Ryan Irelan of Happy Cog recently posted about the challenges of working remotely as part of a team in the web development industry. I’ve got some experience with that; before moving back to Vermont I spent about a year working from an apartment in Florida, 1400 miles away from the rest of my team. A lot of what Ryan said resonates with my own experience. He touched on keeping a strict schedule for certain tasks and emphasizing certain types of communication to minimize interruptions and protect your time. He also talked about techniques he uses to avoid breakdowns in communication that can occur when you’re never face to face with anyone. He has some great tips that are probably almost as valuable if you do work with your team in an office.

I’ve got a few other tips that I’ll throw out, just for kicks:

Communication

Ryan touched on this. Use as many methods of communication as you need to make sure everyone is on the same page. Then take it a little farther. Know what everyone on the team is up to and let them know what you’re up to. Check in about non-work stuff, too (but only when it’s not going to be an interruption.) It’s tough to keep a good working relationship going via single-sentence emails.

Discipline

You may be working 6 feet from your comfy bed. You may be tempted to oversleep. You may have lots of great stuff to play with at home. You may have cool games on your computer that call to you. You may have friends asking you to hang out (you don’t really work, anyway. Right?) Ignore it all. Don’t fall into these traps. Don’t tell yourself “I can sleep in 10 extra minutes and no one will know.” It’s a slippery slope. You’re a professional and you should act exactly as you would in an office with other professionals. Arrange schedules to keep yourself on task. Always be available at the same time every day. Communicate often. Stay focused. Discipline is absolutely the key to working successfully when separated from your team by geography.

For me, keeping rigid discipline in my workday was the way to make sure I didn’t inadvertently abuse my employer’s trust or let down my team members. And it paid off. I was the most productive I had ever been.

Shoes

Seriously. I don’t remember where I read this tip originally, but it always helped me. Something about wearing shoes always made it feel like I was out of the house and into the office, even though I was working from my bedroom desk. If you’re struggling for focus, slap on a pair of shoes and tie them, tightly. This is not a joke.

Douglas Bowman at StopDesign recently shared how his site visitors break down in terms of browser use. As a hero of the web standards movement (sort of like our Hercules or Michael Jordan,) Douglas admits that his stats are skewed toward tech-savvy folks. I decided it would be interesting to look into stats from a more general audience. I develop a lot of real estate websites at work, so that seemed like a natural place to look. I surveyed several of our more heavily-trafficked sites and I’ve made the following observations (which I have also posted at Douglas’ site:)

• Internet Explorer users account for between 65% and 85% of all visits
• Firefox and Safari account for almost all the rest of the traffic, and Firefox tends to have 2-3 times the share of Safari.
• 70% of IE users are browsing these sites with IE7. There was very little variation here, even though the percentage of IE users in general varied by 20% across sites.

(Observations are based on the last month of data, across a sampling of sites based around the United States. Visitors were primarily from the US.)

It’s unfortunate to see how dominant Internet Explorer is sector, but progress is evident. It’s a relief to see that IE7–a fairly capable browser in its own right–has seen increased adoption recently.

I was reading a local news story and in the sidebar I noticed what appeared to be an ad banner for Barack Obama in the sidebar. It turns out it was actually a link to the news site’s section of Obama-related stories. What struck me about the banner was the wording: “President-Elect Barack Obama Click Here.” Apparently they are targeting the extremely small niche of web users that are President-Elect Barack Obama, and imploring them to click on a mysterious banner (and for those counting along at home, that’s a niche of one.)

Just a little mid-week levity. The moral of the story: think carefully about your calls to action. You need to make it clear to your readers what you want them to do and why they should want to do it. Give them a reason to click your banner or sign-up button. And if something isn’t an advertisement, make sure that it doesn’t look like one. This banner looks like a paid ad for who knows what and I never would have clicked on it if I weren’t planning to write this post poking fun at it. It doesn’t represent a compelling call to action for me. At face value, I can’t tell what I’ll find once I click, or even if I’m supposed to. After all, I’m not President-Elect Barack Obama. That’s some other guy.