebook
Of course you should place your petition on this and other social networks to deliver your message right where people play. The following Facebook applications help you create petitions very quickly and easily.

• Convio - The Convio Facebook Application extension is a great tool.  Check out the application for Healthy Lakes, Healthy Lives.
• PetitionBox
• Mission Petition
• Petitions
• Ultimatums

Dedicated Sites
The following sites offer free petition services.  They appear to be quite popular.  I have not tried these out.  Let me know if you have and how effective they have been for you.

• www.petitiononline.com
• www.ipetition.com
• www.petitionspot.com
• www.gopetition.com
• www.thepetitionsite.com (Care2) - Run by the very respectable Care2
• www.epetitions.net
• www.petitionhost.com
• www.mycuase.com
• www.petitionhosting.com
• www.rallycongress.com - Also offers a paid services when you get to a certain volume and also allows you access to data and skin to match your site.  But the free service seems like one that is also one to try out.

Have others? Think I am nuts.  Drop me a line in the comments.

Point 1: Many content management systems (CMS) have templates and pages setup eternal to the CMS as a set of content blocks.  It is unfortunately common for a programmer/coder to set content and format in these blocks that are not linked into content modules that are managed with in the CMS. 

This is usually done by the programmer because they find it is easier to code these in directly than it is to have to link each and every image, meta data or content block to a CMS object.  True - this does often save time up front.  however, it almost always is detrimental in the long term.  When coded outside of the CMS the site administrators, editors and content managers using the CMS do not have the ability to modify this content.  This requires going back to a coder to perform tasks that are intended to be the function of a CMS in the first place. So, please coders - take the time and make it all manageable by your users even if you think it is an easy affair to pass the work on to you. 

Point 2: Use the feature sin the CMS rather than bypassing them.  Every CMS offers its own code for items such as date formats, meta data and other functions.  Programmers often have code snippets or other methods outside of the CMS set that they prefer.  However, the use of these non-CMS methods can sometimes lead to long term issues.  For example, we recently wanted to change the date format on a site.  We went into the CMS and changed the format using the management tools.  The date format changed in half of the site in an instant. Then we found the other half had date formatting set external to the CMS.  Not only was this bad form not to use the CMS, but it was not setup to use a consistent method.

Point 3: Follow the best practices from the CMS provider.  Simply implementing a design in a CMS is not enough.  Read through and follow the best practices to enable CMS functionality for the admins, editors and other users.  These are just as important a set of audiences as are the visitors to the Web site.

Think this is all silly.  Not so.  I find that even the best world-class programmer/coder can be light on the longer term management strategies impacted by their decisions.  After all, they are not expected to have this as their focus.  They are expected to focus on the execution and we need to be sure that managers and strategists are clear on the architecture and best practices to be integrated.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

I have been working with MediaWiki for a couple of years.  I even have my own best practices Wiki running on MediaWiki.  This experience matched with reviewing most client capabilities has led me to the belief that MediaWiki requires far too much technical awareness to recommend as a platform for clients. I have found applications such as SocialText to be a far more attractive package.

Why not MediaWiki for my clients?

• While a fabulous Open Source package, the benefits of commercial package with its support, product roadmap and dedicated team to fix issues is probably the most important reason to go with an alternate solution.
• My clients are all non-technical and have little if any knowledge of any markup language. Even with the best WYSIWYG and other helpful extensions I have found that the users need to know Wikitext. This really kills the popularity of the Wiki. For example, creating and managing categories is a dog in MediaWiki.  My clients expect a far more sophisticated taxonomy solution that is simple for a non-technical user.
• MediaWiki out-of-the-box does not offer features that most clients desire.  We then need to install numerous extensions.  This is fine.  However, we then get into a maintenance cycle that requires upkeep of these extensions.  Going with a commercial (or open source alternative) package that has integrated items for this functionality removes this overhead. For example, one of the constants in my clients’ needs is to upload files to articles.  MediaWiki without extensions expects you to host files someplace else and to link to them.  The preferred method is one where you can browse and upload files easily right when you work on the page.
• MediaWiki templates are a bear.  Compared to SocialText or other Wiki products MediaWiki requires a higher level of skills.  Others that are available build more off of the more common HTML and CSS skill sets.

So, think I am off base.  Please let me know and comment away.

Do clients really want a Wiki in the first place? Wiki technology enables fairly freeform community creation, editing and monitoring of content. In reality, most of the true client desire is for a system in which more control is provided. Certainly, one can make a Wiki a supervised environment. However, when you go down that route there are simply more suitable technologies from the knowledge sharing technology set. Sure a Wiki is cool and people can then say “we have a Wiki”, but is it really the best solution for things such as corporate publishing, internal communications, intranets, extranets and knowledge sharing? Or, are companies simply on a Wiki bandwagon until the next big thing comes along.