Just re-read this article on SVN and this line below just jumped out and hit me, because I just did the exact same thing this week. This company always make me think about my workflow. Time to acquire a copy of rework.
Photoshop is repeating yourself. Ok, so you’ve spent 3 days on a mockup in Photoshop. Now what? Now I have to make it all over again in HTML/CSS. Wasted time. Just build it in HTML/CSS and spend that extra time iterating, not rebuilding. If you’re not fast enough in HTML/CSS, then spend the time learning how to create in HTML/CSS faster. It’s time well spent.
via Why we skip Photoshop – (37signals).
I recently visited a wedding photographer’s website here in Montreal that had a nice looking site. You could tell time was spent into the design and the content of the site. Plainly, money was spent to get this site off the ground.
The only problem I saw with the site (I’ve noticed on other sites of it’s kind as well) was the gigantic Google Adsense banner staring me in the face. You see putting those Google Ads on your ‘Company’ website shows your visitors two things.
First it kills the professionalism of your website by telling me that you aren’t making enough money to pay the $10 a month to host your website and secondly you have just provided me anywhere from 4 to 16 direct links to your competitors from every page of your site.
Imagine going to Starbucks and as you are staring at the menu a man from Dunkin’ Donuts is handing you a business card for a free coffee at his place. Doesn’t look good.
So the $15 a month in Google Adsense you are making could possibly be ruining the experience of your website for your potential clients and also could very well be sending them to shop down the street.
Remove them now, it’s never too late.
…I’ve learned that the phrase ‘if you build it, they will come‘ does not apply to the internet anymore.
This may have been true 10 years ago, but these days the web is getting far too saturated with random stuff. Out of all the sites I’ve built, the site that has received the most traffic is Emilie’s Don’t Yawn Game which is now pushing over 600,000 views. The interesting stat is that the game has been around for close to 6 years and 90% of those visits came in the first year.
The two new phrases I propose:
If you build it, accept the fact that you might be the only one using it.
If you build it, learn how to market it properly.
And that last phrase is really what I’ve learned after 10 years. You can build the coolest site/app/thing these days and if the general public (not just your facebook friends) can’t find it, don’t know about it or worse don’t like it. It’s time to stop and move along. I recently read a book that could have save me a lot of time and the internet a lot of random websites. It’s called The Dip by Seth Godin. A short book that shows you when to quit and when to keep going. I recommend this book if you find yourself starting a lot of projects that nobody knows about. It might just change the way you look at your career.
I’m excited to see where the web is going and where it takes my career. It’s been a roller coaster ride and I’m holding on tight for the next couple loops ahead.
