Month: September 2015

All our lives we’ve been told to improve the areas where we’re weakest.

If you’re unskilled at something, the common wisdom is to work on skill that really hard so you can eventually be a well-rounded individual. A human Swiss army knife, if you will.

A lot of that same mentality carries over into running a business.

And what happens is you have business owners trying to do all these things that they’re not really good at, because that’s what they think they should be doing.

Instead of knowing what we’re best at, and focusing on those strengths, we try to do it all. That leaves us being inefficient at everything.

Continue reading “Focus On What You’re Good At”

Read anything good on the web lately?

Perhaps you’ve noticed the abundance of online advertising out there.

Although web researchers have been warning us about “banner blindness” since 1998, advertising has been a viable revenue model since the dawn of the web.

Recently, a series of events have reminded online publishers of the looming probability that ad revenue may be an endangered species.

Continue reading “Ad Blocking: What’s The Future of Web Revenue”

If you run a business, you want more people to walk through your doors and purchase your services. The only way to make that happen is to market effectively — both online and offline.

Showing up where your customers are looking already online makes a big difference. That means being in forums, having a solid social media presence and doing a TON of content marketing.

One goal of content marketing is to answer questions that people are typing into Google. Answer those questions consistently, on a long enough timeline, and people begin to recognize you as an authority in your industry. This works, but it takes commitment and patience.

The other half of that equation is doing offline marketing. This means getting in front of other people, and establishing your authority in an industry.

Continue reading “Showing Up”

At its heart, front-end design and development is still about putting boxes inside other boxes on a web page.

Granted, the tools, the techniques, and the processes have become more complex compared to even five years ago. That’s part of the territory.

What we do with those boxes has gotten more complicated, but web development is still in its adolescence.

Hell, we just started designing for smartphones five years ago. Double check the date on this seminal article on responsive web design — it’s only from 2010.

That’s not what this post is about, though.

What terrifies me is the idea that there’s a stagnation ’s going on in my own imagination. I get frightened when I think I’ve stopped dreaming of what is possible on the web.

Maybe you’ve felt it yourself. Maybe you’ve forgotten what it felt like the first time you started to understand how to build something on the web.

I can’t speak for anyone else but myself. I don’t live in your skin, or share your exact experiences. But here’s my tale.

Continue reading “Imagination, Stagnation, and Curation”