Take your intranet on the road (or to the canteen)

"Roll up, roll up" - is it time to get out and meet your intranet audience and see what they really think? Image: dhammza

Before we begin: this post is aimed at folks with intranets to run, but I think the lessons can be applied to external sites too...

The beauty of running an intranet is you can easily meet your audience in the flesh, but it can still be easy to hide away in the office and not take advantage of this great opportunity.

A few months ago I was working with the UK Parliament Intranet Team (Maria, Liz, Alex and Ros). They were in the middle of a big piece of work to shift the entire intranet from a department and team structure information architecture to a task based model. And rightly so.

What was so impressive was the level of engagement they had with the intranet´s userbase around Parliament.

The headline event of this consultation was the hosting of a day-long presentation stand in the busy Portculis House (opposite Big Ben) where many MPs have their offices. You know the sort of thing… a few hanging posters, some flyers, free pens…

The aim was to meet the intranet´s users in person and discuss and gather feedback on the upcoming changes.

Afterwards I asked the team why they thought it had gone so well (it clearly had) and if there was anything they would have done differently. These were the key points:

1. Be clear about what you want to achieve

If you´re not focussed on your reasons for setting up a stand you will struggle to get useful feedback. This ambiguity will come across to the visitors at your stand and they´ll be unsure what you expect from them. Focussed examples could be:

• “We want to change the design of the intranet and we need feedback on our prototypes.”
• “We know the HR section of the intranet is not great and we want to find out what our audience need from that section.”

It is important to communicate the purpose of your stand at all stages, from the advertising (email invites, bill-board posters, oral invitations, etc) to the way you start conversations with people at the stand.

There is no harm in spelling it out with a big call to action… at Parliament they had big posters and a great looking scrolling presentation on a TV with words like this: “Use the intranet? Help us improve it by telling  us what tasks you perform.” Most people can get their head around that and give you some useful feedback in 60 secs.

2. Advertise your stand and spread the word

Obvious really, but that is what the guys at Parliament did really well and it made the difference to numbers on the day. This is especially important if you can´t get the busy spots, outside the canteen for example.

You run the intranet so advertise the session on the homepage and make it sound interesting and worth the effort popping along, remembering to be clear about the purpose of the session and who it is aimed at.

And put a bit of pressure on your intranet friends around the organisation to spread the word for you and bring along their colleagues.

3. Time, location, and set-up of your stand

Think carefully about the best day and time of day to run your stand to get the most impact from your effort. That will largely depend on the location of your stand, so using the canteen entrance example it will obviously be best at breakfast and/or lunchtime. Ask the advice of the person who arranges the booking, they will have a good idea.

As for the actual stand, you do need to look the part if you want to be taken seriously. At Parliament they got one of the web designers to knock up a colourful poster design which they had professionally printed. They also had a simple, but professional, scrolling presentation on a big screen to turn heads.

Tip: A really simple, but effective technique is to have a bowl of sweets on the stand. It was amazing how many people at Parliament would come over to get a free lolly. And once they have taken one, you have every right to ask them: “Do you use the intranet…?”

4. Lots of lovely, and not so lovely, feedback

If you ask for feedback, you had better be ready to capture it.

Because the Parliament guys had clear objectives for their stand (What are the most common tasks our intranet users want to perform?) they asked that question on pre-printed forms with a nice big box to scribble the answer in. They had a few more fields to capture the name and audience group of the user, e.g. MP or MP staff, but kept it minimal and focussed. A nice touch was a branded ballot box (fashioned out of a printer paper box and glued on flyers) for folks to cast their completed forms. Very apt for Parliament.

Now not everyone wants to or has the time to fill out a form so try to complete it for them as you talk. Sometimes they may have already left the stand, but capture as much of the useful stuff as possible and pop it on the pile. This isn´t scientific research so don´t get too hung up about completing every field.

By the end of the session you will hopefully have some great data that starts to answer your questions.

