New Carousel in Google Search - YouTube Videos in Bigger View

Google a new carousel in Google Search.



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Help With the Internet Comes From Web Services Companies

To mark presence in the digital world a well functioning site is essential. While choosing a website Design Company things become very difficult and confusing. There is large completion in the market and every design ...



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Good Work Atmosphere Makes Singapore The Choicest Website Design Company

Whenever you are thinking about giving your website a new look, you are thinking about the cost that would be involved. True, the IT knowledge and aptitude in the US is far better than any ...



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Learn iPhone Game Development in Five Easy Steps

By having a great idea about a new iPhone game app which is not only unique and fun oriented can work well in the iOS market. However, the catch is you do not know what ...



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Looking for Custom E-Commerce Development, Get a PSD to Oscommerce Conversion

Getting the best e-commerce solution to manage an online business is an important decision, especially for a new venture. However, web development industry is occupied with countless e-commerce tools, which makes it difficult to make ...



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Benefits of Web Designing

Today we are living in fast moving era where demanding the things like Jennie's magic means at our door step. Nowadays websites are also part of the business. So, it is also important for am ...



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A Few Simple Ways to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

It shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone running a website today that you should be concerned with search engine optimization. When your website is highly ranked by search engines it will show up in ...



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How to Get Visitors to Return to Your Site

Do you struggle with how to get visitors to return to your site? What steadfast methods do you have in place to ensure that you get repeat visitors? If you're like most site owners, you ...



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Strategies to Get Your Online Business Startup Off the Ground

And, to prove to yourself, you just need to glance at the figures for a minute. Based on the US Department of Commerce, internet commerce grows every year, and online buyers pay out over $225.5 ...



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Strategies to Get Your Online Business Startup Off the Ground

And, to prove to yourself, you just need to glance at the figures for a minute. Based on the US Department of Commerce, internet commerce grows every year, and online buyers pay out over $225.5 ...



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Google Adding G+ Hashtag To Search

"...we're bringing a richer hashtag experience to Google Search."



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Don?EUR(TM)T Put Your Reputation on the Block

Appropriate web design can make all the difference to how people view your company and its products and services. Get in place your priorities as to what you really want to achieve via your website. ...



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Awe-Inspiring Vehicle Graphics Berkshire

Vehicle Graphics Berkshire gets to know the insights of the business. They help in boosting advertisement through moving billboards. Public buses, taxis, etc help the companies' products to be advertised to whichever place they go. ...



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Commendable Services of Yorkshire Web Development

Yorkshire Web Development provides an opportunity to the business firms who aim to expand in the market of e-commerce. The agency engage in the development of the websites that are mad by many business houses ...



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Why Hiring a Web Design Company Could Be the Right Decision for Your Business

While many businesses might think they are able to handle their own web design internally, there are many benefits that far outweigh the costs of hiring a company who specializes in web design. While you ...



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WebmasterWorld Weekly Round-Up 27 September

WebmasterWorld's weekly round-up of hot topics and discussions you may have missed in the last few days.



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Some Information About Table The Game Of Golf

Before I reveal the actual are, I really admit that becoming familiar with them reveals a clear part of my character. A couple of of these cheats I have tried while persons I have gathered ...



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Anatomy of a Website - Website Design Basics

Website anatomy 1. Website address - links and URLs The main language used to create websites is known as HTML which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Hypertext implies that the content is built by linking ...



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Importance of Professional Website Design in Dental Internet Marketing

If you are a dental care professional, it is important for you to understand the significance of professional and responsive website design in internet dental marketing. The competition in dental profession is stiff, it is ...



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Tips for Hiring Professional Website Developers in India

Hiring one of the most experienced and talented website developers is a must for launching an online business with an attractive website. A properly designed and developed web can prove beneficial for the growth of ...



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SEO Companies in Lebanon Guarantee Online Success

Marketing products on the Internet does not have to be a daunting task. The process can be made simpler by finding a reliable one from among the herd of SEO companies in Lebanon. Professionals in ...



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Why Websites Should Be Customized

Technology plays a big role in the lives of the people today. With the introduction of the internet, the world was radically changed. Now, it is already hard to imagine life without internet connectivity. People ...



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Google Search Engine Core Called Hummingbird

"Since the switch, Hummingbird's been put to use in over ninety percent of worldwide searches..."



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http://feeds.feedburner.com/mattcutts/PUFy

Someone recently asked me how I manage my to-do list, so I thought I’d write up the software that I use. Fundamentally I use Google Tasks as the backend, but with extensions and apps that improve on the basic functionality in Google Tasks.

Chrome

I use a couple different extensions for Chrome:

- Better Google Tasks is a great Chrome extension. Just click a button in Chrome and you have instant access to all your todo items. I like the extension so much that I donated some money to the author, Chris Wiegman. You can get the Better Google Tasks extension from the Chrome Store.

- I also noticed that on the New Tab page of Chrome, seeing thumbnails of my most visited sites (Techmeme, Hacker News, Nuzzel, Google News, etc.) every time I opened a new tab inevitably led me to click over to those sites. The result? I was wasting more time surfing than I wanted. The solution is a great Chrome extension called New Tab to Tasks. It changes Chrome’s new tab page to be your todo list. That way, I get a nice little signal every time I open a tab: “Hey, remember that you’re supposed to be working on stuff, not goofing off.” Thanks to Scott Graham for writing this Chrome extension.

Oh, and one last Chrome recommendation: if you don’t want *any* distractions on Chrome’s new tab page, consider installing Empty New Tab Page, which makes the Chrome new tab page completely blank.

Android

For Android, I use an app called Tasks. It costs $0.99, but there’s also a free version that starts showing ads after 10 days. I like the Tasks app for Android because it syncs with Google Tasks, has nice widgets, you can easily move tasks up and down, and you can indent tasks underneath each other. I only keep a few todo lists (Home, Work, Grocery, etc.), and to switch between lists you just swipe left or right. Tasks works great for me, but if you have tons of different todo lists then swiping between those lists might get old.

I can already imagine someone asking “Okay, but what about Google Keep?” I’m not opposed to Google Keep, but at this point I’ve found various third-party solutions that interoperate with Google Tasks and work well for me on Chrome and Android. Plus I already have my data in Google Tasks, so for the time being I like these solutions for Google Tasks.

