Web Class Blog

Cultural differences do matter. In ways we do not understand if we have not been exposed to other cultures. Cultural differences may perpetuate feelings of distrust if they are not understood.

It is important to understand that if you recognize differences in the way people from other cultures think, that it is not a matter of prejudice. Rather, it is one way of beginning to bridge the gap in a way that is workable.

Our client base, and our associate base, has broadened quite a bit lately. And I have learned many things because of it, in why I have always felt a certain way about some people I associated with, never even identifying what it was that made me feel that way.

One example is, in dealing with someone from a middle eastern business background. Haggling is second nature to them. They do not understand why we would NOT haggle. Setting a flat price with them is not understood. They have perceptions and responses going on through it that would not occur to me, but which are second nature and important to them.

A client had a bill that was overdue from a man from a middle eastern background. The client tried to get them to pay, but they kept trying to talk the client down. Finally the client filed a lien, which got an instant response. But still, the intent was to not pay full price – in the other man’s culture, to give in now would be a loss of stature. So our client added up the interest due, and presented that for collections as well. The other man haggled on THAT, and the client let him win. The funny thing is, that it ended up costing the business man more than if he’d just paid it in the first place, but since it gave him the feeling that he had won a point in the end, he was satisfied. Our client ended up with more than he’d have asked also.

This all sounds sort of silly to someone living in the US in isolated western communities all their lives. But it was an education to me, in how people can just think about things differently. It stood me in good stead when a client of mine started to haggle. One of my colleagues said she would have just told him flat out to pay or go away. But I did realize that this was his expectation – that if I understood how he thought, we could still have a good business relationship. I did not give him what he wanted, but I did knock my price down a bit, enough so that he could accept knowing he had won a point.

Since then, I’ve learned many other things from this client – the manner in which he does business operates on a different set of principals than it does for us. Not better, or worse, just different. When he first spoke of “old bazaar”, I did not know what he meant. I have since learned that it means many things. And that many of the standards that he operates around, are responsible for some misunderstandings between cultures, and a sense of distrust.

You see, in a haggling culture, you present your wares in the best possible light. It is the customer’s responsibility to examine, and point out the flaws, to lower the value, and the merchant’s responsibility to point out the good points and enhance the value. It is an expected exchange, and both feel certain that if they do it well, they’ll end up with a good balance in the end.

In our American culture though, if a price is inflated, we feel that the business owner is trying to cheat us. We would not generally consider offering a lower price, we’ll turn and walk away and find a stated price that is more reasonable. We consider pricing to be evidence of integrity. They consider it to be a matter of perception between two people.

We think they are telling us to pay full price without complaint. They are actually telling us that they’d really love to get that much but that they’d never expect you to actually pay it!

This is only one set of cultural differences that can influence business relationships. It is important that you understand if you are marketing in a culture that you are not native to, that things may be different for reasons that would not occur to you. It is also important to understand that when you are dealing with clients, suppliers, or contractors from other cultures, that their long held traditional behaviors and thought patterns may influence your interactions in ways that are easy for you to misinterpret. A little bit of consideration can go a long way in easing tensions and avoiding conflict.

The client of ours who started out by haggling, has been a good one. Utterly predictable, patient when he we had no right to expect him to be, and willing to trust me as long as I continue to do what I said I would. It was worth making a concession that I would normally not have made.

One of the questions we get most often from site owners is, “How can I protect my images from being stolen?”

Our answer is, “You can’t. And if you do it right, you don’t need to!”

We recently presented this concept to a group of museum personnel from around Wyoming and Colorado, and watched the light bulb go on in their eyes as we explained what that meant.

Methods of protecting images by blocking the right click, or cloaking the code are pretty much a waste of time. If I can see it, I can get it if I want to. There is no way you really CAN protect images from being stolen by a determined thief. That might sound distressing, unless you determine to use that reality as an advantage instead of seeing it as a disadvantage.

Instead of trying to lock them down, use them for your benefit. If they are going to take them, then let them do so with your blessing.

Apply a watermark to any of your images that may be desirable for theft. You can apply a watermark in two basic ways:

1. A high contrast URL placed in the bottom of the image. Typically, white text with a strong black extrusion or drop shadow will contrast with virtually anything and be readable. This is most appropriate for images that are central to a message where the center needs to be clear.

