I’ve been a big fan of Xero, the online accounting system, for quite some time.  Since I first blogged about it almost two years ago, the service has come on in leaps and bounds, and an increasing number of Irish accountancy practices have adopted Xero and are recommending it to clients.  One of the great differences between Xero and ‘off the shelf in a box’ software like Sage is the immediate roll out of new features when they become available.  Not only can you access your accounts anywhere, anytime (you need internet access of course), but you’ll never have to install any software updates ever again.  The latest update from Xero – their Invoice Branding Tool – is rather cool.The new update allows you to apply multiple, pretty much unlimited, layouts and logos to invoices and statements.  If you’re a multi-product company with various brands under one company name, this feature will make loads of sense for you, so you can maintain brand integrity on invoices and statements whilst providing the correct payment details each time.

You can even specify different payment terms per invoice or statement layout, and on statements you can play around with the font sizes and content of the demand text, to give extra emphasis to the getting money part of running your business!  Check out the video here.

Other features in this latest release include a Fixed Assets Import tool, Bank Reconciliation comments (so you can remind yourself what certain purchases were for exactly), and a new setting for Bank Rules to help you recognise the full amount for certain transactions quickly.

Finally, after a long beta period and 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, WordPress 3.0 has arrived.  As a WordPress user on this blog and other projects, i’m excited.  This version of WordPress really is a huge step away from it being simply ‘blogging software’ – it is now a CMS in its own right.  Here’s some of the cool new features i’m excited about.

1. WordPress 3.0 IS WordPress MU
   
   With this release of WordPress, you can run a single blog from one install – or heaps.  This feature has been coming for some time, and is basically just an integration of WordPress MU into WordPress Core.  Exciting times ahead for community based blogs.
2. Custom Post Types
   
   Previously, if you weren’t a WordPress developer and wanted some extra custom fields added to your posts, it was a slightly messy task unless you used plugins like flutter or others.   Now WordPress has custom post types built in – you can, with the click of a mouse, create multiple post types, for products, property website listings – or anything really.
3. New Theme – Thelonious
   
   Bye bye Kubrick Theme.  The new Thelonious theme that ships with WordPress is a much cleaner affair, more customisable, and really shows off the new features of WordPress.  It should make for a great starting point to any business website, blog, or online store front.
4. New, Powerful Menu Builder
   
   This is super exciting.  A new ‘drag and drop’ menu builder gives you more power than ever before when generating your menus – you can mix and match external links, category links, posts or pages, and in whatever order you like to make the perfect menu.  It creates dropdowns automatically too, for a neat, powerful site navigation.
5. Customisable Headers Per Post
   
   You can change your site header image easily, by just choosing from some packaged with the WordPress install, or you can choose your own.  You can also set the header site-wide, or can have a different site header image  per post.

Why not check out the great video WordPress have released, so you can get a better idea of what this new release will bring for you.  Oh, and don’t forget to drop me a comment below with your thoughts!

I bought my copy of the Diythemes Thesis Theme almost a year ago – in July 2009 – and immediately forgot about it.  I’m a clever boy.  It’s only now, with the summer providing some more free time than I expected, that i’ve gotten up off my rear end and decided to push forward with some WordPress based projects – and of course i’ll be using Thesis on them all.

But first things first – what is the Thesis Theme anyway?  And, at $87 for the single use option and $164 for the developer license, why should you buy it?

I’ve bought my fair share of WordPress themes over the years, and i’ve even (ugh!) shelled out loadsamoney for custom built ones.  Some were good, some were not so good, but all of them had one thing in common – they had to be tweaked constantly to improve SEO performance, and they all required heaps of plugins to allow me easily customise title tags, meta tags, header tags – the lot.  After a while you get used to it, but installing heaps of plugins when you don’t really need to is a huge waste of time.  The Thesis Theme eliminates that workload – and so much more.

Here’s some cool reasons why you should check it out, organised into lovely little headings.

