Let’s say you’re the webmaster for your company’s web site and your boss has asked demanded you put something up to get people to start using a feature of the site that he thinks people aren’t using enough. Being the smart person you are, you know that the feature isn’t being used because it’s either a bad feature, poorly named or isn’t incorporated well enough into the site’s overall navigation. But, you’re also smart enough to realize that your boss doesn’t want to hear that stuff and you need to get something put up today. What do you do? Simple, just run a self-promo for the feature in a banner space. Think this doesn’t happen all the time on sites of all sizes? Check out any video page on YouTube. Ignore the Ted’s Tubes video, and look at the self-promo banner above it. Is running a banner promo like this optimal? Hardly, for a multitude of reasons. But, will it appease your boss? Absolutely, and it might not actually be as bad of an idea as you thought if you follow this one simple rule.

Utilize the Banner’s Context. Pay attention to where the banner will be placed on your site. It can make all the difference. Don’t just pull up Photoshop and start cranking out a sweet looking banner spot in your private 728 pixel by 90 pixel area. Think about where your banner will end up. Most of the time, designers have to create banners never knowing what the context will be. You have the luxury of knowing exactly what the site looks like that you’re designing for.

DISCLAIMER: The following suggestions are intended only for when you know and can control exactly where your banner will run. If you’re planning to run a self-promo banner across a variety of different sites or through an ad network, then you’ll have to create something more generic that works in all situations.

• Snap a screenshot of the page(s) that the banner will run on and pull it up in Photoshop. Work right on top of it.

• Choose an appropriate background color. In most cases, it will make sense to match the background to the banner’s immediate surrounding, so it doesn’t look like a banner. Who wants their users to have “ad glaze” when learning about the site’s own features?

• Figure out where the banner is in relation to the feature you’re pointing out. If you’re lucky, it’s right next to it and you can extend the feature’s description directly into the banner space.

• Use lots of white space. Most of the time, your site will have a big ugly banner. Why not use this opportunity to unclutter that part of the site? Maybe people will even like the look without a banner there and realize the small revenue from that banner isn’t worth degrading the site.

• Don’t incorporate your logo unless you absolutely have to, especially if it’s anywhere near the actual site ID.

If this banner had loaded when you clicked the previous YouTube link, then you would have seen a great example of a self-promo banner taken out of context. Why have an arrow pointing down to a smaller/faded replica of the site’s navigation menu? Why not just have the arrow point up to the Channels tab? It’s right there! The designer clearly failed to take into account the context that the banner would end up in.

Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, spoke today to about 150 execs at the Potomac Officers Club luncheon here in Tysons. It was my first chance to see him speak.

His talk was mostly about the 100-year UPS story and the evolution they’ve gone through over the past few years to focus on 1-to-1 shipping. He had wise-but-common advice like focusing on your customers and keeping your employees happy. The overriding theme that stuck with me, though, was that Mike — or at least UPS — loves the web. He touched on it in a few key ways:

1. He used the web as a metaphor for their transition from a big company acting like a big company to a bigger company acting like a small one. To paraphrase: “The web lets small businesses look big, and lets big businesses act small.”
2. He stressed that being successful now (if you are) shouldn’t distract you from the need to transform your business. It’s happening. Change or lose. It’s a 1-to-1 world, meaning customers expect personalized attention. He touted being nimble and responsive — words rarely associated with a company that employs more than 400,000 people — as being the key to success these days. The cornerstone of their ability to communicate with and support their customers in these ways is technology, mostly through their web site.
3. When he showed off UPS’s $35M “whiteboard” marketing campaign, he inadvertently illustrated how tightly their online marketing is integrated, and how much he likes it. He broke from his PowerPoint presentation to a full TV commercial and then on to their live web site (www.ups.com/whiteboard) and the message, interactive video, and branding was all as consistent as could be. He was downright giddy about the “send a whiteboard” viral marketing feature. He even showed that he pays attention to analytics, noting that the average length of visit is over 4 minutes for the millions of visitors they’ve had since the campaign launched.

Even though he never said “ajaxy” I was impressed with his web savvy. It was cool to see such a big-business guy focused on the ways the web can help create tighter relationships with customers. Whether you have $42.5 billion in revenue or just $42.50, the fundamentals are the same, and those who embrace this mind-set will win.

Update: Thanks to StreamCenter, you can watch the entire event online.

We have a secret here at Viget Labs … we have an internal blog. And, no, you can’t read it (no, not even for the “right price”).

Our internal blog is great. In fact, it often can be a breeding ground for what you read here. But, more importantly, is that it definitely reduces internal e-mail volume, yet makes our communications more useful. Here’s how:

1) Announcements and newsworthy items (including the ever-significant, “There are cookies in the kitchen.”) get posted to the blog.

