A rising trend in web design recently is building sites that are “responsive”. This is a way of creating your site so that it looks good on any kind of screen, from a full desktop down to a smartphone. The alternative, which thousands of sites use, is to create a separate “mobile version” for those visitors. There can be some advantages to building a separate mobile version of your site, but a responsive design seems like it is a better solution in the majority of cases.
The biggest problem with special mobile versions of sites is determining when it should be used. On a 3.7″ iPhone? Sure. How about a 4.6″ phone? How about a 7″ tablet? 10″ tablet? It gets quite messy. Responsive sites will show as much information as they can reasonably fit on the screen, no matter what kind of device you are using.
Here’s a quick look at how it works (via a brighter web):
While converting an existing site to become responsive can be a significant challenge, it’s remarkably easy to build a new site that is responsive from day one — especially if you use WordPress. I use StudioPress for many of the sites I build, and they’re rolling out more and more responsive themes as time goes on. They already have 11 different responsive themes, including the one that this blog is using (“Focus“). Simply install the theme, add your content, and it’ll automatically take care of optimizing the display of the site for every visitor.
You might also find that it increases your traffic. Rob Cubbon recently shared some stats from his blog after making the switch to a responsive theme, and the increase was quite impressive. I just switched the theme on this blog here yesterday, so it’ll be a little while before I can measure any kind of difference. I’ll be sure to post again if I see similar results to Rob.
Another good resource for learning about responsive design comes to use from ReadWriteWeb, which has a great article about the process that the Boston Globe went through to make their site responsive.
Is your site responsive yet? Do you plan to convert it over in the near future? Or do you think reponsiveness is simply a fad that will go away in a few years?
Last week, I saw a speech that Gary Vaynerchuk gave to a bunch of RE/MAX realtors on the topic of social media engagement and it was quite awesome. Here’s the video if you care to watch it:
Watching it inspired me to pick up Gary’s latest book, “The Thank You Economy“. Awesome book, highly recommended. The folks at Marlow’s Tavern really need to read it.
As a general rule, we enjoy Marlow’s. They have a few locations near us, good food, and solid service. Tonight we took our babysitter out there for her birthday, but the evening had a few minor issues, and I think they could really benefit from having more of a “Thank You” approach to business.
No birthday desserts
We made sure to mention that today was our babysitter’s birthday, because we knew that Marlow’s did the little free cupcake dessert like most restaurants. Nope, not anymore. ”Some people lie about it being their birthday, so we can’t do that anymore.” Uh-oh. Really? Did that surprise them? Of course some people will lie about it — that’s why you give them a cheap cupcake and not a free steak. We had three adults and two kids, with a total bill of $78, and they’re concerned that they might give away a $3 dessert that isn’t legit?
While you certainly need to watch out for people taking advantage of you, this just seemed really shallow. Companies that do customer service the right away (like Zappos) just focus on treating their customers like rock stars, and don’t worry so much about potentially giving up $3 every now and then.
My food was SLOW
It was remarkable. The other four people in our party got their food fairly quickly, but I didn’t. So I waited. And waited. And waited. We’re guessing it was 10-12 minutes before my food arrived, which is crazy for a place like that, but things happen. However, I still don’t know what happened. I got a quick “sorry ’bout that” when they brought it, and that was it. It was clear they didn’t care about the issue a single bit. A much better approach would have been like what Scott Stratten had happen at a hotel a few years ago; he had a very bad breakfast, but they apologized and explained the problem and he was much happier as a result. Here’s his full write-up of that experience.
I decided not to press the the issue with them, just to see how they’d handle it. Simply put, they didn’t. No apology from anyone, no deduction on our bill.
(Speaking of the bill – $2.50 each for kid’s drinks? Wow!)
Twitter
With those in mind, I did a little digging when I got home. They’re pretty solid on Twitter (@MarlowsTavern), so I poked around for a while. The content they push out is solid, but their conversation skills are weak. They reply to some comments, but it appears to be at random. Just in the past week:
Jennifer asked whether a dish at Marlow’s was gluten free. A few days later, she got a reply from them — yes! Excellent. So she replied back asking if they had a gluten free menu, or how they should request gluten free products. Crickets…
Robbie tweeted that he was taking his wife to Marlow’s for her birthday. A quick “congrats” would have been nice, but they simply let it go without comment…
Another user tweeted to rave about their Sunday buffet. Again, no reply.
