I just read this really fun article about the possible futures of Google. The staff of CNN posed the question, “What kind of company will Google become in the coming decades?” to scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries. These are the four best responses.

I’d have to say I’m most comfortable with number 1—I don’t really like the idea of a single company running too much of my life, and I don’t want to see Google dead, either.

Which is your favorite response? Which seems most likely?

Sometimes the changes we make to our web sites, businesses, or personal lives seem small, insignificant, or hardly worth the effort. It can be hard to stay motivated when all we seem to make are small, incremental improvements.There is something powerful about incremental improvements, however.

Linking Incremental Improvements

I was looking at ways to improve some web sites recently, and a powerful realization hit me.

Incremental improvements are linked to each other.

Almost nothing happens in our businesses or lives that doesn’t affect some other part of our lives. One event’s output is the input for another event or process.

The Math of Incremental Improvements

Here’s some math to illustrate the principle. Let’s say that you work hard and make a 10 percent improvement in the amount of traffic that arrives at your web site. Because there are 10 percent more people on you site, you would expect your revenue to go up by about 10 percent (assuming the quality of traffic is the same).

Now let’s say that you made the same incremental improvement in how many people make it to the product or catalog pages. You get a formula like this:

1.10 Traffic x 1.10 Catalog = 1.21 Revenue

The incremental improvements are multiplicative, which means that you get a one percent bonus (21 percent instead of 20) increase.

Daisy Chains

The power of incremental improvements really starts to stack up when you have many steps that you can improve. Let’s say you also make a 10 percent improvement in the number of visitors who put items in the shopping cart, order size, and order completion.

1.10 Traffic x 1.10 Catalog x 1.10 Add Items x 1.10 Order Size x 1.10 Completion = 1.6105 Revenue

You get a whopping 61.05% (not just 50%) improvement in revenue by improving five steps by 10 percent.

You Can Make Incremental Changes

Incremental changes are often much easier to make than huge, landscape-altering changes. In fact, the expense and difficulty of making huge changes can eat away at the benefits of such a large change.

Set achievable goals, work at them bit by bit, and remember how powerful making multiple incremental changes to your site, business, or life can be.

One of my ongoing projects is to help out with my parents’ web site, www.kindredlearning.com. We sell home school and family curriculum, books, projects, and supplies. The site has a very loyal following of repeat customers, and it helps my parents to serve other families and to earn a little money on the side.

As you can see, the web site itself needs a little help. It’s still using the same template that I made for it in an afternoon nearly 3 years ago. The site is also hosted with a company that provides a WYSIWYG editor, but this editor is very clumsy and slow, and it severely constrains your access to resources to “keep you from messing things up.” For example, we don’t have access to an FTP server, there are no server-side includes of any sort, and it’s impossible to override the CSS that’s built into the system. The list goes on and on.

We decided not long ago that, since our knowledge of search engine optimization and web design are drastically greater than when we first started the site, we are going to switch hosting and redesign the web site.

Web Site Redesign

What’s it take to redesign a web site? I have a long list of things I know that I will have to change. There are also a lot of things that I’m sure we’ll find out along the way.

Because nearly every company will have to perform a web site redesign at some time, I’m going to try and document the whole process of rebuilding Kindred Learning’s site from the ground up so that you can learn from my mistakes and successes and get your web site redesign right.

I’m going to create a new category of posts specifically for web site redesign projects and discussions. Check out “Web Site Redesign” for my posts and progress redesigning Kindred Learning and other sites.

Zillow.com is a brand new online real estate tool. I was rather impressed by this slick, Web 2.0 type application.

Zillow is designed to do one thing very well—value homes. It’s still in Beta, which means that some of Zillow’s data on houses is incomplete, but for many areas it works very well. It currently has data for over 60 million homes, mostly based on county and state sales and tax records.

Something else I was drawn to was this statement from Zillow’s home page:

. . . you don’t have to enter any personal info and no one will contact you

Zillow’s coolest feature is its map—you can choose a streetmap, satellite image, or combo view. Home values and property lines are overlayed over the map. Navigation is intuitive and smooth. I quickly found my last 3 houses. Only the map application refreshes—the rest of the page is nice and static.

Focused is Coming

Whether Zillow will make it or not is hard to say—they need to cover more areas and make their estimates more accurate (my parents home was estimated to be worth about 4 times its last appraised value and twice what any home in the community has every sold for)—but that’s not the point.

Zillow is an example of a phenomenon we need to pay attention to.

In our world of powerful communication and increasingly easy search, highly focused and local solutions are going to grow dramatically. We are moving ever closer to one-to-one marketing when it comes to everything—mass markets are being cut up like so much holiday pie.

In order to be successful, you had darn better know who your customer niche or collection of niches is and you had better provide them with a very good solution to one of their problems.

