Site credits

Here we list the people and technology that have made this web site possible. It has deliberately been built with cheap or free technology wherever sensible, and put together by PRIME’s staff. This makes it much closer to the web sites that many small businesses are now (2007-2008) building.

Key decisions in building a web site

The basic choice in getting a web site off the ground is whether to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. PRIME’s first web site, www.primeinitiative.org.uk, developed in 2003, was outsourced. It did the job required, but by modern standards is difficult to keep up to date and it is expensive to alter in any significant way.

The onward march of technology means that the option of doing it yourself is getting increasingly attractive, as the tools needed are becoming much simpler to use and cheap. The whole blogging movement has opened up the world of web publishing to millions of individuals. Some of the stuff pioneered first by highly technical people then by teenage diarists is now good enough for routine business use.

There’s more about what PRIME is using on this site in individual posting in the Internet category. What we do below is list the things we have found most useful without going into much explanation.

Open source

A key reason why good cheap web sites are now possible is the coming of age of the Open Source software movement. Many high-quality tools are now available at little or no cost because they have been produced by highly-organised teams of volunteers.

In part this is a 21st century expression of the same charitable impulse that has given rise to organisations like PRIME and Age Concern. But the open source approach can also fit in neatly alongside profit-making commercial businesses in highly competitive markets, so it is in other ways an entirely new phenomenon.

Our content management system

We are using WordPress as our main content management tool. WordPress is a popular blogging platform available in both a simple free version and a fuller-featured hosted version that involves some costs. On this site it does all the basic work of displaying words and images and also provides us with the facility to change them as often as we want ourselves.

WordPress is a classic open source project, developed by a small core team and an army of volunteers. This community has a mixture of motivations, with some people (and firms) contributing out of altruism, others to demonstrate their technical prowess and a third group offering services for money. All these motivations are perfectly acceptable in a well-run open source project, and freely discussed.

Hosting

Our host is Native Space. We pay for this service. What hosting means is that Native Space rent us space on a big machine that has a fast connection to the Internet. All the words, images and software that make up our web site go on to this machine, which serves up the pages to anyone visiting www.prime.org.uk or www.primebusinessclub.com.

We have online access to this server 24/7, and so can instantly alter the web site any time ourselves. Hosting firms can provide technical support to their clients as well, and it’s their helpfulness and expertise that often differentiates their services. We chose a UK host that knows a lot about the sort of software we are using – WordPress and what WordPress itself works with behind the scenes – Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (all also open source software products themselves).

Design

WordPress is made in such a way that its behaviour and appearance can be altered to suit the needs of individual web sites. Everyday content like words and images can be easily altered by anyone with the necessary passwords, and that’s what PRIME staff do. But more fundamental thins like the layout of the site and the overall colour scheme require more expertise.

There’s a flourishing community of people producing “themes” and “plugins” to customise each of the major content management platforms, including WordPress.

Our WordPress theme is currently Suffusion by Sayontan Sinha. It gives the site its overall appearance and colour scheme, and is probably the single most important thing responsible for the look of the site. This is a free theme.

We also use several free plugins. Two are particularly worth mentioning.

Comment spam is very effectively detected and destroys by Akismet, written by Matt Mullenweg, one of founder members of the WordPress core team. Also very useful is WP-Print by Lester Chan, which solves a common problem with web sites – wasteful messy printed output. Instead this WordPress plugin produces neatly formatted printed pages.

Paid-for software

We have also used paid-for commercial software where no open source software is available that is equally good. In a surprising number of cases the open source solution is as good or better than the commercial offering, but there were four specialist areas where we felt the paid-for option was clearly superior (and we were able to find the funding!).

Text to speech

We use Readspeaker to provide the automated voice that reads items out loud when you click the listen button. This is the best solution currently available. The voice is fast and clear and because it’s server based there is no need for our visitors to fiddle with their browser settings or download any software.

Forms and partner database

The useful thing about our partner list is not pretty maps or the ability to tell people what was near where they lived (which they could figure out for themselves), but the actual information about the services our partners could provide. The availability of free and low cost business help at the local level is constantly changing, so what we most needed was a database it was easy to alter.

So we we are currently using DabbleDB. We now provide clients with information about free and low cost local business support as a simple set of regional lists with DabbleDB.

