Forem: madebyjonny

So you decided to disaffiliate with CrossFit

madebyjonny — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 10:51:32 +0000

If you are one of a number of gyms that have taken the decision to disaffiliate from CrossFit, this article might help you to consider how this affects your online presence and how to improve this moving forward.

A big part of your online presence is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is essentially your ranking on Google and other search engines. If you are changing your name, you have built up a rank based on that name and content linking to that website. A sudden change to this can have quite a big impact.

Redirecting correctly can mitigate some of this damage. If your gym was called “CrossFit North” and now it is called “Northern Fitness”, and your domain name crossfitnorth.com is now northernfitness.com, this is like starting again. You may also end up with errors as the pages from the original domain don’t exist anymore, but these links contribute a lot to your rank; the more content that links to your website the better. It would be good to keep the original domain alive during the transition, but when a user hits that domain it should redirect to the new content. For example if you have a blog post with a url like crossfitnorth.com/blog/some-post-title, you will want to redirect this to northernfitness.com/blog/some-post-title, which will help when people visit old links by ensuring that they aren’t hit with an error, and it will also help contribute to boosting the rank of the new domain.

You will need to take into consideration how a potential customer will find your gym. Having worked with a CrossFit gym previously, I have seen this first hand: Most people searched “CrossFit” or “CrossFit near me”. Obviously dropping that from your brand will mean customers will have to search something different, but people who don’t drop that name will see better results and therefore rank higher than you, this will be a difficult one to find a solution for as you are now competing with other gyms that offer similar services, but don’t have a novel name that helps identify their specific service. I believe if you include CrossFit in your keywords or in the copy of your website you could get into trouble with HQ. Like I said this one is really tricky and will take time and research to figure out what works specifically for your gym.

I imagine most gyms will make use of social media. This is great as it helps get your message out there, and will help inform people of the transition. However, social media applications aren’t always predictable. They may display posts out of order, and they’re likely to rank popular posts higher than less popular ones; the danger this has for you is that your customers might suddenly be presented with a post from an account that they don’t recognise, which in turn could lead to a loss of followers for you. I would recommend putting a marketing strategy together to inform your followers of the change in an engaging way, and maybe try and be consistent with this over the period of time it takes you to transition over to the new name.

I have left this to last, as it is the most straightforward but can be the most effective: make sure your business is registered with Google Business. This allows your gym to be listed on Google Maps, which in my experience is how people will decide on which gym they will get in touch with. It means your business will appear in two places: if specific enough it will appear on the top right of the search feed, otherwise it will appear in a list just below ads and top two results.
These are ranked in two ways:

Location: as it shows a mini map and where your business is located in the region a user is searching
Reviews: which are important to customers, as most people prefer to go to a gym that has been reviewed by real people

So to finish up here is a list to consider:

Ensure old content redirects to new content
Inform your users and potential customers through a marketing strategy
Have content people can read about this change on your website, maybe through a blog post.
Research search terms of how people find you, this can be done with google analytics or google webmaster tools
Ensure your business is registered with Google Business or if you are already registered that all your information is updated.
Speak to your members, word of mouth is still the most powerful asset a gym has, getting feedback and being open about the changes will go a huge way to retain people and keep their confidence in you.

If you have any questions feel free to get in touch; My DMs are open over on instagram @madebyjonny , and I would be happy to help.

PWAs are dead, long live PWAs

madebyjonny — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 22:04:04 +0000

So it was WWDC this week and Apple as usual announced a tonne of new things for their suite of products. For me one thing stuck out: App Clips.

These are small applications that have a focused bit of functionality that can be activated from NFC, QR, or basically anything that links to a webpage with a specific meta tag. Stop me if you have heard this before?

This has of course been possible for a while through QR codes and NFC tags which can open a web page when scanned.

Before I continue, I should probably say I have been an advocate for the web and PWAs (progressive web apps) since you could add websites to the homescreen on the iPhone. Back then you couldn’t do anything apart from open a website full screen (without the URL bar).

This always made sense to me, as most applications which show a list of data (like Twitter or Instagram), I always thought were better off as web applications mostly because the work needed to develop a native application for iOS, Android, and at the time Windows Phone.

Obviously now we have tools like React Native, Flutter, Ionic and others. So developing a cross platform app isn’t that difficult, however you still need approval from App Stores, and if you want to monetise these apps chances are you will have to surrender 30% (see the recent HEY controversy). There are companies that get around this, but usually at the expense of the user experience; Netflix and HEY for example allow their users sign up on their websites to avoid this “tax”. Anyway, I digress; back to App Clips.

The announcement of App Clips took the wind out of my sails: I finally admitted defeat. The lack of support on Safari for things like push notifications make certain application types — like messaging, amongst others — redundant. The cynical part of me thinks that they know how this would impact their hold on the app market, but they do a fantastic job of protecting users from dark patterns, and let’s be honest who isn’t sick of seeing that “this website would like to send you notifications” banner. Unfortunately I think this practice ruins the legitimate reasons for using them.

Recently I was talking about hanging up my web dev boots and changing into native development, as I want to make cool things but I don’t want to be restricted by the technology and the things I want to build require functionality that just isn’t there on the web on Apple’s mobile web, and I don’t see it being added anytime soon.

