The Less Annoying Blog

6 reasons small businesses shouldn't use big-business software

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

We recently decided that this blog should focus on the technology needs for small businesses. You might wonder why a small business shouldn't just use the same tools as bigger companies, so this post will outline just a few of the reasons.

In case you're not sure what we mean by "big-business software", here's a trick: you can normally tell the target market for software by looking for annoying acronyms and buzz words. If software is described as an "enterprise-level data-driven ERP solution", that means it's meant for giant companies. At giant companies, decisions are made by people that want to feel like they're doing something really complicated, and software vendors know how to pander to that audience.

We'll write a lot more on the topic in future posts, but companies like Oracle, SAP and even Microsoft make most of their money by selling to huge corporations, and they simply don't offer products that are right for small businesses (most of the time). Here are six reasons why you should look elsewhere for your technology needs:

You don't want to overpay

This is the easiest of these reasons to measure. Big companies have a lot of money, and software vendors want as much of it as possible. Most small businesses simply can't afford to use "enterprise-level" (read:overpriced) software. One easy way to tell if a company is charging too much is if they don't publish their prices online. If you go to a website to buy a product and you can't tell how much it costs without talking to a sales rep, you can bet it's way too expensive.

You don't need all those features

Big-business software is meant to do everything. This sounds like a good thing until you try to actually use it and you can't figure out how because it's too complicated. Your software should do what you need it to do, and anything extra is just unnecessary clutter. This is also related to the price issue, because even if you're not using all the features, you're still paying for them.

You don't have an I.T. team
We've already said that big-business software is complicated, but that doesn't just impact the users. The more complex the software gets, the more work is generally required to set it up and keep it running. Big companies have large I.T. departments to take care of everything, but who's going to be responsible at your company when your fancy new server crashes?

You won't be taken seriously

If a software company is used to serving large clients, why would they spend their time worrying about you? Most big-business software companies won't even talk to you without knowing how many employees work at your business, and they obviously aren't going to treat you quite the same as they would a larger client.

You're lucky enough to have a choice

Many people assume that the tools used at large companies are better than the ones used at smaller companies. They cost more, they have fancy buzz words, and large corporations must know what they're doing when it comes to software purchasing. This couldn't be further from the truth. Many large companies are still using horribly outdated software (like IE6) because it takes a tremendous investment for a large company to make even a small change. You have the ability to avoid all that endless bureaucracy.

Software can be one of your competitive advantages
I wrote an earlier post about how trying to copy the big guys is a mistake. By assuming that you should use the same tools as big companies, you're effectively deciding to play the game using their rules. In order for a small company to succeed, they need to be disruptive. If you're lucky enough to work at a small company (or run your own company), you can gain a serious edge on your competition by using technology in ways that they can't.

The main point that I want to make is that you should celebrate the fact that you don't have to use big-business software. Hopefully if you keep reading this blog, we can help you decide what you should use instead.

What is a domain name, and why does your company need one?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

This post is going to cover the most basic aspect of your company's online identity: your domain name. Most people know most of this already, but I think it makes sense to start from the beginning and work our way to more advanced topics later.

So first, what is a domain name? It's basically just the address that is used to access a website. For example, Yahoo's domain name is "yahoo.com" or "www.yahoo.com". If you want a website, or an email address that ends with @Your_Company.com, you have to buy a domain name. They only cost about $10/year, so there's no reason not to have one.

It's important to know that a domain name has nothing to do with website hosting. You can own the domain name example.com, but that doesn't mean you have a website. Many companies sell hosting plans and domain names together, but you can choose to buy a domain name on it's own. This means that even if you don't think you'll have time to get a website set up in the near future, you should buy the domain now so that you have it. You can worry about what to do with it later.

Now let's get into the different parts of a domain name. A domain name is generally split into three parts: (1)www . (2)yourcompany . (3)com. I'll explain them in reverse order.

(3) Top-level domains

Every domain name has to end with a top-level domain. There are different ones to choose from, but the most common ones (in America at least) are .com, .org, and .net. There are other options to choose from, but when you buy your domain name, the top-level domain has to be selected from one of the options that already exist. You can't make up your own top-level domain.

(2) Second-level domains

The second-level domain comes between "www." and ".com" so this is where you get your real customization. Many of these names are already taken, particularly with the ".com" top-level domain, so you may need to get creative to find a good domain name that is available.

(1) Sub-domains

The sub-domain comes to the left of the second-level domain. For example, most websites use "www" as the sub-domain. You don't actually need to pick a sub-domain when you buy a website, because if you buy "example.com", you automatically own all sub-domains of that (www.example.com, blog.example.com, etc.).