Easy to install

One of the first things that struck me after I downloaded the Thesis Theme was just how easy it was to install.  Recently I had a harrowing experience with a theme I bought on Themeforest, which ended in massive tears.  I wasted almost a day trying to get it working.  I sent emails over and back to the developer (who had ‘bug tested’ this thing and put it live for sale), but to no avail.  Yes I had the most recent version of WordPress installed.  Yes I followed the installation steps (i’ve been doing this interweb thing for over a decade, so duh).  And Yes, I did chmod that particular folder to 777 just like the developer asked.  But after all this, the darned thing didn’t work.

My Thesis Theme experience?  Download.  Unzip.  Upload.  Click ‘Activate’ in the ‘Manage Themes’ part of my blog.  Et voila, it was done.  Easy peasy.  Installation done in seconds.

Out of the box readability

When I clicked ‘refresh’ in my browser after installing the theme on this blog, I noticed the way the theme looked ‘just right’ out of the box.  The default font Thesis Theme ships with – Georgia – is super easy to read, and the default font size the developers have chosen is just right.  The layout, whilst 3 columns and not 2 which i’d prefer, still works well and is a good, clean starting point for most bloggers and developers.

The out of the box colour scheme is a mixture of blues, greys, and a background of white – think New York Times and you’re on the right track.  It looks just like a good online (or offline) newspaper.  Easy to read, uncluttered, and without any ‘Web 2.0′ bells and whistles.  Why complicate things when you don’t need to, eh?

Of course you can customise the theme using an easy to use point-and-click interface in the WordPress admin area.  You can even customise the site-wide font with one click by selecting your favourite from a drop down.  And you can – with a few clicks once more – change the number of columns from 3 columns to 2 or 1 column, and change the site background colour and various other elements using a simple palette selection tool – no css coding is required.  Check out the video below for an idea of how it works.

If you do like to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, you can dig in and play with the layout, styling of elements, and add in things like tweetmeme buttons using the built-in custom file editor.  Simply chmod three files in your Thesis Theme folder to ’666′, and you can edit custom.css, layout.css, and custom_functions.php files via your WordPress admin area.  The last file – custom_functions.php – is the place where you can add custom php code to utilise the themes’ great ‘hooks’ based system to play with the order of site elements and such.  Websites like Thesishooks.com provide a handy reference, so you can roll up your sleeves and get moving elements around in a jiffy.

Fantastic community participation

So let’s say you want to do exactly what I said above, and roll up your sleeves to get customising your Thesis Theme.  But let’s also say you’re possibly a total novice, and the thought of hooks, functions, and echos has you scratching your head in dismay.  Never fear.  On top of some great video and article tutorials, you’ll also get access to the Diythemes community for a lifetime.  It’s a vibrant place frequented by Diythemes staff, enthusiastic developers, and users of the theme who will most likely have encountered whatever issue you’re experiencing, solved it, and posted their solution to the forums.

On top of the php / css type help, you’ll also find links to great articles on how to set up your Thesis theme in the most search engine friendly way possible (it’s very SEO friendly out of the box, but tweaks can be made on a site by site basis to optimise it), how to write great content, how to promote your blog, and how to use analytics and statistics to improve and refine the content on your blog.

All in all the community access is well worth the $87 personal plan price alone – you’ll learn so much more from it than just Thesis-related tips.

Search Engine Optimisation Benefits

Matt Cutts uses Thesis Theme.  Isn’t that reason enough for anyone to buy it?  Matt Cutts – for those not in the know – is the head of Google‘s webspam team, and the guy every SEO in every corner of the planet would love to have a pint with.  He knows what makes pages rank highly in Google, the holy grail of free organic traffic.  So if he’s using it, it says a lot about just how good Thesis Theme is.

If you’re the biggest sceptic in the world and you don’t even trust Matt Cutts when it comes to your SEO advice requirements, all you need to do is search the web for anything to do with ‘Thesis Theme Reviews‘ or similar, and you’ll see stories from loads of users with real life proof of just how well Thesis has worked for them.  No wonder the community around Thesis is so active and vibrant.  Everyone who uses the theme feels like they have to give something back, or feel they must spread the word about it.  How cool is that?

