Monday 17 March 2008

A content management system which is a good tool for SEO

Open Lab's content management system (CMS), Webwork, is in these days under scrutiny as a tool for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is an interesting and dynamic field, and after a while of study I noticed a peculiarity: the most indexable site is a static one, but in order to be able to dynamically optimize a site for SEO, you need to have it dynamically generated.
So a step towards SEO is to generate and manage your site with a CMS, but then add functionality to your CMS to generate pages optimal for SEO. For example, it is better to have plain friendly url named and pointing to sections of you web sited, then a constant url with just an id parameter changing all the time. Very bad is
  • getting the same document with different urls
  • links not in href but just in onclicks
  • having the same metatags on all pages
So I had a meeting with the Webwork guys, all this will be supported natively by Webwork.

Tuesday 11 March 2008

Opening

I have the pleasure of opening the developer's blog of the Teamwork, Webwork, Smallcodes and Flowork applications, all built over the JBlooming platform.

We have used for quite a while Teamwork's blog also as a developers blog, but by now its time to dedicate a blog exclusively to technical issues.

Started in 2001 as a 4 friends startup company, Open Lab has been growing steadily in these seven years. We first made a leap by acquiring two other software houses in 2003 and 2004; now we are making our second leap, by putting together an enlarged development team and a prettier workplace. We'll call it <big>OpenLab</big>.

Open Lab is a rare case of an Italian IT company which is not a service company, but a real software house, with products like Teamwork, used today in 35 countries, and winner in 2007 of a Jolt Award, or Smallcodes, used by 10 different linguistic communities.

By real software house I mean not only what we do, but how: workplace quality, powerful tools, state of the art technology, a balanced male/female production team, team meetings, no overwork, pair programming, all contributes to the construction of a real, solid sotware house.
Pietro Polsinelli