I feel I’ve spent the last 12 years of life, my career, trying to help people do things better.  Helping them make better systems, better experiences, better websites.  And I would expect that there are other people like me doing similar things for similar organisations.
But still I see so many organisations just getting it wrong, and I think I’ve figured out why.  Fundementally these organisations (I’m going to just say ‘people’ from now on) are making flawed business process decisions.  The decisions they are making about what to do on …

Presentation conducted at Fundraising Institute of Australia’s Professional Development Lunch in Adelaide on 12 Nov 2009.

Someone asked me today about building a website, and part of the conversation revolved around why the site needed to exist.  The answer was a few things but part of the answer was “it looks good on a resume”.
This made me think… what is it about building a website that would look good on a resume, which led me to think about what it means to have a successful website.
Success is measured in many ways, but for a website i think it’s critical that you establish what success means, even …

I get asked sometime to explain how Google ads work and how you can make money from these ads.  And invariably I end up drawing a picture on a piece of paper, like this.  Enjoy!

A quick overview of using twitter hashtags.

I realized this morning that there are a bunch if things I check when making a decision to follow someone on Twitter – here’s what I do.
- Do you have a real avatar? A real picture, not a logo and definetly not the default Twitter avatar.
- Are more people following you than you are following? This is typically a good indication of interesting posts.
- What’s your tweet to friends ratio? If you are following 600 people but have only tweeted 6 updates then I’m not going to follow you.
- Do …

witter is a two way street, you can post as much as you like but it’s only when you start to listen that you become part of the conversation.  In fact I didn’t really ‘get’ twitter for quite some time and it wasn’t until I installed a great tool called tweetdeck that it finally made sense.
The problem with twitter (I think anyway) is the twitter website, it’s just not well designed for having conversations with people.  I use twitter without EVER VISITING THE TWITTER WEBSITE! I use it from my …

I’ve been using Excel and these shortcuts for such a long time that I virtually take them for granted.  Here’s a quick video of these if you don’t feel like reading…

Regardless, here are the 5 keyboard shortcuts that save my alot of time:

Multi-Line text in a cell – ALT+Enter. This is like hitting enter in a word processor to make a new line, but in the same cell.  It’s good for column headings that are a little long and you want to control the wrapping manually.
Autosum – ALT + =. …

Two days ago I completed the upgrade of newagestore.com from Kentico 3.1a to 4.0.  This took roughly 4 hours to do, the process I took was a little laborious but perhaps the safest.

Backups and double checking backups all round
I took a backup of the database and then restored it into a new database
I took a complete copy of the site on the file system of the server and pointed it at my new database in the web.config
Created a new site in IIS to point to this new folder with a …

I can’t believe that this is the best Qantas can do for a temporary page???
I don’t think it’s firefox either, i think this is the actual page.  I loaded in IE with the same result!  I think this goes in the “if you’re not going to do it right then don’t do it all” basket.