Archive for November, 2011

The End of Flash as We Know It

Posted by Jason Shindler in business tips on November 9, 2011

The handwriting has been on the wall for the past year, but today’s it is official: Adobe is abandoning efforts to support Flash on mobile devices a Browser plug-in. This means that in the future, all Flash-only sites (like ours and many others — we’re already working on a new version of our site, are others?) will not work on any mobile devices.

To us, this isn’t a surprise — we’ve been advising clients to avoid Flash for most of this year. Even before this announcement, Flash sites didn’t work on Apple’s handheld devices. A few months ago, Microsoft announced that Flash wouldn’t work on future Microsoft tablets. And many Android devices that supported Flash didn’t have enough processing power to handle the sites well.

Flash will live on in certain PC-only Web sites and as a standalone program.  Though, the era of Flash on Web sites is over.

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Get Rich Quick!

Posted by Jason Shindler in business tips on November 1, 2011

We get a lot of calls from folks that are starting businesses. Some have some unreasonable expectations that I figured I would share:

  • When I start my business, people will start using my Web site without me having to do anything.
  • There are some easy special things I can do to my Web site to attract a lot of new customers.
  • I want to start the next Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist or eBay.
All of these expectations remind me of a “Get Rich Quick” scheme. The scheme usually goes like this: spend some amount of money on a book, program, or training materials and you will become rich. These schemes never work for a simple reason: if getting rich was so easy, everyone would do it and then everyone would be rich, which means no one would be rich.
The fact is that starting a business requires hard work, both in creating a product or service folks want and getting the word out about your new business.  If you do these things well, you can be successful. In fact, the odds can be in your favor that you will be successful, but only if you avoid the “Get Rich Quick” mentality.

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