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mardi 31 décembre 2013
What People Suffering From Diabetes Would Like You To Know About The Condition
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The Benefits Of A Wordpress Website For A Small Business
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Researcher Invents New Phone Display That Allows For Much Longer Battery Life
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Design Should Attract Visitors and Drive Business
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LA Web Development - Provide The Reliable Web Site
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lundi 30 décembre 2013
Steve Grove: Google+ Is Mobile, Search and Live Video
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Best Website Designing Services India
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The Psychological Power of Graphic Design Manipulate Users Mind A Lot
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Web Design Company Sydney - Present Business Online
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Finding Work With Website Design London
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Opt Reliable Hurley Internet Web Hosting Service Provider
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Recommendations That Can Help You Deal With Diabetic Issues
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dimanche 29 décembre 2013
How Human Resource Planning Can Be Used To Ensure Output And Quality
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How Human Resource Planning Can Be Used To Ensure Output And Quality
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Mozwebdev Is a Leading Web Design and Seo Firm
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Marketplace Your Products Successfully With Business Show Booths You Can Buy Or Lease
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samedi 28 décembre 2013
Go Online With A Professional Web Development Company
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Go Online With A Professional Web Development Company
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Improving Your Web Design Skills To Reach Your Potential
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SEO and Web Design Services Company for Online Business Growth
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Today I made a Bluetooth garage door opener. Now I can open my garage from my Android phone. There’s a short how-to YouTube video from Lou Prado. Lou also made a website btmate.com that has more information, and you can watch an earlier howto video as well.
The project itself was pretty simple:
- Acquire a Samsung HM1100 bluetooth headset (the Samsung HM1800 also works). You can buy these cheap from Fry’s or eBay. I got mine on eBay for $10-$15.
- Crack open the earpiece on the Bluetooth headset and solder one of the earpiece wires to the base pin of a transistor. Solder red and black wires to the other pins of the transistor.
- Connect the red and black wires to the garage door opener. It turns out that most garage door openers are built to allow easy insertion of wires, which is nice.
That’s more or less it. My soldering was ugly as sin–too ugly for me to even post a picture. And rather than leave the house for some heat shrink tubing, I just left bare wires on the transistor, but everything works fine.
Lou wrote a nice Android app that’s free to install and then pay-what-you-want for a license. Then it’s just a single button to open or close the garage door. In theory, I could use Tasker to open the garage door automatically when I get home.
It’s not quite as sexy as Brad Fitzpatrick’s Android garage door opener, but it was a fun little project for a day.
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vendredi 27 décembre 2013
Products That Sell Themselves
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Rising Importance of Big Data Analytics
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Significance of Web Development Services to Your Organization
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jeudi 26 décembre 2013
Three Things To Must Know About Content Repurposing
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Where to Find a Website Designing Company to Build Your Own Website
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How to Choose the Right Web Designers Nyc Has to Offer
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Details Of Revitol
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mercredi 25 décembre 2013
Jacksonville Web Design: Get a Professional, Organized and Attractive Website
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mardi 24 décembre 2013
Israeli News Sites
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How Professional Web Design Company Will Help Small Business
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How Professional Web Design Company Will Help Small Business
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Overview About Web Development
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Get Expert Web Hosting And Make Sure Your Website Is Fast And Robust
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Selecting A Website Support Service For Long-Term Maintenance Contract
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How To Change Vocabulary Settings In Youtube
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Importance Of Web Design Company For Success Of Online Business
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lundi 23 décembre 2013
Toning Shoes For Your Workplace
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Get Started With GitHub Pages
Anna Debenham explains the basics of using GitHub Pages with Jekyll to create simple, template-based collaborative websites.
