Come for the Ride…

The topic of 2009 goals was a suggestion made over Skribit and I think it’s a great suggestion and something that every entrepreneur should do as we head into the new year. But before we spell out the master plan for 2009, I’d like to point out a tweet I saw from David Cummings a couple of days ago which I also thought was great.

“A good entrepreneur resolution is to set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timeline).”

There are undoubtably many challenges and opportunities that entrepreneurs face every day but one of the main challenges is knowing what opportunities are worth your time to pursue while dropping the other 15 great ideas that may sound great, but won’t make sense or money today.

I see it a lot, including our own team meetings where good hypothesis just run rampant.  I guess that’s one of the benefits and drawbacks of having a smart team that are good at brainstorming.  However, I think by following the SMART rule above, it should be easy for us to stay focused, trim and to the point.

For 2009, we have a number of goals we’d like to achieve within the calendar year.  The most important being an increase in the number of cars up to 3 million+ and an increase in our monthly unique visitors to over 1/2 million. (There are obviously more details associated with each goal, but none I feel too comfortable sharing on this blog.)

Being that we’re still in the advertising game, one of the obsticles we would like to over come is increasing the number of page views per session to about 10x what they are today.

As we grow vertically in traffic numbers, we would like to grow horizontally by partnering up with similar websites and services as well so that will also be one of our goals in 2009.  If web 2.0 has taught us anything it’s that the web is connected and no site stands alone.

What are some of your goals for 2009 that you can share?  If they’re good, manybe we’ll borrow some. =)

I don’t usually post inspirational stuff but given that it’s the holidays and words of encouragement are always motivating, I figured this would be a positive message to lead into 2009.  This is a repost from a blog I found, but inspired from Kung Fu Panda - now one of my favorite flicks. =)

Imagine there is a bank account that credits your account each morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day.

Every evening the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course?

Each of us has such a bank. It’s name is TIME.

Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds.  Every night it writes off as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to a good purpose.  It carries over no balance. It allows no over draft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day.  If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no drawing against “tomorrow.”  You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success!

The clock is running!! Make the most of today.

To realise the value of one year, ask a student who failed a grade.
To realise the value of one month, ask a mother who has given birth to a premature baby.
To realise the value of one week, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.
To realise the value of one hour, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.
To realise the value of one minute, ask a person who just missed a train.
To realise the value of one second, ask someone who just avoided an accident.
To realise the value of one millisecond, ask the person who won a silver medal at the olympics.

Treasure every moment that you have! And treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time with. And remember time waits for no one.

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why its called the present.

With so many updates to WordPress in such a short amount of time, it’s really hard to keep the various blogs we have on the web up to date with all the changes. However, we just upgraded this blog to WP 2.7 and I must say, this has been one of the easiest transitions I’ve ever done.

For those of you who run an established WordPress blog, all you have to do is overwrite every file and skip the items /wp-content and wp-config-sample.php. A quick trip to the admin page will prompt a DB upgrade and after that it’s smooth sailing.

I remember as short as 7 or 8 months ago when I saw one of the plugin writers use an automated way to upgrade updated plugins and I thought - man, this should be the standard way of doing things. It’s great to see that just a few months later, it came true, even though I never followed through with suggesting the idea. (It also makes me wonder if sites like EasyAutoSales will also benefit from going open source at some point.)

Anyway, as many other bloggers have mentioned, most of the upgrade is in the admin console. In addition to it being more UI friendly, it’s also feels as if there’s been a significant speed boost since the ole 2.4 days.

At the startup, we don’t usually waste time on stuff that doesn’t provide financial value, but this is definitely a worthy upgrade and at 30 seconds to get it all done, it’s certainly a no brainer.

This past weekend I spend the better part of the day at the Mall of Georgia while my wife got her hair highlighted and cut. While waiting in the Master Cuts, I saw something that looks pretty darn familiar advertising for a hair products brand called Tea Tree. Anyone in the social networking realm will find this twit-bit interesting:

While I’m not sure what Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams is going to do to make Twitter profitable, but I’m quite sure it’s not licensing their logo for hair product. Considering I see no relationship branding between the two, it might be more like profit via litigation. Either way, it was an odd find in the middle of a Saturday amongst the Christmas crowds.

For some reason, many entrepreneurs that have great vision often can’t translate that vision in the execution of the user interface. Speaking from experience, I’m sure many of you have admin pages where a blank field or drop down exists with a submit button and no descriptions or instructions on how to use the mysterious feature.  After all, the admin pages are designed by you, for you and you know exactly what its supposed to do - so why bother?  Sadly, many entrepreneurs also take the same approach for laying out the public facing website which of course, leads to confusion and a poor user experience.

Luckily, it’s now easier than ever to translate your thoughts using advanced tools or web based services.  If you are graphically challenged, you can now get some help.

Balsamiq

I had the pleasure of designing some mockups using Balsamiq as part of START Atlanta’s team.  This software makes it SOOOOO easy to design new pages its not even funny.  It’s basically as good as designing rough wireframes on paper or in Photoshop except you won’t have to scan the paper afterwards or waste hours in photoshop to get everything layered and pixeled correctly.  The tool is also simple enough to use that even an non-graphical idiot CEO can piece together some elements to get the page close to what he envisions.  If you need a tool to jump start you from concept to rough sketch, I’d highly recommend this tool.

99 Designs

99 Designs is a service I just learned about that I haven’t had the chance to use.  However, from the design of the website and the sample work I’ve seen by their community, you definitely have a lot of potential to get some great work for bargin prices.

The site basically allows you to create contests where you specify your design needs and a bounty and designers get to work based on your descriptions and feedback.  The best thing about this service is you get to see your work before you pay for it so ultimately, you win.

As a graphically challenged person, if you combine the wireframe tool and submitting the wireframes to designers at 99 Designs, you should be able to get a great mockup of your new website for under $500.  This is a lot cheaper and faster than paying a professional designer thousands only to get the work after a few weeks. Your mileage may very…