If you do, drop in and see tendrel. Do it because it’s more fun than spreadsheets. Do it because I said so.
May 15, 2008
by Jean
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June 13, 2007
by Jean
1 Comment
Did they sell you a marketing tool?
Recently, we were helping a client review a boxed software solution for handling appointment scheduling. Part of what the company selling the software offered in the bundle is ‘marketing tools.’ In the same vein, another client recently purchased large-scale fundraising software – and again, bundled in with the core component, were these ‘marketing tools.’ In fact, the availability of an email marketing component is a significant part of what drove the company’s decision to buy the product. The reasoning: Now we’ll finally be able to do some of our own marketing.
Many companies are lured by the same promise – not realizing that buying an email marketing tool doesn’t make you a competent email marketer, any more than buying a band saw would make you a competent carpenter.
And soon after purchasing this email marketing tool, the problems begin…
April 29, 2007
by Jean
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This Week’s Links: Client Focus
This is the first installment of This Week’s Links, which I’ll try to keep up (you guessed it) weekly. I read a great deal, and I often discover themes in the material I’m drawn to any given week. It’s my goal to try and share the better articles, blog posts, and (perhaps) even forum posts I come across. So – without further ado…
This week, the links are all about clients – who they are, what they do, what they should do, how to get them, and more.
Paul Boag of Boagworld.com considers the role of the website owner, from pseudo project manager to visionary. It’s worth reading. (Boagworld has a smashing podcast too.)
As ‘pressed in a previous post, FreeLanceSwitch blogged about the 12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them – but what hasn’t been mentioned is their post about the Pitching and the Decision-Making Styles of Clients. Both worthy reads.
SitePoint, publisher of many things worth reading, offers an article to help freelancers find clients – a good starter piece for freelancers trying to build a client base. Donna Gunter adds a few choice bits of advice in her blog about getting more clients online.
Mr. Design Designer has an entire blog about clients from hell, and Graphic Define Magazine offers some advice on how to deal with difficult clients.
So that’s this week’s links. If you’ve got some to add, please do!
April 16, 2007
by Jean
2 Comments
12 Breeds of Client
FreelanceSwitch has published a terrific article about the 12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them. They’re bang on; I’ve worked with every one of these people through the course of my career, and I still work with many of them.
I think they’ve forgotten one, truth be told – so I’m going to add my own…
April 15, 2007
by Jean
0 comments
Better Error Messages: Wrong Done Right
How many times has it happened to you? You’re using a piece of software or a website, performing whatever task you need or want to perform, and suddenly there’s a useless error message. It tells you that something has gone wrong well enough, but it doesn’t tell you what to do now. It doesn’t say how you can fix it, or what your next step should be, or who you can contact for help.
How do otherwise savvy marketing firms miss this critical part of the user experience? Hours are spent contemplating a user’s experience when everything is going well: how users will find the needed starting point on the homepage, the help text and instructions that will make sure they’re able to follow an easy process, and clear messages about what’s happening all the way. That is, until the user makes a mistake or the software suffers some small problem – and then the user is suddenly cast into uncertainty. In the worst cases, they receive some server-generated error message, citing numeric codes they don’t understand and containing alarming code snippets they have no hope of comprehending. Certainly many users know what a 404 error is – but what about the ’500 Internal Server Error’ that likely runs a close second in frequency? Or the even more ominous ’502 Bad Gateway’ error? For the user, all of these messages seem much more like error 417: expectation failed. The process they were trying to follow has brought them to a confusing dead end, and the website they were trusting to guide them to success has let them down.