The FuzzyBlog!
Marketing 101. Consulting 101. PHP Consulting. Random geeky stuff. I Blog Therefore I Am.

Monday, June 10, 2002

Marketing 101: Your Very First Website in 5 Steps This article will seem remedial to some of my readers.  It's assumes that you are a small business that is either new to the web or just plain new and walks you through the step by step process of developing a website.  I wrote this for someone who is just getting started as a small business website and, since I am handling their hosting, I didn't cover very much about hosting.  I did cover lots of other basics including how to do a free U.S. trademark search. ==> Read Story <== 9:33:11 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Any Bloggers Going to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention? Given my rather frequent references to open source, no one is probably surprised that I am attending the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in July (San Diego).  And, yes, I actually paid for it today so it's definite.  Any other bloggers going?  Leave comments on this item if you are and we can get together if anyone's interested.   7:40:49 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Very, Very Practical Tips for the Busy Person : Part 2 Based on an enthusiastic response from Sooz, I chose to write Part 2 and, soon, Part 3 (and perhaps a Part 4) of this series of articles. Background Material: I don't know about you but I am busy.  Very busy.  And, if you don't want to make mistakes when you are busy, you need help.  Over the past many years, I have found that these tips really help me quite a bit.  Listed below are 10 tips for busy people.  You'll laugh and some are perhaps a bit silly but I use most of them every single day.  These are general tips.  I moved computer specific tips to Part 3 since not everyone want's to be all that geeky (they aren't hard just a wee bit more technical). ==> Read Story <== 6:58:51 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Yo!  Crucial -- ASP = Active Server Pages! I've been buying memory from www.crucial.com as long as I can remember them existing (96??? 97???  Back to when they just had a phone number???  A long time.).  They usually have a great web site but today it failed for me on two counts.  One was understandable and one was just plain stupid.  Here were the problems: They didn't list my computer.  The great thing about Crucial is you don't have to know a DIMM from a SIMM.  You tell them your computer manufacturer, category and model and they look it up.  It's never been wrong for me -- and I've bought a lot of RAM.  Perhaps Compaq didn't make very many Compaq Deskpro EXMs or maybe Crucial didn't like their color.  Sigh.  They broke my expectations with a promise to me.  And they did it in a way that indicates that they are kind of clue free.  When I couldn't find my computer, I looked a bit more closely at the home page and saw this: I figured great!  It may be 5:17 am in the U.S. but this is a big company, they sell globally, I'm online via IM to Norway.  I'll just click.  And I got this: BUZZ!!!! Do not pass go.  Do not collect $200.  Do not get that sale.  Your customer just decided to go somewhere else.  Seriously, here's what went through my head. Don't they know how to program ASP scripts to check if the experts are available?  Before giving me that option?  And then change the text to something like this: "We're sorry, our experts are currently busy.  Would you like us to email you when an expert is available to answer your memory questions?" If a customer needs to use an online expert, it's probably about 90% certain that they do it after the normal site interaction method fails.  In this case you are already doing poorly with customer.  So don't you want to get it perfect?  Not just right but perfect.  I did what the rest of us do: www.google.com and started looking for another option.  Will I ever come back and try again?  Not sure.  I'll now have found another vendor since I need to buy RAM and, if they are good, will I try again?  It really depends on whether or not the new vendor works out.  And if you run a web site and you don't think that customer affiliations can be this tenuous now adays, I disagree.  Everything I know about consumer psychology tells me this is true.  When we have a successful vendor, we do tend to be loyal (me and PC Connection) -- until they fail us in a way that kills their usefulness to us.  For me, what made Crucial wonderful, was that I didn't need to know the difference between DIMMs and SIMMs.  When that failed today since they didn't even list my machine (come on ... Compaq is #1 or #2 every single year -- what's going on).  Sure I recently had a problem with PC Connection but that problem was just annoying but didn't kill their usefulness to me.  They're still a great company -- and, to me -- an even better one than I knew. Just as a closing note, I added a new category, Web Critic, so all these types of web site related commentary can be accessed as one.  http://scott.blogs.at/categories/webCritic/.  Want to subscribe to just these items then use this RSS url: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/categories/webcritic/rss.xml 5:48:03 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Why You Have to Love Bloggers... This isn't the first time that I've seen this type of thing but it is the first time that I've had the energy to comment on it.well.  I came down to my PC this morning to find the normal IM message "User X has sent you a message.  Would you like to accept it?".  I clicked Yes as almost every person I know does.  Here's what was waiting for me: (name altered in case he doesn't want to have his AIM handle given out): A XXX: About thatt company that lost their Web site due to the ISP's stupidity... A XXX: Have they tried Alexa's Wayback Machine? A XXX: http://web.archive.org/ A XXX: If the site's been around any time at all, the Wayback probably has all of it archived. A XXX: I use the archive so often in doing research (it's great for reading pages that have gone 404) that I've created some bookmarklets that show the archives for the page you are viewing. A XXX: http://kalsey.com/rant/archives/i/000073.stm How can you not love bloggers?  Here is someone who saw a dilemma, and not even mine, and just wanted to share it.  Bravo!  Thank you!  When I wrote the now late, lamented (yes it's been cut) Chapter 9 for Essential Blogging, I included this text: Newcomers to the blogging world are often very, very surprised—it's not just a world, it's a community in the truest sense of the word.  It's warm, inviting and friendly, just like an old-fashioned real world community.  Community is a word that is tossed around so often that I thought it had lost all meaning -- and my career includes a stint running portal technology for a set of 60+ internet sites with over 300,000 users in total.  In my blogging experience, what I have found online is a level of community that hasn’t been seen since the late 1980s before the Internet became a piece of everyday life.  A good analogy for the blogging community is the following: Blogging feels like a small rural town.  The roads may not always be paved, sometimes the electricity goes on and off but the people are friendly and everyone is happy to help you. When you start blogging, you won't find the fit and finish of a commercial product like Microsoft Word (the road isn't paved), the technical support is, well, interesting (the electricity goes on and off) but what you will find is worth the journey.  If you need help with your blog or something that you are writing, post it to your blog and you’ll probably be surprised at the level of help you are offered.  Detailed examples are here: http://www.fuzzygroup.com/go/?blogCommunityExamples Even though this text won't be in the print book any longer, folks like Mr. Kalsey prove this every single day.  Thanks again. PS -- I did try this and it got only a few pages of hers as did the Google cache.  But www.archive.org is a huge resource.  Want to see the earliest commercial website I made that the Wayback machine has on file?  Here.  And, if my somewhat fuzzy memory serves me correctly, here is the first commercial site I made for $$$.  How times have changed. 5:04:21 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This