In my 20 years in the industry it never ceases to amaze me how many times we fall into the same trap.  My favorite trap is the "if you build it, they will come" trap.  This is of course from the movie Field of Dreams, where Ray Cansella is told to plow his corn field under (his main source of income) and build a baseball stadium for players from the past.  I love to watch companies build elaborate new services and products only to find out they don't want it.  The more apt phrase is "If you build it, they may come", that is if they have a need and you

Have you ever tried to get that perfect domain name only to find out that it is taken and everything close to it is taken as well.  There is limited real estate on the web, due to the fact that there are only 21 top level domain names such as .com, .org, .net, etc..  However, everyone will tell you that .com is the most recognizable, and therefore the only way to go.  Well an announcement this week from ICANN the governing body for domain names is about to open up a whole bunch of ocean front real estate when it comes to domain names.  Here is a quote from the article.

 While I was creating the website for a law firm, I did some research on the various elements in many legal websites.  I thought I might share some of that research with you.  Some of it is obvious, some not so obvious judging from the various sites I looked at.

The Header

The header, or a form of the header should appear on every page.

Westend End Management and Leasing called on Pioneer Solutions Group to develop a new website that would allow for their internal staff to manage the posting of information and provide robust search and extensive use of images. If you have been reading any of the posts on my blog recently you will know that Drupal is my platform of choice, and it did not disappoint as a great option for this site. The only real question was should I use Drupal 5 or Drupal 6. At the time when development started, Views for Drupal 6 was not quite ready for prime time, so I went with Drupal 5.

Pioneer is pleased to have the privilege of working with the great team at the Society for Design Administration. We completed a new website for them recently which sits on the Drupal CMS. http://sda-stl.com

Pioneer is pleased to launch another website for Baratta, Russell and Baratta, a law firm based in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

The client was looking to present more information to their clients and have the ability for people in the firm manage the site. Drupals extensive features allowed us to focus on the content of the site without having to spend a considerable amount of time on the design or programming tasks. You can visit the site at http://barattarussell.com.

Thebarquest.com. This was one of the more fun projects that I have worked on using Drupal.

.... Remember when we were kids and we used to go to the video store?

My son and I just sat down and watched the Keynote address from MacWorld with my daughter stopping in from time to time. Nothing earth shattering in terms of technology. No new iPhone, iPod, or iWhatever. What we saw was Apple building upon their world class operating system, no no no, not OSX Leopard, but the backbone of their fortune iTunes.

Obvious you say, well not always.

In the world of business ownership you will often be told your idea won't work, wrong time - wrong place, your shooting for the wrong market, etc..

This article will show you that sometimes the experts are wrong.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_21/b3733059.htm?chan=sea...

I hope you find it as encouraging as I did.