So I was pleased that following a short training session on our Content Management System our latest client found our South CMS so easy to use that she proclaimed “Martin’s got the best backend I’ve ever seen”.

Ahem. I’d like to thank my manager, my family, the people that voted for me etc. etc.

So ok, the pedants among you will point out that the award those ‘celebs’ won related to their physical attributes, where as mine wasn’t an official award (in fact it was only said as a off-the-cuff remark) and was about a piece of software. But hey, at my age you have to take compliments wherever you can, and the worrying thing is that I probably take more pleasure from having a well built application, that simply from being ‘well built’.

So the lesson is simple, if you want to live ‘The Good Life’ than make sure editing your website isn’t a chore, and head over to the CMS demo area to try it out for yourself. http://cms.south.co.uk

And I quite liked it too. Granted, I never really understood the whole iPhone App hysteria, after all I only used mine to send text messages, and even take the odd call on occasion (not that it was particularly good at that as the speaker was dreadful). But at least it meant I no longer needed to carry a phone and an iPod, it could all be done by the same gadget, which was – to be fair – the sole USP for me anyway.

So when the 3G then 3GS versions came out, I looked at the specs and didn’t really see the point, and I continued on with my old model and watched from afar as the wave of AppMania rolled on without me.

However, then the iPhone 4 was released, and the rules of the game were reset. But this time I wanted in on the action and loaded my new shiny toy up with all the apps I thought I’d ever need, and very soon I had chance to road test it.

I was due to attend an important meeting in SW1, so using the National Rail App, I checked the train times and arrived at the station in time. A relatively comfortable transit ensued where I was able to keep answering emails, and do some Wordpress edits too. Shortly before arriving at Paddington, I used the Tube Status App to check which lines were running ontime, and as the Circle and District lines were showing delays, I hopped on the Bakerloo to Piccadilly instead.

Emerging from the underground – and because I’d skipped breakfast – I realised I was now getting a bit peckish. Regular readers will know that I’m making a few feeble efforts toward a health kick, but sometimes you just fancy throwing caution to the wind and grabbing a McDonald’s instead. But where was the nearest one? Once again, the App store had the answer. The official (and free) McDonald’s finder was hastily downloaded and installed, then using the built-in GPS it gave me directions to one of their fine establishments which, it turns out, was only 250 yards away.

Hence it was, that only a few minutes later my appetite was satisfied (well partially at least) by an exotic and finely-balanced fusion of E-Numbers, gelatine & preservatives that can only be purveyed at the ‘Golden Arches’. Exquisite.

So onward to my meeting, guided of course by Google Maps (as I had no idea where I was going). Then during the meeting it transpired that the companies wifi code was only known to one person – who of course was away. No problem, I’d already set up Bluetooth tethering, and continued to demo the software without a glitch.

The return journey was much the same (sans the E-Numbers). Though once on the train I took the opportunity of a brief pause in email traffic to check the evenings TV listings, and noticed a political documentary that I wanted to see. However I’d not set the Sky+ box to record, and there wasn’t anyone at home to carry out this menial task for me (quelle surprise). Unsurprisingly, the iPhone came to the rescue yet again and within a few seconds the free Sky+ App had found the listing, and commanded our set-top box into action.

So here I am, once again riding at the forefront of the technology wave. Yes it’s true, I love my new iPhone 4.

Some phones are like girlfriends, you keep them for a while because they do have some uses, sometimes they break down and you have to move on. Occasionally you’ll miss out on an upgrade because it’s not really worth the hassle, and sometimes you may even borrow your friends one just to try it out (ahem).

But the iPhone 4 changes everything, and opens your eyes to what a technological relationship can be like if you have the right partner. In the gadget/girlfriend analogy, the iPhone 4 is your wife, your soul mate, the mother to your children, the one whom life wouldn’t be worth living without.

Plus, it has a mute button too.