Note: We are currently thinking through how to maintain the long-term historical integrity of the blog by removing these sorts of posts, a process which we are calling “weeding.”

2) Knowledge-sharing as it relates to the web industry and to our clients gets posted to the blog. Unlike e-mail, the blog facilitates conversation better (follow-up thoughts are posted as comments) and provides a nice way for us to preserve the collective “Viget brain” when it comes to time-sensitive information.

Note: We are currently thinking through how to take the gems of the internal blog and migrate them over to our wiki to provide long-term value, a process which we are calling “harvesting.”

Another benefit of the internal Viget blog is that it allows Vigeteers to consume the information passively and on their own terms. Now, to be frank, that sometimes can be an issue because certain people are a bit too passive (i.e., they are focused on producing great work for our clients). But, we definitely are developing a culture that gently encourages folks to check out the internal blog on a daily basis (and, no, we aren’t on the internal blog secretly mocking the colleagues who aren’t reading it).

If you are struggling with internal dialogue, think about getting an internal blog up and running. It’s also quite helpful to start there, especially if you still are not sure how a public blog would actually work. If you’d like to know more, contact me at:

ken [at] viget [dot] com

replace the [at] with an “@” and the [dot] with a “.”

Jeff over at Coding Horror relays a metaphor from Roger Sessions at MSDN describing how the technically inferior F-86 consistently beat the MiG-15 in dogfights and how it relates to developers. The answer? Maneuvering the F-86 was easier on the pilot, resulting in less fatigue over repeated maneuvers. Thus, a developer or project that iterates faster will yield better results than one that focuses on quality.

A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault. ~John Henry Newman

Regardless of the accuracy of the metaphor, there’s one thing I’ve seen in almost every project over the course of the last 15 years:

When a programmer thinks something is finished is never the same as a project manager or client. It doesn’t matter how much planning you have, if programmers are rushed or relaxed, or how much testing occurred. There are many types of programming projects (server, client-server, web, computation, etc.), and each one has its own idiosyncrasies; but, something is always forgotten, misinterpreted, corrected — or, the client just changes their mind. Revealing these disconnects sooner will help minimize the number of surprise moments at delivery time, as in the swing-set example.

The big benefit of quick iterations is the feedback process. Getting feedback sooner than later is always good, assuming the client can accept that what they see after an early iteration is not representative of the finished product. The quick feedback process applies to the developer as well since automated tests minimize the refactoring and validation time, allowing you to handle change with minimal pain.

As Jeff says, “when in doubt, iterate faster.” It’s not always that simple when working with external clients, but successful fighter pilots developers know that without agility, it’s tough to be successful — especially with web projects.

When Andy and I talk about how Viget can do more in the community, we tend to focus on things we’re passionate about.  That’s why we’ve worked pro bono for a couple of years with the DC chapter of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).  Founded in 1987 by Steve Mariotti, NFTE runs a mini-MBA program to teach at-risk kids how to start and run real businesses themselves.  More than 150,000 kids have completed the program, and the impact has been fantastic.

Entrepreneurship has been in our blood since Andy and I were kids running 9 paper routes before elementary school.  Working with entrepreneurs now is a big part of what we do at Viget.  Becoming dads in recent years has only heightened our interest in helping kids grow up to be confident, self-sufficient, and business-savvy adults.  So our passion for NFTE continues to grow.

Last week, USA Today featured NFTE in Get a job? No, make a job; How can we prepare our children for today’s economy? Teach them workplace skills. Teach them entrepreneurship.  It provides some great insights into the good work NFTE is doing and what Steve’s experience was as he conceived of the program.

“The biggest problem in education in certain communities is that kids are bored,” he says. (A 2006 Gates Foundation survey found that more than six out of ten high school drop-outs were earning a C average or better when they quit.) … Research from Harvard and Brandeis Universities finds that NFTE students are not only likely to consider entrepreneurship as a path out of poverty– but, that they also grow academically. Writing business plans is a sneaky way to make kids think about grammar. … Calculating profits has kids learning math. Harvard research found that NFTE kids show a 32% increase in interest in attending college vs. a decrease over the same time frame among comparable low-income student groups.

NFTE isn’t necessarily trying to inspire or train the next Bill Gates (although Jasmine Lawrence, the 15 year-old NFTE grad and CEO of Eden Body Works who was featured on Oprah yesterday, is pretty impressive).  The program is as much about getting kids re-energized about education and thinking for themselves as it is about starting a business.  Entrepreneurship is as American as apple pie, and it’s instinctively interesting to young people in this country. 

