Talking Through My Hat

The Red Beret Design Blog

The new wave of start-up companies

December 13, 2010

There’s an excellent article in the New York Times about young college graduates punting on the job market and choosing to become entrepreneurs instead. The anecdotes range from wildly successful to unabashed failures. Starting a business in your 20′s used to be an option only for the wealthy, well-connected or bold individualists willing to risk [...]

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A 360-degree view of web design and online strategy

December 6, 2010

How thoroughly have you thought about your website? Have you considered every aspect of what makes a website successful? Sometimes companies concentrate so much on one aspect of web design, content or technology that they neglect other important factors. The building blocks of a successful website can differ depending on your point of view. Best [...]

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How do you Facebook?

November 9, 2010

A recent article in Fast Company discussed what they have termed “social browsing”—what the rest of us might call noodling around on Facebook. They cited a study of women in their 20s, for whom Facebook has become the time-killer, with the rest of the web relegated to goal-driven tasks such as checking the weather report [...]

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Building the future of news on WordPress

November 4, 2010

I attended the Raleigh WordPress Meetup last night at the First Flight Venture Center in RTP. Tony Zeoli, lead developer for the Reese Felts Digital News Project at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He demonstrated the website reesenews.org, which was launched this past week. The local news site is built entirely on WordPress [...]

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Goal-driven web design

October 29, 2010

I wrote earlier about the importance of determining your business goals before embarking on a web design (or web redesign) project. What you are trying to accomplish—find leads, sell products, provide a service, raise funds, sell advertising, etc.—will influence everything from what platform you choose to how much you need to budget. Imagine that you’re [...]

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What has your website done for you lately?

October 27, 2010

Is your website working for you? If not, why not? I get a number of emails from people saying “I need a website. Can you send me a proposal?” or, “I need a website. How much do you charge?” Why do you need a website? The answer may seem obvious—”You just gotta have a website [...]

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Downtown Durham start-ups buzzing

September 17, 2010

RTP has always been the center of entrepreneurial activity in the Raleigh-Durham area, but downtown Durham is coming into its own as a hotbed of start-up activity. The new website downtowndurhamstartups.com lists 14 start-ups in downtown, employing an estimated 170 people. Hyperlocal blog Bull City Rising has hired correspondent Justin Landwehr to write a series [...]

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A short tour of Durham Makerspace/Hackerspace

September 13, 2010

I dropped in on the new collaborative space in the basement of the Snow Building yesterday, and got an introduction to the space and the concept from founders Alan and Ashley. They are very recently moved here to Durham from Rochester, NY, where they were involved in the hackerspace Interlock. There were a couple of [...]

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Triangle Hackers open up Hackerspace in downtown Durham

September 12, 2010

Looking forward to heading down to my old stomping ground, the Snow Building, this afternoon to check out the new space for Triangle Hackers. I don’t consider myself a hacker, but any community dedicated to the intersection of art, technology, collaboration, start-ups, and making stuff sounds like a place I want to know about.

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Vacation day? What’s that?

September 9, 2010

Interesting article by Dan Pink about the Netflix policy of not having a set number of vacation days for employees. They instituted the policy for a couple of reasons: one is to treat grown-ups like grown-ups; another is a nod to the reality that many employees were putting in extra time responding to emails, texts [...]

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