Frame Boxis a simple drag-and-drop tool for creating and sharing wireframes, which can be useful during the website design process to illustrate the structure of a page without getting bogged down in the details. I made a short screencast to show you how it works:
Frame Box is free and really easy to use. You don’t even have to sign in to try it out, but signing in with a Google, Twitter or Facebook account enables you to save your work.
Here’s a breakdown of some things you should consider before taking a leap into the cloud and trying to bring your team along with you.
1. Portability
How portable is your business? If you’re dealing in intellectual property creation or knowledge work— anything that can be produced and delivered electronically via computers, the Internet and phone— then you’re probably in good shape for moving your company into the cloud. Andy mentioned public relations and marketing as good candidates for virtual companies: the virtual agency model. Any content creation shop with creative teams— ad agencies, news agencies, copywriters, bloggers, podcasters, editors, online producers— can work remotely.
2. Process
Just asking yourself the simple questions:“If we didn’t go into an office together, could we still get work done?” and“If so, how?” These will lead you down the path of thinking about how to configure, or reconfigure, your business. You need to deeply analyze the way you currently get things done and document it. Illustrate your work process using a mind-mapping or flowchart tool. Break down how your projects are handled from start to finish. When does your team meeting face-to-face? Envision how that would look as a videoconference instead. What are the steps you might be eliminating by going virtual? Don’t just stop at mapping out your process and translating that to a virtual workflow. Add dollar amounts to your current process versus a virtual process. You should begin to see why virtual work makes good financial sense.
3. Personality
Even if you’re in an industry with proven virtual models, this doesn’t mean that your company that has been entrenched in“the office” can eschew physical location and hit the cloud running. As you probably know from managing people: people hate change. Even if change is for the best, the very act of changing can paralyze some. You may have to make some hard decisions about how to handle resistance against the change to virtual work. Start with open communications, present the concept of going virtual to your team, and suss out the champions of this model. Chances are, you’ve been approached in the past by someone or several team members who’ve asked about telecommuting, even part-time. For the nay-sayers, find ways to offer support every step of the way as they transition from being in the office to working from home.
You may want to bring in consultants to assess your team and offer individual consulting on setting up their virtual workspaces. Set up training sessions for workers and their managers to make sure everyone is up to speed, not just on the technology changes but the culture changes as well. If not everyone is thrilled with your intention to go virtual, don’t be shocked. Be prepared.
4. Infrastructure
In my post What Does It Take To Run a Virtual Team (Redux), I listed the needs of a virtual team, namely:
There is no“one size fits all” technology solution for every company that goes virtual, although there are many enterprise solutions available from Microsoft to Cisco to a never-ending procession of innovative startups looking to solve the problems of virtual work. If you pick a fully-integrated enterprise system, keep in mind it may be more expensive and less flexible than newer, more innovative solutions. The rub of going with smaller startups for your virtual infrastructure needs is that you may have to cobble together several tools, so while they might be highly affordable, you’ll be looking at issues such as cross compatibility and integration.
5. Accountability
A common question managers ask when confronted with the prospect of managing a virtual worker is“how am I going to make sure they get their work done?” A manager who is constantly looking over a worker’s shoulder to make sure they are working is going to have to go through a fundamental shift in how to manage— and how not to manage— to be able to handle managing a virtual team. Managing virtual workers isn’t about watching them like a hawk and micromanaging their every move. Instead, the infrastructure you put into place should have built-in checks and balances to watch productivity and on-time delivery.
Make sure your processes and expectations are not only clear but also communicated clearly to team members. Not everyone will thrive in a virtual work environment, but the issue may be less an inability to get work done and more to do with a feeling of isolation or being disconnected from the team. Be ready to address any issue that crops up as you move toward virtual work and have a plan for addressing issues including missed deadlines, lack of participation, failure to properly document or archive, and forgetting to log time, if that is a requirement.
6. Commitment
You need to decide how committed you are to going virtual and how flexible you’ll be with team members who resist. Can you afford to move in phases, first deploying the team members who are ready, willing and able to take to the cloud, while leaving the others in the office? In order to get the real benefits of going virtual, you should at least consider downsizing the physical work space and look for suitable alternatives that offer real cost savings.
