"mediocrity now howls in protest" by Hugh MacLeod

Without sounding overly simplistic, I think there are 3 types of businesses on the web:

1. Ones that try to milk or exploit the web (think spammers, Zynga, the “make millions on Google” crowd). These people aren’t always dirtbags nor are they breaking the law but they’re looking to take everything they can get without giving much back.
2. Ones that just see the web as another medium to conduct business. Decisions on the web are made the same way any other decision in the business is made. Should we change our health care provider? Should we move our office to another city? Should we invest time in a Facebook page?
3. Ones that have a sincere passion for the web and what it can do for people. These are people who contribute valuable work to open source projects, manage vibrant communities of people, and write about these things because they can’t help themselves.

I whole-heartedly fall into the third category; I love the web and everything it can do. I’ve been using this crazy conglomeration of pipes and nodes since its birth and have been contributing and building for at least 5 years in various capacities. The breadth and depth of humanity expressed on the web never ceases to impress me and I’m proud to be a part of this amazing global community by giving where I can and helping others do the same.

Being a designer/developer, I have a unique perspective on the web compared to other small businesses. I know what it looks like under the hood and can tell the difference between a Yugo and a Lexus. I know what works most of the time, what doesn’t work any of the time, and what needs to be explored and tested before putting it in place. I’ve also worked with many different businesses in many different industries and can appreciate different needs and approaches.

I took a hard look at what I’ve learned about being on the web and wanted to share my complete web philosophy. If you’re reading this on my site, I invite you to add your own pieces here or address anything I’ve said here in the comments. I’d always rather have a conversation than a broadcast.

1) Look for the path of least resistance

The best way to build something on the web is rarely the most expensive and never the most complicated. If it seems insurmountable then you haven’t done enough exploring. Every great developer will tell you that their most valuable tool is Google. I’ve found solutions to problems I didn’t even have, saved them, and found a use a year later. Finding the path of least resistance is simple with a few questions:

• Does what you want to make already exist? This is for anyone with a web-based business idea that revolves around a tool or a site. If you think you have a great idea for a productivity tool or a web application, it’s time to do some major research on what’s out there. If it doesn’t exist, are you looking hard enough?
• If so, are you sure you’re not the only one who would use it? It might be hard to be objective about a great idea you came up with so ask around and make sure that what you want to make actually needs to be made.
• If it does exist, does it need improvement? If so, does it need major improvement? Breaking into a segment with existing products is going to be tough if what you’re offering isn’t a big jump ahead of what is there. If your potential competition is open source, can you contribute instead of starting something new?
• If it kind of exists or exists in a partial form, can you extend or customize what’s there already? If you want to build a site with a lot of different features and functionality, you’ll need a starting point. Custom-built software starts around $20,000 and can easily cost 10 times as much depending on what you want to do. Check out Drupal, Wordpress, Ning, Facebook, PHPBB, Joomla, Magento, and KickApps.
• For those looking to sell products on-line, who is your competition? If you want to sell shoes on-line you’re going to be contending with a big dog, Zappos, so you better be offering something very unique. If fact, that advice goes for anyone wanting to sell anything on the web. If you’re not standing out in some big way, you’re wasting your time.

2) Have a goal in mind

This is the first thing I ask everyone I start working for: what is your goal with your web presence? For many, this seems like such an obvious question but there is usually more than meets the eye.

If, for example, you’re a dentist, you might want a site for people to read about your practice and call you to set up an appointment. Sounds pretty normal but is it really a phone call you want or would you rather have an email with a bit of information? Are you looking to increase the number of appointments or improve the quality of your inquiries? Are there common questions people have about a service you provide?

Being clear about why your site should exist makes every decision down the road a matter of returning to your goal. If a feature or function doesn’t support what your goal, don’t implement it. Having a fun, exciting, pretty site is great but if it makes it harder for people to buy your product or contact you then you’re doing everyone a disservice. Be clear about what you want to do so you don’t buy yourself into non-performing site.

This speaks mostly to business websites, i.e. one that promotes a product or service but the same idea goes for community and informative sites. Even if you’re not selling anything your site still has a function to perform. If you’re providing information, then your structure should be simple and well-thought-out. If you’re building a social site then it needs to be easy to sign up, get started, and contribute. If you’re promoting a cause then you need to make your message clear and give people easy ways to take the next step (donate, volunteer, sign up for more information). Don’t fool yourself: every site has a goal.

3) Always consider performance

The more I construct on the web, the more I understand how important this piece of the puzzle is. I was tempted to put this first since it is so often overlooked but making something work well isn’t going to help you if you’re building for the wrong reason and don’t have a goal in mind. Also, a great idea with a well-designed but poorly-performing site can be corrected.

I see three major components to web performance. These are measurable and correctable and can make the difference between success and failure.

1) Page load speed – This is the low-hanging fruit of most sites. I’d estimate that 90% of the sites I come into contact with could have their loading speed improved (mine included but it’s in the upper percentile :) ). A faster site has been proven to increase the number of pages a visitor views (people are more likely to click around and stay on a site that moves quickly) and increase the likelihood someone will share a site with others.

Page loading speed comes down to how many things you’re loading on your page and how large those things are. The less your load, the faster the page. Keep your code small and combined into as few files as possible, optimize your images in an image editor like GIMP or Photoshop, and load as few external scripts (like share buttons and widgets) as possible and you’ll be in good shape. If you need an analysis of what can be done on your site, contact me.

2) Search engine optimization (SEO) - Another piece of web site performance is how well it’s constructed for search engines. On average, about a third of your traffic should be coming from search engines (more if you’re a content-based site like mine). If you’re under 20% then something might be wrong and you may need an analysis.

SEO is a set of rules dictating how a site needs to be structured to allow the search engine spiders to do their job. It’s also a strategy that comes from picking the right words in that structure and content to appear as high as possible on the results pages. Though there are outstanding questions on the finer points, there are also agreed-upon standards and it would behoove a business owner to understand the basics.

3) Conversion rate - I’m talking more and more about this as time goes on because I believe it to be the most important metric for any site that’s selling something. Your conversion rate, put simply, is the number of people who do what you want them to do (buy something, sign up, submit a contact form) divided by the number of unique visitors to your site. If I get 10 contacts a month and I have 1000 unique visitors then I’ve got a 1% conversion rate.

It’s really tough to say what a conversion rate should be and how, precisely, it should be calculated; it’s different for every site. What is universal, however, is having a sense of what your rate is and where you’re potentially going wrong. Conversion rate problems I’ve seen very typically come from an unclear path to the goal, convoluted verbiage leading to a confused user, and too many steps to take to reach the goal.

A final note on site performance. While it’s something that needs to be an important part of a site’s initial build, your performance, particularly in the areas of SEO and conversion, need to be monitored and re-visited. People change over time and so does what you offer. Collect data and watch the patterns and you’ll be surprised by what you can achieve with what you already have.

4) Put your best foot forward

If you’re talking to a designer, this is the only thing that matters. If you’re talking to a developer, this doesn’t really matter very much at all. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between. Aesthetics are, for the most part, relative though there are a few general rules to good design that should always be considered (alignment, grouping, negative space, and balance to name a few). That being said, there are some important things you can do to put your best foot forward on the web. These rules apply to everything from your Facebook page that you have fairly minimal control over to your own site that has few limitations.

1) Check your spelling and grammar. The web is rife with juvenile spelling and painful grammar errors (just look at all the pages devoted to calling them out). Because much of the web is informal communication, it isn’t efficient to spend a lot of time editing and proofing your blog comments, Facebook status messages, and you IM messages. But, on the important stuff, an obvious error could turn off potential customers, employers, or connections. Marketing content, slogans, emails … re-read at least once before sending and you’ll put forth a much more professional air.

2) Check your pages thoroughly for errors. It seems like the web just wants to break. As entropy in the world increases, so do the number of broken links, server errors, missing images, and layout problems. Finding an fixing errors on a web page, unless your a complete nerd like me, is tedious and feels unrewarding but it’s a very important part of upkeep. Click around your site on a regular basis looking for text that shouldn’t be there, missing page titles, broken links, and embedded code that doesn’t work. There are also tools to help you like Xenu for broken links and missing images.

3) Pay a WEB designer. This shouldn’t sound too strange from a designer but it’s a rule even I follow for certain projects. Design is unlike many other disciplines in that it seems like anyone can do it. In fact, anyone can do it since Photoshop and Illustrator don’t require a license to use. What some people fail to understand is how much work actually goes into a professional design. Designing for the web takes into account human interaction guidelines, information architecture, business goals, branding conerns, performance, eye movement, and so much more. Before you call your nephew in high school who just took a digital art class, talk to a professional designer about your project and what it would entail. You’ll thank me later.

4) It needs to look good to you. I say this knowing some people have a very strange idea of what looks good and what does not. I’m of the belief that there is always a sweet spot that can be found between someone’s person taste and a designer’s eye. This sweet spot can be exceedingly hard to find, so much so that there is usually some compromise. If you hire a designer (I should say “when”), take their advice but make sure you feel good about what they made. A web site is your face to the world and you should feel proud to show it off. Bonus tip: ask in the beginning of the process how many revisions are allowed.

Am I missing anything? I welcome your feedback and insight in the comments below.

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A little internet research, typically the cure for any random issue you can’t seem to explain on your own, did not do much to allay our fears that something – something terrible – was happening. There were a few anecdotal reports of traffic drops but I could not find anything that allayed our fear. We crossed our fingers, took some time off, and hoped for the best.

Turns out that the significant down-turn cleared itself up by the first non-holiday week in January. Here are the visitor graphs to illustrate:

As you can see, the sites saw a big dip in traffic that came on slowly and recouped immediately after the last holiday weekend. We were quite relieved.

But, still, there was the question of how to potentially prevent this problem in the future. I wanted to figure out if there was some kind of obvious pattern that this dip was following so I looked at the traffic sources for one of the sites (the last graph above). It confirmed my suspicion that we were just seeing an overall decrease in web use:

Visitors from direct traffic

Visitors from referring sites

Visitors from search engines

The fact that the drop was across all three (actually four; our campaigns showed a similar pattern) was bittersweet. Sure, we weren’t doing anything wrong or suffering some sort of Google penalty but there also wasn’t any obvious recourse. We were prepared for next year with an explanation but not a way out.

I read a Chris Brogan article (or was it a video? I’d link to it if I could find it again) that made me feel bad (which is rare) but I got his point. He said that everyone slows down around the holidays so that’s the best time to kick ass and take names. While everyone drinks and eats and gets their merry on, he’s making videos, writing blog posts, and generally crushing it. I felt bad because I think I watched/read on vacation.

