Andy Sack is the CEO of Judy’s Book. He has been sharing his experiences starting and running the social shopping site. Today he wrote this about leadership:

The leader of a business must fight this complexity — and communicate simplicity to the world, to customers, and to employees.

Naturally, I agree. I also think that simplicity is everyone’s job. If you aren’t making things simple, you’re making them complicated. Organizations, be they businesses, countries, or groups of friends, are not top-down. Reducing complexity is everyone’s responsibility.

The brain can only hold so much information at a time. I’ve heard the phrase “five plus or minus two” used a lot. It looks like the original theory (from the fifties) was seven plus or minus two. The point is there is a limit and productivity is about finding good stuff to put in your available buckets. It’s something that should be important to everyone, in every organization.

I’m seeing a number of Web sites pop up that do exactly one thing. They are often an off-shoot of another site. The one trick ponies focus in on the single thing they do, probably in an effort to get people like me to link to them.

Rentometer gets your zip code, rent, and simple information about your apartment and tells you whether you’re paying too much or too little. The chart I’ve included shows why I’m not a home owner. The orange needle represents the median mortgage payment.

This is put together by an outfit that sells property management software. So, this tool might be of more use to somebody wanting to set a rental price.

Tom found the Global Rich List, a site that shows where your salary ranks compared to the rest of the world. Hint: you are very rich. The example above shows the US poverty level (just shy of $10k / year).

This is made by a Web design firm in London. The organization they recommend people support is Care International. I’ve been approached on the streets of Portland a kabillion times by Care and I’ve never been as open to helping them out as I am now. It’s the soft sell.

But it’s also the simplicity of their approach. There is minimal navigation and both of these are extremely interactive. I put in some stuff and it shoots out an answer just for me.

Once you have a site with good, clean URLs, the next step is to make sure they never change. It’s a simple mantra to have, but a tough one to follow through on.

You see, sometimes you have to change URLs. A new content management system might demand a certain structure. You might be improving your organization to have site sections. Heck, your wacky Web Developer might be changing programming languages.

In that case, make sure the old pages remain immortal. Don’t just redirect pages not found to the home page. That’s a cop out. Go to the effort of determining every broken page on your site and make sure it redirects to the new page. This is a lot of work, but both users and search engines like it.

When I switched from Blogger to WordPress, there were all sorts of changes. The whole URL structure changed, which breaks my immortal URL rule. That meant I needed to do some extra work to make sure that the Blogger URLs were not forgotten and that they found their way to the new structure.

The solution was permanent redirects on the server. I have about 100 lines in my .htaccess file that look like this:
Redirect permanent /news/2005/07/trailboss-best-band-that-never-was.html https://adamduvander.com/me/trailboss-the-best-band-that-never-was

Just a couple weeks ago I decided that my Weird Al CD post was more about me than keeping things simple. I switched its category, which changed the URL. Then I made sure the old, broken one would remain immortal by redirecting it.

If your server uses Apache (and most do), check out their docs for more information.