This User’s ExperienceThe blog of Matt Henderson

On February 17, Jason Fried wrote an article announcing 37signals’s intention to hire an outside firm to redesign their blog, Signals vs. Noise. Companies wishing to be considered for the project would be required to have a Pro listing on Sortfolio.com — 37signals’s yellow-pages service for finding web design companies. March 8th was the date earmarked for choosing the winning firm.

Our small team at Makalu Interactive decided to give it a shot, and tweeted our interest just in time, on March 5th.

March 8th has since come and gone without any news from 37signals, and so it’s likely they’ve chosen someone else. That’s disappointing, of course, as we’re confident we’d have been a great choice. On the other hand, simply going for the project resulted in a surprising number of positive consequences, from which a few lessons can be learned.

A million and one excuses…

Since it launched, we’d been intending to establish a Pro listing at Sortfolio. It’s a well-designed service, and quickly established itself as the place to advertise your web design firm. But we hadn’t done so yet, because we first wanted to redesign our own corporate website at makalumedia.com (its previous design was probably three quarters of a decade old; prehistoric as internet time goes!) What good would it do to have a slick Sortfolio listing, if potential clients ultimately navigated to an archaic corporate site?

Turns out, we’d actually been thinking about redesigning makalumedia.com for the past three years, but hadn’t quite settled on how to proceed, since the company has evolved into two distinct businesses — aerospace (in Germany), and interactive products (in the USA).

It further turns out, that we’ve actually had an interactive design sitting on the shelf for the past half year, but hadn’t yet implemented it for lack of time due to client work, uncertainty on how best to integrate it into WordPress, and reservations about launching it alongside our existing site.

Dependencies. Procrastination. Uncertainty. Nothing getting done.

Get started now! (or, constraints are good.)

To bid on this project, we had to design and setup a Sortfolio presentation, and do it now, regardless of how our corporate site looked. Alex and I set aside a dedicated afternoon, turned off everything, and focused. The tight time constraint forced us to take decisions with little debate, and by 11 PM on Friday night we had our design online. It was “good enough.”

Later that evening, I got an alert from Chartbeat that makalumedia.com was seeing a whole lot of traffic. Checking Twitter, I got super excited to find that our Sortfolio entry had caught 37signals’s attention — and they liked it!

On Monday morning we thought, “Right. We have to launch a redesign of the Makalu Interactive site, and we have to do it now.” Again considering the time constraint, we settled on the idea of a simple, focused, one-page site. Alex hunkered down, repurposed our shelved design, and 24-hours later, Makalu Interactive was launched.

Another 24-hours later, another high traffic alert from Chartbeat. This time, however, it was because the new site had been “FAVd” at CSSMania.

All this activity caught the attention of our colleagues over at Makalu Aerospace (Germany), who of course demanded not to be left behind in aesthetic dust. So another focused burst of inspiration, and a similar one-page design was born.

(The new Aerospace site isn’t implemented yet, but check back on Monday, and you’ll likely find it is.)

Reflecting on all this…

Alex and I were reflecting on all this over coffee this morning.

Although we didn’t achieve what we set out to do — win the 37signal blog redesign project — it was obvious that going for it brought a lot of benefits, and uncovered some important lessons.

Working within constraints is good. The deadline of March 8 not only forced us into action, but forced us into a highly efficient and effective mode of work. To find time, we had to organize our client work with laser-like precision, so that it wouldn’t suffer as a consequence. To meet the bidding deadline, we had to collaborate and make pragmatic decisions. We had to accept “good enough,” which later proved to be “much better than we thought!”

Finally, achieving so much in such a short period of time created a renewed momentum of motivation and excitement that’s certainly going to benefit us going forward.

The following resume, verbatim, just landed in my inbox. Seriously, how could we not hire this guy!? The only thing he’s not, is concise. Continue reading →

Those of us working in the Marbella, Spain office of MakaluMedia are pretty darn lucky to have a super scrumptious cafe/restaurant—Mocca Marbella—just five minutes away, serving up fresh, seasonal international cuisine each day at lunch.