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Stand Positively Out Of The Crowd With An Impressive Custom Logo Design

Creating a good impression on the audiences is the key aspect that helps in driving high number of potential clients. With the advert in technology, people find it easy to sustain and live with comfort. ...



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1099 Software - Taking Care of Your Small Business Requirements

Every year small business owners file their business and personal tax. However, they should also report earnings of each employee working on their payroll. To gather all the requisite information about your employee and filling ...



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Google AdWords Certification Program is Changing

"Google will begin replacing the Google Certification Program with a new and improved experience for agencies and online marketing professionals, Google Partners."



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The Options For Core Elements In Seo Tools

SEO tools might be divided into those from search engines and the third party ones. A more efficient strategy would be to build a website and its content with SEO in mind and then start ...



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This week's sponsor: Happy Cog

The Happy Cog Way -— Eight instructional courses highlighting Happy Cog’s methods and best practices from prototyping and responsive design to type systems and site deployment techniques. Get all eight courses for $99 until October 10/8/13.

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Google Launches "Ready Creatives" For Display Ads

"Ready Creatives consists of two powerful tools: Ready Image Ads and Ready Ad Gallery."



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US Attorney General's Operation "Clean Turf" Fines Companies For Writing False Online Reviews

The authorities fight back over false online reviews!



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Web Development in Bedford Will Enable You to Compete With a Wider Customer Base

Basically, anyone or company that wants to make money by offering services or products will need to seek the services of a web development Bedford company to build a site for them, their service or ...



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Advantages and Importance of Social Media Optimization

Internet has become an indispensable part of human life and every passing day, people are delving more and more into the Internet for some or the other purpose. For this, it has become a great ...



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Web Design in Milton Keynes Is an Essential Part of Any Business Model

A simple, attractive and effective site can multiply the earnings that come along its way. It forms the backbone of an online business. Owing a site that can serve your purpose is very important for ...



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Other Services Offered By A Website Design Company

With the competition between companies being a never ending battle, it is very important for a company to have a very strong online presence. The first step to an effective online presence is a website. ...



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Impress Your Business Contacts With Your Web Design

The website design of the business is the first thing that your potential customer or visitors notices, while browsing your business website. It tends to lay an emphasis, on the visitor, to a large extent. ...



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Online Web Development in Netherlands and Website Designing and Garnishing With the Help of Powerful and Able Tools

Online web development in Netherlands and website designing and garnishing with the help of powerful and able tools are offered by many providers. Webshop beginnen tools are very handy and up to the mark. These ...



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Specifications to Get Your Ecommerce Business Started Off

And if you are unsure this is valid, simply take a look at the amounts. Ecommerce expands annually, and as said by the US Department of Commerce, at this time, on-line buyers spend more than ...



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Specifications to Get Your Ecommerce Business Started Off

And if you are unsure this is valid, simply take a look at the amounts. Ecommerce expands annually, and as said by the US Department of Commerce, at this time, on-line buyers spend more than ...



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Learn How to Get Your Business Online Started Off

And, to convince yourself, you just need to go through the statistics for a minute. Ecommerce develops yearly, and as stated by the US Department of Commerce, at this time, online purchasers spend more than ...



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Learn How to Get Your Business Online Started Off

And, to convince yourself, you just need to go through the statistics for a minute. Ecommerce develops yearly, and as stated by the US Department of Commerce, at this time, online purchasers spend more than ...



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Google AdWords Now Allows Click Conversion Monitoring Up To 90-Days

"...the capability to customize your conversion counting window from 7 to 90 days after a click."



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Computer Aided Design for Engineers

At one time, students in engineering training would be required to take extensive courses in the painstaking process of manual drafting. While that method served its purpose well over the years, it has since been ...



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CAD for Engineers and More

The design software allows a user to customize and create a three dimensional image of just about anything, ranging from a car to a bridge and anything else in between. The computer aided design software ...



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CAD In Fashion Careers

The computer aided design software provides several different helpful features that you just are not going to find with most other programs. With the software, it is possible to design just about anything, ranging from ...



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New Google AdSense Redesigned Text Ads CTR Performance

"...we're beginning to give our text ads a modern look designed to enhance their performance and the overall user experience."



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So Your Company Wants A New Website - Can You Handle That?

How many times have you looked at a website and thought - this just isn't helping me find what I'm looking for at all! The brand may be great and perhaps even well-represented on some ...



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Are You Aware of Popular Website Design Trends?

Just as the world around us is constantly changing, so is the global internet marketplace. Technology will never stop, so as long as there is research and development taking place, new and better ways of ...



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Guide for Beginners to Create Their Own Websites.

How generate a Website: These steps are just to show you how to begin creating your own website. It is planned for the beginner to move step by step during the whole procedures from the ...



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Guide for Beginners to Create Their Own Websites.

How generate a Website: These steps are just to show you how to begin creating your own website. It is planned for the beginner to move step by step during the whole procedures from the ...



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Best Web Based Design, Applications And Seo For Your Business

In now-a-days fast world, a website is the backbone of your company. Consumer goes through that website which is more appealing and common people friendly as compared to the one that is out of design ...



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How to Get the Best Web Design for Your Website

The best web design practices are always evolving. This is because designing a website do not follow a fixed rule. However, there are some important factors to consider while designing your website. Some of them ...



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The Importance of Accuracy on Your Company Website

Many companies put so much effort into certain elements of their website that they unintentionally neglect other important aspects. When it comes to successful website design, it is all about looking at the bigger picture ...



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The Secrets to a Successful Small Business Website

The secret to a good website is thorough planning, quality content and good marketing. Planning involves working out who your target customer is and creating your website around their needs. Consider who your target demographic ...



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Is Your Small Business One of the 80% With a Below-Par Website?

In this digital day and age, having a website is an important part of running a successful small business. However, just having a website doesn't mean that your business will be a success. A quality ...



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Web Design Tips on Functionality and Marketing

When paying a company to design your website, you may make the mistake of leaving too much with the professionals. Web designers are experts at creating websites but you are an expert in your business. ...



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Sustainable Web Design

A growing number of industries are trying to reduce or at least curtail carbon footprints and energy use. Emissions standards have been set for the automotive, construction, and even telecommunications industries. Yet the internet’s carbon footprint is growing out of control: a whopping 830 million tons of CO₂ annually, which is bigger than that of the entire aviation industry. That amount is set to double by 2020.

It is time for web designers to join the cause.

