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If you are looking for someone to build you a new website, you'll probably have noticed the phrase Content Management System or its acronym CMS appearing on websites and in literature from web developers, including here at MRG Web Development. But what is a CMS, and why would you want one?

In my last post I talked about ways and means of finding a web developer. Now I'm going to address the next step, which is the process of actually approaching a developer with a project and going through the commissioning process in a way that will make the rest of the project run smoothly.

So, you've chosen the developer you wish to use, you've contacted them to arrange a meeting and now you are about to meet with them for the first time to discuss your exciting project ideal. What do you need?

1. A Positive Attitude

   
   By and large, web developers are passionate about what they do. They love the creative process of designing and building websites and they love meeting with clients and embarking on the long journey of a new web project together. What they don't love is clients who are uninterested, cynical and unwilling to contribute their time and ideas to the project. Websites aren't commodities that you can pick up from a shelf in a supermarket. They aren't generic. They are complex, individualistic entities that require a great deal of understanding of the purpose for which they are being built and creative enthusiasm from everyone involved.




2. A List of Requirements

   
   I might be exaggerating slightly if I suggest that websites are all as unique as snow flakes or finger prints. They aren't. There are a lot of copy cat websites out there. But that doesn't mean that every website is the same. There are many different things that a website can be, and you won't be doing yourself or your developer any favours if you don't have a clear idea of what you need your website to be able to do. You won't be expected to know every detail of every feature, that is something your developer will work on with you. You will be expected to know what sort of information the site will contain, roughly how many pages you think you'll need, whether you want a picture gallery anywhere, or a contact form. Start thinking of these things in advance and the meeting will be far more productive.




3. Brand Guidelines

   
   If you are commissioning a website for an existing business or organisation with an existing identity, your developer will need to understand that brand identity as soon as possible. The image of your organisation determines everything from the colours on your site to the wording on your menus. For the website to work, it must "feel" like a part of the organisation it represents.




4. Realistic Expectations

   
   This relates a little to the specification of the site, but even more so to the time scale and cost of the project. Modern websites are complex creatures. As a result, they often take some time to build and will therefore cost a lot. Please don't contact your developer and expect them to deliver the finished website to you by the end of the week. It isn't going to happen. For a start, most web developers keep several projects on the go at any one time. This means that they may not actually be able to start work on your project for two or three weeks, or even longer, if they are really busy. Make sure you ask them for an indication of how long they think it will take and be upfront and honest about any deadlines you have to meet, so they can tell if what you want is realistic or not. Similarly, make sure you approach the project with a realistic budget. Web developers are highly skilled professionals and as a result charge professional rates. My standard rate of work is £40 per hour and the majority of websites I build take between 25 and 100 hours to complete. That means that most projects are going to require a budget of between £1000 and £4000 to be completed satisfactorily. Don't approach your developer with a budget of £200 and an idea for a site that makes Facebook look small scale. You won't get your project off to a good start and you're likely to offend the person you wish to work for you.




5. Understand The Problem

   
   Almost all websites exist to solve a problem, so make sure you understand what that problem is. It might be as simple as your customers needing more information about your business, or it might be that you are struggling to time track and invoice the work you do effectively and need a web based system to manage it for you. Whatever the problem is, make sure you understand it, so that you can communicate it to the developer. They need to have a thorough understanding of the situation if they are to come up with a good solution.

During the meeting, your developer will probe you for more details as they try to build a picture in their minds of what you need and how to go about doing it. They may make lists of features or draw little layout diagrams. They may discuss hosting options with you, visual details and content management systems.

This is a two way process. You should take this opportunity to ask questions of your own. You might not understand all the details of web development, but make sure you understand enough to feel comfortable about what will happen and when.

You should leave the meeting with a clear understanding of what the course of action will be, what you expect from the developer and what they expect from you.This way you should find yourself at the beginning of an exciting journey, not a commissioning nightmare.

Finding a web developer is a tricky business. The relationship you form with them will, at the very least, have to last the duration of your project, and ideally should last for as long as any and every project that you've commissioned from them remains live.

This requires a great deal of trust and mutual understanding. If you can't see eye to eye with them, how can you be sure that they are going to do the work you need them to do, and at a reasonable price? How can they be sure that you are going to pay them and deliver the things that they need to get the job done?

Here are a few top tips to help you find a Great web developer:

1. Word of Mouth

   
   Personal recommendation is the single best way to find a web developer. If someone you know and trust has a website, find out who built it for them and if they'd recommend that person or not. No one can give you an insight into the service a developer provides like an existing client.





2. Social Media

   
   If no one you know personally can recommend a web developer, try reaching out to your wider network of contacts, via social media. Linkedin is popular amongst professionals and web developers will often have recommendations from people who commissioned them or worked with them on their profile. Twitter is another great source of recommendations as everyone is always willing to answer a question quickly and concisely. If you haven't tried it yet, I'd also suggest Google Plus (http://plus.google.com), as it is mostly inhabited by computer geeks at the moment, so there are lots of developers on there.





