10 harsh truths about corporate websites

Posted in Web strategy on February 11, 2009 by Paul Boag

We all make mistakes running our websites. However the nature of those mistakes varies. As your site and organisation grow, the mistakes begin to change. This post addresses common mistakes in larger organisations.

Most of the clients I work with at Headscape are larger organisations – Universities, large charities, public sector institutions and large companies.

Over the last 7 years I have noticed certain reassuring misconceptions within these organisations. The idea of this post is to dispel these illusions and encourage people to face the harsh reality.

The problem is that if you are reading this post you are probably already aware of these things. However, hopefully this article will be a useful tool for convincing others within your organisation.

Anyway, here are my 10 harsh truths about larger websites.

1. You need a separate web division

In most organisations I work with the website is managed by either the marketing or IT department. However, this inevitably leads to a turf war and the site becoming the victim of internal politics.

In reality running a web strategy is not particularly suited to either group. IT maybe excellent at rolling out complex systems but they are not suited to developing a friendly users experience or establishing an online brand.

Marketing on the other hand is little better. As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it in his article ‘Let there be web divisions‘:

The web is a conversation. Marketing, by contrast, is a monologue… And then there’s all that messy business with semantic markup, CSS, unobtrusive scripting, card-sorting exercises, HTML run-throughs, involving users in accessibility, and the rest of the skills and experience that don’t fall under Marketing’s purview.

Instead the website should be managed by a single unified team. Again Zeldman sums it up when he writes:

Put them in a division that recognizes that your site is not a bastard of your brochures, nor a natural outgrowth of your group calendar. Let there be web divisions.

2. Managing your website is a full time job

Not only is the website often split between marketing and IT, it is also normally under resourced. Instead of having a dedicated web team, those responsible for the website are often expected to run it alongside their ‘day job’.

Where a web team is in place they are often over stretched. The vast majority of their time is spent on day to day maintenance rather than longer term strategic thinking.

This situation is further exaggerated because the people hired to ‘maintain’ the website are junior members of staff. They do not have the experience or authority to push the website forward.

It is time for organisations to seriously investing in their websites by hiring full time senior web managers to move their web strategies forward.

3. Periodic redesign is not enough

Because corporate websites are under resourced they are often neglected for long periods of time. They slowly become out of date both in terms of content, design and technology.

Eventually the site becomes such an embarrassment that management step in and demand it is sorted. This inevitably leads to a complete redesign at considerable expense.

As I point out in the website owners manual this a flawed approach. It is a waste of money because when the old site is replaced the investment put into it is lost. It is also tough on cash flow with a large expenditure happening every few years.

A better way is continual investment in your site, so allowing it to evolve over time. Not only is this less wasteful it is also better for the users as is pointed out in Cameron Moll’s post ‘Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign‘.

4. Your site cannot appeal to everyone

One of the first questions I ask our clients is ‘who is your target audience?’ I am regularly shocked at the length of the reply. Too often it includes a long and detailed list of diverse people.

Inevitably my next question is which of those many demographic groups are most important. Depressingly the answer is that they are all equally important.

The harsh truth is that if you build a site for everybody it will appeal to nobody. It is important to be extremely focused in your audience and cater your design and content around them.

Does this mean you have to ignore your other users? Not at all. Your site should be accessible by all and should not offend or exclude anybody. However, it does need to have a clearly defined audience that the site is primarily aimed at.

5. Your site is not all about you

Where some website managers want their websites to appeal to everybody, others want it to appeal to themselves and their colleagues.

A surprising number of organisations choose to ignore their users entirely and build their websites entirely around an organisational perspective. This typically manifests itself in inappropriate design that caters to the managing directors personal preferences and content full of internal terminology and jargon.

A website should not be about pandering to the preferences of staff but about meeting the needs of users. Too many designs are rejected because the boss doesn’t like green. Equally too much website copy uses acronyms and terms that are only used internally within an organisation.

6. Design by committee brings death

The ultimate expression of a larger organisations approach to website management is the committee. A committee is formed to tackle the website because internal politics demand everybody has their say and all considerations are taken into account.

To say that all committees are a bad idea is naive and to suggest that a large corporate website could be developed without consultation is fanciful. However when it comes to design, committees are often the kiss of death.

Design is subjective. The way we respond to a design can be influenced by culture, gender, age, childhood experience or even physical conditions (such as colour blindness). What one person considers great design another could hate. This is why it is so important that design decisions are informed by user testing rather than personal experience. Unfortunately this approach is rarely followed when a committee is involved in design decisions.

Instead, design by committee becomes about compromise. Because different committee members have different opinions about the design, they looks for ways to find common ground. One person hates the blue colour palette while another loves it. This leads to design on the fly when the committee instructs the designer to ‘try a different blue’ in the hopes of finding a middle ground. Unfortunately this can only leads to bland design which neither appeals to, or excites, anybody.

7. You’re not getting value from your web team

Whether they have an in-house web team or use an external agency many organisations fail to get the most from their web designers.

Web designers are much more than pixel pushers. They have a wealth of knowledge about the web and how users interact with it. They also understand design techniques including grid systems, white space, colour theory and much more.

It is therefore wasteful to micro manage them by asking for ‘the logo to be made bigger’ or to ‘move that 3 pixels to the left’. By doing so you are reducing their role to that of software operator and wasting the wealth of experience they have.

If you want to get the maximum return from your web team present them with problems not solutions. For example, if you have a site aimed at teenage girls and the designer goes for corporate blue, suggest that the audience might not respond well to the colour. Do not tell them to change it to pink. That way the designer has the freedom to find a solution which might be even better than your choice of pink. You allow them to solve the problem you have presented.

8. A CMS is not a silver bullet

Many of the clients I work with have amazingly unrealistic expectations about content management systems. Those without one think it will solve all of their content woes, while those who do have one moan about it because it hasn’t!

It is certainly true that a content management system can bring a lot of benefits. They…

reduce the technical barriers of adding content,
all more people to edit and add content,
facilitate faster updates,
allow greater control.

However, many content management systems are less flexible than their owners wish. They fail to meet the changing demands of the websites they manage.

Website managers also complain that their CMS is hard to use. However, in many cases this is because those using them have not been given adequate training or are not using it regularly enough.

Finally, a content management system may allow for the easy updating of content, but that does not ensure it will be updated or even that the quality of copy will be maintained. Many content managed websites still have out of date content or are filled with poor quality copy. This is because the internal processes have not been put in place to support the content contributors.

If you are looking to a content management system to solve your site maintenance issues you will be disappointed.

9. You have too much content

Part of the problem with content maintenance on larger corporate websites is that there is too much content in the first place. Most of these sites have ‘evolved’ over years with more and more content being added. At no stage has anybody ever reviewed that content and asked what can be taken away.

Many website managers fill their sites with copy nobody will read. This happens because of:

A fear of missing something – By putting everything online they believe users will be able to find whatever they want. Unfortunately, with so much information being made available, it is hard to find anything.
A fear users will not understand – Whether it is a lack of confidence in their site or in their audience, many website managers feel the need to provide endless instructions to users. Unfortunately, users never read this copy.
A desperate desire to convince - Many website managers are desperate to sell their product or communicate their message. Text becomes bloated with sales copy which actually conveys little valuable information.

Steve Krug in his book ‘Don’t make me think’ encourages website managers to ‘Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left’. This will reduce the noise level of each page and make useful content more prominent.

10. You are wasting money on social networking

I have been encouraged that increasingly website managers are recognising that a web strategy is about more than running a website. They are using tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to increase their reach and engage with new audiences.

However, although they are using these tools, too often they are doing so ineffectively. Corporate twitter accounts and posting sales demonstrations to YouTube miss the essence of social networking.

Social networking is about people engaging with people. Individuals do not want to build relationships with brands or corporations. They want to talk with other people. Too many organisations are throwing millions into facebook apps and viral videos when could be spending that money on engaging with people in a transparent and open away.

Instead of having a corporate twitter account or indeed even a corporate blog, encourage your employees to start tweeting and blogging themselves. Provide guildelines on acceptable behaviour and the tools they need to start engaging directly with the community that surrounds your products and services. This not only demonstrates a commitment to your community but also a human side to your business.

Conclusions

Large organisations do a lot right in the running of their websites. However, they also face some unique challenges that can lead to painful mistakes. Resolving these problems will involve accepting mistakes have been made, overcoming internal politics, and changing the way you control your brand. However, doing so will give you a significant competitive advantage and allow your web strategy to become more effective over the long term.

For more information on how you can make your site more effective read the Website Owners Manual or discuss your site with Paul personally.

There is a followup to this post entitled ‘10 ways to battle site bureaucracy.’ Check it out!

For those of you hard of humour

Posted in News on February 6, 2009 by Paul Boag

My last post ‘10 things a web designer would never tell you‘ has received more views than any other article. But what caused me to write it?

If you haven’t worked it out by now ’10 things a web designer would never tell you’ was a joke. Basically it takes all of the points I cover in chapter 4 of my book, The Website Owners Manual and flips them on their head.

The idea came about because I was asked to speak about that chapter at BathCamp. Instead of doing a relatively boring talk telling people stuff I hoped they already knew, I decided to spice it up a bit.

For those interested here is a video Mike Ellis recorded of my talk, as well as my slides.

10 things a web designer would never tell you

Posted in Design on February 5, 2009 by Paul Boag

These arty-farty web designers are always telling you how your site should look. Don’t listen to them! Don’t they know the customer is always right? Here are 10 things a ‘good web designer’ would never tell you about choosing the perfect design.

Working with web designers is a nightmare. You will never meet a more opinionated bunch of snobs. They are always going on about ‘white space’, ‘composition’ and how they went to art college (like that counts as a proper education!). When it comes to choosing the design of your site, they are the last people you should listen to.

What follows are 10 things you need to know about managing a web design project, that no web designer will ever tell you!

1. Always request speculative design up front

Before you pick which web designer to work with make sure they submit some designs for your site upfront. Whatever you do, don’t pay for this work. If they really want to work with you they will swallow the cost.

Some of them might start bleating about not doing ‘speculative design’ and that only designers desperate for work would do design for free. Personally I ignore this BS. If they are ‘so successful’ that they can’t spare the time to do unpaid work for me, then I don’t want to work with them.

What is great about speculative work is it is not constrained by ‘understanding the business’ or ‘user feedback’. Its all about creativity. Surely a good web designer can come up with great work out of thin air, even if they don’t know who the target audience is and have never spoken to the client. I want something that makes me go wow. Who cares if it ‘fulfils my business objectives.’ The more bells and whistles the better!

2. Don’t get hung up on end users

Web designers are always obsessing about the end users. They worry that users won’t like this or that they won’t understand that. Its pathetic.

People like to be told what to do and they will ultimately follow your lead. I once had a web designer complain because I wanted to collect users phone numbers on a sign up form for our newsletter. Apparently ‘users’ don’t like being asked for unnecessary personal information. Can you believe it! How the hell am I going to cold call these people if I don’t have their phone numbers. Sometimes you wonder how these idiots survive in business.

Instead of focus on user needs, focus on what you can squeeze out them. Times are tough these days and so you need to maximise your returns on every one of these sheep. You have to be tough in business.

3. Rely on your gut instinct, not testing

Talking of users – what is this obsession with user testing? Just sounds like a way for web designers to charge more money if you ask me.

After all you have probably been working in your job for years. You know all there is to know about your audience, right? Even if you did run user test sessions, stakeholder interviews or whatever other made up technique is the latest fashion, its not going to tell you stuff you do not already know.

Admittedly, these sessions occasionally turn up stuff you might not expect, but can you really trust the results? Surely your years of experience count for more than a few hours of testing.

Of course, the other problem is that user testing is massively expensive. I heard from a friend that it involves usability labs, videos, two way mirrors and ‘facilitators’ (whatever those are). That all sounds pricey to me!

Some web designers will tell you that they do it by going into user’s homes and talking with them in their own environment. They justify this by saying you learn more because the user is relaxed and you can see where they live. Personally, it doesn’t sound very professional and if it isn’t expensive, how could it possibly give good results?

4. Form a committee to provide feedback

Admittedly I maybe sounding a little arrogant, but I really am not. I think it is important to get the opinions of other people. I just think web designers are not the people you should be asking. They live in a techy bubble and do not understand what it is like to be an ordinary user like us.

I suggest forming a committee to approve any designs produced. After all web designers keep telling us that design is subjective. That means you shouldn’t rely on the opinion of just one person (especially if that person is a designer). What you need is a committee to thrash out what the site should look like.

Ideally you would call a meeting with the designer in the room and get them to produce something there and then under the direction of the committee. However, most designers tend to get ‘emotional’ when you suggest that. So instead I recommend giving them the freedom to produce something themselves and then discuss it as a group.

Now inevitably this will lead to disagreement. Some people will like the colour, others will hate it. This is natural. What you need to do is seek a compromise that will please everybody. If you can have the designer on hand to try out new ideas in the meeting this will really help. Before you know it you will have a design everybody can tolerate (although admittedly not everybody will like it).

5. Become obsessed with detail

“The devil is the detail they say. Nowhere is that more true than on a website. Unfortunately you cannot rely on a web designer to have that attention to detail. Its hardly their fault. They are ‘arty’ people after all and their brains just don’t work that way.

If you want your design to be ‘just so’ you will need to micro manage every aspect of the design process. Don’t be afraid to tell your designer exactly what you need them to do. Be as specific as possible. After all, they call themselves pixel pushers.

Also insist on consistency across all browsers. Web designers tend to be sloppy in this area. It might look great in Safari (apparently this is a browser – who knew!) but in Netscape 4 it looks awful. They will give you some rubbish about not all browsers being capable of rendering modern design. They will say that as long as it is usable on all browsers, that is what matters. The hell it is! You don’t put up with that kind of rubbish in print design, so why should you on the web?

6. Enforce corporate style guides to the letter

Your organisation has a corporate design guide for a reason and yet web designers think they can flaunt the rules. They will talk about the differences between print and the web. They will go on about colour on screen, web typography and dots per inch. However, the real reason they want to ignore your guidelines is because their egos will not allow them to work within limitations.

You must take a firm hand over this issue and stick to the letter of the law. Enforce pantone numbers and ensure they use corporate typefaces. They might mutter something about limited fonts on the web but this is just not true. I know for a fact that sites built in flash can use any font you want. With that in mind I always recommend that sites are built entirely with Adobe Flash.

Oh yes, and watch out for abuse of the logo. Most style guides say that the logo must have a certain number of millimetres around it to allow ample white space. I recommend taking a ruler and measuring the space around your monitor on screen. Better still, print out the design so you can be even more accurate.

7. Fit as much on the homepage as possible

Let’s take a moment to discuss the design of your homepage in particular.

Without a doubt the homepage is by far the most important page on your site. If I look at my own website statistics the majority of people who come to my site never get further than the homepage (I have no idea why this is the case!) This is a problem.

The solution is obvious when you also consider the importance of minimising the number of clicks a user has to make to reach content – Put as much content as possible on the homepage.

This also solves the problem of everybody within your organisation wanting homepage real estate. Instead of endlessly discussing whose content is most important, simply put it all on there.

Of course with so much content on the homepage people might complain their content is lost in the crowd. The best solution in such situations is to either make it bigger or animate it. I find flashing text particularly effective.

8. Ensure all content appears above the fold

Unfortunately you are limited in the amount of space available on the homepage. This is because all content has to sit above the fold.

The fold refers to the point where users have to start scrolling. As we know users do not scroll. In 1994 Jakob Nielsen found that only 10% of users would scroll when presented with a web page. 15 years on I see no reason why this would have changed.

Some designers will tell you that the fold is a myth. They will argue that it does not exist because different browsers, resolutions and toolbars all effect the vertical available space. All I know is that on my computer I have 470px of vertical space before I have to start scrolling. I am a fairly typical user and so you should ensure all content is within this area.

The only exception to this rule is if your boss has a different amount of vertical space. If he is going to be looking at the website I suggest designing for his browser. Alternatively simply print out the site for his approval.

9. You only need to test in Internet Explorer 6

Web designers like to claim they need to spend hours testing on every browser combination. However, in reality this is just another way to extract more money from you.

All you really need to do is build the site so it works on Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer is the most dominant browser having by far the largest market share. Although there are different versions of IE most companies run IE6. As corporate customers are the people with the real money you should concentrate your testing on their browser. Also surely if it works in IE6 it will work in IE7! You can trust Microsoft not to break the web.

If you want to be super cautious, add a message to your site telling users it is optimised for internet explorer. Users can then download that browser if they want to see your site.

10. SEO is more important than design

Getting the design of your website right is important. However it is no use if nobody sees it. Your number one priority has to be driving traffic to your site.

The best way to do this is through search engines. Fortunately there are a plethora of tricks and techniques to fool Google into ranking you highly. You can use hidden text, cloaking pages, redirects, doorway pages and keyword stuffing to force you up the ranking. Google kindly list these techniques in their Web Master Guidelines.

The problem with some of these techniques is that they undermine the design and content of your site. They can also affect the usability and accessibility. However, this is a sacrifice worth making in order to keep those new users rolling in.

Some web designers place a higher emphasis on repeat traffic. However, in my experience it is hard to get a user to return a second time. This is almost certainly because they have seen everything already. Why would they come back? Concentrate your efforts on creating a steady stream of new users.

Conclusions

If I could leave you with a single thought from this post it would be this – your web designer does not work with you, he works for you.

You need to take control of the design process. Its your site and you should get the design you want. The role of the designer is to implement your idea. Do not allow him to drag you down into endless discussions about ‘users needs’, ‘accessibility’ and ‘usability’. These are all distractions from the primary aim – to impress your boss and earn that next promotion.

This article was based on a presentation I gave at Bathcamp and is a sick twist version of content taken from my book ‘The Website Owners Manual‘

151. Budget

Posted in Classic shows on February 4, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul shares 5 tips for when your website budget gets slashed. We have a review of Dropbox and discuss ways to improve the typography on your site.

Download this show.

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Housekeeping

Two pieces of housekeeping this week.

WCAG2 Video

A couple of weeks ago I did an internal presentation to the guys at Headscape about WCAG2. The idea was to bring them up to speed on the new accessibility guidelines and also to put accessibility back at the centre of our processes.

At the last minute I made the decision to record the session and put the video online. Although the audio is awful (hence not using it in the show) it maybe useful if you have not read up on WCAG2 yet. There is also a transcript if the audio becomes too much.

You can watch my Introduction to WCAG2 here.

Win a copy of ‘A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web’

Mark Boulton has just released a book that covers the underlying principles of all good design. Whether it be online or in print, good design is governed by certain best practices. This book introduces the reader to these principles, including subjects such as…

How to start the design process
Research and ideas
An introduction to typography
The basics of colour theory
The rules of good layout

The book is unsurprisingly beautifully designed. However it is also well written and engaging. I can highly recommend it.

You could go and purchase a copy right now for only £12 (and I would encourage you to do so). Alternatively you could win one of three free copies by entering our twitter competition.

For your chance to win a copy of this inspiring book, twitter your top design tip using the hash tag #designTip. For example your tip might be…

#designTip – If you wish to draw attention to a design element surround it with whitespace.

The closing date for this competition is Friday 27th February, so get your tips in before then.

The winners will be chosen by Mark and we will direct message them shortly after the 27th. To ensure we can do so please subscribe to the Boagworld Twitter feed.

The winners will also be announced over twitter and on the boagworld podcast.

See the excellent tips that have already been submitted here

News and events

IE8 Cometh!

The big news this week is that IE8 has taken one step closer to being officially released by announcing their first release candidate.

According to the IE blog:

The IE8 product is effectively complete and done. Our next step, after listening to feedback from the final testing feedback from the community, is releasing the final product.

Although they do not provide a release date it is fair to say that it will not be long now.

Whenever I talk about IE8 people immediately ask if they can stop supporting IE6. My recent article on graded browser support should make my opinion on that clear.

However, the more important question is are you ready for IE8? Do you know what CSS properties it supports and have you tested your websites in it?

Microsoft provide a handy table of CSS selectors and properties that IE8 and indeed all other versions of IE support.

Once you have looked at that check out the IE8 readiness guide for developers. This has loads of information about IE8 support for CSS, Javascript and various proprietary features.

It also has a small piece of code you can fall back on if you are experiencing serious rendering issues on existing websites. By inserting this code into the head of your HTML document it forces IE8 to render in the same way as IE7. I am sure this will be a useful stop gap measure for website owners unwilling to pay for updates to their sites.

15 Tips for Freelancers Starting Their Own Business

Next up some great advice for web design freelancers. Think Vitamin have published a post entitled ‘15 Tips for Freelancers Starting Their Own Business‘.

In actual fact the advice applies to all freelancers, not just those starting out.

It is a fairly arbitrary list, but it has some good stuff in there. Just a few of what has been included are…

Move Out of Your Back Bedroom
Don’t be Afraid to Pass
Work on your Sales Technique
Learn About Personality Types
Maintain a Verbal/Email Relationship

If you are a freelancer looking for advice I can also highly recommend FreelanceSwitch.com, which is an entire site dedicated entirely to helping freelancers. Check it out.

Facts and Figures

This last week seems to have been a week of facts and figures.

The first figure that caught my eye was that Adobe AIR has been installed 100 million times. That is an impressive figure, even if it is being overstated as some believe.

Moving web applications to the desktop is an area I find particularly exciting. I am not sure it is always necessary. However, platforms like AIR make it scaringly easy, as we discovered when we did a proof of concept recently at Headscape.

The same announcement from Adobe also stated that Flash 10 has a 55% market penetration on Internet connected computers and they expect that number to rise to 80% by Q2 2009. This is an improvement on the adoption speeds of previous versions.

Other facts and figures to appear this week came from the "state of the web" survey carried out by Web Directions South. This is a survey of professional web designers and developers. Some interesting figures pulled out of the survey by Roger Johansson included:

The number of Mac and Windows users are almost equal â€“ both are used by 46.8 % of respondents
As many as 4.7 % use some version of Internet Explorer as their primary browser
Only 29.5 % test their sites in IE 8
Many more use XHTML than HTML
Over 10 % still use tables for layout
Almost 70 % still use presentational markup
Only 69 % create print stylesheets

Not sure these figures are particularly useful, but interesting none the less :)

Sprite Optimization

Finally today, I
would like to draw your attention to an interesting post by Dave Shea on ‘Sprite Optimisation‘.

Let me briefly explain what CSS sprites are in case you are not aware. Let’s say you have a button with three states – unvisited, visited and hover. Instead of having one image for each state of button you can use a single image containing all three states. You then use CSS to position the image in such a way that it only shows the current state.

In fact Dave Shea wrote an excellent article on ‘CSS sprites‘ back in 2004.

Dave’s new post demonstrates that this technique is now being taken to the extreme with sites like Amazon, Google and Apple cramming large numbers of sprites into a single image.

Whether this is entirely necessary for the types of sites most of us are involved in is debatable. The technique also has some drawbacks on devices such as the iPhone, where performance can be effected.

That said, it is a way of substantially reducing the number of calls to the server so causing pages to load faster.

If you are suffering from performance problems or have a project that requires lightning download then check out Dave’s post and also a CSS sprite implementation guide he refers to.

Feature: 5 options when website budgets get slashed

Your site is in desperate need of a redesign, content is out of date and the technology is archaic. Unfortunately times are tight and your budget has been cut. What do you do? Read More

Listeners feedback:

I am very conscious that I have not been encouraging listener contributions and that is slack of me. This is a part of the show I really want to grow. As I have said before, Boagworld is about the community, not just my personal opinion.

With that in mind you can contribute in three ways…

Email – I cannot always respond personally but I read everyone.
Phone – You can either Skype ‘boagworldshow’ or call 020 8133 5122 and leave a message.
Forum – I often take questions from the forum, so make sure you join that too and get involved.

Talking of the forum, both of this week’s listener contributions come from there.

Listener Review of DropBox

From time to time we do listener reviews on the show and there is a section of the forum dedicated to reviews.

This week I have selected a review from the forum by Dave Redfern. He reviews DropBox, which although not strictly a web design tool will be useful to all.

Dave writes:

I came across dropbox last month thanks to the good people over at the mac roundtable podcast. Because i work on several computers from windows and mac machines in the same house, windows machines at work and at uni i am paranoid about making sure my files follow me around.

The basic concept of getdropbox.com is you install the software on each computer you have, then any files you wish to keep synced between them all you drop in this folder. If it is a public machine you can still access your files from their website although it is a little more clunky. You don’t need to set it to upload changes at a certain time or activate it, the software will automatically sync the folders whenever anything is changed.

A nice feature is within the dropbox folder there is a public folder and anything put in here can be accessed by anyone via a website link. the get the link all you need to do is right click on the file and select ‘copy link address’ and then paste it where ever you need. it is great for sending things to friends or showing clients screenshots of mock ups.

Preferences are very limited to limiting the bandwidth used at anyone time and changing the foler (although when i tried this feature i kept crashing my finder!) but simple is good sometimes.

It is free to sign up and you get 2gb of webspace free. you can upgrade to 50gb for $10/month or $100 for the year which seems reasonable.

the software is available for mac, windows and linux so perfect for anyone.

I will give it 3.5/5 at the moment. there is still some work to do on the software but a great start and very promising.

Personally I think 3.5/5 is a bit harsh but I know what he means. I love dropbox and have just paid for the 50gb account, but the web interface could do with some improvement. Also a native iPhone application would be nice.

That said we use it loads at Headscape to share files privately. It is perfect for that and online backup (including versioning) and I would highly recommend it to everyone.

Font Embedding on the Web

There is an interesting thread on the forum about font embedding that I also wanted to mention. Started by Dven he writes:

It’s a pretty popular subject but wanted to raise this to hear what your thoughts are on it all.

Basically a designer in our office found this link: http://www.fontburner.com. Thought that it be a good idea to maybe use in the near future. Now personally, I’m against embedding non-standard web fonts in this way.

The designer’s reaction. "its pretty much the way the design on web is going – limitations in type have always been a problem – not anymore. Its not the best solution, but pretty soon there will be a better one."

Be good to hear your thoughts?

After checking out Font Burner I discovered that it was a quick and easy way of adding sIFR to your site. We have talked about sIFR before on the show. It is a technique that uses flash to replace HTML text with your desired font.

I was pretty impressed by FontBurner but as Laura said…

It’s not the most semantic way to embed different fonts, as it requires <div class="font-name">text</div> if you want to change anything but <h1>.

Later in the thread Dvan went on to say…

These types of solutions are always prone to not working somewhere along the line. Guess I am kind of a very semantic guy and prefer to do things the ‘standard’ way.

Personally I do not feel that strongly. I think techniques like these are sometimes necessary to overcome browser limitations. That said, I do share his concern about these things not always being very reliable.

I actually rarely use sIFR. My preference is to make better use of font-stacks. These can be very powerful if used well. It is basically another variation on progressive enhancement. If the user has the nice font they get it, but if they don’t they get a substitute.

The reason most designers resort to sIFR is because the client insists on a
particular font. I would prefer to educate the client than resort to sIFR. By educating them over this issue you are laying the ground work for conversations about graded browser support and various other progressive enhancement issues.

On the subject of web typography, let me leaving you with a smashing magazine post that has come out this week – 50 Useful Design Tools for Beautiful Web Typography.

Tips for a transformed twitter

Posted in Marketing on February 3, 2009 by Paul Boag

With everybody from Britney to Obama now on Twitter it is safe to say the social networking platform has gone mainstream. But what does this mean for the service and how can we as website owners use it?

Paul Carter from New York writes:

Paul, I notice that you have been lamenting a lot on twitter about it becoming a marketing tool. Is that really wrong? Shouldn’t we be embracing and using it?

I sent my first twitter in November of 2006, only 7 months after the services launch. For me it was a way to keep in touch with new friends I had made at the Refresh 06 conference. It was less intrusive than instant messaging and less formal than email. I quickly became hooked.

For the longest time it was the tool of geeks. My friends laughed at me as I sent tweets from the pub, my family stared blankly as I explained the service. However, that has all changed now.

Like Facebook before it Twitter is everywhere at the moment. It was even recently discussed by Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross on the BBC in front of 4 million viewers. It has become mainstream and increasingly it is being used as a marketing tool. There is no going back.

However, Paul is right. I am wrong to lament what Twitter once was and should embrace it as a tool I can use. Nevertheless like everybody, I need to be careful how I use it. I do not believe Twitter users will allow the tool to be reduced to a broadcast mechanism for pimping the latest blog post or special offer.

So how am I choosing to use Twitter?

I guess the first thing to say is that I am not a Twitter success story. Sure I have nearly 4000 people following me but that pale into insignificance when compared to others. That said, Twitter is turning into a third string of my online presence, alongside this blog and podcast.

With that in mind let me share with you a few tips that have helped me better utilise this interesting new tool.

1. Above all, keep it personal

Although twitterers like CNN breaking news have been very successful, generally I feel corporate twitter accounts are a mistake.