Generous license

$164 buys you the developer licence, which will allow you to install the theme on as many sites you own as you like.  You can even (I think!) install it as a theme on WordPress MU if you want to set up a multi-user blogging community.  Your money also gets you access to a lifetime of updates – as well as a lifetime of access to video and article tutorials, community forums, and super quick support.

Think about it like this – if you buy it once, you’ll never have to buy another theme again.  Cha-ching!

Pricing

Thesis Theme – as I said at the top of this post – costs $87 for a single use licence, and $164 for a developer licence.  You can, at any time, upgrade your personal licence to a developer licence for the difference between the cost of both – so there’s no huge risk in buying it for the ‘one use’ price, giving it a whirl, and if and when you like it, upgrading to the full whack package.

Diythemes give you a 30 day money back guarantee too, so there isn’t really any risk in giving it a bash – and you should.

Forget all the other wishey washey bling bling superficial but seo unfriendly themes.  Give Thesis Theme a whirl and you’ll see the difference in your blog traffic and user engagement in weeks.

I have a huge confession to make. I’ve not had business cards since 2006. Any self-respecting networker or business owner would think i’m mad by not having had any, but i’ve held off for one very good reason (actually two). I paid through the nose for a few hundred cards in 2003 when I first set up one of my businesses… which I then promptly rebranded four months later, with a new logo and the lot. My business cards were bin-bound.  I then ordered some more when we moved into our first offices, complete with our new office phone number, address, the lot. 8 months later we ran out of space and had to move offices – and we couldn’t keep our old office phone number as we were on an internal exchange. Business cards once again rendered useless. I stopped bothering after that.

Until now.

Over the last year, i’ve been busy getting Compare.ie off the ground, and the site is now well into ‘Version 2′ of its development. Now that basic traffic levels are good, and based on user feedback, i’m building out new channels and working on various tools to allow Compare.ie users to compare almost anything. To facilitate this myriad of comparison tools I need partners. To meet these partners I need to network. To network – i’ve realised yet again – I need business cards. Problem is, I also need more time.

So, without time to get in touch with a designer to make my cards look good, without the time to waddle down to a printers to approve drafts and pick the cards up when they get printed, and without the urge to pay through the nose for business cards yet again, I decided to give MOO a shot.

MOO is a great little business i’ve heard a lot of over the years. They’re a 100% internet based business focussed on one thing – printing cards, and more specifically, business cards. And based on most of the reviews i’ve heard they do it particularly well.

You don’t need to hire an expensive designer if you’d like to get your business cards printed by MOO (although you can if you like). They have literally hundreds of business card templates you can choose from to create your cards quickly and easily, or you can use their ‘Text-o-matic‘ tool to easily create business cards with tons of different slogans of your choosing on one side of them. You can even upload photographs from your desktop or flickr to print on the flip side of your cards – a different photo for every single card should you so wish. A great idea for photographers and other creative types.

With ten minutes free time available to me one Thursday morning to get the things designed and ordered, I went for the ‘Text-o-matic’ option. I simply bashed out some slogans off the top of my head, uploaded my logo, filled in my contact details using one of the pre-defined layout templates for the contact side, et voila. The system was super easy to use, and brought me through the process step by step. It’s idiot proof, and believe me, I can be a total idiot the majority of the time.

MOO had a special offer on – 200 business cards for £39.99 + £5 postage which wasn’t so bad for such a hassle free process, and certainly far less than i’ve paid in the past.

Just a few days later my cards arrived in a lovely, shiny, happy, well presented box. Not only did I receive my business cards, I also received a handy card holder, complete with Filofax ‘Mine’ and ‘Theirs’ separators I you can keep my cards and those of my new found contacts separate. Here’s a photo.

The card quality was excellent, as was the colour quality.  Bold colours, with a great matte finish to really set them off.  However, there was one teeny-tiny problem.  Look closely at the contact details side of the card – doesn’t it look a little bit off centre?

I have to say, I was slightly disappointed by this – one tiny little problem like this unfortunately took the shine off my experience with MOO.  After half a days deliberation about whether it was something to highlight for them or not, I sent MOO a quick email:

Hey,

I just have to say I love the service.  The website is friendly, easy to use, and the delivery was prompt!

