What are the results you are trying to achieve? How can your web site help you get those results? These are a couple of questions we're starting to ask all our clients, and what we're finding often reveals some very easy things we can do to drive more results, quickly and easily.
There's a few problems with setting up shop on the web. All of your competitors are right next door. You're in the worst neighborhood, with crooks inventing new tools to break in every day. That parking lot you just built now has to accommodate scooters and semi trucks.
This doesn't mean you can't be your usual, happy-go-lucky self! In fact, it's absolutely vital that you approach any project with a healthy 'yes we can' attitude.
Results. Return On Investment. Value. How do you measure these things in a website? There's one thing you can easily measure -- cost. Or at least the amount you actually spend to build and maintain a site. The others are far more troublesome to measure.
August 2013
What are the guiding principles you use to make decisions? Over the past few months, as the Freelock team has grown, I've been spending more time on strategy, while delegating more and more of the day-to-day work to my team. To get us all working more effectively together, I needed to answer that question.
The more I dig into the decision-making process, the more I spend time on planning, the more I have found four key principles emerging that underly most of our business decisions.
Not 4 hours after posting my most recent blog stressing the importance of setting up systems with disaster recovery in mind, fate stepped up and thwacked me. "Oh yeah, think you're so resilient?
If there's one thing that's constant in the web world, it's change.
If you've used a web ontology before, or any other large-scale data repository, you're likely familiar with one of the chief concerns facing anyone in such a position: how do you get your data into the system? Moreover, how do you get large amounts of data into the system with (relative) ease? And if you've used a content management system before, you've likely faced a similar, albeit inverted problem: how do you get your data out?
If you can accomplish these preliminary items without a good deal of effort, you're finally left with the task of transforming the data from one, and allowing it to be recognizable by the other.
If, instead, you haven't used either of these, you're likely wondering why on Earth you would want to.
July 2013
If you learned how to make decisions before the fall of the Berlin Wall, you might get overwhelmed by decision making today. We used to live in a fairly black-and-white world -- East versus West, Pepsi or Coke, Miller or Bud, Democrat or Republican, ABC, NBC, or CBS.
How do you decide? If you're like a great many people in my generation, one tactic might be to create a list of pros and cons for each of the alternatives, and then compare these lists side-by-side. Ok, great! Let's use that to select a content management system. Let's see, what are our alternatives?
At Freelock we're in the midst of building dashboards for ourselves and for customers, to really dial in our process and let us know where to focus our improvements.
A couple weeks ago NPR's Planet Money and This American Life had some really great episodes about the broken patent system. These are great stories for people who don't understand why patents are a problem, but they overlooked a couple of crucial points. First, go check them out.
Before doing any changes to your web site, the first thing to figure out are your goals. As a web development shop, we focus on building web sites that create measurable value for our customers, aligned with their goals.
Some common goals:
