Be prepared for users

Earlier today, I did something as innocuous as setting up a profile on about.me, a profiles startup much like flavors.me.  When I signed up, it invited me to tweet my profile’s URL:

I set up my blog’s URL as part of this — but I didn’t have anything new on it at all. Surprisingly to me, a bunch of traffic came through, much more than usual, simply because of this one tweet and — apparently — how cool about.me is.

The takeaway is this: you’ve got a brand you’re showing to the world. If you give them some reason to come to your site, even a small one, you need to have something new for them. If you don’t, you’re only asking for dilution of your “personal brand”, something that’s been mused about frequently by my friend Ted Gonder — on his much more actively “branded” personal blog .

midVenturesLAUNCH: Come see Chicago’s future

There’s a new conference in town that’s been lighting up publications like Crain’s Chicago Business, the Sun-Times, and new media outlets like TheNextWeb and Mashable.  midVenturesLAUNCH is a new startup and innovation conference, held on September 27-28 at the UIC Forum, that’s a culmination of this year’s explosion in the Chicago tech scene.  In the past year alone, Chicago:

• Became the home of the “fastest growing company in the World” according to Forbes (Groupon)
• Got its first, but certainly not last, YCombinator-style incubator (Excelerate Labs)
• Has a vibrant, rapidly-growing community forming in the startup space (like the SyncTechCenter, Flyover Geeks, and more)

Yes, I’m involved in the conference planning committee, but I’ve been putting in long hours because I believe, like many people that are coming, that Chicago and the Midwest can become prime places for technology investment and startup incubation.

We’ve got 50 hours of programming, speakers from Groupon, Reddit, OKCupid, OpenTable, and dozens more — and eleven startups, some local and some from California and beyond, who are launching their latest products on stage right here in our hometown.

Not convinced?  Want more information? Check out the conference Web site at midVenturesLAUNCH.com or watch the awesome new trailer embedded above for a quick overview.

Portfolio Sample: a new ShortwaveDesign.com.

I’m currently in the process of redesigning my business site, Shortwave Design, to fit my new needs.

Updating my portfolio is one of those things that has never been easy enough for me to convert into a solid habit, so it’s almost always behind.  Currently, it not only lacks my most recent work but also some of my best work, work that simply never had a screenshot taken of it.

I’m hoping to make the 2010 redesign of shortwavedesign.com as simple as possible, minimalist in both presentation and publishing philosophy. It simply needs to be.  This is the first conceptual version.

Pattern App

I don’t remember at all how I got to it, but I ran into a site called Pattern App, which catalogs and displays common user interface design patterns.

It’s unreasonably cool for a guy like me, but it’s also kind of neat for the average web user to see just how much thought and planning goes into simple things.  Take, for example, the “Always Visible” design paradigm; the example used over at Pattern is Facebook.  They certainly have some pretty cool designers.

Not that they deserve a feature film to be made about them…

Yeah. It’s happening. I just found out today.  It’s a bit weird.  I like the idea of overglorifying web developers and designers, don’t get me wrong, but we all know there’s not a single logical way that Zuck got as much action as that trailer seems to portray.  And why is Justin Timberlake in that movie?!