One of the first web design jobs I did for a family member, was this little number to promote an apartment for hire: Whitstable Apartment. This included SEO, advise on marketing etc. It gets quite a few leads through, for a minimally marketed website.

My latest family web venture is more interesting for me. My Uncle has written a book, or what he wants to turn into an eBook, on a niche not so widely covered on the web (or so he says!). This is interesting for me, because he has clearly done a lot of research and we’ve had some good ideas for marketing, SEO, sales etc. This is particularly exciting for me, because I’ve never marketed an eBook before, so it’s territory I’m new to, but would like to get some kind of experience in. One thing I have made clear to my Uncle is that we will not do the whole “Make £3,000 in 7 Days. Become A Millionaire.” kind of crap, with the big long letter and the signature at the end. That’s what he wanted to do initially, but I told him my feelings on such a site and I’m sure a great deal of you will feel the same way.

So far, I have mocked up a design:

(Perhaps subject to some revisions)

I have started coding it; you can take a peak if you want, but it’s not finished yet and I’ve noticed some bugs in other browsers which I haven’t got round to fixing yet: Coffee@Events HTML. Note my HTML/CSS isn’t ’super duper hey look I’ve put in all these fancy code snippets ’cause I’m cool’ kinda crap, but I don’t believe it’s at an unpresentable level (perhaps some of you will beg to differ!).

I’m doing everything as cheaply as possible, including possibly securing a free shopping cart license from a contact, free marketing techniques, etc. It’s a fun breath of relief for me; a nice fun side project that doesn’t have the pressure of possibly losing lots of money, for once. I’ll keep you updated with this, because the more my Uncle and I talk, the more possibilities I could turn this into more than just an ‘eBook selling website’ and could perhaps engineer some parts to make my own revenue from this.

If anyone has any experience in marketing/selling eBooks, by the way, please get in touch. Oh and of course, designers/coders, feel free to critique my work.

Note before the article begins:

I’ve read this through a couple of times now and I’m not entirely sure of the usefulness of this article. To summarise, I make a pretty simple observation of technology in society, but as of my original draft, I feel that this lacks a bit of depth and it’s something I’ll have to think about more and perhaps revise this. I wouldn’t recommend giving it a read if your time is precious, but if you do have some time, let me know what you think and even help expand. Sorry if you felt you’ve wasted your time.

– Begin the article

Today, I was on a train, returning home to London with two of my not-so-tech-savvy friends after a day out at the beach yesterday. As I sat there listening to my iPod, I looked at the table full of all of our tech gear. My friends aren’t into tech stuff as much as I am (evident in the picture with the older phone models), but as I sat and looked at the table of our gadgets, I realised, that surely there must be a problem with technology.

Nowadays, technology seems to be moving in the direction of being able to do more from the smallest possible single device. This has been seen since cameras started getting added to phones, then MP3 players were added and now downloadable applications.

My newly purchased iPhone has all of these. I can take photos, listen to music and with applications, do pretty much whatever I may want to do from my ‘phone’. Yet today, I still was carrying an iPod classic, another phone and oh yeah, what did I take that photo with? My Sony Cybershot camera, of course. That’s four devices for me alone. Ok, my Sony Ericsson phone doesn’t really count, as I’m using it until my old number gets ported over to my iPhone. Still, that’s three devices I’m carrying on myself in my pockets.

Here’s the crazy thing. My iPhone has a camera and can also serve as an MP3 player. Why am I carrying an iPod classic and another camera with me also?

Well, perhaps this is just me being the way I am, but whilst my 32GB iPhone takes great photos and stores a fair amount of music, the photo quality doesn’t even scratch what the Sony Cybershot does and my iPhone doesn’t have the capacity to hold my song collection, which is approaching 10,000 songs. This is fine on a day-to-day basis as I’ve synced my song collection so that the latest played, most played and highest rated played songs on my desktop are also on my iPhone (which takes up very little space, but gives me a decent selection of music I like) and for day-to-day stuff, the iPhone camera will suffice. So, what if I want to have my complete song collection with me and take great photos; two things you would likely want on a day out to the beach that includes a long train journey home? For me, I have to take all three of my devices. Surely, given most manufacturer’s vision of putting more into smaller single devices, this would sound pretty ludicrous.

