I’m no design expert (you can see that from my sites), but I’ve recently been working with designers on major overhauls of my stuff.  Last night I was in meetings with a team for a new project and I had a personal epiphany of what makes a site awesome.

After a couple of hours, I narrowed it down to three components:

Sexy: It must look cool.  It has to look modern, and have current elements of design that don’t make people think – wow, that was so last decade!

Functional: this is where my applications have always shined… even though they didn’t look very good, they have always been extremely functional.

Easy: If it is not easy to do a “thing” (like add a new record, etc.), then people won’t use it. I tried to use financial software for a while but it was just to dang hard, and I gave up.  People will give up if it is not easy and intuitive, no matter how complex your process is.

How would you grade your offering (or design) on those three things?

Which is more important than another?  I have focused on funcational, then moved towards easy (there’s still a lot of work to do), and have neglected sexy.  But sexy is coming in the next little while… which means the next task is to focus on easy.  Oh man, it’s going to get good

Brilliant post by Reid Hoffman.  Sounds like simple stuff, but I’ve read and reread and asked myself where I am at on each of these 10 points…

Ten Entrepreneurship Rules for Building Massive Companies

Are you an entrepreneur, or aspiring entrepreneur, or business owner?  Read the post.

And then read this: Analysis for Continuous Delivery: Five Core Practices

Have you seen a really cool About Us page?  Something that is really about the company, and with personality?

Look no further than GaryVee’s Vayner Media company’s About Us.

The abnormal starts off with a picture of everyone on his team.

That’s cool enough.

But it gets brilliant… mouse over each of the pictures, and you see PERSONALITY!!

I love what Vayner Media is doing here… they are showing they are normal people with all their pictures, and then showing personality just seals the deal for me.

AWESOME!

One of my favorite techie colleagues is Camille Carboneau Roberts, who specializes in in resumes (and especially federal resumes).  Camille always has great insight into techno-geek stuff.  She wrote in about her favorite screen sharing software/systems, and gave me permission to repost here.

I’ve been using GoToMeeting, GoToPC, and GoToWebinar since they first came out. I’d have to say for at least 12-13 years. So long ago, that the price I pay per year is not even half of what they charge now because I set it up to renew annually. I do get my money’s worth because I use it for training-software, social media, and on occasion 1:1 with clients on their projects.

However, now, I use join.me for the quick individual sessions. Clients don’t  always want to download the software even though it only takes about 2 minutes and join.me is just really simple to use. I also use it to “remote” in and do computer/file/software fixes.

There are hundreds of others that work well including:

WebEx.com

Glance.net

Skype

TeamViewer.com

Mikogo.com

Freescreensharing.com

CrossLoop.com

and a small drum roll:  Google+

There has been Remote Assistance built into the last few versions of Windows, but not a lot of people know about it… and it is a bit buggy if you aren’t tech savvy.

If you are looking for simple, you can’t beat join.me.

Thanks for the list Camille!

We have format issues with our stuff – usually audio and video.

I asked a friend from my neighborhood what he uses to convert video and he said to use Convert Files. I’m guessing we’ll be using this a lot, between our Lumix camera and the Olympus voice recorder.

Scarcity is what keeps us from giving, sharing, risking, being, achieving, doing, thinking.

How we think about “things,” like time or money or _____, affects how we act, and what we get.

I’ve been intrigued by the concept of the scarcity mentality for a while… here’s an amazing snippet of something I was reading on James’ personal website (scroll down to “HOW TO BREAK FREE FROM THE SECURE JOB“… It’s in the paragraph that starts with “Third answer:”

“I like security too. I’ve had a lot of insecurity in my past which built up a lot of fear, which has built up a scarcity complex inside of me.”

Wow.

Security makes you fear insecurity.  Insecurity = fear. Fear leads to scarircity complex.

Can security really give you the scarcity complex? The seem to be at odds with one another.  If you are secure you should have peace… and not fear…

I’ve seen it, though.  People who are “secure” are scared to death of losing their security, even if it isn’t worth much.

Amazing.

I have a new favorite blogger. I’ve ready James’ stuff before, and always liked it.  Now he’s a must read for me.  Here’s the latest I found from him, thanks to the LinkedIn email telling me what the most popular shares are this last week:

Secrets of the Accidental Entrepreneur

Cleo Parker shot me a note about After the Deadline… looks like an awesome tool for writing better.  You can use it for free, and if you have a web service you can incorporate it there, for free.  I think we’ll need to add this into JibberJobber

Here’s what Cleo wrote:

While I was writing the summary, I used a cool tool I learned about in my local  WordPress Meetup, After the Deadline.  You may be familiar with it as it’s a grammar checker plugin available for WordPress and I see you’ve got a WP blog. But outside of a blog, you can use their online demo to check grammar and spelling in anything you cut and paste into the space.   It’s called After the Deadline, great resource for anyone who wants their writing to look as good as possible. http://www.afterthedeadline.com/

Thanks for the tip, Cleo!

I spent a lot of time in my undergrad and MBA program in team projects… because the real world really valued teamwork and wanted us students to learn how to work in a team.  Check this out:

I’m not as skeptical as “trust no one” might imply, but I am reminded of a team project in my senior year were two of the team threw everyone under the bus with lies and almost made me and one other person fail the class, which would have meant we would not have graduated.  Stressful, and a big lesson in ethics…

I’m busy working on my 101 Alternatives to a Real Job book.  Two days ago I was on the phone with someone and I said something like this:

“We are so busy chasing our career dreams (meaning: the traditional job) that we are giving up the American Dream.”

I thought that was profound, especially as the elements of the career dream has changed so much in the last decade.  Before, it meant steady, secure, pension, benefits, safety.  Today it doesn’t have much more meaning than what you might get as an unattached contractor.

The American Dream, though… ah, the images that conjures up!  Hope, freedom, prosperity, reward for ideas or work… have we lost sight of this American Dream?

Before all the American Dream haters come out, I’m not saying that big corporate greed, or small corporate greed, is part of the American Dream.  I’m saying that a chance to earn a reward, whether it’s on your one acre farm, or on your family’s 20k acre property, is yours for the taking.

The American Dream is not about “what I was born with, so I’m limited,” it’s about opportunity for everyone, if they only want it and work for it.