It was a lot of fun to track Google Analytics last year. Since I started writing this blog in mid 2008, traffic to my one-page site has been increasing.

Have a look at the visitors graph:

Can you tell when this blog was launched?

It’s interesting to see the different implications each post had. For instance, one of the first about uppercasing the first letter of a MySQL result value, has brought 313 visitors to this site (through almost as many search phrases) while the one about a Euro conversion rate feed brought none.

As a side note: close to 63% of these visitors used FireFox.

Besides that, bounce rate is at an extremely high 75%. While this is normal since the only thing this site has to offer is that once specific piece of information someone was looking for, it should be fairly easy to have visitors browse through more than one page.

If time was on my side and I would be short on work, that would probably be a fun challenge!

It’s great to use these experiences in other projects though.

If you live in Belgium, you may get a “private” call once in a while (and no, I do not mean calls from your mistress). I have no idea if it exists in other countries, but these calls appear on your phone with an unknown or hidden phone number.

Some people probably have a solid reason to hide their number and I will respect their choice. But if a business has requested their phone company to hide their number, I am clueless.

Why on earth would they do that?

I have no intention to ever pick up the phone when I receive a “private” call. Never.

If, for some obscure reason, you have such a hidden number and you cannot change it before you start calling, it may be a good idea to leave a voicemail message.

There are some companies (especially in the recruitment sector) that do not get why this may be a smart thing to do. If you are the owner or decision-maker of such a company, I have one small request: please, do everyone a favor and get another job.

Finally. May this be the beginning of common sense.

If Guy Kawasaki (yes, the one from the motorcycles) states:

Focus on function, not form. Mea culpa: I love good form. MacBooks, Audis, Graf skates, and Breitling watches.

maybe others will follow and finally wake up.

Read the rest of his post about bootstrapping here.

Because even the current president of the United States has heard of the economic crisis, I felt the need to hold a small survey with Belgian customers/colleagues/friends about their vision on what is currently happening.

While it is probably still too early to see significant effects, it’s nice to know what entrepreneurs with a similar activity think and experience.

15 people, all self-employed and active in ICT, send in their responses within the first 3 weeks of November. 5 of them are consultants with a limited amount of clients, while 10 run a company with a larger amount of customers. Because it is difficult to compare their experiences directly, I’ve split up the results:

Feedback of ICT companies on the current economic turmoil.

While the larger companies in this group tend to have a better planned long term vision and the smaller ones state to have none, they do not notice a change in their own business nor act pro-actively. A fairly large part of them notices some effect on their clients. Some doubt about hiring new staff, while others think this is the best moment to do so.

Feedback of ICT consultants on the current economic turmoil.

Although the low amount of participants makes it difficult to conclude anything, the result is aligned with companies with a larger amount of customers. Consultants receive a large part of their income from fixed budget projects and thus are not affected immediately. They also state to never plan ahead more than one year. Their clients, outsourcing companies, expect to see major changes around mid Q1 2009 when the current budgets will be replaced with (less) new ones.

I want express my gratitude to the brief and useful answers that were provided. Thank you all!

Please do not feel offended if I forgot to contact you, but do so if you didn’t answer. Shame on you!

I hope you found this useful: please let me know.

As I went through the CSS related books I ordered first, here’s another one: The Art and Science of CSS.

Since this is the first book I ever ordered published by the famous Australian web design/development community I must admit I didn’t expect it to be of the same “level” as an O’Reilly book for instance. But that didn’t turn out to be an issue at all. On the contrary: given the books structure I don’t think they could have done a better job explaining the different subjects they picked.

While the structure is in some way similar to Bulletproof Web Design, this book describes a few different common scenario’s you’ll come across. Although they are not similar to the former, I find them better explained. Where Bulletproof Web Design is suited for a broader audience, this one touches the limits of CSS support in the current browser versions (pre-IE 8).

One section that I found particularly useful was the one about Forms. It basically tells you how to fine-tune to the default Zend_Form set-up many people have been struggling with.

My opinion

I think people new to markup - layout separation, should read one of the other SitePoint books first. After that, The Art and Science of CSS is one you should keep on your desk when crafting XHTML & CSS pages.

Many freelancers and small businesses don’t like to write quotes and proposals. Depending on the project, me neither. I especially dislike getting into it. Once you get going, it doesn’t seem so bad.

In my case one of the reasons is that I like working on actual projects better. Since I have more than enough work to do, quotes mostly just get pushed back to the last hours of the day.

Lyndoman from Cornwallseo doesn’t like them either.

