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Open source publishing

From http://kennethhunt.com/archives/001144.html

John Bartlett owns and operates Bartlett Publishing,
which puts out approximately four titles per year in programming,
business, and ... religion. Huh? Those don't go together, do
they? This is the strength of small publishing, to bring together the
disparate genres that make up a particular publisher's passion.

Bartlett is a true believer, in God and Linux. He chose open
source tools because he "believes in free information." He uses the
DocBook DTD,
running the manuscript through OpenJade with a heavily
customized version of Norman Walsh's
stylesheets. "Using OpenJade and Norman Walsh's stylesheets to
typeset gives me a huge advantage in both costs to produce a book and
time to market. In particular, with DocBook, an index is amazingly
easy to produce," says Bartlett. Post-processing of the PDF is done
with Perl's Text::PDF module
and Adobe
Acrobat for complex work. A professional graphic artist produces
the cover and Bartlett does post-processing with the GIMP. Finally he uploads the finished
materials to CafePress or LightningSource.

Bartlett's recommendation of the open source tools he uses is
unequivocating. "DocBook makes your book look professional with very
little effort. The combination of DocBook and a good cover artist
gives you very professional results with a minimum of time and money."

John Culleton of Able
Typesetters and Indexers provides services for small- and
self-publishers with a completely Linux-based workflow using variants
of TeX. First, he keys in and
corrects the source text in Gvim.
Culleton compiles the text to PDF with ConTeXt or pdfTeX and views
the output in Xpdf. He
also uses various other bits and pieces: grep; the Ghostscript ps2ascii

translator; pfaedit (FontForge); PSUtils
for brochures, makeindex
for indices, and some custom macros and scripts. He does image
processing in the GIMP and has recently begun using Scribus for book covers because it
can handle ICC profiles and
produce CMYK output.

Culleton makes two points about the strengths of open source
software. First, "All of these tools are supported by active email
lists. I don't have to call an underpaid clerk.... I
get superior support from users and maintainers of the software." (Ask
any XPress user about Quark's customer support. It's infamous.)
Second, when Donald Knuth backed away from TeX, others picked up the
torch. Development continued and TeX is still going strong.
Meanwhile, in the proprietary world, PageMaker is dying a slow and
painful death and is no longer the behemoth of book production;
FrameMaker has been losing ground as well. Adobe now pushes InDesign.
QuarkXpress went years between updates on the Mac, still
the dominant desktop publishing platform. With proprietary software,
Culleton says, "[You] face the potential discontinuance of the
product, just like users of the once excellent WordPerfect have found
their own purgatory -- the Curse of Corel."

Posted by klsh

Financial fitness for Entrepreneurs

From http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2004/07/financial_fitne.html

Financial Fitness for Entrepreneurs

I thought I'd give you a break from the DNC coverage in the blogosphere (and everywhere else).

I wrote the following article on "financial fitness for entrepreneurs" last year for the Kauffman Foundation's Entreworld web site so it's reasonably fresh; I got a lot of positive feedback and it ended up in USA Today. It's aimed at any entrepreneur - not just those running venture funded companies. While it's aimed at an early stage entrepreneur, I think it's useful whether you have one employee (you, the founder) or thousands of employees in your business. It was "professionally edited", so it lost some of my special voice (you'll notice the lack of cuss words.) Enjoy.

While creating a growth business can be exhilarating, many entrepreneurs – especially those starting a company for the first time – don’t pay enough attention to some core issues surrounding the financial management of their businesses.

Often, founders don’t have formal training in finance – they’re “techies” launching the next Apple Computer or Netscape, professionals putting together advertising, management consulting, or human resources agencies, or super-salesmen types who’ve figured out how to sell a pizza or deliver a package faster, better and cheaper. Always, they’re intimately involved with their core product or service. Often, they are too busy to burrow into the details of some of the company’s functions, of which finance is the most critical.