In my opinion twitter is about person to person communication and not a broadcast tool for faceless corporations. To use it in that way is to miss the potential of twitter.

Does that mean you cannot have a twitter account for your organisation? Not at all. For example if Vitaly Friedman created a twitter account you might not recognise the name. However, if he used the name SmashingMag you are more likely to follow because you know the Smashing Magazine website.

It is not the name that matters so much as the tone of posts. In my opinion your tweets should be more than an endless string of press releases and links. It should include personal content and a dialogue with followers.

This is important because it enables you to make a connection with your users. An open and honest relationship with users is very powerful. It builds trust, loyalty and engagement. It encourages repeat traffic and word of mouth recommendation.

2. Learn from others

I have learnt a lot about Twittering just by reading the tweets of those I admire. Merlin Mann for example injects a lot of humour into his posts and his followers really respond to that. Darren Rowse on the other hand strikes a good place between recommending content others have written with promoting his own posts.

As well as examining the style of others you can also examine statistics. Use a tool like TweetStats.com to examine how often others tweet and how often they reply to their followers. All of this helps to build up a picture of what makes a successful twitterer.

There are also a growing number of great sites which give advice on how to get the most out of twitter. One of my personal favourites is TwiTip that covers subjects such as “The Merit of Twitter Competitions” and “How To Get Unfollowed On Twitter“.

3. Get a good desktop client

Without a shadow of doubt the most powerful twitter client currently available is TweetDeck. This air application not only runs on Windows, Mac and Lynx but also provides a range of superb tools for managing your life on Twitter.

With TweetDeck you can create groups, filter tweets, monitor certain subjects as well as tweet, reply and retweet posts.

In fact it is so powerful that it can be somewhat intimidating at first. Don’t let that put you off. Check out this short tutorial into TweetDeck’s core features and you will be up and running in no time.

4. Use twitter on the road

If your twitter account is going to be personal as well as professional then you will almost certainly want to use it on the road. One option is to simply use Twitters mobile website. However if you are fortunate enough to have an iPhone then there is a wealth of Twitter clients available to you.

I think I have paid for and tried almost every twitter client on the Iphone, but the winner hands down is Tweetie.

I love Tweetie. It has a clean, easy to use interface, and yet is packed with powerful features including the ability to:

Handle multiple twitter accounts.
Navigate reply chains.
View twitter trends and perform custom searches.
Access complete user profiles.

In many ways it is even better than TweetDeck because it has much of TweetDeck’s power, but in a much cleaner interface. If only they did a desktop application!

5. Tracking the results

Although I have already mentioned TweetStats, that is just the tip of the statistical iceberg.

There are an ever growing number of tools you can use to track your activity on twitter. However, the ones that really interest me are those that track click throughs. What I really want to know is if I mention a link in twitter, how many people click through.

If the link is one on my own sites I could use Google Analytics using their URL tagging tool. However, this is somewhat fiddly and only applies if I am linking to my own site. What is more these URLs can get long, which is a problem when limited to 140 characters.

Fortunately there is a tool called TwitterBurner which solves these problems. It shortens the URL and tracks all click throughs even to sites you do not run yourself. Best of all it is now supported from directly within TweetDeck (although not Tweetie unfortunately).

6. Follow as well as be followed

Always remember that Twitter is a two way conversation. A big part of successful twittering is about replying to those who tweet you.

Twitter is also not just about who follows you. It is also about who you follow. One service that I find particularly useful is Mr Tweet.

Mr Tweet will provides two type of information.

First it suggests people you might want to consider following because they fall within your broad network (people who are followed by your friends).
Second it suggests those from your list of followers who you should follow back.

For each of these people it provides various stats including:

The number of followers they have
The chance of them replying to you
How often they update

This is a great way of extending your network of contacts and potentially increasing the chance of your tweets being retweeted. Its also a great way of meeting new people!

7. Integrate whenever possible

If you are intending to use Twitter for anything other than personal use it needs to be incorporated into the rest of your web strategy. That means it needs to linkup with your other online activity including your website and other social networks.

There are no shortage of tools that help you do this from the basic twitter widget to a tool for sending your tweets to facebook.

One tool that particularly caught my attention is called TwitterFeed. It posts content from an RSS feed to Twitter which is a useful way of updating your followers about new posts.

However, use any tool that automatically posts to Twitter with caution. It can easily become annoying if used too much. Also it lacks the friendliness of a personal post.

8. Don’t over think it

Of course the problem with all these tools, statistics and analysis is that it can suck the spontaneity and personality from your tweets.

Although some of those late night drunken tweets are best gone, you want to avoid your tweets becoming too sterile.

Let me explain what I mean. I am naturally a fairly good public speaker. However, once I was sent to a public speaking workshop. They taught me all the techniques you should use to be exceptional. However, instead of it improving my skills it made me so amazingly self conscious that I was paralysed. I was over analysing what I was doing.

The danger is we do the same with Twitter. Sure, Twitter can be used as a marketing tool but that doesn’t mean it cannot be fun too. Don’t let articles like this suck the joy out of twittering!

Win a copy of 'A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web'

Posted in Design on February 2, 2009 by Paul Boag

Everybody involved in the web design process needs an understanding of design fundamentals. That is why everybody should read “A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web”.

Maybe you are a website owner who has to sign off on a design comp. Maybe you are a developer who has to implement the design produced by somebody else. You might even be responsible for a sites design without having any formal design training. Whatever the case, you should probably read Mark Boulton’s new book.

This PDF book covers the underlying principles of all good design. Whether it be online or in print, good design is governed by certain best practices. This book introduces the reader to these principles, including subjects such as…

How to start the design process
Research and ideas
An introduction to typography
The basics of colour theory
The rules of good layout

The book is unsurprisingly beautifully designed. However it is also well written and engaging. I can highly recommend it.

Win a free copy

You could go and purchase a copy right now for only £12 (and I would encourage you to do so). Alternatively you could win one of three free copies by entering our twitter competition.

For your chance to win a copy of this inspiring book, twitter your top design tip using the hash tag #designTip. For example your tip might be…

#designTip – If you wish to draw attention to a design element surround it with whitespace.

The closing date for this competition is Friday 27th February, so get your tips in before then.

The winners will be chosen by Mark and we will direct message them shortly after the 27th. To ensure we can do so please subscribe to the Boagworld Twitter feed.

The winners will also be announced over twitter and on the boagworld podcast.

Current entries

Below you can view the current Design Tips that users have submitted.

My Favourite iPhone Applications

Posted in Mobile, Reviews on February 1, 2009 by Paul Boag

I often get asked what my favourite iPhone applications are. Its hardly surprising considering the excessive number of application I buy and the amount I go on about it. I therefore thought it was about time that I compiled a list of my favourites.

One caveat before I begin my rundown of top 5 applications – I am a fickle creature and so my favourite applications change regularly. What you see here is a snapshot of my current setup. It will no doubt change in a week or two!

1. Omnifocus

I am a Getting Things Done addict. Its the only way I can stay on top of the ridiculous number of half finished projects I have. I am also a worrier so having a system really gives me a sense of control I would otherwise lack.

I started off using Omnifocus as a desktop application. It is designed around the GTD methodology and I would only recommend it to people who are serious about this approach. Also the iPhone application is far from cheap but for me it was worth every penny!

Omnifcous is not perfect (adding tasks to the inbox takes too long) but I use it far more than any other application and I could not live without it. If you feel out of control in your life, read Getting Things Done and then buy this app.

2. Evernote

Evernote ensures you have your notes wherever you are. They offer a desktop client (both mac and PC), a web client and an iPhone application.

You can add text notes, audio notes or images. You can tag the notes, sync them across all your clients and even capture images using the iPhone camera or web cam. However, the real power of Evernote is its optical character recognition. If you upload an image to the evernote server it will convert any text in that image into a searchable format. Very useful indeed!

3. Tweetie

I have tried every twitter client available on the iPhone and Tweetie is by far the best for anybody serious about Twitter.

It allows the management of multiple accounts, access to entire conversation threads and offers a powerful search functionality. It also allows you to get detailed information on other users and to manage of your relationship with them. However, it is the interface I really like. It is clean, customisable and easy to use.

I cannot recommend this application highly enough.

4. Google Reader

This is my only web based iPhone application. There are actually a number of native applications that integrate with Google Reader but none of them are as good as Google’s own application.

I need an RSS reader which syncs across my iPhone and laptop. Google reader does that and does it using a clean and fast interface. I love the way Google handle RSS and so wanted an iPhone app that works with that.

That said I would prefer a native application. Occasionally mobile safari chokes on the Google reader application and it often makes the page reload unnecessarily. Unfortunately all of the alternatives I have tried are slow and unresponsive. Either that or do not offer as extensive functionality as Google’s own application.

5. Mobile Fotos

My final choice of application was a tricky one. I could have gone for facebook, brightkite, speakeasy, yammer or any number of others. In the end I chose Mobile Fotos.

Mobile Fotos is an application for managing and uploading to your flickr account. It is extremely well executed and they have thought of everything.

It is incredibly easy to manage your own photos and to access the photos of your contacts. It offers a powerful search functionality and allows you to view photos in the same intuitive way you do with the built in photo application.

Best of all it provides the ability to share a photo through either email or twitter. As a heavy twitter user this has proved invaluable.

Conclusion

This is the tip of a very big iceberg of applications. It was a hard choice to pick my favourite five. For example, I had to leave out Yummy which is the best delicious bookmarks application I have found. I have also had to miss ‘Bible‘ which is a very well thought through application and Instapaper which has been a life saver on long plane flights.

Of course the application I am really excited about is the SlingPlayer for the iPhone. But I am just going to have to wait for that!

If you recognise that the mobile web is important and you need help deciding on a strategy, then book a mobile consultancy clinic.

Book a consultancy clinic or contact Rob about a more in-depth review.

5 options when website budgets get slashed

Posted in Web strategy on January 30, 2009 by Paul Boag

Your site is in desperate need of a redesign, content is out of date and the technology is archaic. Unfortunately times are tight and your budget has been cut. What do you do?

The economic downturn is affecting everybody and even at Headscape we have noticed the budgets of clients shrinking. With less money to spend how can you maximise the return on your investment?

To be honest I think it is a good thing that people have less to spend on their websites. We have had too many clients approach us asking for complete overhauls of their sites when that is not what is really required. Often more subtle changes can have a greater impact over the longer term. They certainly generate a better return on investment.

We have been working closely with our clients to suggest ways they can improve their sites without breaking the bank. Here are just 5 of our suggestions.

1. Realign rather than redesign

Why do you need a redesign anyway? Redesigning your entire website is time consuming and costly. However, more importantly it is often unnecessary. I seem to be quoting Cameron Moll’s excellent article “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign” a lot recently, but that is because he talks a lot of sense. He writes:

Like a kid in a candy store, we creatives redesign like it’s the new black. Why do we possess such an insatiable desire to refresh and remake? Why do we thrive on renewal? What tempts us to be seduced by the sway of renaissance?

I believe it is because we see a redesign as the solution to a failing, tired site. However that is rarely the case as Cameron goes on to explain:

Too often, look and feel, color scheme, layout, and identity are presented as solutions to problems… long before regard is given to other less-aesthetic issues that may very well be the root of the problem. The old warning against treating symptom rather than cause comes to mind.

What is more redesigns can often cause more harm than good by confusing the loyal users who are familiar with your old site.

When budgets are tight let go of the notion you need to do a complete redesign. You can improve your site many times over with the smallest change. Just take the case of the $300 million button I mentioned in show 150 of my podcast.

2. Simplify

As website owners we are always looking to expand our websites by adding more features and content. However, that costs money we may not have.

Here is a radical alternative – Instead of adding more to your site, why not take things away.

Typically websites are stuffed with content and features that users simply do not use. A quick look at your analytics package will demonstrate the problem. The vast majority of traffic is to a handful of pages.

The problem is we tend to leave content in because ‘somebody might find it useful’. Although this maybe true, it does not necessarily mean keeping content is a good idea.

The more content and features we make available the harder it is for users to find what they need. It is the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack’.

Fortunately, simplifying your website does not have to be entirely about removing content. According to John Maeda’s book ‘The Laws of Simplicity‘ we can also streamline our sites by shrinking and hiding content too. Consider ways to reduce the prominence of less important content, to place a greater emphasis on what matters.

When budgets are tight take a long hard look at your site and ask whether more can be achieved by simplifying what you have rather than adding complexity.

3. Prioritise and phase development

Another technique which can be used when budgets are tight is to phase development. There seems to be a tendency among website owners to store up changes and roll them out in a single large deployment. Unfortunately this means a large single expenditure too and that can be problematic from a cash flow perspective.

A better approach is to roll out incremental changes on an ongoing basis. Not only is this better from a financial perspective, it brings other benefits as I explain in the Website Owners Manual. Phase development also provides:

Faster delivery because new features are launched independently. Some features can be launched while others are in development. This prevents a single feature stalling the entire rollout.
More accurate estimates. Bigger project are harder to estimate. Breaking them down makes it easier for suppliers to quote accurately.
Better PR opportunities. Whenever a new feature is launched there is an opportunity to publicize the site. New features can motivate users into taking another look. A single large project only provides a single opportunity to grab peoples attention.
Limited risk of working with a new supplier. Choosing an agency is always a risk. Until you work with somebody, it is hard to gauge how good they are. Reduce this risk by limiting the size of project they are commissioned to build. If the agency fails to perform, you can look elsewhere when commissioning subsequent work.

This is an approach commonly adopted by larger websites with their own in-house teams but much rarer among smaller sites who use external agencies. Nevertheless, it is an approach which works well in tough times.

4. Reuse and recycle

Too often we reinvent the wheel. When budgets are plentiful this can make sense. Although there is similar functionality out there, we might choose to develop it ourselves so we have more control or can customise it to our exact requirements. However as budgets begin to get squeezed these are luxuries we cannot afford.

In a world of widgets, APIs and open source it is becoming increasingly hard to argue the case for custom builds. Why build your own mapping application when there is Google Maps? Why build a forum when you could use an open source alternative like Vanilla?

My only word of warning is in regards to integration. It can be hard to get these ‘prebuilt’ tools to work together. Be careful that the savings made are not lost to integration problems. Where possible use tools like WordPress that provides an architecture with a wide range of plugins for quick integration.

5. Move beyond the website

Finally, I think it is important to remember that your web strategy is not all about your website. We spend the majority of our ever decreasing budgets on adding bells and whistles to existing websites when there are large number of potential customers who never reach our sites.

Instead of sinking your budget and efforts solely into your website consider looking further afield. Could your web strategy be better served by putting resources into a Facebook group or a twitter account for example? Would your target audience listen to a podcast? Do they read RSS? What about a mailing list? The possibilities are endless.

Ask yourself where your target audience congregates. Instead of constantly trying to draw users to your site begin to spend time where they already meet. What social sites do they use? What editorial sites do they read? Contribute to these communities and offer to write for the editorial sites they read.

Many of these things can be done at almost no cost and with little technical knowledge. All it takes is some time and enthusiasm.

Conclusions

Whether a site is successful is not dictated by its budget. However many larger organisations have relied on money as a method of driving their web strategy forward. As these budgets are slashed there is an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by being smarter.

Hopefully this post has demonstrated a few of the possible avenues available and inspired you to discover some more of your own. However if you would like some more personal advice specific to your own website then feel free to drop me an email.

150. User Manipulation

Posted in Classic shows on January 28, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Liz Danzico talks about user research. Paul explains how to create an effective call to action and we discover how one button cost $300 million in sales

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events

The $300 Million Button

Our first news story is an incredibly tale from usability expert Jared Spool, which really shows the power of usability testing.

In the post he writes about a client who had a fairly standard checkout process on his website. The process began with a login form:

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password.

It is the kind of form I have seen on many ecommerce websites. This feature, which had been designed to help repeat customers, created two distinct problems:

New users resented the idea of having to register. One user said: "I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something."
Repeat users rarely remembered their username or password. They wasted substantial time guessing, before eventually resorted to creating a new account. In fact after examining the database Jared discovered that 45% of all customers had multiple registrations. Some did go as far as clicking on the forgotten password link but of those only 25% went on to place an order.

In the end the site was redesigned, allowing the user to continue without registering. Within a year this created a $300 million increase in sales.

Of course $300 million is a meaningless figure in itself. It is the percentage increase that matters. In this case is was a 45% increase. That is a staggering number and one that really drives home the importance of testing with real users.

Read the ‘$300 million button’

The UK government and graded browser support

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the importance of graded browser support. In my post I explained how we should not limit our support to the browsers we test and how it is unrealistic to push for identical support across all browsers.

This is an approach which has been adopted by the likes of Yahoo! and the BBC for some time, but which now also extends to public sector website in the UK.

According to The Web Standards Project the rules surrounding browser testing on public sector websites have been changed to better reflect best practice in graded browser support.

Changes include an emphasise on functionality over identical layout across browsers (paragraph 39):

You should check that the content, functionality and display all work as intended. There may be minor differences in the way that the website is displayed. The intent is not that it should be pixel perfect across browsers, but that a user of a particular browser does not notice anything appears wrong.

As well as support for progressive enhancement (paragraphs 17-18):

You should follow a progressive enhancement approach to developing websites to ensure that content is accessible to the widest possible number of browsers.

This is excellent news and certainly provides a great reference for UK designers and website owners looking to convince others of the importance of graded browser support.

Read the UK government guidance on browser testing

50 Illustrator tutorials

From development to design now, and a list of 50 tutorials that help you get your head around Adobe Illustrator.

The list is compiled by UK web designer Chris Spooner. He echoes my own experiences when he writes:

Adobe Illustrator can be a little tricky to get your head around, particularly after getting used to the workflow as applications such as Photoshop. The difference between layer use and creating and editing shapes can be especially strange at first hand.

I am a Photoshop man and I have found it very difficult to make the transition to a vector based world, so this list was particularly appealing to me.

Its a great list that you will definitely want to check out, if like me you have never got to grips with Illustrator before.

Read 50 illustrator tutorials every designer should see

A new approach to PNG Support

Finally today I would like to draw your attention to a new technique that has been developed by Drew Diller for using PNG transparency in IE6.

Unlike previous techniques this one allows you to use PNGs as background images instead of just as IMG tags. This opens up a world of possibilities and overcomes one of the most annoying limitations of IE6.

This minor miracle is achieved not by using AlphaImageLoader as has been done in the past, but with VML.

Implementation seems fairly straightforward and involves adding a Javascript library to your page. Because this is for IE6 only you can embed the code within a conditional comment. This means other browsers will not even download it.

Although I have yet to use this approach myself, I have high hopes that this will finally solve the IE6/PNG barrier.

Download DD_belatedPNG now.

Interview: Liz Danzico on User Research

Paul: So joining me today for our little interview is Liz Danzico. Liz, why don’t you start off by introducing yourself a little bit. Telling us a bit about yourself and your background.

Liz: Sure. Um, I am a user experience consultant, I am here in New York City, I have been developing web sites and user experiences online for about 12 years now. Um, I do a lot of work with Happy Cog Studios here in New York, with Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santa Maria. Um, I’m also chair of the new MFA interactions design program.

Paul: Okay.

Liz: At the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Paul: Excellent. I mean, so, to say that you’re an expert in user experience would be a slight understatement then, Liz.

Liz: Well I wouldn’t go that far.

Paul: You’d be too modest, obviously, to say that. Okay, so we got Liz on the show, I met Liz when I went to Future of Web Design and we got talking. Um, she’s got some fascinating insights into the whole area of user research, and usability generally, so I thought let’s get her on the show and let’s maybe, you know, try and cover things from, from the very basic level, a kind of introduction to this concept of user research. Um, so, perhaps a good place to start, if you’re okay Liz, um, would be, how would you go about defining the area of user research? What would you include, what would you exclude from that?

Liz: Right. So … user research, even today, we’ve been doing user research on the web since, uh, the very beginning, so it’s a very old concept but it’s still fairly controversial. So the basic concept is it tells you what really happens when real people interact with your product or service. So, there are no real rules about what it includes and what it doesn’t [inaudible]. You can basically speculate about what your users want, or you can find that out, um, you know? And uh, and the, uh, the latter is probably a more useful approach for you to take than speculation. But with either one, thinking about your audience is useful no matter what. And so, so there are no real rules, now um, when you disconnect thinking about your audience from your business objectives, and you start getting, you know, very excited about behaviors that they’re doing that are sort of disconnected from the real mission that you’re trying to sort of accomplish, then it becomes, um, a bit murky, and confusing. But thinking about your audience is, just in general, is an extremely useful approach.

Paul: Okay. I mean one of the things that, that, um, I’ve heard said before by, particularly cynical clients I have to say, but I’ve heard it said before, you know, ultimately user research, and all of this kind of stuff feels in some ways like, um, just another way for web designers to suck a bit of extra money out of us, you know that fundamentally how, I know my audience already, is the kind of attitude that many web site owners have, so why do you see it as an important part of the process?

Liz: Well uh, you know, as we’ve been seeing design flaws often translate to lost business opportunities, you know, usability is becoming more important than ever as the number of web sites and products is, you know, increasing more and more every day. So, we design these products and services, and we are at the same time users of them, but there’s no way that we can really tell what are users, um, might want. And the best way to, you know, usability research doesn’t cost a lot of money, so, the best way that you can help your clients kind of understand that you need to do usability research in some way is to let them know that usability research is important and it doesn’t need to, um, suck up a lot of time or money in the, in the process. So there’s a great fantastic book by Steve Krug, called Don’t Make Me Think, which I’m sure you’re probably well aware of.

Paul: Uh huh.

Liz: And in one of the chapters towards the end, he has a chapter called "Usability Research on a Shoestring", or it’s probably better titled, which talks of this approach of going out into the hallway and kind of grabbing people, and just sitting them down, and putting them in front of your product or service, and getting some feedback. So getting some feedback from people, no matter who they are, is better than getting none at all. And so, I think starting there with clients, instead of the, you know, $100,000 user research project that’s going to take you across 8 markets, you know, in the United States, the UK, and Asia, then, is going to be a much better approach than kind of intimidating them with the very extensive projects.

Paul: Mmm, I mean, when it, the kind of one scenario that I’ve come across before, um, is where we’ve come across with clients that say "Well we’ve already done user research, we already know our audience ’cause we’ve got somebody in to do this or that." Is there a difference between user research that’s been done primarily with an offline audience, and those with, you know, when you’re interacting with people online? Is there a difference in the kind of results and information that you’re after, and even the techniques, maybe, that you use?

Liz: So, they are probably, when they say that they’ve done user research, they’re probably talking about focus groups. I would venture to guess that when they talk about that they’re probably talking about either focus groups or surveys of some kind and those are not, well, I wouldn’t say that they are, those are bad things to do, but those are not the kinds of user research techniques that are going to give them feedback about their product’s usability. Those kinds of techniques are going to give them good information about, um, certain kinds of things but they are not going to give them information about whether or not people can use the product or service that they’re looking at. So, you want to find out exactly what kinds of user research they’ve conducted. If they say the words "focus group" then you know you want to move them towards something that is a one on one kind of interview. Focus groups tend to be conducted with groups of people, as the name might suggest, um, and when groups of people get together to talk about, you know, they put forth a question for these people, and when they, you know, groups of people get together to talk about the question they might influence one another in their answers, they’re typically aren’t talking about an interface, they’re typically talking about ideas, so you’re not getting good feedback, like in a one on one kind of scenario. So you want to sort of guide them to a more individual, one on one kind of experience. Surveys, on the other hand, are good, but they don’t get that kind of personal experience with a moderator, sitting with an individual, kind of looking at an interface in a kind of task-based scenario.

Paul: Okay, yeah that makes a lot of sense. I mean, let’s then talk about some of the techniques that can be used to better understand individuals, or how those individuals will interact with your product. What different kind of techniques do you use? I mean, there’s the kind of very basic usability session, but do you do, or are there other things above and beyond that, that you do?

Liz: Right. Well, the sort of big secret is that, there are names and there are certainly techniques, but the big secret is there are really no sort of techniques beyond knowing who your users are, kind of documenting what you’re seeing, and then kind of analyzing/prioritizing the results of what you see. So, you can, I’m gonna tell you a number of techniques that we can go through, but if those basic sort of constructs are there, then you’ve done sort of good user research. Now, that being said, the techniques that you can do are usability testing, usability testing traditionally has taken place in a user lab where a moderator is sitting with an individual looking at a screen, or a product, or a sketch of an interface and going through questions in sort of a task-based way, asking people "Show me how you would search for x" or "Show me how you would check out," or, you know, and seeing, measuring the success or failure of that kind of task. The clients are typically sitting behind a one-way, a one-way glass, or mirror, and observing these kinds of things. People have been not so thrilled about this technique recently, saying that it kind of, um, is not, it doesn’t produce natural reactions from users, but that is one kind of technique. There is, uh, kind of creating personas, and using personas, user personas which are an archetype of your site or product’s users, and getting everyone involved in activities around those personas, whether that be using those personas as your talking through features around, you know, a brainstorming session, and getting people to sort of role-play those personas. That’s another user research method. There are, there’s sort of the ethnography kind of take, where a lot of people have been doing kind of in-home interviews and observations recently. Ethnography, cultural anthropologists and people who have been doing traditional ethnography have been watching closely the design research that we’ve been doing recently, and wondering if we’ve been doing it right and so on, but ethnography, in that sort of observing users in their "natural environment", has been I would say a more successful way recently of watching people use products and services, um, so I would say that those three things, usability testing in a lab, sort of using personas and scenarios, and ethnography or kind of going out into the field and watching users, whether they’re in their homes or their offices, are the three kind of key ways to gather user research with users. The fourth way that I’ll mention, and we can talk about this in a little bit, is not with users directly, but it is certainly user research that’s available more and more now, and that is data on sort of analytics, which you can gather from Google Analytics, Shaun Inman’s Mint, these kinds of things. Watching site data and user behavior through site analytics is another form of user research that gives you, you know, some information, and you can watch these traffic patterns on your site. It doesn’t answer the question "Why?" but it does show you some evidence as to how users are behaving on your site.

Paul: It’s quite interesting that you bring up eth, ethnography, whoa I can’t even speak today, because, that’s of interest to me, because that’s an area that we’re beginning to explore a little bit more, and have kind of discovered the same thing, that there’s a real value of going into you know, somebody’s home, seeing the environment that they access the internet on, you know, do they have kids under their feet? You know, where they access their PC, can they sit comfortably at it? All those kinds of things. Um, I guess it’s also an advantage you don’t have to hire an expensive usability lab and all of the rest of it. But I have to confess, I’m a little bit new at it, so talk me through maybe some of the things, you know, how does it differ from a usability test that you would do in a usability lab, other than that you’re in a different environment?

Liz: Well, uh, it depends. It doesn’t have to differ at all — it depends on the goals of the test. I would say that you could construct a test that’s exactly like one that you’d conduct in a lab, it just happens in someone’s home or office, or in a different environment. But as you said, you get the more realistic interruptions, and that kind of thing, and are they going to be able to complete this task given the natural kind of occurrences of their day. And that, depending on what kind of test you are constructing, that’s either going to inform your results or not. If you are doing task-based testing, so I could maybe talk about the different kind of usability testing that you could do.

Paul: Yeah, that’s good.

Liz: Yeah so there are different ways that you could conduct a usability test. Um, traditionally there is task-based testing, where you set up pre-written questions, before you get to the test, that are based on the goals of the testing. So, if we were testing a photo site, we would test whether or not users could upload photos, could they task photos, you know, those kinds of things. So we would write those kinds of questions up beforehand, and then ask those questions during the test. Um, that’s one kind of test. You could do that in a lab, and you can do that same test in someone’s home. In a lab there would not be the children screaming, and the phone ringing, and that kind of thing, or, if someone say were uploading a photo, you would never be able to tell if sort of, timing out, would be an issue, or if anything with time or space or motion would be an issue. If those kinds of things are a goal of your test, then you might want to think about doing it in real time, in someone’s home environment. Another type of testing is something that, I’ll say it was first coined by Mark Hurst, who is a user experience consultant at Good Experience, I think he coined it, it’s called "Listening Labs". Listening labs are, I’ll call them experimental, but they’ve probably been going on long before I was aware of them, where people are designing usability tests in real time. So in other words, you go into the test with absolutely nothing written down, and you sit down with users, and based on your initial interview with them, you hear who they are, and after understanding a little bit about how they use photos in general, say, then you kind of write the questions on the fly, and then sort of develop a test around who that person is and their behavior, with your product, or product type.

Paul: Which I guess, makes people more engaged with the test, because it’s about what they specifically interested in. Is that the idea?

