Could the person posting happysheep stickers on Coke vending machines in the Henderson mall…please stop.
It seems Coke has my email address :/
It was fun to see happysheep featured on TV3 last Friday night as part of Natasha Utting’s World Wide Wonderland on Campbell Live.
If you’re interested you can view the video online on the TV3.co.nz web site. Unfortunately it’s the final site mentioned in the piece, so you have to sit through a handful of other sites before getting to happysheep.
There was a great post earlier this week on Signal vs. Noise about how not to apply for a job.
It’s got me thinking about the importance of attention to detail and using terminology correctly and consistently throughout your web site.
To use some examples from Zillion, an “auction” is how you sell an “item” and an “item” is what you actually sell. You can therefore “win an auction” but you eventually “pay for an item”.
Sellers are not “listers” and pictures are not “photos”. A Member Name (not “member name” or “username”) is how you’re identified on the site and what you use to sign in (not “login”).
Zillion is not “zillion” and happysheep is not “Happysheep”. nzflatmates is certainly not “NZ Flatmates”.
In my opinion, getting this wrong is right up there with misspelling someone’s name, so as a team we try our very best to remember to get it right.
My Dad used to always say to me “good manners costs you nothing” and this is no different. Attention to detail costs you nothing either. Microsoft would never refer to themselves as “Micro soft” just as eBay wouldn’t refer to themselves as “Ebay”.
Just because you’re small, why treat yourself and your brand with any less respect?
And before you ask, yes I’m a bit weird and at times I can be very difficult to work with…but I’m lucky that I’m by no means the only person in the team who shares these values!
Seeing lots of small improvements go live feels great.
Today on Zillion we increased the size of pictures in categories and on the listing page. With more and more people upgrading to bigger LCD monitors and broadband, the timing felt right. The site looks great. We also jiggered the Favourites page so it’s possible to view new listings from your Favourites quickly and easily from the one page. Very cool.
On happysheep we created a page where enthusiastic members can download banners and buttons (go go go!) to display on personal web sites and blogs. It’s important to encourage things like this when you have a near non-existent marketing budget (it’s hard to justify spending big bucks on advertising when you have a “free to list” business model).
These changes only took a small handful of hours off and on over the past couple of weeks. The only tricky part was running a script to resize the images on Zillion and reducing how long we retain images on expired listings to ensure our backups don’t balloon too much.
Unlike some changes we’ve made in the past, today’s improvements feel well worth the effort. Small wins FTW.
Today I’m going to offer up yet more evidence that when it comes to web design, keeping things simple is smart, especially when you’re small.
For the purpose of improving our communication with our members, we made the decision to add a blog to both Zillion and happysheep. The happysheep blog is live. The Zillion blog isn’t.
Why?
While the fact that happysheep is built using newer technologies (e.g. Zend Framework) the difference in output can largely be put down to the fact Zillion is an over designed site that requires a graphic designer to get stuck into Adobe Photoshop every time we want to roll out a new feature. When your designer is tied up on more pressing projects (as ours is at the moment) this is really annoying.
We’ve learned this the hard way. If you’re working in a small team I highly recommend that you take the happysheep “less is more” approach to web design and ask your designer to “design” your site in such a way that a reasonably careful and creative developer can take the design and adapt and apply it to future page designs. This means saying “no” to lots of icons, images for headings, flexi width designs, gradients and the overuse of images in general.
The happysheep blog actually took less than one day to put together. When you’re a small team with a limited budget, I think this design approach makes a lot of sense.
There is a double-paged feature article on happysheep in the June Issue of NetGuide Magazine.
Unfortunately I’m not allowed to publish the article here, but it starts on page 16 and is available for sale from today.
My thanks goes out to Jorin and the team at NetGuide for the opportunity to answer their questions.
The 2008 NetGuide Web Awards were held last night and Auckland, and I’m happy to report that Zillion was a finalist in the “Best Trading Site” category and happysheep was a finalist in the “Best New Site” category.
