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I'm working in a small company and weeks away from deploying a web-app that will be used a lot. Everyone at one location will have to learn to use it, and although I think it's pretty easy and intuitive I may be biased.
I've written a help guide with plenty of screenshots that's available on every page, but I'll still need to train everyone. What's the best way? How do you take a step back and explain code you've been working on for weeks?
First try to avoid the training:
Perform usability testing to ensure your web app is intuitive. Usability testing is a very important aspect of testing and it is often ignored. How you see your system will probably be very different as how a new user sees your system.
Also add contextual help as often as you can. For example when I hover over a tag in stack overflow, I know exactly what clicking it will do, because it tells me.
Also this may seem obvious, but make sure you link to your documentation from the site itself. People may not think of looking in your documentation unless its right in front of their eyes.
About training documentation:
Try to split up your material into how your users would use the system. I personally like the "trails" option that Sun created for their Java tutorials. In this tutorial you can do several things, and you can chose on which trail you'd like to go.
Support random reads in your help documentation. If they have a task to do in your web app, then they should be able to get help on that without reading a bunch of unrelated content.
Make sure your documentation is searchable.
About actual training sessions:
If you are actually performing training sessions, stay away from explaining anything related to your code at all. You don't need to know about the engine to drive a car.
Try to split up your training sessions into very focused aspects of your system. If you only have 1 training session available to you then just do one specialized use case of your system + the overall description of the system. Refer to the different parts of documentation where they can get help.
Letting the community help itself:
No matter how extensive your documentation is, you'll always have cases that you didn't cover. That's why it's a good idea to have a forum available to all users of the system. Allow them to ask each other questions.
You can review this forum and add content to your documentation as needed.
You could also open up a wiki for the documentation itself, but this is probably not desirable if your user base isn't very large.
Few ideas:
Do you have some canned walk-through scenarios? Don't know if it is applicable for your product, but I built a pretty substantial product a couple years ago and developed some training modules that they'd work through - nothing long, maybe 15 minutes tops for each one.
I put together a slide presentation that hit the highlights to talk about what it does. I would spend about 10 minutes going through the app's highlights to familiarize them with it before doing the hands-on stuff.
People don't tend to read stuff, unfortunately. You could put hours and hours into a help document, and still find that folks simply don't read it or skim over it. That can be frustrating. Expect that answers that are in your guide will be the topic of questions your users will have.
Break up any training you do into manageable chunks. I've been to a full-day training exercise before and the trainer broke it into short pieces and made it easy for me to get the training topic in my head. You don't want to data-dump on them because their eyes will gloss over and you'll lose them.
Ultimately, if your app is highly usable, it should be a piece of cake. If it isn't, you'll find out. You might want to have a few folks you know run through your training ahead of time and give you constructive criticism on it. Better to fix it before the big group is trained. You'll be more confident in the product and the training materials (whatever they are) and you'll likely have a better training experience.
If applicable, provide an online help/wiki/faq for them. Sometimes that is helpful.
Best of luck!
You should really have addressed this issue a lot earlier in the development cycle than you are doing.
In my view the ideal scenario for corporate software is one where the users design their own application and write their own documentation and I always try to strive for this. You should have identified key users early on and designed the system with them (I try to get my users to do basic screen designs and menu layouts in Excel or similar - then I implement that as static pages and review before writing a line of significant code, obviously they won't get the design right first time, but it's your job to guide them - and ideally in a way where they think they came up with the correct design decisions, not you :-) ).
These users should then write the user documentation from this design in parallel with you developing the system. I have never seen help documentation delivered by a IT department/software company used significantly in a corporate setting. Instead what happens is the users will create their own folder of notes and work-arounds and refer to this (in fact if you're ever doing system analysis to replace an existing system finding the 'user-bible' for the old system is a key strategy). Getting the users to write their own documentation up-front simply harnesses what will happen anyway - but this is vastly easier if the users feel they have ownership of the system because they designed it themselves in the first place.
Of course this approach needs commitment and time from your users, but generally it's not that hard a sell. It's trite, but working as a facilitator so the users can develop there own system rather than as a third party to give them a system pretty much guarantees user acceptance.
As you are where you are you're too late to implement all of this, but if you can identify a couple of keen, key, users and get time from them to write their own documentation then that would be a good move. If you can't get even that then you need to identify an evangelist who you can train to be the 'departmental' expert and give them 110% of your energy to support them.
