We were enjoying a sunny day off last Monday in Rochester and were heading out for breakfast at the popular Highland Diner, but had talked about trying to find locally roasted coffee.  Purely by chance, I happened to notice the Boulder Cafe on Alexander St. as we drove by.  It looked as though it was good-sized, and its sign and decor seemed to indicate a good product and atmosphere, so we decided to stop.

The decor was the characteristically youthful and funky style you tend to find in city cafes, splashy paintings, posters, ironic paraphenelia from the second-hand store, you know the drill.  It was very spacious, with plenty of comfortable seating.  Then the fun ended.  We went to the counter to order, and were greeted with “what do you want?” by a young white brown-haired woman.  We were both brought up short by this noticeable brusqueness, but ordered anyway.  I’ve written elsewhere about some cafe staff being distracted and apparently resentful of having a menial job, but at least they usually manage to force out a “can I help you?” or “what can I get for you?”  Maybe rudeness is the new assertiveness, a way of sticking it to the Man.

By contrast, when our coffee was served, it was very good.  We sat down to enjoy it.  They have a large sound system there, and the music was pretty loud for a cafe.  I enjoyed some of it, such as Regina Spektor, but much of the other music was standard-issue angry indie dreck, which actually went well with the personality of our tough little barista.  We finished fairly quickly and left, instead of our planned leisurely sipping, reading, and snacking.

One could easily, and rightfully, say that everyone has a bad day, other staff are friendly, the music is normally not so loud in the daytime, and so on.  But as any restaurant or cafe owner knows, you only get one chance for a first impression, and we will not be going back.  If it had been something like an honest mistake, as opposed to deliberate rudeness, we might have been willing to try again another time.  Hey, if you like very good coffee and have no need for friendly staff or tasteful music volume, this could be your place!

We went on to have a nice breakfast at the Highland, and decided to go to our usual favorite cafe, The Spot.  Although the music was pleasant and the atmosphere good as usual, even they managed a couple missteps.  We nearly always order the pie there, which is delicious and served in generous portions.  There was none this time, so we opted for a couple of fruit tortes.  These looked nice, but proved to be very dry.  We turned them back in, and the staff member was kind enough to substitute lemon tarts, which were much better.  She said that they bring in the tortes every other day, but even two-days-old tortes should be in better shape than that.

The other thing was the men’s room, which smelled really nasty, and definitely needed a cleaning.  They had the door propped open, which may have been an attempt to air it out until some male staff member arrived?  Ouch.  So I wonder if they are starting to deteriorate, or maybe are undergoing cost-cutting measures.

Our search for a really great cafe in Rochester will continue on our next visit – with all the ones they have, there has to be one!

But like any special effect, it’s only effective if used judiciously, and that means actually stopping once in awhile.  So the basic problem you see is profligate use.

But now there’s a special annoying new development: excellent singers using it.  This is baffling to me; if I were a top singer, it would be a badge of honor not to use it.  I’m not fond of Kelly Clarkson’s music, but I do think that she’s a skilled singer.   So why does she need Autotune?  To me, it’s unmistakable on her latest big ballad hit.  It’s possible to set it more subtly so that the uninitiated will not know.  But even at a low setting, to me it’s like a very phony coating over the note, kind of like gold-plated Jello.  It’s especially obvious when the singer does an interval jump.  I’d rather hear the Autotone cranked up high and obvious, like Cher did with her big hit she had when Autotune was first heard in the wild.  It’s just more honest, and to me, somewhat more respectable than trying to scam your way through undetected.

I’d bet that the reason for good singers using it, apart from occasional laziness and not wanting to do yet another take, is simple budgeting, just like everything else now: it’s cheaper to fix something with Autotune, or even have the singer (or in some cases, “singer”) use it up front to make absolutely sure there will be no mistakes.  Boom, one take, you’re done, lower studio time bill.  Like, totally cool?  So the old work ethic and self-respect are replaced with a Walmart cheapo approach to record making.  Hey, the record sounds perfect, and is cheaper to make.  Break me off a piece of that perfect corporate gold-plated Jello, cheapness rulez!

But many newbies were unwitting victims of a subtle trick:  the web developer they hired registered the domain name himself before building the site.  The site is running, it looks fine, everything’s fine, right?  Just one little problem – the original client does not own the domain of their site, the web developer does.  Why does this matter?  I know of a case where a fellow wanted to update his website using a new designer.  He went back to his old web developer and told him of his new site plans.  Guess what?  The developer said, sure, you can have access to your domain: I’ll sell it to you for $600.  Otherwise, get lost.

This is a form of cybersquatting.  Essentially this amounts to someone taking advantage of your lack of technical expertise in order to make money from what should be your property.  Someone new to the web would likely not even be aware of this practice.  Legislation has been put into law to combat cybersquatting, so you may have legal recourse.  Web companies are doing less of this scamming now because of the laws, but many of these swindles took place when the web was nearly new.  Developers are well aware that trying this with a large company will result in very harsh consequences, but if the client is small, the developer may count on the client being unaware of the law, or being unable to afford legal counsel.

In the best case scenario with these developer-owned domains, the developer will simply sign it over to you when you ask for it.  In worse scenarios, they will try to charge you an usurious rate for the domain, or they may simply try to strong-arm you hiring and paying them to make further changes to the site – their bid for permanent job security.   And they count on clients being unaware of their rights.

