When I stand up to talk about my business at my networking meetings of of the first things I say is that many vendors will try to sell you the most complicated system that they can. This is true for websites, inventory management or almost any system that a business will buy.
For websites there are several reasons for this. Sometimes they believe it is the best system for you, other times it’s because they don’t know any other way, but usually because it’s the solution that makes them the most money.
Sometimes it is actually the best way to go, but it’s been my experience that the simplest solution to any problem that works is usually the best one. I know that it’s almost always the most economical solution. That’s why I choose for my business tagline “Simple can be Good”.
Maybe it’s the recession that’s making people take a second look at simple things or maybe it’s just because it’s the right thing to do, but I keep reading more and more of it all over the web. Yesterday on the MediaPost Publication email Insider they are talking about it on a post called
In addition to designing websites, I am getting requests lately to just manage data for clients.
For example, shopping cart databases, Google or Open Office Documents. Some password protected and some not.
Because I like to also host my customers sites I know where to go to manage these files
I use cPanel which is free and open source. They make it pretty easy to do.
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.
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.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
This is a fun game to play. It’s pretty simple, but maddening. All you have to do is click on the ball and it changes color. It took quite a while, but I got it.
There has been quite a bit written and talked about lately about an “SEO Bubble” and how long that search engine optimization will remain viable. One of the best posts that I’ve read recently is on a blog called Conversation Marketing.
The issues that seem to be of the most concern is that SEO is pretty simple and that site owners will be doing it themselves, much more than will it go away. I don’t believe that SEO will go away, because if it’s done well it is one the best and most economical ways to bring customers to your site. Even with all of the phoney, fly by night “SEO Experts” out there, most people will learn the difference between good work and bad.
The main concern that has really benn there for quite a while now is that it will move “in house” and individual shops will not have any customers. My feeling here is that while SEO is simple, if done well it’s also quite a bit of hard work. Even is all of the site owners out there know everything about it (still a huge IF) there will be plenty that just would rather pay someone else to do the work well.
One of my potential customers is a group who have concerns about how I write my sites. They were worried that because I write my sites from scratch that they wouldn’t be able to edit it themselves.
I believe that the opposite is true. When you design a site from scratch by hand your code is much less cluttered than what you get with the design programs. It’s straightforward and easy to read and follow. That does several good things for you.
- It loads faster and looks the same in more browsers without having to use “hacks”. Every computer looks at a page differently and some (mostly IE) can really change the look of how you want your page to look.
- It makes it easy for the search engines to read it and follow your links. That helps get your pages indexed more quickly. I also believe that they reward you for making it easier for them by giving you higher rankings. Your actual content and how many sites link to you count much more for that, but every little bit helps.
- Because the code is also standards compliant, straightforward and simple most any page editing program will be able to edit it. There is a very nice page editing program that is in the control panels of most web hosting accounts these days. There is also a great program that I recommend to my customers Called KompoZer. I believe it is as good as Dreamweaver for most users, but is free and open source. These programs will clutter up the code a bit, but they both work fine and still comply to all current web standards.
I believe in helping my customers learn to do as much work on their site themselves that they want. I’m not the kind of designer who likes to keep things secret. I like to share information and will teach my customers (and you) anything that you want to learn from me.
More on these subjects:
Yesterday I got an email from a pool company in Virginia. They wanted to exchange links with me.
“Please consider adding our link to your site on your page: http://lillicotch.com/Blog/2008/02/28/add-additional-income-to-your-site/”
For those of you who don’t have blogs, when you allow visitors to post on your site you will get blog spam. Some of the posts will attract more than others and this page is one of my worst for spammers. So what I’m guessing here is that this pool company hired an “SEO company” to help them with search engine rankings and that company probably first tried to post an ad as acomment on this page and then when my spam filter stopped it they tried this email.
Have a look at my page that they wanted a link from. There was nothing about swimming pools on it, in fact, I can’t think of any page on my site that has anything to say about swimming pools except this one.
I also went to visit the pool site and it looked fine. All about swimming pools. Then at the very bottom of the page there was a link to “Resources”. This was a link to page after page of completely unrelated links (a link farm). While this may have been an effective and acceptable form of promotion in 1996 it won’t help you at all today and may actually hurt your rankings. At the very least it looks your site look cheap and spammy.
Of course they probably never actually visited my site, but how much more simple would it have been for them to find any post of mine that they had some interest in and to write a short relevant comment? If the comment was related to my post I would have allowed it along with a link to their site and I probably wouldn’t have noticed or cared that it was a swimming pool site. Not only that one way links tend to be much more valued than link exchanges anyway.
If you want to know the right way to get traffic to your site there’s a good interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the USA Today’s site. Anyone want to trade links?
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Alternative Designs.
This site is very easy to look at and use. There is plenty of whitespace to let the important aspects stand out. I must admit that I would prefer a darker text color. Many designers these days care more about how the page looks rather than how easy it actually is to read. It’s a fine line to walk, but I prefer to weight readability heavier.
Overall this site is simple, easy to use and looks like fun. Exactly what you want in a site selling playground equipment.
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It’s is not my usual kind of post, but this drove me nuts all weekend.
I bought a new GE Adora washing machine for Christmas. I even bragged about how well this washing machine worked for me. I know, a guy and his washing machine, you probably hear it all the time.
This weekend the machine wouldn’t work correctly. The drain ran slowly and it kept shutting down because it was full of water. I tried and tried to figure out what was wrong, read the manual from cover to cover and even glanced at the other languages, but to no avail.
I am still under warranty, but you probably know the drill, call and make an appointment then sit at home and wait all day for the repair person to show up. Even if you are not paying for the call or missing work it’s still a huge hassle.
I don’t know why I didn’t Google the problem any sooner, but I finally did late Sunday night. The second result told me that the lint filter was clogged. It was a simple five minute job to remove the cover unscrew the filter, empty it out, and put everything back. I didn’t find any folding cash like some of the others that they helped (I found 6ยข), but I am overjoyed to have my machine working again.
How can a company like GE have a filter like this that will probably need cleaned once or twice a year and not tell you about it? They have to know it’s going to need it. Are they looking to sell service? It sure seems like bad publicity to me and I might not tell another person how much I like their machine.
I’ll also visit and recommend the Instructables website again and again. Thank you so much for your help. This is a great site with lots of free help for many things.
The moral of this tale for me is, which side of this story would you like your company to be on?
I know where I want my company to be.
