At least that’s the idea I got the other day from a fellow motorist while on my way home from a work project.  Driving down the road, I watched as the driver of the Jetta in front of me rolled his window down and threw his trash on the curb.  Ironically, his bumper sticker was adorned with all sorts of “green living” and sustainability bumper stickers.

Even his license plate screamed “eco-friendly.”  It was a phonetic variation of the phrase “use bio-diesel.”

This kind of behavior is what gives proponents of green living a bad reputation.  On the one hand, they’re doing mountains of good by promoting positive messages, developing environmentally sound products, and generally increasing public consciousness about conservation.  In the past few years I’ve seen curbside recycling bins overtake and greatly surpass their garbage counterparts.  I’ve also seen more people biking to work and sharing the carpool lane than previous years.

But it’s the few that embrace this message in public and deny it in private that set things back.  The idea of being one person in one environment and shedding that persona once on your own destroys many movements, and serves as a suicide pill to any brand.

When I worked for the Boy Scouts, we used the concept of on-stage versus off-stage.  Whenever you were in front of the Scouts, you were on-stage, meaning you were playing the character of the upstanding citizen, prepared Scout, and roll model.  When your uniform was off and you were out of town with your friends (or in the staff-only areas at camp) you could participate in off-stage behavior – less “appropriate” language and the like.

I didn’t realize until some time later that this dichotomy in our behavior was setting things up to fail.  Even when you were outside of camp, you could run into a Scout.  Off-stage behavior would destroy any sense of moral equity you’d built up at camp and destroy the image and brand the staff had worked so hard to create.

In reality, there is never an appropriate venue for off-stage behavior because your brand is always on-stage!

Many times, your off-stage behavior does more to define your brand than your on-stage behavior.  Are you a good driver because you stop at every stop sign during the day?  Or because you still stop at every one at 2am when no one is watching?  As J.C. Watts once said, “character is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.”

Branding is living your story when no one’s looking, too.

For example, I always type my bank’s URL into the browser by hand.  I have links to Facebook stored on my homepage.  I skim through Google results for domains that mirror the meaningfulness of a result.  Then again, I’m a web developer and I take things like this for granted.

As evidenced by a recent ReadWriteWeb fiasco, it seems that quite a few Facebook users don’t actually know how to log in to Facebook.  Rather than pointing their browsers to Facebook’s homepage, they’ll enter “facebook login” into Google and hope for the best.  When this happened early last month, thousands of Facebook users found themselves reading a ReadWriteWeb article rather than updating their status.  It caused a lot of confusion, as shown by the thousands of confused reader comments.

Part of me finds this funny.  But part of me is still trying to figure out who is to blame.

There are a few people who are claiming it’s the users at fault for not paying attention to which website they were headed towards.  There are others who argue it’s the fault of developers as a whole for producing confusing and overly “helpful” user interfaces.  After giving it some thought, I tend to agree with both groups.

This is a cataclysmic failure of ui – “ui” in this case standing for both User Interface and User Intelligence.

On the one hand, developers should never give so much help to users that it becomes a hindrance in the future.  Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature lulls many people into a false sense of security – if I enter “facebook login” I’ll immediately and only be redirected to the legitimate Facebook website.  On the other hand, users of any form of technology should be expected to exercise a certain level of intellect when using it.

It’s failure on both parts that led to this problem in the first place.  I expect the same failures are the reason phishing is such a profitable black market business these days as well.  If ReadWriteWeb can accidentally gather up so many Facebook users ready and willing to enter their private account information, how hard would it be for a malicious developer to purposefully gather the same?  What if he or she instead targeted Bank of America?

I have to admit, I take a lot of things for granted when it comes to web design and the Internet.  Unfortunately, it appears many average users take even more for granted … and it puts them at a huge disadvantage.

As much as I may want some contracts, I can’t afford to do anything at $4/hr.  Yes, it’s money coming in, but many times I spend more than that in fixed costs for a project.  If I need to purchase a custom piece of code for $50, I’d need to invest 13 hours on the project just to break even!

As the field becomes more competitive, I find myself expecting to see this sign on the side of the road.  I’m actually surprised I haven’t seen it yet.

