Everything in Vegas is open twenty-four hours
Sunday, June 5th, 2011
Everything in Vegas is open twenty-four hours.
It’s the second city that never sleeps.
So if you’re opening a casino or a bar in Vegas, the sensible option is to stay open twenty-four hours too, right?
There’s a strange paradox in marketing which makes every company tell you they want to be different, while meticulously following the moves of all their peers and competitors because they’re petrified of missing out on a potentially profitable trend.
The problem with following trends is that you’re never starting them.
People who start fashion trends take risks. They know they’ll receive some odd looks, but that’s the point – if nobody stares, then it’s not different enough to ever be considered a new trend.
Perhaps you don’t want people to whisper as you walk down the street. But surely you want people to talk about your business?
So stop following. Start trending.
Buy a bar in Vegas and open it for one hour every night. And never for the same hour two nights in a row.
It’s only business suicide if nobody talks about it.
Hospital toilet ambiguity
Sunday, June 5th, 2011
Yes, I’m still playing around with images in the WordPress app.
It seems the small, medium and large options you’re given within the app’s settings have no correlation with your WordPress media settings.
On the iPhone 4, large images seem to crop to around 640 pixels on the longest edge, medium to 480 pixels, and I’ve no idea about small.
Hopefully they’ll add more control to the image sizing soon in order to make the app a serious on-the-go CMS.
And regarding the photograph, the character in the illustration seems to running away from the toilet after leaving the door open. Quite the opposite of the instruction. Interesting.
Take two
Sunday, June 5th, 2011
I’m still testing the iOS WordPress app. The quick photo feature is pretty cool, but the snap below is clearly too big. This one should resize to 500px wide because I’ve set this in the WordPress admin as my medium size, and selected the medium size within the WordPress app settings on my iPhone. Let’s see if this works …
Nurofen
Sunday, June 5th, 2011
I’m testing the quick photo feature in the WordPress iPhone app.
A sparkling soft drink with vegetable extracts and sweeteners
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
How explicit do you need to be about what you do?
This popped up in a conversation today.
It seems to me that some of the best brands don’t feel the need to define what they do. They let you decide through your purchases and experiences.
What does Nike do? How about Apple? Amazon? Virgin?
Even if you could explain exactly what you do in just a few words, should you?
Imagine if Coca-Cola put the words in the title of this blog post on their cans and bottles, nice and big.
How would that affect sales?
Child’s Play? A few thoughts after building a website for educational toys
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
Condiment recently launched Up To The Moon – an emporium of educational toys, gifts, games and suchlike. It’s one of the first few e-commerce sites that we’ve launched on the incredible Lemonstand platform, and the learning curve has been steep at best, and vertigo-inducing at worst.
I’ve learnt loads of code-based stuff, but I thought I’d jot down a few non-technical benefits of building this particular website.
1. Chuck yourself in at the deep end
It’s a bit scary, often cold, and you can end up in serious trouble, but it’s wonderfully liberating to chuck yourself in at the deep end. With Up To The Moon, I decided not to modify the demo theme (starting with something that works, and tweaking it until it looks different and still works) but rather start from scratch. First there was nothing, and then there was a fully functional website. Every piece of code in that website is written by me or, at the very least, copied and pasted by my fair hands.
If you always start at the shallow end, you’re always getting closer to being out of your depth. Do the opposite.
2. There’s always a dip
There were times when I literally tried to tear my hair out when building this website. I’d spend hours trawling the internet looking for similar issues, in the hope that one forum or blog post, somewhere on this incredible internet, would hold a clue that would solve my riddle. Often I had to resort to submitting support tickets (a coder’s white flag; a horrible admission of defeat).
This is the dip. The difficult bit where we feel despondent; where chucking in the towel seems like a bloody good option. The dip isn’t pleasant, but pushing through it gives you valuable knowledge and a pleasant sense of achievement.
3. Do something different, often
I still see myself as a copywriter. I still love words and phrasing and rhythm and psychology and tutting at people’s apostrophe usage.
But being able to code makes me stronger. It gives the mathematical side of my brain a good workout, it increases the profitability of our company, and it means I can walk into a meeting and sell an e-commerce store based on my experiences of building them – not on something I retweeted from Mashable once.
4. Building an e-commerce site is the easy bit
The difficult bit is the ongoing work to make it a success. Building a robust e-commerce site isn’t cheap, so a small business isn’t going to have a bucket of money for pay-per-click, display, or traditional advertising. Getting visits through natural search is vital, as is a commitment to social media marketing – but visits don’t necessarily mean sales.
Increasing the conversion rate will take time, patience and a willingness to try things out. Alter the structure of the homepage, tweak your pricing policy, be critical about your copy. Even if the first iteration of the site proves to be a success, there’s always room for improvement.
5. An online shop isn’t the easy alternative to a physical store
You don’t have to pay rent for an online store, but if you want to do serious numbers you’ll need some powerful hosting. E-commerce stores can be much more memory intensive, and any downtime will lose you sales and customers – so scrimping on your hosting is very much a false economy.
Opening a shop in a town centre gives you guaranteed foot traffic and exposure. Building a store online doesn’t guarantee you any visitors whatsoever. If your site is poorly optimised, and your marketing is forgettable, you’re going to get very few visits and very poor sales.
