How to build a website in ten easy steps

I recently stumbled through the process of creating a website for my new company.  I thought I'd consolidate my learnings into a blog post in case they're helpful to any of you.

1. Write down what you want to say.  Before you start designing anything, sit down with a Google doc and write down your marketing message.  Imagine you're telling your ideal customer what you can do to help her.  To cover your bases, answer the basic "who, what, when, where, why, and how" questions and let your story unfold from there.
2. Organize what you've written down into a logical collection of web pages.  Sort out what you want to say into a set of pages that makes sense.  
3. Purchase a template that basically gives you the architecture your content requires.  Alternately, if you are an uber-designer, you can design your own site. Or you can find a design for free somewhere on the internet.  I am not a designer, by any stretch of the imagination, but realize that a good design goes a long way towards an effective first impression, and wanted to minimize the time I spent hacking my content into a site that someone else designed.  That's easier with a template that's designed to be flexible and extensible.  Therefore, I purchased a template.
   Regardless of where your design comes from, make sure that the site is mobile-friendly.  (In other words, Flash is out.)  If you can find a good HTML5 design, that's your best bet.
   I did a lot of searching before I stumbled across ThemeForest, which is ultimately where I found the design for my site.  The templates they offer are well designed and competitively priced.
4. Add your content to the template; adding, subtracting, and moving things around as needed.  
5. Customize the site design using custom graphics and fonts.  This is not actually as difficult or expensive as it might sound. iStock Photo is a great resource for graphic art. Google WebFonts let you do amazing things with fonts. (You might notice that after this step, you've drastically departed from the template you originally purchased.  That's how you get a custom website out of a template someone else designed.)
6. Set up tracking so you can evaluate and optimize traffic to your site. Generate Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics tracking codes and include them on your pages, as explained on the linked sites.
7. Think of, and reserve, a reasonable domain name.  Good luck.  Finding a good domain name that hasn't already been reserved is next to impossible.
8. Find a web hosting provider and upload your site.  I chose Bluehost and have been happy with them.  Their customer service was helpful when I was having an FTP problem.
9. Set up domain-specific email and calendar accounts.  A domain-specific account is much more professional than a generic web account. Google Apps gives you the convenience of Gmail and Google Calendar for domain-specific accounts.  
10. Drive traffic to your site.  Use Search Engine Optimization best practices to drive organic traffic to your site, and paid advertisements to include your site in targeted ads.

Here's what I ended up with: DevComm: Engage Your Developers.  Comments and feedback welcome!

What other great website development resources do you know of?

Corporate Identity 101

A corporate identity has a few basic required components:

• Company name
  Don Dodge recently gave a good interview on choosing a company name.  I'll be the first to admit that the name I chose for my company, DevComm, is terrible.  In this case, my writer's mind is working against me.  I'm used to coming up with the perfect word out of an existing dictionary, not the perfect set of harmonious, meaningless characters.  I'm still working on it.
• Logo
  You can buy a generic logo from various websites and print companies, or you can have one custom designed.  I commissioned Rusa Vuong, a San Francisco-based designer, to create a custom logo for me.
• Business card
  Rusa also created my business card design.  I chose to electronically embed my contact information on the back of the card using a QR Code. Rusa generated the code using QRStuff.  If you want to go the simple route, you can get a standard business card design from many printers.
• Website
  This one's complex enough to merit its own post, which is coming soon.

Resources for starting a new company

As I set off down the path towards starting a new company, I realize that there are a lot of things that I don't yet know how to do.  I have lots of questions:

• Should I structure my company as a consulting company, or a product company?  Or both?
• Is it just me, or do I involve others?  If I involve others, in what capacity?
• What kind of business do I set up: Sole proprietorship? LLC? S-Corp?  C-Corp?  Anything in between?   When do I file the paperwork?
• What legal considerations do I need to be aware of?
• Do I need funding?  If so, what for?
• Should I fund this myself (what's known as "bootstrapping", I've come to find out) or seek venture capital?
• What's the difference between angel investors and and venture capitalists, and why would I seek out one over the other?
• How do I find a designer to help me set up a marketing presence, like a logo, website, business cards, etc?

I've run my own consulting company before, but it seems different this time; bigger, more real. I've also worked in several startups, but never at the beginning of the venture when all of these decisions are being made.  So this is essentially all new to me.

Although I certainly don't have all the answers yet, here are a couple of the resources I've found that have been helpful so far:

• YCombinator: A micro-financing / mentoring organization that helps a select group of startups develop a business model and seek funding.
• SCORE: An entrepreneurial support organization with local chapters around the US.  They give  useful classes on topics related to starting a business.  I've taken "Be a Successful Consultant" and "Legal Issues for Small Business.  They also offer free consulting services that give you the opportunity to get feedback from seasoned entrepreneurs.  I intend to take them up on that as soon as I've narrowed down my list of questions. SCORE tends to be pretty generic in terms of the types of business it consults on, so it's not so great for questions specific to creating a technology-related startup.
• SVForum: A more tech-focused advisory network, local to the Silicon Valley.  They sponsor panel-style discussions related to startup topics.  The panel is usually composed of seasoned tech entrepreneurs and VC investors.  I attended " New Venture Launch Fundamentals for 2012" and got a lot out of it.  This is also a great venue for networking and meeting people who are working on similar things.
• The Founder Institute: A tech startup support organization that offers a complete curriculum for creating a startup.  They have chapters around the world.  I haven't started reviewing their curriculum yet but the topics look promising.