Point being, we slow down during the holidays and we should slow down if we need to. Incoming content slows down, traffic decreases, people spend time away from the glowing screen. This is a good thing from a human standpoint but is there a way to mitigate it? I see a few options:

• If possible, start tuning your content towards the people that are active on the web at this time: shoppers and the researchers/media that follows them. I see so many “what I’m thankful for posts” and that’s cute but I’m not motivated to read that at all. What I do want to know is where the good deals are. For a blog about business finance or social CRM, this just doesn’t make sense. But what about retail spending analysis? Improving online sales? Bumping up customer service during these months? The people that are producing are dying for timely content and the holiday season makes it too easy.
• Another option is a holiday-specific event like a webinar or conference. The problem here is that your general attendance might be low so the return on the time invested may not be worth it. If it’s vital to keep those numbers up, it needs to be done.
• The last option is to accept the hit and concentrate on other things. Let go of a few things and concentrate on cleaning up broken links, old site sections, social networks you’re not using. Change the pace and the focus to switch things up and give yourself a break from the usual. Catch up on your RSS feed and leave several comments across the ’sphere.

In the end, if you’re starving for work, you can find it. Just make sure you understand the limitations of the season and set your expectations accordingly.

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But, like always, reality stepped in fairly quickly and reminded me that the days between showers are unpleasant, coffee shops are expensive, and working from home has some subtle pitfalls that make it much less of a paradise than one might expect. Since my month (or two) of adjustment, I’ve learned what makes me a happy, successful, home-based cog and what can turn me into a grumpy, malnourished, pain in the ass. Some of it is attitude but a good portion comes from the right tools for the job.

Desktop and Web-Based Software I Use and Love

Certain people and companies deign to describe productivity nirvana through a perfect app. I’ve tried many, many of these incredible apps and have found about a 5% retention and success rate. That means 19 of 20 things I think will help don’t help and only get used a few times. A few, however, have stuck around for whatever reason.

InstantBoss: I would call this a critical addition to the tool belt and it’s why I’m listing it first. InstantBoss is a very simple Windows application that allows you to set working and break time spans so you have something to remind you to shift your eyes and get off your butt. I set 15 minutes of work with 2 minute breaks and make sure I stand up and walk away for that time. The best thing to do is to drink some water and do a quick set or two of a good compound exercise (see below). It might not seem like much but it truly makes the difference between a good day and a bad one for me.

Gmail, Gdocs, Wave: Yes, Wave. The Google Apps suite is something I just couldn’t do without. Honestly, it’s mostly Gmail and Gdocs but Wave is really helping me in a number of ways. I’m not going to go into too much detail since I’m probably preaching to the choir but I’ll say this: if you’ve never tried Gmail before, give it a shot. it really takes email to a new level.

Dropbox: To me, this is another one of those no-brainers. Dropbox is 2 gigabytes of data that you can put on any computer. Install it on two computers and they each share a file folder that stays synced. You can also access your files from their website. And that’s all it does. But, man, it does it well. I’ve never had a problem with their software and it’s never slowed my internet connection down. I love Dropbox, period. I even wrote about it already.

iTunes and Pandora: Between iTunes radio and Pandora, I’m always listening to something high-energy and potentially annoying to my non-existent cube-mates. I used to use Pandora exclusively but when they started to limit listening to 40 hours per month, I had to switch back to iTunes every now and then. Just to be clear, I don’t have a problem with their pricing structure, in fact I was considering paying for the premium version. What happened, though, is that I discovered a whole new host of stations on iTunes (Beat Basement being one of them) that blew away what I was hearing on Pandora. As smart as Pandora is, it’s still algorithm controlled and tends to revert back to the same songs. I still use Pandora every now and again, but iTunes really takes the streaming cake for me.

Keepass: KeePass stores and organizes all of your passwords in one place. it’s very secure and open source so there are developers creating plugins and add-ons. I just use the regular install and it makes my life much easier. I have a whole slew of client logins, passwords, and other information that I can’t just keep on a stack of post-it notes. I put everything into KeePass and just need to log in with one password when I need any of them. Joy. Combine it with Dropbox and your passwords can be synced across multiple computers.

FeedDemon: This is an interesting little RSS feed organizer that I started using a few months back. The one thing that caught my eye is that it plugs into Google Reader so there is a “cloud backup” of sorts. It also means you don’t have to install it everywhere so you can still use Reader on your laptop or phone and everything will stay copacetic. Feeds are easy to read, it has a built-in browser, and it’s fast and bug free (in my experience). Freeware gold.

Desktop Software I Still Use But Hate

So those are the applications that are a pleasure to use and make my life better. There are, however, a few that I use that I would love to just get rid of. Each one holds a special, dark place in my heart.

TweetDeck: My problem with Tweetdeck is not really the software itself (or the “why did we need this platform” Adobe Air it’s built on) but how easy it can fritter away a day. With enough followers (probably a few hundred will do), you have a constant, urgent steam of signals and noise (mostly the latter) that can distract you almost immediately. I use Twitter and I love Twitter but Tweetdeck makes it too easy.

Skype: Skype is the opposite of Tweetdeck in that it’s an application I hate which does things that I need to do. I really, really don’t like Skype for a number of reasons. Skype is the only IM client that I’ve ever used that I get real-time spam through which, to me, is quite disconcerting. Skype has the most annoying Fisher-Price interface I’ve ever had the displeasure of using (though the sounds are mostly pleasant), an interface that’s changed at least twice since I’ve started using it and has not improved even incrementally. Skype’s telephone function (dialing, sending tones, etc) does what it wants, sends the tones it sees fit, and only lets you use the num pad when it wants you to. If I could use something other than Skype, I’d do it in a second but taking calls through my computer is essential (audio quality is actually pretty damn good) and everyone seems to be on there so, what can I do?

Adobe Creative Suite 3: Adobe had been on my bad side since they took 2 weeks to tell me via an (automated sounding) email that they wouldn’t help me with my Illustrator problem because they had already moved on to a new version. I’m one of probably 20% of people using their product that actually PAID for it rather than downloading it but apparently I should have already bought CS4. Their knowledge base moved around causing 404 not found pages from Google and their product decides not to work at really inconvenient occasions. Their products do amazing things, I’ll give them that, but when I heard Steve Jobs call them lazy, I found myself smiling and nodding. You can’t be at the top forever.

Hardware That I Use and Love

So, we covered all the applications that make my life better, how about the physical stuff?

Good mic + speakers: I got a new set of Altec speakers and an inexpensive Logitech microphone (both are Amazon referral links) for Christmas and I’m kicking myself for not upgrading long ago. The music I listen to is fairly bass-heavy and typical all-in-one speakers were not doing the job. As for my VOIP set-up, I was using speakers but had a headset around my neck that I just used the microphone on. Classy. With the desktop mic, people can hear me clearly, I have a big, light-up mute button right in front of my for sneezes and profanity, and voices come through clear as day. All this for under $70.

Weights: Exercise, you need exercise. Well, I sure as hell need exercise and if you’ve made it this far, you probably need it too. I have a set of Powerblocks (another referral link) that I got a while ago and they do the job very well. I stick to mostly compound exercises (several muscle groups at once) and, because these don’t get really heavy, go 8 to 12 reps on what ever I do. Check this site out if you need some help coming up with good dumbbell exercises.

Good chair (see above): Who knew that spending 12 hours a day in a chair would require something more than a creaky, armless IKEA chair? I was using a fairly nice one before, actually, but it was over a decade old and started to lean the bottom pad forward so I always felt like I was going to slip off of it onto the floor. I picked-up an Aeron last year and have been very happy with it. It’s one thing to be supported properly but my main concern was ventilation. I was used to an air-conditioned office and now I found myself in a non-insulated office facing west with very fickle breeze. The mesh back and bottom of this chair was a very nice change of pace (read: temperature) which I highly recommend.

iPod + Nike+ (you know the drill): Uh oh, starting to sound like an advertisement all-of-the-sudden. Still, what can I say? Some companies make great product. For the most part, since learning about their use of child labor long ago, I’ve been a Nike boycotter. Not the type to stop people at the store, just the type to vote with my wallet like everyone should. Recently, I tried to find out whether they had absolved themselves and moved on but wasn’t able to see anything concrete. In the absence of evidence, I remain an abstainer… except in the case of the Nike+. when I was able to run (damn knee), this little thing really motivated me and gave me the data I needed to see how I was progressing. It was, and still is, very addicting to see your distance increase, your pace improve, and your goals get tracked. It also seems to call my name in the middle of the day… like “hey, buddy, there’s a new This American Life podcast and it’s sunny outside. What say we take a break and get some air.” That’s a good friend.

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The whole review landscape has changed for the better lately. What used to be just lazy one-liners have turned into a type of creative outlet for people with something to say about the things they consume. The more I research the more I find people taking their own time to really give back to people they’ll never meet. Also, with the proliferation of Twitter and Facebook connect, reviews have gone social. Reviews have gone from an anonymous thumbs-up to a network-wide recommendation.

It’s easy to forget that this valuable information comes from real people taking their own precious time to construct helpful and sometimes very creative reviews to help others avoid pitfalls and find the best [insert anything here] available. There are people out there with nothing better to do, that’s true, but so many reviews (mine included) come from a strong desire to give back to a community that caused the discovery of something great. It’s more about community than ego, more about making sure this system stays healthy than just quenching boredom.

So I’m here to remind you in the nicest way possible to get out there and write reviews about the stores and products you can’t live without and the ones you want to annihilate.

Write a Review to Help Out a Buyer

There are a disturbing number of options out there just waiting for our approval (watch this great TED talk about how the massive proliferation of choice has actually made us less happy). There are a million meal choices, thousands of different car models and configurations, and hundreds of individual options for each consumer good we decide to consume. Honestly, there are too many choices to make.

Take, for example, buying a printer. First, you have to decide how you’re using the printer. That will help you determine how the image should get on the paper. Now, do you need color? For photos? Do you need to scan as well? How about faxes? How fast should it print? How many ink cartridges? Do you have a brand preference? Is size important? Do you need wireless? At every turn you’re faced with a cacophony of pros and cons making you feel less and less capable of making a simple decision for yourself.

Here’s where product reviews come in. Pick what you have to have, choose a price range, and pick the best rated model. If you don’t have as much trust in an anonymous community of people as I do, this, at the very least, can help you narrow down the choices. I certainly wouldn’t pick a printer that 10 people gave a 1 star rating, would you?

In order for this great system to work, we all have to give back. So…

1. For every product you buy before of user ratings, go back and review that product on the site you used. Even if there’s already 100 reviews, add one more.
2. If you’re head-over-heels, write a love letter. If not, just give it an appropriate number of stars, add a couple sentences of explanation, and leave it at that.
3. If you’re going to take the time to write something, explain your rating. Stars are great for the aggregate but it’s the comments that really help us all decide.