Seriously, businesses need to build true fans to be successful and here are people actively telling their world about your restaurant — and you ignore them?
Google Place Pages
How about their Google Place pages? They have a handful of locations, so I just checked out a few of them. I found these two gems rather quickly:
The response from Marlow’s, as expected, was silence.
Google+
Needless to say, they’re not on Google+ yet. Not that I can really fault them for that (it’s new, smaller than Facebook/Twitter, etc), but people are already talking about them on there…
Website
Since they’ll probably be reading this, I’ll toss in a few suggested website tweaks as a bonus. Their website is really pretty solid (many restaurants have dreadfully awful sites), but it could use some adjustments:
On your front page, you have a link to your “to-go” menu. Seems like people might often be in the car when they call for that. And the menu is a PDF?
“Follow us on Facebook”. Don’t you “follow” people on Twitter and “like” them on Facebook? People get confused enough, so don’t switch them up for no good reason. I’ve never liked the words “follow us” anyhow, because it implies that “you should follow us and we’ll send you a bunch of crap”. I’m glad the Twitter widget (which you have on your site) says “Join the conversation” instead, as that sounds much better.
Your Entertainment page encourages people to visit you on MySpace, which you haven’t updated in about two years. Can’t blame you for the lack of updates, but you should probably remove that link.
It just takes time
Social media can be difficult for some businesses. If you sell toilet plungers, it’ll take some work to come up with a creative campaign. For restaurants, though, it’s dead simple. Just put in the effort, connect with your patrons, and prove that you really care about them. I should also mention that their Facebook pages (like this one) seem to be managed quite well, so they’re not totally ignoring everyone.
At the end of the day, these weren’t killer problems for Marlow’s. We certainly think less of them, no doubt, but we’ll be back eventually — they’ll just be a little bit lower on the list.
No matter what line of business you’re in, you can often get inspiration and ideas by checking out your competition. You can see what kind of stuff they’re putting on their website, how they’re using social media, what new products they’re stocking, etc. However, you ultimately need to trust yourself. Here are a few examples.
Using music to set the tone
I was recently talking to a client about her site, and suggested we take the background music off. After a brief discussion, she agreed. When I asked why she put it up there in the first place, she said that a lot of her competition did that and she was trying to match them. Being a brand-new business, emulating some of the established sites is certainly a great idea. Now that she’s removed the music and they haven’t, she’s a step ahead!
Facebook “welcome tabs”
I have a lot of clients asking for “welcome tabs” on their Facebook Page. While it’s certainly appropriate in a few situations, it seems that most people are doing it simply because everyone else is doing it, and no one is really thinking it through. Most users come to your Facebook page for the content — information, specials, etc. Why put an extra page in their way?
It feels a lot to me like the “splash pages” everyone had in the late 90′s — simply an unnecessary step between your user and the content they want. We all eventually realized how stupid those were, so how are Facebook welcome tabs any different? (Honestly — leave a comment and convince me how they’re a good thing for everyone. I’m certainly open to changing my mind if someone can supply a solid argument.)
Copying the church down the road
One church I worked at was obsessed with the other big church just down the road. We’d often spend thousands of dollars copying activities that they did, even if we didn’t need them. It was quite sad. There were essentially two ways that our leadership viewed things:
If they’re doing x, and we’re not, we need to start.
If we’re doing x, and they’re not, we need to stop wasting time on it.
This was especially problematic during the rise of social media, because the “other church” was slow to adopt it. Therefore, it was tough for us to convince our church leadership that it was worthwhile. The “other church” is a wonderful place, but they have made some very poor technological choices over the past few years; very dumb things with their website, very little social media, etc. Copying them in those areas would have been a foolish mistake.
Stylish restaurant websites
Have you ever tried to pull up a restaurant website on your phone? It’s almost always brutal. Slate recently had an article about this, and I agree completely. Not only are they often unusable on a phone (especially an Apple device, with no hope of loading their cute Flash menus), but they’re equally frustrating from a normal browser.
My thought is that it’s the restaurant owners and their desire for a particular ambience that cause most of the issues. While you certainly want the actual restaurant to have that feel, putting cheesy background music being a painfully “creative” navigation bar isn’t the way to do it on the website.
