Noah Says He’s Ready
Dude, let’s get this thing in the water!!!
Posted in Information Overload
Tagged Noah
2 CommentsProject News – Asian Learning Center of Indiana
Last week, the Asian Learning Center of Indiana site went live. Dennis Good of D.Good Design Co did the interface design and front-end coding and I built a custom CMS. Let us know what you think.
Posted in Business Projects
Tagged CMS, Project News, Web Applications
1 CommentWhat I’ve Been Reading
I started out the year hoping/wanting to read 3 books a month. I haven’t achieved that goal, but I am making progress. So far this year, I’ve read:
- The Referral Engine by John Jantsch
- The Myth of Multitasking by Dave Crenshaw
- Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
- Poke the Box by Seth Godin
They were all good reads.
The Referral Engine should be read by anyone wanting to market their business.
The Myth of Multitasking and Poke the Box don’t break new ground, but I benefited from reading them both. Just because things are commen sense doesn’t mean we don’t need to be reminded on a regular basis. I tend to take the path of least resistance and that isn’t always the best path to take.
Unbroken is an amazing book. The hardship and humiliation that American POW’s endured in Japanese prison camps was disgusting. The will to surive by Louie Zamperini (the main character) and those around him is truly inspiring. People today (myself included) think we have it tough. If we don’t have our cable tv and a cell phone that works 100% of time, we think the world is ending. If we can’t make our mortgage payments, we blame somebody else. If our kids are doing poorly in school, it is the system’s fault.
We take for granted the things we have and the freedom we were given by those who came before us. Reading stories like Unbroken provides a reminder of how thankful we should be for what we have.
I read all these on the Kindle. The keyboard and the interface are a bit clunky, but the reading experience is perfect.
What Am I Reading Now?
- UnMarketing
- Crush It!
- CSS3 For Web Designers
- The Elements of Content Strategy
I’m more than half way through all of them. Be looking for an update in a week or so.
Posted in Information Overload
What Your Tax Dollars Don’t Go Towards
I’m currently working on a couple of county related web sites. Through my research, I’ve found that the affluence of the county residents has no correlation to the quality of the county web site(s). The same goes for the city sites within those “rich” counties.
Personally, I’ve never visited any county or city web site until I took on these projects. If I’m the norm, then the local governments shouldn’t be devoting a big budget to their sites. That being said though, more than a few should be putting more dollars towards design, content and promotion. It is a chicken and egg dilemma though. Why spend the money if no one is using the site? Who wants to visit a site if it is hard to use and not kind on the eyes?
Surprisingly, about 1/2 of the sites I visited are using social media and/or news (rss) feeds of some sort.
Posted in Information Overload
Let’s cut this FREE crap
I’m tired, I mean really tired of FREE stuff. To all you people out there giving away free stuff on the Internet, please stop. You’re ruining it for everyone else. We are already a society of take, take and than just take some more. Do we really want to convince everyone that everything else is free?
I’m a strong believer in you get what you pay for. If somebody gives something away, how valuable can it be? Okay, yeah, I gave you my email and name (John Doe and email@johndoe.com), so I guess I did pay for it. I do undestand the loss-leader concept, but how many times does that really work? I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get that beautifully crafted 5 email follow-up sequence you created.
If you start out giving something away, you better not plan on ever charging for it later. Well, you can, but you’re going to piss off your exisitng customers who you’ve conditioned into thinking they are entitled to your service for nothing. If you actually make people pay to use your web service, you’re sending a message that says you believe in what you created, that you will stand behind it and answer emails, fix problems and continually strive to make the service better.
How many of you use Gmail? Did you pay for it? Who do you call if you just lost the last 6 months of email? I think Eric has some free time before he jumps ship to Apple, try him. Anybody can purchase a domain and web hosting at GoDaddy and get WordPress installed with one click. Who are you going to call when you can’t get that free theme installed or some hacker takes your site down? Unless you understand PHP and MySQL, you’re SOL. Did you pay for WordPress? Nope. Did you pay for that theme? Nope. If you didn’t pay for it, should you really have any expectation that your problem will be a top priority to anyone?
So please, start charging for hard work. Show people you value your time and then show them you appreciate their money by giving them a valuble service with outstanding support. You’re making those of us who have the nerve to ask for money in exchange for our time and expertise look like complete asses….
Posted in Information Overload
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