I am currently juggling several large projects, as well as some small ones, and it is quite an exciting and busy time for me. This is the main reason my blog posts have been few and far between this past couple of weeks.

I am experiencing a period of intense motivation and innovation at the moment. I have no idea where it came from but I feel a certain inertia to keep going, to ride the wave and see where it takes me (ok, maybe that was a bad choice of metaphor, as most waves end up crashing into the shore, but you know what I mean!).

As much as I love “riding the wave of enthusism” (ok Jim, step AWAY from the metaphor!) it is a lot of hard work, long hours and a little bit of frustration of not getting things ready as soon as I would like.

My present situation let me to wonder how others deal with the pressure of juggling projects, when different people are pulling you in different directions. Do you get frustrated or overwhelmed?

Do you wish you could finish one job before starting the next, or are you good at juggling multiple things at once?

Personally I tend to do quite well under this sort of pressure, when expectations are high and timescales are tight.

I do however find it very different when it is myself that puts on the pressure. If i have one project I can get stuck into it, but when I have many I tend to focus on one at the expense of the others, and because there is no client associated with these other projects I do tend to allow them to drift.

So, I am interested to hear how other people deal with “multiple project madness”.

Do you work better when a project is your own, or when it is attached to a client? Does “juggling” make you excited, or frustrated?

It has been over a week since my last blog post. This has been down to a number of factors, but mainly being busy and not having the time to spend thinking about blogging and writing a post.

Actually, reading that first paragraph out loud, that sounds like an excuse. There are 24 hours in a day and, once you allow for work and sleep, you are left with a fair chunk of time, certainly enough to write a blog post.

The real reason I have not posted (I think) is, due to how busy I have been, I have not allowed myself to be inspired, and when I am inspired is when I feel like I have something worthwhile to write.

I have come up with a theory I am going to try over the next few weeks. I am going to have a list of topics to blog about. This list will start with maybe 15 topics. When I feel inspired I will pick a topic and write about it. When I am busy, or not feeling like blogging, I will just add a couple of topics to the list.

For me a lot of the mental energy is expended in the process of thinking about what to blog about. If I am not in the mood then I find it difficult to think of a subject. I am hoping this ongoing list will enable me to choose a topic to write about more easily. This will allow me to take advantage of those times when I am feeling inspired but only have a limited time to write, as the subject is already taken care of.

Of course, like every theory, the proof is in the pudding. I am going to run with this one for a few weeks and see how it goes.

I have just seen the details of the new Macbook range and I must say I want one more than ever!

Last year, after a trip to New York with my Dad, and a visit to the Apple Store, I took the plunge and went for a 15″ Macbook Pro. I must say it’s the best (computer related) thing I have ever done. I love the OSX environment and love the way the machine boots in the same timescale it did when I first got it. It is light years ahead of Windows in my opinion.

The only regret I have is not spending that little bit extra (on top of the already high price) and going for the hi-resolution 17″ version. When I am doing my design work I find the 1440 x 900 screen on the 15″ (although very good quality) a bit restrictive.

It looks like the 17″ range this time round has standardised on the hi-resolution 1920 x 1200 screen. I saw this resolution in the Apple Store and I must say it is fantastic!

Once of the aspects I love about the Macbook Pro range is their durability. I am VERY hard on my laptops, you should see the state of my old Dell, or even worse take a look at my work PC. They are generally dead on their feet after 12 months! My Macbook has survived quite a lot of abuse over the past year and it still looks (and works) like new!

The cost has always been a prohibitive aspect with Apple products, especially the Macbooks, but for a product I use every day of my life I really feel I should treat myself.

So… Food…who needs that? Drink…nah, what’s wrong with water?… I have a Macbook Pro to save up for!

Links to new macbook pro’s:

MacBook Pro 15″ 2.53GHz/4GB/320GB/GeForce 9600M GT/SuperDrive

MacBook 13.3″ 2.0GHz/2GB/160GB/GeForce 9400M/SuperDrive

MacBook Pro 17-inch — 2.5GHz/4GB/320GB/GeForce 8600MGT/SuperDrive

I promised a while back that I would write a post about building a successful forum community. My experience has come through building the world’s most active and successful BMW Z4 forum (title sounds too grand! LOL!). I came at this completely blind and have made some good decisions as well as some bad ones, so I thought I would share them with you so hopefully you can learn from my experience.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been running with the Entrecard system for a few weeks now and have been largely impressed with it. I like the way it brings new people to the site, and although traffic hasn’t increased dramatically it has brought a few regular posters in, which in my mind is a great thing.

One thing I have noticed though is from the amount of cards getting submitted for approval to go on my site, roughly 25% are nothing to do with my subject matter (ok, that is not necessarily a problem), but 25% simply look bad.

I spent a great deal of time crafting my site to look a certain way, and I expect entrecards to look neat and tidy and not an eyesore on my site. I don’t mind if there is not a great deal of design work, plain text on a coloured background would be fine, but a JPG graphic compressed to the extent it looks “muddy” is not going on my site, however good the content.

