Q1: Who are you?

I'm a long term blog developer. Built my first website back in 1995, when there were just several thousand sites. Been hosting these types of blogs since 1999, my clients include the UK governments's intranet, many blue chips, many, many small organisations and protest groups, and oddly, the Australian Hari Krshna, all using the same technology.

I run servers in Australia, the UK government and several of my own.

I'm 43, single, with two children. I live and work in Telford, Shropshire, UK, though I'm originally from Aberdare, South Wales.

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Q2: Where can we see examples?

The recently updated list is the best place to start. It's on most, not all school's home page. Including my own. It's a good thing to have, I reckon, and so do many of the schools that have it. It means children can click through to other schools to see what's been happening there.

Teachers too click through, to have a spy on the other schools. It's recently updated so it makes everybody want to be on the top of the list at least in the list, as they know they get extra traffic because of it.

There's also the most read yesterday, and the most read of all time. More competitive fun.

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Q3: Do we get stats?

Referers: those sites that have linked to you and sent you traffic. Google is a good example, you'll see what search strings people are using to find you in Google. Only editors can see this page.

Most read messages: you'll see which pages are the most visited.

Hourly hits: is traffic coming mainly at lunch times or tea time?

Home hourly hits: see hits to the front page.

XML hourly hits: Are subscribers to your feed hitting it at odd times?

Each message, news item has a number of page views, so you can see how many times your new news item has been looked at. Look through your discussion group view at any page to see this number. As an example, see this FAQ's reads in the top section of this page.

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Q4: Initial costs for developing site?

The costs vary depending on the size of you school. £3 per pupil up to a maximum of £990 for the first year. This includes everything! Design, support, training, monitoring, mentoring, the lot!

We've made it a scale because smaller schools haven't so much money, and are probably going to use it less—less machine processing, less bandwidth, less editors for me to coach, less activity for me to monitor.

If you're still unsure there are some example charges on our how much page, along with additional costs and extras.

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Q5: Do you have a manual?

I've a good, detailed 100 page manual. I update it fairly regularly, last update was Wednesday, March 12, 2008.

I also have two sided hand outs for those nervous, newbies. It covers just the posting of a news item, and how it can be edited.

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Q6: Annual maintenance costs.

The second year, and subsequent years are £1 per pupil to a maximum of £200 per year. This still includes all maintenance, support, monitoring and mentoring.

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Q7: The curriculum and BECTA and eLCs

We are an approved retailer so English schools can use their eLC allocation to purchase.

We've a full set of a term's lesson plans for Writing for Different Audiences. You should check out the integrated task for some cracking ideas for getting your pupils to add news, reviews to your website. These ideas can apply to pupils from 7-18.

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Q8: Are we only for English schools?

We have no content that is pertinent to only English schools. We add your prospectus, you add your own content. This means we are fine for Scottish schools, Welsh schools, English language schools in any country. Any school, anywhere!

We also have the capability to swap the language from English to: Danish, Dutch, French, German and Italian.

We now have sites in 19 LAs: Conwy, County Londonderry, County Tyrone, Coventry, Denbighshire, Doncaster, Havering (Essex), Leeds, Lincoln, Northampton, Morayshire, Powys, Staffordshire, Stockport, Suffolk, Tameside, Walsall, Warwickshire and Worcestershire.

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Q9: Why are you so cheap?

This is a new way for schools to look after sites.

I keep my overheads to a minimum, stay away for exhibitions, and other expensive marketing, preferring word of mouth and email.

Working on your site, there isn't much for us to do, and what we do do, we do very quickly and easily. Besides we enjoy seeing updates, people using this technology.

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Q10: Graphic design

Changes to the graphics are very easy, we use Photoshop. I've offered several schools the opportunity of using their Photoshop documents and uploading things themselves, but, sure, it may look complex to them. I'm very willing to work with anybody who wants that degree of control over their look.

For instance, they could have several designs. For Christmas, Eid, Summer, Autumn, Spring terms, school's anniversary... Each swappable in seconds. Or we can do this, for a small fee.

One of the designs I have is very plain. It's meant to be photocopied, handed out in art lessons, and a competition launched for the best design. Which we'd realise. Our graphics are meant to be much more fluid, much more fun.

You can see a selection of themes (these are the designs we produce) with this thumbnail search.

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Q11: Adding initial content

We take your prospectus, or old site and convert it to editable web pages. We'd prefer you to give us clean, digital text, rather than brochures produced in a page layout program, or, untidy web pages, with small pictures. Of course, we can manage with anything, but there maybe a small charge for anything awkward or for massive amounts.

Once the pages are in there you can edit them as much as you want, moving them around the virtual directory site structure is simple too. Once you know how.

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Q12: Training

Training is included in the initial price.

Training can be a mere few minutes to enable someone to send an email with pictures attached. Or a few minutes to post a news item to the front page. There really is very little to explain. Of course, there is lots of power lurking about, like trackbacks, podcasting, and Google Juice strings, but post a simple news item to the front page, really isn't rocket science—this really is why hundreds of thousands of people are attracted to blogging.

Two 10 minutes sessions spent on the phone while on-line twice in a week is really enough to get going. Later a few more 10 minute conversations, and really you're an expert.

Sure there is lots, and lots, and lots under the hood. Should you want to go much further, you can. Though I'd suggest you thought of this as long term, with your other busy job (teaching).

