We recently decided that this blog should focus on the technology needs for small businesses.  You might wonder why a small business shouldn't just use the same tools as bigger companies, so this post will outline just a few of the reasons.



You don't want to overpay


If a software company is used to serving large clients, why would they spend their time worrying about you?  Most big-business software companies won't even talk to you without knowing how many employees work at your business, and they obviously aren't going to treat you quite the same as they would a larger client.


Software can be one of your competitive advantages
I wrote an earlier post about how trying to copy the big guys is a mistake.  By assuming that you should use the same tools as big companies, you're effectively deciding to play the game using their rules.  In order for a small company to succeed, they need to be disruptive.  If you're lucky enough to work at a small company (or run your own company), you can gain a serious edge on your competition by using technology in ways that they can't.

This post is going to cover the most basic aspect of your company's online identity: your domain name. Most people know most of this already, but I think it makes sense to start from the beginning and work our way to more advanced topics later.






The sub-domain comes to the left of the second-level domain.  For example, most websites use "www" as the sub-domain. You don't actually need to pick a sub-domain when you buy a website, because if you buy "example.com", you automatically own all sub-domains of that (www.example.com, blog.example.com, etc.).

About 30 minutes ago we pushed out the biggest software update in the history of Less Annoying Software!  There are a lot of exciting new things to talk about, so let's dive right in.

• New Navigation - We moved all the navigation links from the top of the main content area to the sidebar on the right of the screen.  This makes getting around a lot easier because we can show more options and organize them more intuitively.
• We work with Internet Explorer - Up until now, we have completely blocked all IE users from accessing the site because there are all kinds of problems with IE that we didn't want to deal with.  Well, we caved into to the demand for IE support, so now you can log in (or sign up) using IE7 or IE8.  We still recommend using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox instead because IE is definitely more annoying software, but that's up to you.
• Recent activity report - There's a new report to help you keep track of your customers.  You can click on the "Recent activity report" link on the sidebar to see a list of all the customers you've written notes about, ordered by their most recent note.  This can help you review what you've been working on recently, or identify customers that you haven't talked to in a while and might need some attention.
• Other little improvements - There are a lot of minor things that are a little better throughout the site.  Some of them you'll notice, some of them you won't, but almost every page is a little better today than it was yesterday.

I hope you like all the changes.  I'd love to hear what you think!

In the software world, there are two primary systems for organizing information: folders and tags (also called labels).  The difference is most noticeable as people transition from Outlook to Gmail, but I want to talk about the more general uses of tags and folders.  Specifically, I’m going to go over when tags aren’t the right way to organize things.

First, let’s make sure everyone understands the difference between the two.  While there are a lot of superficial differences, the thing that really separates the two is that a file can only exist in one folder, but a file can be associated with multiple tags.  For example, let’s say you just bought an airplane ticket for your mom and you want to file away your confirmation email.  You often classify your emails as “family” or “travel”.  In this case, the email applies to both categories, but with folders you have to pick one.  With tags, you can assign the email to both categories.

People often think there are other differences, such as a hierarchical structure (i.e. subfolders), but both folders and tags can support that (it’s just less common with tags).

In the example I gave above (organizing emails) the tag system is obviously much better than the folder system because it doesn’t make you choose between the two different categories. The problem is that people seem to think that tags are always better, but that’s just not the case.  They are generally better, but sometimes organization requires mutual exclusivity between different categories.

I’ll use the Less Annoying Software CRM as an example of when tags just aren’t as useful.  When you’re dealing with sales leads, you generally want each lead to belong to exactly one status.  If someone fills out a contact form on your website, you would categorize them as a “lead”.  If you call them up and decide that they aren’t ready to buy, you would categorize them as “inactive”.  “Inactive” and “Lead” are mutually exclusive.  It’s one or the other, never both.  For this reason, we use a folder system (we call them “statuses”, but they’re basically the same thing as folders).

If you’re a hardcore tag supporter, you might wonder why it matters that the two statuses can’t both exist at the same time.  The best reason I can come up with is because it messes up reporting.   If I want to see a report of the current status (or folder) of all my leads, I can’t have overlap between inactive and active leads.

This is obviously a somewhat obscure example, but there are all kinds of different scenarios where folders actually do make sense.   When I finish writing this blog post in Google Docs, I’m going to want to move it from the “draft” folder to the “published” folder.  This means adding it to one and then removing it from the other, because Google uses tags for just about everything (they call them folders in Google Docs, but they’re really tags).

So enough rambling.  What’s the point?  The point is that in many cases folders are outdated and ineffective, but don’t disregard them entirely.  They still serve a purpose, and if you find yourself designing software, I suggest you put some thought in before going with tags just because that’s what’s cool right now.

This is another graphic design post meant for people that know nothing about graphic design.  I'm going to walk through some really simple tricks you can use to make a logo for a website.  To demonstrate, I'm going to make the Less Annoying Software logo seen above (No, we're not actually going to use it).