Coming along shortly after our next article on choosing the right CMS, is a rockin’ article on the differences between a mobile app and a web app. With the iPad2 frenzy going on, this article should help you decide on the best approach for your business needs.

An article on choosing the right CMS (Content Management System) for your needs. Open Source or off the shelf?

Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Kentico, SiteCore…..what do they all mean?

Who is going to live in it?
Who is going to ride it?
or
Who is going to view it?

And having written that, for a website it still makes sense. We live in our websites if they are our business, we ride it if its an e-commerce or social media site, and view it if it is an information website.

With the plethora of website technologies around today, how do we chose?

I listen to my clients, and I hear them say “I want a Ruby on Rails website” or a “I need a WordPress presence”

Credit where credit is due. Research has been carried out and a technology found that appears to promise to deliver, and who wouldn’t go for that?

However careful choices need to be made to ensure that the solution matches the requirements. Making the right choice of technology platform to underpin your online presence should be carefully considered.

I see many requests for help where a platform has been imposed on a client without careful consideration of the clients needs.

And I don’t mean their needs right now…….I mean the needs they don’t realise they have……and that is our job as professionals to identify their needs and requirements.

Following a fixed, un-researched solution can translate in to increased costs to the business to migrate them from their current presence to a more economical and effective online presence further down the track.

Engaging early with a knowledgeable digital provider like Digital Foundry can save a lot of technical and financial headaches, and put you in the best position to create and grow your business.

From another perspective, every business looks for cost effective online representation that puts the power of a CMS (Content Management System) into the hands of business owners. And that is where WordPress enters the scene as a flexible and effective content management system, that although is primarily a blogging tool is just as, yet if not more effective, as a lead generation tool.

So how can we combine the power of Salesforce.com and the flexibility of WordPress?

The Salesforce.com model is particularly advanced as it is a highly scalable, modular and functional platform suitable to many business needs, and more businesses are turning to this platform to make customer-centric applications leverage off enterprise software applications. No longer is the enterprise CRM a “no-go” area to smaller business due to cost or implementation timeframes.

WordPress by nature is a blogging tool, and aside from the micro-blogging generation, can enable business users and staff to post relevant and meaningful content updates to consumers. WordPress also allows RSS feeds to be generated, which pushes content further into the internet community willing to subscribe.

Now we can combine all the functionality and flexibility of a CMS with Salesforce.com, an enterprise CRM, to bring website visitors directly into your business processes.

We now have a viable CRM and CMS that are cost and customer effective.

Get in contact with us to see how we can help you with Salesforce.com and WordPress integration.

Sometimes we propose a new technology, but our clients haven’t reached the technological maturity level within their business to support it, and other times we have a client who wants to push the boundaries of what is possible and embrace new technology.

So it is a breath of fresh air, when a client asks us to deliver a cutting edge, accessible and integrated eLearning solution.

eLearning projects let’s face it, are not known for their willingness to embrace new technology. Quite the opposite in fact, they tend to try and constrain us to this guideline, or that standard, which is all fine when education conformance is required.

If we look at how eLearning has evolved technically, it has been a slow process compared to the rest of the digital landscape.

We can disregard the early internet adoption and move straight to the first of what we could consider to be the beginning of interactive eLearning platforms, Macromedia Director.

The progress of eLearning development processes

After many years, we evolved the eLearning landscape to the Flash platform.

To create interactive eLearning, Flash has for long been the first choice with developers as it allows the rapid creation of interactive elements such as drag and drop exercises, click and replace, multiple choice quiz elements to be usable within the eLearning resource.

However to make SCORM, AICC or IMS compatible resources for an LMS, it requires such additional development to the learning resource within Flash that it can often be a barrier to entry.

Hello HTML5!

HTML5 is the latest implementation of the HTML language that we all know and have come to understand and tolerate its inconsistencies between browsers.

HTML5 will let us embed video without a video player such as Flash or Quicktime,
HTML5 will let us have drag and drop functionality without Flash,
HTML5 will let us enable multimedia integration not possible without plug-in technology.

HTML5 is really HTML + JavaScript + Cascading Style Sheets.

As our current SCORM and AICC wrappers are also JavaScript based, there will be a lot cleaner integration with these standards, not previously achievable without a significant investment in resource and budget.

It may be a buzzword for a while, where everyone wants an HTML5 website, and whilst it’s not fully compatible with every browser, in the eLearning environment where we are able to set the requirements for an eLearning course so much easier than a marketing or product website, we are best able to leverage off the additional functionality that HTML5 can offer.

So Subject Matter Experts and Online Learning providers…..start your HTML5 engines!

You can now create rich engaging interactive and compliant eLearning courses without the use of plug-in technology.

