Waveplus Blog

Just finished the redesign of my new website www.waveplus.co.uk, it all started when one of the business link advisors told me that the website looked ok but she couldn't really be sure what I did!

Its a bit sparse at the moment as I need to work a little more on the wording and add a few more pages but its a much cleaner and simpler design which can be used as the basis for any small company website with a few simple changes to the layout and colour palette.

Just had a recent experience of why IT support is often seen in a poor light, I was consolidating my domain registrations and decided to move some from one account to another with the same registrar, should have been simple and was but I failed to read a warning that popped up much to my cost. The site was down for four days until finally we discovered that the domain transfer had wiped the zone records out.

I take a fair amount of the responsibility as I ignored the warning but it just didn't make sense, the registrars IT support staff though made it immersurably worse by being very unhelpful with standard responses that didn't get near helping me solve problem. There online help was also rubbish as it was more promotional than technically useful, I did finally get some help but from another company where the site was actually hosted and within hours everything was back.

To their credit the registrar did apologise following a complaint but is it too little too late? I can't see me leaving the domains with them as I have at least two other registrars who seem much better. I on the other hand kept the user who owned the site fully informed, admitted my part in creating the situation in the first place and will credit him with two weeks of free hosting to overcompensate him for any loss.

I learned some useful stuff as I had not previously even heard of a zone record and it will help going forward as I continue the process of consolidating the domains and the hosting provision to make ongoing management easier. Its only a small part of my business at the moment but there is potential for it to grow, that won't happen if I don't look after the customers I have. The old saying that its easier to keep customers than get new ones is very true.

I spend a great deal of my time supporting complex applications originally built in Lotus Notes R5 & R6 and recently upgraded to R7 or R8. It does mean however that I am very much behind the curve in terms of all the new stuff coming out of IBM such as Lotus Symphony (http://symphony.lotus.com) and quickr to name just two. Its hard to find time to grow new skills or even keep up with new releases such as Notes 8.5 which went gold in January. I'll have to find the time though as every new product is making it easier and easier to sell Lotus/ IBM as a tool to help small & medium sized business to thrive and even grow, when so many are failing.

A common comment I hear is 'I used Notes 10 years ago' or 'I don't like Notes Email, Outlook is better' etc. If that is you though then put your preconceptions aside for a while and take another look because you really need to. The ability to communicate better with your customers and internally within your organisation have never been more important and Lotus/ IBM software is making it so much easier.

In some cases the products work out of the box, other cases require some work on your side but from what I see the results are more than worth the effort.

Thought I would try out the IBM Lotus Domino blog template, after a quick look it seems to have plenty going for it. This is the pure vanilla version, I will explore it more fully in the coming months and make some adjustments and may also add some custom code.

It will be available as a standard feature if you host your site with waveplus Systems Ltd, we have plenty of capacity on the site so get in touch if you want to learn more.

I have two new websites under my control, Career councillor Judith Gerberg (http://www.gerberg.com/) and Andreas Benkwitz (http://www.situaction.de/), a third site is transferring this week. My first steps once I had control of the sites was to install Google Analytics so that I could monitor site activity and report it back to the site owners, I am also looking at the keywords to improve their search engine ranking. All the sites have dedicated email addresses which is included in the management fee. The sites are not all Domino based as static html sites can also be hosted although converting them to Domino is very easy and makes ongoing content management much easier.

The first pass design for my new Lotus Domino family history site (http://www.broxholme.net/) was a bit of a mess, last night though I released an update with much improved navigation and about ten new pages all linked with a plain but functional site for Google and visitors to the site. It's not a very active site but Google Search works well and its fully indexed.

The next stage is to fix the final bugs on a few of the imported pages and tweak the central style sheet to sort out the layout which isn't quite right. The site looks equally good in Firefox 3 and IE7 but probably isn't fully HTML 1.1 compliant yet although I'm getting there.

Its now back to http://www.meteorflight.com/ as that still needs more work on the content as I haven't finished the importing of all the original content yet. I will also tweak its design as a result of the lessons I have learned from the work I have done on http://www.broxholme.net/.