Companies need to improve their communication—make their messages clearer and more concise. They don’t always need to be simpler, but messages should allow potential customers to find them and grasp them and persuade them to hold on to your company tightly. I think that the key word here is specificity.

Keyword phrases keep getting longer as customers become more search-savvy and search engines become more accurate.

More focused messages, smaller target segments, and highly specific keyword phrases are all a lot of work and are difficult to implement sometimes—I mean, it is easier to bid on the keyword “real estate” than to bid on 100 terms such as “Utah real estate valuations and appraisals”—but the ROI on highly specific campaigns and phrases is much higher.

Refocus

Take a look at your company. Is your mission clear? Do people understand what you’re about? Is your message consistent across all of your materials and coming out of the mouth of your employees? Do you provide a valuable service to a clearly defined group of people?

You can cut down on drag by streamlining and focusing. Your returns on investment will improve as you leave behind the prospects who don’t really want what you sell and focus on those who are specifically looking for your service. And everyone will be better off because we’ll waste less of each other’s time.

I’m graduating this April, and thus it is high time I started working to make sure that I find the best possible position—the best possible fit between my interests, experience, and skills and a company’s needs. I’m reaching out to my network to see if anyone can help me learn about available positions.

My Ideal Position

Obviously, no job is going to be perfect, but there are some that are really close and all of us would like to find a position that is as close as possible. Some of the criteria I’m using include the following:

• Internet Marketing

  The firm doesn’t have to be dedicated entirely to Internet marketing, they just need to have a position for an Internet marketer.

• Room to Grow

  I will be fresh out of school, but I have considerable Internet marketing experience. I would like to be part of a company that will have room for me to grow as I develop my skills and progressively contribute more.

• Performance-Based Compensation

  I love to be compensated based on my performance because then I am motivated to do great things.

• Location

  I would prefer to work in Utah County (Utah), no further north than about American Fork.

• Hours

  I am graduating in business, but I refuse to consistently work 60 hour weeks like the investment bankers and accountants. Around 40–45 would be nice.

• Insurance

  It would be really great to have a decent insurance plan as part of the compensation package. I can be flexible on most terms, including insurance, but this would make my life a whole lot easier.

Please e-mail me at mike@diamondlime.com if you know of anyone who could find me a position that fits some or all of the above criteria.

Here’s a link to my resume in Microsoft Word format: Michael Ebert’s Resume

Update (March 30, 2006)

I have accepted a full-time offer for an Internet marketing/web site coding position at SEBO Marketing. I have been working there part-time since April of 2005, and I have really enjoyed my work. I’m excited to keep working on some of my favorite projects. Thanks to all those who read this post and sincerely tried to help me out.

Ara Pehlivanian wrote a brilliant post yesterday about a difficult problem—he wrote about web site degradation and how graceful degradation is a myth.

The basic premise is that complex, dynamic sites that use Javascript or other technologies cannot maintain their functionality and degrade well for all audiences at the same time.

Do you agree with him? I think I do.

Why is Graceful Degradation Still a Myth?

The World Wide Web is still relatively new as far as communication mediums go—the written word has been around for thousands of years, and print with movable type (not the blogging tool) has been around since Gutenburg. In sharp contrast, the web has been around in mainstream form for about a decade.

The early web was designed as static markup of text—Hyper-Text Markup Language, or HTML, was the language and Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol was the delivery method. We have made great strides in taking this static foundation and making it dynamic, but we still fight with the orginal text-based nature of the web.

Accessibility

Also, if you think about it, the web is trying to do more than every other communication medium ever.

Print isn’t universally accessible. You have to print a braille copy or make an audio recording for the blind. Spoken language gets changed into sign language. Music and most audio isn’t universally accessible. Transcripts won’t communicate the whole message. For many technologies, if you turn it off, you can’t get it.

The web, if implemented correctly, can serve nearly every audience and group.

Unfortunately, some of the final issues, like degradation in the face of a complex, dynamic design, haven’t been completely ironed out yet.

Will Degradation Always Be a Myth?

For the time being, we are faced with a difficult choice. We must either make websites that are simple and have separate pages instead of multiple states, or we must choose to exclude the percentage of the population that cannot or does not use the technology we choose to use.

I think, though, that these problems can be ironed out with a little more work. We’re nearly there—the web is already one of the most accessible communication mediums ever. Just like universal browser support for web standards, we just need to keep pressing and working, and it will come.

Today is a historic day. I have completed my migration from Blogger’s ultra-basic blogging service to WordPress, including salvagable comments and page redirects. I’m absolutely thrilled that I never have to work with Blogger on a serious blogging basis again.

Lost Comments

Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties and limited resources, I couldn’t copy all of my users’ comments over. I apologize to all those who wrote thoughtful comments and to all those who would have liked to read those comments. Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. I’m not migrating ever again. Feel free to comment on any of my posts!