Liz: Exactly. So it’s a more natural way of doing the test. That’s the idea. That kind of thing you could do either way, and probably is even more rewarding if you’re doing it in someone’s natural environment. And then the third type of test is sort of a web, a web wide kind of test, where you have people just surf the internet, as it were, and uh, and just have them think out loud, and that kind of thing is also, I’ve found, more rewarding and fruitful in someone’s home environment, because they have their bookmarks there, and they have their post-it notes. Whereas you put them in a sort of artificial setting and they don’t have those things around them. So, if you, it kind of just depends on the type of testing that you’re doing. If you’re doing just the first kind I talked about, just task analysis and having people go through that kind of task-based testing, doing it in a traditional usability lab is great, you know, I mean you really do get the answers that you’re looking for, and it just depends on your goals.

Paul: I mean, it’s interesting, going back to Steve Krug’s book that you mentioned, I mean he talks about, I guess his agenda in that book is to get people to do testing who perhaps aren’t previously, and so, you know, he really downplays the demographic of who it is that you test, and that it’s more important that you test than that you get the right people, you know and all of that kind of thing. Um, but when you’re going into somebody’s home, and interacting with them, I’m guessing it’s more important to get the right demographic? Is that right?

Liz: Yeah, I mean one of the, um, I think it’s always important to, it’s always important to get the right demographic. Um, but, well I would say that there is a hierarchy of common mistakes around usability testing that kind of has a trickle down effect. You know, the number one mistake is not conducting any research at all, um, and conducting research on the wrong audience is kind of further down the list. So, you know, yeah if you’re doing research on the wrong audience, it’s not going to affect, whether you do it in a lab or you’re doing it at your desk, or at the water cooler, or at home, it’s going to affect your results and your analysis, you know, no matter where it takes place. So, you know, I think that the drawback is you are going to waste more time going out to that person’s time going out to that person’s time, so it’s going to be a drawback for you, but I don’t think that, it doesn’t matter really where it happens, because if you’re testing on the wrong audience, you’re testing on the wrong audience. Um, you’re probably going to get more information out of that experience if you’re in someone’s home, than if you’re not, so if you’re going to test on the wrong audience, do it in someone’s home, because you’re going to, it’s a richer experience, you’re going to get more information out of it than if you’re just testing in a lab.

Paul: No that makes perfect sense, I kind of see that. No, it’s difficult, isn’t it? Because, uh, obviously finding the right demographic of people, and picking the right people to test on is tricky, you know, it’s a more difficult thing and it can be time consuming. So have you got any advice about that? What really matters here? You know, for example, if you’re designing a web site for an over-60s audience, you know, are you, do you want to concentrate on the age aspect of that? Or the technical literacy aspect of that? You know, is it okay to have somebody younger if they’re not as good with the internet, if your audience is, do you, I’m kind of not wording this very well, but you get the idea — what’s important when you’re trying to match demographics?

Liz: Um, well, it’s very specific to your clients. Developing a, so, whenever you are trying to match demographics, you want to work with your clients to develop what’s called a screener, and a screener is a, I would say, whether you’re trying to develop a pretty rigorous recruiting demographic with a professional recruiter, to say, recruit 300 people for an extensive study, or whether you’re going to go out into the hallway and grab some people, or whether you’re going to recruit from something called Craigslist, which a lot of people are familiar with, um, which a lot of people do, I would say developing a screener which kind of outlines your demographic is a really good idea.

Paul: And what kind of things would that include? Sorry I interrupted you.

Liz: Yeah, what a screener is, it kind of goes through, it’s a questionnaire that outlines a number of questions that you would ask a potential recruit, that says, if this person can answer a particular question we should keep them in or out, so it’s actually a really good exercise to go through that allows you to kind of think through the type of demographic that you would have. So that doesn’t answer your question in any way.

Paul: It’s very interesting, though. Can you give me an example? Sorry, I’m interested in this screener thing, cause I haven’t come across it before. Can you give me an example of the type of questions? I mean obviously they’re going to be specific to the individual client, all the rest of it, but what kind of questions?

Liz: Um, what kind of questions? So, let’s see, would this person, so, let’s see, has this person, I mean typical questions could be around financial demographics, age demographics, you know the sort of typical things. But let me think of some more interesting things. So, is this person a full-time student? Has this person been fired from a job in the last 6 months? Has this person participated in usability research in the last 6 months? Those types of things, so if the person answers yes or no, then they’re not a good candidate. But there are other kinds of things you could put into that screener that would be more specific to the project.

Paul: So could it include something like is this person aware of a certain brand, because you want to associate with that brand?

Liz: Absolutely, so does this person drink Coca-Cola on a regular basis, yes or no? That kind of thing. But I’ve found that the screener, because the clients that you work with are often kind of speaking in those terms about their audience, the screener is a really good way to kind of help them understand how you’re recruiting audiences, and a good tool to kind of work together with them to narrow down who you want to be in the target audience for your testing, or your research in general. So, that said, how do you develop a good kind of set of participants for a research study for, say, a product for people over 60? Um, what’s most important, you know it depends on, and I know I hate to say that it depends, but you’re going to develop a goal for the testing, right? And the goal might be about usability, the goal might be about navigation, it might be about design, it might be about, it’s going to have, you have to first identify the goal, and depending on what that goal is, then you can identify the audience. So, the audience, you know the goal might have nothing to do with age, although the product has to do with age. So you can kind of strip away, you can pull apart the product from the goal of the testing a bit, and sort of just focus on the goal of the test. That’s why developing goals for user research is so critical, um, because often times you can separate those and therefore develop a better set of participants for that user research.

Paul: Mmm, that’s really good. I think what we’ve done here, is, a lot of people that listen to this show probably have a basic understanding of user testing. Maybe they’ve done some basic user testing before, or maybe they’ve even written a persona before, but I think what we’ve done, or what you’ve done, is push people a little bit further to kind of consider it in a little bit more detail what they’re doing in order to kind of refine the results that they’re getting back, and that’s really, really great. I mean, if somebody has just kind of done the very basics, you know, they’ve grabbed some people, they’ve done some user testing, maybe in their own office in front of their own PC, and they’ve got a few people in, um maybe they’ve created a couple of personas, what’s the next step for them? What should they be pushing? Is it through this screener? Is that the number one thing they should be doing? Is the goals more important? Is getting a better demographic more important? What’s the kind of next step for them?

Liz: Mmm, that’s a good question. I think that one of the most, well, doing the research is really key. Analyzing the research and connecting the research to the next iteration of a design is also key. We haven’t talked about that at all.

Paul: No, we haven’t, we ought to.

Liz: It’s often a grey area, um, you know there are lots of reports that are produced, you know, diagrams and things, but there’s a lot of kind of intuition that happens between sort of translating the research and putting that research, feeding that research back into the design. There are hunches, leaps of faith, um, you know kind of between that analysis and design. I mean there are clear cut recommendations that one can make, but then there are a lot of more grey areas. So I would say that, I still think, even though I mentioned we’ve been doing this kind of research for at least, you know, more than a decade online, and you know quite a long time offline, I think we still need to get better at the rigor at which we translate those recommendations and findings. So that’s one place I think we need to focus. Um, in terms of the actual research itself, uh, you know, there’s something, I think there are other sorts of techniques. I’m interested in these kinds of emergent, I would say emergent techniques like the listening labs, um, you know where the kinds of things that we’re looking at today with kind of mobile research, where people are, we need to be looking at how people are using our sites not just in the browser on their desktop but, you know, in the browser on their phone, and how their context is changing constantly and how we need to sort of look at that adaptation. So how do we develop tests that are more emergent and can be a bit more flexible, rIght? So I think there’s something interesting about that listening lab, where we kind of understand the person, and then develop the questions around a person and how they use a product, rather than having a pre-written set of questions. So, something that’s more emergent, I think that’s an area that’s interesting to kind of look at. Then, uh, ethnography, really understanding, goes right along with this sort of, emergent, as you said you’ve been getting more excited about ethnography as well, so, thinking more about kind of fine-tuning our approach to people’s own context, whether that be ethnography, going into their homes, their offices, you know, where people are using our products, whether that be on the street, in the hallway, wherever it is, but really understanding how to find people where they’re using our products and test them or do some research around that, I think that’s really exciting and a really interesting opportunity. Um so that, that’s the next step for us, uh, and I think that the way that people are designing tests and doing some usability testing now, is, you know, is good, I don’t think that there’s a big next step that we can all take together, but I think these are three areas that I think as a discipline that we’re going to see people moving forward together in.

Paul: Excellent. Let’s finish off, then, with a kind of where people should go if, you know, they’ve been excited by this interview, they want to learn a little bit more, um, about user research and user testing. You’ve mentioned Steve Krug’s book. What other resources are out there that people should be looking towards?

Liz: Well, let’s see. You know, I was thinking about, I was thinking about that and there are physical places that people can go, but they’re all in San Francisco in the United States, so that’s not going to help anyone. There is, you know, A List Apart has a User Science topic that often publishes user research related methods-like articles, there’s always BoxesandArrows.com which publishes user research related topics, um, Adaptive Path, which is a user research consultancy, or at least one aspect of what they do, they have published a number of articles but they also do events. A lot of events are in the United States right now, but they may have international events as well. But they do kind of give away a lot of their content. Um, and then last but not least, there’s a new-ish publisher called Rosenfeld Media, and the books that Rosenfeld Media publishes are about methods in user experience and, one recently in web form design, was about the usability of web form design by Luke Wroblewski (called Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks).

Paul: Yeah, I saw that. That looked very good, I have to say.

Liz: Yeah, so that’s something to keep an eye on as well.

Paul: Excellent. Thank you so much, Liz, that was absolutely superb. And I will be fascinated to get you back on the show in the future to talk more depth about some of these issues. Thank you very much for your time, Liz.

Liz: My pleasure.

Thanks goes to Jason Rhodes for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Every website should have a call to action, a response you want users to complete. But how do you encourage users to act? How do you create an effective call to action. Read More

Snape and Keith, separated at birth?

149. White Hat

Posted in Classic shows on January 21, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: How to become number one on Google *cough*, are customer testimonials worth it and how do you create a reassuring website.

Download this show.

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Housekeeping

Some housekeeping to kick off today’s show I am afraid:

Web Design Introductory Training

Drew and Rachel over at EdgeOfMySeat.com are running two training courses next month that look ideal for those starting out in web design. What is more they are offering boagworld listeners 10% off if they enter the promo code ‘boagworld’ at checkout.

The two courses are…

HTML and Web Standards for Beginners – 19th February

a one day course ideally suited to those wanting to get into web design, or perhaps for clients who have to format content with HTML for their websites. Covers the basic web standards principals of semantic markup and separation of content, structure and presentation.

Beginners CSS – 20th February

a one day course for learning CSS from the ground up. We go from zero knowledge right through to building floated, positioned and fixed width layouts.

For more information visit edgeofmyseat.com/training/

Bamboo Juice

Next up is a conference I am really excited to be speaking at. It called Bamboo Juice and is a one day conference taking place at the Eden Project in Cornwall. There is a growing line up of speakers that currently includes people like Jeremy Keith and myself.

It is great to see conferences happening further afield in the UK and I really want to see this one succeed. Please support it if you can. Cornwall is a stunning place and the Eden Project is a must visit. You ticket includes entry to the Eden Project so you will have a chance to look around.

Best of all the entire conference only costs £99! Please, please join us. Its going to be great fun and it should have a nice intimate feel with lots of time for chatting.

You can book your ticket now at bamboojuice.co.uk.

Consultancy Competition

Just a reminder of our free consultancy competition. Headscape are giving away a free days consultancy to a lucky winner. Email us with your name, URL and why you want us to help you out. We will pick a winner at the end of the month.

If you can’t wait that long Paul has started running mini-consultancy clinics via Skype. You can buy 30 minutes or more of Paul’s time and he will chat with you about your site, career or anything else (within reason). Its a bit of an experiment at the moment so if you are interested in trying it out visit the Boagworld forum where he talks more about the idea.

News and events

More on jQuery

If you listen to this show regularly then no doubt you will be aware of what a huge jQuery fan I am. I was therefore super excited this week to see the release of a new version of jQuery that builds on what is already an excellent Javascript library.

Most of the improvements are in performance. This is remarkable as jQuery was already one of the most lightweight and speedy libraries available. However, they seem to have made some significant improvements.

The main new piece of functionality is something called Live Events. Live Events allows you to bind events (such as a onclick event) to all elements even if they have yet to be created. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you wanted all links with a class=’external’ to open in a new window. Previously you would create a function that added an event to all links with that class so that when the link was clicked it opened a new window. The problem was that if you added more links dynamically to the page you would have to rerun the function if you wanted them to behave in the same way. With live events this is no longer necessary. This is a huge improvement and one that will streamline a lot of code.

I really cannot say enough good things about jQuery. It really is enormously powerful and a real time saver. What you can do with it is quite amazing as is demonstrated by a post from Smashing Magazine this week entitled "45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience". Whether you use jQuery already or not, check this post out. It will definitely give you loads of ideas for enhancing your sites.

Getting started with HTML 5

Talking of new releases, there is a significant amount of buzz surrounding HTML 5 at the moment. This is somewhat surprising considering it is a long way from being finished and some even argue we do not need it in its current form.

Cameron Moll does a nice job of providing a round up of what is currently being written about HTML 5 including a nice little summary at the beginning…

The world isn’t ready for HTML 5 at large just yet, but we can begin preparing for it by using common, semantic selector names (header, nav, section, etc.)

To be honest it is still early days for HTML 5 with ~~some estimating it will be released in 2022~~ some estimating that it will not be fully implemented by browsers until 2022. With those kind of timescales we can afford not to care. Jeff Croft puts it up nicely in his post "Two Thousand and Twenty Two" where he says…

It ultimately doesn’t matter if HTML 5 is available next month, next year, or fifty years from now. Those of us who do real work in this industry know that the only thing that really matters is what specs and technologies are supported by the browsers real people use.

Jeff came under a lot of attack for his post but I have to say I agree with him. What matters to real web designers and real website owners is what browsers will support now. So my advice is to ignore HTML 5 now and brush up on your WCAG 2 instead!

Web design trends for 2009

We turn now to the more immediate future and a post by the people over at Smashing Magazine. "Web Design Trends of 2009" endeavours to look at emerging trends that could become mainstream over the coming year.

To be honest I am not sure these are some much web design trends of 2009, as a look back at the end of the last year. However, it makes interesting reading none the less.

The trends listed include…

Use of letterpress typography, where text is ‘punched out’ of the background
An increase in the richness of user interfaces through the use of Javascript
The general acceptance of PNG transparency
Big bold typography
An increased use of font replacement using tools like sFIR
More sites than ever using overlay boxes to display images and video
A proliferation of video and screencasts
Blogs adopting a more magazine orientated design aesthetic
Lots of Javascript slideshows wherever you look

Nothing particularly surprising, but the article does provide some inspiring examples of these different trends and analysis about wh
y they are becoming fashionable.

Your website can thrive in a recession

We conclude today with another post about the recession. To be honest I am getting sick of talking about it. In fact I suspect it is turning into a self fulfilling prophesy. However, Gerry McGovern has written an interesting post about how your website could thrive in a recession.

The article mainly focuses on the cost savings that can be made by bringing customer interactions online. He quotes research which states:

the average cost of a web interaction is 27 pence, the average cost of a phone interaction is 3.76 Sterling and the average cost of a face-to-face interaction is 9.34 Sterling.

He goes on to say:

So, it is 14 times cheaper to allow a customer to complete a task on a website than to have the customer complete the same task over the phone. The Web is 35 times cheaper for completing such a task than a face-to-face interaction. Isnâ€™t that a compelling business case for a website during a recession?

It is an interesting argument and one that may sway some of the people holding the purse strings. However it fails to take into account the upfront development cost of moving customer interactions online. For better or worse companies are focusing on short term cost savings at the moment rather than long term expenses. As a result some web design projects are being put on hold.

Nevertheless if you work for an organisation that deals with a large number of customers then this article is a powerful arguement. It is certainly something that you need to show your boss.

Feature: Becoming Number One On Google

‘Become number one on Google’ – The dream of every website owner and titles like that grab people’s attention. What can you do to help achieve that dream without resorting to black hat techniques? Read More

Listeners feedback:

Customer testimonials – Are they worth it?

Question from Dave Rupert –

“Client Testimonials” – whenever some marketing aficionado comes up with these they want them on the site. When was the last time you thought “OOOOH CLIENT TESTIMONIALS!! OMFGWTFBMXBBQ!!1!” and clicked to go see a whole page of them? Are these out of date? Does anyone care about them? Are there examples of good implementation? Do you use Client Testimonials on your site? If so, why?

This is a good question because it has made me question something that I have always considered to be a really good thing on websites.

I think someone in Dave’s position – who I assume is a web developer/owner – won’t ever get excited about a list of client testimonials. Let’s face it, they’re not for Dave. They’re meant for visitors to the site to try and persuade them that buying a product or hiring a service is a good idea. The idea is that customers are far more likely to trust a testimonial from an existing client than the marketing speak on a website.

But this is where I have started to question my thinking. For example: “I am Mr X from company Y and I have to tell you that after using these people’s services I am now a better, more rounded person and I have decided to name my first-born after the MD”… this rather points to the fact that Mr X is the MD’s brother/drinking buddy/receiver of folding in a reverse handed way (delete as appropriate)… or even the MD himself!

So, do potential customers place any value in testimonials or do they instantly think they are fiction. In my opinion, I do still think they have value, particularly if you back up an online testimonial with that particular client’s contact details in a proposal. I also think that video testimonials have more value than written ones because (unless they are a complete setup) you will be getting the client’s real feelings and you can watch their body language.

Slightly going of point, regarding providing client contact details for inclusion in a proposal, I have started to ask potential new clients which of our existing clients they would like to talk to rather than simply providing a list chosen by me. I think this adds a further degree of trust.

Fundamentally, I do still think testimonials are a good thing and we will continue to use them on our site. But I don’t think I will be placing so much importance on them as I used to.

How do you make your site feel safe

Kevin Dees asks an interesting question on the forum:

I don’t know if this question has been asked before but I’m interested in what other designers have done to help make a site "feel safe".

Many times I find myself leaving e-commerce sites… because they do not feel safe. I find that this is due to poor design. Big flashing buttons and the like make me wonder if I’m going to get scammed.

So, I guess what my question is "how, as a designer, do you make your site feel safe, welcoming, and secure with the design itself? What are good practices? How do you make users go were you want them to, yet make them feel like they are still in control? What do you suggest adding or even keeping way from when it comes to design"

The answers he got in the forum didn’t really address his question. They focused on the realities of making a site safe (security and technology) rather than on the perception of security.

A site maybe the safest in the world but if the design isn’t right you are left with doubts. Take for example the new US government site that allows people to apply for visa waivers every time they travel to the US. One would hope that a site collecting that amount of personal data would be extremely secure but the design leaves you wondering if it is legitimate. It just doesn’t ‘feel’ professional.

I have spent a long time trying to come up with an answer for Kevin. However, I have found it hard to define what provides that sense of security. Part of the problem is that I think as a web designer I am more sensitive to the ‘vibe’ a site gives off than the average user. I am not sure I am best placed to judge.

Also, a lot of the things that occurred to me where content issues more than design. Delivery policy, site security, returns policy etc. are all content issues and so do not answer Kevin’s question.

However a few things have come to mind…

An attention to detail – Sites that lack an attention to detail always make me nervous. Poor browser support, bad grammar, inconsistencies and ill considered design reek of unprofessionalism. If I am going to spend my money on a site, I want to know that money and time has been invested in its creation. If an organisation is shoddy in the production of their own site, then I can probably expect the same attitude in the way they interact with me!
Structure – I think a strong grid structure is very reassuring. It conveys a sense of order that is disconcerting when not there. I think that is the problem I have with the US immigration site. The form you have to fill in is all over the place. Fields don’t line up and the site lacks any sense of order.
Colour – Misjudging colour can have a serious physiological effect on how we perceive a site. Some colours ar
e naturally more trustworthy than others. Blue for example has a very safe reliable quality. However using a conservative blue on a site aimed at young girls will project entirely the wrong image and make the audience suspicious of your site.
Trying too hard – Some sites just try too hard, shouting for attention. Flashy graphics, heavy sales copy and advertising orientated imagery all scream desperation and manipulation. People do not like to be manipulated or pushed into responding. They like to move at their own pace. Push them too hard and they will run away.

I am not sure I have done particularly well at answering the question either, but hopefully there is something in there you might find useful.

Becoming number one on Google

Posted in Marketing on January 14, 2009 by Paul Boag

We have spoken before about the dangers of using black hat techniques to improve your sites ranking. But, what legitimate techniques can you use?

There is a lot you and your team can do to improve your placement on search engines. These fall into three broad categories:

Improving your site’s build
Improving your site’s content
Encourage quality links

Improving your site’s build

I have written before about how accessibility can also improve search engine placement. By avoiding content types that search engines find hard to access (like Adobe Flash), marking up content semantically and using appropriate ALT and title attributes, we make our sites easier to index. However, although these techniques ensure content is indexable, it does not mean search engines will discover that content in the first place.

The following will ensure Google (or other search engines) discover your content.

Create a clear hierarchy – Every page should be reachable from at least one other page of your site.

Use text links – Links between pages should be textual rather than use images, Flash or other unaccessible technologies.

Use short URLs – Some web addresses created by dynamically driven websites (such as those built using content management systems) cause problems for search engines. Shorter web addresses with less parameters (characters after the ? in the address), the more likely to be found.

Add a site map – Add a site map that includes links to the important content. However, try not to exceed 100 links on a page as this can cause problems.

Submit your site – A search engine will find your site through those who link to you. However, speed up the process by submitting your site for indexing. You can submit a site to Google here. You can also submit a site map using Googles Webmasters tools. This helps Google learn the structure of your site and increases the number of pages indexed.

Once search engines can access your website, you need to address the content.

Improving your site’s content

The most important consideration when writing copy for search engines is the inclusion of search terms. Before writing a page have a clear idea of what it is about and what search terms might use when searching for that subject. Next, incorporate them naturally into copy, headings, image alt attributes and the page title.

Be careful not to use too many search terms. Two or three per page is adequate. If you use more, copy may become hard to read and the ranking of each individual term will be reduced.

Do not stuff a page with search terms as you may be penalized. They should be incorporated naturally into your copy. Try reading your copy out loud. If it sounds like you are forcing the use of keywords it will require some rewriting.

Ultimately all you need to do is write good copy. If it is well written and engaging it will also attract links.

Encourage quality links

If you already run a website, you will have probably received an email from somebody wanting to ‘exchange links’. The email may have explained that Google ranks pages by the number of incoming links.

There is some truth in this claim. Google does partially rank pages based on the number of sites who link to you. However, this is not the whole story.

In reality nobody but Google knows how they rank sites. Links are a factor but it is not just the quantity that matter. Google states that:

The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating.

Google looks at a number of factors:

The subject matter of the site linking,
The copy that appears in the link,
The popularity of the site linking,
The reputation of the site linking.

It is rarely worthwhile responding to link requests, unless they come from a high profile website with appropriate content.

It is however worth seeking links from relevant sites. Which sites would you like to appear on irrespective of the benefits to your ranking? Which sites do your target audience frequent? Getting featured on such sites provide benefits of their own, independent of the benefit to ranking.

Will the above techniques get you to number one on Google? Possibly. It will certainly do your site no harm unlike many of the other techniques out there.

This was another lovely little extract from my book – the website owners manual.

148. Recession Cheer

Posted in Classic shows on January 13, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this weeks show: Surviving the recession with Andy Budd, providing effective browser support and free boagworld consultancy.

Download this show.

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Housekeeping

Unfortunately we have a bit of housekeeping to get out of the way before we begin:

Boagworld Christmas Appeal – I really want to thank everybody who gave so generously to this year’s Christmas Appeal. You guys have raised over £2000 for Sarah and Simon’s work in India and they are both over the moon. This money will allow them to provide better facilities for the growing number of children they work with, and doubles the amount raised last year.
Transcribers – After such an amazing effort for the Christmas appeal I feel bad asking you for more. However, we really need people to help transcribe the podcast interviews. We believe it is important to make our show as accessible as possible and we need your help to do that. If you feel you could help or have questions about what is involved email Ryan Taylor at [email protected].
.net Magazine offer – Fortunately my next piece of housekeeping allows me to give something back to you guys. I know you love the offers and competitions we run from time to time and this is a particularly good one. .net magazine have been kind enough to offer boagworld listeners some massive discounts on their annual subscription. In case you haven’t heard of .net magazine it is the UKs premier web design magazine and has some truly phenomenal content each month. If you are based in the UK, you can now get the magazine for 50% off. That is only £9.75 every 3 months. In the USA the discount is even bigger at 54%. That means an entire years subscription is only £64.99. In the EU you pay £55 for a year and the rest of the world pays £67. Those are excellent prices for a really good magazine. To take advantage of these offers visit the special boagworld offer page.
Free consultancy – My final piece of housekeeping is a little competition we would like to run. We are always giving away other people’s stuff but never give away anything ourselves. To rectify this problem we are giving away a day of our time to a lucky winner. Myself and Marcus will provide a free days consultancy where we will dispense advice on ways you can take your website forward. If you are interested in entering, email myself by the end of January. Include your name, company (if you have one), URL and why you want our help. We will pick the most deserving case and contact them at the end of the month.

News and events

Obviously a lot has happened in the world of web design while we have been on our Christmas break. To make matters worse, I must confess to not following the news while we were away. I have therefore gone for the first four stories that caught my eye. Apologies for the lack of professionalism!

A roundup of 24 ways

Way back in show 146 I mentioned the return of the 24 Ways website. As I explained on that show 24 ways is an advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December they publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring a little Christmas cheer.

As I said before 24 Ways is without a doubt one of my favourite web design sites. However, it does have one fatal flaw – it releases one article every day throughout December and I just can’t keep up. December is always mad with clients wanting stuff wrapped up before Christmas and people taking holiday felt right and center. I simply do not have time to read everything they publish.

Fortunately their archive of articles are still all waiting for me on my return and make perfect reading as I struggle to return to work.

This year has a truly bumper crop that I cannot wait to get into. The top titles that have grabbed my attention are:

Sitewide Search On A Shoe String by Christian Heilmann
The IE6 Equation by Jeremy Keith (Deciding when to support IE using Algebra!)
The First Tool You Reach For by Kevin Yank (A look at CSS tables)
Making Modular Layout Systems by Jason Santa Maria (Gaining greater flexibility in laying out content)
Shiny Happy Buttons by John Allsopp (Styling HTML buttons without resorting to images)
Recession Tips For Web Designers by Jeffrey Zeldman
Contract Killer by Andy Clarke (Writing the perfect contract)

Most of these I have yet to read but they promise to keep me entertained and informed until next year.

WCAG 2.0. is official

Probably the most significant story while we have been away is the release of WCAG 2.0. WCAG 2 has taken an age to be released but has also come a long way from its controversial beginnings. When I read some of the initial drafts it was horribly complex and anything but accessible. However the final release is extremely well thought through and communicates complex concepts and ideas in an easy to understand manor.

I think what impresses me most about WCAG 2 is the way the guidelines are conveyed. It has four layers of guidance which include:

Principles – These are broad principles of accessibility which need to be understood by everybody. If you had to explain web accessibility to senior management you would probably talk in terms of these top level principles. They include the need for a website to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Guidelines – There are a total of 12 guidelines organised into the 4 overarching principles. These are ideal for website owners or project managers that need to understand more detail on how to achieve the broader principles but do not need to understand the technical detail.
Success Criteria – For each guideline, testable success criteria are provided that allow designers and developers to know specifically how to conform to a guideline. These are the equivalent of the WCAG 1 guidelines and are still organised into Priority 1, 2 and 3.
Techniques – Finally, designers and developers can also access techniques that may help them to fulfil the success criteria but are not in themselves mandatory.

It is a very logical approach and makes it easy for anybody to understand how to make their site accessible. With these guidelines now official it is important that you begin to learn about these guidelines now, even if you just start with the 4 broad principles.

Issuu Smart Look

From WCAG 2 to something that encourages website owners to ignore accessibility! I often find myself torn over whether to share something on this show or not. Part of me wants to teach and encourage best practice, but another part is more pragmatic and accepts that sometimes we have to compromise. The next item is an example of the latter.

Website owners love to post PDF, Word files, and Powerpoint presentations on their site. It is quick, easy and gets their content online with minimal fuss. However, it creates accessibility problems requiring users to have appropriate software or plug-ins. It also makes it hard for search engines to index their content and increases demands on bandwidth.

If you are a website owner and you do this – stop it!

That said, if you have no choice or you are a web designer being forced at gunpoint by your client, then there maybe some hope.

Document publishing site Issuu has released a promising Javascript tool called Smart Look that allows users to view PDFs, Word files and Powerpoint presentations in much the same way you would view an image using one of those Javascript overly script.

The best thing about the service is that it involves very few changes to your site. All you have to do is copy and paste some Javascript into each page. Your downloads will then be miraculously presented in the new format.

