I like bagels. They are a nice easy breakfast, that doesn’t divert too far from my diet. Costco, makes some great raisin bagels, but for some unknown reason, they like to seal the bags with tape.

I am sure there are some great reasons for this at Costco corporate. Maybe tape is cheaper, or more environmentally friendly. Perhaps, it seals the bag better to keep in the freshness. Irregardless, tape is a HUGE pain in the ass.

At 6 in the morning, the last thing I want to do is to struggle with a tiny piece of clear plastic tape, to get to my breakfast. So, this brings up a question that you should be asking yourself. Is this more convenient for me or for my client?

Listen

I am very curious to see if Costco will hear about this post. This blog is not super busy, but it is on the WWW and it will be picked up by the search engines, twitter and perhaps a few other social media sites. Are you listening for your clients?

Evaluating

I work with technology, so it is very easy to forget that some things that I find intuitive, are not. It is entirely possible that whoever made the decision to use clear plastic tape at Costco, does not eat bagels. Or, they do not try to open bagels at 6 in the morning when they are half asleep.

So, make sure that you are asking your users what is the best solution. I think you will often find that what you have implemented may not be the best choice.

Fix it

Evaluating is great! But, action is what counts. Try not to get into the paralysis by analysis game. If, something has been identified as not being ideal for your client… act one it. No matter how insignificant it may seem at the time some of the smallest changes result in the biggest gains.

Trust no one

People are self centered. We all have trouble identifying with others and what may be best for them. So, once you have identified and fixed a possible inconvenience, make sure you test to see if you have the right solutions.

There are loads of great Usability tools out there to help with this. Use them.

Summary

In the end, I am not going to stop buying Bagels at Costco, I probably should… but I more then likely won’t. What the big problem is that every time I open up a bag sealed with tape, I consider shopping elsewhere. Is this really the lasting thought you want for your clients?

WordPress is a great platform, but if you want to harness the ridiculous power that some sites are boasting you are going to need to be familiar with some great plugins.

WordPress is starting to power more and more multi-author sites, and as such WordPress’ default publishing options could use a bit more horsepower.

Summary

Setting up your WordPress site to be as efficient as possible is always the goal, I hope I have given you a bit of insight in to how you can extend it.

Being a web worker is fantastic, but it also poses a few challenges that we have never had to deal with before. Traditionally, it was always fairly easy to separate our work and personal lives, but with many of us now working in our personal space, the line has become quite blurred.

Setting boundaries

When I first started working exclusively from home, I was more interested in making sure that I was getting enough work to pay then bills, then I was interested in setting boundaries. I used to work continuously.

I definitely don’t recommend this.

Even when you are first starting out, it is important to define some boundaries. Things like work hours, and no it is not a good idea to work as much as possible, or work places. For instance, I only do work in certain rooms of the house, this may seem strange but having a work zone is incredibly important if you want to not only be a good worker, but also be free from work.

Allowing some slack

If you work in a traditional office space, I think you would be surprised at the sheer amount of time that is spent actually not working. Meeting, lunch breaks, stops at the water cooler, these all add up to a small breaks from work. And guess what? They are important.

Working at a home office does not always present yourself with any type of break, and as such it is quite easy to get burnt out. I actually try to give myself a few small household chores everyday, just to break up work a little bit and make me a more efficient worker.

Actually moving

Like I said, I am a web worker, which means long hours sitting in front of a computer and not getting a lot of excercise. I have read countless studies telling my how bad this is, but the reality is all I had to do was look in the mirror to see what it was doing to me.

The first year I worked from home I definitely put on some weight, and left it there. Now, that I have nearly four years under my belt, I make darn sure that I excercise nearly every day. I cannot stress this part enough, not only will it keep you feeling and looking good, it is an amazing mental release from the stresses of working for yourself.

Scheduling balance

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” – Albert Einstein

The easiest way to find that elusive balance is simply to start. Here are a few things you can schedule to help you on your way:

• Schedule time blocks – start by scheduling everything. From waking up time to having lunch. As you get into a routine you will be able to slack off a bit if you like.
• Say “No” – I know this is easier said then done, but sometimes it is important for you to know when it is time to say “No”. Like, “No, I won’t work 17days in a row” or “No, I can’t pull an all nighter and get this to you in the morning”
• Get out – I mean literally getting up and getting out of the house. Go on a date, go for a bike ride, go see a movie. Anything that is not in the same building as your home office.
• Start a journal – not all the suggestions I gave will work for you, the only way you will find your balance is if you actively search for it. A great way is to document exactly how you feel.

