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The proposals are in.  They include some great designs; features that meet requirements; and maybe even some novel ideas.  Budgets get compared, references checked, and a selection is made.  Yet all is not well.  Several months down the road, after the new site’s public launch, problems arise that weren’t contemplated during the proposal process.

This year alone, we’ve had a half dozen or so organizations contact us expressing dismay with their current web development partner.  The complaints: deadlines are frequently missed; simple changes to the site aren’t made; and requests for new additions to the site seem way overpriced.  And they don’t know how to move the site to a new partner.

What’s going on?

Answer: the proposal process didn’t take into account two key factors, a) the platform on which the site was built, and b) the web partner’s experience with it and its dedication to client service.

So before throwing good money after bad in building a site, make sure you get solid and verified responses to these seven questions:

(1) Don’t get fooled by a great design.  Turning a mock-up into a real web site is where the rubber meets the road.  Demand that the potential web vendor demonstrate previous experience.  You don’t want to be a guinea pig.  This leads to the next question:

(2) What platform will the site be built on, i.e., is there going to be a robust content management system (CMS) housing the site’s content?  If not, you’ll be looking ahead to lots of slow, manual labor in making changes and additions to your site.

(3) Is the CMS well supported, with a growing list of new modules and refinements? In other words, are there lots of people behind the CMS, and is the CMS growing in popularity?  You want a CMS that’s successful, and that will grow with your evolving requirements. Make your prospective partner demonstrate that.

(4) Is the CMS easy to use? Most clients want to take charge of their content.  With a few hours training, a serious CMS will enable the client to do just that.  Make your prospective partner prove it.

FACT: There are a number of FREE (open source) CMS available today, such as Drupal and    Joomla.  They are powerful, easy for the client to employ, and used by all sizes of organizations and companies.  They enable basic changes to be made with little effort, and new site additions (blogs, video, social media) to be incorporated without costing an arm and a leg.  DEADLINES MET, BUDGETS KEPT.

(5) Just how adept is your web partner with the recommended CMS? You want a partner with thousands of hours on the CMS, a partner that knows every detail, no matter how small.  You want an expert, not a vendor who sees your project as a chance to build its own CMS – a disaster in waiting.

(6) What happens in the event that you need to end the relationship with the web partner? You need to make the break as seamless as possible.  The client owns the content and the transition is very simple with the right CMS – if the contract has provisions for this eventuality.  Web partners worth their salt will help with the move.

(7) What the web vendor’s record of client support? Research this carefully.  Ask lots of question from references.  How quick are they to respond?  Do they make simple changes as a matter of course?  How accurate are their time and budget estimates for site customizations? Do they keep their word?

So next time you’re in the market for a website, no matter its size, keep these questions in mind. You want to make management of the site as effortless as possible. And you want a web partner who knows what it’s doing and values your relationship.  You need both together otherwise you’ll be wasting money.  And not in a real party mood.

Conversations about blog posts are increasingly taking place on Twitter in addition to the comments section of blogs.  Due to this trend, over the last six months we’ve seen lots of blogs integrate tweetbacks into their comment sections.  Building on the trackback concept, a tweetback searches Twitter for links to specific blog pots and displays relevant tweets in the comments section of your blog. 

I’ve had a variety of clients request this feature over the last few months, so we’ve spent some time figuring out how to get tweetbacks working in our core platform, Drupal and Wordpress. 

For Drupal, we did an exhaustive search for tweetback modules back in February and didn’t find any that work, so we developed our own custom module.  We are currently fine tuning the code we wrote and hope to release our Drupal tweetback module to the open source community in the next few months.

For Wordpress, there are quite a few tweetback modules to choose from.  We tried a handful of the plugins with mixed results.  I’m posting a quick review of our experience with each in the hopes that it saves time for others hoping to implement tweetbacks on their blog.

Before I dive in, please note that we did not test all of these plugins exhaustively.  In my mind, the point of plugins is to quickly add functionality without involving our development team.  So if I couldn’t get a plugin to work within an hour or so, I chose to cut my losses and move on to the next one instead of spending time debugging.

Tweetbacks and Tweetsuite by Dan Zarrella

As far as I can tell, Dan Zarrella was the first to build a tweetback plugin module for Wordpress back in January. 

His first take on it was a simple javascript solution called Tweetbacks.  While this solution probably works, it relies on inserting a javascript hosted on his personal server on your blog/website.  While this might be ok for some, we simply did not want to take the risk of inserting a javascript from an individual on a client website.

