Entries by Charles Verge

Beauty is in the eye of the holder Beholder, A pretty design might distract from the content which means it would look out of place. For example if you are selling cheap used clothing then a good looking design might make people think you are expensive. A plain site may do best in that case.

What is need its making sure you pay for what you need rather then concerning about paying for what you get.

Isabel Walcott has a good write up on the difficulties with developing an online community. I seen many cases where her numbers for Business Development, Features and SEO would not apply though for the most part it is a good start.

http://iz.typepad.com/isabel_walcott/2006/09/audience_develo.html

Jobloft.com was on cbc Dragon den the other day and got bought out. Oh wait a minute that was only 50 %, so invested in. A little high percent, though the experience for them will be well worth it. The next companies that these people (Andy Lai, Lee Liu, Chris Nguyen and Sundeep Mokha) go into will be better.

The good - A great job at getting clients to signup and get their name out there. So long as they keep their relationship with their customers and their site in line with their users then they will do well.

Problems with jobloft.com is that the site is easy to duplicate software and design wise. Content can be retrieved form other sources. Easy to duplicate as in development time is measured in days or weeks.

Two things can spell the end for the company, one a key creative person leaves and is not replaced. Someone elses features are much more attractive to the workers. This is always the problem with basing your pitch on features.

The root success their success is the connections they made vs the features that they talk about.

Communispace builds communities which allows companies to get to know their customers well. The goal of these communities is to develop quality communication with their customers.
Quality communication can only happen after trust is built.

Making Social Networking Work for Marketing:
Communispace Shares 10 Best Practices for Online Customer Communities

Related blog postings...
Myspace is not always the way to go, I have seen many communities which are small and do very well. Smaller size can result in higher quality.
http://blog.willmcinnes.co.uk/blog/2006/10/keeping_online_.html

Isabel Walcott Hilborn adds in her own words on the matter, these 10 tips are really common sense for building any relationship. How easy it is to not apply them to building customer relationships.
http://iz.typepad.com/isabel_walcott/2006/10/community_top_t.html

Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata by Adam Mathes

Metadata for the Masses by Peter Merholz

Many times I have attempted to explain to clients why I hold off on showing them work in progress and it never works very well. Joel Spolsky has wrote an article up on why it is difficult for programmers and non programmers to see the same thing.
The Iceberg Secret, Revealed

In any society if the people truthfully dislike their leader then that leader will be replaced. Long ago Microsoft applied this by developing great development tools. They managed to get people to use their libraries and their platform. From there the developers created better applications which in turned won over more users to their platform, other wise known as Windows.

Now, the same thing is happening with google, they are releasing lots of tools that developers can use like Calendars, Maps and many other apis. Their platform is the web and their massive server rooms. The latest volley in this is the Code Search .

Now to the average person this is completely useful, though for the developer it can be very useful. Soon the developers will integrate this into the tools they use every day. This will be done so they can easily find code samples to make their job easier and build applications faster.

The way google will get ahead is quite simple, make code that is good to use on their platform rank higher then something that would work on say some other empire. This way over time plenty of applications will be using parts of googles api's, web site, databases and so on.

If you are questioning why is google building such simple gadgets that will not make as much money as their adwords, adsense product. Then most like you have not taken account into what happens when you went over the people.

Brick by brick google is taking over the web and using the power of the search to do this.

I been looking around for a system to rate positive and negative text for a while now. Here is the start of one, talk to the donkey and see how much he likes you.
http://www.convo.co.uk/x02/

There is all ready automatic responses for customer support based on what people emails are asking. This will one day turn into very smart computers who can understand voice commands.

Website Pros Acquires RenovationExperts.com a local Halifax company.
see Yahoo news
Renovation Experts is a site which hooks people with local contractors.
renovationexperts.com

The staff
Craig Lucas, President/CEO
Chris Payne, CFO
Dean Mitchell, CTO
Lorraine Kotyk, VP MARCOM

There are many sides to developing a product, do you want a Grand Slam or do you want to build more slowly brick by brick.

Tom Evslin talked about his experience with VisiCalc and how it would of never came about by asking people what they want. VisiCalc solved a problem that people never knew they had.

Tom Evslin - DON’T Ask the Users What They Want!

Seth Godin - Another brick in the wall

Some thing to chew on.

Startup Hiring

Using Java as an applet is good for where you help the users fix the problems with applets. This is based on my experience for developing a Java Applet for a domain named administration system. After a few months of operation the Java Applet was too difficult to support. It is might be ok for the admin interface, though I recommend AJAX for the front end and Java is fine for the backend.

AJAX compared to Java is not that great, expect the reality is the main stream market likes AJAX allot more. By using a java applet you will limit your user base.

Why it is this way is quite simple, if there is a problem it is too hard to fix. The multi step process to get the errors, email them or speak to you over the phone is very difficult process. Most users would rather not answer the survey. Microsoft made sure Java never made it main stream, hence the billion dollar lawsuit they lost.

Your clients, the ones using a admin interface may be willing to use a Java applet interface and fix problems when the come up. Expect only if you provided features that Java could do better then what AJAX could do and your competitor does not offer a better system.

In war the need for innovation can be very clear, for example a Knife can still do a very effective job. Once the gun came about, knifes become only useful in the niche cases.

Watch out that your tools do not go the way of the knife. Still being able to do the old job just fine confuses the issue, tell you see how much better the new tool can do its task.

Mood views looks threw blogs and reads the mood tags off of livejournal blogs. The recording of many peoples personal thoughts have opened new ways of getting feed back. It could provide new means to direct advertising campains, for example say you have a magic product that can cure creative problems. When there is a dip in people felling creative it may be a good time to feature that product.

Mood views

When a customer calls your company with a difficult problem does your company have a way to solve it ?

Having a escalation support procedure in place is often needed for web sites which can be difficult to use. Forwarding the most difficult problems to more trained staff often points out problems with the site.

The problems have to be solved as well, other wise things can turn sour fast. For example
Mark Evans writes about a customer service problem with HP.
Mark Evans

How much is this costing HP for having a poor procedure ?