Editor and former Chamber President Peter Davison said “South˚ CMS is incredibly simple to use – turning the arduous task of regularly updating a website into a daily doddle: copy and paste text from Word, upload photo, hit send, done – the site even includes a dynamically updated ‘top 10′ list of the most popular stories from that day.”

Peter also uses Sendit to create and send a weekly news bulletin to all the subscribers and is delighted at how much time he saves using the new systems.

You can check out the latest stories here: www.chambernews.biz and follow them on Twitter as well: http://twitter.com/chambernewsbiz

The issue was to do with a small (yet annoying and relatively pointless) piece of legislation, that insists all company emails should have their full details within them – including the companies registered address. Now this seem reasonable in principle, but back in 2006 when this law was introduced, we tried to comply, but found lots of our post going to the wrong place.

You see, our company operates at three different addresses, and so we have our registered address recorded as out accountants office. This is a common practice and avoids having to update records each time an office location changes. However when we added this information into our email footers, we found a dramatic increase in post being sent to them (no matter how many times we told our clients!) and it caused a lot of problems and delays. The simple solution seemed to be to include two addresses, one for the registered office, and one for the actual office… but having two addresses didn’t cut down the confusion!

So, tasked as I was to try and solve the problem, I dialled the number for Companies House Compliance Department, and readied myself for an afternoon’s worth of ‘blood out of a stone’ jobsworthiness.

Now, I’ll admit that I do occasionally like to ‘do a Victor’ and attempt to instil a bit of common sense into those who are bereft of it (especially public sector organisations), and so I have several choice phrases at my disposal designed to win an argument. So I was slightly miffed when, having explained the situation, the lady on the other end of the phone simply said “Yes, I can see your point, ok let’s see if we can find a sensible solution”.

After a few seconds of stunned silence, I thanked her and we proceeded to come to a very acceptable result, whereby we’d include our office address, but also include a link to the registered address on the main website. This seemed very sensible to me, and shouldn’t give us any problems with post redirection either. But then I started thinking…

Who was this mystery lady? Do her bosses know she’s being polite and efficient? And if so, what plans do they in place to put a stop to that sort of behaviour as soon as possible?

Of course this recent experience may have simply brought my attention to a wider shift in practises within organisations that are publicly funded. I find myself wondering if it’s possible that the impending cuts to the public sector have managed to focus the minds of those employed there?

If so, it’s win-win as far as I’m concerned. Less national debt, and at the same time we’re getting efficient employees who don’t want to hinder growth in the private sector. I only have one question:

Can someone promote this lady to the head of the Civil Service?

Does this story sound familiar?

Standards, styles, and best practices on the web change at lightning speed, and although your website may still be completely functional, you may be warding off potential customers and clients unknowingly. Here are 5 questions you need to ask yourself to see if your website needs a redesign, pronto.

Question 1: In terms of speed, how fast is your website? You’ve worked hard to get your visitors to show up at your website’s door – don’t put them to sleep with long load times. Numerous studies have been conducted and all of them have found the same result: Longer load times = less visitors = less business.

A study conducted by Akamai in 2006 found that if your website takes longer than four seconds to fully load, 33%, or one-third, of all visitors will abandon your site. Additionally, Amazon found that a 100ms increase in site load time would result in a 1% decrease in sales, while Google found that an increase of 500ms on load time would directly result in a drop in traffic and revenue by 20%.

Whatever numbers you go by, the one takeaway is that your website needs to load, fast. Try optimising your website by compressing images for the web, aggregating and cleaning out your CSS, and removing old, unnecessary content to reduce HTTP requests. You can also try switching hosts if loading issues persist.

Question 2: Does your website lack consistency? Although it may not seem like it, consistency in major elements on all pages of your site is a must. Elements like navigation, fonts and colours, URL format, and editorial style should show consistency throughout your website as it shows your professionalism and attention to detail when conducting business.

