WaratahWeb Blog

Breaking News - Adobe buys Business Catalyst
Sunday, September 06, 2009

Well, not exactly ... as you may be aware, Bloomkit has always been WaratahWeb's branding for the Business Catalyst solution that we develop websites on, but our headline is not far from the truth. On August 29th, Adobe acquired Business Catalyst!!

For more than 25 years, Adobe has revolutionised the way the world engages with ideas and information. They are a BIG player in the web industry with products like Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash and Illustrator to name a few. Business Catalyst will complement their existing tools and services for the web and strengthen their software as a service (SaaS) offering.

So what does it mean for WaratahWeb and our customers you might ask?

For our customers, we don't anticipate any interruptions to the service. The system will continue to run at full steam, business as usual. The entire management team at Business Catalyst (BC) will remain intact and continue to manage and grow the system with the support of the wider Adobe organisation.

For WaratahWeb, we've made the decision to transition from the Bloomkit brand, instead we'll call it what it is ... Business Catalyst. It makes more sense to stick with this brand, and with Adobe's backing, it is sure to become more well-known in the marketplace in the very near future. WaratahWeb will be known as an Adobe Business Catalyst Partner.

The only change you will see in the coming weeks is the "rebranding" of the website administration console. The Bloomkit system will operate exactly as before, but workflow notifications, the admin console and the login screen will include the WaratahWeb/Business Catalyst branding.

So as far as we're concerned ... the best just got better! As for the future, Adobe will continue to deliver improvements, new features, and more for the BC platform. We know one thing is for sure, there are a lot of exciting initiatives in the pipeline - we'll keep you posted on those!

If you have any questions, please be sure to contact us.

Consider the SaaS Delivery Model
Friday, April 17, 2009

There are three types of people in the new technological world, those who know, those who don’t and those who pretent to know. And if you pretend, the easiest way of being caught out is to use an acronym incorrectly, for instance, recently I was asked by a manager, what the 'earl' of the server is (URL). Now U-R-L is one of the those abbreviations that is not pronounced as a word, but as three distinct letters: U - R - L.

So that you don’t make that mistake with the relatively new Software as a Service (SaaS), I can tell you it is pronounced as ‘sass’, not spelt out like S - A - A - S. And you’re going to hear more and more about it in the near future.

The idea of SaaS (and the reason you are going to hear more and more about it) is that you don’t buy a license for your software – instead, you pay when you need it. You also don’t need to install it on a computer or download updates for it, the software is hosted on a remote server and all that is taken care of. You simply access it through the Internet and pay a monthly or yearly subscription to use it. As the internet speeds up and becomes more efficient and reliable, Software as a Service becomes a more viable option for a larger number of applications. In fact, there is virtually no task you do on your computer that could not be done through remotely hosted software.

SaaS has been used now for a long time by niche providers like the makers of Client Relationship Management (CRM) software,  Salesforce and Sugar CRM.  And probably the largest player in the SaaS market is Google, with their highly effective web statistics software, Google Analytics, their web mail and most recently, their free online document editor and spreadsheet. This is a wonderful, easy to use browser based set of tools that could really be seen as a direct challenge to Microsoft’s domination in this arena.

Website management software; the Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to update your website through a browser interface, is of course a form of SaaS and CMS’s have existed in many different forms for a number of years now. Traditionally, these have been a simple interface with what is called a WYSIWYG editor (pronounced wis-ee-wig) which stands for ‘What You See Is What You Get’. The WYSIWYG looks like a document editing interface and it writes the HTML code for the web page as you create it.

The concept of Software as a Service has recently been embraced by web hosting company Business Catalyst (the creators of our Bloomkit solution) and taken to a new level, where it now forms a complete small business management system online. Business Catalyst have taken the website content management system and combined it with a client relationship management system, a shopping cart and ordering system and a website statistics system like Google analytics.

This means a small business owner can login to one interface and check who has been to their website, new orders for their product or service, communicate with their database of clients and update their blog and website.

The beauty of combining this into one system is that it makes it easy to use and ensures that even technologically challenged people, the people who don’t know and who may have become completely frustrated when they had to log into several different systems, will now perform all the tasks necessary for their business to succeed in today’s technological environment.

And the pretenders? They will just continue to amuse us with their pronounciation of techno acronyms.


Mike Barker
Internet Business Consultant
Read Mike's profile

Sitemaps for Usability and Visibility
Friday, January 02, 2009

I'm often asked about sitemaps and why/when you would include them on a website, so here's an explanation...

There are two types of sitemaps that you can incorporate on your website:

1. HTML sitemap - Basically a page on your site displaying your website categories and each page as a hyperlink (excluding those contained in a secure zone). This type of sitemap provides users with an alternative way to navigate your site and can help them find the information they need quickly.
2. XML sitemap - This is a way for you to give the search engines information about your site. It ensures the search engines know about every page on your site; particularly useful for websites with dynamic content such as Bloomkit. An XML Sitemap will also serve the purpose of providing the search engines with additional information such as how often your pages are updated, the date each page was last modified and the relative importance of pages on your site.

Bloomkit customers can easily create both types of sitemaps in the admin area.

TO SETUP A HTML SITEMAP IN BLOOMKIT:

Firstly create a new page for your sitemap, then you can either:

a) Enter your sitemap content manually on the page, or
b) Use the Sitemap module:  Modules > Sitemap and then insert the module on the page. The Sitemap Module allows you to organise your pages by dragging & dropping them into a hierarchy. When the Sitemap is inserted on the page using the module, you can customise it further by deleting any pages you don't want to have appear in the list (such as pages you have excluded from search results or those in a secure zone).

Note: When you add new pages to your website in future, don't forget to include them on your sitemap page manually, or reinsert the sitemap via the module.

TO GENERATE AN XML SITEMAP IN BLOOMKIT:

Go to Admin > Google/Yahoo/Live Optimisation and click the "Enable Optimization" button. The Sitemap will be generated automatically and appended to your site. You can check the XML sitemap by typing "/sitemap.xml" after your domain name in your browser address bar.

Be sure to contact us if you need any assistance. Happy sitemap creating!