Tag Archives: clients

135. Libraries

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this week’s show we talk with John Resig on javaScript libraries and address the question what is more important when we release an app: speed or quality?

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News and events

The complexity tax

Don’t you hate it when somebody beats you to the punch? I recently finished writing a report for our biggest client (Wiltshire Farm Foods). It talks a lot about the need to simplify and remove complexity. It is a lesson we should all learn and so I am in the process of turning extracts from the report into a blog post which we will cover in next weeks show.

However, it would appear I have been too slow and that Gerry McGovern has beaten me to it with an excellent post on the cost of complexity. However, where I focus on why simplicity is important, he addresses the underlying causes of complexity.

For me his post is summed up in the following quote…

Most organizations are producing far too much content. Too many emails, too many PowerPoints, too many reports, too many webpages. All this content creation activity keeps a lot of people busy.

If you are part of a large organisation or work on a substantial website you need to read this post.

10 Rules for Driving Traffic Using Forums

What do you do if you have no marketing budget but have some free time to promote your site? Well, there are a number of guerilla marketing techniques you could use but contributing to forums is one of the most effective.

Sitepoint has posted an article explaining why forums are a great way of driving traffic to your site. It goes on to suggest 10 rules for doing so effectively. These include…

  • Build your profile
  • Follow the rules
  • Start by responding
  • Contribute your expertise
  • Don’t be a ‘me too’ poster
  • Don’t self promote
  • Explain yourself, but be brief
  • If you’re wrong, say so
  • Write intelligently and correctly
  • Negativity is a no-no

This is an excellent article and one that you should definitely read before using forums as a marketing tool. If you do not, you are in danger of damaging your brand, rather than driving traffic.

Accessibility in suit and tie

The life of the corporate web worker who cares about standards and accessibility can be a frustrating one; hampered by office politics and archaic content management systems. In an article on the Think Vitamin site, Bruce Lawson looks at what you can do to make sure your projects are as accessible for your users as possible.

Its a very pragmatic article, which I love. Bruce works from the premise that this is going to be tough and makes suggestions like "some accessibility is better than none". He also talks about the need for ‘buy-in from the top’ but goes on to provide practical tips about how to get that buy in. What is more, his arguments for accessibility were backed up with facts. For example…

Finally, he looks at how to get content providers onboard through education and getting them writing HTML rather than relying on the WYSIWYG editor.

UK Government Browser Guidelines

Our final story raises an interesting discussion; should you decide which browsers to support based on popularity or capability?

Apparently, the UK government believes we should test on the basis of popularity. In a draft document advising public sector websites, it suggests that if a browser appears in visitor logs as being below an arbitrary percentage of total “unique visitors”, then it should not be listed as being “fully supported”.

On the surface this appears very sensible. However, as Jon Hicks points out on his site, this can create problems. He writes…

It isn’t clear how the supported browser list would be enforced, but I’m concerned that this approach will encourage browser sniffing, a move that will exclude browsers like Omniweb, Shiira and iCab, simply because their name isn’t ‘Safari’. They share the exact same rendering engine, and therefore require no further testing. You can be more inclusive without spending any extra resources.

In other words we should be defining our list of supported browsers based on capability rather than popularity. This is the approach used by Yahoo! and it is one that I would fully support.

The Yahoo model supports all browsers through progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, without the need to test on every browser. Its a neat solution but one that the UK government guidelines specifically say they do not advocate…

These guidelines do not advocate specific development methodologies, for example graceful degradation or progressive enhancement. However, it is widely accepted that sites conforming to open web standards such as XHTML and CSS are more likely to work well across a wide range of browsers.

How come if they are widely accepted, do they not advocate them?

Fortunately there is an opportunity to change things before this is set in stone. I recommend reading the WaSP article on the recommendations and then sending some polite feedback to the powers that be.

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Interview: John Resig on javaScript Libraries

Paul:Joining me today is John Resig, who is famous for jQuery and the work that he has been doing with jQuery. John, it is great to have you on the show.

John:Well, thanks for having me.

Paul:I have to say this at the beginning. I have to get this out of the way. I absolutely love working with jQuery, and it’s an absolute pleasure. I remember twittering just a few days ago that every time I start doing anything in jQuery it makes me smile, so that’s got to be a good sign.

John:Well that’s good. I’m glad to hear it.

Paul: What I wanted to do today is get you on the show and not just for me to suck up and say how great jQuery is, but to kind of look a little bit broader at the subject of JavaScript libraries. Because I have to say from a personal point of view my opinion has changed quite a lot about JavaScript libraries and I’m kind of interested in your perspective on things as somebody that’s actually created one. I think the place I want to start is for a long time I had the attitude that you shouldn’t use JavaScript or indeed any library and that you should know the underlying code yourself and all of this kind of thing. Let’s start with the question of how do you know if it’s appropriate to use a JavaScript library? When is it appropriate to use it? What’s your opinion on that?

John:Well, I guess my opinion is it’s always appropriate, and I mean the simple fact of the matter is that there’s two things. One is that when you’re developing, you’re trying to support, generally a large number of browsers simultaneously. This is the same as if you are doing CSS development, JavaScript development, you want to support a large enough market share and you want to make that development process easy. The problem is twofold that you’re going to be encountering weird browser bugs and the APIs, the different utilities the browsers provide, will be different. For example, Internet Explorer provides different ways of handling events from all the other browsers. So what libraries do is that they remove you away from dealing with browser bugs, which is huge. And at the same time they provide a simple interface that you can interact with that will just work ubiquitously.

Paul:Is there a problem there in the sense of, you know, somebody came along and they basically learned to write jQuery for example from scratch, but never learned the kind of underlying JavaScript? Is there a problem there, do people need to know JavaScript before they start using a library?

John:It depends on the library, but I don’t think you do. I don’t think you have to know JavaScript. In a lot of ways, at least in my experience with jQuery directly there’s a lot of people who have used jQuery who have never done any programming whatsoever. jQuery does embody a lot of advanced concepts but you don’t necessarily have to know them in order to make good use of jQuery. I know this sort of translates well into some of the other libraries but one point of concern you brought up was what if someone learns a library but doesn’t learn JavaScript? I used to be more concerned about that, if someone only knew a library and I guess from a purist perspective, that’s a bad thing. Fundamentally, you want people to be getting better at programming JavaScript, not this specific thing. However, I think the reality of it is, is that so many people are just using JavaScript or CSS or doing web design, they just want to get their job done. It’s not really a matter for them of becoming an excellent JavaScript programmer or awesome CSS user, you want to get from A to Z and finish their work in an effective manner that works everywhere. So I think it’s important to realize that this market, so to speak, exists. It’s a very large one. And that ignoring it completely will just leave users frustrated and going back to the simple cut and copy paste scripts that they used to use. So, I think what libraries are doing is they are instilling good standards, they are instilling good practices, even though the users don’t necessarily know about it. And then eventually what’s good is that since these libraries have these good practices that users can always open up a library and read about it and try to understand better what’s going on.

Paul:I guess that’s always been a little bit of my concern with relying heavily on a library is that if you come across something that’s a problem or a bug or something like that, you can’t fix it yourself because you don’t necessarily know your way around the library. What’s your response to people that say stuff like that?

John:Well by the same token if you encounter a problem with a browser you are far less capable of fixing that issue. There’s really no way about it other than that ultimately it would be good to have that knowledge, absolutely. I fully support people who want to do that and I’m writing a second book now encouraging people to do that, to dig into libraries, to learn more, to build their own. What’s important here is that you just don’t, you can’t force people to do it if they, one if they don’t want to or if they’re just not capable. There’s no reason I feel to force a designer, someone who’s a designer by trade to learn the fundamentals of object oriented programming, or functional programming. Theoretically that can help them some way in the future but what’s more important to them is doing good design and I think by helping people keep their focus where it should be. Obviously if a library is able to help programmers program better, that’s good as well. It’s all about helping people keeping their focus and making sure they aren’t down a rabbit hole getting sidetracked.

Paul:I think that’s the thing that really attracted me to jQuery is as a front-end interface designer was the fact that I could pick it up and run with it very easily. The conclusion I came to is, “OK. Well if I do by some chance find a major problem with it, there’s a massive community of very clever people out there that I can ask and I can get help from.” So, that kind of reassured me, I think. If then, we’ve kind of come to terms with the fact: “OK we want to use a library.” There are so many different ones out there. Run us through some of the different options available and the pros and cons and how do you go about picking which library is right for you?

John:Well it really depends a lot. There’s a coupe questions you need to answer. Probably the most important of which is you need to ask yourself, how do you want to write JavaScript? Because libraries end up augmenting or really changing the style of how you write JavaScript. So, finding a library that you like how it looks. It sounds very superficial, but you like how it looks, you like how the code feels is a great place to start. There’s obviously a lot of libraries to choose from. There’s a select group of libraries whose quality is generally above the others and the popularity of those libraries generally reflects the quality as well. Out of those I pick generally jQuery, Prototype, Yahoo UI, dojo, then also MooTools and sometimes XJS. What’s interesting is all those libraries are open source and they are all the most popular JavaScript libraries. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s just a matter of fact that in the web these open source frameworks are going to improve better and attract more users and generally have better community to surround them. So out of these libraries though you break down into a lot of different paradigms for development. I’ll try to summarize as best I can, but it really is not substitute for trying it out yourself. Looking and seeing some examples you can have a pretty good feel right away. So, Prototype and MooTools, they both extend the native objects of the language. They both try to improve the JavaScript language itself. So they add new methods to arrays, they make strings better, at the same time they provide things like object-oriented code
, and all the way out to doing things like events and AJAX. The normal things that you would expect. But at a very broad level they are trying to improve the overall quality of the language and of the experience. Then you have Dojo, Yahoo UI, and XJS and they are generally very modular, very package oriented and they have components you can easily snap in and out with nice ways of handling dependencies and it can end up being a very cleanly architected style of coding. They really support object-oriented code, and additionally events, AJAX, all the normal stuff you would expect. I would tend to group jQuery a little bit differently in that jQuery is more oriented toward improving the relationship between JavaScript and HTML and that it’s highly focused on searching through an HTML document, modifying some things, just getting in and getting out. Unobtrusive, and it doesn’t provide any language features, it doesn’t provide any object-oriented code writing features, it’s just hyper-focused at the task on hand.

Paul:It strikes me from my experience with jQuery that it’s very much a tool that’s primarily focused at helping front-end interface people implement the kind of functionality that they require from a usability point of view rather than necessarily doing, I mean would you build massive applications in something like jQuery?

John:It’s absolutely possible and people do it all the time. For example, T-Mobile’s T-Online in Germany, they built their entire user area so like their mail, their calendar, and everything using jQuery. So it’s absolutely used for very large projects. What I think is very interesting for jQuery at least is that while we don’t explicitly provide the object-oriented styles that most hardcore developers are used to we provide some very interesting alternatives especially they way it, like functional programming that I think actually end up suiting development very well. It’s very different, I will completely grant that, but it’s still very capable of scaling quite large.

Paul:So if people go out there and they have a kind of play around with these different libraries and try each of them out as you say to kind of find what fits their style of coding, once they’ve found something that kind of codes in the way they would like to, for example for me the similarities between jQuery and CSS made it a very natural fit, but what are the kind of things that you should look for from a functional perspective? What kind of things should be included in a JavaScript library? Does that make sense?

John:At the very core there should be a set of features. Of the libraries that I listed previously they all have methods for doing DOM traversal, so traversing through an HTML document, modifying an HTML document, events, so handling user interaction, animations and AJAX. All of them have some support for that to one degree or another. You can be fairly safe in knowing that if you pick a library you will have that base level. In my opinion those sets of features are probably the most important features and the ones that you end up using the most with your applications. Some people might say in their particular case that maybe animations aren’t as important, or maybe that they aren’t using AJAX, it really depends but for most of the time that set of features is fairly comprehensive. On top of that you really have to start to, once you’ve tried to use it, and once you’ve played around, there’s a whole set of secondary features that you kind of have to dig into, ones that aren’t immediately code-related. Things like the community around a library, the documentation for a library and even the health of the projects themselves.

Paul:What do you mean by that last one, the health of a project?

John:There’s a lot of things. In health, do they have an active development team? Are there developers? Are there multiple developers? It’s the famous hit by a bus; if a developer is hit by a bus will the project still continue? Is there a team will continue? Can you view the source code? Is there a repository where you can go? Is there a bug tracker where you can submit bugs? And finally is there a test suite, is what you’re going to be using going to be tested and analyzed to make sure it stays working. Another point that’s important to bring up is that a lot of browsers now are starting to integrate the test suites of these libraries into their test suite. So for example actually this is a lot of my work at Mozilla, was integrating the test suites of Prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery, MochiKit, a bunch of libraries into our test suite such that if we ever added a change that caused a regression to happen in a library we would catch it and we would fix it on our end. Obviously we would do this in a very smart way, we wouldn’t just blindly be like, “Oh something broke!” We would communicate to the library what the issue was or whatever and this has been very big because now you can, there’s an extra level of safety and security here, in that you’ll know that if you’re using a library like this that it’s going to continue to work going forward in these browsers. That’s an extra level of safety that your personal code can’t provide. I think that’s very interesting. I want to jump back here really quick to the other issues I mentioned.

Paul:Sorry, I distracted you there and we took you off topic.

John:It’s OK, it’s OK, of community and documentation. So community, it can be usually be pretty easy to determine the health of the community. All these libraries will have some sort of a mailing list or a forum that you can go to. Just hopping on there, seeing how many messages are posted, seeing what the typical response is like, how they treat new users, just stuff like that it can be really useful because if you’re just starting out, you know you’re going to have some pretty basic questions. Do they understand your problems? Do they help you out? Doing some searches on Google for example to see how many people are talking about it, or using a service like Technorati or something. Are people blogging about it? Is it positive? Are they having problems? The other thing is documentation. This is also pretty easy to tell. If you are starting out with a library, you’re probably going to start out by doing a quick test, running a simple application just to get a feel for it. When you’re doing that you’re immediately going to be in the documentation trying to figure out how things work. I think you’ll be able to determine pretty quickly if the documentation quality meets a standard that you, because if you aren’t, if the documentation just isn’t that good, you’ll immediately have problems and I guess you will have to resort to the mailing list or the forums or whatever. Secondary is, do they have good examples? Do they have books if you want to learn from a book? Do they have books that you can buy to learn from? So again there’s a whole lot of issues here but what a lot of it boils down to is looking at the libraries, looking at their style of code, does it seem alright with you? Then just doing a quick test with each of the libraries that you’ve picked out, building like a menu or just a basic form of interaction. How easy is it? How hard is it? Does it in fact mesh with you well? This is something you can do over the course of a single day and it definitely shouldn’t take you any longer th
an that. If it’s taking longer than that then you probably want to try a different library. Ultimately you should be trying to use these libraries to make your development simpler and easier. If it doesn’t improve your productivity, if it doesn’t improve the quality of your code then you probably shouldn’t be using it to begin with.

Paul:Tell us a little bit about the kind of plug-in architectures that exists around many JavaScript libraries. Certainly I know there’s a strong plug-in architecture with jQuery. Does the same kind of thing exist with other libraries?

John:It depends. What jQuery has is a little bit unique in that we provide a number of plug-in points that plug-ins can snap into and extend how jQuery works. So they can add in new CSS selector behavior, or they can add in new events or all sorts of intricate additions. Other libraries have things that aren’t quite of the same vane, in that they’ll have modules or packages that you can use. Also another thing that varies is how do the various projects treat these plug-ins? At least with jQuery there’s a dedicated plug-in repository that’s used that plug-ins are listed in that you can browse through, you can see ratings, comments, discussions and things like that. Currently no other framework has something similar to that to the best of my knowledge. It’s much looser, just people uploading, putting things to their websites or Google code or some such. So again, at least to me, what makes plug-ins, jQuery-style plug-ins important is that they are, that there’s extension points and that they are supported by jQuery fully.

Paul: The only thing that I think that I kind of struggle with a little bit about plug-ins, you know I love the idea that there are other people out there that can do the hard work for me in that they can develop something I was looking for, and I love the fact that I can go to jQuery, I can type in whatever I’m looking for and it will pull back stuff. I’m always a bit unsure mind about how reliable those plug-ins are, you know as you’ve been saying with the kind of, the core jQuery library that you’ve created I know there’s a big team of developers working on it, I know that it’s thoroughly tested, I know what browsers it’s tested against, all of that kind of stuff. Plug-ins are a bit more of an unknown entity. Is there any kind of advice that you can provide about judging whether a plug-in or module or whatever is reliable or not?

John:I mean you sort of have to use the same standards that you would use in looking at a library. Looking at, what you mentioned, is it tested? Is there good documentation? Are there, how many developers are working on it? Like for example in the jQuery project we started a sort of, sub-project called jQuery Glide in which we’ve taken a whole bunch of plug-ins and actually blessed them and proved them, given them themes, excellent documentation, examples, all this stuff and made them sort of official. We’re doing this more and more, trying to bring in more plug-ins, improve their quality and make sure that they’re up to our standards. There’s still tons and tons of plug-ins that are just excellent, but the issue comes down to that you have to sort of train your eye to look at, and be able to spot when something has good quality. The thing that’s easiest for a plug-in author or a library author to do is to just set up a page that has their code on it and has a basic example. At the very least every single library is going to have that. If you dig in and see that it has documentation, that it has tests, you begin to realize that that plug-in is a much higher quality, at the very least. I think it’s really starting to dig in to these side issues, that you begin to get a better picture of how, of the true nature and of the true health of a particular library.

Paul:Excellent! That’s really useful and I think it’s easy to just look at these libraries and indeed the plug-ins as well and ask, “Well do they have the basic functionality that I require?” But, like you say, looking at things like the community and documentation and things like that are equally important. It’s been very useful John. Thank you for taking the time to come on the show. No doubt we will get you back in the future to talk about some of the specific things going on with jQuery and maybe this book that you’re writing as well, sounds very good. Thanks for your time.

John:Thanks for having me, Thank you.

Thanks to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

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Listeners feedback:

Quality or Quickly?

What is more important, to reach market quickly or to launch with a quality product?

I received this question from Pete in South Africa…

I have been working on a small web application, which I hope to launch soon. My problem is that I am spending ages tweaking and improving it before launch. I fear that if I spend much longer on it somebody will beat me to market. What is more important, getting the product right or launching it quickly?

It is a good question and one with no single answer. It is certainly something we have been struggling with as we prepare to launch GetSignOff.

To read the rest of this blog click here.

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Fixed Footers without JavaScript

Posted in Development on by Paul Boag

Ed Merritt (one of our very awfully clever designers at Headscape) has come up with a innovative little CSS technique I have encouraged him to share with you.

A client recently asked me if it was possible to have a page footer which would stick to the bottom of the browser window if the content didn’t fill the window, but behave normally (i.e. be pushed down by the content) when the content was tall enough.

This footer behaviour is not a new idea; I’ve seen it on a few sites over the years, the most well known probably being version 7 of Shaun Inman’s site. Take a look at the ‘Work’ page with JavaScript enabled, then disabled to see the effect in action.

I suspect that this behaviour, which can look great in the right situation, has not been widely adopted because existing solutions have always relied on JavaScript for what should be a simple presentation issue.

The technique described in this article is purely a CSS solution and works in all modern browsers, tested down to IE5.5.

Firstly, here’s a demonstration.

The HTML

<div id="container"> <div id="content"></div> <div id="footer"></div> </div>

The CSS

*, body {margin: 0; padding: 0;} #container {display: block; position: absolute; min-height: 100%;} #content {display: block; margin-bottom: 3em;} #footer {position: absolute; display: block; bottom: 0; height: 3em }

IE6 Stylesheet

body, #container {height: 100%;}

this should be referenced using a conditional comment:

<!--[if lt IE 7]> <link href="css/ie6.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"   /> <![endif]-->

How it works

As you can see, the mark-up and styling are pretty simple. Here’s a quick run-through of what’s going on…

  • #container is set to be at least as tall as the browser window using min-height and although IE6 doesn’t understand this, it treats height in exactly the same way. #container must be positioned absolutely, or this will not work.
  • #footer is positioned absolutely at the bottom of #container
  • #content is given a bottom margin equal to the height of #footer to prevent the two ever overlapping.

Known Issues

The simplicity of this technique makes it fairly reliable and the only real issues to consider are for IE6 and below. For these browsers you’ll need to specify any additional containers as also having a height of 100%.

For example, if your mark-up was:

<div id="extraContainer"> <div id="container"> <div id="content"></div> <div id="footer"></div> </div> </div>

In your IE specific CSS you’d need to specify:

body, #extraContainer, #container {height: 100%;}

Conclusion

This is a nice and easy solution to those unsightly gaps below your footers and while it won’t be appropriate for every site, it might come in handy from time to time. Please let me know if you find any problems with it.

131. Version Control

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this weeks show Ryan and Stanton return to talk about the importance of version control and answer your questions on project  management and invoicing applications, download sizes and page weight.

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News and events

Twitter Cuts UK SMS

This week the team over at Twitter announced that they would no longer be delivering outbound SMS over there UK number. They go on to explain that the bill which up until now they’ve been footing is simply too great and that even with a limit of 250 messages per week they estimate a yearly cost of $1000 per user.

Thanks to established relationships with SMS services in Canada, India and the United States the outbound SMS service will be continuing uninterrupted in those countries.

Twitter has suggested a number of alternatives to the service, links to which can be found on their blog. It would also appear that a number of start-ups are rushing to fill the void as TechCrunch have also reported.

A large portion of Twitters popularity is due to their SMS facilities and it is feared that “freezing” out the UK and other countries from this service will be detrimental to their future.

It reminds me of when Pandora, the online radio station, closed its doors entirely to its UK audience due to licensing constraints and it begs to question do we poor souls in the UK miss out on all the good toys?

facelift (FLIR) Image Replacement for Fonts

Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that aren’t otherwise supported in web browsers. The generated image is automatically placed on your site and works in a similar way to sIFR, the big difference being the lack of Flash.

This script uses PHP and javaScript and utilises actual .ttf font files to generate its replacement images, so you can simply specify which elements you want to replace, h1, h2 tags etc, download a font you want to use, point the script to it and your done.

I’m looking forward to having a play with this script as it seems to be simple to use and the fact that you don’t have to mess around with Flash like you do with sIFR is a big bonus in my book.

Take a look at the number of examples they have on their website and see for yourself.

Gmail went down!

So Gmail went down for a few hours this week and as Josh Catone said in his sitepoint article article:

Judging by the reactions on Twitter and in the blogosphere, you’d have thought that the world ended.

There’s nothing really more we can say about this that Josh hasn’t already mentioned, but suffice it to say, no web sites/app is going to have 100% up time and this echoes what Stanton and I were talking about the other week in regards to S3 going down. It’s important to always have a backup and not to put all your eggs in one basket because when the service you’re using goes down, and invariably it will, you need a plan B.

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And Now For Something Completely Random

During the recording of this weeks podcast we were thrown completely when we spotted Paul Annett from Clear:Left dressed up as a Gorilla on Yahoo Live! and then proceeded to start dancing… always aiming to share the hysterics here’s proof. Random indeed.

Paul Annett Dresses as a Gorilla

Feature: To Version Control or Not?

Version control can seem like a very daunting thing to incorporate into your work flow, but once it’s there you can be left wondering how you ever lived without it. In this week’s feature Stanton shares his experiences with you in a bid to convince you why you need it.

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Listeners feedback:

Project Management and Invoicing Applications

James writes: I would like some boagworld advice. I’m a web designer and SharePoint specialist at a large company in Cambridge, UK. Over the last 3 to 4 years i have been messing around with web design etc. I now am very busy outside of work and it is getting busier every month.

I started of with a server under the bed at home with UPS hosting these sites. They ranged from personal sites, to company profile pages to shops. This server has now been replaced with a VPS hosted externally.

My plan is to keep working full time and manage my time very carefully outside of work and keep these sites coming in and out etc and then one day take the big leap into the self-employed world.

What could you recommend for me to manage my tasks, projects, time-management and invoicing etc?

I love the podcast and would be quite happy to chat further with you. Look forward to hearing your experience comments.

Well there is a multitude of online and desktop applications designed specifically for managing your business.

Probably the most popular project management app I know of is 37 Signals’ BaseCamp and that’s certainly the first one that springs to mind when I’m asked this question. Depending on what package you have, BaseCamp allows you to create projects, set milestones, to-do lists, manage time spent on tasks among other things, however BaseCamp is tailored more towards collaborative projects for when you’re working with a team of people. It doesn’t provide facilities for invoicing clients and managing your accounts and so it might not be the perfect choice if you working alone.

Another app I know of and which comes highly recommended is FreeAgent. FreeAgent like BaseCamp allows you to create and manage projects, clients and timescales, however in addition it provides you with the facility to generate invoices, manage your bank accounts as well as your expenses and incomes. It’s designed for sole traders, partnerships and limited companies and is wrapped up in a nice, user friendly interface.

A final mention goes to a Microsoft app that I came across a couple of years ago now, and has only this year been release in the UK. It’s called Office Accouting Express 2008 and it’s actually free to download and use. As you would expect it integrates with other Office applications and provides you with all the facilities you would expect from an accounting package, invoicing, client management etc. So if you’re working on a PC it’s worth having a look.

Luckily you can have a play with all these apps before you buy. BaseCamp has a free account which allows you to create 1 project so you can get in and see how it all works, FreeAgent has a series of demos you can use to see if the interface and facilities are to your liking and as I’ve said Office Accounting Express is free. So my advice would be check out them al
l and see what works for you and no doubt there will be several suggestions in the show comments on other apps that I haven’t mentioned here.

Download Sizes

Bob writes: After reading a recent post from Smashing Magazine on textures I started to wonder… what is a good rule of thumb regarding document size per page on the web? Most of the example pages in the article ranked in at close to 900kb per page… am I behind the times?

Very good question, and one I think we all worry about at points. There’s more than just the filesize to really worry about, there’s the general ‘page weight’ which is affected by many factors, such as:

  • The number of HTTP requests made – if you’re pulling in a lot of external javaScript or CSS files, each one has to be requested seperately. You can combine these into single files to reduce load times, but at the expense of readability, maintainability and organisation
  • The size of any javaScript files you’re pulling in – you can get minified versions of most libraries, for example, which strip out all the extra spaces and line breaks in the code, which aren’t needed in order for the code to execute
  • CSS expressions can be a useful tool, but are bloody slow, especially when used a lot
  • Image filesize can have a massive effect on load times, which is one of your main concerns as you mentioned textures. I’m assuming you’re already familiar with image optimisation, but also test to see if you can squeeze images into a GIF, or a PNG8 if possible, these formats will give you a nice small filesize if you only need a limited colour pallete.

In this day and age it’s nice to think that we’re all cruising on nice fast broadband connections, but in reality we know that’s not the case and you really have to consider your audience, and the context in which they may visit your site (Paul’s talked about this quite recently). If you expect an older demographic to your site, or people in remote areas, then they might still be hitting you on a dial up connection. Some visitors may be using poor public wifi (I get suicidal on the train to and from London as the wifi is usually worse than dial-up), or mobile devices where the data charges can be ridiculously high.

There are a couple of tools I use to get an idea of how my pages weigh in:

There is a Firebug addon called YSlow which provides some nifty statistics on what’s happening under the hood of the pages you visit, and also grades the page performance and suggests methods to improve the loading time of your page.

I tested 2 sites quickly with this extension to give an idea of what you can expect to see, Amazon and Boagworld.

  • Amazon.com weighs in at 501k with 85 HTTP requests and a performance rating of D
  • Boagworld.com is a bit lighter on it’s feet at 57.6k and 79 HTTP requests, but has a performance rating of F, due to (among other things) including 37 external javascript files compared to Amazon’s 8, and 33 CSS background images compared to 9 with Amazon.

I also use a Firefox plugin called Firefox Throttle which lets you simulate a specific network speed (such as 56k) and get an idea of how long your site will take on certain connections.

Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a good rule of thumb here. Personally, I don’t let the page weight issue affect or limit my design, but try and make savings where I can nearer the end of the project, by optimising images, switching to minified JS libraries and reducing the amount of HTTP requests where possible.

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130. Air

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this week’s show; Paul talks about better understanding disabled users. We have a tip from Jeremy about problem solving and Jonathan Snook introduces us to Adobe Air.

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Housekeeping

A few pieces of housekeeping I wanted to quickly mention at the start of this week’s show.

