1. Building Momentum in Your Business
2. A Series of Stresses or a Series of Adventures
3. Five Ways To Stay Productive In Your Mobile Office
4. Twenty Time Savers: Plus, the 80/20 Rule
5. The Purchase of Alaska: Making Decisions
6. Don’t Multitask: Stop Wasting Time

This year, we redesigned the Ketchup Week web site, integrated with Twitter and are promoting through various social media sites. Join Ketchup Week if you’re into getting things done this week.

Our product has had a few names during our development process. Picking a name for a product is incredibly tricky. Not only do you need to come up with a good name that everyone likes, but you have to find the domain name.

Previously, the product was called Roundup, and before that Windstorm.

Now, we’ve come up with a name we’re happy with. It’s Minuteglass. It’s like “hourglass” but for minutes. Get it? We like it and we’re working on logos and also working on the product. The product is coming together faster and we’re excited to release it. At this time we don’t have an ETA. Stay tuned!

More at our blog for the product: www.trackthetime.com and at www.minuteglass.com

What’s it about? It’s a review of marketing efforts that have worked for other web app companies mixed with marketing topics and ideas geared especially for people who need to spread the word about their web application, software, or web site.

It includes marketing insights which I have personally received from the founders of Campaign Monitor, Brightkite, Dogster, Geni, JumpBox, Viddler, Tumblr, JotForm, Harvest, SmugMug, Ma.gnolia, Beanstalk, Wufoo and Cashboard. Not to be missed!

If you live in Phoenix, be sure to come!
When: Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Cost: Free
Location: See Refresh Phoenix web site

I have a really neat presentation called Marketing for Web Apps which is brand new and includes marketing insights which I have personally received (in the last 24 hrs) from the founders of Geni.com, JumpBox.com, Viddler.com, Tumblr.com, JotForm.com, HarvestApp.com, SmugMug.com, Ma.gnolia.com, BeanstalkApp.com, Wufoo.com and GetCashboard.com (and I am even waiting on a few more). Not to be missed!

In addition, Hamilton Wallace from Wallace Resources in Scottsdale will be presenting on the importance of getting your message right.

If you live in Phoenix, be sure to come!

Tom here at Tornado did all of the Flash work, including building a custom Flash map to show their locations.

You can see the products featured in the photo above on the Danao Outdoor web site, which we also designed.

The network today includes the following sites:

1. Track The Time Blog
http://www.trackthetime.com/

2. Minute Glass
http://www.minuteglass.com

3. Tornado Design
http://www.tornadodesign.com/

4. Tornado Email
http://www.tornadoemail.com/

5. Ketchup Week
http://www.ketchupweek.com/

6. BrainFuel
http://brainfuel.tv/

7. Arizona Coffee
http://www.arizona-coffee.com/

8. Thomas Chapin Blog
http://www.tchapin.com/blog/

9. Chris Tingom Blog
http://www.christingom.com/

10. Caption Fridays
http://www.captionfridays.com/

11. Focus Think Network
http://www.focusthink.net/

12. 100FactsAbout.com
http://www.100factsabout.com/

13. Another Great List
http://www.anothergreatlist.com/

14. Places to See in Arizona
http://www.placestoseeinarizona.com/

15. Arizona Reviews
http://www.arizonareviews.com/

16. Chris Tingom Photos
http://chris.tingom.com/

So who’s going? Chris Tingom and Thomas Chapin. If you’re going to be there this year, and would like to meet up, just give us a shout. Thanks.

http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/wea00206.htm

Tornado is seeking to meet with expert web designers, CSS/XHTML developers for consideration for joining the Tornado team. We are looking to expand our team and our capabilities and have the business to support this growth. If you are interested please email me and I’ll be in touch over the next week to discuss.

Thank you,

Chris

Chris Tingom
Tornado
Phoenix, AZ
www.tornadodesign.com
(480) 945-5653 phone

Check out the sweet calculators we made (all in Flash, too). The Tax Benefits Calculator. The HSA Contribution Calculator.

