An oldie but a goodie. I love how I can shazam songs from my iPhone and find out the artist and song.
Month: November 2012
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Matrix Group’s Favorite Thanksgiving Websites and Traditions
In honor of Thanksgiving, I asked my staff to share their favorite websites and traditions. Not surprising, what came back was a collection of foodie websites and a bunch of traditions involving family, friends and sharing a great meal. From everyone here at Matrix Group, have a happy, safe and delicious Thanksgiving!Our Favorite Thanksgiving Websites
- The History Channel has fun facts about Thanksgiving. Did you know that three towns in the U.S. take their name from the traditional Thanksgiving bird, including Turkey, Texas (pop. 465); Turkey Creek, Louisiana (pop. 363); and Turkey, North Carolina (pop. 270)?
- Real Simple magazine has great recipes, entertaining tips and decorating ideas.
- You can’t go wrong if you follow recipes and plans from Martha Stewart.
- SouthernLiving has great recipes and wonderful ideas for place settings and tablescapes!
- Paprika Recipe manager is an app that lets you explore recipes from Food Network, Martha Stewart, and any website. Paprika will scrape the recipe and store it in your personal collection. Pull together a menu of different dishes, and Paprika will generate the shopping list for you!
Our Favorite Thanksgiving Traditions
- Me? It seems that every since I married Maki, we’ve spent many Thanksgiving holidays overseas. We’ve celebrated Thanksgiving in Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and Budapest!
- Leah says, “My family always travels to my Aunt’s house, which is an hour north of Pittsburgh. 25+ of us cram into her cozy home to watch some football, eat great food, catch up, and share what we are thankful for. With 9 kids under the age of 10, it is always a LOUD event where my brother Drew and I always turn into “Human Jungle Gyms” but we wouldn’t have it any other way!”
- Jason says, “Thanksgiving isn’t Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie and whipped cream for our family. It has to be the pie recipe from the Libby’s pumpkin can. Absolutely critical – the volume of whipped cream on a slice needs to be between 125% and 150% the volume of the pie. Too little and there’s no point. Too much and you’re just being silly.”
- Tom says, “We always make it a point to invite the Thanksgiving orphans – folks whose home is elsewhere and they are unable to get back, e.g., friends in the military, college students, or Capitol Hill friends). We usually have between two and six people each year!”
- Kevin celebrates Thanksgiving at his grandma’s house. Grandma always makes her special grape leaves, kibbeh and tabbouleh…..YUM!
- Janna says, “In my family, Thanksgiving dinner is always a group effort. Mom always makes the turkey, but my sisters and I contribute the rest of the meal. My vegetarian sister always makes a hearty veggie that serves as her main dish, e.g., stuffed acorn squash. My oldest sister makes the cornbread stuffing and cranberry relish. My baby sister contributes some desserts. And my husband and I add a few more sides to the mix. It helps everyone feel a part of diner prep and one person doesn’t end up being stressed and responsible for the whole meal.”
- Sherrie says, “For as long as I can remember, we celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas with our Charleston Family and the Bakshis always bring the turkey – no matter where Thanksgiving is hosted.”
- Kelly and Eric’s families go to the beach (separately) with their extended families and enjoy huge Thanksgiving meals!
How about you? Have any favorite Thanksgiving websites? What’s your most treasured Thanksgiving tradition?
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How TheMatrixFiles Blog Became Responsive
Last week, Matrix Group launched a redesigned version of this blog, TheMatrixFiles.net. Why redesign my blog? I wanted to update the layout and colors, I wanted each post to be more social, and, most importantly, I wanted the site to be responsive.
Responsive web design is “an approach to web design in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices” including widescreen monitors, standard monitors, tablet computers and smartphones.
Although my team has developed many responsive sites for clients, it’s always interesting and fascinating to implement a new design philosophy for your own firm. Here’s what I learned:
The widescreen size is the most fun to design for because of all the available real estate. When viewing this blog on a widescreen, high resolution monitor, you get two columns of content in the right rail. At this screen size, the site displays my tags, my recent bookmarks on Delicious, the most popular posts on this blog, etc. I love how the site fills the screen and uses the available real estate.
