Happy 2012! Lets talk about some companies that are ripe for disruption this year. Below are 5 companies that I think are at serious risk of being unseated from their top positions in the near future. If you’re looking for ideas for a new startup, or wanting to know what startups you should be looking to join, consider these as trend lines to jump on.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy has been the big-daddy of domain registration for years, aided by obnoxious and tactless super bowl ads which, despite all due criticism, made GoDaddy the registrar who everyone had heard of, and which many people used. They’re like the Wal-Mart of domains and hosting – if you only care about price, GoDaddy has been the go-to registrar.

They’re at the top of my list of companies itching for a takedown right now because of the recent dust up over their support for SOPA, and the ensuing exodus of domains from tech-savvy customers, but GoDaddy has been on my radar for years because of their horrible user experience. Something as simple as purchasing a single domain name turns into a dozen-page nightmare of confusing forms, aggressive add-ons and upsells designed to trick users into buying things they don’t need, and a miserable interface that would make Gandhi want to stab someone in the face. After you’ve registered that domain, managing it is often just as difficult, and despite being a relative pro when it comes to these things, I’ve had to call their phone support multiple times to figure out how to change something. God help you if you have other services with them as well.

SOPA issues aside, and those are certainly valid, GoDaddy has a huge vulnerability when it comes to user experience. Whoever comes up with a “mint for domains” will win a lot of converts, even if the price is slightly higher. I moved most of my domains out a year or so ago after being fed up with GoDaddy’s nightmare of a site, but I have yet to see someone really do it right yet. I expect soon I will. The reality is that domains and hosting and other services once the domain of the tech elite are now being sought by the mainstream, and the experience for purchasing and managing them needs to be updated accordingly.

More

About six months ago I moved out of my suburban house and into an apartment in a 35 story building in downtown Dallas. This of course necessitated the use of an elevator 5-6 times a day to walk the dog, go to lunch, meetings, etc. Any time I need to go anywhere, the trip starts with an elevator. It’s a typical elevator, lots of round buttons for the floors, buttons for opening and closing the door, etc. It’s pretty much just like every other elevator I’ve ever used, but something about using it all the time has made me realize how poorly designed elevators are in terms of interface, particularly this one. More

Dave McClure at Business Week recently published an article about the value of design to startups, in which I thought he made some good points about how important designers and marketers are to the success of startups and applications. Predictably, this didn’t sit so well with developers like Steve at Big Dumb Dev, whose sarcastic response mockingly fails to think of a single startup where design trumped development. As is so often the case, I think the answer lies somewhere in between.

I disagree with Steve that the success of many/all startups was due to stunning technical achievement. While that’s important, and indeed at the heart of many startups, I think design is too often taken for granted. Perhaps I’m a bit bias being a designer myself, but nobody would want to use your awesome new app if there wasn’t a designer on the front end designing a quality UI. In the case where developers are left to their own devices, usually the app is ugly and unusable. Google as the example of a company that doesn’t need designers or marketers is disingenuous. Google is really a case where they are successful despite poor UI/UX design simply because they are reliable and free. Google Analytics, for example, has serious usability problems and a pretty steep learning curve, but it’s popular because it’s free. If it were not free, it would have a big vulnerability from a competitor who invested in a good UX designer, and it’s one of the reasons John P over at Woopra has a business that can compete with free.

Lets look at Flickr as another example. There’s nothing technically amazing about a photo sharing site (I’m sure there are some achievements in there for scaling and performance, but those apply to any large app), and Flickr wasn’t the first. What made Flickr work was design and marketing. It was EASY, you could make friends and comment on photos, and the result was a social network around a hobby. You wouldn’t need a team of MIT grads to build Flickr, but you would need a team of designers driving product development, making careful decisions about whats needed and whats not, where everything on the site goes, what the interface elements are, etc. Those are key advantages Flickr has over other photo sharing sites, and it’s why Flickr actually makes money while other sites struggle to attract members for a free service.

I’m currently working on a startup myself, 1FTP, where we’re rethinking how we can use FTP connections. FTP has been around forever, and has become a commodity, but it has a tender soft underbelly when it comes to usability because the only people who have been working on FTP products to date are developers. We have an awesome developer on our team, but technical achievement isn’t what’s needed to make a better FTP service. What’s needed is to make FTP simpler, easier, and idiot proof. It should be something that is natural to use, not something we loathe to use. Anyone who’s tried to walk an FTP newbie through the process of connecting to a server over the phone will understand where the difficulty is. The 1FTP team is 1 developer, 2 designers, and that ratio reflects the needs of the product.