Write a Review to Help Out a Business

One of my prime motivators for writing reviews is the small business that I’m helping because of it. I’m all about giving back to the digital community but I love the idea of a small Thai restaurant or an auto body repair shop or a bar getting the credit it deserves because of something I said. Allow me to explain using two recent experiences.

At one favorite place looking at another

I drove way out east to eat at a Thai restaurant a few months back. It is called Thai Taste and it gets great reviews on Yelp. We had eaten at (and enjoyed) all the Thai places in our area and wanted to try something different so we went to Yelp. It was a longer drive than we’d usually make for a quick bite but the reviews compelled us. The place was almost totally empty but the woman who took our order was very friendly and the food was quick. I was talking to her while paying and told her that we came because of Yelp. Her face lit up and she told me how nice the people were on there and how it had driven a good amount of new business. She seemed so delighted and surprised that these strangers would say such nice things about her. The food was great and we’ve already been back again.

I’m selling my car to make way for the 2010 GTI being shipped to me from Germany (sorry, had to mention, I’m really psyched about it). A couple years of street parking had scuffed the bumpers up fairly bad and it needed a professional scrub-down. I found a place called Bumper King just by searching the area but needed more than just a website with pictures. I called and got an estimate but wanted to shop around a little. I went to Yelp to check him out and saw one good review from a returning customer. I also found a ton of great reviews on Google so I made the appointment. Not only was the owner about the nicest guy I’ve ever worked with, they came and picked up/dropped off my car two different times, were incredibly flexible about the times they came by, and did a fantastic job. I returned the favor by writing a great review on Yelp which caused someone to message me to tell me they were using him because of my review. This guy deserves all the business he can get.

Businesses are people too. Give back to the great ones…

1. Write your review as a sales pitch. You really are marketing on their behalf so make it count.
2. Assume that the business will read your review. Help them understand what was great and, more importantly, what could be improved. Even good reviews can include an improvement suggestion (if applicable).
3. Don’t be a troll. If you had a bad experience, write honestly about what happened and if it seemed like a one-off thing (poor service on a busy night, say), give them the benefit of the doubt.

If You Don’t Research Before Buying, You Should

With things like doing a search before asking a question and using on-line applications like Gmail to manage and backup your contacts I find it tough not to assume everyone just does it. Same thing goes for on-line research; I can’t make any move involving the exchange of currency without consulting The Oracle (read: Google). But not everyone does and I’m here to help so here are a few times.

• For consumer electronics, there is no better place to go for reviews (or, typically, prices) than Newegg.com. There is a core cabal of super-users, IT professionals, and gadget freaks that don’t hold anything back. If you’re in the market for a cell phone, a computer part, or a digital camera, this should be your first stop. If you’re still stuck after Newegg, try reviews.cnet.com or Amazon to augment.
• I mentioned Yelp but, for those not in the know, Yelp is the best place to find anything in your area. Want a great place to eat you’ve never heard of? New to an area and want to see the best stuff? Just can’t decide where to go? Start here. If you’re a business, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with starting your own page and asking your customers to post a review.
• For reviews on anything and everything else, try Amazon, they probably sell it, other people have probably bought it there, and some of those people probably left feedback about how it turned out.
• Looking to find the straight dope on a particular car, new or used? Try the Car Lounge forums at forums.thecarlounge.net. The on-site search function is not fantastic so the best way to find your answer is to use Google to search the site. On the top right, you’ll see a link “Google Search.” Click that and try a few queries like “2010 GTI” or “used Outback.” You’ll get a lot of results back unless you’re specific but it will be real-life information (combined with a little silliness and probably some arguing).
• Google seems to be compiling quite a bit of reviews these days which makes perfect sense since it’s where most people start when they’re looking for something. Whether it’s product reviews on the shopping site or local reviews on Google Maps, there’s plenty of information to be found and a lot of feedback out there. Watch out, though. Google doesn’t require you to have an account to place a review so I find them a bit thin at times and not always the most useful.

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But I’m not going to talk about increasing Wordpress speed, I want to show you how to improve you page load speed by cutting down on the number of external scripts you’re loading on a particular page. We’re going to do this by hard-coding share buttons into your theme.

Share Buttons Work… In A Way

Share buttons on your post help your content reach a greater audience by creating easy channels to social networks. By placing a “share on Twitter” button or “post on Facebook” icon, you make it easy for readers to bring the page to their network and increase your traffic.

The problem with most of the share badges out there is that they load a Javascript file from an external source which can take several seconds on a bad day. Depending on where you placed the badge, your content could be held back while the script takes its time and your readers bail.

Javascript calls are an easy way for Facebook and StumbleUpon to put their links on your page but most networks also have a way to share through a URL. Just hand over the link to your page and, in some cases, a title and you’re presented with a simple form to complete and submit. Your content gets to the share site just as it would with the Javascript, sometimes even faster.

Adding Hard-Coded Share Buttons

All we need to do is display a nice icon and a link to the social network that includes a link back to your page. For my site, I made a few icons using badges I’ve found around the web which you’re welcome to download and use (please don’t link to mine, right-click, save-as, and upload for yourself).

The code for each site is very simple:

Twitter:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=[[SHORT TITLE + SHORT LINK]]” title=”Post to Twitter”>
<img src=”[[PATH TO IMAGE]]/twitter-icon.png” alt=”"/>
</a>

Plurk:
<a href=”http://plurk.com/?status=[[TITLE]] [[URL]]” title=”Post to Plurk”>
<img src=”[[PATH TO IMAGE]]/plurk-icon.png” alt=”"/>
</a>

Delicious:
<a href=”http://delicious.com/post?url=[[URL]]&amp;title=[[TITLE]]” title=”Post to Delicious”>
<img src=”[[PATH TO IMAGE]]/delicious-icon.png” alt=”"/>
</a>

Digg:
<a href=”http://digg.com/submit?url=[[URL]]&amp;title=[[TITLE]]” title=”Post to Digg”>
<img src=”[[PATH TO IMAGE]]/digg-icon.png” alt=”"/>
</a>

Facebook:
<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=[[URL]]&amp;t=[[TITLE]]” title=”Post to Facebook”>
<img src=”[[PATH TO IMAGE]]/facebook-icon.png” alt=”"/>
</a>

MySpace (I think this is right but I don’t have a login to test it):
<a href=”http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?l=3&amp;u=[[URL]]&amp;t=[[TITLE]]” title=”Post to MySpace”>
<img src=”[[PATH TO IMAGE]]/myspace-icon.png” alt=”"/>
</a>

Ping.fm:
<a href=”http://ping.fm/ref/?method=microblog&amp;title=[[TITLE]]&amp;link=[[URL]]” title=”Post to Ping.fm”>
<img src=”[[PATH TO IMAGE]]/pingfm-icon.png” alt=”"/>
</a>

StumbleUpon:
<a href=”http://stumbleupon.com/submit?url=[[URL]]&amp;title=[[TITLE]]” title=”Post to StumbleUpon”>
<img src=”[[PATH TO IMAGE]]/stumbleupon-icon.png” alt=”"/>
</a>

LinkedIn:

<a href=”http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&amp;url=[[URL]]&amp;title=[[TITLE]]&amp;source=[[DOMAIN]]” title=”Share on LinkedIn”>
<img src=”[[PATH TO IMAGE]]/linkedin-icon.png” alt=”"  />
</a>

Place these anywhere you’d like on a static page or in the Wordpress theme file that controls single posts (typically single.php). You’re about halfway there but the next few steps differ depending on what platform your site uses.

Specific Steps for Static Sites

For each page that needs share links, you’ll need to paste the HTML above and replace replace everything with double square brackets with the information from the page.

1. Replace [[TITLE]] with a short description of the page
2. Replace [[URL]] with the direct link to the page
3. Replace [[PATH TO IMAGE]] with the direct path to the folder where your share icons are being stored. Also, make sure the image names here are the same ones you’re using.
4. If you’re using Twitter, replace [[SHORT TITLE + SHORT LINK]] with no more than 140 characters including a short description and a shortened URL (go to bit.ly to get a short URL). The savvy Twitter users bill include their Twitter handle and leave enough room for RTs.

Now load the page and test that the images appear and that each of the share links takes you to the right place.

Specific Steps for Wordpress

What we’re going to do is use built-in Wordpress functions to hand over the current URL and title to the links you created above. We need to replace everything with double square brackets above with functions that will automatically add the required info. Make sure to follow the next section if you’re using Twitter.

1. Replace [[TITLE]] with <?php the_title(); ?>
2. Replace [[URL]] with <?php the_permalink(); ?>
3. Replace [[PATH TO IMAGE]] with the direct path to the folder where your share icons are being stored. Also, make sure the image names here are the same ones you’re using.

If you’re using Twitter with Wordpress

Sending the URL is simple for sites like Facebook and LinkedIn where the brevity of your message is not an issue but for Twitter we need to save characters where we can. Though a Bit.ly or Tr.im API call could handle shortening the URL for you, I prefer to create one before I post and add it as a custom field. This lets me track click-throughs for Twitter in one place (for me, on the bit.ly site). You’ll need to manually create a shortlink each time but, boo hoo, it takes 30 extra seconds.

First, we need to add a little snippet to grab the short URL and create a short title. After the loop starts…

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

…paste this…

<?php
$key = “shortlink”;
$shortlink = get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true);
$shorttitle = urlencode(substr(the_title(), 0, 79));
?>

You now have two varibles, $shortlink and $shorttitle, that can be used when creating the HTML for the Twitter share badges. $shortlink is taken from the post (I’ll show you how to add it later) and $shorttitle is a shortened and URL-encoded version of the post title. These come together with your Twitter handle (below) to create a concise, complete Tweet. Now, just replace [[SHORT TITLE + SHORT LINK]] with…

RT%20@joshcanhelp%20<?php echo $shorttitle . ‘%20…%20′ . $shortlink; ?>

… and change “joshcanhelp” to your Twitter handle and you’re ready to go. What we’re doing is creating a tweet with the shortened title and URL that mentions your handle so you get Twitter credit.

When you create a post, you’ll need to create that shortened URL before publishing.

1. Click the Save Draft button on the top right, then the “View Post” link in the yellow bar that appears at the top.
2. Copy the URL out of the address bar and go to bit.ly (or similar).
3. Paste in the URL in the field and click Shorten (or similar). You’ll be given a short URL.
4. Copy this short URL and come back to your post  edit window. Scroll down to the bottom of your post to a section called “custom fields.”
5. Click Enter New and type in “shortlink” into the field that appears. Now, paste the shortened link into the field on the right.

Click add and you’re ready to rock & roll. Now load the single post and test that the images appear and that each of the share links takes you to the right place.

Edit: This was published and enjoyed on Smart Data Collective to the tune of over 600 views and 14 retweets. Some of you might be aware that I’m contracted by the company that manages that site but I have no sway over published content at all, FYI.

No related posts.

