Web Site Design and Development

Lately I’ve been really trying to blog more and Twitter more and FaceBook more.

I’m not sure why yet.  I thnk I might be selling something someday, but I’m not sure what.  This is probably how people should sell on social media, rather gently.  There’s a company near here that I added to my friends on Twitter, because they asked an interesting question or two about the area, and their first response was to send me a private message with “How can we help you with your [company business related] needs?”

Well, you can’t, really, I was just saying hello.

On the other end of the spectrum, I noticed that Jay Thompson has thousands of followers.  That guy is everywhere.  And he doesn’t sell, but if I had a referral I’d give it to him, because I know who he is.  He’s very nice.

On the non-business side of the spectrum we have Purva Brown.  Purva just enjoys Facebook and talks about what she likes to talk about, and has a good time.  I admire that.

Even though I’m trying hard to feel my way around the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon, the core problem I have is threefold: 

• As often as not, I have nothing (or very little) to say.
• I have a really hard time just going out there and saying nothing, because people who update me on the kind of trivial details that I generally have in stock bore the daylights out of me, and I don’t want to inflict that on others.
• I don’t take a lot of pictures.  I don’t know why.  I have a nice camera.

I think to be really successful at social media, you have to be just confident enough in yourself to blab at the mouth a lot, yet not so egotistical that you feel the need to have something to say.

Take this post.

Please.

Well, leave it to Andrew Rhee, my very smart friend, to finally teach me what social network marketing is about.

The problem I had in understanding social network marketing was that when I first encountered it, it was as a Realtor, and most of my colleagues were just setting up pages like “Podunk Real Estate” and asking me to be fans.  This struck me as rather self serving and not very interesting.

Andrew straightened me out the other day by telling me that he rarely goes on Google except to find information, but when a friend recommends something (on Twitter, for example), he often is very interested.  Oh, yeah, I get that!  That’s plain old vanilla referral marketing, only with a web site as a telephone.

Bear with me:  I’m old.

So anyway, I’m going to start fooling around more with integrating social network content into my sites.  That would be in between making drastic changes to my life, working, learning Spanish, and going to the gym.

Well, at least I’m not bored.

So this post serves to announce that intention to my legions of raving fans.  Oh, right.  As well, it’s a test post, since I’ve just set up TwitterFeeds to Twitter and the MyFace, aka Facebook.

Let’s see if I can read myself there by writing myself here.

You may have heard that a real estate blog can help your online marketing. Blogs — web sites or web pages with entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the most recent posts are on top — are becoming more and more popular, but why should a hard working Realtor® devote the time to write a new web site entry once a month or once a week or — horror of horrors — every day?

I mean, let’s face it, we want to be selling, right, not writing? Isn’t that what being a Realtor® is about, isn’t that how we get paid, by selling?

Well, done correctly, blogging is selling. No, I don’t mean you should promote yourself directly in a blog, that’s not it at all. Nothing is more entertaining (in a "laughing at you not with you" sort of way) than reading a blog that says something like "I specialize in providing real estate service to buyers and sellers." Oh, really, you mean the kind with money?

Yes, blogging is about selling, but it’s not about the presentation stage — it’s about prospecting. Let’s look briefly at two important ways a blog can give your online marketing campaign a boost.

1) The Traditional Search Engines – Publish or Perish

The academic world used to be — maybe still is — dominated by the phrase "publish or perish". As search engines become more and more sophisticated in their ability to separate spam from content, having heaping helpings of the latter at every turn has become more and more critical. The days when one could do any good by stuffing the "keywords" meta tag full of what you wanted the search engines to find you for were short lived at best and are now nothing more than a dim memory. Moreover, simply getting tons of reciprocal links won’t help you build your reputation as well — or as quickly — as it once did. Google and other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms — the rules they use to index content — to make every kind of cheating you can think of more difficult to do.

Trust me on this: you’re going to have to break down and write something.

Search engines want to see sites with lots of content. There’s also at least anecdotal evidence that search engines prefer content that is fresh and updated regularly. Search engines prefer sites with incoming (and outgoing) links that are related to the theme of the site. Bloggers tend to link avidly, both in the text of the posts themselves and in blog rolls — those collections of links you see on blogs.

