I spend another good portion of my day thinking about how to make things less complicated. [You could sum up Jason Fried's philosophy as "less is more." Except that he hates that expression, because, he says, it still "implies that more is better." Fried prefers "less is less."] In the software world, the first, second, and third versions of any product are really pretty good, because everyone can use them. Then companies start adding more and more stuff to keep their existing customers happy. But you end up dying with your customer base, because the software is too complicated for a newcomer. We keep our products simple. I’d rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them.

Jason, you’d rather have people “grow out” of your products rather than keep them prisoner for life?  Brilliant design principle methinks.

Jason Fried started 37 Signals, a company of radical bad-assery.  I’ve been using Basecamp, their flaghsip project management software, a ton lately.  And just stumbled upon Haystack yesterday.  What will these dudes think of next?

Even though I’m all filled up on man bags at the moment, curiosity got the best of me and I clicked through to check it out.  After reading a few pages, I decided I would sign up and try it out because it just seemed too damn good to be true!

Well, in summary, it pretty much is.

Here’s the review I posted to their Facebook Fan page:

The item I’m bidding on, and will surely lose.

Comments are now open for jokes about me bidding on purses.  But you have to buy a package of “100 Comment Credits” for $65 for me to publish them.

Here’s the mock-up, along with his email to me:

I’m trying to rekindle the fire to get our ABSystems website redesigned.  Take a glance at the mock up attached. I 100% ripped it off of mint.com. We won’t be using the grassy bar, but I wanted it there as a place marker and to show the function / naming of the rollover items.  Any feedback would be appreciated.

My Reply

Dude, this mock-up rocks.  You know I love mint.com’s design and even the redesign has grown on me since my review.

Couple of thoughts off the tip top of my head…

1. Image is what I saw first, but Headline is what I *read* first.  Which is perfect.

2. Only two primary call to actions in bright orange buttons.  Awesome.  Would change the one to “Watch 2 minute overview video”.  2 mins is about the max length of attention span for an informational video online.  This is because watching the video is a passive action.  While online, people are in an active mode.  Therefore, if it can’t be said in 2 mins or less, don’t bother.  (For background on this 2 minute stat, click here and scroll down to the section with the header 1 Minute.)

3. The headline uses key phrases, “Fatest” and “Guaranteed.”  And presumably, “Medical Billing Business” is the keyword the site visitor searched on.  So very sticky as a landing page.  (Btw, I’ve been learning lots more about hiring an inbound link firm so you can rank #1 on a search term like that. More to come this week on my blog and Ashley’s.)

4. The “hero graphic” is very pretty on first glance.  But as you move from scanning to reading, it becomes more complicated.  Would recommend making it slightly simpler.  Ie. Maybe less boxes?  Less technical/insider jargon?

5. The use of the “I” instead of “we” is prevalent and much better for conversion.  Questions like, “How Do I Get Clients?”  “How much can I make?” are brilliant to use.  On the other hand, “What We Do” statements as the lead are lame.  (Check out Futurenow’s We-We calculator.)

6. For the header nav, I would recommend, in this order: “How Much Can I Make?”  “Medical Billing 101″  “About ABS”, and that’s it!  Put links to “ABS Blog” and “Products” in the footer nav.  (Check out how minimal the nav bar is for the new Jigsaw Health re-design, yet the footer has many links.)

7. Add your 800 number and a Chat Live now to the top right.

8. Get a new logo!

Dude, this is a great direction for your website.  Higher conversion always has a positive ROI.  So push hard to get it done, and K.I.S.S.

Your Thoughts?

Comments are open for thoughts and reactions.

But then there’s all those “random idea” sites.  I don’t need the full scale bells-and-whistles hosting I get from Firehost.  And I definitely don’t want to deal with ANY complexity.

I want to think of the idea, buy the domain name, get a Wordpress template up, get an email address, and off I’m running.

My requirements for my new wordpress web host are:

1. VERY simple to launch (the site AND the email account)
2. VERY simple to maintain (1 click upgrades to the latest version)
3. VERY simple to move away from if I didn’t like em.
4. (Oh yeah, and VERY inexpensive.)

As the saying goes, keep it simple stupid!

Enter Page.ly, a relatively new wordpress hosting company from Tempe, AZ putting a SIMPLE spin on wordpress (and email) hosting.

Page.ly’s Setup Wizard

Now that was SIMPLE!!

I love it.  Couldn’t have been any easier.  Now I’m just waiting for the Nameserver changes to propagate so I can login and get going.  Since I’m familiar with WordPress, that should be a breeze.

Big on my face so far.

