Small Initiatives

The new design of this Web site means a lot more than just a visual dust-off. Small Initiatives, the company, no longer represents just me, my blog and my occasional Internet design consulting.

My wife, Ka, has reached a point in her executive career where she has amazing advice to offer her industry -- banks and credit unions -- as a business strategy consultant.
So SI becomes a consulting firm with two primary practices. Hers covers growth strategies, marketing and operations for financial institutions. Mine covers Internet user experience, including my longstanding design efforts, but adding site architecture and development projects atop the Drupal open-source content framework.

Ka's brand-new blog joins mine, which has posts dating to 2002. Her first post dispels some popular talking points in banking, refactoring a focus on "differentiation" to a focus on "relevance" -- both of and to customers. I think it's a useful read even for my regular non-banker crowd.

So that's why things look different here, and why the attention now splits between Ka's banking practice and my user experience efforts. If you really want to know the gory details, I've tried to provide them in this handy Q&A format:

• Are you both consulting full-time? No. I still have my "day job" as general manager of the Newspapers Interactive Group at the E.W. Scripps Co. Meanwhile, Ka's still a banking professional, taking on consulting projects as she evaluates choices for her next great executive opportunity.
• What does banking have to do with Internet user experience? Sometimes, nothing. Sometimes, everything -- such as the time I redesigned a credit union Web site. Our practices may overlap more than you'd imagine in the areas of interactive business strategy and overall customer experience.
• You changed a lot about the way the SI site works. Why? As part of opening up my consulting efforts to include site development using Drupal, I thought it best to run this site in Drupal as a living proof of concept. That's nothing against WordPress, the excellent blogging software I used before, only an attempt to put my money where my mouth is.
• What else are you changing? We're in the process of incorporating Small Initiatives. We also changed hosting providers as part of the relaunch of this site -- we're now happy SliceHost customers. And I replaced my old blogroll with the Drupal news aggregator, so you can see nearly live headlines from blogs and sites related to our two consulting practices.
• How can I make my [site|blog|comments|tags|feeds] work more like yours? Sign me to a contract and I'll show you.
• Are those rotating home page posters done in Flash? No, they're done as regular JPEG images that a Drupal module, Views Slideshow, rotates using a JavaScript library.
• I'm an RSS subscriber to SI. Where can I find a list of all your available feeds? Use the site map. I'm also trying to make sure my old FeedBurner feed addresses work with minimal upheaval. Trying, I said.
• I'm trying to find [insert name of old article here]. You moved stuff around. Where do I look? All the blog posts and most of the non-blog content from the old site should be here, though the directory paths are altered slightly. If you remember the headline or even a keyword or two, try entering them in the search box.
• Don't you know changing directory paths will mess up your search engine rankings? Yes, but I had to do it sooner or later, and I'm taking steps advised in Google and Yahoo! Webmaster instructions to mitigate the effects. It shouldn't take long for the path changes to be reflected in search engines' caches of this site. I hope.
• SI now has two newsletters. What's the deal? Ka and I wanted to develop separate e-mailing lists for our occasional alerts and longer-form newsletter essays. I had a list before, but it has been months since I sent out a letter to those subscribers. So I thought it best to let people choose subscriptions anew. You may subscribe to either newsletter with just an e-mail address, and unsubscribe anytime.
• How do you say "Ka"? Just like you'd say "Kay," as in Diane Keaton's character in The Godfather. It's short for Karen. Around the house we all call her Katie. And yes, people do chuckle and ask, "Where's L?" when we introduce ourselves as "Jay and Ka."
• You didn't kill Sid, did you? No. He wouldn't like that. You'll find Sid's sayings on the right side of all my blog pages.