Local Couple Arrested on Human Smuggling Charges

It’s a good thing that A- and I are good at our chosen careers because we would make terrible,terrible agents or talent managers.

A woman approached us at the garden show this weekend and asked to take our picture for something. We immediately said yes and asked for details afterward. And even though we did ask for details,neither of us is still sure what it was for. We’re either going to be in the Insider (whatever that is),the Weekend section of the paper,or The City Newspaper. We’re not sure which.

I half expect to see our smiling faces gracing an article under a phony headline like the one above.

Visual Studio 2005 Professional

I bit the bullet and bought Visual Studio 2005 Professional. It came today. Now that ’ve literally made the investment in it,hopefully I’ll find the time to sit down and get some .NET experience.

Content is King ( still)

Note: This is a rough,rough draft written over two or three days at well past midnight. The topic is something that comes up quite a bit and that I have a lot to say about. This is an explosion of some of those things. It’s somewhat (dis)organized in some places. In the interest of time (and mostly so I can move on to something else),I’m publishing this as is. There are some gems in here if you have the time. If not,the takeaway is right in the title. You don’t need to read any further than that. On with the show…

This is something I’ve talked about in the past,both here and in person to clients. It was a topic in Sitepoint’s March Newsletter and the basis for some recent converstions I’ve had as well.

Content is king!

I think for people with little knowledge of the Internet outside of recreational use,comprehension of this concept comes in stages or unfortunately,not at all.

1. Let’s assume you have a business. I don’t care if you work for yourself selling homemade pot holders or if you’re the CEO of a 500 employee manufacturing company. At some point somebody has probably told you that you need a web site and that this web site would answer all your (business-related) prayers. At this stage,that’s not only believable but you can’t wait to get that site online and watch the $$$ come rolling in.
2. The site is online,you put your feet up on your desk,and…nothing happens. The big letdown. No bags,piles,or stacks of money. You think you know firsthand why the tech bubble burst and the e-Toys stock you bought to send Johnny to college now won’t even pay for a week of his day care. I digress.
3. Your web site really let you down. But you have money and time invested in it so you’re not entirely ready to give up. Good news! You get an email one day claiming to be able to get you umpteen-million visitors. XYZ Company will get you registered on a million search engines,they’ll get you setup with a pay-per-click campaign,and they have tons of SEO tricks that will land you the #1 spot on Google. Cool. You’re on cloud 9 again.
4. You’re paying hundreds a month in pay-per-click and ongoing SEO fees but you’re not getting any more orders or phone calls or walk-ins or whatever you’d like your site to accomplish for you. ‘The web is just hype’,you think.

I think this is an all too common scenario. It’s not necessarily that the web developer or SEO company is no good. It’s just that they didn’t take the time to truly understand what the goal was and what is required to meet it. There’s the old saying,‘when all you have is a hammer,everything looks like a nail’. Some developers just develop.

Simply having a web site is a good start but not necessarily enough. If I never put any work into this site and had only one page,it would contain information about my background,skills,experience,and a way to contact me. That little bit of information would work for me 24 hours a day,7 days a week. It would be like giving everyone I see my business card,only it contains way more (useful) information.

That’s the minimum it accomplishes. I don’t do pay-per-click or search engine optimization. I’m not interested in it. Honestly,I don’t really believe in it. Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe that paying the highest amount for specific search terms will get a site listed the highest for that those search terms. I also believe that optimizing your web site for a specific search term will get you listed higher for that search term. What I don’t believe in is the benefit of it.

Ok,I should probably clarify that. If you’re not explicitly selling something,I don’t believe that pay-per-click is beneficial. ‘Everybody is selling something’,you say. You’re right,this site pitchs me. I said explicitly,meaning,you’re selling…a widget for $25. If you’re a straight up e-commerce company competing with other companies that have the same service/product/etc. and the only difference is who gets to the consumer first,then have at it. Pay-per-click is your best friend. Buy your way to the top,it’s worth it.

If you’re doing anything else (which encompasses a lot),then I just don’t think it’s a productive use of time or money. Let’s use a familiar example: this site. I can pay hundreds (or more) dollars each month to get this site to the top of Google for web design. If you click through and are greeted by a message that says something like,“This site best viewed with Internet Explorer 4”,or terrible MIDI music,or references to clearly outdated technologies,it’s not going to inspire a lot of confidence and it won’t be long before you’re back at Google resuming your search and my hard-earned money is wasted.

My point is that high rankings don’t mean anything if your site doesn’t appeal to your target market and satiate some desire of theirs. Whether it is to purchase something or obtain some piece of information or whatever. When I search for something on Google and I click through on a result,I give that site an assessment in about 15 seconds. If it’s not readily apparent that it will meet my needs,I hit the back button.

I prefer organic results. That means that my site appears naturally for the search terms that it most closely relates to. In my mind this kills two birds with one stone.

1. I don’t pay for listings but my site still appears. Albeit for fewer,more specific search terms but it’s more relevant to the user. This should make that person happy. Making the user happy is very important.
2. I’ve taken the time to provide quality information so my site because useful. A utility. A tool. People come back,instead of this being a hiccup in their search for what they really want.

You can use pay-per-click campaigns and search engine optimization tricks (both legit and illegit) to get traffic to your site and/or make it more appealing to search engines but ultimately,search engines don’t buy your product or service or visit your office or any of those things. So why would you design specifically for them? That’s like manufacturing a product for one audience but marketing to another.

There is not substitute for useful,relevant,current content. Just in case you didn’t get that. There is no substitute for useful,relevant,current content.

More like The Weeklies

Great site,lotsa’ good info but what happened to the “dailies”? From Feb 23 to March 1 is hardly every day. Give us more!!

That’s a comment recently left here by a visitor. It’s true that I’m averaging a post about once a week lately.

It seems like suddenly I’ve become insanely busy. My recent recognition means more and more people at work work (my day job) are asking me to participate on their projects. I think there may be a queue (sorry,but I love that word).

I’ve also started picking up more freelance work. Most recently working for a musician in Syracuse on a site for his CD release party. I hope to complete that in the next few weeks or so. I also have a number of other projects in mind and various stages of completion. Stay tuned!

Lastly,I keep writing that I want to learn C#. Every few months I talk about it. Unfortunately I still haven’t managed to get past half way through the first chapter of the book I bought.

It’s even more unfortunate because for some reason I now get a phone call or email about every other day from somebody looking for a .NET developer. That tells me that learning C# will pay off like crazy (learning for the sake of learning aside) but I just can’t seem to find the time to focus on it. There’s just too much opportunity for paying work.

The point of all this is: I know I’ve been slacking on posts lately. It’s not because I’ve gotten lazy. Keep coming back and I’ll keep writing. Okay,nevermind,I’ll keep writing regardless.

Honk honk!

Luckily I’ve only looked for a new job a few times in my life. When I did,I read everything there was to read about the topic. Some of it was good advice,some of it was truly terrible advice. There was one thing however that I read over and over again. My dad beat this into my head as well.

Toot your own horn! Nobody else is going to do it for you.

I think those were my dad’s exact words. Tooting my own horn isn’t something I’ve ever been very comfortable with. When I even think about it,my head fills with the faces of all the pretentious windbags I’ve known. I guess there’s a fine line between tooting and bragging and I prefer to err on the side of caution. Anyhow,that brings me to the point of this post.

Today The Student Loan Corporation held their quarterly employee recognition celebration and the web application I’ve written plays a big part in it. Because of all my hard work and the wonderful job I did on the application,I received two awards today.

The first is called The People’s Choice. This award requires approval at the Director level and was presented to me by Mike Reardon,CEO and Chairman of the Board. Only 7 other employees received this award this quarter. I was nominated by the project sponsor and here is the text of the award:

Mike came into our business at a critical time in our project. We gave him our requirements and an aggressive date for implementation. Mike reveiwed the BRD and developed a prototype for the team to review. As we went along some of our requirements changed and became more complex. Mike always remained calm and came back to the team with a quality product. This was all completed within our timeframe to implement. Mike has given 110% to getting Great Performances back up with all of the enhancements. Feedback from our users has been fantastic. They appreciate the ease in using the site and the new reporting functionality. It has been a pleasure working with Mike on Phase 1. I look forward to completing Phase 2.

The other award goes to teams whose projects have had a significant impact on the business and my teammates and myself received this award for our work on the employee recognition program.

