It’s critical to your business. It affects revenue. It’s how people who can’t come to you perceive you.

It’s your Web site.

Its complex. Abstract. Lots of conflicting ideas and forces are involved. Everyone says they now the best thing for it. Finger-pointing. Door slamming. Screaming.

Am I describing your Web site and the team that supports it? Or your teenager?

If you think of your Web site as a teenager, you begin to realize the problems that your facing. Like a teenager, it has grown physically and mentally, and, as a result, thinks its an experienced adult, ready to take on the world. However, let’s think of your site as a teenager, and think back to how we, as teenagers (yeah, I’m old), saw the world.

MOM! This doesn’t fit anymore!

Your Web site has grown as all of your marketing and customer service programs bear fruit. Traffic is increasing. Revenue is up. Everyone is smiling.

Then you wake up and realize that your Web site is too small for your business. This could mean that the infrastructure is overloaded, the network is tapped out, your connectivity is maxed, and your sysadmins, designers, and network teams are spending most of your day just firefighting.

Now, how can you grow a successful business, or be the hip kid in school, when your clothes don’t fit anymore?

But, you can’t buy an entire wardrobe every six months, so plan, consider your goals and destinations, and shop smart.

DAD! Everyone has one! I need to have one to be cool!

Shiny.

It’s a word that has been around for a long time, and was revived (with new meaning) by Firefly. It means reflective, bright, and new. It’s what attracts people to gold, mirrors, and highly polished vintage cars. In the context of Web sites, it’s the eye-candy that you encounter in your browsing, and go “Our site needs that”.

Now step back and ask yourself what purpose this new eye-candy will serve.

And this is where Web designers and marketing people laugh, because it’s all about being new and improved.

But can you be new and improved, when your site is old and broken?

Get your Web performance in order with what you, then add the stuff that makes your site pop.

But those aren’t the cool kids. I don’t hang with them.

Everyone is attracted to the gleam of the cool new Web sites out there that offer to do the same old thing as your site. The promise of new approaches to old problems, lower cost, and greater efficiencies in our daily lives are what prompt many of us to switch.

As a parent, we may scoff, realizing that maybe the cool kids never amounted to much outside of High School. But, sometimes you have to step back and wonder what makes a cool kid cool.

You have to step back and say, why are they attracting so much attention and we’re seen as the old-guard? What can we learn from the cool kids? Is your way the very best way? And says who?

And once you ask these questions, maybe you agree that some of what the cool kids do is, in fact, cool.

Can I borrow the car?

Trust is a powerful thing to someone, or to a group. Your instinctive response depends on who you are, and what your experiences with others have been like in the past.

Trust is something often found lacking when it comes to a Web site. Not between your organization and your customers, but between the various factions within your organization who are trying to interfere or create or revamp or manage the site.

Not everyone has the same goals. But sometimes asking a few questions of other people and listening to their reasons for doing something will lead to a discussion that will improve the Web site in a way that improves the business in the long run.

Sometimes asking why a teenager wants to borrow the car will help you see things from their perspective for a little while. You may not agree, but at least now it’s not a yes/no answer.

YOU: How was school today? - THEM: Ok.

Within growing organizations, open and clear communication tends to gradually shrivel and degenerate. Communications become more formal, with what is not said being as important as what is. Trying to find out what another department is doing becomes a lot like determining the state of the Soviet Union’s leadership based on who attends parades in Red Square.

Abstract communication is one of the things that separates humans from a large portion of the rest of the animal kingdom. There is nothing more abstract than a Web site, where physical devices and programming code produce an output that can only be seen and heard.

The need for communication is critical in order to understand what is happening in another department. And sometimes that means pushing harder, making the other person or team answer hard questions that they think you’re not interested in, or that you is non of your business.

If you are in the same company, it’s everyone’s business. So push for an answer, because working to create an abstract deliverable that determines the success or failure of the entire firm can’t be based on a grunt and a nod.

Summary

There are no easy answers to Web performance. But if you consider your Web site and your teams as a teenager, you will be able to see that the problems that we all deal with in our daily interactions with teens crop up over an over when dealing with Web design, content, infrastructure, networks and performance.

