Gary Haran.com

I’m headed to the unfortunately named event tonight where people having an interest in startups or entrepreneurship can meet up for a drink (and not where non-drinkers can take up drinking).

Send me a twit/shout/email if you’re going.

PS: you may have noticed that I caved in and am now using Twitter.

After James posted my Javascript Same Game to digg it seemed I was receiving more job inquiries than spam. Now that the dust has settled I’ve taken some time off to visit family in Paris and think about my options. Standout Jobs approached me just in the nick of time and I would have been a fool to refuse.

I’ll be working in Montreal with what is perhaps the most talented and interesting team I’ve ever had the chance to work with. All that right here in Montreal!!

Fred Ngo who we can thank for making BarCampMontreal and DemoCampMontreal a reality, Austin Hill founder of Zero Knowledge (now RadialPoint), Ben Yoskovitz who runs the famous Instigator Blog and of course the dream team that is currently made up of Marc-Andre Cournoyer aka Ruby Guru, Daniel Haran aka Ruby Guru and brother! and Francis Wu aka CSS/Web Design Guru!

My role here will be to add some sexyness to the front end that ties in with the ass-kicking stuff that’s already there. I can’t say what exactly because I just signed one of those pesky NDAs… all I can say is that they’ll be changing the face of recruiting.

Check out Standout Jobs blog entry about me.

I came to your site after spending over an hour speaking to people at Sympatico support. I was highly motivated to go with a competitor but your site made me question my motivation. Sorry to say, your site is even worse than Videotron.

You’ve done so many things wrong that I just had to make a list:

1) Don’t ask me what language I want.

My browser already tells you that.

2) Don’t ask me if I’m a business or a consummer.

Your site should be able to catter to both easily from the same page or offer a link to that effect on the page.

3) Pay a real graphic artist to make you a site template.

Your site is the ugliest one I’ve seen in this millenium, except for Myspace. Images are blurry, blocky and/or grainy. It’s disapointing for a tech company to have this window to the internet. I’d expect you put more emphasis on how your Internet image looks.

4) Consider text links instead of images

We’ve already established that your graphics were an eye-sore. The links you have on the navigation of your real home page are worst yet because they differ from the user’s normal fonts, take longer to download and cannot be resized for usability reasons.

5) Test your site before going live

From boutiquerogers.com I clicked on “Services Internet”, there I was given ugly flash animations with blocky images instead of a well laid out description of each package. I decided to click on each to see what they each meant but I arrived on a page that perhaps your programmer’s could fix: http://www.boutiquerogers.com/store/cable/internetcontent/express.asp<%=justSID%>

I honestly think you guys can do better.

• Take pics of themselves mooning a camera and make moo(n) cards with them.
• Hop on a plane wearing a t-shirt that says kill -9, or go to church with one saying “practice safe hex“
• Fill out your skype username in forms asking for your phone number
• Answer yes or no question with true or false