These entrepreneurs are savvy enough to know they must work with financial professionals, such as their CFO and outside auditors or CPAs. However, no matter what their background or inclination about finance, founders need to have a working understanding of the basics. An elementary level of financial literacy means they’ll work more intelligently with their financial advisors and become the first line of defense for spotting potential problems in the young company.

What follows are some fundamental financial tenets that all early-stage entrepreneurs should be aware of, understand, and heed.

  • Cash is king: No matter what, don’t run out of money. Nothing else in this article matters if you run out of money. This means know your burn rate (the net cash that is flowing out of your business each month) and be aware that your low cash point for any given month may not be at the end of the month. In other words, don’t get caught planning based on full month figures only to find that you do not have enough money to pay your most important vendor on the 15th because your customers don’t pay you until the 30th.
  • Put in real financial systems from day one: Lots of entrepreneurs figure that they’ll “get around to putting in real financial systems someday soon.” Of course, that rarely happens, especially if no one on the founding team has a strong financial background. The cliché, “It’s better to build on a strong foundation,” applies. Put the foundation in place early so that as your business grows, you are on solid financial footing.
  • Measure everything: If you have real financial systems in place, you can measure everything. Be obsessive about it. Some things that you’ll measure will be similar to what most other businesses measure, such as your P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. Other things will be unique to your business – oriented around your specific customers or products. As your business grows, make sure you evolve and expand what you measure to best reflect the current state of your business. Look especially for metrics that will help tell you where your business is going, not just where it has come from. Financial systems can and should capture more than just historical financial results.
  • Build an annual operating plan: Be disciplined about creating an annual operating plan and budget every year. You should have it finished before January 1. This is your easiest benchmark to measure against - your own expectations. If you don’t set them, you won’t know how you did.
  • Use your vendors to fund your business: Vendors love to get paid on time (or early). However, as a young business, your vendors will appreciate consistency of payment over timeliness. While most vendors will want to be paid within 30 days (or less), it’s typical to stretch payables 45 to 60 days. The key is to pay consistently – if you have a vendor from whom you continually use services or buy products, don’t store up your bills and pay in one lump sum sporadically. Instead, send regular payments. Also, don’t dodge calls from vendors about paying late. Tell them when you are going to pay them, and then make sure you follow through.
  • Use your customers to fund your business: Customers – especially ones that value your products and services – will often be willing to pay on very short terms. Don’t be bashful about asking them to prepay, especially if you are a service business.
  • Be careful of personal guarantees: Banks love personal guarantees. Entrepreneurs hate them. You should avoid them if you can – only sign one as a last resort. You are already investing a huge amount of your personal assets and energy in your business. If you can’t get financing based on the strength of your business, you should question whether it’s the right kind of financing. In the upside scenario, when your business succeeds, the personal guarantee doesn’t matter. It’s the downside case you should be worried about, because you could lose major personal assets like your house.
  • If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: While this is generally true in life, it’s especially true concerning financial issues surrounding an early stage company. Your books should always balance, financings will always have a cost, and investors are always going to have strings attached to their money. Ask questions, be wary, and know what you are getting into.
  • Finance your business appropriately for what you are trying to create: One of the most common mistakes an early stage entrepreneur makes is trying to raise the wrong kind of money for the business. It makes no sense for a service business that could potentially be a $5 million company within three years to try to raise $10 million of venture capital. Correspondingly, it doesn’t make sense for a capital-intensive company that needs to build a plant to raise $250,000 of angel money.
  • Choose professionals carefully: It may be tempting to use your wife’s brother’s friend’s neighbor as your lawyer, because he will give you a great rate and you see him at the neighborhood barbecue, but you get what you pay for. The same is true for accountants and other services that your business will use. Find professionals who know what they are doing and have experience with young companies.
  • Don’t take anything for granted: Double-check everything. If you have the right systems (did I mention that you should have good systems?), this is easy. If you don’t, reread the second bullet point and put in the right systems.
  • Pay your taxes on time: Unlike customers and vendors, our local, state, and federal tax authorities don’t appreciate being used as financing sources for your business. In addition to potentially incurring onerous penalties, missing or delaying tax payments is often a serious crime.