You will also get negative feedback, and often warranted. But this is the juicy stuff (mostly) and you have the perfect opportunity to ask them what they think it should be like or why they don´t like something. It can be really tough to publicly open yourself up for criticism, but it´s vital you don´t become defensive and miss the opportunity to better understand your users.

5. Set expectations or it will come back to bite you

If you aren´t careful you will hear this line 6 months after the session: “…I told your team about this months ago and no one has bothered to do anything about it.”

Asking people what they think is not the same as saying: “we are going to act on what you think”. But don´t presume everyone who comes to your stand gets that. Be clear from the start that this is part of a bigger process… you are looking for trends… you are gauging opinion… however you want to say it, don´t let them think you are going to act on everything they say. That would be crazy.

6. Now do something about it

What you do with the findings of the session will depend greatly on what you were trying to find out, but I would suggest these actions:

• have a wash-up meeting with everyone on the stand to discuss how the session went: key themes, immediate concerns, actions (with owners), lessons learnt for next time…
• process the data on the feedback forms ASAP – if your session was trying to identify the most popular tasks on the intranet (as in the Parliament example) run the numbers and pin up the results on the wall for everyone to see
• send round an exec summary of the session to your team and other key people, spelling out what this means and next steps
• get a follow up news item on the intranet homepage thanking those who came along and tease them with some of the findings and what you plan to do with them…  and if you have the time to send these people an email even better

7. Few last tips for running a successful stand

• ask the people who come to your stand if they are willing to be consulted in the future – these are often the perfect people to demo prototypes to or conduct user testing sessions with. Tip: don´t shy away from asking the most critical people, they are often the most rewarding people to work with
• rotate the people on the stand - it gives people a break but it also means more people in the team gain the invaluable experience of meeting users face-to-face (this again worked well at Parliament)
• get your boss along and helping out, sure they are busy, but they need to hear this stuff and it gives the rest of the organisation a good impression of a united team effort supported from the top

If I´m honest, I was actually a bit sceptical when asked to help out on the stand at Parliament and wasn´t convinced it was the best use of my time. But I was wrong. If done properly it is a very efficient way to better understand your intranet, it´s purpose and the people who use it.

As ever, let me know how you get on.

Liam

DIY web usability testing

I’m not sure why, but website usability testing is often seen as something beyond the remit or experience of web teams.

I simply don’t buy this. I think anyone can run these sessions for nothing and come away with great insights that’ll improve their site.

Usability testing on 10 Cents pence a day

My user testing sessions are based on Steve Krug’s fantastic Usability testing on 10 cents a day guide. I really recommend you download it: 16 pages that changed my whole view on what’s possible with DIY usability testing.

The gist is: user testing can be a cheap, painless and highly rewarding exercise when it is run by the people who run the website.

Run your own usability test session

If you don’t do any usability testing or use a third party to do it, please give this a go. It’ll take about two hours to prep and perform. I’m confident you will feel it was time well spent.

Pick your audience

You should already know who your target audiences are. Pick one to test. I’ll go back to my Foreign Office days and pick British holiday makers for this example.

Now list the 3-5 most common tasks they come to your site to do. In my example:

• Task 1: get the latest travel advice info for the country they’re going to
• Task 2: contact the British Embassy for help because something has gone wrong abroad
• Task 3: get a replacement passport because it has been stolen while on holiday

Recruit your guinea pig

Invite a (non-web team) colleague or a friend at a loose end for a 45 mins session. Try to choose someone who is articulate and easy going.

Ok, ideally you want to test with someone from your target audience – a ‘real’ end user – but I don’t think this really makes much difference when you’re starting out. Once you have an established usability testing programme in place which has already identified the big problems with your site, then it may be worth paying an agency to hire these ‘real’ users.

You need a ‘Test Lab’

Book a room with a networked PC and three chairs. And that’s it! You’ll survive without the eye motion tracking camera for now.

