Feature

posted 4 May 2004 in Volume 1 Issue 1

Opportunity knocks

Opportunity Wales is one of the most successful e-commerce projects in Europe, writes Paul Squires, head of web services at Opportunity Wales. The programme’s weblog was launched in May 2003. It was designed to provide a channel through which the business community in Wales could publish and receive the latest information on technology and business life, with a distinct focus on how such developments would impact on the Welsh business community.

Opportunity Wales is a programme that delivers one-to-one e-commerce advice and support to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Welsh valleys. Our services include a free, on-site consultancy and advanced support for those SMEs wishing to work with us to take their online activities even further. We are one of the most successful e-commerce projects in Europe, having served over 5,000 businesses and contributed £83.9m and over 1,100 new jobs to the Welsh economy since the project’s inception in early 2002.

Project history

Part of the work of the web-services team at Opportunity Wales was to monitor the latest innovations, discussions and news on the web. For our public user base, a value-added service called the ‘e-commerce round-up’ was produced on the website. This is a weekly publication reviewing developments on the internet over the past seven days, as well as the general arena of e-commerce. Information is delivered in a manner pertinent to our principal audience of SMEs in Wales – through the use of non-technical language and explanatory text. Further, we have an obligation to inform our internal advisory network of new developments to ensure they provide our SME client base with the most up-to-date advice. Information for our advisory network is managed and disseminated through our work with the University of Wales, Cardiff.

Weblogs were gaining coverage in the internet press, so it was only natural that we would cover what weblogs are and do as part of our existing information service. We started to report on the increasing use of weblogs in the e-commerce round-up in mid-2002. Towards the end of the same year, we had begun to examine the use of weblogs in business environments. Authors and journalists were starting to theorise that the weblog medium could provide a certain type of functionality that businesses with an existing website might find useful, potentially offering competitive advantage when deployed in context.

Increasingly, weblogs have adopted a more complex model of content management, with multiple authors providing content to a single interface. This suggests that weblogs could, in theory, be seen as a simple website service. Personally, I believe business weblogs should be seen as an additional piece of functionality to a main website, a viewpoint I shall reiterate later on in this article when I discuss what weblogs are and do.

Returning to the aims of the Opportunity Wales website, we intend to provide sophisticated technologies and deliver them in a way that our web visitors – many of whom have relatively little knowledge of, or experience in, the use of internet technologies – will find easy to use. In addition, we aim to be one of the first business-support organisations to use weblog technology and, as part of the developmental process, we plan to inform our advisers, users and clients of the potential business applications of weblogs.

We wanted the Opportunity Wales website to mean something to people. Therefore, it had to be clear and easy to use, appropriate for all skill levels, and written in an interesting, informative and engaging way that would encourage people to use it. People should, for example, want to become registered members of our site and use our advisory services. We cannot be a complacent service that makes too many assumptions on the part of our diverse, multi-skilled, multi-linguistic user community. The ideology of the Opportunity Wales weblog was to hold a mirror up to the business community in Wales, giving members the chance to record ideas and thoughts in their own words by providing them with a basic content-management tool.

As well as ongoing work to define the scope of the Opportunity Wales weblog, additional communication exercises were being developed to further the idea that weblogs were a valid concept for us to explore. First, I had written a broad but fairly technical article on how weblogs could be used in business, which was published in December 2002, on the IT Wales website. Second, as part of a series of meetings with our advisory network to communicate future site developments, I suggested that a weblog could be a useful inclusion. After a brief explanation of its potential functionality, the advisers were broadly in favour of it, both as authors and readers.

The first part of the design process was to consider whether we could install an off-the-shelf package or whether it was preferable to develop such a package from scratch. To discover more about the technology, I had experimented running my own weblog (using B2, Postnuke and Mambo). We decided almost immediately to build a package from scratch to counter user-centric issues surrounding integration, and look and feel.

Developing a user interface

Stage one of developing a comprehensive, easy-to-understand user interface was to refine the process for adding an entry to the weblog. We already had some idea of what the output would look like, so it was more important to think about how users could write down their thoughts without the interface or administrative process being complex or time-consuming. Our storyboard for the ‘add entry’ function was as follows:

User logs in through the ‘existing members’ area screen;
User clicks ‘add weblog entry’ on the members’ page navigation;
User has a very limited number of fields in which to submit content;
User clicks ‘submit’;
Content goes to administration area and user is notified of content-administration queue.

