8/27/11 The Customer As Mom

Remember the old plaque hanging on some families' wall, or the little magnets on the refrigerator, with the message, "Rules of the House: #1: Mom's always right. #2 If Mom's wrong, see Rule #1." Well, that, of course, was because Mom was (and still is) The Boss. It's a tried-and-true principle, you don't argue with The Boss. Just like with your sergeant, when she says, "Jump!" you ask how high on the way up.

That same fine principle applies to The Customer. The Customer, regardless of gender, age or demeanor, is Mom. The Boss. Your sergeant. We do our very best to apply that principle with our customers, and the result is always very, very good.

Not everyone has learned this lesson, however. Perhaps it's a younger-generation thing, perhaps it's an inexperience thing, but it appears that some upcoming shop managers or businesspeople still don't quite get this bedrock business principle. Take for example a recent cellphone experience of DesignByMoonlight staff. Longtime customers, our staffer upgraded to a new phone, and discovered immediately that there was an ad server on the phone, which our staffer really did not expect or want as part of the service he was paying for. So our staffer went back to the store and tried—a total of six times, all unsuccessful—to get the ad server app removed.

At that point, our staffer, calling to mind the above principle, said, "Okay, time for the cellphone vendor to own this—we just need them to fix this and deliver us the solution." And hey, here was an opportunity to provide a little customer-service mentoring to the phone provider staff! Well, unfortunately, as with many unrequested mentoring sessions, the advice wasn't exactly greeted with enthusiasm. The shop manager was never ever rude to us, nor did he ever refuse to try to help us, but our staffer had a hard time getting across the idea that the shop needed to own the problem completely. He kept hearing things like, "Well, there's nothing I can do about this," or "You'll have to come in again for us to be able to work on this". That's reasonable the first, second or third visit, perhaps, but by six it's time for the supplier to say, "You've been inconvenienced enough on this—we'll fix the problem and get you the solution by such and such a day." It's time for the Customer to become Mom again, to be that Customer who is always right, and, for the supplier's own sake, to get good, strong customer service.

Instead, in this case, when our staffer finally came in to the store one last time and insisted that the shop get the problem solved for good and all, the spirit of the manager was one of impatience and irritation, an abrupt tone, complaints about what they could and could not do, and other interaction styles that were the farthest thing from good customer service. After repeated protestations of what the manager couldn't do, our staffer finally shrugged his shoulders, raised his palms in the universal human gesture that means "Not My Problem," and said, "I sympathize! But I'm the customer! Don't tell me what you can't do—fix my problem!"

And sure enough, after a little time on the phone with tech support, the problem was solved.

Unfortunately, this was still a lose-lose for the shop and for our staffer. In fact, it was a lose-lose for the shop all by itself. First, there was all that time the shop spent trying to solve the problem. But second, with the approach the manager took, the shop got no customer-service credit for all that work. In fact, their image is tarnished, not polished, even though the problem is fixed. Consider how much better things would have been if that manager had treated this customer like the manager's own boss coming in with a problem, or, even better (at least in an ideal world,) like Mom had come in with a silly ad that popped up every day. "Don't worry, Mom—just leave me your phone and I'll get it fixed before the day's out." Can you imagine what good things our staffer would have had to say about that shop if he'd received that kind of customer service?

So use your imagination, business friends, and just pull out your best memory of good old Mom, and picture her coming in the door when your next customer drops by. Then keep her picture firmly in your mind's eye until you've owned your customer's need or problem and met it like it belonged to your own mother. It's one of the best investments in your business you can ever make—and it costs only a little time.


4/25/11 Is the Cliff Getting Closer?

Social Media and "cloud computing" have created an amazing environment that has really taken the nation and the world by storm, excuse the pun. You have to respect the power these online tools and applications have demonstrated to bring people together. As you probably recall, social media were a major enabler of some of the recent popular revolutions in other countries. But power is neutral: it's up to us to use it for good. The greater the power, the greater the temptation to subvert that power for purposes that are not good. I don't want to sound the alarm, but rather just a strong note of caution. My main concern with the companies behind cloud computing, social media, and free services in general is that a) they're extremely powerful, and b) they provide free services.

Now concern over power we might understand, but how in the world could free services pose a concern, you may ask? There are two reasons I can think of.

First, since the services are free, these companies set the terms of their relationship with you completely. You have little to no say in how they use the information they store for you, whether it's stored in blogs, social media pages, document storage and display pages, or other applications. Public opinion keeps them from doing really harmful things, and their terms and conditions reflect that, but this just means that you as an individual (or a business) are at the mercy of public opinion. For example, we read that privacy is becoming less and less important in the public's opinion, and that means that the reins on these huge companies' use of our information are becoming looser and looser. (Do you own a smartphone? Do you want your every location sent to advertisers? Do you get our point?)

