Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Bloxorz is a really cool Flash game where you roll a block over a maze and drop it into a hole. Sounds simple, right? Is is pretty simple, but keeps getting harder and is incredibly addictive. You can also save the passcode to quit and continue where you left off.
I just answered a question the other day on LinkedIn that asked “What Is Your #1 Favorite Shoestring Marketing Strategy?”
I answered that one of my favorite strategies is to invent a new holiday or align with one that is not very popular. I have been celebrating Talk Like A Pirate Day for a couple of years now and every September the article that I wrote about it gets quite a bit of traffic to my website.
Yesterday I heard about another one, “Open That Bottle Night” another made up holiday that was thought up by Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher of the Wall St. Journal ten years ago. It seems that the number one question they were asked was “When is the right time to open that special bottle I’ve been saving?”
They would always answer Saturday Night, but it seemed that was not specific enough for their readers so they invented this special “Holiday”.
If my business revolved around wine or another beverage I would try my best to get myself affiliated with this holiday while it’s still young and claim part of it as my own. You don’t always have to make up your own holiday, if you do it well you can attach yourself to someone else’s day.
Here’s a wonderful page with a collection of 224 full Grade-A browser supported CSS layouts. That means these layouts will look the same in almost any browser.
This is a wonderful tool for anyone who is making a website. They are free for you to use and I highly recommend them. These layouts are done in pure CSS, not tables. This is important because every day the number people, like myself, using Google Phones, iPhones and other device to view websites, is rapidly growing.
I always advise my clients to pick a good password for hosting their website. I tell them that their password is the “Key To Their Store”. Because of that they need to pick a fairly secure password, I tell them that they should not use a popular word, they should mix lower case and capital letters, have at least one number (not a 1) and if it’s allowed a non-alpha numeric character (like a @, #, ^, * or even a space).
While no method is foolproof, if you make it even a little more difficult for the bad guys they are much more likely to move on to an easier target than to continue to waste their resources on you.
I recently read that the Conficker worm tries to guess your network password by trying the most popular passwords that people use. This advice is not just for networks. Have a look at this list and if your password is on it (or just plain weak), do us all a favor and change it, please.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
I bought myself a new phone for Christmas. It’s a G1 with Google’s new operating system called Android. You probably already know that I’m an Open Source kind of guy. I think that even though the iPhone has a big headstart and outsells the Android phone by a large margin, there is much more potential for the Android Phone(s) with the Open Source community helping out with things like updates and new applications. I really love the phone. The only thing that I wasn’t happy with was the battery life.
The coolest thing about the phone is the Android Market. I wasn’t happy with the battery life so I went to the market on my phone found a free power management application, downloaded and installed it with just a couple of clicks. Now I’m much happier with the battery life on my phone.
Over the last couple of months I have found several applications that I like and all were free (Google just recently started allowing developers to charge for their work). The latest one that I really like is from StumbleUpon and is called StumbleVideo. Stumble provides random video from the web or you can also select a random video by category. After you have seen the video the user gets to vote on whether they like the video or not and it moves up or down the play list accordingly.
I have had some fun watching video that I probably never would seen otherwise, so I highly recommend StumbleVideo for some great time wasting on a Friday (or any day). You can also download StumbleVideo from the Android Market.
I was working on a site for a new customer and they asked for a contact form on their site. Not a big deal, it’s something that I have done dozens of times before. This time I did something that made me quite embarrassed.
Let me start by saying that when I design a site for a new customer I usually start in a private folder inside my site. I usually design the first page only. I’ll get some idea of what they are looking for, then put up a page or two for the client to review. They can ask for changes and then I’ll put up another first page or two. This process keeps repeating until the client is satisfied then I can put up the rest of the site pretty quickly.
This does two things that I like. First the client gets to see what I’m doing before they have to send me any money. I have many clients that I have never met in person and several have been burned by designers who took their money and never delivered what the customer really wanted. This way they see that I am going to deliver something that they will be happy with, then after they pay me I move it to their domain name. Because these pages are on my site I get more control over the site itself until the client does actually pay me. It’s not infallible, but what is?
