David Seah / Agenceum
Process Journal: Running a Pretend Design Agency

I purchased a license of Unify (tagline: “The Simple Content Editor Anyone Can Use”) earlier this week to test on my staging server. The websites that Agenceum is developing are static HTML based on my simple templates, as I wanted to avoid the complications that even a polished CMS introduces for people who are just getting started with the Internet. However, the great bugaboo of any website deployment is enabling the client to edit their own content. That’s where Unify comes in.

I’d first become aware of Unify a couple of weeks ago thanks to commenter Bill Kracke, who listed a whole slew of simple CMS-like products. Essentially, it’s a web-based program (requires PHP5) that will edit the content in your static website. To tell Unify what block-level areas are editable, you simply apply the unify css class to it. Then, you browse to the unify subdirectory on the website, which contains the web app, which loads the web page in a WYSIWYG-style interface. The block-level elements that have had the unify css class applied to it show what you can edit. You can enter rich text and upload photos, and then publish your changes. You can even click the links and browse your website as you would normally. It is practically perfect for simple websites. The changes are saved back to the files (hence, they need to be writable by the web server).  Very slick. They have also added “unify repeatables”, which will duplicate and repeat any block-level div and its contents. Great for maintaining lists of things, I’d imagine. I haven’t tried this yet.

Some additional notes:

• You need to buy a license of Unify for each domain name. That includes subdomains. As licenses only cost $16, that isn’t too bad, but it does mean that you need a development license for yourself, and a separate license for each of your clients. The web app is customized to your domain, and appears to communicate with Unit Interactive’s server to validate users (I haven’t verified this, though).
• Because of the above, you can’t develop “local” without Internet access.
• Installation is super easy: just upload the unify folder to the website, and add the unify css class to the block-level elements you’d like to be editable.  Make sure that your files are writable by the web server. You will also need to have PHP5 on the server.
• You can’t “nest” editable areas.
• You need a separate install of unify on each website.
• It supports multiple users: the administrator can add other users to a site to allow editing.
• It’s not 100% WYSIWYG, but it’s darned close. Really sweet.
• It requires a modern browser and a fast PC to run it well.
• See the Unify FAQ for more information.

So far, I’m impressed, and have started rolling it out to Agenceum’s clients. It does seem a little slow to start, particularly on the first startup when (I think) it is scanning files for changes. I haven’t profiled it either to see what kind of impact it has on the my server. But these are minor nits; this product vastly simplifies the need for training and content support after-the-fact, which frees me to do other things while giving the client control of the content whenever he/she wants to grab it. Booyah!

This weekend I got a request from Angela about making some changes to her website, and I then realized that when I have multiple clients requests happening at the same time, I’m going to have to track them all! Currently, I am maintaining independent email and Basecamp threads with each of the 3 people I’m talking to, and this has been fine because I am in sales/new business mode. The request to make changes to an existing website threw me for a mini-loop, because there are different expectations for maintenance that I knew I needed to meet. Here’s how it breaks down:

• In the way I do sales/new business, there’s no timeframe to close. I move the process along as quickly as we’re comfortable going, and email seems to be a pretty good way to do this.
• Once the project is active, though, I switch to 37Signal’s online collaboration tool Basecamp to keep all our communications in one place. The client knows this is where I keep everything.
• With maintenance, the client expectation is different: you need to acknowledge the request, give a time estimate, and then meet it within a reasonable time. This is an intermittent request, and it requires a different kind of tracking.

The latter type of tracking is called issue tracking, and I didn’t have a system in place. So I looked around to see what kind of open source solutions were out there, and came across a class of software for support issue ticketing. The specific software I installed is the open source osTicket, which seems attractive and well-supported from the 15-minutes I spent looking around. There are a lot of different systems like this out there, so I’m basically taking a leap of faith based on how nifty the package looks and how clean the design workflow appears from the screenshots.

I installed the software on the agenceum.com website, which is currently sporting a brand new blank home page with the new logo on it. Currently, the help desk link is looking awfully generic, so I’ll figure out how to make my own template for it with the Agenceum/Dave Seah branding. In the meantime, though, I’ll be putting all maintenance requests I get for my projects through the ticket system and get a sense of how it works. This might be an effective way of managing ALL of my tasks and prioritizing them, actually. We shall see.