Sitemaps are a real pain to keep updated. They're fun to build at first, but once they get up to a certain size, you just don't want to deal with them anymore. Here's a neat way to just keep your site structure in Microsoft Excel (which is all I ever end up doing anyway), then import it into Visio when a client needs something visual to look at. You can also use Microsoft Word to build an outline, then import into Visio. Finally, Omnigraffle Pro is a great sitemapping and diagramming tool, with a built-in outliner. Article on Boxes and Arrows...
StartupJournal posted an article about an entrepreneur who launched a successful product, made some money, then tried to do it again. But the 2nd time around, perfection stalled the entire project. It took a liver transplant (and his company going under) to make him realize he needed to "just ship it."
How many web projects have we all been part of, where the owner wouldn't just let it go live? They kept adding more and more ideas, more content, or more features. They don't realize that each idea---no matter how tiny---significantly increases the complexity of the project (ok, I'm guilty of this too). It's beyond scope creep. It's more of an obsessive-compulsive kind of disorder. Perfection will kill a project before it sees the light of day.
But it can also be your friend. At The RSG, we say, "throw your hat over the fence." Get it live, and get some users tinkering with it. It's okay if there are bugs or kinks (the first few users kinda like that stuff anyway). Watch your traffic logs, and review all the initial feedback. Most importantly, start making some money. Then, go back and perfect it a little. The entire time, at least your site is live, growing with users, and making money. That does wonders for limiting scope creep and keeping things practical. Web software is definitely like changing the tire on a moving car. It's extremely difficult (and insanely dangerous), but if the car is stopped, you're not getting anywhere.
How many web projects have we all been part of, where the owner wouldn't just let it go live? They kept adding more and more ideas, more content, or more features. They don't realize that each idea---no matter how tiny---significantly increases the complexity of the project (ok, I'm guilty of this too). It's beyond scope creep. It's more of an obsessive-compulsive kind of disorder. Perfection will kill a project before it sees the light of day.
But it can also be your friend. At The RSG, we say, "throw your hat over the fence." Get it live, and get some users tinkering with it. It's okay if there are bugs or kinks (the first few users kinda like that stuff anyway). Watch your traffic logs, and review all the initial feedback. Most importantly, start making some money. Then, go back and perfect it a little. The entire time, at least your site is live, growing with users, and making money. That does wonders for limiting scope creep and keeping things practical. Web software is definitely like changing the tire on a moving car. It's extremely difficult (and insanely dangerous), but if the car is stopped, you're not getting anywhere.
We've all tried building rocket bikes when we were little (or was that just me?). It was always a challenge trying to 1) find enough firepower to push the bike, and 2)tricking my friends into test driving them for me. Anyways, this guy's built the ultimate rocket bike. What's cool about it? It runs on roof tar.
MarketingSherpa interviews web design expert Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think. Nice tips on evaluating site search logs, button designs, death to flash intros, throwing books at CEOs, and more. The article is open to the public until Feb 6th.
We're under a deadline to launch our new time-tracking service, so I thought this article at Harvard Working Knowledge ( Time Pressure and Creativity: Why Time is Not on Your Side) was pretty relevant. Guess what. Hovering over workers with stopwatches doesn't work. But I do think that "pressure" in general is needed. IMHO, the real management challenge is to find out what specific type of "pressure" drives each worker.
Graphical passwords for better security by ZDNet's Roland Piquepaille -- You all know that passwords are relatively easy to steal, especially because we don't pick difficult ones. So computer scientists from Rutgers University-Camden have developed graphical passwords to enhance your computer security.
Nice story on USAToday.com about a teenager named Ben (17 years old!) that started his own software company. Favorite lines: "Ben began selling gumballs to his older twin brothers when he was 7 and briefly ran a Web-design company when he was 11, says his dad..." and "Comcate has carved a profitable niche, with annual revenue of about $750,000 and a few dozen customers in small and midsize cities in California, Florida, Indiana and elsewhere." Speechless.
A few months ago, we were in the midst of redesigning The RSG website. While we were re-launching, we posted a temporary "back online shortly" page. It wasn't a flat out "Under Contruction" page---we had links to contact us, links to our extranet, etc.