In the summer of 2008 I was given the opportunity to learn from a very talented and enlightened individual, Daniel Hopkins aka Pose2. Pose is a graffiti artist with decades of experience in his craft and since taking his class, he has remained my teacher, became a good friend, got on with Josh Can Help as a client, and soon to become immortalized on my wall.

Pose travels around the world taking on projects, teaching people, and spreading knowledge. He also does amazing things for global communities like beautification projects and teaching kids how to express themselves artistically. This time, however, he’s taking on a very important issue in a way that only he can.

I’ll let him explain this inspiration:

One day as I was driving…I stopped at a traffic light and gazed into the eyes of a homeless man and my feelings related to what I saw. He was impoverished physically, mentally and spiritually; every aspect of him was wretched. I felt his pain, despair. I was attracted to his pain, but wanted to ignore him. I was drawn to his loneliness but wanted him to disappear. I just wanted this moment to end; I wanted his presence to stop reminding me that I was alone just like him! He needed help and I wanted to RESPOND but not with money. This time I felt something deeper, a connection. Yes, his sign, all I could focus on was his sign and suddenly the Artist in me awakened and I said to myself, him and his sign are one. Just like any other business the sign is the representation of the business, RIGHT?  I thought, what would happen if artists created  signs for the homeless? Big, bright colorful, energetic signs with empowering words?

Introducing RESPONSE ABILITY

My overall Goal for this project is to organize an army of Artist, world-wide to create and sell 144,000 signs for the homeless. The distribution and sales of these elaborately painted signs will take place on the walls of international Art Gallery’s. Each show will be a one night only engagement and each painted sign will sell for the maximum price of $50.00. Here’s where it gets interesting. Each person who purchases a piece of art is encouraged to give this gift of art to a homeless person!

This act of engagement is the fuel and intention behind this entire project. It begins with the homeless and their despair, the artists recognizes their condition and responds with these powerful signs. The Art Gallery’s provide the space to sell these signs. Then its up to us, we the people, to purchase these works of art and ultimately offer them as gifts, to the homeless.

Addressing a problem as big as homelessness takes more than just money, it takes love, compassion, and understanding. Pose2 wants artists across the world to express themselves for a greater good. Let’s come together as a community and address this real problem.

Calling Artists of All Types

We want artists to use their talent and passion to make a difference. If you’re ready to do something for a greater good, listen up:

• Each contributing artist will be asked to do up to 3 signs for the exhibit.
• Each sign should be elaborate in color and content.
• The content should be short, to the point and inspirational.
• Think about portability, legibility, and dignity.

Get your signs ready and contact Pose2 to submit your work:  Daniel.pose2fx (at) gmail.com or 619-278-1735. DUE DATE IS JANUARY 14TH.

Ready to Make a Difference?

We need everyone on this one. The vision is global but we must first start local. The first launching of this exhibition will take place on Saturday, Jan 16th, at Voz Alta Art Gallery, 1754 National Ave, San Diego, CA 92113.

Update: a few photos from the event:

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Why can’t I come up with an idea like that?

The insinuation here is that all of us are just one fantastic idea from fame and fortune. I believe this to be true. The more subtle insinuation here, however, is that it’s only the lack of a great idea that’s keeping us away from the success that is rightfully ours. This part is totally ridiculous.

Guess what…

Your ideas mean nothing.

I wrote a post about this before, about how an idea is only good as far as you’re willing to take it. The great (or crappy) ideas that remain in your head do no good (or bad) and just serve as an annoying reminder of your lack of time, motivation, or both. As such, the success that you’re apparently owed (I suspect this is a primarily American belief but have not gone far to prove it) isn’t being held hostage by a mental deficiency indicated by your lack of Golden Egg ideas, it is, in fact, just your lack of desire to make the idea happen. This is good news, I promise.

You see, ideas are merely step one of a one million step process and, as such, are just simple, albeit painful, indicators that your life is going to get harder and your free time will suffer a devastating loss. To most people (this off-hand majority calculation was formed by calculating how many people I know have had a great idea and acted on it to success or failure), this terrible beacon is just the scare they need to file the idea under “no thank you but I reserve the right to bitch about it when I see someone else do it.” This is a very common state of mind and it’s probably fine that way.

Your obsession means everything.

To some, this “idea as a starting gunshot” concept is familiar. It still marks a long road of hard work ending in potentially catastrophic failure but the fear that this causes is more closely related to a roller coaster than it is to a serial killer (with the understanding that some of us have similar issues with roller coasters as we do with serial killers). This fear becomes a challenge and our strong desire to meet this challenge comes in the form of obsession.

There’s more to idea-based success than just obsession but it’s the first thing you’ll want to look for when you’re evaluating the probability of your success. If you have an idea (any idea) and an obsession with making it a reality, the road ahead will be as clear as it possibly can be. Your task isn’t easy and your sucess anything but guaranteed but the car is packed, the tank is full, and the kids just started a movie. Pick a good route, stay alert, and stop regularly and you’ll have a nice trip.

Meet the insane idea.

The family road trip metaphor explains the majority of ideas that we get. These ideas are like, for example, a great new way to store vegetables or a unique content distribution method or a product to clean a dashboard. These ideas are helpful, address a pain point, find a gap in the market, and succeed or fail based on decisions made throughout the process.

But there’s another type of idea that plagues us. This idea is like a non-stop, 8 Red Bull marathon drive from San Diego to Miami. This idea might not seem so good at the start and might not be well thought out but it has a champion, the driver, that infects others with his enthusiasm. This is the insane idea.

This idea is so loud and so bright and so sudden that you forget about the hard work ahead and the obstacles in the way. All at once, the idea becomes monolithic: you can’t move it and you can’t get past it, the idea must be dealt with. You’re left powerless but ecstatic, happy to hand over the controls of your life to something ethereal and unsure but so promising. Your life as you’ve known it is over.

The insane idea is the great equalizer.

Whether you’re the type to file your ideas away or grind through each one methodically, you’re completely susceptible to the insane idea. All that differs is how you react to it.

The idea-filer’s primer to the insane idea.

The first thing you’ll notice is this strange tingling in what feels like the absolute center of your body. This is your obsession germinating like a bean sprout, touching very strange, metaphysical parts of you. It’s also the mark of your eventually complete loss of rationality. Don’t be alarmed.

Next comes frantic planning. We’re talking drawings, sketches, late-night to early morning typing, writing, and researching. The idea isn’t fully formed yet so it feels incomplete. You’ll add features and benefits and add-ons and bells and whistles. There’s no sense of how the idea will come together or if it is sound, just frenetic, unfocused activity.

At some point during this planning stage, you reach a stage that traps many, many people (for good reason). All this planning has brought you to where you need to actually take a step forward to make the idea happen. The problem is multifaceted: there are so many steps to take and so many ways to take each of them. If you had the domain experience to generate the idea, you’re probably missing the necessary business, marketing, and technological acumen to nuture this idea to maturity. Conversely, if you’ve got the goods in the acumen department, you’re probably missing the domain knowledge about the market you’re charging into headlong.

The decisions you make at this step plant the seeds for success or failure (remembering that your idea is a failure right up to when it succeeds). Read more than you think you can handle, discuss things with a broad range of people, and take advice from people who have been down this path before. Paramount to that, don’t make decisions until you have to and, when you do make them, follow through. Nothing will derail you faster than ignorance combined with indecision. Hang on tight.

The idea-farmer’s guide to the insane idea.

You’ll also notice the obsession germinating but it will feel more familiar to you, if maybe a bit stronger than you’re used to. You’ll go through the same planning phase (like you have many times before) and face the same multitude of decisions (like you always do). But you have a different problem to contend with.

Since you’re all “been there, done that,” you have a starting point, previous experience to draw upon, and your own advice to follow. The insane idea, however, doesn’t give a flying dingleberry about any of this. The idea has control of the car and you’re just in the back seat yelling impotent directions and fearing for your life.

What starts to become clear is that you’re not out of control, you’re just playing by a new set of rules. The idea at the wheel may not know how to drive but it shares a goal with you, the frightened passenger: to see the light of day.

So just stay calm, respect the maniac at the wheel, and enjoy the scenery. The idea has no directions and no map but it has a destination and it needs your help to get there. Your idea might change it’s mind, make a sudden turn, or hop on the wrong freeway and it’s your job to remind it of where you’re both headed and guide it back on track. Remember the lessons you’ve already learned but also remember that the rules have changed. Hang on tight.

Bonus section about me: Insane ideas make life worth living

Sidenote: I’ve noticed that blog posts that talk about the author as the main character can come across, at best, as boring and, at worst, as terribly self-centered. As such, I’m trying to move relevant but non-essential personal information to the end of my posts so you can choose to just ignore it if you’d like. You’re welcome.

I consider myself, for the most part, an idea-farmer. I like good ideas and I typically know what to do when I get one: abandon it (see this great video with Ira Glass on abandoning ideas). I have have exponentially more ideas than I have time to implement them but, inexplicably, I’m always ready for another.

I’m currently working on a nice, normal good idea and my obsession with bringing it to fruition (along with a co-obsessor) is making sure it will see the light of day. This idea is fun and has become more of a hobby than a 3rd job.

I have, however, lived through two insane ideas, both of which were sudden, drastic career changes. I call them insane ideas because…

• I had no choice but to follow them through
• I had no idea what I was getting myself into
• My lack of experience did nothing to dissuade me from chasing after them with gusto

My insane ideas changed my life, twice. I consider myself lucky because both changes were very positive and both saved me from intense boredom, abject dissatisfaction, or worse. The first insane idea, to get a chemistry degree and work in sustainable transportation, was only good because it lead to the second insane idea, abandon most of my formal education to work on the web. They work in mysterious ways these ideas.

I’m always looking for people with insane ideas who either need a push forward (that part is free) or need hand-holding throughout (that part isn’t but let’s talk). There’s nothing I like more than exchanging ideas with motivated people. Maybe I’ll spark an insane idea or maybe I’ll talk you down… you never know until you ask!

Related posts:

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2. Advice to a client: don’t just have a great idea and act on it – remember the bottom line too So you’ve got a great idea, do you? Good for...
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The most annoying part about using tracking codes, however, is creating the URL. You need to append at least two (and up to five) query strings to your URL to use this function in Analytics and making this happen while tracking what codes you’re actually using is frustrating enough to make you rethink this whole thing in the first place. Google provides a cute little tool to help you but it’s still a pain in the ass.

Google Docs to the rescue! Using similar code as my simple Google Docs CMS, I created a script that parses a spreadsheet full of tracking codes and turn them into usable URLs that you can then copy and paste. It makes it easy to keep track of the campaigns you have while quickly creating error-free URLs. See the Google Docs UTM appender in action.

