Building a Better Web - One Site at a Time.
Most articles in this category address general Web and Internet issues. Some of them are rants and ramblings that may have less to do with the Web and the Internet and more to do with life lessons and business lessons.
I’ve been working with a number of clients recently on Web-site CTAs (Calls To Action).
In an effort to reduce ambiguity and confusion and to suggest a common vocabulary for planning and talking about CTA implementations, here are my working definitions of the components that comprise a Call To Action.
I’m kidding with this title, but it’s no joke. This does appear to be the strategy many follow to get Twitter followers. Call me curmudgeonly. But please explain it to me like I’m a six year-old: How does one follow 1,000 people on Twitter (not to mention 99,953)?
We all know that guy, the guy who tweets 48 times a day and appears never to have had an unexpressed thought. The guy who makes you think, “I’m sorry, but you must be mistaking me for someone who cares.” It’s easy to let the fear of becoming that guy discourage us from blogging and posting to social networks. Don’t. You’re probably not that guy. And if you start becoming that guy, people who care about you will let you know.
Social networking is a little like baseball. Neither is rocket surgery, but both have their complexities and nuances. If you’ve decided to finally take the plunge, to give social networking the old college try, I say go for it. But have patience. Be prepared to tread water for a while. Every social network has its own peculiarities that take some time to comprehend.
Today I tried to contact someone a trusted friend referred me to. My friend had given me the link to the fellow’s About.me page. A page on which I could find no telephone number. No email address. (Forget about a snail-mail address.) When I clicked his About.me page’s Email Me button, I was given the opportunity to send him a message — but only if I either joined About.me or authorized About.me to access my Facebook or Twitter accounts. Is it just me, or is anyone else annoyed by this kind of crapola?
Here’s a short video demonstrating just one way Firebug can help in Web design. I really don’t remember what I did before Firebug.
(Hat tip to compadre Mickey Mellen who inadvertently shamed me into upgrading to Snagit 11, which I used with glee to produce and upload this screencast.)
If you’ve got your own screencasts showcasing ways you use Firebug, please feel free to post them as video responses on my YouTube channel.
In yet another attempt to discover Twitter’s value, I started following more people yesterday. Then I spent time lurking and trolling, reading and scrolling. My dominant impression: there’s a whole lot of huckstering going on.
If you’re scratching your head over Vine and Instagram video, Mitch Joel offers an interesting perspective in last week’s Short(er) Form Video blog article on Six Pixels of Separation. Money quote: Who knows if Vine or Instagram will win this short-form social sharing video war? We just need to be asking better questions. For every […]
In the spring of my senior year at Harvard, I was awarded the contract to make passport photos for any of my fellow Quincy House residents who needed them. By "awarded the contract" I mean that the assistant to the House Master was a friend of mine who knew I knew my way around a darkroom (that may have come out wrong…), and so she gave the project to me. This is the story of a brief encounter with one of my customers — and what it still means to me 40 years later.
Scanning my newsfeeds tonight and finding way too many salesey, hypey headlines linking to boringly bland blog posts, I was overcome by a sudden and strong visceral dislike for the formulaic, overly-clever blog titles that are everywhere on the Web these days and which, admittedly, until tonight, I have been all too inclined to emulate (and recommend to others).
It’s got to stop. And stopping has to start with me.
