Posted under Best Practice, Project Success on May 2nd, 2012 by Philip Allen / No Comments

Historically, Content Strategy is a component of best practice used for high-end brand savvy Web projects where adequate budget means best practice can be followed to the letter by a multi-disciplined team with all the right skills in all the right places, 

However, Content Strategy is fast becoming recognised as a critical component for success in the SME and even large enterprise arena, creating a new core job function with a dedicated skill-set.

So What Exactly Is Content Strategy?

In simple terms, Content Strategy is the process of maximising the commercial impact of content to achieve business goals.

It follows a simple six-step process:

1. Defining the business goals for the site and individual pages
2. Defining the type of visitor who will land on each page
3. Defining the phase of the search cycle the majority of visitors fall into when they land on each page
4. Delivering content to generate a user experience that will resonate with the visitor
5. Defining how to influence the outcome of the visit
6. Defining metrics to benchmark performance over time

It also assumes that you have completed a detailed Key Phrase research project to define the language your audience is using, and hence, have a completed Meta Strategy in place.

So Why Does It Matter?

Because without a Content Strategy, content is nothing more than a general guess at what someone might be interested in reading on your Website.

There will be no relevant structure, no business logic, probably no relationship with your underlying compelling value proposition, and most importantly of all, very little to suggest a visitor should trust you with their time and money.

If your competition has a Content Strategy, they will undoubtedly be relishing in higher numbers of page visits, longer time on a page, more pages per visit as well as higher goal and conversions.

How Can I Create My Own Content Strategy?

You can use this simple template to help. Just complete one of these tables for each page on your Website.

Bear in mind that this table will summarise your strategy for each page logically, but you will still need to create the content and meet the following objectives:

• The content must be relevant
• The content must be compelling
• Copy must be professionally copy written and designed for Web use, not print or editorial
• The architecture (layout and presentation) of the page should aid easy viewing and reduce eye stress

Philip Allen is a Content Strategist and Interaction Designer at mwa Digital. His job is to make Web pages more engaging and the content more relevant.

He can be contacted on 0844 544 9553.

Posted under E-commerce, SEO, Web Design, Search Marketing on February 2nd, 2012 by Paul Barnes / No Comments

If estimates are correct and only 4.8% of Websites correctly validate for perfect HTML, does Google favour W3C compliant Web pages?
 

Google spokesperson Matt Cutts (speaking in this video on the topic) maintains that demoting web pages that don’t validate to the W3C standard is not something Google will ever consider.

Moreover, Google’s own page doesn’t validate, nor is it possible to achieve validation with the Google +1 button without a workaround.

So why do many “SEO experts” argue that Google values compliant web pages?

The cynical view is that some companies throw every subject but the kitchen sink into SEO recommendations to a) appear knowledgable and b) justify their fees. Many also claim that compliant code will work in any browser and take less time for a spider to crawl the page and take the data out.

However, we know that browsers do an excellent job of rendering web pages with non-compliant code, a fact endorsed by Matt Cutts in his video.

He goes on to make the point also that Google remains focused on delivering the most appropriate content to its users and precluding websites because of the odd HTML error could be a slippery slope.

So why bother with W3C validation at all?

Despite the jury being out on Google’s use of validation in its ranking algorithm, there are still very sound reasons why compliant code is good:

It Shows You & Your Web Developers Care

Whilst there may be a legitimate reason why a web page won’t validate (such as a Google +1 button script), on the whole, bad validation = bad housekeeping. It’s sloppy and unnecessary.

If your web development team isn’t attempting to make your site compliant, or at least fix the errors that really matter, what else are they skipping and keeping quiet about?

Page Speed Matters

There can be a relation between certain validation errors and slower page loading. As page loading speed is one of Google’s primary ranking factors we would state that starting a build by validating the HTML forms a solid foundation to build an effective web presence.

Helps Cross-Browser Compatibility

Compliant code doesn’t guarantee cross-browser compatibility in itself but it’s a great start to making sure your web site pages display correctly in the following browsers:

• Firefox

• Internet Explorer (7, 8 & 9)

• Safari (on Mac and PC)

• Chrome

• Opera

Posted under Open Atrium, Design & Build on February 1st, 2012 by Paul Barnes / No Comments

Open Atrium is an invaluable and intuitive way to collaborate online internally within your business, or externally between your clients and other companies.

