After my post discussing how vendor-client relationships are complete crap most of the time — which was really a thinly veiled excuse to post a funny vid — a friend of mine posted a response on my Facebook page:

While you’re right that you in essence ‘get what you pay for’ in this economic climate you’d be surprised how much lower vendors will go in order to keep a customer satisfied (which in turn could bring in more work…)

This is quite true, and I’m sure she wasn’t alone in her opinion, so here’s some additional insight. The problem isn’t the act of dropping prices, but the speed with which we as vendors come to that decision. Many vendors drop their prices at the first hint of customer disapproval. Clients know they can feign disappointment to try and get a better price (that’s what makes the video funny!), but if a vendor has a solid product at a reasonable price, they should ignore that impulse to cave to such requests.

Consistently dropping prices unnecessarily has a lot of long-term penalties. The customer who gets a discount once will ask again, further decreasing the bottom line on that client work. Those bits of discount add up really fast, yet the companies I’ve worked with rarely stopped to calculate how much they are actually losing in discounts. Only when the customer was obviously taking the business to the cleaners did they give it a harder look.

Plus there are more “fuzzy” net effects, like price perception. A product’s value is tied to the price that a customer actually pays, not what you “might have” charged them before you offered that on-the-spot discount. Decreasing the price decreases the value a customer places on the goods they receive. Luxury goods live and die by this rule. Why are Diesel jeans, Oakley sunglasses, and Coach purses considered premiums in their respective markets? An expert could talk about product quality, but the vast majority of people couldn’t identify these tangible advantages. The pricetag is the number one conveyor of luxury status.

I’m not saying “never give discounts,” just that companies should be more selective in doling them out. Most of the time, clients already see the value of goods and services, and *will* pay for it, they simply want to squeeze as much value as they can out of it. Standing up to these scare tactics, as illustrated in the video, can save companies tons of trouble down the line.

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Saw this post come across the community section the official Digg blog today discussing changes to the ads they’re running in the PC Games section. The mind-blowing line:

And if advertising skins just aren’t your thing, one of our users provided this story on how to disable them.

They not only acknowledge that people are going to remove ads, but actually link to instructions on how to remove it. Sure, it’s a bit of a challenge for non-techies (although installing AdBlock Plus makes this super-easy in Firefox), but the vast majority of the audience in the PC Gaming section is going to be able to figure it out.

You want your users to love you? Don’t BS them. An overt effort to tell the cold hard truth, especially when it hurts most, will win over people far more often than it will lose. Real relationships are built on trust, after all, and you can’t fake real.

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This is one facet of business that I simply never understood, and always drove me nuts. My boss would ask me to “get a better price,” and I’d have to go back to the vendor and essentially beg them to drop the price. How often does the purchasing company really have any leverage to ask for anything? The price is the price. You don’ like it, go elsewhere. It’s nonsense.

Good to see I’m not alone! I particularly enjoyed the comparison to other services. Taco stand vs. filet mignon? “It’s cow.” See this mindset all the time in web development. Somehow the services you got from your 16-year-old neighbor are equivalent to a professional shop with 15 years of experience. How do people make these mental leaps!?

(Click through to get a very nice HD version)

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Came across this BusinessWeek article (published on Yahoo!) today discussing companies that “embody the creativity and resiliency common among today’s entrepreneurs.” They do make it clear that it’s a new recurring segment, so maybe they’re still getting their feet under them. That’s what I’m hoping anyway, because I see nothing but a bunch of me-toos and also-rans in this list.

Read the article, and see if my summary (and accompanying snarky comments) jive with what you read:

