Content Fairy – Guy Redwood's Blog

Whilst kicking a few ideas around the office, ranting about a few bad technical decisions a customer had made about their wesbite, I came up with a great analogy that will hopefully explain the pain and pleasure of having us onboard, within your business.

In the UK, we have a popular chef called Gordon Ramsay who’s a very astute business man. He’s about to start his 3rd season of a TV series called Ramsays’s Kitchen Nightmares – in essence he’s a trouble shooter for restaurants in trouble. There’s an interesting dilema involved for the businesses that take part. Do they accept that their business needs help in a popular TV program in exchange for some clear, hands-on advice from Gordon – or do they lie low and hope they can work it out for themselves?

Gordon’s advice invariably covers the whole business – it’s not just the stuff that goes on in the kitchen. It’s everything from restaurant promotion, team work, hiring/firing team members, workplace environment, ingredients, interior decoration, booking patterns, customer expectations/needs, menu revamps, profit, etc…

He usually bruises a few egos, sometimes looses a few people in the process of turning the failing restaurants around.

This is very much what we do in our style of ‘usability testing’ at SimpleUsability. We consider the whole business – not just where the online activities dovetail into the owner’s main ambitions. Without turning this blog entry into the web industry ‘Kitchen Confidential’ book everybody wants me to write, you have to realise that the website you own, that’s probably not working as well as it could do, has been created by a team of people. Did they set out to make something that’s below par? Most people think they need to defend the reasoning behind why they did, what they did – but we believe life’s too short and our day rate for counciling is the same as our day rate for advice.

Where the analogy of why I think the stuff I do is pretty similar to the stuff that Gordon does really makes sense is that we both regularly roll our sleeves up and do any aspect of the business we’re involved in.

This is the bit that usually leaves the biggest bruise on the biggest egos – showing the incumbent what to do – and sometimes that’s not pretty. That’s what makes the TV show entertaining/embarassing to watch.

Anybody want to improve their online business? Better warn you that it may upset the incumbent in the process… if you really want it to work… that is.

how to run osx on a pc

We’ve only got panther and the first osx, boxed in the office – but I think it’s pretty cool that you can install and use osx Tiger on a pc – before Apple switches to intel hardware. I’m not going to do it – I rely too much on windows apps to do my job efficiently and there’s plenty of other useful things to complete on the todo list.

If you ever have to create some tracking urls for your google adword campaigns for a site hosted on a Lotus Domino setup – then you need add the command ‘open’ to your url vars before the url will work. It had a few of us scratching our heads, because webservers normally ignore this stuff – whereas Domino returns a 404 page not found error.

So normally this would work:
http://www.mysite.com/mickysite/?trackid=googleuk

but for domino you need to do the following:
http://www.mysite.com/mickysite/?open&trackid=googleuk

I tidied this up because I think this structure could break some stats packages. Hence I settled for:
http://www.mysite.com/mickysite/?open=1&trackid=googleuk

If this helps you, please let me know!

gapingvoid: blogger’s wine freebie

It’s a nice idea, give out a few bottles, get people talking, if the stuff’s any good, you get a strong base to grow a loyal organic market. Being possibly the first company promoting a wine this way, also develops a nice story to tell all types of traditional press, builds a few nice links from many sites to bolster that google ranking, etc

I’ve emailed a few times to participate in this offer – but heard nothing – which got me thinking about the down side.

I will never know if Hugh got the emails with my details, or the email chasing my details – at one point I even felt I had to apologise for not writing up the wine tasting ‘cos maybe the postal system had snaffled my bottle? Maybe a spam filter blocked me. Maybe I just didn’t make the grade. I guess the latter, which is ok – their loss. But at this point Stormhoek are a brand I’ll avoid. They’ve anchored a poor feeling and I’ve got plenty of great Sauvignon Blancs already to choose from to go with our crispy duck, summer evenings, late night working…. Infact, we had a party this weekend and our lovely guests left 5 different bottles of Sauvignon for us to quaff, amongst other interesting wines.

I’ve just got to finish off that fabulous cask of Guzzler from our amazing local brewery. (note to self – must write a few words about York Brewery – they’re doing so much stuff, very well, with a very nice team)

Brand is the emmotion left in your belly fueled by communication. For me, Stormhoek didn’t work.

Anybody else avoiding Stormhoek?