Derek Bobo's Blog

Whether it’s technology or people you want to eliminate any single point of failure in your business. Failure to do so could place your company at considerable financial risk. I see companies who do it everyday. It’s scary stuff. A fire in your server room that destroys all of your system data, a car or plain accident, or a disgruntled employee could cripple your business if you’re not taking the necessary measures. Avoiding these risky scenarios is relatively easy if you have the right discipline.

The first thing you really ought to do is assess what types of activities are truly

Many of the world’s economies are struggling and with that comes cutbacks. Too many times these cutbacks are forced from the top down, often times from a corporate office by executives who are too far from separated from the details. It’s no surprise that these cutbacks often come by way of a reduction in workforce. I find this mentality to often times be unmerited and should be a last resort.

I maintain a couple of websites for real estate companies. One feature I have been thinking about lately is a way to leverage the website as a tool even when you’re not searching the listings. The idea I have come up with (and may or may not already exist on some websites, I dunno) is the ability to do a search while you’re not at the computer. It basically looks like this:

• As a user you  log in and set some search/preference criteria based on the type of property you are looking for. Some of the metrics might be: acreage, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, square footage, price, school district etc. You enter this information and some very basic contact information. Name, phone number and email.
• During initial account creation the feature would search the listings and send you an email with any listings that match your search criteria. After this initial search you would be notified of any listings the second they hit the market. That way your dream home finds you rather than you scouring the web for that perfect deal. When a match is found you receive an email with direct links to the properties that match your preferences.
• This provides a significant advantage to end users because they are now not forced to waste time. Realtors also get an advantage. They are able to capture information on buyer prospects. They have contact information for which they can send out newsletters with information on open houses, community events, or just general buyer help information. That being said the real advantage is realized at the point that a match is found. At the same time an email gets sent to the end user the Realtor gets notified that they have a potential buyer and seller match. They can then take a proactive approach to the client relationships rather than a reactive one.
• Seller clients also benefit by making sure their listing gets viewed by people who are particularly interested in their type of home. It truly becomes a match making type of service.

I would really like to be able to apply this concept to a larger audience than my couple of clients. I think it’s something that would really prove beneficial for MLS website, however the proprietary nature of such sites makes such an implementation very difficult.

Regardless if you think it’s a good or a bad idea let me know what you think. If you’re an agent or broker who would like to explore the potential for implementing this into your website please let me know.

One of my least favorite things I see out of management/leadership is negative reward for positive performance. This is when you do something great for the company or for your boss and the reward for good work is getting more crap to deal with. I see it on an almost daily basis.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to go back to the old “I scratch your back and you scratch mine” kind of mentality? I mean if I come to the rescue and save the day, the next time something comes up instead of immediately throwing me in to save the day again, why don’t you push back for me? Dig your heels in a bit and go to bat for me. It’s got to be a two way street, or eventually I’m going to stop coming to the rescue.

It’s unfortunate but I’m afraid the general thought process is all about #1. Everyone is looking out for themselves and what is best for them. People want the path of least resistance for themselves. They want to be everyone’s friend and make everyone happy no matter the cost. I think that’s fine to an extent but don’t forget to take care of the people who are taking care of you or one day they just may not be there to catch you when you fall.

Starting a business is a lot of hard work. You want to look professional. You want to work efficiently. You want to scale. You want to offer superior service to your customers. The list is endless. Technology can be a huge strategic advantage in these efforts if leveraged correctly or it can cause you a lot of frustrations. It is my goal to help you make it a strategic part of your business.

Are you looking for a lower cost alternative to Microsoft office?

Want to get email addresses @yourbusinessname.com but aren’t sure how?

Need a way to manage your contact lists? Your projects?

Do you need to do advanced graphics editing but can’t justify buying Photoshop?

These are just a few of the types of questions I can help you answer. If you have a question for how you can leverage technology that is more scalable, maintainable, and affordable. Please do not hesitate to ask. I’ll bump you in the right direction for your needs and if you need further assistance I can help with that too!

That’s right developers you have been had. I’m sorry to be the one who breaks it to you but I can no longer let you bang out code and not realize you’re being taken advantage of.

According to Wikipedia agile software development is:

Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.

Let me translate this for you. Your marketing group can now sell to the clients (internal or external) that your development house can operate without requirements. We will build you software and you don’t have to tell us what it needs to do. The business folks then think, wow this is great. I can change my mind as much as I want and not have to put any time up front to plan out the solution and all the variables associated with it.