• Name: Batter Blaster
  No-BS Summary: Late-night infomercial
  I can see the demonstration of the “old alternative” now, where they make some doofus have a spasm while pouring Bisquik on a skillet.
• Name: InterShelter
  No-BS Summary: Portable dome housing
  This never-ending dome idea needs to be dragged out back and shot.
• Name: ParkingCarma
  No-BS Summary: Website for parking spots
  I see “Website for [insert handy information].” Handy, but nothing special here.
• Name: Mota Motors
  No-BS Summary: Sell cars online.
  Another “Website for [insert handy information].” A competitor to cars.com, eBay motors, and Edmunds, touting extra middleman-ness. Who doesn’t want more middleman in their lives?
• Name: Greenmaker Supply
  No-BS Summary: A “green” Home Depot
  Similar to the last two, I see “Sustainable/green [insert physical product].” The green movement in general drives me nuts. There’s no proof any of it makes a difference on the planet (for or against), and some products actually create more waste and cost more to make than their “ungreen” counterparts.
• Name: Wedding Payment Plan
  No-BS Summary: Financing Service
  They specialize in weddings, but how is this loan any different from any other loan? If you’re looking to finance a wedding, the economist in me says you need to dial the event back a bit.
• Name: ExpoTV
  No-BS Summary: Video consumer reviews
  Yet another “Website for [insert handy information].” I would imagine that video-based reviews presents something of a hurdle for most consumers. I’ve known many a non-techie who could barely manage email, and you want them to shoot, possibly edit, and upload a review to the web?
• Name: Freeline Skates
  No-BS Summary: New way to break your neck
  Come on, the guy isn’t even wearing a helmet! The clincher for me is this line: Farrelly says he has turned down Wal-Mart Stores as a retail outlet. Why? Bad for Freeline’s street cred. Yeah, and saying “no” is horrendous for your bottom line. Or do you like bumming on your friends’ couches at, what, 30?
• Name: HomeMade Pizza
  No-BS Summary: Bake at home pizza
  At this point I’m convinced the researchers were just looking to round out the list at an even…umm…nine. Good choice too, because where else can we go for make-at-home pizza besides Little Ceasars, DiGiorno, Red Baron, my grocer’s entire frozen food section and a limitless number of fundraiser catalogs?

Don’t get me wrong, these aren’t bad ideas — except for the sneaker wheels, how much more hazardous can we make our free time? — but I certainly wouldn’t put them in the “most promising” category. They’ve all been done before, and/or being done right now!

Where are the game changers, the ones doing things that improve daily lives on a fundamental level? I don’t think Fwd:Vault is going to shatter our world-foundation, but at least it’s a fresh approach for tackling a known problem. Who finds pancake batter to be a real blight on their lives?

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I was submitting a good business-oriented discussion about SEO just now to StumbleUpon and I noticed they’ve changed how submissions of a new site work. Before, you picked a category for the site, offered a description, and included any worthwhile tags. It wasn’t a whole lot, but I have done the internal “groan” when presented with this to-do list.

Now, if the page is new to their systems, they simply asked if the site is “Safe for work.” That’s it. Sweet.

Looks like this is part of the rollout for their latest version. According to that post, and some poking around, it looks like the service has seen major work in the usability department. I can see the in-house discussion…

• “Why does the user have to do this?”
• “Isn’t this a task that our system could handle?”
• “How many more submissions could we get if we reduced the friction associated with doing so?”

Score another one for simplicity and ease of use.

Do you have the same concern for your product? Everyone loves it when things are easy and obvious, both online and off.

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I was quoted in an article over at IT Expert Voice that pooled advice from hardened IT Veterans on the process of rolling out a new OS in a business environment. There’s plenty of great advice on the actual act of a rollout — test-test-test, schedule for downtime, etc. — but obviously the timing of the article coincides with the recent release of Windows 7, and is directed at IT folks considering an upgrade.

To that extent, I urge all you IT pros to ignore everything else in the article (wink) and follow my advice, which is to wait.

Find more details in the article.

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There’s a new post on the Fwd:Vault blog discussing a new website I found that makes installing and updating the most common desktop software a breeze. Check it out for a review as well as some program suggestions to get started.

In blog meta news, I know that comments were broken for a while. That issue has been resolved, and I apologize if you had a tough time finding the non-existent comments section.

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I was reminded today of Office Max’s classic series of commercials set to the tune of Rubberband Man by the Spinners and starring Eddie Steeples who now stars on the television show My Name Is Earl. I absolutely loved these commercials when they came out; you can’t help but dance in your seat with that happy song and Steeples’ fantastic physical dexterity.

A great advertisement is one that propagates itself. Make it funny, engaging, insightful, interesting, and people will willingly pass it along for you. So many marketers complain about the inability to keep peoples attention. You can still keep it, you just can’t deliver crap anymore.

Case and point: I’m writing a blog post about the Rubberband Man series, I readily found all the commercials online, including a “Making of” video, and it’s been over two years! That’s damn good advertising.

Enjoy some positive vibes before you get back to work.

