has_many :thoughts: Tag Business

Introduction to the Internet and eCommerce

Colin A. Bartlett — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:13:00 -0400

Each year I volunteer a few hours of my time to speak to a group of individuals interested in starting their own business as part of the Reading SCORE program. It’s always great to see new entrepreneurs and to relay whatever little nuggets of experience I might have gained during my trials and tribulations starting a company (or two).

I speak for a short time about the basics of building a website for your start-up business and then I answer questions. I’ve been using the same presentation now for ages. (I don’t even recall if I created it or if it was given to me.) But it was in need a refresh.

So I’ve drafted a whole new version which is more my style – less boring bullets and more basic points and pictures to help trigger me to recall things and prompt questions.

For those that attended, you can download the slides here.

The trouble with services, part 2

Colin A. Bartlett — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:45:00 -0500

In our last installment, during a Basecamp outage, I concluded that occasional service interruptions didn’t dissuade me from using hosted services. I’d rather have someone else running around working to fix the problem then me.

In today’s installment all of Amazon web services are in-operational.

That means all of Web 2.5, as Justin calls it, is down for the count. I first noticed this on WIRE. After I got over the initial panic of not being able to see a picture of Randy’s Cherios cereal bar, I realized Basecamp, Twitter, and a ton more all depend on Amazon.

This brings us back to the debate over hosted services. And I think there’s one component I missed last time: the number cogs in a wheel. It seems like having services that depend on services that depend on services can bring in additional complexity. So now, not only does using Basecamp require all their servers to be running but it also requires the Amazon servers to be running.

We have debated using Amazon S3 and EC2 here on a few projects recently. Andy asked me straight up not two weeks ago how much I trusted Amazon for reliability. I replied: “100%. They’re Amazon.” I suppose I should have remembered that being a big ass corporation doesn’t make them exempt from downtime. And if one truly needs 100% uptime, one needs to use multiple services with redundant backups. That’s what we all thought we were getting with Amazon web services. I guess not.

The trouble with services

Colin A. Bartlett — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:18:00 -0500

I’ve been evaluating services from 37signals recently including Basecamp and Highrise. We’ve been long overdue for an upgrade to our internal job and contact management systems and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try what many people say are some great apps.

So far, I’ve been generally happy. I still have hurdles to get over in my mind such as having to pay each and every month, not having my data under my own control, and not being able to instantly add whatever feature we want. But in general, I’ve been pleased.

But at this moment, I can’t seem to get to any 37signals product. Perhaps they’re having some kind of technical trouble. I’ve tried navigating to their services from several points on the interwebs and: nothing.

And so, I’m confronted by the other reality of hosted services: Outages are out of my control. Which, of course, has both benefits and disadvantages.

Benefit: I’m not running around like mad trying to get Basecamp up and running right now.
Disadvantage: I’m powerless to do anything.

Even if I was using a home-built, in-house app, somewhere down the line someone else is still responsible. For the datacenter, for the bandwidth, for the hardware, etc. And so I think that the benefit of not being the one up shits creek without a paddle outweighs the disadvantage of having to sit on my thumbs right now.

But, it’s still frustrating as hell.

Ads for open source projects on Google?

Colin A. Bartlett — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 07:19:00 -0500

I was shocked the other day to see sponsored Ad Words ads on Google under the keyword “email ruby” that seemed to be advertising a project on RubyForge:

I wonder if someone at the RubyMail project is paying to place these ads on Google? If so, I wonder why? Or perhaps Google gives these out for free some how? Do other open source projects have ads on Google?

Since the RubyMail project has one developer and one file last posted in April 2004, it seems odd that anyone would be paying for ads for such an inactive project.

Choice of domain name

Colin A. Bartlett — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 13:24:00 -0500

I often counsel clients who are very new to the web on how to choose an appropriate domain name for their web site or application.

Perhaps someone should have counseled this Philadelphia based Realtor, because I’m sure I’m not the only one who chuckled at his choice of domain name:

Kinetic Spine and Tire Centre

Colin A. Bartlett — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:05:00 -0500

Steve came up with “Kinetic Spine and Tire Centre” many months ago as a test account on a chiropractic-related website we did. It always give me a chuckle to think of a chiropractor that also did auto repair.

I very often click on the “who made this site” link at the bottom of sites while I browse. I recently came across a site designed by a firm whose “our services” page looked like this:

I’m not sure that I’d ever get a spinal adjustment at a place that worked on tires and I don’t know if I’d ever get a website made by a company that lists real estate investment and property management above web design on their site.

44 Questions

Colin A. Bartlett — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:40:00 -0500

My Dad asked me to help him buy a new (Windows) computer for work today and I agreed to walk him through it on the phone. “Just get the best you can afford.” is usually my mantra to folks who ask for help speccing a PC.

Little did I know the gauntlet that lay before us.

Dell’s website demanded we choose options for each one of 44 different questions as a part of “building” a new laptop.

The process was truly laughable. While there’s something to be said for having a variety of options to get just what you want, this was just ridiculous. It’s no wonder the Mac is considered the non-technologists computer (and hell, now it’s the computer of geeks too)—Apple’s website has just 13 simple options all on one screen.

Most of the “options” were just upsells for all manner of add-ons from PDF writing capability (free with OS X, or an open source download but that’s another story…) all the way to “Would you like Dell to plant a tree for you when you buy this computer?” ($4).

Many of the options were nonsensical and difficult choices even for a seasoned veteran like myself. Here’s one of my favorite selections:

When will people learn that simple is often better? I’m reminded of the old “less software” approach of a well known company…

Is UI really that hard?

Colin A. Bartlett — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 12:37:00 -0500

Sometimes the horrendous user interfaces I come across on the web really astound me. I stumbled across this on an eCommerce site:

Who came up with this? And what were they on? How much simpler would it be if they just used what practically every other eCommerce site uses:

 0-12 $13.00
13-24 $2.80
...etc.

I took this screen shot from a 22 page PDF manual on how to use this particular website. Perhaps if the user interface was more carefully crafted, one wouldn’t need a manual on how to use the site.