benrobb

About Me

My name is Ben Robison. I work for Omniture Consulting Services as a Business Consultant.  My job is to help my clients align their site(s) & analytics strategy with their business goals and to measure progress towards those goals in a consistent, accurate, and precise way.  I also get to analyze data to provide opportunities for site optimization.

I really love my job.  Telling people how they can improve their site to make hundreds of thousands more dollars or increase conversion rates by x% is really neat.  I’m really glad I didn’t go into accounting =)

I’ve also been lucky enough to gain exposure to clients that are pushing the boundaries of what web analytics can do, taking it to places where no one has gone before. Uncharted territory is a fun place as long as you don’t expect everything to go perfectly.

I’m a technologist at heart, scouring the internet on my MacBook Pro looking for the latest technology trends, gadgets, and stories. I’m mildly paranoid about technology security issues. Web development loses it’s allure when someone is telling you what to do, but I love to do it as a hobby. Ruby on Rails is my platform of choice, though I’ve been neglecting it of late.

I’m a Mac convert of three years. When Apple made the Intel switch, I made the Mac switch. I don’t consider myself to be a fan boy however. I do have a MacBook Pro and a Mac Mini, but I also have a XP machine (I gave Vista a try and just didn’t see the point), an XP/Ubuntu dual boot laptop, and an Ubuntu server running on a real old school Dell GX150 before they made the switch to black cases. Work is a Windows only environment for me, though the IT guys and the design guys are always playing with Linux and Macs.

Alison and I have been married for 4 years now, Abby is a year and nine months old, Bryson is just now reaching the two month mark.  We’re also just getting into our first house.

About My Blog
My blog got its start as a learning journal of sorts. I had a professor at BYU that required us to blog for class. This was a substitute for regular homework assignments and I was a huge fan of this approach. It started with little research projects that we would do on our own time and write about what we learned. This worked really well for me.

From there it expanded into writing about the other things that I love. Sometimes I scour the dark corners of the Internet to find out how to do certain things and blog about them to save others the effort. Sometimes I write about things just to rant a little. Google Analytics tells me that my the How To posts bring in the most traffic and nobody really cares about anything else I write.

Life is good. I hope you’re enjoying yours. Now stop surfing the net and get back to work.