If you have a long-standing business under a name that closely matches your domain name, you should have a very strong case for a suit.  If not, it may be less clear-cut.  In the case above, the client finally gave up and registered a new domain name and got others to develop the new site there.  But he shouldn’t have had to do that.

When you set up your new website, the way to avoid this is to register the domain yourself, or at the very least have your contract with the developer indicate that you own the domain name.

Gratuitous Hyphenation

This one comes from good intentions.  Let’s say you’re thinking of using the phrase “West Philly Cheese Steaks”, which is your company name.  People are sitting in a meeting and somebody writes “westphillycheesesteaks.com” on a board.  Someone says that “westphillycheesesteaks” is really long and doesn’t look like a word.  Spaces in a URL don’t work, so they try “west-philly-cheese-steaks.com” instead.  More readable!  Just one little problem – if someone is trying to type that name, they will tend to have trouble.

Even if you can type, most of you will do better with letters than punctuation marks, simply based on frequency of use.  As a geek, I use the number row a lot, but I still make typos with characters.  With three hyphens, typos will abound, which could be pretty annoying to a web surfer.  Because people are quite used to the web by now, they are more accustomed to typing a phrase with no spaces.  So this will make your URL easy to type.  If you’re still worried about people being able to read it, you can put “WestPhillyCheeseSteaks.com” on your business card or brochure – most web servers will handle the caps gracefully.

Using Hard-to-spell Words

I had a whopper that one client had already registered before I could intervene.  I won’t quote it here, but it was along the lines of Guinevere’s Resplendent Serendipitous Tchotchkes.  And she had every little bit of that in her URL.  A spelling nightmare (not to mention nearly impossible to remember).  Even without hyphens, imagine trying to type that.  And if you somehow manage to do so with no errors, it takes awhile to do it, which is still annoying.  What to do?  Abbreviate.  Guinevere.com is not super easy to spell, but better than the behemoth.  Shorter and simpler are good if possible.

Naming things can be emotional, so this could get tricky.  Say your company is named “Cooper and Vishnuswamiramachunandra”.  If you use all of that, you have a monster typing assignment.  But your colleague Vishnuswamiramachunandra might feel slighted if you call the business the simpler “cooper.com”.  You could abbreviate to, say, “vishnucooper.com” or the like.  Or, a compromise:  you do use “cooperandvishnuswamiramachunandra.com” for your site, but you also register “coopervishnu.com” and/or “cooper.com”, and you set up the shorter URL(s) to automatically take you to “cooperandvishnuswamiramachunandra.com”.  Then possibly everybody’s happy!  URL forwarding can be very helpful.

It’s also possible that you have no hyphens AND no difficult words, but there are just too many words, so the URL is still too long.  “smithandmillerandshortattorneysatlawservingcentralkansas.com”  You get the idea.

The last and most fun category might be URLs with misspelled words, or ones that are unintentionally hilarious, like this one.  If it’s your business, you might want to try to spell it correctly, and consider whether it sounds ridiculous or not.  If you’re not sure, ask someone.     People in my hometown do not, and that’s why we have lots of fun misspelled signs.  By the way, misspelled URLs can be your friend!  Along with your good domain name, you can register common misspellings of it, and then forward them to your real site.

I hope this is helpful to you!  Another time I may concentrate more on good practices, or make a rogue’s gallery of really bad ones – that could be fun!

There seem to be two groups that still use this slow, buggy, graphically-challenged, security-risk-riddled browser:  poor innocent folks who have no idea they even have it,  (Hi, Mom!)  and corporate intranets who, sadly, built huge important company applications that won’t work on any other browser.   For the first group, it’s fairly easy to get rid of IE6, you simply upgrade – users are generally prompted to do that .  Even I will admit that IE8 is a pretty decent browser – though it’s not in the class of Firefox or  Chrome, I’d say it’s about as good as Safari by now.

For the second group, they’re sunk:  to re-write their applications from top-to-bottom would be every coder’s unending nightmare.  So they have to quietly limp along and pray that no one clicks on those malware sites that set cyberattacks ablaze.  Let’s have a moment of silence in honor of those poor schmucks supporting such systems.

So gradually, my dream of being able to totally ignore IE6 is coming true!  Another positive development is the significant waning of sites that use the dreaded Irritating Flash Intro Page.  After much keening and wailing, site owners finally became aware that no matter how gosh-darn-impressive these look to the sales staff, site visitors hate them, and they’re terrible for SEO.  Flash is still in wide usage, but its applications have at least become more mature and subtle.

Yet there are still those who have the really goofy Flash splash page that runs nice and long, just enough to assure that the user is motivated to click away to some other site.  And there’s the very annoying phenomenon of sudden music foisted upon the unwitting visitor.  Fortunately, this has mostly disappeared except amongst certain special populations.  Fancy restaurants and top chefs, I’m talking to you on both counts!       With the fanciest restaurants, the probability of having unnecessary bad Flash approaches 100%.  I can only surmise that Flash-splash-loving graphic designers and chef-restaurateurs must be cut from the same cloth.

Here’s to a world with no IE6 and no Flash intros!  Huzzah!