http://www.dougjusticejr.com/tips Great tips for design and development of web sites and web applications (C)/TM/(R) Justice Solutions LLC Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:00:00 -0600 Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:45:00 -0600 en-us Justice Solutions LLC http://www.dougjusticejr.com/tips/index.cfm We just started up a new division of our company a few months back, aptly named Websudizing, and I thought I'd share a little bit of what we've seen and maybe it's something you can consider for your own site in the quickly approaching new year. (Speaking of which...did you finish your Christmas shopping yet?)

Many times, our clients are happy to get new features added to their sites, however they are not often crazy about the price tag that comes with it. Now granted....we're worth it....but I certainly understand where they are coming from, and as an owner myself, money out without a foreseeable return isn't always the smartest money to spend, but if you never attempt new ideas and new strategies to make your site either do more to reduce your soft costs on the business front or do more to make your site more attractive than your competitor's, well you'll never get ahead or succeed in business.

Ok enough of the Business 101 chat. What the hell is "Websudizing" and why do I care?

Simply stated, "Websudizing" pads your website revenues with advertising dollars. So let's say you have a customer base of 5000 emails, or an RSS that has 5000 subscribers, or a podcast with 5000 regular listeners, etc. Now, you have a bi-weekly newsletter or RSS feed that goes out. Out of the people that will receive that information, you're hoping they will come to your site and spend money, view your site, etc.

Now take that 5000 number, and think about how many vertical partners your company has where the people who enjoy your site or your products, would also like the products of a non-competitor. Let's say you think of 3. Most companies, will dip into their marketing and advertising budgets for $500 and less without even batting an eye. Tell those 3 you will be featuring 3 advertisers on your upcoming email blast, or RSS feed and will be charging $500/piece for the space. Congratulations! You just made $1500.00 for your website for that month. Do an email blast and an RSS feed? Great....do 2 for the same deal and you're up to $3000.00

The exposure will be good for their company, you'll make some money to pad your website budget with, and everyone leaves a winner. This is fantastic for companies who have the subscribers another company would want to tap into, but don't either have the traffic yet to get them, or have made enough sales to have a list of their own. Vice versa, the company who has those customers or subscribers, can increase their monthly revenues for doing something they'd already do anyway.

I know...I'm a genius, but hold your applause...the trick is finding those vertical partners for your business and convincing them it makes sense to participate in your little venture. That's actually where we come in. We have a person dedicated to finding and selling these potential websudizers, and we charge about 10-20% depending on the size of the deal. So for our little scenario above, you'd be making about an extra $2400 - $2700 a month.

It's really not all that different from normal advertising on websites, however the methodology of sponsoring your site or your feeds with these partners is. Most people don't want a ton of ads on their site anyway, but a few well placed ones, along with some sponsorships to your communications to your customer base could increase your web revenues significantly. At least enough to pay us to develop some new cool feature for it....wink.

That's all for now. Ok time to go check up on our success in getting a tattoo artist to advertise on a wine site. Wish me luck. Later.

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:00:00 -0600 http://www.dougjusticejr.com/tips/index.cfm Being a web developer you will find that you have plenty of instances where you have the same thing being requested over and over again. Things like a popup calendar, a confirmation email, etc. It is off of these commonalities that sparked web projects such as Ruby on Rails, Joomla, Mambo, etc. However, if you're like me you always seem to have that little bit of difference in the requirement from your customer that makes all that work you've done before basically obsolete. Which brings us to the title of this article....Overclassing.

I've seen colleagues of mine spend days upon days refining a class to do something that they think they'll use in the future. They literally have libraries upon libraries of classes they feel as though they can pull from their virtual shelf and place into the next application they design. My view of classing is much different. When I am coding a specific task to be done...I just code it to do what I want it to do and move on. Then, if I find myself about to code something that seems very similar to the other task I just coded...I then turn it into a class and make sure it can handle both requests from two different areas of the application. If you move in this way you're not wasting time trying to find all these wonderful scenarios that may or may not occur in the application. Furthermore if you don't live and work in the academic world, you'll find you can deliver to your customers in much less time and still satisfy the basics of classing your application.

Now don't get me wrong...there are some very basic classes I use from my .NET, PHP, and ColdFusion (CFCs) that can basically be used almost as a drop in, into most applications. Things like a send mail class, a confirmation email class, open a new window in .NET (if you've worked with .NET you'll know why I find that to be a useful class to use over and over again), a conversion of an XML feed to a query in ColdFusion, etc. But these are classes that really have a pretty specific function and it doesn't require rewriting the class to be useful in the new application. What I'm trying to get across here is don't waste your or your client/employer's time by trying to develop a class that will be used over and over again. Get the task at hand done, and if needed in the future, then class it...but for goodness sake, keep coding and deliver what you said you would. Trust me, most clients of mine don't care if I created this awesome class that can be used over again in other aspects of their business. They want what they asked me to do as quickly as possible and really don't care to hear that I spent an extra hour or so in developing a class. To them, that's an extra hour of programming they need to pay and it will actually take you more time explaining why that hour was necessary, then it would have to just code the item they needed and be done with it.

So the next time you find yourself pondering over whether you should class this action or not....the answer is get the task at hand done, and if you need to perform a similar task later, class it then! Don't waste your and your client's time by overclassing an application. Chances are they will change their mind in a later phase and you'll need to rewrite it anyway! Ok, time to go class a function to submit these RSS feeds. Later! Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:00:00 -0600 http://www.dougjusticejr.com/tips/index.cfm I looked the other day at a well known men's magazine website...(ok it was Maxim and yes I do look at it just for the articles)...and I was surprised to see such a well known publication to have such a complex and almost annoying home page design. So I decided to write about it today.

In my marketing class back at college I was introduced to the concept of a decompression zone when it came to store layout and merchandising. The concept is pretty simple really....let your customers come into the store first....give them a chance to take in the store's layout, colors, etc. before hitting them with merchandising displays, sales signs, etc.

The same holds true for web design and development. Give the user a chance to take in the site...let them see your logo put prominent on the home page, get a good idea at the menu of pathway items available for them to choose to start their journey into the site, etc. I've heard from many a web user that a site they visited gave them a headache because of the number of ads they had on the home page, or that is was so busy that they couldn't even figure out where to go on the site once they got there.

Some great examples of simple elegance have been demonstrated by Qwest.com (www.apple.com), Verizon.com (www.verizon.com), and yes....I'll even admit the mighty Apple (www.apple.com) does a great job at keeping the home page simple enough for you to catch your breath and take in the whole experience.

Am I sounding too much like a therapist? Perhaps...but simple statistics showing time studies of how long a person stayed on a site was directly proportional to the amount of clutter on the site's home page. So the bottom line is, keep the home page simple, and they will stay longer on your site. Now off to my design team who needs to simplify my own site's home page now. Later! Mon, 22 Oct 2007 07:25:15 -0600