Scale. It’s important. More important though frequently is PERCEPTION of scale. How big you actually are is many times less important than you actually are. And get your mind out of the gutters. I’m talking about your website.

Humans have a really hard time judging scale. They can’t really picture size. When you do try and represent things to them that have immense scale their minds shut down. For instance there was a great blog post over at

http://yougottobekidding.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/what-does-one-trillion-dollars-look-like/

About what one trillion dollars looks like. It starts with a hundred dollar bill and goes up in increments till they reach one trillion. Here’s their representation of one million dollars.

It’s a little pile of 100 dollar bills.

Something you can visually grasp. Of course even that little pile you can’t probably really understand the scale of the number, you can at least stuff it in your duffel bag and run out of the bank as fast as possible.

Not that you should rob a bank. Unless your dog tells you to do it while listening to Beatles albums. Then really, who could argue with that?

Ok here’s one trillion dollars…

Boom baby.

And the US Budget is what… three times that? Wrap your head around that scale. Next time someone says ‘Let’s cut this or that from the budget and save a million dollars’ you know to laugh. They spend more on toilet paper in some departments of the government.

Anyway my point is scale. It’s something that at a certain point you just can’t really comprehend it anymore but just hits you in the gut.

We’re closer to the rabbits in Watership Down. I forget how high it was, but they could only count to like four or something. They couldn’t comprehend high numbers. We’re the same way, but we can go past four.

Scale is important. Even with us once you get past 10 it starts entering ‘gut’ range. What does 100 people look like? 1,000? 10,000? Try and do it outside of a context, like on a white background. Most people you say “hey picture 100 people”, think of a picture of something, like a picture of all their wedding guests. If you say 50,000 they picture a crowd at a baseball stadium. But they’re not really picturing those people. They’re not picturing 50,000 people. They’re picturing ONE baseball park full of people.  You know it’s a huge number though. When you see massive crowds on the Washington Mall, etc, your gut is what tells you about the size and importance of something. You don’t, and can’t, count all the heads. It’s impossible. You just gutcheck it after a certain size.

What made me think of this was the map of the current BP Oil Spill…

http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/

That’s a pretty cool little map website. Takes the oil spill in context, and then puts it in a context of size you have a better time understanding. The size is still pretty incomprehensible, but putting it in a more familiar place on the map you can say “holy shit it covers my entire state”. Seriously, click on it. It’s pretty crazy. Seeing it in the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t really let you put scale to it, but putting it centered on your home really drives it home how big the damn spill is.

Ok so where the hell am I going with this?

Websites. Scale. Gut checking.

It’s been established that pretty much everyone under the age of 30 (96%+) use the internet as their primary tool for finding products and services. Bye bye yellow pages, hello yellow pages.com. (they fucked that one up a decade ago, don’t get me started). When they look for services that they’re unfamiliar with, or that they’ve recieved a referral for via their social network (another major way they find things….) they’re going to look your business or organization up online.

It goes like this.

Friend Referral via Social Network (optional) -> Google Search -> Your Website

Pretty simple. That’s the majority of ways that people under 30 (and really the majority under 40, but it’s pretty much EVERYONE under 30). Do you care about people aged 18-40? Are they in your market? Then you should be using social networking, worrying about your SEO and search engine rankings, as well as having a good website.

Here’s where I get to my point and do my TL:DNR.

Your website needs to be concerned about scale. Not the number of pages you have, that’s not what I’m talking about. Amount of content is a separate issue. I’m talking about that gut check. That thing in the person’s gut that they use to comprehend scale whether it’s a trillion dollars, or the size of an oil spill, or your company.

They want a bunch of things from a company that we can talk about…but what I’m getting to here is the gutcheck part of the equation. Is this company legit.

The trick to this is to look to someone’s gutcheck like one size larger than you are. Size does matter. I’m not saying to actually CLAIM you’re bigger than you are. Just look it to a gut check.

If you’re a one man operation working out of your attic, do you want your website to look like a one man operation working out of your attic? Is that a pretty obvious question and answer? No. I don’t care if you’re a lawyer or a gardener….you don’t want to look like you’re one guy working in an attic. You want your website to NOT reflect that. You want to look bigger than you are. Maybe like you might even be a few people in your firm, with professional offices somewhere. That’s what you want to look like.

If you’ve got a few employees and an office you want to look like you’re even bigger. 1o0 employees. A big office.

Etc.

Using restaurants as an example if you’re a corner pizza shop (honestly you probably don’t need a website) but you should look from the person’s gutcheck like a citywide chain. If you’re a citywide chain, you need to gutcheck as regional. If you’re regional, you need to gutcheck as national. If you’re national you need to gutcheck global. If you’re global, then congratulations you’re on top of the heap, make sure your site looks bigger than everyone elses.

Again I’m not saying “bigger” or “size” by actually claiming to have multiple locations. Just how it looks to someone. It’s quality. It’s targeting. It’s a good high quality design.

