Chan's Personal Blog - Work

The Relaunch of VanessaJeweller.com - Behind The Scenes

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:43:32 -0800

This year, I was back in Victoria for three weeks for my annual Christmas vacation. I thought it was going to be quiet time, but I came across a project that amounted to three weeks of raw execution. My task, to modernize and relaunch vanessajeweller.com website in three weeks.

I rarely do private commercial websites these days but this project piqued my interest. I did a quick market analysis and found about a dozen jewellery stores in the Greater Victoria website. Many of the stores that are ranked high on search engines weren't really great websites to begin with. Besides the major jewellery store chains, a lot of competitor websites looked like something out of early 2000s. I felt there was an opportunity to crush the competition with everything that I know about the web now.

Web Development in 2005

The vanessajeweller.com website was first put up in 2005. Here's a screenshot of the old website we were working with:

Some of the primary problems:

Low quality photos.
Not a lot of content.
No content management system.
No search engine optimization.
No data analytics.

Looking back at 2005, it's pretty incredible to think about how much technology and the internet has changed since then. As a web developer, a lot of the modern conveniences we take for granted simply weren't in place back then.

Here's a taste of what the web was like in 2005:

Social media wasn't a big deal. Facebook for businesses wasn't around. Twitter didn't even exist.
Digital photography wasn't on-par with traditional film cameras yet. DSLR cameras were insanely expensive. Remember when you had to scan photos into the computer?
Open source content management systems were still very complicated to use and setup.
The mobile web as we know it today simply did not exist. There were no android or ios devices.
Web developer tools such as FireBug didn't exist. Debugging CSS/HTML/Javascript was a pain.
Internet Explorer 6 controlled 89% of the market. Firefox 1.5 had just come out, and controlled 6% of the market.
Tableless CSS-based websites were starting to gain traction. XHTML 1.0 was apparently the next hot thing.

Hack Day

I only had finite time to work on this project, and the whole thing needed to be shipped before I left Victoria. In the spirit of hack day, I started brainstorming on how I could rapidly bootstrap a professional looking site with a little cash and a little time.

Photography

Priority one was sexy photos for the website. I needed professional looking jewellery photos to maximize the wow factor of the site. I spent a night on the internet scouring for tutorials on jewellery photography. After I was done, I felt like Neo out of the Matrix saying, "woah, I know jewellery photography." A critical piece that I needed was a macroscopic lens; unfortunately they cost at least $400, and I wasn't going to drop that kind of cash for a one-time project. I ended up finding a place in town that rented them for $20/day.

Next, I needed a good digital camera to take photos with. My brother had a DSLR camera available, and he had taken quite a number of courses in photography, so I recruited him to the project. You can take a look at his side of the story on his blog.

Step three was lighting for the photography. A lot of the professionals were using white LED lighting to light up their jewellery. Normal lights give off a yellow-ish light which doesn't look good. I serendipitously found a solution for this while attending a games night at Patrick and Rebecca's. They were outfitting their cabinets with LED strips; they were completely self-contained, very inexpensive, and required very little soldering. I used to have to design circuits and solder together wire, resisters, and LEDs which was a lot of work. My friend Chad happened to have the LED strips with the exact colour temperature I needed, and Patrick gave me a couple power supplies. We bootstrapped together a LED light source, and we were on our way.

Finally, I figured out that we needed a couple plastic backgrounds to stage jewellery on. I needed a white plastic to give off a soft-reflection, and a piece of black acrylic for a dramatic reflection on a black background. I was able to source my materials from a local plastic vendor, and that set me back $60.

The Day Of The Photoshoot

With all our materials in hand, we did a day of photography on site.

My brother and I at the photoshoot, using LED lighting, white plastic background, DSLR with macro lens, and a light box.

Staging jewellery on a black acrylic background.

Final product shot of engagement ring.

It took us about a day to finish photographing everything. My brother produced about two hundred photos. We went through the shots, and made a shortlist of thirty shots that would make it to the website.

The Web In 2012

With the photos in place, it was my turn to throw in my expertise. When I was scoping out the project, I knew I wanted to focus on the following areas:

Content Management System.
Search Engine Optimization.
Social Media Integration.
Site Speed Performance.
Data Analytics.

Each of these site features were areas that I could comfortably beat the competition in. Each of the features actually all support search engine optimization as well (which affects your Google/Yahoo/Bing rankings), so it was crucial to have a coherent strategy.

Content management systems have become commoditized and the open source versions of this software are very full featured, so I went with Joomla. There was no sense in reinventing the wheel. In addition, one of the non-profits committees that I sit on recently made a motion to move their site to Joomla, so I figured it was in my interest to learn Joomla. I spent about eight hours reading documentation, reviewing tutorials, playing around with its code, and was ready to build a site on Joomla. Cue Neo saying, "Woah, I know Joomla."

Having the content management system taken care of meant I could focus on writing content for the website. In addition, it gave me the infrastructure to host a blog on the site which is quite important because Google favours sites with fresh content.

Performance is another critical aspect of web development these days. Google has said site speed matters in search engine ranking these days, so it's very important to get it right. I spent a couple days optimizing the website code, and managed to shave off 500 milliseconds from the site so far. More optimizations to come as I collect more live traffic data.

The social media aspect of the website is still relatively new to me, and I will learn this as I go. Preliminary data is quite impressive, and I'm seeing more social referrals than organic web search referrals. That being said, a couple data points doesn't mean much, so we'll have to see the long-term trend on this.

The Finished Product

After three weeks of writing content, coding, and optimizing, I finally relaunched vanessajeweller.com.

I was quite happy at the speed of the project. We went from idea to finished product in three weeks. It was a nice change of pace. The websites that I typically work on these days are used by tens of millions of users, and you need to setup a ton of infrastructure to support that kind of traffic. When you operate on that kind scale, it's hard to launch things fast.

The other takeaway is just how much more a web developer can do today in 2012. If you asked me to build such a site back in 2005 in three weeks, I would have told you that it was impossible. As a programmer, we live in exciting times because we have so many tools, platforms, and infrastructure to build on top of.

Anyway, let me know what you think about the new site. I'm always look for feedback.

Things I Learned In 2010: Humble Confidence

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:12:00 -0800

I'm kicking off a series entitled simply, "Things I Learned In 2010" as a way to reflect on last year. I've been working on my battle plans and strategy for 2011 and I find it's always important to look to the past's lessons to inform the future. So I thought I'd write about my inspirations from last year before unveiling the 2011 theme.

Let me set the stage for the first topic of 'Humble Confidence'. In 2010, I saw a number of leaders (whom I respected greatly) step down from their respective roles and move on to other endeavours. These changes obviously took a while to get used to and adapt to because of the big shoes that had to be filled. People spoke of these leaders with high-regard and almost reverence. Their reputations precede them. I've heard it said that their presence is felt even when they are not physically around. I pondered what made these leaders great? What was the commonality amongst them?

Last year I also had the opportunity to give a talk about managing finances, and I invited some successful businessmen to help out as guest speakers on specific financial topics. These again were people I held with high regard, and I wanted to know what their secret was. This was definitely a change for me because I come from an environment full of negative encounters with genuinely evil people behaving very unethically when it came to business.

After a couple lunch time discussions with peers about what makes these leaders great, we concluded these were common attributes they had all possessed:

Had a humble confidence.
Had their facts straight, and talked straight with you.
Had a genuine interest in you as a person, rather than treating you as a resource.
Had unquestionable integrity.

When I was back in Canada, I was watching a lot of Dragon's Den, and there was this clip from season 3 where they interviewed the Dragon's (venture capitalists) about what made a good business pitch?