Ask another colleague to observe and take notes of anything significant (you’ll be busy leading the session).

Tip: Try to get the person responsible for the areas you’re testing to be your note taker – they need to see this with their own eyes. In my example: I would (and did) invite the Head of the Travel Advice web team to do this.

Video recording the session can be really worthwhile – a 60 secs compilation of the best / worst bits can have real impact on other web team colleagues. But don’t get hung up about doing this for the first session. If you do record the session make sure the note taker marks the time on the camera with their notes – it saves a lot of time later.

Get into the room 15 mins early to check everything is working ok and the chairs are arranged – two at the PC for you and the guinea pig and one a few metres behind for the note taker.

Running the session

I think the key to having a successful session is ensuring your guinea pig is comfortable with the situation and understands what is and isn’t required of them. Let’s be honest, it is a pretty artificial situation.

I try to introduce sessions with these points:

• I will ask you to try and perform some common tasks
• I need you to think out loud as you perform the tasks. Example: “I think I want to click this link here because it has the word passports in it.” Some people find this quite weird to do and may need prompting if they go quiet
• I’m not trying to test you – I want to see where you are having problems because that will help us to improve the site for real users
• I want you to be honest about your experience and not to worry about offending anyone if you want to be critical

Ease them in with a simple task and then work through the tasks on your list until your time is up. I wouldn’t recommend any more than 45 mins.

At times they’ll get stuck and confused, but try not to jump in with the answer, no other user has the benefit of your knowledge when they come to your site.

And if they go off on some unlikely journey to complete a task, let them, just ensure they continue to think out loud so you know why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Hopefully you will find it really enlightening and gain some important insights into the usability of your website. I’ve never run a session that didn’t identify issues – often things you would never expect unless you had seen them with your own eyes.

The key is to capture what you’ve witnessed, make sense of it and its significance and work out what you need to do about it. That’s when the real work starts!

Oh, and don’t forget to buy your guinea pig lunch as a thank you.

Let me know how you get on.

Liam

It’s good to talk… web

Give your web team regular opportunity to have a good old natter

When I was in the UK Foreign Office web team, Stephen Hale (now Head of Digital Diplomacy) introduced an informal weekly workshop for the team to get together and mull over all things web.

The regular slot was an open invite and members of the team were encouraged to take turns leading the session with a topic of their choice.

Topics ranged from QR codes to RDFa and the sessions were used to think through how these techs could be best used by the Foreign Office.

The idea was not to come out of the sessions with a bunch of actions, but to get the team collectively discussing, contemplating and enthusing about the possibilities ahead of us.

The usual format was an informal 5-10 mins show-and-tell of the technology or tool to set up a few discussion points and then it was turned over to the rest of the team to thrash it out.

I really enjoyed those sessions and think the concept would work well in other web teams:

1. it stimulates a web team to keep looking forwards, to get excited about the possible opportunities
2. it gets the team working together to develop new ideas and can breakdown the usual hierarchies – great for morale
3. it gives individuals the opportunity to share their ideas, knowledge and learning with the rest of the team
4. and perhaps most importantly… it’s a great way for junior and less confident members of a team to showcase themselves and their ideas. It would be easy to add this to someone’s job development plan (or equivalent)

By making this a regular fixture you know there will be a fresh flow of ideas circulating in your team and less chance of good ideas slipping by unnoticed.

I know this isn’t the most efficient way of developing ideas and you lose the combined productivity of your whole team for 45 mins every week or so. That may be hard to justify, especially during busy periods.

But you will come up with great stuff and most importantly, you will do it as a team.

Try it with your team

Stick a recurring invite in everyone’s calendar for a 45 mins session (should be enough). It can be hard to find a good time in the week, but best to have it when people will fancy a break from their desks – friday afternoons perhaps.