  • FOWA – The guys over at Carsonified have been kind enough to offer boagworld listeners a 15% discount off of the upcoming Future of Web Apps conference in London. The conference takes place between the 8-10 October and is an absolutely superb event. To claim your discount use the code FOWA-bw at checkout. There are only 50 discounted places, so be quick.
  • SXSW – Talking of conferences can I ask a favour of you all. Marcus is desperate to go to next years SXSW conference in Texas. However he is only allowed to go if he is speaking. As you may know speakers for SXSW are chosen using a voting system. So, in order for Marcus to attend SXSW he needs your votes. Give an old popstar a second chance. Go vote for him now!
  • Think Vitamin - Finally I just thought I would quickly mention an article I have recently written for the Think Vitamin website. It is entitled "the 5 hidden costs of running a CMS" and I thought you might be interested in check it out. It is an extract from chapter 8 of my book the Website Owners Manual, which as I have said many times before, you can download right now ;)

News and events

Designing for emotion and flow

Not long ago I wrote an article for boagworld on the importance of context. In that article I highlighted elements such as time, mood and environment as key factors that contribute to a users context when accessing your site. This context directly impacts how the user interacts with your site. What I didn’t tackle in my article is exactly how context should affect the way you design.

An article called "Design for Emotion and Flow" on the boxes and arrows website, takes my post a step further by going into a lot more detail about what affects users behaviour and how we should design in a way that accommodates their state of mind.

Its quite an in-depth article but worth the read. It touches on user physiology as well as issues of environment and although it can be slightly theoretical at times, it focuses in on what you can practically do towards the end.

Articles like this always leave me with mixed feelings. They can easily feel overly analytical to the point where you wonder if they are applicable in the real world. However, in my experience if you take the time to read and digest them, they start to influence the way you design on an almost subconscious level.

7 essential guidelines to functional design

By contrast our next article is much more down to earth. The "7 Essential guidelines to functional design" is another post by smashing magazine and focuses on some fundamentals of good design.

However, don’t get the impression that this is just an article for designers. The principles it talks about also apply to developers and website owners. Basics such as the goal and audience for your site are things everybody should be considering.

According to Smashing Magazine the 7 essential guidelines to functional design are:

  • Consider our product’s goal
  • Consider who will be using it
  • Consider what your audience intends to do with it
  • Is it clear how to use it?
  • How does your user know it’s working?
  • Is it engaging to your users?
  • How does it handle mistakes?

Whether this is the definitive list, I am not so sure. However, it is a worthwhile read especially if you are just starting out.

15 companies that really get corporate blogging

While we are on the subject of lists our next post is "15 companies that really get corporate blogging". What can I say, I am a sucker for a list!

This one is really for those of you who run a website and in particular run a corporate blog. As the name suggests it lists companies that do a good job at blogging. However, it is not the list that attracted me to this article, it is the reason why the companies got on the list.

There is a lot of good advice to be gleaned from this post. Just a few snippets I picked up include:

  • Don’t just pimp your products, talk about other stuff too
  • Post regularly
  • Encourage conversation
  • Be candid and open
  • Offer advice and lessons you have learnt

The list could go on. Corporate blogging is by and large a disaster with many companies just failing to ‘get it’. According to a recent report, 56% of corporate blogs just republish press releases and two thirds hardly ever receive comments. However, as is highlighted in this post there are a growing number of organisations that are doing things right and we should follow their example.

Learning from signage

If you have listened to this show for any length of time you will know I am a great fan of looking beyond the web for inspiration. I also believe there a lot to be learnt from other forms of design including signage.

It would appear that Mark Boulton would agree with this sentiment judging by his recent post on airport signage. Mark, compares the signage in two airports and looks at how the lessons learnt apply to web design.

Some of the gems he discovered include:

  • Signage should work without colour coding
  • Only designers care about fonts
  • Don’t rely too heavily on pictograms
  • Always put your ideas to the test

This is a great article which should (if nothing else) encourage you to look at the world around you for inspiration.

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Interview: Johnathan Snook on Adobe Air

Paul: Joining me today is Johnathan Snook who I recently saw at the @Media conference. It was great to see you there again Johnathon.

Johnathan: A pleasure to see you there as well.

Paul: You really got me with your presentation. It was an excellent presentation. Very, very enjoyable, and you touched on the subject of Adobe Air. It wasn’t the main thrust of the presentation, but it was the bit that really grabbed my attention so I thought "let’s get you on the show and have a bit of a chat about it" if that’s O.K. with you.

Johnathan: Absolutely.

Paul: Good. So, let’s start from the absolute basics so that we’re all on the same page. Could you just explain very briefly what Adobe Air is so that people that haven’t come across it before kind of know what it does.

Johnathan: Certainly. Adobe Air is a development platform for making desktop applications to make desktop applications cross-platform. So, something that you build once and that would work on Windows, Mac OSX as well as Linux.

Paul: O.K. And this is built using web technologies…

Johnathan: Yeah, It’s really great that they’ve managed to leverage what they know things like Flash, Flex, and really the kicker is being able to develop desktop applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript that, obviously, a lot of us web developers are going to be familiar with.

Paul: Sure. So, I mean that’s I guess why we’ve included it on the show even though it’s a web design podcast, that kind of line between the web and desktop applications seems to be blurring and Air is a big part of that. What drove you to kind of investigate it and kind of look into Air as a product?

Johnathan: For me, it was just a curiosity. The platform, what it could do, knowing that I could create a cross-platform desktop application was kind of enticing. When we build for the web we’re trying to do things as cross-platform as possible make sure that we target as many browsers as we can, and really be able to reach out to the people and do really cool things. So, for me it was like, O.K., well what can I do with this what are the possibilities. One of the first things that went off in my brain was building a Twitter application. At the time, when Twitter was up for more than 24 hours straight, it was kind of cool to be able to build a desktop application to kind of separate out from the web, because the web site was frustrating me to know end, and to be able to put in stuff that made the site more usable for me and in the end was a tool that I got to use every day and that I enjoyed to use.

Paul: Cool. I’ve kind of got a basic understanding of it. I understand what it does and I understand the kind of technologies that exist under it, but can you kind of give me an idea of, you know, how it works as such. I know how to create an HTML page, CSS and Javascript and stuff like that. How do I get from there into turning it into a Air application?

Johnathan: It’s surprisingly quite easy. What happens is, if you look at the Air runtime, is it essentially runs your Air application, so you don’t create a .exe file or a .dwg file you don’t create an executable in the traditional sense. What you end up doing is creating a .air file that you use to distribute. The Air runtime actually handles that. Building that .air file, there is an SDK available from Adobe that allows you to compile this Air file. So, those Air files are pretty straight forward, they’re really just like a ZIP file with some extra information in it. So, to create an actual Air application, you can do it just using a normal text editor, you can do with specific IDEs like Eclipse. If you’re into Flex development, they have Flex builder. If you’re into just doing HTML and CSS kind of thing, you might want to look into Aptana they have Air support built right in. If you’re a fan of Dreamweaver, there’s a Dreamweaver extension for automatically compiling your application, and being able to set properties on your application. So, things like how big should the window be when it opens up, can I resize it, what kind of stuff can I do with it. That obviously, in this GUI sense, to a certain degree can make things a lot easier. So, I think there are a lot of benefits to using an IDE with built in support, but you don’t have to. There is the capability of just using a normal text editor and then running the SDK command line sequences to actually generate the Air file. It is really straight forward.

Paul: So, the one selling feature or one thing about Air that’s been promoted quite heavily is the fact that you can take online applications offline in a sense. The application is still usable even if you’re not connected to the Internet at a particular point in time. I think they showed off, right from the beginning, an eBay example of that where you could do all kinds of things offline, and then when you connected it was all uploaded. How does that kind of process work? There must be some kind of local database that’s running, one presumes.

Johnathan: That’s correct. I think some people may be familiar with Google Gears in having the local storage using the SQLite database. Adobe Air actually does something very similar. They do have a local SQLite database that you’ve seen create local databases and store any information there. There’s actually different ways. You have access to the local file system, so you can certainly write new files. Say, if you wanted to create new text files, xml files, new binary formats. So, if you wanted to create an image editing software that stores files in a binary format, you could do that. So, there’s a lot of flexibility there because you do have some access to the local system. You have network connectivity, so you can do either regular AJAX calls or you can do socket connections. You can connect to web servers. You can connect to remote database servers. You’ve got a lot of flexibility and a lot of control because of that.

Paul: You seem quite enthusiastic about the development environment. What has been your impression of it. Was it something that was a steep learning curve, but when you get there it’s really cool, or is it easy straight out of the box? What were your impressions?

Johnathan: I think it’s going to depend on what it is you’re trying to do. I think that there are going to be some frustrations. There are going to be some things that you have to understand about the environment. To give you an example; the HTML/CSS stuff is pretty cool it basically runs on a WebKit engine, which is the same engine that powers Safari. That gives you a lot of control and stuff, but ultimately that WebKit engine is still running within a Flash runtime. So, there are some limitations to that because of the fact that Adobe just simply hasn’t built in certain support. Things like support for double byte character encoding, so Chinese and Japanese character sets can be more difficult. However, they are working on that. Version 1.1 is supposed to be coming out soon it will have support for that, but right now you’re limited because of that.

Paul: What kind of people should be delving into this. Is this the kind of thing that only a hardcore developer like yourself should be touching or is it something that somebody like myself that would be a front-end interface designer should I even bother picking it up or am I better keeping away?

Johnathan: It’s really easy to develop in. I think you can make really quick solutions really straight forward. To give you a comparison; there is a Mac software called Fluid for creating site applications, but that is separated from the browser. You can kind of plot the same kind of things with Adobe Air because you do have that WebKit engine. You can basically use it as a browser. So, to give you a quick example; Muxtape, which is an online mix-taping thing you upload MP3s, and then people can go to your page and listen to your mix tape… The problem is that if you accidentally close the browser, you lose that information. I think there are a lot of websites that have this stickiness factor where you want to decouple the application from the browser. So, I put together a really basic example in which you type in a URL and it loads up a mix tape. That’s a very straight forward interface, but to be able to do that in a desktop application that I can minimize to the dock or the system tray is something that is, I think, a lot more appealing than running this kind of stuff through the web browser. And, it was really easy to put together. I spent about an hour one evening to put that kind of thing … I mean it is a very basic prototype, but the fact is that it is very straight forward to put that together. So, I think if web developers have ideas, they can really take advantage of that and build pretty cool stuff.

Paul: So, it’s not something we need to be intimidated of, then.

Johnathan: No, absolutely not.

Paul: The other thing that maybe is a bit of a concern to us very standards-based designers in comparison to the Flash community is that Adobe says we support CSS and HTML, as well as Flash, but obviously Flash is their product. You kind of get this feeling that they’re going to always support Flash more and that CSS and HTMl are a bit of an afterthought. Is that the case, or is that unfounded?

Johnathan: To a certain degree, it is the case. It’s, I think, unfortunate. I think they are more familiar with Flash. They’re more familiar with that environment. So, as you try to build the equivalent of a browser within this Flash runtime it’s going to be extremely difficult and I think things are going to get missed. And, I saw that sort of along the Beta process. Things like no support for "undo." I mean, that’s a pretty basic thing, but the fact that that’s not built in there does hamper people trying to build HTML-based applications. It works great in Flash-based applications and then what you end up running into is, to give you another example with Snitter, my little desktop Twitter application because it’s built using HTML and CSS, it had certain limitations, but there’s other Twitter clients built with Adobe Air that were built using Flash that actually have different limitations. So, people would say, "Well this application can do it just fine. Why can’t yours?" You have to kind of explain to them that it’s because of the limitations of how the environment was developed. Despite the fact that they are both still Adobe Air applications, technically they’re done differently and there are maybe more limitations as a result of that.

Paul: Is there an opportunity to mix Flash and XHTML and CSS and whatever else together, or do you have to make this decision up front?

Johnathan: No, absolutely not. Certainly, within the Adobe Air environment, you have that flexibility to create these little hybrid applications. I think Snitter, for example, is a good example of it. There’s a lot of Flash components out there that can do certain things. For example, a bunch of folks made an iMap component, so you can actually connect to an iMap server. However, that component is Flash-based. Another component out there that I saw was a Jabber client. So, let’s say you wanted to do a GMail chat client or some other Jabber-connected application, you can import those Flash runtimes into your application and use them from Javascript. So, you do have that flexibility to use both technologies and take advantage of that. I’ve certainly done that with Snitter, and I’ve done that with other applications as well because we have that flexibility of the environment. I think there is that sort of understanding that you can do that, and actually look out for the solutions that not only are HTML and Javascript, but that are Flash-based as well and come up with new ways of thinking because I think, traditionally, as web developers, we tend to separate those two as much as we can.

Paul: That’s quite interesting. You talked about this kind of hybrid approach of combining Flash and HTML at @Media combining them together and about how we had some fears as standards-based designers of even touching Flash in any kind of context. Is that a kind of approach that you would apply beyond Air to the web generally?

Johnathan: Absolutely. I think MuxTape is a great example of that. To be able to play MP3s isn’t something that’s easily done using Javascript. However, you can take advantage of Flash and use its capabilities to play MP3s to create new interfaces that aren’t specifically 100% Flash-based; that we have something that’s still HTML and Javascript that interacts in ways that I think a lot of us are comfortable with, but still have access to a lot of features that Flash offers to us you know, the fact that we can create the bridge between the two; we can do that on the web just as well as we can do that within Adobe Air.

Paul: O.K. That all sounds very interesting and it certainly has made me want to kind of pick up Air and have a play with it and kind of get my hands dirty. I guess, perhaps as the last question then, is what tips would you give to people like me that haven’t yet touched Air and are considering having a play. What are the big traps to avoid? What are the good things to start with. Where should I begin the journey, so to speak?

Johnathan: I think probably one of the first things you should do is head over to the Adobe web site. They have a number of really good resources to start off with. Obviously, you’re going to need the SDK so you can actually build your applications, but they also have the dev center where they have a number of introductory articles to learn how to build applications and it doesn’t mean those applications have to be built using Adobe applications like Dreamweaver, you can certainly do them without. So, there’s a lot of really good tutorials on there. From there, they lead off to a number of resources outside of Adobe that would certainly help you get started.

Paul: What about mistakes? What were the big mistakes you made up front that, with hindsight, you would avoid? Or, did you get it right the first time?

Johnathan: I don’t make mistakes! Well, I think one of the cool things about the environment is certainly the flexibility to take advantage of a lot of advanced CSS. Because you are using the WebKit engine which, when it comes to CSS 3 support, is one of the most advanced, you know that you have support for things like rounded corners, border radius, that you have support for multiple backgrounds, image-based borders you can do some really cool stuff with that that is really fun to play around with. You can create transparent applications, so if you wanted something that was completely and uniquely shaped, you can do these really cool things. The downfall for that is that you can quickly start running into performance issues. If you start creating all of these alpha PNGs that are layered over the top of each other, they give you a lot of flexibility, but unfortunately are a performance drain on how much your system can actually handle. I think that was one of my initial mistakes going in and saying "Wow, I’ve got all of this stuff that I can use let me throw everything at it" and then realizing that, you know, maybe that wasn’t the best solution. I think we still have to be wise in considering how we structure our CSS, how do we structure the design in such a way that, while it’s still flexible, it still does things from a performance-minded aspect so we’re not doing things that are going to unnecessarily slow down or application. Those are things that we’ve got to think about.

Paul: That’s some really good advice Johnathan. Thank you so much for coming on the show. That was a great introduction to Air. Hopefully it’s encouraged a lot of people listening to the show to go out there and give it a go. Thanks for coming on and talk to you again soon.

Johnathan: Awesome. Thank you very much.

Thanks to Aaron Cooper for transcribing this interview.

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Listeners feedback:

Getting a feel for accessibility

Our first contribution is from Kenneth and is about accessibility:

I listen to your podcast all the time and am working hard to become a very good web designer. My question for you is about accessibility, I hear a lot of people talking about it but not a lot of web designers are working hard on it to create sites that disabled people can use. I want to be a person who builds accessible sites that really work. How would someone know if their site is really accessible? How can you feel what disabled people are feeling when they visit your site? Could you talk about the different tools that disabled people use to go online so that we can use those tools and try to understand how they feel.

Okay. Let’s start by clearing up a minor point. Validation is not directly related to accessibility. Having a site that validates does not make it accessible. Equally, a site that does not validate is not necessarily inaccessible. Admittedly a site that validates is more likely to be accessible, but that is all. It is great you validate your code and you should continue to do so. However, it is okay if your site does not always validate. There are good reasons why Boagworld does not and I am sure the same is true for Clear:Left.

Let’s turn our attention to the heart of the question; how can you better understand the experiences of disabled users? It is an admirable aim but one that ultimately is impossible to achieve. There are so many different types of disability that you cannot associate with them all. That said, I can make a few suggestions which might help.

A good place to start is by trying out a screen reader. Increasingly screen readers are bundled with operating systems. Recent versions of Microsoft Windows come with a basic Narrator, while the Mac OS includes a more feature-rich screen reader called VoiceOver. However, the most widely used screen readers are the separate commercial products like JAWS for windows. This is probably a good place to start as JAWS offers a free trial version for you to experiment with.

However, be warned. When you first use a screen reader it is an intimidating experience. They take a lot of getting used to and can leave you with the impression that a blind person will never be able to use the internet. An alternative would be to watch a demonstration of a screen reader in action. Ian Lloyd did an excellent demonstration for Boagworld a while ago.

Of course not all visually impaired users are blind. Some use screen magnifiers which enlarge screen content. Again, most operating systems have this functionality built in so you can easily try this for yourself. However, there are also a number of commercial products you can try out too.

The other form of visual impairment worth investigating is colour blindness. Although not as serious, it is far more common and affects a large number of users. There are a couple of tools which will give you an idea of what a colour blind person is seeing. The first is Colorblind Web Page Filter which allows you to enter a url and see what that page would look like to a colour blind user. The second is Sim Daltonism, a colour blindness simulator for the Mac OS. Both will help you better understand what the web is like for colour blind users.

The final little tip I want to share with you is kind of stupid but does sort of work. I do a lot of design for the elderly and they often suffer from a mixture of visual problems and motor issues (like arthritis). In order to better understand their experience I have bought a pair to ski gloves and some reading glasses (I don’t need reading glasses). Every now and again, I surf the site I am designing wearing both the glasses and gloves. The glasses make the screen hard to read while the gloves hamper my use of the mouse and the keyboard. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to select something from a drop down menu wearing ski gloves!

Turning problems upside down

Our second listener contribution for today is not a question but a tip. It comes from Jeremy and he writes:

I can’t remember the name of the book off the top of my head (Getting Things Done?) that you’ve been recommending, but you mentioning it reminded me of a problem solving method that I learned a few years back that I thought you might enjoy. It’s called turning the problem upside down. It sounds stupid, but honestly it works pretty well.

The principle behind it is if you can’t figure out a solution to a problem or are having trouble coming up with different ideas, you turn the problem upside down, or invert it, and then come up with solutions for the backwards problem. For some reason it’s much easier to think of the backwards solutions. Then you flip them back to normal and there are your solutions. Sounds confusing, so here’s an example:

Problem: You want to increase traffic to your website

Turn the problem upside down: You want to decrease traffic to your website

Some ‘off the top of my head’ Solutions:

  • Make the site unfriendly
  • Randomly shut it off
  • Never update anything
  • Be rude
  • Keep key content hidden or difficult to find

Now let’s flip the solutions back again and see if they solve the original problem:

  • Make the site more warm/friendly
  • Make sure it stays up reliably
  • Be good about frequently updating content
  • Be aware how of my copy and if I’m talking down to my visitors
  • Make sure the good content is easy to find and prominent

What a great little tip! Excellent when you are suffering from creative block. I love it when you guys send in suggestions rather than questions. I know from the forum that the boagworld audience is hugely experienced and its great when you share that experience. Keep them coming!

Too many content management systems

Posted in Development on by Paul Boag

I know we live in a capitalist society. I know we are supposed to believe in choice. However, there are just too many damn content management systems. Another extract from the Website Owners Manual

Let’s face it, most content management systems look the same there days. They all offer very similar functionality. After all, most people want similar things. Once you have narrowed the field by price it can be hard to make the final decision.

However, functionality and price should not be the only criteria by which you make your judgement. There are a number of additional issues which need considering. In many ways these are just as important.

These include:

  • Licensing
  • The development team
  • Security
  • Accessibility and code quality
  • Documentation and training
  • Support
  • Community

We should begin by looking at the subject of licensing.

Licensing

Examine in detail the license attached to your choice of cms. It is not uncommon to find licenses that state you can make no change to the source code or use a alternative developer.

You may also find that licensing is per site or worse still per user. This can become very expensive if you want to setup multiple sites or have a large number of content contributors.

Ideally you want an agreement that allows unlimited use of the cms with the exception of reselling.

The development team

Look carefully at the development team behind any cms you are considering. For example is it an open source project with a community of developers or the product of a single company?

Neither approach is wrong. However you need to be confident in the long term health of the product.

Open source projects can be highly productive despite often being created by volunteers. That said, they can die off quickly if a more attractive project comes along. If you are considering an open source solution look at the age of the product. Mature products are more likely to remain supported in the long term.

With a commercial product you need to be confident in the long term viability of that company. Consider requesting a copy of their accounts to confirm their financial stability.

In both cases look for a team that are regularly releasing updates to their system. This is particularly important from a security perspective.

Security

Security is an important issue for any content management system. If your site is hacked you could loose content and find yourself in litigation if hackers get hold of your users personal data.

Judging the security of a content management system is not easy unless you have technical expertise. If unsure, get an experts opinion. However at the very least you can do a google search on the name of the cms and ‘security issues’. If you see lots of results then you will definitely want an expert opinion.

Accessibility and code quality is another important, and yet hard to judge, issue.

Accessibility and code quality

As we established in chapter 7 it is important to build using the latest best practice. This ensures your site is accessible and provides the flexibility to adapt over time.

Judging whether a content management system uses best practice is difficult if you are not a web designer. However, talk to the cms developers about their approach to accessibility. Equipped with the knowledge from chapter 7, you should be able to get an indication of their competency.

One aspect of best practice we have yet to discuss are webpage addresses. For a long time content management systems produced addresses that were hard to read. For example:

http://www.boagworld.com/index.php?sourceid=navclient&q=4

However, more recently content management developers have realized this is hard to read and damaging to search engines placement. Therefore modern content management systems produce addresses that look more like this:

http://boagworld.com/technology/friendly_urls/

This is a huge step forward and also allows the web address to be used as a navigational tool. Users can identify where they are in the site and even edit the url to find different pages. For example if the above address is shortened to:

http://boagworld.com/technology/

it will return all pages within the technology section.

Whenever possible look for systems that support friendly urls. They are a good feature to have and provide an indication of how up-to-date the practices of the developers are. If a cms supports friendly urls they probably support accessibility and standards too.

Additional information on best practice should also be made available through the documentation that supports the cms. This too is an important differentiating factor.

Documentation and training

Good documentation is a crucial component of any cms. As I have already said, content providers may not be using the system on a daily basis. They can easily forget how it works. Documentation should therefore be comprehensive and easy to use. Some content management systems also provide walkthroughs and video tutorials. These also help users understand how the system operates.

There should also be documentation for developers too. This will enable your web team to adapt the cms to better suit your needs. Without this it can be nearly impossible to work out how the cms works.

Alongside documentation, training is another useful resource. This is important for content providers who need more than a manual before they start using the system. Training provides them with hands on experience and the opportunity to ask questions.

No matter how good the cms and supporting documentation, there are occasions when you will require additional support.

Support

You need to ask some hard questions about support. What happens if you identify a bug in the content management system? Will you be required to pay for the fix? How fast can you expect a response? Do you require 24/7 support?

You need to know your requirements and have a good understanding of what the cms provider can offer.

Beyond fixes, there are broader questions about help. If you have a problem with the system is there somebody you can turn to for advice. Do you have to pay for this support and when is this support available?

Of course not all content management systems come with support. It is unusual for anything but enterprise level systems to offer this option. If it is not available you need to look at whether the system has a vibrant community.

Community

The community is made up of other individuals who use the cms. They share advice and experiences via forums, mailing lists and support sites. Such communities are particularly important for open source content management systems because these products rarely offer formal support and training. However, many commercial products also have excellent online communities.

A good community will be able to answer questions, offer support and even make available a range of plugins that can be used with your cms. Before investing in a cms ensure it has a vibrant community. Visit the support site and look at how many users are registered and how often they post. Examine the kind of topics people are discussing and particularly how supportive they are to new users. It is not unusual to find apparently vibrant communities that are hostile to new users asking ‘dumb questions.’

For more from the Website Owners Manual and early access to chapters as they are written go to the books website.

An interview with Freelancer Magazine

Posted in News on by Paul Boag

I have just finished an interview for Alex Stubbs over at freelancermagazine.com. Being a clever cookie he massaged by ego and convinced me to take part even though I am on a family holiday in Scotland.

I hadn’t come across Freelancer Magazine before, but it certainly looks like a superb site. If you are a web design freelancer or are considering making the swap then definitely check it out. It has great features, useful resources and of course star studded interviews!

But before you disappear over to their site take a look at the interview.

Thank you, Paul, for taking the time to speak with us.

Absolutely!

So how are you enjoying your vacation in Scotland?

Scotland is one of the most majestic places in the world. At least if it isn’t raining. I have found it incredibly inspiring being out of the office and away from the web. I have achieved so much more here because I am free from distractions.

Getting to the meat of our discussion is your weekly podcast on Web Design, which is to date the longest running and most popular web design podcast.

I believe you started this in 2005 and it has been gaining more and more recognition since. How do you feel this medium has served you and your web presence over the years?

I was very fortunate to stumble into podcasting. I started out blogging but found that hard work. I love writing but find it much harder to express my enthusiasm and excitement for a subject. Podcasting was a natural fit for my personality.

I doubt you would not be interviewing me if it wasn’t for the show. It has done a huge amount for my personal profile and that of my web design company Headscape. It is also what has enabled me to write the Website Owners Manual too. I doubt any of that would have happened if I had just stuck to blogging. There are simply too many blogs around. You need a way to stand out from the crowd and in my case that was through podcasting.

Any future plans for video podcasting?

I have thought long and hard about video podcasting and yet I do not have an answer for you. On one hand video podcasting is hugely popular and an enormous growth area. It would also enable me to show code and designs. This is something that constantly frustrates me about audio podcasts.

However, on the other hand I am aware that many people listen to my show while walking the dog or commuting to work. You cannot watch a video podcast in such circumstances. Video demands your attention in a way audio does not.

Probably at the end of the day it will come down to return on investment. Doing a full blown video podcast is a lot of work. Unless we can make it pay for itself I doubt it will happen. For now people will have to be satisfied with the audio show and the live ‘behind the scenes’ video stream.

You also have a new project in the works which has gone live recently on boagworld.com: “The Website Owners Manual.“ Which from what I’ve read seams to be an evolving manual for anyone interested in running a successful website (from start to finish)….

I am really excited about the Website Owners Manual for a couple of reasons. First, there are so few books aimed at website owners or managers. They are all aimed at designers and developers. However, the client is key to the success of a project and there are certain things they need to know. Second, I am excited by the way this book is being produced. Instead of simply being published, this book is evolving through social participation. You can get access to chapters right now and have the opportunity to comment on and contribute to those chapters. I collect your feedback and adjust what I am writing accordingly. At the end of the process you get the final product. Its publishing 2.0… or something like that .

Sounds very progressive! Here at FM the bulk of readers seem to be beginning freelancers who themselves will need to know a bit of knowledge you’ve outlined in this manual… what points do you think this book would be most important to our readers?

I think the main thing will be how to better communicate with clients. The problem with most people who choose to start freelancing is that they under estimate the challenges of dealing with clients. You might be the best designer or developer in the world, but if you cannot deal with clients effectively you will fail. The website owner manual shows you what clients need to know and demonstrates ways of presenting that information to them.

So you’re the Creative Director at Headscape, you run a weekly podcast, you speak at numerous web design and marketing conferences, and still find the time to write a book. I think even David Allen himself would be proud… whats your productivity secret? Whats your daily life like?

I am a huge fan of David Allen and follow the Getting Things Done methodology closely. However being organized is only half the battle. The other half is recognizing what you are good at and sticking to that. I know I am an ideas person. I am great at starting stuff and terrible at finishing it. I therefore surround myself with people who are good at following through.

At Headscape I have three fellow directors who are expert at managing me to be at my most effective. They bring me in for short bursts of activity when a load of ideas are required and then quietly push me to the sidelines when the REAL work begins.

With the podcast, I rely heavily on the community to make it happen. There are people who transcribe the interviews, moderate the forums and even produce the show. There is Paul Stanton who helps me source news stories. Ryan Taylor produces the show by organizing guests, writing show notes and much more. Finally there is Anna Debenham who is our technician. She edits interviews, manages the site and handles the RSS feed.

These people all give up there time because they love the show. That makes me feel very honoured. I would be lost without them and feel guilty that they don’t get more out of it.

