"What if" can be anything. What if an earthquake strikes the Texas panhandle? What if a user forgets his password, then forgets what email he used at registration, then forgets his own name? What then?

The problem with what if is that it kills progress. What if is a laundry list of excuses for not pressing on and making things happen. What if is the secret nuke for people who like to sit and be crusty.

"What when" plans for the inevitable. What when a user forgets a password? What when I lock my keys inside the car. These things are going to occur, so go ahead and plan for them.

Despite all the gloom and doom surrounding the economy, I'm optimistic about our l'il business.

We provide a valuable service. We're good at what we do and we work hard at doing it. Who knows? It might be that small businesses will turn more to the web in order to cut costs and get efficient. When they do, we'll be here to help them get things done right.

It's easy to think you're wrong, or worse, nuts when everyone believes different. Here's a guy who called foul on the bull market years in advance.

Did you hear the other "experts" literally laughing at him? One said "don't be so pessimistic." Bookmark that video for the next time your killer idea gets stomped.

Source

This article got me thinking more about pricing.

I wonder what would happen if we asked our client to pick one of these three choices for their project?

Fast + Good

Good + Cheap

Fast + Cheap

Of course, everyone wants all three. We even want all three for our clients. I suppose the trick is in defining fast, good, and cheap. Maybe by redefining those terms, we can easily fit all three into a project.

Effort is the one thing that we have control over. We can't control the economy, clients, vendors, or the price of gas.

What would things look like if I gave just 10% more effort?

Inspiration here.

World's first satellite navigation.

"The Brokers with Hands on their Faces Blog" - Title says it all.

I'm putting this shirt on my Christmas list.

The power of massive amounts of data.

Since we started we've been running behind schedule. This was mostly because of poor project management though at some points we have had an overwhelming volume of work.

However, we've now wrapped up most of our big critical projects. We have a few sites that need some polish before launch, a perpetual project, and a few odds and ends maintenance things we're doing. There are a couple of possible new sites "contracts" on the table. So I predict a slight downturn in volume of billable work hours coming.

Now, the first thing we need to do is go get some new clients. But, that isn't the point of this post.

Perpetual learning is critical to those who wants to be the best at what they do. During a business downturn, learning should be on overdrive.

Colby is taking some time to improve a Google Calendars plugin for Ruby on Rails that we use on several of our sites. He's learning more about plugin architecture and working with third party APIs.

Sunday, I read a small book on RESTful application development with Ruby on Rails. I'm practicing what I learned in the book by writing a small web application using what I learned. Perhaps said application will become a future revenue stream. Or, it might just be a fun pet project for learning.

Of course, it is important to take time to learn even when you're busy. My point is that you should be doubly proactive when there is less work.

(Title comes from habit 7 in Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

1. Search engines don't release the details of their ranking algorithms to the public.

2. Search engine rankings can be gamed but not for long.

3. If you're not in the top 10, you're invisible for that particular search term.

4. If your website throws errors (404, etc.) when search spiders crawl it, those spiders will not index problem pages. (We use error notification to let us know when our sites throw errors. You should too.)

5. If you change the address of a webpage, use a redirect (301) to indicate the new address. Otherwise, search engines won't know where the page went, and your site might produce errors the next time it gets crawled.

6. Build a sitemap. It's easy, and it helps search engines understand your site.

7. Use Google Webmaster tools to get a better idea of what search engines are seeing when they look at your site. It's also easy and free.

8. Keeping #1 in mind, the two items that most heavily influence search results are content relevance and external links. Search engines survive by providing their customers with the best results possible. They do this by knowing which sites offer the most relevant content for specific searches. They also let other websites "vote" by linking to other websites.

9. Remember #2. Adding random links to your site in exchange for other sites linking to you does not necessarily help your rank. Links also have to be relevant. For example, if a taxidermy site were to link to our site, it wouldn't necessarily affect our page rank. What do taxidermists know about web development?

10. Metatags don't help or hinder search ranking. Think about it. What do metatags add that helps with content relevancy? Metatags are just a way for people to try to game the system which, as we've already established, doesn't work.

11. Google currently owns 62% market share for search. Optimize for Google.

12. After you purchase a domain name, you will receive junk mail offering to submit your domain to search engines for $X per month. Said junk mail is a scam. Tear it up and throw it away.

... have a few blow away customers that think we're great, not a ton of satisfied customers that think we're mediocre. 

Lori and I love to split a steak from Texas Roadhouse. Unfortunately we can't afford to do so very often, but that's another gripe.

Tonight I wanted to call ahead to reserve a table so I went to the Texas Roadhouse website to find the number to call.

Surprisingly, I was hit with two web design blunders.

1. Splash page

I don't know how the splash page ever made it mainstream. It serves no purpose besides giving the user one more step to go through to get to what they really want. Worst about Texas Roadhouse's splash screen was the fact that it took time to load, and once it did load, all it did was show you a neon logo with a bug zapper sound (as if bug zapping is what I want to think of when I go to your restaraunt).

2. Automatic Audio

Never ever hit your site visitors with automatic audio. Never. When you put audio that automatically starts playing on your website you are making the erroneous assumption that the visitor does not have his speakers turned up too loud, is not already playing music, is not at work, or does not have a sleeping baby in the next room. Besides being just plain annoying to most everyone, you're really going to turn off any visitor that fits any of the above scenarios. So just don't do it, mkay?

PS: The steak was good, and so was the service.