Volunteer to lead the first session and pick a topic that will catch their attention – something less conventional to make it clear that anything goes. Personally I don’t think there should be any expectation that a session topic should be adopted and delivered – this should not be the time to talk about something that is already on the cards.

Book a comfortable room, not the one you use for all your regular team meetings.  Even better, go outside if the weather is being kind. This is bean bag time!

And off you go. Hopefully you will have a good turn out and a lively discussion.

I would recommend getting at least one action from the first session: agree who will lead the second one. You don’t want to lose the momentum, or end up leading it every week.

And a final thought: once you get up and running, why not invite others from outside your web team (internal and external), maybe even to lead a session.

Getting ‘outsiders’ along is an excellent way of showcasing the ideas, creativity, enthusiasm and value of your team. This is something web teams often need to improve at.

As always, let me know how you get on.

Liam

What’s the best way to present the web?

The web is a visual medium, so present it that way

In my experience web teams often need to get out and about to explain what they can do for an organisation. And so we should!

But what’s the best way to present our ideas about the web to bosses and colleagues?

Should our approach be any different to presentations from other teams?

I’ve just read a great blog post from Steph Gray about what it takes to present ideas about the web.

Quick plug: If you don’t know Steph Gray, I recommend you change that by subscribing to his blog. Steph is someone in e-Government who really knows what he’s talking about with lessons and thoughts that are relevant well beyond Whitehall.

Anyway, plug over and back to this post…

In Steph’s post he rightly says: ‘…Make sure you have a bunch of material from which you can tell stories selectively, rather than needing to build a grand argument slide by slide. In Powerpoint, you could have a structure which lets you jump to slides from a master page using hyperlinks.’

That got me thinking.

You do the web, so present like the web

Two years ago (or so) David Miliband became Foreign Secretary. At the time I worked in the FCO’s Web Team and we were pretty excited by his appointment. This was a Minister who knew the potential of the web, his Defra blog was something of a Whitehall rarity. We knew our web stock was going to rise.

After a few months we were invited to present to him and his advisors about our vision / strategy / ideas for how the FCO could or should use the web in its work. Four of us, including Stephen Hale (now Head of Online Engagement at the FCO), got busy pulling together the things we wanted to discuss, and more importantly, the things we wanted to get a green light on.

Keep it visual and interactive (like the web)

We knew we didn’t want do deliver a standard 10 (ordered) slide presentation. A few months into the job he must have been sick of PowerPoint presentations.

So we made the presentation into an actual website. In truth it was a bunch of exported images from Fireworks with clickable hotspots, but to anyone else it looked, felt and behaved like a website.

So we had our homepage which had big graphic links to the key themes… ‘Flickr, Youtube, Blogs, Google Maps’… in hindsight we were definitely too tool focussed, but you live and learn! Each linked to a ’section’ homepage which had links to screenshots of third party examples such as Obama Girl on Youtube, key facts and stats, and our own interactive protypes for how the FCO could use these tools.

We wanted it to be as visual as possible and not rely on spoken explanations. Sure enough, it was so much easier to explain how Flickr could be used by clicking through an interactive prototype.

Anyway, to cut a long story short we went on to deliver most of the ideas we pitched that day including the FCO Youtube and Flickr channels, policy Google Map, and the successful FCO blog platform. These tools are commonly used across Whitehall now, but not so back then.

A web approach can make the difference

Benefits of this approach:

• you can quickly navigate to anywhere in the ’site’ in response to the flow of conversation
• you don’t have to modify your presentation for a different audience or time length – you just go to the bits you need
• it is much more interesting to look at – you keep your audience’s attention
• it demonstrates you can actually do what you are talking about
• feels real – if you’re asked “is this real then?” you know you’re on to a winner, you almost want your audience to be disappointed that it doesn’t actually exist yet… you’ve got them excited about what’s possible.

