Category: Blog

Bugs. No one likes them, but they happen. Sometimes it’s a bug, a missed requirement, or something just isn’t done quite right. It’s happened to all of us at some point on a project, and more often than not it leads to frustration, anger, and an overall unpleasant experience.

Over time, though, I’ve found it’s better to accept these moments rather than fight them. A div is in the wrong place, a font is too bold, or a link points to a broken page. These things are inevitable. Why? Because we’re human.

We’re not perfect, and our work will never be perfect. The real issue isn’t the mistake; it’s how we respond to it. Was it an oversight? A rushed timeline? A genuine misunderstanding? Or someone avoiding responsibility altogether?

That’s the thing: bugs are inevitable. The problem is how we approach them.

If a timeline is tight and a request comes in at the last minute, you should expect something to slip through the cracks. That’s just reality. On the other hand, if something has been in progress for a while and doesn’t work as expected, and you are given a list of last-minute excuses, that frustration is understandable.

For me, if you find a bug in my work, 99% of the time I’ll acknowledge it quickly and propose a fix. If the issue exists because a feature wasn’t fully thought through, I’ll explain what happened and outline next steps.

What I won’t do is respond rudely. And I won’t let something ship without warning you it may not work as expected.

Because in the end, it’s not about the bug.

It’s about how we handle it. Check out this week’s blog post for the full write-up. 

I found myself wondering, why do we overcomplicate things? I can’t recall a moment where someone explicitly said, “Yeah, let’s make this more complicated.” It just… happens, right?

In theory, we should always aim for the simplest possible way to deliver something, whether that’s a design, a website, or any other kind of deliverable. Yet no matter the discipline, things have a way of becoming complex. So why is that?

Is it intentional, lack of planning, or is it simply the result of repeating what we’ve done before without stepping back and applying a fresh perspective?

Take web development as an example. Agencies often rely on a familiar set of tools, frameworks, and templates to deliver projects efficiently, or at scale. Over time, those tools evolve. Something built for one specific use case gets reused, adapted, and layered onto another. Eventually, you end up with what we proudly call a “stack.”

But here’s the real question, are our internal stacks helping our clients, or hurting them?

Perhaps this stems from the fact that I’ve been hearing a familiar refrain from new leads:

“We don’t like WordPress, it’s too complicated,” or “The site just doesn’t work.”

And sure enough, when I take a closer look, the pattern is almost always the same. An over-engineered, plugin-heavy site, or a bloated solution built to solve a very simple problem.

To be fair, I get it. As service providers, we have to control costs. Building everything from scratch every time isn’t sustainable. Reusable systems are necessary. But the tools that worked well for one client don’t always serve the next, and when they don’t, complexity gets pushed downstream to the customer.

So what’s the answer?

I don’t think there’s a single, clean solution. But I do believe things get simpler when we return to fundamentals and actively work to remove unnecessary abstraction.

In my experience, there’s nothing inherently wrong with micro-frameworks, tooling, or abstraction layers. The problem isn’t the tools, it’s whether we’re using the right tools for the job. And that’s the sticking point. Are we optimizing for our own efficiency while quietly handing the complexity to the people who have to live with the result?

This question keeps coming back to me whenever I hear Drupal is complicated, or WordPress is complicated e.g. My reaction is always the same: if it’s complicated for the end user it was just a poorly built solution. 

Read the full story here.

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This is cross-posted from my Substack Behind the Thought. Which is a newsletter that ventures into the thought process that goes into my many ideas, ventures, and creative experiments.

I found myself coming back to the same annoying thought, the internet is crowded. Not just busy, crowded. And that is what this week’s blog post is all about. 

Every day, more businesses, people, organizations pile into the same digital lanes. Same SEO, GEO  advice. Same content strategies. Same promises of growth if you just follow the formula closely enough. The reality is that much of this is still a guessing game, it’s not that any of it is inherently bad but odds are you will find yourself in the same place where you started. 

When everyone is doing the “right” things, none of it feels right anymore.

