In URLs Can Be Beautiful, Chris Shiflett explains how he built beautiful URLs for OmniTI.
I agree whole-heartedly that URLs can and should be beautiful, and I firmly believe they should not only look good, but should also be useful, meaningful, and “discoverable.” In the case of OmniTI, the first subcategory in the URL is based on an action verb, like “is”, “helps”, or “thinks.” This gives the URL a powerful mnemonic quality, since it reads like a sentence. It also describes the content of the page it represents, which is awesome.
The only downside I can see is the “discoverability” for common URLs like “about” and “contact”. A lot of people are used to finding those URLs the same on most sites, especially typical brochure-type business websites. But, you can always have a redirect rule for those if it’s important. The creativity and unique design of OmniTI’s URL scheme might just make up for the loss of predictability.
I’m glad to see a great example of a beautiful and semantic URL scheme to use as inspiration for my own projects.
37signals, makers of Backpack, Basecamp, Highrise and other great software have published their ideas for making their company a great place to work: Workplace Experiments. Included in their experiments are shorter work weeks, funding people’s passions, and discretionary spending accounts.
As I read their introductory post I reminded myself that in my one-man business I’ve already put several of these ideas into practice.
Shorter work week
I started a 4-day work week April 25th, 2007. Having Fridays free from client work has been a huge blessing. I can play, work on personal projects, or just catch up on reading and learning. In the middle of our traveling and RVing it was often a perfect day to leave our RV park and hit the road. We would beat the weekend traffic, get to our location sooner, and be able to visit and sightsee before starting the next week of work. And as 37signals points out, “We found that just about the same amount of work gets done in four days vs. five days.” So true.
Funding my passions
This is self-fulfilling since I am a freelancer. But, I still have to be disciplined enough to put it into practice. My current passion is travel and learning; this includes working with my wife to publish our photos and stories (she does most of that work). Our work discipline has paid off big in this regard. Having a mobile and flexible work situation funds our passions directly. We can travel where we wish—visiting family and friends and seeing every corner of our beautiful country.
Spending accounts
This one is also easy to do when you are your own boss and accountant. I generally buy any book that is needed for learning web design or development—especially if I can find a used copy on Amazon. I decided with my wife, who I include on business and financial decisions, that anything under a certain amount (say $100) would not require a discussion—I could just buy it and not have to worry about it. Big ticket items still require careful thinking and planning, which is the way it should be whether you are a one-man team or a 100-person in-house group.
I’m glad to see 37signals set the bar high for the industry in publishing their workplace experiments. They continue to be an enormous inspiration to businesses big and small. I’m also happy that I’ve been setting these same principles into practice for at least a year—with great results.
If you like Twitter and the idea that you can easily follow along with what your friends and colleagues are doing all day, you might like the new Prologue Wordpress Theme.
The theme skins your blog to look like a set of Twitter updates, and the “what are you doing now?” form for posting an update is conveniently located on the top of the home page.
This setup would be perfect for small groups or distributed teams who want to keep track of each other. You could password-protect the blog if you want to limit who can view the posts. In the same way, you limit those that could post updates by having only registered users be able to post updates.
The Prologue team has already released an update that improves the layout of the updates and includes Gravatar support.
Give it a try on your own by downloading the theme, or open a free Wordpress.com account and give it a spin there.
See listing on craigslist.org: Software Quality Assurance/Customer Support Engineer.
Digital Fusion is hiring a QA person. Apply today if you live in the Los Angeles area and fit the bill. You get to work with a great team!(Tags: dfstudio, digital-fusion, photography, qa, development, testing, jobs)
