That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that,...you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.
It’s tough speaking truth to power, and much easier to just stay quiet. I find that sometime when someone is branded a troublemaker, it may be they are just curious. It’s a long read, but worth it.
]]>The largest trend to hit web applications over the last few years is mobile. I think we are at the tipping point where most companies will have needed to think about an approach to mobile. A few years ago it was almost laughable to think anyone would make a purchase over a mobile device. Today, some 60% and rising, are using smartphones to make those purchases. If a company is not moving on mobile, then they are being left behind.
I think we’ll see more and more interactions happening via mobile devices. I think the depths of those interactions are dependent on how well a company optimizes and implements the mobile experience and mobile strategy. The desktop/laptop would only be used when you can’t get it done on the phone or tablet. If the site or app is being dumbed down for mobile devices, then should it that complicated in the first place?
In a perfect company, there would be no such thing as “not getting it done on the phone or tablet”, because the question becomes “why can’t I”, and immediately the focus moves away from the user and on the product, which is not where any site or app should be.
]]>2. They take care of the grunt work. I think a great program makes me not have to think. Other than downloading, there is never any configuration, never any hassles. Also, I constantly amazed that even through the movie is streaming, it never feels like it.
3. I’m awesome. Because of item one and two, as a user, I feel great. For me it just works, in that way, Netflix becomes transparent, and achieves my goal, which is to watch the past seasons of Breaking Bad
I think my runner up would probably be Dropbox for almost exactly the same reasons.
]]>Put the javascript at the bottom to the page. A browser loads only a couple of things at a time, and you don’t really need javascript mucking up the works. There are very few reasons why you’ll nee javacript to run before of while the page is loading.
Use image sprites. An image sprite traditionally is an image file for, say, a button with states for when you hover over the button and when you click on a button. So instead of having three files for one button, you’d have one. The file size is going to be a little larger, but weighing the file size verses server request makes it worth it. Expecially if you have a bunch of buttons.
Speaking of image sprites, do what you can in CSS. CSS has come quite a ways, so there is a real possibility that the button or the effect might be done in CSS. CSS will almost always be less expressive than images.
]]>You have to drive folks to innovate. The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work. In other words, they say to themselves, “I know how much I’m going to get if I do this much, and then my life is in balance.” I just don’t think you get a lot of innovation under those circumstances. You want people to figure out how to do things better, to figure out a smarter way. When that’s a constant process, you start seeing things innovate. It’s not because someone comes up with some brand-new idea where you say, “Oh, no one’s ever thought about this before.”
Check out the whole article on Geoffrey Canada.
]]>That got me to thinking: Should more sites be designed around a tl;dr statement?
The term tl;dr means “Too long; don’t read”, you’ll find it in use in some popular forums such as Hacker News and Reddit and is usually followed by a short synopsis of a more lengthy comment that adds color and nuisance, but really the tl;dr says it all.
When thinking about your site, could it be summed up in a short thesis sentence? Will digging deeper only reinforce the thesis? If so why not help your visitors?
My tl;dr statement can be found on the left had side of every page. I’ve played around with different phasing, considering that it was probably going to show up in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) snippet. It’s my name, what I do, and a quote from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
I don’t really encourage a dialogue on my site through social media or comments because at this point it really won’t support my thesis, I mainly get three types of visitors:
1. Someone through search.
2. A recruiter or potential employer
3. My mom
Let’s look at them one by one
Visitors through search: They come, and just like that, they are gone. My tl;dr statement is short enough so they get 2 pieces of information. Who I am and what I do. Hopefully it lends a bit of credibility to whatever they skim through
Recruiter/Potential employer: It’s a little unfair to lump these in together, because they really are two different audiences. However since a recruiter is really only looking for a resume, they should hopefully be able to find it pretty quickly. A potential employer on the other hand may be looking for something to help fill in some blanks inherent in a resume in woefully thin hiring processes. Hopefully by listing my projects and my writing, it fills in some of the gaps.
My mom: She’s been coming since I launched my geocites page. Love you mom.
In other words, most spend very little time on the site, only a potential employer and my mom has probably gotten this far. That’s because anyone can code, but a good personality and cultural fit is much harder to hire for.
In conclusion, think about not only how you want visitors to interact with your site and how they actually do interact with your site, also think about the one or two things that you’d like that person to leave with and make that your tl;dr statement
]]>9. Check what is the norm for you industry. Generally a well optimized web page falls in what is considered normal for like pages. For example, a shopping page might only have 250 words of copy, this is considered ‘natural’. Google does try to consider that when determining Search Engine results, so if you are doing something different, while you may not penalized, it may not help.
8. #1, #2 and #3 are the only positions that matter in a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Google is increasingly adding value to searches by adding maps, images and videos in SERPs, a great thing for the user, but it does take a little more effort for the site that wants to get above the fold. Position 20 might as well be position 10,000.
7. Search results is a games of inches. With millions of results per query, the distance between position 3 and position 2 and position 1 is the width of a hair. It’s about which page is ‘least imperfect’. Put another way SERPs is a game of inches.
6. Focus on the long-tail. When people search they generally try to be specific as possible generally using 3-4 words. If those terms don’t produce the desired results, then the user start searching more broadly
5. Use the tilde ‘~’ when doing keyword research. The tilde is an undocumented way when doing a google search to also return up a result that not only produce your results but also other terms that users have used when searching for the same thing, this is great for long-tail keyword research. An example search term might be “~fashion”, which also brings up ‘style’, ‘accessories’, ‘clothing’ and a slew of fashion related terms
4. Structure you site into silos. If structure is properly done, you can maximize pagerank for internal links. So, that means fewer links per page, linking to landing pages, and being a lot more thoughtful on how you link to other areas of the site and whether you should.
3. Use Google endorsed schema’s. Sitemaps XML files are something we already know about, but a new thing google has endorsed is schemas. This s a spec they intend to probably support in 2012, but it’s a headache to implement, so weight the cost benefit of implementation
2. Result may vary, Factors in SERP can be influence by location and the searches that can before it. For example, if you initially search pushups you’d probably get a lot of results about exercise, but if the search before that one was on bras, you’d get a different set of results. In regards to location, they are starting to be more and more important in result rankings. Think about those things when writing for your sites.
1. Content is still king. We all know this, but the definition is expanding to video (with transcribing), PDFs and images, (which google is starting to learn to read), and of course social media
]]>Additionally, they say that the best time to be on social networks is when you are alone but the gulf of being in two places at once (reality and virtual) will continue to close, on one end technology will be get better and phones (or whatever they will be called) as a distribution and consumption platform will have evolved in to something less intrusive and natural. On the other hand talking with someone face-to-face and doing whatever else will become accepted and even expected by the mainstream.
Will we all still be on Facebook? Google+? Something else? Maybe, whatever is invisible, I don’t want the platform to be awesome, I want to be awesome. People tend to gravitate to what is easy, cheap and gives it to them how they want it, where they want it.
]]>It’s simple, a website with our set -up running a popular content management system on a public facing website might be compromised. It could happen for a variety reasons both in and out of our control. The important thing then is getting the site back to a point where it is safe as soon as possible while being 99% sure that whatever compromised the site in the first place has been removed.
Enter SVN and versioning
Versioning is not the first think I think of as being essential to a content site, benefits aside, there are somethings that can only add more work that do not equal the benefits. Simply Good Media is by any definition is a small shop with just a couple of developers, there are very few conflicts and if there are, a quick IM, clears everything up and one of us backs off for a while.
Also, in tech circles, versioning is for software teams, not a blog. The Budget Fashionista is not just a blog or a website and more than a few people make a living off the site and many more thousands enjoy it on a daily basis. Additionally years and years of goodwill that could be wiped out in the blink of an eye if our site is distribute malware installed by a hacker. It is our responsibility to keep things up and running.
The new workflow
So with that in mind, I set out for TBF to fail. The first thing I looked for was a hosted versioning system. After trying a couple out on personal projects, I settled on beanstalk. No only did I like the design(sorry, the graphic designer in me is alive and kicking) It was defacto endorsed by 37signals and integration with basecamp, which we use.
I also set up a staging server, and refrained from making any changes to the files on the website. The new workflow consisted of the repository where I would make local changes, upload the file to staging to make sure it’s right and them commit to Beanstalk.
With Beanstalk I update the site with a push of a button, or can roll it back to a safe copy if necessary. I also did some testing to make sure when we fail we can get back up. So something that use to take hours or days could now can be done from anywhere from any computer in minutes. We’ve cut down on mistakes making it to the live site and can push several changes at once without the fear of a conflict.
Conclusion
All in all it’s been a good exercise and turning something that has brought the site to a grinding halt and destroying our goodwill as a site to an opportunity to normalize the site and to make it that much more stable by using versioning and installing a few other safe guards to help mitigate the effects of the inevitable.