Drawbacks:

• it can take time to get right – it is important to create templates in your graphics package with the header etc to reuse for each page
• may be overkill for the situation
• you may lose structure to your presentation if you dart from one section to another – be clear before you go in what you want to get out of the session to help avoid this
• requires a reasonable amount of ability in the graphics package of your choice
• the more links and interactivity you have the more to go wrong – test it to destruction

Play to your strengths

I’m certainly not trying to say it was all down to the way we presented those ideas, but I do know that using that format played to our natural strengths as webbies.

We were far more comfortable navigating through a website than an alien PowerPoint format and that allowed us to convey the passion and imagination we clearly had for the topic.

And we also knew our approach would make the experience something a bit different for our audience, nothing radical, but enough to make us stand out and get our point across.

Try this now

I like to finish my posts with something you can have a go at.

Steph mentions Prezi in his post. I’ll put my hands up and say I’d never heard of it, but love what I’ve seen.

I won’t say any more, but if you have been interested by the ideas in this post I’d recommend you take 5 mins to try the Prezi demo version.

It’s certainly inspired me – bring on the next scary presentation.

As always let me know what you think.

Taking the bounce out of bounce rates – part #1

There's more to bounce rates than your homepage. Photo by Aldo Risolvo.

Do you know which pages your visitors first see when they come to your website (other than your homepage of course)?

And do you know how many of those lovely visitors actually stick around long enough to do anything?

In my experience many web teams and managers don’t really know the answers to these important questions. And yes… I’m guilty of this too.

Bounces are missed opportunities. At worse they indicate poor user experience – the sort that damages the reputation of your site, brand and organisation. So not good.

This is the first of two posts that will look into bounce rates and ways to improve the retention of visitors to your site.

Not really sure what all this bounce rate talk is? Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of bounce rates.

Try this now: identify your bouncing pages

In 5 mins you will have a much better idea of where folks are arriving (and quickly departing) from your site. That doesn’t solve the problem but it will trigger a bunch of actions to start reversing this unwelcome trend. We’ll look into some of these in part #2.

Open up your stats package and run the most popular entry page report over the last few months – any decent stats package will have some variation of this. If your pacakge doesn’t I suggest you start using Google Analytics – it’s free, easy and bloody brilliant.

It’s this report in Google Analytics: Content > Top Landing Pages. It even includes the bounce rate for the top pages. Got to love Google!

Ok… no prizes for guessing which page is #1 – your homepage. Well forget about that for now, it’s had enough of your loving care and attention.

What about the other pages on the list? Are they what you expected? These pages are so important to you – they can make or break the user experience. Do any of them have a horrible looking bounce rate?

What’s a good/bad bounce rate?

I really don’t have a definitive answer to this – how long is a piece of string. I’ve read that 50% is pretty normal, but it will vary from site to site and page to page. The important thing is you start to bring that number down.

Tip: get the avg bounce rate for your entire site to see which pages are above avg.

Which pages deserve your attention?

The easy thing to do is list the top 10 or 20 pages with the worst bounce rates and tackle them first.

But which is worse?

a) a page where 20% of site visits begin with a bounce rate of 65%
b) or a page where 2% of site visits begin with a bounce rate of 90%

I would argue (a), because far more visitors are actually bouncing from this page (even if the bounce rate percentage is lower).

The point is: you have limited time and you need to spend it where you will make the most impact.

From this quick excercise you will probably have a list of 2 or 3 popular entry pages with worryingly high bounce rates. These are the pages to focus on first.

Coming up in Part #2

Part #2 will focus on what can be done with these pages to dig a bit deeper into why they are bouncing so much and actions you can take to reverse this trend.

Stay posted. And as ever… let me know what you think.

Improving your web content owners: good cop, bad cop

Sometimes you have to play a bit of good cop, bad cop with your content owners if you want great content

This post looks at ways to change your relationship with under-performing content owners and devolved editors to end the days of outdated, poor quality web content that does more harm than good.

