Progress I would say could be best described as slow and steady at miggle.co.uk

Projects

I’m now moving into my six month with work for AOL which has largely been provision of content management services with some consultancy thrown in. This has also given me an opportunity to start providing work to a few contractors who are able to help manage the load on this, as well as give me an opportunity to start to build up a network of people I can rely on. This is key for the work with AOL as updates have to be done daily, seven days a week.

Since the last update I’ve also seen my first website for a small business launch. The Farmyard Nursery is a new children’s nursery which will open in Battle East Sussex in the Autumn. Sara and Tom, the proprietors, engaged me on this to both build the site and develop the branding. To deliver this project meant sourcing the best possible designer available within the given budget and timeframe, again giving me an opportunity to look at the talent available in the Brighton area from which to get projects like this up and running.

There’s also been a consultancy undertaken for my first overseas client, La Merie Business Intelligence from Spain.

Behind the Scenes
Behind the scenes, its been a case of slowly establishing all the nuts and bolts of setting up a business. I now have a dedicated office in my back bedroom - and after much experimenting with various networking products to try and deal with the few wifi flat spots in my house have got a workspace I am really happy with. It’s basically big enough to function as a small studio for about 3 people and as such I think will be handy for a number of upcoming projects I want to look at.

I’ve been busy buying a bit of hardware too. I’ve bought a fairly cheap desktop running Vista Home Basic, on which I’ve had to hack the sysreg a bit to make it see my favourite bit of kit, my Mac Mini, which plugged into a big external hard drive and a huge flat screen has become the centre of my digital world. It acts as a webserver, a development box, a PVR and fileserver - as well as owning the master itunes library to which all other machines in the house are willing slaves.

There’s been a few other things I’ve had to focus on as well - how to run my book keeping, VAT reg etc etc but I now feel I’m ready to start to look at my next steps.

For me, the best part about the adventure of setting up miggle.co.uk has been having the opportunity to learn new things and rediscover old skills, as well as to think about how best I can run my business to ensure it enables me to maintain as best as possible a work life balance I’m happy with. At present, these are the key things I’m looking at on which I hope to be able to report progress in the coming months:-

Working Efficiently

I’m fairly tired of Microsoft products. Having finally brought my self a Mac after many years of computing and having to also sort myself out as regards setting up all I need to run my office, I’ve just worked out that my old mainstays (which weren’t always choices of my own making) of using Microsoft solutions and Yahoo! online tools is not really cutting it in terms of either time, cost and functionality. Firefox, Google and OpenOffice are instead the solutions which are cutting my mustard. The tools and add-ons for Firefox are great and I have things set up so that I can share my Firefox settings across any browser I choose to sync with my Google account. I’ve been so impressed with it all that my next step is to look at Thunderbird for my mail client, which really is a must as I continue to find Yahoo!’s version just too temperamental.

As for documents the new rule is to use a combination of OpenOffice and Google Docs. I have vowed only to use Microsoft Office now as a last resort and those instances are few and far between. I cannot get my Vista machine to install my office 2003 upgrade on top of Office 97, which Vista will not allow me to uninstall. I just find this incredible…

Product Development

One thing I do think Yahoo! is making a good job of is its developer network.

Amongst these pages, as I mentioned on my last post, is a section on CSS templates. What I like about these templates is the fact that because they are the same ones Yahoo! use for their own product development they get a fair bit of testing by its huge audience, so in that respect they are more robust than something I could write myself. Also, they’ve been written with ad unit support in mind as well and SEO. My plan is that these templates effectively become the core of my front-end web design. Beyond this its a case of just adding specific styles to the templates as far as offering bespoke page design for clients goes, which will obviously be the role of any designers I engage.

Beneath that its then a case of looking at how these templates work with any back end. For that, I’m going to be exploring a number of solutions over the coming weeks:-

1. My own ‘CMS.’ This is an overly bold claim. I’ve not so much written a CMS, but I have put together a fairly simple articles database and written a few other PHP templates that provide certain functionality such that will suffice for certain small websites. My own website, miggle.co.uk when I finally get it finished will use this approach.
2. Joomla. This I think will provide a basic solution for clients who want a CMS quick and easy. I think it may be tricky to get Joomla working with the CSS templates I mention above, but I do think Joomla is going to be an effective toll to be using at anyrate
3. For where Joomla is too simplistic, I’ll be seeing to what extent I can get greater flexibility by using Drupal and Expression Engine.
4. PHPShop. For e-commerce solutions, this is going to e where I start, with Paypal, Payloadz and Google checkout providing support.
5. Wordpress. Running custom CSS in WP seems fairly straightforward and so I suspect that many sites based around simple, articles, or sites that need a supporting blog will use this as a solution.

Other areas I want to explore are writing a Facebook app, customising a Wiki, building an Ebay and Amazon shop, building a Google custom search engine, writing a Freebase app, doing something with Google Maps and Apps, looking at Yahoo! and Windows Live API’s

My current view is that some research in these areas is going to give me the backbone of a set of solutions which will enable me to develop projects for clients as well as create a framework that can leverage common skills against which I can engage contractors and select teams to deliver on such projects.

So, here it is, my first wordpress blog post. I’ve been blogging for a year or so on Yahoo! 360, mainly documenting the travelling I was on before taking on the challenge of launching my own business. I expect to some level I’ll keep that up, for my personal bits and pieces, but this blog will really cover internet issues and will work in tandem with the website I’m building at miggle.co.uk

And as part of that development on the site, what have I learnt so far? Well, I’ve started to re-learn all the PHP and MySQL which I’d last used in 1999. And I’ve remembered how addictive I find the whole art of coding. Up until I started on my site my gym attendance had been pretty regular, but its subsequently been replaced by many hours sitting in front of the laptop, often not vacating my dressing gown till mid afternoon.

Of course, to build a site in 2007 is to be able to build one which really adheres to standards. I got the following advice from an old colleague of mine in reference to what should I be using these days to build my site with:-

HTML - the markup of the page (the actual content). I’d recommend html
4.01 strict
CSS - include a style sheet at the top to make the content look how you want
JS - javascript to add behavioural elements.
PHP - runs server side and is in the business logic sphere of what your
page is doing
MySQL - stores the data

Use html 4.01 strict. In fact, I’m going to point you here:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

Yahoo! open source a load of it’s javascript and css stuff. It’s great
place to get started. Check out the Grids section for getting page
layouts done quickly for example. It will also help with the ajax stuff.
It’s a gold mine.

This then is my starting point.

What else have I learnt since then?

As you can see from the look of my blog, customising Wordpress to follow a certain style (one you’ll see on miggle.co.uk soon) is fairly easy to achieve, given a few hours messing around with the default Kubrick template.

I am becoming a Google user by stealth. And that’s not just search. Currently Google Docs and Spreadsheets are proving to be so much better to use than Microsoft Office, particularly on this very slow PC. And of course for sharing its great. I’m experimenting with the custom search engine, learning my webmaster tools. I’m yet to go fully gmail, but I think that time will come very soon.

Microformats are likely to be very useful indeed!

And there are many other things as well, but maybe more on that another time…