You started out as a Web Designer and evolved into other areas since, I’m guessing mostly due to your success with your podcast. How was your early experience when starting out as a Web Designer?

I started out designing for the web back in 1994. I was working for IBM producing CD-ROMs for the first generation of multimedia PCs. While doing this IBM decided to start taking the web seriously and so I got involved very early on.

I was just a junior designer which was why I was given the web stuff. It just wasn’t important back then. My career ended up growing in line with the growth of the web. As the web became higher profile so did my job until eventually I ended up working as a creative director at a dot com company in the late nineties.

Basically, I just lucked out. A lot of success is luck. The idea that successful people are in someway more talented or better is just not true. It is about being in the right place at the right time. That and having a big mouth and being willing to shout about how good you are!

What advice do you have for those looking into starting out as a Web Designer themselves?

Wow that is a hard one. Its very different starting out today compared to my experience. That said, here is my gut reaction.

First, know the basics. Focus on HTML, CSS and Javascript before anything else. Don’t get distracted by the latest fad or the more exciting trend. These are the fundamental tools you will always need.

Next, find talented people you admire and get alongside them. Don’t be shy in approaching them. In my experience they love the attention!Follow their work, ask questions and look at who they follow and admire.

Finally, get involved in the web design community. Go to meetups, conferences and other events. You will learn so much from your peers. Far more t
han from a book
or university course.

128. Details

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this weeks show I’m accompanied by our Producer Ryan and Researcher Stanton. We Interview Dan Rubin on the Details of Design, and answer your questions on managing a bigger team and terms and conditions.

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News and events

Silverback Launches

This week has seen the release of Silverback, the highly anticipated app from the guys at Clear:Left. After months of speculations about what Silverback actually was, the “spontaneous, unobtrusive, usability testing software for web designers” is finally available for download.

We’re sure a majority of you know all about Silverback, but for those of you who don’t, Silverback, which is available exclusively for the Mac, is Clear:Left’s answer to convenient usability testing on the go. Utilising the iSight and screen capture facilities of the Mac, user’s experiences can be recorded and reviewed at a later date, taking away the costly and often difficult to setup up approach of using specialist equipment like multiple camcorders which can lead to hours of time spent trawling through video footage.

PatternTap

Whether you’re a designer or developer, there are many occasions where you go on the hunt for inspiration in interface design. Normal CSS Gallery sites give you great examples of full site design, but usually don’t focus on the small details of interface design. The only site i’ve ever been aware of is Christian Watsons “Elements of Design“, which is a great resource showing examples of elements like comment forms, calendars & date pickers, footers, image captions and so on.

There’s a new site I’ve come across this week called PatternTap.com which also wants to collect these design patterns and focus on specific elements of design and to help you to reference, collect and organise them for your own needs.

PatternTap is shaping up to be an absolute goldmine of inspiration, and looks like it will build into a large resource of design element exmples. There’s currently 46 collections, everything from 404 pages, audio players, pagination and search boxes. It let’s you create your own “lightbox” style user sets, so you can keep your favourite examples organised for future reference.

I’ll definitely be adding this to my toolbox of design inspiration links, and recommend you give it a look too.

Google App Engine Update

This week also sees the release of a small update to the Google Apps Engine. The Google Apps Engine allows developers to build applications on Googles own infrastructure. I have to admit that the Google Apps Engine is not something I’ve developed with personally however that doesn’t stop us talking about it so let’s run through the list:

  • Firstly you can now have up to 10 apps on your account as opposed to the previous limit of three 3, the Engine also limits developers to 1000 files per application, so the increase in the number of apps you can now have is a welcome addition.
  • Time windows for Dashboard graphs: Zoom in on the data in your dashboard to get a more accurate picture of whats going on. You can zoom in to see graphs for the last 24, 12, and 6 hour periods.
  • Log files can now be downloaded in plain text.
  • And finally you can send email as the logged in user: If you’re using the users API, you can now send email from the email address of the currently-logged-in user were as before it was only possible from the administrators account.

S3

So some of you may be aware that Amazon’s S3 service suffered from some 6 hours of downtime recently, this echoes the issues of service availability that happened back in February.

For those of you who don’t know, the S3, or “Simple Storage Service” is a scalable and inexpensive data storage infrastructure, which allows you to store and retrieve any amount of data.

So this is a fantastic idea – in theory, it means that if you’re developing a large website or web app and need lots of storage, you don’t have to pay for huge webhosting plans with lots of physical diskspace, you store your assets “in the cloud” as it were, and you’re charged based on how much storage space you, and how much bandwidth you consume.

Lots of large sites rely on the S3 service for their storage needs, Twitter, BaseCamp and SlideShare to name but 3 and the recent downtime has raised the age old issue, “are we putting all our eggs in one basket?” Jonathan Boutelle put it best in a recent blog post, stating “When S3 goes down, the internet goes down”. Aral Balkan also wrote recently urging people to have contingency plans in case events like this happen again, stating that the Open Source Google App Engine SDK could be the answer.

Back to top

Interview: Dan Rubin The Details Of Design

Paul:Joining me today is Dan Rubin who I recently saw at the @media conference. Good to see you or speak to you again Dan should I say?

Dan Rubin:Good to speak to you Paul.

Paul:It was good to meet up with you at @media. It feels like a long time since we met up and it was great to hear you speaking there. That was a first for me.

Dan Rubin:Thanks. It was a privilege to be able to help out Patrick it being very last-minute.

Paul:Oh was it?

Dan Rubin:He sent me an email about two weeks prior saying someone had dropped out and of course I wasn’t going to say no.

Paul: laughs

Dan Rubin:It’s been over 10 years since my last trip to the UK, so it was a great opportunity.

Paul:Cool. Well I have to say considering you only had two weeks to put together the presentation, it was truly phenomenal. It was an excellent presentation and I really enjoyed it. You were talking about ‘design is in the detail’ I guess was the kind of subject you were tackling?

Dan Rubin: I’ve been talking a lot lately about the level of detail, the attention to detail and the design and I’ve done a couple of presentations with Brian Veloso over the last year on that same kind of topic. This was an extension of that injecting some of my own little personal preferences into the talk and got to cover things like typography and some of the simple practical things that you can improve very easily that result in a big improvement and typography, and little tricks in using grids, not on how to make them but how to actually implement them and how they can help workflow and bring things together and make layouts tighter and better without
that much effort and the same thing with digital transformations in photography and a lot of pixel detail that a lot of people don’t notice and its all about the subtle level of design.

Paul:I got this vague feeling that as you were talking you were a little bit appologetic for some of these manushi that kind of individually you sit there and go ‘how is anyone going to notice that?’, but accumulatively they have this effect on the design don’t they?

Dan Rubin:Well that’s the thing. It comes down more to feeling than seeing but its about as a designer what you feel with your eyes more than anything else and how that translates to what users or viewers or readers also feel but since they don’t know it is there, they are likely to never actually see it, but as a designer you’ll know it is there, you can see it, and the trick is to get it to the point of you can still see it but it is not really visible it is just felt.

Paul:A subconscious expression?

Dan Rubin:Yes.

Paul:You covered loads of tips in your presentation and there was some excellent stuff in there but if you had to pick out one that has the biggest impact on a design, which of the many things you talked about would that be?

Dan Rubin:I think what it would be is to really underscore trusting your eyes and it seems a really simple concept and whenever I put that up on the screen you get giggles from the audience. The truth is many of us don’t actually take the time as designers to just step away and look at what we’re working on. It doesn’t matter whether it is for screen or print. The medium is a material at this point and it is just having faith in what you see and what you feel. That’s what being a visual creative is all about. It is trusting what you see. It is the same as being a good musician comes down to trusting what you hear and sometimes we forget that, and we start getting into designing based on the rules or how we think we are supposed to do things or designing on technical limitations alone. When we do that we stop using our eyes.

Paul:It’s interesting in the presentation you talk quite a lot about some of the details and the mechanics of design. You were talking about font sizes going incrementally up, your heading and your sub headings and there being a mathematical relationship in their sizes. You talked about being consistent in your margins and padding and how all those things inter-relate. Are we saying that design is something that can be learnt and it is a mathematical thing and it’s a set of rules that you just adhere to? Or is there some sort of underlying artistic thing, some people just know how to do it and it’s not something that can be learnt. What’s your opinion on it because I get mixed feelings from you? On one hand you talk about these rules and on the other hand you talk about stepping back and looking at your design and it feels more kind of arty-farty if that makes sense!

Dan Rubin:What a load of questions and rightfully so! It’s something I’ve written about before years ago and had a bit of back and forth on the topic with Paul Scrivvens of 9 Rules, with him arguing that you don’t need any natural artistic ability because he didn’t think he had any, yet he was clearly doing things that looked good. I was arguing the opposite but when it comes down to it it’s really not something that you can say definitively either way. Just as there are people who naturally seem to be good musicians or good athletes or good at math and programming, there are people who seem to naturally be good at design and any kind of creative endeavours. It is really difficult to tell whether that seeming innate ability has come from something that happened in very early childhood development or if they were born with it. I do think that however difficult it is to put a finger on it, once you get old enough, especially to the point w here probably most of your listeners are doing what your doing for a living already or you are thinking of changing from one thing to another, you’re past that point of subconscious development where you need to put conscious effort into something and you can. I think you can be trained to do most of the things designers do. You can even train yourself to see the way that creatives see. The older you get the harder it becomes to incorporate into the way you view the world. That is a big part of it. That comes down to sometimes the different personalities. How hard is it to put a finger on what makes you ‘you’. I would say as a teacher, and I spend a lot of time teaching high school students over here about music as well, since that’s my other passion, and it’s specifically not just playing music but it’s specifically singing which is one of those things that you can either carry a tune or you can’t. I’ve also seen kids who can’t carry a tune when they start singing learn how they train themselves. They learn the proper muscle memory, and it’s amazing to see what people can actually accomplish when they put their mind to it. If you are listening out there and you want to become a better designer or maybe you’re not a designer and you’re a programmer or a web standards junkie, and I can say that because I am one too, and there isn’t any reason that you can’t become a better designer, or become a designer from scratch if you realy really want to.

Paul:I think that’s really important to say because I think so many people are intimidated from getting involved in design because there’s almost a bit of snobbery. If you’re not artistic, you’re not artistic there’s nothing you can do about that. I personnaly don’t believe that that’s true. Like you say I think there are some people that are naturally inclined that way but I think a lot of the principles that you were talking about in your presentation pretty much anybody can pick up on and do, which is what encouraged me so much hearing you talk.

Dan Rubin:That is one of the reasons why one of the reasons I say one of the most important thing is to trust your eyes and that’s instinctual. These rules, as a good teacher you have to teach these rules. When you start learning any discipline the first things that you are taught are the basics.The basics are things that many people, once they learn enough, don’t conciously think about, but what you find if you deconstruct their work is that they are doing them, they have incorporated into their flow into their process so it’s second nature to them. What we think of as instinct is really just experience.

Paul:Yeah. One of the things you did mention in the presentation that grabbed my attention is you talked a lot about texture and adding more texture to your design and about how that creates a real feel. There seems to be a slight skism, I don’t know if that is the right word, but like 2 different camps in design at the moment. People like yourself, Elliot Jay Stock is another example that does very rich, very textured design. It’s absolutely gorgeous. At the other end of the extreme you’ve got people like 37signals doing this minimalistic functional design. How do you feel those two sides fit togeth
er? Is there a role for one or the other or have they both got their place

Dan Rubin:I really think that both have their place and more than that it’s popular to create divisions. Not just these days, if you look at any industry that spends a lot of its time looking at itself, like we do, you start to find reasons to create little clicks within it or factions or what have you. If you just ignore those splits that happen because we spend way too much time looking at what we do and try to deconstruct it and answer that question of ‘why’. What you find is that it’s all the same thing. When I talk about texture it is important to understand that it doesn’t just mean rough or ??bulap or brick. Texture can also mean smooth and polished and speaking directly about 37signals for instance. I’ve used their apps and I’ve loved them since the first time they came out. If you look at the first versions of Base Camp and Backpack, before their incremental re-design they’ve actually added the little drop shadow over time. If y ou look at it as a designer you see the flaws in the way they’ve done it because it doesn’t look real and it just ends at some edges, it has hard edges, but that’s not the point. The point is they added it because it created a separation, they added it because they felt it needed it. The rest of the interface doesn’t need any other texture because it isn’t supposed to have a feel to it. It’s actually supposed to totally get out of the way and there are different approaches to minimalism. You can use minimalism in subtle detail where you add in things like I was showing in my presentation, or you can use minimalism where you keep taking away and 37signals apps feel right, they always have felt right to me so as far as I’m concerned that means they’ve hit the nail on the head. It shows when you see people trying to recreate the application interface and theat style that 37signals uses and they get stuck in this pattern of adding things, like they feel ‘well, that’s 37siganls l ook so I think we have to add things to make it better, to make it better, and they never work as well because it’s not just about that. So the answer is, and I try to underscore this when I talk to people about this or present about it or even write about it, as much as these things can be presented as rules and definitive this is the way to do something. the fact is you have to do what works best for you and your particular project or circumstance or situation, and you also have to be open to the fact that what works for you right now might change. It might be different next year, next month or next week, and being able to adapt to your situation as a designer specially is really important, because you have to adapt if you’re doing client work, you have to adapt from project to project, because your style might work for one client but you might need to tweek your style to do what’s best for another client. If your working on your own applications, what works for your users now might not work for your users once they become users that have used your app for a year and they’re experts now.

Paul:You talk about tweaking your style. How easy is that, do you think, to do in reality? I mean I’ve got a very strong style in my design, and I really struggle and I look at someone like Cameron Moll’s style and I just love it. I love the light-handed feel, he’s very delicate, beautiful design, and I wish I was more like that, but there is no way I can make myself become like that, or can I? Is there a way of changing your style?

Dan Rubin:I think we’re all naturally mimics. I’m not going to dig into my opinions on human adapability too much. I spend a lot of time thinking about that as far as evaluating how people use things, whether it’s interfaces or products and it’s interesting to start to see those patterns but you can see it on a global scale too. Historically human beings are species very, very adaptable and that happens on macro and micro levels. If you want to adapt your style you can. You look for the inflences you want to model yourself after. This is just how people learn to be designers when they’re starting out, or learn to be artists. When I took my first watercolour and oil painting classes when I was 11 or 12, the way we learnt was to recreate examples that were painted by masters. So learn how to use the brush strokes they use, to learn how to mix colours the way that they use them, to learn how to use the tools the way that they use them becau se you only discover your preferences and your style by mimicing, copying others. You find out what works and you decide what works for you and what doesn’t. So changing how you design and how you see is not necessarily easy, because at a certain point you’re reprogramming muscle memory and from my experience with singing I know how difficult that is to do. Once muscle memory has been built up to the point where you don’t think about it and you just react, it’s very difficult to break that down and re-build it. Difficult does not mean impossible.

Paul:That’s really interesting that you say that because I’ve always very much struggled to design in any other way than I already do, but I obviously need to push myself in this area. Talking of 37signals, I’m sure you have been following their recent post and various reactions to it about skipping Photoshop, and how they move straight into building with HTML and CSS and I just wondered what your opinion was on that.

Dan Rubin:I know I’d get roped into this discussion somehow. There has already been some great responses from people like Jeff Croft and Mark Boulten to the 37signals post on that, and even interestingly enough a follow-up post sourced by 37signals announcing that they were looking for an additional designer for their team that can push them into different directions that they havent been going naturally. That comes back to the whole adaptability and willing us to change and being open to it. In the argument itself I can’t say I always start in Photoshop or Fireworks or some sort of visual tool. I think Jeff said 37signals starts with a visual tool, it’s pencil and paper. I think even if your tool is a marker on a whiteboard to a certain extent everybody tends to start there, even if you don’t start there you start with a picture in your mind. So there’s some level in the process where a visualisation is occuring, if that’s fair to say. When it comes down to it why does the tool that you’re using to visualise really matter? It starts in your head if you’re a primarily visual person you can either realise that vision by programming it and seeing it in the browser or using Photoshop as a tool. All of these are just tools when it comes down to it, they’re not the end result. They’re just part of the process. I’ve done both. I’ve built straight from XHTML and CSS many times and I do tend to find that most visual designers that have weighed in on this conversation also find that in my opinion the result ends up being more simplistic. that’s not necessarily to say bad. It’s just different and you’ll find that the tools that you use as a visual creative influsence the end result because that comes down to constraints. 37signals of course is huge on constraints and you do save time when you’re doing straight HTML and CSS, you skip a lot of the temptation to play around like I know I do with layers and layer setting s and percentages of opacity. I spend a lot of time playing when I’m in Photoshop, I don’t think that’s bad. That’s part of the creative process when using that tool. When I used to paint which I havent done in way too long. I would play with my
palatte, when I was doing oils my palatte and my palatte knife was tool before I got to the canvas, and I would play with mixing my colours ‘and that’s not quite right’ and ‘wait and go over here’ and sometimes you get it onto the canvas and it doesn’t look the way you want it to and have to wait for it to dry and then you paint over it because that’s what you do with that tool. When you’re doing watercolours you don’t have that forgiveness of the tool, you have extra constraints, so you don’t experiment as much putting it on the paper, putting the paint to paper because you know once it’s dried and there you can’t go back. you can’t paint over it. So you adjust your style depending on the tools and the workflow and it’s all good, it ‘s just all different and you have to I think do yourself a favour and experiment to find which works best for you and don’t be afraid if you’re working on a project and you think ‘this doesn’t feel like it needs a lot of subtle gradients and lines and shadows and Photoshop work. I might just be able to build this without using Photoshop at all’. So do it if it feels like that will work best go that route. If you feel the opposite go the other route. If you feel like it should involve a lot more natural media pull out your watercolour pad and paint something and scan it in and incorporate that

Paul:It really down to the right tool for the job thought process.

Dan Rubin:Exactly. The thing that 37signals does really well is stick to their guns. They state their opinion so firmly that people can easily interpret it as law and I think that’s very important. In any industry it’s very important to have people who do that, who can stick to what they believe so strongly and apply it so universally that it creates this set of rules, but it doesn’t mean that they have to be followed or cant be partially followed or bent or broken and you find just as much as 37signals is enfatic about skipping Photoshop. There are other people who would never in a million years go straight to HTML and CSS, doesn’t mean that either camp is right.

Paul:OK. One last question just to wrap this up. We’re running out of time but there’s something I wanted to ask you which is: We’ve been already talking about that there are people that may be want to learn to be better designers, to find their style and to move into this area, perhaps they’ve been a developer background and they’ve been previously put off exploring design because they have been made to feel inadequate. What kind of resources would you encourage people to look for or look at in order to get going I guess?

Dan Rubin:Whether you’re starting from scratch or just trying to improve what you already have it’s important to touch on a couple of specific areas, and those are typography, layout and working with colour. This applies just to design because it’s worked whether you’re designing on the web or designing in print or branding or whatever you’re doing. Typography is kind of my first love with design and if you want to learn about typography you have to go out and buy ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’ by Robert Bringhurst. It’s the bible for typographers. It’s really easy to read too because he’s a well respected Canadian poet as well. He just happens to be an excellent typographer and book designer, so if you are in a rush, you cant get to the book store or Amazon right away Mark Boulton’s series ‘Five Simple Steps To Better Typography’ is a great place to start as well and he references a ton of other good resources. Start there if you a re going to start online but no matter what buy ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’. When it comes to layout there are a lot of things that you can learn about layout but you’ve got to learn about grids, even if you never use them. Do yourself a favour of learning and I’ll reference Mark again, actually I’ll reference Mark in all three of these. He’s got great starter tutorials about this stuff so ‘Five Simple Steps To Designing Grid Systems’ is really a great place to start. Cameron Moll has written about Griding The 960 and read up over on Khoi Vinh’s site about grids. ‘Grids Are Good’ is a great demonstration as well, and if you want to get a physical book to hold ‘Grid Systems In Graphic Design’ is a great, great phyisical book and I think it’s important to as web designers to also reference ‘Print’, because Print is where all these design rules come from and typography rules and colour rules, so learn from these different implem entations and you’ll figure out things that you can do that you didn’t think about, because you haven’t seen them on the web. So ‘Grid Systems In Graphic Design’ is by Josef Müller Brockmann I believe would be the pronounciation, look that up. Colour, and this is something that’s very preferential maybe but read up again Mark Boulton’s ‘Five Simple Steps To Designing With Colour’. He’s great at teaching, he’s great at communicating all these things. Also play around with some of the online tools like Adobe Kuler, is fun. Look at what other people are putting together, look at combinations, again feel is important. Whatever feels right for what you’re trying to do. Another cool tool is Colorjack. You got a couple of ways of mixing colours and it’s really, really cool to look at. Finally on the topic of colour whenever using colours in an interface please be aware of the different types of colourbl indness that exist, and there are lots of tools online. Photoshop CS4 will have some tools built in as well but there are plug-ins that you can get right now for all sorts of tools and online tools as well that allow you to see what you’re designing, or even just a colour palatte. See them through the eyes of someone that has these various colourblindness afflictions and make sure that whatever you do doesn’t render something unuseable to what ends up being a large percentage of the viewing public when it comes down to it.

Paul:WOW !! That’s a good set of resources !! My word.

Dan Rubin:You didn’t think I’d be that prepared did you?

Paul:That’s a superb list. I certainly didn’t know about all those posts from Mark Boulton. there was some great stuff in there – Thank you very much Dan. Just to say that Dan’s talk at @media will be no doubt going live at some point and you’ll be able to download it and listen to it. Definitely do that, it was superb. So check that out. You will be able to go the shownotes for this episode for all those links that will be useful as well. No doubt you won’t be able to remember them all. Dan thanks for coming on the show, it’s very much appreciated and we will get you back on in the future.

Dan Rubin:Thanks very much for having me Paul. It was a pleasure.

Thanks to Sarah Galley for transcribing this interview.

Linkage

You can find Dan Rubins site, Superfluous Banter here.

Typography
Layout
Colour

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Listeners feedback:

Managing a Bigger Team

Jon asks: We are a company of 4 people – myself (owner, design lead and general business development/project management person), one designer, and 2 developers.

We are hopefully about to merge with a slightly larger company in a neighbouring town who have slightly more staff than we do (7 in all), and who have more of a project management structure – 2 project managers, using the services of 1 designer, 3 developers, and 1 designer/developer. I would end up as owner/MD of the enlarged company.

My question is really about project management? What do you think is the best organizational structure for a company of 11 people? I was feeling pushed on the project management side before this merger came along, and the merger will bring 2 project managers with it. How does Headscape do it for example – I think you have project managers there – do the designers and developers report to project managers, or do the project managers pick from a pool of design and development resource as required? What are your thoughts generally on the whole project management side of things.

A-ha… this is part two to a question I answered a few weeks back relating to pricing work after two companies merge. I wanted more detail at the time and now I have it!

Comparing to Headscape, we have 4 designers, 4 developers, 3 project managers, 2 business development/analysts and 1 lazy good-for-nothing called Paul … seriously though, Paul effectively markets Headscape and I have to say he’s rather good at it (ungrits teeth…)

Following the merger Jon will have a team of 11. As he is new MD, I think it is imperative that he much reduces the design and PM aspects of his role and concentrates on bringing in business as there are quite a few more mouths to feed.

That leaves roughly 3 designers, 5 developers and 2 PMs. Depending on the work you’re doing I think that is ok especially considering Jon can bolster both the design and PM groups if needed.

Regarding the allocation of work, project managers should rule the roost. Full stop.

It is their job to manage resources. Delivering projects effectively and on time means that they must know that they are in charge regarding who does what and when they need to do it by. A certain amount of fitting the right person to the job should be done but generally, the rule should be that the next piece of work goes to the next available person. This would be particularly useful advice in a merged company where it would much easier to keep going back to ‘your’ guys because you trust them.

One thing that has worked really well for us is to set invoicing targets for the project managers. We don’t operate performance related targets but it still really helps to focus minds on hitting milestones at the end of months.

Terms and Conditions

Adam writes: I am developing my own web application. In summary, it’s a site with user submission of content in a social networking format with video uploads. Anyone can register an account.

I of course have to try and write Terms of Service for this and I am getting stuck. I am wondering what Headscape uses, especially for Getsignoff, and whether you found a pre-written terms of service, or had a specialist write one.

What’s your solution to the problem, and what should / should not be included.

I have to confess to conferring with Headscape’s fount of all legalese knowledge on this – our MD Chris Scott. I tried to get him on the show but he’s still a little jittery after the last time all those years ago… anyway, Chris put together the TOS for Getsignoff and these are his thoughts on it:

For Getsignoff I looked at the TOS of other online services like Harvest, Basecamp, Youtube and Flickr. I’m not a legal person, but this gave me enough material to be able to identify the key issues that I thought we needed to cover in our TOS.

I assembled this into a brief for our legal adviser that was part overview of what we wanted to achieve and part draft TOS using adapted clauses from other TOSs.

Our legal adviser pretty much re-wrote what I had given him but this was from a position where he had a good understanding of how we wanted Getsignoff to work.

The bottom line with this sort of thing is that you really need to get a professional legal person to assist.

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127. Context

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this week’s show we discuss taking context into consideration when designing websites and we answer your questions about video for an elderly audience and the most influential books in the industry. 

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News and events

Working from home

The first post this week appears on A List Apart and applies to a growing number of people in the web design business. That is because it is tackling the subject of home working.

According to the home business report (PDF) published in October 2007, home based business account for 28% of all employment and have a combined UK turnover in excess of £364 billion.

No doubt that percentage is even higher among web designers. Therefore it comes as no surprise that this subject is being increasingly written about in web design circles.

This particular post is written from the perspective of a home working mother. However, her advice applies to anybody consider working from home. This advice includes:

  • How to draw the line between work and home
  • How to isolate yourself from the rest of the family while working
  • How to explain to your client the screaming child in the background of a conference call
  • How to win clients that are understanding of your situation

If you are already a home worker, I am not sure this article tells you anything you wont have already learnt the hard way. However, if you are considering making the switch for whatever reason this is definitely a worthwhile read.

British Standard for accessibility

Some time ago the British Standards Institute and the Disability Right Commission teamed up to release the first formal guide for business on website accessibility entitled PAS 78.

PAS 78 was intended to be a web accessibility guide, aimed at website owners rather than web designers . Personally I found the result somewhat disappointing. Although the advice was solid the language was hard going and it referred too often to the WAI guidelines. Although these guidelines are superb they are too technical for most website owners.

However, despite my personal opinion the document has proved very popular and is now being converted into a full British Standard. A British Standard is a common standard used across a variety of products produced in the UK. Although anybody can claim to meet these standards without external review, it is possible to be officially certified. Once certified you can display a BSI Kite Mark. This is a symbol of quality universally recognised in the UK.

Personally, I think this is a much better route for web accessibility to take. The alternative is legislation and that carries with it numerous problems. The team working on the standard is excellent and I look forward to seeing the result.

Growing your business through twitter

The next post solves an embarrassing problem I have. When sitting in the pubs with my mates, they occasionally catch me twittering. It is particularly embarrassing because I cannot really explain why I do it. Fortunately now I can thanks to a post from Tiffini Jones at Blue Flavor.

Actually the truth be told, Tiffini’s post refers heavily to another by Elliot J Stocks a few months earlier. He suggests that twitter is:

  • An ice-breaker
  • A purveyor of "ambient intimacy"
  • A broadcasting / marketing tool
  • A fount of knowledge
  • A social network

Both posts communicate well the power of social networks if used wisely. This has certainly been my experienced and without tools like Twitter this site and podcast would have been nowhere near as successful.

I know a lot of people look down their nose at twitter. They claim it is a time waster, unprofessional and dull. However, I think they are missing the potential. I believe that networking tools like Twitter will in time diminish the role of search engines. Increasingly people will turn to online contacts for recommendations about products, services and information, rather than relying on the algorithms of Google.

Smart CSS aint always sexy

My final article today, demonstrates a sea change in the web standards community. It is a controversial article on the Digital Web Magazine entitled Smart CSS aint always sexy CSS.

The article challenges some of the basic arguments of standards zealots. For example is it so bad to name a class ‘red’? Do we need to pursue semantics at all cost, even when it compromises performance or maintainability?

This seems to be representative of a growing group of designers calling for a more pragmatic approach to web standards. Increasingly I am seeing little examples of rebellion against the more extreme supporters of standards. Whether it is the posts of Jeff Croft or the twitterings of Andy Clarke, it would appear there is the beginning of a more grown up approach.

Does this mean we can throw away good practice? Not at all. It simply means we are mature enough in our knowledge to bend the rule sometimes. Before you can paint like Jackson Pollock, you first need to know how to paint traditionally.

The morale of the story is that if you are new to standards then you should stick to the rules. However, if you are more experienced, there is nothing wrong with making compromises from time to time.