The bottom line is that user acceptance is based on perception, and this does not necessarily correlate with how usable an system actually is. You have to focus on the group psychology of this as much as the reality of the system, which tends to be tricky for developers as we're much more factually based than most people.
I'll be looking into something like this too in the next few months.
In your case, hopefully the UI has already undergone user acceptance testing. You say you work in a small company. Is it possible to get the least tech-savvy person there to try it out? In fact, get them to try it out without any guidance from yourself except for questions they ask. Document the questions and make sure your user-guide answers them.
The main thing for me would be logic and consistency. If the app's workflow relates logically to the task it has been designed to accomplish and the UI is consistent you should be OK.
Create a wiki page to describe the use of your system. Giving edit rights to the users of your system lets the users:
update the documentation to correct any errors in the initial release of documentation,
share any tips on usage they may have found.
share unusual uses for the system that you may not have thought of.
request features.
provide any workarounds they've found while waiting for the new functionality to be implemented.
Try a few users first, one or two in a small company. Mostly watch, help as little as possible. This tells you what needs to be fixed, and it creates an experienced user base - so you are not the "training bottleneck" anymore.
Turn core requirements/use cases/storycards into HowTo / walkthroughs for your documentation.
For a public training, prepare a 10..15 minute presentation (just that, not more!) that covers key concepts that the users absolutely must understand, than show your core walkthroughs. Reserve extra time for questions about how to solve various tasks.
Think as a user, not as a techie: - noone cares if it's a SQL database and you spent a lot of time to get the locking mechanisms right. They do care about "does it slow me down" and "does something bad happen when two people do that at the same time". Our job is to make complicated things look easy.
It may help to put the documentation on the intranet in an editable form - page "comments", or wiki maybe. And/or put up a "error wiki" for error messages and blips - where you or your users can quickly add recomendations, workarounds and reasons for anything that does not go as expected.
Rather then train all those people I have chosen a few superusers (at least one person from each department) and trained them to teach the rest of the employees. It is of course vital that those super users are
well respected in their departments
able to teach
like the application
The easy way to ensure that they like the app is to have them to define the way it should work :-). Since they should work with this app each and every day they are the prime stakeholders, no matter what management states
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We are starting to use Kanban and my boss just asked me a question, as one of two people with prior Kanban experience within the group, that I don't really know how to answer.
My previous experience and training with Kanban had developers pulling stories in from the backlog by priority, in our case that was the topmost card. However, my boss would like certain stories to go to the developers that have domain knowledge for particular areas. For example, let's say Joe has the most experience in working with Contracts and a contract story comes onto the board. He would like Joe to be the one to work on that particular story.
This, to me, feels a little "off" and could lead to some developers having significant extra work due to having worked in any given area of functionality. My previous experience with Kanban worked under the assumption that any developer should be able to pick up the next card and figure out what to do and that this practice would eventually eliminate any single functionality area experts and level out developer expertise over time. However, I can also see how using subject matter experts can help move a story through the process faster.
What is the most "Kanban" way of handling priority vs. expertise when it comes to pulling in the next story?
Every system I've ever worked with allows a little bit of developer-level of prioritization. If the next card has the absolute (top-down driven) priority, then you have to pick that card. Mostly, though, I tend to work in places where "these next 6 cards are up, pick the one you like". This gives the developer a little bit of room for type of work he or she prefers. Plus, it gives the developers a greater sense of ownership since they did get to pick (to some extent) the work they were doing.
Regarding your example, it's a little off base. In an ideal world any developer should be able to pick up any card. In reality, this isn't always true. If I give this project to Jim, it might take 2 days. If I give it to not-Jim, it make take all week. This is a sign! What information sharing is missing? How do you get the other developers to understand the Contracts component as well as Jim?
If the priority is a little bit gray, this stuff tends to work itself out. All the other developers know that Jim can handle the Contracts stuff. However, if Jim has no capacity, then someone else must take up the challenge. Kanban is supposed to alert you to blocked stories.
Kanban is great for visualizing work flow, limiting WIP, and exposing bottle necks.
Henrik Kniberg has a great book, 'Lean from the Trenches'. He talks through many techniques he has used in real world examples. He described one approach to having avatars (that represent developers) that can be placed over task to show who is working on what.
One idea for your situation, would be to use this avatar approach to pre-assigning who should work on a task in the buffer leading into development.
If those pre-assigned tasks are not causing bottlenecks and flow is natural, everything is good. If they are causing bottlenecks early in your flow, you have a problem, but now you have an easy way to visualize and see that it is the pre-assigning that is causing your bottle neck!