Office Max Rubberband Man

Office Max Rubberband Man — Back to School

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It’s a common problem with no single right answer: extract the top domain (e.g. example.com) from a given string, which may or may not be a valid URL. I had need of such functionality recently and found answers around the web lacking. So if you ever “just wanted the domain name” out of a string, give this a shot…

<?php
function get_top_domain($url, $remove_subdomains = 'all') {
  $host = strtolower(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST));
  if ($host == '') $host = $url;
  switch ($remove_subdomains) {
    case 'www':
      if (strpos($host, 'www.') === 0) {
        $host = substr($host, 4);
      }
      return $host;
    case 'all':
    default:
      if (substr_count($host, '.') > 1) {
        preg_match("/^.+\.([a-z0-9\.\-]+\.[a-z]{2,4})$/", $host, $host);
        if (isset($host[1])) {
          return $host[1];
        } else {
          // not a valid domain
          return false;
        }
      } else {
        return $host;
      }
    break;
  }
}
 
// some examples
var_dump(get_top_domain('http://www.validurl.example.com/directory', 'all'));
var_dump(get_top_domain('http://www.validurl.example.com/directory', 'www'));
var_dump(get_top_domain('domain-string.example.com', 'all'));
var_dump(get_top_domain('domain-string.example.com/nowfails', 'all'));
var_dump(get_top_domain('finds the domain url.example.com', 'all'));
var_dump(get_top_domain('12.34.56.78', 'all'));
?>

Most of the examples are simply proofs, but I want to draw attention to the string in example #4, 'domain-string.example.com/nowfails'. This is not a valid URL, so the call to parse_url() fails, forcing the script to use the entire original string. In turn, the path part of the string causes the regex to break, causing a complete failout (return false;).

Is there a way to account for this? Surely, however I’m not about to tap that massive keg of exceptions (i.e. just a slash, slash plus path, slash plus another domain in a human-readable string, etc).

No regex for validating URL’s or email addresses is ever perfect; the “strict” RFC requirements are too damn broad. So I did what I always do: chose “what works” over “what’s technically right.” This one requires any 2-4 characters for a the top level domain (TLD), so it doesn’t allow for the .museum TLD, and doesn’t check to see if the provided TLD is actually valid. If you need to do further verification, that’s on you. Here’s the current full list of valid TLD’s provided by the IANA.

If you need to modify the regex at all, I highly recommend you read this article about email address regex first for two reasons:

1. There’s a ton of overlap between email and URL regex matching
2. It will point out all the gotcha’s in your “better” regex theory that you didn’t think about

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Any “decent” website is going to do the following:

• look pleasant
• work in most browsers
• load in a timely fashion
• present approachable navigation layout

These are all the base requirements, as far as I’m concerned. What distinguishes any site from any other is the information it provides, aka the copy (”copy” ~ “text” in the publishing world, for you non-logophiles). The words you put on every page determine who’s gonna find it, read it, share it, love it, hate it. If you focus on nothing else on your site, the verbage would have to be number 1. A few key words at the right place and the right time make everything go very well or very badly.

I think the most important place to choose your words carefully is in the error messages. A user is never more vulnerable than when something goes wrong. Fault has absolutely nothing to do with it. Something screwed up, and now they feel some amount of stress. Leave that to fester long enough, and every user will go elsewhere. I have nothing to back that up save my own experience, but I guarantee its 100%, across the board, no exceptions.

You can easily remove all their stress by presenting them with the right information and steps to move forward. Obviously there’s quite a bit of usability and process logic to consider here, but it all starts with the text. Make the situation clear while simultaneously providing a clear path to a solution, and you’ll be ahead of the majority of sites out there.

Looking for more technical help with your error messages, I found this Think Vitamin post to be a great starter.

Now a recent personal example of copy going horribly wrong. The following excerpt comes from an email from DirecTV, after I signed up for automatic payments…

We have successfully received your credit card information, and your automatic payments should begin to take effect within one to two billing cycles. You can view the details of your Auto Bill Pay information at any time at directv.com by visiting My Account…

So what am I supposed to do until automatic payments “take effect?” Hope that my bill gets paid and I don’t get smacked with late fees? I have absolutely no doubt that some IT flack who had a hand in the automatic payments system penned this little jewel, trying to express to the end user the act of their data propagating through the cluster or some similar garbage. That or a lawyer got their hands on the confirmation email text before it was approved. Either way, this information does nothing but stress the user out, and create even more questions.

Your copy defines the user and their surroundings on your site. The right words put them at ease, the wrong ones can get them lost. Wield your power carefully.

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