I just recently took the “Inbound Marketing University” training course and exam. I guess I should smile… because I can now say that I am an “Inbound Marketing Certified Professional,” which is cool for for the 1% of people in the world who actually know what that means. Hehe. Ok, so I’m being silly. It’s actually pretty cool. And in case you’re not exactly sure … Read more
For those of you who’ve seen it, it’s almost not even worth mentioning that The Godfather is one of the best movies ever made. Yes, it’s a gangster movie. Yes, it’s full of blood, killing, sin and sorrow. And yes, it’s full of astounding business lessons as well. There are far more references to business than I can mention here, but here are the top … Read more
Here’s an annoying little bug: when using most programs on a Mac, if you close (CMD+W) or quit the program (CMD+Q), you’ll get a message asking “Do you want to save the changes you made in (such and such application)?“ You then have three options: Don’t Save Cancel Save And if you’re like me, you’re moving so fast that it’s annoying to have to find … Read more
So there’s an incredibly annoying error message that pops up when you try to connect iCal to a CalDAV account. It goes like this: iCal can’t verify the identity of the server “example.com”. The certificate for this server was signed by an unknown certifying authority. You might be connecting to a server that is pretending to to be “example.com” which could put your confidential information … Read more
Here’s a pretty cool video I found that talks about the Square card reader. (I’ve got one of these, by the way, and it’s totally awesome). Here, the Wall Street Journal interviews Jack Dorsey, (also the co-founder of Twitter). It’s kind of funny to me—both Twitter and Square are incredibly simple ideas. Actually, two of the simplest ideas anyone’s come up with in a long … Read more
Photography It’s shocking to me how hard it is to get merchants to actually spend money on photography, when the only thing that will allow a potential customer to trust you enough to purchase a product sight unseen is a picture! Think about it: would a customer buy something off your website without a photo of the product? Nope. Spend the money. Get some photos … Read more
I’ve found the recent commentary on Google’s decision to shut down Google Wave rather entertaining, and sometimes annoying. For several reasons. Here are a few: I wasn’t impressed with Wave in the first place. I watched the big overblown video announcement at Google I/O, and I was excited at the time, but amidst all the hype and chatter about how “exciting” it was, I … Read more
I like studying. I like listening to audiobooks, reading books and watching interviews. I especially like getting the input of a select few brilliant minds in the tech world who actually make sense to me. There are very few “dot com” companies that make sense—and I think the term “dot com” is thrown around carelessly as an excuse for poor business practices. (And that’s coming … Read more
It’s been just over a full year since I took my web design company full-time. As I was driving home from a customer’s office tonight, I had a few thoughts about past year and think about the things I’ve learned. Here’s a short list of a few particular ideas I think are worth sharing. If you’re going to college, get your degree in whatever you … Read more
Recently I’ve really been trying to view websites through the eyes of users, and not as a web designer. As much as possible, I always try to ask myself “would users find this helpful?” Sometimes I see trends that are very helpful to users (example: phone numbers front and center on the homepage) and sometimes I notice things that were probably designed to help users … Read more