SmashingRed™ Web & Marketing

Although there has been a drought of posts here, that hasn’t meant things haven’t been busy. Tracy, my wife of 11 years started a blog to support her hand-made baby blanket business, Snug-A-Bug Blankets. She has been making high end baby blankets from beautiful prints and the really soft minky fabric and selling them on both eBay and on Etsy.

After listing some of her blankets on both Craig’s List and Kijiji she is selling a number of blankets but to further her growth and build interest she has started a blog. Check out the blankets, she’ll even design a custom blanket for you—I think her prices are far too low but that may be the marketer in me talking.

Yes, this post is self serving but it illustrates how Web 2.0 technology is permeating the wider fabric of society into crafting groups and hobbyists. Soon my 11 month old daughter and my two pugs will have blogs.

Tags: Snug-A-Bug Blankets, minky, minkee, baby blankets, ebay, etsy, web 2.0, tracy sannes

The Title Is All Wrong

Catching up on posts this morning I came across this post from Steve Rucinski (whose posts I go out of my way to read) at BizInformer. Steve wrote, “…this company (www.sitekreator.com) is actually integrating the underlying basic principles and technical capabilities to help businesses improve customer relationships by developing a better online and more interactive presence.” What I take issue with is his post title, “Web 2.0 - Get Your Own Site with it.”

While I agree that businesses need to incorporate more relationship building and ways to use the web better than has been done in the past, one of the issues with many Web 2.0 offerings is that they too often make window-dressing superior to other aspects of web site design and development. It is even evident that Rucinski seems, in part, swayed by the visual aspect: “The finished product looks like a custom design by a pro shop…” Note: one key word—looks.

Turd 2.0

Well this is just Turd 2.0, as making good looking web sites is but one facet of design and development. If you are a small business looking to develop a web presence make sure you know who your customers and prospective customers are. I am sure that your business wouldn’t discriminate against people who are visually impaired would you? SiteKreator may have hit the mark on function and visual appeal by couldn’t even find the target on document structure and accessibility.

Why should these things matter? Well closing doors to prospective clients is not the best way of doing business—Web 2.0 or not.

Accessibility, Document Structure: Inclusion is Web 2.0

Making web sites accessible is important as many people who cannot shop or learn about companies in the real world are able to do so on the Internet using screen readers and other assistive technology. In addition there are a large number of people with low-bandwidth or dial-up connections who shut the images off in their browsers. By making your site accessible you are ensuring that your site is functional for these groups—maybe.

Document structure is another big issue. In Web 1.0 would-be designers would open up their visual web site editor and make pages that look good no matter how it had to be done and no matter how bad the underlying code was. Bandwidth aside, the problem with this approach is that if your page is viewed or read via anything other than a visual web browser the document doesn’t make any sense. Text and images are strewn across the page in no particular logical order and reading such chaos is short of impossible. Documents on the web should be logical and there is NO reason it can’t be done. HTML has always provided the means to create logical documents that have hierarchy and flow. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets, designers were made able to create visually stunning sites that has no impact on the underlying document.

Code Bloat: How to Kill a Web 2.0 Service

Looking at one of their sample sites, it has nearly 1700 lines of code for a single page document with less than 183 words and 14 images only four of which should be within the page itself. This page could be easily written using 10% of this code, just 170 lines. This would increase the speed with which this page loads by likely 60-70%. Wouldn’t you like your pages for your site to load fast?

When testing the same sample page using the Web Page Analyzer, the page takes approximately 30 seconds on a dial-up account and almost 10 seconds at T1. I have a 10Mb connection and the page took nearly 4 seconds to load. One thing to remember is that like microwaves, broadband just makes us less patient for slow loading pages.

The odd thing is here is that SiteKreator has to pay for all this wasted bandwidth so as they get more popular, this code bloat is going to slow service, increase strain on the servers and possibly lead to outages if NetClime (the developers of SiteKreator) can’t keep up with growing demand. Yes, they could just keep adding servers, but servers require management and the more servers the harder they become to manage. Creating an efficient as possible back end would slow their need for equipment and likely mean they would be better able to manage growth.

Kudos to NetClime

I don’t want to rake SiteKreator over the coals here, as they are not out promoting themselves as Web 2.0—or anything other than an easy way to build a great looking web sites with some important Web 2.0 features. For many businesses I would recommend this service well over the alternatives such as GooglePages. I certainly applaud any company who is able to make developing a website in 30 minutes that looks good for moving things forward, just know that what you are getting into is not yet the essence of what Web 2.0 is—inclusion.

Tags: Steve Rucinski, sitekreator.com, NetClime, Web 2.0, accessiblilty, inclusion, business, small business, GooglePages

Doing the Actions of Business is What Really Tests the Business Owner

Running a business that helps other business has been and continues to be an incredible learning experience. I read a lot about how to run and develop a business, about better ways to integrate marketing technologies, about management, customer service, and more. It is through actions and doing the business that really tests me as a business owner. Here is an example.

Failure to Communicate

One of the areas in which I have missed repeatedly is in customer service–specifically, client communication. On a number of small projects, I have let clients slip onto the communications back burner once they stopped calling regularly. I don’t know why–whether it was some sign that they weren’t in a hurry, or that they didn’t care so much–it certainly doesn’t matter.

Why should you as a client or any of your customers have to first, wonder what is going on and second, have to be the one to initiate a contact. They are paying me for a service and that service is my responsibility to deliver. I personally get pissed off when people don’t call me when they say they are going to (maybe my peeve is connected to my behaviour). The solution is so simple.

A Client Gave Me the Best Advice I Could Have Ever Asked For

He said, "When you need to keep yourself in line, tell the client or customer that if they don’t hear from you by [Wednesday] they should call you."

By creating an external motivator, such as a client having to go to the trouble of calling, I or you, don’t need to be as disciplined. We just need to have enough pride to make sure that we beat them to it. If the client ends up calling, that is embarrassing. Who wants to be embarrassed?

The ideal scenario is that a policy gets created that every client be contacted within a particular time-frame regardless of progress. It is better to call a client and tell them what hasn’t happened and when it will be done rather than not call. So this is my solution.

How About You?

How have you failed your customers? What have you done to fix these problems?

Tags: customer service, communications, advice, clients, mistakes

Called Out Via TrackBack

After posting yesterday about Baekdal’s post. I got a trackback from here that talked suggested that it was content light and mostly “a gushing piece of love for the actual story”.

The thing is—is that it was the first time that I found someone who mirrored many of my feelings towards Web 2.0, and since I hadn’t really thought much about how to express my gut feelings about Web 2.0, the post was rather light. Now that I have had a few minutes to think about it further, here is the beginnings of my unleashing on Web 2.0

Jump Onto the Cool Train (Drink the Kool-Aid)

I hate hype and more than that I hate vapid hype about technology that serves little more than the people who want to jump onto to the cool train.

It all irks me as does the term “alternative music” and the like. Where people in a field or an industry label something with an adjective and then they become one in the same.

Many people who talk about the diverging ideas and views between the web of the 90s and the web of today does fit in with the idea of the *next* epoch of the web. Dubbing it Web 2.0 is more of a disservice than a help. No one really knows what it means because it is an open concept and not singular attribute.

An Adjective Come Noun

What worries me most is that when the mainstream media starts educating people on the adjective-come-noun, design and adfirms will start rolling out polished-turd 2.0 and call it Web 2.0 and then the ideals that began Web 2.0 will have been forgotten and replaced with overpriced windowdressing.

Will Web 2.0 be the “alternative music” of the 00s? Let me know what you think?

Are you giving your blog readers partial feeds?

There is nothing wrong with delivering partial feeds. The main benefit is it ensures people will visit your site to read the complete posts and therefore be exposed to your advertising or messages. In addition, they may benefit from seeing other content that they wouldn’t see if they just read your feed.

The issue that prompted this post is that two blogs (this one and this one) I came across this month offer partial post feeds only.

I read blogs using Thunderbird. In the content window, all I see is a partial post that just ends. There is no ellipsis. There is no link to read on. It just ends. For a couple days, I just thought it was sloppy writing and then I realised that the posts were incomplete. So, in order for me to read the complete post I have to open up the headers bar in my reader and click on the permalink which opens my browser to the complete post. This takes me way out of flow. I generally read most blog posts fairly quickly and I don’t read all of them unless they look interesting or valuable.

It is bad enough that I have to go to the site at all, but why do you make me have to work for it? Why can you not place a link at the end of the post fragment to tell me to “read on”.

Three Solutions

Here are a three possible solutions for the need to deliver partial feeds:

1. Include a link at the end of the excerpt to the permalink.
2. Monetize the feeds by adding inline ads.
3. Include special offers, links to related posts and products at the end of your syndicated posts.

Great Content Will Deliver Site Visits

Send whole feeds and don’t worry about site visits. If your posts are compelling, I will happily visit your site. Examples of this are StevePavlina.com or ProBlogger.net. Both of these blogs run full-post feeds and I often visit their sites, not because they force me, but because the content is so good I want to read more.

Tell me what you think?

Tags: blog, DesignByFire, problogger.net, Slow Leadership, stevepavlina.com, Thunderbird

A Kindred Spirit

I came across a post today that reinforces my true feelings about the hype and flutter that surrounds Web 2.0. It goes on to argue as to why AJAX is often misrepresented and misused in application development.

The reason for my distaste for Web 2.0 is because it is a label that gets applied to things often based on aesthetics and the development based around frameworks and not function. It’s cool, Web 2.0. Script.aculo.us, Web 2.0, Drag and Drop modules, Web 2.0. Syndication, Web 2.0.

Serve a Real Purpose

Web development must serve the needs of the users and the aims of the company that commissions it. If it doesn’t do that then it is Waste 2.0. Don’t build Web 2.0, build something that works and if someone calls it Web 2.0 then I guess you are in the club.

Tags: AJAX, hype, Thomas Baekdal, Web 2.0

To sharpen the focus of this blog and my newer business blog, Destination: World Class, I want to make a clear definition and make sure that the six people who currently read this blog are getting what they are looking for. I have written about this recently here, here and here.

Here is what will be happening:

The SmashingRed Blog will now focus more heavily on web site development and marketing as it relates to small business. It won’t be all the boring personal drivel — I will soon find a home for this.

Destination: World Class will be focused on building business in all its aspects. This blog will be more about doing the things that grow a business both through success, failure, observation and inspiration

If the six of you want to let me know who you are drop a comment.

To all my fellow Canadians at home and abroad. Have a proper beer and have fun with some friends today on Canada’s Birthday.

For those of you from other places you can read the background on our National birthday from the government or the Wikipedia version.

All the best!

After a number of months and a lot of client work I have decided to put the SmashingRed Blog back into action.

I will be revising the categories segregating two category sections on the SmashingRed site that will make it easier for people to find articles and news on the site.

Please give me a hand in telling people about the return and let me know who is out there.

All the best.

I want to announce the first post of my new blog. As it is yet to be named, I am seeking entries for a name for this new blog. There are prizes being offered for submissions. See the post for the rules and to enter.