As more and more of your workers opt to go virtual, pretty soon those who are resisting may give in or give up. There is no way to please everyone, but having an understanding that you may have some very unhappy team members from the moment you say“virtual” should help to guide you in your approach. Consider consulting your lawyer to make sure any drastic changes you make in your workplace don’t infringe on workers’ rights.
By thinking through your process carefully and thoughtfully in advance and spending time considering and reviewing the technology you’ll use to build cohesion amongst your dispersed team members, you can certainly construct the ideal virtual workspace. Bringing everyone to the cloud without encountering some digging in of heels is the best scenario, but as a leader and manager, be prepared for the worst.
What do you think about bringing your own company into the cloud?
Stock xchng imageby user linder6580
Users will be able to start with a new home section, where they can access frequently used documents. There’s also a new collections features which replaces labels and folders and allows users to organize documents for easy sharing and editing. Google has included a new preview panel for viewing videos and seeing thumbnails of documents. Pictures can be opened in a full screen viewer. Priority sorting builds off Gmail’s priority in-box and pulls the most important documents to the top.
There are additional filters to view document types. Now users can filter for videos and images and can apply filters for public and private documents. Google has also sped up the back end for faster performance, streamlined the interface overall and included new keyboard short cuts. The changes show that Google is able to iterate well and make things cleaner and more usable, if not the first time, eventually over successive updates. Improvements to Docs are important if Google wants to become a viable alternative to Microsoft’s productivity tools.
Google has recentlyenabled document editing on mobile devices. The company also released Google Cloud Connect, allowing users to begin a document in Microsoft Word, Excel or Powerpoint and then with a click of the button,share the document on the web via Google Docs.The latest update, which will roll out over the next couple of days, is not ground-breaking but it continues to help position Google Docs to better compete against Microsoft Office.
About.me is completely free, while Flavors.me has a free plan and a $20 per year version. Many of Flavors.me’s features are only available on the paid plan, including some that probably should be free but aren’t, like the font faces you can choose from.
I found About.me slightly easier to make a good-looking page; the basic layout was more professional and better designed. Flavors.me, however, has four different page layouts available with its free plan, while About.me only has one. However, you can drag your main information box anywhere on the screen.
About.me offers users a variety of fonts, while Flavors.me makes you upgrade to get the more interesting ones.
About.me also doesn’t allow more than one account on any of these services. I have three Twitter accounts and several blogs on the two platforms above. If you enter, for example, multiple Blogger blogs, the first one is assigned the Blogger icon, and any others are spelled out in the list, in the order entered. There’s no way, like in Flavors.me, to reorder your items through drag-and-drop.
In Flavors.me, I had some difficulties adding several WordPress blogs. It accepted one WP-hosted blog and one self-hosted WP blog, but for some reason, I couldn’t add another self-hosted WP blog, which happened to be my main blog. Not being able to add that defeats the whole purpose of having the page.Update:Flavors.me contacted me to let me know that the free plan allows up to five services to be added, which wasn’t clear in the documentation. It’s also possible to add a freestanding website using the RSS option underContent>Add.
External links operate differently in the two services. On Flavors.me, links open within the Flavors.me page. On About.me, if you click the icons, they open in a widget on the About.me page. But if you click links in the list, a new window opens.
About.me offers a nice“Email Me” button and contact form. A similar feature is available on the paid version of Flavors.me.
You can use your own domain name with the paid version of Flavors.me, but not with About.me. About.me provides a dashboard with stats on visitors, social media reach, and more. Flavors.me makes you pay for stats.
Both platforms were obviously created to showcase individuals rather than to serve small businesses, and neither is perfect. AOLbought About.me just four days after it launched, while Flavors.me still operates independently. It will be interesting to see how both services evolve, and whether they will move to meet the needs of a professional audience.
Whether you run a one-person shop or a small business, either of these sites could turn out to have some practical use. I recommend trying them both. You may also want to consider such alternatives asRetaggr,GizaPage, andChi.mp, which we’ve written about previously, or even the rudimentary splash pages now available with.tel domain names. I’d love to hear your take on them in the comments, especially if you’ve found creative ways to use them for business!
