January 30th, 2010 |
The following has been on the notice board at the Moseley Exchange co-working space for the last few weeks:

I’m happy to say there are 12 names filling all 12 slots so it looks like it’s going to happen, probably on Tuesday, February 23rd though that’ll be confirmed soon.
The precise agenda will depend on the sort of people who sign up but I’m expecting to do a brief but fairly comprehensive presentation of the options available that strike a good balance between cheap, easy and effective before moving on to a series of one-to-one sessions through the day. The aim will be for each person to have a functioning internet presence for their business and a good idea of what they’re going to do with it.
The Exchange caters for self-employed workers who would normally work at home with a slight bias towards the creative sector so I’ll be pitching the presentation in that area. That said, it should be useful for anyone who feels they need to be online but hasn’t got the budget or need for a bespoke website.
It’s actually a perfect fit. The Exchange is for people who are outgrowing working in their kitchen but aren’t ready to take out a lease on an office just yet. The same applied to websites. When you’re wildly successful I’ll send you to Made or Substrakt (or one of the other great web design companies in Brum) but right now you probably only need to spend a few quid on a domain and a bit of web space. Or maybe you don’t need to spend anything at all.
There will be a fee but it won’t be huge – I’ll pick a sum I think is fair and divide it by the number of people attending. £15 – £20 a head seems right at the moment but don’t hold me to that. In return you’ll get a fun and informative talk and at least 15 minutes one to one with me. Which seems about right.
Karin at the Exchange is sorting all this out so if you’re Moseley-based and are interested, get in touch with her.
January 28th, 2010 |
I’m in the process of developing my website so people can buy stuff from it. I’m using a combination of a blog platform (Wordpress) and PayPal.
Just now I went to another website running on Wordpress with the intention of buying four items from it. The seller had given each item a Buy Now button which means each one had to be bought as a separate transaction. There was no option to buy them as a job lot, or to buy three of them. The site had been set up to cater for those who wanted to buy single items only.
As such I haven’t bothered to make the purchase. Maybe I don’t really want them items, maybe I’m terribly lazy (I must admit to feeling a bit guilty now I’m writing this and probably will make the effort later) but my intention to give this person some money was thwarted by a barrier.
This isn’t an easy one to get right. PayPal buttons are fairly flexible but covering all bases can result in your site being covered in far too many buttons, which can be another off putting barrier.
I’d suggest (and will be implementing) using the shopping cart rather the Buy Now option. This lets people add as few or as many items as they’d like and also gives you a few options for making postage fairer for larger orders.
But all in all the old retail rules still apply. You can learn a lot from your sales patterns but the real lessons come from looking at lost sales and figuring out why people didn’t buy that thing they liked. Then make it easier for them.
And all this applies to any sort of website. Online people have infinite choice. If you can’t give them easy access to what they want they’ll give up and go somewhere else. Of course if you stumble upon something people need that’s a different matter, but if you’ve got that you probably won’t be hacking Wordpress blogs and PayPal buttons together.
January 21st, 2010 |
One for your diaries – I’m giving a talk at the Midlands Arts Centre, or MAC, on Thursday 27th May as part of a public debate chaired by the mighty mighty Jon Hickman.
The subject is Social Media and Globalisation, more specifically “examin[ing] lifestyle changes implied by new technological tools such as the personal computer, ipod and mobile phone, as well as looking at changes in behaviour resulting from the use of them.”
Now I have no idea what that means or how it connects to social media and globalisation and thus no idea what I’m going to talk about but I’ve got a few months to prepare so it should be okay.
December 8th, 2009 |
Well, not for the people who actually have phenomenal Internet success. I’m sure they have a most wonderful time. But as a phenomena it’s just not very interesting. So I was heartened to see this bit of wisdom in Alexis Petridis’ roundup of the decade in music:
For all the talk of the MySpace-assisted success of Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen, it’s hard not to think that one of the web’s biggest effects might actually be the opposite of the kind of will-of-the-people surge that powered those artists into the limelight. Instead, the net might have made music a more scattered, microcosmic experience, where a wealth of blogs and messageboards mean that anything, no matter how recherche, can find an audience – just not a stadium-filling, platinum-selling one.
Now that’s interesting. Much harder to study and pontificate on than popularity graphs that fit into the traditional model though.
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