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Key Features to Be Taken Care of While Making an Ecommerce Website Design
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Latest Web Design Trends
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Approach Web Design Wollongong for Best Services
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Web Developers - Make Your Business Improved
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Simple Solutions For Proper Skin Care - Important Acne Facts Revealed
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dimanche 22 décembre 2013
Trade Show Leasing Booth Advice For Beginners
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samedi 21 décembre 2013
The Main Point Of An Point Of Sale System: To Make Things Easy
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Choose the Best Graphic Design Barrie Services to Perk-Up Your Business Online
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How Can You Build a High Featured and Beautiful Website?
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Trick to Google Ranks - Using Semantic Best Practices
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vendredi 20 décembre 2013
WebmasterWorld Weekly Round-Up 20 December
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What Are the Online Marketing Techniques Adopted for Business?
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New Look For Google Knowledge Graph For Medical Results
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Reliable Advice About Facebook Advertising Which Can Help Any Individual
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Importance and Features of Offshore Web Development
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The Outstanding Specialities That Make Windows VPS Hosting User?EUR(TM)S Choice
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Just How Agile Development Makes Far Better Software
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A Basic Introduction to Web Design
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jeudi 19 décembre 2013
An Event Apart 2013 (San Francisco) Links
Alan W. Smith has compiled and summarized some of the most important links in modern web design, as referenced by speakers at An Event Apart San Francisco 2013. Bookmark this page!
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How To Deal Effectively With Project Deadline
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The Reputation Of Ace Parking
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Owning an Exisiting Keyword gTLD (BlahBlahBlah.org) and the Emerging Keyword gTLDs (.BlahBlahBlah)
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Questions To Ask A Web Design Company Before Hiring
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Google Improves Tool To Remove URLs From Third Party Website
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mercredi 18 décembre 2013
Nielsen: 2013 Stats Show Evidence Of Significant Growth In Mobile and Declines With Desktop
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How To Estimate Traffic Levels to a Domain
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Five Essentials of a Web Design
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Parameters to Consider While Selecting the Web Designing Company
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Why Open Source Web Development
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mardi 17 décembre 2013
Magento ECommerce With a Secured First Data Integration
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Some Key Drupal CMS Features That Augment Website Performance
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How To Avoid Search Engine Penalties For Product Names Which Are Required To Repeat
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Facebook Testing Auto-Play Video Ads
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A Moment to Breathe
The look on her face was frantic, her motions frenetic as she exited her office. Somehow I knew she would be approaching my desk. “What’s that?” I asked, removing my headphones and trying to remain calm. I already dreaded the answer. “The site’s down. No one can log on,” said our CEO again in a panic-stricken voice.
As I absorbed those words—words feared and loathed by developers everywhere—I opened the file where I suspected I’d find the culprit. I had a pretty good guess: the one I had just deployed to our production environment. Before long, our phone began to ring, the oncology clinics that depend on our software to care for their patients every bit as frantic as our CEO.
I quickly fixed the bug and committed the changes, watching anxiously as our deploy script spat out its log messages. I switched back to my web browser and refreshed. The page loaded successfully, and I went outside for some fresh air. I paced back and forth in front of our building, my hunched shoulders refusing to relax. The weight I felt on my chest constrained my breathing.
Like most of the colleagues I related this story to, this was neither the first nor the last time I sacrificed my own physical and emotional health for the fleeting promise of startup work: the chance to get in early in a company destined for an enormous IPO. But this time, my body’s warning signs were impossible to ignore.
This is your brain on four hours of sleep
I had always assumed that a brain scan taken while I worked would read like an aerial view of a forest fire: intense, bright orange and red activity engulfing the whole area. In reality, however, one region in particular is uniquely triggered. The prefrontal cortex, the roughly fist-sized, foremost region of the brain that sits behind the forehead on the left and right hemispheres, is at work when we sit at our computers and bang out code. Scientists note that this region is responsible for “executive function,” an umbrella term that includes everything from organizing and planning to goal setting, problem-solving, and abstract thinking.