Second, free services pose a concern because while the free-service providers hold all the cards in their business relationship with you, they're also in another "card game." That one is with their advertisers—and it's the advertisers who hold all the cards in that business relationship. So when push comes to shove, which business partner will they pay the greatest attention to, you or their advertisers?

But what push? What shove? you ask. Can't we all just get along? Unfortunately, there's an inherent conflict of interest between keeping your personal information private and keeping their advertisers' return-on-investment high. So again, the partner with the clout (and that's not you) will tend to win out. And indeed, again and again we read that our 'free' service providers are making our personal information available to advertisers. Certainly, if everyone behaved themselves, things would be fine, but folks aren't behaving themselves very well (see The Aptitude Test).

So what to do about this? Do we recommend that you abandon social media? Not as a knee-jerk reaction, please. But definitely use your good business sense, and your common sense as well. Don't post that you're going on vacation to the Bahamas for a week from June 7-14 for all the world to see. Don't share personal information anywhere, regardless of any "privacy settings", that should be kept out of the public eye. Keep your "public" persona online, and figure that strangers are hearing and seeing everything you post. Act as though everything you put online, regardless of what application you use, will be broadcast to the world at large—because there's a definite (if small) chance that it will be. As the phrase goes, have no expectation of privacy.

For some applications, there are alternatives to free online apps in which the business relationship is not one-sided. You should use these wherever possible. If you browse the internet, then you have an Internet Service Provider (ISP). You pay them a certain amount of money each month, so they have a financial incentive to be very careful with your information—an incentive that the free-service providers don't have in any way. So use your ISP and a website on a hired host rather than those free applications. If you want to put a document on the web for others to view or collaborate on, put it up on your website rather than on a free service. Use your website's email accounts rather than free webmail services. There are even internet-accessible calendar programs that your ISP can host, instead of putting your business or personal schedule in the hands of a company with powerful advertisers they need to satisfy. It's not a guarantee that everything will be perfectly secure, of course, but at least you've got some cards in your hands with these arrangements.

So again, don't be frightened, just alert. Trust the common sense that has gotten you where you are in the world. Business relationships where one party holds all the cards never seem to work out well for the other party in the long run. So if you have reason to enter into a relationship like that, watch that other party like a hawk. That's true even if everyone else seems to trust that other party with no reservations, as is now the case with cloud computing applications like we've been discussing. Your parents no doubt used the time-honored phrase with you, "If all the kids were going to run off a cliff, would you do it too?" So don't stop making good choices and doing wise things—just keep your eyes peeled for the cliff.


4/19/11 A Plea for Quiet Browsing

Just a note to all the large or small companies whose websites start playing audio as soon as a page is loaded: you're losing money and customer goodwill. Never, never, never try to take control away from your website visitor!

If I hear audio playing on some page without my permission, it's now my settled personal browsing habit to immediately locate that tab and dismiss it, completely unread. If it's a big, well-known company and they're playing an advertisement of all things, I make a mental note of it and will begin to dismiss the tab as soon as their icon or name shows up. Just think of all that web advertising money, wasted!

Many people listen to music from a local or web source while they browse. Others just like it quiet. Yet others—virtually everyone else—want to remain completely in charge of their browsing experience. If we wanted to have unwelcome audio, we'd turn on the television, for jumpin' up and down Martha's sake. And please don't tell us just to turn our speaker volume down. Now you've impacted our browsing experience for all the sites we visit, not just yours.

You see, the thing that companies need to remember is that you can't take control away from your visitor. Not "you shouldn't": you physically can't. You're unable to do so. We the browsing public have more than enough tools at our disposal to eliminate your unpleasant intrusion within seconds. That's the joy of the internet: the visitor is king. Web designers and website owners ignore that reality at their commercial peril.

So if you find yourself in the process of defining, designing or running a website, be nice to us visitors out here, would you, and don't ever play audio without your visitors' permission.

'Nuff said.


4/4/11 "What? I didn't even know it was down!"