A lawyer’s website that has “Frank Litigator, J.D.” and a phone number as black text on a white page isn’t going to inspire any confidence in you by that guy who doesn’t know you coming to your site. Whereas if it’s a site with a high quality web design that looks like a classy lawyer’s website, with high quality information, photos, services, etc. It’s going to make them think “ok this guy looks like a professional”.

That’s what I’m getting at.

If you’re a guy with a phone number, you need to be a guy with a kickass website.

Size does matter. How people perceive your size does matter. More and more every year that means having a website that isn’t just some generic template with 4 pages of information and a phone number.

It’s what my company is doing for multiple industries and we see the results in our clients. Daycares using oDaycare fill up and have waiting lists and open up multiple locations. Athletic Clubs using oFitnessclub give our more free trials that turn into new members a week than they used to in a month. Clubs using oClubhouse get more participation in their events than before. Lawyers using oLawoffice get more contacts from people looking for legal advice, that turn into clients.

It’s not rocket surgery. We’ve worked hard to make products that help your websites LOOK bigger, because it’s important to look one level of scale than what you are.

Size does matter. Luckily we can use photoshop to help you.

Seriously, get your mind out of the gutter.

Ok so I’m sure people have seen the ads out there on the internets for Five Hour Energy. The little plastic shotglass with a spout that says it’ll keep you going through your humdrum day. Going by internet ads along, it seems that the American economy is based on 5 hour energy drinks to keep people at their desks playing Evony.

Anyway I digress. The whole schtick about the drink is that you get that 2:30 feeling. The post lunch falling asleep at your desk feeling. Groggy. Unable to work. Unable to focus. Most people have felt this at one point or another. They claim “hey drink this and you’ll feel right as rain for 5 hours to get you through the day”

I’m sure it works on some people. Not me of course.

The drink itself is essentially a b12 shot combined with a couple other things and espresso levels of caffeine. They have a super duper one that has double the cafeine. Personally I didn’t like the taste of it. It was very sacchariney or whatever they use for artificial sweetener, but it wasn’t bad enough you couldn’t drink it and basically it’s a shot. You pound it and are done.

The problem with me is that I already drink like a pot of coffee a day so a cup of coffee at 2:30 plus a b12 shot just isn’t enough to perk me up if I”m falling apart.

But WHY am I falling apart at 2:30? Why do so many people apparently fall apart at 2:30?

Well I’m not doctor, but I’ve noticed something. If I go exercise, even just a 20 minute walk, and then that night get somewhere between 7-9 hours sleep…I don’t get tired at 3pm.

Shocking right?

If you just have very moderate physical activity, and get a good nights sleep you’ll not need to do shots of espresso and b-12 in order to stay away at 3pm.

Maybe THAT wouldn’t work for everyone, but it sure works for me (when I do it).

Today though I stayed up last night till like 2am, and haven’t excercised in days and now it’s 11:30 and I just want to go back to bed.

Seriously though…exercise regularly, eat healthily, and get a good nights sleep. If you’re doing that and falling apart at 3pm then you need to go see a doctor, imho, not drink an energy drink.

Now for me to finish up olawoffice.com and we’ll have all our product sites up. oclubhouse.com got finished first, then odaycare.com and then ofitnessclub.com. I have to update all of them more, and add internal graphics and whatnot, but they’re all getting to be in pretty good shape.

Don’t ask me how you get your page ranks up if you don’t want to hear the answer. I’ll tell you, and then you probably won’t like it. Why? I think I’ve maybe met one person in the last decade who actually LOVES to do what’s necessary. Everyone else, it’s a chore. Something that takes them away from what they actually enjoy doing. Or worse, they just work for the company and don’t even enjoy the job, and then they’re being asked to put on a smiley face and stand outside the Disneyland gates waving. For a significant number of people they’d rather die in a gutter, apparently.

Marketing yourself, your company, your organization, whatever, online is not necessarily easy. Particularly if there is alot of competition. When we went to the second iteration of orcapack.com we changed from being a product focused company to one offering the standard web design and site creation for various companies. This was back in about 2003. I remember talking to one of our business advisors and they asked me “Who is your target audience?” and I said “I dunno. Everyone?”.

It’s hard to market to everyone.

That’s one reason we eventually created oClubhouse.com, oFitnessclub.com, and oDaycare.com because they were businesses we had done alot of work for and had the expertise to turn them into products and they provided us with specific markets for us to target with SEO and Internet Marketing.

So if you want to get your page ranks up, my first advice is to figure out what your target is. Who are you trying to reach? Get that whittled down. The answer can’t be everyone.

I’m gonna skip a few steps here to get the meat of my point, but you’ll want to do all sorts of stuff for tracking your sites, figuring out keywords for your content and SEO, internet marketing, yadda yadda yadda. Ask me again about thos sometime…

Anyway, so glossing over that stuff, we get to the point when we know your target, and we know what words they’re searching for online, and we’re watching for them….Time to get into the social media marketing.