Finally, there are some odds and ends you should know before making the purchase. Domain names aren't case-sensitive which means that it doesn't matter how you capitalize it (example.com is the same as ExaMPle.com). Also, they're so cheap that you shouldn't wait to buy one just because you can't decide on a name. Buy one now to get started, and then if you think up something better, buy that too.

Now you know way more than you ever wanted to know about domains. If you don't already have a domain name, it's time to buy one. There are all kinds of domain registrars out there and they all do pretty much the same thing. Godaddy.com is the most popular one, but I personally have been using Dreamhost lately. As I mentioned above, you can buy a domain name from anyone and host the site elsewhere so it really doesn't matter where you buy it.

New design and features - plus big changes to this blog

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

About 30 minutes ago we pushed out the biggest software update in the history of Less Annoying Software! There are a lot of exciting new things to talk about, so let's dive right in.

New Design

We have a completely new design for our blog, website, and application. If you're reading this from an email or RSS reader, you should click through to see what the blog looks like now. We completely redesigned our logo, picked new colors, and updated the entire site. If you have a customer manager account, you might want to log in and check out the major improvements we made to the user interface.

New Features

You can skip this part if you don't use our customer manager software. We've added some pretty cool features to the site that you should check out.

New Navigation - We moved all the navigation links from the top of the main content area to the sidebar on the right of the screen. This makes getting around a lot easier because we can show more options and organize them more intuitively.
We work with Internet Explorer - Up until now, we have completely blocked all IE users from accessing the site because there are all kinds of problems with IE that we didn't want to deal with. Well, we caved into to the demand for IE support, so now you can log in (or sign up) using IE7 or IE8. We still recommend using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox instead because IE is definitely more annoying software, but that's up to you.
Recent activity report - There's a new report to help you keep track of your customers. You can click on the "Recent activity report" link on the sidebar to see a list of all the customers you've written notes about, ordered by their most recent note. This can help you review what you've been working on recently, or identify customers that you haven't talked to in a while and might need some attention.
Other little improvements - There are a lot of minor things that are a little better throughout the site. Some of them you'll notice, some of them you won't, but almost every page is a little better today than it was yesterday.

So please, go play around and let us know what you think.

Major blog news

We started this blog before we really knew what Less Annoying Software would turn into, and the material lacked focus as a result. Now that we've finished building our brand and identity, it makes sense to reconsider how this blog should really be used. Bracken and I are huge tech nerds, so we've written about tech, but our topics haven't really matched what we're doing with the company.

As of right now, this blog is now going to focus on software for small businesses. We know a lot about technology, and our customers are small businesses, so it makes sense to combine the two. We'll post tips, news, and reviews about software that we think small business should know about. We'll also post about Less Annoying Software product updates so that our customers can stay on top of the improvements we make.

We still have tons of other random tech thoughts, so I'll be picking up my old blog on tylerking.net again. Bracken will start posting at brackenking.com eventually, but that site is still under construction. So to summarize, the Less Annoying Blog will start giving advice specifically for small businesses (and independent business people) and Bracken and I will both post on our personal blogs with all the content that doesn't fit with this site.

I hope you like all the changes. I'd love to hear what you think!

When tags and labels shouldn't be used

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

In the software world, there are two primary systems for organizing information: folders and tags (also called labels). The difference is most noticeable as people transition from Outlook to Gmail, but I want to talk about the more general uses of tags and folders. Specifically, I�m going to go over when tags aren�t the right way to organize things.

First, let�s make sure everyone understands the difference between the two. While there are a lot of superficial differences, the thing that really separates the two is that a file can only exist in one folder, but a file can be associated with multiple tags. For example, let�s say you just bought an airplane ticket for your mom and you want to file away your confirmation email. You often classify your emails as �family� or �travel�. In this case, the email applies to both categories, but with folders you have to pick one. With tags, you can assign the email to both categories.

People often think there are other differences, such as a hierarchical structure (i.e. subfolders), but both folders and tags can support that (it�s just less common with tags).

In the example I gave above (organizing emails) the tag system is obviously much better than the folder system because it doesn�t make you choose between the two different categories. The problem is that people seem to think that tags are always better, but that�s just not the case. They are generally better, but sometimes organization requires mutual exclusivity between different categories.

I�ll use the Less Annoying Software CRM as an example of when tags just aren�t as useful. When you�re dealing with sales leads, you generally want each lead to belong to exactly one status. If someone fills out a contact form on your website, you would categorize them as a �lead�. If you call them up and decide that they aren�t ready to buy, you would categorize them as �inactive�. �Inactive� and �Lead� are mutually exclusive. It�s one or the other, never both. For this reason, we use a folder system (we call them �statuses�, but they�re basically the same thing as folders).