Do people really expect to get their adverts approved, when their cards look horrible? It’s like turning up to a job interview with an un-ironed shirt with yesterdays dinner on it!

This lesson follows on from “be different” and in some ways is the same point, but I think this one deserves it’s own post because it is very pertinent to those likely to be reading this blog.

It may sound obvious but one reason some people prefer to deal with smaller organisations, or individuals, is the fact that they can get some personal attention, and they can feel important.

Large corporations can seem cold, and when you call up you will probably never speak to the same person twice. For a demonstration of this, call up your telecoms provider a few times and see if you speak to the same person.

Be a good little fish

Sometimes being a small fish in a big pond can seem daunting, but use it in the right way and you will find in many ways it can be a significant advantage. i have dealt with clients who are so impressed with the level of service and communication that what started out as a small job rapidly grew into more business, simply because I treated them personally, communicated effectively (and often!) and was transparent in the whole design process.

Call back!

I cannot stress this enough. If you promise to call a client at a specific date or time, DO IT! This may sound so obvious but it is amazing how often this does not happen. Large corporations are worse at it than small ones, I must say. What I will say is if you keep your promises you “may” have a customer for life, but if you fail to keep your promise you may not keep them til next week!

Follow up

This is one aspect that is often overlooked, and is something that can be very effective. Maybe it is because a lot of us designers come from design backgrounds as opposed to sales backgrounds. We prefer to get stuck in, producing products, designs etc.

If you speak to a successful sales person they will have a big list of clients. When they have a gap in their day they will be on the phone, checking in with their customers, keeping at the forefront of their mind. This is oh so easy to do, not necessarily by phone, but certainly by email. Even if you don’t get more business from it, it will no doubt be appreciated and make the customer feel important.

It’s not rocket science

This is probably one of the easiest posts to apply to your work. It is pretty much ALL common sense. Maybe you are doing it all already, maybe you can improve.

The overriding message here, I suppose, is make your customers like you. If your customers like you and respect you then guess what?… They will talk about you and recommend you. You will have heard it time and time again but personal recommendation is the best sort of business you can get. It is easy to achieve if you play your cards right and follow some simple rules, but is often overlooked.

If you want to compete in the online industry you will already know there is an enormous amount of competition. You can go head to head with the big hitters if you like, but you will always be going uphill. One advantage the smaller players have in this industry is versatility, the ability to change quickly without all the corporate red-tape restrictions. The ability to be different!

There are barriers to being different, like there are in many areas, but most of it is in your imagination. It is easy to doubt the wisdom of being different, and to think “if it was worth being different then everyone would be doing it”, but in actual fact you will find people tend to act a bit like sheep, following each other and doing the same thing. The ones that branch out and find a niche often do very well.

This may sound easy, but how do you go about it? Well firstly it is a case of either spotting a gap in the market, a need for a service that is not provided, or generating a gap in the market, providing a product and then convincing people they need it.  The first one is slightly easier to do, but the second one is more exciting!

One way to spot a gap in the market is to look at a good example of the service (or product) you wish to compete with. No matter how good it is, if you think hard enough you will no doubt be able to spot areas in which it could improve. If you can spot several of these and come up with how to improve upon it then you have taken the first step to spotting a gap in the market.

Example – a car wash

Car washes have been around for many years. They provide a fairly simple service of cleaning the outside of your car. You would think this had been done to death, or had it?

I used to take my car to carwashes every few weeks. The car came out quite clean but it always used to worry me what would happen if the rotating brushes caught a bit of grit. It never happened to me, but I have heard some horror stories.

A few years ago we saw brushless carwashes springing up. Now admittedly these wouldn’t clean a filthy car as well as a brush, but they take the fear out of the experience and that is enough to convince some to take their car there instead.

This is a classic example of spotting a problem that doesn’t have a solution, and providing a similar, yet different, alternative.

If the same person who came up with this idea had decided to compete with the same equipment I am sure they would have failed, or at least not succeeded to the extent they did.

Vive la Différence!

Whether you are starting out in business or looking to grow, consider your market and consider your options. Sometimes it is far less effort to step around the giant than to fight it head on.

Have a think about opportunities in the market. What do people struggle with? What do YOU struggle with? If you can answer these questions then you may be able to spot YOUR gap in the market!

Remember, some of the best inventions and products in t he world have come from people not following the herd.

There is a shift in the market at the moment towards browser based applications. There are the more visible (web based) ones produced by Google, but a lot of the software industry hard-hitters are ditching the traditional application clients for a browser based experience. Have we seen the end for a lot of (especially workgroup) applications?

In order to answer this question it is necessary to understand the issues involved in software support, whether it is paid for support or open source community support.

As a software vendor you deal day to day with issues found and raised by the customer. This can be an issue in the code (a bug), a user error, or an environment issue.