A Kanban system shall display the real process. If the manager is assigning stories to developer then the system should reflect that. This can be done in several ways, you could have a specific item for developer X or you can write the developers name on the card. Another option is to have one swim-lane for each developer.
However, all of this is probably not good from a "global" perspective. You should share your Kanban data with your boss. What are your lead-times, what is your throughput etc? Then you should invite the boss to the process improvment meeting. How are we going to improve our figures? Hopefully he sees that Joe probably will be a bottleneck if he is assigning tasks directly to him. Teach him Littles Law, teach him about bottlenecks and Lean in general.
Don't forget to make your policies explicit, that is, it should be written on the wall how your prioritzation policy looks like. Good luck!
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My company is trying to pass a policy forbidding distribution of any application (even free) in any appstore for all developers.
Their reasoning is that "outside work activities create a conflict of interest". They don't want that "you use your spare time to work on your app, and once it takes off you quit your job" (quoting the Head of Development).
A few developers (myself included) have already said it was an abusive, pointless and most of all counter-productive policy (developers will actually be demotivated to work here under such control and to be denied of the freedom to distribute their project).
Personally, I think it is actually in the interest of the company to promote side projects (even commercial activities, if there is no conflict).
I'm also curious, is that common practice?
Needless to say, this is horribly, horribly stupid on so many levels... It may be worth trying to find out whether it's even legal in your jurisdiction.
Anyway and apart from that, if you can, find colleagues who feel the same, and take a stand against it. Try to explain to the management that this is a stupid decision for the company as well. Don't sign anything: A policy like that would probably have to be amended to your work contract to be binding. Chances are, the risk of losing good employees over this outweighs the security they think they get from it.
If there's really nothing that can be done, and you are very unhappy with this (I would be), consider looking for a new job.
As an afterthought, if the practice of limiting your employees' rights to this extent is clearly illegal in your jurisdiction, it could be that simply making them aware of this might stop this without any further trouble.
All companies for which I have worked allowed outside work provided:
no company resources were used (this includes time)
the product of that effort did not directly conflict with the company's interest
the product was not based off of work or specific knowledge gained while working for the company
Typically, companies have a clause in your employment agreement that states that you will inform them when you begin work on outside projects and inform them of the nature so they can approve/deny. In such cases, you want to get that approval in writing.
In your case, this is a pretty difficult situation if this was part of your employment agreement. Even if it isn't, they can fire you for it if your employment is at-will and they find out. Unfortunately, in your situation, you seem to have one of four options:
Convince management that they are being unreasonable.
Fly under the radar and hope you don't get caught.
Find a new job.
Quit and just work on the apps full-time.
If your job is to put out apps in an appstore, though, there's really no way to argue that your outside development of apps for the same appstore isn't a conflict of interest in some respect. If I had to guess, I'd say that either this is the case or you're working for a development manager that doesn't understand the mindset of developers and how they like to tinker and learn outside of work.
While this example sounds a little draconian, it is not uncommon for companies to have some kind of policy regarding outside work. However, this is typically to protect the company from your mistakes rather than to protect them from your departure. If they're that concerned about employees leaving, they should go out of their way to make it the sort of place you would want to stay.
EDIT: I just found this today on a completely unrelated blog, but it totally rings true to this discussion. It's about 11 minutes long, but very entertaining and makes you think too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=player_embedded The TL;DR (TL;DW?): Once you get outside the realm of purely physical tasks, organizations that assume you are motivated by money, hands-on direction, etc. will not accomplish their goals nearly as easily as those that assume you are motivated by desires for autonomy (self-direction, self-management), mastery (getting better at doing something) and contribution to something bigger than yourself.
I believe there was a similar pointless rule when I was under the corporate yoke. I think these rules are pointless, backward and wrong. Instead of keeping their developers management pushes them to look for new managment, well, at least the passionate and talented ones.
Unless your employment contract says otherwise, what you develop in your own time belongs to you.
If they are in the business of writing apps for the appstore, then they might have a non-compete argument against you.
If they allow other types of development projects, it is difficult to see the argument as valid.
Depends on the app and the company.
If you're working for an Android app developer, I'd see why they might not like it. 8)
If it competes directly with what your company produces I can see why they'd prohibit it.
I would consult a lawyer to see just how binding such an agreement would be if you were forced to sign it.
If it's really that odious, your only recourse is to find another employer.