2. A low opacity watermark in the center. This is appropriate for images that are samples or examples, or for images that are of products that you do not want someone to lift. Most graphics programs allow you to do this. A logo, or a URL is appropriate here, but a URL is more viral – it brings people back to you.

Some people will “hotlink” to your images. They show your image, and you get no credit – but you pay for the server power to display them since they just link them from your server to their page. They do NOT show a link back to your website though, so you pay, but don’t get any benefit.

When you use a watermark URL on your images, you at least get some benefit and advertising from people who hotlink to your images, or otherwise steal them.

They COULD remove the watermark. But it is WORK to do so. And most people who steal images or hotlink to images are lazy – work is definitely a put-off, so they are more likely to either use it as-is, or leave it alone.

So instead of trying to lock up your images, invite people to use them – and let it work to the advantage of your business.

The more we add to web pages, the more important it becomes to take simple steps to ensure that those pages can be accessed by virtually anyone. It isn’t only good business, it presents legal risks if you do not!

ADA Accessibility for the web means basically two types of compensation – making sure visual elements can be understood by those with visual challenges, and ensuring that auditory elements can be understood by those with hearing limitations.

This is done through text. Text is the universal equalizer. It can be read and understood by people, and machines, so those who rely on machines to interpret web pages for them can still access plain text versions of elements.

This is most commonly seen in an image alt-tag. A bit of text that is displayed if the image is not shown. This is absolutely critical if you use image links on your pages, because otherwise, if the images cannot be viewed, your site cannot even be navigated!

There are other basic ways to compensate also – if you have audio on your site that is critical to the function of the site, simply provide a written transcript for access by the hearing impaired. If you have video, provide either an alt-text or a written transcript, whichever is most important.

In addition to ensuring that major elements are understandable, it is also important to pay attention to simple courtesies in your design – good contrast between text and backgrounds, easy to read font sizes, and other friendly tactics.

These simple tactics beat getting into a wrangle with a lawyer who has an agenda, any day!

I learned it in less than a day – at least, I mastered the rudimentary skills to produce a fairly decent Flash header, in about 4 hours, with totally unfamiliar software, and very little experience with animation or movies. I’d made animated GIFs before, but that was about it.

No matter which program you use, Flash is going to be complicated to work with. It is necessarily more complicated than image editing, because there are more functions, and more variables. Each of those variables has to have a control, and those controls happen differently in each program. Simplified programs generally will not have the flexibility to allow you to make the animations do what you want them to do.

For the record, I experimented with Namo FreeMotion. I’m a fan of Namo WebEditor, so this seemed the logical place to start. The learning curve is still fairly high, and the manual is confusing – some tools are described, but no information is available as to what they actually mean, if you are not already familiar with their terms. The whole section on symbols is completely incomprehensible. But it is possible to learn to create a basic animation fairly quickly.

You’ll learn more quickly if you have experience with object oriented graphics (vector graphics like Illustrator), because some of the concepts are the same. You spend more time telling the computer what you want to do, than you spend actually doing things directly like you would in a bitmap graphics program like Photoshop.

FreeMotion is available in a trial download though, and is worth taking for a spin. You’ll get off the ground fairly quickly if you follow the tutorial in the back of the manual, after reviewing the tools and concepts.

Blogging often grows slowly, but there are times when it can grow explosively. What gets it to do that, is when people start sharing the link around – the blog “goes viral” when it reaches a point where the majority of traffic is coming from people sharing a link with other people.

When that happens, it kicks more effects into motion – when it gets attention from one source, others pick it up, and it can then explode with traffic. If you have limited bandwidth to your site, this can cause a problem, but otherwise, it is what most people hope for.

The thing about a blog though, is that viral effects are generally temporary. You may work pretty hard to get a single post to go viral, just to have it trickle off in a few days. A few people will subscribe to your blog each time, giving you residual traffic, so it is generally worth making an effort to get a post to go viral. Just don’t expect one viral post to propel you into fame without some follow up work and continued effort with successive posts!V

Online marketing isn’t just one thing, it is a bunch of things. It cannot be confined to just where you post an ad, or what you say in a signature line.

