Hack Day

October 3, 2012 — Leave a comment

Four heads are better than one

We typically pause other work and, as a team, pour all of our focus and resources into one client for eight hours straight. Thus far, this collective effort has quickly revealed itself as successful and most certainly worth the resources.

via The Anatomy of a Link Building Hack Day | SEOmoz.

SEO agency Distilled has a neat thing going here. Their hack days are a really creative way of getting a lot of work done in a short amount of time. I’ve been a fan of group sessions since college (booyah, meeting rooms!), which were a lot like this — junk food included.

I had a brief, but enlightening, conversation after yesterday’s closing remarks.

Someone asked me what I do for a living, and I offered my standard response: I’m a web generalist. I like design and front-end development, but I’m also interested in sales and marketing. Most of my work has been with small businesses, and I don’t have a specialization.

Specialization is a must, I was told. Generalists are a dime a dozen, but specialists are a scarce commodity. “If you want a seat at the table“, they said, “you need to be able to do one of three things: sell, design, or build.

Sell, design, or build? Well, shoot. I guess that makes sense. But which one is it?

 

This post is a follow-up to my presentation at WordCamp Toronto 2012.

My goal for this presentation is to give you a high-level introduction to improving and measuring your site’s performance on the web. I’m by no means a guru when it comes to SEO or web analytics, so if you were expecting me to blow your mind, I’m sorry to disappoint. What I’m providing here is a collection of resources that should come in handy for whatever web projects you’re tackling.

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