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Creating and maintaining a presence on the web is about better communication, putting your best foot forward, and connecting with people. With so many options to consider and so much competition, what can you do to set yourself apart? I take your goals and strengths and help you translate them into a quality web site that performs. Take the first step towards a unique, well-built web presence that works for you and contact me now!
Learn about how I can help, why you need it & how to get it. More about Josh, the company, & how this whole thing works. I design, build, optimize, customize, refresh, & advise.

3 Questions to Answer Before Building Anything Online
I am obsessed with ideas. Ideas by themselves are both incredibly important and totally-overrated. As such, they are completely misunderstood. Simple ideas can transform world but the mean value for an idea approaches zero. I’m in a position where I get to hear a lot of ideas from passionate people wanting to do something incredible. Since ideas have the power to change your life, for better or for worse, it’s my duty to help people stay grounded and test their ideas before jumping head-first into something. Here’s how to do it.

As I see it, there are three questions you should ask yourself before taking any steps forward with a web project:

Is there a need for what I want to do that isn’t being fulfilled somewhere else?
If there is a need, is what I’m trying to build going to fit that need in a way that people will use it?
If there is a need and what I’m trying to do will properly fit that need, is it built in a way that makes it easy for me to keep fulfilling that need?

These questions are the Holy Trinity of ideas on the web. Extrapolated a bit further, these are the questions anyone should be asking before making anything to sell to other people but I’m going to keep the scope with web ideas since I want to speak from my experience rather than just pontificate (I’ll be doing a bit of that too, though).
This list is not a check list (“yep, yep, yep cool, let’s go!“), nor is it any guarantee of success (“JoshCanHelp’s simple rules to endless fame and fortune“). These questions should serve as the very minimum of research you should do before paying anyone to design, build, or otherwise create anything. If you don’t take the time to answer these questions to the best of your ability then you’re not investing your money, you’re gambling it. If you do take the time to answer these questions, you will improve your chances of succeeding greatly.
Let’s walk through these one-by-one but do please note that I use “site,” “project,” “tool,” and “app” to mean whatever you want to build online:

This is the all-important “market research” question. First, you’re figuring out if there’s anyone out there that has a need for your idea. If you decide that there is, you need to figure out the competition for your idea and get familiar with that competition.
This is going to be the big soul-searching one. Ask yourself:

Answer these questions honestly, not in market-speak. This isn’t a pitch, this is an inquiry. You need to be able to summarize what you’re trying to build in a sentence or two. If you can’t do that then keep working until you can.
Once you’ve defined what you want to do, you need to do a little research. Ask yourself:

Are there any other sites doing anything like this? If your answer is no here, look a little harder.
What sites are doing something similar?

You don’t need to go to business school to start the preliminary research on this and spending any money before you’re at least marginally familiar with the landscape is a big mistake. Answer the first section of questions to be clear on what you want to do, then Google your way to answers on the second one.
Second, will people want to use what I want to build to fulfill this gap I’ve found?
This is probably the hardest thing to answer because you will always be biased towards your own ideas. Of course people will use it, I really need something like this!
I’m fighting the urge to call this the most important step, partly because it’s easy to overlook or gloss over and partly because it’s hard to fix once to fix the problem once you’ve realized that it’s what you made that is failing to perform. But I won’t call it the most important step because then you might just ignore the others.
The only real way to solve this problem is get in contact with people who might be using it. Talk to 5 – 10 people in the target audience (re: the people you would expect to use this site) that you want to appeal to. Spend some time coming up with a survey and ask people. Friends, family, doesn’t matter who as long as they are the type of people that would be using this site.
A few sample questions:

“Would you use a tool if it did _____?”
“How much would it take to make you stop using tool X and start using tool Y?”

Draw pictures, diagrams, schematics, comparisons whatever it takes to communicate, clearly, your idea and get a sense of whether it would be worth it for someone to start using it. These are the preliminary baby steps towards user-testing your product once you have a working prototype.
Third, is this market-gap-filling tool that I’ve made easy enough to maintain and administer?
This is an easy step compared to the others. The purpose here is to be sure you’re building something that makes it easy for you to serve your audience. Remember that there are two sets of people using the site: the admins and the users. There will be many, many more users than admins but don’t fall into the trap of “it’s ok if my job is hard, as long as theirs is easy” because it’s going to suck later. It should suck for you instead of the users but the goal is for it not to suck at all for anyone.
The best way to go about this step is to list every possible way that you will be supporting the features you described in step 1 and step 2. You’re looking to create what are called use cases, the specific ways that admins will be using the site. Use something like FreeMind to organize your thoughts hierarchically or just start with a simple list of functions and branch out from there. Get it all down: from “must have” to “would be nice” all the way down it “I wonder if it’s possible to” You’re looking for all the ways to make your life easy creating the stuff that people will come back over and over to use and see.
After that, get this list to whomever is building your site and walk through it item-by-item. They’ll tell you whether something is too hard to be worth it or an easy fix. If you find the right one, they’ll also help you figure out your other on- and off-line processes to make the whole thing work better.
Again, don’t sell yourself short on this one. Just assuming your life will be hell for a period of time while you get things figured out will only serve to stress you out and set the tone for the rest of the site (“hey, it couldn’t get much worse than this, right?“).

