The Chronicles of Outlook

(To be read aloud in a mellifluous baritone voice not unlike that of James Earl Jones or even, yes, Kelsey Grammer.)

Many ages ago there was a lone Mac All e-mail was POP. And the User was innocent and happy.

Copycats

Worried about unsavory folk ripping off the content you sweated over? You may want to try http://www.copyscape.com/.

Copyscape offers several different levels of service. The free search enables you to plug in a URL from you website and search to see if it is being copied and published somewhere else on the 'net.

The Platinum service checks to see if content on your web site is from another source. A good idea if you regularly invite guest writers to post on your site. Cost is .05 per search.

The company also offers Copysentry. For $4.95 per month it will automatically monitor the Web for copies of content from your web pages.

Once you find someone who is plagiarizing your work you can send them an e-mail and ask them to remove it. If they don't respond you can send a DMCA takedown request to their ISP/Hosting company. Unfortunately, unless you are willing to get legal there's not much else you can do.

Jargon

What is jargon? Some folks think it's gobbledygook invented by one group of individuals to keep everyone else mystified about what the first group is saying. Still, we all use jargon in our work. People in the publishing industry refer to text as "copy". Cops call suspects "perps."

People in the computer field have developed so much jargon, in so many sub-domains, that there are entire web sites devoted to the particular jargon that these sub-cultures use. One, The Jargon File, is devoted to the language of hackers. There are other that describe the slang used by system administrators, software engineers, etc.

Jargon is verbal and written shorthand that is useful because it ensures accurate communication and saves time over the course of a professional interaction. When one IT technician says to another "Let's move the XP boxes over here and put the Vista boxes there," he knows that his peer is not going to look around for shrink wrapped boxes with Microsoft Vista or Windows XP DVDs inside.

Problems arise only when a member of one culture has to interface with a member of another culture. At that point, both people have to find a baseline of communication and stick to it. If the IT guy has to to report to a non-IT department manager which computers were moved where, he should say "We moved the computers running the Windows Vista operating system to this side of the room, while those running the Windows XP operating system were placed over there. Should we mark them so that the employees who need to use each type of operating system know where to sit?"

Yes, it may take a few seconds or minutes more than using jargon, but you will have successfully communicated your point, and not incidentally have shown your mastery the most complex jargon of all - human language.

Home

I;ve had more than a few homes of my own. Rental apartments, condos, etc. Yet the places i live that meant the most to me were houses that my family had lived in. I had some poorer times, times that I couldn't bring in enough to find a good place to live in. Yet in those days my parents or grand parents

Stupid designers

I learned how to program radio station presets in my first car, a hand-me-down '73 Super Beetle, by looking at the manual. At the time the procedure was novel to me:

1. Tune in to the desired station.
2. Yank out a button under the radio dial.
3. Plunge it back as far as it would go.

Preset accomplished. Coolness. And that's the way radios would be programmed for the next few years, at least in the old cars I could afford.

A few years later I was able to buy a nicer car. Oh, still it was used, yet less than a decade! It was a hot '92 convertible and it was fast, it was sexy, and it had an electronic stereo.

The sound system was an AM/FM/Cassette with a digital clock. Apparently that was a big deal in 1992. What few buttons it had were 'soft'; they had multiple functions depending on what mode the user was in. Once again, I turned to the manual. And once again I had to learn how to program presets.

Fast forward to 2003. Smelling a gas crisis, I bought a brand new 40 MPG Corolla 'Sport'. It came with a nicer sound system than any of my previous cars. But this time I didn't have to check the manual to program the radio. It was intuitive:

1. Tune the station.
2. Push and hold the button to assign the station.

Why push? Because there was no way to pull, yet the buttons were arranged under the radio dial. Why hold? Because if I held a button, it beeped. And there were separate buttons for the clock. Separate buttons for the CD. And separate buttons for the cassette. None of this "one button, two dozen functions." Hallelujah! Somebody gets me!