I don’t think I’m the only one either. How many times have you seen people at parties taking snaps with a digital camera, but also carrying a phone with a camera? Or someone with an MP3 player and a phone that has a built-in MP3 player? Probably more than you think, and half the time we’re oblivious to the fact that we’re over-equipped with tech gear. Surely, there must be some kind of issue here, because that doesn’t make much sense to me. Sure we can look at it bluntly; if you want better pictures you take a camera which snaps better than your camera phone. But then what’s the point in having a camera on your phone? For day-to-day snaps, then a camera for proper events? That kind of makes sense I guess, but it doesn’t really make sense when you do end up with several devices on your person that do the same thing.

The problem is, whilst new technology offers the ability to do more from one device, you’re never going to be able to get the kind of quality you would get from a device dedicated to something. This might sound like a no-brainer, but after I spent the day with my trouser pockets bulging with tech, the prospect of being able to do it all from one -small- single device (as suggested by manufacturers) was a bit laughable. Has the iPhone actually given me the ability to do what I want to do?

The thing is, you can’t really offer everything in one package. Phones are phones, cameras are cameras, music players are music players. You can’t combine all three and get the best results. Should I resign to this fact or should I just be happy that I can get away with a mediocre of what I want in one device, for now? Some people might find this all a bit snobby, but photos and music are two things that are very important to me. My shortened down problem with technology is: bulged out pockets full of tech that provides best results vs. one device that provides mediocre results.

What will be interesting is if one day, I will be able to do everything I want to do, and to the capacity/quality I’d like from one device. I’d say we’re getting pretty close to that and I won’t be surprised if I can in my lifetime. But of course, when/if technology does move that far, there will be even better cameras and even better music players. Is the problem with technology that there is never a completed solution, simply because when we solve a problem, we somehow find better ways to solve the problem or in some cases, create new problems we would normally not have had? When mobile phones were first created, was it ever an issue that you couldn’t take a decent photo from your phone? Wait, hold on a minute.. take a photo from a phone? I’m all for pushing technology forward and forward, but will a line ever be drawn? Will we ever be content? Maybe I’m wrong and there’s no issue here at all.. I’ll leave it for you to decide.

Coded Preview never fails to surprise me. I originally started it back January 2008, as a small project thrown together and recently relaunched it. When I initially launched it, I was surprised at the response I got and how popular it was. It actually ended up going from a small side project of mine to one of my biggest projects. Like this blog, it was down for quite a few months. I received many emails telling me to get it back up, offers to purchase it and after lots of emails, I finally did. Why it surprised me again, is because despite the downtime and some data loss, people have still rushed back to use it again. It only gets around 2,000 uniques a month, which is nothing special, but lots of Coded Previews are created every day and it still seems to get quite a lot of publicity.

Nonetheless, I have been listening to the users as always and have some new features being launched over the next few days, based on what I’ve been told. I won’t write about it on here till it’s done, to avoid it being leaked to the users (I like to keep things a surprise).

What’s the future for Coded Preview? Well, some of you may have realised Coded Preview has no revenue model (other than the Google Ads, which earn a pitiful amount). I’ve toyed with all kinds of ideas over the years and to be honest, I still haven’t really come to a conclusion. There are some really obvious ways to monetize it, but a great deal of the time when assessing these ideas, there’s often a problem with how to do this.

I’m not going to worry too much about monetization yet, but I will tell you the direction that i’m taking, which will allow better monetization options over the foreseeable future.

Firstly, I’m going to rebrand the entire thing. Yep, you heard here first. New name, new logo, new design - the full works. “Coded Preview” sounds too ‘techy’ now - I want to open the service up. Initially, this name was fine, given I thought it would be a small project, but now I think it’s a bit lame. So I’m on the hunt for new names, more importantly, domains (which will ultimately decide the end name). The design could also be more simple I think and I believe that’s what users love about the service. With this, it looks like I’m going to partner with someone on the project, and we’ve decided to start moving to something more portfolio-based. Importantly though, the whole main concept and form will remain in place, because I think that’s important and I don’t want it to get lost all the sites that offer portfolio systems.

I’ll keep you updated on CP and the plans above. New features look like they will be here very soon, so watch this space.