That’s where people’s hearts sink.

I say “You can do it in an hour a day.”

They look at me with a blank stare.

“I hate blogging.”

“I don’t know how to use tweeter.”

“I don’t want to waste an hour a day on that crap.”

“Can’t I hire an indian or malaysian company to do that for me or something?”

I’ve heard it all. It’s like someone asking how you order a pizza to be delivered to your house, and you give them a number to call, and a basic script to follow and they look at you and ask you if you can call for the pizza instead of them.

Twisting people’s arms is probably not a strong enough metaphor. People HATE to do this stuff. They see it as a complete waste of time, but it’s what works.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post which focused on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman, this is how stuff gets done.

Let me give a specific example for a friend of mine. I won’t name names, so lets call him Shawn Rodgers, and pretend he’s a wedding photographer in Pittsburgh, PA and his company is Ovation Images located at http://ovation-images.com/

Ah damn…I named names. Well it’s good for his SEO for me to do that, so I’m sure he won’t mind. Shawn is an amazing wedding photographer. Seriously. I wish he’d shot my wedding. He’s got the expensive gear, and a great eye, and he’s an insanely particular guy (seriously…he’s INSANELY particular….he notices all the little things). Now this is a kind of annoying thing when you’re trying to buy some hot sausage to grill up for your fishing trip, but in a wedding photographer? You want the guy who notices ALL the details and actually cares about making it look perfect.

Anyway they’re like on page 100 of search results for “pittsburgh wedding photographer” and there’s lots of competition, but Ovation Images is probably top 10 in quality in the region, maybe even top 5. They should be up there in the rankings above lots of these other photographers.

Ok so we know the target (young brides and grooms in western pennsylvania) and we know the search terms (there are more than “pittsburgh wedding photographer” but that’s the big one).

So what do they need to do to get their page ranks up now that they have that info? They need to leverage social media.

First they need to use their blog. It’s at http://blog.ovation-images.com/. The last time it’s been updated was January 9th. Before that twice in December of 2009. That’s just not enough. They need to turn that into a mini-site. A targeted website. Have it just be about great wedding photography shots. Every day put up a different picture, talk in a brief paragraph about what makes it an amazing wedding photo, and then have a set signature blurb on the page about them and pittsburgh wedding photographer linking back to their main ovation-images.com site.

If they can’t update it everyday, that’s fine, but they need to spend an hour a day on their overall social media marketing, so it’d be cool to stack up some photos they can use. Doesn’t have to take long. Put up a photo, write it up, stick up the blurb, post. The point is to have more content pointing towards them, more keywords, more stuff people can find that’ll lead them to the main ovation-images.com website.

If possible they should even change the domain on it to somethign with the keywords. great-pittsburgh-wedding-photography.com is available for instance. You get those keywords in the URL it helps.

Maybe also have a contact form on the blog as well that asks some questions. A questionaire about what they’re looking for in a wedding photographer, or in wedding photography, just some sort of little thing to provide a ‘service’ to people to help them find a photographer that fits them. “Do you like natural shots, or pictures of you posed?” etc.

Then every day after posting that picture on the new external mini-site have a twitter account, and tweet about it, using the keywords.

Go onto the ovation images facebook account and post the link there. Put it on your personal facebook as well. Get your network involved.

Now… There’s a ton more they could do. A ton. I’m not going to go into everything else here though. It’s the stuff that whole books are written about. This is just a first step of many to reach the kids that are getting married. I could suggest a hundred more things, but before anything else, there has to be a commitment to doing just an hour a day of regular posting and then leveraging social media.

And no, I won’t allow you to hire a Malaysian company to outsource your blog like I do.

So I kind of took a way too long extended break from my blog. I’ve been working hard on our product sites, in particular oClubhouse.com which provides high quality CMS websites for Associations, Membership Clubs, and Organizations. It’s really a fun product and I know that our new customers are gonna love it. It really puts alot of emphasis on making websites work for membership clubs with just enough bells and whistles to grab them new members, and leverage the social web to keep their current members hooked, while not providing so much to get overwhealming for people. It’s a delicate balance.

We’re making a few other products as well, in particular oFitnessclub.com for Fitness clubs, Athletic clubs and gyms which is pretty cool, as well as oDaycare.com which I’m even more excited about. The ROI with oDaycare.com is pretty crazy. Any Daycare that has open spots and isn’t using oDaycare.com is missing out on money. For less than the cost of one student a month (alot less) they can really provide an extra level of service for their parents, as well as bring in tons of business.

Anyway that’s another blog.

This one is Captcha Captcha Captcha.

So as I said, I was being a bad social marketer and ignoring my blog. Well I come back after a couple of weeks and I have 179 comments. SPAM. Porn spam, handbag spam, bad english me like post and bookmark very informative i read again SPAM.

delete, delete, delete, delete, delete….

