Site credits

Here we list the people and technology that have made this web site possible. It has deliberately been built with cheap or free technology wherever sensible, and put together by PRIME’s staff. This makes it much closer to the web sites that many small businesses are now building.

Key decisions in building a web site

The basic choice in getting a web site off the ground is whether to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. PRIME’s first web site, developed in 2002, was outsourced. It did the job required, but by modern standards is difficult to keep up to date and it was expensive to alter in any significant way.

The onward march of technology means that the option of doing it yourself is getting increasingly attractive, as the tools needed are becoming much simpler to use and cheap. The whole blogging movement has opened up the world of web publishing to millions of individuals. Some of the stuff pioneered first by highly technical people then by teenage diarists is now easily good enough for routine business use.

There’s more about what PRIME is using on this site in individual posting in the Internet category. What we do below is list the things we have found most useful without going into much explanation.

Open source

A key reason why good cheap web sites are now possible is the coming of age of the Open Source software movement. Many high-quality tools are now available at little or no cost because they have been produced by highly-organised teams of volunteers.

In part this is a 21st century expression of the same charitable impulse that has given rise to organisations like PRIME, the Prince’s Trust and Age UK. But the open source approach can also fit in neatly alongside profit-making commercial businesses in highly competitive markets, so it is in other ways an entirely new phenomenon.

Our content management system

We are using WordPress as our main content management tool. WordPress is a popular blogging platform available in both a simple free version and a fuller-featured hosted version that involves some costs. On this site it does all the basic work of displaying words and images and also provides us with the facility to change them as often as we want ourselves.

WordPress is a classic open source project, developed by a small core team and an army of volunteers. This community has a mixture of motivations, with some people (and firms) contributing out of altruism, others to demonstrate their technical prowess and a third group offering services for money. All these motivations are perfectly compatible in a well-run open source project.

Hosting

Our host is Nativespace. We pay for this service. What hosting means is that Nativespace rent us space on a big machine that has a fast connection to the Internet. All the words, images and software that make up our web site go on to this machine, which serve up the pages to anyone visiting www.primebusinessclub.com.

We have online access to this server 24/7, and so can instantly alter the web site any time ourselves. Normally this isn’t at all technically difficult, because it is done in WordPress – a software application now used by millions. But behind the scenes a  lot of technical stuff is going on. Occasionally there’s glitch or you want to change something, so you need to know more.

Hosting firms can provide technical support to their clients as well, free or at extra cost, and it’s their helpfulness and expertise that often differentiates their services, and the quality of their documentation.

We selected Nativespace because it is very familiar with the sort of software we are using – WordPress and what WordPress itself works with behind the scenes – Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP for short – these are all also open source software products themselves). This doesn’t mean they hold our hands at all times – that’s not what hosts do. But it is possible to get a technical query answered promptly and correctly the two or three times a year it might prove necessary. A host without without the expertise to field support queries is pretty well useless.

That’s why wise users choose hosts with experience of the sort of application they want to run – in our case LAMP open source server software (rather than Microsoft) with WordPress running on top. Hosting is the most complicated thing you will have to deal with when running a web site.

Finally please note that it’s by no means the case that everyone needs to hire a separate host.  If you expect to get no more than a few tens of visitors a day you may be able to get by with an all-inclusive service where hosting and the content management system are bundled together, with the technical stuff taken care of completely by someone else. This means that you can experiment with what the web can do for your business without having to master any of the issues around hosting.

There are both commercial and free services that are bundled this way. You can sign up for a free (its actually advertising funded but not too intrusively) hosted site based on WordPress at WordPress.com. The rival Blogger (owned by Google) is at blogspot.com. Then you just start typing and watch your web site appear.

Google is also behind another free tool called Google Sites. This has been used in a government-backed scheme called Getting British Business Online which at the time of writing (November 2010) was still running. More details of the GBBO scheme here. This post also mentions some paid for all-in-one web site offerings, where hosting is bundled in with content management – Mr Site is one we have negotiated an discount offer for PRIME Business Club members. 

All these systems can really take you quite far. But for full control over features and appearance you may eventually want to go the separate hosted route. But don’t feel you have to do this at the outset when setting up a business, as the many other things you have to sort may be more important than setting up the best possible web site. Starting with a basic web presence, you can refine and improve things later when you have a clearer idea of what’s possible and what exactly you need.

Design

WordPress is made in such a way that its behaviour and appearance can be altered to suit the needs of individual web sites. Everyday content like words and images can be easily altered by anyone with the necessary passwords, and that’s what PRIME staff do. But more fundamental things like the layout of the site and the overall colour scheme require more expertise.

There’s a flourishing community of people producing “themes” and “plugins” to customise each of the major content management platforms, including WordPress. A limited number of these options are even available on the free versions mentioned above, but one of the reasons people end up going for the full versions which they have to arrange hosting for themselves is that the range of choice and the number of things you can then plug in, adapt and alter is then vastly increased.

Our WordPress theme is currently the Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha. It gives the site its overall appearance and magazine-style layout and is probably the single most important thing responsible for the look of the site. This is a free theme that requires the full version of WordPress. We have tweaked the colours a bit to match our professionally designed logos, but the theme does come with a good selection of colours anyway if you don’t want do delve into things this deeply.

We also use several plugins, also all free, to add other useful functions to Worpress :

Comment spam is very effectively detected and destroys by Akismet, written by Matt Mullenweg, one of the WordPress core team.

RS Event Multiday by Robert Sargant and Florian Meier provides the sorted list of upcoming events displayed near the top of the page in the right side bar.

The extremely useful WP-Print by Lester Chan solves a common problem with web sites – wasteful messy printed output. Instead this WordPress plugin produces neatly formatted printed pages.

Hyper Cache by Stefano Lissa makes the site quicker for visitors, especially if a lot of people all decide to vist PRIME Business Club at the same time.

 

Paid-for software

We have also used paid-for commercial software where no open source software is available that is equally good. In a surprising number of cases the open source solution is as good or better than the commercial offering, but there were specialist areas where we felt the paid-for option was clearly superior (and we were able to find the funding!).

Text to speech

We use Readspeaker to provide the automated voice that reads items out loud when you click the listen button. This is the best solution currently available. The voice is fast and clear and because it’s server based there is no need for our visitors to fiddle with their browser settings or download any software.

Forms

There are lots of ways of doing forms on web sites, many of them free. But if you do lots of forms and need to subject the data to intensive analysis – which we do, then it’s worth going for a proper survey package. We use Zoomerang for both the web site and handling telephone queries. It fully complies with EU “safe harbour” data protection rules, something that not all US services offer and that matters if you are going to be handling personal data.

Both Zoomerang and its main rival Survey Monkey are available free to anyone polling up to 100 people, making them useful for initial business market research. We use Zoomerang so much though that we have to pay. As a charity PRIME has been able to get some discounts that an an ordinary business would not get.

We also use DabblDB for taking event bookings and for displaying our business support directory. DabbleDB is a database optimised for web use, so you can both collect information and display it online.

UPDATE May 2011: Unfortunately DabbleDB has recently been acquired by social media giant Twitter. It has now closed down the DabbleDBdatabase service. We’re now using a shared spreadsheet done in Google Apps for the business support directory. This is an inferior solution for web site visitors, in that it’s harder to read and search. But at least the data is still available to our site vistors, and it is still simple to keep up to date. .

Cost

What’s most notable is that many of the technology items are free or cheap. It’s probably true to say that 80% of this web site cost nothing apart from time, with all the money expended going on the remaining 20%. So a good-quality, professional-looking web presence is now very affordable, though still a little complicated to achieve if you go the DIY route.

But the cost of paying to get one done for you should also be falling, as these same technical advances are making it easier for professionals to turn out straightforward web sites quickly and cheaply. Think twice before paying a lot for a web site.

Bought-in specialist content

Where PRIME’s web site differs from many business sites is that it is meant to serve as a practical resource for the people using it – one that can be visited repeatedly and used as a reference.

About half the web site is written by PRIME staff in-house, and we also write the paper booklets, guides and research reports found on this site. But we are not professionally-qualified in all the areas a new business needs information or guidance. So the Resources area of this site contains material that is written and checked by independent experts.

We buy this content in from two specialist publishing companies. PracticeWeb, part of Sift Media based in Bristol, provides all the online content in the resources area. We also buy a series of act sheets, available on request on paper, produced by Cobweb Information. More details on the Resources intro page.

Other services and features

Visitor traffic analysis: Webaliser and Google Analytics. These are both free. Google Analytics is extremely powerful, but takes some time to understand. If you are considering buying Google Adwords to drive traffic to your site its worth biting the bullet and trying to figure out Analytics. The two together are a very powerful marketing tool.

Images

Some of the small images such as this one come from A Perfect World, a library of clip art by the cartoonist Linda Causey. They just happen to fit in well with the Chameleon WordPress theme we are using.

Some other images are in the public domain (in other words freely reproducable as not copyright) or are available under a free Creative Commons licence (explained here). The two most useful free images sources are Geograph for pictures of places and (Flickr ) for just about anything.

On many of individual news posting we have often followed the convention of the web of using a small image from the target site. As long as the image is accompanied by a link to the site most web masters do not object as it brings them traffic.

Custom and practice on the web is still evolving, but this approach to linking is the basis of services such as Google News and has been endorsed by web luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee and Jacob Neilsen. The use of small images in links is commonplace and supported by some landmark court rulings. However, if you are the owner of an image and want us to take it down please let us know at info@prime.org.uk.