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Feature: Content is dead, long live context

No, content is not dead. Yes content is important, but there can only be one king and I am beginning to wonder if it is context in this weeks feature.

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Listeners feedback:

Video and an elderly audience

Steven writes: I am currently working on a website that is going to be targeted toward an older demographic. There seems to be a large disagreement on whether video should be included on the site. The site is quite in depth and video explanation could be crucial. The main argument seems to be that people might not have the flash player and in turn not be able to view the video. On the other hand the Adobe site says that market penetration on flash player is over 99%!? Is flash video a usability issue?

One of the largest clients Headscape works with is trying to reach an elderly audience and so I have put some thought into this issue already. Unfortunately as with all of life, it is not a straight yes or no answer.

I see no reason why you cannot use video on your site. Although I do not believe Adobe when they claim flash has 99% penetration, I do believe the vast majority of your audience will have it installed. In my experience those who do not have flash are those behind a corporate firewall.

Although you can expect the vast majority to have flash I don’t believe you can design solely for it. The elderly develop visual, physical and cognitive c
onditions that can make it hard to interact with flash in some circumstances. Although a well designed application can minimise these problems, it will still affect a significant number of users.

I am afraid that although you can use flash, you will have to also provide an alternative. This could either be in the form of a transcript or captions (depending on the nature of the video), but additional work is required.

Most influential books

Teifion asks: What are the two most influential books you have read. Not just for web design but work and life in general.

I think this is possibly the hardest question I have ever had to answer. Choosing just two books has been horribly difficult. In an attempt to cheat slightly I have changed the rules to reflect BBC Radio 4s Desert Island Discs. This means I get the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare for free! My choices are therefore…

  • Getting things done by David Allen – I know I have spoken endlessly about this book before but that is because it has had such a profound impact on me. It is an easy book to dismiss with statements like "I don’t need to read it because I am already organised" or "it just tells you to write lists". In fact it is about a lot more than that. Getting things done has made me radically rethink my life and what I spend my time doing. It has made me question my priorities and change what I spend my life doing. Yes, I do write a lot of lists now and yes I am more organised but that is not what I got from this book. It taught me to take control of my life and decide what I want to achieve.
  • Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman – I bought this book entirely by accident and yet it set my entire career in a new direction. Before reading this book I was feeling uninspired and stagnant in my career. I was bored with web design and felt that I had gone as far as I could. Reading this completely re-inspired me and introduced me to the web standards community. Without this book I doubt I would still be doing web design and certainly wouldn’t be doing this podcast or speaking around the world. Thanks Jeffrey!

125. Copy

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this weeks show we discuss how to give personality to your site copy and we talk with Elliot Jay Stocks about going freelance.

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News and Events

The clever chaps at Carsonified

If you happen to follow any of the guys at Carsonified on twitter, you cannot help but know they are working on a not-so-secret project called Matt.

It is an interesting idea that they have done once before. They stop all normal work for a week and blitz a small self contained project using an Agile style approach.

The final result is not what counts. It is the exercise itself that I find interesting. By doing this periodically they…

  • Create a lot of buzz which reflects well on their company
  • Build a great sense of camaraderie
  • Get to try out new technologies and techniques
  • Break the routine of everyday work
  • Push people’s comfort zones and help develop new skills

It’s a great plan and one more of us should adopt. It is certainly something I would like to do in Headscape. Of course it is more tricky when you have clients with deadlines however the principle still applies. You may find it hard to do this for a week, but maybe a single day is possible.

Adobe make flash searchable

The big news of the week is an announcement by Adobe that they have been working with both Google and Yahoo! to improve the indexing of flash. This is no real surprises as the SEO of flash has been a major headache for the technology. The surprising bit is that they have succeeded, at least in the case of Google.

Apparently Adobe have created a special flash player for the search engines that acts as a virtual user. This user trawls through each swf converting the content into something search engines can understand.

Apparently Google is in the process of rolling out the technology. Unfortunately Yahoo! apparently have "some work to do." Nevertheless this is a promising step forward.

Of course until Adobe make it easy for the average blogger or website owner to deep link within a flash file, the 73 million flash sites are not likely to be highly ranked.

Colour blindness on the web

My final story for the day is a post on colour blindness by Richard Rutter. To call this news is a huge stretch as the article was published in 2005. However, I have only just found it so it is news to me!

I have to say I love this post. At the very beginning Rich tells us he is colour blind and so I braced myself for feelings of guilt and inadequacy as he tells me my sites are inaccessible. Instead I got this…

The thing is, colour blindness on the Web isnÕt a big deal. You do have to bear it mind (as I will show later on), but there is no need to let it dominate any design decision.

What a breath of fresh air. He then goes on to give some very simple advice that anybody can follow…

  • Do not rely on colour alone to convey information (such as on Jeff Veen’s blog)
  • Do not write instructions such as "click the green button"

He goes on to dispel some misconceptions and provides good examples of where things can become a problem.

If you worry about the large number of colour blind users out there (and you should do), then give this post a read.

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Feature: Copy with Personality

Too much of the copy I read on websites is bland and uninspiring. Its time to add some personality. We look at this in this weeks feature.

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Interview: Elliot Jay Stocks on Going Freelance

Paul Boag: So joining me today is Elliot Jay Stocks previously from Cansonified now a freelance web designer, in the depths of Norway I hear earlier.

Elliot Jay Stocks: Yes. That’s all the hype depending on how you look at it.

Paul: Well it’s really good to have you on the show.

Elliot: Thank you for having me.

Paul: Normally when we get people on the show it’s to talk about some specific area of expertise or something like that. Although I know you have many, many areas of expertise I wanted to get you on the show just because of the really interesting thing that you’ve chosen to do. The fact that you’ve left a fairly well known company that had a really good reputation. That you’ve decided to go freelance. And you’ve decided, at least for a short length of time to work from Norway, as a bit of an adventure. Is that the right way to put it?

Elliot: Yeah I guess so. I don’t like to do anything by halves. I like to do everything at once. So we gave up our flat my girlfriend went off travelling to the far east. I moved to Norway and at the same time decided to start up my own business. So quite a few life changing things at once.

Paul: Cool. I mean that’s really exciting and I guess that’s the power of freelancing, that you’ve got the freedom to work from wherever you want.

Elliot: Yeah and the power of the web in general. You know whenever anybody says "How can you do that?" I say I’ve got my laptop and as long as I’ve got an internet connection then it’s all good. Although having said that my internet connection here is really dodgy.

Paul: Which is why I’m calling you on an ordinary phone line.

Elliot: Right. Where I’m staying unfortunately there is something wrong with the router where it doesn’t allow ftp or any way to send email out. So there’s no upstream traffic. Which isn’t that great when you’re a web designer. So my new office, as it were, is one of the local coffee shops.

Paul: In order to get ’round the problem. So we’ve got loads of people listening to this show that either are web designer’s in an agency of some description or in house designers somewhere or alternatively people maybe not working in web design at all at the moment but want to. So we get lots of questions about freelancing and I thought okay let’s get somebody on the show that’s literally just gone through this process. And kind of ask you a few questions about you’re experiences a
nd how its gone. I guess the biggest one and the one that we probably should start with is overcoming that kind of fear factor of giving up a regular income. How did you kind of convince yourself that this was a good idea?

Elliot: I’d been thinking about going freelance for a while. Not to swat at Carsonified, but sort of the entire time I’ve been working at a web designer. I started off doing freelance things in University. So like doing site for things like friends bands and things like that. I mean I carried on doing that as soon as I started working in the industry and have carried on the last 4 years or so doing bits and bobs, evenings and weekends. Although I’ve only just started doing it fulltime I’ve got quite a bit of experience doing it on a part-time basis which obviously is a little less scary, when you’re making. I think the other thing as well at Carsonified most days of the week I actually worked from home, in London, so that was a really good testing ground to see if I had the self discipline to work by myself all day and stay motivated and stuff like that. So because of that it was slightly less scary making the actual jump.

Paul: So would you recommend that to somebody who is considering going freelance? To kind of build up some work on the side and also if possible to negotiate some home working to see how you get on with it?

Elliot: Yeah definitely. It’s something that’s not suited to everybody. Obviously there’s the appeal, everybody thinks WOW I’d love to work from home, loads of freedom fantastic. But, people I have spoken to have said I find it very very hard to get motivated when I’m at home. It’s easy to get distracted. The other thing as well is it can often be quite lonely. Jonathan Snook recently wrote a post about this on his site. He was disussing these ways of battling freelance loneliness. You know going to the local coffee shop for instance. Which is another thing to bear in mind when you’re doing it. There’s the option of working entirely by yourself. Working in the public, like the coffee shop. Working in a shared working environment. I’m still undecided really. I get on fine working by myself, but when I get back to the UK we’re not sure exactly where we’re gonna go. Depending on where we do go I may look into some kind of co-working space or whatever. There’s a possibility that we might go Oxford way, if so I may shack up with the old Rissington chaps, which would be lovely.

Paul: That would be superb.

Elliot: Yeah.

Paul: Well obviously no it wouldn’t because they’re nothing but rude and obnoxious to me so I’m in no way supporting that decision.

Elliot: And they’re a rival podcast.

Paul: Well it’s not so much the rival podcast it’s the fact that they’re just so jealous and envious of my huge success (Paul laugh maniacally).

Elliot: Well I hear you’re the one who gets noticed on the tube anyway.

Paul: Well yes this is true. Okay moving back to the interview and on with the questions. Cashflow is obviously something that always scares people. Not just when making the leap into freelance. How do you actually fund it starting off? You know in those first few weeks. How did you go about that? What was your solution to the problem?

Elliot: I’m not sure that my solution is the best one. People always say to make sure you have some money in the bank. You know enough to see you over for 2 or 3 months so that if it’s very slow starting off, if you’re not getting a lot of work in or if you are getting work in but clients are slow paying you’ve got a sort of fall back plan. I made sure I had a bit of money in the bank so that if it all went horrible wrong I’d still be able to survive. Luckily at the same time because we moved out of our flat and I am now living in Norway temporarily. Although Norway is horrendously expensive to anyone but Norwegians it’s actually cheaper working out here living here at the moment because of the reduced rent compared to what I was paying in London. So that was one factor that made it a little bit easier. The other thing is that I alread had a lot of work already booked in before going freelance. I think more than anything that’s the important thing when people make that jump, is having the work there. So rather than jumping and saying okay I work for myself now I better go get some work. To already have as much lined up as possible. Fortunately I am in a position where I had loads of stuff booked up a couple of months in advance. That was a good safety net. Obviously clients can be slow to pay so I always ask for 25% deposit before I start. That’s 25% based on the estimated amount of the project. But it’s a nice little safety net to have in there. It means you have a little bit of cash and if they decide that they want to be horrible at the end and not pay you’ve got a little bit of something to fall back on.

Paul: Sure. I mean it’s interesting that you said that you were fortunate enough to get some work lined up before you began. I mean the obvious question is how did you achieve that. You must have been marketing or been selling yourself in some way in order to attract that work.

Elliot: Selling myself. (laughs at Paul’s implied dirty joke)

Paul: Selling yourself in the nicest way.

Elliot: Yeah to some degree. I’ve been very very fortunate and I haven’t had to look for any work yet. So far people have got in contact with me so I haven’t had to go out there and kind of beg for clients or anything. Obviously Carsonified was quite high profile stuff. Prior to that when I worked in the music industry luckily I got work with some very high profile artists and bands so because of that and because I had those things in my portfolio that was part of the marketing. People see these kind of bigger bands in your portfolio. It definitly makes it easier because regardless of the work I think it kind of impresses people if they see a name that they recognize. In terms of marketing I guess this time last year, or I guess just over a year ago, the recent version of my site and things kind of took off from there really. I’ve put that on a load of CSS galleries which obviously helps because they get so much traffic. I think still sites like CSS Beauty and Web Designer Wall they’re still some of my biggest refers even now. So I think getting you’re site on there, getting people to look at it there that often has a snowball effect of having the other galleries picking it up and other sites and
things like that. So that obviously helps. In terms of the work for the next few months, I’m actually launching a new version of my site which will probably launch in a month or two’s time. And I’m gonna do the same things again. Put it on lots of gallery sites. Tell people about it. I think having a new site with an emphasis more on the work more than just being a blog that will hopefully help as well in the continuing marketing. Luckily enough, doing things like this even lets people hear about you some more and I guess the thing with marketing it’s just to get your name out there in which ever way you can. To get people hearing about your stuff.

Paul: So would you recommend, if someone’s talking about going freelance, say a new graduate that has just come out of university. Would you actually encourage them to try working for an agency where they can perhaps build up a portfolio of bigger clients before they go freelance? Or is there really no reason why they shouldn’t go freelance straight away.

Elliot: No. I would definitely encourage working for an agency or as an in house designer for some kind of company before hand. When I left university my flat mate and I were condsidering starting up a business and I was thinking about this this morning actually. If we’d have done that and we could have done it I guess and maybe done okay out of it but the first thing is. I don’t think I would have then got access to the kind of high profile clients that I have got through my previous work experience so in that sense I probably would have still be struggling now to market myself and convince people I can work with big brands. The main thing that I, you know the wealth of experience that working in an agency will give you is definitely something not to be under estimated. Dealing with clients. Dealing with rediculous deadlines. Obviously these are things that your pick up being freelance as well but being inside an agency and working with other people and getting a feel for the industry that you are in, the working environment. The requirements. Things like that. All of that stuff. I am very grateful that I decided not to start my own business that early on and actually went to a real job as it were. So I would definitely recommend that people do it, that graduates do that. As well I thinks it’s just you learn a lot about who you are as a designer and where your strengths are. I mean when I was at Young life I was completely Flash. 100%. I barely new HTML at all when I started there because I was so interested in Flash. Obviously now that has completely changed. Now its much more, well completely standards based. That’s sort of where I specialize in now. If I hadn’t gone through that process I may not have realized that.

Paul: Okay so we’ve done the kind of exciting stuff of kind of talking about setting up, or deciding to take the leap and go freelance. We talked where the work comes from. What about all the boring stuff? What was your experience of the admin of going freelance? Setting up all the kind of legal requirements. What did you do there? You kind of muddle your way through that yourself? Did you get any help? How did you approach it? What were the big problems?

Elliot: A bit of muddling through. A bit of asking around. There’s still some things that I have yet to do. For instance I haven’t yet got a business bank account. Which I’m waiting till I get back to the UK. Mainly because I was setting this up at the time of moving, leaving the country. It was very very complicated. As I’m not getting paid immediately for some of the projects I am doing its fine to wait till July and set it all up then. You know what a nightmare UK banks can be anyway. So still waiting about that. One of the first things I did was get an accountant. I was quite nervous about this because one of the things that really dawned on me was how do you…First of all how do you find an accountant and then once you’ve found one how do you say "Ah they’re good.": You know, if you’re choosing a designer you can look at there work and it’s very easy to see what their like. What their styles like. What they’ve done. This kind of thing. With an accountant I think it’s really hard. You can only seem to go mainly on recommendations from friends and colleagues. Luckily I’ve had some dealings before with Nick who is Carsonified’s accountant and really nice guy and I figured well I’ll get a consult with him and if he fancies doing accounting for myself. I had a quick meeting with him. He was very friendly. I got to ask him all sorts of mundane tax questions which he answered for me. That was one of the first things I got sorted. So that was a big weight off my mind. To have someone who could look after all that stuff. Everybody has always said to me, in fact I think you may have said to me yourself, a good accountant will always pay for themselves and then some. In the time they save you. In the expertise. When the taxes come and all this kind of thing. So everybody recommended to me that I get an accountant from the first thigns and I guess that I would even in these early days say the same thing to anyone else thinking about that. In terms of paper work and stuff like that, one of the things I really really underestimated, although luckily I found out the truth in the first week, is how long it would take to manage my calendar. I just thought yeah I’ll book things and it will be fine. What I didn’t realize was that when projects need to shift round or you had to allocate couple of extra days for this. This had to move. The scheduling was actually, not a nightmare, but something you really have to make time for. The tricky thing is at the end of that you have nothing to show. There’s no realy paperwork to go with it. It’s an output as such. It’s easy to leave it off for, to neglect it. But obviously it’s something that needs to happen. In terms of paper work I made sure I designed myself a nice little invoice template so at least doing paper work isn’t as mundane as it has to be. Caus I got some nice little pretty pictures on my invoices. Doing that kind of stuff and obviously kind of chasing people to pay the money. Although actually so far everyone’s been very good. I haven’t got anything to complain about.

Paul: It’s interesting isn’t it. That when you kind of sit down and think about going freelance and whatever else you do the calculations if I charged this per hour and you know I work 40 hours per week WOW I’m gonna be so rich. But very quickly you realize that well actually half of my time is probably taken up with non-paid work like managing your calendar, project management, invoicing. Dealing with the accountant and all of the that kind of stuff. It’s easy to forget that side of things. What about the business plan? Did you put any kind of business plan together or did you just go oh sod it I’m just going to do it?

Elliot: I said oh sod it I’m gonna do it. For the kind of stuff that I’m doing I didn’t see the point in doing a business plan. Because I know exactly what I’m doing which is providing a design service to clients on a project by project basis. I don’t have any plans to grow the company as it were. This may change over time of course but at the moment I have not interest in turning it into an agency and employing other people. Obviously there are some financial benefits to doing that. A lot of people will tell you it’s the best thing to do and you gradually get less involved with the day to day stuff and are just running the company but to be honest at least w
here I am now I wouldn’t be happy doing that. Because I actually love doing the day to day, the hands on design work and if I wasn’t doing that I wouldn’t be happy and that’s the reason I’m doing this anyway. So at the moment there’s no, it’s not like I’m a start up and I have a product and I need to predict sales and growth in that way. I think just being a designer we’ve got it a bit easier. So maybe I’m going about it the wrong way. Maybe I’m being unprofessional but this if fine for me.

Paul: No I have to say I would agree. You know it’s not like you’ve got big costs going out. You don’t have offices that have to be paid for on a monthly basis. You don’t have staff that you have to worry about. And pensions for those staff. You know there’s no major complexity to it that kind of demands a business plan. I mean ultimately you just need to know that you are earning enough each month to pay your accountant and feed yourself.

Elliot: That’s right yeah exactly. I think as long as you can go into freelance work and aim to earn at least as much as you were earning in your day job then I don’t think you’re going to run into too much trouble. As you say it’s probably safe to assume that half of your week you’re not actually going to be getting paid for because technically you wont be doing paid work like you say you’ll be doing the invoicing, chasing up things like this. So if you say you’re only working 2.5 days a week I think it’s a fairly safe bet to go on. If you can say that in those 2.5 days you’re going to earn at least as much as you were earning in a week when you were in fulltime employment then you’re not going to go too far wrong. Obviously a lot of what we aim to do and what is happening with me luckily at the moment is earning more than what I was earning in fulltime employment. So in that respect it’s yeah it’s good and I don’t think there too much to worry about there. As I said before luckily we as web designers have very very few overheads. Like you say if you’re renting an office that’s one thing and obviously there’s the accountant but actually accountants are very very reasonably priced anyway and I’m paying it all in a lump sum just to get it out there and get it done. Luckily there isn’t too much that we have to spend much money on.

Paul: Okay last question and to wrap up with. How far in, sorry when did you set up again? I’m trying to think how long you’ve been doing this now?

Elliot: Doing it fulltime has been since around the 20th of April.

Paul: So it’s still very early days. You’re just over a month in. So so far pros and cons of being you’re own boss? What things have you liked? What things have you not liked?

Elliot: The main pro and so far they’re living up to what I expected the pros and cons to be. Some of the main pros are the freedom of being you’re own boss. Obviously to an extent you’re clients are your bosses but just having the freedom to decide when you think this deadline should be. Doing the work when you like to where you would like to is a really great thing. When somebody comes to you to estimate a project being able to be generous enough with the hours to know that you can really spend a decent amount of time on the project. Not to a degree where you’re kind of taking the mickey as it were. But knowing that you can really give some really good time to a project instead of it being rushed. Also picking and choosing the clients. If you have got a fairly steady amount of work coming in and you can afford to say no to some things then that’s great cause it means that you can just work on a project that you personally find interesting. As I said before the financial benefits are working out well so far. That is a game when anyone goes freelance as well as freedom there is the monetary benefite as well. I can’t express enough this sense of freedom. Just having a chat with you this morning and then toodling off into town later this morning to go and do some work from a coffee shop and I’ll probably work a bit later this evening because we’ve had this chat this morning but you know having the freedom to do that and not having to worry about needing to stick to normal working hours and things like that. Not that employers aren’t flexible to these things but knowing that you’re the only person you have to please that does make a massive difference.

Paul: So what about cons? Those were all pros.

Elliot: They are aren’t they.

Paul: You’re still in the honeymoon period aren’t you?

Elliot: Yeah I agree. Give me a year and I’ll be all disheveled and angry. The only con I’ll say is that it can be a bit lonely sometimes. I mean I guess it’s hard to judge cause I’m in a foreign country where I only know a few people anyway. There way a while where I was working from my room here when the connection was a bit more reliable and that was great but I found I’m actually much happier being around more people now. Seeing more people during the day. I think I’m fairly well self disciplined like I said before cause I’ve had the experience of working from home before for quite a while but even so I found that I sometimes get a little bit distracted when I’m at home. You know go for a little wander. When you’re sitting down maybe in a coffee shop in public it’s more like this working environment, you can focus a bit more. I think even if you work from home most of the time maybe spend one day a week heading out and working in a public space just to see how it compares. I definitely find my concentration is a little bit better when I’m in somewhere like that.

Paul: That’s really interesting because that’s something I’ve never tried doing. You know I work from home the vast majority of my week and I’ve never kind of gone and sat in a coffee shop. Mainly because I don’t drink coffee but also because, I don’t know its just never occured to me. I will go and try it today. There we go. We’ve got a little coffee shop around the corner I really like so I will go and sit in there and do some work for a while.

Elliot: Of course as soon as you get there there will be really loud music and you won’t be able to concentrate.

Paul: Probably. So Elliot you’ve definitely taught me something. I like that idea. What has that never occurred to me? Never even thought about doing that.

Elliot: Of course I have only been doing it for a month so I could be completely and absolutely wrong.

Paul: Yeah it could be a nightmare couldn’t it. But that’s why I wanted to get you on really. I wanted to get you on at the early outset of you doing this just to kind of give that unique perspective of somebody who’s just gone through the process. The stuff that you’ve covered has been great. I really apre
ciate the time that you’ve taken to come on. We’ll get you back on again in the future when you’re a year down the line and see how you feel then.

Elliot: Yes that would be a good test.

Paul: It would be.

Elliot: Something to aim towards perhaps?

Paul: Yeah. So you’ve got to stay as a freelancer for at least a year otherwise it would be very inconvenient. Alright good to have you on the show Elliot and we will talk to you again soon.

Thanks to Curtis McHale for transcribing this interview.

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Listeners feedback:

Wayne Henderson from Southern California has sent in an audio file for this week’s show consisting of two separate but equally good questions.

Hello Paul, Hello Marcus this is Wayne from Wayne Henderson voiceovers and as you can tell from my voice I’m obviously from Bristol, no wait actually Southern California and I have two question I would love to hear your comments and thoughts on. One, with the iPhone really taking off, gaining in popularity and other smart phones basically copying the iPhone, do you think it’s still even necessary to have the .mobi and designing for .mobi and my other question that I’d love to hear your thoughts on is kind of on the fringe of web design, I was wondering with WordPress being so popular, how do you feel about someone maybe being a WordPress design and installation expert? Taking the themes, customising them tweaking some things, changing some code and then kind of really helping other people to implement WordPress into their websites? Let me know what you think about that? Thanks guys.

Let me address each in turn.

The .mobi domain name

There are two issues here which I would like to cover separately. First, let me look at this issue of whether we need to be designing for mobile devices at all. My answer is a categoric yes. No matter how great mobile browsers become, it is always going to be a different experience to surfing the web on a computer. Let me give you just three differences…

  • Size – Mobile devices have smaller screens than a PC. No matter how clever the mobile browser is a considerable amount of zooming and panning will be required to view a conventional website.
  • Controls – Not all mobile devices come with a QWERTY keyboard and none come with a traditional mouse. This can create problems on some sites, especially those with mouse over effects.
  • Context – Probably the biggest reason for creating a mobile version of a site is context. Mobile devices are not used sitting at a desk. They are normally used on the go. This affects the type of information being requested as well as the level of concentration being given to the task. When it comes to the mobile web context is king.

    • It is also worth mentioning that we are a long way from everybody having a smart phone. The majority of phones still provide a terrible web experience.

    It is harder to give a definitive answer about the .mobi domain. Unless your website is primarily mobile focused I think it is probably unnecessary. Most sites seem to use a sub domain rather than a seperate extension. For example twitter uses:

    http://m.twitter.com rather than http://twitter.mobi.

    I have even found myself guessing this format. I certainly never think of typing .mobi. Also on a purely financial note, you have to pay for .mobi while a sub domain is free.

    That said, I don’t have anything against .mobi. It is certainly a valid choice.

    Becoming a WordPress specialist

    Wayne’s second question was about becoming a WordPress specialist. It is good idea for a couple of reasons.

    First, as he point out, WordPress is hugely popular and there is certainly a market out there. It is also a well established product that has been around for a while and isn’t about to disappear. Having a clearly defined market is always a good strategy.

    Second, I am a great believer in specialising. With so many web designers out there you need to do something in order to stand out from the crowd. Specialising in WordPress is a good step in the right direction.

    However, I would argue that you could specialise further. You may choose to specialise in setting up WordPress for a particular sector or by using it in a particular way.

    Although this approach feels counter intuitive as you are narrowing the number of people who can hire you, it actually makes good business sense. By specialising you become the best in your limited field and so people are more likely to select you over your competitors.

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    124. HTML 5

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this weeks show we explore how to create better online surveys and Lachlan Hunt joins us to discuss HTML5

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    Watch the behind the scenes video (Part 1)

    Watch the behind the scenes video (Part 2)

    News and events

    Removing Microformats

    The story that has generated the most email this week is the BBC announcement that they will be dropping the hCalendar Microformat. This decisions comes because of long standing accessibility concerns over the machine readable content within that particular Microformat. The problem is that code meant to be used programatically is potentially read out to screen reader users and displayed as meaningless tooltips to sighted users.

    The decision of the BBC to adopt Microformats was a huge boost to the movement. Equally the rejection the hCalendar is a blow. However, it is important not to get this out of proportion. Remember, they are only rejecting a single Microformat not the whole approach.

    The other thing to consider is that the BBC is a public service organisation with an incredibly high obligation to ensure maximum accessibility. In many ways they are in a unique position. Although it maybe appropriate for your organisation to pull hCalendars too, it should not be based on the decision of the BBC.

    My advice is as follows. If you already have hCalendar information on your site I would probably leave it (dependant on your exact circumstances). The Microformat community is working on a solution and I would implement that rather than removing hCalendar entirely. If however, you are not yet using hCalendar then I suggest you hold off until an updated specification is released.

    Becoming employable

    In the past we have spoken about becoming a professional web designer. I know that many people who listen to this show or read the blog are students. You are concerned that the skills you are being taught are out of date and will not improve your employment prospects. How then do you become a more employable web designer? What skills do you actually require?

    Andy Rutledge tackles this subject in his post "the employable web designer". Without a doubt it is the best post I have read on the subject of web design career development. I highly recommend you read it.

    The thing that impresses me is that it looks beyond the obvious design and technical skills required to be a web designer. It also tackles the business and communication skills too. He really drives home quite how wide an understand a good web designer has to have.

    My only criticism is that it could feel demoralising. You may read the list and think it is an unachievable aim. However, I don’t think that is the case. What Andy outlines is the optimal requirement of a web designer, rather than what is needed to get your first step on the ladder. I certainly did not have all of the attributes listed when I started.

    All we need now is a second post telling us how to gain the skills he lists.

    Better CSS font stacks

    David (a boagworld listener) sent in the next story. It covers a subject that I am currently still grappling with. It is a post about CSS font stacks.

    If you code in CSS you already know about font stacks. It is where you specify the fonts you wish to use. You can say for instance; use Helvetica and if that isn’t available use Arial. If that fails use a generic san-serif font.

    For many of us that is as far as our thinking goes. The majority of us use very basic font stacks that are uninspiring to the point of being insipid.

    I love this post because it lays out a very clear methodology for improving your font stacks. It also goes on to provide an impressive selection of font stacks organised into heading and body fonts, allowing you to instantly improve your site

    If your site is looking tired and boring, but you don’t have the time to redesign, consider adding a new font stack. Such a simple change could make a real difference.

    Do flexible layouts still matter?

    Our last story of the day is a post from Smashing Magazine entitled Flexible Layouts: Challenge For The Future. To be honest I was ensure whether to include this post or not. On one hand it covers an issue many people have been asking me about. On the other, its arguments seem stretched and the whole thing ends with an advert for a CSS framework.

