OkCool? » beta http://www.ok-cool.com OkCool is the blog for the development team of Simpleweb. This blog is all about sharing the experiences, lessons and stories we have from working daily in the web industry. Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:29:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 SWiM Wordpress, Vanilla, Shopify, testing needed… http://www.ok-cool.com/posts/read/186-swim-wordpress-vanilla-shopify-testing-needed/ http://www.ok-cool.com/posts/read/186-swim-wordpress-vanilla-shopify-testing-needed/#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:34:49 +0000 Mark http://ok-cool.com/posts/read/186-swim-wordpress-vanilla-shopify-testing-needed/

We’re ready to let the first few people test out Simple Web Management – or SWiM for short. Beta is a bit of a fib really, alpha is a more apt description at this stage. Although we do use it everyday with our clients, who so far love it.

We’re very keen for you to have a play with SWiM, give us some feedback and tell us what applications you’d like integrated. Hopefully you will find it useful to you in your working life.

Visit the SWiM page to register your interest

Any problems or questions, please feel free to comment here or message me on twitter.com/redeye

It’s still very early days for us, we expect a few bugs, UI changes, CSS breakages; we expect quite a few things to change over the next few months (the activity stream is going to improve lots), but we think that it’s time to get some feedback and get SWiM to be as useful as possible. We know we still have a long way to go, but with your help SWiM will be so cool.

As SWiM is built a bit like Facebook, we allow 3rd party applications to be built for SWiM (SWiMware) meaning that it can be extended beyond our imagination (hopefully). We’d really like to know what apps would be useful to you – Google Analytics? Mailchimp? Blogger? etc…

Currently SWiM has plugins for:

  • Wordpress
  • Vanilla Forum
  • Shopify
  • Contact Forms (any type)
  • Technorati

Plugins can work on different levels – Reseller (you), Client or website. You can have multiple instances of each, allowing you to manage lots of Wordpress blogs, vanilla forums, shops, etc all in one place, and also allow your clients easy access…

]]> http://www.ok-cool.com/posts/read/186-swim-wordpress-vanilla-shopify-testing-needed/feed/ 3 Getting ready for SWiM beta http://www.ok-cool.com/posts/read/147-getting-ready-for-swim-beta/ http://www.ok-cool.com/posts/read/147-getting-ready-for-swim-beta/#comments Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:51:00 +0000 Mark http://ok-cool.com/posts/read/147-getting-ready-for-swim-beta/

Over the last few months we’ve been beavering away trying to solve a few client management problems.

We now have quite a few clients, each one has ftp details, email addresses, at least one website, a blog, a forum, contact forms, multiple domains, etc… The problem has become not only how to store and access all of this information, and make it available to clients efficiently, but also how do we make it easy for us and the client to monitor all of this web based information?

So we came up with Simple Web Management aka SWiM.

SWiM allows us to monitor all of our clients in one central place, it also allows them to login and get access to the information that we have stored on them, keep it up to date, and get an “activity stream” of everything that is going on with their online presence.

Tom has built in a rocking API so that SWiM is basically modular; applications can be added on a “reseller” level, client level and website level. As an example we are just finishing a Wordpress application that  allows you to monitor multiple blogs in different locations all in one place, along with contact form responses, Shopify sales, etc…

We ported over our current clients about two weeks ago and have noticed that the frequency of client interaction has gone up significantly. We now know which websites get updated the most, which ones sell the most products, which get the most contact form responses etc and best of all the clients get all of this too…

We are now getting ready to open up to other people to test so that we can improve and extend SWiM – head over to the beta sign up page to sign up, get a few screenshots and get involved.

]]> http://www.ok-cool.com/posts/read/147-getting-ready-for-swim-beta/feed/ 1