Managing all the components of a Web site and getting best performance out of it often requires you to have the patience of Job. But it is also good to carry a small pinch of faith in these same teams, faith  that everyone, whether they say it or not, wants to have the best Web site possible.

Tags: conversation, cool, cool new Web, High School, improvement, performance evolution, performance improvement, physical devices, Red Square, Soviet Union, teen, teenager, Web design, Web designers, Web Performance

Many, many years ago, I started my depressing voyage through the world of work at an Overwaitea food store in my home town. As a teenager, I expected to work so weird hours, and accept some level of abuse from the “adults” I worked with.

However, it seems that the organization now expects all their employees to accept this crap [here].

A major B.C. grocery chain wants some of its unionized staff to work shifts of just two hours, a move the union representing 8,500 workers called shocking.

The Overwaitea Food Group, which also runs Save-On-Foods and Urban Fare, made the demand for two-hour shifts as it began negotiating a new contract with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the union said.

Tags: Canada, cbc, content, HTML, HTTP, ISP, it, Om, pr, run, Technorati, teen, teenager

I don’t often (ever) talk about my musical taste. It is unremarkable for the most part, with flights into madness and impulsiveness.

Lately, I have discovered Icelandic music. Mainly Sigur Ros, Mum, Apparat Organ Quartet, Aniima, and (of course) Bjork. Apparently Icelandic music is all the rage, with people trying to understand how such a small country can produce such a wide range of artists.

These artists provide a soothing background to my jangled, often confused, mental state. I played it as I slept while I was on my latest trip, and while I was on the plane returning from Chicago.

However, my deep feelings and desire to visit Iceland has its roots back in my very early teens. A Hardy Boys mystery and a Clive Cussler novel brought it to my attention. It’s a nation of extremes, of wonder, isolation, and survival.

It is among one of the few places I feel I have to visit at least once in my life. I cannot explain this desire. Perhaps it is the latent Viking in me.

But the music draws me as much as the place does.

Tags: app, Apparat Organ Quartet, attention, book, Chicago, Clive Cussler, gif, HTTP, Iceland, IM, IP, it, LAN, live, Om, One, pr, ssl, teen

Since August of this year, I have been exploring the insides of my mind in greater detail. If you read this blog regularly, you are pretty likely aware of the fluctuations in my mood, and the rationality of my behaviour.

If you get the chance, find and watch The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive hosted by Stephen Fry. In his open, intelligent and witty way, Fry tackles the topic of Bipolar Disorders (oh yes, there are more than one), including his own. If you can find it (you will have to try all of the usual channels to get it in North America), watch it.

So, why am I openly discussing the fact that I am Bipolar in a public forum? Why would I confess to the world, to people who may in the future meet me, or even consider hiring me?

It’s simple. Many months ago, I wrote that if you were going to hire me based on what I had done in the past, or what school I went to, I most likely wouldn’t want to work for your company anyway. The same applies to this illness, this condition I suffer from. If you or your company won’t hire me because I suffer from an illness that is beyond my control, that I will have for the rest of my life, why would I work for your firm?

I have had Bipolar for a long time. I can track the behaviours that identify the condition back into my childhood, through my teens, through until today. Normally, the cycling that I go through is benign, punctuated by periods of utter and complete hyperfocus. Most of the time, hyperfocus is a benefit for me — it is what got me through re-building the GrabPERF interface last year, and helped power me to absorb and write as much on Web performance as I have.

The manic side does have its pitfalls. My mania usually results in buying and spending sprees that have often endangered my financial stability. An example of this is my acquisition or stationery supplies, pen, notebooks and books.

Two weeks ago, I cleaned out my desk and aggregated all of the writing instruments I have purchased over the last 12 months. When I was done, I had filled a 1-gallon Zip-Lock baggie with pens, pencils, highlighters and Sharpies.

In my lifetime, I could never use them all.

I fanatically acquire notebooks. Rhodia, Moleskine, Rite-in-the-Rain, anything. How many of them have I written in? Well, lets just say that my kids will be using my blank notebook collection for many years after I have departed this world.

The spending sprees, the intense desire for the acquisition of things, is my most noticeable manifestation of manic behaviour. In most instances, the manic process starts to wind down after a while. In a few instances, it continues upward. It continues upward until my rational mind dissipates, and I start ranting and raving, making irrational and potentially destructive choices in my life. Choices that have (or could have) affected the course of my life.

