There’s an old expression - ‘smiling in the dark’ - which many won’t be aware of these days. Everyone knows if you smile in the dark no-one will see you, so why bother? Well, we all know that smiling actually makes the smiler almost as happy as the smilee (the person being smiled at) – as it tends to lift the spirits of all who experience it. But if no-one sees the smile, a huge opportunity can be lost.

So, what’s all this waffle got to do with the subject of a blog found on a technology-company’s website? Quite a lot actually.

A lot of small businesses, similar to Expert, do incredible things such as offering amazing products and services, providing breath-taking service and support, not to mention undertaking important research and development, creating interesting jobs, and contributing to society in general. The problem is they’re usually too busy to tell the world about what they’re doing, and you can guarantee that most don’t have the resources to engage external marketing companies to put together information or ad campaigns on their behalf.

So, without sharing their good news with the rest of the world, very few potential customers know what they’re doing and what they’re capable of. They may as well be smiling in the dark for all the good it’s doing them. Is your organisation guilty of this?

Blowing our own trumpet

Take us at Expert. We have created a world-class infrastructure platform software, MoST (a Management of Site Tool), primarily for Customer Relationship and Content Management solutions, and we have many happy clients using it. But given the size of Expert, we’ve tended not to blow our own trumpet, and marketing has been largely down to referrals and repeat business from existing clients. One thing that has worried us, is taking on too much work and becoming too big to be able to service our clients in a timely and personal manner, so we’ve tended to only take on the amount of work we know we can successfully manage. We also don’t want our dedicated staff burning out doing jobs that are overwhelming or stressful.

Having said that, we’re also aware that there are many organisations (especially membership associations) that could really benefit from using more of their MoST website than they currently do.

As well as the usual things you’d expect to see in a website, websites built in MoST have incredibly powerful back-room engines.

The sky is the limit (almost)

MoST software can help you with all of the following back-room tasks (and more)

• Manage databases
• Create directories of people, such as suppliers and members,
• Send out bulk invoices
• Coordinate event registrations and manage events
• Support CPD (Continuing Professional Development) programmes
• Offer a jobs board
• Provide a shopping cart for product sales
• Manage client relationships (CRM)
• Update and edit the content on your website (CMS)
• Undertake surveys
• Send out bulk emails and ezines
• Manage your sales pipelines

By using more features of MoST, you’ll reap the following benefits …

• Save time
• Save money
• Cut out the daily, weekly, monthly or annual dross
• Free up resources for other activities
• Learn new stuff
• Increase your knowledge, expertise and skills
• Be able to delegate tasks to others
• Store, search and retrieve data easily
• Reach a wider audience
• Make your boss (and organisation) look good
• Control when things get done (not waiting for third parties to get around to doing it for you);

and best of all

• Sleep well at night knowing your website is hosted in a secure environment!

MoST’s secret ingredient

One thing I didn’t mention in the lists above, is the secret ingredient of MoST that our mainstream competitors don’t have – extensibility (or, in lay-person terms, flexibility). So, what is extensibility? Google’s definition is

In software engineering, extensibility is defined as “the quality of being designed to allow the addition of new capabilities or functionality.” It is a measure of the ability to extend a system and the level of effort required to implement the extensions.

So, back to Google to find out what is an example of extensibility of software …

An extensible system is one whose internal structure and dataflow are minimally or not affected by new or modified functionality, for example recompiling or changing the original source code might be unnecessary when changing a system's behavior, either by the creator or other programmers.

This means that MoST users do not have to be limited in their future activities, and don’t have to throw away their existing website and start again if they are growing and want to add extra components or applications. MoST grows with an organisation and can match it’s need to accommodate growth in size (scalability), whilst also being able to easily add additional items or products, which don’t have to be growth-related.

You can even speak face-to-face with the creators of MoST to develop the perfect solution for you. Expanding on MoST’s capability is effectively achieved due to the supported environment it’s hosted in. This includes robust disaster recovery and secure server space for all of your data.

And it’s really affordable.

Expert provides a world-class support service if a user gets stuck, as well as offering tailor-made ‘plain English’ training at any stage that it may be required, and it’s done face-to-face with one of our highly experienced MoST experts.

We also provide tailor-made Help instructions alongside our training.

Or we can quickly make any changes for you, if you’re too busy to do it yourself.

We also build-in analytical tools to the websites we create in MoST and provide links to social media platforms to make things even easier for you.

If you’d like to know more about the wonders of MoST, check out our MoST website https://most.software/

Your turn

So now that I’ve told you about MoST it’s your turn to go out and tell your customers, members, stake-holders etc about you and what you are doing. Don’t leave it up to guesswork on their part.

There are many channels available to spread the word in addition to your website, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram etc and with the advent of artificial intelligence, you don’t even have to write your own content these days. What could be simpler?