See The Future, Not The Present

Like everybody else, I read much of the hype (and subsequent disappointment) about Apple’s announcement yesterday of the iPad (horrible name in my opinion, but more on that another time). What intrigues me, though, is the number of “How will this change the game?” posts that are met with people saying, “It won’t! It doesn’t even have Flash or a camera!”

I think these folks are missing the point. Apple didn’t unveil a product yesterday, Apple created a new market. Anyone who looks at this specific device and says “It doesn’t have this specific thing” are missing the big picture entirely. How many iterations has the iPod been through at this point? Oh noes, it didn’t have a video camera in the first generation! Well now it does. Did you not see that coming?

Here’s what I saw yesterday. I saw a very near future where the standard multi-purpose computing device is a tablet sort of thing. You can get your email on it, surf the web, listen to music or watch videos. In my own ideal one I’d also like it to work as a remote control, but nobody’s talking about that.  It’s a blending of netbook (“be online from anywhere in the house”), ipod (media player), and yes, Kindle.  It will be an ebook reader, of course, but for whom? I think of my kids, still 10 years away from college. When their time comes, I see them packing a single tablet computer from class to class, and on it are all their text books, complete with notes, study guides, pictures of the whiteboard the professor drew on, wake up calls for that 8am class and reminders of when homework is due… not to mention always-on access to Google and Wikipedia, plus of course IM and SMS for their friends.

Can the specific device introduced yesterday do half of that? Nah. But I don’t care. Because soon enough, somebody will.  Don’t forget that a big part of Apple’s influence in the world is not that they make the best of anything — many geeks will debate with you that they in fact have never made the best of something.  What they do best is make the first of something.  Not in terms of technical innovation, but in market.  The iPhone refined the standard for what you expect your phone to do.  It was through Apple’s power in the market that so many people got one and it became the had-to-have device.  Know what happens next?  Others “stand on Apple’s shoulders”, to steal a line from what Jobs just said about Amazon.  And then we get real competition.  That’s how it works.

What’s the lesson? If you’re going to play in the technology space, you’re going to spend a lot of time saying “What else is the other guy doing?” When you do that, don’t say “What exactly is he doing right now”, ask “How is what my competitor is doing changing the game by changing my customers’ expectations of what is possible? How can I leapfrog him by offering up the next generation?”  Look past what your competitors are doing, don’t just settle for a checklist of doing the same stuff.

Blog Everywhere

Should you have a blog on your site? Let me ask you this: how often will you update it? Where and when and how? If you plan to post carefully edited articles on a fixed schedule after they’ve gone through your editor and technical writer then it’s not really a blog so much as an online magazine.

Part of the appeal of blogs, particularly for individuals trying to develop a following, is personality. Style. Blogs started out life as online diaries. And what do you write in a diary? Everything. When do you write in it? Anytime. A blog entry is part “this was interesting to me” and part “I think my audience will get some value out of it,” and less of the “I read that topic x is trendig on google so I need to generate some articles on that.” You can always get some level of traffic by fooling the search engines and attracting people who’ve never heard of you. But to keep them coming back you need to demonstrate something special that they can’t get anywhere else. To do that you need to use your own voice an don’t overthink it.

This post, by the way, composed on my iPhone while lying in bed after midnight. Just saying.

Tags: blog, Content, strategy

Design Isn’t Everything (Except When It Is)

There was  a time when I would have said the design of your web site is the most important thing.  It is arguably the single biggest reason why I never went into business for myself, because while I can build everything you need behind the scenes, and I can tell you in great detail about what to build and how and why to build it, I have no skills in telling you what it should look like.  I have an opinion, of course – show me a handful of options and I can tell you which ones I like and which I don’t.  But could I come up with my own ideas that would be better?  Not often, and certainly not consistently.  (This, my wife will confirm, is the same way we decorated our house — narrow it down to 3 colors and let me pick one.)

But then I think, maybe that’s not entirely accurate (don’t let the graphic designers listen to this).  Every major online platform these days will start you out with a large selection of templates, providing a handful of different interfaces to pick from.  Maybe they’re not great.  But you know what?  They’re good enough.  Pick one.  Congratulations, you’re in business.

If your new site is primarily a blog, for example?  People are coming for the content, not the colors.  (As a matter of fact in the blog world most people probably aren’t even coming to your site, they’re getting your content from a syndicated RSS feed, but that’s a different post).  For a text-based site like a blog, you need just enough style to keep people interested.

If on the other hand your business is primarily visual?  Then maybe you’ve got a little different situation.  Say that you’re a florist, or a woodworker or a photographer.  These services are all defined by the quality of their output, and people want to see that.   There are image gallery templates, true.  Those will get you started.  But they won’t keep you alive forever.  People are coming to your site to be impressed visually, and they need the whole picture.  Your rocking horse is going to look ugly if it’s in a bad border on a bad textured background, even if the latter two weren’t ever really in your control.

How can you tell if you need a graphic designer before you launch?  You don’t.  How about that?  You are completely capable of putting up a web site using your own content, some clip art and a couple of free templates.  It may not last you forever – in fact it most definitely shouldn’t last you forever, just like we got rid of the avocado colored refrigerator when we bought the house whether it was still functional or not.  If you’ve got the money and you’re in a highly visual business like the above examples, maybe you go ahead and hire a designer because you know you’re going to need one sooner rather than later.  The big thing to take away is that you shouldn’t let the design be an obstacle to getting your site up and running.