You see, I have a good deal of experience programming things, be they car radios, appliances or even computers. Yet almost every time I buy a new gadget to do the same old thing I am faced with challenges created by designers or engineers who have placed non-intuitive user interfaces in my way.

Granted, stuff changes. Yet classic design paradigms don't. If I buy a new recorder of whatever medium I can now record in, I should expect to be able to find the buttons to record, playback, stop, pause and fast-forward or reverse. Just as the paradigm of setting a preset on a car radio was almost exactly the same on an '03 Corolla as it was on a '73 VW. So why was it that all of the other cars that I owned in the intervening years always had a different way to set the radio?

I still have that Corolla. I've driven it through Southwest deserts and canyons, up and down the Rockies and the Appalachians, and through South Florida storms and traffic jams. It runs like the day I drove it off the lot. I guess the folks who designed and built the rest of the car were as smart as the ones who designed the radio.

If you are designing a user interface please remember one thing about the target audience: they learned how to do it once, they may be willing to learn a second time. Just please don't make them learn it over and over, again and again.

Peace out.

E-mail everywhere

If you send and receive e-mail on just one computer or use an online e-mail provider like Yahoo! or G-mail, then this post isn't for you. Thanks for coming out, see you next time!

Have they left the room? Good. OK, so you work for an organization that has a website, and you send and receive e-mail on that domain. You have a PC at work and another computer at home, and perhaps one you carry with you. Keeping track of the e-mails you send and receive has turned into a headache because you have to set one PC to leave a copy of incoming messages on the server, and you also have to CC yourself when you reply from your "remote" computer.

The first question you should be asking your web guy is "Do we use POP and IMAP on our internet-facing e-mail server?" If he says yes, you're golden. With a couple of quick changes you'll no longer be dancing the e-mail shuffle. By switching your local e-mail account (i.e., the one you set up in Outlook or what-have-you) from POP to IMAP you will see all incoming and sent items on every computer you use.

The reason is that the IMAP protocol keeps the messages on the server and synchromizes all of the e-mail clients you connect to it.

Powerful stuff, indeed.

The way I switched over was simply to go to each of the PCs I regularly use (two laptops and a desktop). Once I had started up the e-mail client software I deleted the account I was using then re-created the same account, choosing IMAP instead of POP as the protocol. Details on how to do this on any of the e-mail clients out there can easily be found on the Web.

____________________________________________________________
Disclaimer: As always, back up important e-mails before messing with your account settings...I'm just saying.

Lazy SEO: Bounce rate

Bounce rate. If it's happening on your web site you want to know why. Simply defined, a bounce is what happens when a surfer lands on one of your pages, sees absolutely nothing that interests him and heads off into the sunset, never to be seen again.

If the bounce happens because the surfer plugged the wrong term into Google and found your site then you may want to check the optimization on that page; your SEO may be inviting the wrong crowd to your website.

On the other hand, let's say you sell Yard Widgets and the surfer landed on a page in your website after Googling for Yard Widgets. If the visitor bounces, something may be wrong with the content you're presenting on that particular landing page.

Checking your site statistics often will reveal which pages are getting the most traffic from search engines (landing pages), and what search terms were used to find those pages. If those pages aren't providing what a searcher was hoping to find then get used to the big bounce.

Every day

Jazz musicians have a word for it, "woodsheddin'," as in going out to the woodshed and playing for a few hours. Writers just say "put your butt in the chair," sit down in front of the blank page and fill it.

If you are a creative, no matter what particular talent you possess, you have to exercise that talent every day. The artist has to draw or paint or play or write, working that creative motor in much the same way as an athlete works his or her body.

If you find that you are unable to work on an ongoing project, work on something else. Just because you're coming up dry on one of your endeavors doesn't mean that the rest are blocked. Don't mope about the short story you can't finish. Instead, punch up the biographical blurb that your agent or editor has been asking for. If you're a keyboard player and just can't seem to power up the synthesizer, take out that old six-string we all have and learn a couple of new chords. Make up and hum a tune to go with those chords.

