Clean simple design

I was looking for a nice restaurant and stumbled across this really cool site for the restaurant “North Bondi Italian Food”. This is so simple and clean I love it, just a simple font and a couple of strong colours which work very well. The additional plus is that a site like this would be super cheap to build and maintain. Only two minor negative elements that could be improved.

1. its built in flash and would have been better in just straight HTML/CSS with a little javascript thrown in

2.  the font of the actual menu/food list spoils it as its not consistent but I would say it has been done like this so that the restaurant could easily update the menu items (another drawback of flash).

Getting things done with Jott

I’ve read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done (GTD) and practise the GTD methodology in my daily routine managing work at kmsystems. I find that GTD works well in an agile environment similar methodology to first identifying your to do list or back log and then just work through the actions to clear it or burn it down as the agile folk call it.

I just read this post “Getting things done in the enterprise” which points out that there are a lot of tools available for assisting individuals maintain GTD methodology and one that David Allen uses is Jott (turn your words into actions) which is perfect for the mobile travelling person who on the road a lot. Unfortunately not available here is Aus.

My team and I are remote most of the time and to help us plan our day GTD style and also know what each person is doing we developed our own application called “Whos doin wot”. Whos doin wot allows each person to plan their work in advanced and have it pop up on the day it needs to be done also it helps other team members see who’s swamped and could do with a helping hand.

Design your own great looking website the easy way

In a previous post I wrote about Good Barry which is an excellent simple easy to use content management system (CMS) that has made building a professional website a snap. I was able to set up an exact version of my www.kmsystems.com.au website using Good Barry in around an hour which I think is pretty fast.

Now I’ve discovered two other amazing web site building tools that are just as impressive as Good Barry. http://www.snappages.com/ and http://www.squarespace.com/. They are both super easy to use and have some very well designed templates that you can use to base your new web site design on. I really like the artistic designs available in Snappages and the visual way you can change just about anything in Squarespace. Both feature full reporting capabilities for the all important site stats and both a very reasonably priced. Why would you try to set up and pay for your own hosting when service as cool as these exist.

The only thing I think Good Barry has over these two (apart form having a base here in Australia, I always love to support home grown) is the ecommerce module, which means no mucking around trying to integrate in a third party shopping cart. Good Barry does all of the hard work for you.

If you have any feedback on these CMS platforms please drop me a comment and share your thoughts.

Enterprise twitter with Yammer

I just checked out the presentation by Yammer at TechCrunch50 and love the new twitter based enterprise tool they have built. Similar to when Facebook first started by only allowing education email addresses access Yammer works in a similar fashion by only allowing people that share the same company email address such as @yourcompany.com to view tweets from the same group.

Click here to see the Yammer presentation at TechCrinch50

CEO’s using twitter

Great article on CEO’s who use twitter. The article discusses how CEO’s and bosses are using twitter to share a bit of their daily routine and reduce the gap between them and their staff. Some use twitter as a way to run an instant poll and find out how the community (staff and customers) feel about certain things.

One of may favourites is this profile:

Jack Dorsey

Chief Executive, Twitter

How Twitter helps him run Twitter: ”It’s the fastest and best way to get feedback on what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and what we should do next, both from users and my co-workers. Speaking to the latter point, Twitter makes our company feel smaller and more cohesive. There is something to be said about sharing the small details of your life with those you work with daily.”