I suffer from a small subset of the condition, Bipolar I. What differentiates this group from the standard “manic-depressive” or Bipolar diagnosis is that is more MANIC-depressive, with a sustained emphasis on the manic episodes. Depressive episodes occur, don’t get me wrong; but it is the intense and unstoppable mania that has shaped me more than the depression.

However, this condition is not “curable” in the standard way. It also doesn’t manifest any physical symptoms. So in most cases, people just say that I need to get a grip and get on with my life. I am grateful that I have an understanding and (in some cases) forgiving wife who is intent on helping me control and regulate my behaviour. I am also extremely lucky that my current manager understands this part of me, and gives me the freedom I need to ebb and flow with the condition.

To wrap this up (I hate long postings), I leave you with this thought. In his programme, Fry asks his interview subjects the following question (and I paraphrase it here):

If there was a button you could push, a button that cured you of this condition, and gave you a normal mind, would you press it?

Only one of the interview subjects said yes. Everyone else said that despite the pain and suffering that accompanies the condition, there is no way that they would be willing to give back the state of mind that allowed them to achieve what they had achieved.

We are not in our right mind. And I am proud of that.

Technorati Tags: Bipolar, manic+depression, manic+depressive, Bipolar+I, psychiatric+illness, mental+health, depression, mania, manic

Tags: Acquisition, app, bbc, Bipolar Disorders, blog, book, control, current, depression, EAD, GrabPERF, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, it, LAN, leave, mania, normal, North America, Om, One, performance, posting, pr, Stephen Fry, Technorati, teen, tv, web, Web Performance

As a teenager growing up in a very small logging town in the BC interior, I had what could be politely termed unusual musical tastes, especially for the mainstream, heavy-metal, hair-banging kids I hung around with.

But when I was alone with my walkman, I listened to the real geniuses of 80s rock: REM, Kate Bush, Talking Heads, and…Lindsey Buckingham.

Lindsey Buckingham?? That guy from Fleetwood Mac?

Want a little aural treat? Listen to Go Insane. I literally wore the oxide off my version of the cassette. Crosses so many different boundaries…and realize that you are pretty much hearing Lindsey Buckingham only. Mick Fleetwood makes a couple appearances, but other than that, it is a one-man show.

Do it. I dare you.

Tags: ads, app, ARIN, cro, EAD, flee, HTTP, IE, it, LAN, Mac, Om, One, pr, teen, teenager

Ok, I look like a refined suburban husband and father. But I grew up in a small town in the British Columbia interior.

Now, for those of you who grew up in small British Columbia towns in the 1980s, you know that the hair was Mullet-extreme, the car was a black Firebird “ThunderChicken”, and the music was a mixture of pop-metal, led by those Australian bad boys, AC/DC.

I grew in musical tastes and listen to so much now that to say I have a single musical taste is insane.

But I still have a weakness for AC/DC, as it was the subconscious soundtrack to my teenage years. So right now I have Back in Black, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and High Voltage blasting through the living room. This is the one advantage to being home alone this week.

I think the dog has gone into hiding…

Technorati Tags: AC/DC, ACDC, mullet, 1980s, British Columbia, Firebird, ThunderChicken

Tags: Australia, HTTP, it, Om, One, Technorati, teen

In the past, I have lined up to buy Canadian Olympic team goods from Roots. Good quality, and just generally cool and useful stuff.

This year, HBC (the Hudson’s Bay Company) is doing Canadian Olympic apparel.

This is like grandma dressing a teenager.

I am so disappointed. What was the COC thinking?

Technorati Tags: Olympics, HBC, Roots, Canada

Tags: app, ASP, Canada, cool, HTML, HTTP, it, Olympics, Om, Technorati, teen, teenager

I cashed in the last of my Triple B bonds
Bought a double-wide on the Tamiani Trail
I parked it right outside the reservation
Fifteen minutes from the Collier County Jail
And the SEC is far behind
Down in the swamp with the gators and flamingos
A long way from Liechtenstein
I’m a junk bond king playing Seminole Bingo
Well, the SEC is far behind
Down in the swamp with the gators and flamingos
A long way from Liechtenstein
I’m a junk bond king playing Seminole Bingo

Seminole Bingo — Warren Zevon

I was listening to this song while reading this.