I know that it is a small website but it was still very straightforward to make http://www.waveplus.co.uk html 1.1 compliant. The majority of the code was in subforms so fixing those updated all the pages simultaneously, this only left the page text and a handful of tags. The majority of the issues were solved with a few new lines of css, it hasn't been so easy to put in a sitemap. You would think that it is simple, use a third party tool to generate the site map then import it into the domino database.

No, its not that simple, no matter where I imported the file, Google couldn't find it or if it did fine it, it either had no url's in it or it rejected the format, I've given up on it for the moment as it has taken up too much time already.

The Meteor Flight (http://www.meteorflight.com/) was easier, I'm not making it HTML 1.1 compliant at the moment as the content needs loads of editing but I solved the site map by creating a page on the site with links to the key pages on the site, Google doesn't recognise it but site visitors will which is more important anyway. The site has been indexed fairly well by Google so tends to appear suitable high in searches. The next stage of development for the site is to finish off importing all the static content from the original html site then tweak the css to improve the appearance.

I've completed the move to Lotus Domino now, my family history site http://www.broxholme.net/ is a bit scrappy as the design hasn't worked out that well but I'm happier with http://www.meteorflight.com/, this has about 60% of the content but it looks fairly good including the survivors pages where you click thumbnails to launch a bigger image of the aircraft you see in the museums. I will rework my family history site over the next few weeks to get the navigation sorted out then move across the last of the pages. I ran out of time in the end as my hosting on Haisoft was due for renewal on the 4th January which I didn't want to do. The new sites are both back on google analytics and I'll be setting up some new mailing addresses for the sites using the alias service you get with Lotus Domino. It will be much easier to manage the content for the sites now there on Domino because you just edit the page text in the Notes client then replicate to the host server, the pages have very little html, just a few tags that get picked up by the style sheet. Happy New year to everyone!

Notes & Domino is a fantastic environment for RAD (Rapid Application Development), you can quickly cobble together a form to input some data then construct some views to display it in interesting ways, in a few minutes you can build a simple prototype to prove if your concept will fly or needs much more effort than you thought. This is not a time for rigid version control as its easy to just copy the whole design into a sub folder each time you add something significant, you don't need to spend alot of time creating a version history as your unlikely to want to rollback, and if you do you can just go back to an older version and start again from there.

Once your application/ database is a production application though the stakes are so much higher, you can get away with lax version control but you tend to get hit hard by the consequences. The developers should never get near production application templates and you need some rigour and control over the design and who can change it. The reason for this is simple, if a developer(s) are making 'quick fixes' to applications where you don't have control over the code then it may cost you alot of time to resolve things when (not if!) a quick fix breaks something important. If you can't back out that change to a stable controlled template then where do you start?

Ok, It's broken - now what?
Step One: Baseline - Your not exactly sure why your fix broke the application and maybe it didn't, it was the quick fix three weeks ago but it's only just been noticed, or the users have only just got around to telling the IT Director or calling the Helpdesk. Your baseline is your dirt track back to the highway, it might have to be the broken production database but if your lucky a developer has a copy taken two months ago that hasn't been changed.

Step Two: Fix & Test - Thrash your baseline template and try to determine exactly what broke and what else might be wrong (Regression Testing), prioritise all the changes you need then make these changes in a fresh copy which will be the template for the next version. This then becomes our new baseline, the process is repeated as quickly and as many times as possible until were back on the highway.

Step Three: Don't do it again.

Figuring out how long a given piece of development work in Notes/ Domino has always been something of a black art, various tools and methodologies have been tried but few have been more than passingly accurate. The most serious discrepancies occur when you are working with legacy data or legacy applications which need work, you have to be careful to not change anything you don't understand, or cause knock on effects elsewhere but in a complex application you just don't have time to do that much analysis. You end up having a look, prototyping the idea then if you have as many years of experience as I do estimating the work required with a chunk of contingency added on.

You sometimes win and you sometimes lose, if you doing consecutive bits of work these can cancel one another out. The most important thing though is to keep the project manager informed as soon as you know your estimate is out, and you can't keep going back time and time again with increased estimates, at some point you as a consultant have to bite the bullet and charge for your last agreed estimate, even if it ends up taking you more time which you don't get paid for. This happened just last week with Dept of Health, it only cost me half a day on a five day project which is OK, the client is happy, I enjoyed the work and it got finished.