If you�re a hardcore tag supporter, you might wonder why it matters that the two statuses can�t both exist at the same time. The best reason I can come up with is because it messes up reporting. If I want to see a report of the current status (or folder) of all my leads, I can�t have overlap between inactive and active leads.

This is obviously a somewhat obscure example, but there are all kinds of different scenarios where folders actually do make sense. When I finish writing this blog post in Google Docs, I�m going to want to move it from the �draft� folder to the �published� folder. This means adding it to one and then removing it from the other, because Google uses tags for just about everything (they call them folders in Google Docs, but they�re really tags).

So enough rambling. What�s the point? The point is that in many cases folders are outdated and ineffective, but don�t disregard them entirely. They still serve a purpose, and if you find yourself designing software, I suggest you put some thought in before going with tags just because that�s what�s cool right now.

How to make a simple website logo

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

This is another graphic design post meant for people that know nothing about graphic design. I'm going to walk through some really simple tricks you can use to make a logo for a website. To demonstrate, I'm going to make the Less Annoying Software logo seen above (No, we're not actually going to use it).

One thing that I'd like to point out is that logos only have the meaning you give them. No matter what kind of logo you design, it's going to look kind of silly by itself, but no matter how good or bad it is, people who visit your site and see the logo will generally just accept it as a part of your brand. It can be serif, sans-serif, green, blue or yellow. Whatever you make will seem natural to the user.

There will be four steps:

Pick your font
Pick your color
Draw a random shape
Add reflection

Disclaimer: Similar to my post about using gradients, I'm just highlighting some tricks you can use. I'm not suggesting you follow these directions exactly.

Ok, let's get started...

Step 1: Pick your font

Your logo needs a font that is distinctive, but very readable. Try to pick something that looks fairly standard but has a few unique characteristics that make it stand out a little. Two sites that I use to find free fonts (because they're the first two Google results) are http://www.1001freefonts.com/ and http://www.urbanfonts.com/.

For this example, I'll pick the first font that's currently featured on urbanfonts.com which is called "Mank Sans". To use a font, you'll need to install it on your computer (in windows, download the file, drag it from the zip file to your desktop, and then drag it into the C:\WINDOWS\Fonts folder). After installing it, the font should show up with all your other fonts in programs like Word and Fireworks (after restarting the program).

Ok, so here's what the font looks like plain:

Notice that it's very simple and plain, but it's clearly not one of the fonts you see every day (Arial, Times New Roman, etc).

Step 2: Pick your color

I'm a big fan of blueish green, so I'll go with that. You can pick whatever color you want. I'm also going to have the text fade from light green to dark green like I discussed in my post about gradients.

So here's what I have now:

Step 3: Draw a random shape

If you are an experienced designer, there are a lot of cool things you can do with your logo. If you're new to this, you can draw just about any random shape you want and put it next to the text. Like I said, people accept whatever you show them, so just because you know it's bs, that doesn't mean anyone else will.

I decided to draw a random shape with two different sections and I used the same gradient that I used with the text. Here's what it looks like:

See? That shape is meaningless. It's stupid. But if someone that didn't know any better went to my website, they wouldn't think about it like that. They aren't trying to challenge the site's design, so they don't think about the fact that I used a stupid meaningless shape.

Step 4: Add a reflection

This is a completely overused trick, but it's an effective way to make something look a little bit more flashy. So how do you add a reflection to the logo? It's simple. First, copy the entire image, paste it right below the current one, and flip the lower one upside down.

As you can see, I removed the "y" and the "g" from the lower half because those letters mess things up by going lower than the rest of the letters. There's not a great way to deal with this, so I just skip those letters entirely.

Now you just need to make the lower half of the text look like it's fading out. Put a gradient over the flipped version of the logo. Both sides of the gradient should be white, but you can change the transparency so that the top of the gradient is lighter than the bottom. Also, make sure the top part of the logo is on a layer above the lower one so that it isn't covered by this gradient. Here's what it looks like:

Now I'm just going to add some flair to bring things together. I'll scale the reflection vertically so it's not quite as tall as the main text, and I'll add a subtle grey fade (made with an elliptical gradient) behind the main text. This highlights the reflecting line making it look more believable.

That's all there is to it. It isn't the greatest logo ever, but it gets the job done and it only took me about 10 minutes to make. If you're designing a site, give these tricks a try, and let me know how it turns out.

Special Bonus Section

We're in the process of redesigning LessAnnoyingSoftware.com (and this blog). We haven't settled on anything final, but here's the logo we're thinking about using. I'd love to hear what you think.