People can get maps, by clicking on the post code displayed on the screen – DabbleDB links through to the free Google maps service to display them. The other big benefit for us is that it is easy to export the lists out of DabbleDB in a variety of formats, so we can use it to provide the basic text for the printed business support booklet we produce every six months.

UPDATE: May 2011. DabbleDB is no more. The company producing it was acquired by social media giant Twitter, apparently mainly to get their hands on its excellent development team. Twitter has now closed down the DabbleDB service.

The key thing we were doing with DabbleDB was the partner list. We are now doing it as a shared spreadsheet using Google Apps. This is an inferior solution for web site visitors, in that it’s harder to read and search. But at lleast the data is still available to our site vistors, and it is still simple to keep up to date.

Forums

Again, we have recently changed to something cheaper and simpler. This is often the case with Internet stuff – as you understand your requirement better it proves possible to do things more efficiently.

We are now using BBPress to provide the PRIME discussions forums. This free product comes from the same stable as the open source WordPress, and integrates well with it. It also has excellent spam protection, which as an additional benefit requires very little time to manage.

This is our third solution to the forum problem. For about a year previously we used Vbulletin – an excellent but rather complicated and expensive forum system that has to be installed on a host. We were using it because it has good spam control, but in other respects it was overkill for our simple needs. Our previous forum used more primitive software and was overwhelmed with spam.

Forms

There are lots of ways of doing forms on web sites, many of them free. But if you do lots of forms and need to subject the data to intensive analysis – which we do, then it’s worth going for a proper survey package. We use Zoomerang for both the web site and handling telephone queries. It fully complies with EU “safe harbour” data protection rules, something that not all US services offer and that matters if you are going to be handling personal data. Both Zoomerang and its main rival Survey Monkey are available free to anyone polling up to 100 people, making them useful for initial business market research. We use Zoomerang at higher volumes than this so we have to pay.

More recently we have started using DabbleDB for things like the forms used to take bookings for PRIME events. We are already using this for other database tasks, both on the web (like the business support list) and in the office. While Zoomerang could also do a form equally well, Dabble scores in being able to do other admin-type things too – like automatically send out emails to the people who book.

The cost issue

As a charity PRIME has been able to get some discounts that an an ordinary business would not get. But these four items together still cost as much as everything else, including the content (the major item here is case studies, which we are now getting suitable-qualified volunteers to help us write).

What’s most notable is that many of the technology items are very cheap. It’s probably true to say that 80% of this web site cost nothing apart from time, with all the money expended going on the remaining 20%. You may not require features like a spam-proof forum, sophisticated mapping or need to do large surveys.

So a good-quality, professional-looking web presence is now very affordable, though still a little complicated to achieve, if you go the DIY route. The cost of paying to get one done for you should also be falling, as these same technical advances are making it easier for professionals to churn straightforward web sites out.

Other services and features

Visitor traffic analysis: Statcount, Webaliser and Google Analytics. These are all free. Statcount is easily the simplest to use, and Google Analytics extremely powerful. If you are considering buying Google Adwords to drive traffic to your site its worth biting the bullet and trying to understand Analytics. The two together are a very powerful marketing tool.

Search

On this site we have two search boxes. “Search” at the top right is the standard one included with WordPress. It quickly finds all the posts – the news and events items on this site. But it misses content in pages such as this. And it doesn’t also search our other site www.primeinitiative.com

So we have also installed a “Find powered by Freefind” box. Freefind is much more configurable. You can get it to search several sites and you can tell it which pages to ignore or attach a high weighting to.

Freefind isn’t open source. Instead it is advertising-supported – ads are the other popular way of making things available free. So if you search using the Freefind box adverets will be displayed alongside your results.

Images

Some of the small images such as this one come from A Perfect World, a library of clip art by the cartoonist Linda Causey. They just happen to fit in well with the Chameleon WordPress theme we are using.

Some other images are in the public domain (in other words freely reproducable as not copyright) or are available under a free Creative Commons licence (explained here).

On many of individual news posting we have often followed the convention of the web of using a small image from the target site. As long as the image is accompanied by a link to the site most web masters do not object as it brings them traffic.

Custom and practice on the web is still evolving, but this approach to linking is the basis of services such as Google News and has been endorsed by web luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee and Jacob Neilsen. The use of small images in links is commonplace and supported by some landmark court rulings. However, if you are the owner of an image and want us to take it down please let us know.

If you're new here, you may also want to visit our main web site PRIME Business Club where we provide lots of practical information to support clients.