How about you?

Do you have any tricks or suggestions you would like to add? Use the comments.

Business development is a new field of expertise for me. Well, expertise might be a bit of a stretch, so why don’t we say interest.

As with anything new there is definitely a learning curve that I have been struggling with. Thus, I have come up with several ah-ha moments already.

Execution

Having a plan in place is uber-important. I am not talking “it would be nice important” I am talking “do it or meet the reaper” important. Yes, I tend to be a bit over dramatic.

So what should your plan encompass?

Well this is the part I tended to struggle with, I wanted the plan that was the master plan of all master plans. Think Pinky and The Brain plan. Well guess what? There is only one thing that matters about your plan… and it is can you execute it?

So yes, it is important to know your target market and yes, you need to give them useful information but, more important then all of these is actually doing it.

Not all home-runs

Ok I am not the greatest marketer in the world. Neither am I the greatest writer ( like I had to explain that…). So this next part is really easy to explain, not all of your articles are going to be popular. But, you know what? They don’t have to be.

If you are familiar with sports at all, you know you don’t need to hit a home-run every time you are at bat. In fact, if you hit a single every time up, your team would most likely be undefeated.

Remember, be happy with the small gains.

Remembering the tortoise won

I think we all remember how the Tortoise beat the Hare. I know is a silly child’s story but the message is still just as valid.

Stick with something, persevere through the hills and the valleys and you will win the race. At least that is what I am planning.

Tortoise image courtesy of stock.xchng

Floats are great for positioning elements on a web page, but it has one serious drawback. When an element is floated is taken out of the page’s flow. Meaning that it is no longer considered when the pages width and height is determined by the browser. So, a wrapping element would not see it and could lose it’s height altogether.

Perhaps, a demonstration would go further in explaining this. First we want to create our container element and float an image to the left while having some text flow to the right. Here is the standard markup.

<div id="example-container">
<img src="http://media.cheekymonkeymedia.ca.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/meat.jpg" alt="" title="meat" width="250" height="343" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-360" />
<p>Filet mignon chuck short loin short ribs beef ribs pork chop. Shankle strip steak meatloaf, meatball tongue chicken bacon turducken t-bone biltong.</p>
</div>
then we float the image to the left using some simple css:
#example-container img {
float:left;
margin-right: 10px;
}
this is what you will end up with

Filet mignon chuck short loin short ribs beef ribs pork chop. Shankle strip steak meatloaf, meatball tongue chicken bacon turducken t-bone biltong.

As you can tell the container (in orange) does not contain the floated element. So how do we fix it? Here are three techniques I regularly use.

technique #1 – Adding a cleared element

By adding a cleared item to the bottom of the container, it will force the container to expand to hold all the elements. This will work but is not very semantic.
<div id="example-container">
<img src="" alt="" />
<p>Filet mignon chuck short loin short ribs beef ribs pork chop. Shankle strip steak meatloaf, meatball tongue chicken bacon turducken t-bone biltong.</p>

</div>

technique #2 – Adding overflow hidden

If I know that I am never going to break the dimensions of the container, I usually fall back to the overflow:hidden technique. This will force the container to contain all floats, but if you actually need to have an element overflow the container, this may not be a great solutions. Also, this particular solution does not work in IE6 which is not that big of deal to me.
#example-container {overflow:hidden}

technique #3 – Using clearfix

By adding a class of clearfix to the container element and then declaring the following in your CSS, you can create a fairly bullet proof solution.
.clearfix:after { content: "."; display: block; height: 0; clear: both; visibility: hidden; }
.clearfix { display: inline-block; }
This works by using the pseudo selector :after and then applying the same technique as technique #1, by making the element clear all floats and forcing the container to expand.

I have been building website’s for quite awhile now, and I believe there is one major misconception with how websites are percieved. A lot of people still believe that to be successful all they have to do is have a website made, so let me blunt, a website is not a solution… it is a tool.