    The article tackles zooming and fluid design. The new generation of web browsers – Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 and Internet Explorer 7 – provide full screen zooming. This gives users has the ability to enlarge the whole interface, not just text. Some are arguing that this is the end of fluid layout because zooming tackles many of the accessibility concerns associated with fixed width sites. However, this article strongly disagrees.

    The author argues that flexible designs are better for mobile devices, that pixels are becoming less important and that the user shouldn’t be required to customise a site to their needs (it should be done automatically). Although his arguments are weak at times and he uses some fairly dodgy comparisons I do generally agree with him. I see no reason to think fluid design will go away anytime soon.

    That said, I am in no doubt that page zoom does reduce the number of occasions fluid sites are necessary. Ultimately there is no right or wrong answer. It is entirely based on the situation. For example Boagworld, Headscape and The Website Owners Manual all use fixed designs. However, many of my client websites do not. That decision is based on numerous factors such as device, user base and business priorities.

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    Feature: Creating a Better Survey

    The web allows us to interact with our customers more than any other medium. One of the tools in our arsenal is the online survey. However, these are often badly implemented. In this weeks feature we find out how we make your surveys more effective?

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    Interview: Lachlan Hunt on HTML 5

    Paul: Joining me today is Lachlan Hunt; It’s good to have you on the show

    Lachlan: Thank You Very much

    Paul: It’s great to have you here I really appreciate you taking the time to join us, now the reason that we asked Lachlan on the show is because he posted a brilliant article on the A List Apart site about the subject of HTML 5 and I have been keen to look at this subject for a while partly because of my own ignorance to be honest, um, so lets kinda kick off by if you could perhaps tell us a little bit about where HTML 5 is at the moment I know that kinda getting a language to a release like this finalized is a massive process so can you tell us where we are at in that process.

    Lachlan: OK, it’s, um, a really an ongoing process with browsers implementing different parts of it progressively so it’s not, you know, going to be all implemented at once and ready to go in one, er the next few browser implementations. We have some features implemented already and shipping in browsers other features which are being worked on at the moment and other are planned for, but still a few years of yet. But it is gradually getting there. We are trying to focus on what authors really need, instead of trying to do it all at once

    Paul:Ahh, okay so that a slightly different approach that we have seen in the past, the idea of an incremental roll out. So how does that work from the W3C’s point of view are they doing modular releases is that how it works

    Lachlan: Um, at the moment no, but the way the spec is structured each part of the spec, what I am trying to indicate is the stability of each section of the spec as we go along. SO thing like the Canvas API which has been in browsers for a few years now, it should be getting to IE very soon. That section is pretty stable, Other things for example "data grid" or a lot of the web forms are not widely implemented.

    Paul: OK so that quite an interesting approach to the problem I guess from what you were saying earlier to me there is a community base element people can get involved and contribute. How is that all working then?

    Lachlan: Well we’ve got a REALLY REALLY open mailing list on whatwg.org anyone can subscribe at the moment there wa about 800 subscribers on that list anyone is free to subscribe and post feedback about the spec if they want to, but that’s not for everyone obviously because it’s quite a high volume mailing list and not everyone can keep up with that. We have also got an open blog on http://blog.whatwg.org/ where absolute anyone who wants to can write an article submit it and have it published. Anything to do with what the WHATWG are about, HTML5 and anything related to it at all. It’s also a good way to let the community know what’s going on by publishing articles also to find out what people think because they keep posting comments on there as well. We have also got an open forum which is at http://forums.whatwg.org/ again anyone can subscribe to that, am sue you know how a forum works

    Paul: So there are lots of different ways to be involved, I have to confess things like that can feel quite intimidating to get involved in. You’re kinda worried about putting your foot in it, and saying something really dumb, is there kind of Opportunities to lurk and are people fairly friendly over there? I guess you are going to say yes aren’t you

    Lachlan: Yeah everyone is friendly over there,they are nice sort of area to go to aim at web developers and people who aren’t quite as technical with the spec areas and stuff. You can ask any question you want and just learn whatever you want as well. Their is also the w3c side of it as well. Which is strictly related but is more focused on the actual technical side and issues so yeah. The What WG and the W3C are both publishing exactly the same spec and they both work on it together and feedback can be sent to either place, it will all be taken into account

    Paul: Oooh, that’s useful. So looking at kinda the state of affairs at the moment with HTML 5, reading through your article there was some things in there that really sounded quite exciting, there was this thing about structure and some kind of additional elements that could be used, which provide a little bit more structure, headers and footers and things like that can you tell us a little about that, and maybe explain a bit of what those do.

    Lachlan: Well at the beginning of the work back in 2004 / 2005 we basically took a look at what a lot of site where doing and we noticed that they were all using a similar structure. All the blog’s were using headers and footer and generally things like column layouts to show articles and stuff like that. So we wanted some semantic elements to come and cover each of those features that people actually used, solving the real problems that they were actually focusing on. instead of having to do "Div" elements for everything, which is what people do we give them an actual element and that also has a side effect of increasing accessibility because an element with specific semantics can be hooked into the accessibility API’s and help someone with assistive technology navigate the document a bit easier.

    Paul: Okay, because I mean reaction just glancing at it quickly and not thinking about it was what’s wrong with the div with an ID Equals footer, or an ID equal header or whatever but like you say, as you think about it more it become obvious that if those are considered distant elements, one person might call it a footer another might call it "the bottom" or whatever else if they have consistent semantic names then you know you can have screen readers and stuff jumping to the footer or avoiding / not reading the footer depending on what is set in their preferences, is that what you are thinking?

    Lachlan: Yeah that sort of it, it’s also helping the authoring side too, as there are lots of Div elements in source code which makes it easier to read if you have got elements with different names

    Paul: yeah very much so, I spend half my life trying to which closing Div relates to which elements, that very exciting. Obviously the other big area you talk about in your A List Apart article is the audio visual elements and there is a lot that’s happening in there. It’s always had the vague feeling that HTML has never had any kind of, erm, erm, the audio visual elements have always been and after thought, what happing in HTML 5 in regards to that?

    Lachlan: Well we have added the video and audio elements to the spec to try and allow video to be added directly to HTML, at the moment we have sites like youtube revel and all the other video site out there using flash to embed video and using the flash to give customized controls and stuff to the user, it’s really awkward, depending on proprietor technology, so we want to open that up a bit give a very very easy to use Javascript API to hook into and promote custom controls and all sorts of cool stuff with videos and of course audio as well. We have got experimental implementations of that in opera and in webkit. I have heard mozilla is considering implementing it as as it is now I am not sure of the status of their implementation. However the one big problem with video and audio at the moment is with Codecs, there are a whole load of software patent issues going around and we are not quite sure what codec we are going to standardize upon or if we are going o be able to get common codec support among the browsers, That’s an open issue but I am no lawyer to I cannot really go into that, so the ultimate aim is that you will be able to embed your movie file, your avid file or whatever directly into the HTML without the need to kinda pump it through something like flash

    Paul: cool

    Lachlan: that make it a whole lot easier to the authors hopefully

    Paul: Yeah, you kind of, to some extent got to ask the question why do we need that when we have got a solution like flash

    Lachlan: Well because Flash is a proprietary technology it’s managed only buy Adobe , they control it, they control the changes and what does and what does not go into future versions of it, however the thing with HTML is that it is an open standard platform which can be implemented by anyone and maintain interoperability between those venders.

    Paul: It’s intrusting isn’t it that adobe has just announced they are opening up the flash format, do you wonder if that’s a reaction to some of the stuff you have been doing to kind of force their hand if they want to stay ahead o the game and dominant they need to be open

    Lachlan: Yeah I don’t know how that going to work though, it depends, if they open the format up and actually make it an open development process where anyone can contribute to the future version and features which go into it or whether they just write the specs and tell other people to implement based on what they write, so I don’t know much about that. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

    Paul: Very interesting, Now the next thing you cover in the A List Apart article is something which you titled "Document Representation" now I have to confess this confused me, so do you want to explain a little about what you meant by document representation. What you were getting at there.

    Lachlan: Yeah, well in the past we have had HTM, and XHTML with two separate specs, HTML 4.1 which a lot of people use and XHTML 1.0 which a whole lot of other people use one of them is based on XML and is really really strict syntax that requires well formedness and is supposed to when you serve it correctly, if you make a well formedness error the browser is suppose to stop processing and throw and error message saying "Sorry I cannot handle this" where as HTML is more sorta loose and convenient in its error handling, it’s the traditional inspired by SGML, although really only syntactically similar these day but the error handling is a bit more lenient and you can get away with making a lot more errors. So instead of having two distinct language which you can use we have combined them into a single language which share the same elements and attributes and everything and as much a possible and when the browser reads those file it produces and internal representation called the DOM, a lot of javascript user will be familiar with the DOM as they work with that with their scripts to modify the document through the DOM. That’s an internal representation which is mapped, the DOM which is sort of mapped to by the syntax’s, the HTML and the XHTML syntax’s so it give the authors a choice of which syntax they want to use

    Paul: So why do we need that choice what is the key difference, I mean you talk about HTML being more lenient are there other reason for choosing one over the other.

    Lachlan: erm, well I don’t really know. However a lot of authors do prefer the strict syntax of XHTML like to make sure they quote the attributes and encode all their ampersands properly. They like to know they have done everything perfectly as with HTML a lot of people do make mistakes inadvertently and don’t want end users to see big error messages, so it’s a bit more user friendly if some little small error slips though their CMS and causes problems.

    Paul: So it’s basically come down to personal preference then

    Lachlan: yeah

    Paul: Okay, that’s fair enough, so both, we are going to see equal support for both of them in browser manufacturers are we

    Lachlan: Well that’s the hope we have said that we have got good support in most browsers, it’s just IE which is lagging behind

    Paul: (Sarcasm) Oh that’s a suprise (Laughs) Okay are there ant other things in HTML 5 that might be of interest to those listening to the show which we should be paying attention to?

    Lachlan: erm, well, as I said before we got canvas implemented in most browsers

    Paul: So tell us, what’s canvas

    Lachlan: It’s a 2D drawing API that you can use javascript to draw dynamic image with. People have used it to implement things like graphs that are built using tables of data which are on the page. People have also gone and done 3D games with it which is really cool

    Paul: Wow, that incredible. I mean that sounds very similar to SVG is it a different thing.

    Lachlan: It is different SVG is entirely done with XML, you modify that with script via the DOM by changing elements and attributes and stuff or with CSS. Canvas is an immediate mode graphics API where it is more like a bitmap sort of thing where as SVG is vector graphics, and canvas is bit map. They can both do images, the same sort of images, if you like but we have both vector images and bitmap images, so they both can serve different purposes.

    Paul: Right, I see. Okay that’s good, so okay the big question, kind of the final question everyone is going to have is when can they start doing some of the cool stuff. Now you said right at the beginning this is going to be modular support based thing so we are going to be able to see some of these elements before others. You know some parts before other, so what can we do now, what are we going to be able to do soon give us an idea of where things are at.

    Lachlan: erm, okay let’s see I think what’s being implemented at the moment. Cross document messaging is being implemented at the moment, that’s an API that lets you send message between documents with javascript without worrying about cross domain security issues,

    Paul: Oooo…. that’s good.

    Lachlan: Yeah it’s a really, really handy API that been implemented in opera for a while and I heard mozilla is implementing it soonish and should be in firefox 3 thought I am not entirely sure about that. That should be very very soon, erm, what else have we got, we got…. hmmm, this is tough

    Paul: Sorry put you on the spot there (laughs) is that last one supported in webkit?

    Lachlan: erm, I am not sure I would have to double cheek that

    Paul: Okay that’s fair enough

    Lachlan: yeah,

    Paul: Okay so any other elements? Things like the structural changes are any of those being supported yet?

    Lachlan: Not quite yet, erm as far as I know support for those requires changed to the phaser, and to implment the new pharsing algorithm in HTML 5, as far as I know browsers are not yet focusing on doing that because..

    Paul: Okay that’s a shame, because that one I liked the sound of, what about the audio and the visual stuff?

    Lachlan: We have experimental implementations in opera which supports OGG video, though it’s not really in a public build version yet, there is a experimental version which was released last year sometime. And webkit also has support in their nightly builds, which supports mpeg 4 unfortunate they don’t support the same codec but you can experiment with them.

    Paul: (laughs) That would be far to easy

    Lachlan: yes I know

    Paul: So it’s all progressing slowly but, erm you know obviously the one name which has been very absent in the list you keep mentioning is Internet Explorer, so I expect we can probably see some slower movement there. We are talking you know in the years before this all becomes mainstream and we can actually start using it. Is that a fair comment to make?

    Lachlan: Yes it will be several years before the entire spec is finished, we are hoping that it can get finished sooner rather than later but realistically it’s going to be quite a while yet, But it is important to know people will be able to use theses features before the spec is finished; so it depends on when browsers start supporting features authors can go ahead and use it.

    Paul: That’s great and real exciting that you can start to do that sort of stuff. you know that we don’t need to wait for it all to be set in stone before moving forward. And it’s always exciting as well to see the future, know what coming up and be aware of everything. so is there somewhere people can go a websites address and keep an eye on what is currently supported by browsers.

    Lachlan: Not at the moment but that’s something worth looking into, I think there is a wiki on the Working Group site, it does have some implementations listed but I am not sure how up to date. But it’s something I think we should look into

    Paul: Yeah it would be great to have some kind of single page which says what features are supported by each browser that you could check back every few months see what’s going, there you go there is my contribution to the working group (laughs). Alright it was really good to speak to you and thank you so much for your time, What we will do is to get you back in further down the line and have a check to see where we have currently got to in the development of HTML 5, Thank you so much for your time.

    Thanks to Jamie Knight for transcribing this interview.

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    Listeners feedback:

    Staying healthy on the web

    Evan writes: My question to you is not entirely related to design, development or management but rather about health in the web industry. This is very important but we often seem to forget about it. We spend hours upon hours at our desks but are unaware of the damage this could be having on our health. Eyeballs almost touching the screen, typing without a break, sitting incorrectly – just a few examples. So, what do you do to maintain good health while working?

    I am possibly the worst person in the world to answer this question. I consistently abuse my body while at work. In fact a physiotherapist friend said I had the worse posture in front of a computer she had ever encountered.

    However, there is possibly something to learn from my terrible example. Let’s look at what I do and compare that to best practice.

    • I sit with my leg tucked up under me – Posture while working is important. Both feet should be flat on the floor, rest your wrists on the desktop in front of your keyboard and make sure your monitor is at eye level (in other words avoid laptop screens).
    • I stoically refuse to use anything other than my preferred mouse and keyboard – Using the same keyboard and mouse in the same position day after day can cause damage. Try using a variety of different hardware and positions. Push your mouse and keyboard nearer or further from you to change the position of your arms.
    • I believe that an individual pixel should fill my field of view - Leaning too close to your monitor is a particular weakness of designers who want to position that pixel ‘just so’. This not only damages your eyes but also your back. When you learn forward your neck and back support the weight of your head. When sat upright, the head is supported by a straight spine and therefore your chair bears the weight.

    On the upside I do take regular breaks. I would like to claim this is because of my health. However, I think it has more to do with my short attention span. I get easily distracted and wander off to do something more interesting.

    From Photoshop to HTML

    I see a lot of PSD 2 HTML services on the internet but never tried any out. It seems to be an great option for an designer for making an quick website, to edit later myself.

    What is the opinion of you guys? Love to hear you discuss this topic in one the next podcasts.

    An long time listener from Holland.

    I have to confess to being a snob over these services. Until recently I have always doubted the quality of the code but after seeing some recent examples I have begun to change my mind.

    We are even considering giving them a try at Headscape, just to see what happens. Certainly from an economic point of view they make sense especially if you have more work than you can handle. That said, I do have three concerns.

    First, results may vary. Without a personal recommendation it could be hard to find a provider who can produce the quality you require. Anybody can convert a photoshop document into HTML. However, it is much harder to do so using techniques like microformats, semantic markup and accessibility. Also, just because the quality was good once, does not mean it will be so again. As the good providers get busy it can lead to a decline in quality.

    Second, people code in different ways. Unless careful attention is given to commenting, it is hard to pick up somebody elses markup. This is fine for relatively static sites where only small changes are required. However for projects where change happens regularly as the site evolves, it is more important that the markup is tailored to your style of coding.

    My final concern is that this could lead to designers not learning HTML. As I have said before on the show, I believe all designers should be able to code themselves. You need to understand how the web works and markup is apart of that. Also, if you cannot code how can you judge the quality of the markup you receive?

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    123. Plight

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this weeks show we review Textmate and the Top 5 Tips for Web Designers and we discuss the plight of in-house designers.

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    A quick request. We are really in need of some more transcribers to help with the interviews we do. The team we have are doing an amazing job but it would be great to spread the load.

    If you feel you could help once in a while please drop an email to Ryan our producer and he will add you to the list.

    News and events

    SPAM meltdown

    It is always with fear and trepidation that I mention HTML email. It inevitably leads to a torrent of comments ‘educating’ me about the evils of HTML in email, and that we should only use plain text.

    Although personally I wish HTML email was never invented and try to limit its use, I do accept it is here to stay. Despite its many drawbacks it is statistically more effective than plain text from a marketing perspective.

    You will be hard pushed to pursued a client to forgo HTML. Inevitably we will have to produce HTML templates occassionally. Of course, being conscientious, when we do produce HTML emails we want to ensure they look great and are well coded. This leads me to a couple of stories worth mentioning.

    The first is that Patrick McNeil (of Design Meltdown fame) has launched a new site called Spam Meltdown. The site showcases examples of great email design in much the same way as Design Meltdown does with websites. Patrick has done an amazing job on this site and he has my sympathy because he is subscribed to over 1000 mailing lists! The designs he showcases are organised by style, colour, industry and topic. As with design meltdown this categorisation approach works really well. You can quickly find inspiration by looking at categories that are relevant to your project.

    The second news item worth mentioning is that Campaign Monitor have updated their chart for CSS support in email clients. Campaign Monitor is a service which allows you to send HTML newsletters, but they do a lot more than just take your money. They are actively involved in improving standards support among email clients through the email standards project. Next time you are trying to produce an HTML email template check out their CSS support grid as it will clearly show you whether a particular CSS property is supported.

    Form Analytics

    While I am on the subject of cool services like Campaign Monitor, I also want to mention Clicktale. Clicktale is a service that allows you to track users as they move about your site and even anonymously record their actions. The last time I mentioned them this disturbed many people who saw it as an invasion of privacy. However, I see it as a valuable tool for learning about user interaction and improve site usability.

    If you share my view, then you maybe interested in a new service they are starting to offer. You can now not only track users as they click around your website, you can also watch how they interact with forms.

    In addition to video recording, the new form analytics service also provides three invaluable reports…

    • The time report – This shows how long users spent completing each field.
    • The blank report – This provides information on fields that have been left blank on submission.
    • The refill report – Which highlight fields that have been completed incorrectly.

    If you run a site that requires users to complete long or complex forms then you will see the benefit of this service. On a high trafficked ecommerce site this would be invaluable, substantially reducing the number of users dropping out at checkout.

    Art direction hits the blog

    This week has seen the launch of Jason Santa Maria’s new personal website. For those of you who do not know, Jason is the creative director at Happy Cog (Zeldman’s company).

    Normally, I would not mention the launch of a new personal website. However, Jason has done something very interesting. His new design is well executed but plain. It certainly is not as inspiring as his other work. The reason for this simple approach is that it is a framework upon which he will build.

    The idea is that each of his blog posts will have a custom design to accompany it. The design will therefore reflect the content. In effect he is bring art direction to his blog. This is a bold experiment and something that Zeldman has written about before.

    Although I am fully behind the idea of bringing content and design closer together, I do have some reservations. First, there is a possibility that the constantly changing design could make navigation around the site confusing. Fortunately from what I have seen so far that will not be the case. Jason has been careful to ensure key navigational elements remain in a consistent location and have similar styling wherever you are in the site. However, if other designers were to adopt this approach would they be so careful?

    My second concern is a purely practical one. If each article not only needs writing but also designing, will that reduce the amount Jason posts? In other words is a blog really the right place for this type of art direction?

    However, despite these reservations I am really pleased Jason is trying this approach. A personal website should be the place to experiment and try new things. Too many blogs (including my own) are cookie cutter solutions with some pretty graphics slapped on top. Its superb to see somebody doing something different.

    Prototyping

    My final news story of the week returns to a subject we have touched on recently. How do you wireframe a modern web application with its high level of interaction? In show 120 I mentioned that one approach might be to utilise flash. Today I want to point you at an article on the List Apart website, which suggests that building prototypes maybe better than struggling with wireframes.

    When I first saw this article I was hesitant. After all I can barely pursued my clients to pay for wireframes let alone a full blown prototype. However, the more I considered what was being suggest, the better the idea seemed.

    The majority of time spent getting an application working is spent on bug fixing, browser support and non-core functionality. The rough ‘outline’ of an application can come together very quickly. What is more, unlike wireframing, a prototype can be used as the basis for the final build. It does not get thrown away like a wireframe.

    The article also points out that prototypes are better for demonstrating difficult concepts to clients. They encourage earlier collaboration between designer and developer, and provide something substantially better to user test against.

    With almost every new website having some form of web application, we all need to consider how to better conceptualise their operation.

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    Feature: The plight of the in-house designer

    The more organisations I work with the more sympathy I have for in-house designers and developers. It is a role that can be thankless and isolating. How then can their lives be made that much easier? We discuss this in this weeks feature.

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    Reviews: Textmate and Top 5 Tips for Web Designers

    We have two reviews this week by our lucky competition winners Teifion Jordan and John McFarlane. Teifion and John will be going to this year’s dConstruct in Brighton.

    dConstruct is the affordable one day conference for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications. Tickets cost £125 inc VAT and went on sale yesterday so be sure to check it out.

    Textmate by Teifion Jordan

    Hi, I am Teifion Jordan, I am reviewing a program created by someone far smarter than me. I am going to be looking at Textmate. Textmate is a Mac only application though there is a similar editor called eText Editor for Windows.

    First impressions of Textmate are that it’s pretty sparse, it looks like any other editor. I throw it a PHP file and it colours the text in, just like any other editor would. The colour scheme can be changed, both text and background colours can be altered, which is quite a neat touch. I can even make parts bold, italic and underlined which is a neat touch. It requires knowledge of Regular expressions but I can actually add in more rules for what to colour in! I used this to make variables used as array indexes appear differently, something I have wanted to do for some time. Not since I was a toddler, but definitely some time.

    But enough moaning about how the program itself is both smarter and better looking than me, I wanted to try some code. I found that if I typed "foreach" in a PHP block and hit tab, I was presented with an entire foreach loop. Closer inspection revealed that there were dozens of snippets and commands for PHP and dozens more for each of the many languages and some things that were not languages. With 5 minutes of effort I had setup Textmate to post my blog posts for me, I am now one step closer to not having to put any effort at all into blogging.

    It is possible to create your own snippets and not at all hard either. I now have one to tell me that I am beautiful and another to create a PostgreSQL query. I can also write new commands, I can write them in command line script, Python, Ruby and PHP to name a few. All of the commands are completely open sources, so you can see what’s already been done, and sort of plagiarise that sort of work for your own means. Except plagiarism is bad so don’t ever do it.

    I can edit columns, I can write new snippets, commands and even entire languages, I can Regex, I can manage projects with a hierarchal file structure. It’s like before I was walking but now I’m on a push bike. I can’t make use of the ability to run down pedestrians until I learn how to do balance and pedal. Okay, the running down pedestrians was a bad example but anybody that is still listening and not calling the police must have understood it so I’ll continue. There’s nothing I can’t do in Textmate, I just need to look at the extensive online manual to learn it. And there I think is it’s biggest failing.

    Textmate is a really lovely program to use but it’s so complicated. Coda, as a contrast, is a more intuitive application but it is to Textmate as a spade is to a chainsaw, that is, meant for a different problem and with fewer moving parts but also with the ability to digs holes? I’m sorry, my mind wandered. What I meant to say is that Textmate is great for dealing with code but not so much the design which is what apps such as Coda excel at. I’ve now been using Textmate for 10 months and I still think there is potential to unlock, though, that might be because I’m a thickie.

    I suppose I should wrap this up by saying that I would heartily recommend anybody thinking about writing lots of code to give TextMate a good look. It takes a lot of time to get a lot out of it, but there really is a lot to get out of it.

    Thank you very much for listening, I hope this was at least semi-informative

    Top 5 Tips for Web Designers by John McFarlane

    Hi, I’m John McFarlane and this is the first ever review brought to you live from my living room. Today I’m reviewing a post that has been submitted on the boagworld.com forum. The title is "Top 5 Tips for Web Designers". I’ve been reading through the replies and I’ve put together my top 5 top tips.

    In at number 5 submitted by richquick, allow time and money for personal development, read blogs, buy books, attend conferences, experiment and learn new techniques and technologies.

    In at number 4 posted by Jayphen, surround yourself with designers, whether they’re colleagues, real world contacts, online contacts, forums, podcasts. The more you talk about design the more you learn and I’d like to add to that e-mail designers for advice and let them know your experiences.

    In at number 3 posted by some guy called Paul Boag, develop with the latest best practices, ensure you separate content, design and behaviour. Make sure everything you build uses progressive enhancements.

    In at number 2 another one by Paul Boag, it’s an obvious one but one that can’t be put across more clearly, know HTML, CSS and javaScript inside out, you need to know the core technologies that underpin the web back to front. I’d like to add to this point, the basics of HTML and CSS are easily learnt but don’t be fooled into thinking that you know enough, you really need to know these subjects to an advanced level. This will benefit you when your implemented the latest best practices.

    And that brings me on to my number 1 tip and that is love your job, I think if you love this industry and have a passion for web design, I think those qualities will guide you to achieve your goals. So enjoy your development and don’t rush yourself too much. Take the time to develop the right way, build contacts and friends and embrace the industry as a whole.

    That about raps up this weeks review. I hope you’ve enjoyed the very first show live from my living room. Thank you and goodbye.

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    Listeners feedback:

    Newspaper columns on the web

    Adrian writes: Hey guys, long time listener from the states. I’ve been working on a new personal site lately and I’ve become fixated on the idea of using newspaper style columns. Since you two seem to know a thing or two usability, I’d figure I’d ask for your thoughts.

    It seems like most people view them as a print concept that doesn’t translate well online but seeing as most screens these days are widescreen and vertical space is taken up by menu bars, docks and browser extensions, going horizontal strikes me as a logical solution.

    I appreciate the logic. It is true that more computers than ever have widescreens and that vertical space is at a greater premium than horizontal. However, I would think very carefully before employing newspaper style columns. As I see it there are two concerns:

    The usability concern

    As you point out, people reference usability concerns as the primary reason against newspaper columns. In a newspaper, copy runs across several columns with the eye darting from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. This is acceptable because the user can view the entire newspaper in a single glance. There is no such thing as a scroll bar.

    On the web it is different. You are unable to predict the height available in a browser window and so users will almost certainly have to scroll. This means the user will scroll down one column as they read and then have to scroll back to the top to start the next column. This is far from a pleasurable reading experience.

    It is also important to consider width as well as height. As you say newspaper style columns works well on high resolution, widescreen monitors. On anything less the story becomes unreadable with narrow columns and short line lengths. The alternative is to allow both horizontal and vertical scrolling. But as I am sure you, know this is the ultimate usability error and should be avoided at all costs.

    The technical concern

    There are also technical considerations to take into account. How will a story be split over multiple columns? Currently this cannot be done in CSS, although this may appear in CSS3.

    One option would be to manually layout each block of text. However, this isn’t going to be practical with anything other than the most static of sites.

    The only option is to use some server side code. However, even this is not without its problems. Consideration needs to be given to inline elements such as images or quotations. What happens if they appear at the end of one column? Does a quote get split? Will the design accommodate larger images? What happens when text is scaled?

    Although all of these technical problems can be overcome, you are forced to ask whether it worth the effort. This is especially true considering the serious usability concerns.

    Estimating dev/creative work

    Kirk Henry asks: I’m not sure if this should be listed as a question or not but her goes. I’m a Creative Director for a dev shop with some very large fortune 500 companies and a problem I always seem to come across is difficulty in the estimating process. We use excel documents, have some standard hours for comps but have to do custom estimation for multi media projects etc… my estimates are always pretty decent but I want to know what you guys use or what software you would recommend. I have been listening on itunes from the start and love the show.