If your site is riddled with typos, mismatching font sizes, and non-loading images, not only will it impact the credibility of your website but can also negatively affect your search engine optimisation strategy, which can result in lowered sales.

Sites like Yahoo!, eBay, and the BBC have hundreds if not thousands of pages online at any given time, yet almost all of those pages have a similar feel, design, and editorial style. Browse through, compare, and take notes, and see if your website maintains a solid level of consistency when compared to some major leaguers.

Question 3: Does your website scream sensory overload? Don’t try to throw text, imagery, links, icons, buttons, ads, or whatever else at your visitor right off the bat. Information overload will prevent you from surfacing the most important information on your website while delivering a load of clutter your visitor will have to sift through. You’ll be shocked to see how quickly a set of eyes can glaze over!

Question 4: Does your website look old-school? Technologies aren’t the only thing that evolve at a break-neck pace online – styles do too. Whatever style was hot back in ’05 probably isn’t what’s hot right now.

Just like hairstyles, websites date. What was all the rage a couple of years ago is now seen as passé… Sometimes this is down to design trends – like the 3D buttons and interfaces that were so popular a few years back when graphics tools made it easy to create bevel and emboss styles. Other times it’s because the web is maturing and web designers develop a better understanding of what visitors want. For instance, Flash intro pages were all the rage until web designers realised that users didn’t like them and wanted to get straight to the content. Flash introductions are the beehive hairdo of the web design world: dated, impractical and utterly pointless.

Question 5: Does your website render perfectly? And by perfectly, I mean perfectly, in all browsers on all operating systems, and on all platforms with no text overlapping and no extra scroll bars anywhere, etc. You absolutely do not want to degrade your customer’s user experience based on their choice of browser, regardless of if it’s Internet Explorer on Windows, Firefox on Mac, or even Safari on iPhone.

So, how’d your website do? If you need to revamp your website, don’t fret. Whether it’s a minor facelift or major reconstruction job, we’ve got the experience and the creativity to get it right first time, on time.

We’ve just had a new line put in at home, a fairly easy task you’d think, and normally you’d be right. However we also wanted to keep our very good broadband provider Zen, so we asked for our new number so that we could pass it onto them and get the broadband provisioned without delay. This is where the problems started….

For some reason, the number BT had given us wasn’t the one they first said we’d have. After ringing them they said they’d try again. And so the next day we had a new number… only it was now a completely new one (Zen of course, were unable to provision the line without the right number.) So, another placed call to BT and another new number (the fourth so far) so Zen on hold again.

By this point, I was getting slightly annoyed, as Zen said there was a problem on the line at BT’s end, but BT were blaming Zen. Now considering that Zen have won the ISP best service award more often than anyone else you can probably imagine who I thought was telling porkies. So I was not surprised the next day when I called BT’s bluff and asked them to do a proper check as if provisioning the line and then they finally admitted that actually there was a problem, and it was their fault (hurrah!).

It seems that there was still an open request for a job (probably one of the thousands of number changes they’ve forced on us for no apparent reason). Sadly the order couldn’t be removed by that department (that would be far too sensible), and so I was put through to the service dept. who’s number was of course – out of action and cut me off. Great.

I called back and decided to take pot luck with the service department, and was eventually connected to a young lady from one of the sub-continents who, whilst very professional and keen to help, did seem to struggle with the English language. Now I’ll happily admit that her grasp of English was better than my comprehension of any of the ancient pictorial languages of the Aztec’s… but not by much. However, at least having an enthusiastic helper on a telephone line that didn’t keep getting disconnected was a huge improvement. After all, perhaps she might know what the fifth new number we’d been given was going to be…?

After doing yet another useless line test, then running through their ‘idiots guide’ (which asks you to check that the phone cable was intact, that the main box isn’t on fire, or hasn’t been nibbled upon by an escaped Puma etc. etc.) I tried to persuade them to not transfer me back to the department that had cut me off, but my requests fell upon dead ears, well another dead line to be exact, but who’s counting? Fortunately a few minutes later they called back – no apology of course – and then they did test some more tests, before miraculously managing to clear the outstanding order block and free up the line… along with another new number of course! (nb. Total number of apologies still zero).