The prefrontal cortex consumes a disproportionately large amount of energy for its size: more than six of every 100 calories you eat are reserved for this cerebral region, impressive if you consider the number of other bodily systems vying for that energy. Unfortunately for the typical startup worker, the performance of the prefrontal cortex is also directly linked to our sleep habits.
In a recent study from the Sleep Neuroimaging Research Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, researchers found that the prefrontal cortex is preferentially impaired following a night of particularly poor sleep. In other words, the sleep-deprived brain diverts its resources away from more energy-consuming and higher-order regions like the prefrontal cortex and toward areas like the basal ganglia, which is responsible for vital life functions such as swallowing and breathing.
In other words, while you may think you’re building your advantage by skipping out on sleep in order to get more work done, your brain will eventually be too starved to be of use.
Fortunately, the brain can begin to be renewed after even a single night of what the University of Pittsburgh researchers refer to as “recovery sleep”—the deep, dreamless kind that leaves you sleeping until the afternoon on Saturdays.
This research seemed to confirm my own findings. I found that the cognitive toll of sleep deprivation was most evident when I was working closely with a coworker. In these pair programming sessions, I struggled not only to write coherent code, but to communicate the deeper intentions of my work. This was the point at which I became the most distressed: no amount of coffee could diminish the difficulty of putting words together.
Suddenly, I realized that something had to give. I was forced to come to terms with how unsustainable my work-life balance had become. At one point, I had thought that my capacity for productivity was limitless. But now both science and my own body were directly contradicting the myth of the superhuman startup worker.
Human, all too human
Coming to the realization that people have limitations is much easier than concretely recognizing our own. We spend so much of our time communicating with computers that it’s easy to begin expecting the same superhuman things from ourselves as we do from our machines. Extraordinary feats like 99 percent-plus uptime, a flawless ability to perform complex calculations, and a logarithmically expanding memory become our goals.
But in order to continue to work, I ultimately had to put a greater focus on taking care of myself. This turned out to be both more difficult and more rewarding than I had anticipated.
Knowing how self-defeating my cycles of lack of sleep and increased need for sleep were, I decided to propose a conference talk on this very subject. I knew that I would have to speak from the experience of having shifted the focus from software to my own well-being, and this talk would keep me accountable. When I received the invitation to speak, I had about three months to prepare, which allowed for a deep exploration of the effectiveness of my habits at work and at home.
My two immediate goals were to get a full eight hours of sleep every night and to explore meditation. I found sleep to be the easier of the two to implement, and after I came to terms with the anxiety of not learning quickly enough, I was able to sleep well regularly. But while I had always been drawn to the idea of meditation, I found it difficult to incorporate into my life consistently. It helped me to redefine meditation not necessarily as a religious or spiritual practice, but rather, a single-minded focus on one thing. In this case, my breath.
I found that running the automated test suite on our application’s Ruby code gave me a perfect opportunity to pull my hands away from the keyboard, place them on my knees, straighten my posture, close my eyes, and begin breathing deeply. Prone as I am to racing thoughts, this practice helped me not only manage the stress I felt during the day, but also to focus on a single train of thought more consistently. Once I found this window of time to meditate, more began to crop up: starting up my machine, waiting for my lunch to heat up in the microwave, watching my local server start the Rails environment. Anywhere I had time to check my phone, I had time to breathe.
It wasn’t the easiest habit to cultivate, though. At first, my immediate impulse was to check Twitter, open my email, or switch back to the code I was testing and try to anticipate a failure before reading the command line output. I thought these impulses were saving me from focusing on my erratic and sometimes chaotic thoughts, but I came to realize that over time, they were just adding to the chaos. The more often I overcame the instinct to switch immediately to a new task, the more prolonged my sense of calm was when I went to take deep breaths.
All work and no play?
To my surprise, this sense of calm led to an increased awareness of my level of work-related stress and its effects on my emotional health. That is, the slowing of my thoughts allowed me to pay especially close attention to my moods, my energy, my ability to engage and to communicate well, and the overall sense of personal satisfaction I derived from my work.