Check your local labor laws. In California, this kind of thing is blatantly illegal.
The policy enumerated by Shaun is reasonable, and something very similar has been in place at most of my previous employers. The one place that tried something like this was quickly pointed at the statute by knowledgable developers, and the "policy" quietly went away.
The answer is in your contract of employment.
But if your job is as a computer programmer, you're almost guaranteed to have something in your employment contract stating that any software you write either in work or outside of work is owned by the company.
If you get written permission from HR and your manager, then if you were to make millions from you out of hours projects, then it would be more difficult for your employer to just take ALL those millions off of you.
I was recently asked by a Team Leader (not mine) if I would be willing to undertake a programming project. The members of his team are currently pre-occupied with other more important projects. I graduated college two years ago, and up until now programming has only been a hobby of mine. Recently I decided that I would like to pursue a career in software development. I accepted his offer so that I can gain some real-world experience and start building a portfolio.
In about an hour I'm scheduled to meet with the Team Leader to discuss the details of what he needs. From a short e-mail exchange with him, I know that the base project is to update an existing ASP.NET form—but I also think there's more to it than that.
Considering that I'd like to eventually put this project in a portfolio, what kinds of notes should I take at the meeting?
Take whatever notes you can that will best help you understand the use cases and the user requirements. Everything else is just technical details that can be figured out later.
I graduated college two years ago, and up until now programming has only been a hobby of mine.
In that case, my suggestion is:
revel in your ignorance.
Make the most of the fact that you know nothing and you're being given an opportunity to learn - abuse the chance to ask as many questions as possible of the Team Leader in question regarding what type of questions you should be asking and how you should be documenting what you learn.
You only get one chance to be ignorant, once you've wasted it you have to spend the rest of your life as a know-it-all; take the chance to enjoy the learning process.
Get a list of people who are the intended users. Talking with them will allow you to flesh out the overview that the Team Leader gives you. It is likely that the intended users have a very different understanding of what the app is supposed to do than the TL does. So you'll likely be going back and forth for a while. It's well worth the effort though because you'll do much less re-coding.
Try to understand that the Team Leader him/herself might not even have all the requirements available right at the beginning. Be prepared to be hunting down people and writing all these requirements down as they come in.
Things will change during development, new problems and new requirements will always be popping up.
Three things:
What: What is the software supposed to do, the more detailed you can manage to get the other person to be, the better.
How: Are there any known constraints? For example, if it has to ask for a telephone number, does it have to validate nationally/internationally/not at all. Does it have to run on Windows 2008/2003/all
Who: Two sides:
Who will answer any questions you'll have, will you setup weekly progress meetings?
Who will use the software, can you get their early input on your prototypes, can you ask them for opinion/requirements?
One thing I've found very helpful is carrying a hard-copy of any existing requirements (use cases, wireframes, whatever) or any other potentially useful information in a 3 ring binder to any project meetings I attend. If the meeting strays off topic or questions about previous discussions or documents come up it is very nice to have the information at your fingertips in a format you can make notes on, pass around the table etc.
As a bonus, I find most people don't carry any documents to meetings, so you'll also end up looking like you are a real go-getter who is always prepared, which is never a bad thing.
Main downside to this is that you'll waste paper if the documents are updated and changed frequently.
Find out the where as well, where are the files you need stored on the network, where is the source control repository for the project, etc.
Since this is your first taste of doing a real world project, please please please make sure you use source control even if you are the only dev on the project. Your co-workers will thank you and you will thank you the first time you need to back out a change that didn't work.
As I'm starting to develop for the web, I'm noticing that having a document between the client and myself that clearly lays out what they want would be very helpful for both parties. After reading some of Joel's advice, doing anything without a spec is a headache, unless of course your billing hourly ;)
In those that have had experience,
what is a good way to extract all
the information possible from the
client about what they want their
website to do and how it looks? Good
ways to avoid feature creep?
What web specific requirements
should I be aware of? (graphic
design perhaps)
What do you use to write your specs in?
Any thing else one should know?
Thanks!
Ps: to "StackOverflow Purists" , if my question sucks, i'm open to feed back on how to improve it rather than votes down and "your question sucks" comments
Depends on the goal of the web-site. If it is a site to market a new product being released by the client, it is easier to narrow down the spec, if it's a general site, then it's a lot of back and forth.
Outline the following:
What is the goal of the site / re-design.
What is the expected raise in customer base?
What is the customer retainment goal?