What is your problem?

While it may be true that you everyone has a problem, very few of them have any type of clue on what it is.

It is my experience that the biggest single issue most people have is getting their message out there. Let’s put things in perspective for you, Google announced in 2008 that they had indexed over a Trillion unique URL’s on the web http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html.

That is a lot of competition, what makes you think that just having a website is going to be enough?

SOLUTION: Have a plan for marketing your website.

Who is listening?

You might have a great plan in place, but who the heck are you talking to? This is so important but it may be the number one reason, why so many websites fail.

SOLUTION: Make sure you know who your audience is.

Why is your website here?

What is the reason for your website? Are you trying to make money? Raise awareness? Just log a journal? It is hard enough to do one thing well, don’t try to be all things to all people, make sure you know what you are going to concentrate on before you do it.

SOLUTION: Know what you are focusing on.

How are you tracking success?

Too many times I see web authors publish tons of great content, receive a bit of traffic and consider their site a success. When in reality, only about 20% of their content is getting them any traffic at all. They would be much better creating just this type of content, but they have no idea because they do not analyze their traffic.

SOLUTION: Add analytics to your site and learn to understand them.

Summary

There you have it the Who, What, How and Why of creating a successful website. What did I miss?

Recently, I have moved from my role as Front end Developer for my company (Cheeky Monkey Media) to Business Development. Which is just a fancy name, for “get us more work”.

I have zero experience in Marketing, and the only thing I really have going for me is that I am an extrovert, which is saying something when surrounded by my fellow geeks. So, I decided I better do some research to come up with a game-plan for moving forward. Here are a few things that I have learned.

This is not easy

I think, sometimes it is easy to look at the final results of marketing and think that the whole process is easy. This could not be further from the truth.

For some, starting a Google adwords campaign is enough to land a couple big projects, for others it involves year long meeting with potential clients just to get a sniff at an opportunity.

All I know, is you better know where you are going, which leads me to my next point.

Planning

If there is one thing all successful marketers have in common, is that they have a plan. They know exactly where they want to go and they lay out an actionable plan to make it happen.

Here is a sample workflow:

1. Define what you are trying to achieve
2. Create avatars of the type of people/companies that are defined in step one.
3. Create marketing material (blog posts, mail outs, cold calls, twitter campaigns) that target this group.
4. Execute.

Execution

The single most important thing I have noticed when it comes to marketing is execution. You can have the greatest plan in the world but, if you don’t execute nothing is going to happen.

Make sure you put in the time and effort needed to make this a success.

Put yourself out there

This one is still a bit of an ah-ha moment for me. It does not matter what industry you are in, you need to put yourself out there.

For most people, this is going to mean going beyond your comfort zone, and doing things that you wouldn’t normally. Here are a few ideas:

1. Do a guest blog post
2. Create a video
3. Pick up the phone and call someone
4. Volunteer to do a speech
5. Ask someone for an introduction

These are just a few for sure, but my new mantra is to try and do something new each day. Something that takes me out of my comfort zone and make me grow as an individual.

Work harder

I work in the web development industry, you know how many web companies there are out there? I don’t know either let’s just say a lot!

If I am going to stand a chance I had better make damn sure that I am working harder and smarter then the next guy. Here is a great video from Gary Vaynerchuk talking about hustle.

Summary

Needless to say, I have a ton of work to do if I am going to become a top notch business developer. But, I am up for the challenge, are you?

I have just started playing with Google plus, and I have to say the user interface is absolutely outstanding. Most people will not even notice this, which is kind of the point. You know you have a nice user interface when people don’t even notice it, because everything is so intuitive.

But what about the actual application?

Good question. What does google plus do that nobody else does? Well not much really, but it does have one killer feature that others may be missing. It gives you more control over the content you publish than any other platforms. In Facebook if you publish something it is not necessarily available to all your users but.. it is much harder to control who sees what. This comes back to the comment I made about the user interface.

Interaction

I am not sure if it is because it is shiny and new, but the interaction that I have seen on Google plus is amazing. At least, compared to all the other social media sites that I am part of. Admittedly, I am not a social media guru with a ton of friends and followers,(if you want to find me on Google plus, the link is here) but it certainly seems like people are interacting on Google Plus an awful lot.

Facebook killer?

Honestly, I have no idea, but it is certainly is very good, maybe even great. If I was forced to make a decision, I would have to say that this is not going to cause Facebook too much grief right now, at least if they are smart and “copy” some of the great ideas that the Google plus team has done, but if they rest on their laurels this is going to be a game changer. What are your thoughts?

I think we have all heard the saying, “content is king” , it refers to the fact that high-trafficked, well position websites get there by consistently publishing outstanding content.

While I am not going to dis-agree that content is absolutely necessary to having a well trafficked site, but I think that consistency is equally important.

Consistency is key

I have been around the web game for awhile now, I remember reading Problogger well before it was main stream. And if there is one thing that I have noticed by mega bloggers like Darren Rowse, Chirs Brogan or Jeremy Schoemaker is their amazing consistency.

In fact, I bet if you did a study of their blogs you would probably find that a lot of their blog posts are not that good. But, they do hit it out of the park on a few outstanding posts, and those are the ones, that bring in all the traffic.

5 ideas to help you stay consistent

If you look over my site you will realize that I have not been very consistent in my blog posts, I have decided to change that starting now. To help myself out I have come up with a few ideas to keep the posts coming.

Write at the same time every day

We are people of habit, whether you like to admit it or not, so setting up a writing time is hugely beneficial to get in the swing of things.

Keep notes

If the golden rule for real estate is location, location, location then the golden rule for bloggers has to be ideas, ideas, ideas. I can guarantee that once you start looking for blog ideas that they will hit you in the weirdest locations and times, I have a note book that I carry with me and I plan on using to collect these ideas.

Start a series

Another good idea is to start a series. Sometimes it is easier if you think about a topic that can have multiple entries. Such as a how to. For instance, it is extremely hard to teach someone to learn how to make websites in one blog post, but if you gradually introduce new ideas to them over a course of a series, not only does it promote consistency in your own writing but it is easier for the reader to digest.

Less is more

A lot of people, myself included, often don’t write because they are not sure that they will be able to collect or present enough information. Thinking that the reader wants lots of info. Well guess what? People don’t read blogs, they actually just scan the highlights and move on. Remember say as much as you can in as few number of words that are possible. (obviously something I am still struggling with)

Just write

This ones seems obvious, but in the end just write. Oftentimes, it is best just to throw all your thoughts on a piece of paper and do your best to make it look and read nice later, but you have to start somewhere.

Summary

I have written this post, more as a way to get some of the thoughts that I have rolling around in my head. I hope that it actually helps me become more consistent, if you have any suggestion please add them to the comments so that everyone can benefit. Cheers!

With Football season upon us, I have been doing a bit too much work in front of the old tube on Sundays. Anyways, as my work and my past time meld together into that jumbled mess I call a brain, I noticed that a smart web company could learn a lot from Football.

Game plan

It is common knowledge that a football team spends an entire week ( and probably much longer) getting ready for the next opponents. A game plan is drawn up and put into motion on Sunday. That means that Football teams spend at least 6 times as much time planning their executions before actually doing them. I don’t know if I would call this a golden ratio, but I think that we would see far more effective web sites if more time was spent on the actual planning.

Execution

“We knew what we needed to do , we just failed to execute” is a mantra amongst losing teams. So, unless you want to have a losing web site you better pay close attention to the execution. Once your plan is in place, STICK TO IT! The plan is what makes a successful web site or just another run of the mill link in the Google index.

Competition

In football they have one real distinct advantage … they know exactly who their competition is going to be. In the world of Web development, this is a crucial step that needs to be fully examined first, before even the Game Plan is put into place. Unless. you are running a website that has absolutely no competition ( uh ya right) then you had best know who the other guys are and how you plan on beating them. Do the detective work first.

Keeping Score

So once, you have prepared yourself and are ready to play the game, or launch a website, you are all done right? Uh no! Do they not look at the scoreboard on Sunday? Are you kidding me, the score is the only thing that matters, and if you are serious it will be the only thing that matters to you as well. We may not track field goals and touchdowns, but we can certainly track site visitors and conversion ratios. These need to be your score board and you need to pay VERY close attention to these, because if you are behind on the score board it might be time to throw a few hail marys.