The online ramblings of Dylan Bland

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.

I think I’ve discovered why my email has been going so slowly…

Egor says:
mail.zillion is full and FYI you have 1GB of mail in your Trash folder
Dylan says:
Is there an easy way for you to delete all that Thunderbird has a spaz
Egor says:
all of it? yes
Dylan says:
Delete all my trash yeah! 27,000 unread messages eeek
Egor says:
done
Egor says:
_b

Today I took out the trash. It feels good.

Nearly three years since Shane first created an account, I’m really starting to get into Basecamp. Work gets done. Progress gets made. It’s like magic.

Here’s what I love so far:

• You can divide stuff into projects (e.g. Zillion, happysheep, nzflatmates)
• To-Do lists (e.g. stuff we need for the newsletter, bugs to fix, pages to design for a new feature)
• Writeboards (e.g. write newsletters, help docs, important emails collaboratively with team members)

It’s also possible to create milestones, but I haven’t explored that properly and I tend to adopt a “it’s done when it’s done” approach to our projects anyway.

The To-Do list feature is easily the most useful. On paper it seems too simple to be effective, but here it from me: it works.

When you create a To-Do list item you can assign it to a particular person (with an optional email alert) and when it’s been completed they just check the “completed” box and it gets struck off the list. There’s something deeply satisfying about ticking stuff off…”done”, “done” and “done”. It’s awesome.

Needless to say, like all good apps these days Basecamp is web-based so everyone’s viewing the same stuff regardless of where they’re working from. Brilliant.

But the single greatest thing about Basecamp is how it lets you leave people alone. In my own time I can create lists and write down ideas without disturbing other people. When they’re ready, they can just sign in and find a list to start working on. People write stuff for me to do too – it’s great and so much more convenient than email. Fewer interruptions, fewer meetings and fewer emails means more time “in the zone” and working. It’s great.

If you’re working in a team I totally recommend you give Basecamp a try.

It seems that eBay has withdrawn the Yahoo Search ads designed to trick people into visiting eBay-owned Kijiji instead of craigslist. Read the craigslist blog for details.

eBay’s ruthless determination to maintain its 28.4% stake in craigslist, combined with its aggressive promotion of Kijiji, seems to suggest that newspapers may not be the only ones being hurt by the free classified model…

Maybe we’re onto something with happysheep?

It’s still very much early days for us, but it’s encouraging to see many of our members working hard distributing happysheep stickers up and down the country. You can see the results of some of their handywork on our Flickr page.

While browsing nzherald.co.nz last night I was shocked to discover this article fixed to the top of the homepage as the leading “news” feature.

Highlights include:

• “Budget overshadowed by doom and gloom” (headline)
• “But the history will mean little to the voting public who seem to be turning their back on the Government in droves as they tighten their belts.”
• “According to recent data most people are better off than they were a few years ago, but the reality is almost everyone feels poorer and it appears they are holding the Government responsible for it.”

You would be forgiven for thinking you’re reading the opinion columns on the back pages. But no, this was the lead homepage feature.

Without facts and figures this type of writing should have no place in a news article.

How exactly are the people of New Zealand “turning their backs”?

Where does “the reality is almost everyone feels poorer” come from? Does the author have some special insight into the “reality” of things that eludes the rest of us?

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to print opinion pieces. It’s interesting, and helps people to make sense of current events. But don’t publish it on the homepage/frontpage of the New Zealand Herald. I believe that most people, either consciously or unconsciously, will read articles published on the frontpage as fact. It’s what we’re trained to do.

Simon posted some interesting thoughts on how this kind of reporting creates self-fulfilling prophecies and I think he’s absolutely right.

When reporting the news, big media sites have a democratic responsibilty to accurately report the facts and allow voters to assess the “reality of the situation” for themselves.

Earlier this month I had a few days down in Queenstown. It was really great to make time away from the computer and it reminded me of how much I feel at home down in that part of the country. I can never properly explain to people who’ve never been there just how spectacular and beautiful the scenery really is. It is completely and utterly amazing. Pictures do it no justice.

Anyway, this started me thinking again about remote work arrangements and how working on web sites should give you the opportunity to do your work outside of the office.

At Zillion/happysheep we have members of our team in Auckland City, the North Shore and all the way down in Oamaru.

