Victor
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Storm King
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1 min read
Really, it’s how museums should be. The Storm King Art Center, situated on the mountain of the same name, is 500 acres of gorgeous former farm land, now creatively farmed with long grasses and devoted to the display of sculpture. We visited on a perfect Spring day and I can’t imagine a more beautiful place.…
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Managing the marketing effort
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1 min read
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… Organize and reward marketing efforts as you do billable time Different activities require different skills, so allocate them to people according to ability and preference Form small teams, each focused on one type of marketing Ask everyone to devote the same minimum time to it Include junior…
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Worker-to-worker offshoring
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1 min read
Brett proposes the idea of worker-to-worker offshoring: Just imagine: you get assigned to do two days of … competitive site audits for a pitch. Ugh. Why not sub-shore the work, W2W-style and take the day[s] off? It costs $15-20/hour… I think PeterV has done this before, offshoring some personal programming work to a PHP programmer…
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MT’s Innovator’s Dilemma
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1 min read
OK, just one more blogger-blogging-about-blogging-tools post and then I’m done. We might view the MT price increase through the lens of the innovator’s dilemma. They moved upmarket, and the open source, free, and otherwise interesting competitors suddenly looked like compelling options to those of us on the leading edge of the blog tool curve. What…
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Attracting new clients
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1 min read
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… Raspberry Jam Rule: the further you spread your marketing tactics, the thinner they get. It’s always better to demonstrate than to assert. In-person, individualized methods are always better than broadcasting. The first team Seminars (small-scale) Speeches at client-industry meetings Articles in client-oriented (trade) press Proprietary research The…
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How clients choose
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2 min read
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… So far How clients choose has been one of the most eye-opening chapters of the book. If were we to apply user-centered design principles to clients, we’d end up with this chapter. From the consultant’s point of view, there are two main stages to getting clients: marketing…
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Being client-centered
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1 min read
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… About a third through the book, Maister starts to repeat himself a little, hammering home one of his overarching themes of service. He says you must be client-centered, particularly interesting advice when you’re running a user-centered design firm. This is a balance we’re familiar with, and as…
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Need an IA for 2 weeks…
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1 min read
A friend at Deloitte Consulting needs and IA for wireframe development for 1-2 weeks in NYC. The start date is next week (6/2) or as soon as possible. Send me an email (link in the nav) if you’re interested.
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The wisdom of crowds
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2 min read
James Surowiecki’s Financial Page in the New Yorker has become a must read, a one-page column connecting topics such as macro-economic statistics, currency policy, and Argentina’s promptness policy in clear, concise, enlightening language. He’s coming out with his first book next week, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and…
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Behavior Design v2.0
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1 min read
Chris Fahey and friends launch their firm’s v2.0 site. I’ll admit to disliking the previous version, and for all that lacked the new version more than makes up for it, in what is one of the purtiest-funktional designs for a design shop. They include their own original Venn diagram, and the nav bar is just…
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There’s gold in them thar blogs
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1 min read
WordPress and Textpattern, as previously mentioned, were fortunate to hit 1.x versions at approximately the same time as the MT price policy shift. If you were to try calculating the financial ramifications of this shift, you might fill one of your variables with the number 40,000.
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readability.info writing analyzer
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1 min read
Henrik Olsen points to readability.info which uses a variety of measurements to judge how complex your documents or Web pages are to read. It says my site is too complex for most people to read easily. I’m tempted to take that as a compliment, and if you’re a regular reader, so should you.
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This Old CSS
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1 min read
Roger Johansson uses a helpful “let me show you how I do it, step by step” way of explaining how to construct the XHTML and CSS for a simple but effective two column layout. It’s part of his excellent Developing with web standards mini-book.
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New, Improved NBS
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1 min read
I’ve hired a crack team of stylists, programmers, and librarians to re-organize my five+ years worth of blog posts from four different blogging systems. Work is in progress, but you can start basking in the sheer joy of: A proper RSS 2.0 feed that includes all posts Permalinks and trackbacks Categories now displayed in the…