After getting to know charismatic Danish owner Micheal, we agreed to help him get a website built, with the idea that we’d work on it in our spare time, on a low-priority basis. Well, two years later, it’d pretty much become a monthly joke between Micheal and us. Spare time just never materialized!

So a few months ago, we sat down with Michael, and all agreed to bump up the task from “low” to “high” priority, and seriously set out to get it done. Brian quickly built public and administrative applications in Ruby on Rails, and then Alex came behind and worked his design magic.

http://moccamarbella.com

On the public side, we tried to capture the identity, simplicity and quality that have become recognizable trademarks of Micheal and his restaurant in the local community here. Just like his famous one-page menu, the website exists in a single page, with the daily specials rendered on a virtual chalkboard, just like the real one perched on the sidewalk out front.

Micheal updates the physical chalkboard each morning with the daily specials, and to carry that concept over to the website, we built a custom administrative application where he logs in and enters the same information to appear on the site. In addition, with a click of a button, the application sends a styled HTML email to all his subscribers.

We’re very satisfied with how the site turned out, and Michael loves it. Even though we can’t take on any new projects for a few months, it has also been gratifying to have gotten several business enquiries from Mocca clientele, due to the site!

My company, MakaluMedia, is supporting the joint efforts of the National Writing Project and Google, to provide a platform for the nation’s young people to express their opinions on issues that concern them to the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates.

From the NWP site, a summary of the project follows:

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is an online writing and publishing project that invites young people to write about the issues and concerns they would want the next president to address and, with the support of their teachers, to publish their writing for a national audience.

During the presidential campaign, U.S. high school teachers and mentors guide students through the process of writing a persuasive letter or essay to the presidential candidates. Students’ work should encourage the candidates to give attention to issues and concerns that students feel are central to their future. Topics are chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests, and teachers will be able to support student writing and publishing in a way that most directly fits their local curricula and educational goals.

Through the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website (which launches in mid-September) and Google Docs , a free online writing tool, participating teachers can work with students to publish their work online for their peers, teachers, and parents, and for the public. And who knows, the future president may read their letters too.

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is open to U.S. teachers and mentors working with students ages 13–18. If you know a school teacher who may be interested in participating, please direct them to the following site.

NWP Letters to the Next President Information Page

The deadline for teacher registration is September 8, 2008.

Growing up in the US, I remember how annoying it was to receive commercial sales calls on the telephone late in the evening, when the family was sitting around trying to enjoy some quality time together. This problem was later solved (mostly) through the introduction of the “Do Not Call,” registry — a legislated service which marketers must consult before they can call you. If your name is on the “Do Not Call” list, it’s illegal for them to call you.

A similar problem exists today with paper catalogs. American consumers are simply inundated with unsolicited, undesired paper catalogs from a multitude of merchants. While receiving these catalogs can be just as annoying as receiving the marketing phone calls, there’s a deeper, more concerning problem. The production of the 19 billion paper catalogs sent each year in the US takes a huge toll on the environment.

19 BILLION. We throw around terms daily like million, billion, trillion, without really having a feel for the magnitude of those numbers. Consider this, it takes 11 days for a million seconds to pass. It takes 32 years for a billion seconds to pass! So, 19 billion catalogs — that’s a lot of wasted paper!

Earlier this year, my company MakaluMedia was offered an opportunity to participate in a project backed by some of the US’ largest environmental and non-profit organizations to help address this project. Today represents the culmination of several months of hard work on this project, and I’m proud to announce the launch of Catalog Choice:

http://catalogchoice.org

Catalog Choice is a free service, that allows people to find and opt-out of the undesired catalogs they receive. The concept is very simple; you sign up, search for a catalog you receive, and opt-out. We take care the rest, and in about six weeks’ time, you should no longer receive the catalog.

I’ve written more about the project over at our company blog.

…then by all means, have our company design your corporate logo!

This past year has been really great at MakaluMedia. The company has grown in its core space business, and has moved into a couple of exciting new partnerships in the areas of web infrastructure and applications.

In addition to some new, and really cool, Drupal-based platform work in Europe that I can’t talk much about (yet), we’ve had the awesomely good fortune to have hooked up with a very successful software entrepreneur in the United States, with whom, over the course of 2007, we’re going to be building and launching a series of consumer applications that we hope will positively impact people’s lives.

The first app will launch on January 1, and is called Word Count Journal:

http://www.wordcountjournal.com

Word Count Journal is a new blog format where you write one word your first day, two words the second, three words the third, etc. By the end of a non-leap year you’ll have written a total of 66,795 words, more words that most novels.

Read more about it on the Summit weblog!

Just a little note about the launch of IRMA24.com, the small website we just launched for Jesus Cabello, the electrician that has just made the jump to self-employment, and who did a great job for us in the electrical installations of our new office in Marbella, Spain.

One of our recent customers, Outer Level, has written up a weblog entry describing the process of working with MakaluMedia designer Mike Rohde in the development of a new corporate logo.

Technorati Tags: design, logo

John Engler talks about the salaries of small business owners and his uncle estimates that most small business owners pay themselves a salary equivalent to 10% of gross revenues. I just made a rough calculation, and my own salary is about 7% of MakaluMedia’s gross revenues, so that’s probably a decent rule of thumb.

Between reading John’s blog, and Scott Johnson’s blog, I feel motivated to write some articles about starting and running a business.

As I go through the process of reviewing CVs for a software engineer position we have open, and keep seeing acronym list after acronym list, I’m reminded of the discrepency that seems to exists between my concept of a software “engineer,” and that of so many people out there marketing themselves as such.

In school, I recall a strong emphasis that engineering is more about understanding and process, than tools or techniques. It’s as much about the practical world, as it’s about the theoretical. It’s about knowing how to analyze and decompose a problem, before trying to solve it. It’s about seeing the big picture, finding sensible solutions to problems that exist in the context of constraints, and understanding that the last 10% of a solution can cost as much as the first 90%.

These aspects are common to all fields of engineering — electrical, chemical, software, etc. — but they seem to be often lost these days in the field of software engineering. That’s why, for me, there’s a clear distinction between a programmer, and a software engineer. And the latter is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

Technorati Tags: business, engineering, software

MakaluMedia has been doing business with customers primarily in Germany and the USA since around 1997. During that time, I would say that the majority of contacts we received were from potential customers that:

• Had a general understanding of the cost of quality web design and development
• Were seriously prepared to engage us should we provide them with an interesting proposal

If there’s one thing we’ve learned to do well, having worked with formal organizations like ESA, EUMETSAT and EUTELSAT, it’s how to write a good proposal — complete with an understanding of requirements, detailed technical specifications, a listing of customer furnished items, constraints, risks, planning, milestones, payment plan (against milestones), etc. As the proposal document (and its references) usually serve as the final basis for acceptance, a complete proposal is the best means of avoiding misunderstandings and ambiguities.

Clearly, it takes considerable time to write a good proposal, and so, consequently, the preparation of a good proposal is expensive. But if you don’t do it, you’ll often have (more expensive) problems down the road. So even for the smallest projects, we try to write complete proposals.

About a year ago, we established a branch of our company here in Spain, MakaluMedia SL. I must say, in many aspects it’s been a little frustrating. The biggest problem, by far, is the relatively large number of enquiries that we’ve received from customers that either are not really serious about contracting work, and/or have no feeling for what such work costs.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time preparing proposals (in the way we’ve been used to preparing them), only to never hear back from the potential customer again, or to have a potential customer come back with a statement like, “I appreciate your 5,000 Euro proposal, but I just ran into a guy who’ll do the work for 200 Euro.” (That’s no exaggeration.)

To address the second problem (and indirectly the first), I’ve put up a new page on the MakaluMedia website, in which I try to give an idea of typical minimum costs for projects. I’m considering referring all new enquiries to this page, asking them to confirm a common basis of expectation, before we even meet to discuss their project:

http://makalumedia.com/you-and-us.html

What I’m a little unsure of, is whether this might be seen as inappropriate or even offensive? What’s your opinion?

Technorati Tags: business, pricing