That’s the list. Read it over, familiarize yourself with it, and begin developing a lay entrepreneur’s understanding of finance. You’ll then be able to work deftly with your pros to put the company of your dreams on the sound financial footing necessary for success.

Idea Facilitation

From http://thinksmart.typepad.com/good_morning_thinkers/2004/07/idea_facilitati.html

Idea Facilitation Tips

This list of ten tips for facilitators comes from the book Facilitation: A Door to Creative Leadership by Blair Miller, Jonathan Vehar and Roger Firestien. In Roger's newletter "Innovation Expresso," he reprints these tips and states: "There are a number of factors that contribute to groups being uncreative. However, the most damaging creativity killer in a group is a poor facilitator." (See Jonathan Vehar's site for his latest newsletter.)

  1. Treat each other with respect.
  2. Be supportive of each other's ideas.
  3. Focus on the possibilities, not the obstacles.
  4. Be curious, be suprised, have your thinking provoked.
  5. Take responsibility for your own safety.
  6. Encourage others with support, not pressure.
  7. Acknowledge the contributions of others and appreciate their greatness.
  8. Try to suspend your own judgments, certainties, and assumptions.
  9. Be receptive to feedback and willing to change your thoughts, opinions, and behaviors.
  10. Have fun! Don't take yourself too seriously.

Here's an 11th tip for ideation sessions: Read the Rules.

Several years ago, Andy VanGundy did some research that showed that the simple process of reading brainstorming guidelines to the ideation group resulted in 50% more and better ideas. Alex Osborn, the father of brainstorming, defined four basic brainstorming rules which have been added to and modified for the past half century. Here is a list of the ones we currently use:

Judge Later: During the idea generation process, there should be no judgment ... not even groans, frowns or "great idea!" remarks. Just keep pumping out the ideas and go for quantity not quality. The judging process will come later.

Avoid Discussion: Avoid stories, discussions, and elaborations on how the idea could be done or how great it might be. Just keep generating ideas.

Capture Ideas: Every idea must be captured fully either by a person doing the recording or by each person writing their ideas on sticky notes (one per sheet) or any other capture process.

Be Specific: Every idea should be specific and actionable -- no generalities such as "improve communication." Each idea should include a noun and a verb, such as "distribute a weekly newsletter."

Build: Build on other people’s ideas -- make them bigger, smaller, a different color, turn them inside out. Say, "Yes, and ..." For instance: "Yes, and we could distribute it by email or in payroll envelopes."

Participate: Ideas come from anywhere and everywhere. The best idea may be in the mind of someone who has never, ever had an idea before so it’s important for everyone to contribute all ideas.

Set Time Limit: Set a time limit for generating ideas ... ideally, not more than 30 - 45 minutes. At the end of this time, take a short break and assess where you are.

Number Your Ideas: IDEO, the award-winning design firm believes that numbering ideas stimulates the flow of ideas and thinks that 100 ideas per hour indicates a good, fluid brainstorming session.

How to be a winner

From http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~andre/general/student_research_advice.html, a post by Assistant Professor Andre DeHon

How to be a Winner

Advice for students starting into research work

[N.B.: Observations and recommendations based on first being a
UROP student at MIT and later supervising numerous UROP students at
MIT and undergraduates and graduate students at UCB.]

Don't get hung up trying to understand everything at the outset

The biggest challenge you face at the onset of any new project is
that there is a huge (seemingly overwhelming) amount of stuff you need
to know to tackle your problem properly. While this phenomenon is
true in the small for the beginning researcher, it is also true in the
large for any research project. So learning how to cope with this
challenge is an important skill to to master to become a good
researcher. In contrast, blocking your action and progress while
waiting for complete knowledge is the road to failure.

