Design By Tim

Recently in a post titled, Amazon Sends “Best Customer Service E-mail I’ve Ever Received” the author posted a supposedly true story of a well written customer complaint to Amazon in regards to their fire-sales during “Black Friday week”. You can read Mr. Hildebrandt’s post as well as the replies it prompted, here.

Just for kicks Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s president was CC’d in the email. Several days went by when a reply was received.  In the same tone and whit the clever customer service representative wrote a nice letter that stated the terms of the sales. As well as wishing him the best of luck in next year’s promotion!

Now that is great Customer Service: it’s the ability to take a beating - rather it’s the ability to cleverly say no and have the customer not only accept the rejection - but also be happy and continue to evangelize the company’s reputation.

John Chow dot Com is holding another evil blog contest. He’s giving away a 24″ wide screen LCD monitor and a signed copy of the best selling book, The 4-Hour Workweek! Find out how to enter here. The contest is being sponsored by The Million Dollar Wiki. Use coupon code JohnChow to save $10 on a page.

I always find it quite difficult to build myself a site, so doing it this way—out in the open—works for me, it helps get me motivated. In the past I have called this process a live redesign but wouldn’t be so brave as to put myself through that again.

First, though, some kind of project overview so I have at least half a clue of where I am trying to get to:

What is it for? This is essentially a business blog and it’s long term goal is to generate business, pure and simple.

Why no design for the launch then? I am not actively seeking new clients at the moment, so any kind of design seems superfluous to my needs right now. It’s all about search engines and fellow geeks at this stage, and both can cope without a design for a while I am sure.

Who is my target audience? Well if you’re here then I guess you’re my target - really no direction here at the moment.

It’s a bit of a double edged sword really, my name is reasonably well known right where it needs to be but I have been known to get a bit vulgar and argumentative at times. I wouldn’t ever try and hide that from any potential client (I couldn’t anyway), that’s me like it or loathe it, but it isn’t necessarily all I am, nor all you get when you hire me to do a job (unless requested).

I have no ambitions to see this site featured on showcase sites, though it’s always nice (maybe I’ll give myself an award or something). No, if it’s possible I want the content to drive the site, not the design; we’ll have to wait and see. I might one day change my mind and which point I will plead like the beggar that I am for pointless votes to generate traffic.

That’s roughly it, for now…