Construction Informer

I put up a basic poll in the sidebar earlier in September and it just finished up. There really weren’t enough responses to make it significant. This blog is getting 12,000 page views a month so it’s kind of surprising that there weren’t more votes. Of course the topic was probably kind of lame. I mean, really, who cares in construction what OS you use. I guess just me and a few others. But mainly I wanted to test the plug-in and widget.

Internet polls are far from scientific but I think if they get enough responses they can indicate trends. For the polls on these pages I have disabled the “ISP cookie thing” so in effect people can vote more than once. I just figure there are enough cookies floating around and the people who stop by here are probably not interested in skewing my little polls. 

For the next ten days the poll on the right seeks to discover just how real this credit crunch is for those who are in construction. I’ve been hearing from several sources that it’s simply more smoke and mirrors and that good businesses are not having any difficulty with credit. After all, aren’t banks in business to loan? How could they all of a sudden decide a long-time customer with an excellent repayment history and a realistic business plan isn’t worth the risk? If they do that, why not just go out of business.

Anyway, maybe your vote will add to some clarity. Comments are always welcome also.

The old Construction Informer is now pointing here and other than it disappearing completely for a couple of days things seem to have went okay. The same is not true for the comments. I will be working on moving those in the upcoming weeks…or at least figuring out if it’s possible without buckets of blood, sweat and tears.

In most cases permalinks from the old site will forward seamlessly here since I used the same naming convention. So if you’ve linked to any post at the old site your links should still work. You might want to check that though and report those to me that don’t. Just forward the permalink and I’ll check it out. Eventually when I retire the old site though they will stop working. If you have some you’d like to insulate from that then you will have to change your links by replacing "blog.sunworldventures" with "constructioninformer."

I used to periodically post the downloads that I had incorporated into the blog in aggregate form but now they are all on their own page. The link is also at the top of each page.

Thanks for reading!

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. - Edward R. Murrow

The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe. - H.L. Mencken

The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed, but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. - John F. Kennedy

The trouble with free election is, you never know who is going to win. - Leonid Brezhnev

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. - Benjamin Franklin

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too. - Somerset Maugham

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. - Voltaire

I always like to find a "reader’s blog." There are so many multimedia opportunities with blogs these days, no doubt an effort to keep up with ever-diminishing concentration spans, that I sometimes think we loose sight of what it is we are trying to do. In most cases I think communication is the goal but that gets lost on me when I visit a blog that uses two sentences and a You Tube video for every post.

So when I discovered Construction Marketing Ideas I immediately liked it. It has great information that anyone in a construction business can use and it is "written."  Mark Buckshon, the blogger and publisher of construction newspapers and web sites, addresses those things that relate to marketing, management, human resources and the process of running a business. Whether he is writing about how those repetitive customer interactions can become hollow and unnatural, or is subtly revealing the nuances of brand, Mark engages you and teases you into the material so it doesn’t feel like a homework assignment. Plus, he posts a lot. Check it out.

During the time I have been writing these posts I have had many requests for the URLs to other construction-related blogs. People would variously complain about not being able to find construction very well represented in the blog world. I already knew there were many construction blogs out there because I had casually come across them but I hadn’t been collecting the links so I really wasn’t sure just how many existed. More importantly I didn’t know how many had any meaningful information posted with any consistency.

Today, after many hours of roaming the web and engaging in cataloging kinds of activities, I have answers to those question that at least satisfy me for the time being. I have compiled a list of these blogs and called it the Orangelist Spring 2008 Construction Blog Directory. It is available in MS Word and MS Excel for $12.99.

Some may say this a rather counter-revolutionary concept for creating directories in the computer age. I have to admit it feels like going backward yet it also feels like it gives some meaningful results. In this case a human, me, has viewed every blog, scanned all the posts, compiled all the posts for each month the blog has been active, recorded the Google ranking and ranked each one on three criteria. So, instead of clicking on a blog link and getting a 404 error, or finding a few posts and then nothing, or finding a computer-generated directory with a bunch of irrelevant content, you get what you were expecting.

I went out looking for construction blogs using the simple premise that each one must be clearly labeled as a blog and have a typical blog structure consisting of posts, comments, archives, and the other attributes that we think of as being unique to blogs. Many of you are probably already seeing how such a list might be valuable to you and here are a few of the things I came up with:

• It can help you to network and get your own blog spread around a bit;
• It can help you to monetize and promote to the construction world;
• It can introduce more depth to your current repertoire of sources;
• It can put you in touch with others who have a passion for the industry and a willingness to share insight and perceptions;
• It can offer directions to some valuable tips, tricks and insights related to all kinds of challenging construction things; and more…

It seems construction may be one of the last bastions of the pre-computer age! I found a little more than 60 blogs related to construction that fit my criteria for a blog. I haven’t deluded myself into believing that’s all there are but these represent what a typical person would find using the same techniques and applying the same standards.

Early on I realized you can’t divorce architecture/design and engineering from construction. They are linked and you have to view them all in their own contexts but also as they relate to each other…so I have included blogs about those disciplines as well. Because I found so many legal blogs I limited them to a few and included a law blog directory.

There are many blogs out there done by contractors and material suppliers and others in construction businesses that are just focused on promoting their businesses and they aren’t included.

There are many blogs with a very local focus so they aren’t included and also not included are blogs that focus on a particular project like the building of a hotel.

If the blog is primarily aimed at homeowners, it won’t be in the list and not included are directories although I did pull some blogs from directories because they had some compelling content.

Other than that, if you want good reading, pictures, tips, tricks, techniques, commentaries and inspiration related to construction businesses then you will find all of that and more in this directory. There is much more about this product at the link above.