It starts with the very foundation of your business. What your business is, and what makes it unique.

Marketing starts with your business model, and progresses to your business image, through the appearance and function of your website, and continues on through the methods you choose to promote your business and the words and imagery that you use in those promotions.

It is all one cohesive whole, and cannot be separated into pieces to isolate and disect. When a business isn’t working, a good marketing analysis will include things outside the scope of marketing itself, so that the real problems can be isolated and effective solutions devised.

Marketing is less of a boxable instruction set, and more of a way of thinking. Once you grasp the whole impact of your business, and find an effective way to define it, marketing comes out of that naturally. Then the skills and strategies that make up an effective marketing campaign can be implemented successfully.

It ends up being a lot of fun…

Hands on learning is the key to learning some of the complex concepts of web development. But practice is the key to making them both efficient, and professional.

This is true of writing, coding, marketing, designing, page layout, and the other skills involved in creating a successful website.

I’ve noticed this mostly in writing. With practice, you can become so familiar with the writing process that you can sit down to the blank page, and channel your thoughts directly from your brain, through your fingers and onto the screen. Practice improves typing skills also, so both your writing skills, and the ability to record the thoughts, improve at the same time.

With practice, you begin to conceptualize very complex sites in your mind, in ways that help you build it more efficiently to start. Long term, you can pull many parts into a quick assessment and conceive of an entire project in a way that makes the process far faster.

These are things that I cannot share though – I mean, I can TELL you this, but some of it you don’t get until you DO it – until you see the results of your own practice.

Practice can help with any aspect of building a site – just doing it, more than once, helps you remember and grow in skill.

We remember what we do. We understand what we do repeatedly.

SEO is changing rapidly. For most microbusinesses, the largest portion of their search engine traffic comes from Google. And Google is changing the rules really fast. There are complex reasons for this, and some pretty strong implications. It means that businesses cannot rely on being able to get that traffic from Google.

When you choose a source of info to learn SEO, make sure they are up-to-date. Because some of the recent changes have changed not just a few strategies, like has happened in the past, but they have created some fundamental shifts in philosophy.

Content is still king – but site promotion, so that people can FIND that content, is getting trickier.

This summer’s blogging class will touch on some of these issues, as they relate to blogs. The fall Web Development series will cover it in more depth.

Some things happen best by doing.

Our daughter was in the third grade. She still could not read at a functional level. We knew this, and we kept complaining to her teacher. Her teacher’s response was, “Of course she can read. She does great on phonics!”

The teacher never had her read in class. The time spend on “reading” in class was spent dissecting reading, and learning ABOUT reading, not DOING it. The teacher had no idea that our daughter could not connect reading and phonics – they had no relation to one another in her mind. We sat her down and began reading with her every night. She became a competent reader within a few months.

Many people are like this. They learn best by doing. So taking a class on how to write HTML won’t help you build a website. Talking about building a website won’t help you build a website either. Only doing it helps you see the concepts in action, and to understand some of the abstract issues.

If you want to learn to build a website, or create a blog, or take a few lbs off your photo, you need to DO it. If you come to class with an idea of something you want to DO, then you’ll be more motivated to learn. If you get to actually build something in class, your learning is better retained. And you discover where the hard parts are, when there is still an instructor in the room to help you over the bumps!

We’ve had a lot of fun with image editing software. Most recently, our son played with some tie-dye, and took a picture of himself in a tie-dyed shirt and tie. We promptly loaded it into our image editing program, and put matching dye stains on his face and hands and emailed it back to him.

It was very simple to do – it took three tools to do it – one to select the spots to dye, one to change the color of them, and one to smooth the edges so they did not look choppy. Anyone could have done it, but knowing how to use the tools right, made it fast to do, and made the end result look more natural.

The real challenge in working with photos isn’t to tie-dye someone’s face. It is to create an effect that looks like it was real – and not something that was painted on or computer altered. When you get it right, it really looks like he dribbled the dye over himself along with the shirt!

You don’t learn to do this by practicing doing that exact thing, either. You learn it by learning what the tools are, and how to use them well.

Once you learn that, all kinds of possibilities are open for having fun with your family photos! You are limited only by your imagination.