In our world of ubiquitous computing, hardware and software failures should never go undetected—but they do. Websites should never go down without any signal or notification to their owners—but again, they do. An offline website is more than just an inconvenience to those who try to find your company: at minimum it conveys some measure of unprofessionalism, and at worst it raises concerns that you're no longer in business. It certainly can immediately send your potential client to the next website on the search engine page. We have had several instances of clients' websites going down without their owners knowing about it, and we've put in place a new service to do something about it. Here are just a couple of stories:

DesignByMoonlight discovered one of our clients' websites to be offline, and contacted the hosting service at the owner's request, since he was out of town at the time. The hosting service (a highly-regarded company, and rightly so) had noticed a problem on a few sites, but was unaware of how widespread the problem was. In particular, they weren't aware that our client's site was one of the affected websites. They quickly worked on the problem, and our client lost only a few hours of uptime.

In a second case, it was uncertain how long our client's website had been down, for reasons that will become clear. When we discovered the offline status of our client's site, we contacted that hosting service, and heard the remarkable assertion that they could bring up our client's site with no trouble! After further investigation, it was determined that the hosting service indeed could bring up the client's site inside their company network with no problem, but that a main internet connection from their service had gone down. The result was that visitors from outside the hosting service found the site to be down, but inside the service, there was no apparent problem. In other words, the hosting service could never have found this problem from within their own in-house network. Detection would require a request for the website from outside!

Now, to what we've done about the problem. DesignByMoonlight has put in place a new service to address just these sorts of events. Our Diagnostic Site Checking looks at your home page status on a regular basis, to detect whether it is offline. The service performs the same kind of visit your website receives whenever someone follows a link from a search engine or an email you send out. And if our test indicates that your site is down, we tell you about it right away. With Diagnostic Site Checking, you can have the confidence that your website investment is at work for you. The service is available for a very small fee per test, and can be set up to check your site as often as every business day. Visit our Contact Us page to sign up, or call or email us for more information.


1/10/11 Are Low Search Rankings Fatal? I

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the hot web business topic for a few years now, and for good reason. A well-optimized site can provide excellent business returns and help company profitability tremendously. That's why DesignByMoonlight provides extensive search-engine optimization as a standard service with all our new-design projects. But what if, in spite of all the SEO you can obtain, you're still on page five of Google™'s results? Are you doomed to business failure?

This raises several issues. Conflicts between what search engines like and what humans like in a website, the number and type of your direct competitors in your geographic area, even the default number of listings per search engine results page all impact how your business website will contribute to company profitability. But the truth of the matter is, your business success is primarily in your hands, and no one else's (at least on this earth!)

One of the first points we make when discussing search engine optimization with potential clients is, "The main promoter of your business website is you." That implies the obvious, certainly: make sure you have a good domain name, that your website domain name address is on all—and we do mean all—your printed or displayed materials, and mention your website in every business encounter, regardless of the type. As obvious as these might seem, we're constantly amazed at the number of missed promotional opportunities—company vehicles that lack the company website address, for instance—so let's go over these points in a little more detail. Then we'll go on to the bigger issues of website success in our next article.

Make sure you have a good domain name. You may think that the good ones are all taken already; to some extent that's true. But usually all it takes is a little creativity and thought to come up with a domain that will be memorable, will associate directly with your company name, and won't be too long. A recent client could not find her "perfect" domain name, the one matching her company name, so she added the letters "oforegon" to the end, and got that domain. Since her service was limited to Oregon, the extra terms fit naturally and could also prescreen her potential clients geographically to a significant degree. So think creatively!

Put your website address—your domain name—on absolutely every document you issue. After you have it on your letterhead, in your email signature, and on your business card, put it on your invoices, your receipts, your proposals and quotations, your company vehicles, your voicemail answering message, your company shirts, hats and overalls, and everything else that someone will encounter when they come in contact with your business. And of course, don't forget social networking, a major subject in its own right.

Then, let the words, "Have you visited our website?" come from your mouth immediately after you introduce yourself! At least by the end of every conversation with your clients and prospects, they should have received a reminder from you to drop by your company site. Your business website sells your company for you 24/7, whether it's an e-commerce site or an informational site. Make sure that the significant fraction of your clients who are aural learners get the recommendation to visit your website. They'll remember and drop by.

These basic issues will get us started on the topic. We'll discuss in the next article some of the broader issues, such as how to maximize your website's usefulness if your market is oversaturated with competing businesses. But in any case, make sure you avoid the attitude that "if we're not on page 1 of Google™, we can't be successful." Search engines don't run your business, you do—and since you're the expert in your business, that's a thing to be grateful for.


1/10/11 Are Low Search Rankings Fatal? II

In the last article we discussed some of the basics of how to respond to low search engine rankings. If in spite of all the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) possible, you're still far away from page 1 of Google™ your website can still provide more than satisfactory performance for your company.

