Nate Klaiber

Seth Godin: The right someone

Nate Klaiber — Fri Nov 06 09:35:00 UTC 2009

You don't want everyone. You want the right someone. Seth Godin

Robert Hoekman Jr.: The Myth of Usability Testing

Nate Klaiber — Mon Nov 02 12:31:01 UTC 2009

I am a little tardy to reading a recent A List Apart article by Robert Hoekman, Jr., entitled The Myth of Usability Testing.

One specific sentence that caught my eye was:

Page views and time-spent-per-page metrics, while often foolishly considered standard measures of site effectiveness, are meaningless until they are considered in context of the goals of the pages being visited.

Too many times we get caught up with the tools—first—without understanding the people using those tools.

He finishes up with this:

Test for the right reasons and you stand a good chance of achieving a positive outcome. Test for the wrong ones, however, and you may not only produce misleading results, but also put your entire business at risk.

Jason Fried: When's the last time you read your site out loud?

Nate Klaiber — Mon Nov 02 08:13:00 UTC 2009

When’s the last time you read your site or web app aloud? Not just the big text blocks and the about page, but the headlines, field labels, buttons, error messages, and confirmation emails? —Jason Fried

This can be a truly humbling experience. It's also interesting to watch other people read your website out loud while they try and interact with it.

Respect the brand of your client: don't tramp stamp

Nate Klaiber — Fri Oct 30 12:39:01 UTC 2009

A few weeks back, WRL Advertising posted an article on their blog entitled It Is Your Website - Web Presence Branding Part 1, where Dennis Warner discusses the value of what I like to call car dealership stamping. You have seen it before. You are looking to buy a new car, and before you pull it off the lot it gets stamped with a sticker or license plate cover with free advertising for the car dealership. Now, to someone who really cares about the quality of their car, they will instantly remove these blemishes. To the average person who uses their car as just a utility—to get them from one point to another—they may not even notice, or care, about this stamping. They are just happy to have a car.

This type of stamping used to be prevalent on the web as well, where the company responsible for building a website stamps the client website with a “Web Design and Web Hosting provided by The Super Cool Web Design Group” with corresponding links back to their website. See the correlation here?

Let’s examine some of the correlations:

The first client is the one who cares about the quality of their website and their brand. They care about every little detail: color, typography, whitespace, content, and organization. They care about all of the little touches. Each link and section could be a potential goal conversion, and they want to reduce the amount of noise present on the page. Everything done on their website is done with purpose. A stamp on their page is noise. It is another potential link that someone could click and leave their site. Their website is not about marketing for someone else. It’s a distraction.
The second type of client is one who may still need some education. This isn’t a bad thing, they just may not know much about what it means to have a website and the impact it has on their brand and quality. They will have no objections to being stamped because their website is a utility. It’s just another ‘thing’ that exists as a part of their business. They have advertisements in newspapers, advertisements on the radio, fliers at the local mall, and billboards on the road. They just want a presence on the web, but they don’t yet understand the full value or impact. For this client, they are just happy to have a website and will oblige with the advice of the professionals they sought out to help them build the process. They have no problem with the request of a digital pat on the back from the company who developed the website.

A response from the other side of the fence

Shortly after Dennis posted his article, Geoff Karcher responded on his Websense Blog: “Interesting Topic on WRL Advertising Blog”. I’d like to take some time to question the logic presented in his response.

I can’t tell you how many times TKG has been contacted over the years by users seeking support that they are not able to obtain from our clients, because they do not have the infrastructure to provide 24/7 support. As a result of the nature of our industry, we have that infrastructure in place, and are able to become an extension of our clients’ customer support teams. For example; imagine a non profit who has an event coming up and announced it on their site. Of course, being a non-profit, and all that comes with that (low budgets, understaffed and over-worked work force) there are times that mis-information makes it’s way to a website via the content management system. It’s great to be a backup for our clients when they are unavailable to respond to consumers’ needs. Geoff Karcher

I see this as faulty logic and borderline false advertising. This implies that TKG has a full staff of people that can keep up with all of the inner workings of their clients. With the example that Geoff uses, he is saying that a non-profit client of theirs posted a wrong date on the website. As a result of this, someone visiting the client website to get information of the event happened to notice it was wrong. Upon noticing this, the visitor then clicks the links to TKG, instead of an internal contact link or form, and they have the available staff to respond with the right information, quicker than the non-profit. Someone on their staff has to be in complete tune with the non-profit to know the date was wrong, then take the time to fix it.

If this isn’t the case, then TKG would have to contact someone from the non-profit to get the right information. See the issue here? How can this make the support stream quicker (24/7 support for all non-profits?) if ultimately they have to contact the non-profit to find the right information. I would like to know more about how this infrastructure works where they have 24/7 support for all of the workings of their clients.
But if you are proud of your work, and your clients are proud of the work you have done for them, 99% of the time, they are happy to have it there. It is not all that different than building a portfolio, asking for a client referral, or including PR contact info in a professional press release for that matter. Geoff Karcher

Being proud of your work is a good thing. I do, however, see it as something different than building a portfolio, asking for a referral, or including a PR contact referral. Those things are internal to your business and your marketing. You are responsible for building your portfolio. You are requesting the referral. You are including information in a press release. You are not injecting yourself into the business or marketing of your client.

With this thought process, then you should be able to inject your marketing at any point into the marketing of a client when you do something. Remember, the link is a way out. It’s a distraction. So, if I were making a brochure for a client, then I should be able to include my own brochure tucked away in theirs with all brochures that get sent out—and on the dime of the client.

When it comes down to it, this has very little with being proud of your work. Any professional designer who produces quality work knows that they don’t need to stamp a client website to receive referrals or more work. They are proud, but they are also confident in their abilities and skill–set. They have respect for the client they are creating work for. They don’t need to throw mud at a wall and see what sticks—they are focused on quality leads. Their pride translates to focusing on quality, not quantity.
Is it a shady link building tactic for search engine rankings? If you really understand link building, you’ll realize that the search engine ranking impact of these links would be nominal at best due to the lack of context.

These links should be appropriately positioned, and secondary to utility navigation, not the core focus of any page or part of main nav. I do agree that these links should not be placed without permission, and should always be removed at the first hint of a request by a client. It is after all their website, as Dennis Warner (Internet Director for WRL Advertising Agency) suggests. Read his point of view here.

However, if you have the resources to serve your clients to this degree, you have happy clients and you expect to be in web design business for the long term; my advice is to offer them this service. Geoff Karcher

If you can look through the childish mudslinging tactics used in these last paragraphs, you can see a deeper issue. Geoff states that the links should be removed at the first hint of a request by a client. This would imply that they don’t always ask for permission from the client, but simply opt–in the client to their free marketing. Does anyone else see a problem with this?

I am still intrigued by these resources and services that he vaguely references (implied value–ads), and would be interested to read some case studies about how they can have 24/7 support for all clients, and how that impacts their staff, workflow, and client relationships. Remember—this isn’t about customer support for their product or CMS—this is about TKG being an extension of the customer service department of all of their clients. How does this directly correlate to the stamp they place on the client website? If they were truly an extension of the customer support—and a faster support stream—then why don’t all contact links, customer service links, and calls–to–action direct a visitor directly to TKG?

I will take a recent example of a TKG website: http://www.remconwaterjet.com/. The bottom of this page has a stamp for TKG. Now, if I were a visitor coming to this website, and had a specific question about a waterjet, or noticed that there was some wrong information about Waterjet Target Materials, could I click on those links to TKG and get responses to my questions? How far does this service extend?

I want to see specific examples of these statements backed up in action.

Where do I stand?

At this point it is most likely obvious where I stand on this discussion. I do understand that this is all contextual. If you create a site for your family, then by all means, stamp away, but if you are building for a big business, then I would think twice. What it comes down to is quality: I fully believe that it is part of our jobs as professional web developers to educate our clients on protecting their quality and their brand. Have respect for your client: don’t tramp stamp.

Your life needs more whitespace

Nate Klaiber — Mon Oct 26 07:41:00 UTC 2009

In the process of adding more whitespace to my life, I have been pruning my feeds and cutting back the time I spend reading them. This is why I am late to the game of reading Derek Featherstone's recent posts that hit very close to home.