“Our program transforms street smarts into business smarts” - Steve Mariotti

NFTE DC’s primary fundraising comes through one of the area’s premier annual events.  In addition to being a showcase of NFTE students’ business ideas, the event is a “who’s who” of area business leaders.  This year’s gala will be held on May 2nd at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, DC.  Check out www.nftegw.com for information and sponsorship opportunities. 

The post Digg Needs a Picture Section on Digg.com recently gathered over 5,500 diggs and topped the site’s most popular list. The purpose of the post was to incite conversation among users about whether or not Digg should add a Pictures tab to the main nav menu to go along with News, Videos, and Podcasts. As I’m sure many people are thinking, design by democracy can lead to disastrous results. While many posters jumped on quickly and approved of the idea, there were also a good number of people who pointed out that the feature would unneccessarily complicate the site’s design. In the end, the most popular idea seems to be to combine the existing video section (which many are not happy with anyway) with the proposed picture section into a general visual media category.

Many sites request user feedback and use it to improve. However, it’s much more uncommon to see an unsolicited user base take it upon themselves to discuss a site’s design with genuine interest and insight. I’ll be watching to see what, if anything, Digg does with these suggestions.

This video by Michael Wesch is going around (thanks Brad and Seth):

The most thought-provoking aspect is the notion that the web is forcing us to rethink everything (”authorship … ethics … privacy … ourselves”). Deep stuff.

At the same time, Professor Wesch gives a surprisingly clear and accurate history of web publishing and highlights a lot of today’s most relevant sites (delicous, wikipedia, blogger, youtube, flickr, and, of course, the Wayback Machine) and technologies (CSS, RSS, XML). It’s not easy to take a complex topic like Web 2.0 and summarize it in a unique, articulate, and entertaining way in under 5 minutes.

The link is the currency of the web and one of the defining factors to determine your rank on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Typically, you can check the number of incoming links (or “backlinks”), by using little tools like “link: URL” when using Google or by using Yahoo! Site Explorer.

This week, Google launched a more comprehensive look into backlinks via their Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t utilized these tools to this point, the backlinks feature will be a perfect time to learn about Sitemaps and other great Google webmaster tools.

Matt Cutts, the well known Google guru employee, wrote about the expanded backlink feature:

- In particular, for my site I was easily able to see more than 10x more links in this new tool than the link: command gave me. The link: command has always returned a small fraction of the backlinks that Google knows about, mainly for historical reasons (e.g. limited disk space on the machines that served up “link:” data).

..

- Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.

Backlinks isn’t a game changer because it’s just showing data previously unavailable to you. But it is helpful in better understanding your referrers and referral traffic. So, head over to Google’s Webmaster Tools and give it a try.

Some of my favorite work here at Viget is with our start-up clients. Entrepreneurs often ask for tips on launching a web business and, for those with little more than just a good idea, here’s one: apply to be a TechStar.

TechStars will select 10 start-ups to spend the summer in Boulder, Colorado working on their businesses. You’ll get enough funding to cover your summer expenses ($5K/founder); but, more importantly, you’ll attend about 3 events per week, learning from an impressive list of mentors. You’ll give up 5% of your company.

If David, Brad and the gang manage to entice the right kind of people, I expect the most valuable part of the whole experience will be working alongside other entrepreneurs going through the same things at the same time.

The most enjoyable thing, though, will be being in Boulder. I lived there briefly right before we started Viget here in Virginia back in 1999, and it’s a great place to be. It’s exciting to see so much entrepreneurial buzz out there again. I smell a business trip …

For more, check out www.techstars.org, Executive Director David Cohen’s announcement here, fellow founder Brad Feld’s post here, and recent TechCrunch coverage here. The application deadline is March 31, so hurry up.

As details about registration were released, we were excited to hear that the proposal Ben submitted (“Building and Working with Static Sites in Ruby on Rails”) was chosen as one of the presentations for the conference. The material for this talk comes from his work developing and deploying a mini-framework within Rails to handle custom content management and presentation of static content. This allowed us to deliver a fully functional site to the Alexandria Convention and Visitors Association without the need for them to continue hand-editing their event listings.

Besides the talk he will be delivering at Rails Conf, Ben has been active in the Rails community for quite awhile. Most recently, he was ranked #8 in the Working With Rails Hackfest competition (sponsored by CDBaby) and has had several patches accepted into the Rails core.

If you’re interested in heading to this year’s conference, local user groups are offering discount codes to help defray the registration cost. If the current rate of sign-ups continues (1/3 of the seats were filled the first day), this event is sure to sell out quickly!