Redirects

I am redirecting all of my old blog pages to their newer versions. Please let me know the URL (location) of any page that still uses the old site template so that I can fix it. Thanks.

So please, relax and enjoy the new and improved Lime Blog!

In the heyday of the dot com bubble, some predicted the demise of entire industries at the hands of Internet-based firms. Others felt that Internet and traditional businesses would remain in their own separate little worlds. A few firms stood in the middle, tenuously spanning the gap.

After the dot com crash, a backlash against many Internet firms occurred. Today, we see the strong surviving online companies or new companies that are actually founded on realistic growth and revenue models.

Bricks and Clicks Companies

Some of the strongest firms now have firm footholds in both the traditional (bricks) and the online (clicks) markets. Most of these firms are companies that began in the traditional markets and created strong online presences. Best Buy, Walmart, Gap Incorporated, and the Wall Street Journal are some of these firms.

What we see much less of is companies that started as clicks and moved into bricks. There are many small companies that started selling through eBay and have now built a retail location. I can’t seem to think of any others off the top of my head.

One company that has terrified other firms in traditional channels, though, is Google. They have a massive group of advertisers eating from their hands, and they have run tests in traditional media channels like print ads and phonebooks. Recently, Tim Armstrong, Google’s VP of advertising sales, stated that Google is very strongly considering running ads in all sorts of media channels (Why Not TV, Radio Ads?)

Our advertisers and publishing partners want to run their ads everywhere that makes sense for them, as long as it’s profitable . . . The notion is. . . we’re able to help advertisers break into other media, such as print, radio, and other areas
—Tim Armstrong, Google’s VP of Advertising Sales

I think that Google is probably going to make it work in at least a few of these channels, especially in the lower priced markets (think newspaper classified ads, radio, and niche cable channels, for example.)

Other Firms?

We will certainly continue to see more traditional firms create and strengthen online presences, that’s for certain. What will be interesting to see is how many “click” firms move into bricks. eBay and Amazon might be able to do it. Certain niche sites, especially tourist or travel sites that are tied to physical locations, will also have a solid chance to add a traditional retail outlet.

The lesson we can learn from all these firms jumping over (or into!) the chasm between bricks and clicks is that your business model has to work, whichever side you’re on and especially if you’re hovering in the middle. Google won’t stay in markets that don’t create profit for long, and neither should you.

Have you ever stumbled upon something that was successful but took you completely by surprise?

I recently had an experience where a product I was working on took off and far exceeded my expectations of sales, profitability, popularity, etc. My partner and I had fully expected a small response to what we felt was a small product or a small part of our product line.

Luckily, we had done a good job of creating this small product (which needs to remain nameless for a little while longer) and we’ve been able to quickly ramp up production and marketing to match the dramatically greater demand.

Is There a Way to Harness Surprises?

This experience got me thinking—is there a way to intentionally stumble on these unexpected successes?

I don’t think that anyone can get out a crystal ball and know what all the surprises are going to be. Duh, Mike, that’s what a surprise is—unanticipated.

There are some principles, habits, and tactics, however, for being in position to find and capitalize on more surprises.

For example, being open-minded is one of the best things that you can do. Look for inspiration everywhere.

Learn the skill of brainstorming. Brainstorming is a flowing, uninhibited thought process that can bring new ideas to light or combine ideas into new ones. Combinations lead to some of the most powerful new products or services. My favorite recent example is the convergence of cellular phones, MP3 players, and digital cameras, forming a portable media center.

Look for problems. I don’t mean that you should be obssessively nitpicking everyone around you or trying to find the bad in everything. I probably should have said “look for needs.” Looking for ways to solve problems or fill needs will often result in a surprising, fantastic new idea. Levi Strauss simply wanted to have a pair of pants that wouldn’t get ruined by all the ore samples he carried in his pockets.

Make a record of everything. I don’t care how you do it, but find some way to make a collection of ideas. Write things in a notebook, write a blog and categorize your posts, record ideas onto cassette tapes or your computer, whatever. Just make sure that your ideas are somewhat organized, and, most importantly, easy to access again later.

Flexibility

Being flexible is one of the most important parts of being able to harness surprises. This means that you need to have a mindset that will allow you to change course. You should also keep a pool of resources available to be assigned to pursue new opportunities. They don’t have to be sitting idle, you just need to be able to reallocate your resources when an opportunity arises.

Mess Around a Little Bit

Experimenting and testing will get you a long way. I like the example that 3M has set by allowing its employees a certain amount of time for working on anything they want. They crank out new products like mad, and it’s largely due to their open, inquisitive corporate culture.

Enjoy Your Surprises!

Many projects or ideas get relegated to the “circular file” under your desk. Enjoy (and really take advantage of) the good surprises that come your way because they don’t happen very often, althought they will happen more often if you work at it.