A List Apart discusses content

Finally, I wanted to mention two articles posted on A List Apart over the Christmas break. Both article tackle the subject of Content Strategy. Without a doubt content is the most ignored aspect of our websites and yet is also the most important. It is great to see the profile of content increasing and seeing sites like A List Apart promoting it.

However, I do have doubts about the way content specialists are promoting their work. This particularly shines through in the two recent List Apart articles. First, there is an obvious sense of frustration that people do not value their profession. This is entirely understandable. However, sometimes it comes across as them ‘justifying their own existence’ rather than emphasising the value of content. Second, and probably more significantly, they seem to be fracturing their profession into more and more specialist areas. Where once there was a content editor there are now content strategists, copywriters, editorial specialists, content analysts and more.

Although this specialisation is not out of line with the way the entire web design sector is moving (after all once upon a time a ‘web designer’ built your entire site) I don’t believe the majority of clients are ready for this complexity.

Everything I read in these two posts was excellent, but both struck me as expensive and complex. I still struggle to convince clients of the value of investing in content and I don’t feel these articles do anything to aid that cause. Of course, that wasn’t really their aim. However, what I need is a simple and coherent argument for investing in people to write good copy before we start breaking the skillset down even further.

That said, these are great articles and certainly worth reading, if for no other reason than to understand the importance and complexity of our content.

Feature: Effective Browser Support

Browser support should focus on usability and accessibility rather than pixel perfect design. Sites should render in all browsers, but provide advanced features and aesthetics to those which can support it. Read More

Interview: Andy Budd on how to recession proof your business

Paul: So here we are a new year and our first interview of the year and who else would we get on the show except Andy Budd? Hello Andy.

Andy: Hi Paul. How are you doing?

Paul: I’m doing very well. It’s been so long since we’ve had you on the show. Probably for good reason.

Andy: Are you running out of guests or something?

Paul: Yeah, we’re just having to repeat now, endlessly. There’s only three people that can string a sentence together, that’s the problem, of which I am not one of them.

Andy: Aww, you do yourself a disservice.

Paul: So we thought we’d pick a nice cheery subject. Me and Andy had a little chat earlier about what subject we would talk about today and we thought, "New year, new opportunities, exciting times, let’s talk about the recession and the economic downturn." So here we are. Everybody’s been going on so much at the moment that it’s all doom and gloom and I have to say, I don’t know about you, but you know I’m seeing with regularity on twitter people saying, "I’ve just been made redundant," and it’s a bit of a scary time, isn’t it really?

Andy: Um yeah I think it is. I think a lot of people at really good companies, really good people at Yahoo! and whatever have been made redundant in the last few weeks. Last.fm have been having redundancies as well and it’s like, "Oh wow, really smart people are being made redundant," so it is a bit of a worry for everybody I think.

Paul: The trouble is, everybody’s a bit cagey, aren’t they about their own situation and what’s going on so I thought, "Let’s talk a little bit, try and clear up some of the mystery around it," and I thought, "Let’s start by talking a little bit about our own experiences," you run a small agency, I run a small agency. I mean from our personal point of view at Headscape we have seen a little bit of a downturn. Not dramatic. You know I keep kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop and everything to dry up but certainly we’ve seen maybe a slight reduction in the value, the budget that people have and they seem to be taking longer to make a decision and thinking more carefully about what they’re doing. Is that similar to what you’re experiencing with Clearleft or is everything lovely with you guys?

Andy: No, I think that’s probably very similar here. I mean I know sort of before Christmas we really hadn’t experienced much of an effect at all, in fact kind of October, November, December, particularly October – November, was the busiest time we’ve ever had as a company. We were kind of really really rushed off our feet, but things have slowed down now. I guess the difficult question though is, "What have they slowed down?" I think in part it’s because of the recession, but partly it’s because people have been on holiday over Christmas and stuff so I think the real what we just need to see is what’s gonna happen over the next few months. Christmas is one big milestone because obviously a lot of companies their financial years end on the calendar year and they will start to get new budgets at the start of the new year. So what normally happens is January is usually quite quiet anyway and it starts to pick up toward the end of January when people have now got their budgets and they’re setting their schedules and their priorities for the coming year. Another kind of key point is March. You know March – April when a lot of other companies’ financial years kick in. So I think we need to kind of give it a couple of months, give it until March and then we’ll have a much better idea about the effect it’s had on clients’ budgets. But yeah, I would agree. I think people are just more cautious. I think all of this discussion about doom and gloom, frankly a lot of the reason why we are in the situation we are at the moment is because of media. The more people worry about this stuff, the more cautious people are going to be and it becomes a bit of a cyclic effect. But yeah, I’d say the same. I’d say clients are being a bit more cautious. We haven’t had too many issues with companies. We had one Icelandic bank that pulled out of a project in November which was quite amusing. They contacted us like a week before Iceland, kind of, you know, blew up. And we were like, "Yeah, we could have seen that coming," but apart from that it’s OK. Slackened off but it’s seeming to be OK at the moment.

Paul: So what about you? You’re talk about clients being cautious. What about you at Clearleft? Are you guys being a bit more cautious in what you’re doing? You know, your outgoings and that kind of thing?

Andy: I think we’ve always been reasonably cautious and I think that hopefully will set us in good stead for the next six to nine months. One of the things that we were really really conscious is running a good stable business and we’ve seen a lot of scare stories from the last .com boom with companies growing really really rapidly. They’d basically expand as much and as fast as they possibly could to fulfill the demand. That’s really great in the good times when people are throwing money and projects at you, but as soon as the projects dry up you’ve suddenly got a lot of mouths to feed, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true of Yahoo! but I think it’s probably true of some of the startups like Last.fm. You know, Last.fm have grown hugely over the course of the ten or twelve or eighteen months, and then all of a sudden when people start reigning in their budgets there’s not the work out there and they have to make people redundant. I think we’ve always tried to grow at a steady rate, you know we’ve been through boom times where we’ve been literally turning work down and we could have hired another couple of developers, couple of designers easily, but we chose not to because we didn’t want to get into that situation of the work drying up and not having any business. So yeah, we’ve been fairly careful how we’ve grown.

Paul: Do you think there’s, I mean, the kind of other side of the coin is to take the approach that perhaps Carsonified have done where they’ve actually been proactive in cutting their overheads by admittedly laying off staff in preparation for what is to come. I mean, you know I don’t kind of want to get personal about the guys at Carsonified but that’s certainly an approach that someone like Jason Calacanis would recommend. That actually before things get too bad you should shrink your business so that you’ve got you know, "a long runway," as he puts it, of money behind you over the long period. Is that and approach that you would consider? Well obviously you’re not going turn around and say, "We’re going to lay off all our staff now," but do you know what I mean?

Andy: Yeah, absolutely understand the question. The answer to that is, "Absolutely not," but it’s actually a two-part question. Um, you should, if you’re running your business well, you should ideally have a certain amount of money in the bank to cover operating costs. Now again, one of the things we were very clear of when we set up Clearleft is we would always have, would always aim to have six months of operating money in the bank. Now it’s not always like that. Sometimes it’s four months, sometimes it’s five or six. But that’s kind of what we try and aim to do. So before taking any money out of the company, before buying a nice car or giving ourselves a bonus we try and make sure that there’s enough money in the company that should we lose a couple of clients or should anything bad happen we can carry on paying people’s wages. I think in this industry, in the web design industry it’s all about people. We can’t build good products, you can’t build good services without having good people. So it’s the people that make the companies, it’s the people that make the industries, and I think as the boss, I think as an employee you have to put the good of your company and the good of your staff ahead of your own personal gain. So I think there are two ways of running a company. I think some people run a company almost like a general that commands their troops from the back of the battle front where they send all these people out ahead of them and they get picked off one by one until eventually you’re the only person left. I actually think as somebody running a company you have to take charge yourself and I would much prefer to lose, I would definitely cut my lifestyle and cut my wages before I would let anybody go in the company because you start slashing staff now and then when times are good you have a hiring problem or you get known as a company that will just sacrifice their staff. And I’m not speaking about any particular companies specifically but I think it’s important to realize that the wealth of your company is in the people that work for you. So yeah, I would always consider that as a last option, not a first option. Might not be good accounting sense. I’m sure if you’re just looking at sort of the figures, it might not be good from an accounting sense but people come and work with you and they stick with you through the good times and the bad and I think you’ve got to afford them every opportunity so that’s kind of my philosophy.

Paul: I think to some degree it could be good from an accounting sense as well. I mean it’s very easy to underestimate the cost of rehiring staff. By the time you take into account finding the people in the first place, that often involves going to the dreaded recruitment agency and the horrible costs and pain of that, you know if you don’t have a big network of people you can draw on. But also the cost in time of interviewing and all of that kind of stuff can really mount up so I guess to some degree it depends on how long this goes on, if it goes on at all. I mean we’re still waiting for something to happen. I can understand the whole philosophy about having a runway if you’re a startup company without regular revenue that’s dependant on venture capital or whatever but if your business is like an agency or if you’re a freelancer or something like that then hopefully you’re going to continue to have revenue coming in from work.

Andy: Well I think if you’re running your business responsibly you need to make sure that there’s always a runway. There’s some proverb or fable about making hay while the sun shines or whatever. You need to try to put a bit of a war chest, for want of a better word, in the bank or you’re getting good money because you know times, you know winter is coming and you need to kind of buckle down, but some people just go and as soon as they’ve got money they go and spend it on nice cars, nice apartment, holidays or whatever and as soon as things start to get tough then you’re in difficulty. But yet like I said I think you should always have a bit of money in the bank. You shouldn’t expand too quickly and I think if you end up hiring a large number of staff and then letting them go sort of shortly afterward it’s probably an indication of you probably shouldn’t have hired that many people so quickly in the first instance so it’s difficult. I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way of doing this. Everyone’s got their own approach.

Paul: I mean of course a lot of the people listening to this show aren’t going to be running their own businesses anyway so that kind of comes on to another question about if you’re working somewhere at the moment what should you do? Are you better off just tucking your head down and hoping that things go well in the company you’re working for or should you look at maybe now is the time to start your own business. I mean there was an interesting article by Drew, isn’t there, about you know the myth of stability and that actually you’re almost more stable being in control of your own destiny as a freelancer cause at least you know what’s happening with your business in preference to being employed. So, what advice would you give for people perhaps worried about their job at the moment?

Andy: That’s a difficult thing. There’s always been this myth that if you go and work for a big company there’s stability but I think recent events have shown that’s not true. If you’re running your own company you obviously have a much better understanding of what’s going on and you’re much more able to control the near future. Obviously you can’t plan too far ahead because most web design companies only book up projects three to six months in advance. So you can only really plan financially up to a certain stage but I think it’s good running your own company to a certain extent because you have a bit of a master in your own domain. You know what’s going on. On the other hand there is a certain level of security of working with a company, at least in the UK, a large company particularly because if you do get made redundant you get a redundancy package. If you’re a good productive member of the community or productive member of the company there’s a good chance they’ll try to rehire you in a different role. So I don’t think there’s any certainties there.

Paul: Do you think it would be a ridiculously stupid time to go freelance?

Andy: I think it’s a difficult time to go freelance. I think the problem at the moment is that there’s a lot of people freelancing in the industry and there’s a lot of people who are just not very good. I hate to say that but I think there’s a lot of people who are getting by at the moment on a subsistent wage who are a bit too much of a jack of all trades and a master of none and are kind of operating in a slightly more bottom end of the market. So I think that one of the first things that’s going to happen with the economic shift is the bottom end of the market is going to get even tighter and you’re going to be finding it really difficult if you do a little bit of PHP and a little bit of HTML, a little bit of design, a little bit of this, and a little bit of CMS stuff. It’s going to be a lot more competitive. However, if you’re really good at one thing, if you’re a really awesome designer, if you’re a really awesome coder, if you’re a really great Rails developer, if you’re a great User Experience person, if you’ve got a real skill that you’re well known for there is always going to be a market for good people. There’ll be more people on the market. There’s people being made redundant from Yahoo! and other companies who are really really good at what they do so it’s gonna get more competitive so I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s a good opportunity for people to necessarily go freelance unless they’re really really talented and have a good existing stream of revenue and they know a lot of people but I think there’s opportunities in other areas in terms of setting up your own projects and doing startup and doing work outside the office. I think there’s interesting opportunities there.

Paul: So if there are people listening to this show that are going, "Crap! He’s just described me. I’m a freelancer that works on that kind of bottom end of the market." What should these guys be doing? How can they go about improving their position?

Andy: I think again while the industry was going at a rate of not to new, last year there was so much demand for people, companies, clients would hire anybody no matter what your skills were. I think now we’re in a situation where to really stand out you’ve got to be good at what you do. You’ve got to be highly skilled, and I think people need to see training as an investment. I think we’re really bad as an industry of investing in ourselves of investing in our own personal development. We’re all very happy to go spend £500 on an iPhone or £1000 on a new Mac but spending 500 quid on a training course, people go, "Well that’s just a waste of money," but I don’t think it is. I think you need to invest in your personal development and your professional development so I would say figure out what it is you’re really good at, figure out what it is you enjoy and then see if there are training courses go on or conferences you can attend that can help teach you those skills.

Paul: You missed a perfect opportunity there to pimp UX London, didn’t you there?

Andy: I guess so, yeah.

Paul: You’re just too nice. Tell us a bit about UX London, Andy.

Andy: A lot of what we do again, you know me and you know what the company’s like. A lot of what we do isn’t necessarily about our gain as individuals just purely from a financial point of view. We run conferences like dConstruct because we want everybody in industry to benefit. We want people to get better at what they do, to produce better websites and I think by doing that everyone benefits. And again UX London the whole purpose of UX London, it’s a conference we’re organizing in London in June it’s a very targeted conference. It’s much smaller numbers than dConstruct. It’s 160 people and it’s a real education-based event, to teach people how to be really good User Experience designers, User Experience developers, information architects and usability people. So we’ve got some of the best speakers in the industry coming over. We’ve got Don Norman who’s like the Godfather of User Experience, we’ve got Dan Saffer, we’ve got Peter Merholz, Jared Spool, Jeff Veen, we’ve really had an opportunity here to play fantasy league conference and put together the kind of event that we wish that we could have gone to five years ago. Particularly User Experience is a growing field and I think within the recession or within the looming economic crisis, companies are going to be spending less and less or are going to be able to spend less and less on acquiring new customers and where they’re going to need to spend their money is satisfying existing customers and making sure that the customers that they’ve got don’t go to other brands, other companies and are much better at converting and User Experience is one of the ways we can do this. So I definitely think if you’re interested in getting into the User Experience realm going to something like UX London would be a great opportunity. It’s essentially three days of workshops and practical hands-on stuff. I mean it’s not just a standard talking head kind of conference it really is getting in there and learning new skills. Not just UX London, there’s all kinds of conferences and events out there, there’s all kinds of training courses. There’s development training courses, there’s usability training courses, there’s designing courses, but pick something you’re really passionate about and get really really good at it and if you get really good at it people will find you. There is still a massive demand for Rails developers, there is still a massive demand for good visual designers and there’s still a massive demand for really good UX people and I think those three practices are going to get more and more important so yeah that’s what I’d say.

Paul: You said something there about if you get really good at something people will find you. Do you think that that’s actually going to remain true or are we going to have become more active at going out there and finding work? I mean to some extent people like you and me are we not a little bit spoiled because we’ve already built up this reputation, people are aware of us, because in my case because of the podcast, because of your book and the various things that you do. Is that all that you do to win business? Write a book or put on a podcast? There’s got to be more to it than that.

Andy: It doesn’t hurt, I can kind of say that but that’s the situation we’re in now obviously but the reason that we were able to do this, the reason that I was able to write a book and you were able to do the podcast was because five, six, seven years ago we just sat around writing blog posts about what we were passionate about, what we were interested in and the Internet has an amazing capacity for putting like-minded people in touch, whether it’s through your blog, whether it’s through your twitter stream, whether it’s through meeting people at conferences. I mean again, going to a conference is a great opportunity to network and meet people and I think there’s a community in the Web and you need to be a part of it. If you’re not part of it, if you’re just sitting on the fringes then you’re going find it a lot more difficult to pick up work, but if you throw yourself into this community and actively participate it’s not that difficult, if you’ve got a skill, if you’ve got a talent it’s not that difficult to make people aware of it. You do have to do a bit of promotion though, you do have to write some articles or contact a magazine and say, "Hey do you mind if I write something for your magazine?" Or go around to some of your favorite bloggers and leave messages on their blogs and write to them and say, "Hey look, I’m doing this, that and the other." I’m probably going to get inundated with responses now but we’re always on the lookout for really good people. Despite the number of people working in the industry we find it really difficult finding good visual designers we find it really difficult finding good Information Architects and we find it really difficult getting good front end coders. We see a lot of average people. There’s a scary number of really bad people out there, but finding good people is difficult and we’re not just falling over people in the street. I’m spending a lot of my time actively asking around and asking friends and contacts and doing searches on Google for people so if you make yourself available and you go out of your way to put yourself in that situation it can only be of benefit. I was talking to you before we started the podcast about something we’re doing at Clearleft is that we run an internship program and part of the purpose of this internship program is to get people that haven’t had that commercial experience, that maybe have just left University after doing a graduate degree or maybe are in the middle of a Master’s Degree or maybe are just transitioning to a different career area and maybe they were starting off doing more design and they want to get more codey or they were a coder and they want to do more information architecture and actually having the opportunity to go and work for a company for ten weeks is an amazing training opportunity, sorry if I sound like I’m promoting myself a bit too much but we had a really great guy come in over the Summer a guy called Amild who was from Sweden and he was part way through a University course and in the Summer he came over and he worked for us for ten weeks and he got to work on real-life projects he got to sit down and program with Natalie and argue semantics with Jeremy and be involved in every single part of the process and doing that, you get so much knowledge and training out of going and working hands on like ourselves or yourselves, much more so than you’d probably get doing little side projects over the course of a couple of years I mean I know we’ve had a couple of interns now and the amount of stuff that they know when they leave working with us is two or three times the amount they knew when they came in and actually ironically people come to Clearleft quite often a little bit cocky because they’ve heard about us and they know we’re good at CSS and Web Standards and they come in thinking, "Yeah, I do this," but when they sit down with someone like Natalie and she explains all this stuff their eyes and their universe ends up opening and it’s like, "Oh my God I didn’t know this stuff existed. I didn’t know people would go to so much effort to craft a nice, well designed, well put together website." So yeah we’re running an internship for Spring so if anyone listening out there wants to come work down in Brighton in the Clearleft offices for ten weeks and is really interested in good front end code and HTML and CSS then please go to clearleft.com/jobs and there’s some details of the internship there. We’ll be running it again during the Summer maybe May, June July time. At the moment we’re looking for a front end developer to be an intern. The last intern, the last before one intern we had was more of a User Experience person, we might be looking for design intern next we might be looking for a bit more of a generalist so I can’t really tell you what we’ll be looking for in the Summer, but at the moment yeah we’re looking for a front end developer to come and help us out.

Paul: I think as well, if I was in that position to have the guts to just approach random companies and I get people contact me regularly asking whether we do internships which we occasionally do and a lot of time I’m having to say no to people, I don’t mind them writing. Having the guts to approach a company to say, "I really like what you do, I’d love to work with you." I think that’s great. You’ve just got to go for it and put yourself out there whenever possible.

Andy: Absolutely. If you’re trying to get work, send your CVs around, drop people emails saying "Hey, I’m a freelancer. I’m doing this. I’m doing that, " and stay in touch. It’s really difficult for you as a business owner to keep in your head of who’s available, you don’t have a clue who’s available when and the people we end up working with, the freelancers we end up working with, you work with them once and you probably never let them go again because they’re usually really good. They’re usually awesome and once they start working with us, we stick by people. So it’s worth once you send your CV to someone, drop them a line every couple of months, every time you’ve updated a website or you’ve done something you think is particularly interesting and just keep on the radar and the more you keep doing that, the more you promote yourself the better it will be.

Paul: Of course that works very well if you’re a freelancer, this whole thing of getting involved in the community and building relationships and all of that. It’s great if you’re a freelancer where you’re working for someone like Clearleft or Headscape in that kind of relationship but what about people that are working directly for clients who aren’t part of the Web Design Community? They stand outside of that, have you got any advice for engaging with them, how to find out about what jobs are out there, how to get on those tendering lists and that kind of stuff?

Andy: Well you don’t need to be getting on tendering list I’d say because most organizations that have tendering lists have got a lot of hoops that you need to jump though, it’s very time consuming, there’s usually financial constraints about how big you are as a company, how many staff you’ve got, all that kind of malarkey which I’m sure you’re very familiar with. I think it’s really difficult as a freelancer. I think there’s a glass ceiling in the kind of scale and size of work you do. I think it’s tough. I think you end up doing smaller projects but lots of them, usually for not a huge amount of value and so it’s really difficult when somebody big comes along and says, "Show me the last big project you did," and it’s, "We haven’t really done any because I’m a freelancer and I’m working directly with clients," so the way you can get experience and exposure of working with larger clients is to go and be a freelancer with agencies and actually if you’re a freelancer it makes much more sense to try and approach two or three decent agencies that continuously pass you work than it is to constantly try and get small £1000, £2000 projects. Then also if you’re doing that you’ve got a lot of marketing to do, all of the accounting, the bill chasing, it’s a lot harder and like you say I think it’s gonna get a lot tougher at that end of the market so yeah I think being a freelancer you’re probably best off targeting agencies if you want a more stable income.

Paul: Here’s a tough question and I certainly don’t know the answer to this so I forgive you if you don’t either I mean we’re seeing people being made redundant at the moment, we’re also seeing people that have gone through years of University training going, "I’m gonna become a Web Designer," and they’re stepping out into probably the worst economic situation since the .com bust for web design. What are these guys supposed to do? How are they going to go about finding a job? Does this just come back to the networking issue again?

Andy: I think we’re in a really interesting position. We’re in a really tricky position for a lot of recent graduates. When me and you started doing websites, or when I started doing websites the designs I was producing were rubbish. It really was terrible. The markup was terrible, the design was terrible, but luckily every other website out there was also equally bad so we weren’t worse or better than anyone else we were just meh. As we’ve matured and as the web’s matured we’ve got better at what we do, we got better at the stuff we produce. I went to a local agency in Brighton that kind of supports the local digital markets had a portfolio clinic last year where they had people fresh out of University and the quality of the designs they were producing was about the same level of the quality of design I was producing when I came into the market, but the problem is the bar has now been set so much higher so it’s really really tough. If you go into a three year degree where you spend one semester learning Dreamweaver, one semester learning Flash, coming out built a really lovely Flash animation of a monkey riding a bike and thinking, "OK, I’m gonna get loads of work with my great Flash animation skills," you’re gonna be coming into quite a harsh marketplace. What you need to do is you need to train yourself. You need to up skill. You need to do as much work as possible. You need to get your skills up. You need to get your design up. You need to specialize and to be really good at one thing. Be really good at design. Be really good at HTML and then you’ve got a chance of getting a foot in the door. Internships are good, training are good, but you need to have innate skill and actually in a kind of a weird perverse way I think the shake out is possibly good for the industry because like the last industry shake out is a lot of people who probably shouldn’t have been working in this industry, who didn’t have the passion ended up losing their jobs and going on and working in another industry, but people that stuck with it are the people who are good at it and passionate about it, stayed with it and survived through it and so I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. I think there’s a problem with education that is trying to convince kids that they can go through a three year Bachelor’s Degree and come out and get a job. I think the industries that are going to be hardest hit in this recession are obviously financial industries are kind of stuck, or kind of enterprise level applications that any people working at enterprise apps are going to find it tough. I think people that are working in particular vertical markets, if you’re just a company that just solely focuses on doing startup business, the startup funding is drying up. It’s not gone completely and there’s a big argument to say that actually in times of economic recession that’s the time you want to invest in innovation, you want to invest in startups because once you come out of that recession you’ve got a product that’s ready to go that has been developed for a lot less money because resources are much more prevalent. You can hire developers much cheaper now and if you can start building your ideas up now very very cheaply, come two years time you’ll be two years ahead of the competition and if you’ve got a really really good idea you’ll come out of the market ahead. But I think at the moment if you’re only focusing on developing sites as startups you’re going to have a problem, you need to have a diversified portfolio of clients. I think the other thing is if you’re focusing on getting the majority of your income from just one or two big companies and that is quite common particularly in the entertainment industry. I mean are these Flash games developers or Flash entertainment sites developers that will just work with one or two large media brands. If suddenly they start pulling back on their funding you lose one client that is worth thirty percent or forty percent of your revenue you’re gonna be stuck so I think as a freelancer coming out of the industry it would make sense to focus on where there is growth in the market where the market’s stable. I don’t think it’s in producing Flash games necessarily and I don’t think it is producing multi million dollar blue chip corporate websites I think it is in creating websites that show real return on investment and that is in usability and accessibility, that’s web standards that’s understanding the psychology of human behavior. It’s all those kind of things we’ve been talking about for the last couple of years are becoming even more important.

Paul: You said an interesting thing point though. You talked about innovation and I think that’s quite a good place to end though all of this situation is going to effect innovation and kind of the evolution of the Web, do you think these kinds of slow downs will affect the growth of the Web?

Andy: It’s obviously going to affect the growth of the web because by the very name of recession it means growth of the economy isn’t growing it’s receding so I don’t think it’s going to be a time of growing much I think companies, large companies particularly are going to be taking stock and focusing on what they do well, their core assets. However I think what happens is it provides space for smaller companies to grow so you’ve now got these big companies competing for the same market as you so you can come up with new innovative ideas. You can come into the market much quicker. You can do it much cheaper. You are much more able to spot gaps in the market or gaps in the experience curve you know you’ve got a lot of companies doing this. You’ve got people like TripIt who have seen that there’s a gap between buying tickets and managing your calendar so identifying a gap in the market, "Because the airlines aren’t helping manage your trip, we’ll help you manage it for you," I mean dot was doing exactly the same thing so I think if you’re smart, if you’re clever and good at what you can do and you can see opportunities, there will always be opportunities, big companies going out of business, people cutting back on their R&D, people cutting back on their spending gives you an opportunity because it means less competition in the marketplace, there’s more available talent, there’s more available attention which is a big thing. You can grab people’s attention doing something different. There’s opportunities for making people money, in times of recession people are going to want to save money so if you can come up with an app that helps people save money, helps them, obvious examples are big slew of apps at the moment revolving around either managing your finances or getting better deals on car insurance all this kind of stuff, anything that can actually make people better off or more efficient. Productivity apps I think are gonna thrive.

Paul: Thank you Andy! That was both good and depressing at the same time!

Andy: Oh thank you. I’m glad talking to me you find depressing. Cheers!

Paul: Actually it isn’t depressing. I’m very upbeat about the coming year. I feel that, "OK, we are in an economic slowdown but it does provide lots of opportunities." Even being made redundant has its upside. As somebody that was made redundant and then went in to set up Headscape I really know and understand that these things can be turned to good so I think yeah, I’m positive about the coming year although hopefully I won’t be made redundant from my own company because that would be embarrassing. So there we go. Thank you very much Andy! We’ll get you back on the show soon and Happy New Year!

Andy: Happy New Year to you too and to all the Boagworld listeners out there!

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

147. Ho Ho Ho

Posted in Classic shows on December 13, 2008 by Paul Boag

This week on Boagworld: IT’S CHRISTMAS!

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This week’s Boagworld is our live Christmas special recorded via ustream.tv. It is our last show before the Christmas break. We return on Wednesday 14th January 2009!

News and events

Kevin Rose’s Christmas Shopping list

Later in the show we are going to share your top geek gifts. However, before we do that I thought we would start with Kevin Roses’ list to Santa.

Kevin has posted his top 10 gifts for geeks and it makes interesting reading. His list includes:

Amazon MP3 Gift Certificates – Notice this is not iTunes
A USB Drive that can go through the wash and survive to tell the tale
A clever little box that can stream Netflix films to your TV
A kit for getting you into building your own electronics
A HD flip camera
Some awesome luggage that is perfect for conferences
An insane all in one printer with touch screen
A Drobo
A micro tool with 19 different functions
A Casio slow motion camera

I whole heartedly support the inclusion of the Drobo in this list and I love the look of the luggage. However, personally I would prefer iTunes vouchers because then I can waste even more money buying Apps for my iPhone.

20 signs you don’t want that web design project

Admittedly this next post is not very festive but it brought a smile to my lips and isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

Zeldman goes all ‘ba humbug’ this week when he shares 20 signs that you do not want that web design project. There are some real gems in here. My favourites include:

A previously uninvolved marketing guy starts telling you, your client, and your client’s boss that the minimalist look “doesn’t knock me out.” A discussion of what the site’s 18-year-old users want, backed by research, does not dent the determination of the 52-year-old marketing guy to demand a rethink of the approved design to be more appealing to his aesthetic sensibility.