Download the UTM URL builder
What you’ll need:

1. The file from the big, green link above
2. A Google Docs account (it’s free, you can sign up here)
3. Access to a web server or a local host that can run a PHP program
4. A site using Google Analytics

Step 1 – Create a new Google Docs Spreadsheet

Easy enough… go to docs.google.com and log in. Click the Create New button on the top left and select “Spreadsheet.”

1. When the spreadsheet loads, look for a Share button on the top right. If it prompts you to save the document, type in a nice descriptive name, click OK, and click Share again.
2. In the menu that appears, select “Publish as a web page.”

3. Select “Sheet1″ from the top drop-down, then click Start Publishing.
4. Under “Get a link to the published data,” select “RSS” from the first drop down then click the Cells radio button.
5. In the text box at the bottom, you should have a URL like “http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/tFjKofPSUgX5PSPJhEuH7Dw/od6/public/basic?alt=rss.” Highlight the whole thing and copy it, then click Close on the window.

Step 2 – Add your Google Doc link to the script and upload

Now, we need to open the PHP file and give it the link to your Google Doc. Open the index.php file as plain text using Notepad (PC) or TextEdit (Apple). When you open the file, you should be able to read the code clearly (even if you can’t quite understand it). You should see “$feedName=” right near the top of the document. Paste the link you copied in the step before in between the tick marks after the equals sign. When you’re finished, you should have some like this:

$feedName = ‘http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/tjMfK6oILkthGlM9Vo_8ACQ/od6/public/basic?alt=rss’

If the link is correct, the script should be ready to display the Google Doc. Unless you have a server instance installed locally, you’ll need to upload this script to a public web server. If you have your own website, just upload this file to any public folder. If you’re confused, email your IT department or your tech-savvy niece.

Once the file is uploaded, you’ll want to test it out to make sure everything is working. Go to the file you uploaded (http://[your domain]/[the path to the folder you used]/link-append-util.php) and you should see “UTM coded URLs” at the top. If you see “Invalid feed!” then the link to the Google Doc was not made. Make sure the URL is correct and in between the tick marks after $feedName=.

Step 3 – Update your spreadsheet with the tracking codes

Once the script is functioning, you’re ready to input your URLs and tracking codes.

The spreadsheet needs to by laid out properly to make sure that the script can read and display the information in the right order. Here are the rules and you can see a sample of a functioning Google Doc here (it’s the one I use to create the example here).

• Cells A1, B1, C1, D1, and E1 will not be read by the script.
• Cells F1, G1, H1, and I1 determine the name of 4 additional custom references that can be added.
• Column A after row 1 is the name of the link. This can be anything.
• Column B needs to be a valid URL without pre-existing query strings (meaning that there can’t already be a “?” in it)
• Column C is your utm_source code
• Column D is your utm_medium code
• Column E is your utm_campaign code
• Columns F through I can be any other reference code you’d like. Again, the name will be taken from the column header. Leave these blank if you don’t want to use them

A few things to keep in mind:

• The source, medium, and campaign codes are required meaning that they are always pulled. If you leave one blank, it messes up the rest so make sure you always have a value in there. If enough people want to eliminate this requirement, I’m happy to offer an alternative, just comment below.
• If you’re not using the custom reference codes, you can leave them blank. If you are using them and each URL will have one, then you’re good to go. But if some URLs need one, others need another, make sure to put an “x” where you don’t need one. For example, if the first URL is using reference2 but not reference1 and the second URL is using reference1 but not reference2, make sure there is an “x” under reference1 for the first URL and under reference2 for the second. Hopefully that makes sense. Again, comment if you’re confused!

Step 4 – Reload the script and fire away

Once your codes are loaded, refresh the script and you’ll see them listed nicely in a row. In order for each one:

1. The first thing listed is the name from column A for that link.
2. Next you see “Paste into form field or if in doubt.” This is the not-validated version of the URL . This should work everywhere and is the safest choice. If you’re not sure what the hell I’m talking about, use this one. There is a “test it” link that tries it out.
3. Next is a field with the URL. Just click once to highlight, copy it, and paste it where you need it.
4. After that you’ll see “Paste into code.” Use this for HTML and PHP that is not validated (i.e. within an application file or static page).
5. The validated version of the URL appears in the text field. Click to highlight, etc.

Step 5 – Comment, Share, or Tweet if you like it!

That’s all I ask!

Please leave comments, questions, and suggestions below. I hope this saves you as much time as it save me!

No related posts.

Having said that, it’s terribly easy to use email poorly. Email is a disconnected way of communicating which makes it tough to get just right. It’s also subject to abuse in so many ways.

Because email has been my primary method of communication over the last several years, I want to share with you a few things I’ve learned about communicating via email. I’ve learned these tips by making mistakes, hearing from other people, and just practicing over time. Hopefully I can help you like others have helped me before!

Note: though several of these apply to personal emails, I’m speaking generally about business email. I write long, pointless, unfocused emails to my mom and have no shame in admitting that.

Answer everything that is being asked

I’ll be honest: this one comes from a pressing desire to eliminate this vile habit in other people. There is nothing more frustrating than asking 4 questions and getting 2 answers back. Is the person mad? Are they avoiding the question? Did they forget? What the heck?

When I respond to a long email I type my reply first, then I read the original email I’m replying to a second time, then I re-read my own. I make sure each question asked has an answer and that I’m providing all the information needed for my recipient to make their next step. Emails are like meetings: unless you know what to do afterward, you’ve just wasted a bunch of time.

Use numbered bullet points to organize your questions/answers

Bullet points are the weapon of choice for web content writers the world over. There’s no better way to present several distinct, discrete pieces of information than a list of bullet points. They let you deal with each piece separately and make the document you’re producing much easier to scan.

Here are a few great ways to use bullet points:

• Assigning several distinct to do items (bonus points for numbers indicating priority or chronological order
• Providing multiple points of feedback
• Answering or asking several questions (again, numbers provide great context)

Also, don’t be scared of multi-sentence bullet points as long as each one is a distinct point. Bullet points can suffice for paragraphs if the separation between each idea is great enough.

Strike a balance between complete and succinct

When you’re a long email writer like I am, you regularly reach a point during composition where your instinct kicks in and you hear “hey, buddy, too long… seriously.” I probably hear this little voice more than most and try to be very cognizant of its warning. A too-long email is both inconsiderate (you’re asking someone to take their valuable time to digest your myriad words) and can lead to unnecessarily delayed replies (long message = long reply).

On the other hand, a too-short email can seem terse and incomplete. Striking a balance is tough but it’s just a matter of     saying what needs to be said and hitting send. Answer all that is asked, include all pertinent information, add enough niceties to indicate a good tone, and fire away.

Think about your subject line as a headline

I think I’m more cognizant of this than other people because of the number of emails that I write and because I use online forums a lot. Posting on a forum is like creating a tiny wiki entry: it’s easily findable by Google and it could be a very important piece of information for someone. As such, I try to be as descriptive as possible in my titles.

Email is the same for many people. Gmail’s organization is a combo of user-created labels and a strong search function. If the word I need is in the subject line, it’s much easier to find what I need. It also helps me know if I need to open the email right away (“SH*T! THE SITE IS DOWN!”) or I can wait (“Do you have some extra time on your hands?”).

Reply quickly

There’s one slight caveat here: don’t follow this rule if you hate communicating over email. As I mentioned before, I like emails, particularly for work requests. Because I want people to use email as much as possible, I try to reply as quickly as possible. This creates a great reason for people to send me an email next time they need something.

Besides that, it’s just a polite thing to do. When you wait 4 days to reply to an email you’re sending a distinct message: I don’t want to communicate with you (whether you mean it or not). If you’re too busy to reply completely to someone’s email, send a note setting expectations (“got your email and I’ll send you a complete reply soon”). This is better than leaving what amounts to a pregnant pause.

Mind your tone (or complete lack thereof)

I learned a very important lesson about email tone when I was about 23 years old. At the time, I was working as a corporate trainer for a large wireless company and was very green the whole management gig. A group of the new employees I was training had scheduled time off during the six-week long session and I was left making exceptions and changing the very strict schedule. Admittedly, I was pretty angry about the whole situation but I composed what I thought was a rational explanation and sent it to all the managers I worked with. As it turned out, it WASN’T a rational email and there was a subsequent price on my head for a few weeks thereafter.

It’s much easier to read an email in the tone which you intended rather than in the one that it could be taken. I use a very simple rule now: if there is even a chance in hell that I could be misinterpreted, I re-write it. Sarcasm is hard to detect, humor is tough to convey, and a misplaced sentence could easily change a neutral–sounding email into a thinly-veiled attack. When in doubt, delete and try again.

I hope these tips help you communicate a little better over this wonderful medium we know and love!

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I always like sharing my interactions with people here on my blog. Partly because it adds a really human side to my business and shows prospective clients that I’m more than just an email address. The main reason, though, is it creates a much deeper understanding for me when I write it all out and re-experience the conversation. Like many, I need to iterate to understand and it’s easy for me to forget an important insight I came across while interacting with someone else if I don’t work it through after the fact.

"network cables" by pascal.charest on Flickr

So, this is a “conversation” I had with someone about networking. By conversation I mean it was a transcript of a monologue on his side and an email reply on mine. Quotes are, for the most part, complete and without editing.

With all this networking going on by different business owners you would think we’d all be highly successful. The truth is I don’t think networking works at all, and if and when it does, it is in very few circumstances.

I think traditional networking, exchanging cards at dinner, etc, is dead and not likely to come back unless we just call it socializing  rather than essential for business. “Networking” in a bigger sense, however, has really combined with marketing and branding to become “interaction” (if we can even ascribe words to the awesome social stuff that is going on right now). Take Southwest Air for an example. Look at their twitter: http://twitter.com/SOUTHWESTAIR. Do you see all those messages that start with “@?” That’s directed at someone on Twitter, one person. They are marketing their product, talking directly to people, and creating a consistent and fun environment. Are they networking? Are they marketing? Are they branding? All of the above… they’re interacting. Grey areas abound!

The reason I say that has to do with an observation that came to me. I’ve always wondered why most businesses with ideas that a good or bad always seem to [get to a] certain level and stay there. I surmise that this is because of the business owners network of people that he knows directly or indirectly. His business can only grow as large as his network.

That’s disturbing to me but it makes sense and fits into my experience. It seems like so many companies are willing to stay frozen in one spot, repeating the same mistakes, and chasing after the same customers. Zero innovation, zero real experimentation, zero perceived risk, and, consequently, zero or negative growth. Certainly not the rule but easy to identify when it’s going on.

Under most circumstances, networking is highly inefficient, time consuming, and the return for input is miserable if not totally useless. Over the last four years, I can remember two people that referred more than two clients to me over that period. One of them was an attorney that I had never met. The other is a woman who owns a catering service and is really into networking. But that’s it for me.

