Texture design

Posted by rebecca

Just a heads up to our readers and to any SES London attendees: tomorrow evening Rand, Scott, and I will be hopping on a red eye flight to London to attend the SES conference. We'll be in the UK from February 11 until the 16th. Expect lighter posting from the three of us while we're out and about in jolly ol' England. If you're attending the conference, be sure to congratulate Rand on his engagement and check out either of the two panels he'll be speaking on (the Organic Listings Forum from 4:30 to 5:45 pm on Day 1, and the Web Analytics & Measuring Success Overview from 1:15 to 2:30 pm on Day 3).

Also, don't be a stranger to me and to Scott! I'm always happy to meet new people (and who knows, maybe I'll feature you in my SES London comic strip), and since this'll be Scott's first conference (in another country, no less!), be sure to give him a warm welcome and a stiff drink (which he'll need after cramming his 6'5" frame into an airplane seat for 9 1/2 hours).

So, to our beloved Designmoz readers: we'll be back in the office on Monday, February 19. (Except for me--I'm taking an extended weekend to go snowboarding. Happy President's Day!) To our beloved conference attendees: we'll see you soon!

Posted by randfish

Intuit recently authored a report on the state of US businesses in 2017 - Future of Small Business Report - in which they suggest that by 2017, the number of unique businesses will triple. SmallBusinessHub pointed me to this article (via Reddit) and noted some very interesting takeaways:

The main theme of the report was that we are in the midst of an economic revolution that started in the 1980's when 80% of American workers were at companies with greater than 1000 employees to today where 40% of American workers are at companies with greater than 1000 employees to some percentage far less than that 10 years from now.

Another major contributor to the decentralization of business is that small/new businesses no longer need to rely on huge sales organizations to "find" customers. Search engines make every niche market more "efficient" enabling smaller businesses to be "found" by the right customers who are shopping in a newly efficient niche. I believe search engine optimization further lowers the transaction costs between companies making the decision to outsource versus hire more attractive and making the barrier to starting a business lower which should lead to a further decentralization of business.

If you believe in their microeconomic theories about the marketplace shift, you've got to be pretty happy that you've chosen to be involved in the world of Internet marketing on any level. The very fact that you're reading Designmoz right now points to signs that you'll benefit, financially and in life-quality from business you undertake online. In keeping with this theme, I'd like to carry out these expectations to a logical conclusion:

1. The web will become massively more populated
   
   The numbers of search queries, websites, and business transactions conducted online will continue to skyrocket to unprecedented levels. We'll almost certainly see another large spike in adoption of the web, similar to the dot-com boom - the growth we're seeing now is large, but it's gradual. I believe that in a few years, there will be massive acceleration in that growth.
2. Competition will increase dramatically
   
   If you think it's tough right now to rank for orange county mortgage, just wait until 2017. Both the number of businesses and the number of consumers with demand will ensure that the value of ranking well in the search engines (or whatever new method of retrieval on demand evolves over time).
3. Opportunity is here now
   
   If you're considering leaving your job to pursue web work fulltime, start your own business or leverage the web for your existing company, the trends suggest now would be a good time to make that decision. Granted, you'll often have to give up some income and possibly a lot of security, but the rewards on a macro-level should be tremendous, and for those who prove themselves to earn a higher than average return, financial freedom awaits.
4. If History is any measure, several sectors will boom
   
   Domain names, web services, transaction systems and online marketing would appear to all be large winners in the online economy's continued growth.

If this seems like knowledge you already have and didn't need to read about, just consider that if the data pointed another direction - that trending was flowing back to the large organizations - the above statements would be reversed almost entirely. This is one of those posts to help re-assure you about the value of online content, and, hopefully, light a fire inside to help you realize the value of getting into this game as quickly as possible.

Technorati Tags

internet economy, decentralization, intuit

Posted by rebecca

It has been a week since we launched Designmoz's new site design, and thus it's been a week since YOUmoz launched. We thought we'd offer up a "State of the YOUmoz Address" so that we can fully explain our intent behind creating a user-generated section on our site.

Rand wanted more user participation on our new site, but he felt that there are plenty of great Design forums that already exist. We brainstormed YOUmoz as a way of allowing our loyal readers to author up their own blog posts and see them published on our site. We're looking for quality content that closely resembles something that we'd put on our main blog (in fact, if a user submits a post that knocks our Designmoz socks off, we will move it over to the main blog).

So far, we've had a great flow of submitted posts. At any given time, we've had up to 10 posts sitting in our queue, each of them ranging in length, subject, and author. Any of the Designmoz staff members can approve or deny a submission; don't assume, however, that each post we publish has earned our seal of approval. We've put a couple of posts up that weren't smack-you-in-the-face fantastic so that we could see how the readers would respond to them--this is, after all, a section devoted to you!

So, what posts have we denied so far? There have been a couple posts that weren't published because they were overtly self-advertising, which is not useful or beneficial information for our readers. We are, however, planning on adding some fields where you can enter your company's name, your job title, or your URL, which will serve as a byline of sorts when you author a post. That way, you won't have to pitch or plug yourself at the bottom of each post and run the risk of seeming pitchy or self-advertising.

Additionally, a couple of posts that hadn't been cleaned up or formatted properly (one huge paragraph, multiple spelling and grammar problems, etc) were also denied, simply because we have too much work to do to devote all of our time editing and cleaning up user-submitted entries. (We will make some small changes here and there, but don't expect us to re-write everything.)

Check out the Popular YOUmoz Entries to see which posts have been getting the most reader love. SearchStudent's "How to Game the New Designmoz Voting System" is currently at the top of the list with 20 thumbs up and 3 down. Though his post isn't particularly insightful or chock-full of useful Design tidbits, it's a fun read and is injected with personality. At the opposite end of the spectrum, rmccarley's "Super Advanced Design Tip" post sits at #2, with 12 thumbs up and zero thumbs down. He gets brownie points for brown-nosing me and Matt, but his post also does a good job at grabbing the reader's attention. Rounding out the top three is roadies, who compared Designmoz's Top Ranked Members list to Digg removing their Top Diggers list in his post "Digg Takes Users Down While Designmoz Puts them On Top." His post is well-written and thought-provoking, thus garnering 13 thumbs up and one thumb down.

Peruse through the Popular YOUmoz Entries list and you'll see that the content of these posts vary; therefore, you don't necessarily have to be hilarious, controversial, or an Designmoz butt kisser to get published. All you have to do is write about something that you think will interest or benefit our readers, whether it be a tool, breaking Design news, tips, etc, and we'll definitely pay attention.

While YOUmoz currently has a small community of participants, we're looking forward to receiving entries, reading comments, and watching the participation grow. Happy reading (and writing)!

P.S. Regarding the criticism about rejecting posts that weren't broken up into readable paragraphs and had multiple spelling and grammar problems, I'd like to add that we didn't snobbishly glance at how the posts looked and then rejected them. I quickly read through these posts and found that the content wasn't stellar, either, so combined with the fact that if I were to publish them, I'd have to clean them up a lot, I decided to deny their publication. If I were to come across an "ugly-looking" post that had fantastic content, then it would probably be worthwhile to clean it up and publish it.

Technorati Tags

YOUmoz, Designmoz