Coping mechanisms employed by winners include:

  • prioritizing (what do I need to know most)
  • read (everything made available to you, and seek out more; but
    don't put months of reading between you and getting started
    doing things.)
  • multithreading (when blocked on one item or path, is there
    another I can productively pursue?)
  • pursuing multiple, possible solution techniques (maybe
    some have easier/less blocks paths than others)

  • wishful thinking (ok, let's assume this subproblem is solved,
    does that allow me to go on and solve other problems?)
  • pester people who might have some of the information you need
    (you might think they should know what you need to know,
    but often they don't have a clear idea of what you do and don't know;
    start by getting them to give you pointers to things you can use to
    help yourself. Show respect for their time and always follow up
    on the resources you've been given before asking for a personal
    explanation.)
  • propose working models --- maybe they are wrong or different
    from others, but they give you something to work with and something
    concrete to discuss and compare with others. You will refine your
    models continually, but it's good to have something concrete in mind
    to work with.

Losers will stop the first time they run into something they
don't know, cannot solve a problem, or encounter trouble
slightly out of what they consider ``their part'' of the problem and then
offer excuses for why they cannot make any progress.

Winners consider the whole problem theirs and look for
paths around every hangup.

Losers make sure there is someone or something to blame for
their lack of progress.

Winners find ways to make progress despite complications.

Losers know all the reasons it cannot be done

Winners find a way to do it.

Communicate and Synchronize Often

Of course, when you do have to build your own models, solve unexpected
problems, make assumptions, etc. do make sure to communicate and
synchronize with your fellow researchers. Do they have different
models from yours? What can you learn from each others' models and
assumptions? Let them know what you're thinking, where you're stuck,
and how you're trying to get around your problems.

Decompose

The whole problem often seems overwhelming. Decompose it into
manageable pieces (preferably, with each piece a stable intermediate).
Tackle the pieces one at a time. Divide and conquer.

This may sound obvious, but it works. I've turned numerous problems
which appeared ``frightening'' in scope into many 1-day or 2-day
tasks, and then tackled each nice, contained 1--2 day task as I came to
it. As I understood more, new problems and tasks arose, but they
could all be broken back down to bite sized pieces which would be
tackled one at a time.

Be Organized

In computer systems especially, the biggest limitation to our ability
to conquer problems is complexity. You need to work continually to
structure the problem and your understanding of it to tackle the
inherent complexity. Keep careful track of what you have done and
what you need to do. Make lists; write it down; don't rely on your
memory (or worse, yet, your supervisor's memory) to hold all the
things you need to do and all the intermediate issues you need to
address.

Prioritize

Make priorities in your efforts and check your priorities with your
supervisor. A common occurrence is for your supervisor to ask you to
do A, forget about it, and then ask you to do B before you could
possibly have finished A. If you are uncertain on whether B should
take priority over A, definitely ask. Sometimes it will, but often it
won't, and your supervisor will be glad that you reminded him you were busy
solving A. Keep track of B, and when you finish A, see if B still
makes sense to pursue.

Realize that your supervisor is busy

Your professor or graduate student supervisor is busy. He hired
you to help him get more accomplished than he could have on
his own. Your biggest benefit to him is when you can be self moving
and motivating.

Do not expect your supervisor to solve all your problems.
Find out what he has thought about and suggests for a stating point
and work from there. But, realize there may become a time when
you have put more quality thought into something than he has (and this
will happen more and more often to you as you get into your work).
So, when you think you see or know a better way to solve a problem,
bring it up. In an ideal scenario this is exactly what should
happen. Your supervisor gives you the seed and some directions, then
goes off to think about other problems. You put in concentrated time
on your problem and ultimately come back with more knowledge and
insight into your subproblem than your supervisor.

As a supervisor, I work in two modes:

  1. Until a student has demonstrated that he has thought more deeply
    about the problem than I have, I strongly advocate that he start things my
    way.

  2. Once a student has examined a problem in depth, then we
    can discuss it as peers, and generally the student becomes the
    expert on this subproblem, and I can offer general advise
    from my experience and breadth.