Boxes must go. You know how you want to draw attention to something in a design? You draw a box around it. Then, you want to draw attention to something else and you draw a box around it too. Pretty soon everything has a box around it. And when everything has a box around it, nothing does. Don’t draw attention to or separate various aspects of your life with boxes. Separate them with whitespace. Derek Featherstone

He goes on to say:

Like the elements of a great design the elements of your life don’t need a visual treatment. They just need some room to stand on their own. The elements of your life need more whitespace. Derek Featherstone

This was a response to a previous post he wrote, entitled What Gives?. Both are excellent reads.

Seth Godin: Dunbar's number

Nate Klaiber — Mon Oct 26 07:37:00 UTC 2009

Some people online are trying to flaunt Dunbar's number, to become connected and actual friends with tens of thousands of people at once. And guess what? It doesn't scale. You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can't effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. Seth Godin

This has always fascinated me with the different social networks. People rush for the numbers. They rush to find as many friends as they can. In the end, they ultimately can't focus on this. Is it simply a desire to be popular online? Does it really enhance a brand to have more friends or followers than the next guy?

What is the quality of the relationships you are creating?

Critics that matter

Nate Klaiber — Thu Aug 13 14:03:01 UTC 2009

"Some critics matter. (Your biggest customer, for example). Some are merely loud. Others are just difficult." via

This is something at the foreground when I do reviews. The review itself is not about complaining about the content in a global scope. For example, my review of a book will likely differ from your review of a book. That doesn't make me wrong and you right. What it does is help frame the research for the end user. My review is telling you about what I received given my context (experience level, day-to-day workflow, etc), and then you can take that and apply that as necessary. This is why I removed star ratings on Nate Klaiber Book Reviews. I am not a critic. I am not here to point out the minor flaws. I am about seeing through that and relaying what knowledge was gained. It's also not just about my context, but it's about the context of the book. Who was it written for? Why was it written? Who is the author? All of these pieces are vital to a useful review - not just a critique. Just some of my thought process.

Seth Godin: Find your voice

Nate Klaiber — Mon Jun 29 09:33:00 UTC 2009

Find your voice, don't copy someone else's. via

Uncle Bob: Crap code inevitable?

Nate Klaiber — Thu Apr 23 08:09:00 UTC 2009

Low quality code is not cheaper; it is vastly more expensive, even in the short term. Bad code slows everyone down from the minute that it is written. It creates a continuous and copious drag on further progress. It requires armies of coders to overcome that drag; and those armies must grow exponentially to maintain constant velocity against that drag. (via)

TA: Swim with the current

Nate Klaiber — Wed Apr 22 08:36:00 UTC 2009

If you intend to remain viable as a business, realize that there is no escape from the current. The marketplace is the current. Turbulence is inescapable. Resistance as a defense only makes things worse. Instead, remain stable and absorb. Yield to the current and make your way, surely and swiftly, to a new shore. via

Aaron Boeving launches new website

Nate Klaiber — Thu Apr 02 09:57:00 UTC 2009

I will have more to say about his recent design in an upcoming blog post, but I wanted to at least say congrats to Aaron for getting his new design out into the wild. Some of you may have seen it as featured on Unmatched Style recently, if not, then check out Aaron Boeving for all the goodness.

As a side note, Aaron and I worked together on designing my personal book review site. I posted a new review there today on the book, Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen. If you are a Ruby developer and are interested, check out the review.

37Signals: Make it memorable

Nate Klaiber — Mon Mar 30 08:07:00 UTC 2009

It was during this time that I’d think about the sites that I appreciated from a design standpoint. Many of them are personal blogs or cool brochure sites. I began to realize that these sites displayed information well, but I could not exactly remember what they were about. They sure were pretty with fantastic CSS, but I can’t really remember what what the site said. Did it say anything? via

Seth Godin: Yeah, but he really knows his stuff

Nate Klaiber — Mon Mar 23 07:51:00 UTC 2009

He's the first one to point out a minor technical glitch and the last guy to want to get on board with a new program. He hazes first-timers and avoids the people who are actually productive. Or he's the one who can take any metaphor and make it literal, instantly, poking holes in it as he goes.

And of course, he's the one everyone has to tiptoe around, because they know his technical status can sink their initiative.

I think you should fire this person immediately. Okay, maybe give him exactly one warning.via

Seth Godin: What would a professional do?