I can’t believe I didn’t install a captcha in this WordPress install. Talk about forgetting something major.

Captchas are those images or math problems or things you have to listen to in order to post in certain places. For instance if you try to post a comment on my blog here after your name and message it’ll have this picture of numbers and letters and you have to put them in a box. I’m sure you’ve seen them all over the internet.

The reason for them is that they, for the most part, prevent non-humans from posting spam. Computers have a hard time reading the images and figuring out what they’re saying, where the human eye does not. Of course they’re getting better, or some people hire cheap Chinese day labor, but still you’ll prevent a ton of spam posts from even going through.

I didn’t have one on. Big mistake. Everyone needs to use captcha. Sure it can sometimes be a little bit annoying for the user, but it’s worth it in the long run. Most Captchas are very inconspicuous and take a second or two to complete, and they clean up the internet for you and for me.

I can’t believe I forgot to put one on in the first place.

Ah well I hope this one works. I’m using the SI Captcha Ant-Spam plugin for wordpress which for some reason is hosted on a Long Beach weather website. That troubles me somewhat, but what can you do.

Every site that takes submissions or registers users should use captcha. It’ll save you the headache of deleting 179 spam emails when you go away for a couple weeks.

I’m gonna copy a post from OrcaPack.com

http://orcapack.com/new-website-focus-products

We’ve launched our new website for OrcaPack at orcapack.com to focus on our new targeted website products. We’re starting with oClubhouse, oDaycare, and oFitnessclub.

Since our inception in 2002 our company has undergone a number of radical changes. We started out as a product company making a specific product, then as a website design and service company, then catering to specific industries, then back to general. We’ve been all over the map, whatever needed to be done on the web, we did.

This is a new chapter though. One where we’re moving into working on our specific products.

All these products focus on specific industries. The idea is that instead of having web design be a service, we have it be a product that someone buys a subscription to. It’s like leasing a car versus buying.

When you buy a car you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new car. Let’s say you get a semi-decent new car for $30,000. You get certain warranties with a car, that it’ll keep working and the like, but the car itself doesn’t improve. A few years later the newer models make yours look kind of grungy. You don’t have the latest GPS system, or DVD Video in the back for your kids. The doors don’t slide open automatically, the seats don’t store in the floor, whatever. Plus it’s just looking a little dingy and dirty. The car manufacturer will be happy to help and build you a new car for $30,000 or more given inflation to get those new features.

Not to mention that all along you had to pay for gas by yourself, clean it yourself, drive it yourself.

It’s the same thing when you buy high quality websites. You’re spending 10,000, 20,000 or more, sometimes significantly more, to build a website with a high quality design, specifically architected for you and your industry, but as soon as it’s handed to you, the responsibility of the designer is done. If a month after it’s finished you see some cool new thing, well… It won’t be on your website, unless you pay extra. If after a year you don’t like how the site looks it’s going to cost you thousands more to redesign the site.

That’s why what we’re offering is more like leaseing the car. You pay a low rate per month and you get the same site as if you had paid tens of thousands of dollars. We maintain the site for you. We keep it clean. We update it, make sure it’s patched and secure. If a new feature comes up that is applicable to your industry we add it. Every month the ‘car’ is new, fresh off the lot. You get a current, technologically up to date, well maintained site, that looks good, and is architected specifically for your industry for a low price.

The three industries we’re focusing on initially are membership clubs, organizations, and the like with oClubhouse; fitness clubs, althletic clubs and gyms with oFitnessclub; and daycares, preschools, and early learning centers with oDaycare.

oClubhouse focuses on membership clubs and organizations. One of our flagship subscribers is the Publicity Club of New England. Whether it’s a local professional club, or a college alumni club, etc. Groups that need to have an active membership with many social ties. Groups that need to get new members to find them and join and sign up (and pay dues!). Clubs that have events and need to sell tickets to their members. oClubhouse focuses on providing a basis for these groups to bring in new members, get those members to participate in your club, both at your real life events, as well as online, and to generally be a sucessful club.

oDaycare focuses on daycares, preschools, and learning centers. One of our flagship subscribers for oDaycare is First Step Childcare Center. Whether you’re a daycare, preschool, or some type of early learning center we can help you. oDaycare focuses on these businesses, to better help you get new students, to keep your own parent/clients happy, and make it easy for people to find you. In addition we’re partnering with a number of services so that not only can you have a basic website, but easy setup to provide secure areas for your parents to view video within your center, post secure pictures online, etc. For far less than the cost of one student a month you can help fill your center to capacity by using oDaycare.

oFitnessclub focuses on fitness clubs, athletic clubs, and gyms. One of our flagship subscribers for oFitnessclub is Cambridge Athletic Club. Fitness and athletic clubs have some specific challenges that our product is aimed towards solving. Not just getting new membership, but also keeping your membership involved in your club. It’s important for gyms to get new members on a regular basis, and we can help with that, but every member that doesn’t quit is another one that you dont’ have to worry about refilling. oFitnessclub can help with incorporating various forms of social networking into the site, as well as some other features to make the life of a gym manager more bearable.

