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The topic at last night’s RefreshBoston meeting was Designing in a Recession presented by Joshua Porter. Although the conversation focused on designing and developing for the web, here are some tips that I think would help any business or individual during a recession:

• Find your focus
• Articulate why you’re an expert
• Show people what you do. Don’t expect that it is self evident
• Show your passion
• Find a niche market and highlight it
• Don’t eat alone - network, network, network
• Don’t shy away from small projects, they can lead to big ones

If you want to learn more about what was presented check out kylefiedler’s notes on flickr

We have set up various WordPress sites for ourselves and our clients. User’s love the easy to use interface and we love the flexible back-end. One of the great features of the WordPress.org platform / community is the ability to utilize plugins to extend the site.  Here is a list of some basic must have plugins:

• Akismet - comment spam filter, you will need to create a wordpress.com account and get an API key to get it running, but it’s defiantly worth it.
• WP-Print and WP-EMail - adds email and print functionality to each post
• Sociable - Adds social bookmarking links under each post.
• Twitter-Tools - Connects your WordPress blog with your twitter account. Allows you to show tweets on your blog in the sidebar or as posts, auto tweets new blogs, and has a variety of settings to customize to meet your needs.

Check out additional plugins in the wordpress.org plugin directory and let us know your ‘must have’s’.

We are happy to be a sponsor for this month’s Refresh Boston meeting on Thursday June 25, 2009 at Microsoft Startup Labs in Cambridge MA. The event will include a presentation on Virality by Joshua Porter. We are looking forward to picking up a few new tricks, meeting some great people, maybe even chatting with some interested in joining our team.

When you get an email do you ever pay attention to who was copied on it and why they were copied?  When you respond, do you remember to hit “reply all” to everyone in the same group?

If you don’t, you might want to rethink that nasty habit.

read more about this project»

We currently use basecamp to manage our tickets. The process goes a little something like this: we add a to-do inside of a project, assign it to a person, add a comment to that to-do that includes all of the specs, attach any needed files, and send it along.

The one thing that irks me about this process is that I have no control over what information actually goes into these tickets. See, since we have many types of products and services each may need slightly different pieces of information. In the past I had created some word documents showing templates and required fields needed for common products and services, but these could easily get lost or not referenced as much as I hoped for.   Sometimes, account reps spend considerable time worrying about including the right info and / or recipients have to ask a bunch of follow up questions.

So I had an idea, what if the reps had a list of common products and services, when they clicked on an item, it brought them to a specific form for that type of project. It would ask all the right questions and require certain information. It would be easier for both parties. read more about this project»

Ok so I’m about to state the obvious here, but I still feel wildly compelled to say in anyway.  No matter what outcome you want from someone, the results are always intensely more successful if you “motivate” them, rather than “require” them to do it.   You hear it all the time that — “it has to come from within” or “it’s better if they do it themselves” or “make sure to get buy-in from the stakeholders”.  Yet “30+ page policy manuals, legal contracts, long scrolling webpages, tedious employee reviews, meetings about meetings and lecture hall-like training sessions” keep a’ coming.

read more about this project»

People ask me all the time, “how much should I pay for my website.?”  Of course the answer depends on your needs and goals - both short term and long term.   However, there is one price range that might want to think twice about before embracing - it’s the $5,000-$7,500 website budget.

It’s what I refer to as the “unhappiest range” because it produces the least amount of return on investment [ROI] and more often than not, it’s more than that customer really wants to spend and less than what they really need to spend to achieve their goals.  When a perspective customer proposes this budget we often suggest going either “up” or “down” to deliver a result that will have the best chance of impacting their organization. read more about this project»

I caught a bit of Jason Fried’s talk at the FDU Innovation Summit via live steam today and this really jumped out at me.

With all these interruptions and meetings we no longer have work days, we have work moments.

The vibe on day two of bcb4 was different, seemed like a smaller, calmer, more focused group. I was a fan.

Here are some nuggets of information / quotes / general things I enjoyed.

• Boston is full of geeks
• Just like code design has rules by following the basic rules you can create a decent design prototype.
• Twitter for business: set one clear objective and make sure your follower strategy and content always support this objective.
• An elegant solution has many layers, it is simple enough for the common users, but has the tools and customization features the power use demands.
• Break bad news to clients as soon as possible . If possible warn of bad things that could happen at the start of the project.
• Users get pissed off when they feel stupid, so don’t make them feel stupid.
• iPhone development book recommendation: objective c 2.0 by Stephen Kochan
• Bye Bye Sifr , Hello cufon.
• If you want to test your product and see what it would be like for the common user, take lots of drugs first.
• Have your parents test your user interface, if they don’t get it a lot of users won’t.

I’ll admit it was hard for me to commit the first warm sunny spring day to sitting inside getting my geek on at BarCampBoston4, but I did it. It was my first experience with an unconference, and it was a bit different. An unconference is a participant driven event with a group of volunteers who facilitate the process.

Here are some of my observations / comments on the day:

• I’m a lady who loves rules and structure. I like to know ahead of time when things are going to happen and enjoy having a plan I can stick with. This made the event a little hard for me. Sessions are scheduled right before hand and can move at any time. The day did start to hit a rhythm in the afternoon, so it wasn’t as painful as the morning, but this aspect will probably always be something that irks me about this format.
• Since there is no review process for presentations, some are very well planned out and others are not. I found that an unplanned event is not always a bad thing, especially if the group attending has a lot to say about it, can lead to some great discussions.
• There was a rule of barCamp stated at the beginning of the day, it was referred to as the ‘2 feet rule’ - if you are in a session and you aren’t teaching or learning get up and go to a session where you will. A great rule for the day and for life.

Thats all I got for today, until tomorrow.