The Rocks way or the highway

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

Over the past few years in graduate school, I've somehow ended up managing the computing resources for our lab. Prior to joining the lab, I didn't have any real system administration experience, so while I've learned a lot over these years, I'm still learning plenty whenever something breaks or we decided to upgrade our resources. As you might expect, there's a huge amount of complexity in managing a linux cluster, and one often has to just trust various suggestions at face value without fully understanding the underlying logic. Regardless, I always try to make a point of having at least some idea of why various best practices have been established. The following is a story about my not doing that, and the minor annoyance that it's causing.

About a year ago, we purchased 32 compute nodes for a new cluster. Even if you've never been in a server room before, you've probably seen one on TV (and in the picture included in this post). Basically, there are a bunch of metal racks lined up next to each other, and the computers are stacked on top of each other inside the racks. The racks in our lab can hold about 40 computers each. Cooled air is blown up from the floor in front of the computers, then pulled over the processors by fans inside the computers.

Anyway, when we bought these computers, the company from whom we purchased them came out to do the installation. As I said, we had purchased 32 machines and had room for 40 machines in the rack, so we were going to have 8 empty slots in the rack. I was a little surprised to see that the team installed the computers with all 8 empty spots placed at the top of the rack. When I asked about this, they told me that installing machines from the floor up is "The Rocks Way" (Rocks is a version of linux designed for high performance computing clusters). When I prodded a little further , they told me that it was done to improve the airflow through the computers: put all the machines as close to the air conditioning as possible, and create a continuous block of machines to get even airflow. Satisfied with their answer, I left them to their work.

Somewhat later I noticed that by stacking the machines from the floor up, the computer named node-01 was placed on the bottom with node-32 on top. Previously in the lab, we'd always installed our machines in the opposite order (01 on top). For consistency's sake, I asked if there was a good reason to have 01 on the bottom. Again, I was told that this was "The Rocks Way," but when I prodded further, I didn't really get any further explanation. As such, we asked them to rename the machines to stay in line with the rest of our layout.

And now we get to the point of this unnecessarily long and boring story. Our lab is about to purchase 8 more computers. We want to add them to this cluster. They will be numbered 33-40. But if we put them into our rack, our nicely number machines are suddenly going to be out of order. From top to bottom, they will read 33-40,1-32. Obviously, that's not a huge deal for those who aren't as anal retentive as myself, but if we'd just done things the Rocks way (and understood why), we would now have nice sequentially numbered machines.

It's pretty safe to say that almost every best practice has some reasoning behind it. In plenty of cases, this reasoning might not apply to your situation; but if you don't find out what the reason was in the first place, you've got no hope of determining whether it is relevant to you.

Being better is a decent business plan

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

As you probably know, Google released a new social networking feature called Google Buzz. Just like any Google product, some people love it and some people hate it. There are a lot of legitimate criticisms (mostly about the major privacy holes), but there's one criticism that I just can't stand:

"Google Buzz is just a repackaged combination of Facebook and Twitter"

This criticism seems to suggest that a new products don't have any merit unless they offer never-before-seen features. Aside from the fact the Google Buzz does have tons of new features, that's not a legitimate criticism anyway. I absolutely agree that every new product needs to be unique in some way, but that doesn't mean that it needs radical new features.

Toyata didn't invent the car, so why were they (until recently) so much more successful than the companies that actually did invent the car? Why did Google search beat out Alta Vista and Yahoo? Why did Netscape lose to Internet Explorer, and why will Internet Explorer lose to Firefox and Chrome? The companies on the winning side of all these examples had one big thing separating them from the competition: they were better.

Toyata didn't feel the need to put out a five-wheeled car just because Fords have four wheels. They just made the same types of cars Ford was making, but they did a better job. Being better can be what makes your company unique.

At Less Annoying Software, we offer a CRM (or "Customer Manager" as we prefer to call it). Our CRM doesn't have any special features to differentiate it from the competition. Here's our business plan: "There are a lot of CRMs out there. Let's make a better one". It's that simple, and so far it seems to be working.

So when I hear people complain that Google Buzz can't possibly be worthwhile because it's just stealing ideas from Facebook and Twitter, I have to disagree. What if Google just does a better job than other companies? Isn't that worth something?

Even the big boys have to prioritize

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

As you may have gleaned from our previous posts, Tyler and I are pretty big fans of many Google software products. Among other things, Less Annoying Software uses Google Voice to handle telephone service, Google Apps for email and documents, and Adwords for the majority of our advertising. It probably comes as no surprise then, that we keep a lot of what we like (and don't like) about Google in mind when we're developing.

One of the things that I find interesting about Google is that despite being a huge company, they are remarkably agile in moving into new areas as well as dropping old projects. The latter of these is the one that I actually find more intriguing. Over the past couple of years, Google has basically stopped developing Google Notebook, Google Video, Orkut (a social networking site that you've probably never heard of if you're from the US), and probably plenty more web services with which I'm not familiar. If you've visited Gmail recently from IE6 or Firefox 2, you may have noticed Google Apps is phasing out support for older browsers. Over the past few months or so, they have also transitioned away from Google Gears (a framework for webapps to store data locally to allow offline access) in favor of HTML5. Gears seemed to be a huge part of Google's webapp strategy for a while as they integrated it into almost all of their services, but they seemingly jumped to HTML5 without any major qualms.

So how does this relate to small scale software development? Seeing that even Google feels the need to focus it's resources on the important aspects of it's huge suite of web software emphasizes how important it is for a small company or individual to think carefully about what features are really essential, and which ones are worth forgoing in favor of improving the core experience. Similarly, it's easy to hold on to older technologies even in the face of clearly superior alternatives. If a company as big as Google is able to readily update their technology platforms -- despite significant investment in the previous one -- a smaller company has no excuse to exhibit less agility.

Need to spice up your design? Try gradients.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

Note: I'm sorry about the horrible writing in this post. I woke up in the middle of the night, so I thought I'd write a blog post. I picked a topic that's very visual so my inability to form sentences in my current state shouldn't matter too much.

This post is for those of you that aren't professional designers, but still find yourself responsible for coming up with basic designs for things like websites, email templates, logos, brochures, etc.

If you find that your design just doesn't stand out enough, but you're not sure what you can do to fix it, there's an easy trick that you should try out: Add gradients. A gradient is a graphical element that fades from one color to another. For example, here's a gradient that fades from white to black:

If you add subtle gradients to your design, things will look more 3-d and realistic. Basically, Gradients are to design as auto-tuners (like what T-Pain uses on his vocals) are to music. If you're not sure what you're doing, just throw some in there and things will look better.

On the right, you'll see some examples of how gradients can be used to spice up common design elements. You can do things like add the appearance of a shadow, or make things look shiny.

In real life, nothing is one solid color. Because of differences in lighting, reflections, and textures, objects all have slight color variations. When you look at a solid-colored button or navigation bar on a website, it looks weird to you because nothing exists like that in nature. Adding a slight gradient basically tricks your eyes into believing that the computer screen is somehow more realistic.

I'm not suggesting that things look bad when they're a solid color, they just look different. If you look at the lessannoyingsoftware.com design, there are very few gradients, so I obviously don't advocate abusing gradients. My point is that if you're looking for some random bling to catch your audience's attention, gradients are a nice trick.

To drive home my point, here are two different versions of the same login screen. They are identical except that one uses gradients and the other doesn't. Which one stands out more?

I should note that I went waaaay overboard with the gradients just to make them obvious. Websites end up looking tacky when you lean on gradients as much as I did here, so be careful to use them sparingly and with a little more subtlety than I'm using here (look at attractive websites like mint.com to see how it should be done).

Improvement doesn't always involve new features

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:43:03 -0600

In my last post, I talked about how everything can be improved. I didn't make this distinction at the time, but I implied that I was talking about improving existing features as opposed to creating new ones. Obviously new features can be great and they can help expand old products, but that's not the same thing as improving on what already exists.

Companies often use new features to trick customers into thinking that they're actually doing something useful. This works a lot of the time because customers forget what the company is actually supposed to be doing for them in the first place.

I get at least one email per week from Chase Bank telling me about how the rewards structure for my credit card has been improved, or how every time I spend money I might win some sort of prize, or how there's some sort of new concierge service. I see these emails as a red flag that Chase isn't actually doing anything useful. They aren't emailing me about how their terrible website has been improved. They aren't telling me that they worked with Visa and Mastercard to lower processing fees so that more businesses will accept my card. They haven't figured out a way to combine checking and savings accounts so I can earn interest and pay bills with the same account.

Chase is a bank, not a concierge and not a lottery. The fact that they're working so hard promoting features that have nothing to do with their core business makes me think that they have run out of real ideas (or they're too lazy/greedy to actually pursue real ideas). If you want to cut to the core of how hard a company is working to improve their product, focus on the things that they're actually supposed to be working on.

If you're responsible for creating a product, you have to add new features sometimes in order for the product to grow. Just make sure that the features you add enhance your core functionality rather than distract from it, and make sure you aren't adding features at the expense of improving your existing product.