Nate Klaiber — Thu Jan 29 08:53:00 UTC 2009

Does your customer/client/employee actually believe that they haven't been shortchanged by your amateur performance? It is costing you in ways you're not measuring because you're willfully ignoring the consequences? Think of all the sub-pro experiences you've had as a customer, instances where someone was pretending to be a chef or a bartender or a computer jock but just came up short... Were you delighted? via

Really enjoyed this particular part of his entry today. While I will be the first to admit that I am continually learning, I stumble across many people at the ground level (think basic HTML 101) who are marketing themselves as 'web designers'. I watch them work hours to complete tasks that should literally take them minutes when done the right way. I see the outcome as something that is unmaintainable and unusable. Then I watch the cycle repeat time and time again. Time is money, in these instances. The amateurs spend hours of their time (business time), doing basic tasks. This cost is then passed on to the client. The client then pays more, and gets much less.

Design is not a strength of mine (gasp, you say, as you look at this finely crafted blog!). For client projects, I will seek out a professional designer. Someone who knows the great details of designing for the web. Someone who is a true professional. Sure, I could do it - but it would take twice as long and the results wouldn't come close to that of a professional designer. It's about working smarter, not harder. When it comes to a client on the other end, then it also becomes an ethical decision, in my opinion.

The truth of the matter is this will never end. There will always be amateurs out there (I say that in the nicest way possible), not knowing how to do things but are able to sell it. They often times equate quantity with quality. More output equals better. I tend to think the opposite. Find the right people to network with. Find the people passionate about what they do. Network with these people to help create quality products. More output is not necessarily better.

I need your help with the direction of NK Book Reviews

Nate Klaiber — Sat Jan 17 13:24:01 UTC 2009

Happening at NK Book Reviews

I have been making some more changes over at www.nkbookreviews.com. Some of them are visible changes, and some are still behind the scenes for future feature releases. I am excited about the culmination of data I have related to all of the books, authors, and publishers. Here's some of the content that has been added recently:

I recently finished reviewing Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter. Here is a short snippet of the review:

There are many pieces of the puzzle that fit together to portray the big picture, and it is up to us as web developers to make sure all of those pieces are in place for the end users. Some of these things include accessibility, usability, copywriting, information architecture, design, and more. That's what this entire book is about - putting the pieces of the puzzle together to create a useful, usable, search engine friendly, and ultimately, findable website. Read More

I recently received, and am currently reading, Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen Kochan. I am completely new to the programming scene on Mac OS X and iPhone development, and this has proven to be a very good read so far. It is geared towards beginners, so the first few chapters have been programming basics in the context of Objective-C. I am very impressed at the author's ability to gradually show shorthand techniques, by first showing the base of how you can achieve different tasks (IE: If/Else and Ternary operator). This is a tough book to put down, and since I am completely new to this - I often times find myself in front of the computer running through the different exercises at the end of each chapter. I look forward to finishing this book.

Outside of regular content, I have also integrated what I think to be some very useful advertising pieces. On some pages you will now see information from Authentic Jobs and SidebarAds. A big thank you to both Cameron Moll and Jonathan Snook for coordinating this with me. My goal with these are simple. I have had several people in the past contact me about different jobs or services related to web development. Some looking for jobs in the industry, and still others looking to get different work done. I have done my best to point people in the right direction, and most of the time it would lead back to Authentic Jobs. Initially they are using the default embedded advertisements, but I am working behind the scenes now on the Authentic Jobs API to integrate the job postings with more targeted content related to book and review detail pages. I will keep you posted as more comes of that. I hope that some will find these useful as just another part to their education process.

A search index is currently being integrated. This was a feature I left out at the beginning, because it didn't quite feel ready to me. I didn't want to just settle with a LIKE search on all of the information. I wanted to create a more useful and targeted search index. This obviously takes time, but I think there will be many benefits to having it done right.

Resources

I have been in conversation with Lachy about his recently released website, Uncoverr.com. We have found that we both share some of the same goals and visions, and I look forward to collaborating with him in some different ventures in the future. He has a great vision for that website, and is actively getting more content to fill it out. He recently did an author interview with the one and only, Jonathan Snook (of the newly re-designed snook.ca), and also posted a review of JavaScript: The Missing Manual.

