Internet shouldn’t have an uppercase ‘i’ (unless it’s at the beginning of a sentence, as it is here). Neither television, nor radio are capitalised, so why should our medium be?

Website is all one word (and for people looking for someone to do your website it’s a good rule of thumb not to go for anyone who spells it ‘web site’ or, worse, ‘web-site’. That includes most of America).

World wide web is lower case.

Most importantly email neither has a hypen, nor a capital E. Just don’t. It’s wrong and makes you look like an amateur. You wouldn’t capitalise paper or envelope, and it’s no more a foreshortening of electronic mail than radio is of radiogramme.

Useful links: www.oed.com

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click on image for more detail.

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More recent – and more serious – additions to the Ministry of Crap’s portfolio are the Black Box recorder and Radar. Maybe it wasn’t news to anyone else but I could barely believe it when I read that an aeroplane is invisible once it leaves the coast of Brazil and only exists once more when it has entered Senegalese airspace. Think about that for a second: that’s a big metal Schrödinger’s cat you’re flying off to Cancun in. More surprising still that the non-existent radar is used as some indication as to where to look for the black box. I thought the black box told you where to look for it itself. Silly me. It appears that the signal it emits for 30 days is detectable from 1000 metres away in calm conditions. I wonder how calm it is 3000 metres underwater?

Before last week it would have seemed akin to blasphemy to suggest that aeroplanes themselves belong to the Ministry of Crap. They seemed miraculous things to me. Huge metal machines that could zoom through the sky. Getting you from one place to the next in the most pleasant way possible. Movies and iced G&Ts and quick journey times.  But now I’m not sure. I mean, is there no way to avoid supercells in the 21st century? Is a mass of boiling cloud 5 miles high not a clue? And why do we need the black box at all? If you can make a phone call from the air how come all on-board information isn’t transmitted directly to the nearest satellite and relayed directly to the destination? And if information has to be contained in a box why not make it float? Or make it visible by satellite? Or give it a radiation signature? Anything. Come on.

So the Ministry of Crap takes on a darker meaning for me with the disappearance of flight AF-447 and moves away from comedy and into complete frustration. It’s something that not only needs to be drummed into product designers but also for anybody in business. Whether designing teapots or running an airline – make what you do fit for purpose. Make sure it does what you say it will do. And make sure it doesn’t kill anyone. Or, if that’s also unavoidable, at least make sure you can find out why it did.

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It got me thinking how lucky I was to not have to repeat lots of the tasks I do on the computer over and over:

Designs

Ones you’ve discarded can be picked up again. Ones clients have rejected can be put into use on new projects. Save everything.

Stylesheets

Once you’ve got the basics it’s easy to tweak for use on a new site. Colours have to be changed but if it’s all structured in an order that you’re used to that’s easier, too!

Themes

Wordpress themes always seem really nice until you actually use them. Then you notice that they were all built by people with no real grasp of typography or styling (not to put them down – anyone that can actually put together a theme deserves respect!). Tweak the things that were wrong, thin down the code and get rid of all the META junk down the sides and you can download the theme back to your desktop to use on another site in future!

Macros/actions

Everything from Excel to Photoshop has a way to repeat sequences of tasks using just one click. Think about what you do a lot and get some set up.

Proposals/quotes

You can set up templates for this type of paperwork but even better is to copy your latest successful proposal to use for the basis of the next. Read through it, change what needs to be changed, add what needs to be added and it can only improve with time.

All very handy. Now, if only there was some handy app I could use for those damn slugs…

(PS. See the comments on Paolo’s last post!)

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If you’re going to do a mailshot – get your timing right!

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Calling people up and talking about it seems to generate an awkward defensiveness in them and they usualy claim the solution is “in hand”. I’ve had businesses say to me “Oh, that’s going to be online in May” (Wouldn’t it be better for it to be online now?), or “We’ve just got ourselves a new web designer” (Checking online a fortnight later and seeing the same blank page you begin to wonder how good they are!) or “it must be our hosting company” (So why don’t you want to change them?).

It’s not difficult: get online.

You don’t need the flashiest site, you don’t need to wait for your new marketing campaign to be up and running and you definitely don’t need to wait for the IT person you’ve found to do the site to have 5 minutes spare so that he can knock you up a Joomla site.

Do it now. Do it properly, but do it right away. Every day you’re not there is a day you’re losing business.

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I wanted to make something positive of the day so I put everything I had to do to one side and completed the following exercises:

2. While changing out of my wet clothes I went through the list of things I could have done while I was out and about and made sure I put a system in place to remember things that I had always left to chance in the past.

3. I spent the rest of the day on one of the projects that sits on the sidelines of my work (like this site).

I have a list of these projects and they make up the sort of things that aren’t part of your everyday work but aren’t purely personal projects – they occupy a sort of middle ground of stuff you’d love to achieve but that are also useful professionally. This could be anything from learning PHP to getting yourself a digital camera so you don’t have to farm out work next time a client asks you to take pictures of their office for the website. All useful things on a professional level but also satisfying as achievements in themselves.

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My mind started racing thinking of the stupidity of an ad agency who came up with a giveaway that had a moral message directly opposed to the thing they were connecting it with. And to do
it in such a blatant and idiotic way. And it’s not as if it’s impossible to reconcile the problem of how to put a green sheen on a businesses’ intrinsic un-greeness. Airport websites deal with offsetting greenhouse gas emissions. They don’t shy away from it, or disconnect it from their business, but they don’t deliberately ask people to draw a line between the two things either.

The advert on the radio concluded with a line something like “…so you can save the planet when you park and shop at the Podium!” just in case there were still some people who hadn’t managed to link the two things in their minds by that point. Drive to the shopping centre – get a re-usable shopping bag! It must of been at that point that I fainted.

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