2) A Whole New Audience

In addition to the major boost you get from the traditional search engines, blogging introduces you and your services (and perhaps your existing web site) to a group of clients and online searchers who may not have found you any other way. The blogging world — sometimes called the "blogosphere" — has its own directories (like this one), and even its own subculture. There are specialized search engines like Technorati that are updated in real time as new posts are written. Most of all, the blogsphere is populated by lots of readers, and if you have the best real estate blog in town. Many faithful blog readers use aggregators — special online services or desktop software — to track several blogs at once. Sure, not everyone falls into this category, but those that do are yours to gain or lose. Some sites like this one will even republish summaries of your content — and that means even more free links to you! (If you have a blog already and would like to add your blog to this site, click here.

Getting started is fairly easy, and inexpensive. Technorati has a good introduction to what blogging is all about, Blogging 101. You can get a blog started fairly easily at Blogger.com (Free), or Typepad ($4.95 per month and up). If you have an existing web site on an Apache host (ask your web company if unsure), your webmaster may be able to integrate Wordpress into your site. Having a blog be a natural part of your site helps your site build content and get the benefits of all that good writing you’ll be doing, but it does require more technical expertise to get started.

Most of all, you’ll need to set aside a small amount of time to keep your blog updated. Remember, blogs are like news feeds or diaries, the best ones are up-to-date. A small post every day is a good goal at first to really get the traffic going, but you can cut back to twice a week or less and still be considered fairly current. For ideas, check out other Realtor’s® blogs like the ones we link to here. One idea we get a lot of mileage out of are market updates. They’re fairly easy to prepare, and they offer a good service with local information. Some blogs that feature market updates fairly heavily are my Sacramento Blog and Gary and Lori Woods’ Beautiful Santa Barbara blog.

The customary joke for an off-key vocalist or a corny jokester is “don’t quit your day job”.

I had lunch with a friend a few days ago, who’s response to my trial organizational charter was that there was nothing original in it to attract investors except for the organizational structure.

It seems to me he missed the point of an employee owned company.  We don’t have investors, except the employees who invest their time and talent.  And to be sure, nothing in what I’ve proposed so far amounts to the invention of the World Wide Web or the discovery of a way to turn discarded laptop batteries into crude oil.  So as entrepreneurs go I’m a total drudge. 

Even the organizational structure is old hat.  They even have a sort of chamber of commerce you can join, which as far as I can tell from their like benefits page is like most chambers of commerce.  For a couple of hundred bucks a year, they’ll  take you’re money and send you a newsletter.  Nice work if you can get it.

(Now, now.  Nobody wants to own a business with a smartass, John).

“So”, I might have asked my friend at lunch, “what’s your idea?”

If you guessed "he didn’t have one”, you win a Nobel Prize for guessing.  But it doesn’t come with a stipend like a real Nobel Prize, so don’t quit your day job.

Mostly we talked about my friends position vis a vis capitalists past and future, so I wasn’t able to wrest the blueprints for the Wheel-less Seque or the Kindle Bottle-opener from him before lunch ended.

I probably shouldn’t dwell so much on the dark side.  I got a nice note from Jason Mott over at Ronin offering to help me get ParticleWave off the ground, and I got a comment from Dave.

Heck, we’re practically Edison’s lab already, and thank God we’re not in New Jersey.

I’m going to just go along as though I were an employee owned company already, since if you have one guy, the difference between one guy and an employee owned collective works out to be simply a matter of emphasis.

It changes the to-do list a bit, but not by much.  I downloaded Skype so I could work remotely with people who aren’t in my company yet, in case they should end up existing.  I may upgrade my Unfuddle Account.  There may be a spreadsheet or a new bank account involved, to show the newcomers how many hours I’ve worked and how much I’ve capitalized so far.

Who can turn the world on with her smile?
Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?
Well it’s you girl, and you should know it
With each glance and every little movement you show it
Love is all around, no need to waste it
You can have a town, why don’t you take it
You’re gonna make it after all
You’re gonna make it after all.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this musical interlude as much as I have.  I know, I know:  don’t quit your day job.

I have a few conservative friends. I can’t help it. I live in El Dorado County, not Berkeley. One of my conservative friends who I haven’t seen in a few years used to say that his quarrel with liberals was that they had a lot of knee-jerk ideas. A search for "knee jerk liberal" returns 431,000 Google results, while "knee jerk conservative" returns only 408,000, which proves (scientifically, of course) that liberals have 5.6% more knees than conservatives.

Our abundance of knees is why conservatives less often have a leg to stand on. Unfortunately, this also means we liberals have 5.6% more jerks, so don’t rest on your laurels just yet.

What Has Liberalism to Do With Open Source?

Nothing.

Surprised?  You may find one of your mental knees trying to jerk as we speak.  People seem to innately associate open source with Barrack Obama, gay marriage, and the rest of the rebel alliance, while of course when we think closed source, we generally think of Microsoft, which conjures up Darth Vader, Dick Cheney, and the tanks at Tiananmen Square.

Hey, don’t blame me.  I didn’t make up your mental categories.

I do however find this very interesting.  I was beginning to think about this as I started to notice that everywhere I turned when starting to think about creating an Employee Owned Software Collective, I found that the companies out there were all open source companies.  The first company I came across was the Ronin Tech Collective, who describe themselves thus:

We are a worker-owned and operated technology collective, focused on workplace democracy and promoting a democratic society while supporting progressive businesses, non-profits, and cooperatives by providing open-source website development and consulting.

I have an email out to them, because that’s all good.  (I’m not religious about languages – good socialist that I am, I’m atheistic about them).  My point, again, though is that the assumption is that progressivism and open source go together.  Check out the United Federation of Worker Cooperative’s welcome of their newest member, which I’ll reprint here since ultimately they’ll end up with a still newer member and the link would be no good:

Welcome to our newest member! Passionate about sustainability,this web design and custom application developer has deep roots in Seattle’s progressive communities.

Now if you navigate to the company in question, you’ll find that they “[serve] sustainability-driven businesses and organizations with professional Internet expertise.  We build highly interactive websites with open source software to help you achieve your goals.”

Of course, if you’re going to “support progressive businesses” or serve “sustainability-driven businesses”, you need to be open source, right? 

Why?  For the same reason “stark” doesn’t go with “hungry”.  Nobody’s stark hungry, though we know stark means completely.  If you’re stark, then by golly, we all know you’re stark naked.

When I mentioned to my wife that I was thinking about starting an employee owned collective, fine wife as she is, she didn’t say, “What, are you crazy?  You have a good job, you’ll go broke.”  What she said was:  “You should look into Open Source.”

Is There Anything Wrong With This?

So what’s wrong with a company using Open Source and being Progressive?  Nothing at all.  Here are a few ideas though:

1. Don’t Limit Your Customer Base
   Yes, there are a lot of companies who are building curly light-bulbs or selling low cruelty mochas, but why should we as an employee run business sell only to them?  What if the National Rifle Association wants a web site?  Do we turn them down? 
2. Serve Your Employees
   I just talked to a friend I’ve known for some forty-nine years or so, when our mom’s used to stick us in the same playpen so they could talk.  He told me the story of how a bank he used to work for as a DBA wanted to switch from SQL Server to PostgreSQL, and his initial reaction was:  “I don’t want that on my resume.”  He went on to tell how he met some folks at a PostgreSql conference who told him the story of how they were travelling in a van and concerned that if the Van crashed, there’d be no more PostgreSQL support.   Programmers want to work in a place where there skills are transferrable.  This is so they can take their marbles and go home if your project gets too stupid.  Try this:  go up on Dice and search for “Ruby on Rails”, then search for “ASP.NET”.  I will wait here for you.
3. Open Source is Good Because It’s Free
   Well, this is partially true.  I’m always amazed at how many blogs about ASP.NET are running on Wordpress or Blogspot or another non-ASP platform.  At the same time, I see the fact that open source Application Service Provider companies don’t offer an upgrade and consulting path for medium to large businesses who want a Microsoft hosted platform to be hosted in house to be a huge opportunity. 

   Moreover, as a programmer, free software is not good.  Software that I own (in whole or in part) and can sell is good.  Does that mean I’m going to do a bad job or not offer my clients a fair price?  No, it just means I’m not working for free.

   Labor union organizers had a word for people who did things cheaply for the bosses.  They called them scabs.  Of course, in the course of things, labor unions and socialism gave way to liberalism.  (Love me, love me, love me, I’m a Liberal).  Today we who are afraid to be called liberals are known as progressives, and we lament the fate of workers around the world while refusing steadfastly to pay for music, software, or anything else of artistic value.

Win-Win or Don’t Play

The problem of course with working as a programmer for a big company is that you’ don’t have a say in how the software is created.  Working open source, you can do whatever you want for free, and then try to sell that to people who by definition don’t pay for things.  Working as an employee-owner in a closed source shop, you can build your skills and own the software that is sold and forms the basis of the consulting business –  the “means of production”, if you will.  Your clients will benefit from your longevity to the company and the dedication with which you take a long term view to create outstanding software.  Everybody wins.  And nobody gets run over by a tank.