Required Skills:

• Ruby on Rails
• Web application frontend design
• AJAX web browser client technologies, ie. Javascript, CSS, DOM+XHTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, Web Services.
• (Prototype and Scriptaculous and others)
• Languages (in order of importance): Ruby, PHP, ActionScript, C/C++
• PostgreSQL, MySQL
• Linux and Open Source development platforms

Desired Skills:

• Distributed/Clustered (web) application development
• Any experience or familiarity with other languages such as Javascript, Actionscript, CakePHP, SmartyPHP, C++, VB, or .NET
• Mad PC/XBOX/Wii gaming skills are a plus

This is a full time position in Phoenix. Inquire within.

Tornado did all of the Flash work and our client supplied the basic design for the site. Mega-kudos to Tom for all of the great Flash work. You wouldn’t believe some of the amazing stuff that goes on in the background of that site. There is a full blown content management system, action scripting that determines the thickness of photos that slide out, and then randomizes the distance between them, and which picture to show. We’ve also helped this client get set up with a blog, a forum, and email campaigns.

We’re in the middle of building a customer assessment form system for Just Breathe, which uses Flash and PHP and allows staff to record customers health status and see past assessments. It’s pretty cool.

Andrew Smith is the lead designer on the project. I handled site planning and blueprinting. Robert Sandie and Donna DeMarco are the founders of Viddler, and organized the project (Pennsylvania), and Kasper Cecek and Lukasz Hankus did all of the Java and Flash development (Poland).

Major kudos to Andrew for his work on this project. From the design of the logo to the overall site design and front end CSS and markup, as well as a large portion of the ideas behind this project, Andrew really made it happen.

Highlights:

1. Upload lots of videos at once, and videos up to 500 MB in size
2. Tag your videos with timed tags, and link to that moment
3. Comment on a specific portion of the video
4. Share videos with everyone, or only with specific friends you select, or keep video private

The time tags is the coolest feature. You can hover over the little dots in the video timeline to see what people have said about your video. You can also share a video and send people a link to a specific moment in the video.

A few more screenshots:

The Dashboard which is your homepage once you have logged in successfully.

Your Videos panel lets you see how many times your videos have been viewed, and see whether they are public, private, or shared.

The Explore panel is visible to logged in and logged out visitors.

There you have it! It’s a great new video sharing site, with unique time tags. Be sure to add us as your friends. Our usernames are Chris, Thomas, Kent, and Andrew.

And here’s a test embed of a video:

Continue Reading (I will update this whenever I see a new review):

• Rev2.org: Viddler Puts Time Into Video Sharing
• StevenBao.com: Viddler: YouTube To The Extreme
• Mashable: Viddler and GlanceTV Launch – YouTube, What Have You Started?
• Inspirational Technology: Viddler launches
• Technically Speaking: Viddler
• Feasible Impossibilities: Viddler.com launches Public Beta – Free Flash Streaming Video Sharing Service

View on Live.com 3D Maps or see closeups of the studio.

1. Every time I show people our product, they want to be a beta tester
2. They usually want to help out somehow
3. Some of them want to invest
4. All of them tell me how they do things now, and how this will enable them to move away from product XYZ
5. They all want this product tomorrow
6. We have killer features nobody else has

Speed is of the essence…

Yesterday, the “new guy” got the Awesome Award for completely re-organizing our 200+ project folders. In one single day, he turned our pile of project folders into an alphabetical dream. Now instead of project folders everywhere, they’re easy to find in our file cabinet.

Welcome, Kent and thanks for organizing our projects.

I should have run the moment I learned nobody on the team besides myself had built a web site before.

I should have run the moment the client (a doctor) said: “It doesn’t matter whether we have a long term relationship with a developer because we’re going to be bought out in a year anyways.”