One of the main situations in which good companies can struggle to come up on page 1 of search engine listings is when the local market, from a search webpage point of view, is oversaturated with competing companies. There just aren't enough clicks to go around to support more than a few competitors when a page-one ranking is required to make search listings useful to a company. Put another way, there can be a lot more market in an area than there are useful search engine listings. How do you use your website to tap into the market and avoid the chokehold search engine listings seem to have on your website's visibility?

Beyond our last article's basics, here are some more advanced steps to take to address the situation.

Have a strong, professsional website to make the most of every visit you do get. A recent client contacted DesignByMoonlight about a sudden falloff in business response from their website. She was pretty sure that something in her online advertising campaign was broken, and that either her ads weren't being displayed, or something was keeping people from clicking through to her website. We sat down and analyzed the performance of her ads in detail, and it became clear that neither her ad displays nor her number of website visits had changed over the timeframe in which her responses had dropped. We delved a little deeper, and she indicated that her main competitor in town, who also used the same advertising service, had recently redesigned its company website right about the time her business response had dropped. The correlation of these two things strongly implied that shoppers for her service were visiting both sites, and choosing her competitor's company whose website conveyed a stronger professionalism. Website professionalism immediately transfers to company professionalism in your visitors' minds, so make sure your website is the best it can be.

If you know of weak areas in your company's presentation, promote your website in ways that strengthen those areas. The best example in this area is, unfortunately, our own company. We had a conversation with a state official who had some knowledge of our company, and at the beginning of our telephone conversation, I kid you not, he said something like, "Let's see—your company name is...Fly-By-Night?..." In order to counter any mental association of transience with our business name, we selected a company marketing option that would help establish a visible and constant presence over time in the communities we serve. That option was a pretty eye-popping vehicle wrap. Over time, seeing our company vehicle on the street would clearly let folks know that we're both local and in business for the long term. So promote your business with a view to building a strong trust in all the areas potential clients need to see.

Build people-focused websites. There are a number of measures that search engines apply that, if followed, tend to turn off most human visitors! The main measure of this kind is the number of words on the page. Search engines tend to favor long, rambling, text-filled websites over websites that are brief and to the point. The problem is, when a very human visitor with a specific need for information encounters that same website, he or she spends the typical ten seconds on the site, can't find what he or she wants in the great sea of verbiage, and goes elsewhere. So if your home page ranking is many pages deep, why alienate your potential customers with wordiness? Instead, give them bullet points that provide answers to the main questions, and let them choose to pursue their questions further on the remaining pages of your site. You will avoid irritating the people you want to serve that way.

Well, we're not through yet. Let's post this much, and then we'll wrap up with one final article.


1/10/11 Are Low Search Rankings Fatal? III

In this third of three blog postings, we're outlining some suggestions of how to respond if you've done all the search engine optimization you can, and your natural search ranking is still buried pages deep in the stack. If you haven't read the other two brief articles yet, you should take a look at those for background and momentum.

All these ideas are based on the principle that you are the one person who cares about your business. This idea bears a little development. Why, after all, would a search engine provide you with absolutely free sales leads? They're a company just like you, at least in the respect that their #1 priority is profit. So you may rest assured that they care not one whit about your success or failure, except as it leads to further profit for them. So why build a complete dependence on them to promote your company's success, correspondingly, except as it leads to further profit for you? In the converse, if your website isn't performing up to their standards—perhaps because it's people-focused instead of search-engine-focused (see the previous article)—then do what the search engines themselves do: put other means of promotion of your company interests ahead of their search engine results! If you're on page five of Google™'s results, put Google™ on page five of your list of marketing tools! They won't mind, any more than you take offense at a search engine company's decision about where to list you. Again, you are in charge of your company, and you can make it successful by adapting to the reality of your business conditions.

Here are some final suggestions about how to escape the Search Engine Stranglehold (SES?):

Balance Push and Pull marketing. Search engine results are pull marketing—you dangle your bait in the stream and wait for a pull on the line. Sometimes the search engines, however, prevent your bait from even making it to the honorable customer. So as we described above, don't give up on the search engines, just go around them while you're waiting for their results. Take steps that make sure your bait gets in front of your prospective client. This is a "push" marketing approach—or maybe, more politely, a "float it gently in front of them" approach. Here are some specific ideas:

Don't expect a search engine to do your sales work for you—do it yourself! Make cold calls and cold visits! Here the "float" corrective is crucial, in our experience. We normally make cold visits to businesses that take only thirty seconds, convey a little humor as thanks for their tolerance of our unscheduled interruption, and leave only a business card. The idea is to "float" our name and service gently into their field of view, and then leave such a small ripple on their day that they think well of us when they next view our card on their desks.

Follow up! There's a sweet spot to strike here. If you nag the businesses you have contacted, their initial favorable opinion of you (from your very pleasant sales call) will drop with every email or phone call. If you don't contact them at all, the normal business maelstrom will make them forget about you. But if you gently check in every now and then, they will appreciate your communication as a way to help them reach a decision they know they need to make. This is a wonderfully human process that search engines will never be able to duplicate, and, again, for which you don't need any kind of page ranking at all. Just have your website fully-updated, ready and standing by for their visit after your contact.

Finally, for all this, we highly recommend SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives. Visit their website from our About Us page, or contact us and we'll tell you all about our excellent experience with them.

It's your business! You'll find a way to have profitable fun with it, as long as you remember that most important fact.


12/20/10: Fear vs. Freedom II

I just experienced a most remarkable illustration of some of the points I made in my 10/14/2010 post. As I was walking out of a business-products retailer today, I saw a gentleman whom I knew to be a senior high-tech executive in town. From my past life as an employee with his company (where I sat far, far lower in the ranks) I knew and liked him more than well enough to speak to him, and apparently he to me, and so we exchanged cordial Christmas greetings today. He saw me with my purchase in hand, and then things got interesting.

You see, the retailer where I had just made a purchase specializes in aftermarket products which take significant business away from his company. My executive friend (not to be presumptuous about how well I know him) is most honorably frank, and after our Christmas pleasantries, he asked, "What were you doing in there?" The "in there" rang with distinct disapproval, and it was clear that the disapproval applied specifically to the retailer.

I proudly held up the product from his company that I had just purchased inside and said, "Buying OEM—original equipment made by your company—instead of the retailer's cheaper aftermarket products. The aftermarket products just weren't cutting it."

"They don't work very well, do they?"

"No, they don't work well at all. I tried them for awhile since they're less expensive, and I've been running a small business in a bad economy. But they just weren't worth the trouble they created."

"Well, thanks very much for your support," my friend said, with clear sincerity. Here, at bottom, was a company executive expressing appreciation to another company executive for a favorable business decision. Neither the gargantuan disproportion in the sizes of the two companies, the wide difference in the level of success of the two people speaking, nor the tiny size of the business transaction could change the character of this exchange. And my friend's character and business-mindedness were too good to miss this fact, or to permit even my little company's support to go unthanked.

So there is a new relationship of freedom here. DesignByMoonlight competes with millions of other customers for his product: we will not be single-handedly influencing his company's product price, which it is free to set at will. We'll pay the going rate when we buy his product, you may be sure. But his company equally competes for my business: unless that product price (which is rather high) continues to provide value that can't be had for less, we will be equally free to select another less-expensive vendor (as will those millions of other customers.)

Yet as today's conversation shows, this all goes beyond economics to the character of those relationships among the players in that marketplace. And when the character of the players is strong, good and business-wise, so as to recognize the importance of those relationships, that economic freedom will bring respect regardless of the differences in other factors. I'm not expecting a call anytime soon from my friend suggesting we go out for a beer, but when we next run into each other, I have every expectation that the handshake will be as genuine and the respect as honorable.


12/13/10: "Regular Joe" Javascript

Alright, back to design topics!

What is Javascript, and what do we need it for? Is it as good as Flash? Better? How does it work? Tell me more...

Javascript is a programming language which runs in your Firefox, Internet Explorer, or other browser. Javascript programs instruct your browser to change the display of your website in any of a thousand ways. So Javascript, then, enables you to break out of a website design that just sits there, and create designs that move and respond to your visitor's actions.

Javascript is a very powerful language, and as browser capabilities have improved, Javascript has kept up with them, permitting all those capabilities to be programmed and to become dynamic and active. A simple example from a recent DesignByMoonlight website design is the home page of Applied Climate Services at www.appliedclimate.net. When the home page is loaded, the logo transparency is controlled by perhaps twenty Javascript timers, which read times and transparency values from an array and sequentially produce a lightning effect when the page loads.

Javascript is sometimes compared to Adobe® Flash, and while the two are definitely different things, Javascript comes out the winner in just about any category except online video. (Flash is the way to go for displaying online video, and that's where its application should end, imho.) One of the main reasons for this is that Javascript is "native" to browsers, built directly into them, which makes it more efficient and well-integrated into the browser's capabilities. Flash always requires an add-on to the browser to run its content.

At DesignByMoonlight, we use Javascript extensively, but we like to think of it as "Regular Joe" Javascript. Your website will benefit from a wide variety of Javascript-based features, almost all of which will be custom-written for your site, ranging from simple link rollovers to "lightning effects" such as we mentioned above, to extensive image and testimonial galleries, to visitor-controlled showroom views, to full-blown search-engine-compatible blogs. Why is it "Regular Joe" Javascript? Because, like your main HTML code, these will always be written in a way clearly understandable to future programmers, for the long-term maintainability of your site.

Your website will be much more interesting and visitor-focused through the use of Javascript, and this important website component is always included in our standard new-design fees. (Programming fees may apply for larger applications.)


10/25/10: The Aptitude Test

The hair is standing up on the back of my neck. I'm having a moment of deja vu. And worst of all, I'm sensing that something may be terribly wrong. You remember the aptitude tests, where you had to fill in the last item in a sequence, don't you? Like

apple, banana, _____ (cherry)    or    hammer, nail, screwdriver, ____ (screw)?

Well, it's beginning to feel like we're in a decades-long aptitude test. Try this sequence:

personal computer,
the internet,
computer viruses,
online pornography,
online predators,
social networking sites,
cloud computing,
_________________ (fill in the blank)

Back in the beginning of those decades, when we were all kids, we shared secrets with our best friends. Then, after the inevitable falling-out, we discovered that in some cases we had made a terrible mistake in doing so. As we grew older, and especially when we became adults, we learned to keep confidentialities confidential. We watched our peers, or perhaps younger people, make the mistake of trusting people who had not really earned their trust, and when we warned them, they said, "You're too worried. Nothing's going to happen." We warned them again, because we could see what they could not. And they said, "You're too suspicious. It'll be fine!"

Then, as the decades came and went, along came the PC, the internet, social networking and cloud computing. And here we are, trusting people who have not really earned our trust. But no one is around to warn us—we've all jumped into the experience, it seems. So if there are any little nagging concerns in our heads, we're quieting them down with "You're too worried. Nothing's going to happen." And if they refuse to be quiet, we tell those pesky feelings, "You're too suspicious. It'll be fine!" And finally, they quiet down.

Yet there's that list, that sequence of words, that thing that feels like somehow it's a test....

Then, suddenly, just one word rockets to the top of the news and to the bottom of the list, a word that cuts through all of the illusions of security in the internet, of protection of confidentialities, of respect for the harm that comes when secrets are wrongly revealed. That word links all the core characteristics of the internet, but it ties all the wrong things together, and breaks the ties between the right things. In a moment, it cracks those fundamental unexamined assumptions about the online world that we've silently repeated to ourselves over and over. It connects our private statements to the public internet for all to see. It connects those who wish us harm to our vulnerabilities. It connects our most protected and secure information to open access by everyone, and there is nothing we can do about it.

The word at the bottom of the last list above is "Wikileaks."

But now the most frightening question, the one that has the hair standing up on my neck, is, what is the next word in the sequence?


10/14/10: Fear vs. Freedom I

This is a bit off-topic, but at least it bears on small businesses. It all starts with a job interview I once had, related to a prior life. In a nutshell, things were going fine as far as I could tell, until I met with the HR staffer. Our conversation moved to management style, and I described a difficulty I had had with a past employer, in which the manager "managed up" without "managing down," focusing on his boss's needs and requirements to the exclusion of the needs of the people who reported to him. As soon as I began to express my difficulties with this situation, the HR person sat up in the chair and began listening very attentively, focusing on my every word.

My point is not to debate the merits of the two management styles. My point is that at that point, I probably lost any possibility of working for that company in the future, and that this brings the beauty of small businesses into clear relief. The reason for the HR staffer's sudden sharp interest in my comments was, I believe, that there is often a remarkable climate of anxiety within larger businesses today. Employees to some degree walk on eggshells within the corporate culture, lest they offend those who hold power over their employment status. If this HR staffer was sitting across the table from an applicant who didn't understand or respect that state of affairs, then the poor fit to the culture, and hence to the job, was immediately conclusive.

But what a difference between this and the culture in the small business community! Businesses of a variety of sizes work together under the clear peerage of competition. Is the customer always right? Yes, of course, and a vendor which fails to hew completely to this tenet will almost certainly fail. But that same customer who is always right also competes with other customers for the vendor's time, attention and effort. A small business vendor ought never to breathe a hint of this reality to any customer, but every wise customer will keep this truth in the forefront of his or her perspective. Conversely, and more commonly understood, the best of vendors competes for every new sale from even the oldest and most loyal of its customers. In this community we customers are free to go elsewhere with our business, or we vendors to sell to your competitors, or both of us to stay with a current business relationship indefinitely. It is a climate of freedom, not fear.

It would be wonderful if the benefits of this business freedom could somehow find their way into the workplace environment. Unfortunately, that will never happen. The differences are structural and innate; the implicit social contracts are intrinsic. Why is a job valuable? Because it provides what small business ownership can never provide: some measure of income security. This security contains, of course, the fear of its loss, as well as its price—the surrender of our freedom—as we employees instead rightly do what our bosses tell us to do. So fear and lack of freedom are built into the employment relationship. Of course, small business owners also have their share of fear, and we're certainly not free to expect the market to like whatever we like to produce. But the exhilarating experience of building business relationships based on freedom, of earning the freely-given loyalty of a client or a supplier through hard work and fair treatment, outmatches any security that the employment relationship provides, in my opinion. Small business ownership and success? It's great work—the very best, in fact—if you can get it.


9/22/10: Who wins—client or designer?

Everybody's tastes are different—that's a truism, of course. One goal of good web design has to be the creation of a website that pleases the client's tastes. Now a wise client will recognize that his or her tastes in websites won't necessarily appeal to that site's many website visitors. On this realization, that wise client will turn to the web designer for expert recommendations and the implementation of good graphic design principles in the work of creating the site.

At that good point, however, it's easy to miss the fact that the same principle applies to the designer. That is, the wise web designer will realize that the client will know a great deal about the website's potential visitors, and that this knowledge, whether the result of conscious consideration or intuitive insight, must be given significant sway over the final design.

If the preparation for design work misses the bullseye in this synergism, then two types of problem can arise, depending on the direction of the error.

If on the one hand the web designer relies too heavily on the client to define the design values, the result may lack the professionalism that the client needs and that the web designer could have provided. Then the client likes the final design, the web designer doesn't work to persuade against the poorer aspects of the final design, and the outcome underperforms against its potential. The final dental office website design comes in the dentist's beloved bold colors that are more jarring than restful to his anxious site visitors.

If on the other hand, the web designer undervalues the client's knowledge of the company's own clientele and just goes with the latest graphic design discovery or style, the outcome can be an "overpresented" website that does a poor job of reflecting the values, character and interaction style of the client's business. The hardware store website ends up with beautiful gradients, clever lighting effects and pastel tones that invite interior decorators far more strongly than home handymen.

So if you are a potential client for a new website, bring a good respect for the web designer's experience and design knowledge. But perhaps more importantly, don't short-change your own ideas and tastes: your web designer needs them to build the best site possible for your business. You see, there's that other truism: people do business with folks whom they like. So your clients, who find you a likable and personable supplier, may share more of your tastes than you might think.

If client and designer both bring their best professional ideas and also cultivate a strong interest in the other's concepts, the result can be a site design that has strong professionalism and also accurately reflects the client's business values. That way, it's—excuse the truism—a win-win.


9/9/10: Making a beautiful site better

How can you improve a really beautiful website? Well, first, we need to leave the beautiful part alone. Let's not tinker with pleasing graphic design. But in some cases, there is still opportunity to make such sites even better yet. Once we have a delightful appearance to our site, let's build in features and functionality that use the capabilities of the visitor's computer that's displaying our beautiful designs.

As designers, we're all in the business of good site appearance and layout, but unfortunately some designers stop once they reach that point. Should a website not go on to use the wonderful computing power of its visitors' hardware and the remarkable rendering capabilities of modern web browsers? Shouldn't our website do something for its visitors, in addition to pleasing us with its beautiful looks?

Blogs are perhaps the most common example of such an opportunity. The standard method on any blog is simply to put the content off the bottom of the monitor and make the visitor scroll down to read all the articles.

But there are a minority of blogs that put the browser and computer to good use for the visitor's benefit. So, as a way to improve a beautiful blog page, here are some suggestions. Catalog the titles of your blog articles, say on the left side of your blog page. Then make a nice reader area on the right (maybe with a pleasant background image) that fits within your client's screen. Then, to make things totally easy for your visitor, bring up the article when your visitor simply rolls over the title....oh, wait, that's how we designed this page....

Well, you can see we think it's a good idea. (There are lots of other good ways to actually put the computer to use in web design, and we'll try not to miss a single one.) And yes, if the writer gets verbose, you'll still have to do a little scrolling in that sort of design. But at least the next article can be got with a short arm movement while your scrolling-wheel knuckle rests. Besides, a little scrolling is a small price to pay compared to the alternative of stopping the article right in the middle of a


9/3/10: The Content Management Problem

Content Management Systems, or CMS's, enable website owners to have control over most or all of their website's design, layout and content by using a graphical interface right within their browser. It's like being a web designer without having to be an expert, they say. So why would anybody not want to use a CMS?