But don’t despair! There is someone who does. Steven from Zion (Dutch) told us multiple times he likes it at least as much as coding. And according to him, if I remember correctly, he has an extremely high success rate of 80% (where mine is below 50%). Being pickier about the projects you accept and the time you put into your quote of course has an effect on this.

But why not start www.IWriteYourQuote.com? The one that writes the quote gets 20% (with a low border for small projects) if it gets accepted. You can end up with something like Elance, oDesk or crowdSPRING, but it doesn’t have to be that big.

I recently bought 7 books on Amazon and I will try to write a review of each as I read them. Note: this could take some time because of my workload.

The first one is Bulletproof Web Design by (the famous) Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits.

“The book contains several guidelines to help prepare compelling designs for worst-case scenarios, increasing user control and readability for varying text sizes and amounts of content.”

It explains clearly (as clear as a book can ever get) what best practices are for some common web design scenario’s. It is not a bible nor a reference: it roughly takes 10 common problems you may have experienced (or will someday) and tells you how do to this in a bulletproof way. Personally, I could also see benefits in taking one “project” (website) and applying all best practices to that one subject (for continuity), but the author chose to do this with separate examples. I guess the book benefits from that by the very low prerequisite knowledge you need to read it.

My main intention when buying this book was to verify if my xHTML & CSS knowledge was up to date by comparing it to Dan’s preachings. You can argue that this book isn’t the most appropriate since it was published in 2005 (although this is the second version, published in 2007) with techniques that could be outdated. I hardly believe this is an issue though. For example: a layout made with web standards for IE7, FireFox 2 and Safari 2 should not break on IE8, FireFox 3 or Chrome (note the “should” of course).

My opinion

A must read for anyone writing (x)HTML & CSS. I guarantee you will learn at least 5 important best practices or improve your knowledge of them which makes it worth every penny.
Most certainly if you ever wondered how to get those floating containers to do exactly what you want on every browser!

Lets say the unlikely occurs: you have too much spare time and you want to come up with a great idea to build your next “web 2.0″ project around. Of course you need an idea that will (at some time) generate revenue. I mean: everything but the next Twitter.

This could get you going: have a look at subjects you’re interested in yourself. The obvious ones: your hobbies, your education, your work,… or something you’ve always wanted to do. It’s a good thing if you already know a lot about the subject. That cuts costs in getting content and of course shines off in the actual result.

Some guidelines when picking a subject/sector:

• An outlined niche is always good: the bigger the audience, the bigger your project will be.
• It’s easier when your audience is already accustomed to the web, but there may be less competition in “emerging” markets.
• Evaluate competition but do not let them dispose a perfectly good idea.

Take that subject and have a look where money transfers from one person or company to another. If no money is involved, it may be good to stay away (watch out for the Twitter-syndrome).

Now think about what you can create to:

• Improve/enhance the way “business” is done.
• Raise the income that is made out of each action.
• Make the whole process easier.

Depending on the subject you chose, that should not be that hard at all.

And that’s it: if you picked a good subject you should already be motivated and full of ideas. Just find a nice URL and get going!

Some examples of projects along this line: flickr, Adwords, eBay, Basecamp, Blinksale, Copilot, SeoMoz,…

When you have finally built the next best thing in Web 2.0-land and are looking for more customers, visitors, subscribers,… maybe this approach can help you.

You have probably built your project with a specific audience in mind (if for some unexplainable reason you did not, take time to think of that now and evaluate if everything still aligns!). Now use the web to get lists of that target groups’ contact details.

Let’s say your customers are small businesses. Try looking for lists of their certifications: they always like to mention their contact details (just like you need to do yourself). Or if you are looking for people that like to travel, use social networking sites to pull out lists of people that indicated they like visiting specific countries.

The concept is: there are lists of contact details for almost everything. Think about where your prospects gather. The only thing you need to do afterwards is go through them and contact them. As personal as possible. It doesn’t harm to get a good copywriter (Dutch) to create an attractive e-mail or letter of course.

Even with an average success rate of 5%, that can be more rewarding than “lazy” alternatives like Google Adwords because you are 100% certain the people you contact are your audience.

Let’s just hope they take the bait!

Steven pointed me to Guy Kawasaki who wrote a short but inspiring post about entrepreneurship in general.

Venture capitalists like Guy seem to be rare or unexisting in mainland Europe as far as I know. You have business angels who do invest but rarely in Web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

Well… it may be even better to do it all by yourself if you can. And on the web, you can.

A recommendation to get even more motivated: Getting Real by 37signals.