Some benefits:

• Less time in meetings
• Fewer distractions
• More alone time to get our work done
• When we do meet, meetings are deliberate and have an agenda

Some drawbacks:

• People aren’t always available to make snap decisions
• No opportunity for spur of the moment brainstorming over lunch
• No office gossip/politics

We use a lot of great tools to work efficiently and effectively in our “virtual office”. We’re all on MSN Messenger, we share our documents using Google Docs, we have a staff forum on Zillion and we’ve recently started getting into Basecamp. If you’re smart about the way you use these tools it really does help ease the pain of distance.

But there’s no denying that face-to-face meetings are important. No question. The key really is how often you need them. Working remotely works for us because all except for one of our team members is no more than half an hour away by car. When we need to get together, we can.

So back to Queenstown. I think I’d like to live down that way some time, but should it ever happen I think flights back to Auckland (or visa versa) would be in order to ensure you don’t completely loose that critical face-to-face time. I reckon you could be inspired to do a lot of thinking with views like this…

No doubt there are plenty of people who work remotely, commute when they have to and enjoy a pretty sweet lifestyle.

If this is you, I’d love to hear your story…

When Rod Drury posted on his blog last week about profit per employee being a key performance indicator I thought he was having a quiet laugh at himself. Today’s announcement that Xero has burned $4.3 million dollars for the year to March seems to confirm that indeed he was.

With operating revenue from customer subscriptions at just $134,000, Xero continued to spend a staggering $5.14 million dollars. I’m no mathematician, but that seems like quite a shortfall. In fact, what Xero burns in a single week could probably have funded Zillion for an entire year. Most uncool.

According to a story that ran on nzherald yesterday, Xero are upbeat about their customer base claiming 1406 customers, compared to a target of 1300 in their offer document. However unfortunately their receipts from customers for the year to May 10 tell the real story, totaling only $213,000 compared to an updated forecast of $250,000 to $350,000 issued just a few months ago at the start of February, and the $550,000 forecast last May. It looks like Xero has discounted their product in order to boost sales.

While having the determination and courage to go “all in” and give something like this a go is admirable and no doubt inspiring to many young people up and down the country, sadly Xero looks set to be the third great example of “how not to do a web project” in a small country like New Zealand. The first being Flying Pig and the second being Ferrit. Spending big money with low revenues and an unproven business model doesn’t seem smart. Keeping it real and growing your team and your infrastructure as you can afford to seems much smarter. That’s what Trade Me did, and Rod was on their board. Did he skip the meetings?

An unhappy ending for Xero will make it really hard for future Kiwi web entrepreneurs to gain support and investment in future projects. It’s tough enough to raise money as it is without high profile sites like Ferrit and Xero burning money and achieving less than spectacular results.

While I believe that going public off the bat and raising $15 million dollars is the wrong way to go about building a web business in New Zealand, on the plus side they’ve clearly hired smart people that don’t suck so it’s still possible to turn things around. If I were in Rod’s shoes I’d straight away be looking for ways to reduce spending. It’s going to take a lot of subscriptions at $49.95 per month to reach break even when your expenses total $5 million a year. If the guys at 37signals can service over 1 million customers who use their web apps with just 11 staff, surely Xero can tighten their belts and do the same?

For the sake of our industry, the talented development team on Xero’s payroll and the Mums and Dads out there who invested money, I really hope the situation at Xero improves quickly.

It was reported last month that eBay has filed a lawsuit against Craigslist (PDF) claiming Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark “breached their fiduciary duties of care, loyalty, and good faith by implementing certain self-dealing transactions… which were designed specifically to benefit themselves to the detriment of eBay.”

Today the full story has been revealed with the announcement that Criagslist has filed its own complaint against eBay (PDF), charging eBay with unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty.

An unhappy partnership indeed.

(Note: eBay owns a 25% minority interest in Craigslist after a former-shareholder  and staff member of Craigslist sold his stake in the company to eBay in 2004).

From the outside looking in, it seems hard to justify eBay’s actions. They’re a shareholder in Craigslist with a seat on the Craigslist board, yet secretly in the background built and launched a competing free classified site: Kijiji. Their position on the Craigslist board no doubt saw them gain access to all sorts of confidential information to aid their efforts with Kijiji. In regards to the “deceptive passing-off” eBay’s ads for Kijiji on Google are about as blatant as they come.