I can say at least half of my business now has come through interaction through twitter or person-to-person email. I have great word-of-mouth, a big virtual network, and people who know me as the go-to guy. Did I network to get them? I’m not sure but I certainly didn’t advertise (in the traditional sense) or market (again, traditionally). I’m branded as Josh Can Help and I answer every question people send me through Twitter or otherwise. Interaction.

The only way to gain scale for a business is to have a method to get it out to a lot of people that you’d don’t know. It used to be mass mailing and now it’s the Internet. But with as many eyes and ears that can be reached by the Internet people still do not use it effectively because of a lack of understanding, the time involved, and the expense. That sounds like me.

Absolutely but the rules have changed and change again almost daily. Marketing isn’t one-way anymore just like media isn’t one way anymore (think the decline of TV and newspapers lately). Now, the key is to get yourself into the hands of the early adopters, the bloggers, the twitterati, the people who tell people. Bring them a phenomenal product and ask for their honest opinion and you’re golden. The bar is raised, however. Now you actually have to have something great. Apple makes great products but they’ve only seen their incredible growth and market share grab recently (last 5+ years) since people have become so vocal about the products they use and enjoy. You can’t ignore millions of screaming fans whether it’s music or technology.

Let’s take about all that. Individuals will do with the most comfortable with over and over again even if it doesn’t result in the objective they seek. We want to be comfortable not successful. Being successful requires thinking and acting outside of the box. That requires change that requires uncomfortable, unknown circumstances.

I want to be comfortable and successful. What then? :)

People will do the most comfortable thing, that’s totally true. I think the key to success these days is looking for something that doesn’t work well and then looking for the rules to break to make it work better. That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately, hence the iteration thing above. What if you could predict the outcome of an iterative process? What if your iterations were massive improvements each time? I think Google is the best example of this. They know SO FREAKING MUCH about how people use online tools that they can’t help but to put out incredible products all the time (this is IMHO). I’m hard pressed to think of software I pay for that works as well as free Google stuff. I couldn’t have a better email program, calendar, document sharing, chat program, web site analytics…  each new product is a giant iteration on their last amazing product.

Now I bet the networker spends more time and more money than he ever would for a simple website that is simply targeted to what that networker is trying to sell. Networking is an ongoing highly ineffective use of resources for a value that has an unjustifiable net present value!

Hence, I say, that networking is a total waste of time. And going into next year, 2010, I expect to do little if any of it from here on out.

Traditional networking is lame now only because it lacks focus. Now, you can interact with exactly the people you want to exactly how and when you want to do it. The barrier to entry is low, time taken is low, and, since you can read about someone on-line, you choose to interact only with the people you think are going to bring the most value (in whatever terms you define).

I threw the question out on Twitter (“Networking is dead… what say you?”) and got a great perspective from David McKendrick, owner of Fused Network.

@DavidandGoliath

That’s a damned lie. :p
Resulted in me being a half-millionaire. //shrugs.
Least on paper. :D But really, networking is everything.
And I don’t mean walking around at dinner parties handing out business cards, either. Or handing out any business cards.
Sitting on twitter *is* networking.
The ROI of word of mouth is limitless. Problem is it can bite back in the same way.
And really, it’s a better way to spend time than IM & facebook ;)
Marketing is worthless. Ads don’t get clicked. Branding & interaction pay off.
Sure, but ‘traditional’ is dead. Again, what we’re doing now is networking. Here, now, twitter.
Life isn’t about making money. Nor should that be the sole reason to meet people, that’d be a boring life.
Me on the beach has more ROI than handing someone a business card.
The problem with traditional channels is there’s too much time spent moving. Instant, scalable and doesn’t interrupt life.

What do you think about this whole thing? Do you attend events? Is it productive?

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The Google Docs CMS

See the GDocs CMS in action!

For those not in the know, a CMS is a Content Management System, a web application that lets you add and edit live web content. Wordpress, the system I use over-and-over (for good reason), is a CMS and a great one at that. But, in some cases, it is a bit over the top. What if you just needed to publish information without a lot of regard to the intricacies of presentation? That’s where this system comes in.

The Google Docs CMS lets you publish and manage information on the web using just a Google Docs spreadsheet published as RSS (easy to do, I’ll show you how). The script takes each row and turns it into its own page then creates a list of pages on the left. A site example (which serves as documentation) can be seen here: Google Docs CMS.

How do I use it?

All you need to do is download the package, follow my directions to create a spreadsheet, put a line of information into the script, and upload it to your web server. The script takes the Google Doc feed, parses the information for each page, and displays it a certain way.

What can I do with it?

In an effort to make these sites as easy to manage as possible, I restricted the number of built-in content to 4 types:

• Regular paragraphs (which can accept HTML)
• Headings (h2 tags only)
• Images (can pull automatically from your server or an external source)
• Links (creates  its own line and doesn’t support link text [yet])

Just indicate the content type in one column and the content itself in the next. It’s all in the documentation.

Can I customize it?

I created an external stylesheet that can be used to change how the page displays (you’ll need to know your way around CSS). I also built in a few configuration options in the beginning of the file to change a few functions. I am very much a beginner with PHP so the code should be simple enough to understand for those in the know.

Questions? Problems? Issues?

Please go ahead and leave comments below if you are having trouble or want to know how to change something. Also, if you’re a PHP developer and have some feedback for how this was implemented (good or bad), I would really appreciate it.

Download the GDocs CMS

As an aside…

This is my first attempt at a self-contained (and remotely useful) programming project of any kind. Like I mentioned, I’m a PHP beginner but use it a lot between Wordpress customizations and static sites. I really enjoy using the language and the documentation on php.net is really, really impressive (the user comments are amazing). I try to use it as much as possible and I think the only reason I’m not much better with it is that I don’t give myself (read: have) a lot of time to practice.

Anyways, this was a very eye-opening exercise and one that I enjoyed very much. Truth be told, I wrote this during a long weekend I spent back in Seattle, so, essentially, on vacation. There was a little bit of frustration but a lot of “oh wow, cool!” – enough to keep me plugging away at it. String functions in PHP are fantastic and it’s amazing how easily XML documents can be parsed with just a tiny bit of code.

I’m looking forward to putting out little piece here and there, including a Wordpress plugin in the future (I think that’s just to say I can). As I mentioned above, your feedback is very important to me, particularly if you’re skilled enough to find problems in the code and can tell me how to do it better.

Thanks!

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Your website should be doing two very important things:

• Provide an easy way for people to find more information out about you. This supports email marketing, in person networking, and any kind of word of mouth that you provoke. At the very least, your website should do a great job at doing this. It should be easy to find the right information, the site should showcase your strengths, and there needs to be a path forward for people wanting to take action. Just getting this right is hard enough without help.
• The other thing a successful site should be doing is concentrating on the actions that bring in revenue. Helping people find out about what you have to offer is great and, at this point, basically due diligence for all businesses. Identifying what it is that you want to do and where your revenue needs to come from is a critical step to having a site that pays for itself and more.

OK, here’s the straight dope, ready? I think the fundamental issue with many, many websites out there is that few people have identified what activities contribute the most to their bottom line. Who buys what you have to sell? Who emails you about your product? Who perks up when you talk about what you do? Who do you really want to work with?

Here are a few things to think about:

• Do you know who your buyers are? Do you have an idea in your head about who buys your product or hires you? This is critical. If you don’t know who it is you need to talk to then your message will be weak and your efforts unfocused.
• If you do have an idea, even a vague one, of who these people are and how they find what you have, are your events targeted towards them? Are you emailing them? Do they have blogs? Do you read them and comment on them? Can you find them on Twitter? Are you following them? Can you recognize one out of a crowd?
• You have a national audience because of your website… that’s great but that means your competition is also 100 times larger. If, however, your product or service has more of a local appeal, think about paring down the focus of your site, email marketing, and otherwise. The more focused your efforts can be, the more success you’ll have.

So, what can we do for your site? At this point, nothing. There is not much that can be done with a website until we really know WHO you’re talking to and WHAT you need to say to get their attention.

What can we do for your predicament? So, so many things!

Here’s a few steps to move this process forward. Each of these steps could take 10 – 20 hours apiece if you’re serious about really making a change to your business.

1. Figure out, through your previous buyers and anyone who has expressed interest, who your audience is. Talk to everyone you can to get a profile of who buys your products or who needs your service. Do they buy other types of products? What software do they use? Where do they spend their free time? You’re looking for a profile of the type of person you need to seek out.
2. Sit down with what you have (hopefully many pages of notes) and FIND THESE PEOPLE. Look for commonalities and find where they go. Send out an email poll through your email service and find what they’re reading, what websites they are on, what events they go to, what kind of food they like, where they drink coffee. Know these people in and out so you can speak directly to them. If you know what they do, where they go, and how they interact, you’re in a MUCH better position to find them and talk directly to them (literally and otherwise).
3. Now, take a long hard look at this profile you’ve built and figure out what you’re doing right and where you’re going astray. Does your website appeal to your potential buyers? Ask them directly. Are you holding events they would be interested in? Have you found the site that they all frequent?

Sound a bit like stalking? Well, if you’re concentrating on one person then, yes, I imagine this feels a little creepy. But the goal here is to discover a profile of a person, the theoretical client. If you’re not right where your clients are, where are you? Where are your competitors?

I know this is more “brain storm” than “step-by-step” guide to success but I’m much more of a fan of finding your own path. I also find it hard to believe that one persons path to success will work for everyone else. Without a true desire to succeed and the ability to just get out there and try a few things, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Sit down with a laptop and a pad of paper and FIND YOUR AUDIENCE!

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This is a LAME way to do this, for the record.

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While I haven’t eliminated repitition from my professional life entirely, I’m aware of something very different at work. Creating websites from scratch can be tedious but it has taught me something critical about…

Iteration

This word has two pertinent dictionary.com definitions:

the act of repeating

Iteration can mean doing the same thing over and over again. When I use this word, however, I’m thinking more about the second definition:

a problem-solving or computational method in which a succession of approximations, each building on the one preceding, is used to achieve a desired degree of accuracy

In layman’s terms, when you iterate or use an iterative process, you’re doing the best you can with the information you have, checking how successful you were, and using that information to take another, more educated stab at it. Since I’m a self-taught designer and developer, iteration has been a critical part of my professional growth. I’ve developed a very iterative mindset.

An iterative mindset is based on three things: observation, analysis, and persistence. In other words, iteration comes more from desire and hard work than any kind of innate ability.

Observation

To successfully employ iteration, you need to be observant. What you’re looking for are problems, specifically recurring ones. These can range from minor annoyances right up to massive failures. You’re also looking for benefits. This could be something that saves you 10 seconds a day or something that saves you $100 a day.

The best way to be observant (and to benefit from what you see) is to record. I record things in a simple text editor and write them up later to post on my blog. I also record very minor things in a lined notebook that I carry around with me. A lot of what I type or write down does not get used, explicitly. By recording it, however, I made a mental underline, one that can occur to me later if I’m confronting the same problem.