We have a number of future products in the pipeline. oLawoffice is live, and we’ll be focusing on bringing that up soon. As well as oScientist, creating websites for science and technology research companies. We’re looking to do numerous other future products as well.

For now though OrcaPack and our new website have changed to our new product focus, so we can bring the experience we’ve learned working with these industries for the past 8 years directly to our new customers, for a low monthly cost, instead of a high initial investment.

For more information please contact Tim Hinkel by calling OrcaPack toll free at 866 830-8165 or contact us using our email contact form.

It rained all night. I don’t think I mentioned before, but our gutters totally ripped from the house in the big Snowpocalypse in February. The icedams and snow ripped it from the house. It was a pretty scary sound. Last night the rain fell from the roof onto the gutter now leaned up against the house, awaiting repair or replacement once we find a contractor available. Tap tap tap tap tap. Not exactly soothing. Then waking up to a grey morning by your five year old at 6am after not going to bed until 3am.

The snow is almost gone though. Only one small sad patch remains in the front. Where the snow once proudly sloped all the way up to the tops of those bushes, it’s melted back into almost nothing.

Some places up the block are still fairly sizeable, but they’re hidden behind big bushes and things and don’t ever get sun. I wonder how long some of those will last.

Anyway, Yeah I’ll be crashing by mid afternoon. If you need something from me today I recommend getting it to me immediately because after lunch I’m gonna be a hot mess.

I wish I could find something that would effectively perk me up in the afternoons. I know it’s coming. Right now I’m ok, but I feel it. I know that by 12 my brain will start shutting down, and I might even fall asleep at my desk by 3pm if I’m still sitting here. I’ve tried all sorts of stuff to keep me awake and functional but nothing really pulls it.

Coffee sometimes keeps me awake. More likely I lay on the couch groggy unable to keep the children from jumping on me, unable to react while some weird PBS Kids show flys by on the television. Maybe I pass out and then it’s 5pm and i smell dinner cooking.

I tried Sudafed. yeah it’s speed. Yeah it doesn’t work for me. It certainly dries out my sinuses and it wires me up, and I certainly won’t fall asleep but my brain is turned off. i can’t really compute things. It’s like part of my brain falls asleep but my body won’t.

And that 5 hour shot thing that is all over the hulu’s now in advertising? I tried it. it’s an espresso shot mixed with a B-12 shot, mixed with sweet and low. Not only did it taste disgusting, but it didn’t do a damn thing for me.

I think maybe there’s really only one thing that keeps me from totally shutting down at 2pm.  A minimum of 6 hours uninterrupted sleep, a decent breakfast, and sunshine. Give me a grey damp day, 3 hours sleep, and coffee and I’m as good as comatose.

What’s the point of this? Meh i don’t know. I think my brain already shut down. At least I’ve had a productive week. We’ll see what I can get accomplished today, but I’m looking forward to kicking ass on the new OrcaPack site next week, and getting it live hopefully sometime next week. Then moving onto the product sites. oClubhouse first after OrcaPack, then oDaycare and oFitnessclub.

I have even more things on my list after that.

For now though… I think I might just veg.

It’s a good thing that I have job flexibility.

My daughter last night started to fall apart, and she felt warm to the touch. 101 degree fever. So we shoved some Motrin into her, and she made it to bedtime. She had a hard night, some more medicine, and this morning she was still sick. So we had to keep her home from school.

Now what do people do who have you know….jobs. They take a personal day to stay home with their sick kids. Except, how many personal days do YOU have. It seems like most people I know these days have 2-3 weeks of vacation a year. If they’re LUCKY they get 5 personal days on top of that.

Well, we also have parent teacher conferences coming up for her. School is closed that day, and it’s all PTC all day. Well that’s all well and good for the teachers, but there goes another personal day for many people. Have to stay home with the kids, and then take them into the conference.

Doesn’t seem right to me. I dunno. Setting aside specified vacation days and personal days seems….well it seems juvenile to me now.

One of my first jobs was at Toys R Us. I had the fun job of going up and down each aisle and ‘straightening’. I wanted to be put on cashier, but they for some reason had it in their mind that I was a straightener. They were really mean there. Never pointing out what I did right, only everything I did wrong, and in a mean “you’re a total incompetent, you did it wrong idiot, do it this way.” type way, even if they never told me how to do it right in the first place. Real jerks. Anyway, I got a 15 minute break, so I would go down to the break room and drink a soda and read a magazine. I went down one time, and one of the managers came down with one of the assistant managers. They came down a minute after I did, and after a few minutes turned to me and said “Shouldn’t you be ending your break now?” to which I replied ‘no I have another 10 minutes.” Five more minutes passed and they turned back “OK your break is over.” and I said “No I started at 4, I get 15 minutes, I’ll go back up at 4:15.”