    Ok, this is probably the most important subject that we (and I mean the web community) don’t talk about. Why? I think, because it’s difficult to pin down a method of reliably estimating a project and, more so, we’re all guilty if underestimating time and again… these are my thoughts:

    The first thing to ask yourself is ‘how serious is this project?’ I have a sixth sense for requests for quotes that fit into the following brackets:

    • ‘We have this idea but have no idea how much it will cost and we want you to do all the research work involved in scoping it. Of course we won’t pay for the research and there’s no way we’ll pay sensible money for the work once we know what it is’
    • ‘We have a supplier that we want to work with but my boss says I need a couple of other quotes’
    • ‘Us guys in sales and marketing have been doing some blue sky thinking and want a quote to redevelop Google….’

    You get the idea – timewasters. You need to deal with these requests quickly – this is how I do it. Have a chat with whichever department(s) would do this work if it ever materialised – get them to give you wide ballpark figures. Add in PM and contingency and send them an email. 99 out of a 100 won’t even bother getting back to you. Some will, but they’re usually trying to get free scoping (‘can you give me a bit more detail on how you reached those figures’).

    Anyway, I’ve ranted long enough timewasters, back to Kirk’s question.

    First question – do you know the budget? If yes, then you are looking to fit a scope into a set amount of effort. Can you do it? Will the ‘client’ be happy with the scope that fits their budget? Do they understand what that scope is (especially if you have reduced it to fit their budget)? DO NOT get creative with your effort allocations just to fit within the budget. Either ask for more (up front) or walk away.

    If you don’t know the budget then you are looking to scope a project from scratch. If it’s a really big project then ideally you should be being paid to scope it as we’re looking at business analysis and consultancy here.

    Break down the project into rough task areas. It’s likely that you’ll have done other projects that include similar tasks so you’ll know efforts on these (though ask yourself if you got it right last time). For the ‘new’ tasks, break it down further and you will probably find other smaller tasks that you have done before. For the really new stuff then you need to talk to an expert (designer/developer/IA) and get them to think the task through. They will provide you with an informed guess. That’s right – guess. Because people are guessing it is really important to overestimate fixed price projects. This is the cost to the client of having a fixed price.

    Don’t forget to charge for meetings (if 3 people are attending then charge for 3 people!). Project management is notoriously undercharged. We have a rule of thumb of 15 – 20% (and that’s probably light).

    The golden rule of estimating is don’t be tempted to lower your probably already too low price just to win the work. Be prepared to walk away.

    As far as tools to help with estimating go, MS Project is great at separating tasks, linking resources to tasks and giving you a good idea of how long things will take. But, I tend to find that it is over the top at the quote stage and tend to stick with Excel.

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    The plight of the in-house designer

    Posted in Web strategy on by Paul Boag

    The more organisations I work with the more sympathy I have for in-house designers and developers. It is a role that can be thankless and isolating. How then can their lives be made that much easier?

    I last worked as an in-house designer/developer over 8 years ago, so I don’t feel I can really comment on the subject. I therefore enlisted the help of the boagworld forum and dug out various emails I have been sent over the last couple of years. I also picked the brains of Paul (our researcher) and Ryan (our producer) to compile 10 quick tips for improving the lot of in-house staff.

    1. Coding with others in mind

    The general consensus seems to be that as an in-house coder it is important to consider the next guy. Whether you are working as part of a team or as a lone developer, sooner or later somebody else will have to pick up your code and work with it.

    Two techniques were suggested for coding with others in mind. The first was to carefully comment all of the code your produce and if appropriate even create supporting documentation. The second was to have a library of reusable code so that all work produced is consistently marked up. That way it can be passed around the team easily.

    Personally, I believe this is good practice whether you are working in-house or not. Certainly Headscape use an extensive library of HTML, CSS and Javascript snippets.

    Of course, if you are working alone the need for a library of snippets is less pressing. However, our next problem is a bigger concern.

    2. Seeking out like minded people

    Many in-house designers/developers are working in isolation. There are a relatively few organisations that can afford a web team. Working alone has two obvious drawbacks. First, it is hard to keep up-to-date with new approaches because you are learning on your own. It is easy to get stuck in a rut, using the same old techniques. In web design stagnation can be dangerous both for your career and for the evolution of the site you are supporting.

    Second, it can be lonely. Even though you have other people with whom you work, they do not share your experiences as a web developer. You cannot moan about shared problems or ‘geek out’ on code or typography.

    The solution is something we have spoken a lot about before. Make contacts within the industry both online and off. Use tools like forums, twitter, and mailing lists. Offline, look for meetups and conferences you can attend. Nothing in your area? Don’t let that put you off. Setup something yourself. If somewhere as backwards as Dorset has a web designer meetup then there is no reason why your area cannot!

    3. A demonstration speaks a thousand words

    The feeling of isolation can be exasperated because management often simply fail to ‘get’ what you are trying to do. It can be amazingly frustrating when you have a great idea but you fail to make others see why it is so good.

    One solution might be to build a proof of concept or prototype. It is often much easier to convince management of an idea if they can see it in action. Some even spend their evenings producing prototypes as they are not given the opportunity while at work. Personally, I cannot help but wonder whether you should actually be looking for a new job if you are forced to develop ideas in the evenings!

    4. Impose some structure

    One idea I agree with is that in-house developer you should work within the same rigid structure used by external agencies. Too many in-house teams are treated like a free resource people can turn to whenever they like. This leads to scope creep and (more importantly) to the web team being undervalued.

    So what do I mean by a rigid structure? I am talking about things like:

    • Statements of work
    • Change control procedure
    • Client signoff
    • Project milestones (for both yourself and the client)
    • Resource assignment and budgeting

    These techniques ensure projects run smoothly, limit scope creep and project a professional image to the internal clients improving their perception of the development team.

    They are also worth applying no matter how small the job. For example if you have been asked to change some copy on the website always confirm what the requirement is via email. This acts as a mini statement of work. Project management doesn’t need to be onerous to be effective.

    5. Encourage internal charging

    Of course the best way of making somebody value your work is to charge them for it. There seems to be a general consensus that where possible internal charging is a good idea. However, often this is outside of your control.

    If you are unable to charge internal clients there are alternatives. One option is to calculate how much you cost the company per hour. Once you have this figure (even if it is an approximation) you can start to include it in statements of work. List all of the tasks to be done, associate a time with each of these tasks and include the cost to the company for each.

    Hopefully this will make internal clients think twice before using up your time. If you want further leverage start submitting a monthly report to management outlining what work you have been doing and the associated costs. Let clients know you are doing this as a further incentive for them to think twice.

    6. Be the authority

    Another piece of advice that was generally agreed upon is the need to be seen internally as an expert. How you are perceived is important if you want your opinion to be respected.

    Avoid being hesitant or negative about ideas because you are unsure how to implement them. Instead research solutions and if appropriate bring in an expert. Using specialists does not undermine your authority. Rather it demonstrates that you can manage a project even if it is bigger than your personal capabilities.

    7. Exude confidence, personality and enthusiasm

    On the subject of negativity, avoid saying ‘no’. Many internal web teams are perceived as a barrier to be overcome. Internal clients often turn to external agencies in an attempt to bypass them entirely. Once you are ‘out of the loop’ you loose control entirely.

    A better tactic than saying ‘no’ is to say ‘yes’ but go on to explain the consequences. Once you have explained the negative impact of a suggestion, be quick to provide a positive alternative of your own.

    Be confident and enthusiastic about every project. Avoiding being perceived as the stereotypical geek sitting in the dark barely uttering a word. Ensure you are likeable. If people like you they will listen to and respect your opinion.

    8. Broadcast your successes

    To further enhance your reputation internally make sure you broadcast your successes. If you launch a new sub-site or feature, ensure you tell as many people internally as possible.

    If the company has an internal newsletter or mailing list make sure you write something for it explaining what you have done and why in plain English. Focus on what the project brings to the business rather than how it works and why it was challenging.

    Offer to run workshops about the web or give a mini-presentation on web strategy to management. Anything to make you appear pro active and a benefit to the business.

    9. Understand the politics

    A lot of the points so far relate to company politics. Every organisation has its internal politics and ‘rising above them’ isn’t a realistic option.

    One area where politics becomes particularly important is sign off. If you are having trouble getting something approved ask yourself the following questions…

    • Does my internal client have the power to sign off themselves or is there somebody else I should be talking to?
    • Who are the people influencing those signing off?
    • Who are the opinionated trouble makers slowing down the process?

    In many cases the person who appears to be the decision maker is not really. They are being controlled by management higher up or influenced by a few vocal individuals. If this is the case you need to speak directly to these people or at the very least give your client the tools to force sign off through.

    10. Stick to the facts

    Finally, always have facts to back up your opinion. This is especially important if people within the organisation do not respect your opinion.

    Facts and figures are especially good but when that is not an option turn to an expert opinion. Quoting an internationally respected author like Steve Krug will generally carry more weight than your own opinion.

    That said, remember to explain who this person is and why their opinion matters. You cannot expect the heading of marketing to have a clue who Steve Krug is.

    Where an internal client remains unconvinced by an experts opinion turn instead to the weight of evidence. Don’t quote just one expert, quote ten. The shear number of people saying the same thing will impress.

    So there you have it. Advice straight from the boagworld community. If you have anything to add, post it in the comments below.

    122. Screencasting

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this weeks show we have Ian Lloyd discussing Sitepoints HTML reference and we take a look at creating screencasts.

    Play

    Podcast: Download (28.7MB)

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    News and events

    Typography everywhere

    This week has seen a plethora of posts about typography. There is an article about changes being made to typography in Firefox 3, a post dedicated to working with paragraphs and some future developments in CSS 3 fonts. Combined with the growing support for embeddable fonts, it would appear that web typography has a rosy future.

    Although all of these posts are interesting, I feel we are not making use of the typographic tools we have already. I have learnt a huge amount by reading what people like Richard Rutter and Jon Hicks have to say on the subject. For example how many of you…

    • Ever change the default kerning
    • Really get specific in your cascade of fonts
    • Consider vertical alignment
    • Think about the relative sizing of our various typographic elements

    The list could go on.

    Many web designers choose to ignore web typography because it is so restricted. However, this will soon change. We need to learn to walk with the basic tools currently available before we run with what is to come.

    Accessibility cheat sheet

    Our next story follows on nicely from last week’s feature in which we addressed accessibility quick fixes.

    Aaron Baker has written an accessibility checklist aimed at designers and developers who know little about web accessibility. The idea is that by simply referring to the list during development they will be able to avoid the major accessibility issues.

    Aaron is the first to admit this isn’t an ideal solution. He also accepts the checklist fails to cover everything. However, in my opinion he has done a damn good job at making the accessibility guidelines… accessible!

    What I like most is that he also provides a PDF version that prints out as a single page. Instead of having to wade through pages of W3C guidelines you can print out a single page and pin it to the wall. Ideal for those starting down the road of accessibility.

    Does this mean we can ignore WCAG? Absolutely not. However, this is certainly an easier starting point for those who are intimidated by the subject of web accessibility.

    Advice on wireframes

    We are having an interesting discussion within Headscape at the moment. Where does the job of an information architect (IA) end and that of a designer begin? When it comes to wireframing in particular, the line is blurred. A wireframe is often produced by the IA but can strongly define the layout and design. This reduces the designer to skinning a site, which is a real waste of their skills.

    I was therefore excited to read the first in what will be a series of posts on wireframing. The author identifies exactly the problem we have been struggling with and talks about page description documents. These documents differ from traditional wireframes because they do not endeavour to establish a layout. Instead this is left to the designer. A page description document focuses on identifying and prioritising content. It is then down to the designer to represent this on the site.

    It is an interesting approach and one that I think has a lot of merit. However, I am equally excited to see the other posts in this series, where the author promises to show us example wireframes and provide more details on his approach.

    Top five tips for new web designers

    The final news story of today is an unusual choice as it comes from our own forum. Our forum is always full of great threads, but one in particular caught my eye this week because it covered the most common question I get asked; ‘what advice do you have for a new web designer?’.

    It is not a long thread (yet!) and so is easy enough to follow. However, each poster has provided some excellent advice in the form of their top 5 tips.

    The tips include…

    • Advice on business
    • Techniques for improving your skills
    • Areas to focus on
    • Books and sites to read
    • What to learn first
    • How to increase your profile

    Without exception they are all gold dust and if you are new to design then definitely give them a read.

    Equally if you have been a web designer for a few years take a moment to post your own contribution. I think you will probably learn something at the same time.

    Back to top

    Feature: Creating Screencasts

    Video is becoming an intrinsic part of the web and not just dumb ass videos on YouTube. Video can be used to show off products and provide online presentations. But how do you create a high quality screencast on a budget? We look at this issue in this weeks feature.

    Back to top

    Interview: Ian Lloyd on Sitepoint HTML Reference

    Paul: OK. So joining me today is Ian Lloyd. Hello Ian.

    Ian: Hello Paul!

    Paul: Have we had you on Boagworld before or is it just .Net?

    Ian: Erm… Actually never in real life person. I did the video thing for you before, the screencast.

    Paul: Yeah. That’s it. I knew there was something.

    Ian: I’ve heard my dulcet tones before.

    Paul: Yeah but not on a live, real, happening interview type basis.

    Ian: Is this happening? What as in cool, hip and happening? Wow.

    Paul: This is happening right now! So there we go. That’s exciting. So the reason I have Ian on the show today is that he had just undertaken and completed a mammoth project no less, in the form of a HTML reference guide that is now available via SitePoint. Now we’ve talked before on the show about the CSS reference guide but the HTML one is a new project that is beta at the moment. Why have you showed a beta tag on it? Come on, put your money where your mouth is. Commit to a real live version!

    Ian:Well that’s not really my shout in fairness but I think the reason they do it is that with all the will of the world and all the technical editing that goes on and all the rest of it, invariably there’s going to be things that will crop up.

    Paul: I was always under the impression that you were infallible Ian.

    Ian:Well I would to keep that myth going but it’s obviously completely untrue. But no, I think it’s sensible. From what I can gather they did this with the CSS reference and they told me that they did get some good feedback as a result of doing this. So it gives them an opportunity to capture anything that has so far evaded various editing stages. There are little things that you can easily, easily miss. So it makes sense. Put it in front of a whole bunch of pedants and you will find that things will be revealed that you weren’t aware of.

    Paul:Yes certainly. So tell us a little bit about how the project came about. How did you end up working on this from SitePoint and how you get involved?

    Ian:Right… Well it’s actually quite a long story that I’ll try and shorten down. Basically I’ve got a bit of history with SitePoint. It goes back to probably 2001/2002, something like that where I was writing articles for them. I had written a few and they had been scored quite highly. At the end of 2003, I took a year out of work.

    Paul: Ah I didn’t know… Yes I did know that.

    Ian:While I was travelling around the world I made it my business to try and call in on people that I knew from the web. You know, you’ve part of the world so I’ll pop in and say hello. That’s what I did with the SitePoint guys. I was in Melbourne for a while so I thought I’d pop in and say hello. So we did lunch and I was having a chat with one of the guys there who was saying “Oh, have you ever thought of writing an accessibility book?” and I was like “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve got a book in me. It seems like a lot of work.” But not long after that I was asked if I’d like to do some tech editing and I thought “Yeah OK, I’ll do that” and I actually did it while I was still travelling around Australia in the van. So that was actually quite easy to do, wasn’t too bad at all. And then what happened is that when I got back to the UK I was asked “Do you want to write a book?” and this is the beginners book you have reviewed in the past on the show. So it’s kind of been an escalation from there really. So there was that book and I did a couple of bits and pieces for APress and then not so long ago I got the call back from SitePoint saying “Do you want to do this HTML reference?”. At the time I thought “I don’t know. I’m not sure. Does the world need another HTML reference?”. But I kind of thought that when I did the first book, and that’s done pretty well and I’ve had some really good feedback, so I though “Well, let’s think about this. Maybe it’s worth doing”. In my mind I convinced myself that this wouldn’t be a difficult thing to write…

    Paul: *Laughs knowingly*

    Ian:See you think you know HTML. You think you know it because you use it everyday and I though “Well how difficult can it be?” compared to say the Javascript reference they were writing. There’s a million and one ways you can approach something with Javascript where as with HTML there’s a finite number of elements or tags, whichever you prefer to use, that you can use in any given scenario so you think it’s pretty straight forward isn’t it. That’s what I thought anyway and I was also thinking in terms of browser compatibility the bigger problems come from the CSS you put over the top. That’s where you get all the quirks happening. So I thought to my mind, “Yeah this isn’t going to be too difficult a job”. But I think I underestimated it.

    Paul:Is that not always the way when it comes to any kind of project like this that it always ends up being loads bigger than you thought it was going to be.

    Ian:I think it actually surprised me how much more work there was involved. I don’t know if you did that little test a little while ago that was one of those things everyone was sending around, how many HTML elements can you do in 2 minutes or something. Everyone was having a go at it. You think you know quite a lot but then you realise there’s so many more you didn’t know and there was so many that I vaguely remember and but probably would never use. That was the funny thing, writing about these elements where I think “Well, that’s that one done. Never going to use and nobody’s every going to read it either but it’s got to be covered.

    Paul:So with the CSS reference guide that they produced they have now turned it into a book. Are they intending to do the same with this? Is that the plan?

    Ian:Absolutely. And that was the other strange thing I thought “This is kind of a strange business model. They are going to put it on-line for free but also gonna do a book. Will people actually buy a book?” But I’m sure they don’t do these things without doing the research first. I’m pretty sure they’ve got a good idea on what they’re doing with this. I never went into it thinking I’m going to make millions out of this because it’s never going to happen. Anyone who’s written a book, yourself included…

    Paul:I’m still witting so I’m still in that naive state of thinking “Yeah, it’s going to sell hundreds of thousands of copies and millions of copies and I’m going to be rich”. So don’t shatter it.

    Ian: Sorry Paul.

    Paul: Just say how much money I’m going to make.

    Ian: Oh yeah, you’re going to be rolling on a bed of money. You’re not going to know what to do with the stuff.

    Paul: Excellent. Wonderful. Great. I’m looking forward to that. *laughs* So basically it’s gonna turn into a book before too long.

    Ian: Ah yes.

    Paul:You mention that there were some things in there that you thought “I’ve written this but I’m never going to use this and probably no one else is as well”. I noticed there were a couple of sections in there dedicated to depreciated HTML tags and stuff that people actually shouldn’t use. That’s a bit of an unusual decision isn’t it – to put in stuff people that people actually shouldn’t be using. Why take that route?

    Ian:Well the thing is because it’s a reference you have to include everything. So everything that is in the W3C approved recommendation, everything in there is included. Even if it’s as much use as a chocolate teapot it has to go in there. And that includes the deprecated tags but there’s also things that are included such as blink or bgsound or marquee that were never actually defined in any standard but because they have almost universal support, not all of them have the same level of support, but basically there’s a lot of elements out there that were never defined in the standard but are well supported. So the decision is this has to go in there, we can’t deny it’s existence. It may not be something that anyone would want to use but as it’s a reference book we should include it. There were some that we didn’t include that I can’t remember off the top of my head what they would be. Things that were perhaps defined in Netscape 4 and just are not supported in anything and given that Netscape 4 is dead and gone a long time ago, there were some things that didn’t make it in. But the reason for having a second index that said “Here are some elements that you shouldn’t use or should avoid or these are deprecated ones” was really a case of saying that we’ve got this index of all these things and I don’t want anyone to think that because it’s in the index that it’s necessarily approved. So I wanted to kind of pull them out and say “It’s in the reference but actually we don’t really you to use those.”

    Paul:Which are the worse culprits? Which are the ones you think that people are using a lot and they really, really shouldn’t be? Your chance now to lecture people and preach to them about their bad HTML.

    Ian:Well strangely enough I don’t actually see a lot of them used now. I think probably the most common is people using the bold and italics, the <b> and the <i> tags, when really they should be using strong and em. Then again the b and i tags do have their place but they are usually misused. Thankfully the kind if things that I wouldn’t want people to use, you don’t tend to see much nowadays anyway like the blink, marquee or bgsound that was always a pet hate of mine. You’d visit a site and then suddenly you’d get some Indonesian Gamelan music blaring through that was set in a bgsound. I was kind of thinking it’s good that this is gone but if you go to any page on MySpace and they’re replaced it with something that has got sound in Flash. So yeah, that may have gone but they have replaced it with something equally annoying.

    Paul:Now there’s a little question there. You say that bold and italic have got that place. How is it supposed to be used? Educate me as to the proper use of those two.

    Ian:Well if you what you are actually marking up something that describes something typographical. So if you are putting the b tag around something because you are describing it as bold. So it’s that kind of context. I use in the examples on the reference it’s like I’m describing a sign of something like that. So there are reasons when you use it but generally speaking when people are using it is when you want emphasis or strong emphasis. In most cases what I would end up using would be strong and em because that is what I’m normally trying to do, emphasis.

    Paul:What other kind of bad practice have you been seeing? What are the things, not just with specific tags but general bad practice, that are your pet peeves when it comes to HTML? What things are people doing a lot that just piss you off?

    Ian:Like I said earlier, because of the kind of sites that I tend to look at I don’t actually stumble across too many coding sins because that’s kind of the circles I’m in I suppose. The funniest thing is when you see your own mark-up from years ago and I’ve just had to do this for something at work where I’ve taken on a reworking of something written 10 years ago and I’m like “Oh my God. This is awful”. It had been duplicated 5 times instead of one file with the logic inside that one file. So it was like “Hang on. I have to do this five times over?”. But it was nice to go back and see something that was old and table layout and all the rest of it and give it a good clean up in the process. So yeah, it’s funny when you look at your own mark-up and think “I’ve moved on”.

    Paul:Even when you just look at what you learned from when you started doing standards to when you’re doing it now. I look back on the early standards work I did and it’s all div-tastic. There’s just divs everywhere.

    Ian: Oh yeah. But there’s no meaning to the document as such.

    Paul: Yeah. No meaning whatsoever. It used CSS so it must be alright *laughs* Which obviously doesn’t quite work does it in reality but there you go.

    Ian:I guess the kind of thing that I really see a lot is just general sloppiness. People not closing tags when they’ve said they are using XHTML or unsymmetrical opening and closing. Those kind of things. Probably the first thing is missing alt attributes for images which is such an easy thing to put right but I see it so often. I guess probably the worse offences come from the kind of people who probably have never looked at a reference and may never look at a reference so I don’t know that this would solve the problems. And by that what I mean is people who would never actually get their hands dirty in the code. They’ll be using things like Frontpage, Word. You know – save as HTML in Word. You just want to beat them over the head with a large reference book. I don’t know if those kind of people are beyond hope. Maybe we we’ll be there at one point who knows. Maybe they are not beyond saving.

    Paul: Nobody is beyond hope.

    Ian:Funnily enough, I was saying about the Frontpage thing. It’s quite shocking I was looking at the program for a local college evening course and out of curiosity I flicked through to the computing section to see if they were doing any web design courses and
    yay, there were. How To Build A Website and it was a seven week course, how to build a website using Frontpage. And it was like head slap, what are they doing?

    Paul: Ah. That’s amazing that people are still doing that.

    Ian: Shocking. So yeah. It’s not going to go away in the short term still.

    Paul:When you were going through this reference, putting it together, was there a tag that you came across that you thought “Why don’t I use this more often? That’s an underused tag.” For example, I’ve just suddenly started using definition lists more.

    Ian: Paul, you’ve taken the words right out of my mouth. That’s exactly what I was going to say.

    Paul: There you go then.

    Ian:That’s exactly one of those things that I don’t tend to use an awful lot myself but there are certainly uses for it. When we did this quiz thing that we were talking about earlier, I did with some people at first. So few of them had actually heard of definition lists. It was like “What is this markup of which you speak? What is this dl? What is this dd?” They had never heard of it and it surprises me but, I don’t know, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. You see list items used absolutely everywhere but it seems to be a bit of mystery to people. So that would be one that people could use more often and I’d certainly like to see people use them more often.

    Paul:Umm. I’ve found it really useful. It’s surprisingly how many of the things, for example a news story where you have a title and then the description underneath the news story. There’s loads of examples like that where there are these paired matchings that suit a definition list so well. It’s a cool tag, if a HTML tag is capable of being cool which is probably doubtful.

    Ian:There are some others as well which I would certainly like to see people use more often and they’re not ones that I don’t use, I use them all the time. Things like the accessibility specific type ones like for forms: label, fieldset and legend. I’d like to see them used more often. To some people this is something that they still don’t get. Of course in general, using the proper semantic markup. As you’ve already mentioned sites that are div-tastic. Stick a couple of headings in there and some unordered lists and already you’re starting to give your document more structure.

    Paul:So talking about semantics and all that stuff, I noticed that you have a section dedicated to Microformats. Microformats aren’t really part of the W3C specification so why did you decide to include them?

    Ian:Because it’s really cool. Yeah, it’s really cool stuff Paul. No, the reason really is because in the process of drawing up the table of contents, looking at all the elements we needed to cover, it became clear that there are certain things that HTML can’t do. Obviously this is not a revelation otherwise Microformats wouldn’t have come about anyway. But it felt right to put it in because essentially although Microformats are still developing they do go through a rigid process of being documented, discuss, ratified and all the kind of thing. So while it isn’t W3C recommendation it feels like it’s controlled. Also it doesn’t really do any harm. You can add this in over the top of HTML. You’re still using plain old HTML but adding that extra richness in without necessarily doing any harm. So it felt like something safe to put in. I guess the only problem with putting something like this in, at least for the printed version of the book, is that as they are developing it can get out of date. At least with the on-line version as things get added and they are adopted, that can easily be added in. It felt like a useful thing to do.

    Paul:And it’s good to give Microformats higher profile because I think there are still a lot of people that are unaware of them. So it’s good.

    Ian:I was gonna say it is by no means a complete Microformats reference. It really is still a fairly entry level introduction. I mean there are books out there specifically for Microformats. If someone really wants to learn more they’d do better to pick up a book or go to Microformats.org to learn more. Hopefully it would give some exposure to it that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise. And the other good thing about it is because the reference on SitePoint is very, very searchable hopefully by the time that Google’s indexed it you will find people that stumble across that wouldn’t have done otherwise and just from doing a search from inside the site itself. There’s a chance that people might learn about Microformats when they might not have otherwise of done. But we’ll see.

    Paul:Bearing in mind that a lot of people listening to this podcast are web designers and you know, they are sitting there going “Well I know HTML”, like we were saying at the beginning that you have this perception that is something you know back to front. So just to finish up with is there a kind of one area that you really want to challenge people over or one piece of good practice that you’d like to push people on where they’re not as hot as they should be.

    Ian:Hmmm… That’s a tricky one. I’m obviously aware that the audience of the podcast know a fair amount already. I guess you do have some people that are relative beginners so I’m not entirely sure the advice is appropriate for the audience. But the kind of advice that I would always give is that, and maybe I’m teaching people to suck eggs here, but really it’s so much more useful if you can learn from the ground up. You know, learn the code using really simple tools. I use Dreamweaver a lot, an awful lot, but that’s because I know how Dreamweaver is going to handle the markup. I know if there any little forbals, what it’s gonna do. So it’s very quick for me to use that without causing any real damage. But I wouldn’t really recommend that to a beginner. I’d say learn the basics. Walk before you run. Obviously things like I mentioned earlier – Word and Frontpage. Never, ever dream of using anything like that because they just do an awful, shocking job of it. In essence, HTML is not difficult to get to grips with. What I tend to find is a problem is what you then layer over the top of it. It’s the browser incompatibilities with CSS and obviously with Javascript it can be as simple or as complex as you like. HTML is not massively difficult to learn but it’s still useful to learn from the ground u
    p and not let a tool do it for you. I think that’ll be my advice.

    Paul:On one hand it’s not difficult to learn but on the other hand I think it’s quite difficult to master, if that makes sense. It takes quite a long time…

    Ian:You’re talking about the pedantic kind of… When you start to argue about the fine details about which element is appropriate for this usage and you can get into some debates over some things, yeah.

    Paul:I liked the way you referred to it as pedantic. Do you think we’ve gone a little bit overboard with our obsession with HTML and marking up everything correctly?

    Ian:I don’t know. I think it’s a good thing that people discuss and try and squeeze the most out of it. But there are some grey areas and you do sometimes think it is a bit limited, hence things like Microformats adding the richness on top of it. But I don’t know. It’s usually good natured, put it that way.

    Paul:Oh OK. I thought I was going to get you to say something really controversial that would get you flamed but I didn’t quite manage to…

    Ian: What luck “HTML SUCKS!”?

    Paul: Yeah like “Just use Frontpage. It’ll be fine man.”

    Ian: Yeah something like that.

    Paul:OK. Thank you so much for coming on the show and where can people check this out if they want to try out this reference for themselves?

    Ian: The HTML reference is at http://reference.sitepoint.com/html and if you want the CSS reference, replace /HTML with /CSS. And I understand that the Javascript reference written by James Edwards aka BrotherCake is still ongoing. So at some part there will be a third part to this reference. So we’ll have all three layers.