I should have run when the client said: “We absolutely must be live in 6 weeks” and would not discuss it arguing that the investors were anxious.

That brings me to my first point.

Spending a lot of money on the design and development of a web site or web service does not increase your chances of success. In fact, I would argue that the more you spend past a certain threshold, your chances of success diminish.

This client believed that money could buy him anything including success. Money was no object. I love a “make it happen” attitude, however let’s be real. A homeless guy (no, not this guy) could easily submit a proposal for 5X the cost of the nearest competitor but that doesn’t mean he can do it better.

After spending about 3 weeks building a site map and wireframes for about 20 pages we talked to 8 development companies about building this site (with a massive backend). Surprisingly half of them were interested.

Prior to our Blueprint process this business was nothing more than an idea that few people understood. After our Blueprint we found we could explain the concept to people in about an hour. It was amazing.

Something I found apparent after we began meeting with developers was that my client liked the companies with fancy offices and big smiles while I was able to see they didn’t have a clue.

Even more disturbing: of the two companies that actually got it, they didn’t even make my clients “cut.”

While one company said the site would only work in Internet Explorer, the other asked if they could use AJAX. When one said it wouldn’t work in FireFox until phase 2 or 3, the other asked if they could work out of our office to speed up development.

None of this sounded appealing to the client. All of it was appealing to me.

So in the end the client picked the company that only supported IE and was going to charge not just one arm and one leg, but for both of them. The company with the fancy office and floor-to-ceiling windows, the one with brand-name clients.

So how did it turn out? Well the project is doomed at this point and launched two months late. Apparently “design” wasn’t included and the client must have said ok to just exporting from Visual Studio. Unbelievable.

We bailed out after completing our Blueprint process as the client didn’t want to wait while we asked questions and prepared wireframes.

Lessons learned?

1. Sometimes it’s good to tell the client a few industry horror stories. There is nothing like the potential for great failure to inspire success.
2. Sometimes more is less. This client would have gotten more had he spent less with a more capable development team. Spending upper five-figures didn’t get anything this time.
3. Customers sometimes buy based on price. Deal with it.
4. Good ideas are everywhere and it’s the execution of those ideas that really matters.

This is a great case study in how “Getting Real” doesn’t work unless everybody involved in the process understands “Getting Real.”

The client ignored all of the wireframes and specifications, all of our planning, and so did the development company that bid five times as much as the nearest competitor. Great specifications and planning can save a project like this however in this case too many bad decisions were made and a lot of money was wasted.

That’s the end of my tale. The good news is we got paid. Unfortunately, the client probably doesn’t understand what went wrong and that’s ashame because he’ll never trust a web development firm again.

Coming up next: Planning Matters To Us Client.

Since I don’t feel qualified to put together a big long post about ways you can be successful in the web industry, I thought the next best thing would be eight points — one for each year I’ve been in business.

Some things I’ve learned:

