The net is that I have always liked, and still do like, the MindJet software and their attempts at making MindManager a good tool for brainstorming all the way through project management are good.  They’re still not ready for prime time as a project management tool but for small to mid-size projects it would be sufficient.

Collaborative Work Management Tools: A MindManager Road Test

We here at TechWhirl (read Connie, me and about 20 volunteers) are always looking for better ways to collaborate since none of us live in the same city.  Sure, there are plenty of tools for sharing information like, well the telephone or email; or if we go all web 2.0, the awesomeness that is Dropbox. But from our experiences there are few, if any, really great collaborative work management tools out there that allow teams across time and space to effectively do work together in anything close to real-time.

It takes 4 mins to fill out and if you have the time, please click on the link below:

 http://www.eagleawards.co.uk/survey/index.php?sid=43997

 Then for the following fields, please select NEIL GIBSON or TWISTED DARK (the name of one of my books).

• Favourite New Writer
• Favourite British Comic book – Black and White
• Favourite New Comic book

If you have a couple minutes, I’m sure Neil would appreciate your vote.

More information:

Neil Gibson Comics

Twisted Dark Facebook Page

The work has been some classic MBA work with a hint of benchmarking, a little strategy and marketing.  I know enough to not expect a great day of data so I’ve made do with what I could find; and what I could assume.  As of today, I think we have our upper bound on the amount we can charge the market.

Pricing aside, online advertising sucks.  The placement sucks.  The designs suck.  It’s as if all the bad things about TV ads were magically transported to the web but without 99% of the entertainment value.  Sucks. Sucks. Sucks. Our philosophy with our magazine is that we want to respect the reader with great content and a nice and elegant design.  Part of this means that we have to avoid flashing ads, rotating ads, and anything designed to “interupt” the reader.  Why in the hell would we want to “interupt” the reader – to me that just irritates the reader and doesn’t actually get a quality click for the advertising company?

Our first version of the advertising will be a field experiment into good placement so that a reader sees the ad at the moment they’re ready to make the decision to click.  Either they’ve already read the article and they’re ready to do something else, or they were searching for that company or product to begin with.  I certainly wish we had more cash in hand to allow us to try and build a better advertising placement model, but since my partner and I couldn’t live with ourselves if we didn’t do what is right, I guess we’ll have to bootstrap innovative designs as well.

The above paragraph was not search engine optimized. See, I used pronouns and didn’t repeat the same word 25 times for density. If it had been search engine optimized, by that I mean SEO, or also search engine marketing I’d have repeated SEO, search engine optimization and search engine marketing numerous times in hopes of creating “key word density”. SEO is the new driver of my world thanks to a number of things.

First, TechWhirl ranks remarkably low on most searches other than our own name. Second, frankly I mistakenly thought that if we created a good looking site, which was structured well for search (copy instead of images for labels, CSS vs. table layout) and it had killer content Google would find it without a problem. And, before I hear the black helicopters of big G start circling the house they’ve already documented from space Google and Bing have sort of indexed the site. What hasn’t happened is that many of these posts don’t rank very high, nor do we rank particularly high on big picture technical communication searches such as “what is technical writing.”

Currently search only brings us about a third of all visitors. Since we have almost no budget other than a couple special events and the occasional free $50 on Facebook this number is far, far too low. Search should contribute to around 80 to 90% of all visitors since our marketing reaches around 400 people and there’s a couple billion people conducting searches for everything from car reviews to new pictures of clowns and donkeys.

Now that a majority of our technical work is done, it’s time to start increasing our profile with search engines. Connie and I have gotten ourselves a good little book called Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day and have been working through it.

My biggest take-away so far is that the bad guys who try to game the Google and Bing algorithms are winning. They’ve figured out how to fark with the priority system so much that G and B have had to make less than useful changes to their ranking systems. Now, if you don’t have a good landing page with the right page name, title, web title, description and those darn key words then forget about a high ranking unless the search is pretty obscure. Maybe it’s just bad memory, but I don’t remember it being like this eight to 9 years ago when I was doing a good bit of web work (and launched this blog).

So far, the search spiders can’t seem to understand pronouns and what they are referring too. This isn’t that surprising considering I doubt a decent percentage of American youth (or my age to be fair) really understand the concept either – yo. However, until these search engines become better and figuring out the nuances of the English language the poor pronoun is going to take it in the pants.

Connie and I have decided that while our posts certainly will keep an eye on key words and ensure that we do a lot of the stuff the SEO book suggests, we will not sacrifice good writing. We’re a magazine and website network for writers for goodness sake. Our hope is that the big brains at Google and Bing when they’re not inventing cars that drive by themselves or killing remarkable next-gen tablets (Courier we never knew ye’) can either build or buy technology that helps those little spiders become more like a well educated English majors at Princeton rather than a high school dropouts with lobotomies.

And then the dam broke.

The organizer of the LavaCon Conference, Jack Molisani, quickly replied and said that he was very interested and wanted to know what we could do.  Connie and I said that we could do a little coverage but since we were a small team so Jack suggested a contest for a couple additional bloggers.

Water starts rushing down the river picking up me and Connie.

We run the contest.  In addition to those two spots, Jack is kind enough to also allow a couple of our regular writers to attend. So, at the end of the day we’re going to LavaCon with a team of five people (contest winners Lois Patterson & Roger Renteria & SWU’s Jacquie Samuels) and a pretty aggressive coverage plan.  It’s been a pretty fast and furious few weeks as the contest moved to the planning and as of Saturday now moves to the delivery.  We’ll do our first live blogging Monday morning and have around 11 interviews lined up.

As of now, TechWhirl’s design is setup for planned feature articles and the occasional podcast but next week we have to have two different content streams.  The first is our normal feature content and the second is our LavaCon coverage since we’re uninterested in becoming the LavaCon all the time channel.  The plan of live blogging and content curation (separating the wheat from the Twitter chaff) for activities at the event.  I’ve been forced to dive into some new services out there that helps turn an unmanaged flow of data into something useful and interesting and it’s been very interesting.

Riding the rushing water hoping not to fall off.

This process has also helped us think through some additional areas of content including providing industry news into the mix.  I have this feeling we’re nearing a strategic moment with the company when we really start seeing a lot of progress.  Of course, that feeling may just be the loopy feeling that occurs when someone spends far too little time sleeping and far too much time planning and preparing.

Connie and I have owned TechWhirl.Com (nee Techwr-l.com) for a full six months yesterday.  In that time we’ve rolled out two site redesigns, with the last one moving the site off of the dreaded Drupal to the much friendlier confines of WordPress.  We’ve changed the name and started building a team of writers around us.  It’s been exciting and fun to see this venture start to mature.

Site Redesign

It’s probably not worth showing the interim design so here are the sites side-by-side

The Site We Purchased

Our Latest Design

Aside from being more aesthetically pleasing the new site is doing far better with search engines.  Hopefully later today I can make some progress in sunsetting the old techwr-l.com domain, which like a bad monster from a 50’s horror movie keeps reappearing prominently in Google searches.

Drupal vs. WordPress

I know there’s a lot of people out there who love Drupal.  I, for one, am not part of that crowd.  It’s an awful platform which makes things harder than it should.  WordPress, when pushed, also has some problems but nothing like Drupal.  From my research, it appears that the developer and designer communities are slowly moving toward WordPress as well.

The Special Writers Unit

I’m not going to go into how our team of writers got the SWU name.  You can read about it on our main blog – here.  It’s more important for me to share that while I am very confident on the overall long term prospects for success with TechWhirl (low costs, relatively easy to manage, few if any direct competitors) neither Connie, nor I , really knew if anyone other than us would be interested in working on articles.  We have been pleasantly surprised.

Our publishing schedule, which is slowing evolving, reflects our initial approach on publishing content.  We created a schedule which allowed us to create something “new” each day but Thursday and the weekends.  A new article on Monday, new poll question on Tuesday, a “classic” article on Thursday (read: old content that hadn’t made it to the site earlier), nothing on Thursday and then a summary of the week’s activities on Friday.  Our site numbers on the weekend look like lower Manhattan in the evening so we didn’t see the point in publishing new stuff then.

The easy to remember and relatively easy publishing schedule helped us start creating a rhythm for work and kept the site content fresh, or at least, fresher than it had been before.  This approach worked pretty well until we a) started getting tired of writing something each and every week b) started running out of ideas.  So, we decided we needed people

Next

We are merely in the middle of our plans and roadmap for 2011-2012.  The ink on the new site isn’t dry and we’re moving on to our next site, which is an online job board for technical communicators.  We’re about 40% through development and should have our first version for testing out by the end of this week.  We’ll test it and release it in the next couple weeks.  Everything will be free for the first few months so there’s no issues if things happen to have issues.

I have to say that I’m not longer bored and I’m interested, which for me are two very, very important things.  It’s been a wilder ride than I would have imagined but good.

<yes, all guesses, even the wrong ones, will be complimented>

And, no, not all of them – I can think of at least one analyst at Infosys that certainly doesn’t fit this mold.

Until this little exercise, I’ve never put anything out to bid.  Sure, I’d get quotes on t-shirts or for an event and then ensure that my organization got the best price but nothing like what we’re trying to do now.

Connie and I have owned TechWhirl for over three months and things are going pretty well.  We’ve created a new sponsorship program, and the initial feedback has been very good.  Part of our plan is some pretty serious development for TechWhirl’s website.  I probably lost a couple years off my total life expectancy during the first redesign so Connie and I decided to find some professionals to help. 

We dutifully drafted requirements and researched WordPress to see what could be done and what couldn’t be done.  It was during this research that our three month project whittled down to 6 weeks and now three weeks.  So, I’ve become the client I always hated – lots of requirements with too short of a deadline.

Then, to compound things, instead of creating one master document that was something like 30 – 40 pages, I skipped that step in lieu of a few documents that sort-of hold together.  Find the voodoo dolls for the pins in the ears, because now it’s a tight timeline and hard to follow.  Fark!

And finally, we think we’ve drafted some pretty creative ideas.  Creative ideas = customization = more money; but while we’re not poor going into this process, we’re certainly not plush with cash.  So, now we’re running behind, confusing to follow and [at some level] cheap.  The trifecta! 

The fact I’ve finally gotten it through my head that I can’t do the development (too cheap to pay someone and also the reason for some of the delay) is a major step forward.  We are being reasonable with everyone who’s pursuing the work and intend to be loyal to whomever chooses to tolerate work with us right now.  We’re trying to get the message out that we need just a basic site for the short timeline and then can do development slowly – reasonable – thus taking a step away from client from hell status. 

We’re doing our best to clean up these rookie mistakes, but it’s the old Einstein rule of 11 changes to correct one mistake.  The fact that we’re getting close to securing someone is a major achievement.  It’s said that experience is what you get the moment after you need it and this process is certainly a good example.  I’ll certainly bite my tongue the next time I see a client provide a less than well structured approach to an RFP.  This stuff is harder than it looks. 

Life has been moving fast over the last six weeks for the company.  We’ve rolled out our first redesign, attended the largest convention for technical communicators in the country (STC Summit) and started publishing content for the first time in two years on the website.

The redesign took far longer than I anticipated but needed to happen.  We’ve teed up another redesign later this year, but this one provides easier navigation and doesn’t cause blackouts when stared at for more than 30 seconds.  The darn thing still flashes more than I’d like but that’s a function of the sponsor ads more than design.

The Society of Technical Communications has a convention each May.  Who are they? Here’s their definition:

STC is the world’s largest and oldest professional association dedicated to the advancement of the field of technical communication. The Society’s members span the field of the technical communication profession and reach across every industry and continent. In fact, the Society has members in almost 50 countries and is continuing to grow rapidly outside of North America and Europe.

Frankly, their people are our people.  Heck TECHWR-L.COM was the first Tech Writer email List back in 1993.  We were able to work a deal with them to do cross-promotions over the next year.  It’s our first partnership and it’s pretty exciting. 

The Summit ran from May 15 to 18th in Sacramento, California.  Other than the terrible weather, the event was a great success for us.  Connie and I got to network with many current and potential sponsors, as well as, get to know a lot of the attendees.  To be honest, until that point, this whole thing just seemed like a side project but after meeting people who have or currently use the site and email discussion list – it’s now real. 

We have a chance to create an online trade magazine and fill a huge void in this industry.  Starting on the May 15th we started filling that void with our first articles.  Connie and I were able to punch out an editorial calendar and basic plan for publishing content.  We have a new article on Monday, new poll question on Tuesday, classic article on Wednesday, and a recap on Friday.  It’s a pace we can keep while looking for more sponsors and writers. 

The feedback and numbers have looked good.  We also turned on our Twitter Account (@TechWriterToday) and Facebook Page prior to the event.  We’ve seen growth in website hits, followers and “Likes” so we much be doing something right.