With all the ideas and events swirling through the Windy City during the recent Chicago Ideas Week, one of those thoughts was what I would like to share here, how I took an idea I had and made it a reality. Though this story took place a few years back, it is still very vivid in my mind.

My idea was to create a piece of marketing collateral for my Web consulting business. In this case, I could leave it would a prospect client, allow it to be downloaded from the Web and simply put it out there in printed format, the last 2 cases would be for anyone who wanted it. Depending on where the prospect was, it could server anywhere from a calling card, functional tool or a call to action to contact me.

Origin of the Idea

In my Web consulting business there were 2 categories for prospects – those who did not have a Web site and those who had one and were looking to possibly redesign and/or rebuild it. Where there were many common elements between the 2 for the sales process, when talking with someone who already had a Web site there was always a level of ambiguity to what exactly they needed or wanted to do and to what extent.

To try to streamline this process in a non-intimidating way, I thought of a form of checklist, where someone could read off the list to see if they had any or all of the items incorporated into their Web site, or at least to pose the questions in the event they didn’t know. In my mind’s eye I had a partial vision of the checklist. I saw it as paper-based, as likely someone would read a question from it then look on their Web site on their computer’s monitor for the answer. I wasn’t sure if there should be a score of some form or not. I was very sure I did not want it to be too technical and I did want it targeted to the business owner.

As for what would be in the checklist I had some ideas, but this was something I wanted to put time into over a period of time, then organize them into the checklist.

Like Rodney Dangerfield’s Joke Bag

The process of collecting the items for the checklist had me recalling a story I once heard about the late-great comedian Rodney Dangerfield. Before he got into comedy, he was a salesman and would write jokes on pieces of paper and put them into a duffle bag. When the bag was full, he had the material he would use on stage.

My approach was similar, yet different, as my duffle bag was digital – consisting of folders on my hard drive and in my email program. The ideas I captured varied from text files to links to other Web sites to email newsletters, where some of these items were direct ideas and others either categories or thoughts. I let this collection come together over a period time (exactly how long I do not remember). Then one day I decided to start the process to build the checklist.

Molding the Ideas into the Finished Product

As the collection process had elapsed some time and I didn’t remember everything I had put together, I decided I would go through them, one-by-one and begin curating a list. This was facilitated with the help of my whiteboard. As I read an item, I checked if it I already had it on the board, and if not I added it in some semblance of order. When all was done, this is what my whiteboard looked like:

At first glance, it is a mess. But it was the first pass at the organization of the items and ideas. Needless to say it was worthy of a picture!

From here, I started typing up the ideas, and in some cases I would combine like or similar ones. As I typed them up, I erased them from the whiteboard. At the end of this process hundreds of files and emails were in a clean list, just as clean as the whiteboard now was.

The next step was to boil the list down to a manageable, 1-page list, with the top, most important items on it. This was done over several days, as I would look at the list for a while, then revisit it later with a fresh brain. In the end, I finalized a list of 34 items and broke them down into 3 categories – business, content and design. I also came up with some copy to describe the checklist to put on the reverse side of it. At this point I felt really good about the checklist. Well, except for the name of it.

(Queen’s) Landing on the Right Name

The original name I had for the check was, and get ready for it:

The Web Site Redesign Self-Assessment Checklist

Yes, it sucked. Here I spent all of this time and produced what I felt was a quality product, yet the name would surely be a turn-off, and in some cases scare off people. I decided to put the completed checklist aside as I needed some more quality time to get the name right.

On a Friday evening after work, I went for a walk along Lake Michigan. Armed with a good cigar, I just needed to clear my head after a busy week and stretch my legs. As I was strolling by Belmont Harbor, the topic of the checklist name came front in center in my head. I recall shaking said head and saying to myself, “why don’t I have a better title for this” and the gears in my head started to crank.

As I headed south along the lakefront path, I started decomposing the goal of the checklist. The thought process went something like, “it’s where your Web site is now… it’s a point in time… it’s the current state your Web site is in… wait, that’s it – it’s the State of your Web Site!”

I stopped where I was, at a place along the lake called Queen’s Landing and called my office line and left myself a voicemail message on the name so I wouldn’t forget my inspiration. When I got back from my walk I edited the Word document with the name and then registered the domain name for it.

The State of the State Then and Now

Upon completing the checklist I setup a download page for it and promoted it here on The Hot Iron and elsewhere. I printed copies of it to give people in person and to bring to events as a leave-behind. Although the list never was mentioned on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, it would get a handful of downloads each week and I got good feedback on it from prospect clients and current clients as well.

Now almost 3 years after I created the checklist, it needs to be updated a bit, which would come probably after a new brainstorming session on it. That being said, there are many core concepts on the checklist that are still very relevant today as-is.

See for yourself – download a copy of The State of Your Web Site here right now!

Ideas, Visited

Ideas are just that, intangible thoughts. Without any action, they will remain in that state, floating out there. I know, as The Hot Iron is full of ideas I have had over the years. Where I have acted on many of ideas over the years, I am very proud of the creative process I have just shared here.

Your thoughts – and ideas – on the checklist and the process which led to it are welcome in the comments.

Editor's Note: This post was updated to correct and replace broken links.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Build • Business • Strategize • Technology • The State of Your Web Site • Thrive • Web Design • Web Development • (0) Comments • Permalink

Following the receipt of the loaner Nokia Lumia 925 mobile device from Nokia Connects and capturing its unboxing and first impressions on video, I now had the opportunity to use it. Where I don’t have a SIM card to use it as a phone, I was only able to use it as a WiFi-enabled device. And despite the chance to use a Windows Phone device for the first time, time was not on my side.

Except for a few hours last Sunday, when I took the Lumia 925 with me at about a couple thousand feet over the US Midwest. My friend Walter is a pilot and offered to take me up with him for a flight. Last Sunday was a clear and cool day in the Chicagoland area, so it was perfect for flying. Departing from the airport in Aurora, Illinois, which is west of Chicago, we flew east over Chicago then headed north to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then back south to Chicago and west back to Aurora.

During the flight I took almost 200 pictures and a half dozen videos. Where some of the photos were duplicates of just bad shots, just over 150 of them came out pretty good and I offer you a slideshow of the photos on Flickr, and a playlist of the videos on YouTube – embedded below are links to both.

View the photos below or link to the photos here.

View the videos below or link to the videos here.

Thoughts on the Lumia 925 while taking pictures

Overall, I liked the experience of using the Lumia 925 as a camera. The only features of the camera I used was the zoom and shutter – I did not use or play with any other features, namely as I am simply a point-and-shoot guy, so I would rather manipulate a photo on my PC in PhotoShop than on my device. The best feature to me was the transition when a picture is taken, which is much clearer than the camera “upgrade” with iOS7 for the iPhone. The zoom feature of the camera took somewhat blurry pictures. Now I did not use the camera much at all on terra firma, so I don’t know how the zoom would be on fixed objects. The final thing I missed in the Lumia 925 was the holes for a lanyard or wrist strap, which would have made taking some shots easier.

As for some of the pictures being hazy, these photos were taken between 10 am and noon, and in some cases the sun was not behind me and rather to the side or right in front of me. That tells the difference in the photos of the Chicago skyline as we flew over the city and those when looking north after passing the city, which came out amazingly clear as the sun was behind me.

Thanks Walter!

Thanks again to my friend Walter for taking me up on an amazing tour of the area from an awesome vantage point. I welcome your thoughts on the pictures and videos and you can leave them in the comments of this post.

As a final comment, I am returning the Lumia 925 to Nokia Connects as my 2-week evaluation period is over. Nokia lent me the device with no cost or expectation of how I used it, nor did they ask me to take it in an airplane…

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Mobile Technology • Technology • Thrive • (0) Comments • Permalink

When going through a junk box of stuff recently I found the above-pictured cassette tape. After pondering what was on it for a bit, I realized what it was.