Shifting the balance of power back to the web team

Web teams are commonly seen as little more than publishing teams, a role many web teams regrettably play up to. Such an unhealthy deference to the rest of the organisation is what allows 200 page PDFs to be chucked on the site without anyone saying “boo”.

This is crazy. We are web professionals, brought in and paid for our expertise on web content and communication.

Look at it another way: what would the Finance dept do if you didn’t follow their process for claiming expenses? They’d tell you to do it again, properly. And you would because you know you won’t get your money until you do it their way.

So what’s the difference? You run the website. You are the web expert. You could switch it all off right now if you wanted to. You have control. So use it.

Sounds like fighting talk. Yes, but threatening to switch off content doesn’t actually fix the problem. You [the web team] need to build a positive and relatively equal working relationship with content owners to ensure your site has good quality content at all times.

Good cop, bad cop

In my experience of working with content owners and devolved editors I’ve found a combination of these techniques can win round the most distant devolved editors:

Show them your face – you must, must, must build a strong working relationship with all your devolved editors. Email does not count. You need to get out your chair and go and meet them – I always try to go to their office to show willing and to see what their world is like.

Commitment – show them you want to dedicate your time, skill and expertise to helping them get the most from their content – let them see you believe it’s a valuable use of your time. You need to make them feel a bit grateful to have you on board and interested in them.

Understand what drives them – ask them what they are trying to achieve? What issues do they face? Who are their key audiences? What messages are they trying to get out? How much resource do they have for the web? Do their bosses value the web? Be empathetic.

Credible – don’t be shy to ‘present your credentials’ – they need to be impressed enough that you really know what you are doing to take you seriously. Shamelessly refer to previous experience and successes to leave them in no doubt that they are in good hands.

Inspire – the web can make the dullest things exciting. You need to get this across to the devolved editors. Take examples (always visual) of how others are doing great things with the web and make the connection to their needs. Be enthusiastic and optimistic.

Shame – find the worst bit of content they have, the really out of date, inaccurate, misleading bit. Take a screen shot. Find out how many visitors it’s had in recent months. Spell out that connection: this content is being read by real people, and you must see this is not good enough. But show them the light out!

Jealous – play them off against your star devolved editors. Wave some screen shots in front of them and explain how you’ve already helped others in their position do some great stuff which is showing real benefit. Tell them you are prepared to do the same with them. Make them feel thankful for that.

Way forward – before you meet the devolved editor/s breakdown what needs to be done and then tell them how it is going to be – you have to take the lead or it won’t happen. My previous post Improving your devolved editors – where to begin? has some advice on how to identify and prioritise problems.

Tough talk – you have shown them what’s wrong, you have shown them how good it could/should be, you have offered your expertise and resource, and most importantly you have offered them a way forward. You now need to be clear what will be happen if things don’t start to improve. Now that will vary but you need to be consistent. At a minimum you should make it clear you will switch off their content if it is out of date or inaccurate. That’s hardly unreasonable.

I bet you are thinking: “easier said than done”. Well no actually, I’ve done it, I really have… and you know what happened… they came to our office within the hour and asked what it would take to get their pages back up. We, the little old web team, were now calling the shots.

Now your turn

Pick a particularly switched-off content owner and arrange to meet them to start applying some of the techniques above. I’d suggest doing it with the Devolved editor tracker I featured in Improving your devolved editors – where to begin?.

Let me know how you get on.

Liam

CMS – how do you pick the right one?

Where to start when you need to pick the right CMS for your organisation? Photo by Jared Earle

I’ve recently been working on a project to procure a new CMS for a large organisation.

Get all the help you can

A really useful resource has been CMS Watch – these chaps love talking CMS.

They’ve listed the 42 ‘most significant’ CMS vendors around today, from the big boys such as Interwoven to the Open Source options such as Plone.

And they’ve helpfully divided them into 6 categories to let you compare like-for-like.

This is a great place to start to get you head around the CMS landscape.

