Wed 31 May 2006
At last someone care’s. Seth Godin note’s that the humble apostrophe is more significant than it’s size indicate’s. Its an easy way for you’re reader’s to know that your too uneducated or too careless to get you’re grammar (or is it syntax?) correct.
Wed 24 May 2006
In the 8+ years I’ve been in the web consulting biz, there’s one request I’ve heard over and over: “We just want to be able to edit everything on the site ourselves.”
Do you, now?
The Web isn’t Microsoft Word or even PowerPoint (and I’m sure you’ve seen your share of mangled PowerPoint presentations). If we turned you loose on your own site with next to no knowledge of HTML, what would your site look like in a week? You hired someone to design it and lay it out, right? Why would you want to go back and undo all that hard work?
Yes, there’s a need for the client to have some control over the content of the site. But that control is not easy to build. A custom site requires a custom CMS. For every sexy design feature, you lose content flexibility.
I racked my brain for a way to explain this to the latest client, and finally came up with the following idea. It’s so obvious that I’m probably the last person in this line of work to figure it out.
A typical business site is a billboard. Or an ad. Or a brochure. (We don’t call them “brochureware” for nothing.) You don’t see businesses changing their billboards or radio ads every couple of weeks. Those things cost money and take time to create. How do those businesses deliver up-to-date content to current and prospective customers? They use a newsletter.
What’s the new media equivalent of a newsletter? You’re looking at it.
Newsletters have a set format and delivery schedule, and there’s a per-unit cost. A blog delivers content to as many readers as you want, as often as you want, for free (not counting hosting costs). Most blogging software allows you to create whole pages as well, so you’re not stuck with the post-a-few-lines-about-your-cat format.
Why aren’t more companies buying into this? Maybe because you, Mr. Web Professional, haven’t clued them in to the business benefits of blogging. They (and perhaps you, too) see it as a fad that has nothing to do with the business world. Sure, some corporations are tinkering with blogs, but that’s just a cheap marketing trick, right? Well, it could save you some serious headaches as a consultant.
Try this. Tell your client that you’ll scope and build a fancy custom CMS for their fancy custom site. Then, almost as an afterthought, show them the Typo or WordPress blog that it took you thirty minutes to set up. Tell them they can use that as an interim content-management solution until you get the “real” CMS done. They’ll thank you for giving them a whole new marketing channel, and send you more interesting and useful work.
And they’ll forget all about the fancy custom CMS — the one that never gets finished and no one is satisfied with anyway.
Wed 5 Apr 2006
Last Wednesday was my wife’s birthday. She asked for a pair of white rocking chairs for the porch. Newly-minted househusband that I am, I hauled two big boxes home from Wal-Mart and spent ten minutes assembling two nice new rocking chairs.
This was followed by twenty minutes scraping the gooey residue of several “this end up” stickers off said chairs. (I know, lighter fluid would’ve dissolved it right away.) Yesterday, Signal vs. Noise confirmed what I knew in my heart: whoever produced these chairs cares not a whit for the butts that sit in them.
Thu 1 Dec 2005
My work day got off to a perfect start when I pulled into the parking garage. A quickly-printed sign was taped to the card reader. It read something like this:
Please do not drive the wrong way down the garage ramp. The ramp is for driving up and for parking. People have complained and there have been several near accidents.
This particular garage’s floors are laid out in the form of a bisected square. Looking at it from above, the left, top, and bottom sides of the square are flat. The right side is the down ramp, and the middle side (!) is the up ramp.
The traffic flow for going up is as follows:
(Most of my cow-orkers and I have been banished to the top floor, but that’s a subject for another post.)
At the end of the day, here’s what you do instead:
If you followed all that, you may have an idea why someone felt it necessary to write the note. See, at the end of the day, leaving the top floor, tired and hungry, the last thing you want to do is drive around and around in circles, only going down one-fourth of the time. So you cheat.
You go down the down ramp, make a sharp left, go down the up ramp, make another sharp left, and go down the next down ramp. Et voila: you’ve just dropped three floors in less time than it would take to go down one floor the proper way. It’s late, the garage is over half empty, no one is coming up, and no one parks on the upper floors anyway, except us few poor sods. They keep the rates too high, so the garage is never more than two-thirds full.
The urban geniuses that laid out the garage ignored one crucial thing: people are in a hurry at the end of the day. They’re out of patience. They want to get home and see their families and eat. Yet the proper procedure forces you to take the long way down when you least want to.
It would have been so easy to lay out the flow the other way, so that going up was longer than going down. In a perfect world, they would have installed electronic direction arrows at the corners of each floor, so that up was shortest in the morning and down was shortest in the afternoon. The main thoroughfares to the Charlotte Coliseum (and probably a lot of arenas in larger cities) do just that. Each lane has a programmable traffic light above it, so that lanes can switch directions as conditions dictate. Yes, I know that would cost an arm and a leg. OK, so how about at least using signs that say “turn this way before noon and that way after noon”? Trust our intelligence a little, and most importantly, make it look like you care.
You might say that would invite chaos, and that people would just ignore the signs. Isn’t that what’s happening anyway? I talked to a cow-orker on his way out this evening. He ignored the memo and took the short way down. I can’t say I blame him. When businesses make policy that ignores their customers’ (or employees’, for that matter) needs and wants, rebellion ensues.
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