*
And that’s it. Blimey, this is almost like a proper blog post, with hints and tips and everything. Sweary service will be resumed shortly.
You’ve got to say yes
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
Opportunities present themselves every day.
It’s easy to say no; to resist change; to play devil’s advocate and ask “but what if it doesn’t work out?”.
Much harder to say yes; to embrace change; to say “this is an incredible opportunity – let’s make it happen”.
You can pretend that you’re being cautious because it’s the sensible thing to do. Sometimes it is – but often it’s just the perfect excuse.
I could have said no. James could have resisted. Adrian could have backed out. Tom could have decided to stay in London. Nina could have decided it was too much of a risk. Anders could have gone to work at a ‘bigger’ company.
But we didn’t. And now we’ve created something called The First Sixty-Five, and it’s going to be one hell of a ride.
You’ve got to say yes.
Two drunks holler about prawns
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011
Last night I walked into town to watch the Man Utd game on the big screen at McGinty’s, a very pleasant Irish pub.
It was a jolly decent football match. I’m certainly not a United fan, but, while sipping my Guinness, I couldn’t help but admire the way they dominated the game. To win a Champions League semi-final so convincingly is no mean feat.
Goals from Rooney and Giggs sealed the victory, but these weren’t the two gentlemen that made a big impression on my evening.
No, that particular accolade goes to the two pissed blokes I passed on the way to the pub.
They didn’t look like the nicest blokes in the world, so I assumed they were arguing about where their next alcohol, nicotine or harder drug intake was coming from.
But as I got closer, I realised this wasn’t the case. They were they arguing about seafood outside the library (the geographical irony wasn’t lost on me).
Lush number one was convinced:
“Of course a prawn has a fucking shell on it. That’s why it’s called a shellfish. You prat.”
Lush number two’s argument wasn’t quite so convincing:
“No, because then it would be a mussel. And don’t call me a prat.”
(No, me neither.)
It was captivating stuff. So captivating in fact, that I was caught looking, and subsequently offered an opportunity to settle the debate by Lush Number One:
“Tell this fucking idiot that a prawn is a fucking shellfish,” he insisted, gesturing wildly with his can of Super Tenants.
Bamboozled by the absurdity of the situation, I declined to offer an answer. I smiled and walked faster. But I did tell the boys all about the encounter when I got to the pub.
And I told Anders and JK the story when I got to work this morning.
Whilst the majority of businesses pursue the slick, professional approach of Man Utd, only the very brave few opt for the absurdity of those fishy drunks.
But what’s more interesting and memorable?
Not building Rome
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
I got up half an hour earlier this morning and went for a run.
Running through the suburbs at 6.30am is really rather liberating – especially in spring and summer, when it’s lighter and warmer. (I did it in January; infinitely less fun.)
I ran a personal best for the 5k this morning, and felt pretty good about it all day. Okay, I’m not going to be troubling the Olympic selection committee, but a sense of achievement is always a nice thing to have.
And all because I got up half an hour earlier.
Half an hour, once a week, four weeks a month, twelve months a year. That’s twenty-four hours – all to yourself.
In those twenty-four hours you could learn a new language, write a book, make a model, or run 120k. It could be the most rewarding twenty-four hours of your year.
Just because you can’t build Rome, don’t overlook what you can achieve in a day.
Go on. Adjust your alarm.
The problem with the digital revolution
Monday, April 18th, 2011
We live in exciting times. There’s no doubt about that.
The possibilities created by a connected world are mind-boggling; the things that are possible because of the internet are astonishing.
Wikipedia, Google Maps, Spotify, Kickstarter. These are just four of the hundreds and thousands of amazing ideas and applications that – let’s be honest – make our lives better.
Just imagine getting in a real car, driving to a real shop and buying a real CD.
Absurd.
The devices and services we have at our disposal provide us with information and entertainment at a remarkable speed.
But there is a problem with the digital revolution.
The problem is our level of dependency on the big and idle companies that keep us connected.
You only need to look at your Twitter stream in order to know that BT, Sky and Virgin are all as useful as a dogshit on your cornflakes. These godforsaken behemoths should be brought to justice for the customer service atrocities they commit each and every day. Quite frankly, we should be chasing these multinational clusterfucks out of the country, while burning effigies of Murdoch, Branson and Mr and Mrs Knobhead from the BT ads.
But instead we pay them by DD to provide us with broadband.
Alternatively, of course, you can access the web via a 3G connection. But your choice of providers doesn’t really get any better. Vodafone, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Three. I’m tempted to suggest that never before have five examples of such frightening inadequacy been so successful. But I remember the Spice Girls.
If, however, you are fortunate enough to have a stable connection to the world wide web, you still need a device to view it on. Not much to write home about here, either. The world is full of Dell Inspirons, Sony Vaios, and Toshiba Shitstorms. Even my beloved Apple has dipped in form lately (the iPad was shipped with some serious connectivity issues, iPhone 4 the same, and my new Airport Express is like a cack in a box). I won’t be ditching Apple just yet, though – I mean, have you seen those HTCs? Blimey. They make the Sega Game Gear look like something from Minority Report.
Anyhow. I want to get carried away with the digital revolution. I want to help create and build applications that make people’s live a little better.
But right now, I’ve got to perform some diagnostic checks on my Netgear router.
Isn’t technology magical?