Today we got past that point and the client wanted to see the rest of the site. Because it was still on my site I just started putting up the rest of the pages using the first page as a template. That brings me to the contact form. I decided that the form was probably not going to be used until we actually moved the site to the customers domain. I set up the form and when I got to the form action section I just typed in x.com and moved on, not thinking about the repercussions of that. I told the customer that the form wasn’t set up to work yet, but they went ahead and tried it anyway. When they did they were redirected to a porn site. I felt like a hack.
My advice is to do what I say and not what I do and TEST EVERYTHING before you post your work. I also got the idea to add this story to my blog when I read this post.
The economy today is making all of the news. There is a good article in the Wall Street Journal that talks about how businesses are saving money by spending on updating both their hardware and software.
While it never bad to look at your programs with an eye toward improving their efficiency, it continues to blow me away that companies are spending so much money, time and resources on many different software products when there are so many open source alternatives available that are almost as good, as good as or even better than what they are currently using. Not all of them are free, but many are.
Take for example Open Office. It’s a wonderful FREE tool that I have been using for years and in all that time I have only reverted to my old version of Office once for a particular mail merge thing. While I learned everything that I needed to do on my own and I think most current MS Office users could as well, if a company still had to invert in training I can’t imagine it would be anywhere near the cost of just one MS Office upgrade (or new install).
There are also appearing several online versions of Office Applications. I can understand how many companies would not trust any website with their sensitive data (including Google) many others do not do much more with their programs than typing letters and could benefit from this method.
This was just one example off the top of my head, I’m sure there are many more. Here are some others.
My main tag line for my web design business and my site is “Simple can be Good”. I have always believed that more often than not the simplest solution to any problem is the best one. That the more that you complicate things the more there is to go wrong. The simple solution is also almost always the most economical one.
That’s why it tickles my designer fancy when I see a really cool trick for a site design that turns to be just simple CSS or HTML. Have a look at this post called “Mike asks the CSS Guy about a scrolling trick with background images”. I have probably seen and admired this technique before, but not realized just what it was or how such a cool image effect could be so simple to do.
I invite you to visit Ask the CSS Guy to read about the scrolling image trick. Be sure to visit the examples in the post and the comments as well. Some of them are really well done.
I was speaking with a customer the other day about ways that he could use email marketing to promote his business. He was belt tightening like most businesses today and he finally realized the possible value and low cost of this kind of promotion.
When I first built his site he asked for and I installed a free open source email newsletter management system called PHPList. There have been several visitors sign up and other than the initial welcome email there hasn’t been anything else sent. I explained that since it may have been several months since some of his visitors had signed up, his first email should be an explanation of why he had not written sooner. It’s possible some of his subscribers may have forgotten that they actually signed up and accuse him of spamming them.
My next chore was to talk him out of buying or renting a list of names to send to. It’s always a great temptation to collect a zillion names any way that you can and start sending email “Blasts”. I even hate the term “email blast”. While this method may have once worked very well for any business (and probably still does for some spammers), for most legitimate businesses the costs in terms of loss of your reputation and bad will from your recipients far outweigh any benefit. I have written before of the value of using your own list of names and email addresses.
Finally I mentioned that before he sent anything out that I would like to have a look at it. What I got was just a giant picture that only promoted his business. No text just pictures and nothing that I would call an special offer.
The first thing that I mentioned was that many email clients (Yahoo, Google, etc.) now block images by default, so those folks won’t see anything but a blank page. I also told him that he needed to send something that his recipients would consider valuable. An unadvertised special or a special tip (a trick of the trade) that would benefit his readers. I advised him to look at his email from his customers point of view and ask himself this question if he wanted to grow his subscriber list and business. Is this email something that I would consider passing on to one of my friends or family?
Here’s an interesting follow up article by Loren McDonald on the email Insider called
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Being a native Six-Burgher I especially loved this year’s NFL season. Especially the last game. Well all you Steeler fans here’s one last look back at a wonderful time.
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