Ricky’s Online Business Blog

There are web designers who are overly fanciful about animations. They are talented and creative people. Look at their web sites. Flash animations fly here and there. Sometimes even the whole web site is Flash only.

Consider that you have to watch an unnecessary three-minute “about us” Flash movie before entering the web site. Will you not be turned off and click your way out of the site? The people wowed by the Flash experience maybe the designer and the web site owner only.

I am not against using Flash and animations. A beautiful web site is important. Some graphics and animations can indeed spice up a web site. But I am concerned of excessive use of Flash. Often it could undermine a web site’s user friendliness and search engine optimization.

This holds true unless the Flash designer puts on the shoes of a visitor to improve its usability, and knows how to optimize a Flash site for search engines. But unfortunately, not all creative designers are good at usability and marketing.

I am also not against any creative designers. They are important members in a web development team. But unless they can take a more holistic approach in a web project, they should not take charge of the project single-handedly.

A web developer should take all factors into account such as usability, information, attractiveness, SEO issues and user values or benefits. Which factors are more important depend on the web site’s purpose.

My view may not be popular among web designers. But I’m trying to speak for the interest of customers because they are our bosses.  What is your view on this?

Update on 2/7/2008 – Google has just announced that now it can better “see” Flash elements and web sites and include them into their database.  But there are still limitations.  Read Google’s blog here.

Last night it was massive traffic everywhere. Many cars queued up to pump petrol at the last minute before the price hike came into effect at midnight. One would have to wait for hours to get to pump petrol. Of course, it is the single largest increase in price hike in the history of our country!

But how much money can they save by queuing up? What’s the difference of pumping yesterday and today? 41% of full tank? As Internet guru Gobala said in his blog, thousands of people burned petrol to save petrol. Don’t forget the time spent to queue up. Time is money! And the stress!

Naturally people become worried of the rising living cost. Today’s petrol price hike is only a beginning, many more to come later. Perhaps the most affected ones are the salaried employees. Can their salary keep up with the inflation?

It is good to be in business. Of course business people are not spared from the impact of price hike. But at least they have more control over their income and can adjust their strategy accordingly. As you know, there are people making money, whether in good or bad economy.

Personally, I find it even better to be in Internet business. Not only because the income potential is huge (I wouldn’t say unlimited), but by automating your Internet business, you can manage to have multiple businesses and so multiple sources of income. If one source is not doing well, there are others to back up.

Just look at Gobala. He earned RM50,000 from one Internet product alone in two weeks. Today I also received Google’s cheque of over US$500 for Google Adsense. I know this is nothing compared to that of Gobala and the likes. But isn’t it good also considering you are not tied to a “fixed income” job?

Are you interested to jump on the bandwagon of Internet business too?

There are many things we consider valuable in each of our life, different from one person to another.  It could be our family, business, job, parents, children, relationship, position, community work, hobby, habit or even an addiction.

I’ve been holding certain things very dearly too.  But when I look into these things, I could find that they may not be as valuable as I’ve been thinking them to be.  Are they really that important?

Sometimes these things can even keep me from focusing my time and resources on the most important life goals.  They may be good things, but may not necessarily the best ones in life.   The enemy of “best” may be called “good”.

Perhaps sometimes we need to learn how to let go certain things, so that we can no longer be bondaged by them any further.  Surely there will be pain forgoing something which have been very dear to us so far in life.

In the four actions framework (Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, Create) according to the Blue Ocean Strategy, a business may need to examine what it offers and find out what is not really important and necessary, and learn to eliminate them (but raising and creating other values).  I heard that if there is no pain and resistance to do so, then there is not really eliminating anything.

Similarly there will be pain and resistance to let go something which have been valuable in our life.  But if we don’t learn to stop going after these things, we can be like chasing after the winds, achieving nothing much at the end.  Let’s say NO to these things so that we can say YES to more important things!