I’ve been in a Sharepoint class all week. I looked forward to this about as much as a root canal. I’ve always loved open source, have been developing and promoting Drupal, and generally railing against the Microsoft Borg throughout my web development career. However, my employer just happened to drop a hundred grand or so on a Sharepoint installation, and my group is tasked with deploying it.

Whenever I pull out the “Oh yes, I got my start in the industry with Amazon.com in the late 90’s” line, some part of me feels a little guilty, a little fake, for not completing the statement with “…as a customer service rep in the call center”.

It wasn’t a glamorous job, but the couple years I spent “de-escalating” angry customers and trying to “make things right” taught me some quite valuable, relevant job skills - and ingrained in me a service-oriented business perspective that I use every day.

Which door should I use?

Jakob Nielson is one of my favorite voices on the web. Most people either love him or hate him, which I’ve found to be a good indicator that someone is worth listening to, at least until I can form a judgment myself.

His latest Alertbox column reminds me, again, that no amount of design “wow” can make your website visitors buy more, contact you, or whatever your desired conversion goal is.

Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages… which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.

Successful sales-oriented websites make it easy for users to accomplish the desired action and encourage them every step of the way. Good web design supports, rather than gets in the way of, the conversion process.