Lessons From My Favourite Geeks

Geeks are wise. I’ve been at the mercy of many of them. I’ve pleaded for and demanded more white space, redundancy, and speed. I am a better woman because of the push back and expertise of the web designers and code writers who have served me so well.

The finest geeks give you the straight goods on succeeding in a digital world. I bring you their insights and orders:

1. Do what everyone is else doing. Yeah, it’s cool to be an early adopter. But when it comes to the best technology, just copy the cool kids. This site is built in WordPress because it’s the most popular – and therefore most user-friendly, blogging platform. Tried and tested. I send my emails out in Feedburner because my favourite, most popular bloggers use it. I use the tagging system at the end of this blog post because that’s what Seth Godin uses, and he’s like, totally cool.

2. For God’s sake, KEEP IT SIMPLE. < insert pleading sounds > Don’t have two pages when you could put it into one. Flash is evil, splash pages are annoying, no one likes to click more than four times to register for anything.

3. Automate late. Don’t add bells and whistles and functionality until you have to, until your people are begging for it, until your system will bust if you don’t throw some development dollars at it.

4. If you really need it, you can likely get it for free. In all the sites I’ve stood up, I’ve rarely had to pay to have a special piece of code written. Simple usually isn’t “special.” (What is special on the other hand are IT folks who embrace simplicity).

5. You get what you pay for. Experienced geeks get paid what they’re worth.

6. Deadlines make all the difference. If you don’t have an audience clamoring for your brilliant new site or software, then you may feel like you have all the time to finesse and edit and tweak your virtual masterpiece. But you won’t really know how great your work is until you launch it. So…

7. Just launch!