    Paul:And I have to say I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I’ve actually been using the HTML reference believe it or not. In fact I used it yesterday to check something. I can highly recommend it. Much better than that crappy old W3Schools so you can ignore that from now on and use that instead. OK, thanks very much Ian. That was really good and I look forward to seeing you soon.

    Ian: OK. Thank you very much Paul.

    Thanks to Lee Theobald for transcribing this interview.

    Back to top

    Listeners feedback:

    Can you trust developers?

    JW writes: I have been on the buying side of both fixed and hourly projects with lackluster results lately. The process can be quite frustrating for me with some of the following bubbling to the top:

    • Inaccurate estimates both in cost and time
    • A lack of commitment to carry out all agreed items within a scope when it takes longer to accomplish than originally planned.
    • The need to ask for more money when the scope doesn’t change.

    Which leaves me asking “How much is the developers “word” worth?”

    JW’s email goes on to talk about the differences between fixed price and time and material work. I believe that this is where the heart of the problem lies.

    I know many within the web design industry will disagree with me but I advise in my upcoming book to only work with developers willing to agree to a fix price contract.

    There are always exceptions, such as when you have found a developer you know and trust. In such circumstances I suggest the complete opposite. However, generally speaking I don’t believe it should be the client who takes the risk for projects overrunning. Obviously, if the scope is changed by the client then additional work should be priced and agreed (once again on a fixed price contract).

    Make sure the scope is clearly defined up front even if it delays the project starting. The tendency is to jump right into development work as soon as possible, especially when deadlines are tight. However, this could cause problems later.

    Unfortunately, occasionally you will encounter a developer who agrees to fixed price project only to move the goal posts part way through the project. By this stage it is difficult to walk away. How then do you avoid ending up with this kind of developer?

    There are two approaches that work well. First, before engaging a new developer ask to speak with a selection of their existing clients. If possible, contact clients independently of the developer. That way you won’t just get fed a tame client who is bound to say nice things.

    Second, for larger projects consider separating off some of the initial work into a smaller self contained project. That way you can ‘try the agency out’ before committing to a larger project with a greater degree of risk.

    In answer to the original question, I am sad to say you cannot trust a developers word. You have to put safe guards in place and mitigate the risk.

    The life cycle of a website

    Richard asks: What is the life cycle of the websites we develop as web designers? Do you see it as a short term year / year and a half, or a longer term two / three years? What kind of time period should we expect to wait before being contacted by a client about a potential redesign?

    I would like to challenge two presumptions you make in your question. First, you are presuming sites should be redesigned periodically. Second, you suggest that the client has to come to you. In my opinion, neither are ideal scenarios.

    I have written before about how, ideally websites should evolve rather than going through a continual cycle of redesign. I do however accept that this decision lies with the client and not yourself. Nevertheless I would encourage you to work hard at persuading the client of the benefits this approach brings. This serves both your interests as a web designer and those of your client. Throwing out all previous work on a site every couple of years is lunacy and totally unnecessary.

    I also have to say that you are doing your clients a disservice by simply waiting for them to contact you. It is your role to continually suggest ideas on how their site could be improved based on emerging innovations.

    We offer our clients the opportunity to regularly meet with us (free of charge) to discuss their site and where they should go next. This encourages them to think in terms of evolving their sites. It also ensures the sites do not stagnate and die.

    Not that this approach is completely altruistic. By speaking with our
    clients regularly we ensure they don’t forget us and increase the likelihood of repeat business.

    Do we always take this approach? No. Some clients don’t want us continually pestering them. Some simply cannot afford to move their site forward. In this case we take a more passive role, encouraging them to read this blog or just ‘keep in touch’. However, this is the exception not the rule.

    So to answer the original question; I would argue that the life cycle of a website should ideally be indefinite, as it evolves and changes overtime. This happens through a partnership between agency and client.

    Back to top

    121. Coda

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this weeks show we discuss 5 quick fixes to accessibility, and we review the mac code editor Coda.

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    Watch the behind the scenes video

    News and events

    Skipping Photoshop

    The biggest news this week is a post from 37Signals entitled ‘Why we skip Photoshop‘. The article outlines some excellent reasons why they choose to bypass designing in Photoshop, instead going straight from sketches to HTML/CSS. Reasons include…

    • Mock-ups are not interactive
    • Photoshop draws you into the details too early
    • Text on Photoshop is not like text on the web
    • Photoshop is not productive
    • Photoshop does not aid collaboration
    • Photoshop is too complex

    They are all valid points. However, although I accept this is right for 37Signals, it is not right for Headscape. Our view is echoed completely by the response of Jeff Croft at Blue Favor. He argued…

    • 37Signals are working with an established visual aesthetic
    • That 37Signals aesthetic is simple and so is better suited to pure HTML/CSS
    • That 37Signals do not work with clients
    • That working in HTML/CSS can lead to constrained design.

    That said, the post has made me consider experimenting occasionally with the approach. For me that made it worth reading.

    It is a great discussion and I am really glad Jason at 37Signals brought it up. It has certainly created a lively debate including posts from Jon Hicks and Mark Boulton.

    Web Designers should do their own HTML/CSS

    But we haven’t finished with 37Signals yet. They have posted a second blog entry this week entitled ‘Web designers should do their own HTML/CSS‘. The title is fairly self explanatory and they put forward a good argument as to why designers should never produce a design and then simply hand it off to ‘code monkeys’ who make it work.

    At the end of the article they write…

    We simply don’t consider designers who don’t get their hands dirty with the materials relevant to the kind of work we do.

    If you’re a designer working with the web who still doesn’t do your own implementation, I strongly recommend that you pick up the skills to do so.

    Whether you agree with 37Signals or not, the message is clear: You will struggle to get a job if you do not know how to code pages as well as design them.

    We would certainly never hire somebody unless they know HTML/CSS just as well as they know Photoshop. The nature of the web means that an understanding of the medium is crucial to creating a great user experience.

    Beyond CAPTCHA

    I hate SPAM. I hate it with a passion. I particularly hate comment/forum SPAM because it not only inconveniences me but also affects my users.

    One common approach to the problem is CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA presents the users with a distorted word(s) that they have to type in before they can comment.

    An example of CAPTCHA in action

    Although in principle CAPTCHA sounds great it does have a number of weaknesses…

    • It creates accessibility problems
    • It are hard for normal users to complete
    • It can be beaten by spammers
    • It make SPAM the users problem

    In short, CAPTCHA doesn’t work. So what is the alternative? Well, that is what James Edward (AKA Brothercake) explores in a post on Sitepoint entitled ‘Beyond CAPTCHA‘.

    He looks at server side solutions, services like Akismet and honeytrap approaches. He also looks at OpenID and other forms of authentication.

    The conclusion is that there is no perfect solution. However, he argues we need to stop making this the problem of users and take on the responsibility ourselves.

    I can certainly see his position and generally speaking I agree. However, when you are faced with limited time and budget it can be necessary to cut corners. Personally, I cannot stand CAPTCHA and I regularly fail to complete them first time. However, I have no problem completing a basic question such as found on the boagworld website.

    Read the article and make up your own mind. At the very least it will offer you some alternatives to CAPTCHA that can be implemented quickly and easily.

    Website Owner’s Manual

    Our last news story is a little bit of news about the book I have been working on. For a start it has a title; ‘The website owners manual‘. However, the big news is that you can start reading it and contributing to the final version.

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    Feature: Quick Fix Accessibility

    Complying with accessibility guidelines can seem like a massive undertaking. However, addressing 5 simple problems can make a huge difference to your sites accessibility. We discuss these in this weeks feature

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    Review: Coda

    Find out why I am seriously considering abandoning the code editor I have been using for over a decade in favour of Coda for the mac in this weeks review.

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    Listeners feedback:

    Team working environment

    Gareth writes: I have been “promoted” from a support desk position for an Oracle based financial system to the company’s single web designer. We are not by trade a dedicated web design firm and as such i am having to develop procedures and polices by myself. I have been reasonably successful in this thanks in large part to your podcast, which has in turn led me to blogs and websites such as A List Apart, Sitepoint, Headscape (obvious one that) and many more that have also helped me.

    Due to the sheer volume of work that is coming in this year we have found ourselves needing to recruit an additional web designer. At the moment i have all of my work saved on my laptop and all my tasks and appointnments stored in my Outlook.

    What tips can you give me in relation to creating a centralised working environment that can be used by both myself and this new person as well managing our work loads. What do Headscape do? I should probably point out that we will be office based in the sane room rather than working from home.

    Why is it that Ryan our producer, keeps picking questions he knows I am not an expert on. I am a front end interface guy. What do I know about this kind of thing! Also we primarily work remotely so have a different setup anyway.

    That said, I am willing to give anything a go and ignorance has never stopped me before.

    Okay, if you are sitting in the same office communication is not going to be the primary problem.
    However, you still may want to take a look at Basecamp. Its a great way of organising team working.

    The main problems will come in the form of file sharing, backup and overwriting each others work. One thing you might want to consider is a version control system like Subversion. At Headscape we use something called Source Anywhere however this is just personal preference. These systems allow you to…

    • check out files, preventing others from overwriting them,
    • rollback to previous versions of a file,
    • branch files, allowing multiple versions of the same file.

    However, for some this might be an over the top solution. The biggest danger is overwriting files. There are a number of code editors which prevent this including Dreamweaver and Coda. This just leaves the problem of shared storage and backup. You could solve these problems separately. However, personally I like the look of Drobo. Its not that cheap ($499 plus the drives) but it provides an incredibly expandable solution that minimises the problem of data loss.

    No doubt my ignorance is showing in this question so if you have better advice please post it on the show notes.

    Internal Search

    Stephanie writes: I have a question regarding internal site search. I am wondering what types of solutions there might be for enabling a site search when one does not have a development team to turn to. All I can come up with is Google custom search and it has some drawbacks (ad serving in the free edition and blog posts do not get indexed right away).

    Love the new site!

    So you want to add search to your site eh? If you’re using a popular engine such as MovableType, then there will be a built in search, so let’s assume you’re not. If you’ve just built your site using HTML, or aren’t happy with the results of your CMS’s out-of-the-box search, you still have options.

    If PHP is your game, you can install a spider on your server, such as Sphider. This will index your site and provide a very customisable solution, that doesn’t send queries off to a third party server. If you’re looking after a large site, with huge numbers of pages and documents to index, you might consider a program called SearchBlox. SearchBlox is expensive, but powerful. It runs as a java based web app on your server, with many fine tuning features that will keep even the most fastidious of clients happy.

    If it’s a free, third party service you’re after then you might consider Atomz or Google. Atomz is easy to setup, free and customisable but does include text based ads, similar to Google. The indexing schedule is regular, but only weekly. Google is an established name in search, but also has the downside of irregular indexing and ad supported results. It is of course possible to spend a little extra money to remove these, with Google Site Search

    There is however an interesting alternative service called JRank. JRank don’t stuff adverts into the results, they only require that you provide a link to their website on the page that you set as the index for crawling. They also have a REST API, so without much work you can integrate the results in your website, as the PHP code below demonstrates:

    <?php
    $jrank = file_get_contents('http://www.jrank.org/api/search/v2.xml?key=[API key]&q=[query]');
    $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($jrank);
    $result = $xml->xpath('//entries/entry');
    while(list( , $node) = each($result)) {
    echo '<h3>' . $node->title . '</h3>';
    echo '<p>' . $node->content . '</p>';
    echo '<a href=”' . $node->url . '”>' . $node->url . '</a>';
    }
    ?>

    An interesting point in the question was that Google doesn’t index blog posts right away. In my experience, search is used to find old articles or those that can’t easily be found by tags or menus. Newer articles should be easy to find from the home-page of the site, particularly if it is a blog site. If powerful search is required, then you’re going have to put up with the ads, or fork out for a bespoke solution.

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    Website Owner's Manual

    Posted in News on by Paul Boag

    I have been working on my book (The Website Owner’s Manual) for a while, but finally I have something to show you.

    Update: You can now order the website owners manual and get access to chapters as they are written.

    No, I haven’t finished it and to be honest my progress continues to be slow. In fact it is so slow my publisher is currently looking for a release date of December! Oh the shame :(

    A recap: What the book’s about

    First of all a quick recap on what the book is about. This is what my publisher has written…

    Just because you’re responsible for your organization’s web presence doesn’t mean you know how to build a website. The job of planning, launching, and managing a site often falls to people who have little or no experience in web design or development. Website Owner’s Manual is a book for the thousands of marketers, IT managers, project leaders, and business owners who need to put a website in place and keep it running with a minimum of trouble.

    Website Owner’s Manual helps you form a vision for your site, guides you through the process of selecting a web design agency, and gives you enough background information to make intelligent decisions throughout the development process. This book provides a jargon-free overview of web design, including accessibility, usability, online marketing, and web development techniques. You’ll gain a practical understanding of the technologies, processes, and ideas that drive a successful website.

    So, basically it is a book aimed at website owners rather than web designers. That said, I think there is a lot of useful content in for web designers as well.

    Content includes…

    • Secrets to a successful website
    • Defining roles and evaluating objectives
    • Planning and measuring your success
    • Page design and branding
    • Layout challenges
    • Creating killer content
    • User testing
    • Content management systems
    • Web design best practices
    • Domains and hosting
    • Website promotion explained
    • Techniques for engaging visitors

    All useful stuff, whatever your job title. What is more it shows web designers how to better communicate with clients. In particular it helps define the role of the client. I can imagine this is a book many web designers will end up buying for their more ‘challenging’ clients.

    The news: Get early access to chapters

    Of course most of this you already knew. The interesting part is that you can now read and contribute to the first 5 chapters of the book.

    The thing I love about Manning (my publisher) is that they run something called MEAP (Manning Early Access Program). The aim of this program is to engage the reader in the process of writing the book. Think of it as user generated writing.

    For between $23 – $40 you can join the program and gain access to all of the chapters as they are written. You will also get the final book when it is released.

    Each chapter is released in a very rough and ready form including all my horrible, badly drawn, sketches. You can read each chapter and make suggestions, corrections and comments via the books own private forum. I will be checking it regularly and working with you to improve the book.

    What a bloody brilliant idea!

    So if you fancy getting involved go to the Manning website (yes it is horribly designed!).

    There is even chapter one waiting for you free of charge.

    120. WCAG 2

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this weeks show we talk with Patrick Lauke about WCAG 2 and we discuss the perils of blindly following conventions.

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    News and events

    IE testing made easy

    Testing in Internet Explorer is horrible for many reasons. Not least the fact that you cannot run multiple versions of IE on a single operating system.

    In the past there have been a number of solutions to this problem. There were standalone versions of IE. However, it quickly became apparent that they did not behave as IE does natively. There are online services which provided screenshots of your site in different versions of IE. However that does not give a sense of whether interactive elements were working correctly.

    The only really feasible solution was to run multiple operating systems as virtual PCs but this was slow and inconvenient.

    However, it looks like things might be about to change. DebugBar have just released IETester. A free web browser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7, IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP all at once.

    They are currently describing it as Alpha software (whatever that means), so it sounds like it is still a work in progress. As with any such software it is hard to know if it is accurate. If you do choose to use IETester, I would still recommend giving your site a final once over in native copies of IE before making it live.

    That said, this does look very promising and I will be trying it out myself very soon.

    Hosting your Javascript libraries

    Our next story is an announcement from Google. They have started to host the main Javascript libraries including…

    • jQuery
    • prototype
    • script.aculo.us
    • MooTools
    • dojo

    This means that if you are using a Javascript library it does not need to run from your own server, but can pull it directly from Google.

    “Why would I want to do that?” I hear you cry. Mainly to improve performance. First, according to people much cleverer than myself the Google servers are faster and can deliver libraries much quicker. I know little about server performance so I will have to take their word on this.

    However the main reason is that if enough web developers use this approach we will see a significant caching benefit. Lets say a user visits headscape.co.uk and this site pulls its jquery library from Google. Boagworld.com does the same thing so when the user visits that site it uses the cached version (from the visit to Headscape) rather than re-downloading it again. As more and more sites pull their Javascript libraries from Google the likelihood that a user already has a cached copy of that particular library increases.

    Of course allowing Google to host your Javascript does require a level of trust. What if Google goes down? What if Google turns evil and starts using Javascript to manipulate your site? What about the data this approach gives Google about your site?

    However, if these concerns do not worry you, then there are definitely tangible benefits.

    Prototyping website interaction in flash

    Next up we have a tutorial demonstrating a quick and easy way to prototype complex website interactions.

    In some ways the static Photoshop comp is becoming less useful. Modern websites have numerous interactive elements that are hard to convey through static images. There is a need for something that can demonstrate this functionality.

    We have spoken before about wireframing interactive websites, but not how to demonstrate changes in visual look and feel. This article on boxes and arrows suggests that Flash maybe the answer.

    The advantage that flash has over something like a clickable PDF is that it allows for easier updating when the client wants to make changes. However, it does require basic Actionscript skills. Fortunately, the tutorial talks you through these step by step and none of it is too challenging.

    If you are looking for a way to better demonstrate interaction in your design comps then this might be the answer.

    The rule of thirds

    The final news story today is another post from those lovely people at Smashing Magazine (we love them since they said nice things about our podcast!) The article entitled “Applying Diving Proportion To Your Web Design“, introduces the reader to the fascinating subject of the golden ratio (also known as the divine proportion or rule of thirds.)

    If you haven’t come across this principle before then I highly recommend reading more. The rule of thirds emerged in the Renaissance but has always excited in nature. There seems to be something inherently pleasing about these proportions and they occur again and again. There is something about human perception that is naturally drawn to this composition. We can use this to our advantage when designing websites.

    The article goes on to demonstrate how the golden ratio can be used in all aspects of design from photography to web design. In particular it focuses on the benefits this can provide to the grid structure of your sites.

    Admittedly if you have not come across the rule of thirds before this can all sound like hocus pocus. However it really does work. Following principles like this can dramatically improve your designs. What is more they can be followed by anyone even if you would not consider yourself a designer.

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    Feature: Defying Conventions

    As the web matures an increasing number of conventions are emerging. But should we always follow the crowd? In this weeks feature we discuss just that.

    Back to top

    Interview: Patrick Lauke on WCAG2

    Paul: So joining me today is Patrick Lauke from splintered.co.uk, is that best way to refer to you?

    Patrick: Yeah, it’s one of my many monikers, yes.

    Paul: Just so many presence on the web, you’re just so well known. Good to have you on the show, Patrick, it’s been a while.

    Patrick: Thanks for having me.

    Paul: I don’t think you’ve actually been on Boagworld before have you done Dot Net with me, but I don’t think you’ve done Boagworld.

    Patrick: Exactly, yeah, I’ve only had the pleasure of sitting on the Dot Net one.

    Paul: Well this is the proper grown up, you know, professional version compared to Dot Net.

    Patrick: Super!

    Paul: So the reason I wanted you on the show, Patrick, I have to be honest is as much for me as it is for my listeners this time round, because you are our resident accessibility expert, and we had a conversation a long time ago on the show about WCAG2 and we talked a little bit, not with yourself but we’ve talked on the show before about WCAG2 and it was coming along and all the rest of it, but it suddenly occurred to me we haven’t done anything on it for ages, and I’m wholly ignorant on the subject and the current state of affairs, so I thought, I know, I’ll get Patrick on the show, I’m sure he’s bothered to read it and knows what’s going on. Hence you’re here.

    Patrick: Excellent.

    Paul: So you’re not going to let me down, you have actually read WCAG2 have you?

    Patrick: I have, I’ve been fairly involved with it, yeah.

    Paul: Good! That’s encouraging. OK so perhaps the best place to start is, where’s it currently at, what’s the stage of development at the moment?

    Patrick: Right, well literally a few weeks ago it entered what’s called the Candidate Recommendation Stage, all part of that W3C terminology they use. It wasn’t…it has been in last call for about 2 years now, but yes, Candidate Recommendation really means that now the WCAG working group and the general public has been kind of sending in comments etc on the status of the document. They’ve all reached kind of a broad consensus about, yeah, it’s fairly…it’s pretty much there, you know, it’s fairly accurate, technically there’s no big howlers in the actual wording of the things. I mean there might still be a few minor, minor details that change from now until the end, but pretty much the actually core of it is as good as it’s going to get.

    Paul: OK.

    Patrick: And really the…kind of the purpose of this Candidate Recommendation Stage, you know, why aren’t they going straight out and releasing this now as a standard, is really to give people an opportunity to start test driving, you know, what WCAG2 says in its current state, so working group thinks it’s pretty much there, let’s test it out actually in the real world, so give people the opportunity to run it…run their websites through their paces according to WCAG2, see if, you know, things are feasible, if it’s realistic to kind of say, yeah, this will be the standard from now on, and they’ve actually…they want to make it quite official, so if you have an intention of kind of doing that, you have a website and you want to actually officially say, OK, I’m going to use that website to test WCAG2, they’re now asking for people to basically register their interest and to actually, you need to then implement that, you need to say, right, I’m going to run WCAG2 on my site and by the 30th of June you want to be able to basically say right, I’ve finished it, and then give feedback and basically say yeah, no problem, or you know, we tried and tried, but this is actually not realistic, it might need to be modified, but unless there are major, major issues that come out in the wash as people are now trying to implement it and test drive it, it should be fine really. One of the main things with WCAG2 is, as with any kind of Candidate Recommendation documents, is really that there are a few items where even though we’ve got consensus, the working group isn’t 100% sure that they’re going to make it in their current stage, so they’ve kind of gone very ambitious with some of them, but they realise that yeah, it might not actually make it through, and they’re called….quite fittingly, items at risk, which in the latest CR document, Candidate Recommendation document, they’re clearly marked, and they’re basically…the testing phase is really about, let’s have a look, specifically these kind of items at risk, can they actually be implemented in the kind of more stringent way that we’ve worded them? If not, we might have to scale them back. I mean there’s one for instance where it says, it talks about, you know, colour contrast, and they’ve worded it currently that the contrast needs to be on a ratio of 5:1, so if you’ve say got, you know, text and background colours, you need to have…want to do your calculations for the various algorithms, there needs to be a contrast of 5:1. Now they’ve put that at risk, because some people still felt that it might be a little bit….setting the mark a little bit too high, and they were already saying, OK, well if it turns out that it is too ambitious to say, right, you need to have that ratio, that they’re happy to kind of jump back to 4.5:1 or even 4:1, so it’s kind of things like that, we’re really now at the nitty-gritty stage with these kinds of things, of saying, you know, can it actually be implemented.

    Paul: So this is getting very close to the point where, you know, your average website owner and your average web designer needs to be…we need to be looking at this now, don’t we really? I mean we’re getting that close?

    Patrick: Yeah

    Paul: OK, I mean it sounds like things have gone a long way since the kind of early stages where WCAG2 was quite heavily criticised. I mean what kind of shape do you personally think it’s in at the moment?

    Patrick: Yes, I mean looking back, I think it was May 2006 where Joe Clarke wrote his kind of vitriolic post, to Hell with WCAG2 on A List Apart, we have definitely come a long way since then. I think it was a good wake-up call back then for somebody like Joe, somebody of Joe’s stature, to really come along and, where web designers maybe at that stage weren’t really that interested in WCAG2 to actually say, look guys, you need to start looking at this because in the current shape it’s in, it’s really not feasible, and what Joe said at the time, there are many things that he criticised, but you know, overall he was spot-on with a lot of the things. The main thing was that the whole document at that time was extremely bulky, it was one big monolithic document which tried to do everything. There was loads of Orwellian-style language, everything was made up of Newtons, and they pretty much invented…because the problem with WCAG2 it’s a kind of full shadow of it, is that because it tries to be technology agnostic, it tries to avoid in the main document and talk about anything relating to actual technology, so it doesn’t mention specific HTML elements or things like that, so to make it very tech-agnostic, that document at the time really re-defined almost anything, so it didn’t talk about web pages, but it started ta
    lking about web units, and basically the glossary was almost bigger than the actual document, so you know, that was very problematic because even people who’d been doing web development for years, if you just gave them the document as it was, they would have had to completely re-learn whatever all the terms were, it was of no practical use.

    Paul: So has all that gone now?

    Patrick: Yes. The language has been simplified. I mean it’s gone now from 2006 onwards it’s gone through, I think it was 2 or 3 last call stages. Well it went back from…in 2006 it was at last call stage, literally the stage before we’re saying, OK, we’re up to Candidate Recommendation. They actually scaled that back. W3C don’t admit that was because of Joe Clarke, and OK, it was probably not exclusively because of his article, but I think the general kind of feelings that it stirred up, or that it tapped into, kind of made the W3C reconsider. They’ve scaled it back to a public working draft, which is kind of one step previous to that. Everybody had a pretty good look at it. There’s been rounds and rounds of comments, I mean I’ve submitted in the 2 year period that it’s now been since that article, I’ve submitted loads of comments. I mean ranging from really small things like, oh you missed a comma there, or that’s not very clear, to kind of very substantial things about the actual core concepts that are being discussed, and in that process, a lot of really hard copywriting and editing has happened since then. They’ve also split out the document into far more manageable sub-documents themselves. One of the main things, for instance, is that the whole structure of, you know, WCAG2, it’s actually a suite of documents. The main guidelines document itself is only a handful of pages, I think it’s…yes, 19 pages I’ve printed out today. That is purely the core guidelines document, and that’s the only part if you will, that is actually normative, that’s the only one that is the actual guidelines. Then there was a lot of extra documents that really are just what’s called informative, so you can read through them, but you can’t actually refer to them in terms of, you know, just if somebody sort of says, your site isn’t accessible, you can’t point to an informative document and say, yeah, but I’m following that particular thing.

    Paul: OK

    Patrick: One of the documents will be the techniques document. You can’t actually point to that and say, well I’m following these, because the only thing that’s important are the actual guidelines, so they’ve really slimmed it down, broken it up into separate documents, you know, 19 pages printed out, it’s nothing, you can pick that up, you can read it through. It’s roughly the same size now of WCAG1 if you will. So they’ve simplified the language. There were loads more contentious kind of fundamental problems with WCAG2 as it was back in May 2006. I mean one of the main ones that really caught, you know, the eye of a lot of developers, was the concept of base lines where basically at the time they were saying, even though the concept itself is good, but it’s pretty much read like, as a website owner I can basically say, right, to work with my site, you need to have Flash and you need to have this and you need to have that, which was completely opposite to, you know the very austere WCAG1 which basically said, you can’t have anything. This seemed to open it up completely and allow for website owners to basically say, right, you know, we are going to do a whole Flash website if you will, and our baseline will be, you need to have Flash to use this site. But the concept was good at the time, but the wording pretty much came out like that, so these kinds of things, base lines, at its core, is actually still in the current document. They’ve basically re-worded it and turned it on its head, where before it was talking about website owners can say what technology they’re using, now it’s far more, if as a website owner or designer, I’m using a technology, I need to make sure that I know for a fact that it’s supported by accessibility…assistive technologies, for instance screen readers, so they kind of turned it on their head. The onus isn’t any more on the user to say…to have the latest technology, but on the developer to make sure that the technology they use needs to be accessibility supported. So loads of kind of fundamental changes like that have happened really, and no, definitely to go back to the original question, it has improved quite dramatically since May 2006. I mean I’ve now familiarised myself extensively with it. It’s good bedtime reading material!

    Paul: You’re not convincing me of that one. Not unless I want to go to sleep I guess!

    Patrick: I know. OK, I’ll be blunt, it’s better toilet reading. You kind of print it out and you put it there, instead of a novel you’ve got that there. But it is very good. I mean it’s now down to the level of…it almost reads like common sense. You kind of…you go through it and you just find yourself nodding and thinking, like, that’s not contentious. OK, there are still a few here and there where I might slightly disagree in a heated argument, but overall there’s nothing really there that makes me think, ooh no, that’s never going to be realised, so absolutely, it’s in very, very good shape I would say, and this Candidate Recommendation Stage looks like it’s going to be very successful really, and fingers crossed, I think; I’m not 100% sure now of the timeline that W3C are working by, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, say by the end of calendar year, we might see actually WCAG2 being released and getting out and becoming a proper recommendation.

    Paul: Cool. So then what’s the big differences from WCAG1. I mean with WCAG1, you know, every kind of standards-based designer became very familiar with that. I was a great fan of that, you know, single sheet which listed everything by priorities and I would go through and I’d check myself off, and I kind of knew where I stood with WCAG1. With WCAG2, it’s much more of an unknown entity at the moment, so kind of give me the potted version. Where are the big changes?