The instinct, of course, is to push harder. Be louder. Post more. Chase the next tweak or trend. I’ve done that too, and it mostly just leads to burnout and a strange feeling that you’re working nonstop without actually going anywhere.

So the real shift often isn’t forward. It’s sideways, that’s how one stands out.

Standing out doesn’t mean being outrageous or trying to manufacture personality. It’s not about stunts. It’s about paying attention to the parts of your business that don’t fit neatly into a template, and resisting the urge to sand them down.

That’s the hard part.

Because doubling down on what makes your brand different means letting go of what makes it familiar. It means trusting that being specific will attract the right people, even if it turns others away.

And when it clicks, things will change. You stop forcing momentum. Conversations feel more natural. Opportunities show up that don’t feel like you have to wrestle them into place.

That kind of clarity rarely happens alone.

It usually takes someone outside your day-to-day, someone who can see what you’ve stopped noticing, challenge your assumptions, and help bring what’s already there into focus instead of layering on more noise.

In a digital world obsessed with best practices, standing out often starts by ignoring a few of them, and choosing to sound like yourself again.

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This is cross-posted from my Substack Behind the Thought. Which is a newsletter that ventures into the thought process that goes into my many ideas, ventures, and creative experiments.

The internet has a way of playing tricks on our heads. At some point, everything became about these massive, almost imaginary numbers. We chase millions of followers and thousands of “impressions,” but if we’re honest, most of it is just a digital fog that doesn’t mean much in the real world.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I just posted a piece on locallybiz about why we need to stop trying to reach the “four corners of the earth” and just look at the people right in front of us.

We’ve forgotten what numbers actually look like:

• If you have 5 people in your living room, that’s a party.
• If you have 20 people in a room, that’s a full-on meeting.
• If you have 100 people, you’re standing in a lecture hall.

Since when did reaching five or ten real people become a “small” thing?

The digital world is endless, but it’s also thin. We’re obsessed with “scale,” but we’ve lost impact. For most businesses, the real value isn’t found in some obscure corner of the internet—it’s local. It’s about building an identity where you actually live. You have a much better chance of building a real relationship with those five neighbors than you do by shouting into a digital void where the odds are rigged against you anyway.

The problem is that the “town squares” of the past are gone. The platforms that promised to replace them have mostly just closed us off or made us pay to be heard. Most people are great at what they do, but they’re exhausted by the “options” and the noise of the internet.

I wrote this because I think we’re being fooled into chasing a global reach we don’t actually need. Sometimes, the best way to grow is to stop looking out and start looking in.

We’re working on a way to help businesses do exactly that. Read the full post here.

One topic I explored this week was the review trap that many digital platforms impose on businesses. Platforms like Google and Yelp have been known to disproportionately suppress positive, organic reviews while amplifying negative ones, especially when ad spend is reduced or stopped.

The reality is that businesses are largely at the mercy of these platforms and their algorithms. Vague, opaque guidelines make it nearly impossible to understand how reviews are weighted or what actually influences visibility. From shifting geographic signals to inconsistent ranking behavior, even sustained ad spend doesn’t guarantee long-term stability or fairness.

The real challenge, and one that becomes hard to ignore with enough observation, is that this imbalance appears intentional. When ad spend continues, favorable and relevant reviews surface. When it stops, lower-quality or negative reviews suddenly become more visible.

So why are we stuck playing this game, and is there a better way? I think there has to be. But it requires businesses to recognize that this system isn’t a merit-based reward; it’s a dependency model. An analysis of this behavior was difficult given the lack of concrete data, relying instead on observations, and even then, many findings could be readily challenged because of the platforms’ full control over and opaqueness. Though to be honest when the system is this convoluted, instead of pouring more money into large platforms, that investment is often better spent building trust, visibility, and reach within local communities.

So a while back, I went to a networking event where the keynote speaker mentioned “Every business is in the hospitality industry, what you do is your specific slice of hospitality.” as cliché as it may sound it really hit home. As it is quite true, just about every business in one way or another practices hospitality.

The core of every business is the customer. And it’s our job to entice them, to make them feel welcome, wanted, and appreciated that they are thinking of giving us their business. It’s why I have always been a big component of customer service. It’s no longer about how something gets built; most people really do not care what tech stack you use so long as it works. But what really hits home, what people really want, is to ensure that they are valued.