I think it’s only natural for everyone on a team to view themselves as indispensable, and that is often the case. Design and marketing alone won’t take 1FTP anywhere without a developer. But in today’s market the inverse is also true – development alone is not enough to make a product people want to use, and designers are a critical part of a product’s success. If you’re building a startup for consumers it’s essential to make an investment in a good UI designer, and the earlier you bring them into the process the better.

This is a story of what not to do on the internet. It’s a story of theft, of law suits, of a community coming together to fight a common foe. It’s a story that I thought was over years ago (2006 is ancient history in internet time). It may yet turn out to be a story of forgiveness. But before we get to the story, let me share with you the email that prompted this post:

Brian,

My name is [Kevin C].  A few years ago you posted a photo about me stealing photos on the internet. I am looking for you to delete the photo on flickr:

(link withheld, here's a screenshot)

What I did was extremely wrong and I was able to apologize to the other photographers and mend fences a week after the incident happened. I was younger at that time and much more immature than I am now after a few years.  I’m not a photographer by any means – in fact I sold my last camera last year and have no intention of doing any photography work in the future.

However, the internet is not as forgiving and that image has sat at the top of Google results for my name for at least four years.  In this time I have struggled to find adequate employment and do simple things like form new friendships with people in fear of them finding out my last name.   It has been mentally draining on my psyche to say the least.

In 2010, I am looking to get a new start in life and looking for a second chance.  I am asking for you to look into your heart and help me move forward in my life.  This will give me greater peace of mind and help with future employment opportunities which will lead me to live a meaningful and fulfilling life which is what I want more than anything.

Thank you for your time and consideration, please write me back when you get a chance.

- [Kevin C]

It’s a very nice letter, and a lot nicer than what some of my photographer friends received from him when they blogged about him stealing their work in 2006. Back then he had a lawyer send them letters threatening a defamation lawsuit if they didn’t take down posts showing that he had stolen their photos. Of course they wisely responded by posting the threatening letters, resulting in a flood of attention to the matter that spread over the internet in dozens of blogs (see: Streisand effect).

Kevin felt the full wrath of the internet, and rightly so. He was blatantly taking credit for work he did not do, and then had the balls to sue those who called him on it. I commented at the time that this mistake would haunt him forever, and he’d likely have to legally change his name if he ever wanted to work in the creative industry. Looks like I was right, because here we are 4 years later and he’s still trying to recover.

Kevin’s email this morning asking me to help him put all this behind him stirred up a mix of feelings for me. One the one hand, I am not sure the punishment of a scarlet letter for the rest of his life is fair. We were all young and stupid once. I was actually guilty of plagiarism when I was young as well, but  fortunately for me I learned my lesson in third grade, not in college.

On the other hand, he really should have known better. He wasn’t in the third grade, he was an adult, and should have the foresight of consequences. It was a real dick move, compounded by the fact that he stole from really high profile people with really high profile friends. By all standards he deserves to have a hard time finding work in a field where this sort of thing is not just embarrassing, but potentially a multi-million dollar liability for an employer.

Crime and punishment on the internet is a strange thing. There’s no judge, no sentence, no debt to repay. You’re judged by everyone, perpetually, forever.

Crime and punishment on the internet is a strange thing. There’s no judge, no sentence, no debt to repay. You’re judged by everyone, perpetually, forever. I don’t think that’s really a good thing. Maybe Kevin deserves the consequences he’s served in the last 4 years, but does he deserve them in the next 4? Or 40?
So I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with my little piece of his sins. I’m not sure it should be entirely up to me. His punishment was doled out by the community, perhaps the community should be involved in lifting it.

So what do we think, viewers? Should Kevin get a fresh start, or should the scars of lessons learned remain as a reminder and as a warning to others? Sound off in the comments.

(Please note that I have withheld Kevin’s full name in the hope that this post will not add anything more about him to Google. If you know his full name, please just keep it to first name only in the comments. I’ll edit it if you don’t)

After one of our clients recently set up a twitter account for her company and we connected, she sent me an email that read “OK, seriously – how did you manage to get 439 people to follow you?  I mean, I’m sure you’re an interesting guy, but 439?  The race is on!”