Crap like that.

Anyway saying “You get 3 weeks of vacation” is something similar. If I’m not making someone punch a clock from 9am to 5pm, why am I punching it for X number of work days a year. If I hire someone, and I give them work to do, then shouldn’t it be judged on how much work they get done, and how good the quality of that work is, not the time spent?

If you’re making widgits, and the assembly line moves at a constant rate no matter your skill it might make sense to pay you by the hour. You’re essentially paying by the widgit.

So why are we still paying as if the assembly line is rolling past. Sure you’re gonna keep track “hey Joe we’ve noticed that you’ve taken 8 weeks vacation so far this year, and missed a few project deadlines, we’d like you to scale it back and no more for the rest of the year ok?” rather than something formal. If Joe however works 10 times as fast as anyone else and his quality is beyond compare….why limit him to X days vacation or Y personal days.

It depends on the job and the industry, but really….the whole 3 weeks vacation days thing is so last year.

—

Wrapping back around to my sick daughter, we had to dig to find a number to call to call her in sick. It’s the first time. Nothing straightforward about it. We also both got conflicting messages about the Parent Teacher Conferences, and no real way to figure out what’s up with that.

That’s the great thing about using a product like oDaycare for your daycare or preschool. You can control that information, and make it very easy for not only getting new customers and students, but getting that information out to your current ones. Calendar plug ins so people can see what food is being served on their iPhones from linking their calendar to yours…The days you’ll be closed, information about it. oDaycare doesn’t just put it on your website and easy for them to find, but it can even put it on their mobile devices so they can reference it anywhere.

It’s the little things like that, which make a parent really happy to be a part of your school, and oDaycare can keep that communication flowing.

Peace out. I have to go watch Thing 2, as it sounds like Thing 1′s fever is up to 103 and her mom is going to take her into the doctors office. Don’t get me started on that….

Design means making choices. Choices about choices, even. What do you want your users to be able to do with your system? What choices do you want to give them? I think that in general, the better usability lies in restricting user choices as much as possible.

You see it everywhere. Like Microsoft vs. Apple for instance. Microsoft comes from a much looser design standpoint, one of providing users many many options. Heck, they even allow it in the programs that run on their machines. They don’t restrict the hardware that can be used with Windows. They let programs edit the registry data, or allocate memory in really stupid ways. Lots of freedom for programers, for programs, for users….and it causes problems.

Whether it’s the kind of systematic freedom that allows a program to install a printer driver on your computer while also forcing you to install a recipe organizer, a photo editor, and a stamp collection, or alter your computer in subtle ways that breaks an important piece of completely unrelated software, or to run an unnecessary background process which eats up half your computers memory, Windows and Microsoft have always been big on giving developers whatever they want and letting the pieces fall where they may. This allows smart, and good, programmers to build some pretty remarkable things on the PC. It also allows the other 90% to write some pretty bad ones.

Apple is in many ways the exact opposite. They tightly control the operating system and the hardware. They only let the operating system work with specific hardware. It MIGHT work with something else if you jury rig a machine, but don’t count on it. They also highly restrict what programers can do within the system itself. For awhile they didn’t even tell people openly how to program on their Operating Systems, where the coding for Windows books filled shelves at bookstores, and in my basement.

Oh MFC programming, how I’ve totally forgotten you…Did I really once know C++? I think I’ve overwritten that part of my brain.

Anyway…fast forward to the world wide web and me talking about it on a blog…

When you present an application, or a website, to a user you need to think about what they’re going to do, and what you want them to do. You already make choices. Let’s say you put the logo in the top left, which is pretty damn standard these days. You don’t make it a movable layer to let the user move it anywhere they want. Why would you do that? What purpose could that solve?

I imagine myself in some office where a douchebag sales guy tries to explain how he likes to move the logo to the bottom left because that’s where it feels ‘real’ to him or something completely anecdotal and absurd.

Even if 1% of users feel that way, do they REALLY care if they can’t move that logo? Does it REALLY give them anything? Of course not. It’s pointless. However if 80% of users were to say they wouldn’t use the application because they couldn’t move the logo from the top right corner, I’d say “ok well…lets let them do that then.” Even if I didn’t fully understand why. I’d probably TRY to understand why.

Still that’s a dumb example. Nobody cares about that, so we don’t do it. The logo is fine in the top left, or top center, or whatever, and people are fine with that.

What about a more ‘current’ example?

I’ve been talking with CustomMade about restricting users to 10 listings within each of their Galleries. Each particular woodworker should only be allowed 10 listings to show up within a Gallery, though they can have as many as they want within their own user profile area, and they’d show up in search. The reason for this is to not let any one single woodworker ‘drown out’ all of them in the gallery by putting in 200 items. So how do we handle this, when we’re not currently handling it at all?