What is the target demographic?
Outline from the start all the interactive elements - flash / movies / games.
Outline the IA, sit down with the client and outline all the sections they want. Think up of how to organize it and bring it back to them.
Get all changes in writing.
Do all spec preparation before starting development to avoid last minute changes.
Some general pointers
Be polite, but don't be too easy-going. If the client is asking for something impossible, let them know that in a polite way. Don't say YOU can't do it, say it is not possible to accomplish that in the allotted time and budget.
Avoid making comparisons between your ideas and big name company websites. Don't say your search function will be like Google, because you set a certain kind of standard for your program that the user is used to.
Follow standards in whatever area of work you are. This will make sure that the code is not only easy to maintain later but also avoid the chances of bugs.
Stress accessibility to yourself and the client, it is a big a thing.
More stuff:
Do not be afraid to voice your opinion. Of course, the client has the money and the decision at hand whether to work with you - so be polite. But don't be a push-over, you have been in the industry and you know how it works, so let them know what will work and what won't.
If the client stumbles on your technical explanations, don't assume they are stupid, they are just in another industry.
Steer the client away from cliches and buzz words. Avoid throwing words like 'ajax' and 'web 2.0' around, unless you have the exact functionality in mind.
Make sure to plan everything before you start work as I have said above. If the site is interactive, you have to make sure everything meshes together. When the site is thought up piece by piece, trust me it is noticeable.
One piece of advice that I've seen in many software design situations (not just web site design) relates to user expectations. Some people manage them well by giving the user something to see, while making sure that the user doesn't believe that the thing they're seeing can actually work.
Paper prototyping can help a lot for this type of situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_prototyping
I'm with the paper prototyping, but use iplotz.com for it, which is working out fine so far from us.
It makes you think about how the application should work in more detail, and thus makes it less likely to miss out on certain things you need to build, and it makes it much easier to explain to the client what you are thinking of.
You can also ask the client to use iplotz to explain the demands to you, or cooperate in it.
I also found looking for client questionnaires on google a good idea to help generate some more ideas:
Google: web client questionnaire,
There are dozens of pdfs and other forms to learn from
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I'm currently trying to build a personal website to create a presence on the web for myself. My plan is to include content such as my resume, any projects that I have done on my own and links to open source projects that I have contributed to, and so on. However, I'm not sure which approach would be better from a perspective of "advertising" myself, since that what this site does, especially since I am a software developer.
Should I use an out-of-the-box system and extend it as needed, with available modules and custom modules where needed or should I custom build a site and all of its features as I need them? Does a custom site look better in the eyes of a potential employer who might visit my site?
I've toyed with this idea in the past but I don't think it's really a good idea for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are a number of places that can take care of most of this without you needing to do the work or maintenance. Just signing up for a linkedIn account for example will allow you to get most of your needs catered for in this regard. You can create your resume there and bio information etc and make it publicly viewable. The other issue with your "own site" is that if you don't update it often, the information gets stale, and worse yet, people have no reason to go back because "nothing has changed" - and that's not much of an advert for you is it?
Now that I've said all that, I'll make another recommendation. Why not start a blog instead?! If you've got decent experience, why not share that. I'd be willing to bet that this will be the best advert for your skills because:
It's always updated (if you post often)
It's not like you're looking for work doing it - but your (future) employer, or their developers will check it out anyway to get a better insight into your character.
Putting something on your resume doesn't mean you can do it. I'm not saying that you'd lie about your skills :-), but there's no argument about your ability when you're writing articles about the stuff, getting comments and feedback, and better yet, learning EVEN MORE about your passions.
Best of all - you can run your blog from your chosen domain and also point to your resume that is stored in linkedIn. Just an idea...
That's my two pennys worth on that - hope it helps you come to a decision!
If you are a web-specific developer I would go with a custom site, but if you focus more on desktop applications or backend technologies, I think an out of the box system would be fine.
A nice looking, default, off the shelf, complete website could be more impressive than a poorly done, broken, tacked together, incomplete website. Perhaps start with something "off the shelf" but nice looking, keep it simple, professional, and then eventually add more custom functionality, style and content. Potential employers may like to see that you are capable of reusing tried and trued solutions instead of trying to create everything from scratch without a good reason. Or you could spend time combining great components into something even better than the sum of the parts, as Jeff Atwood talks about extensively in the Stack Overflow podcasts. Stack Overflow is a good example of writing lots of custom code, but combining that with some of the best Web 2.0 technologies/widgets/etc. into something coherent, instead of trying to prove that they could implement x/y/z from scratch.