Later in January Dan released Tweetsuite, which moves away from javascript and includes a bunch of additional features.  This plugin looks awesome, but unfortunately we couldn’t get it to work on the two blogs we tried to implement it on and gave up.  The plugin also doesn’t have a lot of documentation, and from reading the comments it doesn’t sound like it is being actively supported.  So we grudgingly moved on.

Disqus

Disqus is a third-party commenting system that can actually take the place of your Wordpress commenting system.  I’ve written about it before, and use it on my personal blog.  I’m a fan of the product, and when I saw Disqus was adding social media reactions to its feature set I was anxious to try it out. 

We decided to install Disqus on our own ImpactWatch blog as a way of testing out tweetbacks and giving the the system a full test drive before recommending clients start using it.  Unfortunately, the tweetbacks feature in Disqus worked correctly for exactly one day and then mysteriously stopped and never got working again. Disqus has also periodically had performance issues that have caused our blog to load slowly.  Disqus recently acknowledged that they are having some significant problems.  Despite my fondness for Disqus, we will be uninstalling it from ImpactWatch this week and go back to Wordpress comments, with Backtype for tweetbacks (see below). 

I’ll probably loop back on Disqus in a few months and see if they’ve gotten their act together.  At this point, I simply can’t recommend the service.

Backtype

Last week, we gave Backtype Connect a try here on The Bivings Report.  The installation of the plugin went smoothly and tweetbacks started showing up pretty much immediately.  While the service definitely misses some tweets (probably due to people using some obscure URL shortening services), it seems to capture around 90% of relevant tweets.  It is definitely the best and most consistent of the tweetback services I have looked at and would be the one I would recommend at this point.

Note that I did not look at Tweetbacks by Yoast or Intense Debate, which is a service similar to Disqus that includes tweetback functionality.  If you have used these plugins, please post about your experience in the comments sections.  Please post if you think there is another service I should look at. 

Anyone that has done a lot of work in Drupal knows what a complete pain it is to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.  The change was dramatic, and many vital Drupal 5 modules still haven’t been upgraded to work in Drupal 6.  For many sites, going from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 isn’t so much an upgrade as a rebuild. 

Given this, it is sort of amusing that Drupal’s flagship website, www.drupal.org, is down today for maintenance as they upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 a full year after the release of Drupal 6.  I guess it really is as hard of an upgrade as it seems.

A few weeks ago we unveiled our favorite WordPress plugins. Drupal is another popular CMS platform we utilize here at Bivings. Here's a list of favorite modules we've compiled for it as well. And as always, feel free to signup and contribute to our wiki. (more…)

Almost all the sites we build at The Bivings Group these days use Content Management Systems (we usually use Drupal or Wordpress).  However, we do occasionally build old fashioned static sites when we know a site isn’t going to be updated that often and/or it is design heavy and we’ll be charged with managing it.  SEOMoz has a great chart up showing the decision tree people should use in deciding whether they need a CMS or not.  The chart is embedded below and I think it pretty much nails the questions people should be asking.

Many of our readers are well aware that we use WordPress as the CMS platform for a number of our clientele. We thus thought it would be fun to compile a list of our favorite WordPress plugins. (more…)

The Bivings Report is built in Wordpress, which comes with a robust commenting system out of the box. Due to this, I’ve very rarely looked at third party commenting systems like Haloscan. I haven’t really had a comment problem so there was no need to experiment with these third party tools.

But I recently set up a personal blog on Tumblr, which does not have commenting built in due to its reliance on reblogging instead (which is cool). I wanted people to be able to comment on my blog so I spent the ten minutes it takes to integrate Tumblr with the third-party tool Disqus. (Check out Fred Wilson (A VC) or Dave Winer’s blog for good examples of the tool in action).

Here is a quick breakdown of what I see as the pros and cons of Disqus after playing with it for a few months: (more…)

Version 6 of the open source Content Management System, Drupal, was released last week. We are really excited about this release, as we specialize in Drupal and have been playing with the beta releases of this version for many months now. Version 6 represents a significant step forward for Drupal. You can see a breakdown of all the new features here.

Since The Bivings Group builds a lot of websites that feature multiple languages, we are particularly excited by advances in Drupal’s language support. In previous versions of Drupal, to run websites in multiple languages you pretty much had to hack into the Drupal code and make it work using duct tape. It wasn’t pretty. Drupal 6 is the first release to natively handle multiple languages. The new release allows for:

• On the fly creation of multiple versions of the site in different language, including custom URLs.
• The ability for site visitors to set language preferences themselves, so they can control what language the site is in when visiting.
• Support for both left to right and right to left languages out of the box.
• Most importantly, the ability to manage pieces of content in multiple languages.

This last point is particularly important. Below is a quick breakdown of how this works with screenshots taking from a video demo by birdmanx35.

(more…)