Our Experience with Basecamp
Around eight months ago we made the decision to start using Basecamp to manage nearly all our projects. Prior to the move to Basecamp, we used a patch work of tools to manage our work. We had an internal wiki we used for many of our task lists and project documentation. We used a bug tracking system for some of our more intense programming projects. We used Basecamp for some work. And for some projects we relied on emails, Outlook task lists, whiteboards and Excel sheets.
While in retrospect this random approach to project management seems dysfunctional, it really wasn’t a huge problem until we started growing and hiring new people. When you have a small group of people that have worked together a long time, formal process and tools are less important. You just sort of know how people work, where they saved their files and how they want to be communicated with. However, this reliance on personal relationships falls apart when the volume of work increases and you have to integrate new employees into a poorly defined process. It doesn’t scale.
So we started using Basecamp.
"The biggest challenge to better design isn’t getting better designers."
I came across a great article today entitled How to Design for Your Worst Client: You. While the article aims to provide designers with tips for designing their own personal websites, there are some some lessons that anyone working on a web design project can learn from.
“Be as specific as you can on what you would like on each page. That means decide on the content first. I know, it’s a design portfolio. You need something to design though. How many times has a client had you design something without saying what content they want on there, or saying they will get it to you soon (meaning the day before it goes live). Don’t do this to you.”
Too often sites are designed without a thought out content plan in place. This usually leads to last minute redesigns or sites that are squares when they should be circles. Content should be where you start, not an after thought.
“There is always someone better than you. Always. But remember: That person’s first few websites sucked. Not only did they suck, they might have been the worst website ever created. So why are you trying so hard to have the best website ever in one shot? You won’t get better unless you start making your own sites.
Stop using other websites as a crutch while you aimlessly wander looking for something to spark an idea. Since you have your goals defined and know what content you want, you can quickly move along until you find the elements that match your needs. Then STOP looking.”
In almost all cases, organizations are better off getting something good, but simple up quickly and then improving in an iterative way over time. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
One of the biggest obstacles to getting good design implemented is a dysfunctional approval process, as this article on the struggles American Airlines has had attests.
“The biggest challenge to better design isn’t getting better designers. The problem is organizational, and the hub-and-spoke decision-making process that was originally created to slash bureaucracy–that is, to create more decentralized decisions and less hierarchy. But the overriding weakness, which design thinking makes manifest, is that good design is necessarily the product of a heavily centralized structure. Great design at places such as Apple isn’t about “empowering decision makers” or whatever that lame B-school buzzword is. It’s about awarding massive power and self-determination to those with the most cohesive vision–that is, the designers. Those are the people with the best idea of what customers want. That’s the essence of design thinking.”
While the quote references problems with the way things are structured at American Airlines, I’ve found that organizations of all sizes and shapes have similar structural problems. No matter how talented the design team, it is difficult to produce good websites unless the end client has efficient structures in place for responding to and approving your work. Committees are probably good for a few things, but designing websites isn’t one of them.
Integrating Tweetbacks into your WordPress Blog
Conversations about blog posts are increasingly taking place on Twitter in addition to the comments section of blogs. Due to this trend, over the last six months we’ve seen lots of blogs integrate tweetbacks into their comment sections. Building on the trackback concept, a tweetback searches Twitter for links to specific blog pots and displays relevant tweets in the comments section of your blog.
I’ve had a variety of clients request this feature over the last few months, so we’ve spent some time figuring out how to get tweetbacks working in our core platform, Drupal and WordPress.
For Drupal, we did an exhaustive search for tweetback modules back in February and didn’t find any that work, so we developed our own custom module. We are currently fine tuning the code we wrote and hope to release our Drupal tweetback module to the open source community in the next few months.
For WordPress, there are quite a few tweetback modules to choose from. We tried a handful of the plugins with mixed results. I’m posting a quick review of our experience with each in the hopes that it saves time for others hoping to implement tweetbacks on their blog.
Before I dive in, please note that we did not test all of these plugins exhaustively. In my mind, the point of plugins is to quickly add functionality without involving our development team. So if I couldn’t get a plugin to work within an hour or so, I chose to cut my losses and move on to the next one instead of spending time debugging.
Tweetbacks and Tweetsuite by Dan Zarrella
As far as I can tell, Dan Zarrella was the first to build a tweetback plugin module for WordPress back in January.
His first take on it was a simple javascript solution called Tweetbacks. While this solution probably works, it relies on inserting a javascript hosted on his personal server on your blog/website. While this might be ok for some, we simply did not want to take the risk of inserting a javascript from an individual on a client website.