Get out to the woodshed, and hack away for awhile. The Muse only rewards those who she hears working.

Design Brief: Your project blueprint

Rare and wonderful is the prospect who sends me a well-tuned design brief for a project. When I get a clearly written RFP, I am assured that the customer is focused, educated and results-driven.

What goes into a good design brief? Here goes:

Title
New business card and stationery for Smith & Jones Architects PA

Summary
Architectural firm needs new design for letterhead, with compliments slips, and business cards

Company Name:
Smith & Jones Architects PA

Description:
Smith & Jones Architects PA is an architectural engineering consultancy that specialises in luxury homes. We do not produce a large number of printed letters and so we will be printing letterhead and comp slips on demand on a high quality mid-range color laser. The design for the letterhead and comp must be such that it can be converted into an EMF and made a part of a standard Word template. We are after a contemporary design.

Wants

• Clean, contemporary design
• Template for Letterhead
• Template for "With Compliments" slip
• Template for Business Card

Do Not Want

• Any clip art images or stock photos
• Gradients or similar as they will not print well on our color laser

Other details on the design brief might include project time frame, deadlines, payment methods and even specific direction and requests for print shop instructions. A good design brief should be considered a project blueprint that will save me time, save the customer money and deliver a project tuned to the customer's specs.

Internet Time

I'm not a twenty-something but have worked in enough design shops and development departments to have become acclimated to the Internet Time that many of these young web professionals are on. Everything is quick, information is available at one's fingertips and everyone is always connected.

The problem I have is transitioning from the Web Generation to social or business situations with people my age. For example, what I think of as a normal time frame for a greeting, response and other traditional interactions with the Web Gen, the older generation tends to regard as brusque, almost rude.

This is an issue that more and more of us are facing as we make the switch from dealing with folks who are on Internet Time, where everything happens quickly and almost chaotically, to the more leisurely pace of interactions with our real-world friends, associates and business partners. The way I have come to deal with this is simply by taking a few deep breaths when I am going from one context to the other. Much like moving from dry land into the ocean, or from a darkened room into sunlight, the change in timing takes a few seconds and a little thought to get used to.

"So say I."
"So say we all."

Don't outsource your image

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who is also a customer. He has been brokering web sites for some of his clients (he's an IT guy who also does value-adds such as telephones, web sites and data connectivity). At any rate, he usually outsources his customers' websites to designers in India. When it came time to do his own site, however, he contacted me.

I gave him an estimate and a time frame, but knowing his connections to inexpensive overseas designers, I didn't think I'd get the job. Much to my surprise he sent a deposit and asked me to go ahead with the work.

Once the job was done and we launched the website I asked him why he had picked me instead of one of the cheaper overseas firms. "It wasn't worth the hassle to save a couple of hundred dollars. I was spending hours on the phone and e-mails every day just trying to get a concept across to someone who isn't culturally aware of the business issues I have here in the States. Plus, these guys promised custom design and I caught them trying to use the same templates I resell."

Ta-da.

Differentiation

When I am preparing a new website for a business customer I ask them what differentiates their business from competing businesses in the same arena. This point is important yet often overlooked by folks involved in the day-to-day operation of a business. Making the most of a business's unique qualities is a vital part of nurturing awareness of the brand.

Talking about the great qualities your business embodies isn't just good marketing, it helps in attracting new customers as well as retaining existing ones.

IRFCD

Monday May 4^th is International Respect for Chickens Day. These fine birds are the roast, fried, grilled and broiled entrées that many of us find so delectable. Hats off to our feathered friends. Now, please pass the gravy and mashed potatoes.

Favorite Tool

What is my favorite tool? No, it's not some flavor of the month politician. It's a well made implement, one that I carry around nearly all of the time. I speak of the Leatherman. In my case the Leatherman Kick. Mine is missing an implement; a screwdriver got broken off when I idiotically used it as a pry bar. Other than that it has served me well for the last five years.

What's your favorite tool? Send it in, win a book (My second-favorite tool, lol!)