Part of this comes back to the problem of the University website. Universities think that we want to read about the school’s philosophy and press releases, and that idea is validated by other universities posting the same junk on their home page. This is very similar to churches that post a big link to their denomination’s website, rather than providing decent driving directions.
Check them out, but be smart
I’m certainly not saying you shouldn’t see what your competition is doing. As I said at the beginning, you can often get some good ideas from them. Just be smart, and always view things through the eyes of your customers. Ask yourself, “if I was a customer, why would I visit the site and what would I be looking for?” If the answer is “cheesy music and a mission statement”, find someone to help you think through it a bit further.
Three years ago I wrote up a list of my favorite plug-ins, and decided that it was well past time to give the list a fresh look. While many of them have stayed the same, I’ve got a few additions and a few deletions.
The ones that stayed the same
These plug-ins have certainly been updated in the past few years, but remain part of every blog I manage:
FeedBurner Feedsmith – I still run all of my blog RSS feeds through FeedBurner, and this is a great plug-in to quietly redirect visitors over there.
Google XML Sitemaps – A simple way to generate an XML sitemap and automatically notify search engines of your new posts.
Highlight Author Comments – Make your replies stand out when you reply to comments on a post of yours.
Subscribe to Comments – Allow users to get email notifications of new posts after they leave one. I love when blogs have this, so I can be notified if someone replies to my comment and then we can continue the conversation.
The ones that I’ve moved away from
Here are the plug-ins that I no longer use regularly, for one reason or another:
All in One SEO Pack -Most of the themes that I use (typically from StudioPress) have great SEO baked right in and this is less important.
I’ve dropped some plug-ins, but also added some new ones over the past few years such as:
Canonical URL’s – A very simple plug-in to add the canonical tag to your pages. Not overly helpful in many cases, but can be excellent for your SEO sometimes. (What is the canonical tag?)
PuSHPress – This enabled PuSubHubbub support for your blog. In short, it makes sure that RSS readers and others will get your posts instantly, rather than the next time they check in a few hours. (more about the PuSHPress plugin)
RSS Footer – This adds a line of text (with a few links) the bottom of each post in your RSS feed. The basic idea is that if someone is scraping your site and posting it as their own, you’ll at least still get some free links back to your site!
I did this a while back on the Droid X, but I just realized it would probably work on the Xoom — and it does!
You can play any of your old NES games on the Xoom (or any other android phone/tablet, probably), using the Wii remote to control them. There are two apps required to make this happen:
1 – Wiimote Controller: This is a free app that connects your Wii Remote to your Android device via Bluetooth. You can find it in the market here for free.
In the video I mentioned the HDMI output from the Xoom, which you can read more about here.
There are other emulators you can get (Super Nintendo, Genesis, etc), but the Wii Remote works perfectly with NES games because of the button layout, and I simply prefer those games anyhow.
If you have any kind of Android device and a Wii Remote, give it a try!
I’m not a big fan of phone calls. I certainly use it as needed, but it’s gradually becoming less and less often. Google Voice helps quite a bit, since it rids me of the pain of voicemail, but phone calls still often (but not always) seem to be a waste of time. For example, a 20 minute phone call with a client usually could have been resolved with a 2 minute email exchange.
Two articles have come out in the last week that support that view.
In the past, when most people didn’t have mobile phones, such random calls were more common. And you might assume that our greater access to telephony would mean greater desire to make calls. Now, obviously, a big part of the reason for making calls has been replaced by (mostly text-based) alternative means, such as email, text messaging and social networks. But, I’d argue that the greater access also makes us more wary in general. For example, I was thinking about calling a friend recently, who I hadn’t spoken to in a while, but realized it would be his mobile phone, and what if he was out with his wife and kids, and I didn’t want to interrupt that.
The other article is from Pamela Paul in the New York Times, with “Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You“. Her main point is that phone calls are becoming rare enough that they can almost be alarming:
It’s at the point where when the phone does ring — and it’s not my mom, dad, husband or baby sitter — my first thought is: “What’s happened? What’s wrong?” My second thought is: “Isn’t it weird to just call like that? Out of the blue? With no e-mailed warning?”
For me, a big part of it is the lack of a paper trail. When I’m on a phone call, I usually need to take notes (often directly into Evernote) so I can remember exactly what was said: “edit xx file”, “invoice for $xx”, etc. Communicating via email, sms, Facebook, etc, generates an automatic record of what was said.