It’s little wonder that Newmark and Buckmaster want nothing to do with eBay and are actively doing whatever they can to protect their control and influence over Craigslist.

Stories like this validate in my mind our decision to keep Zillion an independent company. Over the years we’ve had various people interested in doing JVs etc with Zillion and while it’s always been tempting, it’s never quite been tempting enough.

There’s no doubt that in many ways Zillion could have benefited from the involvement of a larger company (capital, access to media, traffic etc), but as the unhappy eBay/Craigslist marriage illustrates, unfortunately it’s never really that simple.

I feel for the Craigslist guys I really do. Having a lawsuit filed against you by eBay mustn’t be an easy thing to have on your mind, especially when it’s a relationship you didn’t ask for the in the first place.

Good luck guys.

We’ve had a couple of passionate Zillion members bring to our attention that two of our competitors, Webuy and Oneway, are publishing misleading statistics on their web sites, presumably in an attempt to trick people into believing that their sites are bigger and busier than they actually are.

This kind of trickery undermines the trust relationship that exists between web sites and Internet users, and that’s bad, not just for Webuy and Oneway, but for our industry as a whole.

On the Webuy homepage, Webuy claim to have 44,535 items for sale, yet if you count up the category counts on the Browse page the total only comes to 24,711. I’ve emailed Webuy about this on Monday and have so far not received a reply.

Oneway claim to have 603,850 items for sale on their homepage, yet a similar count up of the Browse page suggests the true number is only 40,473 items.  I also emailed Oneway about this discrepancy and received a reply stating…

“…We have what are called inventory auctions.  If you have 10 items to sell
you can queue them up to spawn once one of the items has been sold or
reserve has been met.  This means that you may only see one auction on the
site, but there could be a number of auctions queued behind it…”

Basically what this means is that you can list something for sale (say a 5c piece) and tell the system that you have 1,000 (literally) of them for sale. So instead of the home page listing your 5c piece as one item, it adds 1,000 items to the home page total. This would explain the extraordinary difference between 40,473 items and the 603,850 items they claim to have. It seems that on average, each listing contains 15 items.

Now obviously this matters to me more than the average punter because it makes Zillion look smaller than it really is, but there’s a bigger issue at play here.

When it comes to the Internet there’s a trust relationship that exists between web sites and their users. When users trust us we can tell them good news about how we’re doing and they’ll take our word for it. This trust allows us to build community and for people to feel involved with what we’re doing.

When a small minority of site owners start throwing around misleading statistics it plants a seed in people’s minds that they should doubt all statistics quoted by all web sites. And that sucks.

Given that Trade Me is the market leader in the auction space in New Zealand, my challenge to Oneway and Webuy is to follow Zillion’s lead in adopting Trade Me’s method of counting auctions: one item per listing.

Let’s compare apples with apples.

I’ve always valued people on what they produce rather than the number of hours they’ve spent producing it. This is why we have flexible office hours and work at home arrangements; a culture of judging people by what they contribute to our business, not how long they spend at their keyboard pretending to look busy.

As a company, if we accept contract work and agree to help out with other projects, we try and apply the same thinking. We resist working for an hourly rate that values our time and ties us to a desk, preferring instead to charge people what both parties consider to be good value for our contribution.

I think some people struggle with this and feel somewhat uncomfortable paying a small group of people a lot of money. They’d probably feel more comfortable if we had a bigger team with the money spread around a larger number of people. Lead programmer, assistant programmer and a manager that sits in between them etc. But surely it’s the product that counts? When you buy a car do you ask how many people were employed to build it? Of course not.

To use an example, just yesterday Shane was helping Matt speed up a MySQL query that was taking over 3 seconds. In just a couple of minutes, he made a suggestion that saw the same query reduced to just 100ms. What took Shane two minutes may have taken Matt two days, simply because Shane has more experience in this particular area. When contracting out our expertise to paying clients, how do you put a value on that?

[As an aside, I highly recommend making lots of friends. Where Shane was able to help Matt this time around, Matt has also helped Shane with our own problems, especially around our server environment. Sharing resources and knowledge when you're small is a great way to compete with larger competitors.]

I think Jason Fried from 37Signals says it best, “Remember — size does matter: A small group of 10 great people will outproduce, outwork, outthink a large group of 50 average people.”

Good food for thought.