I had always enjoyed my job, and was exhilarated by the initial investment it required in forward-thinking technologies. Recognizing a dramatic jump in my learning curve from week to week had given me a profound source of motivation. But when I began meditating, slowing my thoughts to a speed at which they could form a coherent stream, I realized I was overwhelmed by all those extra hours. My emotional burnout was rivaling my sleep-deprivation-induced physical one.
In the long term, I believe—and the research I uncovered supports—that focusing on my emotional stability was perhaps more effective at ensuring my success as a developer than staying up all night reading books on object-oriented design patterns would have been. But in the interim, I started to miss the previous pace of my learning progression. I wondered if I would ever rediscover my passion for programming.
But I was also emerging from my shell, re-exploring the activities I used to love. I went out for drinks with friends. I played board games with my wife instead of incessantly reading JavaScript framework documentation.
I felt better than I had in months.
Finding harmony
Only in the past month have I begun feeling inspired again. I’ve started waking up an hour or two early each morning to explore some of the new topics in JavaScript that cropped up over the summer while I was taking a break from extracurricular exploration. My complexion has regained some of its color, and I feel both more motivated and less stressed at work.
I would love to say that this pause, this perspective-broadening sabbatical I took from the overwhelming workload of the web, fundamentally changed my career and the way I work. But ultimately, it can be difficult to justify spending too much time recovering from burnout when our industry continues to fetishize productivity and the breakneck pace of web technologies.
Like most things in life, it’s about striking a balance: an equilibrium between the frantic tempo of our industry and our own internal rhythms. This year, I learned that my body knows this balance—and it will help me find it if I listen.
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Responsive Web Design: What Is It and How Does It Affect My Website Development Strategy?
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Lifestyle A Complete Lifestyle With Diabetes Mellitus Condition
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lundi 16 décembre 2013
BBDII - The Deuce Tulsa - Web Design - Web Development - 360? Virtual Tours
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Why Responsive Website Design Gaining Its Popularity?
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Design Is?EUR?
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I’ll keep it short: this week when you donate for cancer research, I’ll match your donation (up to a limit of $5000 total for all donations). We’ve already raised almost $8,000 dollars to help stop cancer, but I’d love to get to $10,000 or even higher.
If anyone has ever wanted to take money out of my pocket, now’s your chance! Donate for a great cause and I’ll match you dollar for dollar.
Thanks in advance if you can donate to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute this week. And if you do donate, remember that many employers will match charitable donations! I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has donated, and I’ll be thinking of you on my multiple-hours run in Boston this spring.
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Do You Need a Higher Traffic and More Business Inquiries Through SEO Service?
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Pillars of Successful Modern Web Design in New York and New Jersey
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Facebook just devalued "Facebook Pages"
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dimanche 15 décembre 2013
Web Designer
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Organizational Structure And Design
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How to Use WordPress As A Content Management System Or CMS
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samedi 14 décembre 2013
Getting The Most Fashionable Cell Telephone Skins
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Cell Telephone Tower
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Things You Need to Do to Make Your Website Design Look Professional
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The Best Recommendation On Making Use of Fb For Marketing
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Google+ Now Gone From AdSense Scorecard
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vendredi 13 décembre 2013
WebmasterWorld Weekly Round-Up 13 December
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WordPress 3.8 Is Out, And It Has a Dashboard Facelift
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Twitter Immediately Backtracks On Changes To Block Functionality
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Facebook Advertising So You: Tips And Techniques
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The Professional SEO and Website Design Service for Increased Visitors
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Internet Shopping Aid Directly From The Professionals
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Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on their servers
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Make Your Website Impressive With Orange County Web Design
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Create Strong Brand Name With Huntington Beach Web Design Services
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jeudi 12 décembre 2013
Google and The Vulnerability of Sites to Negative SEO
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How To Make Your Mobile Phone More Quickly
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Cell Phones-Our Kids At Risk?
