Welcome to My Blog
Here is a basic blog layout with a right sidebarHow People (Really) Use Websites
One book I highly recommend for learning about how to design a usable website is Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. This book should be your starting point if your job depends on you understanding the fundamentals of maintaining or designing a functional website....
Hasn’t That Been Done Before?
When you get ready to do a new business venture of almost any kind, you should expect a lot of people to ask, "Isn't somebody already doing that?"The answer is: I hope so. If no one is doing it, or planning it, or offering a different version of it,...
Treating the Disease and Not the Symptoms – Why We Work for Nonprofits
One great thing about my job is that I regularly get approached by nonprofits that are doing really cool things, and I sometimes get to become involved in their projects, which is both rewarding and educational. Yesterday I spoke with someone who I was introduced to...
Three Things That Always Happen When You Poll Your Customers
According to my hero Steve Krug, who wrote the classic book on how to design a "usable" website, Don't Make Me Think, the same three things happen every time you conduct "user testing": 1. You confirm some things you already knew. 2. You learn some new things...
The Point of the Official Retweet Button
A lot of people who are very knowledgeable and experienced at leveraging Twitter do not understand the point of the "Retweet" button that Twitter launched last year. It doesn't make sense to them for a number reasons, including: 1. It was unnecessary,...
The Value of Knowing the Ending
When John Irving writes a novel, he always starts out with the . Once he knows the ending in detail, he begins writing all the parts of the story that lead to the ending. This writing method reminds me of the business method that lots of entrepreneurs...
Viable, Fundable or Proof of Concept?
(I'm going to wait a few more days before updating results of my Twitter Experiment, because data is still changing and I'd like to let a little more time pass. In addition to updating results, I'll let you know on this blog what I plan to do next with my...
“Discoverable” Blog Posts
There's a difference between a "discoverable" blog post and a "popular" blog post. For example, recent blog post was about how my car was unfairly towed while I was eating dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, and how the owner stopped preparing food to...
Results from Day 4 of Twitter Experiment
On Monday I am going post some analysis of the results of my Twitter Experiment. To give the summary for those of you just joining me, on January 12th I had 12,701 followers on Twitter, and I was following almost all of them, which gave me a 1:1...
Results from Day 3 of Twitter Experiment (with Chart)
In 24 hours, I have lost another 100 followers. (Remember, on the first night, I lost almost 2,000 followers, which must include all the people who use applications to auto-unfollow people who are no longer following them.) As the chart shows, my follower count...
Data-Driven Training
We created Royku to train marketers in data-driven marketing.