Deliver

Once you've signed up you have to deliver. But, you do not have to
deliver the final solution to everything at once. This, in fact, is a
fallacy of many people and research projects.

Losers keep promising a great thing in the future but have
nothing to show now.

Winners can show workable/usable results along the way to the
solution. These pieces can include:

  • solutions to simplified models
  • pieces of a flow
  • intermediate output/data
  • measurements of problem characteristics
  • stable intermediates (see below)

Demonstrate progress. This allows your supervisor to
offer early feedback and to help you prioritize your attention---this will
often help you both make mid-course corrections increasing the
likelihood you will end up with interesting results in the end.
Requirements and understanding invariable evolve (remember the
key challenge at the beginning is incompletely knowledge). Change and
redirection is normal, expected, and healthy (since it is usually a
result of greater knowledge and understanding). The incremental model
is robust and prepared for this adaptation while the monolithic (all-at-once)
model is brittle and often leads to great solutions which don't address
the real problem.

Incrementally grow your solutions (especially software). In
the new chapters which appear in the 20th Anniversary edition of
Mythical Man Month, Brooks identifies incremental development
and progressive refinement towards the goal as one of the best, new
techniques which he's come to appreciate since the original writing
of MMM. From my own experience, I
whole heartedly agree with this, and it does have a very positive
impact on morale (yours, your team's, your supervisor's).

Target stable intermediates

Look for stable intermediate points on your incremental path to
solving some problem.

  • points where some clear piece of the problem has been solved
    (has a nice interface to this subproblem, produces results
    at this stage)

  • things you can build upon
  • things you can spin-out
  • things you can share with team members (allow them to help)
  • points of accomplishment

Don't turn problems (subtasks) into research problems
unnecessarily.

Often you'll run into a subtask with no single, obviously right
solution. If solving this piece right is key to the overall goals,
maybe it will be necessary to devote time to studying and solving this
subproblem better than it has ever been solved before. However, for
most sub-problems, this is not the case. You want to keep focussed on
the overall goals of the project and come up with an ``adequate''
solution for this problem. In general, try to do the obvious or
simple thing which can be done expediently. Make notes on the the
possible weaknesses and the alternatives you could explore
should these weakness prove limiting. Then, if this does become a
bottleneck or weak link in the solution chain, you can revisit it and
your alternatives and invest more effort exploring them.

Learn to solve your own problems

In general, in life, there won't always be someone to turn to who has
all the answers. It is vitally important that you learn how to
tackle all the kinds of problems you may encounter. Use your
supervisors as a crutch or scaffolding only to get yourself started.
Watch them and learn not just the answers they help you find, but how
they find the answers you were unable to obtain on your own. Strive
for independence. Learn techniques and gain confidence in your own
ability to solve problems now.

Nine things you can do to make your website better

From http://scribbling.net/nine_things_you_can_do_to_make_your_web_site_better

  • Conceive, design and organize your site to be exactly what it is: a web site.

    The Web is not print. While this may seem like an overtly obvious statement, designers, programmers and users trip up on this very issue every day. It's a common misconception, which branches off to notions like "a site author can control how a site looks to the pixel" and "a well-written web page will look exactly the same on all browsers." Let go of these ideas from the very start. Accessing a web site is a client-server interaction which varies in ways dependent upon several variables, not the least of which include connection speeds and client hardware, software and configuration.

    So, as you make decisions about your site, carefully consider and exploit the medium. Make no assumptions about the user, because a dizzying array of configurable clients can access your site. Not everyone has Javascript and cookies enabled, or is sitting in front of that great 22-inch monitor that you are, or is using IE on Windows. Accept that your "pages" will not look exactly the same to everyone. Remember that search engines will run indexing software on your site and this software only understands text (for now). Don't focus on visual design, concentrate on making your site as usable as possible. Users should be able access your site quickly and intuitively and even bookmark (a misnomer that points back to the Web=print misconception) specific documents on it; so go nuts and facilitate this.

    The rest of these recommendations aim to help achieve this end.

  • Validate your markup.

