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This might be a post about Agile, the action-packed software development methodology that’s been damming up waterfalls for a few years now.

Agile development is about iterations, working software, self-organised teams and the ability to adapt to change quickly. It casts aside massive functional specifications, requirements documents and 18-month lead times. There’s a lot to love.

It’s worth a look if you’re not familiar. The Wikipedia entry on Agile is a good start. And, like all utopian religions, it even has a manifesto.

But this isn’t a post about Agile. It’s about being agile. Sure, there’s cross-over. The methodology wants to be truly agile. And when it is, it’s terrific and exciting. But more often than not, it isn’t. And whether Agile is agile or not comes down to the people involved.

In my experience, failed Agile processes come unstuck when practitioners approach the process with a religious zeal that doesn’t take the project’s individual circumstances into account.

Two stated Agile principles that derail projects are:

• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

In an interpretation straight out of the Old Testament, too many Agile team leaders and ‘Agile Coaches’ have dictated that the business owner and the development team must sit in the same room. Or maybe a room nearby. With an open door.

This becomes a rule slavishly followed, despite two facts:

• humans have ‘worked together’ without being co-located for millennia
• ‘most efficient and effective’ does not mean ‘only’

When the business owner is actually located in another building, suburb, city or even country, developers too often decide that the process is ‘corrupted’ or – worse still – work as if the business owner was in the room.

In Agile, we don’t waste time with pesky documentation. We stick cards on the wall (if we can find a bit of wall not covered by a whiteboard). So if the business owner isn’t in the room to look at the cards…bad luck. Not here to answer a question? Tough.

Stupid.

Ah, but this isn’t a post about Agile, remember? It’s about a mindset; about being. Substitute ‘agile’ for ‘nimble’ or any other synonym that comes to mind. Think about how to work faster and more effectively. There is much to like about the Agile Manifesto. There is much to be disappointed about when considering what it becomes in the hands of neo-technical report-o-phobes.

If you’re working on software development…or development of any kind (including content)…you’d be foolish not to consider working in an agile way. Iterate, discuss, show the boss, review, tweak, and – most of all – actually do it.

But you might want to consider what is being sacrificed by substituting that little ‘a’ for a capital letter…

Lots of product development and marketing processes call for the creation of personas. Personas are fictional characters, based on real user information, that we then use to test our ideas out on.

If we know that our target market is female, university educated, aged 30-39, married with one child, and interested in netball, we might create a character and name her Fiona. We then assign attributes in keeping with our demographic knowledge, and then flesh her out with additional details we make up.

Her favourite magazine is Marie Claire, she still listens to the Cure, she met her husband Chris at RMIT where they both studied journalism. He’s now a web manager and she’s a marketing director. And so on…

And now, with a small handful of personas, we can ‘market test’ product decisions, marketing initiatives, development ideas and more. It’s not as good as real market testing, but it’s fast and cheap.

Right, so personas are good. They help writers write, designers design, developers build and marketers sell.

But maybe there’s one more persona you should add to your toolbox. Your product – be it a company website, a software product, a blog, a shoe or a brand of coffee – probably has a ‘personality’ and a voice. Why not add flesh to this by developing an internal product persona?

This embodiment of your message can then be used by anyone who has anything to do with the product in question. You’re more likely to create consistent experiences for your consumers/users if everyone in your organisation is channeling the same character and characteristics.

This doesn’t mean that everyone pretends to be ‘Jason’ in the call centre, just that product messages, tone, values and approach are consistent.

And – if you get it right – your persaona might even give you ideas for your next successful step…

Web 2.0. It’s all the rage. For the past few years, it’s dominated online activity. Does it dominate you?

While some perverse folks dismiss the term ‘Web 2.0’ as meaningless, most agree that it’s used to describe ‘collaborative media’ or ‘social filtering’. Web 2.0 is all about interacting with your users/visitors/customers in an intimate and compelling way.

And, importantly, it’s about turning those people and interactions into a real community, allowing your site users to interact with each other. It’s brave. It exposes you to the judgement of the masses (or “the wisdom of the crowd”). It’s cool. It seems scary.

It’s not.

This Web 2.0 movement is marked by socially-orientated sites that utilise tools such as:

• blogs
• polls
• wikis
• RSS aggregation
• Twitter
• tagging
• tag clouds
• bit torrent (and peer-to-peer generally)
• folksonomies
• microformats
• podcasts and vodcasts
• user reviews and ratings
• mashups.

So what does your site need? Anything here? Or does it all sound like gobbledygook?

What websites need is a clear strategic vision, not the latest widget.

Knowing your business and knowing your website visitors’ needs will let you figure out what tools to provide, and how to deploy them. Web 2.0 is not technology: it’s a mindset that lets users share and collaborate.

Is it a mindset that would help your business?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Are you a fish and chip shop? Chances are your web visitors want to know your address, opening hours, prices and contact info. Chances are they don’t want to hang out and discuss frying techniques…

It’s time. In an earlier post, we learned that newspaper websites, bloggers and more were chasing traffic by using ambiguous, vaguely sexual terms in their headings.

After some spirited comments, I decided to try it too, but for purely scientific reasons.

The headline here was suggested in comments by John Ford, an architectural lighting designer who knows a thing or two about puns.

He wrote:

I bought a tap at the hardware store a while ago which had written on the tag: “Rough Stop Cock Brass Male”, which roughly translates to a brass stopcock with a rough surface and a male thread. It makes me think of gay porn, not plumbing hardware… Not a headline though…

Oh, I beg to differ, Mr Ford. I think it’s a grand headline.

By the way, a search on Google for this series of words delivers 16 legitimate plumbing results before a porn return. The adwords spots, though, are pure smut (although some of the ladies out there might want to see just how hunky those hunks are…).

So check back at the comments here occasionally, and I’ll post updates on how traffic stats are going.

Alt text (alternative text) is the little bit of descriptive text that displays:

• when you hover over an image in a browser, or
• in the place of a broken or missing image

Importantly, alt tags are also used by vision-impaired users who rely on screen readers to gether information from websites. The alt tag is literally read aloud to these users.

So alt text describes the image. And it’s a requirement for accessibility for many government and business sites. And it’s also handy for SEO purposes.

But just saying what’s in the image isn’t enough. When describing a photo of a monkey wearing a fez, it’s not enough to write “monkey wearing fez”.

Designers work hard to create or source images that evoke a feeling. Images are a significant part of the ‘voice’ of any good website. Just like writers, designers are attempting to say something. Don’t the vision impaired deserve to share that?

So set aside SEO considerations (alt text isn’t that important anyhow). Actively write alt text. Describe the emotion as well as the content of the image. Write alt text for humans. “A scary monkey wearing a red fez poses for the camera”.

It’s good for usability. It’s good for creativity. And it’s good for the soul.