Return on Intention

Every Thursday in the Albuquerque Journal the Business Outlook section is neatly tucked into the papers fold. Unlike most people, I usually read this part of the paper after work instead of in the morning. On December 11, 2008, before I had the chance to get home and read the paper, my mother called me. 

“Have your read the Outlook today?”, she said.

“No, not yet. Why?”, I replied.

“There is an article in there that sounds like you wrote it, right down to the quote by Peter Drucker.” my mother exclaimed ecstatically. Well, not really, she just plainly said it.

I immediately called my wife at home to read the article. When she got done she agreed it sounded a lot like some of the articles I have written or presentations I have given. Needless to say at this point I couldn’t wait to get home and read this article. 

Finally, closing time came around and I came home to read the article. It was a really good article. Of course, I guess if many people thought it sounded like me then I guess I would like it, wouldn’t I? 

The title of the article is “The right website can help a business succeed” and was written by George Kenefic and Mary Schmidt. The gist of the articles is basically, that a website is an extension of your business, and you should treat it just like any other part of your business. The articles talks about the importance of knowing your customers, not being afraid of the technical stuff, the importance of your content and the FACT that all good websites have reached success by changing over time, in response to testing and metrics. 

I am really happy to see this article appear in the Journal for several reasons.

1. The more people that read information like this, the more we can spread the word on how to get real results out of a website instead of treating it like a brochure.
2. The authors of this article are not running a web development shop.  George Kenefic is director of Enterprise Empowerment and Mary Schmidt is Marketing Advisor with the Loan Fund. 

It’s nice to know that there are people out there who get it that are not in the development side of the equation. This is a great sign for us all.

–NOTE–

I do not believe that George Kenefic or Mary Schmidt have plagiarized my work, or we’re influenced by me in any way. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have never heard of me. These concepts are out there already and I have no special claim to them. Don’t misunderstand this post to believe that I am suggesting any influence from me on the article in question. The point is that I didn’t influence it…. at all, and thats what makes it so great.

It’s really early in the morning and here I am writing about Upgrade NM day 1. I guess it’s not that early, but earlier than I want to be awake for today. Oh well, we’re not gonna stop now, we had a good day yesterday and I think we will meet success today for this years Upgrade NM.

Upgrade NM is like the sprint we did last year. It’s an event where many New Mexico web developers get together and try to do a complete web site build in a short period of time. Last year it was a day and this year we are using the weekend. The event last from 8am to 8pm both Saturday and Sunday and all planning and work must be completed in those hours. This year we are redesigning, upgrading, adding functionality and new content to the 1st-mile.com website. We are also going to build the UpgradeNM.org site so in the future we can involve the community in the process of identifying projects and participants for future Upgrade events. 

We do it as a way of giving back to our community and to show the local area that there is talent here that accomplish these types of projects. Often this kind of work gets outsources out of state, and there is not good reason for it. We have a great talent pool right here in town. It’s also fun just to get all of us together and see what we can do, and help out some folks who might not be able to get this level of help normally. 

So here we are about to start day two and we are looking pretty good. We have a new design and and some new content we need to get integrated into an update version of plone that is running the current 1st-mile site. We also have the design and front end markup for the UpgradeNM site and we just need to build out the back end. So far its been a great run and think we have enough done and enough time to finish it. Keep a look out to hear more after today is over to see how far it all got.

Here is the original 1st mile site:

Here is our current version:

Here is the current media-wiki install for UpgradeNM:

Here is the new design for Upgrade NM:

Here is who participated today:

• Reid Givens (of course)
• Jack Moffitt
• Emily Lewis
• Michael Bernstein
• Mark Casias
• Eric Renz-Whitmore