Web Class Blog

What, exactly, is a blogging community?

It is not the same as a Community Blog… which is one blog, with many bloggers.

A Blog Community is many bloggers with many blogs, often centering around a theme, or user group, which can be linked together to some extent, or which are promoted through a common website. Blogger.com and WordPress.com are the loosest of blogging communities, with the least degree of community benefit. Blogher, is intermediate – it allows promotion of women owned blogs, and also allows members to blog on their site. Other communities allow you to have a blog within their website structure, such as the NASCAR blog community.

The degree to which you benefit from the community varies, as does the degree of ownership that you are granted by the community. But community blogs have some nice advantages even if you are limited in customization or use standards.

1. Marketing. Usually they’ll plug you right into their network.
2. Established community. The people in the community are your target market if you choose a themed community. That means you’ll get spillover quicker.
3. Help. Most will give you assistance in getting started.
4. Other bloggers. It is easy to find other bloggers with whom you share common interests within the community – this also helps you with promotion.

Some blogging communities allow links with outside blogs, some do not. A few allow customization of a template, some do not allow you to even choose a template.

The advantages may be worth blogging from inside a community, or you may choose to use the community as a resource for commenting, linking, and through that means, leverage the power of the community.

We have a class on Blogging for Business which will be scheduled for this summer. We’ll have many valuable blogging tips in the class.

A content management system (CMS) really isn’t any easier or harder to maintain than any other site type. It is, however, different.

There are two issues for maintenance, which do not apply to a regular website:

1. Security updates. Since the site runs on software, that software has to be kept up-to-date. This means you will periodically have to install updates to the site. Failure to do so makes your site a walking time-bomb, and hangs out an invitation to hackers to take over your site.
2. If you allow community participation on your site through a forum, article posting, or comment posting, you will have to screen posts and review things that people submit, to make sure they are appropriate. Spammers love sites that they can submit things to, so you have to watch to ensure that your site stays high quality. Failure to do so will get it banned from search engines.

A good schedule for maintenance and site checks can help you to keep the site running smoothly. A content management system can, and should be, an asset that helps you gain site functions and performance that is not possible other ways. Keeping up with the maintenance makes sure it stays an asset and does not become a liability.

There are several issues which are very important in choosing a content management system (CMS). Most are not readily apparent to someone who is unfamiliar with the software world.

First of all, software descriptions and software realities rarely match. Choosing something can be hard when all the descriptions sound marvelous, and nothing is telling you which features that are listed are a pain in the neck to actually USE, or HOW the system in question actually handles or displays the task in question. And those things can make a huge amount of difference!

Beyond that, there are three primary issues which must be looked into:

1. Developer community. These are the people who make the software, and are responsible for ensuring that it continues to improve, and that it stays secure. You need a active developer community, or your site is doomed.
2. Active user community. These are people who use it, test it out, comment on it, report bugs, and very often, provide additional forum based support and assistance. An active user community helps the developer community be more effective in keeping the software usable and secure.
3. Sustainability. This has to do with how the software is structured, and how easy it is to maintain and use it long term. When frequent tasks are too time consuming, a site is not sustainble. When upgrades take too much time, it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain it. Sustainability is the factor that is most often overlooked by people who have little technical knowledge, and sadly, by a good many developers as well.

The first time you choose a CMS, you’ll have to go on the recommendation of someone else. No choice. After that, you begin to learn what is helpful and what is not, and you have a better ability to choose. In choosing the first time, you want to make sure that the person who makes the recommendation actually has an understanding of the need for security updates and the three areas above.

Our Advanced Website Intensive Course will cover selecting a good CMS, and how to recognize that it is, in fact, a good one.

Content Management Systems first began to be used in large companies and institutions where multiple people needed to add information to a single website. They allowed a technician to handle the technical stuff, a designer to handle the design, and individual content editors to handle just their jobs of adding content.

They’ve become much more than that – while they do still offer that convenience, they’ve been adopted by smaller businesses to achieve high end performance on a budget.

The original Content Management Systems were expensive. It is now possible to get free, Open Source software, which is functional for a wide range of flexible purposes. This brings high end features within the reach of those who could have never afforded them before.

Our business – and our classes, cover two types of content management system:

1. A simple type which allows a professional to set up the site, and the site owner to add content through a site admin form. This helps the site owner to split the work, paying only for the parts that are truly technical. It works similarly to a site builder, but the designer has complete control over the template, so a site owner can get a site that is truly customized to their business.

2. A full featured content management system. This allows membership management, integrated forums, galleries, database directories for business or catalog purposes, and much more. They provide a huge range of flexible features, and can be adapted to almost any high end purpose. The learning curve for a site owner is a little higher, but they can automate more tasks once they learn how to use the various components.

Content management systems require some specific hosting and maintenance requirements. And they certainly are not the solution for everyone. But when you need simplification of complex functions, they can provide a means to empower a business owner with features they could not have reached just a few years ago.

Beginning on the 29th of March, the University of Wyoming will be offering a course on using a high powered Content Management System. Additional introductory information will be provided in subsequent articles here.

Since just about anybody can theoretically set up a shopping cart, and since shopping carts are freely available, many people are caught off guard by the complexity of some of the setup tasks involved, and totally unprepared for ongoing maintenance issues. There are really only three areas where carts require specialized expertise:

1. Choosing the cart. If you aren’t familiar with some of the standards with carts, and some of the background issues, you may choose one that is needlessly complicated to set up, or maintain. Or you may choose one that is awkward to use, or inflexible, or worse, one that is not backed by an active user and developer community (making your site a time bomb).

2. Setting it up. There are several complex tasks here, and in fact, setup is the most challenging of the three technical areas, because it involves multiple areas of knowledge. You must be able to install the cart, customize the template (ever wonder why so many of one type of cart look the same?), and then set the configuration of the cart to work in the way you need it to work. Then you must enter in your store information so that it will display it as needed. Products and photos must also be added, which is not highly technical, but can be very tedious.

3. Maintaining it. Keeping the cart running smoothly involves many obvious, and some not-so-obvious tasks. You should regularly attend to routine store tasks, but you should also back up the database regularly, and back up the site files periodically. Last, you must make sure that you check regularly for updates to the cart, and install them if you are hosting your own cart software. Failure to do the last one will invite trouble.

Good instructions can help to smooth the bumps for setting up a cart. Unfortunately, good instructions are hard to find for many of them, because documentation invariably lags behind the development of the software, and many instructions are written by techies, for techies, and they assume that you know what you want to do, that you only need to be pointed in the right direction to know HOW to do it. They do not assume that you are a newbie who doesn’t even know quite what to call the function that you need to perform, let alone what series of tasks you need to coordinate to perform the function.

This Saturday’s class will cover these items in a way that is understandable and personalized to the needs of the students.

Shopping carts are incredibly complex. I believe I just said that in the last post, but it is repeated here as an entrance into this topic.

It is their very complexity which makes them often lag behind in function and features.

No two stores are the same. I think I said that too. That means that carts have to be very flexible in how they do things, allowing a LOT of configuration options. Typically when setting up a high function cart, you’ll spend hours just working through the configuration options – do you want this feature, if so, how do you want it to work… ok, then how about the next one… ? It is a tedious process, but nothing compared to the original tedium which the programmers endured to give it all those choices!

Because carts are so complex, they typically come in three categories:

1. Young, immature, and barely functional. An incredible number of carts fall into this category, and can have all sorts of limitations that you would not believe.

2. Old, clunky, with a lot of choices, but not necessarily ease in USING those functions. Anything that forked from OS Commerce, and the giant itself, falls into this category, as do a number of other carts.

3. Extortionately priced. Ok… so a successful business that makes millions a year can afford a licensing fee of $4000 per year, or $1500 for every version of a cart. Small businesses and startups cannot! The sad thing is, even if they are in this price range, the VAST MAJORITY still fall into the “immature” or “old and clunky” categories!

The reason those old and clunky ones hang around is because they already have a HUGE code base, large user base, and established developer base. It takes a long time to produce that much code to do that many things (the average cart contains between 2000 and 20,000 code files), and to get that many people both using it, and assisting with the development of new features. They tend to build onto it, so that it often looks like what started out as a 2 bedroom single wide and ended up as an apartment complex – funny looking, awkward to get from point A to point B, and seriously in need of a rebuild!

But rebuilding is hard. If you knock out one section, it may affect another, and what seemed like a simple little modification may domino on you until you are rewriting half the files just to modify one feature. And if you are going to modify those files, why don’t you do it right, and not have to redo the changes you just did when you go for the next round of improvements! Like the mechanic that says, “while we are in here replacing the clutch, we really should do the water pump at the same time since we have to pull the engine anyway”.

So many of those old carts, build on a code base that was created long before anyone had any expectations of user friendliness or standardized features, are still clunky. They get better slowly. Their very complexity seems to keep half their functions in a state of obsolesence at any given time. As each of the worst functions is improved, other functions slide into the mire of antiquity. It is a battle they will likely never win.

What does this mean to you? It means there is no perfect solution. You are going to have to compromise. Choosing smart though, makes sure that you compromise where it matters least. That you go forward with something which allows you to at least sustain it in the most efficient manner.

We feel that the cart we chose to teach about in our Database Shopping Cart Intensive Course (Beginning Saturday the 23rd, 2008 through the University of Wyoming Enrichment Program) fits  that criteria. It isn’t perfect, but it is usable, flexible, functional, and more sustainable than any others that we’ve found.

Shopping carts are complex. Mindbogglingly so. They have to be in order to do what we expect them to do. Consider:

• You need the cart to allow you to specify a certain price for a certain product. If your products have variables (higher price for a larger size, or optional items to add to the price), then it has to do that too. Not just how you might want it to, but in all sorts of ways.
• You need the cart to calculate the prices of all the items. It has to be better at math than I am.
• You need it to calculate sales tax. Just for certain visitors though, not for all of them, and maybe different taxes for different visitors.
• You need it to offer a discount. But what does that mean? A flat rate? A percentage? On everything? On just a few items? Is there a minimum purchase amount to qualify? Do you want it to stop and start on specific dates?

Just those basic functions are incredibly complex, and the average cart worth using does far more.  I must point out though, that many carts do far less… while SAYING that they do more. And we haven’t even TOUCHED on shipping options!

With software, it is hard to know just what you are getting. Many descriptions are exaggerated, to say the least. The term “user friendly” seems to be applied to everything, regardless of the opinions of the actual users. And features listed may or may not do what you think they will. That particular misunderstanding happens for two reasons:

1. Some vendors misrepresent their product. Yes, it’s true, many of them outright lie. You can’t tell which ones are lying and which ones are telling the truth. I once read a glowing report on a cart that promised simple flexibility. Simple it was, flexible it was not, it did not even have a way to set up a payment option!
2. A cart may in fact DO what it says, but it may not do it in the WAY you need it done. A cart may be advertised as handling additional options for a product, but it may or may not allow you to attach a price to options. It may handle cross selling, but it might only do it if you attach each item to each other item.

No matter the cart, you are going to have limitations. This is a fact of dealing with software. It will do what it does, the way it does it, and you will have to work within those constraints. Often though, some familiarity with how they work, combined with a little ingenuity, will allow you to come up with an acceptable alternative to what you really wanted. Maybe it won’t do everything the way you wanted, but you can usually come up with a way of handling it that keeps your manual tasks manageable.

The one thing you want to avoid if possible is custom coding. Custom code is more expensive, more prone to having bugs, more insecure, and less sustainable. This is because it is not tested with a wide variety of situations the way that pre-packaged (Commercial or Open Source) software is, nor is it regularly updated. If you have to have custom coding to get the job done, then it is wise to limit it to tweaking an existing software package instead of wholesale coding.

Carts are complex. They do a lot. And their very complexity creates built-in limitations that must be dealt with. Dealing with them in a smart way helps to get maximum function from minimum financial investment, with the greatest possibility of long term sustainability.

Check the Classes page for more on upcoming classes that deal with this topic.

Website security is simultaneously a complex, and a simple thing. Complex in that the issues are often complex. Simple in that a few simple tactics can protect you from the major threats.

Most business owners, and a good number of small web designers, have no idea what those threats are, or what to do about them. The most common things that they overlook are:

1. Bad forms. These open your site to abuse.
2. Bad server software (scripts). They don’t know how to identify good ones.
3. Failure to update old scripts.
4. Careless handling of sensitive information.

In addition to some simple security precautions, there are legal issues, which, while not exactly security issues, certainly pose a threat to your ownership and sustainable site operations. These issues include:

1. Copyright issues.
2. Libel.
3. Liability.
4. Accessibility.
5. Disclosure.
6. Privacy.

These issues also, can be handled fairly simply for most small businesses. The trick is knowing how far it is reasonable to go, based on your own business model, website structure, exposure, and risks.

These issues are covered in our next class through the University of Wyoming Enrichment Program, Monday, February 18, from 6:30 to 8:30 in Laramie, on the LCCC Campus. This is the last of a series of four classes.

Watch for information about the Advanced Web Courses, coming up in March and April.

Last fall I taught my first web development class. It was good. So they asked me to teach more. They seem to be going well. Summer class prep is occurring, and we had to decide what to do for it. In the summer time, quick and easy is good.

Blogging for Business seemed a natural. And it would only be natural to promote it… Through a blog.

A quick visit to Fantastico, a search for a template that would be easy to customize, and here I am, a short 24 busy hours later, blogging the first post. And that 24 hours was not filled with work on this – only about an hour of that time actually involved work on this blog. The rest was the usual emails to clients, tweaks to sites, stepping forward on existing projects, a trip to town to restock the cupboards.

Still need to get a better image for the header – I loved the original image in the design, though it was not at all Wyoming (and it seemed to NEED to be). It needs a better shot – with a road that does not look like it ends in a lake! We’ve got that planned though.

Teaching is great fun. The students are really the best. Hopefully I can provide info here that will help to let prospective students know what we can offer them.