Where I work at, we have this phenomenal client list, but there’s a good chance you’ll never see it. Most of the work we do is intranet work, and it’s boring.

It also pays well. Very well.

A lot of consultants want to work on only the most exciting projects, where I’m trying to angle for less exciting government and corporate clients, because they have work no one else wants to do. Smart consulting companies do well with these clients, because they aren’t competing with many other clients.

For example, tons of agencies pitch websites for Paramount movies.

Few agencies or firms pitch intranets at Paramount because, well, it’s boring. No one’s going to see it. Yet, on my company’s client list, we list Paramount as a client, and our work may be more important to Paramount than a website for a single movie.

The website for the movie has to be built only twice.

That intranet for Paramount goes on forever.

From Signal Vs. Noise:

There's more than one way to skin the revenue cat:

• If you sell web software, you can also write a book. Or put on a conference.
• If you're a design firm, you can also sell jewel case packaging. Or start an ad network.
• If you're a site that collects funny videos, you can also sell tee shirts.
• If you're a popular local blog, you can operate a flea market.
• If you're a computer company, you can reinvent the music business.

Etc.

Your self-imposed limitations on how to make money are often just that: self-imposed. Seek out other routes to your destination.

Great post. Sometimes we miss the obvious (and not-so-obvious).

The domain name kind of sucks, and it’s not exactly an original idea (people have been doing this for years, and part of the reason we’re in this mess is because of the investors buying futures, which is the investing in the future price of gas) but Mashable points out MyGallons.com is capitalizing on the current situation with consumers where can lock the price of gas in at a certain price.

How it works:

• Pay the $29.95 membership fee and get a card in the mail
• Pre-purchase gas at a certain price
• Use the card at any of the 200,000 participating stations in the network

The site is fairly usable, but when I checked it, there was no place to look for locations near me, but I was able to check out how much I would save. I haven’t been driving a lot lately, but they estimated my savings at $400 a year. That’s ironically just about what I would set down at a blackjack table in Las Vegas, so I don’t see it as that much of a savings.

But if you want to hedge your bets, this is the place to go.

The real goal of MySpace opening up their site to external applications is so developers will extend the profiles and give the end users more functionality to view their MySpace content. Flash Photo Viewer is a good example at an attempt to extend the functionality.

Flash Photo Viewer is exactly what it’s titled: an application built in Flash that loads on your photos on your home page, profile and canvas so you can view all your photos in a scrollable list, and see a larger version of a photo in the primary window. Click on that photo, and a new window displays the full version of the photo. While you view the profile or home page, the viewer goes into slideshow mode.

The application isn’t very complex, but it doesn’t have to be — it does exactly what it advertises.

The application design has a few issues though. It looks the the developer didn’t build separate Flash applications for the User Home Page, User Profile and Canvas, so the size of the slideshow controls is painfully small on the profile and home page. Additionally, the interface is clunky, not polished.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 4
• Usability: 3
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 4
• Monetization Opportunities: 3

With some of the people I work with, they think I come up with some of the designs and user interface components out of thin air. What I really do is look for patterns and best practices at other websites, and use them over and over again i.e. design patterns.

Smashing Magazine has a great (but lengthy) article about a topic dear to me — web forms. Web forms are the most important aspect of what we do because they usually lead to conversions, yet we spend so little time on designing them.

Never mind that Firefox 3, the new browser, is so fast it runs circles around Internet Explorer 7 and Safari for the Mac (this after a long time of bloatware with Firefox 2), their website is the best I’ve ever seen at identifying exactly at getting people to download the browser. The navigation of the site has always been phenomenal (is there anything more straight forward than add-ins?), and this release, it just gets better.

The wins?

Detect who the user is in a hurry

Am I a Mac or a PC person?

No problem!

We’ll just look at the user agent provided by the browser and server, and we’ll detect the language and operating system. No choosing, just a small note that tells the user exactly who they are. This is a detail most websites completely miss (how many times do I have to see PC Software listed when I access Download.com?).

At the bottom of the page there’s content comparing Firefox vs. Safari, the native browser for the Mac I’m on. Brilliant!

How much does this cost?

It’s free! And they tell you it’s free! Download now! Operators standing by!

But what if I have the wrong language selected?

I would have listed some of the languages here (how many Japanese people will be able to translate Other Systems and Languages if their browser is set wrong?), but for the most part, selecting another platform or language is straight forward. The secondary page does it a great job listing the languages, but a poor job of translating the word “Download” into each language. Was someone, anyone paying attention?

This is a serious post, but I find it just a bit silly: the usability of urinals. Apparently, it’s serious business.

If only most companies took the care to design a usable project urinal companies do.

This comes by courtesy of BoingBoing. Check out the IHam 5JS , an Apple spoof site by Shackleton, a PR firm in Spain. Absolutely hilarious! It gives me the same satisfaction as when Apple lowered the price of the Iphone after 3 months on the market and made hordes of early adopters “IRate.” Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple products, but the smugness of some Apple-philes drive me nuts. Just goes to prove that even  the ridiculous (in this case, a ham)  can be cool, if packaged in the sleek Apple grey and presented by an ultra geek in black glasses.

There’s nothing better than examples of how something was implemented so you can copy it. JOPX on SharePoint 2007 has a bunch of links to other posts (which we copied below) for examples.

• How We Did It – Tag Driven Information Architecture using MOSS 2007 for the New Zealand Ministry of Transport
• BinaryWave Sonar – Component Level Performance Measurement Tool for SharePoint – How We Did It
• How We Did It: Building a News Workbench on MOSS 2007 for Microsoft’s Corporate Intranet Portal
• How we did it: Australia National Native Title Tribunal website – advanced web content management
• Tomoye Ecco and SharePoint Integration – How We Did It and What We Will Do Next
• How We Did It: blueKiwi SharePoint Connector and OfficeAssistant
• How We Did It: Integrating Telligent Community Server Evolution 2008 with SharePoint Server 2007
• How We Did It: Connectbeam Spotlight Connect for SharePoint
• How We Did It: Christian Children's Fund extranet powered by SharePoint

So Sam’s Club is now selling milk and orange juice in these new squarish Frankensteinian bottles. The problem is these new containers don’t have any spouts, so spills are almost inevitable. The reason behind this new packaging makeover is green. Green as in cash and green as in eco-friendly. Supposedly, these square containers are easier and quicker to ship. The result is less fuel, less money, less carbon footprint. Unfortunately, this is isn’t form follows function. It’s more like form follows shipment.

There’s still the fundamental usability problem of spilled milk and orange juice. The  invention  of spouts go back hundreds may be even thousands of years. I mean half of the Greek statues I studied in Art History was of a naked person pouring wine from pitchers. And yes, these pitchers all had spouts on them. Last I heard, Sam’s Club is launching a marketing campaign to teach consumers to tilt the bottle and not pour it. Tell this to a  six year old kid who wants milk and cookies and their moms who have to clean up after them. I think the money that Sam’s Club saved on shipping these new bottles will go to a marketing and  user adoption  campaign, at least initially. It remains to be seen if you can teach an old dog new tricks. May be the dog has no choice if the choice is green and the company is Sam’s Club who’s also part of Walmart’s evil empire. That’s the inconvenient truth.