Hale Events Ltd: the Torquay Fair and Select West
Some time ago Mike, our ex-neighbour, good friend and Marketing Manager of Hale Events Ltd. was facing a problem. They had lost touch with the website designer who had created their Torquay Fair website.
The website had become out of date and Mike wanted it to be updated. He also wanted to create a website for Select West, a new annual gift fair which Hale was developing.
One evening, Mike asked me "Is it possible for a business to control and actively develop a website without having to raise dramatically the level of investment of time and/or money?" (I paraphrase).
As Marketing Manager, Mike felt that a solid Internet presence would properly reflect the high professional standards which Hale were applying to their business development. But without some identifiable Return On Investment, it can be difficult to argue (even to oneself) that an immature website justifies the investment required to develop it further. And the same holds true perhaps, with more compelling force, for a website which is languishing because of lack of development.
It remains a difficult argument to make, irrespective of whether it is money or time which is being invested. These days, nobody seems terribly sure which of the two is the scarcer.
We were able to set Mike up with a solution of sorts. I assembled a pot pourri of a solution from some freebie XML resources I had stashed away but had not yet deployed.
To create a working solution, I had to recast the website's text content into Dockbook XML, set up an XSL stylesheet to transform database output into Docbook XML and an XSL stylesheet to transform Docbook XML into HTML, the latter installed as a scheduled task running once a week, automatically updating the website.
Mike took on the responsibility of editing the text content directly in Docbook XML. We were able to make that task a little easier by recommending Morphon which uses CSS to present editable XML content in a pseudo-WYSIWYG style.
The solution has worked fairly reliably for the last couple of years and Mike has been able to develop the website according to his own schedule.
Over time, it has become evident that the websites are making a positive contribution to the business and it has become a little easier to make a case for a development budget. The next phase in the technology transfer is to transfer the pot-pourri into an embracing environment, such as Eclipse.