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Google AdSense Announces Custom Ad Sizes
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PHP Web Development - Cost-Effective Solution of Web Development
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Upcoming Web Design 2014
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Pull in Easy Business! Just Make Your Website Engaging and Alluring
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Maryland Wed Designs And Facets To Consider
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mercredi 11 décembre 2013
Advantages of Cheap Business Website Design
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10 Reasons to Choose WordPress for Your Business Website
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Cell Phones-Our Kids At Risk?
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Firefox 26 Launched, Gives Click-to-Play For Java
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Brochure Style Web Design in Sheffield
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Uses of Government Content Management System in Web Design
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Drupal Web Development at a Glance
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Planning A Website Launch: Aspects Of Web Development And Web Designing
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mardi 10 décembre 2013
Successful Tips For Web Developers
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Web Site Design Strategies For Any Sort Of Website
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A Collection Of Specialist Website Design Tips
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Webmasters Now Fearful Over Linking As A Result Of Google's Crackdowns
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Tech Giants Cal For End to NSA Data Surveillance
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Will the Windows Start Menu return in Windows 8.2?
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Responsive Design.
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Reasons Why a Megento Deisgning Company Should Be Hired
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Lawyer Web Design - Why Lawyers Should Consider a Professional Website Design for Their Website?
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Convenient Web Design Solutions Explained
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lundi 9 décembre 2013
Logo Design Made Simple With Software - Tacoma Service
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dimanche 8 décembre 2013
How Can You Improve Your Business by Incorporating Business Intelligence?
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Getting The Most Fashionable Cell Phone Skins
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Fast Methods In Web Design - The Inside Track
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Fast Methods In Web Design - The Inside Track
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samedi 7 décembre 2013
What Everyone Ought To Learn About Fb Marketing and Advertising
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The Advantages of Search Engine Optimization for E-Commerse Websites in Seattle.
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vendredi 6 décembre 2013
WebmasterWorld Weekly Round-Up 6 December
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jeudi 5 décembre 2013
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Matt Griffin on How We Work: Let’s Do It! What Are We Doing?
Today is a great day. A new potential client has come knocking on your door, and they’d like to consider you for a project. Thrilling as it may be, your excitement quickly turns to anxiety as you realize that the next thing they want to know is “how much will it cost?”
Here begins the great struggle of web business development. You need to know what you’re building before you can know how much it costs to build it. But accurately mapping out the scope of a project could take weeks of focused effort. That’s probably not something you can give away whenever you get a request for a quote. So what do you do? Make up numbers and hope you’re on target? Undershoot and you may land a job that cripples your business. Overshoot, and you may unnecessarily send that new client packing.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. Defining the challenges, solutions, and strategies for the project to come is some of the most valuable work you will do for your client. Not only is that time worth paying for, but the resulting deliverables will be critical to the success of the project, regardless of who they hire to complete the next phase.
Let’s look at how we can structure a pre-project research phase that will ensure that—on completion—everyone’s ready to hit the ground running with design and development. By the end, our new client will know more about their organization and web project than ever before, and you’ll be able to create a much more accurate budget for subsequent work.
Let’s do it! What are we doing?
So there it is. That unread email with the subject line Fancy Organization Request for Proposal.
It’s a website redesign: no surprise there. And, wait—oh miraculous day—they even told you their budget. They have $100,000, which is enough money to do some real stuff. But what stuff do they want? Poring over the pages, you realize quickly that it’s not so clear. Some of the requirements they state, in fact, seem vague, strange, or misguided. As much as these folks are hoping you can take their RFP and give them a precise quote and a plan of action, you know in your bones that you need more clarity—and clarity rarely comes easily.
Smaller is better
So instead of putting together their requested $100,000 proposal, what do I do? I put together a $20,000 one. This, my friends, is unexpected. Gutsy, even! This is not what they’ve asked for. The gall. The nerve. The chutzpah!