However – and it’s a big however because I used your ‘Text – o – Matic’ business card creation tool  - each and every one of my cards was off centre on the contact details side.

Do you think you could run off a few copies at your end and see what I mean?  I’d hate to go to the hassle of sending them back, but it did slightly ruin a really good experience with your company up until the cards arrived.

I’m just letting you know because if it was generated from one of your templates, heaps more of your customers might have had the same results?

Anyway, i’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Kind regards and thanks,

Hugh

I wasn’t expecting anything really.  I didn’t ask for anything in particular, simply I asked if they could run off a few copies at their end to see if they could replicate the problem I had.  Perhaps other people were getting the same results as me?  I did, after all, use their ‘self service’ online card designer software – maybe there was an issue with it I should highlight for them.  In my head, the very most I was expecting was a discount off my next order with them – should I even bother to order from them again – and nothing more.

Shortly afterwards my response from MOO arrived, and I have to say I was more than pleasantly surprised!  Here goes:

Dear Hugh,

Thank you for getting in touch with the MOO Team.

That’s great  - thank you very much for your lovely feedback – it is much appreciated.

However, we are sorry to hear that your order did not come out as expected and that your information on the back of the cards was off centred. We have a 2mm leaway in the cutting process, so we cannot gurantee that your cards will print out as accurately as a result.

We would be happy to reprint your cards again for you free of charge. Its ok, there is no need to return the old cards back to us. Thank you.

Please feel free to contact us again if you have further questions.

Best Regards,

Mrs [Name deleted to keep the lovely woman's privacy intact!]

Service Agent – MOO

Wow!  How about that for a ‘no quibble’ guarantee?  ”We’re sorry.  Don’t send the cards back, they’re yours to keep – and we’ll reprint and send you out some more free of charge”.  Pretty much immediately, I even got a message from the MOO website saying my cards were being reprinted and would be with me very shortly.

MOO just showed how much respect they have for their customers and how they would do anything to keep them happy.  Whilst other, more ‘old fashioned’ printing businesses would whinge and moan about proofs and sign offs and printing costs and the sort – for the sake of some card and ink – MOO were more than happy to say “hey, we made a mistake, but it’s our job to rectify it and let’s show you why you should stay a customer of ours.”

And I will stay a customer of theirs.  I’ll be ordering from MOO again.  Now – instead of spreading the word about where not to get business cards from – i’m now telling my friends, colleagues, family, and you via this blog post, just how great my experience with MOO was.

A fantastic example of how great customer service won’t just keep existing customers happy, but can also help generate even more business via a priceless marketing channel – word of mouth.  Well done MOO!

The internet has been paying my bills for over a decade, and in that time i’ve seen email marketing tools come and go.  From open source to paid, there have been massive developments in the space over the past few years, and now the choices are greater than ever.  Recently, however, I took the step to migrate all my email marketing lists (double opt in of course!) to Mad Mimi, a fantastically easy web app for managing email lists.  Here’s why.

First of all, Mad Mimi is insanely simple to use.  After migrating my lists over to Mad Mimi (also stupidly simple), I had one of our website managers trained in about ten minutes.  It really is that simple to use.  Every single button is where it should be, the workflow is perfect, and if you mess up at any point along the way, it’s easy to go back a step and make changes.

Mad Mimi comes with a variety of templates by default which are simple to customise.  You simply point and click to select new colours, upload a header for your emails (or multiple headers), the app resizes the headers to fit, and you’re good to go.  It’s possible to customise and save as many templates as you wish – total presentation flexibility.

Throughout the app, two main tabs have pride of place – ‘Promotions’ and ‘Audience’.  The ‘Promotions’ tab allows you to create, edit, and most importantly clone emails, and also view extensive stats on each mailing (more about that later).  The ‘Audience’ tab allows you to view subscriber figures, and if your ego needs a boost, it shows you at a glance how many new subscribers you’ve gained since the last time you’ve logged in.

When viewing your list of promotions (or mailings), you’ll see a list of links for each mailing: Scheduling, Send, Edit, Clone, View, Stats, and Delete.