I mentioned the other day that there are three different elements to a product: price, timeliness, and quality.  Obviously I will never compete on price terms with these cut-rate developers.  So I invest much of my free time experimenting with new techniques and technologies to keep my product quality ahead of the curve.  If a developer can build a widget better than me and only charge $4/hr, I’ll be out on the street with my sign in no time!

The other day I had a specific support request pass through my inbox.  I read the request, and, feeling pity for the developer, offered a discounted rate for solving his problem.  This was my mistake.  He then proceeded to try to negotiate a further discounted rate with me!  In the interest of full disclosure, I charge between $50-$100/hour for custom development work depending on the size and complexity of a project.  If you want it done more quickly, it costs more.  If I need to learn a new programming language to finish things, it costs more.  Etcetera.

I bid $75 for a 3-hour project because I wanted to do someone a favor.  He came back and asked if I could do it for free.  When I said no, he tried $20.  Then $50.  Then he tried to compare my rates to an Indian firm with the same service offering.  Once again, I was placed in direct competition with a firm I never wanted to compete with, on terms I swore never to compete on: price.

The moral of the story is to come to a clean understanding of what terms you will compete and negotiate on.  I’ll always give on timeliness, but I hold quality as a personal standard and will not compromise my pricing standards.  What terms do you negotiate on?  What terms are off-limits in negotiation?

I built a custom XML-RPC server.

And with that statement I know I’ve already lost most of you.  Rather than get too much into the details, XML-RPC stands for XML Remote Procedure Call.  It’s a way for one server to send information to another for processing – like posting inter-office mail to another department.

XML is just a way to code information.  You split up the message into chunks and label it.  For example, you can send a message via XML-RPC that asks to multiply two numbers together.  You’d code a 2 as <int>2</int> to mark it as an integer.  This way the server knows what kind of information it’s reading and what to do with it.

My particular server is meant to handle and report errors created by my open source WordPress plug-ins.  I write more than one, and several hundred websites use them.  Unfortunately, when they break for whatever reason I rarely hear about it … so I can’t fix it.  Hopefully this new system will give me a way to monitor my own performance and step it up a bit.

I’m calling the system “Elliot” after the main character in E.T the Extra-Terrestrial.  I was inspired by the thought of my plug-ins “phoning home” to tell me whether or not they’re working.

Will this make things better for me?  Time will tell, and I’ll definitely keep you apprised of my progress!

Mother Goose & Grimm by Mike Peters

I love my Sony eReader, but I’ll never fully give up on paper books, either.  Though I’m sure I have completely different reasons than does the dog in the comic.

The world moves quickly, and in an economy of rock-bottom prices, it’s the quick delivery that more often than not secures the sale.  Your expediency is your competitive advantage – if you can move more quickly and efficiently than the next guy, you will do more business.

There’s an old adage regarding web development work.  It can be done quickly, cheaply, or well – pick two of the three.  In a premium market, you never want to elect “cheap.”  That begins a race to the bottom that ends poorly for just about everyone involved but Wal-Mart.  Stick with the other two – quality and timeliness – and you’ll stay well ahead of the game.

When I design a website, I do everything in my power to optimize its loading time.  A 3-second website might seem acceptable to most, but if your competition’s site loads in 1 second, you can lose customers.  Consider this example:

A customer Googles your product category.  They’re presented with a list of the 10 most relevant companies in the industry and click to load all 10 websites in separate tabs in Firefox.  Because they’re in a hurry, they view the site that loads first and get right into the content.  Meanwhile, your site finishes loading and sits hidden behind a plethora of other tabs.

Yes, your product is better than that featured on the first-loading website, but this fact is irrelevant.  The customer wants results quickly.  He wants to see a feature comparison now.  He wants a pricing data sheet now.  He wants to start using your product now.

An extra 2-second loading time fails to address this concern of the customer.  Yes, you have a higher-quality product, but you’re failing to deliver on the “quickly” element of our aforementioned trifecta.  This leaves you with only price to compete on … and any marketer worth his salt knows you never want to compete on price.

Let me say that again. You never want to compete on price.

Focus on producing the highest quality product you can and delivering it as quickly as possible to the customer.  Do that well, and you can set whatever price you want.