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Sounds fair enough to me...
I think after reading Steve Job's open letter with regard to the ongoing Flash saga he makes good sense and is completely reasonable about the whole issue, and I have to say I agree. I'm sure many will not.
OK I could be accused of being a bit of an Apple fanboy (and you'd be right!) but I use and love products from both Apple and Adobe, in fact I've just upgraded to CS5 and about to buy Final Cut Pro but I wish they would get this Flash issue resolved one way or another.
Here's a link to Steve's Open Letter, have a read and see what you think.
It's happening again...
Another month has passed since my last post, so much for doing this a bit more regularly!
Lots of stuff going on at the moment, new sites going live and what seems like too much time spent on admin, e-mail and phone calls!
Looking forward to what the iPad has to offer and how it may change things or not? I decided to sign up for the Apple Developer kit and have a look around, there's some cool tools in there but I think for me it would end up being another language to learn and the focus needs to be here. Quiet interested in the Interface builder though, so we shall see!
Apple vs. Amazon: The Great E-book War Has Already Begun
Further to my previous post another interesting article
To iPad or not, that is the question...
Here's a link (see below) to a well balanced take on Apple's iPad by Frasier Speirs which I tend to agree with. I think it should be seen as an opportunity to engage with a potential new audience of users, both domestic and business.
If the App store is anything to judge by I can just see all those business branded iBooks and ezines on the virtual shelf right now!
Good job InDesign CS4 can export out the ePub format already! Looks like I could be exploring the potential of this with a few clients and their brochures! Future Shock, worth a read if you're keen to follow how this will go. Roll on March, I think I'll need to get one just for research and development purposes of course ;-)2010 the year I make content! (hopefully!)
Having started on this I had promised myself to post at least once a week and sadly that has already failed!
I think the problem is actually committing the time to actually write when you're up to your ears in projects to get finished. I'm sure this is the same for many small business owners and looking around you'll find lots of blogs that seem to make a good start and then just stop, probably for the same reasons.
So what can be done about it? I suppose it really does come down to how important you think it is to your business. From my research it seems that a lot of top class internet professionals think it is really important to engage with your customers, help answer any questions or concerns they may have or just to give some good help and advice about your products and/or services.
Like most business owners I'm passionate and serious about my business and I want it to do well, so I'll do what it takes to make that happen and if that means blogging (regularly!) then I guess I have to make the commitment and find the time to do it.
Whilst researching I found Problogger, which is packed with a lot of really good information. I decided to e-mail Darren Rowse who started ProBlogger back in 2004 to ask for some advice. Being a pretty famous guy on the blogging scene (and therefore very busy) I wasn't really expecting a reply for some time, if at all. Imagine my surprise when I got a response to each of the points of my multi-levelled question within two hours the same day, and he was between meetings!
Now I think that was pretty impressive, he didn't have to make the effort but because he did I have since bought one of his (and Chris Garret's) very useful books, "ProBlogger - Secrets for blogging your way to a six figure income". Not that I'm looking to make money from blogging (haven't got the time!) but the book is full of useful information and well worth a read.
Here's a link to the book at Amazon (UK) if you fancy buying it, not affiliated, in case you were wondering. (haven't got round to sorting that out either).
So my point to the story is that by taking the time to help me out a little bit and giving a lot of free information to help my online business I have now become a customer, subscribed to their RSS feed to stay in touch and will most likely buy another book at some point in the future. I think that in some way this proves that by engaging with your visitors they will hopefully one day become customers.
What do you think?
By the way here's a link to an article on Darren's blog with 5 tips to keep your blogging regular, which is where we began. I think I'll go and read it again…
I've started…
This is a test post via MarsEdit on the Mac. (well it was at first!)
I have been thinking it would probably be good to start writing a blog but have been too busy to actually get it going! I guess now I've got this to work there's no excuse really so we shall see how it goes.
Why blog? For me I think for several reasons.
It will allow me/us to post useful information and help for visitors to the site about various aspects of our online solution, which in turn will hopefully start some sort of dialogue that could benefit others using the system.
People will hopefully post useful and constructive comments and it will give a platform to discuss all aspects of the system and perhaps where improvements could be made.
I spend a lot of hours researching some of the fantastic tools and applications out there to see where they could perhaps fit in with running an online business. We all have our favourites because after all we're individuals and influenced by different things.
I'll make no excuses here I'm a Mac user through and through, so from time to time there may be a little bias! (And I'm afraid that also means there's only one phone for me too!)
These days I don't think it really makes a lot of difference which platform camp you happen to be in as long as it gets the job done and you like using it then that's all you really need. (although I must admit the Mac/PC thing is quite good fun to keep up!)
Anyway, I imagine that I'll post my thoughts on some of the applications I like to use and why I like them, along with links to useful resources, be they on design, typography, software, hardware, other peoples thoughts etc etc. In fact normal blog kind of stuff but with a leaning to working and running a business online and all that it entails.
Speaking of which, another reason for blogging if what I've been reading is correct, the omnipotent Google loves content, fresh and lot's of it! So it seems if you write some hopefully useful and slightly interesting content and post it to your blog this could help in the ever challenging quest of being found.
Being found by Google, Yahoo and Bing and all the other search engines is just one of the things you need to be doing for your SEO strategy. There's on-site and off-site optimisation all of which you can do yourself given the time, and that seems to me to be the biggest problem these days, where do you find the time you need to do all this stuff?
Looks like I've started making steps in the right direction, I seem to have some content…