This is begging for a real-life example.

Let’s say your having a conversation with someone. If this person is someone you want to please (your significant other, a potential client, a potential date), you probably want to be tuned into them and observant of how they react. If you talk poorly about our current president (a potentially risky topic with any of the people referenced above), you’ll want to judge their reaction to see if you shold do that again. Now, extend that to everything and everyone around you. You want to have pleasant, recurring interactions with all that surrounds you and the first step towards that is being observant.

Analysis

I find this word particularly unfriendly at times because it implies a lot of work. Analysis, here, just means being observant in way that finds connections between what you’re observing.

There are people that have “an analytic mind” and seem to find connections between pieces of information that seemed so unlikely. I have certainly heard my fair share of stories regarding people who found incredible connections between things but there are other forces at work:

1. Practice - the more you think abstractly and look for connections, the better you become at doing so (you are, in fact, being iterative while you practice this)
2. Intention - to connect seemingly disconected elements, you have to let go and make this your intention. Analysis is self fulfilling: if you’re certain there are no connections or you are unable to find them, that will become true.
3. Patience - I think this is the true talent of what might appear to be a gifted analyst. In theory, if you had enough time to draw a proverbial line between all possibilities you would find the connection (or be certain there was no connection).

Using the previous example of a conversation, now consider taking the next step beyond your observation and try understand what you’re seeing. The easiest thing you can assume about someone reacting poorly to speaking poorly about the current president is that they are a democrat. As likely as this could be, there might be other factors at work here.

• They could be a strong republican and patriot discouraged by those who don’t support the powers that be.
• They could be apolitical and assume that you’re being racist.
• They could be just generally uninterested in politics and bored of hearing about it.

Your analysis consists of coming up with many possible solutions and, using your observations, making a guess at the right one.

Persistence

Here’s where the actual work comes in. To be iterative, you need to repeat the process using your new information honed by your analysis. You must be willing to face the same problems with new information and risk potential (repeat) failure.

Persistence is direct reflection of how much you want to succeed. It has less to do with innate ability or the size of the reward. I’ve seen people tenaciously playing a video game for months on end towards a goal that few people understand. I’ve also seen people lose seemingly important things in their life through inaction. People will cause a scene over a few pennies but will drop out of high school for no discernable reason. Hence, persistence is a mindset.

Sticking with the observation and analysis necessary to make better decisions about previously faced problems is not always easy but if you see each attempt as an experiment and part of a larger process instead of individual failed events, you’ll be better prepared to face the next iteration.

My conversation example needs a bit of modification to work here. We’re going to assume the person you’re talking to does not have any inclination to give up and walk away. With that in mind, you’re now free to iterate towards a better experience with them. If your goal is to find a healthy middle ground, maybe you try a topic that isn’t so inflammatory. Maybe you ask them questions. Maybe you compliment them on a particular attribute. However you do it, you’re experimenting towards your goal, watching and learning along the way.

Bonus: How I’m iterative

This topic came to me as I was combing through my obsessive-appearing series of folders holding various re-useable website templates, code snippets, and documents. Each time I create a new website, I add something new to this library. Maybe it’s a link saved on Delicious, maybe it’s a better site header, maybe it’s a new module I can use in Wordpress – could be anything. What I’m always looking to do (in order of importance).

1. Create a better product each time
2. Minimize repetition
3. Save time on the next go-around

I do that through iteration: observing things that cost me time, money, and patience; figuring out how I can cut down on these things as much as possible; and never giving up on improving what I do.

What say you? Do you explicitly or implicitly use iteration? How?

“We Are What We Repeatedly Do. Excellence, Therefore, is Not an Act, But a Habit.” – Aristotle

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Tweet in question:

Holy crap, I hope not! There goes an income source…

You can gauge (if you couldn’t predict) my first reaction: um, no.

What I’m meaning to say in so few characters is that “having a company website” is like saying “having a steady job,” it doesn’t say anything specific. One company website could be a static, 8 page online brochure built poorly in 2002 and not kept up-to-date (but left online for due diligence). Another company website could be a Wordpress-based blog site with a Twitter feed, a Flickr feed, a Facebook group widget, and loaded with videos from Youtube. These are both company websites.

But @pevachon is touching on a very important subject for a company that wants to build a new site or rebuild an existing one: what does having a website really mean and what’s the best way to go about it? Whether you have information posted on Squidoo or a Posterous blog or a LinkedIn profile, you have a place for people to find you. Do you need your own blog? Do you need to control exactly how everything looks? Are you OK with your content and information being owned by someone else?

@pevachon replies:

@joshcanhelp not sure but why not use all the spaces already available on the web?

Why not, right? There are so many sites and pages and companies begging to hold onto your information, most of the time for free.

As usual, the question comes down to what you want to accomplish. If you’re looking to get the word out about yourself, your cause, or something you’re selling, just having a website isn’t going to cut it. Alternatively, if you’re looking to showcase something or need more control over presentation, starting a Facebook group won’t let you do what you need to.

@pevachon I’d argue that’s like saying why have a business card when you could hand someone a post-it note :)

There’s nothing wrong with your number on a post-it note, right? But doesn’t a custom designed and printed card say so much more?

I think @pevahon and I would both agree: if you think a solid web presence stops at a website, there’s a lot out there you’re going to miss.

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The Drudge-Style Site Template

This one-page template has the following features:

• Managed with a Google Docs spreadsheet. No HTML knowledge required!
• Include-able files to easily add banner ad, scripts, meta tags, and more.
• A section at the top set aside for a banner image and a story of the day with image
• Three fluid (that means it shrinks with the size of the screen that is viewing it) columns that contain lists of links
• The ability to add headings in the columns to separate sections
• The ability to add paragraphs below the links to give a bit of description, if necessary
• A footer with a line of links that can be added for, say, an email address of another page
• Works in all browsers (including IE6)
• Baked-in SEO!

Read more, buy, and download the Dynamic Drudge Report Website Template

Also available is a free template…

The Free Drudge Report Website template

In addition to the dynamic template above, I also have an HTML version available for free. This template was the basis for the one above and is easy to work with, providing you understand basic HTML.

As a side-note, the HTML on Drudge report is very poor. It was a table-style layout for no discernible reason, there were capitalized tags and attributes throughout, and it looked like it may have been avoiding CSS altogether. It’s really none of my business how other people put their sites together but it was clear I wouldn’t be drawing any inspiration from the technical construction. So I started from scratch and made this very simple, lightweight, one-file, one-page site template that mimics the layout of Drudge report with a few extra features. See the template now.

Download the free Drudge-Style Template

How to Use The Free Template

In typical Josh Can Help style, let’s walk through how to get this little guy to do what you want.

I use [[double square brackets]] around the text that needs to be changed in the file so it’s easy to find all the meta (unseen on the page) information. To add new links and change the information, you’ll want to have a bit of experience with HTML but, at the risk of a flood of new web developers taking all my clients, I’ll let you in on a little secret: HTML isn’t that hard. Here’s a real quick way to get familiar.

So, let’s customize this page:

• Unzip the package somewhere on your desktop and open the “index.html” file with a plain text editor. If you’re in Windows, you’ll need to right-click the file and pick Notepad.
• Start scanning for double brackets and fill in the information as needed. Make sure the <title> text has words that tell search engines what you’ve got going on the page. Fill out those meta tags too, just because.
• Unless you’re familiar with CSS, just leave everything between the <style> and </style> tags alone. If you are familiar with CSS, go crazy!
• The <h1> tag, by default, is invisible but still fill it out with a short (few words) description of the page. This combined with the <title> tag helps search engines figure out the main purpose of your page. If you aren’t going to use a banner image, then delete id=”page-name” and your header is now big, bold text.
• Now, your header image. This image is centered on the page and can be any size you want. Just put the filename of the image you’re going to use after src=” and make sure the image is placed in the same directory on your host as this file. Type in a description of the image as well while you’re at it.
• For the story of the day, do the same thing with the image and add your text where indicated in the template. The image will resize to 200 pixels wide automatically. FYI on the image, just delete the whole img tag if you don’t want to use one. You can also change “Story of the day” to something else and use that space for something different.
• Now, you’re ready to plug in your links. Each link is in its own <li> tag to keep them on their own line and to give a little space in between. Just replace the text after href=” with the direct URL (including http://) and replace the next set of brackets with the text you want to appear on the page. You’ll notice that the first link in the left column has a paragraph right after it but before the closing tag. Make sure to follow this syntax to keep the spacing kosher.
• Want to add another link? Just copy and paste one of those <li>…</li> rows wherever you want it to be. Deleting a link is the opposite.
• Add a new separating header with <h3>...</h3> tags wherever you’d like (but, of course, within one of the columns).
• Want to add a separator line? Figure out where it should go and stick an <hr> right there.
• img tags can also be used in columns, just make sure they are in between the <li> and </li> tags. Style wise, it’s probably better to put img tags in between the <li> and the <a> tags.
• Scroll down to the bottom for the footer links. Don’t want any? Just delete them all except mine :).

And that’s it! To make it live, just copy index.html to a public folder on your web host and check it out. If you already have a website going, be careful where you put this so you don’t overwrite the main site file.

Have fun! I’m happy to answer questions in the comments below.

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This post is because you don’t have enough to read. Scratch that… you don’t have enough useful stuff to read. These are must-reads for anyone who has or thinks they should have a website out there and gathering eyeballs.

I’m a firm believer in understanding why things are done. I also believe that anyone can understand anything if it’s important to them to understand it. People love to tell me “I’m not technical so I’m not going to understand it” but that’s a cop out. If you find value in what you’re learning, you’ll learn it.

Having a website without knowing what goes into it is like having a car and not understanding your gas tank or oil changes or tire pressure. You can go from here to there but, one of these days, that car is going to break and you’re going to be stuck. With that in mind, I strongly suggest you understand the basics. These should help. Best way to go about getting through these is to read the parts that pertain to what you’re doing, absorb the parts you get, and look up the parts you don’t.

First, of course, a couple posts by me.

• What is Web Strategy?
• 3 Things Every Business Owner Needs to Understand About Their Website
• Making a Technology Taming Plan

Google’s Starter Guide to SEO

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Google and what it does for people. Their free applications are priceless to me and their geeky nature appeals to me greatly. I also love that they would go out of their way to write a guide like this. For people who know little to nothing about search engines, this is the place to start.

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

MailChimp’s Guide to Email marketing

I am consistently impressed with how much free information is produced from MailChimp. I have not used their product once but I’m still their biggest fan. This awesome guide gives you all the information you need to design, build, and send an email campaign the RIGHT way. A must read for ANYONE doing bulk HTML mailing.

First, we’ll cover all the basics, like how HTML emails work (and why it always seems to break when you try to send it yourself). Then, we’ll get into technical stuff, like how to design and code them. Finally, we’ll run through email marketing best practices, such as for list management, deliverability and measuring performance.

Seth Godin’s Guide to Traffic

I am a big Seth Godin fan. His honest, simple delivery of business and internet common sense is unique, refreshing, and insightful. I’ll read his blog as long as he writes it, no doubt about it. This ebook is yet another example of his pure common sense at work. It’s great advice for those that don’t know and a very important remind for those that do. It’s a quick read and an important triad of concepts.

In other words, the best way is the long way. The long way is to create content that is updated, unique and useful. Again and again we see that sites that do all three manage to get more than their fair share of traffic.

Getting Real by 37 Signals

This is a book written by the folks at 37 signals. It takles about how to build a web application but much of it applies broadly to any bootstrapping operation. This book, available to read for free online, gives you a great mental framework to push your ideas forward.

Underdo your competition; Your passion – or lack of – will shine through; The leaner you are, the easier it is to change; Differentiate yourself from bigger companies by being personal and friendly; Explicitly define the one-point vision; Build something you can manage.

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talent.

I have a Hotmail address that includes the word “talent” in it. I’m not going to broadcast the story of how this address came to be simply because the entertainment to embarrassment ratio is far too low. Regardless, every time I give this address out over the phone or in person to someone, it makes me think about the word “talent” before I think about the genesis of the address. I think ‘does this person think I’m full of myself because I have the word “talent” in my address?’ Then, I think ‘do I deserve to have this word in my email address?’

talent.

Talent is a funny thing. Being talented in something is a product of chance, practice, both, and neither [these days, I'm leaning much more towards practice]. By chance, you can be a talented writer. By practice, you can be a talented basketball player. By both, you can be an inspirational painter. By neither, you could have the potential for something within you and never even know. Talent is born and built and wasted and ignored.

talent.

In the past couple of days, I’ve talked to two very talented people. These are people that I have a lot of respect for and whose work I am amazed by. The talent they both display is fascinating to experience though each of them have very different talents that exist at very different cultivation levels.

talent.

One is accomplished in his field and an expert at human interaction. He wrote a book which, if the universe is fair and just, will sell a million copies. He is a family/marriage counselor by trade who happens to be the most insightful person I know when it comes to humans interacting with each other. He can say very, very little while telling you more than anyone has ever told you before. This is what he told me (personally) about talent (this is not a direct quote; I’m paraphrasing):

Use who you know and what you know to do what you need to do. Sometimes we think that we need to do everything and know everything ourselves but that is not how you get done what needs to be done. Leverage your talent to build relationships and use these relationships to reach your goals. When you try to do everything at once, you get bogged down in the details. You need to find the people that can help you the most and use their talent to help you.

What do you think? I think I need to get better at exactly this.

talent.

The other person I talked to is a musician with an international fan base and an album coming out soon. I’m not sure exactly how long he has been making music but I can assume that it’s been at least a decade. Having a conversation with him is a pleasure because he’s both very smart and very knowledgeable and does everything he can to make sure he speaks his mind as clearly as possible. He’s political, musical, socially-conscious, sans both a driver’s license and a cell phone (OMG, can you imagine?? LOL), and a great person to talk to about talent.

We talked about someone he knows who is a talented videographer. Hearing someone like him talk about someone he respected made me want to ask him how he handles others with talent. I asked him, essentially, how he feels when he is around talent that is potentially greater than his own? He had this to say (again, paraphrased):

I just like to be around talent, be the nexus of talent around me. I like to be around people who are more talented than me because I can learn from it. Having talented people around me makes me work harder and do more, not to compete but because I have more resources

Intrigued, I dug a little deeper. He clearly has a talent that he has no choice but to follow. How does it feel to have a talent and a passion you can’t deny?

I’m not sure it’s all that great. I’m stuck doing this whether I want to or not. Trying to be a rock star and making an impact on pop culture is a curse, really. I don’t have anything that’s marketable, I’m basically a starving artist. Either I make an album that works and appeals to people or I fail; those are my two options. I’m always facing failure no matter what I do. There is a stigma to being creative, I don’t really have a marketable skill. If this doesn’t work, then what? If I fail, people can look at me and say ’silly boy, of course you don’t do that, you’ll never get anywhere in music.’

talent.

Talent is a blessing and talent is a curse. Talent ties you up and talent sets you free. Talent pays the bills and talent drains your savings account.

So what is universal about talent? Talent only gets better with practice and focus. Talent makes you popular if you let it. Talent is knowing when to use your talent and when to use someone else’s talent. Talent gets better in the presence of complementary talent. Talent comes to you, it finds you. Talent is finding your own flow, tapping into something that’s bigger than yourself. Talent won’t guarantee your happiness and talent won’t guarantee your income.

Your talent is bigger than you, it’s bigger than what you can create or fix or destroy. Still, the talent that you have inside of you is yours to use or yours to ignore. Not everyone who finds and exploits their talent will end up with what they wanted or thought they deserved out of life. What they will do, always, is inspire and amaze and cause people to think if they let that talent out into the world. Human ability appears limitless in it’s depth, breadth, and scope. Even if you don’t or won’t find it in yourself, talent has the ability to affect you in fascinating ways.

talent.

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I had two major goals with this site:

1. Showcase my design and Wordpress talents better
2. Make it easier for people to find information about me and what I do

With this in mind, I sat down a few months ago and began writing out the plan for the site. I wanted an area to highlight work I’ve done for specific clients and a better representation of what I do. I wanted a simple, clean layout and to ditch the ever-present blog sidebar.

After settling on a structure, I went to work in Photoshop putting together a design. For whatever reason, I always find it tough to design websites for myself. It’s tough to balance what you want to say with how you want it to look. It was my chance to do whatever I wanted but I was still constrained by business sense and usability. I think the combination of being able to say anything and do anything makes the process harder. Design is about constraint, art is about freedom.

After I had settled on a look, it was time to get in and work with the code. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Certain pages have a template that allows them to be appended with a list of posts from a particular category. For example, the page about Josh Can Help is appended with announcements and information about Josh Can Help in general. This is controlled by entering in a category when I write the page.

• On each individual post page (on the left there at the top) there are share links for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, my three main social networks. When I create a post, a also create a bit.ly link which I put into a custom field. Then, the Wordpress template takes that short link and adds it to share links for each of the services. The twitter share adds my handle and shortened text from the title of the page. Go ahead, try it out… no plugins! It’s also dynamic so old posts without this information won’t show the links. I debated whether or not I wanted to dynamically generate links from bit.ly but I figured this way I could track all shares from each article using that link in my account. I could also just as easily add in a different short link without much hassle.
• Using information from this article, I made a contact form that validates inputs and can sent the user a copy. It basically receives the information from the form then calls the same page to process that info.

Those are the main features with more to come. On the to-do list:

• Add navigation to the footer to make the site a little easier to navigate
• Figure out a way to ditch the post meta information on the search results page when pages match the results
• Straighten out styles for IE6 (sigh)
• Add more links to my network page
• Plug in the Lightbox code for the website images on my portfolio page
• Add bit.ly links to all my old posts
• Add a few more images to the content pages
• Add h1 tags for the main landing pages to improve SEO

Comments are appreciated!

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Step 1: Assess the situation

Wordpress is notorious for being a big server resource hog but there is little else out there that provides the kind of flexibility and extensibility on such an easy-to-use platform. I’m sure there are debates to be had but I’m a huge fan of Wordpress and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

In this case, the Wordpress core along with several essential but potentially resource-heavy plugins were causing the server to become unresponsive and, at times, crash for several minutes. This happened during short periods of intense traffic caused by the aforementioned temporary Digg.com front page position (called “the Digg effect”).

I ran a simple website optimization test and found several things that needed to be corrected:

• The site was creating close to 90 HTTP requests. This means that the web page asked for 90 different things across the internet before it would be complete. This is really high.
• The images on the page tested were too large
• The page size, in total, was over a megabyte. For very graphics-heavy sites, this might be normal but there was room to improve here.

Step 2: Plan of attack

The first thing was to address images on the site. Several images needed to be decreased in size (read: lower quality) and the images called by the stylesheet, CSS images, needed to be combined into one file called a sprite.

Since page load speed is made worse by an increasing number of server requests (the HTTP requests I mention above), I wanted to cut that amount in half or more. I would do this by concentrating on items that were loaded from the hosting server. If you load 100 objects from other servers, the page may take a while to load but the host for the page you’re viewing won’t crash. Since the primary goal was to avoid crashes, this would be an important improvement.

What happened?

Though the ideas behind the improvements were simple, there was a lot of trial and error involved. Code written by different people sometimes doesn’t play well together so there was a lot of care taken to make sure that the right syntax appeared in the combined files. The plugins themselves were actually written very well and there was rarely any problem removing the references to certain files. A few observations:

• For one reason or another, combining javascript files is a very finicky procedure. I found that any JS that came after the JQuery block did not work. I also found that minifying the code broke it completely so that didn’t work.
• There’s really some hard decisions to be made when you’re combining all of these files. You’re trading a lot of control for load speed in certain cases. The plugins that were modified can’t be upgraded automatically of the changes will be lost. In the case where there was a dynamically altered style sheet or javascript file, I left it alone. This left one minor JS error on the page because of the order that the scripts are called but nothing on the page is malfunctioning.
• Working with a heavily cached site is very difficult because it is hard to figure out if the changes you made went through. Next time around, I’m going to turn the caching off.

In the end…

With the changes made, we saw an improvement of around 36% (from 320 sec 56K load time to 206). The requests are sitting at 48 total (down from 90) and the site is running noticeably faster.

I made a few recommendations for managing the site going forward.

• The biggest thing you can do, as important as the code I changed, is to make sure your images are as small as possible. If you’re in Photoshop, save your JPGs at a 4 or 5 setting. Also, save non-photo images (logos, cartoons, etc) as GIFs. Give this site a try if you’re not proficient with a graphics program: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/
• On the topic of images… if you have the time, you might want to host some of your images offline (Picasa, Flickr, etc). This might increase load times a little bit but it will keep the load off of your server. Check those sites for bandwidth restrictions, though. It wouldn’t be good to have them take down an image that’s getting you a lot of traffic.
• You’re fine to install new plugins on the site but keep it to a minimum. Many plugins won’t affect your load time at all but some will start adding things to your header which is exactly what I worked to remove. I can, of course, do the same modification to any new plugins as well, though.

Next Steps

We’re getting as close as we can get to making the page as lightweight as possible. There are a few dynamic style sheets and JS files that could be combined if the settings never need to be changed but this might be overkill. I’d like to work out the JS minification issue if possible because we can squish 20KB out of that file.

The next big thing to tackle is the MySQL database. I found a few articles that talked about some settings that can be modified to activate caching and a few other things. I’ll try them on my server before his, though!

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