WebMantras

Jack Dorsey on Making Ideas Happen:

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain:

Threadless: The Do-First Work Ethic:

This post is in response to a question a mate of mine asked about selecting a good Outsourcing partner.

Firstly to debunk a popular misconception – Outsourcing isn’t just about cutting costs Its also about adding value.

Outsourcing can:

• Help achieve goals that you cannot achieve on your own
• Give you a competitive advantage
• Even make you money

Some types of Outsourcing:

• Business Process – Customer Service, Finance, HR
• Application – Development, Upgrades, Maintenance & Support, QA
• Infrastructure – Data Center, Network, Security

All the tips I gave my mate are covered in this excellent article on Outsourcing projects to India. The pros and cons discussed in the article apply to any country or type of project. You can also get a couple of good pointers from this article on sourcing good Offshore Developers.

Feel free to leave a comment with any Outsourcing question or tips you might have.

My team is currently assigned to map & document an existing (intranet) application for a client. We basically want to create a document that we can use to estimate the impact of any change we might make to the code base. This will hopefully save us time in the long term.

What strategies have you used to document an existing application?

Did you know that you can now tell Google which country or geographic location your website should be associated with? You can set the geographic location via the Google Webmaster Tools.

Via the Google Webmaster Central Blog :
“The information you give us will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improves our search results for geographic queries.”

For my weekend trip to New York I have been scouring hotel websites to get the best deal. I finally ended up getting a good deal via Priceline. I noticed the following about the hotel websites in general:

• None of them used any Ajax or Web 2.0 features. It was so hard to find the right room at the right price without hitting the back button a million times.
• Most of the hotels had very limited room pictures. They had pictures of lobbies, outside the hotel, restaurants, Gym BUT very few pictures of their rooms. I would love to see more pictures of each type of room they have available. Hate to see just a generic picture of a bed for each room type. Only some hotels had virtual tour videos.
• Why not recommend special events or festivals happening around the area during my stay or tour packages I can buy with my hotel room?
• Wouldnt it be nice if you can read reviews and ratings on the hotel website itself rather than a 3rd party website? Ratings and reviews would be a perfect way to get into the social networks.

Hotels just have to implement a few simple changes to their websites to make it more usable and increase their conversion rates. I think Jeremiah has hit the nail on the head with his What would the future of Hotel websites look like? post.