There's a concept in various scientific disciplines called "irreducible complexity" that we can borrow to explain the main problem with using a CMS. It boils down to this: if you're not a web designer but you want full control of your website design, either you learn enough HTML to be a web designer, or you use a CMS and learn enough other stuff to have become a web designer anyway.

Let's see if we can explain how this unfortunate situation comes about. The objective of a CMS is to simplify the work of web design until a non-expert can do that work. In other words, where an expert needs to have special knowledge of HTML tags and programming keywords like < div >, onClick and if(), a CMS can 'know' about those keywords so a non-expert using the CMS can design or modify a site without that knowledge. But does it work?

Well, let's suppose we capture all those tags and keywords one by one, and put them into the buttons on a CMS taskbar. We just put them all on the taskbar under more easily-accessible names, or better organized, or using other nice "graphical user interface" techniques. Learning to use such a CMS to design a web page would be just as difficult as learning to use the tags themselves: it's essentially just a renaming of the tags. So we'd be no farther ahead than if we just became web designers.

But suppose we made our CMS 'smarter' so that it combined those tags and keywords into much more common features like 'draw a rectangle and put a border around it' or 'build a table of data with this many rows and columns'. Then things become simpler, but we have unavoidably limited what we can do...until we add in 'draw a rectangle and put no border around it' and 'build a table of data and hide it' and so forth. We still have to cover the same number of functions and features, and before we know it, we have as much complexity, and therefore as much difficulty mastering the CMS, as we had above when our CMS just translated the tags.

It turns out that the process of designing a good website is in some sense irreducibly complex: if you want to be able to do it, you have to attain a minimum amount of expertise. That expertise might be in how to use tags and keywords, or in how to use a full-featured CMS, but it's unavoidably a great deal of expertise. You're just choosing what to become an expert in—HTML, or a CMS, and they're both about equally complicated.

So the challenge of a CMS is that either you learn enough HTML to be a web designer, or you use a CMS and learn enough other stuff to have become a web designer anyway. That's the irreducible complexity that creates the Content Management Problem. There is, however, a design solution that enables you to have exactly the website you want, and still update the content of your site yourself. Contact us for more information.


9/2/10: Why hand-code, anyway?

Why hand-code a website, anyway? Like many things in life, it's a tradeoff.

(Just a quick review: In the non-hand-coded, automated web design process used today by almost all designers, software lets a designer-developer create a web page graphically, then the software (termed WYSIWYG, for what-you-see-is-what-you-get) generates 'source code' that a browser needs to display the designed graphics. In hand-coding, the web designer-developer composes the source code text directly to create the page design.)

I spoke to a friend of mine a few weeks ago who had just gotten a new job as a web designer at the university. He had begun to use some very well-known WYSIWYG software, and his main enthusiasm for it was that you could spin out a web page very quickly. He was certainly right about that.

A downside of this approach came out when I met with another professional friend, a very well-respected local web designer who also uses WYSIWYG software, and we looked at the source code for a website she was building. She had a fair idea of what was going on "under the hood" in the source code produced by the WYSIWYG software, but admitted that there were parts of her page code that she didn't understand.

So if you want to complete a web design quickly, and don't feel you need to know all the details about how the source code works to produce that web page, WYSIWYG software can do that for you. On the other hand, if you need to be the absolute expert in all aspects of your client's web page (or your own), then hand-coding is the way to go.

The single strongest advantage of hand-coding is that the designer-developer gets to rely on his or her brain rather than software with limited capability that is neither creative nor able to adapt. The way a program writes source code is itself programmed, and therefore is unavoidably limited. The mind of a designer-developer is not limited but creative, and so can do an unlimited number of things that a preprogrammed tool will never be able to do.

A second, equally-important advantage is that if a designer-developer has disciplined himself or herself to hand-code, then he or she will always have the expertise needed to solve absolutely any problem that arises with the code. This avoids a situation in which the design work waits while calls are made to a WYSIWYG software company support line.

Farther down the list of advantages, but still significant, are that source code can be written with full clarity, helped by formatting and commenting, called 'factoring', and that it can be done using a simple text editor without a penny of investment in costly WYSIWYG software.

These all have practical implications for important issues like cross-browser performance of web designs, server-side code security, general design creativity and even company competitiveness.

Hand-coding is becoming a lost art, unfortunately. But we'll be sticking with it, and now you know why.