James Wilding's Weblog

How do companies like Apple to get a massive foothold in a market that they’ve previously had no involvement in? By relentlessly focusing on customer experience.

Take the iPhone: there are plenty of mobile manufacturers out there, but before the iPhone the whole market was a complacent mess. Before the iPhone, there was no world-class customer experience in the mobile phone market. I’ll put it another way: until Apple came along, no-one in the mobile phone market was doing a good enough job. Many people would have loved to switch phones, but they didn’t have a better option.

When a business which can provide that better option comes along, wow — everyone else gets blown out of the water. It makes me wonder: how many businesses are just sleep-walking through corporate life, waiting for a keener competitor to come along and give them a nasty wake-up call?

If you’re a small business, you’re lucky: you have a much greater chance of failing if you don’t focus relentlessly on your customers, so there’s an incentive to concentrate on what’s important right from the start. There are no million-dollar savings accounts to fall back on, no equity in property, no investors — just you and your customers. Give those customers what they really want, and you’ll be a great position to compete with the sleep-walking giants around you.

Search Engine Optimisation is one area of website technology that seems to evoke naked desperation in the people who practice it — some will do anything to get that top spot on Google.

But desperation in SEO brings the same results as desperation in banking. If you invest too heavily, or construct elaborate schemes to inflate your income (I’m looking at you, US sub-prime mortgage sector), then ultimately the whole thing will blow up in your face and you’ll be worse off than when you started.

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The internet gives us amazing new ways to communicate with each other: blogs, RSS, Facebook, Twitter, etc. What often ruins these cool tools is that people use them as ego trips — not really posting anything useful, just trying to get more followers, more ‘friends’, more subscribers. (more…)

People need to stop sending emails that say “did you get the email I sent you earlier today?”.

My solution (this goes in my email signature):

I reply to most emails within 24 hours; if you need a faster response, please call me.

That’s it: if your message can wait a day, email me. If not, call! Simple.

A short video from the Greenpeace website.

PHP has a great reputation as a hackers’ language, a tool for putting together websites with minimum fuss. It’s pretty easy to add new features to PHP-based websites too, as you scale. But what if you’re a Ruby fanatic, or just plain lazy, like me?

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Well-written CSS is easier to read, easier to maintain, and generally less of a headache. But the key to better CSS isn’t in brackets and line breaks: it’s actually all about the HTML.

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Great article from John Nunemaker explaining how to create proxies — objects that act like other objects — in Ruby, using a little bit of method_missing magic.

If you need to seriously extend the functionality of existing Ruby classes, it’s much cleaner and safer to use proxies, so this article is a must-read.

Ruby is a beautiful language: easy to write, simple to read, and powerful as hell. It’s also pretty easy to pick up the basics of Ruby without too much trouble — but save yourself some time by checking out the following resources that have helped me loads.

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