Because we “have” to. That’s the one and only reason. [Well. I suppose we don't really have to, but as a business owner doing my best to keep my staff employed, often we do feel the obligation to respond.]
If you’re ever involved in writing one of these boogers, please, if only for me, try to avoid ridiculous terms, demands and requests.
For example, here’s a paragraph taken directly from a recent RFP:
Monthly Invoicing and Reimbursement of Project Expenses
The successful candidate will be required to submit monthly invoices for all program expenses incurred during the prior month by the 10th of the month following. Invoices must include detailed documentation supporting all program expenses, and expenses must be incurred according to the budget established at the beginning of each year.
The successful candidate will be reimbursed for all properly submitted and approved invoices within five working days after the receipt of payment from our funding source. Based on our 2009 experience one can expect that payment for one’s January services will be processed in May and that subsequent monthly invoices to be paid every 30 days thereafter. The average payment cycle is expected to be 120 days from the date of invoice.
So, in other words, I have 10 days — not 10 business days, mind you, 10 days — to get my sh*t together, but the entity who MIGHT hire me, has 120 days (4 months!) to pay me???
Wonder what what happen if we paid our taxes 4 months late?
Give me a break. I despise RFPs.
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Posted by Donna Bowling on August 28, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Filed under: Ramblings, What were they thinking?
Tags: RFPs
There’s a lot of information floating around on the Internet right now. The rather obvious reason for this is that we’re not limited by the constraints of having to physically fit information on paper. Space is cheap online and we’re in a big rush to fill up that space with all the information we couldn’t afford to put anywhere before. The down side to all this is that there’s a lot of stuff to sift through. Clay Shirky notes that this isn’t an information overload, just a failure of filtering systems.
Almost any website is going to be a big repository of all the information that anyone might need, and rightly so. But proper organization of that information is of key importance. Not only do you want a good, robust search feature that will direct people to what they’re searching for, you also want to make sure that the information is easy to navigate.
Ease of navigation first and foremost means a solid hierarchical structure that’s easy and intuitive to get through. It means getting a sitemap nailed down that doesn’t have too many levels and has pages sorted logically. More important than a good hierarchy, however, is finding areas of your site to place information that are intuitive, yet not necessarily immediately apparent during the site mapping and design phase of creating your site.
One of the best examples is moving the content from a general “About” page to an interactive element on the homepage. This not only eliminates an entire page, but creates a filter that blends the “about” information into the rest of the site so that the information is integrated into the experience of the site. The text is still present, but by combining it with other parts of the site the information is less oppressive and doesn’t overload the visitor.
Replicating this process as often as possible on your site is an important point to keep in mind as early as possible in the design and planning stages. This keeps your site from being a mass of information that is exhausting to sift through and instead properly filters the information so your visitors can easily get what they need without resorting to the search function.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on August 10, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Filed under: Ramblings
