Wednesday, December 10, 2008
I used to work with a project manager who liked to use the term "eating our own dog food". It means walking the talk, as it were; actually doing yourself what you tell others to do. At that job, it meant following the best practices within our own organization that our clients paid us to implement in theirs. You might be surprised at how seldom that happens. The old adage "the cobbler's children have no shoes" comes to mind. This post is about how EditMe eats its own dog food - how we use our own product vigorously every day.
Internet startup protégés 37 Signals stress the importance of solving your own problems, and then figuring that others probably have those problems, too. This is exactly what EditMe has done. I've posted before about working on content management and wiki implementations for clients and getting frustrated with the inflexibility and needless complexity of so many available tools. EditMe was born from that frustration. And I'm happy to report that the result is serving all of EditMe's web needs with flying colors.
This site, www.editme.com, is the most visible example of our use of EditMe. I always chuckle when I see sites like Wetpaint and PBWiki that don't even host their own sites using their product. What does that tell you? This site represents EditMe's sales and marketing face. The site's goal is to educate visitors about the product and company, and hopefully get them to give it a try. We've customized the skin a bit for our custom design (which we encourage our business customers to do, too!), but this site doesn't do anything outside of EditMe's core feature set. It's hosted in the same environment along with our customers' sites.
The site has served us well, getting EditMe on the front page of Google results for our target keywords, handling spikes of traffic without flinching (for a long time it was by far the busiest EditMe site), and allowing us to easily and quickly change it as our marketing goals and strategies have evolved. If it didn't work for us, how could we expect it to work for our customers?
The second most visible example of EditMe eating its own dog food is the Customer Support Wiki. We used to have a separate Help site that contained the documentation in addition to a wiki for customers, but these were combined several months ago to create a really compelling resource for our support staff and customers alike. For this site, we focused on searchability. Using a wiki format for product documentation has been a huge success. Customers have contributed by fixing typos, adding tips, and even at times adding entire sections of documentation they felt were missing. Unwanted edits to this site have been almost non-existent - with maybe a handful per year, and they're easily rolled back by support staff.
EditMe's built in site search indexes all the content, and devoting a page to every issue and feature we can think of makes it easy and fast to find answers using the site. When we prompted visitors to our support ticket site to search the wiki first, the number of tickets opened decreased substantially. We use the site as a knowledgebase, adding and updating content every time a support issue that other customers might also have comes in and is not answered on the site. Over time it has become indispensible. And with the new Forums module, our old support ticket site has become more and more obsolete. It currently just takes in support requests via email, but we have plans to direct those to the Forums and shut the ticket site down altogether.
Finally, we were able to copy the design from the www site to the wiki site in about 3 minutes. Upload a couple of image attachments, copy the Layout and CSS pages, and voila: custom design on two sites instead of one.
The site we use most frequently is the intranet. This site is locked down to require a login and uses SSL for maximum security. We use this site to manage all information about operations and the company that are for internal eyes only. It has reams of internal process documentation as well as more temporary stuff like task lists, development plans, feature ideas, marketing strategies... you name it. Over time, a lot of the content quietly disappears as links to irrelevant pages are removed from the main navigation. But these have proven valuable numerous times when we needed to go back and find some old bit of information. The site search is great for that - it can search orphaned pages you've long forgotten about and bring them back only when you need them.
My favorite reason to use a wiki site for all internal information is the tracking capability. All staff updates to the site are tracked and we're notified of each other's changes. Try that with a shared network drive! We have had staff in other countries (Ukraine, China, Canada) and giving them access is as simple as sending a link. No VPNs or network setup required. It doesn't get any easier than that.
Outside of the business, I maintain a number of sites for personal use. Every time a new business idea comes up, I whip up a site and start playing around with ideas. How would I market it? Is it a compelling idea, and to whom? I have a site where I post pictures and updates of my daughter to share with friends and family. Finally, I have a personal blog/wiki (bliki) site where I keep ideas and thoughts for private and/or friend and family consumption.
I hope this little review has helped give you some ideas of how you can use EditMe within your own organization. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