Honestly, how do companies get so big by offering such woefully lame services, backed up only by inadequate support?

Anyway, it turns out that the line ’should’ now be ready BUT it may still take 24 hrs for the line to show up clear on the systems (and then the standard 5 working days for Zen to provision). If it doesn’t I suspect you’ll be hearing my name all over the evening news tomorrow night. Do not be surprised to also hear the words “rampage” and “assault rifle” in the same sentence too!

Though I suspect a High Court Judge may consider “taking 3 weeks to get broadband” as a mitigating factor in any level of civic disobedience…

Like many people this time of year, I’m starting a health kick. Quite how successful it’ll be remains to be seen, but rest assured I’m very determined… Well, at least for this week anyway.

Having realised many years ago, that the gym was – in all fairness – the dullest place there is, I knew I needed to find some exercise that didn’t involve a monotonous treadmill. It needed to be an activity that had a beginning, middle and an end – something to focus on, and so I decided that the best option was to start cycling to work around a different route. So, credit card in hand I ordered some new parts for my bike to get me fired up.

A few days later the items arrived, just some grips and a new seat from the excellent Tredz.co.uk The only problem was that they’d sent the wrong grips to what I’d ordered. So I got in touch with the returns department, the problem was dealt with, handled very efficiently, and the replacement arrived the next day. All good so far.

Then, a day later I received a cheque from them for the sum of £2.34 to cover “the return postage” that I’d paid to send the other ones back. Now I realise that it wasn’t my error, and so I’d incurred this cost unduly, but I didn’t make a big deal out of it as I figured that everyone makes mistakes, and Tredz’s prices were pretty keen anyway. So I was impressed that they’d sent this through un-prompted.

Anyhow, a few days into the new regime, I realised that my old bike wasn’t really helping matters. I was doing most miles on the road and so a full suspension mountain bike wasn’t the ideal kit for the job (I had enough weight to carry in the first place). So I researched the type of bike I wanted, then, credit card in hand (again), logged back onto the Tredz website and made what can only be described as “a rather large impulse purchase”, knowing full well that the price was good, that they’d take care of my order and keep me informed of delivery dates too.

Over the years I realise that this methodology of getting the little things right really does pay dividends. We’ve had lots of large web clients who started off just needing a small banner ad designed, or a minor text edit doing on their site. But because of the service they’ve received from us, the jobs have got bigger and bigger and rolled into some major projects.

I guess the snowball effect holds true in business too… Though that’ll be of little help to me later when I’m trying to ride home back up the hill wondering what made me think this was a good idea!

Sending email is easy, we all do it every day. But communicating with thousands of potential customers, racking responses, and being able to judge the effectiveness of each campaign, is where you need sophisticated management software. Doing all this is easy with our Sendit Email Marketing Tool to assist you with your online marketing campaigns.

Sendit has been developed to cope with the demands of high-volume email campaigns, anything from 1000, to over 1m (yes million!) subscribers each month. It’s an incredibly powerful and feature rich piece of software. Sendit allows you to create a fully branded, email marketing campaign within moments. You can insert your own pictures and change text and font styles with ease, then simply import your list of subscribers and send your masterpiece with the click of a mouse.

We take all the pain out of list management by handling the messy stuff like bounces and unsubscribes automatically. And of course the crucial part of any marketing campaign is to measure its effectiveness by reviewing your campaign related sales, conversions and finding out who clicked which links…

…Or to put it another way, if your email is telling potential customers about 10 brand new products, after the campaign has been delivered, you’ll be able to click into the reporting section and download a list showing who was interested in which products! No more need for endless cold-calling to try and establish interest – you’ll already know!