Do you use About.me or Flavors.me as an online calling card?
Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
On Friday evening, Facebook quietlyannounced to application developersthat third-party apps will be able to access the addresses and mobile phone numbers of its users.
This change is consistent with Facebook’s policy of encouraging openness. But for web workers who are increasingly using Facebook for business purposes, such a policy may not be welcome.
Note: if you’ve added a phone number in the“Other Phone” field, Facebook will copy that number into the“Mobile Phone” field if you leave the mobile number blank. So you’ll need to erase any phone numbers that you’ve entered into either field.
Do you include your personal contact information on your Facebook page?
Language evolves, but the web has provided a hothouse for the overblown blossoming— and just as swift demise — of fad language, jargon and discipline-specific words. Last year’s Word of the Year,“Tweet”, and the Word of the Decade,“Google,” were also technology-related. How do web workers keep up with the breakneck evolution of online language? And how do we avoid misusing words and sounding out-of-touch in a field where being connected is the most basic requirement?
The Linguistic Society of America’s naming of“app” as its word of the year points to the speed at which words and word usage evolves online. App– an abbreviation, of course, for application— is a technology-specific word that, for a while, was heard all too often in the phrase,“There’s an app for that!”“Nom,” a word made popular by the Cookie Monster, has taken hold in the world of social networking— a world in which theCookie Monster has quite the following.
The changing language of the digital space points to the evolution of the web and online culture, as much as to our growing technological vocabularies.
Back in the 90′s, it was common to“surf the‘Net”, to“ICQ” a friend, and to hang out on“bulletin boards”. Within a few years, we were talking about static websites as“brochureware”— with a negative inflection — and communicating in acronyms: IMHO, ROFL, and so on.
Today, better search facilities, and our improved ability to control our own online experiences, preclude most of us from having to“surf the‘Net”. Similarly, changes in the way in which online properties are run has severely reduced the number of“webmasters” online. The declining popularity of these terms points to the changing way we use the Web as much as to simple word usage trends.
Similarly, the adoption and adaptation of concepts like“Web 2.0″ puts their associated fad terms out of use almost as quickly as they come into the industry’s consciousness. The growth and persistence of digital brands impacts our language, too. I’ll still“Google it”, but I’ll no longer“ICQ” you the results of my search— I’ll more likely“IM” them.
Beyond the popular language of the Web lies discipline-specific terminology, or jargon. While this may stick around for longer, its evolution is still incredibly fast by comparison to the rest of our language.
Take“usability”, for example. Initially,“usability” was the buzzword, until awareness of“accessibility” became widespread. Around this time,“user testing” could usually be taken to mean physical testing with users in a room with a computer.
We’ve seen these areas unite and expand into the broader field of“user experience”, which includes the design focus that many readers ofJakob Nielsen’s AlertBoxused to long for. Where once they were ends in themselves, usability and accessibility are seen today as two elements of the broader discipline of user experience, a term which has overtaken the other two in the conversations I’m hearing online. Oh, and“user testing”? These days, that could mean anything from in-house, on-site testing with actual users, to virtual testing carried out by an offshore agency you’ve never met.
Interestingly, it’s often the practical terms within an area or field that outlast the bigger-picture or trend terms for that field: talk of wireframes, use cases, information architecture, and so on persists. But to speak of“usability” or“accessibility” when you mean“user experience” immediately implies a lack of knowledge and expertise.
Many web workers take the evolution of online language with a grain of salt, and few of us expect to be across all of the common buzzwords. That said, my web working friends seem to know— and use — more jargon than they realize.
It’s true that the majority of these words aren’t restricted to online usage: word themes that begin and grow online are inevitably carried into the offline world. We use them in general conversations, often with people who aren’t tech-savvy or web workers.
For most of us, staying up-to-date with the evolving online language is less about looking up words we don’t understand than it is listening to the conversation of others, reading widely and heavily, and avoiding using terms whose meanings we’re not sure of.
Most of us know the current language of our fields, and have a general, less-developed knowledge of those of related disciplines. Our knowledge of general web terms is usually commensurate with our degree of online submersion and socializing. And for most of us, that’s enough.
