Why Software and Websites Get Worse Over Time
In the middle of this article about How Jason Fried Works, I read the best summary ever about why software and websites tend to get worse over time as they gain more customers… I spend another good portion of my day thinking about how to make things less complicated. [You could sum up Jason Fried's philosophy as "less is more." Except that he hates that expression, because, he says, it still "implies that more is better." Fried prefers "less is less."] In the software world, the first, second, and third versions of any product are really pretty good, because everyone c

Purses for a Penny! Really? REALLY?? No.
There I was, minding my own business on woot.com and I saw a banner ad for PennyPurses.com with the caption, “Designer handbags for pennies. Really.” (paraphrased) Even though I’m all filled up on man bags at the moment, curiosity got the best of me and I clicked through to check it out.  After reading a few pages, I decided I would sign up and try it out because it just seemed too damn good to be true! Well, in summary, it pretty much is. Here’s the review I posted to their Facebook Fan page:

8 UI Suggestions For My Friend
A good friend of mine emailed me this morning to ask if I had any suggestions for a new user interface mock-up he created for his company, ABSystems, which sells medical billing businesses. Here’s the mock-up, along with his email to me: I’m trying to rekindle the fire to get our ABSystems website redesigned.  Take a glance at the mock up attached. I 100% ripped it off of mint.com. We won’t be using the grassy bar, but I wanted it there as a place marker and to show the function / naming of the rollover items.  Any feedback would be appreciated.

Setup Wordpress Hosting with Page.ly in 3 Easy Steps
I do all my secure web hosting with Firehost. That means sites that take credit cards, have customer databases, etc.  Firehost RULES at this. But then there’s all those “random idea” sites.  I don’t need the full scale bells-and-whistles hosting I get from Firehost.  And I definitely don’t want to deal with ANY complexity. I want to think of the idea, buy the domain name, get a Wordpress template up, get an email address, and off I’m running. My requirements for my new wordpress web host are: VERY simple to launch (the site AND the email account)

Users Hate Change; A Real Life Example
Last week I facebooked this quote from Jackob Neilsen’s excellent article, Fresh vs. Familar: How Aggressively to Redesign. My good buddy, Ryan Farley the genius developer, picked out this quote from the same article.