I started looking into Swift and SwiftUI to start with, and how to actually create App Clips, and I realised that this could actually work in the favour of the web. If Apple can get people in the west to start scanning things to interact with them, then this benefits the web in the end, as these things will still open a website if you’re not on an iOS device or the website doesn’t have the correct meta tag, you will still be taken to the website. I think App Clips will actually promote creating “micro interactions” (as I have started calling them) which will be a focused interaction that will require minimum effort. For example, if you were renting a scooter, you could scan the code and have it open a URL with the ID of the scooter, and be directed to a method of payment. This could still have a Google and Apple pay button so it requires very little input to start riding the scooter. I know this might not be what a lot of businesses want, as people are in the data game, so they would prefer you to sign up, but that is another can of worms that I don’t want to get into right now.

So I probably did overreact to this announcement, I do think that App Clips are over-engineered, when the web exists, but Apple do have a habit of normalising things that are often seen as too techy initially. So I do hope they take off as it can only benefit the web. Once this interaction is normalised then why would you invest in creating a specific App Clip when you can create a website that more or less does the same thing? Invertedly I think Apple has possibly given PWAs a new lease of life through focused interactions.

I only give 60%

madebyjonny — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 09:00:38 +0000

I know what you’re thinking; “Sixty?! That’s not really a lot, I give a hundred and ten percent, I give almost twice as much as this guy!”. Well give me ten minutes of your time and see if you feel the same by the end of this article.

Let me give you some context first. I am somewhere between a designer and developer who is heavily inspired by punk music and the DIY ethos. My qualifications centre around graphic design & UI design, but while at school I taught myself how to code. I found myself having quite a unique skillset, as once I started my first job I found myself being the communication bridge between teams. During all of this I did a lot of freelance work. I would happily burn the midnight oil as I genuinely enjoy what I do as a career. I would also describe myself as a perfectionist, agonising over all the little details making sure my clients would be getting something that is high-quality. All of this sounds admirable and pretty standard right? Well this is where you are wrong, the funny thing about burning the midnight oil is this: It burns out.

Side note: I know I’m not the only 29 year old who has been through this, and I know I won’t be the last, this is why I felt the need to write this. I know this won’t only relate to people in the web development industries either, and I can imagine in other careers it is just as bad if not worse e.g. junior doctors anyway I digress.

People who work in fields like design, art, music, or development tend to feel this is what defines them as people. This is due to the skills usually having to be self-taught as traditional education systems either haven’t taught these subjects or don’t place the same value on these types of subjects [1] . The hard work these people put in becoming awesome at whatever they love, is later exploited when they translate their skills to a career. This is mainly because society doesn’t teach you how to pause or take a breath and enjoy other aspects of life.

I have seen expectations of people rise significantly in the web development community. With people who work for free on open source repos dealing with constant demands, developers in general having to learn the latest and greatest tool and also employers expecting that people will work for free or get paid in another way (e.g. free pizza) to stay late. Let me put it bluntly, that badge of honour we have all worn at some point in our life that shows off how much we work is nothing to be proud of; that badge will kill you.

A lot of people over time will say “oh you have to find a work life balance”. This kind of advice sounds helpful, but without actually being helpful at all. It’s kind of like saying to someone who is trying to lose weight “oh you should eat healthier”. People who give this sort of advice seem to think there is one answer to these types of problems, and there isn’t. What works for you might not work for someone else. The advice I will always give people is this: If on average you would work 60% of the day that you’re awake (assuming you do actually sleep. If not, then yeah... sleep), you’re probably already working 2 hours longer than most people who work 9am-5pm. If this sounds like you, then great: we’re almost there, but one more thing, do you care about what you do? If not then you might want to rethink what you are doing. This 60% should be something you love and find fun, you’re not going to get this time back and you don’t want to regret the time you could have spent with your partner, friends or just by yourself playing Destiny.

So far these steps have helped me maintain a good balance:

Learn to say no. Say no to your boss and/or clients, it’s natural that you want to make these people happy and you don’t want to let them down. However if they are asking to much of you or are making unrealistic requests, you don’t have to feel obliged to do what they say. Through learning to appreciate your own time, this will reflect back upon the people you are working for, and ultimately the time you spend working for them is likely to be more productive.
Consider how well you spend your working time. Don’t procrastinate until the deadline is around the corner and try to make sure your estimates are accurate to give yourself enough time to create quality work.
Appreciate you own abilities and charge what you are worth, and make sure you get it down in a contract where if anything happens you will see some return for the efforts you have put it. When you don’t have to worry about finances you will sleep easier knowing your clients respect your time, your skill, and they have validated it by paying you for it.
Finally, just let go of your ego, I have seen far too many people posting things just to get likes or approval from their peers rather than producing work that is based on information. This mentality is about being happy and satisfied and you will never achieve this by imitating others and comparing yourself to them.

I know you might be reading this as a graduate or someone who is just starting out in their field. I’ll be honest it is going to be a tough, especially if you haven’t had any previous experience: you will have a lot to learn. However just because you are new to your job or you are young, there is no reason the people you work for or with to treat you unfairly, but you have a responsibility to stand on your own two feet. No-one else will do that for you.

References

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/feb/17/arts-and-culture-systematically-removed-from-uk-education-system