Check out the new MTV website. They moved from an entirely Flash based website to a hybrid of Flash and CSS/XHTML. They even brought in the big gun by consulting with Dan Cederholm of Simplebits. The coolest part about the site is what MTV is calling their “hats”. They are rotating background images on their home page causing the site to feel a little different on every visit. I am sure there will be some tweaks in the upcoming week but as always, great execution by MTV.

Refresh was good the other night but Thea wasn’t available to speak. I look forward to that the next time. I had a real solid conversation with Matthew Alberty about the Houston area job market. We did find out however that OpenCoffee Club will be happening in Houston next Friday. I am even going to drag Rodrigo Jimenez of Whiteboardlabs to that.

I had previously written a post about OpenCoffee Club that you can read about here. My next post is going to be about the big air I am getting this evening on the river. You know you better come back to see the pics of that.

Tonite I will be attending Refresh Houston. The subject is very relevant to me because it will be about Flash Accessibility and Standards. It is surely going to make some of the regulars a little uneasy because of their contempt for Flash

I will post tomorrow about the folks I see and meet up there. Looking forward to hearing Thea Eaton of Snert Studios speak.

There are a few perks with my job when handling customer service. I know what you’re thinking…”customer service can have perks?” Not always, but there are few that just feel good after we get off the phone with a customer who has just purchased our products. We love to receive compliments and that is an obvious bonus but my favorite is one where we surprise the customer with service they didn’t expect.

Lately, we have been getting a lot of calls for express shipping or rush jobs. Our policy is that custom t shirts and apparel will be delivered to you in 10 work days or less. The truth is that 9 times out of 10 we routinely beat that timeframe. Most of our customers know this and expect to pay more because we post a 25% upcharge for 6 days or less. We don’t offer a faster option at check out because we know they will contact us to give the date they need them by. When they do and we tell them that we are going to make it on that date or sooner without an extra charge, we can just tell that we made their day.

In return, they make ours.

I have been writing recently about Content Management Systems and have finally chosen one. I am going to post much more about it later but the main reason I needed a CMS was landing pages. These are pages on a websites that are directed towards very targeted groups of your customers. For instance, it would be You Design It having a single page with a lot of information on it for Softball Teams or another page for Christian Groups or another for Houston Screenprinting, etc.

These landing pages are great for directing those specific groups to the exact information/products/designs they are looking for. I think they have a lot of use and are definitely handy when you have a lot of content on your website. However, there are some web companies who are abusing those pages to get higher in the search engines. These companies have caused a group to form named “No More Landing Pages” that is against targeted landing pages altogether. Kind of silly and a bit extreme if you ask me. I just hope they cool their jets and don’t get the ear of Google. I don’t want to be punished for hard/smart work.

A friend of mine, Angelo from Whiteboardlabs, is headed to the Adaptive Path UX intensive workshop this week in Chicago. The guys/girls at Adaptive Path are legit when it comes to designing for the user experience. They did a panel at SXSW that I attended where they compared designing a site for a demographic in the same way that casinos design their interior for middle-aged to older women.

User interaction with your interface can be the difference from little money to big money in revenues. We are working on a new design for You Design It and we are going to incorporate Split A/B testing to see what parts of our site are more effective. Split A/B testing is rotating two different layouts on a webpage and seeing which one performs better with your audience. I am looking forward to hearing the latest information from the UX Intensive conference from Angelo whenever he gets back. Hopefully, I can get a few nuggets from him.

If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can laugh until you cry here. This is not only a video created by Will Ferrell and his 4 year old landlord Pearl but a diabolical scheme for a website to go viral and create critical mass. What am I talking about?

Will Ferrell and his production studio recently accepted Venture Capital money from Sequoia Capital (investors in Google and YouTube) to start a video website called Funny or Die. The premise is to allow users to submit their comedic videos for voting whether they are funny or whether they should die. Sounds a lot like Hot or Not for comedies. I am fairly certain that Sequoia would have laughed some normal joe’s out of their office had they come in with this pitch. But throw in Will Ferrell during his prime along with his star connections and you have an instant hit. Why would he do this???

Money, fame, an increase in his star power…….I am sure a little bit of all three. I imagine one of the main reasons is for him to be able to recruit talent and create a farm system for his production studio. If he sees someone funny, or a character that is hilarious, or a scenario that would equate to big screen dollars….guess who could capitalize….yeah, that same production studio that started Funny or Die.