We decided not to give users the authority to upload straight to the live weblog. Instead, entries are placed in a web-based approval queue, and if the user has written something inappropriate that cannot be uploaded, we tell them and, hopefully, agree a more suitable entry. We do not intend to produce guidelines on what can and cannot be posted because it is very rare that entries are rejected.

The ‘add weblog entry’ screen was the key enabler to ensuring the weblog was successful because we knew people would not use a complex interface. We thought long and hard about it, even debating what level of user flexibility would be permissible, for example:

Should we allow for HTML/Javascript to be included in entries? No, we wanted to ensure the output pages were consistent between those users who know how to use HTML and those who don’t. We didn’t want to use external referencing, where one might use the IMG tag to reference an external file, as this creates additional security issues in terms of traffic permitted through the firewall;
Should the user be given Word-style buttons – as is used in Blogger – to allow for the insertion of text styles and other HTML functionality? No, we didn’t want to provide additional buttons and thus extend the time taken to produce a weblog entry. This was equally important for our advisers, who would know how to use the buttons, but would want to upload content quickly, without any fuss;
Should we allow for image uploading? Not immediately, although it could certainly prove useful if we were running an event and wanted to add a weblog entry, complete with photos, telling everyone how it went. Were this to happen, it would work via an ‘upload’ function to the database rather than by extending the HTML provision;
How are user details stored? We like the way some weblog software provides author details in the footnote of weblog entries. Ideally, we would like to add user details automatically from when the user logs on to post information. The issue of automating the publication of user details became increasingly important because we felt the weblog should be a community style of publication, removing as many obstacles as possible for the user by minimising available content fields. However, although author details are hard wired, users can change their name when registering – and, at this point, we concluded that the terms and conditions of site use would require consultation with our lawyers.

The final ‘add weblog entry’ screen

Having by now become very familiar with weblogs, I had some idea of how the user interface should appear. Most weblogs are single author, with one notable exception: the Guardian’s Onlineblog. Onlineblog was a very useful example of how a multi-author weblog interface could be presented simply and clearly. In fact, Onlineblog was also very interesting to me in terms of its philosophy. Although there is an implicit desire to persuade users to add entries, the worst-case scenario was at least comfortable. If public users did not add entries to the weblog and it subsequently appeared that the Opportunity Wales web team and advisers were the only authors, then at least we would have a service similar to that provided through Onlineblog – a one-way digest of what’s happening.

Onlineblog entries contain the following fields in order:

Single first header, comprising of date;
Entry heading;
Entry text;
Author;
Time stamp;
Comments link, opening up a new window for users to submit entry-specific comments;
Permalink – ie, an exclusive URL of this entry.

This commonly accepted format became an inspiration to our adopted format, which was finalised as:

Entry heading;
Entry text;
Full name of author, including title and middle initial;
Time and date stamp;
Permalink.

Permalinks were an optional development, although it seemed fundamental that they were included. We needed to ensure that authors of other weblogs could link to us and sufficiently manage any ‘track-back’ functionality. We also wanted our RSS output to link seamlessly to the HTML output. Permalink was a feature available on most other popular weblogs and, as such, we felt it was important that users unfamiliar with the technology should get used to the feature being there.

Although the weblog is an integral part of our engine, it required some sort of separate search functionality. Our search engine caters for the concurrent use of search collections, where sub-directories of sites can be collected in their own silo. Although the main Opportunity Wales collection indexes weblog entries, another collection was set up within our search engine to specifically index the weblog directory, and thus aid those searching it. It is now possible for users to perform basic and advanced searches of the weblog as an exclusive body of content.

The look and feel of the Opportunity Wales site was significantly redesigned in the autumn of 2003. The homepage and sub-homepages now feature the most recent weblog headlines, with permalinks and date stamp.

Workflow

Adding the weblog to the site required modifications to the global terms and conditions of use. The original terms and conditions were co-written with legal partners, Morgan Cole. The firm had advised us that the weblog should be included as a specific reference in relation to other areas where information would be provided outside of Opportunity Wales:

‘Opportunity Wales may establish general practices and limits concerning the use of all or part of the Opportunity Wales website, including (without limitation) the maximum number of days that discussion forum postings, weblog postings, event information, literature or other uploaded content will be retained on the site. Users agree that Opportunity Wales has no responsibility or liability for the deletion or failure to store any such material. Users further acknowledge that Opportunity Wales reserves the right to change these general practices and limits at any time, in its sole discretion, with or without notice to you.’