    Patrick: Right. No you’re quite right, it’s actually a lot more vague WCAG2, but it’s that way for a reason. Right, so WCAG1 really was very much, I mean it’s a product of its time, I mean it was 1999, the web was still quite in its infancy, and it is very much HTML focused, WCAG1, there’s no denying that. There’s a few mentions of things like CSS, but pretty much it’s all about how to use HTML to create content that at the time would be deemed accessible. I mean JavaScript was pretty much bad; I mean you could use it but you need to make sure there’s a fall-back. Non-W3C technologies were completely out basically, unless you provided a W3C alternative, so things like Flash and PDF etc, when they first started becoming more and more used, that directly clashed with WCAG1 at the time. Now WCAG2, as I mentioned before, it’s far more tech-agnostic. It tries to basically not t
    alk about specific technologies. It doesn’t directly reference HTML or CSS or Flash or Flex or various other things in the actual core guidelines. Now the reason for that is WCAG1 as soon as it was released, the thought behind it was that it would be updated on a very regular basis, but from 1999 onwards, nothing has really happened, and because it was so heavily influenced by the technology of its day, it aged very, very badly. I mean nowadays, if I hear people saying, we’re building against WCAG1, I almost have to chuckle a bit, because it is pretty much just going back to, you know, we’re doing the web like it’s 1999, you’re not really allowed to do anything, and it’s completely opposite to what’s actually happening with the web. I’m not going…well I am going to say Web 2.0 to sound all trendy, but you know, all those things, Ajax, Flash, PDF etc, particularly say PDF, there is now…there are now easy ways, or relatively easy ways, to create reasonably accessible PDFs, I mean the technology itself has moved on, the format has moved on, screen readers are quite capable of dealing with well-structured PDFs that are created in a certain way. We’re not really talking about, you know, you need to test your pages with links because, you know, people might just use a text only browser. Things have moved on, but WCAG1 is pretty much kind of frozen in time of 1999. There have been a few kind of…people who’ve been working towards WCAG1 have started kind of re-interpreting it a bit for the modern days. I mean in my own practice in my…one of my other identities, in my day job as web editor for the University of Salford, I’ve never actually said, we’re going to make our pages WCAG1 compliant, but always said, you know, we’re going to take inspiration from WCAG1, filter it through our own knowledge of what the technology landscape actually is today, and try to do the best we can to actually serve the users and you know, how they currently use the web.

    Paul: So….so are you, you know, you said that you’d never claimed in your day job, you know, to be WCAG1. Are you intending, you know, are you more confident in WCAG2 to be able to say that, that we’re going to be WCAG2 compliant, or is it not that kind of thing?

    Patrick: I think …I think yes, WCAG2, it would be a lot easier to say we’re working towards WCAG2, because to kind of go back a bit and explain WCAG2’s kind of…the thinking behind WCAG2 and how it’s structured. WCAG2 as I said, doesn’t talk about HTML, CSS, it really just sets out very general principles, when then break down into guidelines, which then in turn break down into success criteria. Now again it probably sounds like there’s a whole new language to learn, but it is fairly straightforward, so if you think, web pages themselves need to be the four principles. They need to be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. So those are the four kind of guiding principles, which you know, make sense. It was already implicit in WCAG1, but this kind of just spells it out. These are the kind of four things that we want to make sure. Now under each of those principles, say perceivable or whatever, there are guidelines which still provide…they don’t go into detail, but they provide some very, very basic overall goals, so what we want to achieve is X. They’re not testable, because they’re still very, very generic, they’re saying, we just want to make sure that people can, say, use a keyboard to do things. They don’t go into detail about what that means particularly. And then under that you’ve got the testable, what are called success criteria. Now these are very small kind of little atomic sentences if you will, that say, right, very specifically, if you’re providing this, then make sure that that happens. Now I’ll pull out an example, I’ve made some notes here, let me just go through…yeah, I’ll give you an example here. So in the big WCAG2 document, you’ve got principle number 2, operable. User interface components must be operable. So, you know, you can’t argue with that, fair enough. Underneath that, there’s loads of guidelines, I’ve pulled out one here, guideline 2.4, navigable, which states that you should provide ways to help users navigate, find content and determine where they are. Again, that’s a very, very broad goal that doesn’t say anything about you need to use a link, you need to put title in here, or you need to make sure you use access keys. None of that. It basically just very generically tells you that. Now under Guideline 2.4, there’s loads of smaller success criteria. Now I’m just going to pull out one of them. The first one, 2.4.1, which basically is called bypass blocks, and I’m just going to read it straight from the thing, ‘a mechanism is available to bypass blocks of content that are repeated on multiple web pages’

    Paul: Yes

    Patrick: Now again, this doesn’t say anything about HTML or whatever, but it is quite testable. You can actually pull up your web pages and say, right, are we following this? Is there a mechanism available to bypass blocks of text, blocks of content, sorry, that are repeated? So I don’t know if that gives a flavour of…

    Paul: Yeah it does.

    Patrick: …against WCAG1. Now you couldn’t write a validator to actually just run through this and check for that, that is one of the core differences I think with WCAG2 compared to WCAG2. I mean even WCAG1 we all agreed that you can’t just run it through Bobby and then, you know, if Bobby gives you the thumbs up, that’s good. You still have to do some manual checking. But there were a lot of things that because it was so HTML-centric, you could pretty much run it through something and it gave you a fairly good indication of whether you were achieving that particular check-point in WCAG1 or not. Now the way the success criteria are worded, yes you could say, OK, if we accept that, we want a skip link, and the skip link will fulfil that particular success criterion, we could write an automated tester that just looks for skip-links, the presence of skip-links, however you want to code that, but it’s not to say that that is the only way in which you can pass that success criterion. The actual guidelines don’t say exactly what you’re supposed to do. They pretty much focus on the end result and particularly what I’m interested in, they focus on the end result for the user for the most part, so it really puts the onus on the developer to understand, these are the user needs, and this is the kind of very generic thing that needs to happen. You can then, from that success criteria, jump over to the techniques document for instance, which actually goes into detail, if you’re using HTML, here’s some of the ways in which you could achieve this success criterion, and then you can test against those, but the techniques document is only informative, it’s not the be-all and end-all. You could follow whatever’s said in there, or you could actually come up with something that’s completely separate, is not mentioned anywhere in the techniques, but if the end result of an actual real user is still, OK, they can still bypass blocks of text that way, then that’s fine.

    Paul: Which is great, because it kind of gives people the freedom to innovate and come up with original ways of solving accessibility problems.

    Patrick: Absolutely, and it puts…it puts the focus straight back on doing something that is good for the user, rather than right, we’re just going to go and make sure that we tick that particular box because the guideline says we need to do X in HTML and, well, we’ve done it, so we’re cool. This kind of forces you to actually think about solutions. I mean you can… you can go into the techniques document, and what’s mentioned in the techniques document, is pretty much they’re tried and tested ways in which that situation has been solved, so you know, you can be I’ll say lazy, but you know, you can get guidance from that techniques document, but that’s the important thing to know, is it doesn’t mean that you have to necessarily use one of those techniques, and absolutely you’re right, this will stimulate a lot more creative kind of ways in which these success criteria can actually be met. And as I said, it then applies to any technology. You could say, right I’m going to provide that functionality in Flash if I’m doing Flash, or maybe I need to do that in PDF, or whatever, so it is a lot more open. Which obviously is a problem if you’re very set in the ways of I’m going to run it through a validator, and I’m going to get a clear yes or no answer, because you pretty much need either a lot of user testing to say, OK are the users actually able to do this particular thing that the success criterion says, or you get experts that kind of help you with that, and there it’s a lot more likely that you’re going to get 2 or 3 experts and they might not necessarily agree on what’s the best way to implement something, so that is kind of…not the problem I would say, but the slight shift in mentality that website designers and website owners will have to make, that it’s less easy to make a very kind of cut and dried, yes it’s accessible, not it’s not accessible. I mean it was problematic before, now it could be even more woolly, which you know, is a bad thing in a way, but also a good thing because it does force you really to focus on the actual core of the problem rather than trying an easy way out and just implementing some mark-up that a guideline suggests.

    Paul: Yeah, I mean yeah, I can see how it potentially might create some legal problems further down the line, but it certainly gets people beyond that kind of arse-covering check-box mentality, which has good to be good. So it sounds like a lot of the time we’re kind of going to be working as web designers on the success criteria level where we’re going through and making sure we conform with these various success criteria. What about priorities? WCAG1 had Priority A, AA, AAA or whatever you want to call it; Priority 1, Priority 2, Priority 3. I mean, did, you know, is there anything like that any more or has that gone away completely?

    Patrick: No, that’s actually still there. At one point there was a bit of a change in terms of how it’s going to be worded, whether you could achieve full compliance or not by following…having to do all the success criteria for a particular level or not, but no, they’re pretty much there in their old form if you will, so it’s still called Level A, AA and AAA. One of the things that WCAG2 has tried to do in its wording of these Levels is to say that it wants to remove the kind of idea of hierarchy that AA aren’t less important than A, and AAA aren’t less important than AA. They’ve written a lot of nice words around it to explain why it’s actually still worth doing AAAs when you’re not fulfilling all of AA etc, but I think they’ve actually muddied up the waters a bit because in effect, you can’t claim, say, AAA, if you haven’t claimed AA, so the hierarchy is actually still there, so probably this explanation was quite confused, but it actually reflects exactly how confused the WCAG2 document is about that. They’ve tried to kind of have their cake and eat it at the same time, I think, because they have to…necessarily have some hierarchy, but they’re really trying to stress that they’re all equally important, you know, but some are just more important than others. So…interesting.

    Paul: Yes. So I mean what, you know, we’ve got potentially, you know, if you’re right, until about Christmas to sort out our act and to kind of really get thinking about WCAG2. What kind of steps would you recommend for people that are owning and running websites in order to kind of prepare for this?

    Patrick: I would say that because WCAG2, as I say, is a whole suite of documents, you’ve got the actual guidelines which I mean now I can read them and they’re quite understandable to me, but I’m obviously very close to the subject at hand. I can kind of understand where they’re coming from. But as part of the suite of documents, there are kind of better documents possibly to start with, depending on what your current level is. There are ….there are simple things like Understanding WCAG2, which kind of takes a helicopter view of WCAG2 and gives a lot more context that explains why, you know, certain guidelines are important, how, you know, people will use them, how they will benefit from them etc. It goes more of a context. It’s obviously a lot weightier than the actual core guidelines, but that is…if you’re a bit rusty with, you know, I haven’t looked at WCAG2 at all, you’re a bit rusty with what WCAG1 even was about, beyond just being a document that you checked some boxes against, that’s certainly worth reading, just to really get a feel of understanding why….why are we changing things, why wasn’t WCAG1 good enough, so that really gives you a good kind of introduction to the subject. And I think that’s an important step towards actually implementing WCAG2 would be for people to buy in, as with anything, if you’re trying to push it through at an organisational level. People need to understand the rationale behind it. You can’t just dump this document on say your developer’s desk and say, right, these are the new rules, you know, white is black, black is white, this is what you need to do now. They need to buy in from actually understanding what the rationale behind it is, so the understanding document will really give them all the information they need. Some, you know, technically minded people might be tempted to jump straight to the techniques document, which is fine, but again with the caveat that I mentioned before that the techniques document is actually only informative, so whatever’s written in there is not the law. Some techniques that are currently in there might even be proven later on to be maybe not optimal in certain situations etc, so it’s not the law; it can help you initially get, if you’re really technically minded, you might read the success criteria and say, yeah, OK, that’s all nice language, but what does it actually mean, you know, if I’m doing HTML, what….what are you expecting me to do? The techniques document can help, it will give you actual examples. If you’re using HTML do this, if you’re using Flash do that, etc, so it brings it back down to something that as a techie, you might be more comfortable with, but again, understand
    ing that that is not the law; those are not the guidelines, and that there might be even better or more creative ways around the problems, but it’ll get you into the right frame of mind I would say.

    Paul: Cool

    Patrick: There’s also documentation that just pretty much compares WCAG2 to WCAG1,

    Paul: Ah, that’s good

    Patrick: Yeah, if you’ve got a lot of experience with WCAG1, that will kind of help you roughly map, you know, what used to be WCAG1’s check-point about this, is now this far broader guideline that covers a lot more aspects, so it’ll help you kind of move towards the thinking behind WCAG2. And I think that is the main thing as a website owner or as a designer; it’s more of a shift in perception if you will, more of a shift of understanding of what accessibility is, more than, you know, the change of how is my mark-up now going to be affected by it. It’s really moving beyond that kind of very HTML specific, you must do exactly this, to a more, you need to understand how users actually use your website and how to creatively kindly of help them in that pursuit really.

    Paul: Cool. I mean that sounds good; there’s lots of different ways you can kind of start the process of learning it

    Patrick: Absolutely

    Paul: …which is good. I mean I guess my last question, you’ve almost kind of answered, which is, you know, if you’re somebody from a WCAG1 background that is comfortable with WCAG1, the one thing that you’re thinking is, hang on a minute, I kind of knew this, I had my head around this, you know, I’ve suddenly got to change to this new system, you know, is it going to involve more work, is it going to be painful? The fact that you’ve talked about this document that does transition, you know, between WCAG1 and WCAG2 sounds helpful. Overall, do you think it’s going to put more pressure on designers or is…more going to be expected of them as they develop stuff?

    Patrick: I think it’s going to be interesting for a variety of reasons. I wouldn’t say necessarily there’s going to be more work involved. If you’ve been working similar to the way I’ve been working, that you take WCAG1, you take what you want from it, and you filter it through your knowledge of, yeah, that screen-readers can actually work well with PDFs, so I’m ignoring the non-W3C technologies I’ve banned that used to be in WCAG1, so if you’ve actually been doing accessibility based on WCAG1 in the real world rather than simply just following it as a set of check-points that you just tick the boxes, I wouldn’t say it’s going to be more work. Certainly if on the other hand, if you have been somebody who hasn’t been too understanding or involved with WCAG, you pretty much had it as a function in your, say, Dream…copy of Dreamweaver or whatever, I’ll just quickly run it through this validator, I’ll run it through Bobby, although Bobby’s now gone, thank God, various things like that, you know, if you really just saw it as a check-box exercise, yes there will be…it will be more of….I don’t want to say paradigm shift…well there you go, I just said it….absolutely, no cliché will be left unturned in this particular episode…you really need to start understanding it more. But if you’ve actually been doing what I would term in a quite elitist way, real web accessibility over the last few years, there’s no major, major big surprises there, and there’s…I wouldn’t say there’s a lot more work involved. Now it would be interesting, I think, one of the aspects will be if you’ve been working in an organisation and you’ve been trying to appease management say, and one of the things that management might have erroneously picked up is, we need to make sure our pages are Bobby-compliant, for instance, is that will be a difficult, I would say, or challenging, should we say, situation because you will have, already at the time you might have been crying, saying, well, the validator can’t check everything, you still need to do manual checks, but at the end of the day, some managers, all they wanted was to see the thumbs up and the smiling policeman with the helmet on their website. This time around it will be a lot more difficult, and yes, as I mentioned before, there will be automated tools that will help you in determining whether you’re doing certain things right according to WCAG2, but because, as I said, the techniques…there is no definitive list of techniques that are OK, and there are no definitive lists of techniques that aren’t OK, it’s practically impossible to write an automated checker that will be able to check against everything, so tools…automated tools will really just be relegated to certain interpretations of WCAG2. I know that there’s a few organisations in the States that are currently working on, you know, validators. I think the….name escapes me now, but the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, they’re currently working on their own version of a WCAG2 accessibility tester for instance, and I had an interesting discussion with representatives from Fraunhofer the other week when I was in Germany at a conference, and they’d pretty much agreed that their tool will only check against, basically, their favourite techniques if you will, from the techniques document. Now who’s to say, as we said before, that those are the best techniques? They’re ours. You might come up with a really creative way that no tool has been primed to kind of sniff out in your mark-up or in your Flash or PDF or whatever, so you’ll always get a very, very subjective, based on what the developer’s written into their tool, very subjective assessment of your website, so bring it back to the point, it will be extremely difficult I think for a manager to be able to say, right, I just want to make sure that we pass that particular test, unless you then go and dig out exactly what that tool is looking for, and you end up back in the situation that we used to be in, where you’re trying to write it to get a good grade from a tool, rather than actually thinking about what is best for, you know, users with disabilities or users in general, so that, I think that will be the more challenging part, as I said, the paradigm shift, getting managers who might not have understood it up to now, to really kind of confront the fact that automated tools aren’t the be-all and end-all, and that yes, everything is a lot more subjective now, so really I would say the only solution to that is really start thinking more exclusively about proper user testing, getting actual end-users in there. You could give them the success criteria from WCAG2 and basically say, can you confirm that this is something that you can do on our website, so it becomes a lot less about automation and a lot more about actual end users.

    Paul: Cool. I mean it all sounds really exciting, you know, a bit apprehensive, you know, a whole new thing to learn and all the rest of it, but I think the whole freedom of approach side of things, that you can approach problems in different ways and sold things in different
    ways, is very refreshing and it all sounds really exciting. Patrick, thank you so much for coming on the show, that’s been really enlightening, and I look forward…

    Patrick: a delight

    Paul: Yes, and I look forward to getting you on again, maybe to get into some specifics once WCAG2 is up and running. Good to talk to you.

    Patrick: Yes, super duper. Okey-doke.

    Thanks to Alison “Anna’s Mum” Debenham for transcribing this interview.

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    Listeners feedback:

    What are the key features of a CMS

    Hi Paul. Hi Marcus. What in your opinion are the important and fundamental features of a CMS, not such as the ability to create pages, but the add-on features that make a CMS better than other CMS’s around it. Thank you very much for answering my question.

    Interestingly Drew Mclellan was talking about content management systems at this years @Media. He had an excellent list of things to look for in a CMS. Some of his recommendations were…

    • Friendly URLs
    • Data Feeds(RSS)
    • Customisable and accessible administration interface
    • Well implemented search
    • Multi-site support
    • Multi-language support
    • Caching
    • Support for user generated content

    Interestingly some of the features he looks for (such as friendly urls) are not always required. He wants to see them there because it indicates best practice from the developers who built the system, not because he actually needs them.

    He also spoke in his presentation about the importance of not buying a CMS based on a wish list of functionality you might need one day. This will lead to unnecessary expense. It is also the problem with ‘off the shelf content management systems’. You end up buying functionality you don’t require and introducing additional complexity into the user interface. Perhaps that is the reason why both edgeofmyseat.com (Drew’s company) and Headscape have chosen to build their own CMS codebase, which can be customised to clients needs.

    If you are looking for more information on the selection of a content management system be sure to check out episode 24 where we dedicate the entire show to the topic.

    Is certification worth it?

    Chris asks: I’ve been working in web design for the last 5 years and am really looking to get into the more user experience side of things. I was wondering if you or our listeners knew of any qualifications or certifications that might be a good idea. Are they even worth the good idea in the first place or are they not worth the paper they were written on?

    As somebody who regularly recruits user experience designers I have to say that qualifications and certifications mean little. Sure, I like an employee to have a degree simply because it demonstrates a certain level of academic achievement. However, I don’t think that web specific qualifications count for a huge amount.

    What I consider important is example work, that shows your skills in user interface design. I want to see sites you have produced and for you to explain to me the underlying thought process that went into them.

    Given a choice between work experience with a high profile web agency or becoming a student again, I would recommend the former every time.

    119. Fluid Elastic

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    On this week’s show Ed Merritt joins us to discuss fluid, elastic layouts and we take a look at PHP Designer, a feature rich code editor.

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    Watch the behind the scenes video

    News and events

    Harness the power of "frilly bits"

    I love watching design trends come and go on the web which maybe why I love Patrick McNeil’s Design Meltdown so much. One trend that has caught my eye is the move away from the Web 2.0. look to something more ornate.

    This style makes use of what can only be called "frilly bits". You know the kind of things, those swirls and ornaments buried in typeface sets but rarely used. They have been around for years, used by blacksmiths and typesetters alike. They turn up on everything from wedding invitations to architecture, and now it would appear, the web.

    One of the first sites I saw them was Cameron Molls blog. He is an amazing designer with a very ornate and delicate style (about as far away from my own as possible).

    Recently one of Cameron’s readers asked him where he sourced such beautiful ornaments and he has been kind enough to share 25 different sources of similar frippery.

    Unfortunately, simply knowing Cameron’s sources will not grant us the ability to design as well as him. However, it is an extremely useful list and definitely worth perusing at your leisure.

    The cure for content-delay syndrome

    Returning from the world of creativity to the realities of project management, our next post tackles the frustrating subject of clients failing to deliver content on time.

    Entitled the cure for content-delay syndrome this article addresses once again the subject of copy-writing.

    We have talked about the need for a copywriter many times before. I have encouraged you of the need to engage a professional to craft your sites copy, while at the same time struggling to convince my own clients of the need.

    The problem is that ultimately many clients believe they can write their own copy. After all they are experts in their field and know their own audience. Some argue that it takes as long to brief somebody as to do it themselves. When budgets are tight, these sound like convincing arguments and are hard to dispute.

    This post suggests that the answer in not to promote the use of a copywriter but an editor. An editor refines the clients text rather than writes it from scratch. This is considerably cheaper but still brings improvements in continuity, accessibility, usability and SEO. What is more, the client no longer needs to worry about the quality of his writing. Instead he can concentrate on "bashing it out" and let the editor improve its readability later.

    Its a persuasive argument and gives me hope that I might soon be able to encourage my clients to engage a professional to work on their copy.

    The roles of a web entrepreneur

    From the role of an editor to the many roles of a buddying web entrepreneur.

    We haven’t spoken much about developing web applications on the show (this is definitely something we should try to do soon). Traditionally web design has been a service industry and for the vast majority that is still the case. However, a growing number are looking to add a product line to their offering or make the switch entirely. Certainly this is something we are doing with getsignoff.com

    But what does it take to be a web entrepreneur and build web applications? Well, unless you have a lot of venture capital it requires you to wear a lot of hats as explained in this post on Think Vitamin.

    From marketeer to customer service representative, you are required to fulfil many more roles than you are used to. Its a challenging undertaking but the benefits are substantial. Get it right and you have a regular income without the overheads associated with a service based business.

    Intranets revisited

    Another subject that we have neglected on the show is intranets. They continue to grow in importance and yet have fundamental unresolved problems.

    In two great posts Gerry McGovern exposes these flaws including the tendency for intranets to become dumping grounds for information and their lack of decent search.

    Both posts in their own way focus on the fact that intranets should be about "getting things done". They should provide tangible productivity benefits but often fail to do so. Each post identifies a reason for this being the case.

    The first points to the way intranets are perceived. Many see them as an information repository. This appears to be a fancy way of saying "where information goes to die". Viewing an intranet in this way, McGovern argues, is to miss the point. We should only be distributing information if it aids productivity or encourages collaboration.

    The second post argues that intranets fail to aid productivity because information is just downright hard to find. In particular Gerry targets search but he also argues there is a wider problem of find-ability. Why is it he asks, that even in the largest of organisations nobody is dedicated to ensuring employees can quickly access the information they need to do their jobs?

    If you have an intranet or are involved in developing them, then these are an excellent read.

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    Feature: Fluid Elastic Design

    When it comes to planning the layout of your new website there are just three commonly used website layout structures to choose from: Fixed; Fluid & Elastic width layouts. None of these are perfect; each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages and in this weeks feature we have Ed Merritt with us to disuss them.

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    Review: PHP Designer 2008

    This week’s review is on PHP Designer 2008 has actually been submitted by Simon Jones of Zako Media. He writes…

    As a web business, I needed stable coding platform or IDE which would allow me to be as productive as possible. Money was no object so I researched everything available from open-source packages to expensive commericial software. I discovered phpDesigner from www.mpsoftware.dk and was blown away. It’s much quicker than Zend and has most of the same features. phpDesigner has all the usual code highlighting and auto-completion for PHP, CSS, HTML, Perl, XML, Javascript, along with easy buttons to tidy this code on the fly. We all know how hard it is to keep code tidy… now we don’t have to. phpDesigner also allows you to arrange files by project without disrupting the standard windows folder system. If you ever want to transfer away from this software, you don’t need to worry about compatibility.

    The smaller features I find most useful are: bracket matching, code explorer (to jump to functions, variables and arrays), code snippet library to store your most commonly used functions from project to project. Tooltip syntax reminders for PHP and rightclick to view PHP.net help page for that function. Finally it validates your syntax on the fly, without affecting performance… all other editors stalled, slowed and chugged away as they scanned the whole file every time a character was added. phpDesigner offers the same ability with very little processor time, as soon as you’ve finished a line, it hilights unobtrusively to show missing semi-colons, brackets etc. A more detailed error message can be accessed. This saves valuable Alt-Tab, Control-F5 time. (or for apple users, switch task and refresh browser) as you know the code is error free before you start.

    The software offers links to internal ‘browsers’ for phpmyadmin and php help, has an inbuilt ftp client or allows you to call an external one like filezilla. It helps integrate nicely with Smarty templates and works with phpDocumentor for instant php documentation.

    On the longer term projects, it has built in bug tracking information, project and global todo lists.

    One of the most important and major strengths with this software is it’s stability. It has a few issues sometimes closing down if it’s travelled through a laptop’s standby mode, but otherwise it has never crashed or lost data in the years I’ve been using it. mpsoftware is obviously passionate about this product as updates are available very regularly offering additional functionality and fixing minor bugs.

    This is by no means the full feature list, but more information can be found at www.mpsoftware.dk where they have a free cut down non-commercial version and sell the full version. Compare to other available software and it sounds expensive, but mpsoftware.dk is charging a ridiculously low €39 for a single license with further discounts for groups of 10.

    Thanks to Simon for that review.

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    Listeners feedback:

    Can you set up a web design company in the evenings

    John Bullock asks: Hello boagworld team, my name’s John and I’ve got a question for you. Basically I’m starting up my own web design company and I’m in what I think is an unusual situation of trying to do it along side my 9 to 5 job which has absolutely nothing to do with computers, it’s actually an engineering job so I actually have no chance at all to work with computers in my normal job. Now I know trying to set up a company alongside your 9 to 5, while obviously tiring, is a very sensible and safe way to do it, is it actually possible? Do you think it’s a realistic way of setting up a company or do you think I would have been better going with the freelance option? It’s great to have the show back after what seemed like a decade and keep up the good work.

    Yes it is definitely possible. In fact it is the way the vast majority of freelancers begin. That is not to say it is easy. However, it is the most sensible approach. If you don’t your options are fairly limited…

    1. Wait to be made redundant and hope you get a payoff
    2. Live off the kindness of friends and family (a guaranteed way of losing friends)
    3. Borrow money from the bank

    Personally, I am very much against borrowing money. It substantially increases the risk. If you setup loan free then you can get another job if things go wrong. With a loan you are left in debt and struggling to pay the rent.

    Build up a freelance business on the side and save the money to pay for the first few months. Also if you are able, land some regular customers. This will give you an existing client base to bring in much needed cash. At the very least you will have a portfolio of client work to show off.

    We were fortunate. The web design company we worked for folded. Although we didn’t get any redundancy payment we were able to take several of the clients with us. These not only provided valuable income in the first few months but also allowed us to attract other clients.

    Domain names

    Robert Prior asks: Hello Paul and Marcus, my name is Robert Prior and I am from Waco Texas, i’m currently a beginner web designer but in the future I would like to set up a small web design agency here where I live and my question is, when you’re trying to get the URL for your company name, how important is it to get different extensions like .net, .info, .tv are those important at all? Or do you just need to get the one main one like the .com name? Really enjoy the show, appreciate all the hard work you guys put into it and looking forward to future episodes. Thank you.

    In my opinion your domain name is incredibly important. You should definitely try to get the domain extension for your country and .com as well. We have never managed to get headscape.com but as the vast majority of our business is in the United Kingdom headscape.co.uk has been adequate.

    However a good domain is about a lot more than the extension. Personally I am not a fan of these new web 2.0. urls (flickr, del.icio.us, digg). They are hard to spell and hard to remember. In my opinion a good url should be a well known word (or words) even if not directly associated with your product. Headscape for example sounds more like a hair dressers than a web design agency, but at least it is memorable and easy to spell.

    Another common mistake is to go for a domain name with hyphens. This never works well as it is hard to tell somebody. For example "headscape dot co dot uk" is much easier then "head hyphen scape dot co dot uk". Also users often later forget that it contained a hyphen.

    The ideal domain is also descriptive of the site. For example we were blown away to discover getsignoff.com was available. It describes exactly what we do and is memorable too. That said more recent studies suggest that a brand name (Amazon.com) is more valuable than a generic name (books.com), so if you are forced to choose pick the former.

    Finally, be careful to avoid words with multiple spellings especially if working internationally. For example don’t choice a domain like colorTheory.com because it could equally be spelt colourTheory.com.

    Many claim that there are no good domain names left. Although it is harder these days getsignoff proves they are still out there. With a bit of lateral thinking (or using one of the domain suggestion tools) they can be found. There is no reason to start randomly start dropping vowels.