We've a stand alone application in which you can edit your site in an outline. The best most detailed and expanded blog API, to connect to any other open system, maybe a MIS at your school or your LEA. We're built on the open standards of RSS and OPML. With a development platform that's been used since 1999 by a vast array of developers there are many places you can play, if you're interested.

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Q13: Support

(Think of me as Uncle Steve, The Fat Controller or Big Brother.)

We do phone, email and txt support. I far and away prefer to see you doing something, in my Big Brother way, and then for me to text or call you to tell you how you can be doing it better.

And you can txt me, and know you'll get instant aid to your help plea.

Our base content management system has been around since 1999, it's bug free, and been used by hundreds of schools and colleges in the US. Therefore, tens of thousands of users. I've been eating my own dog food since 1999 too.

The two main problems I have is that:

People think it must be harder :-) To achieve the results, "it must be more complicated than that?"

Getting to understand what you're trying to do—it's a language thing. What do you mean by new section? Do you mean a new department or a new directory in the site structure?

This is push button publishing on the web for the ordinary person (or child).

I'd be more than happy to talk you through adding a picture, say to a news posting on the front page of the demo site. Mostly I do this myself, about my own two kids, via e-mail which is too easy to believe.

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Q14: How much control over content

Everything is editable!

As a managing editor, you'll be able to edit or delete anybody's messages, news items and stories. Content editors can do the same, but not so much control over the configuration. While contributing editors can only, well, contribute. Members can edit their own content at any time.

As for the front page, there are areas where you can edit, things that you can add, and if there's more areas that you want to add that you need to edit, you can add them, it's called an includeMessage macro and you merely pop it into your home page's template. OK, I'll do it first and talk you through it.

It's a nice little macro because you can put say an address, and use the macro everywhere in the site, and when you need to change the address, you merely need to change it in one place—that's content management for you.

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Q15: How much safety

Comments... This is probably worrying to you. Anybody could leave something nasty in a comment?

First, it's not directly on your front page.

Secondly, we do check programmatically for swearing.

Thirdly, we monitor here. Anything that we can plainly see is nasty we delete, or edit. You get an email (you'll get lots of these from your site, sent to a list of people) telling you what's be added. You too, can edit or delete, or even ban or delete the member and all their comments, with just the one simple click in your email application.

Effectively, the openness means people are happy to contribute to the site, but anything nasty, isn't going to be there for too long. In my experience with schools, children are extremely well behaved. In my experience running these sorts of sites for, for example, football fans, we have the controls and power to make sure all is good, clean and proper.

(If you'd want comments and other feedback loops switched off, perhaps initially, it's easily done.)

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Q16: How much web space

You can create as many pages, news items, messages in the discussion group, folders... Thumbnails, pictures, uploaded files (Word docs, PDFs, wav files...) as you like. There are no limits!

You can update as many times as you want, whenever, where ever. The more, the happier I am. I try and encourage my schools to break away from thinking about one webmaster doing all the work.

Spread the joy! To secretaries, the Head, any and all teachers. Parents, pupils, neighbours, the local bobby! Yes, we have membership controls. Three levels of editors.

There are many sections of the front page that are editable by you. If you want more (unlikely) I can add them and while doing so, show you how you can do this. Again, an on-line demo will ease your concerns here. I'd like to limit the glossy, glassy buttons at the top to five, but sure we can change them to suit you. Best then, to leave them consistent, for the repeating visitor. And with a frequently changing front page, you will get people coming back each day, everyday. They'll be worried if you don't update ;-)

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Q17: Uploading of other files

It's easy to upload other files. Anything will go and can therefore be shared.

As above, there are no limits. Though, obviously, smaller files are easier to upstream and for users to download.

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Q18: Still images, in bulk?

Adding lots of images to a website has always been hard. Some people have suggested using Flickr, but it's too easy for children to click through to a world of adult content.

So, we made it easy to email your photos directly into your site. Attach one, two, several or a score of images, and everything is done for you, automatically.

I do this a lot from my mobile phone. I can attach images to emails and send them, from the beach :-)

There's more you can do to control how they finally look on your website. Read the how to for the details.

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Q19: Video

Yes! Merely attach your video to an email and send it to your website. Everything, from there is done automatically for you.

You can even mix video with still images.

More on the how to.

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Q20: Secure areas

We can create secure areas in sites. Though we think it us usually better to create a duplicate site and for that to run as an intranet.

Another intranet site would cost £50 (I can do bulk buying deals too, as you may consider several intranet sites), this site would be made as members only.

You add members (fill in a little form) it sends them an email with all the necessary. You can bulk add, for that initial start.

All the controls for running an effective intranet are there, including ways of setting the time out of the log in. As I said this stuff's been around since 1999. (Actually, it's been around since 1990, but you don't need a history lesson here.)

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Q21: Faults, errors and going bust

Sure I run back ups. I've got my kids' life here!

We back up every night, actually at 6am. However, we only keep daily back ups. If you over write something, if you don't ask us the very next day, it'll be gone.

What if we go bust? You're able to download your entire site, and move it to another supplier.

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Q22: Are we locked into a proprietary service?

Yes, your downloaded site can only be run in the Frontier/Manila environment. Once there, you can export to another blog format, there are some tools available.

No, there are many other Manila hosters around the world who will take your downloaded site. Some of my customisations will not however, be there. But in the main your site will run happily on their servers.

Indeed, you could buy Manila and host your site on your own machine. Further, you could become a competitor to us. IMHO this would be great. The more schools running good sites, the more RSS feeds from multitude of news departments the more interest there would be in aggregating all that content.

The only lock in is one of good service :-)