Well, it took us a little longer than expected (about a week) to launch that new site. Consequently, Google totally dropped us from their index. D'oh! "No problem" I thought. "We'll just wait a little while, and their little GoogleBot will swing by, and spider our site again."
Nope. We just recently launched (yet another) redesign of our website, and decided to check ourselves out on Google. Nothing. Even searching for "The Rocket Science Group Atlanta" gave us nothing but a few links to MailChimp, and something from CitySearch. Not good. It was as if they refused to acknowledge our site's existence.
So I re-submitted our URL to Google, and crossed my fingers. It only took about 1 week for GoogleBot to swing by our neck of the woods and spider our site again. You know how I found out? I got one of their keyword alerts by email. Yeah, Google rocks.
Well, it took us a little longer than expected (about a week) to launch that new site. Consequently, Google totally dropped us from their index. D'oh! "No problem" I thought. "We'll just wait a little while, and their little GoogleBot will swing by, and spider our site again."
Nope. We just recently launched (yet another) redesign of our website, and decided to check ourselves out on Google. Nothing. Even searching for "The Rocket Science Group Atlanta" gave us nothing but a few links to MailChimp, and something from CitySearch. Not good. It was as if they refused to acknowledge our site's existence.
So I re-submitted our URL to Google, and crossed my fingers. It only took about 1 week for GoogleBot to swing by our neck of the woods and spider our site again. You know how I found out? I got one of their keyword alerts by email. Yeah, Google rocks.
We've been getting some interest in our upcoming product, PunchyTime. The story behind it? We built it three years ago after searching the world over for a good time tracking tool for web designers, agencies, programmers, etc. Couldn't find one. They were all too complicated to us. They made you enter too much data, or had you racing against some kind of stopwatch (they might as well stand behind you with a gun, for crying out loud). They also tried too hard at integrating with invoicing, accounting, and project management. Apples and oranges, to us. So we built PunchyTime, a very simple, web-based time tracker (with a slight attitude problem). It tracks your project time, then generates reports that you can 1) send to clients, and 2) use to create invoices.We've had some agencies and colleagues using it for a while now, and have been collecting some good feedback. It's currently undergoing a bit of a re-write, so that we can post it live soon. We want to open it for testing to a much wider audience, because frankly, it was built for our own internal needs and "bookkeeping" style. For instance, we've never assigned "Codes" or "Numbers" to our projects. But it's apparently a must-have for larger agencies (duh). Feedback like that's what we need.
Right this minute, we're experimenting with ways to slightly enhance the interface, specifically with AJAX. But only if we can keep it fast and simple (we're intrigued by AJAX, but it can ruin the user experience as quickly as it can help it). And we're building in some tools that let customers tweak the colors, upload their own logo, etc. That's the update for now. We're shooting for end of next week to get it live again. We've got a nice list of people wiling to test. As soon as it's ready, we'll send you guys an update. If anybody else would like to be notified, send us a note. Thanks!
Pretty neat braille device for reading computer screens. Heck, some of the features would be nice on standard keyboards. A button that would highlight and skip to "next line" would make for some easy skimming and scanning.
Don't know what to think about this one. Bellsouth is proposing to start charging companies (like Napster, Google, and MovieLink) for access to their high-speed network. One example they give is to charge Apple a nickel for every download.
Link to the article: http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2006/01/16/story4.html
Link to the article: http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2006/01/16/story4.html
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association is holding WOMBAT ("Word of Mouth Basic Training") on January 19th and 20th in Orlando. If you've never heard of WOMMA, they're an organization that focuses on word-of-mouth marketing (as opposed to mainstream advertising). The group was founded by BzzAgent, a company that recruits people to "spread the word" about products. When I first read about BzzAgent, I thought, "well that's a novel concept---pay people to go around and spread the word about stuff. Guerilla marketing, blabbidy-blah." But it really hit home when I visited my nephew, and saw the little BzzAgent bumble bee sticker on his violin case. I asked him about it, and he said, "Yeah, they send me free samples of new stuff, and I just have to tell people about it." Sheesh! They've got a whole army of kids evangelizing everything out there! So next time you're at the store, and thinking about buying a new vacuum cleaner, and some stranger walks right up to you to tell you how much she loves that thing, and she gives you a demo of how it works, right on the spot, she could be a "Buzz" agent. Neat, huh?