At meeting to which you have traveled at your own expense, client informs you that he doesn’t have a budget per se, but is open to “trading services.”

Client begins first meeting by making a big show of telling you that you are the expert. You are in charge, he says: he will defer to you in all things, because you understand the web and he does not. (Trust your uncle Jeffrey: this man will micromanage every hair on the project’s head.)

Very funny stuff and sadly, depressingly true. Nice to know even the mighty Zeldman has to deal with this kind of thing!

2008 on the Web: The 20 Key Events

Our final story for this Christmas show comes from Mashable. They share with us the 20 key events that have shaped the web in 2008.

You get a lot of these retrospectives at the end of the year but this is actually a very good list.

According to Mashable some of the key events of 2008 include:

The presidential election being fought online
The growth of data portability
The Apple apps store
Citizen Journalism
The Facebook redesign
The economic downturn
Streaming TV
Twitter
Microsoft and Yahoo!
Justin.tv suicide
Rick Rolling

The complete list and more detailed analysis can be found on Mashable.

It makes interesting reading if only to reinforce how fast things move online. In one year so much has happened. It makes you wonder what 2009 has in store. No doubt we will have a plethora of predications in January.

Geek Gifts this Christmas

On last years Christmas show we shared our ideas for the perfect geek Christmas gift. This year we thought it might be more fun for the Boagworld community to share their ideas.

You guys have submitted and voted on some great suggestions and here is the top 10:

A new Macbook Pro
Adobe CS4 Design Premium
iPhone 3G
Marcus to play his guitar
A Nintendo Wii
A moleskin notebook and Lamy 2000 pen
Apple TV
Nikon D300 DSLR
New iMac
USB slippers

I was a bit gutted to see that ‘A decent joke from Marcus’ didn’t quite make it into the top 10 list. However, I thought it deserved a mention anyway :)

Other entries worth a mention include a netbook, A job and the Website Owners Manual!

Boagworld Christmas Appeal

Last year I decided at the last minute to raise some money for a charity on the Christmas show. The Charity we chose to raise money for was called the Bethesda Project. It is a school and children’s home in rural India. The children who attend the school or live in the home come from very deprived backgrounds and the project provides them with a unique opportunity to better their lives.

The Boagworld community last year raised over £1000 to help this project and our money was able to buy an entire new building for the school. It was an incredible achievement and one that you should all be proud of.

However, over the last two years the project has doubled in size and they continue to need our help. With that in mind we are providing you the chance to give again.

I know you guys are constantly bombarded with appeals for money from various faceless charities. Its hard when you feel no connection to the people involved. I am lucky because I grew up with Sarah who helps run the project. I know her and her husband. I know the amazing sacrifice they have made to help these kids.

I therefore thought it might help if I shared a short video interview I did with them last Sunday while at church. Apologises for the poor quality but this was a spur of the moment thing and recorded on my little digital camera.

Occasionally I get emails from people asking who my ‘web design heroes are’. It always strikes me as a bizarre question. The web is an amazing place and I am honoured to be involved in developing something that is the pinnacle of human achievement and knowledge. However, in my opinion it does not generate heroes.

My heroes are people like Sarah and Simon. These people are intelligent and talented. They could have earned a fortune in the commercial sector. Instead they have devoted their lives to serving others. That is to be admired and respected. In my opinion that should be supported.

That said, I know times are tough and people haven’t got a lot of spare cash. SO, I have decided to bribe you. If you give something to the Boagworld appeal no matter how big or small we will give you the chance to win a GetSignOff T-Shirt. As an added bonus I will get Marcus to sign it (he used to be a popstar don’t you know!) and I may even sign it myself.

So can I ask everybody to give something even if its just a few dollars. The majority of last years £1000 was made up to tiny individual gifts. Simply go to http://justgiving.com/boagworld/

Question time

The remainder of the show was dedicated to answering questions either sent in by listeners or asked directly in the chat room. Questions included:

Paul asks – What would be you’re ultimate (non-electrical/non-computer related) Christmas present and why?

Doug asks – what’s been your favorite site redesign, either that you have done or you’ve seen done on the internet in the last year or so?

Paul asks – For someone interested in getting into the Web Design industry, what would be the 1 piece of advice you give them?

Matthew asks – What would you be doing, career wise, if the web did not exist?

Jamie asks – How much do you think technical competency counts for or against a good sales team.

Matthew asks – What is your innate age? Have you alway been a 42 year old in spirit? Or a 12 year old?

Paul asks – What Christmas present did you really want that you never got as a kid?

146. Obsessive

Posted in Classic shows on December 3, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show, Paul interviews Nicholas Felton about designing with data, we celebrate the return of 24Ways, and explain how community can keep users coming back for more.

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Housekeeping

Two pieces of housekeeping before we begin:

First, Jaysone wrote in asking about the chat room we mention on the show. He wanted to know what it was and whether anybody could join. The chat room is associated with the shows we occasionally stream live. You can watch these shows at http://boagworld.com/live and interact with us as we record via the chat room. Anyone is welcome although you will probably need to follow me on Twitter to see when the shows are being recorded.
Talking of streaming shows, the next live show will be our Christmas special on the 8th December at 2.30PM UK time. The show will be an open question and answer time so either send in your questions in advance or come along and join us in the chatroom. We will also be doing a feature on this years top Christmas gifts for geeks. You can vote for your suggestions over at UserVoice.

News and events

24 Ways is back

This week sees the return of 24 Ways. 24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December they publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring a little Christmas cheer.

I am not sure whether it is the quality of the posts or that 24 Ways appears just before Christmas, but I always get excited when they return.

This year it returns with a somewhat controversial new look (personally I think it is great they are experimenting) and a whole new set of posts. They still offer a complete archive of previous posts so be sure to look through that, as well as subscribe to their RSS feed.

There is something very special about 24 Ways. I think part of the reason I like it so much is because the writers are given a free hand. They can write on whatever they want and so inevitably write about their passions. This leads to a better quality of post.

As if that glowing recommendation is not enough, I should also point out that our very own Marcus Lillington has a post coming soon. Surely that will be enough to encourage you to subscribe!

iPhone designers kit

In the past I have been slightly rude to the guys over at Smashing Magazine about their endless lists of other people’s creativity (we love them really). However, this week they have released something that is genuinely useful.

The iPhone Starter Kit, is a set of button elements and various iPhone interface options, bundled in a Photoshop PSD. The pack is ideal for mobile developers and front-end designers who need a professional way to show mock-ups or try out ideas.

You can use the set for free and without restriction. This includes both private and commercial projects. The only thing they ask is that you do not resell it.

Admittedly you may not be doing work on the iPhone right now. However, I suspect it will only be a matter of time before we will all be working on a mobile application of some description.

The mobile sector is incredibly exciting at the moment and this is another useful little weapon in our arsenal.

5 Ways to Get Usability Testing on the Cheap

Our next post is from the sitepoint blog and is entitled ‘5 Ways to Get Usability Testing on the Cheap‘.

Usability testing is a good idea for any new web site. Increasing the usability of your web site is good because it will increase visitor satisfaction, which in turn increases sales and user loyalty. On the business savings side, usability testing can also save you money in development, maintenance, and support costs.

The problem is website owners often perceive it as expensive, failing to grasp the high return on investment. However, it doesn’t need to be and any project can incorporate some user testing, no matter what the budget.

The sitepoint post makes 5 suggestions of how you can keep the cost down…

Use a service like usertesting.com, which provides a video of users interacting with your site.
Get a written user response to your site from Feedback Army for as little as $7.
Use a DIY user testing tool like Silverback for the mac or Morae for Windows.
Ask friends and family to take a look at the site. Alternatively ask for some feedback on the boagworld forum.
Use services like Crazy Egg or Click Density to get heatmaps showing how users interact with your site.

Whatever approach you choose, always make sure you have at least some user testing in every project.

Site search options

One of the things I hate most about the Boagworld website is its search facility. The built in search mechanism that comes with my blogging software sucks! This is particularly embarrassing as I am always banging on to clients about how important search is. After all half your users will turn to the search box before even considering browsing the site. Search has to be right.

I have half heartedly looked around for something that would do the job. I remember looking at Atomz a while back and also there is the obvious Google integration route, but nothing inspired me.

This week however another post from Sitepoint caught my eye. It was talking about the new site search from Yahoo! Recently adopted by Techcrunch it has some fairly impressive features…

Real-time indexing of content – When new blog posts or comments are added to the site, the search index updates almost immediately.
Customised ranking – You can fine tune the algorithm to fit your audience and user experience.
Structured search – You can build your own refinement mechanisms. For example I could allow users to filter posts by category, number of comments, tag or any other criteria I set.
Blending Web with site results – Users can search both site and web content and see the results blended together in a single display.

If your site search sucks as much as mine, you might want to check this out.

Interview: Nicholas Felton on ‘Designing Data’

Paul: So joining me to day is Nicholas Felton. Good to have you on the show Nicholas!

Nicholas: Thanks so much Paul, it’s a pleasure being here.

Paul: It’s the first time that I’ve really spoken to you. I only first saw you or heard about your work at Future of Web Design and I have to say you completely blew me away with a presentation that was very different from the majority of stuff that was being talked about because it wasn’t really fundamentally about Web design, I guess in a way.

Nicholas: No, I think in a way it’s about a weird hobby that’s kind of developed into a tiny Web phenomenon.

Paul: Well, from what I can gather it’s a fairly big Web phenomenon according to Keir from Carsonified who was raving about you afterwards. For those people that haven’t come across you before, tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you? What is it that you do? Where is it you work? A bit of background basically.

Nicholas: Sure, sure. Well again, my name is Nicholas Felton. I’m a graphic designer, predominantly print but I definitely dabble in the web and am there more and more frequently. I went to art school, I studied graphic design about ten years ago here in America at the Rhode Island School of Design and I’ve worked in graphic design firms and advertising doing identity and on the side I’ve started my personal website called Feltron where I’ve grown these annual reports that have become something that I’m sort of getting well known for.

Paul: So let’s talk about these annual reports, because this is what you were talking about at Future of Web Design. There’s a lot of people that might be listening to this thinking “Well, hang on a minute he’s just said that he’s primarily a print designer, this is a web design podcast. Why have we got him on the show?” Well just to kind of deal with that to start with, I mean obviously web design should be a lot broader, we should be looking outside of the web for inspiration and I’ve found these Felton Annual Reports incredibly inspiring. For those that don’t know, tell us a little bit about what they are.

Nicholas: Alright. Well, I really latched onto this name for them because I think it communicates pretty quickly what it’s about. Everyone understands what an annual report is. It’s the summation of a year. I’ve just attached my name, more precisely my sort of Web name, which is Feltron. My last name is Felton. But these started in 2004. I was just trying to get a grip on the year and wrap it up and I looked around at the websites I was looking at and the books I enjoyed and I put that all on my site but I snuck in a couple of little details, like the number of postcards that I sent and worked out the number of air miles that I traveled and those sort of, they hooked me. And so the next year I went back through my records and I put together a multi-page feature for my website where I looked at my travel in more detail, making pie charts of the countries that I went to. I split up my photography into all these different metrics that I could examine and between that I came up with about six pages I think of exploration of my eating and drinking habits and the culture that I enjoyed for the year and this is something I thought would only be appealing to people who knew me well, it would be a little bonus for them at the end of the year and it turned out to be a little viral and people started sending it to their friends and I started hearing from strangers that they thought it was fantastic and people saying, “I want to do this,” so I’ve tried to spend more and more time on it each year to stay in the forefront of this desire that I see building for people to encapsulate their year in this kind of report.

Paul: For me personally, when I heard you speak I immediately came away with a desire to do the same thing, just as you described.

Nicholas: That’s fantastic.

Paul: But the question that’s burning in me is, “Why?” Why do I feel the desire to do that? Why did you do it? Where did the idea come from? How did this all start?

Nicholas: I think it wasn’t that hard for me to do. The first one that I described, which was a multi-page document I actually didn’t do anything different than I’d been doing for previous years. I just had this natural habit that in my calendar I would write down where I went socially as well as what I did for work and I was able to look at that and between the names of the restaurants I knew this was a Thai restaurant so I could sort of make pie charts of what types of meals I was eating and I knew how many bars I had been to and I guess after that year I decided I was really going to formally examine this and decided to strictly track more things over the course of the year. I guess for me it’s driven by curiosity, I think I’m a pretty naturally curious person, maybe you are as well and it’s not about changing my behavior. I really don’t want the reports or this recording of my year to affect what I do over the year. I think I find a lot of solace in the numbers that come out of it. Just knowing how many beers I had or how many coffees I had or how many air miles I traveled is really comforting to me. It’s a way of tackling some of the unknown in our life.

Paul: It’s interesting because when you describe it, if someone hasn’t seen these reports you kind of think of an annual general report that’s published by a company, which are tediously dull documents but the things that you produce are graphically stunning as well. So I’m interested, is it primarily a kind of data collection exercise for you, or is it more a graphic design exercise? Is it about, I mean you kind of indicated that it’s about the data that you’re gathering rather than maybe the graphics, but the graphics are obviously what sells it to other people I guess. I don’t know.

Nicholas: Yeah, it’s hard for me to split it, but I have to say it’s absolutely about the finished product which is a piece of graphic design and the better the data is the better the story I have to tell so it’s a narrative of my year. It’s all encapsulated. It’s primarily a visual piece and I do put a lot of time and effort into making sure that it’s very visual and very easy to read quickly but that there are little details in it you can pull out if you want to spend more time with it.

Paul: Yeah. I mean that’s the immediate thing that you said there, it’s very time consuming.

Nicholas: Yes.

Paul: Not only from a design point of view, and I’m sure it must take you just an unbelievable number of hours to produce something that is so exquisitely designed but I mean tracking all this stuff, you must spend, I mean I’m surprised there isn’t a big part of one of your pie charts that’s just entitled “Tracking” you know where you spend hours just tracking all this information. What keeps you going? Why do you continue to do this?

Nicholas: Well first of all, it just doesn’t take that much time actually. I tend to sit down in the morning in front of my calendar and write down the meaningful things from the previous day but at most five to ten minutes a day. It’s definitely a background process that’s running in me all the time as, “Do I need to take note of this for my reporting?” And when I do leave my routine, when I travel, it’s a bit more complicated because then I’m doing new things and I want to make sure I get them right but it’s something I think you get into the habit of doing. For anyone who writes a diary or does these sort of recordings of the day I think after a while it’s not a burden at all. Last year I did find out, I decided out of this curiosity that I wanted to record every street that I’d walked down in New York City and that did become a little burdensome, but it was well worth it.

Paul: It’s interesting that you picked that one out because that was the one that I really looked at and went “Wow, that must have taken a long time.”

Nicholas: Yes. But it was well worth it. A year is a long time but it’s actually not that long of a time and I had a lot of hunches going into it about where I would go and where I didn’t go and it’s phenomenal to see how little of the city my routine is actually settled into.

Paul: Yeah, it’s a fascinating exercise. Just kind of give us a little bit of an idea, you know tell us you just mentioned walking down certain streets. Tell the listeners some of the other things that you collect, the other bits of information.

Nicholas: Well last year I was keeping track of every single alcoholic beverage that I had. For some reason I think drinking is really easy to keep track of because it is sort of a binary act, it’s like “one drink” versus a meal which can be more complicated but so alcoholic beverages I had 968 in 2007. I had 83,565 milligrams of caffeine through all my coffee beverages which by examining my weight and the caffeine content of each type I was able to deduce was approximately 6.8 lethal doses. I knew there’d be a couple lethal doses in there I just wasn’t sure how many and I worked it out.

Paul: That’s just horrifying. How do you decide what it is you’re going to track?

Nicholas: It usually just leads naturally out of the previous year. So like in June I will decide, “I wish I’d been tracking that this year,” and so next year I’ll make a point of doing that. So last year I started delving into the distances I’ve traveled, I worked out that I traveled about 1075 miles on the New York City subways. So this year I’ve taken a much closer look at the distances I’ve traveled. I’ve worn a pedometer all year so I could figure out how far I’ve walked and yeah.

Paul: What kind of other stuff are you tracking at the moment? You’re tracking how far you’ve walked, what other things?

Nicholas: Mostly the same things from previous years, but I’d like to look at it all through the lens of distance so it’ll be a different measure of the year rather than relating things to days or hours how does that relate to how far in terms of length I was through the year.

Paul: I mean you mentioned a pedometer there. What other kind of tools do you use for collecting data when you’re out there? When you’re out and about I feel like you need a really handy little iPhone app or something here that kind of records all this stuff for you but what tools are you using?

Nicholas: Well yes the iPhone is great I’ve tried to have some sort of smart phone where I can take notes at all times through this project but often times it’s just as simple as sending an email to myself so I have this little note that gets collected and goes into a folder and I make sure that I enter that into my calendar. It mostly all goes into iCal. I also use Backpack by the 37signals guys to keep running lists of the clothes that I purchase through the year or the movies that I saw and then when it all comes together it’s Excel. Everything needs to get into a spreadsheet so that all the math can get done and that’s probably half of the time it takes to design is just collating all the numbers.

Paul: Yeah, I’ll bet. Wow. This is absolutely fascinating. It’s something very addictive about the whole idea. I mean OK, for somebody like me, let’s say I wanted to go for this and I wanted to try it. What kind of advice would you give me starting out?

Nicholas: Well probably the best advice is to pick something that you’re going to be able to track, that you’re not just picking “What websites do I visit?” because it’s going to be overwhelming and you’re just going to pass on it after a week or two so pick something that’s easy that you do, not too infrequently that it’s not interesting but frequently enough that you’re going to get a good data set out of it. And so like if you see a lot of concerts I think concerts attended is great and then what aspects of that that are interesting? Who did you see and where was it or how long was it? So I think definitely in this website I’ve been developing to help other people create their own annual reports or just personal reporting in a way you can just have one really rich data set and by slicing it in different ways I think you can get a lot of interesting presentations out of it.

Paul: You mentioned a site there that you’re developing. Tell us a bit about that.

Nicholas: OK, it’s called daytum.com. It’s D-A-Y-T-U-M and it’s just a place where I’ve tried to remove a lot of the boundaries for creating a document like this. So there are two parts of it, there’s the recording element that can get complicated so we want to make a way that’s really easy for you to count things and then the display part of it which is practically inaccessible to a lot of people so there are a lot of built-in pie charts and stack line graphs and counting methods that are all built in, in a sort of clean design and you can just make this page that fills up with graphs and numeric intricacies of your life.

Paul: I must admit I’ve had a quick look at it and I haven’t signed up for it yet and you know it has that same clean look that your reports have and you know it’s obviously beautifully designed as well I mean we’ve spent a long time haven’t we talking about the collecting of the data I think that’s probably the most fascinating bit but as this is a web design podcast I feel like we should be talking about the design a little bit as well.

Nicholas: Absolutely.

Paul: You know I think the kind of key thing that really struck me is that you’re presenting, you know, fairly dry data and don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that your life is boring but at the end of the day it’s data that you’re presenting and you’re doing that in a kind of visually stunning way. Tell us a bit about how the design comes together, you know. What’s your design process?

Nicholas: Well I have the benefit of being in control of all the data so if something isn’t looking right one way I can explore it a different way or I can rewrite a headline which is one of the greatest advantages that any designer can have rather than working for someone else. And then I sort of have an infographics approach where I really eschew using keys or trying to make your eye go in too many places to understand something so whenever possible I try and keep everything really focused so you can look in one spot and hopefully understand what’s going on there immediately rather than having to look at color codes or translate symbols unnaturally.

Paul: I mean is it, a lot of graphic designers out there that kind of find working with data and, you know, things like that incredibly dull. How do you keep inspired? How do you get something out of it? Because you’re not working with gorgeous imagery or anything like that, you know it’s quite dry, what inspires you about doing this kind of stuff?

Nicholas: Well I guess they’re kind of like puzzles for me. Um, I will see the establishing of infographics sort of like the data’s there and it wants to look interesting so how can I make a system that’s going to present it in the most instructional way? So I’ll play with that system so that it will line up in a dramatic way rather than just sitting in a static predictable line graph or bar chart or something like that.

Paul: I mean also you seem to use typography very heavily so I’m guessing that’s something you’re particularly passionate about.

Nicholas: Yeah I guess it’s my two natural loves in one place: the numbers and type.

Paul: Oh dear. So what advice would you give for us Web designers that are kind of, you know we do work with data a fair amount, you know from surveys through to content management systems that provide reporting and things like that. What do you think the key is to presenting data in an understandable and approachable format?

Nicholas: I think that one of the key things is just getting away from the default options that you’re given like I’ve found it’s really impossible to get a nice looking graph out of Excel or out of Apple’s Numbers and the same is kind of true for the Google Chart API which is what we use for daytum.com which is basically a way to send a URL to Google and they return a pie chart or a line graph but they can get really overly complicated and ugly very quickly so it’s a matter of stripping it down and making sure that this is something that’s going to be dramatic and simple to understand.

Paul: It’s that simplicity thing again that, you know, have taken something complex and as you say stripping it down and keeping it simple.

Nicholas: Absolutely, and even if you have the benefit being able to edit your material so that I’m looking at a pie chart that has four or five slices rather than seventeen I think it’s going to benefit your readers enormously.

Paul: So Daytum, that you are in the process, is that actually live now or is that still in the process of being developed? I can’t remember whether it was generally accessible or whether it was in a closed beta.

Nicholas: It’s in a beta but the wait list is down to less than a week now so it’s just a queue basically to protect out severs. But yeah, we’re adding new features all the time. We’re about to add averages there so you can examine your average cup of coffee or your average commute time and we just plan on trying to preserve the user experience by making sure we don’t get too swamped and growing it over time.

Paul: So how did this come about? You keep saying “we” so who’s the team that’s behind that?

Nicholas: Yes it’s my partner Ryan Case who is more on the development side but is also a fantastic user interface designer and he came to me in January or February of this year and like many people had said we should figure out a way to do this year reports on the web so that other people can do it but he had the technical chops and motivation to really get the ball rolling and he’s become actually a great data tracker himself and has been keeping track of all his beers religiously and all the trains he’s been taking, which I didn’t know he had in him. So I think it goes to show anybody with the proper motivation could get started.

Paul: So is this your full-time job now or is it a part-time project?

Nicholas: It’s about half-time at this point. I still have my editorial clients and web clients and identity clients that I work for but this definitely occupies as much free time as I can give to it.

Paul: Well I found the whole thing incredibly inspiring.

Nicholas: Thank you so much.

Paul: It made me look from a completely different perspective at graphic design and also at life in general I guess and we have so many people who come on the show that are talking about the stock and trade of web design and thought it’d be really good to get you on just to give a different perspective and make us look outside of our little boxes. Thank you so much for coming on and I wish you all the best in your various projects.

Nicholas: Thank you Paul. Thank you.

Paul: Good to talk to you.

Nicholas: OK, take care. Bye bye.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

This week’s listener contribution is a question from Dave. He writes:

I am having real problem maintaining users. They visit the site once and then I never seen them again. I have good content, the site is usable and so I am at a loss as to what I should do.

Should I be worried? Are repeat users really important? What can I do to keep them coming back which doesn’t cost a fortunate?

It is such a good question that it spawned an entire post on using community as a retention tool.

Successful communication

Posted in Site content on November 21, 2008 by Paul Boag

We put a lot of time and attention into the content on our sites, but what about our other communications?

We send out newsletters, post blogs, participate in forums. All of these reflect on our brand and the way we are perceived. How can we improve the way we communicate?

Good communication is dependent on two factors:

When you communicate
How you communicate

Get this wrong and you risk seriously damaging the relationship with your users.

When to communicate

The schedule of your communications are always important, whether posting to a blog or sending out a newsletter. Send too many communications and it becomes irritating, too few and they forget about you.

There is no frequency that is always right. To a large extent it depends on the nature of your site. If your site sends out stock market tips then users may expect updates every few minutes. However, if you sell a service that is purchased once every couple of years then sending out communications every few weeks will be enough to keep you in their minds.

The key is not so much frequency as regularity. Users should come to expect your communications. Communicating on an ad-hoc basis becomes frustrating, especially with blog posts, newsletters or podcasts.

However, communication does not have to be completely dictated by a schedule. You can also have trigger based communications. These are normally emails sent to a specific individual rather than the whole community. They are sent in response to a specific event rather than a schedule.

A common trigger based communication is an email sent to somebody who has just purchased from an ecommerce site. These typically include an email confirming the transaction but also one when the goods are dispatched. These emails are extremely important and yet are often overlooked in the development process.

Trigger based communication are also useful in encouraging repeat traffic. Most website communities have a large number of ‘sleepers’. These are individuals who have signed up for your site but have stopped using it. It is possible to monitor user activity and if they stop using the service an email can be automatically sent tempting them back with incentives or new content.

However, never forget the golden rule of user communication; do not contact users without their permission. Nothing will damage your sites reputation faster and destroy your community than spam.

Take a few moments to consider your communication strategy. When might it be appropriate to send out trigger emails? Are you collecting user’s contact details and is it legitimate to contact them? What methods you are going to use to communicate and on what schedule?

Your communications with users needs the same attention you gave your sites copy. This includes not only when to communicate, but how.

How to communicate

There are lots of communication tools out there including blogs, podcasts, email and RSS. However, these are just technologies and don’t get to the heart of how to communicate. Communication is about what you say and how you say it.

Always remember when communicating with users to make it personal. Whether it is in a forum or posting to your blog, people like to talk to people not faceless corporations. Whenever possible write as ‘Jim from Marketing’ rather than as ‘Acme inc.’ People are less critical and more receptive when dealing with a individual rather than an organisation.

Although your aim is to demonstrate that your organisation is made up of ‘real people’, that does not mean you do not need no unifying voice.

Know your voice

The danger individual employees engaging with your users is that your organisation sends out mixed messages about its identity. All copy should have a consistent tone, from the content on your website to the emails you send existing customers.

At first reading this may seem contradictory. On one hand I demand a consistent identity and on the other I want users to see the people behind your organisation. However, this is actually an approach newspapers have been employing for years.

Most newspapers have regular columnists who readers come to recognise. However, each newspaper has an overall identity. For example in the U.K. tabloid newspaper "the Sun" has a very different persona to that of "the Times".

Deciding on your persona will underpin all communications with users. Ask the question – if your site was a person, what type of person would it be? Would it be a young hip teenager or a boring middle aged business man? These characteristics help define how you communicate and the tone you set for your site.

However, whatever persona you create it should always be as open and transparent.

Be open and honest

Many organisations feel they need to maintain a flawless facade with users. This serves to create a barrier, reinforcing the feeling that the user is dealing with a faceless corporation.

A better approach is to be honest and fallible. Nothing is more effective in getting users trust than admitting when you get it wrong. Take for example photo sharing site Flickr.com. Their site suffered a series of outages in which users were unable to access their photos. Unsurprisingly the mood in the flickr community was pretty negative. However, flickr was able to turn that negativity around with a simple blog post entitled "Sometimes we suck". They acknowledged the problem, apologised and promised to do better. They did exactly that and before long flickr was seen as a shinning example of how an organisation should run a community.

In fact it is possible to turn a critical user into an evangelist for your site simply by responding in a timely and open manner. In a world where users can instantly broadcast their frustrations via blogs, social networks and other methods of online communication you cannot afford to ignore them. However, if you respond in a positive and open fashion those same users will be broadcasting their pleasure at your response.

This post is an edited extract from Paul’s book – The Website Owners Manual.

144. Scale

Posted in Classic shows on November 19, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show Paul talks to Joe Stump from Digg about scalable websites, we review the best apps for web designers and investigate services for sending bulk emails.

Podcast: Download (28.3MB)

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News and events

How much should you charge?

If you are starting your freelance career the number one question you will have is ‘how much should I charge?’ It is important and yet strangely it is not something you are taught at college. Perhaps they don’t teach it because it is a damn hard question to answer. It is certainly something we have avoided talking about on this show.

Fortunately an article entitled ‘Six things to consider when setting your freelance rate‘ has been released this week. Although the article does not give a magic number, it does provide 6 valuable insights that will inform your final decision. These include…

Young freelancers and recent grads almost always ask for too little.
You can do things your clients can’t.
Your rate influences your perceived value.
You don’t get to keep it all.
An hour worked is not an hour billed.
The higher you start, the less you’ll need to increase.

I couldn’t agree more with everything said in this article. However, the one that really resonated with me was ‘You do not get to keep it all.’ Your rate has not only got to cover your billable hours but the cost of sales and marketing, as well as your various overhead. The article has a link to a superb rates calculator that helps you work out your chargeable rate based on these various costs. Definitely worth checking out.

