Paper Canopy » General observations

Using the WordPress Editor

Jonathan — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:59:03 +0000

In case you haven’t seen this, or are new to WordPress altogether, here’s a handly little primer on the WordPress WYSIWYG editor: http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/

Most of it is pretty common sense, but there are some nice hidden gems in there such as special characters, and a handy copy/paste feature especially if you’re working in MS Word

How to build a widget

Jonathan — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:43:49 +0000

In MBA school you explore a lot of theory and eventually try to apply that to actual practice. But theory comes first in academia, so theorize we did. And when you have to zoom so far out to make such broad brush strokes you need a common business model or product. In our case it was the widget.

In school, widgets could represent anything. Tires, chairs, rubber duckies. And that’s not really fair to the real world with real product nuances. But the worst of it is, that that line of thinking somehow invaded the real world in the form of web widgets.

Web widgets, like in school, can be anything. And they are anything. For example you may be using a widget on your desktop to monitor the weather. Or maybe there’s a widget on your Google home page to display the latest news. Or even a widget that let’s you send a quick burst off to your Twitter followers. All widgets, all doing something completely different.

So the question is, how do you build something like that? Something that can be anything. When the client comes begging for a widget, what do you give them?

Well the first thing you have to decide is what will your widget do. This one’s a biggie, not just because your widget can actually do almost anything, but it’s the foundation of the production process. We can’t build something that can do “anything”.

Here are some questions to get you started:

Does it pull or push data? In other words is this something that users will use to see what’s going on with your brand or company, or will it be something that users use to send data to you?
Where will it live? Is this a desktop widget, Windows or Mac? Google home page widget? NetVibes? Mobile? Something people put on their website like a badge? All are built differently, some using different programming languages.
What’s your delivery method? Are you emailing this, or posting it on your site? Does it need to live on a provider’s site like WordPress or Google? What are the restrictions for those hosts?
What’s the goal of the widget? To interact with your brand? To help users stay in the loop?
If the widget is to display information, where is that info coming from and who will manage it? Does this data already exist somewhere? If not will that portion need to be built as well? Will the client manage the information or will that be a service you provide? Did you include that in your estimate?

Obviously those are all starting points. Maybe some you thought about but some you didn’t. Maybe those aren’t even questions you need to be asking with your widget. The end result though should be to narrow down how your widget can be moved from some broad thing to an actual usable piece of the web.

Then when you’re ready to hand it off to some stellar web production company the last step will be smooth and efficient!

What’s the good word?

Jonathan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:48:02 +0000

About two years ago my wife and I bought a house here in Atlanta. Since we weren’t super familiar with the area and how much things cost we enlisted the help of a realtor. No big deal right, just your standard realtor/buyer relationship.

I don’t know how we found her, but she was great. I mean she really earned her commission, answering our noob questions, finding great houses based on our wants/needs (and not based on her commission or what she wanted to sell). And there was a happy ending with us finding the house that fit us and our budget.

So of course when a friend started their house hunt we recommended her. She did a great job for us, and we knew she would do a great job for them as well. Which turned out to be true.

A few weeks back our realtor asked to take us out to dinner to thank us for the referral. Apparently that one referral had turned into 3 more listings and sales (one of which she was both the buyer and seller agent!) and led to a contact which got her out from under a terrible boss and under someone she really respected as a mentor!

Basically the one referral had taken her business to a whole new level.

And at dinner she kept saying thank you thank you thank you. And I kept saying that she was the one who did all the work. But without our referral she wouldn’t have gotten those leads. But without her hard work we wouldn’t have referred her.

It was round and round the whole dinner!

I don’t know if she ever got what I was saying but I made the realization later that just because you do great work doesn’t mean you will get a referral. And sometimes people who don’t really do great work get referrals. But when that combination of great work and a good referral happens it can be great.

Are you doing both great work that deserve great referrals and referring great work?