ParticleWave is currently being organized as startup employee owned cooperative, owned and controlled exclusively by its employees.

This document is a DRAFT of how that might look – based on one founder’s take on how we might be organized and do business.  If others are interested and committed to this idea, then we should probably get together weekly or something and go through this process.

This document consists of the following sections.

• Business Activities
• DRAFT Organizational Structure
• Related Resources / Reading

Business Activities

ParticleWave owners will create multiple lines of business that will, in our consensus opinion, be rewarding to the membership both as people who need to eat and as creative software developers.  Some potential business activities include:

• Application Service Provider Model Applications
  We will create commercial web applications using ASP.NET MVC or other web development environments that will compete directly and favorably with solutions developed by companies like 37 Signals (a Ruby on Rails shop).  Unlike 37 Signals, however, we will also offer these applications as licensed solutions sold with or without an associated consulting engagement.   [My own preference is to see this grow into our core business model].
• Consulting and Contract Programming and Web Development
  In addition to creating long term value through service applications owned by the company, we will also create software to be owned by clients.

DRAFT organizational structure.

The word owner is used throughout as a synonym for owner-employee.  Although we may from time to time hire employees who are not asked to stay on as owners (temp workers, contractors, or potential owners on probation), the company will be 100% owned by active employees.  (The only exception to this rule is outlined below in “Legacy Ownership”).  There is therefore no stock sold outside the company.  Also, as much as possible, we will try to have work performed by employee owners, so temporary workers should be the exception and not the rule.  It is not our intent to create a core of “senior partners” who benefit from the work of others, but a true cooperative system.

Company Shares

All owners receive one ownership share for every hour of work contributed that is either billable outside the company or contributes to the goals of the company as laid down by the voting owners.  A share is a percentage of the yearly profit payout if the company is profitable, with the downside risk that the hour could have been better spent playing World of Warcraft or eating a hamburger.   This is not a stock option, which we all know often turns out to be valueless toilet paper, but a full ownership share, which may also turn out to be valueless toilet paper.

We will create a mechanism for tracking hours that the members can use.  The current number of shares, amount of capitalization, and other income and expense information will be available to all members.

Company shares may not be transferred or sold.

Voting Members

Owners who are skilled enough to work billable hours and who wish to help direct the affairs of the company and make a more significant contribution may, with the approval of the existing voting members.  Voting members will capitalize the company.  The capitalization requirements are $4,800, payable as either:

• Twenty-four monthly payments of $200.
• Forty-eight monthly payments of $100.

Voting members expect to work for the company full time, either now or as soon as practicable.

Management

The company is managed by the informed consensus of all voting owners.

A Board of Directors consisting of not more than five owners will be elected every six months.  Their responsibilities will be limited to the following areas of concern:

• Ensuring compliance with Federal, State, and Local laws and tax requirements.
• (Annually) setting the ratio of gross receipts to be allocated to the general fund versus the membership fund.  The general fund should consist of the no more than the amount needed to cover the expenses of the business, plus a prudent reserve.
• Working with those outside the company (sales, managing vendors etc). Working with the ownership at large to reach a consensus on any and all hiring or firing decisions.

Members of the board will make the same compensation as anyone else, assuming anyone else does.  Also, the board should be mindful that it’s purpose is to serve the owners collectively.  Shares of ownership and the corresponding dividend payments will always be equal among Non-Voting Members, Voting Members, and the Board.  There are no preferred shares, and the rule is one hour of work, one share.

All other company affairs will be decided at a company meeting to be held at regular intervals.   This document naturally can’t cover everything we do.  Initially, the meetings will be held weekly.  Any matter may be raised by any voting owner, with the outcome to be decided by as much as possible by a consensus.   In the event a consensus cannot be reached, the outcome will be decided by a simple majority.

Legacy Ownership

• Capital shares must be transacted within 90 days of an owner’s termination of their employment.
• Work shares are retained according to the work share formula described in the section “Ownership Share Formula.”

Further Reading

What is an Employee Owned Cooperative.
This article is an excellent introduction to how Employee Owned Cooperatives may be structured.

U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives
Organization consisting of member companies organized as cooperatives.

The Rochdale Prinicples
A core set of principles and values that many co-op organizations follow.

California Center for Cooperative Development
State analog to the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.  There’s a lot of good information here including an introduction to Worker Owned Co-Operatives.

National Center for Employee Ownership
A detailed resource of information we may need going forward.

Ronin Tech Collective.
A Vermont web development software company organized as an Employee Owned Cooperative