What other resources do you know of that help entrepreneurs?  What advice would you give to someone just in the midst of starting a new venture?

Being deliberate about career choices

Hello!  Long time no talk.

As you may have noticed, I've been taking an extended break from, well, everything, including this blog.  It's been kind of fun to be suspended in time, and get a break from the day to day frenzy of commute - work - commute - hanging out with the kids - sleep - and repeat, punctuated by a flurry of errands and kid entertainment on the weekend.  To paraphrase a saying, when I was at Google, the days were long, but the years flew by.  Taking a breather from all of that has been wonderful.

It's been so precious to sit on the floor and play a game with my kids, and be fully present; not distracted by the latest crisis at work.  And to go out to dinner and a movie with my husband and talk about something other than how we'll juggle this week's busy schedule.  And to have the time to tackle my never-ending to-do list, which is finally starting to diminish.

The word seems to have gotten out that I'm no longer with Google, and I'm getting job offers on a regular basis. Most of the opportunities have been for roles that I've done in the past; tech writing, and leading doc teams.  It would be so easy to fall into another job like that.  And yet, I've resisted, because I want the next step in my career to be different.  If I wanted to do the same thing, I would have stayed at Google.

I put myself through college by cleaning houses and working the cosmetics counter at Walgreens.  I have a healthy appreciation for the luxury of having plentiful food on the table and good health insurance.  So every time I turn down a job opportunity I sort of mentally recoil in horror and ask myself what I'm thinking.

And yet... and yet.  What keeps me going is the sparkle in peoples' eyes when I tell them that I want to help companies do collaborative documentation and support.  The excitement in their voices, when they say "Yes, that's a great idea, and have you considered... "  Their hope, when they say "Wow, my company could really use something like that.  When will you have a solution in place?"

These opportunities are much less tangible than a funded headcount for a documentation manager, or a vetted need for a tech writer.  But they're surrounded by passion and opportunity and excitement, and by the potential of a new way of looking at the world.

No, I don't have all the answers yet.  I don't even have a guarantee that an answer exists, or that I'll be the person to figure it out.  But I do see the value of collaborative documentation, and I want to try to move the industry forward in a way that realizes that value.  I do know that every advancement I make, however little, might drastically change the way companies and customers interact with one another.  So it is that my plan remains to, deliberately, refocus my career towards building collaborative documentation solutions.

The next chapter of my career

Well, folks, the time has come for me to move on.  Today is my last day at Google.

After I eliminated my position, I got to thinking about what I want to do next.  I thought about going back to tech writing, and there was plenty of opportunity to do so at Google, but it didn't draw me in, like it has in the past.  I thought about managing a different type of team, but that didn't resonate with me either.  In short, there was just nothing at Google that called my name.

I'm a firm believer in choosing work that you can be passionate about.  We spend so much of our time at work.  Our job should be something that gets us out of bed in the morning with anticipation for the day to come.  Sure, not every day can be like that, but overall, we should be doing something we love.

I also believe that careers don't have to be linear.  For some, the right choice is to work in one place for a long time, becoming a deep expert in what they do, and climbing the ladder over time.  Others prefer to hop from startup to startup, engaging in the excitement of a new venture.  Still others prefer to contract, sometimes working 80 hours a week on an exciting job, and other times taking long vacations. Many of us encounter a combination of those situations over the course of our career.

Finally, I see skills as abstract entities that can be applied to the same job title, or can be repurposed for new and different roles.  I think that outlook will become increasingly necessary as personnel needs morph to accomodate an ever-more-quickly changing world.

So.  What's next for me?

I'm going to start my own company, helping organizations implement collaborative developer documentation.

The industry's changing.  We've seen it.  I've talked about it a bit in this blog, but here it is: Developers no longer go to the manual first when they get stuck.  They go to Google, and type in the problem or error code they're encountering.  More often than not, this leads them to a forum, a blog, or some other "non-official" resource.

"Official" documentation is still important.  Without an initial version of the docs that accompanies the API distribution, and explains how to set up the SDK, how to use the APIs, and gives some sample code, it would be impossible for developers to understand what the API is, and what it's meant to do.  That documentation can never be written by the community, because writing it requires close collaboration with the developers who created the API.

However, there's a long tail of documentation that is best written by the community.  For example: explanations of how to overcome obscure errors that occur only in certain environments, sample code that shows how to use the API for things it's very good at, but for which it wasn't intended to be used, and, sometimes, up to date translations of the official docs.