Along with certificates and some financial appreciation comes company-wide fame. Not to bad for my first quarter at the company.

There’s no i in team however,so as long as I’m taking credit,I’d like to give some as well. Thanks to everybody on the team for volunteering their time and doing a wonderful job. Especially Jaime who’s attention to detail and organizational skills have kept us on track and JC for being so good at his job. His thorough requirements gathering has made my job easyier.

Now let’s talk about what I can do at your company:

• Get my contact information and resume

Networking

Raise your hand if you’ve never had to look for a job….That’s what I thought.

You’re probably all too familiar with the saying,“It’s not what you know,it’s who you know”. Conversely,it’s also been said,“It’s not who you know,it’s who knows you”. I think successful networking is a little bit of both.

Since I’ve stumbled across two great articles about networking lately,I wanted to link to them and throw in some comments of my own. Since my job at the pizza shop way back in high school is the only job I’ve ever gotten without being referred by somebody,I know how important networking can be.

Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of Schmoozing” discusses the ground rules for effective networking. I am consistently wowed by Guy’s writing and this post is no different. As an ex-Apple exec turned venture capitalist,Guy knows what it’s like to be schmoozed. Read his tips and you’ll be a better networker for it.

See the section on Face Time at Christopher Hawkin’s web site for details on how he used networking to start and grow a business in a town where he knew no one. All it took is a little legwork and some careful listening.

Back in July,I wrote about LinkedIn,a professional networking site,after I read about it in the career section of the local paper. The gist of the newspaper article is that more and more companies are turning to referrals in order to get quality candidates rather than online job sites such as Monster,HotJobs,etc. You know the drill,you find a posting online and you’re one button click away from exiling your resume to the abyss along with 100,000 other applicants using the site. LinkedIn allows users to cultivate a network of trusted colleagues who,ideally,they would have no problems referring to other users. I’ve made tons of great professional contacts in this manner.

Both of the articles above mention something that I think is important enough to be worth mentioning again. Networking is not about what someone can do for you but what you can do for them. Be generous. Favors come back a thousand fold. Becoming a valuable resource for someone is the surest way to open doors to all sorts of opportunities you can’t even imagine now.

Phew…the great weight

Implementation Day!

We finally went live with the application I’ve been writing at Citigroup. The project had been delayed after some production issues over the weekend. People seemed slightly disappointed as expectation has been building since before I came onboard. There was a lot of fanfare today with balloons and posters and little freebie gifts for everybody. Much more hoopla than I’m used to or prefer.

All in all the program was well received and people seemed to enjoy using it. A minor bug surfaced but out of roughly 200 or so users today only 3 trouble tickets were issued and they were all related to the same defect. 1.5% isn’t too shabby for the ‘fng’.

The project sponsor has been talking this application up to the whole company since I started so the pressure has really been on to deliver. It also didn’t help that I’m new to the team so my performance here would really make or break my reputation. Like I said,things went well and we got tons of positive feedback. Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep tonight…for a change.

My .Net Adventure

I freely admit that I’ve been lazy. I’ve had years to learn .Net,I’ve even had a book for years,but never quite got around to it. .Net is in,VBScript is has been out. Citigroup’s best practices recommend .Net and C# and after another discussion last week,I decided that’s my best course of action at this time.

I think I might actually be looking forward to it. I enjoy learning new things,and in a sick twisted way,the frustration of grappling with a problem and the satisfaction of coming up with a solution.

‘Cause You Gotta Have Goals

With the new year rapidly approaching,everybody is talking about and/or setting goals for themselves. Here’s two of mine off the top of my head:

• Within 5 years…have my own business with at least two coworkers (I already know who they are)
• Within my lifetime…write a book

Usability testing

So we had our first usability test of the new recognition web app I’m writing and things went swimmingly.

Imagine that,usability testing…with real users. It was a pleasant change for me. We got tons of great feedback and fortunately it tells me that I’m really on the right track.

This is a high visibility project and it can’t be bad when the CEO drops in to see how things are progressing and the Director of HR comes down to participate in the tests. The project sponsor told me today people are pressuring her to get things wrapped up because they want me on their upcoming projects. Not bad for 6 weeks on the job.

Ok,time to stop tooting my own horn and write something useful to somebody.