The liability of weblog content by the author was already covered under paragraph five. Here, there is an implicit legal requirement for author details to be used in the weblog output (note the second point): ‘5. All material that is explicitly stated not to be owned by Opportunity Wales is governed by the terms and conditions of the relevant owner and/or author. Opportunity Wales is not responsible for the content and service provided by any entity other than Opportunity Wales. These sections include:

Business information;
Content that contains a clear reference to its authorship by an author or company external to Opportunity Wales.’

The user is also reminded of this on two additional occasions. First, in the weblog main output screen, the weblog sub-menu includes a link to the terms and conditions: ‘Weblog postings are personal opinions, for which the author is wholly responsible – see terms and conditions.’

Even though there is a consistent terms and conditions link on the site, the above wording and link was required in order to ensure there was a contextual reminder as to where the weblog postings exist from a legal perspective. Second, the ‘add weblog entry’ screen states: ‘When you registered with the Opportunity Wales website, you had agreed to abide by its terms and conditions. Please ensure that you remain familiar with them, as submitting your weblog entry is bound by them.’

This ensures that when users hit submit, they are implicitly and instinctively aware of the action taken by submitting their view.

We decided that our weblog-approval-queue administration tools required the following simple functionality:

Accept weblog entry – Publish entry to the live weblog;
Reject weblog entry – This simply marks the entry as ‘rejected’ in the database, but does not delete it.
We must then communicate with the author about why the entry was rejected;
Move rejected entry back to accepted;
Delete rejected entry.

RSS

I had started to use aggregators at the earlier points of experimenting with weblogs. PostNuke and some other weblog/content-management hybrid systems allow for the integration of external RSS feeds into the interface, and I started to use aggregation tools to help find stories to compile the e-commerce round-up. In order to deliver the perception that the Opportunity Wales weblog was fully functional, and to encourage additional users to visit it, it was natural to provide an RSS outbound feed.

As well as the RSS output provided by our weblog, I had long considered the idea of a live inbound newsfeed system. Having embraced RSS through aggregation software, it was obvious that this could be done easily and cheaply by developing a web-based aggregator for the site. The product would provide a number of RSS feeds through our website, and the benefits would include:

Ensuring users could access a number of news sources, updated every day;
The ability to add or subtract an RSS-compliant feed at any time;
Excellent overall return on investment: RSS feeds are often provided free of charge by publishers, and little transformation of individual feed data is required.

Three high-quality feeds are currently available: the first, Resource Discovery Network, is a freely available, daily newsfeed; the second, IT Wales, provides a monthly update of Welsh IT news from the University of Wales; finally, I had contracted out provision of a pertinent, UK-focused business and technology feed to ICP Europe. Some transformation of ICP’s feed data was required to make it an RSS format feed that our system could recognise. We have requested permission from other relevant news sources that already provide RSS feeds for public use, so we aim to increase this facility in order to push the concept of news aggregation – in this case, through the use of a simple web interface – to our users.

Our development partners offered ideas throughout the project’s development, of which one of the more interesting was to make the system into a ‘multi-weblog engine’. This would allow us to host a number of concurrent weblogs from the same system, developed as we saw fit. At the time of writing, there is still just the one main weblog. In future, we may create a separate weblog for our advisers and the public, and even one in different languages, such as Welsh. Welsh-language entries are currently interspersed with English, so setting up a separate Welsh weblog will depend on when volume requires it.

Delivery

One way to link the weblog into existing activities was to replace the e-commerce round-up with a ‘best of the weblog’, a weekly round-up of the best weblog entries. This ensured that users were regularly aware of activities taking place in the weblog, even if they were not directly viewing it. It also provided an impetus to people to get involved in writing for and reading the weblog.

The e-commerce round-up broke issues up into small paragraphs. The following is an example from the 8 July 2002 issue:

‘Online tax returns, returns
Good news for those sending tax returns back to the Inland Revenue – their self-assessment service, SA Online, is now available once again, allowing web users to handle tax online.’

SA Online – Inland Revenue

The replacement service was to adopt a similar format that users would find easy to read and use, but referred to weblog activities such as in the following example from an issue of ‘best of the weblog’ one year later, 7 July 2003:

‘Are you secure?
According to one of our weblog authors this week – a small business – keeping your anti-virus software up to date is critical in order to ensure you have the facilities to detect new viruses and prevent possible infection of your systems. Conversely, Microsoft’s recent acquisition of an anti-virus company does not appear to be a move appreciated as much as ensuring that software in itself is secure.’