Send, edit, and view are pretty much self explanatory.  You use these to send, edit, or view the mailing.

Scheduling allows you to schedule the mailing for any point in the future – super handy for getting future mailings ready when you have time, and letting the Mad Mimi app take care of the delivery when the time comes.

The clone feature allows you to clone previous mailings – this saves soooo much time, it’s hard to get across unless you start to use the app regularly.  It’s such a simple feature that most other mailing list management solutions don’t have, but it’s incredibly important.

Now we get to the stats link.  Click on this, and you’ll get a lovely pie chart showing you at a glance how that mailing went.  You’ll see open rates, click tracking stats (you can opt to switch this off, but why would you?), the number of times the mail was forwarded on (hello viral happiness!), the number of bounces (bounced email addresses are removed automatically), and critically the number of members who unsubscribed from your list after opening this particular mailing.  See?  Everything for the stat hungry marketeer.

As well as all of that, you can opt to switch on extra tools – some paid and some free.  The include a ‘drip feed’ feature, to automatically send subscribers a set of pre defined emails at specific time increments after signing up with you.  A multi-user feature allows you to add extra users to mange particular lists, or a particular set of lists.  An RSS to email feature automatically creates mailshots at specific time intervals, parsed from RSS feeds – really handy for news websites, or if you’ve a regularly updated special offers blog.

Obviously you can create web forms to handle signups, and once again creating a web form is super simple.  If the built in stats aren’t enough, a simple integration with Google Analytics is possible.  Mad Mimi also have a Mailer Api if you’d like the system to handle registration emails for an app of your choosing, or even ‘lost password’ emails.

There you have it!  Mad Mimi is the best email marketing tool i’ve ever seen.  The best part?  You can try it out for yourself for free -  click here to give it a go.

Whether you’re looking to sell ebooks, music, or software, there are two ways to make money from selling digital products online – the easy way, and the hard way.  The hard way entails spending thousands on set up costs for your ecommerce website with long set up times and legwork.  The easy way simply involves finding ‘point and click’ service providers who specialise in payment processing and digital fulfilment, signing up, adding your products, and promoting them!  Here’s a few handy sites which can help you sell your digital downloads and products online.

1. Paypal

One of the first things you need when selling anything online – digital or otherwise – is a merchant account.  There are many providers on the market such as Worldpay, Realex, and 2Checkout, but the fastest and easiest way to start accepting payments online is via Paypal.  There is no set up fee to create an account with Paypal, but there are fees incurred on a sale-by-sale basis, usually an incremental percentage of the sale value itself.  Paypal also provide access to an API, so many ecommerce applications such as E-Junkie and Shopify (below) integrate with Paypal to provide instant payment notifications – perfect for making digital products accessible immediately after payment.

2. E-Junkie

E-Junkie is one of the best digital product fulfilment solutions on the web today, not just for the price (from a mere $5 USD a month for 10 products with no transaction fees) – the feature list is comprehensive and above and beyond what many small merchants will need.  Registration is free, and E-Junkie give you a 1 week free trial to check out the service and see for yourself how easy it is to use.  Oh, and it integrates with Paypal’s IPN notifications service meaning you can hook up your Paypal and E-Junkie accounts in a few clicks.  Seriously cool.

3. Shopify / Fetch

Shopify is one of the easiest ways to get a fully featured shopping cart style website up and running in a few minutes.  They provide you with a fantastically easy to use interface, and a massive range of out-of-the-box templates which you can use to get your shop up and running quickly.  Search engine optimisation is built in, so no need to pay for an ‘expert’ to help you get the most from your pages.

Like Paypal, Shopify has an API which developers can utilise to build handy addons to extend the Shopify service.  One of these addons is Fetch.  ‘Seamless digital delivery’ is the mantra of Fetch, and they deliver just that.  Their plans start from $10 USD per month for up to 15 items – so slightly more than E-Junkie – but you get the added value of being able to attach your digital products to a fully search engine friendly Shopify website, complete with Paypal integration so you can process payments.  If you have big ambitions and want to future proof your digital sales, try this combination out for size.