What do you think? I’m not quite at that point yet (I still dial and receive “random” calls quite often), but it certainly seems to be heading that direction. Where do you stand?
Romania has a very high rate of phone theft, but most people “don’t think it could happen to them” (of course).
To counter that, Vodafone hired professional pickpockets to quietly slip promotional flyers into the pockets, bags and purses of people on the street, to show how easily their phone could have been stolen. Very creative, and quite brilliant!
Over the last few years, I’ve made it quite clear that I’m a huge fan of Dropbox. It’s so simple, so useful, and (for most users) completely free. It’s amazing, and has helped make me a much more productive person. If you’re not familiar with Dropbox, check out this post from a while back that explains how it works.
Dropbox Forms from JotForm
JotForm is a pretty cool site that helps you easily build forms for your site, for things like online registration, contact forms, etc. However, they’ve recently added a new feature called “Dropbox Forms” that is quite slick — you can add a form to your site with an upload field, and anything that users upload will go directly into your Dropbox! For people that have to receive a lot of files from clients, this seems like a great solution. Check out their video below to see why you might want to use this new feature:
DropVox
The other new thing that was just released is an iPhone app called DropVox. It allows you to record audio with your phone, and the resulting file is uploaded directly into your Dropbox. It’s kind of similar to the reason that I use picplz for most of my mobile photography — having the files uploaded directly to Dropbox saves you time when you’re finished because they’re already waiting for you on your computer!
If you have an iPhone, use Dropbox, and often need to take audio notes, DropVox looks like a pretty cool solution.
Do you use Dropbox? Do you use any cool third-party tools like these to make it better?
I’ve had many people ask the same question about the Xoom and the iPad 2 – “when would I use it?”. Here’s a few answers:
In front of the tv. When I take a few minutes to chill in the evening, the tablet is much easier to use from a recliner then a phone or a laptop. On the other hand, Don Reisinger at SlashGear just posted why his iPad 2 is not very useful in the living room, so your mileage may vary.
At sports practice. While most tablets (including the iPad 2 and the Xoom) are very difficult to see when you’re outdoors, tablets work great for indoor sports. In particular, I find it quite useful when my girls are at taekwondo a couple times each week.
At lunch meetings. Great tool to work through concepts with a client, since you can show PDFs, browse web sites, etc.
At McDonald’s. My kids are in the play area as we speak!
In the car. I’ve had a few times when I’ve been in the car (not driving — in a parking lot, post-meeting or picking up my daughter from preschool) and saw a semi-important email come through on my phone. It’d be too slow and cumbersome to dig out the laptop, but very easy to pull out the tablet, look at the document/website, and hammer out a quick reply. Google video chat over 3G from a parking lot has been useful (and surprisingly high quality) as well. This also works if your spouse is driving and you need to work on something while you travel.
At church. Our minister (@IkeReighard) uses his iPad as his Bible when he preaches (he’s mentioned he loves the ability to use a huge font), and he encourages us to “take out your Bibles, iPads, Androids…” as he shares scripture. Being able to quickly bookmark passages from the Xoom is pretty slick, and our church is working on setting up YouVersion Live for the church in the near future.
I think it’d also be quite useful in classroom settings and office meetings, though a laptop might be preferred for the faster input with a keyboard.
Where can’t you use it? Outside, pretty much ever. I had dreams of using it on the back deck, but unless it’s quite shady out it’s hard to see the screen. Even in the car can be a challenge unless you can get some good shade on your side.
Realize that these are all places where I would have used my phone in the past, and the phone is still a solid solution. The tablet just makes it easier. As I’ve said before, it’s mostly about convenience. For example, I wouldn’t have written this post from McDonald’s on my phone — I would have simply waited until I got home.
This isn’t a “how-to” but more of a “whoa, that’s awesome!” kind of video. This guy obviously does these kinds of modifications for a living, and installed an iPad 2 directly into the dashboard of his truck. It is amazing!
Sadly, this kind of work can’t be easily sold in stores as a kit or anthing — you’d have to visit a shop like that in person, and likely pay far more than the cost of the iPad to get it done . Still, it’s way cool.
Twitter
Using music to set the tone
I’m not a big fan of phone calls. I certainly use it as needed, but it’s gradually becoming less and less often. 
I’ve had many people ask the same question about the Xoom and the iPad 2 – “when would I use it?”. Here’s a few answers:
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