I had to admit that 400 wasn’t really that many compared to a lot of the people I follow, and we continued a conversation about how twitter and other social networks could fit into their marketing plan. In keeping with my new years resolution to blog more for clients than creatives, I thought this topic would make a good blog post – so here we go: how to use social media for your business (an introduction). More

If you’re a regular reader of sxates.com (ha!) you may have noticed that after starting relatively strong, posts have trailed off and are now pretty infrequent. This is a pretty common problem for startup blogs – after you’ve dumped the initial genius thoughts you had that prompted you to start the blog, then you look around and think “now what?” But I’ve been enlightened to what I believe is the cause: everything I could share I assume most people already know.

Rajesh Setty has a great post explaining this (“Why some smart people are reluctant to share?“). I use my knowledge every day, I follow expert blogs that reinforce that knowledge, my friends are similarly expert in my field – so I perceive as common knowledge what many would consider expertise.

So for 2010, I’m going to try blogging more, and instead of thinking of my web/designer friends as an audience, I think I’m going to picture my clients. They currently pay me for my knowledge, so apparently it’s worth something right? And if any less experienced designers find the info valuable, so much the better. Come along!

Now I just have to come up with topics about stuff that isn’t proprietary or confidential to somebody …

Used music stores don’t sell 8-tracks anymore, or cassette tapes. But I’ve found several that sell old records. Something about vinyl gives it an enduring quality.

It’s been probably 15-20 years since I played a record, but having found a couple of local caches of vinyl gold, I decided to give it another go. I don’t know what it is about vinyl, but its a unique music experience for me, that my computers and iphones and zunes just can’t match.

I found a couple of old turntables in storage that I tried cleaning up, but they didn’t work very well. For Christmas I got 3 turntables, 2 new, 1 very old. I’m sending the new ones back in favor of the 70′s model pictured here. It was my grandparents, and my dad has been doing some restoration work on it. It needs a bit more tweaking, particularly the amp, but it’s working well enough that I’ve got it hooked up and playing some Simon & Garfunkel tonight.

I think the thing with vinyl is that it requires your undivided attention. We hear music in the background all day long – while we work, while we drive, while we shop, while we watch tv… It’s constant, but never the center of attention. When you have to place a needle and can physically watch the music play, you have to just sit back and listen, and enjoy.

While Microsoft has been making great improvements on the web standards front in IE, they’ve been seemingly rolling backwards with HTML support in Outlook. For the 2007 version they switched from the IE rendering engine to the Word engine (apparently for security reasons), which is completely crippled compared to IE. For anyone who does email marketing and designs and codes attractive HTML emails, this decision has no doubt had you shaking your fist and cursing Bill Gates’ mother.

We were all hoping that for the upcoming Outlook 2010 release Microsoft would go back to IE, but they have announced that they are sticking with Word. The pitchforks and torches are waving, but it looks like we’ll be dealing with the Word engine for emails for many years. Even if they switch to IE for 2012, we’ll have clients using 2007 and 2010 for years. So if you haven’t yet learned the ins and outs of designing emails for Outlook, now’s the time to learn!

Forget all your best practices for CSS – go back to 2001 coding practices for an idea of where your head should be.

Mural does a lot of HTML email work for some of our bread and butter clients, and we literally have thousands of campaigns in our archive dating back many years, so we have a lot of experience testing for lots of different clients and learning the various techniques needed for each. With Outlook 2007 we have our most challenging client, and in general if your email works well in Outlook it’s probably working well everywhere.

Limitations

The first thing you need to understand when designing and coding for Outlook is that the usual rules do not apply. Forget all your best practices for CSS – go back to 2001 coding practices for an idea of where your head should be. Note that some of these things might work in Outlook, but I advise against them because in my experience they do not work consistently, and it’s embarrassing to get an email back from your client asking why it broke when they sent it, so just trust me.

General “best practices” for Outlook 2007:

• Forget about separating content from design with CSS. Build your emails with tables and spacer gifs. No divs. See example below…
• No background images, only background colors. If you want to have HTML text over an image area, you’ll have to make the area behind it a solid color so you can slice it out of the layout.
• You can use basic styles, but use them inline attached to each tag, not in the header. Don’t get fancy – a lot of what works in a browser will not work in Outlook.
• Don’t use padding, only margins. Padding does not work properly.
• Keep your code as simple as possible.
• Optimize your email for ‘images off’ mode, which is likely to be default for your recipients. If you don’t define a height for images, they’ll collapse vertically, moving your text content up. Do specify width though.

Lets take a look at a sample email: