A few weeks ago, a client Web site disappeared. It happens: in the past, other clients have occasionally lost their sites, for reasons ranging from hosting hard disk failures to various human errors. (In this client’s case, they hadn’t renewed the domain name, so the site was still there, but the URL pointing to...
Managing Web Content: Tech skills needed, but also verbal, written and organizational skills
I’m the so-called “Webmaster” for a couple of large nonprofit organizations, which has me either managing the content of the site or coordinating with other content managers. It turns out that being a Web Content Manager requires a pretty diverse set of skills. Tech Knowledge: Sure, a pretty good knowledge of HTML and CSS...
Spam + Too Many Tools = Problems
Okay, we all know that junk email is a problem. But today, within the space of about 15 minutes, three things happened, and they illustrate a problem… A Facebook friend has apparently picked up Koobface, the Facebook virus whose least-troublesome symptom is spamming all your friends with posts (which link to the virus file...
Just Make It Look Pretty
I’ve had a few projects recently where an existing site need a lot of help in a lot of areas: poorly organized, ineffective design, hardware or programming problems, inconsistent integration of various services, etc. Problem is, design is visual, and clients get that. So they know they want a new design. The other things...
Hiring Freelancers — What's Most Important?
I’ll be brief here, but here’s the setup: this past fall I hired a bunch of freelancers for various things, which means they had various skill sets, and I paid them according to the market value for the services they provided. I got mixed results — some excellent, some really bad, and some mixed...
Documentation: No Big Deal… Until It Becomes a Big Deal
A few weeks ago, I was working with two separate clients to track down their various passwords and access notes. Took a long time… Meantime, a friend of mine started a new job where the outgoing guy didn’t leave any documentation, so he was trying to figure out procedures, and in a few cases...
Don't Take Our Word For It — Ask Google
Just saw a print ad with the bold header “Search this” followed by a generic search bar and keywords for the product. In other words, the trusty reviewer’s quote is being replaced by Google. This is a recent trend — I first read about its prominence in Asian advertising about a year ago. However,...
Free Trial — Ends Today (or does it?)
From the Incompatible Marketing Rules department: a) generate buyer excitement and b) tell the truth. Case in point: a few weeks ago, I signed up for a MagicJack free trial. On their (very aggressive) web site, it listed that the free trial was about to end — in fact, I noted that I had...
Lookin' Old
When do you need to redesign your Web site? If it’s doing it’s job — that is, if it is easy to use and the right information and services are accessible and provide value to you and your customers, you should be fine, right? Maybe. Some Web sites just look dated. They might function...
TOS Violation = Too Bad For You
Earlier this morning, my Web sites went black. No Web site, no email, no back-end access. Turns out, my hosting provider claims I violated their terms of service. Rather than contacting me to resolve the issue, they yanked the account without warning. All my sites disappeared in one fell swoop. What did I do...