3. Websites You Like

   
   If you come across a website you like, take a look at the bottom of the page (the footer) and you'll probably find a little credit telling you who designed and built the site. Although this isn't the same as a personal recommendation, knowing that the developer you choose is capable of delivering the result you want is very important. If a website doesn't say who built it, try contacting the owner. If they received a good service they'll be only too happy to tell you.




4. Google

   
   It might seem obvious, but Googling (or Bing, Ask Jeeves etc) is a great way to find a developer. Almost all web developers have a website of their own, usually with some customer testimonials and a portfolio of their work. It may not tell you everything you need to know, but in the absence of anything more concrete, it's a pretty good place to start.


Once you've found a web developer you think you might like to use, the next step is to approach them with your project idea, and that is something I'll talk about in my next post.

If you've looked through the site, you'll probably have noticed that I put emphasis on the fact that I'm a developer, not a designer. It's a distinction that many people outside the industry struggle to grasp, and I often get referred to as a web designer, usually by people that I've just told that I'm a developer.

The distinction has mattered to me for years, but not out of some misguided sense of pride. I'm not suggesting that because development and coding are regarded as being more difficult that design by the general public that I think that that's the case, quite the contrary. The reason why I don't call myself a designer, is because, in my opinion I'm dreadful at it.

From as far back as my memory goes, I've always been dreadful at all aspects of presentation. Handwriting, drawing, painting, laying out text neatly, imagining new things, all of it. I don't consider myself naturally creative or arty at all.

But people don't recognise this, and herein lies the problem. To my friends, family and clients, I am someone who "makes websites", and no matter how many times I tell them I'm a developer, they see me as a designer as well. And they expect me to design. Well, my clients do, I don't think my friends and family care too much.

When I'm working with other developers it is important for them to understand my strengths and weaknesses, so that they allocate me work that is suitable, but end users and site owners expect me to provide a complete package, and that is what, going forward, I need to be able to deliver to them.

So, starting now, I am attempting to teach myself to design, as well as build websites. It isn't something I've ever been opposed to doing - I love the idea of being arty and creative - but as with development, it isn't a skill you can learn without effort. That's my challenge: learn how to design websites.

People who aren't involved in the running of a business on a day to day basis often imagine that they are well organised, well oiled machines. Obviously this isn't always the case. When I started MRG Web Development, things were disorganised and chaotic. And that's largely how they've remained, until now.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a webapp that I hope will simplify and enhance our back-office operations significantly. At the moment it is primarily a client and task management and invoicing tool, probably not all that different from many available on the market.

I started with this element of the tool because I needed a replacement for the third party solution I was then using, partly because it didn't really work the way I wanted it to, and partly because I would have had to pay a monthly fee to issue more than 3 invoices a month, and I'm not a fan of paying for things that I don't think work terribly well.

So I built the tool and it now manages all our clients, projects, tasks and invoices rather nicely. But this is only phase one of the project. What I'm really after is the ability to produce useful and meaningful statics about where the business is and where it's going. Up until now I've had no way of knowing how turnover performed in the last quarter relative to the previous one, or relative to the same quarter last year. I had no way of telling you whether we had unpaid invoices, how many projects we have on the go or even how many clients we have.

To some, this sort of information might seem like number crunching for the sake of it, but actually, if you are trying to run a business at a strategic level, this is exactly the sort of information you need to know to help you make the right decisions.

The webapp isn't finished yet. It's going to continue to grow and evolve over the coming months as I try to understand the business in new ways. Whether it will dramatically alter our direction, I can't yet say, but in future, when we make decisions, they will at least be backed up by some reliable data.

We all know that line: It's not personal, it's business. I've never even seen The Godfather and I know it. It seems to get used a lot in the corporate world by those wishing to justify unpleasant actions or decisions, but does it really make sense?

When I decided to go into business in November 2010, I had seen first hand what it was like to be on the receiving end of a web development company who seemed to think that the Mafia were a good role model for how to do business. For the founder of the organisation I was working for though, the venture was intensely personal and being treated in a cold, distant and unhelpful manner left a bad taste in his mouth and in mine.

When I left that job a short while later, I had a theory that, actually, for most business owners, especially amongst SMEs, business is nothing, if not personal. It occurred to me that treating my clients with the same degree of respect and understanding that I extended to my friends was a pretty good model for business and would help me when making decisions with an ethical element to them.

This philosophy has served me well since then and is still at the heart of how MRG Web Development relates to clients, supplier and colleagues in the industry.

There is one element of business though, where I've had to learn the hard way that business is business too: money. One of my hardest struggles has been relating to money in a business sense, rather than a personal one.

Prior to starting in business, I was earning an average of about £8 per hour over a 40 hour week. So when someone suggested to me that £15 an hour might be a good rate to charge clients, I thought I was in the money.