1. Change is good. Often when things seem the very worst and you can’t believe you’ve gotten yourself into a situation it can be helpful to change the bad thing. Just do it, get over it, move on. Often times, more often than you might think, change is good.
2. People don’t change, much. I’ve hired so many people over the years who couldn’t do the job. Then I’d go and hire them again. I have soooo learned this lesson. People don’t change. Usually it’s a performance issue but sometimes it’s just that they can’t do the job whether it be a technical limitation or a personality defect. Get over it because they won’t be changing.
3. Hiring the best people is smart. It is expensive hiring the wrong people and that is one reason why if you are really good at what you do you can charge higher rates (basic economics). I’ve got a very, very short list of good developers I trust and I’m willing to pay them what they ask. Usually they’re really nice and get the work done fast. Something to do with motivation and skill.
4. Don’t complain. There is this one PHP developer that I work with that I recently complimented. I knew he was very good and finally realized why I like working with him so much: he didn’t complain. Whenever I would give him a new project he’d ask all the right questions and just tell me he would get it done. Then he’d get it done and without a single complaint! It’s brilliant. He’s the only developer I know that doesn’t tell me what a pain something is going to be when I show him what we need to accomplish. It’s pure heaven.
5. Get to know people in the industry. Surprisingly, contacts do make a difference. Get to know people. I’ve discovered a huge advantage by knowing and doing business with about a dozen or more different agencies in the last two years. As a result they sell projects for us, manage them, and then line up additional projects for us. It now makes up a good quarter of our business. The key to getting to know people is being friendly.
6. Charge for proposals. I’m not going to give this secret away. You can read into it what you want.
7. Suck it up and just do it. Two years ago I was hired to provide ecommerce integration for a local company and was working with an account executive with a lot of experience. When the designer bailed I stepped in to save the day and while I didn’t make a lot of money, I got to be the hero on a high profile project. Since that day I’ve done at least 50 times the amount of work with that client.
8. Deadlines matter, but so does getting it done. So many designers and develpers are flakes. While everybody makes mistakes it is the pattern of success or failure you need to be concerned about. Everybody’s failed and everybody’s had successful projects. Something important to look at is that ratio because I’ve had a ton of projects in the last 8 years that were delayed for whatever reason. One time I had a web site project go two years due to various client delays. But we got it done and it’s been a great client ever since.

Now for eight (business) goals:

1. Residual income is really valuable. There have been times in the last eight years that I wanted to quit what I was doing and go get a job working a 9-5 job. The stability of a 9-5 job is often due to the consistency in which money comes in the door. While I’ve developed a lot of resources that generate constant revenue I’ve also learned that nothing lasts forever. I want to develop residual revenue that really lasts and eventually completely replace my income with residual sources.
2. Work normal hours. I’ve been known to work 80 hour weeks and get myself burned out. Consistency is the spice of life if you want my opinion. Not variety in this case. I think another way to put this is work/life balance.
3. Build cool stuff with small teams. Sometimes one person can get more done than two (or 10). I’ve seen the power of small teams. Poor performers can’t hide in a team of 2 or 3 and I’d like to build really cool stuff with small teams. Speaking of poor performers. My resolution is to hire less of them. I’ve worked with far to many bad programmers.
4. Track business trends and statistics better. If you want to make something better then track it. I’m working on tracking financial and project trends better (cash flow in weeks, not months for example). The best companies know exactly how long it takes them to do something and can spot potential problems early because of statistics. They can also spot opportunities.
5. Build my top secret web app. This project has been on hold for so long it’s like a bad phone call. This year is the year it will happen.
6. Work somewhere else for a month or three. I’ve always wanted to try this. Pack up your day to day goods and hit the road. The internet industry is one of the few in the world that enables you to travel the world and work all at the same time. I wouldn’t mind going to some far off city and working there for a period of time. Just to get away and yet still work.
7. Expand and build upon our good reputation by marketing. I’d love to cement why our company is different and how we work within our local market. I’ve sent out about a half dozen email newsletters in the last 5 years. I need to send them out more often and revamp our letterhead and envelopes. Having a better business identity system helps to cement your company as strong
8. Improve customer service. I think the best way to decide if you have good customer service is to analyize what happens when things start to break down. In my shop, if we overcommit ourselves it becomes painfully obvious when we can’t provide perfect service. Understanding our limits and making our service better will go a long ways.

I left personal goals out because, well, those are boring.

As I write I’m remembering that I built my first web site in 1996. That’s ten years ago! I have always respected people who have been in an industry ten years. It’s sort of a badge of honor to say you stuck with something that long. I have no intention of quitting. I really do like this industry despite the constant learning curve.

Continue reading about this topic on BrainFuel:

• How to be successful in the web industry
• Two types of freelancers
• Do you provide value?
• Measure everything important, track everything worth tracking

Hooray for Ketchup Week! Please help me spread the word.