If you have ever worked supporting a software product you will know that an awful lot of issue are environmental issues, and a lot of these take a long time to diagnose. Depending on the complexity of the software you need to take into account everything from the Operating system (the version of Windows), the database drivers installed, the configuration scripts, the version of the client software, even idiosyncrasies within their user profile. Software support can be a web of complexity!

If you strip away some of this complexity this gets rid of a lot of the environmental issues and leaves you with user error and bugs. It also leaves you a lot more time to concentrate on what you should be doing, improving the product, instead of fire-fighting the issues people are having trying to run the existing product.

One way of stripping away the environmental issues is to use a web client. Largely it doesn’t matter what OS they are using, what drivers they have installed, or conflicting software, 9 times out of 10 if they have the supported web browser installed then the application will run fine.

A lot of companies are ditching the application clients to go with browser based solutions for this exact issue. It is a God-send from a support perspective, I speak from experience here.

Aside

There is also a link between browser based applications and web based applications. While they are similar they are also fundamentally different. Web based applications break out of the office domain and communicate with a server hosted by the software vendor. This has positives, negatives and many other issues, but that’s for another post.

A week ago I decided that I was going to try every piece of technology I came across on the Internet. Not become an expert in it, but at least try it out and report my findings. Today I decided to install Entrecard, a viral marketing “widget”.

First of all let me say there is a LOT of disagreement about Entrecard, it’s value to your website, general misuse, and the concept of “drop and run”. Before I go into these I will explain a bit about what it is.

Entrecard is a system whereby you create a 125×125 pixel advert for your site and “drop” it on other sites that have the Entrecard widget. If the owner of the site likes your advert they will approve it, and usually in turn will visit your site and may “drop” a card on you. This process is repeated over and over until you have approved lots of adverts. These adverts are displayed on your Entrecard widget on your website and a queued up and shown in turn.

The Good

The good thing about Entrecard is people do end up visiting sites they would not have usually visited.

Because the owner has to approve the banner you can assume the advert is at lease vaguely relevant. This is not always the case but more oftem than not it is.

You will get an increase in visitors to your site once you start to use Entrecard, and if you use it according to the guidelines (a lot of dropping) then you should gain a good amount of visitors. The value of these is debatable, and will be discussed further down.

The Bad

Here’s where it starts to get messy. There is a lot of negativity thrown at Entrecard and there are various reasons why.

Firstly, 99% of people who visit your site from an Entrecard link will be Entrecard advertisers. They will load your page, drop their card, and they will be gone within 5 seconds. They will probably not even glance at your posts. The problem with this is twofold. Firstly it takes up needless bandwidth and secondly if you have monetized your site, a visit without any clicks will hit your earnings.

Website success is often judged on visitors per day. Using Entrecard will undoubtedly increase the traffic on your site, but if these people never read the posts and never comment then your statistics are skewed. In my mind the success of a website needs to be judged by genuine visitors per day (not Entrecard) and subscribers to news feeds/newsletters.

The Ugly

More importantly than the above points is the fact that it is seen by many as amateurish and people who otherwise would take your message seriously will see you at attention seeking and unprofessional. For this reason I am unsure if I will keep it on this site.

So, what do you think?

I have only just added the feature to my site, so at present I am unsure how it will work out. From what I have heard you need to put in a lot of effort dropping cards here there and everywhere. I am unwilling to do that.

The reason I am unwilling is I am not going to drop a card on someone if I am not genuinely interested in participating on their site. I think it is rude and defeats the object of networks in general. I know a few people with Entrecards and I will drop on them, but I will also read their posts and comment on them.

For this reason I am unsure if Entrecard will work for me. I will give it a little while to bed in, see how it affects the stats, and will post an update once I have some findings to report.

One thing that infuriates me nowadays is the reliance on email. Every day I see people emailing each other to try and resolve issues, playing email tennis, when picking up the phone would resolve issues in half the time.

I am the first to admit email has it’s uses. It is great for keeping track of what has been said and it’s great for conducting a conversation amongst several people, but for quick fixes it is not always the best option.

Regularly I see situations where a particular problem has not been resolved. I ask the person responsible what the delay is and the answer is more than often “I am waiting for an email from x”. I find myself having to count to ten before asking them “why the can’t just pick up the phone and speak to the other person?”. More often than not the problem could be resolved in the time it takes to type out the next email, yet for some reason some people are compelled to resolve things by email.

Maybe I am just “old school” but I come from a background of support roles (amongst other things) and reams of emails was usually a sign of an analyst lacking in confidence in their own ability. Personally I mostly found it was better to pick up the phone, get the facts and fix the problem. Calls could be resolved in minutes rather than days.

It seems to me in this day and age that people are more and more unwilling to speak to others, to interact and to “cut to the chase”. I think it would be an interesting experiment (but not necessarily practical) to do without emails for a week and to keep in touch with people on a verbal level. One thing that I am certain of, a lot of issues would probably be resolved quicker!