Aaaaaanyway, our good friend Toby Bloomberg (from the Diva Marketing Blog) will be there live-blogging the event. No time to go to Orlando, so I'll definitely be following along, and you might be interested too. Here's her post about WOMBAT, in case you're interested. have fun, Toby!
Aaaaaanyway, our good friend Toby Bloomberg (from the Diva Marketing Blog) will be there live-blogging the event. No time to go to Orlando, so I'll definitely be following along, and you might be interested too. Here's her post about WOMBAT, in case you're interested. have fun, Toby!
AiMA's got an event coming up that looks really interesting:
"Major online players Delta.com, InterContinental Hotels Group, Target.com and UPS are developing interactive initiatives focused on maximizing the user-experience. Join us for a panel discussion where representatives from these organizations will discuss methods to understand user needs and specific online tactics that are getting results."
Event details are at the Atlantaima.org website...
"Major online players Delta.com, InterContinental Hotels Group, Target.com and UPS are developing interactive initiatives focused on maximizing the user-experience. Join us for a panel discussion where representatives from these organizations will discuss methods to understand user needs and specific online tactics that are getting results."
Event details are at the Atlantaima.org website...
Do you get those cheap CD-Rs to burn backups of all your photos? This article warns that they'll only last a couple years before you have to re-burn them. Seems the cheap dyes they use wear out from heat. Maybe you should just backup all your files to spare hard drives? No, they sometimes use cheap ball bearings that wear out. Sigh. What's the answer? Magnetic tape lasts 30 years, according to one IBM physicist.
According to Wired's Monkey Bites, Mozilla Firefox browser usage is up to 9.6%. Full stats here. Good grief, there are actually people who still use Internet Explorer 5?
Icons are really fun to design. They're an art form, really. But they take forever. I'll never forget the time I spent an entire day working on an icon set for one of our CMS projects, only to find a $79 package of stock icons called, "CMS." D'oh! So here's a list of places where you can buy royalty free icons (that look really nice).
One thing we've found when purchasing icons is that they're usually a "side business" for some design shops, so they don't have very sophisticated shopping carts. Some of them use Paypal, and some of them approve orders "manually" (I think they get hit by plagiarism and credit card fraud a lot), so you'll want to order these well in advance of any project due dates.
- Iconbuffet, by Firewheel Design (we use some icons from their "Manhattan" line for our MailChimp)
- Chameleon, by SimpleBits (this one's neat, because you can specify a hex color for them)
- More from SimpleBits
- Stock Icons from IconFactory (IconFactory's been around for ages. We use some of their "Logica" icons in MailChimp as well)
One thing we've found when purchasing icons is that they're usually a "side business" for some design shops, so they don't have very sophisticated shopping carts. Some of them use Paypal, and some of them approve orders "manually" (I think they get hit by plagiarism and credit card fraud a lot), so you'll want to order these well in advance of any project due dates.
Anybody else going to the UIE Roadshow here in Atlanta this February? If you're in the web design business, or manage a website, you should check it out. I've been to a couple of Jared Spool's conferences, and I've always walked away learning something new about usability for my own website(s). Last time I went, he even reviewed our old MailChimp website in front of all the attendees. He pretty much gave it a thumbs down for not explaining what we do on the home page. Ouch. I've made some modifications since then. On the plus side, about 500 people in the audience saw our site up on the screen, and I got some business out of it. Yay!
Happy new year! Tom Peters has posted a couple of questions to think about while you're taking that morning shower:
- What's the most important thing you've done in the last year?
- What's the most important thing you'll do in the next year?
According to Peppercoin and Ipsos Insight (via ZDNet), about 20 million Americans age 12+ bought something for $2 or less in 2005. We've always loved the idea of micropayments, because we think people use the internet in microsessions anyway. Think about it. How much time do you ever spend on any one particular website. One minute? Two?
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