The Author

This blog is written by Evan LaPointe.  I live in Atlanta and have been “doing stuff online” for somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years.  While this experience was being gained, I learned a very valuable lesson: “experience” is the most dangerous thing in this industry: we can’t depend on what we learned last time in hopes it will fix our problems this time – things simply change too quickly.

The mind is slow to unlearn what it learnt early

- Seneca

This quote works well in the worlds of analytics, usability, design, marketing, programming, and more, where we can fall into patterns that prove ineffective over time. Experience is certainly valuable on the web, but not without a healthy portion of awareness.

The stuff I’ve been doing has spanned from ground-up design to search engine marketing, and everything in between, and it all rolls up nicely into web analytics. In working with large brands, and all sorts of companies of varying sizes, I’ve learned so many things through my own real-world successes and failures (although we should think of a better word than failures) that I figured it was time to start bouncing ideas off of other people to see what they thought, too.  This blog is that effort.

In the 15 years I’ve been developing, marketing, analyzing and improving web sites, I’ve been lucky or cursed enough to have worked on almost all aspects of what makes a web site work, both from a user’s perspective and the business’s.  From search engine marketing to HTML, PHP, SQL, to graphical design to retargeting to display on both publisher and advertiser side, I’ve been thrown into more pools than the guys on Jackass, and with over 100 implementations of Omniture SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics behind me, you might call me the most unspecialized and tired web analytics person in the world.

But what I’ve come to find out is that you can’t even hope to be effective if you haven’t been in all of these different places.  If you’ve ever seen a decision made in one area of a site that harmed another effort, you know what I’m talking about.  Over-specialization has made professionals in this industry very adept at saying, “That’s not my job,” which is just unacceptable.  If nobody is going to take ownership of managing the site and make holistic decisions, we just get the output of the strongest personalities.

Please have a look at my personal site for more information on me, my other blogs, and whatever else I’ve cooked up over there.  I can be reached on twitter, where I’m @evanlapointe, and I’m on facebook.  The other networks I’m a part of can be found on the social networks page of my site. We hope you enjoy your stay.