How do you take time in your busy day to just think and plan?  Especially with the constant stream of operational demands – the weeds – knocking on your door and appearing at the email in-box.  A recent article in CIO Magazine suggest tactics such as staying focused, setting aside scheduled non-operational time during the day, delegating to staff and outsourcing commodity work.  I find blogging is a really helpful exercise, allowing me to pull together ideas I’ve gathered from various sources and think through how they relate to my own experiences.  Conferences and workshops are always a great way to get out of the day-to-day and gain some perspective – particularly if you are also contributing through a presentation to your colleagues.   It is all too easy to allow time to get eaten up through many small needs and distractions.  We all owe it to ourselves to make a conscious decision to create time for planning, general information gathering, and strategic thinking. 

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Planning for a web site redesign involves a lot of components – and the real job is only just beginning when the design itself is done.  From Adaptive path comes this diagram of a typical site redesign process.   Take-aways:  Strategy & Design is approximately 1/6th of the total job – technology considerations don’t really enter until after strategy & design are done (it IS really all about the content and communication, isn’t it?)  And the content owner (also known as the client) has the lion’s share of the work.  No surprises here for those of us who’ve been through this a couple of times, but nice to see it all so well illustrated.  Bring this to your next site-design kick-off meeting!

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I attended a day-long workshop yesterday on Google analytics, run by LunaMetrics. For those of you who may not know, Google analytics is one of their free services that let’s web site owners gather website visitor statistics which can be used to provide more effective sites.  It was a great workshop, and I’ll be incorporating the ideas into some web-application re-writing I have planned for the summer. 

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Do-it-yourself (DIY) is back in style again and on bookstore (and library) shelves.  I recently read two of these books which take decidedly different tacks on the perils and rewards of a DIY lifestyle.  In Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make magazine and Boing Boing (tech culture and weirdness blog) provides a pretty positive outlook on the benefits of doing it himself.  Manny Howard in My Empire of Dirt: A Cautionary Tale isn’t quite so sunny.

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Here is a new approach for all business/academic presentations – 20 slides, 20 seconds each that auto-advance.  You have 6 minutes and 40 seconds – go!  I wonder if this would accomplish the intention of getting people to focus on sending a clear message with no filler/no distractions.  Or would it just dumb-down further the already dumbed-down, low information quality of most Powerpoint-driven presentations.  I gotta find some place to try this out soon…

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“This is a point of confusion for many of our customers.”  So began a tech support response that was the latest in a string of messages.  The good news is that this was the message that actually helped me solve the problem.  The bad news is that came at the end of almost a day and a half of frustration and confusion on my part.  I searched the help system.  I consulted knowledgeable colleagues (and got them confused and frustrated too.)  This was for an initial setup of a new system, so I expected there to be some annoying setup issues.  But I’m left wondering “If so many customers have the same issues, how about altering things so we don’t all experience this problem.”

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