I found some of the posts in the project phase section very useful. There’s stuff on requirements gathering, shortlisting and project managing – all handy stuff when you’re facing the daunting task of finding and installing a CMS.

Obviously you will still need to do a whole bunch of work to find the right CMS for your organistation, but resources like CMS Watch will help you get there.

I’ll hopefully be writing more about CMS selection in the near future.

Liam

Improving your devolved editors – where to begin?

Devolved editors can be a bit of a handful! Image: freefotouk

I’ve worked on several websites that have devolved editors (contributors who aren’t part of the central web team).

In my experience this can be a mixed blessing. What you gain in extra content from subject experts around the organisation you can lose in quality. Maybe you know the feeling.

So many devolved editors, such little time

When I worked for the UK Foreign Office web team I was responsible for the policy channel of the site (climate change, human rights, that sort of thing).

The content for each policy was owned by the policy desks and it was my job to help them produce good quality content that was audience and message focussed.

The problem was dedicating enough time to them to continue improving their web content – there was probably about 25+ groups of devolved editors.

I needed to get my head around the scale of the challenge and identify where to spend my limited time.

Devolved editor ‘Tracker’

At a glance you can see what's going well or not so well with your devolved editors!

So I came up with a matrix thing. I’ll call it a tracker to make myself feel clever.

1. Each team got a row on the sheet.

2. Each factor / step required for devolved editor nirvana got a column. Example: ‘in devolved editor’s job description’, ‘CMS trained’, ‘clear on target audience’…

3. I went through each team and scored them in each column: -10 terrible, -5 need to address, 0 ok, +5 doing well, +10 happy days (kind of thing!), with a corresponding background colour to reflect positive or negative… red for the -10 scores, green for the +10 scores.

4. Quick sum formula at the end of each column and row to total overall status for each team and factor.

I could then see just how well (or not!) each set of devolved editors was doing. I could see some teams had lots of red – I had to address these teams first.

Have a go yourself

In 30 mins you will have quantified the status of devolved editorship on your site.

1. Feel free to copy and modify the Google Docs Devolved Editor Tracker I’ve quickly set-up.

2. Add the things that are important to your organisation, web site or role in the columns (you can always add more in the future).

3. Add the distinctive areas of your organisation that have devolved editors in the rows.

4. Score them (be honest with yourself!).

5. Take a step back and let your eye settle on the patches of red – that’s your priority.

6. Think about setting targets – you can now quantify improvement. At least aim to get zero or above in all boxes.

Let me know how you get on!

They’re under starter’s orders… and they’re off

Hello. After months of threatening to launch our own blog, we’re finally up and running.

We’re a bunch of web professionals [squad list coming soon] who know a thing or two about running websites. And we think it’s time to share some of our experiences and insights with a wider audience.

“Another blog – just what the World needs”

Fair point. We know there’s already loads of good blogs and sites dedicated to specific aspects of the web. We are happy subscribers to many of them.

But we think there is a gap.

Jack of all trades, master of none

If you run a website you’re expected to know so much stuff: editorial, design, technical, social media, evaluation, resource management. But that doesn’t mean you’re an expert on each (how could you be?).

So if you run a website, how much time do you have to think about evaluating your site? How many hours can you spare to look into the latest social media tools? Do you have two free days to review the accessibility of your site? So much to do, so little time.

And that’s where we come in…

If you only have an hour or two a week to dedicate to these things we’ll share ideas (always based on our own experiences) of how to best use that time. If we learn something the hard way we’ll pass that on.

Our regular posts will address real issues and suggest clear actions for you to take to improve your site and your web skills.

And of course… we want to get your comments and follow up questions.

Our first steps

Managing Websites is a work in progress, and something we have to fit around our busy lives.

But as we develop our strategy and build our site we’ll share the experience with you to prove we practice what we preach!

In time we want to become a popular resource of info and advice for fellow web manager types. A site worth telling others about.

Thanks for reading.

Liam