I don't completely agree with all of his "steps", particularly the examples he provides. Take #7--Get people hooked on free--for example. Yes, free will always win you fans, and a large user base has intrinsic value, but if you're providing a service that people are willing to pay for, by all means let them pay. (Regarding his Thefacebook vs. Match.com example--which one is actually making money?) Still, there are some good ones. My favorite: 6. Be mindnumbingly simple. Then again, this is a pretty age-old design mantra.
I've had my web designer hat on lately. I've always been a much better judge of good design than a creator of good design, so I need all the help I can get. One thing that can make a huge difference in the quality of your site is color selection. Here are some sites I've been going to lately for chromatic inspiration.
ColorBlender
Pick your starting color and ColorBlender will show you a 6-color palette for that color, and allow you to easily play with variations or customize them. You can also save them [to a cookie] so you have your personal blends available to you whenever you visit the site. You can also email direct links to your blend. Very cool.
Color Scheme Generator 2
The ultimate color-generating tool. If you can't come up with a color scheme you like with this tool, you really are a lost cause. You can even see how your scheme looks to people with any one of eight different types of colorblindness.
I just spend *hours* trying to get some CSS working only to discover that the reason it wasn't working was because I didn't have the DOCTYPE declared at the top of my html:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Took me about 45-50 minutes, the first 30 minutes of which were spent on a false start. After starting over with a better system for keeping track of everything, it wasn't that bad.
I really doubt that this was Einstein's puzzle, and certainly the 2% figure is pulled out of someone's ass, but it's still good for some brain calisthenics.
Last night Jacqueline was looking around online for flights to Seattle. She ended up falling asleep before she could book anything, but when she went to check again in the morning, she found that the same flights were about $30 cheaper.
Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but my theory is that people/agents put holds on flights throughout the day, and those holds are released at the end of the day (assumedly midnight, although I don't know which timezone), freeing up seats and thus reducing prices. Has anyone else seen this? Or is this common knowledge and I've just been clueless?