If you’d like to see just how easy it is to build your own HTML mailer you can have a play with our live demo area: http://sendit.south.co.uk – There’s no registration required. Simply type in ‘testing‘ into the Username and Password fields

Or just call Martin 0845 644 77 44 / 020 7871 0900 for a demo.

We’re so pleased with it, that we’ve also built a new demo site at http://cms.south.co.uk that showcases the benefits of using the system and includes a testing login area where you can try it out for yourself to see how easy it is. Simply go to http://cms.south.co.uk/live-demo to login.

The CMS is now more expandable, which means we can plugin new modules such as the European Language packs, or the Rollback module which allows you to revert to a previous edition. Additional plugins are available for eCommerce, blogs, RSS, and Twitter feeds. The Global Settings function now includes areas for your tracking and analysis codes.

Of course we’ve kept the advanced User & Groups functions, but we’ve improved it so that you can now allocate as many – or as few – pages and sections, to any particular user. Version 3.0 expands on this and introduces a new series of site-wide editing preferences. You can now choose between Admin, Editor or Contributor, so you can quickly divide the workload between as many people as you want – and be sure that they can’t break anything! (Though if one of them did make a mistake you can simply use Rollback to restore!)

The Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) abilities are also improved. Of course we’ve built the system to ensure it only generates standards compliant code. But as well as s site-wide meta data option, you can now include specific meta information on each page – so you can be as detailed as you want to be.

If you’re thinking of upgrading your current site (or building a totally new one), don’t make any decisions until you’ve had a look around the demo site – and of course logged in to the admin area to see just how easy it is to manage your own site on a day-to-day basis.

If you’d like any further information about SouthCMS, or what it can do for your business, then just get in touch, or call 020 7871 0900.

At the same time on this side of the Atlantic, a slightly less visionary (though just as deeply untrendy) man was also presenting a new product. However, there was a rather fundamental difference between the two (apart from the distinct lack of any sort of press attention here). That product is the latest version of our Content Management System (CMS), and is probably better described as evolutionary rather than revolutionary… and when you think about it, perhaps that description would better suit the iPad too.

Now I’m a big fan of Apple products, I’ve lost count of the number of Macs I’ve owned (I still have a Classic in the loft somewhere) and it’s not just PCs – No. At one point during the never ending upgrade cycles of releases of iPod’s, Nano’s & Shuffles I think I had the complete matching set to go with any occasion. And then, just when they couldn’t possibly squeeze another penny from me, Apple went and released the iPhone. Bang went another few hundred, thanks Steve. The problem this time though, is that I already have an iPad. I have a small one that I can make telephone calls on, and a large one with a proper keyboard that I work on… I’m just not sure there’s a gap between the two – and if there were, is it fair to describe it as “revolutionary?” Let’s compare…

With our new CMS, we’ve taken the existing built-in technologies from our previous one, and then streamlined and improved each of them. In essence, we’ve taken v2.0 and made it a little bigger, better and faster for v3.0. Sure there’s a few new modules (such as the Rollback, Blog and User Management features) but isn’t the iPad just a bigger and faster iPhone? (sans the ability to make telephone calls of course!)

The issue I have though, is that almost every day some company develops a revolutionary product… or at least that’s what they claim. But when does evolution turn into revolution? It’s certainly not on day one. Take the ubiquitous iPod for example, no one could argue that it hasn’t revolutionised the way the music is bought and sold (ask any ex-Woolworths employee). But I remember when the iPod was first launched – there wasn’t anything revolutionary about it at all. In fact other manufacturers were already building smaller and better specified units. No, the revolution wasn’t from the hardware, it came via the software used to support it.

So, if the determining factor in deciding evolution or revolution is how we interact with the supporting software (rather than the actual hardware), is it not fair to say that a CMS which gives non IT personnel the power to manage their websites on a day-to-day basis, is in fact, more revolutionary than the new Apple iPad?

Discuss….