(On the other hand, it's really fun to build your own login system, blog, or photo gallery. If you really enjoy it and you want to learn a lot or create something new and different, then go for it!)
Here's what I did (or am currently doing). First, use an out of the box solution to begin with. In my case, I used BlogEngine.NET, which was open source and easy to set up. This allows me to put content on my site as fast as possible. Now, I can continue to use BlogEngine.NET, and skin my site to give it more personality or I can start rolling out my own solution. However, I haven't found a requirement yet that would give me a reason to waste time building my own solution. Odds are you probably won't either.
I don't think it matters if your site is blatantly using a framework or other "generic" solution. The real question is "is it done well, with taste?" If you are using an out of the box solution, you should take the time and pay attention to details when customizing it as if you were creating it from scratch.
Alternatively, if you're looking for a great learning experience and something to spend a lot of your free time on -- write it yourself. But know that you are re-inventing the wheel, and embrace it.
edit
A recent post from 37Signals, Gearheads don't get it, really sums up a good point about not focusing on the technical details, but "content and community".
Reinventing the wheel is not such a great idea when you are building a personal site. Building your own CMS is fun, and to some degree is something to brag about, but not so much features you won't have the time to build and all the security holes that you won't have the time to fix.
It's much better to pick a good, well-established engine, build a custom theme, and contribute a module or two to it: you'll be writing code that you can show off as a code sample and at the same time creating something useful.
Knowing your way around an open source CMS is a good skill in just about any job: when your boss says - hey, we need a three pager site for client/product/person X in 10 hours, you can say - no problem.
For a simpler portfolio site, Wordpress might meet your needs.
You can set up 'static' Wordpress pages for contact information, various portfolios, a resume, etc. This would also give you a blog if you want to do this.
Wordpress does give you the flexibility to "hide" the blogging part of it and use it basically as a simpler CMS. For example, your root URL of example.com could point to a WP static page, while example.com/blog would be the actual blog pages.
If you self-host Wordpress on your own domain (which I really would recommend instead of going through wordpress.com), it should be trivial to set up a few subdomains for extra content. For example, downloads.example.com could host the actual downloads for projects you've developed linked from the Wordpress portfolio pages. Similarly, if you're doing a lot of web work, a subdomain like lab.example.com or samples.example.com could then host various static (or dynamic) pages where you show off sandboxed pages that are not under the control of Wordpress.
Keep in mind though that you'll want to make your page look good. A sloppy looking site can scare away potential clients, even if you are not looking to do any web work for them.
Putting your resume up online somewhere helps, I get a lot of recruitment emails from people who happened on my resume via googling. However I agree with ColinYounger in that you'll probably get more bang for your buck from LinkedIn.
My advice is this - if you want to take the time out to LEARN a CMS or something, to better yourself, then why not make your first project in one be your homepage?
Maybe enlighten us as to the "features" you want to have on a personal homepage? Outside of a link to an HTML resume and perhaps some links to things you like, not sure exactly what the features of a homepage would be...
It really depends on:
a) what services you provide
b) what your skill level is when it comes to web design/development
If you are primarily a web applications developer then running an off the shelf product or using blatantly using DreamWeaver to develop it may not be so smart -- or maybe your clients aren't adept enough to notice?
Likewise if you're primarily a web designer then it is probably a good idea to design your own website.
Just as a side question and following up on my 'ego trip' comment: why would you take anything on the web to be 'true'? IME printed submissions, while not necessarily accurate, tend to be slightly less, erm... exaggerated than web submissions.
Do those responding\viewing ever hire? I wouldn't google for a candidate. I might ego surf for a respondent, but would ignore CVs.
Rounding back to the OP, I would suggest that you need to SHOW what you're good at - participate in Open Source projects and POST on their forums, link to projects you can post details of and generally try to show what a Good Employee you could be. Just telling me that you're good at [insert latest trend here] means diddly.
I have come to see that the best way to advertise yourself is to put quality content out there. If you write about the technology that you have experience in, maybe create a few tutorials, and if you do all that often enough, that shows some authority in your chosen field of work.
This alone is one of the best advertisements. However, you also want to show passion. And online, that can be shown through how meticulously your site is done (it doesn't have to be a super great UI or something), but it should be neat, clean, and professional. It doesn't matter if its out of the box, or custom designed.
Either way, you will have to work hard to make it look good.