Right now, at least 332 million tons of CO₂—40 percent of the internet’s total footprint—falls at least partially under the responsibility of people who make the web. It needn’t be that large, but with our rotating carousels, high-res images, and more, we have been designing increasingly energy-demanding websites for years, creating monstrous HUMVEE sites where we could be just as well served by slender hybrids or, better yet, bicycles.

The good news is that we have several methods for fixing obese websites and simultaneously attacking our industry’s carbon footprint—methods that conveniently dovetail with good business practice: mobile-ready design demands a thoughtful and efficient approach to page design, and increasingly sophisticated web ROI metrics are already driving businesses to pursue faster and lighter sites.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty, let’s first look at how to estimate a website’s footprint.

What is the web’s carbon footprint?

Just as we refer to a car’s energy usage in terms of miles per gallon, we can think about website energy usage in terms of the amount of data downloaded. This, in turn, gives us a framework for guessing the relationship between page size and carbon footprint. Unfortunately, working out a website’s carbon footprint is, on the best of days, tricky and imprecise. Here’s my shot at it:

• A 2008 paper from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests it takes 13kWh to transmit 1GB.


• According to EPA figures, the average U.S. power plant emits 1.2 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent (called CO₂e) per kWh produced (other countries have higher or lower averages depending on their energy policy).


• If we multiply 13kWh by 1.2 pounds, we get 15.6 pounds of CO₂e—and that’s just to transfer 1GB of data.


• If one million users each download a typical page, which now averages 1.4MB, that’s a total of 1,367GB of data.


• At 15.6 pounds per gigabyte, that’s more than 10 tons of CO₂e.


• Mobile data, with its reliance on 3G/4G, is up to five times more polluting—77 pounds CO₂ per gigabyte.


• If a million mobile users on 3G download a 1.4MB page, that’s 1,367GB times 77 pounds, which totals 52 tons of CO₂.

Based on these figures, we can estimate that a site the size of Tumblr, with 183 million pageviews per day and approximately 10 percent of those from mobile, has the potential to be responsible for a staggering 2,600 tons of CO₂ daily.

That doesn’t take into account important factors like how much of the data center’s electricity comes from renewable or fossil fuels or end-user electricity usage, both of which could significantly influence the total. But these numbers do give us a framework for seeing the relationship between page size and carbon footprint—and make it clear that cutting gigabytes saves CO₂.

The first place to start trimming? In our designs.

Reducing CO₂ by tackling page bloat

At 1.4MB, today’s average page is 15 times larger than it was 10 years ago, primarily due to images (881kB) and script (224kB). Plain old HTML totals just 54kB—but when’s the last time you saw an HTML-only site? This average page also makes more than 100 HTTP requests. Whether they fetch a big object or a small one, these add up to more delay and more power wastage. The average site is also slow: Alexa’s top 2,000 retailer sites now take an average of more than seven seconds to load—much longer than users consider acceptable.

Budgeting for a lean, mean, and green website

No one intentionally sets out to build a 1.4MB page, but clients often demand eye-catching images, advanced social features, and plenty of design bells and whistles, and that’s pretty much all it takes to get to that size. The best way to prevent this kind of obesity is to set a page size budget: start with a target page size, and stick to it.

At MadPow, we’ve adopted the page size budget approach to help us chase better page-load performance, with the holy grail being a page that loads in two seconds or less. Of course, the more page weight we shave off, the smaller the site’s carbon footprint. To keep track of this, I multiply the page size by analytics on user visits to arrive at a rough total for site traffic, not forgetting to separate out the more-polluting mobile traffic and account for caching.

Sticking to the page budget means considering data-weight at each stage of design:

Content strategy: If you are retrofitting a site to reduce page weight, a quick fix might be to trade higher-weight content for lighter alternatives, like still pictures instead of video, or text instead of images—so long as the same user and business goals are served. Better yet, if you use a “content first” approach, you can bake the size considerations into your content planning, so as to make content choices that are appropriate for the audience and the data budget.

Interaction design: The experience definition phase of design is the perfect time to intercept the more data-hungry site features that threaten a page budget. The ubiquitous carousel is a prime offender—a typical one has three to six big images, plus the JavaScript needed to make it move, typically adding up to hundreds of kilobytes. The value of carousels is debatable anyway; if you need to make a metrics-driven case for reduction or replacement, take the Brad Frost Carousel Challenge. Other candidates for reappraisal include sharing buttons, embedded maps, auto-play video, Flash, ads, and syndicated third-party content services—all of which come with a hefty data overhead.

Visual design: Images are the largest part of the footprint for most sites (60 percent on average), and are ripe for data reduction. To start, can you get by with fewer images? Many images on the web are also saved in the incorrect format, are improperly sized, or are badly optimized. Free services like smush.it can optimize your images better than your regular editing tool, and they’ll do batch processing, too.

Consolidating all the small images on your site by using CSS sprites or web icon fonts will save data and HTTP requests; pure CSS icons will be the lightest-weight option, when browser support catches up. And since mobile data is so much more polluting than wired data, make sure responsive sites use a working responsive images solution. Good optimization could shave 72 percent off mobile image weight.

Code design: Front-end optimization is burgeoning with low-hanging fruit: shrinking scripts, compressing downloads, setting appropriate caching times, and combining files can all help reduce data overhead and HTTP requests. For a quick taste, point Google Page Speed at your site, and it will identify which techniques could be applied to help speed it up. For a deeper dive, I recommend reading “Web Performance 101,” or Lara Swanson’s recent ALA article.

Green hosting: Even before you start minimizing your site’s carbon footprint through design and optimization, you could consider moving to a green host. Many of these are powered by renewable energy—particularly in Iceland, where data centers have opened to take advantage of cheap geothermal power. Green hosting might not be for everyone yet (it can be more expensive, and Iceland might be far from your customers), but more local green hosts are starting to appear. Some cloud-based services are getting greener, too: Google, Apple, and Rackspace get some of their power from renewables, though according to Greenpeace, Amazon Web Services does not.

Offsetting the rest: Even after applying a lean design, optimizing, and moving to a green web host, your site will still have a carbon footprint. To account for that, you can buy an offset, which typically costs $19 per ton, depending on the project. Offsetting doesn’t actually take the CO₂ out of the atmosphere, and it is a poor substitute for reducing emissions. However, many programs have additional benefits, such as funding education in the developing world or protecting fragile habitats.