4. Indiestore

I first found out about Indiestore in 2007 when it was launching, and I even got a great tour of their offices in East London (thank you Tejas) when they were busily working on newer versions of the product. Indiestore is a division of 7Digital.com – one of the biggest music download providers on the internet – and allows bands and musicians to sell their music online, and distribute it through the 7Digital network.   The service also allows musicians to use social tools such as Bebo to promote their work via music player ‘widgets’ which can be embedded into social networks or on basically any website or blog.  Indiestore have starter packages starting from free (with you earning 70% of the value of your sales), to a pro version (£35 / $50 USD per year) which allows you keep 80% of the revenue, and also makes your download sales chart eligible.

5. Clickbank

Clickbank has been around for as long as I can remember, and there are thousands of E-Books out there which can tell you how to make gazillions from Clickbank.  The best way to make money from Clickbank is to create your own digital products and sell them yourself, whilst leveraging the 100,000+ affiliates Clickbank have registered with them.  If you’re looking for a ‘one handy invoice’ solutions, Clickbank issue weekly payments but have fairly strict guidelines you must adhere to before being allowed to sell products on the network.  Clickbank also has an international, multi-currency checkout which is handy for localisation. In terms of pricing, there is a $49.95 USD once off activiation charge when you upload your first product, and a $2.50 charge per cheque they issue to you.

Setting up a business is one of the most exciting things you’ll ever do, especially when it’s your first time.  However the one thing that usually puts a dampener on all the fun of going it alone is the boring process of preparing and filing accounts.  I’ve previously blogged about fantastic web based accounting software which makes the processes involved in generating invoices and recording payments outwards slightly more interesting.  However, what if you don’t even want to do that?  What if you just want to throw heaps of paper at someone once a month and say ‘do that’!  Then you’ll need Mazuma Money.

I first heard about Mazuma Money last year when I was watching the series ‘The Last Millionaire’ on the BBC.  One of the younger entrepreneurs on the show, Lucy Cohen, had set up a fantastic business which allowed business owners to completely offload their bookkeeping and accountancy functions for a small monthly fee.

One of the more interesting and fun parts of the service was the purple envelopes you receive, into which you stuff your invoices, receipts, and other boring stuff.  You post this once a month to Mazuma, they do all the boring stuff like filing VAT returns, creating management accounts, and payroll, and that’s it!  At the end of they year they even file your year end accounts – happy days!

Mazuma Money have packages starting from a mere £16 a month for sole traders, and £55 per month for Limited Companies, excluding VAT.  The measure of any business is having plenty of testimonials from happy customers, and Mazuma have just that.

Hopefully something like this will arrive in Ireland soon – accounts really are a pain in the rear end!

Running a business should be fun.  Most of the time it is fun.  Meeting new people, learning new things every day, seeing first hand the fruits of your labour – all benefits of running your own business.  However, there is one big downside.  Boring, tear inducing accounting.  Every time I go to start up my version of Sage to do any boring accounts related stuff, I usually double click the icon, run off to make a coffee, and by the time I get back, the bloody thing has only barely finished starting up.  Zzzzzz.  As well as all this the interface is quite dated, the computer it’s installed on freezes up constantly, and if I ever want to take my work home with me I can’t.  Thankfully several SAAS (software as a service) solutions have popped up, with the best looking one (in my humble opinion) being Xero.   Only one problem – unless you’re in New Zealand, the UK, or Australia, you won’t be able to use it.  Until 22nd December 2008 that is!

I’ve been looking around for about a year or so for a solution to allow us to move our accounting systems online.  Within the last six months we’ve successfully moved our email and document archiving to Google Apps, we’ve moved to Salesforce CRM, and we’ve seen numerous productivity benefits. The only broken link in the SAAS chain has been accounting, and now Xero seem to have catered to our needs!

Xero is cool – just check out the feature list here.  Everything is made easy, from invoicing to reporting.  In certain territories you can automatically link to your bank account(s) to reconcile automagically, making this supremely boring task that little bit easier.  Hopefullly Irish banks will play ball and we can have this handy feature sooner rather than later.