It is my Boston radio commercial debut, dating back to the mid 1990’s.

The commercial is for Fleet Bank, and it was aired during radio broadcasts of the Boston Red Sox, throughout the Boston area as well as in other parts of New England. Thanks to a couple of friends I converted the audio to a YouTube video and you can watch the embedded video below, or listen to it directly from this link to YouTube.

So why was I in a radio commercial for a bank for my baseball team?

And Now For The Rest Of The Story

It was a summer night in Boston and I was going to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. Prior to the game, as I would do for most games, I would have a pint or two of fresh-brewed beer at Boston Beer Works, a brewpub across from the ballpark. This night – and I forget the exact date or even the year – I recalled seeing some people with a digital audio tape recorder and a microphone. Being the former college DJ that I am (was?) I approached them and asked them what they were doing. They explained they were with an ad agency recording stories from fans for a series of radio commercials for the Sox for Fleet Bank, and then they asked me if I had a story. The story you heard in the commercial is what I told them, with a little editing I am sure.

After I recorded the story a couple of times for them, they asked me to sign a form with my name and address, indicating if they wanted to use it they would contact me. They gave me $10 for my time, and went on to talk to other people, as I went to the game. Several weeks went by, and one day I got a voicemail message from the ad agency, Arnold Fortuna Lane, saying they wanted to use my story and needed me to sign paperwork.

What? Me, on the radio? Cool! I called and confirmed my information, and they sent me a non-union talent contract to sign. They said in a few weeks the spots would run on the air and I would even get paid. What? Me get paid for being on the radio? Cool!

The next thing I knew, people were calling to tell me they heard me in the radio spot. I then made a point of listening to entire games on the radio, and there I was, telling people this story. My Mom, who was an avid listener of Red Sox games on the radio, would call me to tell me each time she heard me. Another friend said her Mom almost drove off the road when she heard me. The ad did not run every game, and as it aired later in the season it stopped its run in October. For my voice talent and my story, I got paid US$150.00 - surely not enough to retire on, but a nice bonus nonetheless. They also sent me the copy of the commercial on cassette tape.

That Was Then And This Is Now

I recall it was the mid 90’s as Fleet Bank had just bought another bank in Boston, Shawmut, and was making a big radio campaign with an end-goal of customer retention. Fleet later merged with BankBoston which was later acquired by Bank of America. The ad agency is now known as Arnold Communication. Unfortunately for me the phone did not ring seeking my golden voice endorsing other products, but I went on to a career in the Internet that has led to this recording being unearthed and released for all to hear once again. The Red Sox made some changes since then as well.

Special thanks to 2 distinguished gentlemen who helped me get this cassette to the Web. My good friend and DJ extraordinaire Eric Patel transferred the cassette audio to MP3 format, and veteran Chicago filmmaker and historian Floyd Webb took the audio and made it into a video.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Announcements • Diversions • Social Media • Thrive • (2) Comments • Permalink

Nine months ago I did something that, looking back now, was both a brilliant and educational moment in my life.

No, not “that!” Instead, I quit Facebook.

What did you say Mike, quit “the” social network” Yes, I did. I had thought about it for a while, and when I heard of other smart people I know also getting out of the closed ecosystem like my good friends Jen Hanen and CT Moore, I decided it was time for me to stop the madness myself.

And you read that correctly – I had been thinking about quitting Facebook for a while. Why? The reasons below are many. Blended together, they got me to cancel once and for all.

Nothing Personal

Quitting Facebook had nothing to do with any specific person, people or event. I did not do it in retaliation to anyone for any specific act. Rather, my decision was based on trends around how and what people communicate, actions that were moving in a direction by just about everyone who was using Facebook that I was connected with (and others who were friends of friends) that I did not like. I also count myself in with that grouping of people.