Imagebystock.xchnguserBrybs.
1. Managing Your Profile and Reputation
So many networks, so many different audiences and connections. Maybe you’re feeling like you have split personalities: being professional on LinkedIn, running at the mouth on Twitter, then letting your hair down on Facebook. But wait! You forgot that you’re connected with your boss or your client on Facebook. Panic ensues. Or what if someone is Googling your name before interviewing you for a job. What will they find? Over the last 10 years, we’ve all learned some tough lessons about what it means to be digital.
Solution:Reduce the number of networks you use. Keep your work and personal networks separate. Create a“universal” profile to help clear up the clutter. About.melets you display an attractive, social-media integrated profile. Gist encourages you to claim your public profile so everyone using their application sees consistent information for you. Iblogged about the companyrecently.
2. Privacy Issues and Protecting Your Identity
Are you feeling squeamish about what personal data is floating out there in the ether about you? You may not even realize how complicit you’ve been in releasing this information, from emailing your credit card information because it was quick and easy, to uploading a photo to Flickr with a geotag that reveals the exact location of your home. So what can you do about it?
Solution:Get smart and help educate others about privacy issues. Be smarter about what you reveal and how and when you reveal it. Opt out of automated features on social networks and take the time to manually configure your privacy settings to a more conservative setting. Companies likeReputation.comare popping up to rescue us from our accidental over-sharing.
3. Curating Information and Coping with Information Overload
RSS feeds, Twitterstreams, news feeds… when will it end? We continue to open the floodgates to more and more information, desperately seeking tools to help us parse, filter, slice, dice, and otherwise funnel information into our already overloaded brains.
Solution:My advice? Stop your addiction to data; go cold turkey. Pare down and eliminate. You do not need to know everything, and trying is an effort in futility. Identify no more than a handful of blogs or information sources that give you a solid cross-section of the information you need. Trust the curators whose job it is to be human filters of the information that interests you or that pertains to your work. Count what you’re consuming like you count calories: No more than five sources. Can you do it? And what about your Twitterstream? Focus more on your interactions with others than the never-ending stream of information. Create heavily curated Twitter lists based around specific areas of interest to zero in on more important information, then peruse them occasionally to get a quick fix. Use these lists sparingly and stop immediately if you find yourself getting sucked back into the datastream.
4. Keeping Up With New Tech Developments
You’re human. You can’t keep up all the latest technology development or the myriad of continuous changes to the tech you’re already using. Every week, Facebook offers new features and interface tweaks.
Solution: So what do you do if you want to at least understand where things are going? I’d go back to my suggestion to identify trusted curators, such as bloggers and news sources that are devoted to explaining what is current and keeping an eye on what’s next. Then go back and review #3 above in order to keep your data consumption under control.
5. Organizing Your Digital Files and Data
Our digital ephemera is everywhere, and we are generating data more rapidly than ever before. Our files are hard to organize and hard to find. I’ve come to rely on my computer’s search function to find files because I can’t file them away in neat little folders fast enough any more. Online, I rely on Google to find thing because I find that I have too many tools, sites and apps to help me tuck away data that I can no longer find posts or articles when I need them— did I save it withDelicious?Instapaper? How can you better organize the files and content you want to save and access again in the future?
Solution:Find the handful of tools that help you monitor, manage, curate, archive and organize your data. From Hootsuite for monitoring and managing your accounts to tools such asScoop.itandPearltreesto archive, organize and share articles and blog posts, there are tools and applications out there created specifically to relieve your social media pain. Dropbox might be an answer for your files. New sites likeGogobeansoffer to bring all your digital“stuff” into one place to help you manage it and manage who sees it. Once you find the one that works for you, use it regularly and learn to use it well.
6. Finding the Time to Deal with Social Media
Yes, dealing with social media takes time. How much time? Iblogged about it here.
Solution:See #3-#5 above.
If you’re experiencing social media pain, step back and look for ways to pare down and simplify. Narrow down your trusted sources of information. Resist the temptation to get caught up in data frenzy. Leverage technology tools that help you ease the pain.
What is your social media pain point? Let us know in the poll above and discuss it below.
Stock xchng imageby user cribbe