Persuading people to optimize

Optimizing for lower emissions is tantamount to optimizing for general performance, so even non-green businesses have several compelling reasons to put their site on a diet: faster pages make for happier users, especially on mobile; they convert better and have better SEO, too.

Adding climate benefit to that list makes an overwhelming case for cutting page size and data, especially for companies that are already sympathetic to a climate case (such as those that have signed the Climate Declaration).

The internet as climate hero

Despite its huge carbon footprint, the internet could also be a climate savior. The transition of old industries and services to the internet has the potential to save eight billion tons of CO₂ by 2020, more than counterbalancing the projected 1.4 billion ton 2020 internet footprint.

For instance:

• Teleconferencing has already reduced business travel by 30 percent.


• Home sharing (like AirBnB) is 66 percent more efficient than staying at a hotel.


• Car sharing services are taking cars off the road—as many as 20 regular cars per shared one, according to ZipCar.


• Meshing.it, the directory for the sharing economy, lists a further 8,000 startups, all focused on spreading ownership amongst communities, thus reducing consumption.

As we continue these shifts toward an increasingly online economy, though, we’ll also soon be welcoming five billion new users to the internet. As the internet’s overall share of world climate pollution continues to grow, so does the climate responsibility of those who architect it. But by building lean and clean, we can reduce the damage—and make happier customers and profitable businesses to boot.

Perhaps we’re conditioned to frame environmentally-friendly choices as sacrifices, but it isn’t so with the web. We can have cleaner, greener websites while also making users happier and improving the bottom line. And while the problem may be large, as any dietician can tell you, small changes add up. Why wouldn’t we get started?

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Very Important Ecommerce Strategies for Your Web Page

And, to assure yourself, you only need to go through the figures for a moment. Internet commerce grows every year, and as said by the US Department of Commerce, at this time, online buyers spend ...



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Very Important Ecommerce Strategies for Your Web Page

And, to assure yourself, you only need to go through the figures for a moment. Internet commerce grows every year, and as said by the US Department of Commerce, at this time, online buyers spend ...



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Google Organic Keyword Data "Not Provided" - It's Now Gone

Today's switch by Google to https, logged in or not, means that organic keyword data is now gone.



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Local Online Reviews - Meet Reputation Marketing!

Freedom of speech is an integral part of the United States, a constitutional right guaranteed by living in the U.S. as a citizen. The common viewpoint is that this is good and a right to ...



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Online Reputation - It Isn't Word-Of-Mouth Anymore!

Managing a company's online reputation is one of the more important parts of marketing and managing a modern business that is often overlooked. In order to successfully compete in the global internet market, having a ...



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Online Marketing And More With Singapore Web Development

You can keep your product and service, updates over the internet, with the web activities, available all across the globe. The system not only allows you to give leverage to your business, but to a ...



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I Want a New Search Engine

"The search engines are failing me. I spend more time trying to push the search engines out of the way, than finding stuff."



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Creating a Video Marketing Strategy

In last article we discussed how online videos can improve a business' online marketing presence. If done well, videos can help a business increase sales, brand awareness and search engine optimization. The importance of video ...



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Tips For Achieving A Great Website Design

The internet is making big waves in the lives of humans today. It can be difficult to imagine life without the internet anymore. It is even very hard for people to work and function without ...



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Run Google AdSense on HTTPS Sites

Google says you can now run AdSense on HTTPS sites.



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Website Navigation - It Can Be Creative!

Navigation is one of those elements involved with designing a great website that either works - or it doesn't. If it works, great; if it doesn't, users may have problems getting around the website which ...



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WebmasterWorld Weekly Round-Up 20 September

WebmasterWorld's weekly round-up of hot topics and discussions you may have missed in the last few days.



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Important Footer Link Facts You Need To Know!

Until recently, footer links on websites have been an element that were thought to serve certain beneficial optimization functions. For the most part, this is a true statement as they have helped speed up indexing ...



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Why Great Websites Must Have Great Articles!

It is more important than ever that a business website be as user-friendly and relevant as possible. Between the amount of competition in businesses and niche topics as well as the difficulty involved to rank ...



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Writing Blogs - It Can Be Done Without Any Magic Tricks!

Blogging has become a very popular and convenient way for information to be presented, whether it is a personal one or the presentation by a business or organization wanting to keep viewers aware of current ...



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Site Link Partners Being Harassed To Remove Links

"WebmasterWorld Members discuss how to handle the vexing issue of link partners being harassed to remove links.



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How Creativity And Simplicity Combines for a Quality Web Designers

Modern era witness a rise in demand for Web Designers with good talent, extremely skilled, imaginative, well equipped and sufficient experience. Web designer made it simply by the good method of planning, designing, presenting, building ...



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Web Design Tips

A quality website is becoming a necessity in today's world with many people researching online to find the goods and services they are in need of. However, just having a website doesn't mean people are ...



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Major Web Design Styles That Are Trending in 2013

Just as fashions, especially in clothes, come and go, trends in web designs are also temporary phenomenon's which change from year to year or from season to season. Some may last long and a few ...



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Major Web Design Styles That Are Trending in 2013

Just as fashions, especially in clothes, come and go, trends in web designs are also temporary phenomenon's which change from year to year or from season to season. Some may last long and a few ...



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Google announces new flat logo and "App Launcher" nav menu official

Google makes its new flat logo and �app launcher� style nav menu official, will roll out over the next few weeks



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Google Improves Backlink Data in GWT

The most significant improvement you'll see is that most of the links are now sampled uniformly from the full spectrum of backlinks rather than alphabetically.



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Blogging - Two Different Viewpoints!

Until now, it has been thought that blogging - inviting other writers to submit articles to a non-owned website - was beneficial for a number of valid reasons. Such writing provides interest to users, increases ...



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Content Management and Optimization Needs A Combined Effort!

Great websites are a careful mixture of design, content, and optimization, all of which must work together for successful internet results; however, that is not always the easiest thing to achieve since there are so ...



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Real Estate Website Design

An attractive website is the key to success of any real estate business. It is therefore a good idea to not only design a great looking but also user friendly website that has all the ...



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Rachel Andrew on the Business of Web Dev: Pricing Underpins Everything You Do

Over the last four years, my service business has become a product business. During the transition, I’ve had a chance to reflect on the uses and pitfalls of each model. Hindsight is a wonderful thing—I can now see that many of the difficulties we experienced as a service business could have been avoided with a different pricing model. Yet what was ultimately one of our biggest mistakes gave us experiences we could draw on when deciding on a pricing model for our product, a model that has been very successful for us.

When I started my company in 2001, I was essentially operating as a freelance developer. I was still relatively inexperienced, with a few years of Perl and Classic ASP development under my belt. I had a natural aptitude for troubleshooting problems, but this meant that many of my projects were fairly short term. I would bill for a few hours here and there fixing a problem or writing some additional code for an existing system. Therefore, I figured out an hourly rate based on what I needed to earn to survive, and charged per hour worked.

The hourly rate method of pricing worked well for an individual developer on short-term projects, but in retrospect we should have moved away from that model once we were developing large and complex projects. Six years ago, Drew McLellan joined the company. By then, I was developing fairly large projects, often using other contractors, and Drew brought another 12 years of experience to the company. Our value at this point was not that we could write lines of code. Our value was in the huge amount of experience we brought to projects. However, we were still charging like PHP freelancers, trying to work out the number of hours any project might take.

As we gave the client an estimate based on an hourly rate at the start of the project, any change to the spec or designs meant a recalculation of that estimate. Costs were constantly being discussed; I’m sure it felt to our clients that every interaction with us came with a price tag. Of course, when you are outsourcing services, that is ultimately the case. However, constantly needing to discuss and sign off changes meant the focus became the price and not the work. Our model worked best in the early days of the web, when designers would sign off designs and throw them over the fence to be built in a “pixel perfect” fashion by developers. It fell apart once a more collaborative and iterative way of designing and developing sites was attempted.

Pricing your services

For a new service company or freelancer the issue of what to charge is probably top of the list of worries. There is a huge amount of material out there to help you. For example, Cole Henley has recently begun to publish the results of his 2013 freelance rates survey; Jason Blumer has presented his opinion on value-based pricing here on A List Apart; Andy Clarke has written about moving to weekly billing. However, rather than just figuring out an hourly or project rate, I’d like to encourage people consider the type of service they want to provide, and tie the pricing model to that. Whichever model you choose, it needs to be profitable. You need to know that you are going to earn enough to pay any fixed costs and be able to live. However, that can be attained through very different ways of charging your clients. To illustrate, let’s take a look at two freelancers, both just setting up a new business.

Our first freelancer wants her offering to appeal to small businesses, perhaps those who don’t have a website at all. In order to appeal to these small owner-run companies, she wants to offer a low-cost service. To do this, she decides to put in place a number of constraints—for example, the sites will be essentially customized templates and the client will pick from a menu of features that can be implemented quickly. This approach enables a rapid turnaround time. It will need to be to keep costs down yet allow our freelancer to make enough money.

Our second freelancer has just left a job in a large agency. She has 10 years of experience on large-scale projects in a niche area and a good track record of delivering. The type of service she is keen to provide is very bespoke. She wants to work with a single client at a time, iteratively developing their identity and bringing in specialist skills as required to build their website and applications.

Both of these businesses are viable and valuable to the clients that they serve, but their pricing models are likely to be very different. Our first freelancer knows her potential clients do not have a lot of money to spend and want to know what things cost up front. A fixed price for a site built within constraints will work well for these clients. By tailoring her service to suit, she can do that and still make money. It would be a disaster, though, if she tried to offer a bespoke service like our second freelancer within the first pricing model described. With clients requesting extensive changes or asking for functionality outside her skillset, she would soon find herself working for less than minimum wage.

The type of project our second freelancer is skilled in is by nature that of far larger businesses with larger budgets for this type of work. Due to the iterative nature of the work and decisions made throughout the process, the project might take longer than expected, which makes any kind of fixed-cost quote impractical. She considers an hourly or daily rate, but given her desire to immerse herself in the requirements of only one client at a time, she decides that charging in one-week blocks makes more sense. It is much easier to estimate the length of a project in weeks, and the client doesn’t feel nickel-and-dimed when the scope changes. My own experience shows that it is hard for a client to feel like a partner in creating something with you if every interaction has a price tag attached.

There is nothing wrong with offering a fixed price, inexpensive service with strong constraints. I know many companies that have been successful with that type of service. But you are heading into difficult territory if you try to offer the same service as a company that bills weekly and uses an iterative approach. Equally, if you are happiest working long term with clients, in an iterative manner, the necessary constraints of fixed-price work would not enable you to do your best work.

Pricing a product

In our work as a service company, I believe our pricing strategy negatively affected the service we offered. On the flip side, the pricing for our product has been very successful. It has enabled us to look after our customers well, make a profit, and continue to develop and improve the product.

The most obvious place where pricing will change the decisions you can make is in support. Our support for the product we develop has been incredibly important to our overall success. However, it comes at a cost. In order to offer the free and unlimited support that benefits our customers and motivates them to speak highly of us, we need to dedicate a lot of time to it. This impacts our profit. As we grow, we will need to hire more people to do support if we want to offer the same quality of service. Charging less for our product might double our sales, but it would also double our support and the number of people needed to offer the same quality of support.

For the same reason, we chose not to offer a free version of the product. If we did so, we would need to support all of those free users. We wouldn’t be happy with offering a free version with no support, as any free users hitting a problem would take their issues to Twitter, giving a skewed version of what our product and support was like. But support takes time, which has a cost. Ultimately our paid license holders would be paying more in order that we could support everyone who is kicking the tires. We don’t think that’s fair.

When deciding on a pricing strategy, we also considered the type of customers we were aiming our product at. Our target market is web designers and small agencies. The majority of these will be more like the first freelancer I described in the section on service pricing. Typically, they develop a large number of sites per year, and once a site is finished it is handed over. If more work needs doing in the future, that will be billed as a separate job. In light of this, we gave our CMS product a single, fixed, and one-off cost. There are no recurring costs, and no additional charges for add-ons to the core product. This means that companies can quote for a job and know up front exactly what the CMS license will cost. Four years on and the model still works for us; it suits the majority of customers and is transparent to everyone.

Base pricing decisions on the service you want to offer, and who you want to offer it to

Whether products or services, much hangs on a pricing decision that frequently comes down to a gut feeling or a quick look at what other people are charging. You should always start with an understanding of what your costs are, in order to come up with a basic amount you need to earn as a freelancer or bring in from sales of your product.

