Social Structure

Social forums, news, mapping... this site has it all.

The site uses bbPress and ties together a number of custom functions. We’ll be following up with a full write-up in due course for our Portfolio, but for now, why not take a look at what’s on offer? We didn’t do the full design this time – we followed the Capita supplied designer’s lead, completed the WP and bbPress specific elements, then got coding.

Permission Levels

One key part of the job was to create a properly hierarchical file store and workflow.  Different types of users can see different areas of the websites, and these had to be easy to manage for relatively non-technical users.  Each user can be assigned to a group on subscription, and then simple radio buttons in the forums and content administration allow for easy setting of permissions.  For a site that often deals in confidential matters, this was important functionality.

And Welcome

We hope that this marks the start of other projects for NHS related bodies. Along with our work for the Greenwich Healthy Living Service we now have a number of clients in the sector and look forward to expanding in this exciting area in the future, no doubt aided by our cost-effective and reliable use of WordPress as a platform.

Informa T&M Home Page

Informa Telecoms & Media are a large and growing division within Informa, the publishing and events giant.  Since the launch of the interconnect/it developed Telecoms.com, they have increasingly used WordPress to deliver business critical websites.

Since then the organisation has launched Telecoms.com Webinars – a service that allows sponsors to provide live webinars delivered through an embedded player which is managed from the WordPress back-end.  This site has to be able to deliver videos to up to 500 concurrent users (think of the bandwidth requirements) and provides a live discussion forum allowing for dynamic question and answer sessions.

Going Corporate

But the most exciting news is that for April 2011 – yes, just a few days ago Informa T&M launched their corporate site on a WordPress platform using interconnect/it‘s most sophisticated developments yet.  Our combination of taxonomy listers (yes I know, a techie term, but stick with me), sections with their own widgets management, aggregation tools and sophisticated grid based flexible content means that their marketing department was able to build a highly featured cross-linking site for a budget way below anything that corporates would be used to.

And this brings me on to something unique about interconnect/it and our relationship with clients – we supply all our source code under the GPL license.  The consequence is that the intellectual property is shared between us.  Sometimes we release some in the form of plugins, and often we get to reuse our code, entirely legally and openly, to help make future projects even better.

The advantages are numerous – it means that our clients are like a collective – each one who spends money on us makes the life of all other clients potentially that little bit better – we can reuse code where necessary.  That cuts costs and increases capabilities.  This is different to the games industry, for example, where each publisher demands exclusive access to all assets developed.  That means that 3D models of famous landmarks have been painstakingly created over and over again.  Imagine the costs and waste in human ingenuity that’s involved?

Clients also benefit from a lack of lock-in.  Of course, if they’re paying for all assets, that’s not a problem – but most don’t want to and, as a consequence, get completely locked in to their vendors.  That’s not good – it doesn’t keep suppliers terribly sharp and can result in gouging – especially in the case of takeovers and mergers.  By sharing our source code with clients, they can be assured of the ability to gain long-term support for their code, even if we changed.

We’ll carry out a full review of the Informa T&M site, what we built, and how, in the near future.  But in the meantime, why not  head over and see what’s there?

The NATS home page in all its glory.

Our erstwhile contractor, Stephen Sandison, who carries out our functions at NATS, has been busily involved in the launch of their lovely new WordPress site.

The site was designed in-house, with Stephen building the plugins and making sure that all the clever bits worked well together.  A great example of how the WordPress platform can work with complex corporate sites.  It’s amazing how many people still view it as simply another blogging platform when, these days, it’s proven to be a powerful content management system capable of delivering a wide range of sites.

A lot of the motivation at NATS had been to ensure that it was possible to develop a site with the capability to scale up to meet peak demands during crises such as happened in 2010 during the Icelandic volcano incident.  With WordPress NATS can be sure that the broad support and depth of knowledge behind the platform means that the site can be well cared for going into the future.

Officially not an interconnect/it project, as it was managed in-house with an embedded contractor, but I’d like to make sure that Steve gets the credit he deserves – hence the mention on here.  Well done Steve and the NATS team – especially Matt.

Telecoms.com is considered to be the telecoms industry’s leading news, opinion and analysis website. It is produced by the Telecoms & Media group within Informa plc – a major operator in the information business with over 8000 staff in over 40 countries.

Thanks to Interconnect IT’s significant WordPress skills and extensions, coupled with the system’s ease of use, it was quickly decided that this open source software would be an excellent fit for the requirements that Informa Telecoms & Media had listed. These ranged from support for multiple contributors with varying access rights, tagging, category templates, sections and so on.

The added functionality that Interconnect IT brings to WordPress, including a multitude of news specific widgets, quick and easy section page creation and so on helped create a highly flexible website that can easily grow without a need to repeatedly involve the developers. This strength helps to give Telecoms.com an advantage in being able to quickly respond to changes in the business environment they work with.

Matt Horsford, Head of New Media at Informa Telecoms & Media said “Interconnect IT were one of the few people in the UK able to deliver WordPress functionality to the level we required. The project ran smoothly and we were impressed at the way Interconnect IT understood and executed our requirements with very little need to make further changes.”

The visual design of the site was carried out by Coast Digital.

Media Orientated WordPress

Interconnect IT believe that WordPress’s underlying structure, coupled with the correct theme and our own custom plugin set makes for a platform that is excellent for media outlets such as Informa. David Coveney, Director of Interconnect IT said “The semantic and chronological structure of WordPress content was originally designed for blogging, but it also perfectly matches the needs of media organisations who have a lot of news to present. The wide range of ways in which media can be presented, coupled with the multitude of RSS feeds available makes for an immersive, high performing news website.”

WordPress is currently used by many large media groups for blogging, with some starting to exploit its power for news websites. The largest growth sector for WordPress is likely to be in news websites for both small and large organisations. Early adopters such as the New York Times, CNN and our own clients at Politics & The City (run by June Sarpong MBE) have shown the real benefits in using this technology. Telecoms.com have shown great foresight in adopting WordPress for their own site and should gain another advantage over their competition.

Willows Mallorca are a Mallorca based property management company who came to us over two years ago for a budget site.  They’d taken over the company but the web presence they inherited wasn’t suitable.  The site we created then was basic, but carefully built and with good search engine performance – in fact, the results were remarkable.  Willows Mallorca have since grown to a team of seven staff, with a showroom office, and high-flying clients.  It’s been estimated that as much as 70% of their work came through their website.

Following that kind of performance, it’s no surprise that they wanted to stay with us!  Our belief in high quality along with great value mean we very rarely lose a client.

Well, with the Olympics diverting the world’s attention, Russia stepped up hostilities. The attacks on the city of Gori aren’t really that far from where our clients are in the capital, Tbilisi. And it’s weird. We’ve worried about clients going bust (happened twice already in the company’s history) and we’ve worried about clients that are undergoing upheavals. But we’ve never worried about them being in danger of military actions. And that’s an altogether different feeling.

So here at Interconnect IT we’re wishing all the best to our Georgian friends, and following the blog of their British team leader Helene Ryding. It’s an interesting insight into what it is to be in a country that’s under attack.