A plethora of accessibility posts

With the implement arrival of WCAG 2.0. we are seeing a resurgence of interest in accessibility. This has led to a plethora of accessibility posts over the last few weeks. These include…

Writing good ALT text – This is a simple post about the use of the ALT attribute. It suggests two rules of thumb when it comes to writing ALT text. First, if you were to describe the document to someone over the phone, would you mention the image or its content? If you would, the image probably needs an alternative text. Second, does the alternative text of any images in the document make sense if you turn off the display of images in your web browser? Simple advice, but well worth remembering.
Designing for Dyslexia – This is a series of 3 in depth articles that look at the subject of Dyslexia. It asks what Dyslexia is and how we as web designers can improve our sites to accommodate the needs of Dyslexia users. Its interesting stuff. Part 1 defines what Dyslexia is. Part 2 looks at some of the conflicting requirements with users who have visual impairments. Part 3 suggests some specific things you can do to improve the legibility of your designs.
Accessible forms using WCAG 2.0. – This extensive post aims to provide web developers and others with practical advice about the preparation of accessible HTML forms. It compares the WCAG 1.0 accessibility requirements relating to forms with those contained in WCAG 2.0. Important stuff but not a 5 minute read!
Too much accessibility – The RNIB explains how the LEGEND tag can cause more harm than good if not concise and relevant. The reason? LEGEND text isnâ€™t read at the start of the FIELDSET, it is read at the start of the label. It repeats at the beginning of every single text label in that FIELDSET.

A business case for deleting content

I find myself using the word ‘simplify’ a lot when I talk to clients these days. So many website owners are constantly wanting to add features or content to their site. However, in reality we should be removing not adding to our already bloated websites. This is particularly true for large institutional websites. However it does also apply to smaller sites.

Take for example the Headscape website. When we started the redesign process for our site, I sat down and really thought through what information prospective clients wanted. The answer was very little. In the end our large text heavy website was reduced to a single page. That is the power of simplicity.

Gerrry McGovern summed it up perfectly this week in his post entitled the ‘Business case for deleting content‘. He wrote:

The more you delete, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you increase the chances of your customers succeeding on your website.

We may think that we cannot delete content because ‘somebody might want it’ or because we believe ‘it will help our search engine ranking’. However, bloated sites bring complexity and with complexity comes confusion. The more content on your site, the less chance a user will be able to find the content they need.

12 principles for keeping your code clean

We finish today with a great post for those who need help with their HTML code. Whether you are a student learning HTML or a designer who is more comfortable in Photoshop than Coda, this is a very useful article.

The post provides 12 excellent tips for keeping your code clean. These include…

Use a strict doctype
Set your character set and encode those characters
Indent your code
Keep your CSS and JavaScript external
Nest your tags properly
Eliminate unnecessary divs
Use better naming conventions
Leave typography to the CSS
Add a class/ID to your BODY tag
Validate
Order your code logically
Just do what you can!

The article explores each of these points in depth and communicates clearly current best practice in coding HTML. Well worth the read even if only as a reminder.

Interview: Joe Stump on Building a Scalable Site

Paul: Ok, so joining me today is Joe Stump from Digg. Good to have you on the show Joe.

Joe: Oh, good to be here.

Paul: Have we had you on the show before?

Joe: Ah, not that I’m aware of.

Paul: Oh, wow, well we need to rectify that then. It’s good to have you on. Well, I have to say, this interview was arranged by Ryan, who is our producer. And he’s a developer, and I’m a designer. And he suggested we got you on the show, not that I wouldn’t like you on the show, obviously. That we got you on the show, obviously about scaling websites. Now, I’m going to be out of my depth very quickly here, so you’re going to have to be very gentle with me Joe.

Joe: Sure

Paul: So, in fact, it was so bad, that as I sat down to write questions I thought: "I don’t know what I’m doing here" , so I went and talked to some of the developers at headscape, and I asked some of the Boagworld listeners, and so we’ve got a little selection of questions for you, that, hopefully we can learn a little bit about how you go about doing things at Digg. Lets start off, what’s your job title, what is it that you do at Digg?

Joe: Ah, I have a really fancy job title that doesn’t mean a lot of anything, but ah, my official job title is "Lead Architect" and um, I think what best describes it, is that I manage the technical implementation on the code side.

Paul: OK

Joe: So, Digg’s broken up into a lot of different arenas on the tech side, we’ve got, R&D, which is headed up by Anton Cast, we’ve got operations, which is headed up by Scott Baker, and then under that are the people that I work with, ah, probably most closely in implementing solutions for Digg. Ron Gorodetzky is our lead systems engineer, Tim Ellis, also known as timeless, is our chief DB wonk, and then, Mike Newton is our lead network guy. So I think us four kind of steer the technical implementation along. The managers, ah, the manage, and handle the strategy and partners, and stuff like that.

Paul: You managed to say the word manager with real distain.

Joe: Oh, no actually, I have a great manager, John Quinn, he’s our VP of engineering, he’s by far the best direct manager I’ve probably ever worked with. Yeah, he’s really good.

Paul: OK, well lets go back in time a little bit. And start by, well, when was the point when you realized, that you were going to start having scaling issues with Digg? When did you start thinking about the whole subject of scaling?

Joe: Um, well Digg was pretty big when I came on board, so Digg was about 10 – 12 million uniques when I joined on.

Paul: Wow.

Joe: And I think we’d just cleared 35 million last month. So scaling was obviously an issue, but the big difference is that, I think sites generally go through a few different levels of scaling, where like the first one’s like, "I’m just going to throw it on a virtual server, or an Amazon server, you know, you’re basically just seeing if things are going to just "stick to the wall", and then they do. Ah, so the first thing you normally do is start breaking services off onto separate boxes. I want to put my DB on one box, my server on another box, and maybe memcached on each of them. And then you hit, read saturation on that one DB server, so then you go to the kinda next level of scaling. Which is where Digg was when I started, where you start dangling, a whole bunch of read slaves, off of your DB master, so, and for those who are not familiar with the master / slave terms, you send all your writes to one database server, and then that disseminates those writes to a whole bunch of slaves, and then you send all your read traffic to those slaves. So that’s where Digg was when I started. It’s write http traffic across a whole bunch of servers, its read traffic across a whole bunch of slaves, and then we have one master. And we’re now going through, what I think is the third phase, where you hit write saturation on your master, which is a bigger problem, because you then need to start sending some write traffic to some masters, and we’re actually going with a strategy that’s common with Facebook, and Flickr, and those kind of websites, where it’s called horizontal partitioning, where you put some of your records on one server, and the other records on another, so it’s like, you can say, for users, all users whose names start with A through J, would go on this database server, and K to Z live on this other database server. So we’re in the middle of implementing the first swipe at that. So we’ll be pretty aggressively into where everything will be federated and partitioned across a whole bunch of servers.

Paul: OK, one of the questions which kinda came up, which kinda relates to that, is, once you start spreading things across multiple servers, how do you handle things like user sessions, which have obviously got to be persistent.

Joe: Aha, so there are a couple of ways to handle that which, I’d say most people are handling it by.. There’s two ways, probably that you can do it easily. One of them, is if you have what they call "session affinity" on your load balancer, so the load balancer will say: "Oh, well this person, last time I had them here, they went to server A, so we’ll send it back to that server". So the session always lives on only one box. That’s one way to do it, we don’t do that here, we have a custom session handler in PHP which sorts the session in Memcache, and that allows you to.

Paul: Can you just clarify what memcache is, for idiots like me who don’t know.

Joe: Sure, memcache is a distributed caching system that’s actually, basically what it allows you to do, is expose a machines RAM over the network, and cache stuff into another machines RAM across the network.

Paul: Ah, OK

Joe: Yeah, it’s insanely fast, it was developed by Danga back in the day, and Brice Fitzpatrick, yeah so it’s heavily used by anyone whose scaling with LAMP, even a lot of people who aren’t. They all use memcached.

Paul: Wow

Joe: So, yeah, we store all of our session data in memcached, so PHP creates a unique session id, and we just stuff session data into that in memcached, and we can distribute that across, I don’t know, 50 or 60 memcached servers, and what not.

Paul: So how many servers do you guys have, it must be a staggering number by now.

Joe: Um, yeah, it’s kinda funny, every time I ask Ron that, he’s always like "Ah, I don’t know"

Paul: Laughs

Joe: Because we really can’t I mean, I couldn’t give you a specific number because on any given day, we’ll pull or push into production, a dozen servers, so, hundreds, there’s definitely hundreds in production. So.

Paul: I mean, with that many servers, so obviously you’re talking about taking servers on and offline, and all that kind of thing, I mean, making updates to the site, when Daniel comes up with some stupid idea, that you’ve got to apply to the site, of a new feature that he wants to apply on the site, and you’ve gone through the process of making it work. And you’ve then got to push it live.

Joe: Aha

Paul: How does that work? How do you go about pushing something like that live when there are so many servers involved.

Joe: So we have Ron Gorodetzky our lead systems engineer guy. So us developers have a bunch of M4 make files, that, when you check the code out, you run basically Make, Install, and it, for lack of a better word, it builds or compiles the website into a cohesive package, and then Ron pushes that to each server, I think he is still doing it by rsynch, but I know we are migrating over to Puppet, so it may happen via Puppet soon. The production side of things, is something that’s handled completely by operations, so I couldn’t tell you specifically how it happens, but generally, we make a tag of the website, and tell Ron, we need you to push "9.4.15" or something like that, and he does a checkout, builds it, and pushes it to all of the different servers.

Paul: So is that – do you actually have to take the site offline to do those updates? How do you minimize the downtime that’s involved with that.

Joe: Oh, well there’s a bunch of different ways. Um, we don’t bring the website down normally for pushes, it depends on the size and complexity of the push. But like, day to day pushes, we probably push I guess, a minimum of once a day, just little bug fixes and stuff like that. And those happen generally in the middle of the day, and nobody notices, it’s no big deal. Ah, the outages these days, are completely dependant on database activity, you know, like database fixes and stuff like that. And the ways that we’re getting around that these days, is using a different method of partitioning called vertical partitioning. Where, like for instance, like I think our comment Diggs table, of like, who’s dug a comment, up or down, that’s like 15 billion records in it.

Paul: Wow

Joe: that’s like, yeah, if you’re like to alter that table, you’d probably crash mysql, but if you were, it would probably take a week to alter it. So instead we probably create another table, where we have like comments, and then we have another one called comments_made_up, or something like comments_diggs, comments_diggs_beta, and that has a couple of extra fields in it. And so we’ll say, OK, we’re about to push the code, at the end. When we push the code, the first comment id that was added to the table was 15,000,000,001, so then you start at 15,000,000,000 and work my way back in the table. So we do some of that live as well. For the next push that we’re doing, we’re using a migration table, which will tell us how far along each record is, and which records we’ve actually migrated, and stuff like that. And then we’re going to use this package called "GearMan" which is a queuing system which we’ve had in production for a while. And we’re basically turning our servers into a giant BotNet, so we’ll back fill all those partitions quickly.

Paul: Wow, that kind of amount of data, it must create huge problems, even adding a new piece of functionality onto the site, to actually code it in a way that’s not going to have a momentous impact on the database. This must be something that’s always constantly on your mind I guess?

Joe: Yeah, I’ll tell you a really funny story that highlights that perfectly, we have these little green badges that are on the Digg button, and they indicate, that a friend of yours has dug that story. And when you hover it shows the last four friends to dig it or something. So that’s a pretty knurly query, against a very big table, and we’ve actually had to, what I would call "dial it down a bit", so that it only shows up on the stories that are 48 hours old, and it won’t show up if there are more than 500 diggs or something. So the features fairly usable, but it’s not like… Well before if someone went to the top of 365, it was basically crashing our servers. So we’ve been rewriting that, and we basically, the way that we’re rewriting it is: If you write something, we take that Digg and we drop it into each of your followers buckets. So we make a bucket for each story for each person. Any time one of their friends digs it, we drop that dig into their bucket, but the problem is, like Kevin Rose is followed by 40,000 people, so every time he digs something, I need to drop 40,000 things into 40,000 different buckets. And we did the math, and just to get that feature up and running in a vast sane manner, so that it will scale, so we can bring it back in full capacity so everyone can use it all the time. We need 1.25 GB of storage, and we need to be able to sustain 3000 writes per second in order to keep just that small feature online.

Paul: So that really kind of illustrates that a relatively small feature that someone comes up with, has massive ramifications from your point of view.

Joe: Yeah, this is something that has kind of been something that I always talk about. I mean even back when I was doing consulting, I’d kind of have clients come to me, and it would be: "Check out this awesome design", and I would be like "that designs awesome, but that little feature down there, that’s going to cost you know, $100,000 in servers, and 500 man hours. But it’s, like, well the designers think of sizes and shapes, and so Daniel always jokes around and says: "Well I can make it purple" if that will make it easier for you" you know, it’s like…

Paul: Laughs

Joe: Laughs – well that doesn’t make it easier!

Paul: Well, we’re going to get you and Daniel back on the show to talk about this whole design / developer relationships, so you can lace your side of it now, and get your side in first. Before he defends himself.

Joe: Sounds like a plan.

Paul: So are you at the point now where you’ve got an architecture that’s kind of infinitely scalable, or are you going to have to go back to the drawing board if Digg just goes even more, you know off the scale than it already is?

Joe: Yeah, well we’re actually at the drawing board right now.

Paul: Yeah?

Joe: Yeah, Ron, myself, and some of the other senior peeps, about 8 or 10 months ago, we started putting together… well we knew that we were going to start to have serious limitations, especially since we were going to be scaling internationally. You know there is a problem with latency. With you guys across the pond hitting the west coast and other things like that. So we want to be in multiple data centers. We want to be actively serving traffic from multiple data centers, so we’re are, well we need to horizontally partition, we need to make sure we can do that. And we need to live in two different data centers. We need to be able to survive one data center disappearing. So we spent basically a week in front of the white board, and we created this thing called IDDB, which is kind of an elastic storage engine, built on top of SQL, and memcachedb, that we’re going to be putting the first bits and pieces into production, probably over a month or so. And really, the whole partitioning thing isn’t the difficult thing to figure out. The difficult thing is basically spanning multiple data centers, and also we’ll have a couple hundred gigabytes of data, and I need to spray that across, you know, a couple dozen different servers, without bringing the site down. So we have a couple million – 3 or 4 million users, and I need to take all of their records, and all of their auxiliary records, here’s like your user record, and there’s also a bunch of cruft related to that. So I need to take all of that, and migrate it to different partitions. But I need to do that while the site’s still up and running, and I need to do that without breaking the site for you. So, that’s the more complex problem at this point.

Paul: I mean you talk about spreading across multiple data centers, and if one of those data centers goes down, the site does too, and whatever. How are you currently handling redundancy? How are you making sure the site stands up at the minute?

Joe: Right now, our only single point of failure at this point, is our actual data center, so if the data center falls off the planet, then we’ve got problems. But we’ve got a general architecture. We’ve got a couple of general balancers up front. And those two have, what we call a "heartbeat" between them, and if one of them falls off, the other instantly takes over traffic for it. And that balances traffic across, I couldn’t even tell you, dozens and dozens of web servers, and of course, the load balancer does help checks on those, so if any of those falls over, it will drop it out of the pool. Behind that, we have, I think, 4, I guess our masters are technically single points of failure, but we have multiple masters as well, and we have dozens of read slaves hanging off of them. I think right now it takes about 10 minutes to bring a new master into production if one fails. So, and then we have, to store our files, we have a thing called MogileFS, which is a distributed web dav storage engine of sorts, and we can loose multiple nodes on that, and not have any problem with that as well.

Paul: Yeah, so at the moment it’s a physical problem that you have, that if your data center gets hit by an earthquake or whatever, then you have problems. Please tell me it’s not in San Francisco?

Joe: It’s not in San Francisco.

Paul: Ha ha, yeah, you’re not actually going to say where it is are you?

Joe: No I can say we have one on the west coast, and we have one on the east coast.

Paul: Oh, well that’s at least something. Um, I mean so far we’ve concentrated a lot on scaling technology, but there’s kind of another side to this, as well, where you get something like Digg, that has grown incredibly rapidly, over a very short length of time, and that is, kind of scaling the team behind it. You know, I don’t know how many developers were working on Digg when you joined it, but there would certainly be a heck of a lot more now. And I’m quite interested in how you went about growing the team. And how you deal with that kind of rapid growth, and making sure everyone knows what they’re working on, and not overwriting others work, and all the complexity that goes along side of that. How have you dealt with that?

Joe: Sure, I guess, to put things into context a little bit, when I was hired, we had both Kurt Wilms and I, were both hired on the same day, and were respectively employees 18 and 19, and developers, I think there were 7 of us. So, now we’re at the low 20′s as far as developers, and we’re in the mid 80s, as far as total employees, and that’s been in a year and 9 months. So as far as scaling the teams go, some of the building blocks were well in place by the time I got here. Like, source repository, stuff like that. But I think the crucial things that we’ve done, since I’ve come on board, that were, we had some coding standards that were out there, but they weren’t really in force. And then we had, we didn’t really have any frameworks in place. I think one of the problems, you know, when Jay, our CEO, was asking, where do we find more senior developers, I told Jay, like that’s not the right question, the right question is like, how do we get the code, and how do we get the technology, in a position, where we don’t have to hire really senior people. So I think the keys to that are, we do have pretty strict coding standards, so we do enforce those rigorously, through continuous integeration environment, and code reviews. Every piece of code that gets pushed to production has to be reviewed. And that’s literally 4 or 5 coders, sitting in a room, going line by line through change sets, and stuff like that. And that sounds really time consuming, but without question, on every code review I’ve sat in on, we’ve found one show stopper bug. So, those have been crucial, in getting things put together. The other things we did as we grew, is we broke the team up into smaller teams, so we have a development team of 20 – 25 developers, but that’s broken up into teams of between 3 and 5 developers. This really helps in a couple of areas. 1, it enforces code ownership. So everybody has this problem. I code this, then I go and work on something completely different. And 6 months later I come back to this code and I’ve forgotten. I don’t remember any of that. Where as if you’re always working in the same area of the sites, not only do you remember a lot more, you’re a lot more familiar with that. But also, you feel a bit more of a sense of ownership over that. You’re not just this hired gun that’s come in and ploughs through this feature then moves on to something else. You have your own territory that you need to keep track of. You need to keep really nice and what-not. So we did that, and then we have a bunch of core frameworks, that we’ve built. We have a small application framework, we have an AJAX framework, and now, we have this data access layer that we’ve been building up called IDDB. So I think those are pretty crucial too. It’s difficult to find coders that are intimately aware of memcached, and race conditions that exist in memcached, and um, we have to be very selective about what fields we add indexes on in mySQL. We also have to be very selective about how we store that. Normalization flies totally out the window, if you’re a DBA guy. A lot of concepts, they are not bad developers, by any means, they do great AJAX work, they do great application level PHP work, but if you don’t have frameworks in place for them to not have to worry about the super-super complex stuff. It’s going to be really difficult to hire, and it’s going to be really difficult to, you know, get a lot of stuff running in parallel and stuff.

Paul: Wow.

Joe: Yeah, and then we also, another one of the things we’ve adopted, is the agile SCRUM. So we’re doing sprints, and we’re running those in parallel now across all the teams. So right now we have 4 major projects going on right now.

Paul: Ok. So you talk about a sense of ownership there, and the developers are split down into multiple certain areas. You know, does that not get boring, for the developer, having to work on the same bit of code long time, or do you rotate people?

Joe: Well, we don’t currently rotate people, the team structure’s been in place for about 4 or 5 months now. And you know, most of the work they get is fairly immediate, and we’re moving major projects like Facebook connect, so the "Tools and integration team", their doing facebook connect now, and after this, they will maybe work on a new version of the API and so on. It’s written out to wide swaths of the site, so that we have "Site Apps" which does like, all the different applications on the site. And then we have "Tools and Integration" where we have the external projection of Digg, then we have "Core Apps" which is like, search, R&D stuff like recommendation engine, and what not, and then we have "Core Infrastructure".

Paul: So it’s probably enough to be interesting?

Joe: Yeah, we have pretty broad teams, and also, when we put people on those teams, even if someone has an amazing core infrastructure background, but they say, look, like, one of our UI guys, used to be really heavy into core infrastructure stuff when he worked at Quest, and managed massive warehouses, but he says, like, "That’s not what gets me up in the morning any more". It’s like, "Javascript UI interfaces are". So we try to put people on the teams where, you know, where their passions lie. And that’s kind of another thing that people need to recognize. And that’s like, not all developers are driven by, or interested in the same things. We have some, what I would call "UI / Frontend" developers, where like, they could care less about PHP, but we have PHP guys who could care less about Javascript. So I think, recognizing strengths and weaknesses, and capitalizing on those, is pretty important too.

Paul: OK, one last question to finish off, and that is, well you know, the kind of things that you’ve been talking about are fascinating to hear, about the kind of challenges that you have to face with the size of Digg, and the amount of traffic you have to handle. But obviously a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, aren’t at that stage. They are not working on massive projects like that. So I’m really interested in what advice you would have, for those who are just beginning to suffer from scalability problems, and they feel that it’s coming, and it’s something they need to be paying attention to. But it’s not on the enormous scale that you have to deal with. What things can they do right now to prevent problems down the line?

Joe: Um, I think, the easiest things you can do, is you need to re-think the LAMP acronym, because that stack is actually no longer really that stack. I would take Linux, and I’d take Apache out of that stack, and it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re running on a Unix. And as far as Apache goes, Lighty and EngineX are much better at getting a lot more money out of your box, as far as scalability goes. The two areas, that I think people, they sound hard, but they are really easy. One of them is installing and using Memcached, and the other one is installing and using a queuing system of some sort. And I think, like, recently I went through this with a little side project, called "Please Dress Me" which AJ and Gary Benashack and I did.

Paul: Oh, yes yes.

Joe: And we had a very small virtual server at MediaTemple, that survived pretty crushing blows from TechCrunch, Digg, BoingBoing, with almost no load. And that was like, beforehand, memcached is so second nature to me at this point, that I was just like, "Oh, well I’m just going to cache everything in memcached", and it was literally just like this RAM spewing machine. It didn’t actually hit the database. Actually my sysadmin at MediaTemple was like "Something’s really weard, MySQL is only doing like 1 query a second, and you’re doing like 500 requests per second from BoingBoing. So I’m cached. Yeah memcached is just like, it takes literally 10 minutes to install, and probably another hour or two to implement.

Paul: Wow, that sounds excellent, that’s really good advice. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show, and I can’t wait to get you and Daniel fighting with one an other in the not too distant future. I’m hoping to get a good violent argument about designers and developers, just because I can.

Joe: Laughs.

Paul: I was a little bit disappointed when you guys sat down at Future of Web Design, were far too nice to one another, compared to the evening before, when you’d had a bit to drink, and you were talking in the restaurant. That’s the kind of conversation I want, that real vicious session.

Joe: OK, I’ll make sure that Daniel and I get liquored up before coming on then.

Paul: Yeah, that’s the answer. Ok, thank you so much Joe, that’s really good advice, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Joe: Thanks Paul, bye.

Thanks goes to Nathan O’Hanlon for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Top web designer applications

Often this section of the show consists of questions for myself and Marcus. However for a change, I thought we should ask the questions. Via the forum, the boagworld site and twitter I recently asked you to vote for your ‘favourite web designer application‘. The response was overwhelming and you can see the complete list of suggestions on UserVoice. However, here are the top 5…

Firebug – Firebug is a Firefox addon that puts a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. A less popular suggestion was the Web Inspector in Safari.
Web developer toolbar – The Web Developers toolbar is a Firefox addon that provides a variety of web development tools. You can disable CSS and Javascript, visually highlight elements, manage cookies and much more. A less popular alternative was the IE developers toolbar.
Adobe Photoshop – A professional image-editing and graphics creation software from Adobe. It provides a large library of effects, filters and layers. This is the grandfather of such applications and many (like myself) use it out of habit more than anything else. Less popular suggestions included Fireworks, Illustrator and Inkscape.
Coda – Coda is a one window development environment for the mac. It includes FTP, text editor, browser preview and even terminal window. A beautifully designed app it appeals to the more visual web designer. Simple, easy to use and elegant.
TextMate – TextMate is a powerful text editor for the mac with an extensive plug-in architecture. From its code highlighting in near endless languages to support for numerous version control systems, TextMate is probably the most powerful text editor out there.

If you disagree with the Boagworld Listeners top five or want to see the other entries then head on over to UserVoice and vote for yourself.

Sending out bulk emails

My second listener contribution comes from the forum. It is a question from Richard about sending bulk email.

Richard writes: I need to send out bulk emails to approx 200k registered (opted in) users on a monthly basis.

Does anyone have any recommendations for an outsourced bulk email provider?

As with the previous contribution I want to focus on your responses rather than my own. This is what the Boagworld community had to say…

Jamie was the first of a number of people to recommend Campaign Monitor. Judging by the feedback from the forum they offer an excellent service but are expensive when compared to others.

As well as recommending Campaign Monitor Nick mentions Silverpop, which he described as ‘an enterprise affair’. Apparently it is not as polished as campaign monitor but considerably more powerful.

Phil recommended two more, Mail Chimp and Mad Mini. He hasn’t used them personally but the prices look good and he says the user interfaces appear polished.

Doug doesn’t recommend a specific service but does refer Richard to a post on Creative Tips which provides a comprehensive review of Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, AWeber, and Constant Contact.

If you have suggestions for Richard or would just like to share your experiences of using bulk email services then contribute to the thread in the boagworld forum.

143. Partnership

Posted in Classic shows on November 12, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show Paul and Marcus discuss how to promote your web application, ways to improve the client/designer relationship and tools for managing your font library.

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News and events

Obama top technology promises

One of the most exciting things about being at this years FoWD conference in New York was that I got to witness the election of the next U.S. president.

Whatever your political persuasions it was a landmark election. Not only will Obama be the first African American president he is also probably the most technically aware.

Obama campaigned aggressively online, from a dedicated YouTube channel to Obama pages on Facebook and MySpace as well as Twitter feeds. He even had his own iPhone application.

So what can we expect from this tech-savvy President? How will he shape the future of U.S. online presence and possibly that of the entire web? An article on tgdaily entitled ‘Barack Obama’s Top technology promises‘ gives us a roundup of various technological promises from Obama’s speeches. These include:

A commitment to Net Neutrality
A desire to expand broadband penetration in the U.S.
A review of the current wireless spectrum usage
Tougher legislation around online security.

Of course, promises made on the campaign trail are one thing. We shall see what the reality turns out to be.

Could Microsoft consider adopting Webkit?

Talking of things that may never be, a young (and very brave) developer at Microsoft recently asked Steve Ballmer:

Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?

Ballmer’s response was surprising to say the least:

There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service. Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.

Although some have seen this as a sign that Microsoft may adopt Webkit, personally I am sceptical. Were Microsoft to completely change its rendering engine it would inevitably break large numbers of sites and cause outrage among many of their large corporate clients.

The backlash when moving from IE6 to IE7 was massive. Moving to Webkit would conflict with Microsoft’s mantra of ‘not breaking the web’.

That said, we can dream. Without a doubt the real innovation and competitive advantage among browsers is in features, not rendering engines. This would in many ways be a smart move allowing Microsoft to concentrate on differentiation through ‘extensions’ and functionality, rather than wasting time on getting pages to display correctly.

WCAG 2.0 resources

Something that is definitely going to happen very soon is the release of WCAG 2.0.

WCAG 2.0. has now become a proposed recommendation. This means it is not only technically complete but has been successfully implemented on a large variety of sites. In short, it has been proved to work.

According to the Web Standards group this means it could therefore be released before Christmas.

This is hugely significant and very exciting from an accessibility point of view. WCAG 2.0. has come a long way from its controversial beginnings and is now a very good set of guidelines.

Now is the time to start building compliant sites and the Web Standards Group has provided some useful resources for implementing WCAG 2.0.

Prototyping with XHTML

Our final story is a post on the Boxes and Arrows website encouraging us to ‘Prototyping with XHTML‘.

The article lays out an approach to wireframing and prototyping, which is based entirely around the use of XHTML. Starting with the XHTML itself, you build up the structure and elements within your site. You then add CSS and Javascript to further refine the concept.

It is an approach with a lot of merit. Unlike other methods, the prototype is not thrown away but becomes apart of the final deliverable. It is also an approach particularly suited to multiple iterations, allowing you to refine the design over time.

In a world of web applications it is becoming increasingly important to demonstrate user interactions in a way static comps cannot. However, although this approach is appealing I do not believe it replaces the Photoshop mockup. Client’s like to see ‘finished’ looking designs. That said, it is another useful tool in your arsenal and you should be sure to read this post.

Feature: A Partnership of Cooperation

At this years FoWD I shared how the relationship between web design agency and client is fundamentally broken. Where there should be mutual respect and cooperation, there is negativity and mistrust. Read More.

Listeners feedback:

Marketing a web application

Nick Charlton writes: Long time listener, havenâ€™t asked a question before though..