To be honest, you don’t have to change much at all, yet still experience the rewards of an outsourcing arrangement.

Outsourcing can be such a rich and rewarding opportunity for any business. The exposure and involvement with another entity be it a company or individual, can substantially reward the business owner with both experience and knowledge.

On reflection, the outsource company can also maintain and improve their organisational practices and tools.

It really is a win – win situation…..both teams benefit from a wider workplace, a wider work experience and a less enclosed world view.

In this article we will dissect a typical waterfall project using a PMI approach.

The time honored tasks of a PMI driven project would be

Initiating
Planning
Controlling
Executing
Closing

The same process applies when outsourcing, although a shared level of project involvement needs to be factored into your project lifecycle, as sharing key components is necessary.
Engagement with your outsource partner is mandatory at this stage.
Engaging with your partner at this level will not just ensure a mutual understanding of your project outcomes, but let them “buy in” to the project outcomes, and really engage with you, which they are looking for to enhance their organizational practices and tools.

Initiating
This is still very much the domain of the Project Office or business project manager.

Planning
A shared responsibility between both yourself and your outsource partner, deliverables and milestones need to be negotiated. The Global Project Manager will ensure that the timeframes and deliverables are relevant and acceptable to both onside and offshore project managers.

Controlling
The Global Project Manager will act as the project lead, and will be instrumental in ensuring the project outcomes are met across both parties.

The GPM will work towards controlling risk, deliverables, project outcomes and users needs. Working closely with the outsource company, and fostering close relationships will ensure that the to and fro of project scope movement is best negotiated to both parties satisfaction and ultimately achieve a positive outcome.

Executing
The executing phase is the most important, this is where the actions the Global Project Manager has taken to-date come into fruition and deliver on the project outcomes and expectations according to milestones and deliverables.

Being able to step back as the Global Project Manager and allow the skilled resources to do their magic is so important as it invigorates the project ownership by the outsourcing company, and allows them to feel involved in the project lifecycle, and responsible for such a large component of the outcomes.

Closing
The closing process I feel is more like an opening process. We get to engage with our suppliers and customers. We close off the project tasks, but open up training tasks, communication tasks, and growth tasks as we learn what we could do or have done better, and what we will do better next time.

Very few companies want to make a big deal of the negative, they want to make it easier next time, and to help a good provider meet their own needs more efficiently and with more success help improve their organizational practices and tools.

There are a few important factors that should be considered before integrating search functionality to your website.

Let’s establish what considerations should be made:

1. Consider your target audience
2. Consider their level of searching expertise
3. Consider their motivation
4. Consider their willingness to learn

Consider your target audience
Are your elderly relatives as comfortable with Google as they are with the local library book search? Too often we believe that everyone has the same understanding as we do. We need to look at our search from the perspective of our users.
You want your visitors to S.T.A.Y. on your website? To do that, you need to Stop Thinking it’s About You.

Consider their level of searching expertise

We live in the online space, and have learnt the correct way to use search engines like Google to our advantage. When presented with a logo, a text box and a button, we instinctively know what to type to get what we are looking for, and we know how to refine through discovery, to get to the information we are looking for.

When presented with your search functionality, your visitor will make some assumptions as to how they will use it, and how it will work.

For example
“I can just the type a description of the object that I’m looking for, and the search engine will do the rest.”
“I don’t have to type in those AND, OR, or NOT thingies.”
“I don’t have to worry about synonyms for my search; if I’m looking for a car, I just type car, not cars, or vehicles or automobiles.”
“My query will search the entire site.”

Assumptions can be made very quickly, and if your search doesn’t deliver the results, the visitor will be less likely to return.

Consider their motivation

Motivation drives visitors to a website; they have a specific need, which I like to call a “thirst”. That thirst may be for information or for specific content or for social interaction and engagement.

Now, how you deal with that motivation will set you apart as a trusted and valued online resource….if you can deliver the results, the visitors will return, and through recommendations will return in numbers.

Give them a search that doesn’t provide them with the results they expect (see audience & expertise), then you are unlikely to see them again.

Consider their willingness to learn

Are your visitors tech-savvy, up with SQL queries, BITWISE operators, CASE statements and BOOLEANS? No, I didn’t think so.

If your website is a forum for lingo-savvy tech professionals, then the above statement will probably be true, but for the rest of us, we are just trying to find a snippit of information, a link or a comment that will help us achieve the task that we set ourselves that day.

“after school care Brisbane”

“cheap flights to Melbourne”

Introducing a new way of finding information, will only serve to confuse visitors, who will find the additional learning curve a barrier to entry, and hesitate before engaging with your site.

Conclusion

If your users are time-poor, which most of us are, and not especially motivated to learn more about how you site search works differently, then go with the flow and create something that suits the audience, their expertise and motivation.