Even though I had amassed quite a large group of “friends” over the years, the quality of communications was not there, only the mass quantity of it. The fact I disconnected from them on Facebook doesn’t mean that I don’t like them, it was the pool we were all swimming in that I didn’t want to be in.

Too Much Information All The Time

Social media is all about sharing. But when everyone is sharing as much as they are, all the time, it can get overwhelming. I was getting drawn into Facebook and was spending too much time separating the wheat from the shaft to find relevant or useful information or engage in somewhat meaningful conversation. A visit to Facebook.com or the app on my mobile device was a time suck, as I was compelled to keep scrolling through until I found something of interest, even though many times I didn’t.

What I was sorting through was another matter altogether. They say that kids say the darnest things, well adults on Facebook are even worse. Just when I thought I had seen and read it all, I would read more and more detail that one wouldn’t normally post to the world, let along share in a whisper. Yet there it is, posted for all to see on Facebook.

One Hot UX Mess

To make matters worse, when Facebook went to the 2-column format, it became far too much for me. It was completely unusable, and compound that with the aforementioned volume of content and it makes for something I found very difficult to read and enjoy. Why subject myself to a (user) experience I did not like? I don’t visit some Web sites because of design and functionality flaws, so why should Facebook be any different.

One thing positive I will say about Facebook is the powerful engine behind that user experience. How often do you get a real error on Facebook? Years ago I attended a local conference and some developers from Facebook were there talking about the architecture of the site, and afterwards I had the opportunity to talk with them one-on-one. I was extremely impressed with their background, experience and the technology behind the site. How it was presented, at least to me, did not live up to what was powering it.

Living McLuhan’s Words

To me, Facebook lived to the letter of the words of Marshall McLuhan in that “the medium is the message.” I had written about this a couple of years ago in a post here on the Hot Iron titled Streaming Awareness By how I lamented about missing the birth of friends’ kids that were only announced over social media, and I never saw the original post. Needless to say, it continued. There were more I missed, though each time I did bring it to the parents’ attention my dismay – once it even compelled someone to send old-fashioned birth announcements by postal mail!

This changing of how we communicate feels almost like a cheapening of the interaction between people. Miss a small couple of word post on someone’s wall and you could miss out on seeing someone visiting town, and then the person who posted those few words thinks you are ignoring them. Yes, that happened to me once. Now I am not saying we all need to grab our quill pens, ink reservoirs and parchment paper and write long letters. Any tool of communication can be used wisely or poorly. Where changing your relationship status to “single” can inform the world of a divorce or major break-up, there are certainly classier, more tasteful ways to do so.

There was at least one time when Facebook put in a chance to only display the posts of people you recently communicated with. Huh? Yes, so if I was communicating a lot with 20 people, I would predominantly see the posts from them, and anyone else I may not see at all. When I heard about this I was shocked and undid the setting, and low and behold I was hearing from everybody, as I should be. It’s one thing if I make such a setting change, but I certainly don’t want someone telling me what I read and do not read.

And Now A Word From Our Investors

I will certainly not say that I predicted the snooping and tapping of electronic messaging on networks and social media sites by the US government. When I read the article in Time magazine when Mark Zuckerberg was named Person of the year in 2010, there is a direct mention about US FBI Director Robert Mueller walking in on the interview -. Why was the FBI Director at Facebook headquarters? I’ll leave it at that – read the article for yourself.

Nobody Seemed To Notice

Over the last 9 months, I have only heard from 3 people who said they tried to reach me on Facebook but could not find me. There were some that I told about my decision, and I certainly mentioned it more than once on Twitter. I had changed my Facebook picture and banner to the image at the top of this post, but once thing I did not do was inform people through Facebook that I was going to quit. Why? More so out of curiosity if anyone would realize I was no longer in their “stream” of consciousness. This experiment in social media was correct, but sad in its own right.