Robert Herjavec reinforces the point that successful pitches involves people with a humble confidence. These are folks who are not overly confident and seem arrogant. These folks are also not underwhelming in confidence to a point that they seem weak. The key is humble confidence and having your facts straight. Have you ever watched a presentation crash and burn because the person is spouting shaky incorrect facts, and they get destroyed in the question and answer period? Have you ever seen a leader take all the credit of his success without acknowledging his team, and you see his team members grumble under their breathe? It's an absolute train wreck.

The reason why I introduced good business pitches is because I think leadership implicitly requires you to pitch well. One of the keys to leadership is being able to articulate a vision and convincing people to follow you in that vision. I'm a firm believer in the idea of the marketplace of ideas, where ideas compete with each other, and the best ideas should survive. Being able to convince people that your idea is good is critical to your success in the marketplace of ideas.

In closing, I think one of the secrets to great leadership and success is the ability to maintain a humble confidence, no matter how far you've come, how much you've accomplished, or how big your salary is.

I'll end this quote, "For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted." - Matthew 23:12

The Oddest Interview I Had In 2010

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:23:24 -0800

Last year, I interviewed a ton of programmers at work. Our interview process is a multi-layered approach; each layer acts as a defence intended to filter out candidates along the way as they run the gauntlet. The first line of defence is with our recruiters who makes first contact with the candidate, chats with them, and ask some simple technical questions. The second line of defence is the phone screen interview with one of our programmers. The final line of defence is the on-site interview where the candidate meets with several managers and programmers. The reason for all these hoops is because it's actually very expensive in terms of time and money when you get a bad candidate come through.

One day I get an e-mail from our recruiter informing me that an on-site interview was being scheduled. I took a look at the candidate's resume and found something quite peculiar, the candidate had a bachelor's degree in writing, and a master degree in journalism. Don't get me wrong, the degrees are perfectly fine, but this isn't the usual educational background that I see for programmers. Interestingly enough, the candidate had also published several books about a programming language that use. I assumed that if you could write a book about a subject and have it published, then you would be a domain expert in that area. So this was going to be an interesting interview.

The interview day finally comes, and it's my turn to interview the candidate. I do my usual introduction, and then immediately ask him what his story was. How does a writing major transition to the world of computer science? The candidate asserts that writing good software and writing are actually very similar disciplines, it all comes down to syntax and grammar, and being able to express yourself creatively. A part of me was somewhat skeptical about this analogy because I remember all those painful math and algorithm courses that I took in university. Is every writer out there really a closet programmer just waiting to be discovered?

I jump into the technical portion of my interview and ask the candidate to write some code on the white board. I present a fairly simple programming task and the candidate seems to be stumbling through it. I go through a couple questions related to what he had written on the white board, and asked how he could optimize the code to run faster, and he was completely stuck. I look at one of the functions he had used on the board and asked him if he could implement a simple naive version of it by hand, and he could not. Long story short, the technical portion of the interview didn't go well at all.

I left the room fairly unimpressed. I met up with a colleague who had interviewed the candidate earlier just to trade notes. I asked my colleague if he had read the candidate's book before. My colleague said he read snippets of it on Amazon.com, and it was absolutely garbage. I thought to myself, how could a bad programming book possibly be published? In academia, when you publish a paper, they're typically peer-reviewed which ensures a certain level of quality. My colleague laughed at my naivety; he explained that book publishers/editors aren't necessarily domain experts in good programming practices, and that's why there are a lot of really bad programming books out there. Just because you could publish a book about programming doesn't mean you're a good programmer.

This was an eye opening experience, and I definitely learned something that day.

Watch Me On Fox Business Network

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:05:49 -0700

Fox Business News was filming in Silicon Valley yesterday, and they made a pit stop at Yahoo! HQ. I happened to be walking by during the interview with Juniper's CEO, and you can see me walking in the background in a blue shirt at the 3 minute mark of the video.

Enjoy! I hope this helps me get discovered as a TV personality.