The online ramblings of Dylan Bland

I was discussing with Shane today about how difficult it was to find good people to join our team (great teams ftw) when he coined the interesting term the NZ-Idol effect.

Some pretty impressive musicians turn up to compete in American Idol, with any of the top 10 capable of producing a CD that would sell. NZ Idol on the other hand, doesn’t quite cut it, presumably because our talent pool is smaller. Hence the NZ-Idol effect, a B Grade show in comparison.

Maybe the NZ web scene is similar. Maybe New Zealand is just too small to produce an excess of talented web people. Or maybe they’re out there but they’ve already been snapped up? Or maybe they’re just not turning up to the audition…not looking for employment…busy working away on their own thing.

Either way, good web people seem really hard to come by in New Zealand.

We have a growing number of projects on the go, so we’re looking for a talented Auckland-based designer to join our team and spread his or her talents across our network of sites.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Lives and breaths the Internet
• Has an eye for high-quality design
• Is great at picking colours and fonts
• Is a Photoshop wizard (no html or CSS experience needed)
• Who understands and appreciates web site usability

We can offer work across all our sites (happysheep, Zillion, nzflatmates, Gameplanet Store) in either a full time, part time or contract capacity. We’re prepared to be flexible for the right person!

While previous experience is ideal, we’re also happy to work with someone young and naturally talented who’s keen to learn.

If this sounds like you, please get in touch (my email address is on the right) and include some examples of your work, and a list of web sites you like, and why.

We’re starting to think New Zealand lacks talented web people, please prove us wrong…

National announced yesterday that should they win the election, they’ll spend $1.5bn on rolling out a fibre network to deliver high-speed broadband into the homes of 75% of New Zealanders in the next five years.

This is bold move from National and great news for our Industry.

From my point of view, I believe that properly managed government investment in this kind of infrastructure is no different from government investment in roading and highways. Just as our state highways are critical to our country’s economic well being, so too is the “information highway” and access to super-fast Internet.

Of course careful work will need to be done to ensure we don’t end up with another monopoly. That would suck, but really, what’s the alternative? New Zealand’s a small country and it’s unlikely that the private sector would ever invest the kind of money required to get something like this off the ground properly.

I think that it’s great that National is taking the issue seriously and showing some bold leadership. I’m not sure if it would swing my vote, but it would certainly have a positive impact on my daily life. It will be interesting to see Labour’s response and how the debate unfolds leading up to the election.

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!

My blog has been online for just over a month now, and so far it’s been read by over 400 people, mostly from New Zealand, who on average each spend 5 minutes reading through my posts. Pretty cool!

So thanks for reading. If you have any questions or topics you’d like me to write about please feel free to get in touch!

A good friend of mine has taken the plunge and opened up her very own boutique clothing store selling high-end designer clothing. I visited her shop during her opening weekend, and have been pondering the difference between setting up shop in the “real world” vs. starting your own web site.

One key difference is foot traffic.

When you open a store in the real world, provided you’ve chosen a good location, you’re going to get a certain amount of foot traffic, regardless of how much (or how little) advertising and promotion you do. Setup in a busy area and you’ll get a steady flow of people walking past your front door. Setup next to your competition, and you’ll get even more.

Starting up on the web is difference. Instead of rent to a landlord in a great location, you’ll pay for hosting in the middle of nowhere. No body will visit your site just because they’re passing by. You cannot setup shop next to your competition. You’re an island on your own.

This has got me thinking about happysheep. We’ve not leverage our existing traffic effectively. Zillion receives over 100,000 visitors every month and we’ve done precious little to direct those streams of people to our other sites.

So today we added a nav bar to the top of all our sites. All of a sudden they don’t feel like an island on their own, and over the course of a year I think the extra visits to each each site will add up to something significant.

Last week we had a mini crisis over at Zillion with some members reporting that they could view private information belonging to other signed-in members. Obviously this was alarming and the issue had our complete attention until it was resolved.

After eight long hours of investigation and various attempts by five people to get to the bottom of what was happening, we eventually uncovered that the problem was experienced exclusively by members who use either Slingshot or CallPlus as their ISP.

It turns out that Slingshot and CallPlus were experiencing “browsing and authentication issues” (probably due to the misconfiguration of a proxy appliance) which basically translates to “we’re serving our customers random cached authenticated pages belonging to other customers.” Scary stuff.

Once we understood what was going on we were able to make a quick change to our headers to prevent Zillion from being affected. During our investigation we also uncovered that Trade Me experienced exactly the same problem in 2007. It’s sad that Slingshot/CallPlus obviously didn’t learn their lesson…

..or perhaps Annette was offered her job back and has fallen off the wagon, again

Moral of the story? We recommend customers of Slingshot/CallPlus switch to a decent ISP and recommend Maxnet, Orcon or even Telecom as suitable alternatives

At the office I’ve made do with the same old crappy PC for about four years now, and watched with envy as those around me upgraded to bigger monitors and new operating systems.

I even remember a few years back when TV3 interviewed us for our win at the NetGuide Web Awards, I sat in front of Simon’s PC because mine looked well, sad.

So this week it’s my turn to have the coolest PC at the office, as I’ve treated myself to a shinny new Shuttle PC with dual 22 inch Dell LCD monitors.

Dual monitors are great. Once you’ve used two, you’ll never go back. There’s something great about not having to switch between windows, and having your “work” on one screen, and you MSN conversations on another. It just works better.

I thought about switching back to a MAC, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle because all our apps are Windows apps and it meant I’d be swimming against the tide in our current environment. Maybe I’ll get another MAC for home.

I ordered from Ascent, who were great as always. They show stock data, so you can choose in stock items and get fast delivery. Although because they drop ship, inevitably the RAM arrived one day later than everything else so I had to wait a WHOLE EXTRA DAY(!) to play with my new toy. I’ve always been impatient.

Dell surprised me, with the monitors arriving at the same time as the rest of my bits. They obviously hold a lot of stock locally.

Switching to a new PC is so much easier these days. I use IMAP email so all my emails and folders are stored on the server, meaning they’re all where they should be on my new PC. We use Google Docs for document writing, so all my docs were just a click away. We store all our important business files on the network, so they’re still there too. After a couple of days, the only thing I’m missing is my iTunes music library, which means I’m currently listening to Shane’s iTunes library across the network – cool feature!

My old PC saw a lot…from the launch of Zillion right through the launch of happysheep. I wonder what the new one will see…

Today I remembered a lesson that I sadly let myself forget. Being small doesn’t always suck.

Let me explain. Early last month we reintroduced “Free Gallery” on Zillion, and after crunching some numbers today we uncovered that the number of items successfully sold last month was up 27 percent over February – an impressive increase.

This is significant because it illustrates some important points.

1. Small changes can make a big difference.
2. Being small allows you to experiment and take risks.
3. Being small allows you to roll out changes quickly.

Because Zillion is run by a small team, when the time comes to make a decision, the decision can be made quickly and without long meetings, reports and red tape. What’s more, our development environment is not sophisticated and decisions can be implemented in just a couple of hours.

Being small also means that any negative effects on a decision are less damaging, and of course much easier to reverse.

Bigger companies on the other hand have more staff to brief, more procedures to follow and the impact of their changes are more profound (for better or worse!).

Given the short amount of development time Free Gallery took to implement, and how positive the result was, I’m ashamed we took so long to give it a go.

Lesson learned.