Chris Bartow

Facsimile is Retiring

This is the year the fax machine needs to retire. Not just the machine, which I haven’t used for awhile now in favor of an Internet faxing service, the whole idea of sending documents over a phone line.

The fax changed the way many companies did business. No longer did you need to mail official documents and wait days for them to arrive. Now you could send them instantly with a press of a button.

The Internet has replaced any need for a fax. I know what you are thinking, “But Chris, what about signed documents?” A fax machine is just a scanner that sends the documents over the phone line. Nothing is stopping anyone from scanning to a computer and emailing it instead.

So if you work one of those companies that are still living by a fax machine, please start accepting these documents by email. I would love to cancel my fax service by the end of the year so it can retire peacefully in Florida.

Posted on July 1st, 2009 | Comments (View)

Trusting your customers

Occassionally I will create business cards and brochures for customers. It’s pretty easy since I usually have all of their information, logos and colors, but I prefer non-dead tree media.

The problem is finding a printer that is easy to work with and priced fairly. I ended up settling on Overnight Prints and until recently I’ve been happy. They have gotten slow, more expensive and putting advertisements on their web/email receipts.

In the last order a bunch of the cards were smudged, like the machine that stacked them rubbed the ink. My client wasn’t overly upset, it was only a few out of the 5,000 they ordered, but I went ahead and put in a request to see if I can get some reprinted.

Two weeks went by and I got a message that they will reprint 250 of them and I will need to send the bad cards back. I understand that they are just trying to prevent people from ripping them off, but really? Wouldn’t I say all of them were bad?

They could easily look at my account and see the thousand of dollars of cards I bought in the past and never did this. They can’t resell the cards, so shouldn’t they trust their customers just a little bit?

Comparing this experience to Amazon makes it feel in inadequate. I ordered a book as a gift around the holidays and UPS said they delivered it (left on door step), but it wasn’t there. I looked everywhere, called UPS and they said I can submit some paper work to get money back, but I’m better off calling Amazon.

I call Amazon and within 2 minutes they apologized and said they would overnight me another one, no questions asked and they would handle everything with UPS. I could have just made up this story and got 2 for the price of 1, but Amazon puts some trust into their customers to make the experience better.

This is why I order everything with Amazon and one of the reasons why I’m looking for a new printer. Any suggestions?

Posted on April 14th, 2009 | Comments (View) | Tags: business

Remote Backup: Jungle Disk, Mozy, Syncplicity and Carbonite

I’ve been searching for the perfect remote backup tool for awhile now, but today I decided to try them all, or at least the ones that I’ve considered using. I have automatic backups locally in case of hard drive failure, but I’m just too lazy to burn DVDs or getting an external drive to take off site. Today was the day I was going to find a solution.

Carbonite

Before I started, I thought Carbonite was the solution for me, but for me it was the least appealing. This is really designed for home users that don’t want to worry about the details, just backup all my stuff. The interface is missing a tree structure, so it wasn’t easy to select a directory and unselect sub-directories. It does the job, but doesn’t have a lot of options.

Mozy

Mozy offered something similar to Carbonite, but it has more control over the backup process. It was a little bit harder to use, but definitely more powerful than Carbonite. They also offer a 2 gig backup for free, which is nice if you only want to backup a small amount of data. Overall, Mozy was the second best backup tool I tried.

Syncplicity

Syncplicity isn’t really a backup tool, but more of a way to sync files online and between computers. I think this has a lot of promise and would be great for small offices or if you work with people in different locations. You can easily sync folders between all the computers.

You can access the files through a very nice web interface, but I had problems deleting files which I didn’t want sync’d. It also was always syncing, there was no way to schedule the sync. This means when you open up a huge Photoshop file and hit save it starts backing up even though you may keep making revisions.

Jungle Disk

Jungle Disk was the solution I settled on. It has the most flexibility, yet a very clean and easy to use interface. It also uses Amazon S3 (or Rackspace) to store the data, which I trust more than the other solutions. It offered the best options for encryption, scheduling, revisions, settings to auto-delete old files, email reports and web access. It is also the only solution that works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

You do pay per GB, but for less than 25 GB, it’s cheaper than the other solutions.

Posted on March 19th, 2009 | Comments (View) | Tags: software

Don't make the user fix the problem

I was going through updating my profile at SEOMoz and I realized I had an old profile picture. First off, you can’t just update it, you have to check Delete, press Save, press Edit Profie and THEN you can select a new one.
Below the choose file button there is this message:

Please try and upload a photo with square proportions. Rectangular photos will be stretched.

REALLY? I don’t expect you to do the cool Facebook thing where you can crop and resize on the fly, but at least just handle this nicely so I dont need to edit it on my end. You can crop it to be square on the center if it has to be square or you can just resize things proportionally.

I realize you think your audience is smart, but you’re being lazy. Rand Fishkin please fix this!

Posted on March 14th, 2009 | Comments (View) | Tags: interface usability

Laziness will not get you through a recision

I’m amazed at the number of small businesses that ask me how to improve their business, then complain that it’s too much work. If you don’t have money to throw at the problem or aren’t willing to dedicate time, how do you expect to succeed?

Just showing up is not good enough anymore.

Posted on March 6th, 2009 | Comments (View) | Tags: business

Traditional Advertising is Priced Wrong

As small businesses continue to pump money into advertising to keep generating business, I’m amazed that they aren’t collecting the data to see how bad the ROI truly is. Gary Vaynerchuk gave a keynote at Inman NYC where he talked about how for the holiday season he sent out a free shipping code to Wine Library four different ways.

• Billboard on the New Jersey Turnpike got 170 orders.
• Radio Ad pulled in 230 orders.
• A Direct Mailing got 302 orders.
• Finally, he used Twitter to tweet out a code and in one 24 hour period received 1700 orders.

Your time is valuable, but can be a great tool to reduce your advertising budget while increasing your sales.

Posted on February 19th, 2009 | Comments (View)