Alright, let’s acknowledge this right now: there is risk involved in this approach. If I turn in something that looks entirely different from what the client is requesting, they cannot compare apples to apples with the other proposals. This may not fit into their (potentially rigid) RFP process. Our proposal may get tossed out in the very first round, just for being different.
On the other hand, this may be exactly what makes us stand out. Rob Harr from Sparkbox has a terrific line that I’ve started using myself: “I’m going to embrace the fact that I’ll know more about your project tomorrow than I do today.” For some clients, that may be a refreshing dose of honesty and creative thinking. And I don’t know about you, but those are the clients I really want.
One caveat: though we’re holding off on producing an accurate second phase budget until later, we still need to address the general cost of future work in some way. It’s a good idea to take a stab at a ballpark range for the second phase, with the understanding that it’s a bit of a shot in the dark. That way everyone will at least have a sense of the magnitude of a second phase, and can plan accordingly.
So what are we actually pitching in this smaller project? Well, it’s the first part of the bigger project, naturally. Depending on the nature of the project, it may require different tasks and deliverables. But we’ll likely include things like meetings, interviews, information architecture recommendations, branding analysis, a copywriting style guide, a content audit, wireframes, and style prototypes/style tiles. Whatever we end up doing, we’ll compile all of the research and conclusions we draw in the specification document, which is the central deliverable we provide at the end of the phase.
When putting together a standalone research phase, the trick is to focus on work that will help you more clearly define the project. That way you’ll have a well-formed plan for a second phase, and can provide the client with a much more accurate budget for that subsequent work.
What does everyone get out of this?
In all likelihood, I don’t need to sell you on research. Understanding what we’re going to design and build before we begin means we can create better things, more efficiently. But why, when we have the opportunity to sign a big contract, would we opt to sign a small one? Why, indeed!
It’s good for clients
You know what’s scary? Handing a big wad of money to a stranger. That’s what a big initial contract is like for a potential client. A smaller introductory research project lets a new client wade in ankle-deep before the big plunge.
Not only are they making a smaller commitment of time and money but—by the end of the project—they’ll know if you’re a good fit for them. If everyone decides to part ways at the end of this phase, they’ll still have valuable deliverables to help them jump-start the project with a different team.
It’s good for you, too!
And this goes for you, too. There’s nothing worse than signing on for a year-long project with a new client, and then realizing a month in that it’s a bad match. The pre-project project lets you assess the relationship in a low-risk environment, and decide if it’s worth continuing.
From a business development perspective, this initial research project has a lot of appeal, too. Sure, you’re not landing a big ticket contract just yet, but bear with me on this one.
Proposing is time-consuming
If you’re a small company like ours, you likely don’t have a dedicated sales person. This means that responding to RFPs is costly, and before long you’ll have to start making some hard decisions about which proposals you can afford to write, and which you can’t.
The nice thing about research phase proposals is that they tend to be very similar from project to project. By definition, these proposals don’t include very much about the specifics of the work being done, so a chunk of well-written boilerplate in your proposal gets you a lot more mileage. Investing less time with each proposal means that you can respond to more proposals. Wider net, less effort—without sacrificing quality. Yay!
Your feet, their door
In my experience, when you don’t have a proven track record with a client, selling a $10,000–20,000 project is a lot easier than selling a $100,000–200,000 project. This little research project helps you get a foot in the door with that new client, and prove your worth without resorting to something devaluing like spec work.
A clearer future
As this phase is nearing completion, you’ll be able to create a much more accurate budget for phase two. Because your research has generated a well-informed project definition, there will be much less guesswork, and a far greater understanding of the project’s requirements. In effect, you’re getting paid to write the best proposal ever. And you should be! The insight into the project and organization you’re providing is vital work that ensures that no one will be jumping into the project blindly and simply hoping for the best. That’s because now you’ll have something that every project desperately needs, but surprisingly few actually have. You’ll have a plan.
via planetweb