Later in January Dan released Tweetsuite, which moves away from javascript and includes a bunch of additional features. This plugin looks awesome, but unfortunately we couldn’t get it to work on the two blogs we tried to implement it on and gave up. The plugin also doesn’t have a lot of documentation, and from reading the comments it doesn’t sound like it is being actively supported. So we grudgingly moved on.
Disqus
Disqus is a third-party commenting system that can actually take the place of your WordPress commenting system. I’ve written about it before, and use it on my personal blog. I’m a fan of the product, and when I saw Disqus was adding social media reactions to its feature set I was anxious to try it out.
We decided to install Disqus on our own ImpactWatch blog as a way of testing out tweetbacks and giving the the system a full test drive before recommending clients start using it. Unfortunately, the tweetbacks feature in Disqus worked correctly for exactly one day and then mysteriously stopped and never got working again. Disqus has also periodically had performance issues that have caused our blog to load slowly. Disqus recently acknowledged that they are having some significant problems. Despite my fondness for Disqus, we will be uninstalling it from ImpactWatch this week and go back to WordPress comments, with Backtype for tweetbacks (see below).
I’ll probably loop back on Disqus in a few months and see if they’ve gotten their act together. At this point, I simply can’t recommend the service.
Backtype
Last week, we gave Backtype Connect a try here on The Bivings Report. The installation of the plugin went smoothly and tweetbacks started showing up pretty much immediately. While the service definitely misses some tweets (probably due to people using some obscure URL shortening services), it seems to capture around 90% of relevant tweets. It is definitely the best and most consistent of the tweetback services I have looked at and would be the one I would recommend at this point.
Note that I did not look at Tweetbacks by Yoast or Intense Debate, which is a service similar to Disqus that includes tweetback functionality. If you have used these plugins, please post about your experience in the comments sections. Please post if you think there is another service I should look at.
Conference Attendance Optimization
I was in Las Vegas last week to participate in an ACG Intergrowth panel about how the rise of the social web is changing the way we network. David Teten, the author of the book the Virtual Handshake and CEO of Teten Advisors, was one of my fellow panelists and also a featured speaker at the conference. In the talk he gave, David introduced me to a concept he calls Conference Attendance Optimization, which is his process for making sure he gets the most possible ROI out of the conference he goes to.
After selecting the conference you want to attend, David suggests getting a list of conference attendees in advance. If you can’t get a full list, I’d suggest putting together your own list of probable attendees by going through the speaker and sponsor list and making some educated guesses based on previous conferences. Once you have the list, go through it and identify the people you want to meet. Then get in touch with the folks you are targeting in advance of the conference to arrange a short (15 minute) meeting during breaks or after hours. This process will help ensure you meet everyone you want to at the conference and maximize your time at the event.
After the conference is over, David suggests sending follow up emails to the folks you meet as a way of keeping in touch and continuing the conversation. David is also a big proponent of executives and companies methodically maintaining contact databases of the people in their network.
I think David provides a very useful framework for planning your conference attendance. I think it also scales well based on your personality, function in your company and appetite for networking. An employee whose primary function is sales might schedule 20 meetings with potential customers. A graphic designer attending an educational conference might only target two to three industry leaders whose brain they want to pick. In putting together my personal list as a sort of jack of all trades type, I’d focus on reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in a while and on meeting people in person who I’ve only met virtually (there are a ton of them).
How you optimize your attendance is really up to you. The important point here is to develop an actual strategy in advance that ensures you are getting the most out of the conferences you attend.
Do you have any conference attendance tricks of your own?
The perfect is the enemy of the good
Entrepeneur Mark Goldenson wrote a great article in Venturebeat last week on the lessons he learned working on his failed startup, PlayCafe. This passage resonated with me:
3. Know when to value speed vs. stability. Another reason PlayCafe’s complexity hurt us is that developing good content and technology simultaneously required too much time. We tried to make each deep and stable — important, we thought, given our live nature — but we were too slow to iterate in a novelty- and entertainment-based business.
A metaphor I like is that a chess novice can defeat a master if moving twice each round. This generally increases bugs and offends perfectionists, but I agree with Reid Hoffman that if you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.
This is a lesson that applies to all web development work. Way, way too many organizations tend to turn a web development project into a six to twelve month process, with delays resulting from months of arguments about font choices or waiting on content that sounds good in theory, but no one has time or energy to write.
In almost all cases, organizations are better off scaling back their initial requirements in order to get something up quickly so they can start making an impact now. As long as the initial site is built in a flexible platform like Drupal, it should be relatively painless to then launch iterative improvements to the site over time.
A website is not a print brochure. Nothing is being sent to the printer and a website isn’t something that should ever be seen as finished.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire