67 Bricks Blog

Early days - big decisions

It is exciting to be here now. Inigo and I have been discussing setting up a business for many months. We came up with an idea that utilised our skills, had revenue potential and most importantly we were both very excited about.

“Deriving value from existing information using the Semantic Web”

This ties together Inigo’s strengths in software development, my experience in running high performance teams and our joint interest in how people, information and technology come together. We believe that in certain industry sectors the key success factor is, and will become more so, the ability of a company to derive value from the knowledge its staff has access to. We want to help companies understand how to do this.

We decided that if we were planning to do this for others then we should also do this for ourselves. We are going to practice what we preach. We also plan to document this process as we go so that others can gain as much as possible from our journey.

One area we are looking into developing is a community of interest for colleagues and family and friends who are keen to support our new venture. Communities of practice and communities of interest are solutions we will be discussing with clients to support knowledge sharing.

I’ve set the 67 Bricks website up using WordPress as a content management system. Previously, I’ve used either simple static HTML pages, or a traditional, full-featured CMS. I decided to use WordPress here because it is easy to use, and has an ecology of templates written for it making site design much simpler. It also describes itself as a “Semantic Publishing Platform”, and for a knowledge-management company such as our own, semantic publishing is important.

Setting up WordPress requires very little technical knowledge: my ISP, Heart Internet allows you to do it with a few clicks in their script library, but even without that, it’s still simple. The changes that I’ve made to make it work as a CMS are:

• Installing the Navigo plugin: which makes it easy to create a menu
• Installing Search Everything: so pages can be searched as well as posts
• Installing WP Last Posts: to put the text of the last few posts on the home page

Then, I created the bulk of the site using WordPress “pages”, and the news items as “posts”. I set the front page to be a static page under the Options | Reading menu.

To create a design for the site, I looked through the library of templates on the WordPress site, downloaded four or five that looked interesting, and tried them out locally. Having found a template with a good layout, clean HTML code, and a reasonable license, I then customized it to remove the sections I didn’t like, and to change the graphics - a much simpler process than building a web site design from scratch.

That’s really all there is to it.

So, what did I learn?

Setting up a website with WordPress is very quick. Installation of WordPress took a few minutes, installing plugins took maybe quarter of an hour, choosing and customizing a theme about an hour, and the rest of the time was spent creating content.

The WordPress way of separating content from presentation using PHP functions works well. This is more powerful than the pure CSS approach of CSS Zen Garden, since it allows different templates to display different content. An alternative would be to use XQuery: which would probably be more versatile, but the PHP developer community hasn’t had a wide take-up of XQuery and seems generally sceptical of XML.

(thanks to twenty3design for help with choosing WordPress plugins)

Sam and I both feel that a company should be as open as possible - with its employees, with its clients, and with potential clients - which is everyone else! One of the advantages of working with a small company is that we’re able to enter into a proper dialogue with our customers, to benefit us and them. We’d also like to help out any other small companies by sharing our experiences, and there are plenty of friends and former colleagues that are interested in following our progress.

So, we’ll be using this blog to talk about our thoughts on the Semantic Web, knowledge managment and team performance, as well as some of the issues in running a small consultancy, and some technical advice on managing our websites, managing communication, and our software development.

67 Bricks is a consultancy and software development company that focusses on delivering value to companies from their existing information  using the Semantic Web; which Sam Herbert and myself, Inigo Surguy, have set up.

Sam and I have both had experience as consultants before, so we’re familiar with setting up a company, handling accounts, and so on. We’ve also both worked a lot with the Semantic Web, knowledge management and with helping teams be highly effective. I’m also very experienced with software development. However, setting up in business together and selling software products as well as consultancy is new to both of us, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty to learn!

So, we’re looking forward to having a great time building a successful company. The next few years are going to be very exciting.