Whilst many in the tech industry have heard of “Silicon Roundabout”, the internet focused area of London around Old Street roundabout in Shoreditch, there are other parts of Britain where internet is spoken.
One of these is near 2020Media’s south London offices, and has been nicknamed “Silicon Junction”, due to it’s proximity to Clapham Junction railway station.
http://siliconjunction.co.uk/ is a community of digital businesses, bricks and mortar ones, freelancers and start uppers who live or work around the famous station.
We’ll be meeting up with the digital hipsters tonight for one of their semi-regular meetups. Meantime if you’d like to know more, this video introduces the concept.
Is there a local tech hub near you? Let us know (in the comments) and we’ll help spread the word.
Lots of great London based CiviCRM stuff coming up so thought we’d give you a heads up so you can get the dates in your diaries now.
CiviCRM is the market leading open source CRM application for the Third Sector. Robust and reliable, our hosting plans fully support both small and large CiviCRM deployments.
1. Meetups!
First off, the dates for the next two meetups are confirmed:
Both will be @ Compucorp in Shoreditch, London and start at 6pm.
Agenda
The meetups are designed for those looking to find out more about CiviCRM or considering it for their organisation. There is always a mix of experience levels represented and are a great forum for asking your questions or meeting current users, implementors or developers who can help with your project.
We’ll be following the usual format with an introduction to CiviCRM and one of the main CiviCRM modules followed by some other follow up sessions and whats new in the Civi world.
2. CiviCON!
Then the big one… the annual 2 day CiviCRM European conference held in London. Get your tickets now for earlybird discounts:
CiviCON London: Thurs 25th and Fri 26th Sept – Register here
CiviCon London 2013
The full CiviCON website will be up shortly with details of sessions and speakers.
There will also be London based training before CiviCON:
London user and administrator training: Tuesday 23rd and Wed 24th Sept – Register here
And the unmissable after conference sprint in the beautiful Derbyshire village of Edale:
Edale After CiviCON sprint: September 28th to October 4th – Register here
The first talk was by Graham Armfield of Coolfields, who is known as Mr Accessibility. But this month he almost managed to talk about something completely different! Accessibility came in sideways with an aside about captchas vs logic puzzles.
Graham Armfield
Graham’s talk was about handling user generated content – this means input to the website via a form or upload box – without requiring a login. Grahame gave us a run down of the steps needed to take input from a form on a wordpress website, process it, allow an admin to moderate it and then publish the data on a page. He used a gig guide as an example.
Another useful tip was the the popular Ninjaforms plugin offers a logic puzzle anti-spam test, which is apparently much better from an accessibility point of view.
Using WordPress to find clients
The next talk was from Rob Cubbon and entitled “Using WordPress to find clients”. In practice this talk was about optimising your site or online presence to attract and then convert vistors into clients. Rob talked about carefully choosing keywords with buying intent, creating specificity in your pages, not generallity. Example being writing detailed tutorials on how to do something – a subject hopefully you are an expert and authoritative on. Creating a call to action on every page. Adding key phrases to page titles and headlines. He also recommended creating in-depth profiles on social media sites for freelancers as it’s likely prosopective clients will research these when selecting somone.
Duncan Stuart gave us all a wake up call with his fascinating talk on WordPress Security. Duncan’s company works mostly for government departments or agencies and they spend a lot of time working on security. Duncan began with telling us that the well-known Jetpack plugin, has been suffering from a security weakness that allowed spammers to publish their own content on websites. He then went through a set of examples of types of attack and some well known plugins that have (in the past) had vulnerabilities that have allowed these attacks.
Duncan then gave some advice on improving WordPress security. The first point of call being the Hardening WordPress Codex page. He recommended choosing plugins carefully as these can be a very weak part of the WordPress ecosystem. Look for high numbers of downloads, recent updates and an active support forum.
He wrapped up with tips on writing a good plugin or theme so that our own work does not become part of the problem. His company runs a free resource at https://security.dxw.com/
After a break, the final talk was from Adam Onishi. The company he works for recently built the new iteration of washing powder brand Persil. It was a great insight into a complicated build that spanned 20 countries with many competing requests from different parts of the Persil marketing departments.
Adam’s mission was to keep the site management under as tight a control as possible so that updating and changes could be made as simple and straightforward as possible. To this end, the entire global prescence of 35 websites runs from a single WordPress multisite installation.The second vital ingredient was Parent/Child themes. This has allowed extensive localisation of design and content.
Adam went through some code examples, the tools he and his team used to build the site, the most useful plugins that were used, and how he now is working alone on building out the individual country sites.
If there’s one thing that doesn’t change about the internet, it’s that it is constantly changing. As a web host founded 15 years ago, we’ve seen a lot of technologies develop and unfold across the ‘net, especially in the last couple of years. The hand-coded HTML website from the early days of the web are now a rarity, and developers, designers and end-users have embraced the CMS [Content Management System].
We’ve refocused our website and promote and inform our customers that 2020Media provides quality CMS hosting, with a special emphasis on open source. The open source stable of CMS software have taken a leading role across the web – over 60% of websites 1 now use a CMS of some kind or another. Blogging systems like WordPress have become full blown website development platforms, and specialist developer platforms like Drupal have become user friendly and widely adopted. There are also open source e-commerce and non-profit specialised systems that are equally prominent2.
Original MiniNew MINI
Another reason to refresh a website is linked again to the fast pace of change on the internet. The Mini cars of 2014 still are recognisable progeny of the 1960 originals. However I’d challange anyone to compare a modern website with a 1996 example. So every few years it’s necessary to give a website a fresh look, taking account of modern fashions and fads, whether you like them or not!
With this in mind, and not wantingto end up on “Ancient and Abandoned Website that Still Work” we decided our own website was overdue a fresh look using an up to date CMS and the content needed editing and rewriting.
Like your neighbour the builder who’s own house looks like a explosion in a brick factory, our own build has taken weeksmonthsyears longer than planned! However there comes a moment when one can delay no longer and it’s time to publish (and be damned!).
There’s still a lot of work behind the scenes to update old links, complete certain sections (we do still offer broadband and servers!), and apply the various changes needed to get the best from search engines like Google and Bing.