Unfortunately we didn’t actually win either of the two awards, however Simon won “Best Shopping Site” with GPStore and “Best Gaming Site” with Gameplanet, two very well deserved wins! I’m especially happy to see the GPStore team continue to win the Best Shopping Site award, as the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to keep meeting and exceeding their rapidly growing number of customers is truly impressive. Well done guys!
The Web Awards did however highlight for me the relative lack of emerging web talent in New Zealand. In most categories, it was the same sites up for the same awards with few, if any, real surprises. I’d love to see more new sites launched in 2009 and more young people getting involved too.
But overall a really fun night, and my congratulations goes out to all the winners.
A little over a week ago I was interviewed by StartUP and asked questions about Zillion, happysheep, nzflatmates and what it’s like starting a web site in New Zealand.
Having now seen the video and the huge bags under my eyes, I can confidently say I need more sleep!
Today I’ve been humbled by the huge number of good people out there who really want to see us succeed with our ventures.
About four hours ago we sent a happysheep email newsletter to just over 1,000 people, inviting them to email us if they’d like to stick up happysheep stickers in their local area. To my amazement about 40 people have already emailed to say they’re keen to help out. Wow.
What’s even more interesting, is that so far this afternoon only 20% of people have actually opened the newsletter. 20% of 1,000 recipients is 200, and of those about 40 have requested stickers. That’s about one in every five people wanting to volunteer to help out, for free.
Here are a small handful of the comments we’ve received:
“Hi, I would be happy to hand out stickers & plaster them all over, please send me some.
I am Queenstown – Glenorchy area”“great i will also hand them out in my shop and plaster them on vehicles give them away to customers spread the word”
“thanks – ps: send lots!!”
“hi ,i would love to help get the word out about HAPPYSHEEP !!!”
” We would love to receive some stickers. We have a shop at the Historic Village in Tauranga. The Village is becoming a thriving Arts, Crafts, Events and Community Centre – pretty much all the things happysheep is trying to promote.
A number of the groups that hold classes at the Village got together and are going to be running a range of school holiday classes – we have listed them all on happysheep. It’s great that there is somewhere we can promote them!! Thanks
”
“We get a lot of visitors on holiday as well as the locals and they are all looking for things to do and see around the region so the stickers would be fantastic so they know where to go to find that information. Thanking you in anticipation.”
“Hi, I would love some stickers please. I live in a hall of residence so can help spread the word!”
“Send heaps, ill put them in our bags when customers purchase.”
It makes me smile to think there are so many good people out there who are happy to volunteer their time to help us succeed. We may only have a small number of people on the payroll, but an excercise like this one quickly illustrates that our team is in fact a lot bigger than that
Sometimes I take a moment to reflect on the way I go about doing things, and often catch myself making life much more difficult than it really needs to be.
Take email newsletters as an example.
Monthly email newsletters are key to all of our sites. They’re the cheapest way to obtain traffic and keep our brands near the top of people’s minds.
But preparing them every month can be a real *#^!@. Actually sitting down to write them is easy because I can do that on my own in my own time, but then I need to organise the artwork, wait for that to get drawn up, send it back if I didn’t do a very good job of describing what I was looking for, then forward the copy plus the visuals through to get coded up, then proof read then finally send it some five days later. Drama!
As you can see, the end result is basically a work of art. But boy do we pay a price! Is it really worth all the time, hassle, money and stress? I don’t think so. Plus, the whole rigmarole actually puts me off sending one in the first place.
So with happysheep we tried something different. No images, no artwork, nothing but the bare bones of what we wanted to communicate to our members. And what do you know? It works. People still open them, people still read them, and people still click through to the site. In fact, I actually prefer receiving newsletters like this because they take less time to read. Just the key points with no happy text to fill the space beside a random piece of artwork!
And the best part of all? The whole thing took 30 minutes to write, and less than an hour for Shane to code up and send. Oh, and that includes building the online survey. The effort vs. reward ratio doing it this way is awesome and so much smarter for a small team such as ours. We don’t have a marketing department or an ad agency, so every minute we spend working on stuff like this is a minute we cant spend on developing the site.
Keep it simple ftw!
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