So what does hospitality in web design look like? To me, it comes down to ensuring the agency, developer, and designer are able to listen and understand your needs. Able to communicate what needs to be done to achieve them, and finally be timely and communicative when questions arise.

Read this week’s blog post where I dive deeper into this line of thinking of hospitality in web design.

Time and again, platforms launch by positioning themselves as open and empowering tools designed to help businesses get discovered. Google promised discoverability. Facebook promised connection. Yelp and others offered visibility through everyday, organic interactions.

And for a while, it worked.

But over time, a familiar pattern emerges. Organic reach is quietly reduced. Paid boosts are introduced. At first, the cost feels nominal, almost reasonable. Then the reach shrinks again. Prices inch upward. Increment by increment, the gap widens until participation without paying becomes nearly invisible.
This isn’t an anomaly, it’s a trajectory. The common defense is that these platforms provide a service and deserve compensation. And that’s true, up to a point. But once they become the dominant force, the relationship shifts.

What was once a partnership turns into exploitation. Businesses find themselves on a hamster wheel, endlessly chasing visibility while a carrot dangles just out of reach.

There should be a better way.

A platform that doesn’t punish organic activity. One that works with businesses instead of extracting from them. One that strengthens local communities rather than hollowing them out.

That’s the problem we’re here to fix.
And that’s exactly what we’re building.

This is a fun little share. I think we often forget that things we take for granted or that seem simple to us—aren’t always obvious to others. But also an important lesson.

I’m part of the PTA at my kids’ school, and before a recent meeting, I noticed a budget line item for the website that seemed high for what they actually needed. Curious, I reached out and discovered that it’s high because they anticipated an issue with the migration of their new website from the old.
After a few follow-up questions, they told me the domain had been purchased years ago by a parent whose child has since moved on and that parent is no longer responsive and was holding up from going live.

Fortunately, they were still able to log in to the WordPress site. I suggested setting up a redirect from the old site to the new one. The idea was simply something no one thought about, and it worked!

It’s not a perfect fix, but at least the existing links now work, making it easy for parents to find all the current and new information about donating food and other essentials to families in need.

Sometimes it’s the small things that make the biggest impact, and many times people are just not aware or, even more so, the thought did not occur to them.

It’s a good feeling knowing you made an impact, but it’s also important to understand the lesson. We’ve all seen it happen. A well-meaning volunteer builds or manages the website, then moves on… and suddenly no one left has the login. Emails go unanswered, ownership is unclear, and the organization is effectively locked out of its own digital home.

In this post, I break down a few simple, practical steps any group can take to avoid that costly loss of access and keep control where it belongs.

This week I wrote about the similarities between “vibe coding” and the early DIY website days such tools like Dreamweaver and FrontPage. Back then, they promised to make web design simple, but eventually got replaced by CMSs that later became bloated and overcomplicated. And here we are again, circling back to the same idea of simple, fast websites, just built differently this time.

It’s interesting to see things come full circle—where what was once old feels new again. The question is whether these modern platforms will actually fix the challenges earlier tools never could. Will AI finally make something like updating button colors across an entire site trivial? Or will it add a new kind of complexity that sends us back to the drawing board? Only time will tell.

A new week means another new OllyJolly cartoon titled Skydiving! This was a fun illustration, re-using an existing background and working on creating a shocked expression. The lines of movement showing falling with the parachute give the user the idea that something seems off. Caption is a play that the cartoon character is falling faster than one should.

This weeks Good news stories:

• MIT Study Shows a 10% Reduction in Global Mercury Pollution
• Portable Ultrasound Device Detects Early Drought Stress in Crops
• Louisville Plants Trees as ‘Urban Medicine’ to Boost Public Health
• New Discovery Reveals How RNA May Help Fight Cancer
• First Map of Fruit Fly Brain Unlocks New Insights into Mental Health
• Squid-Inspired Fabric Brings Temperature-Controlled Clothing to Life

And many more!