Apart from your blog, the podcast and twitter, how else have you marketed GetSignOff?

To be honest, I have done very little marketing yet. However, I know that has got to change. The problem is that I am not a trained marketeer and so don’t really know what I am doing. That said I do have a rough plan:

Free pro accounts – While in beta we gave away numerous pro accounts to ‘web celebs’. However, to be honest it was a waste of time. These guys were either too busy to review it or just didn’t feel it was worth writing about. This time I intend to give free accounts to those who blog about the application. Not entirely sure how I am going to do this yet but I think it might generate some buzz.
Offering discounts – Discounts are an effective way of spreading word of mouth. Again I am not entirely sure if or when we will do this, but offering the occasional discount should encourage people to tell their friends.
Targeting appropriate publications – I am in the process of writing a number of articles either directly or indirectly related to GetSignOff. I have also asked some sites to review the application. I have approached sites like Digital Web, Think Vitamin and printed publications such as .net. Having a product aimed at people like myself makes identifying appropriate publications easy.
Producing supporting video content – I have already produced the ‘Getting design sign off‘ presentation but also intend to make some shorter tutorials for YouTube. These will contain valuable content in their own right, but will also promote GSO.
Utilising CSS galleries – Because my audience are web designers we have submitted GSO to several CSS galleries. We know that many web designers use these sites and so this gives our application a lot of exposure.
Use speaking opportunities – Speaking opportunities have been a great opportunity for promoting GSO and I have started tailoring my speaking slots around the subject of sign off.

In time we may consider advertising through things like Google Adwords or the Deck. However, until we are confident in the return on investment we are not willing to invest more money in anything other than development.

Font management

Aurel writes: I would realy like to know how designers deal with fonts? From personal experience, I have alot of fonts and it takes me time to find or manage them. So I was wondering if you know of any way to group the fonts, e.g. when you go through the drop menu of fonts in photoshop, they apear in groups (or something along those lines).

The solution I use was recommended on the Rissington Podcast (oh the shame of admitting that.)

It is a piece of software called FontExplorer X which is available for both the mac and PC. It has some superb features if you are serious about fonts. These include:

Organising your fonts – Organise using a library, folders, tags and even smart sets. You can directly access all typefaces from a certain foundry or all fonts tagged with a certain keyword? You can even view all italic fonts.
Auto activation – FontExplorer allows you to decide which fonts are available in which applications. This is ideal if you want to avoid scrolling through large numbers of fonts in applications like Photoshop.
Font information – FontExplorer gives you a clear customisable preview of your fonts as well as detailed information on the character set and usage restrictions.

The application also has an in built store that allows you to buy additional fonts within the same intuitive interface. I am guessing this is how they manage to offer the whole application absolutely free.

141. Feedback

Posted in Classic shows on October 29, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show, Paul Annett joins us to discuss how he pushes the boundaries of CSS and we look at how to improve your website through user feedback.

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News and events

Working from home

I suspect the vast majority of people listening to this podcast spend at least some of their time working from home. In today’s world, doing the type of work we do, there is no reason not to.

However, home working is not the utopia some believe. It has its own challenges and problems. For me it is a constant sense of guilt that I am not pulling my weight in the business. For others it is a lack of motivation or fighting the distraction of housework and family.

With some many of us struggling with the relatively new environment of home working it is great to see people sharing their experiences in a new A List Apart article (Working from home: Readers respond).

This article has some great advice and although it contradicts itself in parts (different people deal with home working in different ways) it is full of ideas that I either already implement or will be soon.

While I am talking about A List Apart I want to quickly mention "Progressive Enhancement with CSS". This is a follow up article to "Understanding Progressive Enhancement" an article we mentioned in an earlier show. It is a great article that explains one possible technique for ensuring your CSS squeezes the best out of as many browsers as possible. If you have a chance, give it a read.

Everything you know about CSS is wrong

Talking about CSS, yet another book on the subject has been released this week. However, this one is different. Written by Rachel Andrews and Kevin Yank, "Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong" is aimed at web designers who already know CSS well. The emphasis is on emerging techniques and future CSS support.

I haven’t read this book yet (although I do have it on order), but it looks very exciting. It has been a while since I have got to experiment with CSS and so this will hopefully point me in the right direction.

It tackles subjects like Internet Explorer 8, CSS tables and CSS3. These are all topical subjects and so the book appears to have a lot of potential.

I will review the book once I have read it and we intend to get Kevin on the show to talk about some of the techniques.

Reduce your business costs with free stuff

With the economy in tatters and a general sense of impending doom, we are beginning to see posts on how to cut cost and tighten belts. One such article is "Reduce Your Business Costs With Free Stuff" on the Think Vitamin website.

The article is a mixture of ideas on how to save money in your business. Some will save you thousands and apply only to larger companies, while others save only a few pounds a month. However whatever type of business you run, from a humble part time freelancer to a multi-national design agency, there is something in here for you.

Ideas include:

Cutting costs on your phone system without reverting to VoIP
Subletting office space
Open source versions of basecamp, Microsoft office, campfire and much more
Moving email and hosting in house

Although I think some of the suggestions are somewhat short term (Managing email internally would quickly become an expensive headache) I generally agree with most of what is suggested.

If you are beginning to feel the squeeze then this one is worth the read.

HTML Email: What mail clients are people using?

Finally this week there has been an interesting evolution in our understanding of HTML email clients. This has been nicely summarised by Alex Walker on the Sitepoint blog. He writes:

There are lots of reasons for hating HTML Email, but perhaps no#1 on most people’s hit list is having to produce HTML Email to deliver to potentially hundreds of different mail clients and configurations.

Now, clearly it’s completely impractical to test your work on hundreds of mail rigs, but the question is, where do you draw the line? Generic browser usage statistics are reasonably common, but mail clients stats?

In the past you could confidently make up whatever numbers you liked on those question without fear of being caught out. But that may be changing.

Litmus, who produce an excellent web-based browser and email testing suite are now publishing email client usage statistics from their new Fingerprint email analysis system. It makes very interesting reading.

Alex goes on to summarise the key findings which include:

60% of people use web based clients
Just over 80% of the HTML email market is dominated by Outlook, Hotmail and Yahoo!
Business still generally stick with Outlook although they seem reluctant to upgrade to 2007

Interesting stuff.

Interview: Paul Annett on Pushing the Boundaries of CSS

Paul Boag: Joining me today is Paul Annett from clear:left, good to have you on the show Paul.

Paul Annett: Thank you very much. Nice of you to have me here.

Paul Boag: So Paul is, with a few others from his company, the people who really make clear:left happen, rather than Andy and Jeremy and Rich, which we know, well Richard does work, but Andy and Jeremy certainly don’t do anything do they?

Paul Annett: Well, you know, they fly around the world a bit you know?

Paul Boag: Yeah that counts. I guess..

Paul Annett: No, we all chip in, obviously. Everyone does their fair share, so we say.

Paul Boag: Very diplomatic of you. I feel like I can insult them over this as I do the equivalent of no work in my role as well.

Paul Annett: I was going to say… Well there’s eight of us at clear:left, yeah we all just chip in. We’re all caught making the tea, that sort of stuff.

Paul Boag: Cool. Well tell us about your role. What is it you do at clear:left?

Paul Annett: Well, I’m a user experience designer. So that means, well it’s more than just making a web site look pretty, which were are accused of sometimes in the trade; to make sure that the sites are easy to use, as well as a pleasure to use really. That’s something that’s often overlooked with some web site design companies, obviously none of your audience.

Paul Boag: Obviously not.

Paul Annett: It’s a vital ingredient in the mix really. My job does overlap with some of the other guys in the office. Basically, we all know each other’s jobs fairly well so we chip in and share some responsibilities. My main focus is UX design. We’ve also got the others guys doing information architecture, they tend to start the project off with handing over wire frames or prototypes to me. Then once I’ve finished my bit I then hand over the designs to our front end developers who then code up the HTML and CSS. As I say we do overlap a bit more than that but that’s basically how it works.

Paul Boag: I’m quite interested in how that works. You are saying you don’t do too much HTML and CSS, or how does it work.

Paul Annett: I don’t do a lot right now, I used to when I was freelance before joining clear:left. I used to do pretty much everything on a project. I don’t do a lot now; I don’t really have time to. The occasions when I do get time to are when we are working on our own projects. I especially seem to have had a bunch of project holding pages or client holding pages in the past where Natalie and Jeremy who do the front end are busy doing other projects and we need to just get something up there while the design is being made. So I will code up that kind of thing. I don’t really get to work on a lot of the big life projects, but then I’m no where near as proficient as Natalie and Jeremy are at those kind of things. I think they would have a fit if they considered my code going live.

Paul Boag: See that’s quite interesting, isn’t it? You’ve begun to build a bit of a reputation as somebody that does-I don’t know-CSS embellishments for want of a better word on some of your designs. You know the kind of thing that other web designers go oh. The most kind of well known example would be the Silverback holding page where you have the clever resizing background How did that come about? Where did that idea come from?

Paul Annett: It comes from… it’s fortune, really, that I happened to be building that page because it was one of the holding pages. I always look for something unusual to do, or something that’s going to catch someone’s eye, that kind of thing. That particular technique was quite appropriate because the site has quite a niche audience, in terms of web designers. People who wouldn’t necessarily pick up on the subtleties and things that I like that are in there, they’re like hidden gems, wouldn’t care. Web designers seem to catch on to that, it’s something they haven’t seen before. The particular technique itself was just a happy accident, really, because I virtually designed the site, it’s a very simple little holding page with the gorilla icon, designed by Arch Nemesis podcaster, John Hicks.

Paul Boag: Well he designed our logo as well so he can’t be that arch nemesis

Paul Annett: That was fantastic drawing on it’s own. But then when I put the vines there, I was just thinking finally give it some kind of depth. I was fiddling around with some of the CSS, and because I don’t know, this is a benefit, because I don’t know CSS like the back of my hand. I do sort of dip in and out. I might make mistakes. Those mistakes might accidentally do something that makes me go oh hang on maybe I can actually use that for something, which is what happened in this case. I happened to position the only layer of vines that I had a percentage off the screen. It moved in relation to the grid. That got me thinking, well maybe I can do this with multiple layers of vines. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I happened to mention that I had launched the holding page on twitter and a few people.

Paul Boag: All hell broke loose.

Paul Annett: Yeah the few people that follow me thought oh that’s nice and they twittered it, and other people twittered it. Before we knew it, a day later, we had 25,000 views on the web site and we were thinking wow we’ve hit something here. 50% of those people signed up for more information about our product, which it didn’t even exist yet, and the web site didn’t even say what it’s about. So they were just intrigued to find out more based on the what they had seen.

Paul Boag: So that caught you very much by surprise then?

Paul Annett: Oh yeah We were kind of overwhelmed. If it had been, in an anyway, some kind of planned INAUDIBLE machine, then we would have waited until we had actually started building the app probably. We had over 10,000 people signed up for something we were thinking we’ve really got to pull something out of the bag here. Hopefully we did.

Paul Boag: Well you do have very good feedback on it. That really demonstrates well the power of design, that even something that, let’s be honest, is maybe, gimmicky is not the right word but you know, isn’t fundamental to the functionality of the site, yet had a huge marketing impact. So it was very worthwhile.

Paul Annett: Exactly. These things, they are gimmicky. They’re things that people come back to and play with and just want to fiddle around and look at it again. They don’t mean anything. The idea is that they entertain me and maybe some other web designers. It just happened that it entertained 25,000 web designers.

Paul Boag: Is this something that you do regularly? Do you sneak things like this in a lot?

Paul Annett: It is something that I like to do, as I said, to entertainment myself. But I do now look for places where I can sneak these things in. I think I’ve always done it really. I always strive to do something unusual. Back in the days of my freelance site, which is nice-design.co.uk, which is still there but not updated since IE8 so if you are using IE8 it will break. Even then, that was one of the first sites where the header and the sidebar were fixed and it was only the content that scrolled. It’s an unusual thing to see, other than the framesets, obviously, back in the day. I always try to sneak these things in. And when I’ve been working here at clear:left, last year’s de-construct site where we snuck in an Easter egg. There’s a style switch on it, I don’t know if you saw it, but when the site launched it was like a wire frame and along the top there a time line which said the progress of the site as it was being built. It was played as if it was being built live as the event got nearer. The time line at the top was actually a style sheet switcher and we deliberately hid the mouse cursor and made it not look like a bunch of links so that if people found it by chance then they would be pleasantly delighted at the surprise of these extra designs on the site that they’d found. Actually we had a few people email us and say terrible usability, they don’t look like links and the mouse cursor doesn’t look like a hand when you move over them. They kind of missed the point, it wasn’t supposed to look like a link, it was supposed to be a hidden little gem for people to find. That got good feedback as well.

Paul Boag: It’s that creating a sense of satisfaction from a user that they found something special or you know, it’s that little bit of wow factor.

Paul Annett: Yeah. When people are then able to say their friends oh go on look at this, then they feel like part of an exclusive little club of people that are in the know. Definitely.

Paul Boag: You talked a lot of the Silverback example of how basically that came about because you were fiddling with CSS and then something didn’t behave as you expected it to and you saw some potential in there. So that was very much a technology driven way of coming to it. Is it always like that or are sometimes these things planned in from the start. I guess in others words, do you have the ideas and implement them or how does it happen?

Paul Annett: It really varies. Sometimes it’s design driven, like with the de-construct site last year, that was design driven and we wanted to have something which resembled the process that building a web site out there. The silverback one was kind of technology driven but also slightly design driven because I wanted to give it that depth. To take that one step further, I’ve used the same technique on the UX London site. UX London is another conference were running next year in June, uxlondon.com. The technique that I used on silverback is reimplemented there. There’s no three dimensional movement or anything like that, but as you resize the window, the logo changes color. That’s just done by having a transparent window through the logo in the shape of the U and the X, so as you resize the window, the background color behind the whole page slides sideways and changes the color of the logo. This kind of this could be done with Flash, it could be done with Java Script, but I don’t know Flash, and I don’t know Java Script, so it is me trying to find my own little work around and quirky way of doing things really.

Paul Boag: I guess the thing that you know when you start thinking about these things is browser support. Some of these things you are doing are kind of either very advanced CSS or very hackerish CSS so either way you come up with browser support issues. Do you worry about that or is it just that they’re extras and it doesn’t really matter.

Paul Annett: Well fortunately because the audience for the sites that we’ve done in this sort of extreme way are web designers so you know they are going to be using the latest browsers. They’re going to be using firefox and they’re not going to be using IE6. We wouldn’t go to that sort of an extreme on a client web site and everything that we do, everything that leaves our doors is valid CSS, valid HTML. It wouldn’t be allowed not to be if you know what I mean. We’re very standards aware as a company, but I do like to kind of push the boundaries on things a little bit and see what I can get away with. Not in anyway inaccessible, but just not very conventional and if it doesn’t work in IE6 and doesn’t work in other browsers then as long as we implement something that looks the same but without the effects then that’s fine. The silverback site, if you look at it in IE6 is just a gorilla in front of some vines, no movement, nothing lost. Nobody coming to that site will be like there’s something missing here, but they just won’t get that extra little embellishment.

Paul Boag: It’s that graceful degradation.

Paul Annett: Progressive enhancement really. Most people that do have the technology get the extra stuff. This isn’t a company policy, but personally I’m usually in the favor of, I’ve seen quite a couple of sites recently that had a browser upgrade nag bar where if you’ve got IE6 then it says hey just upgrade your damn browser, you’re missing out on stuff. We’d never do that, we wouldn’t put that on a client site here, but I might put that on my own site. I haven’t, but I might.

Paul Boag: Sounds like a good idea to me. What’s the kind of process you go through in getting these extras added in? Are they kind of planned in from day one. When you, say for example, did the UX London web site, did you have it in your head right from the beginning that you wanted to do this with the logo, or something occurred to you further down the design process? When did it happen, is it in the design stage, the build stage?

Paul Annett: With that particular one, that was something that I tried out on a previous site. It didn’t really work 100% and we thought we’ll do something else with the site. But I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to do it from the start on that project. But in general, again it varies really. If, sorry to be so vague and unspecific.

Paul Boag: No no, that’s the nature of design isn’t it?

Paul Annett: One thing I do advocate is that with all our client’s stuff, as well as our own stuff, I always present mock ups in a browser. I never send out a JPEG of mock ups to clients because for start, they are going to view it at the wrong size, they are going to look at it in preview or some kind of windows equivalent, image viewer, and it’s going to be resized to fit their screen, so they’re not going to see it in the context of the web site anyway. Not only that, but it also gives you the opportunity to actually build part of the site so you might have the header as a flat JPEG and the footer as a flat JPEG and the left hand side as a flat JPEG but the right hand side, where you want some kind of interactivity, you could spend a little bit of time building that so that it kind of explains to the client that this is what I want to happen here, roughly. Obviously it wouldn’t be the final thing because you don’t want to invest that much time up front, to give them that little bit of insight. That’s what I do when I am building holding pages or whenever I do get the opportunity to do something like that in house here is that I’ll code up some bits I think is the unique, gimmicky bit of it, and all the rest will just be a flat JPEG. It’s just to sell the idea internally, if you like, and to have everyone gather around my Mac here and ridicule me and laugh at you.

Paul Boag: It makes sense that more and more web design that we are doing these days has got so many interactive elements with use of Java Script and various other things, that a static JPEG doesn’t always cut it anymore does it?

Paul Annett: No, exactly. Another thing we do to combat that here at clear:left is that we often build prototypes of a site, instead of having like a paper wire frame which we often do as well but if there are interactions that need to be explained to the client we’ll build a flat wire frame of it in HTML just using framework and Java Script libraries and simulate the AJAX side of things just with hard coded Java Scripts. It’s also not production quality code, but the prototype wire frame and the flat JPEG combined will give the client a better idea of exactly how the finished site will be.

Paul Boag: Sounds good. We’ve talked a couple of time about is this gimmicky, is this not you know… I’m quite interested as where you feel the line is drawn between good design here and tipping into that naff gimmick area. Do you know what I mean?

Paul Annett: Yeah. There are a couple of things that haven’t seen the lights of day yet, which maybe they will one day. I guess it depends on how much time it’s going to take and how much value it gives us at the end of the day. Using a similar kind of thing with positioning elements we’ve got these great big letters in the clear:left office and we regularly rearrange the letters that spell clear:left to spell different words on the shelf at the office. To simulate this online I’ve built a little page which has got the word clear:left across the page when it’s at full screen at 1024 pixels wide and as you resize the window all the letters swap places because they’re all positioned at different places at different percentages off the screen, blank bits of image and all this complicated CSS positioning going on. When you reach 800 pixels wide it says elf:cartel. So it doesn’t have any fundamental reason or… it doesn’t do anything, it’s pointless, so it’s not going to be anywhere probably. But that is too, possibly gimmicky. There are some ideas which are not necessarily web based which are gimmicky but do work like when we were planning this year’s de-construct and INAUDIBLE wants to get some silverback promotion in there. I talked to him why don’t we just have a gorilla one day running around dishing out silverback branded bananas. Everyone laughed and thought it would be stupid, and then we did it. And then it was really successful and everyone loved it. Yeah, it was a bit of a gimmick but again it kind of fitted with the brand so it worked.

Paul Boag: It’s a fine line isn’t it, you walk in things like that? Because you know you could have been absolutely ridiculed for something like that. How do you know what is going to go down well and what’s not? I guess you don’t.

Paul Annett: Yeah, luck. I was ridiculed for that here in the office but we went with it and it seemed to work. It was great fun.

Paul Boag: I’ve seen pictures. It looked entertaining if nothing else. Going back to the online stuff, even if you develop something like that, it never sees the light of day, you never know that technique may come in use in a future web site that you develop and it might be appropriate.

Paul Annett: Yeah there’s always like a library of that stuff that we’ve kind of half developed and ideas that we’ve got, notes, that kind of thing. It might well see the light of day in the future

Paul Boag: Let finish off with just a kind of general advice that you like to give designers out there that they look at some of the cool little things that you do and they think I’d really like to do that but I don’t want to just go out and copy him because there’s nothing imaginative in that. I want to kind of get into that mentality of looking for opportunities to do this kind of thing. What advice can you give them? How can you start them off?

Paul Annett: There’s loads of stuff that’s come out as a result of the silverback hype, if you like. There was an article that I did on ThinkVitamincom which kind of explains how to achieve that technique. People have taken that and done all sorts of other things with it. I’ve seen someone creating moving 3d images and that style of a zoetrope(?) toy thing, which uses the same kind of principles but applied in a different way. So by all means, the best advice in all cases of web design is to look at the code, see how someone else has done something and see how you can adapt that to your own stuff. One thing that I really rely a lot on is, especially in these hidden Easter eggie things, is alpha transparency and thinking of how you can create a window through the front layer of a web site so you could have, instead of having a white background on the web site, put a white foreground layer with a window through it, shaped in the shape of whatever, and see how you can make that interact with the background layer so as you perhaps scroll down the page something becomes visible through this previously invisible transparent window. There’s a site called webleeddesign which does this brilliantly. That’s my ultimate, I would have loved to have made something like that, it’s really good. Only that one page, but it’s really nice with that alpha transparency in the front there. Think about what you can do with resizing the text on a browser so-we redesigning the clear:left site at the moment, hopefully it will be online soon-now I’m giving up an Easter egg that’s coming up on it.

Paul Boag: No one listens to this podcast so it’s fine.

Paul Annett: There are certain things hidden on certain pages and if you bump the text size up a couple of points then those things would become visible because of course you can control the position of things based on ems. As you resize things, your font size gets bigger, it perhaps moves in relation to the other things and things begin to peak out from behind something that was previously in front of it. I play around with that kind of thing a lot. That’s the advice I’d give you in terms of this particular way of doing things.

Paul Boag: That’s some great advice there, there’s lots of possibility. I like what your saying that it only takes a small number of techniques, you talked about transparency there, you talked about the background stuff, and you talked about the font resizing, but the possibilities of just those three things are endless really. You could do all kinds of things with them.

Paul Annett: Exactly, combine them in different ways. Again someone take this and do something with it, but imagine a line going diagonally across the screen but in font of that you’ve got a completely white page and across that white page is a very narrow slot of transparency, so if your line starts at the top right hand corner all you see is a dot in the top right hand corner but as soon as you start scrolling down the screen, that dot moves to the left because it’s visible through that hole. That’s a very basic example of how you could use windows of alpha transparency interacting with the background to do something which moves horizontally as you scroll vertically. I haven’t done anything with that yet as I haven’t thought of anything good to do with it but maybe someone can.

Paul Boag: That’s absolutely brilliant Paul, there’s some really good advice in there and thank you for taking the time to come on the show. I hope we can get you back on before too long.

Paul Annett: Thanks. Thanks very much for having me.

Thanks goes to Troy Oltmanns for transcribing this interview.

Feature: Improving your site with user feedback

Users can be invaluable when deciding how to move a website forward. We should always listen to what they say. However, sometimes that is easier said than done. Read more here.

Improving your site with user feedback

Posted in Site content on October 27, 2008 by Paul Boag

Users can be invaluable when deciding how to move a website forward. We should always listen to what they say. However, sometimes that is easier said than done.

Whether you are a website owner or a web designer, listen to your users. Whether you are running a web application like GetSignOff or developing content driven websites, listen to your users.

We all know that user feedback can be invaluable for improving our sites. However, knowing something and putting it into practice are different things.

There are two problems with listening to users:

How to listen to them in the first place
How to decide what is valuable feedback and what is not

We will never pay more than lip service to the idea of users shaping our sites unless we overcome these obstacles.

Collecting user feedback

Everybody thinks they know their audience. However, in reality they probably do not. When was the last time you actually asked a user his opinion? You may think you know what they want but you can’t be sure unless you ask.

Fortunately there are a number of ways to collect feedback from users:

Face to face

From focus groups to usability sessions, meeting users in the flesh provides unparalleled feedback. Meeting users allow a level of interaction unavailable through other methods because they allow two way real-time interaction.

This creates a better empathy and connection with users. You can get inside their heads by watching their mannerisms, listening to their tone of voice and even observing the way they dress. All of these subtle elements help construct a picture of the type of person they are.

Admittedly face to face meetings can be difficult to arrange. However I would encourage you to settle for nothing less. You may not do it extensively, but make sure you do it at least once.

Web stats and search queries

In my post ‘use web stats for more‘ I explored what could be learnt from analysing web logs and search queries. I explained that web stats could be used to find and resolve problems with usability, accessibility and content. I also looked at how monitoring search queries reveal what users really want from your site and the mental model they use to find your content.

In short, web stats are an invaluable source for identifying trends in behaviour and expectations.

Questionnaires and surveys

Probably the most traditional and most favoured form of collecting user feedback is the ‘survey/questionairre’. One reason they are favoured is because they identify broad trends in much the same way as web stats.

Personally I am not a fan of this approach, especially when used in isolation. Tracking broad trends through statistical analysis does not encourage empathy with users. As is pointed out in the book Subject to change, empathy is an important aspect of successful web development. Without empathy you will not truly understand your users.

Also, in my experience there is a difference between what users say and what they actually want. Users often request features and functionality when in reality they value a simple user experience. Without a two way discussion with users it is hard to identify the underlying needs.

Finally, unless users feel strongly about a site they are unlikely to complete a survey. This polarises results suggesting extreme opinion where it does not exist.

I am not suggesting surveys are useless. The problem is how they are acted upon. Many treat survey results as absolute. In fact it is necessary to ignore some results and read between the lines of others.

Third party web applications

The final way of collecting user feedback is through a new generation of community tools. Sites like Get Satisfaction and User Voice allow two way interaction with users. Users can submit suggestions, questions and complaints online and you can respond in kind. This happens in an open forum allowing anybody to participate in the discussion.

This open format (when compared to the predefined questions of a survey) encourages a more personal discussion and provides opportunity for a deeper level of discussion.

As with surveys the people responding are likely to be more polarised in opinion. However, because of the interactive nature of these services it is possible to dig a little deeper and understand the underlying issues.

Personally, I have found these services an invaluable way of building a closer relationship with users and better understanding what they are looking for.

Of course, whatever method you use to collect feedback it must be assessed. You need to determine what must be acted upon and what can be safely ignored.

Assessing user feedback

Once you have engaged your users, you will be amazed at the quality and quantity of suggestions. The problem becomes deciding what to implement.

I have had this problem for some time with both Boagworld and more recently GetSignOff. I have established 4 criteria I use to judge whether I act on a suggestion or not. These are:

Level of feedback – How many people are making the suggestion? If it is a substantial number then you should seriously consider implementing the idea. However if it is just a vocal minority then you may wish to think twice.
Source of feedback – Who is making the suggestion? Are those people your core audience? It is easy to find yourself implementing functionality for a group of users who provide no value to your business or site.
Cost of implementation – Consider return on investment when deciding on whether to implement a suggestion or not. If it is time consuming to build and expensive to implement, then the benefit to your users and your business must be high.
Impact – Finally, consider the broader impact of adding new functionality or content. Will it introduce complexity into your site? Will it break another part of the site? Will it distract users from your call to action or undermine business objectives? Often implementing a suggestion can have surprising consequences.

There is no doubt that listening to users can be an invaluable way of improving your site. However, ask yourself how you intend to gather their feedback and respond to the results.

139. Brand

Posted in Classic shows on October 15, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show we’re joined by Ryan Carson to discuss building an online brand. We look at promoting your site with minimal budget and Marcus shares his views on working in an office.

Podcast: Download (33.1MB)

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News and events

Understanding progressive enhancement

Its funny how we spend our whole lives telling clients to avoid jargon and yet web design has more jargon than most. Every few months we seem to make up some new term that is thrown around like everybody knows it.

In reality some we have never heard certain terms, while others seems so similar to one another that the difference escapes us. Take for example ‘graceful degradation’ and ‘progressive enhancement’. Have you heard of them? Could you tell me the difference?

I have to be honest, I couldn’t. In fact in a few weeks you will hear an interview I recorded with Paul Annett from clear:left where I make a comment about graceful degradation and he said ‘no its more like progressive enhancement’. I had no clue why one was right and the other was wrong and I am supposedly a web design expert. Does that make me thick? Possibly. However, more likely I just missed the memo on that one.

The trouble is we are all too busy looking intelligent to clearly communicate with one another.

I have to some extent criticised A List Apart (among others) in the past for perpetuating this kind of ‘in the know mentality’. However, I am now being forced to eat my words (gratefully so) as they published an excellent article on Progressive Enhancement and why you should care about it.

Now if only somebody could explain what Web 2.0. really is.

A free conference (kind of)

I realise that some of the advice I give on this show is unrealistic for some. For example, I talk about the importance of attending conferences. However, when a conference can cost hundreds of pounds it is not always possible.

One alternative is to listen to the podcasts that most conferences published. Unfortunately, they are slow to appear and are hard to follow without being able to see the slides.