The Product


From a product perspective, Open Atrium provides an intranet and extranet solution that includes collaboration features that are commonly needed by organisations seeking to build social knowledge sharing websites. 

Centered around the concept of using formal and informal groups to let users organize themselves for collaboration and then filter information up to universal features, Open Atrium makes the following tools available to each group:

• Blog feature provides a means for timely conversation, with support for threaded commenting, file attachments on both the post and comments, and granular email notifications to alert group members of new activity.
• Calendar feature lets each group to share information about meetings, project milestones, and more. Calendars support iCal sub- scription so that existing individual or team calendars from applica- tions like Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook can be seamlessly integrated with Open Atrium.
• Notebook feature lets users post static content, collaborate on documents, store and compare revisions, attach relevant files, and print interim or finalized versions.
• Shoutbox feature provides “microblogging” for users to share short updates, links, and other relevant information with others.
• Case tracker feature allows users to create, assign, and update tasks to to-do lists for projects, so that projects can be managed effectively online.
• Dashboard feature allows group and site administrators to control and arrange content display and make sure that teams are kept up to date with the latest important content appropriate for each group.
• Folders mwa Digital has developed it's own custom module to help you organise valuable company resource. Keep all your company literature, logos, guidelines, media and forms in one handy library. keep it simple or scale it up limitelessly.

	Dashboard: Your personal landing page to organise the tools that are most relevant to you.			Case Tracker: Create and assign cases to your team members and track it’s progress to completion.
	Blog: Start a discussion with team members or make important anouncements.			Folders: Upload/organise all your important company files. Jpegs, Word Docs, Excels, PDFs etc.
	Notebook: Dont hide all those valuable notes, links & references away. Share them with your team.			Calendar: Dont lose track of important milestones, deadlines & events with a project calendar.
	Themes: Customize the look and feel of Open Atrium with company branding & colours for each project.			Shout Box: Send a quick message to the project team using the elegantly simple, Shout Box!

Content on Open Atrium sites can be edited using a web interface using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG editor (Click here for a demo). Content can exist in various workflows and have customized fields, and sites can have users with various permission levels. Visual and other user interface customizations can be facilitated through a simple web interface. By paying careful attention to long term scalability and extensibility needs during development, the core Open Atrium product allows for significant customizations to be made within the user interface without changing any code. Such tools provide users with great flexibility to meet unique requirements for each new site built with the Open Atrium product.

The Platform


At the same time as Open Atrium is a product with turnkey features, it is also a platform for building custom knowledge management sites. The open source Open Atrium core package – based entirely on Drupal 6 – is fully extensible using common Drupal development best practices so that organizations can adjust the base Open Atrium features to meet unique business needs. For instance, Open Atrium users have integrated their sites with third party enterprise software like LDAP, document management, and CRM systems, created custom workflow features to match precise internal business processes, or created entirely new interfaces to meet unique branding and use case needs.

To help maximize return on investment for its users and cut down on long term costs of ownership from maintaining customizations, we pursued a few important priorities in the development of Open Atrium to ensure it would be a useful and reliable platform:

• Benefit from the open source community. We knew that using code and tools maintained by the wider Drupal community would minimize the effort required from developers to support customizations and would allow organizations to take advantage of future developments initiated by others without learning a new software development paradigm.
• Provide a clear upgrade path. We knew that as Open Atrium adoption grew, new features would inevitably be added to systems that have been customized by their users. Through a combination of application architecture and public documentation, we have made sure that new tools are as easy as possible for organizations to adopt into their custom systems.
• Allow for unique requirements and niche use cases. We knew that customizations for specific organizations would need to be accommodated in a way that would not degrade the core product. Techniques must exist for making truly custom changes to a given site.

Taking these considerations into mind, our team successfully developed the Open Atrium platform in a way that is letting us meet all of these goals. The core Open Atrium code provides a foundation for quick deployment, and relying on the Features development paradigm, developers are able to continue building new functionality and making customisations that can be accommodated within the product framework.

The end result of this “product and platform” approach is that Open Atrium users get the benefits of a carefully maintained and well supported core feature set, while at the same time maintain a level of freedom to customize when needed - something that proprietary software and restricted products rarely offer. For your organization, this flexibility will mean the ability to iterate on an established product base over time, and pursue the adoption or creation of new features when appropriate to meet the evolving needs of your users.

Read more about our Open Atrium Development Services or Contact mwa Digital to see how we can help tailor a solution that benefits your business immediately on tel: 0844 544 9553