The new CNN.com isn’t a news website
As you probably know by now, CNN launched a redesigned website yesterday. While I like the look and feel, the thing that really strikes me about the new homepage is how little of it is devoted to news. As you’ll see in the screen shot above, the far left column that I’ve highlighted in yellow is hard news while the rest of the page, which I have greyed out, is devoted to feature stories, ads and site features.
As a frequent visitor, it seems to me that CNN site has been shifting for awhile towards feature stories/ lifestyle news and away from hard news. With less than 1/3rd of the above the fold homepage devoted to national/world news, I think this new design is another big step in that direction.
RNC Redesign: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I’m not breaking any news here by telling you that the Republican National Committee launched a significant site redesign yesterday. After spending some time going through it, I have mixed feelings about the new site. While I admire the boldness of what they are trying to do, I think in an effort to develop a strong online brand the GOP messed up some of the basics. I also know that the best sites improve in an iterative nature over time, so I suspect many of the problems I see will be addressed in the coming months. With that, following is the good, the bad, and the ugly of the redesign.
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Our Experience with Highrise
Over the years, we’ve attempted to use Customer Relationship Management systems such as Salesforce and Sugar CRM internally as a way of tracking our own sales process. Our needs on this front are pretty straightforward, so both Salesforce and Sugar CRM seemed like way more functionality than we needed and fell into disuse pretty quickly. Given the success we’ve had with Basecamp, we decided to give 37 Signals contact tracking solution, Highrise, a try.
As mentioned, our needs are pretty simple:
- We want a central Contacts database that we can share and edit as a group.
- We want a way to enter sales leads and track where they are in the pipeline.
We are still at the beginning of our experiment with Highrise, but here is a breakdown of the good and the bad so far.
Contacts
The Contacts part of the site just works. It is easy to add new contacts to the system, and Highrise does a good job of de-duping entries and associating contacts from single companies. The simple and advanced search interfaces are both intuitive and powerful. Users can also enter simple notes about the Contact and assign follow up tasks if needed, such as reminders to call someone on a given date. The tool meets nearly all our needs.
The one criticism I would have is that Highrise doesn’t include the ability to import custom columns into the Contacts database. Instead, the system wants you to use tags to add this kind of custom information to your database. In our case, we have a legacy Access database with a variety of columns indicating whether the person is on our email list, etc. Getting this kind of data replicated in Basecamp is cumbersome, and as of yet we have moved over all of this legacy information.
Deals
The Deals section of Highrise also meets most of our needs. To add a deal (or sales lead), you simply enter the deal name and associate it with a Contact from the database. From there you can enter deal amount ($), enter the Deal status (Pending, Won, Lost), the relevant deal category and the person responsible. As with Contacts, you can also add Notes about a given Deal and assign follow up tasks.
My only addition would be to add a fourth Deal status called On Hold. Our sales process often takes a few months, and as such we can have a ton of Deals that fall in the Pending category. Having the ability to mark a project as On Hold would allow us to better separate out active and non-active leads.
Email in Information
The feature on Highrise that I didn’t think I would use but do is the email dropbox. Basically, each Highrise user is given an email address they can forward and bcc on emails in order to associate the emails with a Deal or Contact. This tool is a great way of keeping an archive of correspondence that everyone can see, lessoning the need to play the chase the email game.
Bottom Line
I think a lot of CRM software is overly complicated and way too feature rich for the average user. In a lot of instances, you are bringing a gun to a knife fight. Highrise is a great solution for companies that don’t need something as robust as something like Salesforce, but who want a tool more structured and user friendly than shared Excel sheets and Outlook contact lists.
Is the New Twitter Homepage a Mistake?
I’m definitely late to this party, but yesterday Twitter launched a new design for its homepage. This is the version of the homepage users who are not logged in and who are visiting the site for the first time will see.
Lots of smart people have already surrounded this topic, so I won’t write a long drawn out post about it, but I did want to share a few quick thoughts.
To state the obvious, the new site emphasizes search and trend tracking, and de-emphasizes orienting users new to the service and Twitter’s social components. It looks like the homepage for a search engine. This strikes me as a mistake. While I certainly use Twitter trends and search, the main reason I use Twitter is for the community of people I follow and who follow me. This aspect of the service gets lost with this homepage. Perhaps more importantly, the new page doesn’t do a good job of explaining what Twitter is – it assumes you already know.
In addition, the heavy highlighting of trends on the homepage will further encourage people to spam Twitter, or, more legitimately, to manufacture memes so that they appear on this main page. The obsession people have with becoming a trending topic will increase dramatically I would think. I’m not sure this is a positive development for Twitter.
What do you think?
Tech Meets Cycling
I ride my bicycle to work whenever possible through the scenic District of Columbia, which offers me numerous benefits. It forces me to exercise regularly, cuts down on commuting costs, is a zero emissions method of navigating the city streets (aside from manufacturing processes), and it’s much quicker door-to-door than driving through rush hour traffic.
Naturally, I’ve dabbled with websites, apps, and mobile tools to enhance my riding experience, most of which have been of little or no use to me. That said, there are a few gems available to cycling enthusiasts, and I thought I’d highlight the best of the best from my experiences. Keep reading after the jump for my findings.