(But if I don’t like it, there’s no longterm contract so I’m only risking $15. Perfect!)

My good buddy, Ryan Farley the genius developer, picked out this quote from the same article.

Here’s the perfect example of this in real life…

Tuesday

For at least a month (maybe longer), ARMLS had been warning realtors that a new login screen was coming.  The main difference?  Your username and password would no longer be saved in the two fields. That’s it.  Simple, right?

Wrong!

One day after the rollout…

Wednesday

“Uhh…”

Friday

“Oops.”

Guess the phones were REALLY ringing off the hook.  Classic!!

(And yeah, I’ve been in projects that had to go back.  But as I like to say, some mistakes are too important not to make.)

Well, let me rephrase that…I’m un-learned at the rest.  How do I know if I’m good, great, or horrible.

But all the books, blogs, etc. say you have to become an expert in a niche to have a successful blog, right?

Well I say it’s upside-down!

The Problem: Writing Like An Expert is REALLY Tough

My Editweapon.com blog is allegedly about software and website usability and learn-ability, something I am great at.

But I almost never write about that.  Why?  Nuance causes massive writers block and I start writing like an “expert.”

The Solution: Write Like An Idiot

In helping start-up Ashley’s new real estate website, Scottsdale AZ Homes For Sale, I realized there was actually a lot of things I didn’t really know about internet marketing, SEO, PPC, etc.  And it just occurred to me one day, “Well, I’ll just write ‘How To’ posts as I go along since I know those get good link juice.”

Most People Are Idiots Un-Learned

Who cares if there are 500 different version of How To Buy a Domain Name. Not every single person has read all 500 articles.  In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed that 99.9% of the population has never read a single one of them.  Which means 99.9% of the population might find my take on the subject useful.

Writing As I Learn

Writing about the topic as I’m learning about the topic has completely removed my writers block.  And I’m starting to see that these posts are some of my best work.  (As judged by me, the amount of comments, etc.)

I don’t even have to reach a conclusion, and yet I’m still providing value in the content.  (For example, see my work-in-progress review of thinkBIGsites from yesterday, or 5 Steps To SEO Domination from August.)

Research. Write. Publish. Repeat.

I research things well.  In fact, now that I think about it, I over-analyze everything.  Well, on second thought, not quite everything.  Probably 70%…no, 65%…well, hmm…let me export my posts to a spreadsheet and categorize them by on a keyword…

(You see what I’m talking about?!?!?!  I’m a menace to myself.)

Seriously though, just like so many other small business owners, I have to research a very wide variety of topics to get myself learn-ed.

But now, instead of researching until I’m an expert (which never really happens anyways), my content creation strategy is to write and publish while I’m still an idiot.

What’d you think?  Am I an idiot for suggesting this as a winning content strategy? And by that I mean, good for inbound links.

Maybe you are too.

I figure the best way to do this is to evaluate the work they did for one of their reference clients, Frank Key, who sells a colloidal silver product.  (This is good because it’s the same industry as my company, Jigsaw Health, working to optimize for magnesium supplements.)

(Images from The Secret To Internet Marketing That Actually Works pdf download.)

So…How Do You Check Inbound Links?

Links to your website with your keywords in the “anchor text” is what Google ranking is mostly based on.  Everyone gets that, right?  Ok good.

I needed to figure out how to check Frank’s inbound links.  Here’s what I did:

Step 1) Googled “How to check inbound links”

Step 2) Got totally lost for like 2 hours.

Thus, Step 2 will be the subject of a future post called “How Do you Check Inbound Links?” because this was not nearly as easy as I wanted it to be would have imagined.

I couldn’t find a single service that reported inbound links grouped by unique domain.  They all just showed every page that linked to the target domain.

They were showing me millions of pine needles.  I wanted to see the trees.

Of the tools I tested out, Backlinkwatch seemed the best. (Found from this list of 10 Backlink Checking Tools.)  It found 1133 links.  Wow…sounds awesome!

Of course, what is confusing is that Yahoo!’s site explorer tool only showed 15 inbound links, and Google shows “about 29.”  WTF?  Don’t you just love data discrepancy?!?! Grrr…

Next Step: Reference Check

The sales rep at ThinkBIGsites I talked with this afternoon is going to let me talk to some reference clients.  I’ll share what I learn from them in a future post or an update to this post.  More to come…

What’s A Boy To Do?

Get high with a little help from my friends.  (Pun intended…like Gaylord Focker, I pass on grass. Always.)

Chase Granberry — of Authority Labs website tracker fame — recommended I check out SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and SlingshotSEO.  I’ll take a look and report back.

