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I’ve mentioned a few times over the past while my increasing high regard for Drupal. It has come such a long way over the past couple of years, and you may not know it but you’ve probably stumbled across several Drupal powered sites in your travels. Here are just a few of the higher profile ones for you to check out.
When planning a website, everyone has their own way of figuring out which content should go where. Loads of people use spreadsheets, others use downloadable and installable purpose built tools and - ashamedly - I’ve been using a good old piece of paper and pen for about ten years. After a while though, it can become quite a pain rejigging your site plan time and time again. Today I was once more editing the visual sitemap for Shares.ie to accommodate some new content I signed contracts for today, and pretty much lost the plot because it was becoming such a pain to plan a site with that much content. After a quick search on Google I stumbled across a web based tool called Writemaps, and what a saviour it is!
Unfortunately, more often than not, offline businesses think of having a website as a bit of an ‘extra’ that they don’t really need, but will get round to one day when they’re bothered doing it. The majority of businesses - when they do get their website sorted - put a half arsed effort into it, just displaying their contact information, location, and some blurb they’ve not revised since 1991. Thus, it’s refreshing when businesses do make the effort and treat their website not just as a necessity, but as a powerful marketing tool which they can use to engage current and potential customers, to help make the business better for all. An excellent example is Organicsupermarket.ie, courtesy Ray at Intrigue and Ken Stanley.
Back in the day when I was starting out with my first business, keeping costs down was a bit of a priority, and for that reason we relied heavily on open source and free software to get us going. We used OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, used Modernbill for our billing (it was rubbish, and didn’t suit us at all!), and used SugarCRM to accommodate our CRM requirements. However, with SugarCRM in particular, the cost vs reliability factor was throwing up all sorts of problems, and between Thunderbird clearing my inbox and the newest version of SugarCRM being a dog, something had to be done. Along came Google Apps and Salesforce.com.
A few months ago my flatmate arrived home with one of these, the iRobot Roomba 560. It’s basically a hoover for lazy people, and you can either turn it on by pressing a button whenever you want your gaff cleaned, or you can set a timer on it. Using the timer method the lil fella (that’s what I call the Roomba!) will switch himself on, drive out of his little base station, and bash around the place till it’s nice and clean.