New Team Home

For any of you have been following the Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff blog, you’ve probably realized it’s no longer Martin Hardee writing it. Since Martin left Sun to go and customer experienceizate Cisco.com, we’ve been running that blog as a team effort and it’s probably about time we got ourselves a new team home. There’s no particularly good reason for moving, except that the blog’s URL is a personal one – blogs.sun.com/martinhardee – and we wouldn’t want to misrepresent Martin, or give a false impression of who’s writing for it.

Actually, that’s not 100% true. It sounds good in a corporately responsible way, but actually, the reason we’re moving is that this new blog is MINE. ALL MINE. Well, its the sun.com design team’s, so we’ve given it an abstract URL identifier so that its not associated with one person. We’ll probably lose 80% of our regular readership that linked to the old URL in a feed reader or added a link in their del.ectab.le bookmarks or just have it favorited, but I’ll be sure to put an enormous blinking message on the old blog, to try and redirect folks here. If nothing else, it’ll show us if people actually read the other one, rather it being popular through automated referrals.

We will endeavor, of course, to make this an interesting place to come, so hopefully, if you’ve never even read the old blog and are reading this because you thought ‘New Team Home’ might have something to do with football, then we’re already reaching out. As a point of interest, even though I might say something like ‘favorite endeavor’, I’m actually in the UK, so when I say ‘football’, I really mean ‘soccer’, but I’ll let you interpret it as it makes most sense to you, which is probably more sense than it makes to me. Most other contributors to this blog are in the US, so when they say ‘soccer’, they probably mean ‘football’, if you’re reading this in London. Not that they will. They might say something like ‘community’, though, which will refer to our programs to engage with specific audiences to build a relationship, not to a block of flats in Hackney.

We’ll be posting thoughts on web design, customer experience, usability and letting you know what’s happening on sun.com and associated sites. I expect we’ll post completely irrelevant things too, but we’ll try and make them sound relevant by adding a web design tie-in in the last paragraph. You can let us know what you think, or maybe just quietly agree/disagree. Either way, we hope you’ll find it a worthy distraction for a few minutes and maybe we’ll even be interesting or useful. That’ll be a first for me, but there’s more cleverer people on the design team, so if I can somehow bribe/blackmail them into breaking their blogging duck, it should be an interesting web experience.

Listening Post: Chris Morris: Radio Show 27/07/94