Newsletters

April 4, 2013

Chances are, whenever you do anything on any website in the world, Google knows about it. That's because half of the top million sites use Google Analytics to track everywhere you go. Nearly 2/3rds of the top 10,000 sites use Google Analytics. And out of all 186 million active web sites in the world, including a huge number of spam or parked domains, nearly 16 million of them use Google Analytics.

November 27, 2012

In the software industry, the definition of "success" isn't necessarily the same as it is for the rest of the world. The customer asks for a complex system composed of many parts, with a specified budget, and a timeline. A software project is usually considered successful if any part of the system is developed, at any cost, at some time. Not necessarily the functionality requested, the budget, or the deadline.

So claimed Steve McConnell at a recent talk about the business value of software processes Timon and I attended.

Surprising? Shocking, even? Not if you've ever been involved in creating a moderately complex web site, or software project. All too often, people charge in and build something, never taking a moment to plan, never stopping to look at the big picture.

And, I'm embarrassed to say, I have been guilty of this too.

Here is what we're doing to make sure we don't do it again.

April 25, 2012

I learned an important lesson last year. Ok, three important lessons. You would think they would be obvious to a smart guy like me, but I can be stubborn sometimes.

The big one? Pricing some services below my cost.

July 27, 2011

How would losing your web site affect your business?

That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.

February 2, 2010

Did you notice? The world's a different place. Rules for doing business have changed—there's new ways of getting hired, finding employees, reaching new customers, and (shudder) for them to reach you. Economies of scale have flipped—it's getting more expensive to do things on a huge scale, and far cheaper to do them at a micro scale. Mass market items have lost their appeal, and people yearn for authentic, individual connections in a world of franchise same-ness.

August 10, 2009

Jedi mind tricks for getting your web site done

We see it all the time. Our clients hire us to get a web site put together. We build it, provide tools, training, and everything, and then it sits there on our development server, waiting for them to finish writing up those new pages they wanted to add. Weeks go by. Then months. And in a couple cases, years.

May 26, 2009

As I got on the plane to Helsinki, I wondered if I had been duped. I was flying blind--I didn't know where I was staying, whether anybody would be there when I arrived, or if I would end up sitting in a hotel room by myself for three days. But when the well-known founder of a billion dollar company invited me to his home to help my business, I figured I'd better get on that plane.

June 30, 2008

Once upon a time, for a period of about 8 years, picking a document format was safe and easy: save it as a Word document, a .doc file. The vast majority of businesses could open, edit, and print it with no difficulty whatsoever.

This mythical golden age of Word arose after Microsoft conquered the world of Word Perfect and Lotus 123 by bundling a “good-enough” version of each into a single package, Microsoft Office. After a few generations of painful Office upgrades where every new version had a slightly different file format, Microsoft finally matured into a format that it kept stable for three versions in a row—Office 97, Office 2000, and Office XP. And the overall interface has stayed stable much longer than that—there weren't any dramatic changes to the way you use Word between version 3 (when I started using it, back somewhere around 1987 on a Mac) and Office XP, in 2003.

With Office 2007, Microsoft completely changed the interface to its new “Ribbon” style. It also introduced a whole new file format. And now, only a year later, the new format is obsolete. Yet businesses are unknowingly starting to use this new docx format, not understanding that there are only a couple of minor advantages it has, while having several enormous drawbacks.

March 31, 2008

Computers and information systems are essential parts of every business today. Like accounting and legal, every business needs to invest in technology to compete. Technology is both a cost of doing business, and an opportunity to do more business. Most people I talk with recognize the necessity of having a computer, an email address, and a web site, but still look at the upfront cost more than other issues.

After spending some time working with dozens of businesses, I think it's time to take a step back and look at the big picture of technology in business. Let's take a reporter's view of the topic, and ask the basic questions: who, what, where, why, when, and how much?

January 25, 2008

It's been far too long since our last newsletter. There's a lot more stories to tell, but today I'm going to talk about some of the reasons I haven't written in so long: our customers.


Open Source Consulting: Helping people get the most out of Free Software

Web sites are the most visible thing we do, so I'd like to highlight a few of the ones our customers have launched in the past few months. Our newest core offering is an e-commerce system called ZenCart, and we've had two of them launch in the last month.

Pages

Customer Feedback

Again, good job on the site. Unfortunately, most people won't be able to tell just how cool it really is. There is definitely a better look and feel on the outside, but where it really shines is under the hood. In today's world of crappy software vendors who provide crappy products and next to zero service at premium prices, it's refreshing to work with someone who is honest, thorough, reasonable and willing to do what it takes to meet the customer's needs.

Eric Leung, Director of Information Systems
Outdoor Research

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