You don’t off have a synchronistic experience involving the Tamiani Trail. And after reading the post, and listening to the song, I can almost feel the swamp surrounding me as I wade through the primeval much searching for my lost dabber, absorbing the desperate failure in the eyes of the bingo zombies and other refugees and outcasts from the Great Society.

Tags: blog, EAD, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, it, Om, pr, refugee, search, teen

I wanted to point you to an evangelist of the good kind that Scoble found — "Obi-Wan", the Prowler Knight. They come in all shapes and sizes.

One of the directors in our company keeps saying how impressed he was by a certain product evangelist he saw at a conference a few years ago. He sings high praises about my potential to do the same. I know I can — spent the last five years delving into the how-tos of Web performance, and have a bit of an opinionated streak to help me along.

Today, I am going to evangelize on Web performance.

The issue is that everyone has specific questions and nobody wants to think about the actual big picture. The biggest question an online has to ask is: "How do we make it fast, reliable, scalable, efficient and economic?"

Easy, right? Well, no actually. Big players in the online commerce world still have problems with this. Why? Why can’t they get it right?

Over the last few days, I have posted a couple of screenshots showing that Amazon, the online retailing poster child, has had 3 distinct and length outages. This is unheard of from them. However, they should be in seasonal lockdown at the moment. So I looked at some data I have access to last night. I know when the problem started, but don’t know the root cause. It is frightening that in the span of a single day, the internet leader is in the uncomfortable position of scrambling to decipher and resolve their problem during the busiest time of the year.

This doesn’t surprise me anymore. I just shrug my shoulders and say, loudly, for the umpteenth time that if someone had asked the right questions, followed the correct process, and accurately analyzed the data none of this would be happening.

I have said it before: I have tried. Look at a retailer like Amazon, and you must also look at Target — Target is completely wedded to the Amazon Infrastructure. Was Target part of the analysis of the data so that they could approve the system state freeze? The answer is likely no, and you know what? Target is likely going to collect a ton of paybacks from SLA infringements as a result of the Amazon outages.

At the beginning, I asked what does it take to achieve Web performance excellence. The answer is time and dedication. Online businesses have to either dedicate themselves to this, or sign on to partners who can.

Some big firms think that the traditional IT consulting firms can do it. What is their expertise in Web performance? How do they plan to validate and verify that the improvement plan they have outlined is actually meeting your business objectives? How will they help you manage your content, customer-tracking and ad providers?

Big IT consulting firms: Can you validate and verify that the performance improvements that you have implemented are economical? Are they efficiently resolving the issue? Who resolves problems?

How many consultant, engineers, developers and business managers does it take to fix a bad Web page?

Answer: I don’t know. Do you?

In the end, Web performance is no longer about response times and success rates. It is no longer about usability. It is no longer about hit tracking, processor utilization, SANs, and distributed content. We performance boils down to a single question:

"How do we make it fast, reliable, scalable, efficient and economic?"

Tags: analysis, app, blog, business, consultant, content, data, EAD, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, improvement, Internet, IP, it, LAN, Om, One, online, opinion, outage, performance, performance improvement, pr, run, teen, tn, tracking, web, Web Performance

I keep hearing that the latest and greatest wave in technology for the home PC is the ability to have more powerful file and data search tools to help you find grandma’s picture which got stored in some oddball directory last year.

I would use these in an instant, except for two concerns.

1. Google Desktop Search. My recent feelings of animosity towards Google aside, the concept of a Web-based local search is so backwards. And then you spook us by injecting local results into Web seraches? That app got round-filed in less than an hour.
2. CPU and Disk Thrashing. Some of the other search tools that I have tried thrash my hard drive and lock-up my teeny PIII/500Mhz Thinkpad 600X. Not everyone has a monster machine with a GB of RAM. I demand Auto-Indexing of all new content, so I am not taking advantage of the gentility that these processes can bring. But I also demand instantaneous results. So either the desktop search companies can by me a new machine, or clean up their indexing.

Tags: app, ARIN, content, data, desktop, Google, HTTP, IE, IM, it, LAN, Mac, Om, One, pr, search, teen, the other, web