WordPress – for corporate “billboard” sites, wordpress is the most apt. If there’s less interactivity and more browsing and information dissemination, we’ve found wordpress to be the best for such sites. It has a friendly backend panel with all the tools you need to run a small site/blog and has a few added extras to keep things interesting. It is a powerful CMS don’t get us wrong, it just doesn’t have everything you need for long term/heavy development.

Joomla! – Joomla! we would say is the most client friendly of all the CMSs. The backend panel is soo friendly with all the “managers”. Article Manager, Category manager, Module manager. It’s a bit difficult to grasp at first since even menus are modules and you would think of using Menu Manager to add a menu but apparently you do that in Module manager. However, if you have a client who wishes to only add articles and other content once in a while, this CMS is perfect. Just don’t give them 100% access to the back end. Content management only.

Drupal – Drupal is the most powerful of all the CMSs we here at Hangad use. It has very impressive community backing and you never have any questions unanswered in the long run. However, it is not the CMS for people new in the field. We highly recommend Drupal only for extensive web development particularly web applications and very dynamic websites. It’s not friendly for clients as well since the backend is quite a doozey to operate.

We will discuss these CMSs at length at another post.

Bobson Apparel is a clothing brand that wants to provides STYLISH, COMFORTABLE and QUALITY products that fits the LIFESTYLE of today’s generation. Established under managment of Crolific Garments Manufacturing Corporation, with the leadership of Mr. Victor Tan, it is one of the Philippines most promising lifestyle brands with 28 boutiques to date.

Jerico “Salleh” Vilog of Hangad I.T. Solutions accepted the project to bring the site up. He lead the development of the site.

Miguel Biag, headed the artistic design of the site.  He’s a web designer on Hangad’s roster and a long time partner of Jerico in developing sites.

Salleh used the WordPress platform as a base and also used other open source plugins to build the site as it is seen now. This enabled the dynamic duo to significantly build the site in a short period of time and the site is remarkably affordable. This kind of development is what Hangad I.T. Solutions offers to its clients. Speed and quality.

Previous sites made by Jerico and Miguel under Hangad IT Solutions are Bookworm Philippines, School Talk and Randell Tiongson.

Through all this, people have been documenting the event through their cellphones and cameras. Surprisingly, they have been posting on Facebook, Youtube and Twitter as their homes were being flooded. Some even called for help on Twitter. Internet users have been covering the events at par with traditional media since they are themselves the victims or were incidentally on-site.

Never did we imagine the Philippine’s Internet access infrastructure to be this sturdy especially since some telecoms have had their signals cut due to the storms.

First and foremost reason is some enterprises are not even aware of the opportunities they can take advantage of online. Their idea of an all encompassing demographic is localized, e.g. “Everyone who likes handbags in the greater Manila area.” Export opportunities are golden and some aren’t even aware of them.

Second, most of these enterprises haven’t considered going global with their wares. Some say that its “too big” or worse yet “it’s still uncharted territory” and they’re fearful of what it will entail. Here in the Philippines, some are still technophobic and do not trust e-commerce. Credit card penetration here is still at its infant stages and the numbers aren’t very encouraging. If someone is far away, you can’t shake their hand and make the deal – the Pinoy entrepreneur’s “no go online” mantra.

Third, budget budget budget. Websites cost money and for a small startup, money is better spent on – in their opinion – acquiring more tangible assets. These days, websites ARE assets. They function as a base to create a community around your product. Community, overtime, translates to direct marketing to an audience who are truly interested on what you have to offer.

We here are Hangad will keep all these in our hearts and minds in trying to change this outlook on web development and Internet marketing. This is the primary reason we offer low cost, high speed quality work with open source software.

How do we use these tools? Well you can navigate through the mapmaker or google maps and find the physical location of the client’s store or service center. Google maps will provide you with an embed code or a link. Just have your developer embed that code into your site or link right to it. Voila!

Here’s an example of what the embedded map will look like.



View Larger Map


Google Mapmaker

Google Maps

Source: Universal McCann (Susan Rice Lincoln, 2009)

New media requires sincerity. People who use it will not tolerate BS (bullshit) and will call you on it. What’s worse is that they can write about it an. d publish their own articles which more will be able to read. One negative word will translate into hundreds if not thousands more.

So what is the solution to this? How do we communicate well in Web 2.0? The first step is to create your own “voice”. You must create an identity that communicates well with your audiences, public or private. This voice must be sincere, relatable and as simple as possible.

How do you create a voice? You may refer to the guidelines below:

a. Find out who your audience is – what is their core demographic?

b. If you have multiple target demographics, you may create an individual voice for each or find one that speaks to all.

c. Now imagine these people (your audiences) inside a small room. Now think of somebody that can confidently sit in the middle of that small room and speak to them, whom they all will listen to. And more importantly, somebody they can trust.

d. Once you have this person in mind. Flesh him out; who is he/she? How does he/she talk? Why would your audience listen to him/her? e. Once you have all these details you may start communicating with your various audiences using this person as your “voice”.

The source of the fear of companies who are considering taking advantage of web 2.0 is this. Anybody and everybody can say something about their company and/or product that will give CEOs nightmares for weeks and send their PR representatives into years of therapy.

What is a page vs. a post? A page is static, it doesn’t change unless specifically changed in code. Pages come few and far between. A post however can be a series. Much like this article (a post) we have had 2 parts and content is flowing and progressing.

Websites these days must adhere to this new phenomenon or get eaten up by more content driven sites. What is needed is a change in the way we see public relations. Spin doctoring will not work. As long as you have sincerity and humanity in the “voice” you give to the publics, 2.0 will work for you.

(next article – business/organization’s “voice”)

Even corporate websites these days must offer more than just advertising. Nobody will want to visit a website that’s non-dynamic more than once since they’ve already seen everything. Businesses must evolve just as the web has evolved to take advantage of the vast opportunities on the Internet.

The reason why there are companies/corporations that hesitate to take advantage of the vast marketing potential of social media is fear. Companies still follow traditional public relations practices which involve the control of information. Social Media is about sharing and daring to lose control since anybody and everybody has the ability to comment on your services/products. This causes hesitation on the part of these companies who would not dare to have their services/products be under the widely broadcasted scrutiny of their very publics – internal or external.

We here at Hangad IT Solutions strongly suggest to companies who have the capability to, to test the waters of Social Media, no guts no glory. A simple Myspace (www.myspace.com) page about your company or your website itself won’t take many resources to create and syndicate. This alone is a concrete step in finding out if social media is for you.
There have been many companies who started their own social media sites – with varying degrees of success – and allowed their employees to blog about their respective companies albeit with some guidelines set. Sun Microsystems, Wallmart and General Motors are just some of these companies. If it garnered favourable results for these big names, why not try it out?