Category Archives: Website

You know it’s happened to you. You were just going to check your email. It was only going to take a few minutes.

Next thing you know, you’ve missed a meal because you were too busy watching videos or yammering away in chat rooms to notice how quickly the time was flying by.

The internet is a great resource for research, but it’s also as addictive as a slot machine, and for the same reason. It puts you on an intermittent reinforcement schedule, rewarding you at pretty much random intervals, just like B.F. Skinner randomly rewarded rats in his maze.

It doesn’t have to be the barking cat or the confused web-cam grandparents. Because the internet is such a motley collection, just about anybody with any obscure interest can suddenly hit pay dirt if only they make one more click. Presto! There’s a clip of Buster Keaton laughing! There’s a picture of the actual train that was stuck in the Tracy cut, that kept the Ingalls family near starvation during The Long Winter! There’s a video of Anna Pavlova dancing “The Dying Swan!” There’s a copy of Dale Earnhardt’s autopsy report! There’s an essay by Chuck Jones about how he became a cartoonist!

What’s worse, no matter how esoteric your interest, there’s a clique of people ready to argue with you about it. You start out just wanting to find out the caloric count of popular vegetarian foods. Suddenly you’re in the middle of a flame war between advocates of soft versus firm tofu (if there really is a debate…really!), and you’re astonished to find that you actually do have an opinion about it, even if it’s that nobody should ever eat tofu.

When you get online, the fact that you were ACTUALLY looking for something specific often falls by the wayside.

With all that temptation lurking, how do you keep yourself on task? Or if not totally on-task, at least honest about how many of those online hours you’re billing your client for?

Well…(sales pitch coming) you can make one more click to a great time tracking program. This product Worksnaps.net tracks computer usage — programs, web pages, you name it. Best of all (if you are fine with Big Brother), they takes periodic screen shots so you (and your boss/client) can see exactly what you were doing at what time.

Of course, this carries the risk of becoming fascinated with your browsing habits and getting sidetracked yet again. Still, it gives you the tools you need to sort out play time from work time, and bill your clients honestly. I find it particular helpful when collaborating with people that you are physically working with at the same location. So, you can turn “Did Tom really work 6 hours on the design” to “I see Tom working on 6 hours of design. Groovy!”

Then (once you are done) you can get back to the Internet Movie Database and find out which critics enjoyed “Cycle Vixins” as much as you did.

Don’t you hate entering in captchas? I really do. Looks like Solve Media is trying to solve this problem by changing the captcha into an ads.

My question though is the reason the captchas are getting so complex is that hackers and black haters (sp?) are pushing the captchas to be more complex. So, if we are going to change this:

…to this:

…seems like the spammers are going to have a field day.

So, I guess the question is are websites willing to get paid for spam? Maybe from the increase in ad revenue that I presume Solve Media can command, they could invest in some in some better email filtering (or move to Gmail ).

What are your thoughts? Do you think company is going to challenge captcha?

10) When you put your site’s name into Google, you have to click through to page 103 before you find your site.

9) Your dog howls every time you open the page.

The only e-mails you get only say “My eyes! My eyes!”

7) People ask you if you designed your site with a sharp stone and an Atari 2600.

6) Your wife has been using it to help the kids nap.

5) Your customers seem to prefer faxing, snail mailing and using other antiquated office practices instead.  Carbon copies?

4) Your grandmother doesn’t even have nice things to say about it!

3) Visitor comment # 45  “Who knew the Amish had the Internet!”

2) Your biggest competitor sends you a bouquet of fresh flowers, and a gift certificate to Mouse and Man.

1) Your sales suffer, you catch your employees giggling behind your back, and you make the local “Worst of the Web list”

Ten years ago, when the World Wide Web was just a small e-village of geeks, nerds, and early adapters, it was possible to have a no frills vanilla website. Nothing special necessary, just throw up your contact information, some catchy phrases, and perhaps a logo drawn by your neighbor’s art student son. Now days, everyone from here to Estonia has a website. You’re not just competing for customers with the folks in your town, your battling people all over the world. Every website needs to fly, pop, and explode off the screen.

Check out any brokerage house, insurance company, or drug manufacturer’s website. Usually they are pretty staid and businesslike, with few bells and whistles. That’s fine – if you’re a brokerage house, insurance company or drug manufacturer. They are great – but they aren’t always “kickin”. If your Internet schemes extend beyond these three classes, you will probably want to make your site a bit more exciting. Nobody’s suggesting naked dancing girls (or boys…We don’t judge…), but a little sugar and spice might not hurt your site. A memorable website is the first step into imprinting your organization’s mission on the net surfer’s mind. People have the attention span of mayflies, so to get the attention of the ADD generation, you have got to reach off the monitor and grab them by their retinas. Look at us! Look!

The basic tenant in all Web development is to avoid boring your visitors to tears. If people are only using your website as an Ambien substitute, you might have some issues. Don’t be afraid of bright colors, animation, music, blogs, interesting content, pictures, bios, links to images or clips of your work, or even videos. The Internet is a rapidly evolving place, so adapt, change or die. We aren’t suggesting you detract from your base business or idea. If you’re developing a site for your dog walking company, then make it THE site for dog lovers. Make it something people will forward all over the web. Cute puppy pics? Easy! A page/tab for FAQs on mutt lover’s best dog food pics? Why not! Debbie the Dog Walker’s video doggie-diary! Holy Youtube Yes!

Perhaps this sounds overwhelming, and way beyond your capabilities. That’s fine; I can’t change my car’s tire to save my life. Thankfully for both of us there are great people out there who you can hire to do it for you! Don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s a cost you can’t afford. Your website is oftentimes your first chance to make a good impression to the world. Don’t make the public cringe they find your site, make them want more.

Becoming Carbon Neutral

Mouse & Man is now a carbon-neutral, green marketing company. This means we take steps to cancel our footprint as a business on the environment. The majority of the impact is made by offseting the electricity used in hosting our sites and our client’s websites. Additionally, you’ll see us taking place in such outstandingly lavish and painstaking steps such as riding our bikes to local meetings in Charlotte, NC and even doing such wild things as video conferencing to save on car and plane travel.

Putting a price on carbon output is just one way to help make the world a better place for everyone. It’s a first step towards true energy sustainability. When companies take a step in this direction they do so using a neutral third party that takes steps to verify the reduction and issues what are known as “emission reduction credits”.

Companies like Mouse & Man can purchase these credits which are then immediately retired on their behalf. This effectively takes them off the market and moves the money toward funding further emission reduction projects. We are not yet able to actually power our servers with by by the wind but this is the next best thing!