I had never really thought of software as handmade, but of course it is. A human being pores over every line of code in a piece of software. Of course there is code that writes code, but the code that writes code was written (you follow?) by someone. The human element gives rise to a number of things which make software more than the sum of it’s parts.

Style
Software developers each have their own style. They may be devotees to a certain movement or ideology, but each of us have carved out our own style.

• How and where do you write comments?
• How much detail do you include in your commit message?
• What language do you prefer to write software with?
• How do you organize your workflow?

Answers to all of these questions are just the tip of the iceberg that is your specific style. The style of the software developer often comes through in the end product. We all make assumptions about the end user. How you came to those assumptions (research, intuition, testing, etc.) is part of your style.

Beauty
The ability for code to be beautiful has been widely discussed and debated. I won’t enter into that discussion at this point, because I don’t think it matters. Software most definitely can be beautiful. There are applications, and operating systems that are more beautiful than others. These points of beauty are crafted from the hands of the people writing the code. Choices are made to one thing rather than another. The result of those choices are what ends up on our screen (be it on your phone or computer).

Simplicity
A piece of software is rarely simple. Although the user experience of successful software is often simple. Distilling complex problems into simple solutions is a very difficult task. Think about the best teacher you ever had? Ten times out of ten, they were a good teacher because they could take something that you didn’t understand and simplify it to the point where you could understand little bits at a time, until you were finally able to understand the whole thing.

The idea that software is handmade is a good reminder that what we do is a craft and that we, as human beings, do have an impact on the things we create. It can very often feel like we are automatons churning out line after line of code, but to change our collective perspective to see that the product that we are creating is handmade and like anything else that is handmade, it bears the fingerprint of it’s maker. That is something I will be more mindful of now.

CEO: I want it to scream passion for the lifestyle.
COO: It needs to showcase the product.

The CEO (and in this case founder) is the visionary. The person the whole team will rally behind because of his passion and excitement about the company. It’s the COO’s job to make sure that that passion and energy translate into quantifiable results. In this case, both are very good at their jobs and it’s been exciting to work with them.

The best way to remedy this situation is to create a “Filter” within Google Analytics. To do this you’ll need to go to your Google Analytics setting for your WordPress site.

1. Click on “Filters” and then “+ New Filter”
2. Select “Create new Filter for Profile”
3. Name your filter – I called mine “WordPress Preview”
4. For the Filter Type, select “Custom Filter”
5. You’re going to want “Exclude” this traffic from your reports
6. The Filter Field should be “Request URI”
7. For the filter pattern, use the regular expression: ”/p=[0-9]+&preview=true”
8. Click “Save”

That’s it. Now all traffic that is previewing a post or a page will not get counted in your Google Analytics data.

Client: I want my company’s web site to be the number 1 result on Google for “Product X”.
Me: Yes, that sounds great. You just starting selling your version of “Product X” two weeks ago and you have never had a web site for your company. So we’re going to have to start small and work our way up to number 1.
Client: But Company Z is number 1 and they are our biggest competitor.
Me: They’ve been at it a lot longer and have put in the effort to get that number 1 spot.
Client: How can we do that too?

That’s the best possible outcome to this situation. Very often people don’t understand how to rank well on search engines. The technology and algorithms used are constantly changing and are hard to stay on top of. There are some basic concepts that will start to set you up for search engine success.

1. Content – Your site needs to contain words and phrases that are relevant to your product. Specifically your page title, headers and site content.
2. Inbound links – If your site is linked to by a lot of different sources, the search engines view that as proof that the content on your site is relevant. Another big part of  the inbound link equation is the words that are actually linked. If there was a link on one site that said kids shoes and on another site the link was all black Converse Chuck Taylor toddler shoes, which one do you think will give a bigger bump as an inbound link? Obviously the second. It has more context and relevance. That’s important to search engines.
3. Reputation – This takes into account not only the reputation of your site, but also  the reputation of the sites that are linking to you. If your site gets linked up in the New York Times, that’s going to carry a lot more weight than if it gets linked up in your sister’s personal blog.

All of these concepts are pretty obvious. It’s just a matter of being diligent and putting the effort in to develop all of those aspects of your website.

Our studio has grown by leaps and bounds this year. We’ve taken on great new clients and continued to build great relationships with our existing clients. So much is happening in the tech world. We’ll use this space to talk about that. Discuss it. And share what we’ve learned. Thanks for stopping by. Take a look at some old posts (circa 2005) or peek at some of the work we’ve been doing lately. If social media is more your thing, check us out on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Talk soon.

We also created a custom template to allow Evri to create a Facebook page using their WordPress content management system. This helps Evri keep their Facebook pages up-to-date without having to login to two different systems.