    There are rules which specify how to create documents renderable by web clients. Follow them. Markup is either correctly written or it's not. If you're using pure CSS and XHTML or just plain ol' HTML, make sure your markup is correctly written by using a validator: software which checks markup for mistakes. This one and this one work just fine. If your markup is valid it has the best chance of rendering on the widest array of clients. If you have invalid markup, don't assume that just because your browser is forgiving that everyone else's is.

  • Avoid frames and splash pages.

    Frames on a web site are not ideal for lots of reasons. Frames prevent the user from being able to bookmark individual documents on a site. They present related information in separate documents, which keeps search engines from associating related information. They require that a browser make more than one document request per document, which increases client-server connections and eats server CPU cycles, network bandwidth and users' time. Frames are also, coincidentally, being deprecated.

    When I say "splash page", I am referring to a welcome page with one link on it to "enter" the site. Splash pages are unnecessary and meaningless. The first time a user goes to your site, it might seem like a nice effect. But every time after that, a splash page just gets in the way. For a search engine it makes the bulk of your site another needless step into the hierarchy. Don't make users, robots and your server work harder than necessary to deliver the content on your site.

  • Optimize your site to be as small a download as possible.

    Making a user wait for your site to download is the best way to get him or her to go elsewhere. While creating your site, remember that more than half the web surfers in the US in February of 2003 used a 56k or less dial-up connection. Entire books and web sites are dedicated to the subject of how to optimize a site, so I won't even attempt to cover the subject here.

  • Make your site URLs as short, descriptive, static, technology-inspecific and permanent as possible.

    Remember that your site's navigation URLs can be totally independent of the physical file system on your server. What I mean is, if you have a 

    /about_this_site/index.html

    file on your server, the URL to the about section does not have to be (and should not be) 

    /about_this_site/index.html

    Decide on your site URL structure before you begin creating the documents which will present the information. Make them as short and descriptive of the content as possible, and avoid any indicators of the technology behind them. Avoid file extensions (like .php, .htm, .html, .asp) and don't expose query string parameters. Google specifically recommends using "static" (querystring-less) links to every document on your site. For example, if you have a section which describes the staff of a company, don't use 

    /staff.html

    to point to the staff page. Use 

    /staff/

    instead. Then use 

    /staff/joesmith/

    for Joe Smith's page, instead of 

    /staff.asp?firstname=joe&lastname=smith

    Once you've determined the URLs for your site, use server-side technology to make them work.

    Finally, once you create a URL which points to a section on your site, stick to it. If you follow these suggestions from the start and then re-organize your site, your URLs don't have to change. However, if you absolutely must change a URL, make sure the original URL redirects or points to the new section, so that cached search engine referrals and bookmarks still work.

  • Make the information on your site textual, and offer non-Javascript-dependent navigation.

    Images on a web document, while meaningful to human eyes, are actually just a collection of 1's and 0's to search engine indexing software and non-graphical browsers. Make sure all of the information on your site exists in a text format. For example, if your site has a masthead which is an image that contains the title of your site in it, make sure you set the alt attribute to describe the content of the image. You should even ensure that the most relevant information on a page appears first in your markup, and make other elements (navigation, etc) follow.

    Short of installing a text browser like Lynx, a good test to see what your site looks like to an indexing robot or a non-graphical browser is to turn off images in your browser. If you're using Internet Explorer, to do this, in the Tools menu choose Options, and on the Advanced tab go to Multimedia, and uncheck "Show pictures." In Mozilla, go to Tools, Image Manager, and choose "Block Images from this Site." Then view your site, and make sure that without images, all information is adequately represented. This same concept applies to all objects (like Flash movies and Java applets.)

    Additionally, remember that search engine robots do not execute Javascript. If any navigation elements on your site use Javascript, set the onclick attribute of the a element to the Javascript call, and the href attribute to the destination of the link. This way Javascript-enabled browsers will execute the script, and the link will still be usable to non-Javascript-enabled clients.

