We are proud to announce that our latest website www.sportsister.com has gone live this morning. Sportsister is an online sports magazine for women, with interviews, kit reviews, events and more!

Anyone who spends any time with us will have often heard us promoting users of your website or printed material. We believe very highly in putting your end users first as without them any solution we produce will fail. With this in mind I got a recent email newsletter from a website I use that sums this whole subject up in a few choice words. Below is an extract from the email (the line in bold is the best bit):

“It’s both easy and hard to believe, but yesterday, February 15, was our first birthday! We’ve learned enough lessons to fill a book, which we might write someday, but the most important one can be shared in just a few words:

Listen to your members because without them a website is just web pages.

It’s one thing to craft a website, hook up some processing rules and a database, put it on some servers and go live. But when people, all kinds of people, show up and start doing their thing, it becomes something very different. It grows, it surprises you in good ways (awesome avatars, brilliant bookmarks!) and bad (spam). It makes you work harder than you ever expected and it pays off in so many unexpected ways. By listening to members, we’ve been able to do a great deal with just 3 to 4 people, depending on when you look. If we tried to think it all up ourselves, we wouldn’t have a chance.

We don’t have aspirations of runaway signup numbers and gajillions in revenue. We find that the words “small and remarkable” go together well when thinking about where Ma.gnolia is going. Ma.gnolia as a website is a shell of technical pieces and good looks, but with our members with us it’s a truly unique experience. Let’s see where the next year takes us.”

As I said, the website is a social bookmarking service so listening to members is very important. However, we can all apply this principle to our websites. When we finished the current Walney website (www.walneyuk.com) we began discussing the next phase of the site. My advise to the great people at Walney was to find out what their customers think of the website and what features they want before we decide what should go into phase 2. We will post further information here on phase 2 as it happens.

So let’s all make an effort to invite comments and suggestions from our users. I will start this off here and ask if any of you readers have a topic you would like us to discuss or something you want our website to do then please let me know by contacting us.

Kleeneze have now launched the new kleeneze.nl website for their operations in the Netherlands. The dutch website is based on the design of the UK and German websites that we did for Kleeneze in April.

Great to see the complete set now!