Accepting Awards

If you were going to accept an award at the Oscars, what would you say? Who would you thank? Who helped you get there?

Remember, it has to be a fairly brief acceptance speech.

Brand New Look

Some much needed maintenance led to a brand spankin’ new look. I hope you like it as much as I do. 

The old theme was giving me troubles (kept lumping text into one big paragraph). My enthusiasm has come and gone here, but I lately I have been rejuvinated by a jump in traffic, and RSS subscriptions. 

I may try to monetize with adsense soon. I hope it doesn’t ward anyone off. Please let me know if the ads are a deterent.

Managing Corporate Sites

Smashing Magazine posted some great points about managing corporate websites. This is a must read for anyone who cares about their web appearance.

1.  Content Management Systems either won’t solve all of your problems or they won’t be pliable enough for you.
2. A site is in constant flux, don’t just overhaul periodically.
3. People connect with people, not brands or marketing schemes.
4. You need a dedicated team, not an IT department.

One particularly bad site comes to mind. The landing page is ©1998, and the whole site looks stagnant to that year. The site title in Google result is their mailing address. Their lecture series links mentions events in the late 90’s and 2000. It’s time for an overhaul. About a decade overdue. 

A Lessor Known Saint.

My shoes look great! Theo did a great job on them. And then he said I could decide the price. Just 10 minutes before I had heard him quote another customer 18 dollars. I gave him everything I had in my wallet, (which was more than enough). What do you charge your customers? Google tells me that sometimes he doesn’t charge at all. Of course people still pay.  

Consideration in the 21st Century.

I received an email today with a tag at the end advising me to consider the environmental effects before printing.

 ”Please consider the impact on the environment before printing this email or its attachments”.

This is being done in places of business which run through paper without thought at all. Is printing email a real problem? Is it pervasive? If you find yourself printing your emails at all there is a larger problem.Leave your self-promoting two cents off your signature line. 

Going Green

What if your business card literally turned into a flower when planted. I bet people would talk about it. 

CHROME

Google certainly is on top of the industry, planning to release their own web browser only a week after Microsoft launced IE8.

It has always been interesting that while Mozilla’s Firefox browser commands only 19% market share compared to Microsoft’s 70%, there is no doubt that Firefox has been adopted by a particular subset of web-surfers. A uniquely current site like BoingBoing or Gizmodo for instance, may see up to half of its traffic originating from Firefox browsers. This speaks not only to early adopters, but also the uniquely web-savvy.

No doubt, Google’s Chrome browser may replace both at astonishing speeds.