Rounding out a month full of IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) activity, I was privileged to speak to Edmonton’s local IABC chapter today as part of their final professional development session of the year.

2009 was an exciting year of growth for Lift – staffing, space, clientele and revenue. We experienced so much forward movement, in fact, that it landed us a spot on Alberta Venture’s 2010 Fast Growth 50 list. Needless to say, we’re honoured and thrilled to be among such glowing company – all innnovative, enterprising businesses, determined to not only keep themselves afloat during last year’s downturn, but actually emerge ...

I’m a big fan of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s book, Freakonomics. If you don’t know the book, the gist is that the authors take a lot of raw data and apply statistical analysis to it in an effort to come away with a conclusion. Sounds pretty dry but the beauty of the book is in what data they choose and how they break it down. The ...

Business at Lift has been good lately. We’ve been diversifying our client base and taking on all sorts of new and interesting projects. (We really should update our portfolio sometime soon.)

However, by putting our heads down to get a bunch of projects done, we may be letting other (and perhaps better) opportunities slip past us. It’s not that we aren’t trying to make good choices but ...

The same as nearly any other website, non-profit organizations (or associations) need to worry about all the regular design elements. If you belong to one of these organizations, you’ll need to worry about the site being easy to use, friendly, having the right message, appropriate colors and fonts, and all the other stuff. In addition to all this, you also have to worry about a few other things that ...

“the coffee’s over there… it’s self serve”
~ cashier

Trying something new isn’t always as simple as it should be. This morning, I had a few minutes to kill so I stopped in at a new (to me) coffee shop to grab a cup to go. It’s a fairly well known establishment in town, but I had only been there once before. Not thinking that it should ...

I used to teach a few classes on various aspects of web development at the University of Alberta and one of the things I would say to boost the students’ confidence was, “every mistake you make, I’ve made a dozen times.” And it’s mostly true. The number might be exaggerated in some cases but every typo, every logic flaw, every design decision that I make is based on ...

“Don’t copy your competitors… you end up with their bad ideas.”

When we start a project, we usually do some kind of competitive analysis to get our bearings on the client’s place in the market. The idea with this exercise is not to come up with a list of elements to copy, but to understand the world in where our client does business. Sometimes in conjunction with this ...