A belated Happy New Year
Posted on January 10, 2008 by Tim
Filed Under Technology |
So, after a bit of a frantic December we’ve launched the new moneywise website - www.moneywise.co.uk. Technically quite interesting in that it’s allowed us to explore a number of new things without the same legacy restrictions and considerations we have with interactive investor, namely:-
1. Drupal.
The obvious content management system / site framework for a site such as Moneywise. That said, it’s got quite a few quirks and there have been a few challenges to customise in areas. Other options were looked at, but only Drupal seemed to have momentum and an active developer community of any reasonable size.
2. OpenAds.
I introduced a friend to this opensource adserver a few years back and have followed it since. It’s a fantastic product already and having met some of the team, many of whom have experience of working on competing products (DoubleClick etc), they have a very bright future in my opinion.
3. Google Analytics.
For free, I don’t think anything beats it for tracking site usage and key metrics. Interactive Investor uses HBX which is more complex and comes with a price tag. We’ll know whether that price tag is justified having given Google Analytics a good run out.
4. Campaign Commander (by Email Vision).
We’ve looked at a number of outsourced email send / reporting / software companies. Managing deliverability, ISP sender reputation, new SMTP authentication technologies, increased demands on reporting and of course the ongoing overhead of list cleansing is quite a challenge for a small IT group.
Most companies we saw were selling vapourware or run by a bunch of crack heads; which left…..a French company. These chaps claim to send more email, on behalf of their clients, than anyone else in Europe. That of course could be a bad thing. In terms of ISP relationships and being forced to manage those extremely proactively- it’s probably a great thing.
Anyway, we’re giving their service a trial for Moneywise newsletters prior to considering moving interactive investor’s newsletter send requirements on to them.
5. Since this is my geekiest post for a while, I might aswell mention other stuff we’ve used and can recommend:-
PostCode Anywhere - a great suite of web services for address completion and user demographic data.
Blip.TV - OK , we’re already using them for iBall ; but this is a great video publishing platform - now used for the Moneywise videos too.
Crysis - Not project related but it’s often easy to forget just what PCs are capable of when working on websites. It’s all a bit static and text based really, for an obvious reason. The gaming industry is one I admire greatly and this release pushes the boundaries in terms of visuals and gameplay to a completely new level. It’s games like this that stop me from having those ‘what the hell am I working for at this time of…..
<LAUNCHING>>>>>>>>
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