Well we could just restrict it in the SQL call we use to pull up the gallery listings. We could say ‘we’re gonna pull 10 random listings of yours and put them on the gallery page.’ It’d be easy, fast, the user would have no choices to make, and the problem would be solved. we’d be systematically solving the problem with no user involvement.

However, do most users want to CHOOSE which items they get to list? I haven’t surveyed them yet, but I’m willing to bet that they do want to. They don’t want a random sampling to show up, they want what they think are their 10 BEST items to show up. How we solve that then becomes about altering the user interface in some way, maybe even adding pages, and features, to let the user CONTROL what they’re showing.

Other times you simply don’t want to give users the option. For instance with text editing. CMS is great, as it allows people to quickly change a name or phone number, but way too often they include stuff that’s not really good to put in people’s hands.

Some people might change the fonts for some paragraphs or be overly fond of making things bold.

They might even use colors, and really go crazy, making what was once a refined user content contributed site, a pretty nasty looking thing, like Myspace.

Sometimes you just don’t want to give people those kind of choices. Other times…maybe you do. If you give people choices you need to both feel like those choices are NECESSARY in that without them you’re taking away a key piece of functionality the user demands, but at the same time you need to judge those demands and even if people want something, like colored text, it doesn’t mean that it’s smart to give it to them. They need to be QUALIFIED to use those features.

So design means making choices. It means determining what features and functionality are not only necessary for your application, but which you have users qualified to use them.

Which brings me to our product line. We’re specifically designing and developing odaycare, oclubhouse, ofitnessclub, and olawfirm with these concepts in mind. We want to provide the specific functionality the different users need, because a membership club needs different things than a daycare or a health club, but at the same time we want to provide those features in a way that is easy to use, and as restrictive as possible. We don’t believe in letting our users do whatever they want just because they want it. We believe in making applications that do things the way you’ll be happy with the outcome. We’ve spent time thinking about these products, and we’ve had numerous experts in their fields help us determine WHAT kinds of features and functionality are necessary, and they all have a ways to go, and we plan on continually updating and improving all of the products with new and cooler features.

We’re just not going to do everything. We’re going to do what’s necessary, and right, and the customers who use the products will thank us for it.

So, it’s no secret that I primarily work from home. Brick and mortar is fun and all, and maybe if we ever get enough people working on our products all in one place we’ll spring for some ultra cool hip office space with a foosball table and free soft drinks, but it ain’t gonna be today.

I do love my office though. I used to have it on the main floor at the back of the house. The room was basically open to the rest of the main area of the house, and it was also a travel path from the living and dining room through to the backyard, or the laundry area, or the first floor bathroom. Essentially my office doubled as a hallway for a third of the rest of the floor, and with a two year old and a four year old, as well as a stay at home wife…things got…a bit busy.

It wasn’t a problem before we had kids to work from home, nor even after we had one, and she was an infant or in child care, but when my wife got pregnant with her third, I knew it was time to refinish the basement and get my office down there or I’d never get a scrap of work done. Maybe another day I’ll post some pictures of the work my father in law and I did on fixing up the basement. Basically it was a post-apocalyptic 1970′s Pizza Hut with mouse nests and skeletons everywhere. I had to gut it completely, tear down the old spackled cheap plywood walls, rotting in some places, the horrific and falling to dust drop ceiling, the red flattened shag rug, the plastic fake textured brick superglued to the plywood which I spent a month’s spare time tearing off, before eventually just ripping the whole wall down….

Anyway it’s all finished now, new drywall, painted recessed ceilings and track lights, new electric for the computers (I have EIGHT OUTLETS for my work station… no more triple chained surge protectors). I moved down immediately when it was complete this spring, before the baby came, and my productivity increased tremendously. I really love it.

There’s one problem though. The cat.

See this is not my cat. This is a cat my wife was given as a gift back when she was in grad school. She didn’t even want a cat then, but her roommate gave it to her, and how can you turn down a cat. I’m highly allergic, and when we moved in together and got married we tried to get rid of the cat. Noone wanted her, so we kept her. Of course both her brother and her parents said at the time they didn’t want a cat, and both within a couple years had bought new cats of their own. Anyway, so now I live with this cat, spend ungodly amounts of money on asthma medication because of her, and so on. Well her catbox is also in the basement, down in the basement bathroom. It’s not literally next to my office, but that doesn’t matter.

New cat food and old cats do not mix. My wife bought her some new dietary cat food to help her because she’s old or something, and dear god almighty…Seriously, when the cat goes now the whole house stinks. You can smell it on the second floor of the house. It’s like a rotten meat stewy smell mixed with vomit. It’s so strong you can taste it. I have an air purifier, and a glad plugin in my office now, but it still doesn’t even come close to helping. It’s like the Maginot Line of odor protection, and the poop smell is already in Paris. I tried immediately jumping up and running back there to spray the entire area….nay… hose the entire area down with Lysol, and it helps, but now it smells like lysol, and faint cat poop still there lingering.