For one thing, this kind of information is best learned through trial and error by a large user base.  Even if a tech writer did nothing but use the APIs, she would never encounter errors that occur with a different development environment, software version combination, or operating system.  The community is working on a diverse set of environments, will encounter these errors, and can help each other overcome them.

Secondly, more people means more viewpoints, and more viewpoints can provide better documentation. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  A community of collaborators provides creativity and strategic thinking that can only come from the meeting of more than one mind.

There are already many tools that enable collaborative documentation, such as Mindtouch, MediaWiki, and SharePoint, among others.  However, these tools fall short of encouraging people to contribute their knowledge to the docs.  There's no incentive for them to do so.  I have some ideas for fixing that problem.

Another roadblock with collaborative docs is that the review process becomes a bottleneck.  It is not sustainable to have a single person, or even a few people, review all contributions.  I have some ideas for fixing that problem too.

So there you go: that's what excites me.  That's what pulls me out of bed in the morning, eager to find out what the new day holds.  And so, with a mixture of anticipation and sadness, I say goodbye to Google, and welcome the next chapter in my career.

Think through your career.  Does its flow resonate with you?  Are there threads that have resurfaced at various points in your career? What do you like best about what you're doing now?  What haven't you done yet that you hope to do in your lifetime?

The future of technical communication

For most of the history of technical communication, docs have been a megaphone that enable one-way declarations from tech writers to product users.  In many cases, tech writers still perceive docs in that way.

However, user behavior has diverged from this model.  Since web search became good and readily available, product users no longer exclusively rely on the official docs.  Now they listen to whatever the search engine deems to be the most reliable answer to their question.  Sometimes, this comes from the official docs.  More often than not, though, the most useful information comes from forums, blogs, YouTube, and more.

As tech writers, we're at a crossroads.  We can either ignore the fact that the world has changed, or we can embrace it and realize that docs are now a multi-way conversation, of which tech writers only have a single voice.  Our job is still to make the most of that voice, but it's also to facilitate the rest of the conversations and make them more accessible to users.

Two examples of sites that do a good job of this are:

• Instructables
• iFixit 

Both sites seamlessly merge different, related content sources, including docs, forum answers, photos, and video.

Contributor profiles are a major focus of both sites, and the contributions of each user combine to create a site-wide reputation for that user. iFixit has a particularly good algorithm for establishing and showcasing contributors' reputations.

For both sites, the interface for contributing content is quite easy to use, with WYSIWYG authoring environments and brief but useful inline guidance. The Instructables site has excellent guidance on how to write good content (although it would be nice if this page were easier to find.)

What are other important considerations for collaborative sites?  What are examples of your favorite sites?

The Potential of Forums

I've spent the last couple of weeks recovering from a tonsillectomy.  Having your tonsils taken out when you're pushing 40 sounds (and is) insane.  Surprisingly, though, there are a fair number of people who do it.  When I stumbled across a forum of people my age undergoing the same surgery at the same time, I was happily surprised.

The official documentation that my hospital and doctor provided was helpful.  It told me what kind of surgery I'd be having done, the expected prognosis and recovery time, and detailed the medications I could take.  However, as with any documentation, it was missing a lot.  What the official docs were missing, the forum provided. Forums are the perfect complement to documentation. 

2 things that forums are great at

In general, forums are great for two things.  First, they're a good medium for people in similar situations to share practical advice with one another.  I'm thankful to the person who discovered that chewing Dentyne Ice gum helps with ear pain after surgery, and am very glad that person thought to share his discovery.  That kind of information would never have been included in my doctor's documentation, but it's nonetheless very helpful.

Forums also provide emotional support.  Just knowing that someone else is grappling with the same thing; whether that be going through a medical procedure, or trying to write code against the same libraries, is heartening.  Your peers for whatever's at hand are uniquely able to appreciate your triumphs and empathize with the problems you're facing.

2 things that would make forums even better

Forums would be even better if the information that goes into them were easier to get out.  They work well for people who are facing the same problem at the same time and can have a real-time conversation about it.  But once that conversation is archived, it's harder for Joe Schmoe to come along a few weeks later and get all the learnings that the first people figured out together.  The same learning process is often just repeated over and over with new people.  Search should be improved for forums so that people can learn from past conversations, as well as current conversations. Even better would be the addition of artificial intelligence to forums, so that forum conversation about documented topics could automatically be added to the relevant documentation.  That would bring the best worlds of documentation and forums together; a perfect marriage.

The second thing that would make forums better would be a way for participants to create a  reputation based on their contributions, at their discretion.  This reputation should be persistent across forums of similar nature; for example, a developer's Java reputation and her Android reputation should combine to show her skills as an Android app developer.  Stack Overflow has a good algorithm for reputations; it would be great if we could extend that to other sites. 

How do you use forums?  What works about them, and how could they be better?