Fortunately, the FOWA in London has significantly raised the bar and other conferences will be forced to follow suit.

FOWA has released video of most talks. These appeared within hours of the speaker taking the stage, and are beautifully done including both speaker and screen.

There are also ‘highlights reels’ for most talks. These are a cut down version of the presentation, ideal if you are too busy to watch the whole thing.

With some of the most influential people in web design taking the stage, this is an invaluable resource and Carsonified should be congratulated for making it freely available.

Design Float

Talking of useful resources check out Design Float. Design Float is basically a Digg clone. However it is a clone aimed at designers.

I have to say I don’t like sites that rip off Digg. I have huge respect for what people like Daniel Burka and Joe Stump are doing at Digg. I hate to see people directly ripping off their work (normally badly).

However, Digg does have one flaw. It doesn’t serve the niche very well. Even Kevin Rose recently said: "We don’t really do a good job of servicing the long tail of content." And he is right.

As a web designer, categories such as technology or design are just too broad for me to bother following Digg regularly. Until this problem is resolved, Design Float is an alternative.

Design Float allows me to only see stories relating to web design and although the smaller community means that stories are posted less regularly, what is posted is pretty good.

I recommend checking it out. However, if you are a designer don’t just limit yourself to web design posts. Also look at the other design posts. There is some pretty inspiring stuff there.

Can we stop supporting text scaling?

Finally today, a post by Dave Shea in which he discusses page zooming.

Most modern browsers now support page zooming. The only exception is Safari and that will soon change. This allows users to zoom an entire page, not just the text. Obviously this is beneficial to those with visual impairments. However, is also exciting for web site owners and designers.

Traditionally websites have been forced to support text resizing. This significantly increased development time as well as making design integrity challenging. As text scales, designs often breakdown especially when fixed sized images are involved.

With page zooming these problems go away. It provides the designer with more control and reduces the costs of development. A cost normally passed on to the website owner.

Dave asks whether it is time to support page zoom rather than text resizing. As can be seem from the comments, there is no wrong or right answer. Nevertheless it is an interesting question and one you might want to start considering for your own site.

Interview: Ryan Carson on Building an Online Brand

Paul: So I’m really excited to have joining me today Ryan Carson from Carsonified. Good to speak to you Ryan.

Ryan: Thanks for having me Paul. Good to be here.

Paul: It seems that we are crossing paths more and more often with me doing various things with Future Of conferences and you guys kindly giving discounts to my listeners, so it’s good to finally actually have you on the show.

Ryan: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Paul: So the reason I have asked Ryan on to the show today is to talk a little bit about building an online brand. Carsonified have got lots of different brand identities going on with obviously Carsonified itself and then Future Of and ThinkVitamin and various other things. Ryan’s a bit of an expert really, or he comes across like that anyway, at building an online brand and I wanted to talk to him about how he’s gone about doing that. But before we get into that, Ryan, tell us a little bit about the background of Carsonified. How did it come into being, so to speak? How did it end up being what it is today?

Ryan: Well, it was kind of born four years ago. It started off basically as just me in our top bedroom. I used to be a developer in a web design studio and when Jill and I, my wife and I, got married four years ago we just decided to start our own company. At that point it was just me and I was trying to build web apps and attempting to make money and didn’t really do a great job of it. Then I kind of slowly moved into doing sort of more workshops and things and then we built our first proper web app, which was DropSend, and then we just kept growing and growing and doing more web apps and more websites, for ourself not for clients, and then we launched a couple big conferences, Future Of Web Apps and Future Of Web Design, and all of a sudden now we’re about eleven people. Located in Bath and just love what we do and are really excited to be part of the web industry. So that’s us kind of in a nutshell.

Paul: It’s quite interesting, the approach that you’ve taken. You’ve come from the same background as the vast majority of us yet your business has gone in a completely different direction. You haven’t gone down the road of delivering solutions to clients but you’ve done this quite eclectic thing of a bit of web apps here, conferences here. Was that an intentional thing or has it just kind of naturally evolved that way?

Ryan: It kind of naturally evolved but my mother, and your mom always knows you best, she always said there’s a vein that’s been running through my life for a long time, which is just connecting people. I don’t know, for whatever reason I just get a lot of joy out of connecting people and physical events are just a great way to do that. I’m passionate about the web and therefore it’s kind of like, well, connecting people in the web industry, in the technology sector is just kind of made sense. It did start off with this thing called BD4D which you probably don’t remember, By Designers For Designers. A friend and I did that and it was bd4d.com which is now gone but the idea was we got together designers for free just at a bar and people showed their work. It was in London originally and it kind of took off and I think then it was always just a for fun thing. We called it the Creative Fight Club. I think that was kind of the genesis of our events career. We don’t really see ourself as an events company we see ourselves very much as lovers of the web and technology and we just kind of happen to connect people at events so, it just kind of worked that way. I’m also not a big fan of working for clients because it’s just so hard. I really respect what you guys at Headscape and any web designer web developer because constantly doing work for clients is really hard work and it’s fun but it’s hard and because we run our own conferences and build our own web apps thankfully we’re our own client which gives us a bit more freedom. So that’s kind of how we ended up there.

Paul: It depends on how you look at it Ryan because from my point of view you’ve got thousands of clients while I only have one at a time because you have all those users of your apps and the people who come to your conferences. You’ve got far more trouble in my opinion.

Ryan: I guess you could look at it like that but they tend to be less demanding. They’re not paying us thousands of pounds each so it kind of. But you could look at it like that. We try to treat all of you who come to our show with the same respect as clients, it’s just a shorter term, lower economic value relationship.

Paul: OK, so let’s talk about brand a little bit and profile and stuff like that. Carsonified has kind of built quite a significant online profile and I’m just quite interested in some of the techniques that you’ve used to achieve that. You know, how have you made that happen?

Ryan: OK, well I think underlying everything we do is genuineness. I think that we care very much about honesty and being genuine and being kind and friendly and that sounds a bit fuzzy and happy but that’s just kind of, I don’t know, the way we are. And I think that’s been the key to our success, that when we do things people know that we’re not trying to pull the wool over their eyes or secretly sell them something. We have a genuine interest in the web and the tech industry and so when we do things people kind of know there’s real people that are behind this, we’re not some company. And I think we’ve always been very personal and very human and very transparent and I think that at least set the stage for being successful, but obviously we just follow through with pumping out tons of hopefully valuable content. We see building a brand as basically building friends and I think that on our blogs and through our tweets and at our events and through our communications we try to treat everybody as friends and that’s kind of, I think, a little bit of the key to our success.

Paul: I like that idea of talking about treating people as friends. I think that’s a good way. Too many people treat people as potential customers in preference to actually having any real interest in them as human beings I guess. So it’s good.

Ryan: Well yeah. I just kind of think about who do you like being around? I mean, It’s your friends and there’s a reason for that. I think why does business have to be different? Of course there’s an element of professionality but when you go to the pub and you relax it’s because you feel comfortable with people and I think that whole idea should permeate business. You know with your friends you just buy them a beer, but with your customers there’s significant money being exchanged I think that should involve even more trust than friendship. Hopefully our customers, our attendees and our sponsors really believe that we’re doing the right thing for them. You guys probably do something very similar when you work with your clients. You want them to know that you care about them. That this isn’t just about money that you actually are trying to build something beautiful and worthwhile for them.

Paul: Yeah. I mean it’s interesting. You talking about friends reminds me a little bit of the Innocent smoothie guys that I heard talking at Fuel, which is obviously one of your conferences, where they were talking about how they refer to their customers as family, don’t they? And I always thought was quite a. It sounds naff when you say out loud, referring to your customers as family but if you kind of treat them with that kind of respect, I don’t know, it’s good but it depends on how you get on with your family I guess.

Ryan: Yeah. It could be good or bad but the problem is that would never work if you didn’t actually think Innocent cared about you. If you looked on their bottle and there was E numbers and preservatives and stuff you’d think, “Well, they talk this stuff, but they don’t really seem that committed to doing this.” So I think it really needs to be backed up with a sincere and real effort to support. I mean, we’ve been talking about accessibility, this is a good example, at Carsonified for years. You know, “Yeah we care about accessibility and it’s a great thing,” but we don’t actually know what we’re doing and so we just met with AbilityNet yesterday with Robin and we said we want to get serious about this. I know that you guys are really good at accessibility and sort of putting our money where our mouth is. We want people with disabilities to be able to attend our shows and to use our websites. Let’s actually spend some money on that and get serious about it so at the bottom of each page we’re going to put a little thumbs up symbol that will go to a site that explains why accessibility is important to us and what we’ve done to move towards that with also sort of some tips and hints for people who are disabled like how can you use this site better and get more out of it so trying to put our money where our mouth is really.

Paul: Yeah. I tell you one of my favorite moments I ever had at one of your conferences was, I can’t even remember who the speaker was but the question that came out for the panel was about promoting your business and can you do that outside of San Francisco and California and this guy said you had to be in California you had to be at San Francisco if you wanted to launch a web app and you stood up afterwards and you completely laid into this guy and you said, “No no no, that’s not the case, blah blah blah.” But it does strike me, you know, you’re a Bath-based company and Bath isn’t exactly the beating heart of the web design world and I’m quite interested as to whether you feel that that’s been a barrier to you in any way, being based where you are.

Ryan: That’s a great question. It makes it harder, for sure. You know, we have to go to London to have meetings to go to drink, parties, to network, blah blah blah, but the way we make up for that, and I think a lot of your listeners won’t be in London necessarily or New York or Silicon Valley so this is applicable to all of you out there. It’s all about being visible on the web. And you guys do a good job of this as well. You just have to get yourself out there. So we blog as much as we can, we tweet as much as we can. We try to gather a community around us and that’s the way we make up for the fact that we’re not in London or Silicon Valley. I was going to say another important thing about building a brand, and this fits into that, you need to have an opinion in order to be heard, and that means that you have to be comfortable with the fact that people will completely disagree with you sometimes. You know I think in a way I’ve been successful at building a brand because I’m willing to say something that pisses people off really. You know and I think it’s only interesting to hear from someone who has an opinion. When Paul Graham said that “You know you need to be in the startup hub,” it just really made me angry, because he was basically saying to every one of us, well, you know you’re just kind of screwed, and I just thought, “You know what? That’s just not true, and it makes mad and I’m gonna sort of put my reputation on the line by going on stage and disagreeing with you, a well known entrepreneur.” And if I kind of was afraid to do that you know, not so many people know about et cetera. So yeah, get out there, blog, be as controversial as you can, you know as long as you’re being genuine and be ready for people to say mean things about you really.

Paul: Talking about mean things and people say mean things about you. You’ve come under some criticism for being somewhat pushy in your self-promotion. Do you think that’s kind of justified in any way? Do you think maybe there’s a cultural difference there, the fact that you’re American and are us English more uncomfortable with marketing and promoting ourselves?

Ryan: Yes, I think there is a cultural difference. But I’m also kind of, I like to think I’m friendly but I am sort of a brash person. I’m not afraid to tell you my opinion and do what I think I need to do. While being kind, I don’t want to sort of hurt anybody, but I think there is a cultural difference and I do think that, I mean my wife is English so I’m obviously very familiar with English culture now and British culture and I think there is kind of a slight uncomfortableness with getting on stage and blowing your own horn. I think that in the UK we need to get over that. Not change our culture here but be willing to admit that in the UK if we don’t start to step up to the plate and start talking about ourselves, the rest of the world’s just gonna carry on in the tech space. Mike Harrington, he’s not going to shut up. You know and unless we really start to kind of compete with that and start talk about all of the great things that are going on in the UK and really kind of get out there I think unfortunately it means that the startups and the web designers and web developers that are British are going to start to fall behind in the world stage. For instance, I was trying to think, who are the rock star developers in the UK? Who can you name? I mean I can name a couple but who do you think?

Paul: It’s hard. It’s hard to say. I think there are more rock star designers than there are developers. You know you can think of people like Rachel Andrew, and Drew. Two that spring to mind. Jeremy Keith is kind of a developer but maybe not really.

Ryan: Matt Biddle. You know, there’s a few but it’s just. It’s not the plethora that are sort of being spoken about, in the US particularly, but I have no doubt there’s just as many talented people here. It’s just that, that hesitancy to say, “I’m going to do my own startup. I’ve got a good idea. I’ve got what it takes. I’m gonna start talking about it.” It’s just less common over here. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing and that everyone here should change but I think if you want to build a brand in the web space you just need to admit that I’ve got to get out there. You know I had an interesting conversation with Alex Hunter who is sort of really big in Virgin, The Virgin Group, he’s high up and he’s met Richard Branson a bunch of times. And you know what was crazy? He said that Richard was really shy. And I was like, “Really?” That’s a great example I think of a guy, he’s obviously driven and I don’t think everyone should be like Richard Branson but he’s obviously driven and he understands that in order to get Virgin talked about, to build a brand he’s got to be kind of crazy and get out there. He’s always hanging from helicopters or you know flying spaceships and you know, that’s why people talk about him.

Paul: I think there’s also a little bit within the web design community here in the UK of kind of almost false modesty and a little bit of trying to persuade the world that we’re being very altruistic in what we’re doing and not being up front. I receive criticism for the fact that I’m very open about the fact that Boagworld is a marketing tool and that we make money out of it.

Ryan: But it’s the truth.

Paul: Yeah, exactly. So I think I prefer to be up front about those things, than kind of hide them behind a faÃ§ade of false modesty to be honest.

Ryan: Well yeah and that kind of goes back to my thing I said earlier about being genuine. I think you’ll always be better off if you’re genuine. And of course we’re sort of painting with broad brushstrokes here, but there’s some very talented people here and I just think, let’s get on our soap boxes and sort of shouting back at the Americans really. And people are doing it, I just think there should be more of it.

Paul: Talking about effective marketing tools, ThinkVitamin, let’s talk about that for a little bit. ThinkVitamin is a website that you run which is basically web design related and web app related kind of articles and stuff like that. I’m guessing that was set up as a marketing tool. Tell me a little bit about why it exists and how you came about setting it up and what its aim is for you.

Ryan: Yes. So thinkvitamin.com has two purposes. It’s to build good will and to give back to the community but it’s also a marketing tool and those things are actually very related. If we pump out great content we give away for free it will be valuable, but those of you who read thinkvitamin.com will also probably come to our shows. It’s a symbiotic relationship. We’re very happy to do that. There is a little bit of altruism there, we do actually want to provide good content and give it away for free but we also realize we needed a platform to talk about our shows. We kind of kept calling in favors like, “Do you mind blogging about Future Of Web Apps?” and “Can you mention it?” We just thought we need to build a big site that people go to so we can tell them about that and we’re fortunate to have great connections. We know people like you and Molly Holzschlag and Kevin Rose and just big Internet people and they all agreed to be on the advisory board and really that’s just a group of people that we trust that occasionally write for us but we’re actually taking ThinkVitamin in a new direction where we want it to pretty much become it’s own little business. So we’ve hired a full time Editor named Simon Mackie and he was really high up at SitePoint actually. And he’s come over and he’s taken the reigns and we’re gonna, yeah we’re gonna basically grow that team and expand that out into its own little business.

Paul: That’s interesting.

Ryan: It’ll be better for the readers. It kind of was dying. The publishing schedule was going down and I think we realized, “Man this is so valuable we have over 50,000 RSS subscribers, closer to 70 if you count the news feed,” and we thought, “This is great, we should grow it.”

Paul: Yeah. I mean it’s interesting in some ways you’ve kind of taken the same approach that we have at Headscape using ThinkVitamin that you could have created a blog on the Futures Of website and you could have put this content there. There’s actually a value in separating it out and making it a standalone thing. It feels less salesy I guess. The same way as I could have posted my Boagworld stuff on the Headscape site. You know it could be the Headscape podcast instead of the Boagworld one. All the rest of it. It just comes on a bit too strong if you do that I guess.

Ryan: I totally agree. And it’s interesting because I had a good conversation with Mike at FreshBooks, and freshbooks.com for those of you who don’t know is an app that helps you send out invoices. He had this blog and he was really slogging his guts out on it and at freshbooks.com/blog or something and he said, “I don’t get it. No one’s really reading it,” and to me it was obvious for that reason you just said. Well it’s clear that this is just a marketing tool. Why would you put a blog on your company’s site, on your product’s site? It’s just kind of obvious and that’s exactly why we haven’t done it for our events, you know we put occasional updates there but it’s hard. As much as I like Web 2.0 Expo or something I would never read a blog from Web 2.0 Expo. It’s just too blech, you know what I mean?

Paul: Yeah totally. It’s interesting that the other thing that you’ve done, which again is something that I do, which is that you haven’t just relied on people coming into your sites, whether it be ThinkVitamin or the Futures Of sites or even the Carsonified site. You’ve made a big deal of kind of going out there and using tools like Twitter and Qik and YouTube. I’m just interested as how effective you’ve found those things.

Ryan: I find Qik to be really effective, or Qik, however the heck you say it qik.com and I was really shocked as soon as I started broadcasting was that just tons of people were interacting and I almost couldn’t wait to do the next one. Annoyingly 3G is kind of spotty in Bath so it makes the quality a little bit bad but I’d highly recommend Qik or any other comparable service. It’s so fun you just take your phone with you, I had to get a kind of crappy Nokia phone or something, because I use my iPhone for normal business but just grabbed it from the 3 store, got a plan I think it’s 20 pounds a month that gives you unlimited data which you’ll need if you’re streaming live video from a phone, and whenever I’d walk to Starbucks or something I’d just turn it on and start talking and people would show up because the way Qik works for people who don’t know is you actually see comments live on the phone screen.

Paul: That’s very cool.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s great for interaction and any tool you can use to interact with your fans will increase your connection and that friendship. It will show you want to be real and you want to connect with people and I think hopefully we’ve achieved that where people think, “Gosh you know Carsonified we know who’s there we know it’s not a company it’s really these people that are there and they’re interested in hearing from me and talking to me,” so that’s been good. YouTube has been amazing, I mean I hate YouTube, it’s ugly, it’s a bit crude you know but man there’s just a lot of people on it. I used this cruddy little video camera, filmed myself giving some tips about business, threw it in iMovie, put some music to it and popped it on YouTube and I think I can’t remember the figures it’s up to, it’s up to like 10 or 15,000 views in literally like two hours work.

Paul: Yeah, I keep meaning to get around to that myself and I’ve never quite managed it.

Ryan: Now you can use a Flip camera. Flip is just a type of camera, you just record and then it’s got a USB dongle built right into it. You pop it in and it actually automatically uploads it to YouTube.

Paul: That’s nice.

Ryan: There’s a couple tools you can use to make it easier. And then Facebook, I’ve been using Facebook a lot just to connect with people and remember people’s birthdays and say hello and just be a friend to them. The more connections you can have to people the better, which builds your brand and I feel that, like a mercenary when I say that, and I don’t like it, like I do believe it’s just a better way to live to connect with people and it happens to build your brand which is great and I like that as well, but I think it’s important that you need to be genuine and actually care about people for this to connect.

Paul: What about Twitter? How have you got on with that? Have you found that a useful tool?

Ryan: I love Twitter. And it’s been probably the best way I think for me to communicate I’ve got I think around 4,200 followers now and I don’t know why people follow me. I don’t think I’m particularly interesting but I do whenever I tweet I try to imagine if I was somebody else and I was reading it if I would find it interesting. I think with Twitter don’t tweet too much, maybe a couple times a day max. If you tweet too much people unsubscribe.

Paul: That will explain my problem then, I tweet too much.

Ryan: I still follow you so it’s not too bad. But you know Evan Williams had a good tip he said you should tweet things every so often that you’re not quite sure if you should tweet because they’re a bit too personal or a bit too blech, because that’s the type of stuff that’s actually fun and interesting to read. Initially we had a twitter account for Carsonified and we deleted it. I think we decided that that was kind of exactly what not to do. People don’t really want to hear from a company, they want to hear from you.

Paul: That’s almost the same as having a blog on your own corporate website isn’t it? Having a kind of corporate Twitter account. After saying that we have set one up for GetSignoff but more as a for announcements. If something goes down with the service or if we’ve done some bug fixes or stuff like that. By far the majority I do via the Boagworld Twitter account which is just me talking about my life. I agree with what you’re saying about putting personal stuff there as well that people seem to like to know what’s going on with each other’s lives. I like to know how Jackson’s doing. People like to know, I don’t know. Making it personal, it’s about that personal connection again isn’t it really?

Ryan: Definitely. And I think that that’s the future, you know just in general. Humankind you know it’s just kind of being personal and not hiding anymore behind companies or brands or policies or terms and conditions. It’s about, “Hey, how can I help you and how can I take care of you?” and that’s just a better way to live and it will massively benefit your company which is great. What’s interesting though is that everybody, including us, continues to look at the Signal vs. Noise blog from 37signals and kind of scratch our heads it’s like, it’s the one blog where it is a company blog, I mean yes it’s called Signal vs. Noise, but it’s on their domain, and yet they have over 90,000 subscribers. It’s funny because I think everyone is kind of, “How do you do that? I want to replicate that.” In the end I think you know, they were kind of first. You can’t have that many of those type of blogs and I think most of us are gonna have to be happy with just doing a good blog that is real and personal whether, and I mean ours is carsonified.com and it seems to work and we have about 4,000 subscribers and for us that’s a pretty good number. We should post more but that’s something I haven’t quite figured out yet and I’d be interested to hear from your listeners what they think about that. Is it possible to have a company blog that people care about or is it just not possible? I don’t know.

Paul: I think what you said there about being first is quite significant. I think originality goes a long way. I mean even with the Boagworld podcast. Simply the fact that I was the first web design podcast it seems to give it a momentum that keeps things going, you know because you keep delivering the goods so to speak which obviously the guys at 37signals really have done. I think there is a momentum in being first in something.

Ryan: Yes and that’s probably the secret sauce.

Paul: OK, So let’s wrap this up with kind of a last question which is: What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs seeking to increase their profile? Let’s have some kind of top tips if you’ve got some.

Ryan: OK. The first tip I give is to start connecting with people that you feel are influential. You know, spend some time and try to get out and physically meet these people, get to know them and to not be creepy about it, but to get out there, to get in front of them and to get to know them. See if you can do something to help them out, to get on their radar, and I think building sort of a group of friends that trusts you but is also influential is just instantly valuable. So I’d do that and you can use all the tools we talked about for that: Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. but physical meeting is always the best. I mean you want to have a beer with people.

Paul: And you say you do that by trying to help them out in some way? Because that’s always the difficult thing. It’s all well and good to say, “Get to know influential people,” but how you do that’s the tricky part isn’t it?

Ryan: Well my dad always did something that worked. If it was someone he really respected or cared about and wanted to get on their radar he would find an article about them in a magazine and he’d actually go to a framer and have it framed and then write them a personal note and just kind of say and send it to them and say, “You know, I bet you haven’t had time to actually frame a picture of your article so I thought you might want this for your wall.”

Paul: What a genius idea. I love it.

Ryan: And it’s genuine. I’m not trying to get anything out of you but I respect you and here you go. It’s very subtle. You have to be very careful to not try to sort of bribe people. If you come across that way it’s exactly what you don’t want to do. If you feel, and kind of think deep down, “Do I actually want to be friends with this person or am I trying to use them?” I think you should steer very clear of a person if you just think actually I don’t really like this person I’m just trying to get something out of them. But if you think there’s some synergy there, that’s a great way to do it. Remember people’s birthdays, it’s just a nice thing to do. Stuff like that is a great way. Most people’s friends don’t even do that for them. I’ve had people send me stuff and you know it just makes me smile and I’ll always take their call or answer their email now. So I think that’s a good idea.

Paul: Any others?

Ryan: Um, other tips. Um, probably put a real emphasis on customer service and build a real base of caring in your company. Not just for your customers but for your own team. I think that your team will never be able to treat your customers well if they don’t think that they’re treated well. So I think as entrepreneurs grow and they start to hire people I think it’s important to remember to take care of your staff first and then your customers second. And a really great resource for that is what zappos.com does. Zappos.com has an amazing company culture. They have this book called the Culture Book and every year it comes out and you can buy it and it’s basically a bunch of testimonials, thousands of them from the Zappos employees about why they love their job. And it’s just packed full of ideas of how to take care of your team and it’s a great inspirational resource. I think you can either get it on eBay or Amazon or you can buy it straight from Zappos. A couple hopefully useful tips?

Paul: Yeah that’s excellent. Ryan thank you so much for coming on the show, it’s been really good to get you on and I think there’s some really good useful advice there for anybody looking to kind of build an online brand so thank you very much and no doubt we will have you back again soon.

Ryan: Thank you, it’s an honor.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Site promotion with minimal budget

Our first question is from Adam in the boagworld forum:

I have got a site that needs an awful lot of promotion to work, and have got very little budget to do it with. I could probably spend a little bit on Google AdWords but on nothing else. So, how can I promote my site for little money?

Adam went on to tell me it was a charity website. This makes it challenging. As Adam said…

There are thousands of Charity sites, and many better funded, and just altogether bigger.

In this situation search engine optimisation or Adwords is going to be tough. The competition is fierce and so it will be expensive to be highly ranked.

The other problem with a charity site is that unless it is niche (e.g. bird protection) the potential audience is open ended. However, with limited resources there is little point in targeting ‘the general public’. You will have no impact on such a broad audience.

Target a specific group as it will be easier to gain momentum within a smaller audience. For example, there are Christian charities who do general humanitarian aid. Even though anybody could be a potential supporter, they instead target other christians. Therefore they are well known in that circle. Better to have a lot of support from a niche audience than a small amount of support across the general populous.

Once you have picked the audience use three techniques to reach them:

Offline promotion – Engage with your audience offline as well as on. Attend conferences, produce offline promotional material and target magazines your audience reads. As web designers we often forget to power of offline marketing.
Social marketing – Identify the social sites your audience You should be wherever your audience is interacting. Finally, seek out key figures who your audience admire and respect. See if you can get them on board and encourage them to promote your site.
Editorial promotion - Find out if your audience reads online blogs or magazines. Offer to write articles for these sites. Do not overtly promote your charity but instead write content which will be of interest to the audience. Failing that make use of comments to join in the discussions and increase your sites profile among that audience.

However, be careful. In your haste to promote your site do not spam. The key is to offer something of value. You must earn the right to promote your site.

Sitepoint has an excellent article entitled ‘10 rules for driving traffic using forums‘. Although it is focused on forums, its advice is applicable to most forms of online promotion.

Office Or Not

This from Brad:

A question from Canada! I’m a long-time listener of the show, and I thank you both for your entertainment and inspiration.

A little bit of background first… Two years ago I co-founded a small web development company, and to date we have not yet invested in office space. As we slowly move on to ‘higher profile’ clients, we find it increasingly important to have someone in-house, to answered the phones, do the books, etc, etc, so we can focus on growing the business.

That said, I’m obviously touching on a huge spectrum of possible questions, so I’ll try to narrow it down. I don’t think this is something you have covered specifically on the show before…

Is office space really important for a creative business? If so, what steps would you recommend. And if not, are there better areas to spend $2000 / month?

If I had been asked this question only two years or so ago I would have said that office working for a web team is not important at all. If anything, I would have said that home working was better. The following extract from Paul’s blog, written in 2005, underlines this:

The benefits of a virtual company

By virtual company, I mean we do not have a central office. Each member of staff works from home and we communicate and file share with tools such as Skype, CVS and Groove.

People are often curious about an entire company home working and ask how well it works in reality. My answer is usually that it is brilliant. From the employee perspective, you do not have to commute and you can see a lot more of your family. For example, if I were still working for IBM when I used to commute an hour and a half everyday, I would only see my 2-year-old son at weekends. As an employer, I love it because my staff tend to work the hours they would commute and generally home working is seen as a big bonus that keeps people at the company longer. Not to mention the savings made on premises.

Communication really is not a big problem. There are so many tools out there these days that help, and broadband means that even telephone conversations are now free.

Paul goes on to say that the only drawback of home working is that it lacks the social aspects of working in an office.

Not true I’m afraid. Though of course home working does give you an environment to ‘get your head down’ without interruption, what it really lacks, that phone/email/IM cannot replace, is creative collaboration. People simply do not bounce ideas around like they do if they work together.

Our current office is open plan and there’s nowhere to hide yourself away. This has meant that I haven’t really frequented it that often – I need ‘calm’ to write. However, watching particularly our development team grow and work really effectively together underlined to all of us the value of working together.

So much so that we are about to move into our ‘dream’ offices where there will be a mixture of open plan spaces and areas where we can work quietly.

So (finally!), in answer to Brad’s question, I think that office working is better for the business in the long run and I would say warrants the additional associated cost (though beware the costs, they can mount up – another podcast topic I think). That said, we have managed for nearly seven years before doing it properly (i.e. pretty much all of us will be in together most of the time) so it won’t necessarily damage you if you leave it awhile.