So, I’ve decided to make it an outdoor day. Weather is nice enough, cool fall breeze, sunny sky. Why not. I love my new office the 95% of the time when the cat isn’t ripping one loose back in her catbox, but really if 5% of the time I get to work outside things could be alot worse.

I can’t do coding as well on my laptop. I like to use a full keyboard and multiple screens and a real mouse when i do it, but it’s ok. Same thing with design. It’s a bit harder without my work station. So I’m gonna do some Information Architecture on the new OrcaPack site to bring it up to speed with where the company is now. OrcaPack has morphed so many times at this point, what’s one more iteration.

Originally we started as a product company, making a product similar to what we had been making at the previous company I was at, which went tits up thanks to 9/11 (nearly all the companies being targeted for initial sales were in the Towers). So we tried to mirror that, before we moved on to doing web maintenance and monkey work for various companies. We dabbled for a while as something more akin to retained web services, transitioned a bit to be a little higher end while still doing maintenance, etc. That’s where the website is at currently, not showing that we’ve gone BACK to a product focus.

So we need to rebrand and rearchitect Orcapack to show off the new products and our basic services, and get those off the ground. We already have customers for all the products, we just need more, and we really kinda need the websites to help out in that regard. I mean we are a web company after all.

As I have mentioned our first focuses for products are odaycare.com, oclubhouse.com and ofitnessclub.com, with olawoffice.com in there as well, but that’s on a back burner.

odcaycare.com is going to be a product focused on providing a high quality website to daycares and preschools. We’ve architected and designed these sites to go up fast, and be very high quality. If a new day care were to come to us for a custom site it’d be at least $10,000 for just something basic, and probably more. Why pay that though, if you don’t need to. We’ve created an architecture and features specifically targeted towards these businesses and provide them as  a product they can purchase on a monthly basis. And really, if it gets the daycare just ONE student it pays for itself, and then some. If you’ve ever tried to find a local daycare online you know it can be a real pain, and even if you do find a site, it’s probably not any good. Yet we have a new customer who had filled up BEFORE she even opened her doors thanks to her website. People found it, liked what they saw, and signed up. Her new daycare was profitable ON DAY ONE. That’s a testimony right there.

I’ll talk about oclubhouse.com and ofitnessclub.com on some other day. Right now though I need to get my power cord, and headphones, and settle in for some work on orcapack.com while enjoying a clean cool breeze and a beautiful day.

Thanks cat. This should turn out nice.

Well it’s end of the week again. I’m glad I no longer work weekends. For awhile there I was working 7 days a week and it was just way too brutal on me.

Today was an OrcaPack day. I did alot of background noise stuff. Playing with the ins and outs of some WordPress stuff. Getting this blog set up. Getting my twitter feed set up http://twitter.com/sayfsharif if you’re interested…

Of course the fun part of the day was at 4 realizing that I couldn’t dial anyone on my iPhone. Tried calling my wife, nada. Tryed calling my business partner Tim, nada. Finally had to reboot the phone and then it worked fine.

I blame AT&T. The phone is great but AT&T is just godawful. Used to be fine for me then six months ago (or so) we had a storm in the spring time and a super cell came through. Ever since that storm came through my reception has been crap. Before that storm I had full bars every day everywhere in the house. AFter the storm fora  few days service was spotty, on and off, and no 3G at all. It got ‘better’ but these days that means that it’ll be at full bars and then it’ll be at no service completely and I’ll drop a call.

Or I’ll have full bars and the call will drop, and i’ll still have full bars, and I can’t get any kind of connection to call the person back for five minutes. Then I’ll have 3 bars.

Or I’ll sit at 1 measly bar all day long and the connection will be tenuous at best, anywhere in the house from the 2nd floor to the basement.

I don’t care what they say, I bet lightning struck the nearest cell tower to me in spring and since then it’s been crap. They’d never admit that though. Ah well.

OH and also my phone just won’t ring, and things will go to voice mail. I’ll make a call and then I’ll get the voicemail sound, and 3-4 voicemails from the past 5 hours that the phone has been 1 foot from me the whole time will ding in. Never rang once.

I tell people at AT&T this and they say the usual “are you a moron” questions like “did you have it on vibrate?” “Was the phone on?” “Were you in a tunnel?”

Useless.

Anyway. Now that I have this stuff up i can talk every day about my own stuff like this but also stuff like OrcaPack or our new product to provide great websites for daycare centers and preschools odaycare. Or our other products olawoffice, oclubhouse, and ofitnessclub as well as our custom design and development work, and future products, and any current clients that deserve a shoutout like CustomMade which we just launched and are helping move towards their next product version.

For now though i’m gonna go get my shorts on and take a walk to help prepare myself for Grouse Camp later this month, and then shower and relax in house with the family once they get home. We were gonna go to a high school football game tonight, but nobody wants to go out in the cold or rain, so instead we’ll put the kids to bed and I”ll probably end up playing World of Warcraft when wife and baby conk out at 9pm.

Toodles