From there standpoint this is a great place to be. They have no skin in the game. For the developers… well you’re getting screwed. You now have to do twice as much work (or more) because you have new requirements and features thrown at you constantly. You have to redo work you’ve completed because you didn’t have an expectation set for you. The end product isn’t what it could be because you had no vision in mind throughout the process and this can cause significant pain for organizations downstream.

At the end of the day agile is fine if you’re a research and development shop where you are coming up with a proof of concept. Once you’ve validated something you then leverage that knowledge to build the real thing from a functioning prototype.

If you want quality software/systems built you need to think and plan through things appropriately. Stick to the waterfall model. This requires all parties involved to work through the issues and come to conclusions, to lay out requirements, set forth a design and get signoff at each phase. If you do this you will have a blueprint for which to build from and you will have set the appropriate expectations.

A friend and I were making an observation the other day that intersections create a lot of problems. In this particular instance were were sort of talking about the packaged software versus custom developed software and it sort of branched from there. My argument was basically that companies would save themselves a lot of money if they just built what they wanted instead of buying a half dozen different applications that perform their jobs well but don’t play nicely together. As a result you end up having to import and export data between systems, do more custom development to make them talk, map data from one system to another and the huge expense of profiling and doing ETL work. What a mess. If you just built the features you wanted into a single system you wouldn’t have all of these integration components and you could fit the flow of data to your business model instead of having to adopt whatever model the tool supports (but this isn’t necessarily a bad idea… it just usually doesn’t happen).

So from there our conversation began to branch out. State and country lines create issues due to new laws, taxes, etc, vehicle accidents are more common at intersections and ramps, leaks happen where pipes meet, and breaks happen where something is welded or soldered.

I don’t know what the answer to this is but I thought it was an interesting observation. As I move forward I will definitely think more about how I approach these scenarios in my life.

I just wanted to do a quick post on some ways that will help you drive more traffic to your site. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but should help get you started. I’ll start out with how to structure your HTML and content and then talk about some strategies that encourage users to visit your site.

1. Let’s start with a doc type. I’m obviously going to suggest a strict doctype but that may not always be easy to pull off. Search engines like well valid/standards compliant code.
2. Each page in your site should have a unique title. If you can get an exact name match on the search terms that you expect users to use then this will significantly help your rankings.
3. Keywords and description  metadata (in the head section) are not nearly as heavily weighted as they once were, but they are still a good to include. Don’t go over the top here or it can have an inverse impact.
4. In  your HTML include relevant keywords for the alt attribute on images, and for titles. Make them relevant to your content and do not just include buzz words.
5. The content higher up on your page is usually considered more important because users are most likely to see it. If you have content that needs to be displayed lower on the page consider writing it higher on the page and then using divs to actually present it lower on the page. The search engines won’t know that it’s displayed lower and may weigh this content heavier.
6. Your header tags h1, h2, h3, etc will have a higher priority than p tags. Have your keywords appear in heading tags where it makes sense.
7. Write tasteful content. At the end of the day there is no substitute for good content on your site. Not only do search engines like it but your users are going to enjoy it more as well. If you give the users a a reason to visit your site they will keep coming back. Their hits alone will help you generate a better page rank.
8. Consider adding a site description footer on your sites. I personally don’t care for the “tag clouds” you see these days, so I always try to make my descriptions flow. This is basically just a short paragraph description of your overall message or offering. It’s another opportunity to duplicate some key words and messages that your users may be searching you on.
9. Once you’ve adhered to some of the best practices you want to start pushing users to your site. Include a link to your website in the signature of your email, put your website in your signature line on forums and blogs, etc. You can also create a link back from your MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or other social networking site.The only thing I will caution on this is to make sure you’re not just making posts to drive traffic to your site or it can have an inverse effect. Make comments that are on topic and contribute to the conversations going on. If you add a compelling though users will be more inclined to check YOU out by clicking to see your website.
10. If your site is a blog or some other sort of site with dynamic content you might also consider adding it to social bookmarking sites and feed readers. If a topic comes across a feed as something that interests the users they’ll be more likely to check this out.

These are just some ideas and by no means constitute as an end all be all strategy. I hope they help out and if you have any additional items to add please feel free to share.

I was asked today why IT guys (and gals) are typically night owls. While this does seem to be the norm I had never really given much thought to it. My response (or perhaps defense mechanism) was:

We have all the clueless people asking us for crap all day long so after hours is the only time we can get real work done.

So why do you think IT folks prefer late nights to early mornings?