Communication

For those who don't know, I have also added a Twitter feed for nkbookreviews. I did this to supplement other avenues of communication. The twitter timeline will be used for several things:

Let you know when a review is posted.
Keep you updated on books I am reading.
Snippets and quotes I find helpful or interesting from the books.

This will be used two ways. As I write to this feed, I will be pulling all of my thoughts back into the website to harvest with some other pieces of data.

Next, I have been thinking about getting an email newsletter in place. Is this something you would subscribe to and find useful? I see it containing some of the same things as the twitter timeline, only on a less frequent posting schedule. Used as more of a brief overview of activity, an email dashboard of sorts.

Oops!

I have noticed recently that some URLs need to be updated for RSS subscriptions at the site. I will be updating these items this weekend to assure they get redirected to their proper spots. I apologize for those who have received errors with the feed while trying to subscribe. For now, the main feed to subscribe is http://www.nkbookreviews.com/reviews/rss.xml

I need your help

As I have gathered all of the different data for the reviews site, I am trying to find some of the different useful ways I can roll into useful features. My goal from the beginning was to keep the site as clean as possible, and make sure that each piece I added was useful and served a purpose. This meant that at launch time I actually removed several features, as I wasn't sure they were quite ready. Some of those were related to taggings, nested categorizing, and intended audiences, others were related to meta information from the books.

So, my question for you is: When trying to find the right book on a certain topic, what do you look for in a review and extra information that help you make your decisions? Be sure to let me know in the comments, or email me directly at nate@theklaibers.com.

Seth Godin: What to do when the new thing doesn't work

Nate Klaiber — Fri Jan 09 09:53:00 UTC 2009

From the start, you have to choose a path and stick with it. Either you are on the path of the TV Industrial complex, and you're prepared to promote and spam and spend and make average stuff for average people... or you are busy embracing the new media for everything it can offer. via

Rails 3 to feature new guest, Merb

Nate Klaiber — Wed Dec 24 09:20:00 UTC 2008

There's absolutely no pleasing everyone. You can't and shouldn't try to make everyone love you. The best you can do is make sure that they're hating you for the right reasons.via

I look forward to the merging of the two frameworks. It's a smart move that will ultimately give people more choice (and potentially less overhead or server footprint). In my time researching PHP Frameworks, I don't think I would see this happen with any of them - even if they all are trying to achieve the same goal. To me, it's not about competition - these are two bodies with the same passions, goals, and desires - just taking slightly different routes. Merging makes perfect sense.

Now I wonder what CakePHP will do, will they try and find someone to merge with? I mean, it only makes logical sense with their hanging on the coattails of Rails and all ;)

[NK Book Reviews] Website optimization: speed, search engine and conversion rate secrets

Nate Klaiber — Mon Dec 15 11:55:00 UTC 2008

As I continue to migrate my reviews over to http://www.nkbookreviews.com, I am going to cross-post some links to recent reviews. The most recent review was today, with Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine and Conversion Rate Secrets. This is an O'Reilly book packed full of great information.

If you haven't already, be sure to add the NK Book Reviews feed as it will have the most recent reviews and information. Thanks for reading, and let me know if you have any feedback as I spend time refining the process and website.

D-I: How to build a gantt chart with the Google Charts API

Nate Klaiber — Tue Dec 09 11:39:00 UTC 2008

The Google Charts API is an excellent way to add high quality charting to your web application. We first started working with the API as part of the Simpli5 dashboard development, and were quite impressed with its functionality and ease of use. Wrapper classes were developed and added to our Sandstone Application Framework to make the addition charts to Simpli5 and other applications as simple as possible. via

This is truly an awesome way to use the Google Charts API. Dave got to show me how he worked this out first hand from a whiteboard, and I was impressed. If you have a need to integrate gantt charts into an application you are working on, be sure to check this out first to save you some potential headaches.

Luke W: Signaling Flexible Inputs

Nate Klaiber — Tue Dec 09 08:45:00 UTC 2008

[...] For instance, there are basically five different ways a valid phone number could be specified in the United States. A simple script can check to see if one of these has been used and then submit the information in whatever format the back-end system requires. The chore of adhering to a specific format is taken off the person providing an answer and instead given to a small bit of code. via