When we do web design, many of our clients at first insist that hold on until we roll the finished project out the door. I often encourage them to put up a business card or brochure website immediately for one simple reason: it gets the search engine going faster. When they finally roll their brand new site off the disc and onto the server, they are surprised (even though we told them) that they cannot find their site in google. Don’t be surprised, it takes a few days to even a few weeks before you can start to see the site — and if you are in a jammed search term category, perhaps longer to see it do well on terms that are important.

Until you are on the web, they cannot find you, so get the brochure site up even if it is temporary. It will still help people find you. Do you need a temporary site to get you started? Give us an email and we’d be happy to help you. We can usually put up a placeholder site within a day or two using existing printed materials that you have.

Currently I am working on MicronMfg.net. They have an interesting business. I toured it the other day. They are big into lean manufacturing as a culture. Everything in the entire place had a place and a purpose — no wasted movement is one of their key things as I understand it. They make tiny tiny little metal and plastic parts and once they get a run set up, they are able to simply leave and run the project “lights out” as they called it. I was quite impressed. If you need something small manufactured, I would encourage you to call them. I reference them because we have in fact convinced them to do just that, put up the site with some limited content in the interim while we work on the finished product.

There has been a great deal of fuss regarding the Windows 7 beta release and how it may be everything Vista should have been. To see what all the fuss is about, I grabbed a copy and set about installing it in a virtualbox VM and having a play. Here are my observations.

It’s very polished for a beta. It looks more like Apple OSX than any previous version of Windows. It seems quite stable. It boots and shuts down reasonably quickly (about XP speed to my eyes) and uses an order of magnitude less system resources than Vista. However, all of the above points bring to mind one question: Vista was created after many many years of development, whereas Windows 7 was evolved from Vista in about a year I think. So why was/is it so hard to get Vista to perform like this? It almost looks like they released Vista as a buggy bloated waste of hard drive space on purpose just to make the next (much sooner) release look so much better.

When you think about it, Windows 7 has almost the speed and system resource usage of the 8 year old XP OS, it can still suffer from Viruses and Spyware, It doesn’t seem any more or less stable than XP (which was pretty good in my experiance), so I’m left wondering why people are singing the praises of an OS that manages to mostly match its much much older sibling? Don’t get me wrong, Windows 7 is a MASSIVE step up from Vista. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it’s only a minor step up from XP. It looks better than XP or Vista, it seems easier to use and more intuitive than Vista as well. (I’m so used to and familiar with XP that my opinion is not valid as to its ease of use)

Conclusion: Well done Microsoft for fixing the problems with Vista, but why didn’t you do this the first time around? Also, XP has been a pretty good OS for Microsoft and for end users. Until something really revolutionary comes along, everything is going to just seem like an incremental upgrade of XP.

Windows 7 is a good looking, stable and solid OS, but I’ve not seen anything so far that would compel a tight fisted company bean counter to justify replacing XP as it doesn’t really do much extra for a corporate desktop. As with MS Office, Microsoft’s older OS products are going to become their biggest competitors, especially with the current financial crisis making everyone nervous.

More and more I see stories where criminals are caught by technology. Two that really struck my funny bone this past week are the guy in Columbus, Ohio, who sent text messages to his stolen cell phone thereby luring the thief to come on down and meet the police instead of the girls and drugs promised in the messages. The other one I enjoyed was a thief who took pictures on a cell phone, unaware that the phone was also uploading his images to the real owner’s server. Should help with the identification of course and in this case the police recognized the thief. (I think this is a story from last summer). I have heard many more stories of phones being located, cars being located, etc. Maybe people should earn things the old fashioned way once again and then they’ll have nothing to worry about.