Big Ahha

When it comes to designing, building, and writing for a website, findability is often an afterthought to things like search engine optimization and usability. Instead, findability should be a core concern throughout every step of the website development process.

A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message.

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Ok so I’m not a big fan of baseball. It’s only logical then that I am really not a big fan of baseball movies. Add commercials to a baseball movie and I am calling my dentist to see if he has an opening because I would rather be spending my time in his chair than on the couch watching this errrr stuff. But when the flu has you down its amazing what you will sit through and not even try to lift the remote.

I watched a baseball movie with commercials on TV last night and I am glad I did. So glad in fact that I started watching it a second time when it was replayed immediately following the first showing. It’s not that I was overly impressed with the movie, its actors, the music or the cinematography. It was the simple underlying message that was the foundation for the story. Follow your dreams.

The movie was The Rookie with Dennis Quaid. It’s the true story of Jim Morris.

I’m not going to tell you about the movie because I am over the flu today and you already know how I feel about baseball movies.

What I do want to talk about though are the Ahha moments we have in life and how you must follow your dreams. Sometimes Ahha moments are fleeting thoughts like a tiny spark that never really had a chance to become a true flame. Other times they are lingering like a candle or a match fighting to stay lit. Read the rest of this entry

Choosing the right name for a new product, service, or company can be very difficult, frustrating, and time consuming. Choose the right name and people may immediately be interested and identify with what you are offering. Choose the wrong name and your customers may not ever find you, or if they do, they might not even give your product or service a chance.
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I often use this phrase when working with clients. I use it when talking about Big Ahha and what type of company we try to be everyday. I use it to talk about the way they should think about their site visitors, their customers, the business partners they work with and most importantly their employees.

I didn’t make up the “Don’t be evil” phrase. Many people know this as the motto espoused by the leaders at Google. But not many know where it came from. Here is an excerpt from the Don’t be evil - Wikipedia page. Read the rest of this entry

For some time now I have been following TED.

No not this guy

though I am a huge fan of TR and will write about that another time.

Today I am talking about TED - which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It is an annual event held in California. On their site you will find fascinating videos of varying topics.

Whether you agree with the position being presented or not there is something that can be learned in each one if you take the time to experience these great speakers.

Below is one of my favorites that I go back to from time to time. It is Sir Ken Robinson talking about how creativity is killed by schools and culture. He is a great speaker and quite amusing. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

In a pretty surprising move, Microsoft announced that they have changed the way that the next version of Internet Explorer will handle web standards. When news of the next browser version first appeared, Microsoft announced that IE8 would behave like IE7 unless specifically requested. This would have meant that any web designer or developer wanting to take advantage of any advanced standards support in IE would have to add a meta tag to their pages that would define which version of the IE rendering engine should be used. Not surprisingly, this caused quite an uproar in the web standards community. Whether Microsoft truly responded to public criticism or not, this is a positive change.

On the IE Blog, Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Internet Explorer for Microsoft, says:

interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

Long term, we believe this is the right thing for the web. Shorter term, leading up not just to IE8’s release but broader IE8 adoption, this choice creates a clear call to action to site developers to make sure their web content works well in IE.

I only hope that Microsoft maintains their newfound focus on standards and, as Eric Meyer stated:

when the public beta hits, there will [not] be [so many] incompatibility problems that pushback from other constituencies forces a change back to the original behavior.

If you are a fan of new and interesting web design check out commandshift3.com. The site bills itself as

like Hot or Not except instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot websites.

It may not have quite the same appeal as it’s predecessor, but it is quite addicting.

From the about us page…

You are presented with the screenshots of two websites side by side. If you click the screenshot of the site you think looks best, the page reloads and you start all over again. It never ends.

Thirty minutes later that seems to be the truth.

I was reminded yesterday of something I had tucked away in my mind from my days as a Sales Executive for a financial services company.

A friend of mine in the web services industry told me a story of how he was driving with his family in an unfamiliar area. As things can and do go wrong when we least expect them, the fuel light was and had been on indicating he was running on fumes without a whole lot of development in sight. He finally came across someone to ask and found a gas station just before running out of gas. As you can well imagine it was not a very pleasant time for my friend. He probably was feeling all sorts of emotions but definitely he was feeling some fear and thus pain. Read the rest of this entry

We are back in the office having returned from FOWA Miami 08 and Bar Camp Miami.

We are working on a new project that came out of the 5 hour drive from Miami to Jacksonville. We are going to keep it under our hats until we have it more fleshed out. Sorry for the tease.

Thursday morning we took a drive to South Beach since Bar Camp wasn’t starting until 3PM.

We had breakfast on Lincoln St. and then walked to the beach.

While there the young woman in the photo above came up and asked if I would take her picture. I said sure and she asked if I would take another, and another, and another and one more. We basically did a 360 photo shoot of her. I hope they turned out the way she wanted but it was kind of comical at the time.

We headed back over the water to the hotel and decided to grab lunch before heading to Bar Camp. Driving up Biscayne Blvd. we saw Latin Cafe 2000.

I’m glad we did because the food was awesome! So awesome that in the next 36 hours we ate there three times.

We had Cuban Sandwiches, Vaca Frita, the Latin 2000 sandwich, the Miami Sandwich and the best Cuban Coffee I’ve ever tasted.

Friday we left Miami at 6:30p and drove back home.

Over all we were pleased with FOWA Miami 08 and Bar Camp Miami. It was definitely different then what we expected but none the less a good experience.