Any other comments, please post them.  “I want to get high, so-o-o-o-o high.” 

Woot!!  And thanks Chase!!

PS – You can see from the screen shot that he’s been tracking our progress on the magnesium supplement experiment as well.

Here’s what we’ve done so far:

1. How to buy an after-market domain name.  Check!
2. Pick an ugly wordpress template.  Check!  (Design will be changing soon.)
3. How to design a real estate business card.  Check!

On my blog, I want to dig deeper into #3 and explain how I made an ugly business card much prettier with the help of a few friends.

Step 1) Learn The Pen Tool

I really liked the wavy lines in this sample design.  It looked classy and professional.

So I IM’ed my good buddy Justin Youens and asked what tool was used to create that?  Adobe’s Pen Tool.

So I start playing around with it, and here’s what I got.  Pretty awful.  LOL!!

Justin then got on Skype screen sharing with me and showed me how to set a point, drag the handles, set another point, etc.  (Here’s a 28 minute YouTube video showing how to use Adobe Illustrator’s Pen tool.  It says pretty much the same thing.)

Step 2) Less (Anchor Points) is More!

I’m a minimalist by nature, so I knew I didn’t want to get too crazy.  So I set the first anchor point in the upper right, made small handles.  Set the next point in the middle, small handles.  Third point, off the card to the left, small handles.  Fourth point on the bottom left.  Fifth point on the bottom right.  Then tie it all together by clicking on the first point in the upper right.

Next, copy the shape, move it up and to the left slightly, send it backwards, and set the transparency / opacity to 66%.

Third, paste the shape again, move it to the bottom directly below the first all black shape. I also added a slight gradient for fun after watching this YouTube tutorial about Adobe Illustrator Gradients.  I thought about doing more gradients, but didn’t want to break my minimalistic design.

Step 3) Fonts Really Matter

So I had my basic design.  Time to add the words.  Here’s the default, Myriad.  And wow, talk about cheeseball city!! 

At this point, I was laughing at myself thinking, “I’m never going to make this look any good.”  I forwarded a screen shot to my buddy Chris Drake with the words, “I don’t know why anyone thinks I need help with graphic design?” to which he replied, “LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Good point Chris.  I then spent 2 hours scrolling through Mac’s FontBook looking at different fonts.  I wanted something more soft than sharp, more playful than serious, but not too playful.

I tried out the Foot Lite MT, but it was too sharp.

Giddyup Std looked great on the name, but bad on everything else.

I finally settled on Giddyup Std for the name and Minion Pro for everything else.  It was starting to look a lot better.

Step 4) Fix Your Vertical Alignment

Casey Barthels is an AMAZING graphic designer.  Like, crazy stupid amazing.  I sent a screen shot and down-played my pride using the same line I used with Chris, “I don’t know why anyone thinks I need help with graphic design?” to which Casey replied “I know, weird! …hahahaahaha.” which made me laugh, but deflated my pride because he was right.

But then he said, “Actually man, that blows the doors off most non-pro design.” which re-inflated my tires. 

We yacked back and for a bit more over IM, and he told me to send him the file.  About 30 minutes later, he sent back this.  Notice the improvement just by focusing on horizontal and vertical alignment of the lettering.

Step 5) Touch-Ups

Sent another screen shot back to Chris Drake and got a “Boo yah!” reply.  So I knew I had something.  But Chris gave some great final tips on scrunching up the design areas so I could move Ashley’s image below the safe line to make sure we didn’t make her look bald.  Good call Chris!!  Here’s the final design.

Thanks

Big time thanks to Chris, Justin, and Casey for their help!  Ashley will re-pay you with…free real estate help.  Don’t you guys go getting carried away! 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll probably also enjoy How to design a real estate business card.

Bryan Eisenberg IM’ed me this afternoon to inform me Jigsaw Health is now at #7 for magnesium supplements.  That’s the highest I’ve seen it at so far…woot!  Five-ish competitors to overcome.  It can be done.  It will be done!

So it’s time to implement more of this strategy.  And I just changed the probiotic supplement title yesterday.

Old title:

New title:

Research:

I’ll track these standings as well and report back.  Currently, we’re not in the top 100 listings.

PS – If you link to either of these pages using magnesium supplement of probiotic supplement, I will buy you a private jet — but you have to pay for the gas! 

Update on the Update:

James asked the question, “Did you start getting any traffic or revenue from the increase in page rank?”  Which reminded me that I was totally going to include that in this post and forgot.  So here’s the real real numbers.  It ain’t doing much for the bottom line…

…but it’s better than where we were.