Posts About General

Right now, I’m finishing a project for a client and am uploading all of the files to her site. It’s 2 am, and it’ll probably be another hour before I’m done.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve stayed up this late on a work night, working on something. It’s nice to care about my work so much that I’m willing to sacrifice my comfort and sanity for the impending Monday.

Of course, I don’t want to be doing this every night, but it is good to have it happen every now and then.

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I’d like to take a moment to wish you a Merry Christmas (or whatever may be your choice festivity).

We’re all unwinding and approaching a new year. Relax some and unwind a little. Enjoy your time with friends and family. Reflect on what has made this year great. Pray that you can do more great things in the coming year.

We all have a tough year approaching. It’s important for all of us to take pause before diving in.

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Boing Boing posted a great write-up about Meetup.com’s user testing process. It’s always great to see this done in practice the right way. They make the process very lightweight and agile. It’s not a huge project, but it is something that they do every day. Just the right amount of discipline to make a difference.

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Everyone has the choice in their career to either go really deep into a topic (specialist) or to learn a little bit about a bunch of topics (generalist). Both types of workers are needed for different scenarios.

Yesterday, I was talking to a generalist who had a funny comment: “The generalist route has worked very well for me so far. People think I’m smart because I know stuff about a lot of different things. The thing is that if they talked to me for 5 minutes longer about one topic, I would exhaust all of my knowledge about it.”

Taking the specialist route is not a bad idea either. Just make sure that a generalist never knows something about your specialty that you don’t know.

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Thank you to those who have been following this blog over the past year. And a thank you to those of you who write your own blogs and cheer on innovation and change.

2008 has been quite a journey. I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish for the rest of the year and beyond.

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In August, Seth put out the thought that clicking an ad on a site that you enjoy is like a tip jar. If you like the site, click an ad, and the site owner will get payment from the ad provider.

I don’t have ads on my site. And many great websites don’t have ads either. Also, clicking an ad that you’re not interested in wastes the advertiser’s money. Not exactly ethical, and it creates problems in the online advertising economy.

But there is value in linking to a site that you enjoy. A straight-up text link is one of the most sought-after assets on the Web because of its SEO value. And a lot of you are probably doing it already. I can’t think of a better form of “payment,” even if it doesn’t have direct monetary value.

Do you like my site? Want to thank me for it? Then give me a link in your next blog entry or somewhere on your site.

P.S., Seth eventually apologized for putting this out there. I still don’t see how he felt that there was any room to “misinterpret” what he said though.

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My pastor once said, “Responsibility means that you should be the first to respond. It does not mean that you’re to blame.”

We all have jobs to do, and sometimes they’re thankless. And when customers are involved, sometimes we get blamed for things that aren’t entirely our fault.

But in keeping the new definition of responsibility in mind, that just may change the way that you respond.

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Google-acquired GrandCentral offers a high tech “phone number for life.” The service is currently free, so why not use it to get a separate phone number for your business?

I set up a business line on GrandCentral a year ago and have received several inquiries from posting the number online. Plus it’s nice to know that a call is business-related when it comes through on my cell.

Read on to find out more about GrandCentral.

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As I mentioned earlier, Target was going to get sued for not having an accessible website. As it turns out, they settled for $6 million.

What does this mean for you? Read on.

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I will be presenting about “discount usability” next week at the Columbus Digital Adobe User Group presentation night. Come for some food and networking opportunities and stay for 2 presentations about usability and accessibility.

The gist of the presentation: You can cheaply figure out where the biggest usability pitfalls are on your website. This type of analysis helps you identify areas where your site’s design is not performing as well as it could be. Learn how to do it yourself. No need to hire an expensive usability lab to do this high ROI activity.

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