Migrating is – according to Xero – easy, and i’ll update this blog when I go through the process myself.

Anyhoo, I got a lovely email from them today notifying me that two key features are due to launch on 22nd December: a global version, and integration with Paypal to help businesses accept payments online.

The Global version will allow you to determine tax rates for countries you do business in, as well as handle multiple currencies.  The Paypal integration will make it easy to take payments over the phone by creating Paypal requests which are automatically linked to invoices – from personal experience this will come in quite handy for accepting small payments from customers of the few hundred quid variety.

Another pain in the arse Xero have created a solution for is the annoying admin overhead that goes with filing expense claims.  I bloody well hate this, and Xero have a feature to make this super easy.  If you’ve a field sales team, or any staff who need to be reimbursed for expenses, you’ll love this.  Check it out here.

Feature wise, what extras would I like to see?  Salesforce and Gmail / Google Apps integration really would be the cherry on top.  They have a developer API which several other vendors are using, so hopefully we’ll see some progress here soon too.

What do you think?  Do you think in five years time most businesses will have moved their accounting to a SAAS solution?

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.

The Onion

You have to love The Onion.  The worlds most famous satirical newspaper moved their website to Drupal ages ago, and it’s a fantastic implementation of Drupal.  They have all sorts of cool features, from videos to podcasts to a cool Google Maps feature called Our Dumb World.  You should check it out.

Fast Company

Back in 2001 when the dot com bomb exploded, Fast Company was ridiculed for being one of the main media outlets which had been fuelling the crazy venture capital fire.  Since then they’ve calmed down a bit, thought twice before penning silly articles, and moved their site to Drupal.  It’s quite a simple implementation, but it works well.

MTV.co.uk

Music Television.  Hmmmm, not anymore.  MTV might as well stand for ‘My teen videos’ these days, but to hell with it, I still watch some of their channels now and again.   About two years ago they engaged Lullabot to help them redevelop MTV.co.uk, to incorporate new community features and more interactive stuff – and it’s worked.  Their MTV Flux thingy is a great example of how to create sophisticated community features with Drupal.

Universal Music

These fancy Dans have gone to town with this one.  The site is massive, and even individual artist websites are not mostly powered by Drupal.  They’ve music videos, news, artist profiles, and loads of other stuff.  They’ve clearly realised selling records won’t cut it anymore to make money.  Three ad formats per page is how they now make money from music.

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!

Writemaps’ mission statement is as simple as their site is to use:

WriteMaps was created to provide a fast, fun, and easy way to plan your websites. WriteMaps’ aim is to enable any user, not just web professionals, with the tools they need to get their ideas mapped out in a visually pleasing environment.

Signing up is a breeze, with the registration form consisting of username, password, and email address – that’s it.  You don’t even need to verify your email address, and the site logs you in as soon as you’ve signed up so you can start building sitemaps instantly.

You’d need to be a thicko to not figure out how to use Writemaps from the get-go.  You’re presented with a blank sitemap with just one top level index page icon.  On this you’ll find a little green icon with a ‘+’ sign on it – just click on this to add the next item / level to the site navigation.  Easy eh?

It’s simple to rename items in your sitemap, and each item is drag-and-droppable, so you can easily reshape your visual sitemap on the fly.  There are two view options, an outline view and a tree structured map, both great options whether your site is one level or ten levels deep.

Another great feature is the ability to change the ‘Page Info’ for each sitemap level.  You can add notes, a url for each level (more about this later), and the ajax powered interface makes editing both of these a breeze.

There is a clear and easy to use menu bar at the top of the application, and by clicking the ‘File’ button, you’re presented with several options, including several export functions – you can export as XML here, which’ll create a sitemap for your site, and if you’ve added values for the url using the ‘Page Info’ tab at each sitemap level, your sitemap will be crawlable by Google, Yahoo, et al.  Handy eh?

It’s also possible to share sitemaps with colleagues, and you can control whether those you share with can only view the sitemap, or make changes to it too.  Great for collaboration, and for sharing information with clients.