Article The Right Fit by Mark O’Brien on December 8, 2009 I thought I was just fine at cooking scrambled eggs--until I had to make them for Julia Child on her 86th birthday.The restaurant I managed the kitchen for wasn't open for breakfast. But when Mrs. Child decided that she'd like to have breakfast with twenty or so of her closest friends at our place, well, we opened for breakfast. Cooking for The Queen was an honor, a lifelong memory, and a great opportunity to learn how to make perfect scrambled eggs (medium-low heat, be sparing and gentle in your interactions with the eggs, and leave them more than a little runny).Somewhere between making those eggs and speaking with Wolfgang Puck about the grilled pizza I had just made for him, I came to two realizations: One, I had made it! I was cooking at the best place for the best customers--and not just cooking, but actually managing the entire kitchen. Two, if this is what "making it" feels like, life isn't quite what I had hoped it would be. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design 4 Ways to Improve Your Email Newsletters by Christopher Butler on December 4, 2009 Many clients ask what a good click-through rate is for an email newsletter campaign. Keeping in mind that 1% is generally considered to be a respectable response rate for direct mail, I would say that you should generally shoot for somewhere between a 10-20% click-through rate for an email. The appropriate desired response to an email newsletter should be for subscribers to simply continue reading the material on your website, a much lower level of commitment than is usually implied with direct mail campaigns. That said, achieving this response isn't the easiest thing to do. We've grown accustomed to being quite aggressive with email- particularly with deleting email that we find irrelevant at that moment. But over the past couple of years, I've noticed that certain tweaks can enable a higher and more stable click-through rate from one campaign to the next. Here are four ideas... Read Now About
Article Screencast : Tracking internal site search with Google Analytics published on December 4, 2009 I am starting a bi-weekly screencast surrounding topics involving Google Analytics. The topic for today is internal site search.Why you should set up internal site search tracking?How to set up internal site search tracking?are discussed in the screencast.Please use the comments section for any feedback / recommendations or questions you may have for me. Read Now About
Article Self-Editing for the Nonprofessional Writer published on December 4, 2009 Recently, in a post about editing professional writing, I broke down the revision process into 3 general stages, which I'll repeat in this post. Here, following those same three revision stages, I want to give a few concrete tips for people who are editing their own writing. Not all of these methods will fit everybody's style, but these are some of the ones I like. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design 2010: The Year of Better Web Fonts by Justin Kerr on December 1, 2009 As the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, many look with anticipation towards 2010. Working for world peace, a cleaner environment or a cure for cancer are all noble pursuits, but there's only one thing I wish for in the coming new year.More choices for web typography. Read Now About
Article Google Analytics: Getting Out of the Way in a Good Way published on December 1, 2009 Loading third-party JavaScript (which is code usually loaded from a domain on another server) can often do bad things to your pages' performance. Putting JavaScript on a page blocks, which in software-speak means that nothing else can happen while it is loading and executing. The reason for this is that JavaScript can change the page after it executes which means that the browser needs to wait until the code is done executing before it go on to the next thing. Why is this a problem? Read Now About
Article Search is a Work in Progress by Christopher Butler on November 30, 2009 We are all librarians now. I'll back that statement up over the course of this article, but if you're already picturing a stern, bespectacled woman who might shush you at any moment, think again. Today, our lives represent a fusion of roles hitherto segregated to a minor piece of society- the author, the producer, the librarian. The libraries I'm talking about are networks of content on the web, and they're run by ordinary users just like you and me... Read Now About
Article Short and Sweet Website Copy published on November 30, 2009 Less is more when it comes to website copy.Think about it. When you visit a website, do you carefully read every single word on the page? I doubt it. Very few people do! In fact, according to research on useit.com, "users will read about 20% of the text on the average page."To combat this problem, your website needs strong, concise copy... Read Now About
Article Guess the Desk published on November 24, 2009 Newfangled's workspace is out in the open. No cubes. Only a few walls. Needless to say, we are fully aware of the distinctive quirks each of us have about our desks.I've taken some photos of a few particularly interesting details of 8 desks in our office. You can guess which desk belongs to whom. Read Now About
Article Measuring Sales by Kinds by Christopher Butler on November 19, 2009 Another day, another set of data... I've been investigating what I call "peripheral" data sets in order to get a different perspective on how previously unseen or unmeasured activity affects the overall operation of our company. In my last post, I looked at how our busyness could be represented by the volume of communication over our internal project management system from one month to the next. In looking at that picture, I realized that the volume of activity is much more drastically affected by maintenance work for our clients than by new projects. I classify "maintenance" as any work done for an existing client- it's a pretty broad spectrum, but since our new project process is so regimented, the split in categories is pretty realistic as far as our company's day to day experience is concerned. When I noticed that October of 2008 had the highest volume of communication, I wondered what our maintenance sales were that month and how they related to new project sales. Sales data is the easiest information for me to dig up, but I wasn't interested in the particular sales totals as much as the relationship between the numbers... Read Now About