Anti-virus protection for small businesses – weblog

The links under each paragraph in the new service take users back to the original article in the weblog. Even if the user is just talking about something available elsewhere on the web, we take the user back to the original weblog article rather than directly to the quoted link. This not only ensures continual exposure to the weblog, but also limits the possibility of us misrepresenting the views of the author by removing his or her original words from the user’s view.

One distinct advantage for my team is that ‘best of the weblog’ is much easier to compile. The e-commerce round-up took about a day to produce and involved intense ‘sweeping’ of web news and information sources. With ‘best of the weblog’, we simply run through what’s been written in the weblog in the past seven days. The weblog also provides a way to push news to our users more frequently. As a result, the user gets the best of both worlds.

A more general feature of the site – and, indeed, the service in general – is that we try to ensure that speakers of either English or Welsh have a full and holistic service delivered to them in the language of their choice. This is where the ‘best of the weblog’ comes into its own. We tell our users that every week we pick the best postings and compile them into one article, and deliver the article in both languages. Therefore, we translate the content of the best weblog postings into both languages, whether in English, Welsh or both. Y Gorau o’r Gwelóg thus becomes a high-value service for our Welsh speakers, and is probably the only regular e-commerce news bulletin delivered in the language.

One interesting by-product of the service is that it is also used by advisers to communicate developments to their colleagues. As our advisers are trained and strategically managed through our partnership with the University of Wales, it has also been extensively used by staff at the centre to disseminate developments to advisers. Much of this information is publicly available anyway, so it does not matter who reads the news and in what context it was recorded.

Launch

The weblog was launched to the public during the ‘Business Week in Wales’ exhibition in May 2003. Within 14 days it had achieved 200 posts, and by February 2004, it had exceeded 700 posts. The weblog is now the second most-visited area on the site. Perpetual PR activity ensures that it is referred to in various Opportunity Wales activities, including our quarterly paper and online customer publication, WOWe.

Wales is a country where awareness of what weblogs can do for business is significant. A continual programme of internet training and awareness sessions is delivered by the Welsh Development Agency (WDA) through its mobile ‘technology trailer’, visiting towns and villages throughout the year. These two or three-day residencies frequently feature a free, two-hour session on weblogs, delivered by a WDA representative or myself. This is a great way to get businesses to understand the technology in a direct way. Similar sessions are also delivered by Opportunity Wales advisers across the country, as well as by my web team. In all cases, the content covers an introduction and overview as to how weblogs can be of benefit, followed by a hands-on workshop that covers starting a weblog (with some HTML authoring thrown in). It covers the most popular weblog packages, as well as the Opportunity Wales weblog itself.

The weblog received external recognition in summer 2003 by becoming a finalist in the ‘Most Innovative Use of Technology’ category at the UK Government Forum web awards. Although we didn’t win, we aim to continue the technological development of the service and, hopefully, continue to receive external recognition. My view is that the best external recognition we can have is for people across Wales to view and contribute to the weblog.

Future

My view is that the weblog system we have delivered, built around a multi-author environment, is the tip of the iceberg regarding the future of web-enabled community development and collaboration. Although some technologies may not be wholly applicable to the Opportunity Wales site, we are very much interested in the development of services such as wikis (which are similar to a weblog, except that users are able to edit previous posts by different authors, as well as contribute themselves), activity-matching services, and tools that take advantage of peer to peer, wi-fi and models of connectivity. Similarly, we have plans to crystallise the networks and resources available within and between businesses by virtue of developing further tools that build upon the people-centric strategy that we have taken through the weblog and elsewhere.

Looking more specifically at the weblog, we aim to further refine the system through tools that are becoming increasingly commonplace. A comments field in each posting, as seen in the earlier example of Onlineblog, is something that we are looking to introduce. This will hopefully spur more passionate views and counterpoints based on ad hoc transactional conversations, and will further cover the gap left by a discussion forum system, which we closed upon launching the weblog due to lack of take-up. Another feature will be image uploads. This will be particularly useful when we are out and about and wish to capture what’s been happening, as well as for authors that wish to just tell others about their own experience through a visual medium.

Overall, we are very pleased that both the culture of weblogs and the development of a weblog system has already made an impression on the technological awareness within Welsh businesses. We hope the weblog continues to be a living entity that reflects e-commerce activity relevant to our core audience and our core audience’s activities in e-commerce.

Paul Squires is head of web services at Opportunity Wales. He can be contacted at paul.squires@opportunitywales.co.uk.