Archive for September, 2007
September 27, 2007
The Amazon Bar
Amazon continues to set the bar for ecommerce efficiency and overall experience. I have been telling clients and audiences this for some years but I had an experience this week that shows they are still on top.
I bought three books from Amazon yesterday, which get free 2 day shipping from my Amazon Prime membership. They showed up today. I could immediately access status reports on the orders and even change or cancel them before the products had shipped (although that didn’t take long!). Great experience, exceeding my expectations all the way around.
I also bought two small bags from REI for organizing all the gear that goes with my laptop and other electronic doodads. I selected regular ground shipping since I don’t need these in a hurry. My e-mail from REI confirming the order says I can access the status of my orders after 48 hours have passed. I have no idea when they might arrive. It was such a let down from my experience with Amazon.
The lesson, my friends, is to go through your own ecommerce process, including fulfillment. How do you measure up? Do your customers know exactly what status their order is in, when it ships and when it will arrive? I guarantee you are being compared to the Amazon experience by many of your online customers.
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September 24, 2007
Search Engine Optimization Tips Article
I just posted an article to my site on how to improve the placement of your content in natural search engine results. I focus on how to improve your own content and management practices in this article: 10 Search Engine Optimization Tips.
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September 6, 2007
WYSIWYG Web Editors
All modern content management systems provide a Word-style editor that lets non-technical staff edit and add content to web sites. It is a key part of enabling line staff around the organization to produce and manage their own content.
What you may not have realized is that you have several options avaiable for adding WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get) to your own web applications. Sometimes they are as easy to install as adding a few lines of code to a web page.
Here are a few free and commercial solutions for providing an easy to use text editor in your own web applications:
Tiny MCE
This editor works across numerous platforms and is available under an open source license. It is written in javascript and is used widely in many applications. It has many configuration options available and can be tweaked to support a defined set of styles.
Ektron eWebEditPro
A widely used commercial editor from Ektron. It is also highly configurable and allows you tie down functionality to just what you want editors to have access too. It is not cross platform and only works on Windows-based browsers. (Their suggestion for Mac clients is a bit of a joke.)
openWYSIWYG
Another open source content editor written in Javascript.
FCKeditor
And one more open source, Javascript-based, editor.
Given all the options available, it is unreasonable not to provide a rich editor for your applications that should support user formatting of content.
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September 4, 2007
Quoted in Workplace Column on Saving a Failing Project
Mildred Culp interviewed me for her regular column that appears in numerous papers across the country. I appear in the most recent column in which she takes on how to rescue failing projects. Here is a link to a copy of the piece in The Hartford Courant: Recognize Signs That A Project Is Failing.
When you’re working on a team, even if you’re not the leader, you’re investing in the success of the project. You don’t want it to slide into a ditch. What are the warning signs? What can you do before it’s too late?
I have two or three quotes in the piece. Much of what I discussed with Mildred is covered in a blog post I made a four years* ago: On Killing Projects.
* Wow! Hard to believe I have been writing this blog since 2002. Time flies!
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