What I didn't understand is that there are many aspects of business that suck up the money you charge your clients before it enters your wage packet, and that you have to charge more as a consequence. If my low rate wasn't harming my profit margins enough, my perpetual habit of underestimating my hours to avoid asking for large sums of money certainly was.

Last month I finally brought my rate up to what I've calculated will be enough to run my business: £40 an hour.

To me, on a personal level, this seems like an incredible amount of money to charge someone for my time, but this is business, it's not personal. My clients may like that I am personable with them, but they see me as running a business and providing a service. What they care about is the service that I offer them, not what I charge for it. They all know what I took a year to grasp, which is that my fees aren't for my time alone, they are for running a successful business and making a profit, and if they don't have a problem with that, why should I?

Service is personal. The fees for it are business.

I spent much of this week building a WordPress theme for a client. It wasn't a brand new theme, in fact, it was identical to the existing theme.

The reason for the rebuild was that the original theme had been built in 2009 and wasn't put together in a way that accurately reflected the progression in browser support for web standards. At the time it was built, it worked reasonably well on the browsers that were available at the time, but it didn't adopt many best practices and it didn't cater for any changes that were expected, either in newer browsers or in WordPress itself.

The result of this was that after less than 3 years, the site simply stopped working. It was impossible to upgrade the WordPress installation, there were error messages all over the admin area, and the public facing part of the site had numerous errors in styling and a drop-down menu that simply didn't work in some browsers.

Had I built the original theme, I would have fixed it for free, as the design itself wasn't due for replacement and the errors were all down to bad coding. Sadly though, the original developer was no longer available, and the client ended up having to pay MRG Web Development to fix something that shouldn't have been broken.

Although browser and server technology is regularly changing, it isn't generally hard to predict where it is going, as web standards tend to be developed slowly over a number of years. Whilst backwards compatibility is very important, it's no less important to ensure that a website is still going to work with the standards that are due to be introduced, as well as those that have expired.

We aim to build sites that will comfortably last up to 4 years without technical problems. Most websites have their designs refreshed every 3-4 years, so this ensures that our clients can choose to have a new look to their website when they are ready, without being forced to make changes because of more and more technical problems.

I feel that this should be a minimum standard that all web developers meet. I hope that most of them do, but unfortunately there are still many cowboys in this industry.

This week I attended the first 3 days of the Eden Project's 5 day Green Foundation course, aimed at helping businesses to position themselves to take advantage of the low carbon economy, which the UK is shifting towards over the next few years. Although I consider myself pretty switched on when it comes to climate change and the various related issues, I found my time at Eden to be a real eye opener.

The first and most important point being made was that the UK Government has bound us to such strong carbon reduction targets that over the next 40 years, the whole way we live our lives and do business in this country is likely to change significantly. At the moment, a few of the most switched on large companies are beginning to talk about their carbon emissions in terms of electricity usage and waste management, but within a very short few years, we are all going to be expected to know and to be able to justify the carbon emissions from our suppliers' employee's cars when they commute into work.

In short, the level of responsibility that each business, large or small, will have to take when it comes to environmental issues, is being stepped up several gears from where we are now.

The second thing I took away from the course was a little of the process that a business has to go through (using the Eden Project itself as a case study) to make changes that will allow it to be more sustainable. It isn't simply a case of sticking some solar panels on the roof or putting bio-fuel into all your company cars, it's about systematically looking at every aspect of your business in an analytical and measurable way, and evaluating the way you operate; not just against the traditional financial bottom line, but against the Triple Bottom Line of sustainability - economic, social and environmental.

Only when businesses start taking those three factors into account for every single decision they make, can they begin to prepare themselves for a world in which they will be scrutinised more than ever before.

And the starting point for all this? Knowing where you are now. Until you can measure, accurately and systematically, what your Triple Bottom Line looks like today, it won't be possible to improve on it.

That being the case, over the coming weeks I shall be beginning a process of measuring and auditing MRG Web Development, to find out how we stack up. In the future I look forward to announcing the things that we can do to help ourselves, our supplier and our clients to deliver on tangible Triple Bottom Line targets.

It won't be easy, but that's not an excuse for failure. The future of this business, and of every other, depends on the success of this mission.

Hello!

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the new, not-temporary, and finally finished MRG Web Development website. One of the sad truths of being a web developer is that the worst website you have any involvement in is invariably your own, simply because it isn't practical to find much time to work on it when you have a busy client list.

That said, having finally found the time to build this site, after more than a year of attempting to fit it in around everything else, I am hoping to be able to keep it up-to-date. This blog, especially, should hopefully avoid looking too static, with regular news and information from the MRG office, as well as my thoughts, comments and ideas about a whole range of tech, web and small business related subjects. I hope it'll be an interesting read for other developers, clients and anyone else with an interest in any of these areas.

At the moment I have an idea in my head that I'll be blogging here about once a week, probably on a Friday, but we'll see how that plays out in practice over the coming months. Until then, I'd like to welcome you once again to the new site and thank you very much for taking the time to drop in.