Designing for a standard monitor is a lot like designing for a tablet in landscape mode. We collapsed the right rail to a single column and the widgets are set to NOT display content. If you click on the +, the navigation slides down to display the content.
Designing for a smartphone is the most challenging. You don’t have a lot of real estate, visitors use their fingers to navigate so you need large buttons and touch areas, and the text has to be readable without pinching. We had several lively discussions about what information to display on the smartphone display. We realized by analyzing our Google Analytics reports that people who visit the blog on a smartphone really just want to read the latest blog post. So we wanted to make it super easy to simply read the latest blog post and be done.
You have to test, test, test your responsive pages. Be prepared to spend countless hours testing and tweaking. For example, you might find subtle differences between brands and models of phones.
Monitor your usage reports. Currently, about 10% of the traffic on my blog comes from mobile devices. If history serves as a guide, this number will grow quite a bit in the next year for two reasons: mobile traffic is increasing in general but, more importantly, when visitors are rewarded with a mobile-optimized website, they tend to come back on a mobile device. I’ll be sure to report on this in the next few months.
I’d love to know what you think of the redesigned TheMatrixFiles website. Which device do YOU prefer to use when visiting blogs? Do you feel that we succeeded in creating a mobile-friendly experience with this blog?
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Keyboard Pro Case for iPad
I love this iPad case. It essentially turns my iPad into a laptop and even comes in my favorite color – purple!
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How the Plumber Lost the Business to Home Depot
The dishwasher at Matrix Group died yesterday. If you’ve spent any time with me and my staff, you know that we like to eat and the dishwasher gets a lot of use. So no dishwasher is a big deal. We called a local plumber and he arrived this afternoon.Mr. Plumber came in, checked out the dishwasher and gave Jaime, my Director of Administration, two options: replace the broken drain or replace the dishwasher altogether. This is when I walked in. He explained the situation all over again to me and I said, “okay, so how much is it going to cost?” He said something along the lines of “a good dishwasher starts at $350 and labor will run you $150. I’ll even pick up the dishwasher at Home Depot and remove the old one.”
Here’s where Mr. Plumber should have sealed the deal but instead, he botched it. I said, “you’ve got a budget of $600, get me a nice dishwasher, pick it up, remove the old one, get a black one please. Can you come back tomorrow?” I figured we were done. I gave him a budget, it was more than what he quoted me so he had wiggle room to get me a nice dishwasher AND charge me extra for the small things that always come up, and the office would have a new dishwasher the next day.
Instead of saying, “great, I’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll pick a nice GE that my customers really like,” he said, “well, you need to go to the Home Depot website, pick the one you want, I want to be sure you like the dishwasher, what if there aren’t any black dishwashers, what kind of options do you need, yada, yada, yada.” I gave it 5 more minutes. I told him that we would be happy if the dishwasher washed dishes, was installed properly and could be here tomorrow. In the end, in frustration, I told Mr. Plumber that we would do our research and call him back.
So what happened? Jaime went to HomeDepot.com and found a nice GE dishwasher for $450. And guess what? The Home Depot price included delivery, installation and removal of the old dishwasher. So we ordered the dishwasher from Home Depot and Mr. Plumber lost the business.
What was the lesson here?
When the customer is ready to buy, for god’s sake, seal the deal. Give her the recommendation she’s looking for and don’t walk out of the office or get off the phone without an order. This is especially true when you are dealing with the decision-maker. Decision-makers are happy to make decisions, especially when they are in pain. Decision-makers in pain want YOU, Mr. Vendor, to solve their problems, not give them homework and not give them reasons to keep looking.
How about you? Did you ever try to give the business to someone and but walked away in frustration because it was just too darn hard to give them the business? Details, please.
And you better believe I’m going to be talking about Mr. Plumber with my sales and project management team tomorrow.
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MemStash
This service helps you remember names, places, quotes, etc. It sends you an email or SMS at just the right time to help you commit things to memory.