Once you know the bottom line in terms of profitability, I would encourage you to think about what you want to offer and who your ideal clients or customers are. You can then start to shape your pricing model in a way that will appeal to that customer. You can ensure that the way you price your product or service supports the way you want to work with people, rather than it becoming a source of friction in your relationships. And finally, be confident in your pricing once you have made a decision, but don’t be afraid to take a look at the situation again as the industry and the people you work with change.

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Lyza Danger Gardner on Building the Web Everywhere: Do as Little as Possible

I make websites for mobile phones. Or, at least, that’s what I used to say.

Nowadays, it’s complicated. Builder of websites and applications that, with minimal exception, work decently well on nearly every kind of physical thing that is web-enabled doesn’t fit well into the OCCUPATION box on tax forms.

Explaining my job is complicated because the web itself is complicated. It’s already a spicy, mysterious dish, cobbled together with some questionable ingredients. It’s hard to say just what we’ll have on hand tomorrow—or how we’ll be able to satisfy all of the fussy devices joining the feast.

The mobile web was the future

A number of years ago, we joined hands and felt the sun on our faces and chanted “The mobile web is the future!” and went off to build it.

We started by (mostly) making and maintaining separate mobile websites. That sometimes felt cumbersome, and so we learned about Responsive Web Design and felt better that we were merely making and maintaining separate mobile web layouts. We started talking about swipe gestures in public. Then tablets happened. Eh, we thought, we can still handle this.

Then some thoughtful people started realizing that, perhaps, treating the mobile web like this Big Separate Thing might be counterproductive. Jeremy Keith, for example, proposed that There is no Mobile Web , which at the time seemed like a big old buzzkill. We had skills. Mobile savvy. Right?

Reverting back to the shorter title of regular old web developer was scary. Without the word “mobile” in there somewhere, how could we prove that we’d gone through the elaborate hazing ritual of mobile web development and in fact were still showing up every day for more beatings?

Not all of this was posturing. There were legitimate things that differentiated what we were up to from “traditional” web development. We’d learned a lot. Chucking out the new special sauce of mobile-tailored sites and apps in favor of a vanilla, lowest-common-denominator web? That would be silly.

But once we started to question the terminology, it was easy to get coaxed into dinner party arguments: What makes something mobile? What is the mobile web? What is the web, anyway, really?

My efforts to find a replacement for the word “mobile” haven’t amounted to much more than semantic air freshener: cloying, artificial cover-ups. I’ve used such stinkers as pan-device web. To get around describing how adaptive layouts look “on phones,” I say even lamer things like “in narrow-screen environments.” Barf.

Yet I don’t think it’s too grand to say that some of the trends that emerged from pioneering mobile web development represent the future of the entire web. Devices everywhere. Different displays, different inputs. Complexity. Integration of hardware characteristics. Even less control over the ultimate representation of our content.

Welcome (back) to the World Wide Web

So, let’s say it’s just the web again, now. No extra adjective needed. But it’s not the old Web, it’s the future Web. It’s changed. It got a summer job, went off to college, got sophisticated.

Looking at this new web and seeing beyond the specificity of the mobile web, or at least seeing it as an extension of the web, allows us to shore up some of the more fragile foundations we’ve laid and find ways to build the web that make a bit more sense.

Because the detail- and hack-heavy way we’re coming at this browser and device explosion will not scale. It has already broken down. Building a basic web page that works on a whole lot of devices has become in many ways a time- and soul-sucking morass of polyfills and workarounds. We sometimes spend more time tracking down why web fonts are spitting out garbage on a particular BlackBerry than creating and honing meaningful content.

Do as little as possible

Instead, I think we need to try to do as little as possible when we build the future web.

This isn’t a rationalization for laziness or shirking responsibility—those characteristics are arguably not ones you’d find in successful web devs. Nor it is a suggestion that we build bland, homogeneous sites and apps that sacrifice all nuance or spark to the Greater Good of total compatibility.

Instead it is an appeal for simplicity and elegance: putting commonality first, approaching differentiation carefully, and advocating for consistency in the creation and application of web standards.

Getting to this less-is-more future web involves, in part:

• Integrating what we’ve been learning on the mobile web—“mobile first” design practices, performance focus, progressive enhancement, and, yep, Responsive Web Design—into the future of our overall web crafting toolkits;


• Understanding the difference between inspired details and distracting minutiae, and assuring what we do do has impact;


• Introducing less risk, or managing the risk we introduce—because each workaround or device-specific tweak we make introduces risk;


• Putting more oomph and involvement behind our requests for the reliable support of web standards in browsers and across platforms, while making sure we’re learning and using the web standards we’re asking for; and


• Realizing when things aren’t in our bailiwick and getting ourselves off the hook for every technical eventuality.

Am I asking you to eschew everything unique about mobile (or other) devices in favor of cramming a one-size-fits-all blah webbiness into everything with a browser on it?

Nah. The do-less future is not about creating a great dumbing down, but instead making sure the pile of technical tasks required to get a decent site or app out the door doesn’t smother us entirely.

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Interviewing Humans

The goal of interviewing users is to learn about everything that might influence how the users might use what you’re creating. Good interviewing is a skill you develop with practice. The great myth is that you need to be a good talker. Conducting a good interview is actually about shutting up. This can be very hard, especially when you’re enthusiastic about the topic.

Remember, the people you’re interviewing want to be liked. They want to demonstrate their smarts. When you’re interviewing someone you know nothing. You’re learning a completely new and fascinating subject: that person.

Preparation

Once you have established who you want to talk to and what you want to find out, create your interview guide. This is a document you should have with you while you’re interviewing to ensure that you stay on topic and get all of the information you need.

The interview guide should contain:

1. The brief description and goal of the study. This is for you to share with the participant and use to remind yourself to stay close to the topic.


2. The basic factual or demographic questions for putting the participant’s answers in context. These will vary depending on the purpose of the interview, but often include name, gender, age, location, and job title or role.


3. A couple of icebreaker or warm-up questions to get the participant talking. Most people know this as “small talk.” Feel free to improvise these based on the demographic information.


4. The questions or topics that are the primary focus of the interview.

You should also gather a bit of background information on the topic and people you’ll be discussing, particularly if the domain is unfamiliar to you. Talking to homeowners about how they selected their mortgage brokers? Read up on mortgages. Sitting down with the head of customer service? Review the support forums or frequently asked questions.

Interview structure: three boxes, loosely joined

An interview has three acts, like a play or a spin class: the introduction and warm-up, the body of the interview, and the conclusion.

Introduction

Introduce yourself with a smile, expressing genuine gratitude that the person you are interviewing has taken the time to talk (even if they’re getting a large incentive and especially if it’s a busy staff member who has taken time out of their workday).

Describe the purpose of the conversation and the topic without going into so much detail that you influence the answer. Explain how the information will be used and shared. Obtain their explicit permission to record the conversation.

Ask whether they have any questions about the process.

Move on to the demographic information or facts you need to verify. Use the collection of this information as the basis for the warm-up questions.

“Oh, you live in San Diego. What do you like to do for fun there?”

Body

Once you’ve covered the formalities and pleasantries, it’s time to dig into the interview meat. With a sufficiently talkative subject, you might get all of the answers you wanted and more without asking more than the initial question directly.

Ask open-ended questions that encourage the subject to talk, not closed questions that can be answered with “yes” or “no.” (Closed question: “Do you communicate with the marketing department often?” Open question: “Tell me about the internal groups you communicate with as part of your job.”)

If the subject doesn’t offer enough information on a topic, ask a follow-up or probing question, such as “Tell me more about that.”

Allow pauses to let the story through. Silence is uncomfortable. Get used to it and don’t rush to fill gaps in the flow of conversation. You want your subject to do that.

Use your list of questions more as a checklist than as a script. If you read the questions verbatim, you’ll sound like a robocall survey.

Conclusion

Once you have the information you were looking for, and hopefully even more, make a gentle transition to the wrap-up. Say something like “That’s it for my questions. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about what we discussed?”

Thank them for their time and cover any administrative topics such as incentives or next steps on the project.

Don’t be afraid to shut it down early if you find yourself in an unproductive interview situation. Sometimes an interview subject goes taciturn or hostile. It happens and the best thing you can do is move on to the next one. There is no rule that says you need to hang in until you’ve attempted to have every single one of your questions answered.

Just do your part to remain friendly and respectful to the end.

Conducting the interview

You, the interviewer, play the dual role of host and student. Begin by putting the participant at ease with your demeanor. The more comfortable a participant feels, the more and better information you will get. A relaxed participant will open up and be more honest, less likely to worry about putting on a good impression.

Once you’ve done your part to get the subject talking, get out of the way. You should strive to be a nearly invisible, neutral presence soaking up everything the other person has to say. Think of them as the world’s foremost expert on themselves, which is the all-absorbing matter at hand. Insert yourself only when necessary to redirect back on topic or get clarification. You will know when your interview is going particularly well because you won’t be able to get a word in, but you will be getting answers to all your questions.

Breathe

It’s easy to feel like you’re on stage and tense up without realizing it. Your own tension can be contagious, so remind yourself to breathe and remain relaxed and observant.

Practice active listening

As long as you’re breathing, make interested mm-hmm sounds. If you’re interviewing in person, make sure to look at the speaker directly and nod. Unrelated thoughts might start to pop up, especially if an answer goes on at length. Stay alert and focused on the other person.

Keep an ear out for vague answers

You want details and specifics. Always be ready to bust out a probing question such as “Why is that?” or “Tell me more about that.”

Avoid talking about yourself

Sometimes, what starts as active listening turns into, “Let me tell you about a similar experience I had….” The interview isn’t about you or your opinions. This can be very hard to remember and takes practice to avoid. So, if you find that you’ve inserted yourself into their narrative, just stay relaxed and steer the conversation back on track.

Handy checklist

This checklist for effective user research was adapted from the Ethnography Field Guide produced by the Helsinki Design Lab, powered by Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund (http://bkaprt.com/jer/10/):

• Create a welcoming atmosphere to make participants feel at ease.


• Always listen more than you speak.


• Take responsibility to accurately convey the thoughts and behaviors of the people you are studying.


• Conduct your research in the natural context of the topic you’re studying.


• Start each interview with a general description of the goal, but be careful of focusing responses too narrowly.


• Encourage participants to share their thoughts and go about their business.


• Avoid leading questions and closed yes/no questions. Ask follow-up questions.


• Prepare an outline of your interview questions in advance, but don’t be afraid to stray from it.


• Whenever possible, snap photos of interesting things and behaviors.


• Also note the exact phrases and vocabulary that participants use.


• Pay attention after you stop recording. You might get a valuable revelation.

Try to be as conversational and natural as possible. If the user volunteers the information in the course of your conversation without you having to ask, that’s terrific. Your questions are just prompts to help the participant tell you a story that reveals situations, attitudes, and behaviors you didn’t even think to ask about. Offer enough information to set the scope for the conversation, but not so much that you influence the response.

Here is a sample set of questions, based on our museum website design example, for you to modify to meet your needs:

• Tell me about your job.


• Walk me through a typical week in your life.


• How often are you online?


• What computers or devices do you use?


• When do you use each of them?


• Do you share any of them?


• What do you typically do online?


• What do you typically do on your days off?


• How do you decide what to do?


• Tell me about how your children use the internet.


• How do you decide what to do on your days off with your kids?


• What are your particular non-work interests? What do you read online besides the news?


• How frequently do you visit museums in your town? Which ones?


• What prompts you to go?

What to do with the data you collect

The interview is the basic unit of ethnographic research. Once you’ve completed your interviews, analyze them all together to find themes, including user needs and priorities, behavior patterns, and mental models. Note the specific language and terms you heard so you can better reflect the way users think and talk in the actual interface. If you are doing generative research, look to the needs and behaviors you discover to point out problems that need solving. Turn the clusters around user types into personas that you can use for the life of the product or service you’re working on.

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Nishant Kothary on the Human Web: The Merry Stormtrooper

“I work at Microsoft,” I said.

It was SxSW 2009, and I’d just bumped into someone I dated in college. This was the first time we’d seen each other since our breakup. As often happens in such situations, the uncomfortable exchange had come down to one question: whose life was better?

My reptilian brain went into overdrive as I sensed her move in for the kill.

“Oh? Ha”, she said. Knife. Twist. It was over.

In today’s tech culture, Microsoft is like the guy wearing the bluetooth headset: uncool by default. I joined the Death Star shortly after the iPhone was announced in 2007. I left earlier this year, shortly after the launch of the Surface RT, and a few months after my five year anniversary at the company. My area of focus was the web community, a place where relations were strained to say the least. And for a brief period of time during my tenure, my job was to get the web community to love Internet Explorer again.

Sad Yoda.

At the time, Internet Explorer was any web evangelist’s worst nightmare. In the years leading up to my start at Microsoft, it had become a product that we (excluding our moms, maybe) had grown to love to hate. Try to imagine charts like this, even if made in jest, being created for your product. IE-hating is so much of a cliché that the IE marketing team even released an ad based on the very cliché of trolling IE.

Despite the incessant animosity, I loved my job. With the exception here or there, I liked my coworkers, respected my direct management chain, loved what I worked on, and delivered some work worthy of real-world pride. I was a happy Stormtrooper, and one of the things I frequently repeated to my peers and friends while at Microsoft was, “If I quit, it’s going to be to work for myself. It’s going to be really hard to beat this gig.” That is, in fact, what I did earlier this year.

But, under the predominantly #firstworldproblems lens for evaluating job quality, most people considered my job, pardon my French, shitty. Dan Ariely sheds some light on this in his first book: “We are always looking at the things around us in relation to others. We can’t help it.” Humans derive the value of Item A by subconscious comparisons to similar items B and C. And as compared to working at a “cool” Microsoft competitor or a “hot” Silicon Valley startup, I had a shitty job. So, let’s just go with that.

On the upside, though, this does uniquely qualify me to answer a profound question for you: how can you be happy in a shitty job?

Ashton Kutcher—yes, that Ashton Kutcher—provides some sound career advice in his speech at the recent Teen Choice Awards. “I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job,” said Ashton to a sea of screaming teenagers. Comedian Louis C.K. echoes Kutcher’s refreshing eloquence with his characteristic bluntness in a hilarious routine where he says, “You think you’re too interesting a person to have a shitty job!?” But I suspect telling you that you have to get over yourself, appreciate opportunity and work hard isn’t very helpful advice. So let me borrow the thoughts of another mind whose work has influenced me greatly over the years, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Csikszentmihalyi gets credited with introducing the concept of flow: the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. But Csikszentmihalyi’s greatest contribution wasn’t the concept of flow but his insights into how you can achieve flow in any situation in life. In other words, Csikszentmihalyi cracked the code for the secret to happiness. And miraculously, he achieved this without having to resort to theoretical clichés and platitudes. He actually did it scientifically.

At the risk of unfairly summarizing Flow, Csikszentmihalyi’s recipe for eternal happiness is based on a counterintuitive idea that unachievable goals, those proverbial big dreams of fame and fortune if you will, are the root of most unhappiness. This is not to say that he is against achieving great successes in life. After all, much of his findings come from examining how the highest achievers in the world, from Olympic triathletes to concert soloists, find flow. Csikszentmihalyi’s research has found that you pretty much write off any chance you may have of achieving flow (happiness) by setting goals that are obviously out of your reach. In my experience, you also greatly lower your chances of stratospheric levels of success by explicitly setting goals that are obviously out of your reach. It’s a lose-lose.

The secret, as Mihaly discovered by studying all types of people in the flow state, lies in setting achievable goals that are just a wee bit out of reach. The kind of goals that will require you to stretch yourself and grow in order to achieve them. And when you meet them? Raise the stakes, and repeat. That’s it.

This is a profoundly simple concept in theory. But as the saying goes, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are different.” And it’s because it’s always easier said than done.

Leading up to IE9, I believed that getting the community to love IE again had two prerequisites: (a) IE had to become a product deserving of love again, (b) The community needed to let go of the legacy hatred. Even though I helped loop community feedback into product features, I wasn’t on the engineering team, and thus, I was limited in my ability to directly influence (a). Instead, along with a handful of my peers, I turned my focus on (b): reducing all the hatred for IE.

Eliminating hatred is no small feat. But from Mihaly’s perspective of flow, it is an achievable one, i.e. it’s relatively easier to get someone to stop hating something than it is to get them to go directly from hating to loving it. It requires humility, discipline, patience, a strategy, and admittedly, a pinch of masochism. Most of my work in and around the IE9 timeframe focused heavily on regaining community trust. Projects I was involved in, like 10K Apart and Lost World’s Fairs, were all part of an effort to show IE9 in its true light. It took a year’s worth of hard work and more than a few tomatoes to the face, but the negative sentiment around Internet Explorer reduced surely and steadily. Feedback became meaningful, conversations become constructive. The engineering team had created a good browser, and by the time it launched, the hate wasn’t canceling out that fact. Even you partook in the rare public display of affection for IE9.

Influencing sentiment in any domain is a challenging problem. But freed from my idealistic shackles, I was able to approach the problem without the surrounding negativity bringing me down. I flexed new brain cells, learned to truly strategize and measure in long-term units, reevaluated beliefs about right and wrong (a discussion for another day), and grew in all sorts of previously unimaginable ways. And, as Mihaly predicted, this led to a tremendous amount of flow. For such a “shitty” job, it was one of my happiest times not only at Microsoft, but in my career.

The beauty of Mihaly’s approach is its micro-versatility. It can be applied to almost anything in life, both at work and at play, from attitudes and behaviors to career and life goals. Having difficulty losing fifteen pounds? Maybe you should focus on losing five pounds first. Is your business not making enough money? Maybe you’re boiling the ocean, and need better focus. Unable to successfully give your sister some career advice? Maybe you should work on being a good listener first. Whatever the problem, it can be framed in such a way that you are working toward the long-term goal by setting a realistic initial goal before you raise the bar and repeat. As it turns out, the essence of aphorisms like, “He who ships, wins,” or “The secret to getting ahead is getting started,” live in Mihaly’s elegant recipe for flow.

But try to tell that to your inner critic and you’ll feel an instant backhand slap across your cheek. The inner critic sees realistic goals as the doorway to mediocrity. It will taunt you, and call you a loser for setting a “lesser” goal. It will attack you with Vince Lombardi’s infamous words that forever tipped the scale in favor of our runaway aspirations, “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” But as Seth Godin counters in his pocket reference, The Dip , “Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.” What your critical mind dubs a lesser goal is, in fact, a smarter goal. And it is your only path towards getting the big, even if currently unachievable, prize.

In closing, I encourage you to revisit that recurring shitty situation. It could be related to your relationships, your finances, your health, your job, or something else entirely. The realm is irrelevant. What is relevant is your approach. And while there’s a limited amount I can do to help you through the internet, I urge you to dedicate some attention to the finer details. Happiness is a goal, and an achievable one if you are to believe Mihaly when he writes, “A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside’.”

May the force be with you.

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