So, every morning when you wake up with the next big amazing internet idea, I want you to do these things, in order:

Whittle your idea down to a few sentences that actually make sense
Try explaining your idea using these few sentences to someone that might use it and see what they say
Repeat #3 several times; listen carefully

I love feedback so leave your comments, good or bad, below. Am I off my rocker? Speaking nonsense? Let me know.
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5 Reasons Why I Won’t Build That For You (it’s not just because I said so)
Turning down projects (or redirecting ones that are on the wrong track) is the only path toward some semblance of sanity in this business. For some people, the internet is magic and I’m a wizard here to cast spells and make magical things happen (you could also see me as a genie making wishes come true). Fact is: I only have so much time on this planet and making clunky, ugly, and bad ideas come to life is not what I want to do with that time. If you work with me, I might say no and you should probably understand why.

First off, I should say that I do say yes more often than I say no. I assume some of that comes from the fact that people look to me for advice and I would never (intentionally) lead someone astray. Also, most of the projects I work on are word-of-mouth referrals so they come to me expecting to enjoy the process. These two things work very well towards creating good relationships and, hence, good outcomes.
But, from time-to-time someone comes to me with a bad idea or a bad attitude and, because I’m in a type of service role, it’s expected that I do what I’m told to do. The problem here is that I’m only interested in working on sites, scripts, and blogs that I’m proud of completing. If I’m in a service role then we’re not a team. If that’s the case then I have no sense of ownership over what’s being created and you’re simply not going to get my best work. That’s just not where I want to be and I’m going to say no.
So, here’s why I said, am saying, or will in the future say no.

Confessions from an accidental spammer
Thou shall not spam is one of the ten commandments of the web. Sending out unwanted email is unnecessary, intrusive, and, at times, downright abhorrent. Who would do such a thing? Yours truly did… but if you give me a chance to redeem myself, I think youll understand (and, more importantly, learn something).
I wrote a post a long while ago about spam. A conversation at a previous employer sparked my thoughts on the matter and, from that conversation forward, I became a nearly-militant anti-spam campaigner. My colleague argued that spam is just junk mail that people dont want but how do you know if people dont want it unless you try it out. My argument was that spam is email that was not asked for explicitly. Its one thing to send a one-to-one email out of the blue, its another to send a bulk mailing to people who probably wouldnt mind.

Goodbye San Diego, stay connected, monthly website reports , and other news
It’s been a long time since I’ve sent out a newsletter email (coming up on two years) and I think it’s about that time again. Here’s what’s going out today.

In this issue: goodbye San Diego, stay connected, monthly website reports , other news

JoshCanHelp is changing location soon ( hint: )
The winds are changing direction and taking the wife and I to Europe… for a while. We’ll be in Paris, France starting the second week in August until the 2nd week in November. After that, we’re moving back to Seattle to continue the adventure.

What it means to me to be a free agent
Seth Godin posed 16 questions for people making a living as a free agent. While the people I currently help and those I might help in the future may benefit from knowing the answers here, it’s more important to put in words why I do what I do to make sure I understand that for myself. Still, I hope this little exercise provides a helpful window into how I work and who I am.

A Layman’s Intro to the Semantic Web: Web 3.0, ontology, and RDFa
A recent San Diego Refresh meeting found me in a room full of fellow geeks learning about microdata and the semantic web. What I thought was going to be a new look at SEO turned out to be a very in-depth look at where the web might be heading.

The session was led by Barbara Starr (@BarbaraStarr) and the information here is distilled from notes I took during the session. As such, attribution is appropriate. Thanks again, Barbara, for a great session!
WIIFM (What’s In It For Me)?
A great teacher once told me that you need to tell people what they’re going to get out of a learning session before you start. For this heady topic, I think this is more true than ever. Here’s what you should get out of this post:

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