Don’t Call Me Anti-Social (Media)

Though I am not on Facebook, I am not shying away from social media. I am on Twitter @thehotiron, and this blog is my primary channel for longer form writing, longer than 140 characters anyway.

I have been drawn to Twitter because of its simplicity and binary nature – what I put out there is out there, and what I send as a direct message, which I use infrequently, is not. I find it easy to have conversations with individuals and on occasion with groups, though I don’t often participate in Twitter chats which are commonly driven by a unique hashtag. I also find it easy to pickup on a conversation and continue it later with the medium. My Twitter client of choice is HootSuite on the PC, though I am using the Twitter.com Web interface more and more as it has evolved tremendously. Twitter for me is like the water cooler or barstool in the local pub.

Blogging is something I enjoy and don’t do nearly as much as I used to and not as much as I would like to. In one regard it is an outlet for the things in my head, and in another it is a way to share and start a conversation. Where my tweets tend to be forgotten over time, my blog posts are still out there, and older ones still draw comments (even real, legit ones too!) and are shared by others. The Hot Iron is like a fireside chat or sitting down with a scotch and cigar among friends.

Looking Ahead And Always Evaluating

Facebook is not the only game in town. If you quit Facebook it should not be the end of your social media activity or identity. I have written before here at The Hot Iron about managing your online presence and I will continue to do so. But at the end of the day, what you do online should be only a part of who you are. So whether you call, tweet or write longhand, you are greater than the tools you use to communicate.

Your comments, as always, are welcome and encouraged!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Blogging • Social Media • Technology • Thrive • (4) Comments • Permalink

When I think back to all of the "smart" devices I have owned, going back almost 15 years with my original Palm Pilot, they always came with a cradle – a stand / holder that served multiple purposes from presenting the device to charging it.

With today’s smart devices, they do not come with any form of cradle from the manufacturer, and any cradles I have seen are more for charging them rather than their presentation or protection on your desk. I find this odd, especially with the escalating cost of these devices. However, there is an alternative that may bring the cradle back – the Wedge by Toddy Gear.

The Wedge is a pyramid-shaped bean bag-like item item with a lip for holding a mobile device into place as it rests on the shape. As a result of its flexible shape, you can place almost any device in it and at a comfortable viewing angle. The Wedge is made from the same material as cleaning cloths that Toddy Gear, a Chicago firm, creates for cleaning and polishing mobile devices, thus allowing you to do the same thing with the item you support the device with. As a result you have a highly functional and attractive item on your desk for holding your highly functional and attractive mobile device.

I have taken some pictures of the Wedge I have been using for the past several months along with my Nokia E7, my past device. Below is an embedded slideshow of the pictures of it on my Flickr account and you can also view the set of pictures by following this link.

As you can see, I can orient the device however I want. Though these pictures don’t show the power cord, I can also place the device however with it, or with headphones, and it holds it fine, especially as no cords actually go through the Wedge itself, just go out the sides of the device, so it is not in the way of them. The Wedge is also small and lightweight enough that I can throw it in my computer bag and take it with me to other places or even on vacation without taking up much room.

When device manufacturers today talk about "ecosystems" of mobile devices they often are referring to the device itself, its operating system, apps and maybe an accessory or two. There was a time when ecosystem included all of the main accessories you would use with a device. When I think back to even my Palm smartphones they came with a cradle for holding and charging the device and even charging a spare battery. Sure there were third-party or aftermarket accessories, but the main ones from the manufacturer were ones you would always want and get. The Toddy Gear Wedge is filling that gap for me, as well as the physical gap between my devices and my desk.

For full disclosure, I was given the Wedge by the brother of the founder of Toddy Gear, whose son used to go to school with my daughter! That being said, I was not asked to write this – the device itself compelled me to share my experience with this great item with my readers.

So what do you think? Do you own one? Do you want to own one? Is a flat surface enough for you? Share your thoughts in the comments of this post.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Mobile Technology • Technology • Thrive • (2) Comments • Permalink