  • Actively direct search engine indexing robots.

    Search engine robots want instructions on how to correctly index your site, so give 'em to 'em. Read up on search engine guidelines and features (like caching site text and image search). Determine how and what areas of your site should be indexed. The use of meta tags and the robots.txt file are the most common methods of directing robots to your content. Use this robots.txt validator to ensure your robots.txt file is correct.

    For example, Google has been Scribbling.net's biggest referrer since day one, but I noticed that often users from Google would land on pages that weren't the most relevant to their search terms. So I checked out how the Googlebot indexes sites. I wanted robots to index only the permanent locations of posts, but not the front page (as it constantly changes to show the latest post). I don't want any of the images or text cached and presented out of context. I also have a page or two that I don't want anyone to find via a search at all. So here's my robots.txt file which lays out some of these instructions. Additionally, the robots meta tags on my front page say "noindex,follow,noarchive", which effectively tells robots to follow links but not to index or archive the front page. The same tag on any post page says "index,follow,noarchive" which tells robots to index the content on that page but not to archive it.

    This way, if the day the Googlebot indexes my site is the day I have a post on the front page about a dog, with a link to the dog post's permanent URL, the Googlebot will index only the permanent location of the dog post. Four days later, when my front page has a post on it about a cat, and someone searches for site:scribbling.net dog, the only pages returned should be the dog post (and any associated documents) and not the front page.

  • Serve "friendly" error messages.

    The most unhelpful, dead-end message you can get from a web server is:

    404 Not Found 
The web server cannot find the file 
or script you asked for. 
Please check the URL to ensure that 
the path is correct. 

Please contact the server's administrator 
if this problem persists.

    A usable web site does a lot better than that. Hook up friendly error messages which include navigation to documents that do exist or don't throw an error, a search box and/or a contact email address. Get creative.

  • Don't "click here."

Recommended Reading:

Extractions from "Time for a Redesign: Dr. Jakob Nielsen"

Good interview with Jacob Neilsen, whose website http://www.useit.com/alertbox is a great resource for how to build good websites.

Nielsen's "Alertbox"
www.useit.com/alertbox

Adaptive Path's incisive essays on information design, architecture and usability
www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/index.php

Slashdot blurb:

CIO Insight's executive editor Brad Wieners interviews Web site design usability evangelist Jakob Nielsen about design mistakes like poor search, discusses organizational resistance and common barriers to doing usability reviews, concluding with Nielsen's Adobe PDF and pop-up pet peeves, common redesign errors and budget advice when it's time for a redesign, either for your Web site or company intranet. And just to make it more usable and readable (so you don't have to click through multiple pages), you can read the entire Jakob Nielsen interview on one printer-friendly page with fewer graphics and a bandwidth-saving document size for people using dial-up Internet connections.

Notes from this article, originally at http://www.cioinsight.com/print_article/0,1406,a=129234,00.asp

Pet Peeves in General

  • Fail to include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does.
  • Neglect to use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the home page size.
  • Don't use color to distinguish visited and unvisited links.
  • Use graphics to decorate, rather than illustrate real content.
  • Give an active link to the home page on the home page.

Source: Dr. Jakob Nielsen's "Alertbox," November 2003

B2B Tips

To make the most of your B2B Web site, nielsen recommends that you "Help your fans help you" win their business. Provide the resources prospective clients' need to sell your products and services internally. Offer these aids:

  • Downloadable product photos, preferably ones that show the product being used.
  • White papers that demonstrate ROI. Make these short, and don't use PDF; standard Web pages make it easier for advocates to cut and paste text and images into their memos and presentations.
  • Links to external press coverage that demonstrates that independent sources have covered you positively.
  • Downloadable tables showing your product's main specifications, benefits and price, along with competitive comparisons.
  • Downloadable slide shows, preferably in PowerPoint format.
  • Ongoing updates through an e-mail newsletter, which can offer advocates hints about tidbits to feed their bosses.

Source: Norman Nielsen Group Inc.

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