Ryan Christensen — Your friendly neighborhood web specialist

There’s a new project in the oven, and yesterday marked first full day of active development. Our goal is to address the “broken” nature of certain web services as far as their availability to the small businesses of the world. We want to make website maintenance (and other web services) less complex, more accessible, and more cost effective for small businesses.

Before we get to the juicy details exactly what this new project is, I’m going to offer some observations on the state of website maintenance, web consulting, and things of that nature. This will give some background for the why, so next we can discuss the what and the how in greater details later on.

1. There are no obvious winners in the HTML/WYSIWYG (offline or web-based) editor game. When anything visually complex or unique is attempted, a messy solution is too often the result. Code is turned to soup. Bad soup, at that.
2. WYSIWYG aside, website maintenance is something that always benefits from the touch of an expert. There are contextual intricacies to copywriting, design, usability, and search engine friendliness that simply can’t be programmed into applications built to satisfy the lowest common denominator.
3. This is not a rant condemning web editing software. No software can be expected to satisfy each need for every potential situation. Software often relies on the 80/20 principle, resulting in focused (and higher quality) solutions intended for broad application. Unfortunately, this leaves a largely un-addressed market in dire need of better solutions.
4. There is a serious lack of affordable web knowledge available to small businesses. Even less expertise that can suggest how best to market a certain product online, how to develop a search engine strategy, and so on (in plain english, at least.) Worse, the large majority of us out there charge hourly at a rate that usually requires the client to ignore what they might really need, focusing only on what they can afford. It’s the nature of trading hours for dollars.
5. While there is a slew of web-workers available to do a given clients’ bidding, few clients can know what is truly best for them in the long term. (Example: it’s generally a bad idea to ask the cabinet salesman what cabinets you should buy when his pay directly relates to your decision.) I’m not implying widespread dishonesty in the industry, instead identifying the general nature of any service/product industry when it comes to sales.
6. Clients of the world would all do well to retain a sort of “web genius” to help iron out their exact needs—someone to sift through the jargon without profiting off the resulting decision. Unfortunately, this is rarely an affordable option.

So, what does this all mean? There are a few companies out there that are headed in the right direction when it comes to “helping” small businesses with these problems, but there needs to be a balance between hiring a full time web-head and having no web expertise on staff at all.

These issues have plagued the web industry (and small businesses) for a long, long time. Accordingly, we see this as an opportunity to bring a more cost-effective web expertise and maintenance solution to small businesses with a web presence—a market that hasn’t seen near enough love in recent years.

Check back regularly for updates on what exactly we’ve got planned. We have an aggressive development schedule, so you should see updates with some regularity.

Either I missed this hitting the wires, or they just rolled out AIM support for Google Talk (by way of the web based chat in GMail.) Looks awfully snazzy, and is definitely convenient.

AIM conversations are logged exactly as GTalk ones are. In fact, the only real identifier that you’re talking to an AIM contact is the AIM icon in your contact list.

The only feature I’d request is the ability to “group” contacts that exist both in google talk and AIM, creating duplicates.

Updated: Looks like Google Blogoscoped has more, and Google’s GMail team blog had made an announcement, too.

I knew I’d be facing some interesting winters when I moved to Snoqualmie in July, but I didn’t expect the snow to start so early as last night. We received something around 8 inches.

Fortunately, much of the snow is expected to melt over tomorrow and Monday. (Also fortunate: I work from home and am not required to traverse this freshly fallen minefield…)

(Re-posted from the original ryanpc.com archives.)

Am I the only one that thinks the Comcast Housemates commercials are well beyond sad?

Updated: The Wikipedia entry (at time of publishing) for the housemates is awfully humorous. To partially quote:

…apparently recent college graduates, who are brought together under one roof by a shared affinity for Comcast deals. The show has been relentlessly mocked on the blogosphere for its idiocy and for the housemates’ blithe unawareness of the substantial homoerotic energy that is pumping through their house.

I can only wonder how successful this marketing plan has actually been for Comcast, as they’ve surely invested an enormous sum into its success. The other week our household actually received a letter “written” by one of the housemates, telling us how amazing the service from Comcast was, so the effort is certainly spanning more than one medium.

What will they think of next?

(Re-posted from the original ryanpc.com archives.)

I don’t think I really understand the concern over what Facebook might be doing with the “private” data of its members. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the people screaming the loudest probably also have credit cards, library memberships, use services like Netflix, or have magazine subscriptions. (See where I’m going with this?)

If you’re truly concerned about someone harvesting your personal data, don’t provide it — you can sign up and start using Facebook with a name and email address. If you’re honestly worried about the government or some mega-corporation profiling you and using your demographic data for their own gain, I’ve got some bad news for you. (That’s been happening for some time now, and Facebook should probably be the least of your worries.)

Mel sums it up nicely with her comment on Colene’s post:

I figure that providing a service, the site, the support, the code, etc costs money… nothing is for free. If they want to share with 3rd parties that a female living in downtown Vancouver likes the Shawshank redemption then by all means… :)

I’m always open to alternate points of view, but I’ll need to see an awfully convincing argument from the other side. Any takers? (For reference, here are links to the Facebook Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.)