Web design is also about customer service

Posted in Working in web design on February 18, 2011 by Paul Boag

I came across an interesting article recently that made me weep with joy!

I don’t get angry very often but it really irritates me when I hear web designers complaining about their clients. One complaint that annoys me more than anything else is when designers moan about the client phoning them up, asking questions and demanding updates. It’s as if some web designers expect to go into a darkened room, produce website and then get paid. Unfortunately this is missing a fundamental part of the process.

The idea of customer service in web design is something I cover in my presentation “40 better ways to work with clients” so you can imagine my delight when I came across this article entitled “improving client relations and enhancing the work process“. This post is packed with great advice but my favourite quote comes from relatively near the beginning. The author writes:

Consistently communicating with your clients and educating them throughout the project can make a world of difference. As a designer, there is more to your job than just sitting behind a computer screen and pushing pixels around.

All I can say to that is “preach it brother!”

Watch an introduction to my 40 better ways presentation

Buy the whole presentation for £9.25

A great user experience extends beyond the website

Posted in Web strategy on September 8, 2010 by Paul Boag

As web designers we can only do so much for you the client. You can have the best website in the world, but if your customer service stinks users won’t come back.

I went to meet with a new client yesterday and was blown away by their commitment to customer service. Not only had they addressed every one of their customers points of pain, they had gone above and beyond in so many ways.

Update: Are you a web designer? Have you found yourself nodding at this post? Then before you get too smug you better read: “You’re a hypocrite (and so am I)“.

An unbelievable returns policy

The most stunning example of this was their returns policy. If you are lucky a website will offer you a 30 day return policy if the goods are unopened and so can be resold. If you are unlucky they will not accept returns at all or charge a restocking fee. However, with our new client things are radically different. They offer a 365 day return policy! However, they don’t stop there. You can return products that have been used and cannot be resold. Better still they will even pay the postage for you to return the goods.

It is truly staggering. So much so that the problem is convincing the user the offer is genuine!

A culture of service

However, it is more than that. They have the right culture too. I was fortunate enough to chat with their call centre staff. Currently they offer customers three ways to contact them…

Phone
Email
Live chat

I asked which contact method they preferred. I expected them to say email first, followed by live chat and finally phone. After all, when on the phone you can only deal with a single customer at a time. Email and live chat are much more cost effective. However my expectations were entirely wrong. The answer was the phone because “it is the quickest way customers could get their problems resolved”.

Cartoon in which the web designer is asked to remove the phone number from a site

Davi Sales Batista, Shutterstock

A growing trend

What’s interesting is that this client is not alone. More and more companies are realising that to compete on the web they cannot sell on product and price alone. The problem is that competition is fierce and the chances of having a unique product low. With your competition only a click away and savvy customers doing price comparison you are left with two choices – be the cheapest or be the best.

What this new breed of web businesses are realising is that racing to be the cheapest is a losers game. Eventually there is only so much that can reduce your margins. Instead they have discovered that customers (especially online) are willing to pay more for convenience. In today’s society time is as important a currency as money and users will often choose a more expensive option if it saves them time quibbling over returns or being on hold with customer services.

There are many poster children for this movement including the likes of Zappos. What these pioneers are proving is that the increase in revenue outweighs the costs involved.

zappos

On face value limiting customer service may seem like a good idea. However, in doing so you are putting short term objectives over the long term health of your business.

Think long term

Recently I wrote a post in which I said that business objectives are more important than users needs. However, that is not an excuse for neglecting your users. If you care about achieving long term business success, then you have to put great customer service and the user’s needs at the heart of what you do.

As web designers we can help you. We can make intuitive sites that are both painless and pleasurable to use. However, that is only half the battle. We also need you (the website owner) to continue that pleasurable experience in terms of customers service. What happens offline is as important as what happens on.

What about you?

So ask yourself – how could you be helping your customers more? Have you hidden away your phone number because you don’t want users calling you? Have you added in extra fields to your contact form so you can collect demographic data for spamming? Have you limited your returns policy for fear of people abusing it? What about hidden costs? Are there charges for returns or delivery?

Whether you are running an ecommerce site or an informational one the message is the same, provide outstanding user experience both on the site and off.

Chris Lea on hosting and customer support

Posted in Development on April 21, 2010 by Paul Boag

Chris Lea works for Media Temple probably the best known hosting company within the web design world. He shares his advice on hosting and their experience of dealing with customer support.

Paul: Ok, so joining me today is Chris Lea from Media Temple. Great to have you on the show, Chris.

Chris: Glad to be here.

Paul: I kind of wanted to have a chat with you for a while, because, obviously, I host my website with Media Temple, as does pretty much everyone else I seem to come across one way or another.

Chris: We like to think so.

Marcus: The whole world is covered.

Paul: The subject of hosting is not one that you heard talked about massively unless people are complaining. “Oh, my site’s down,” and blame whomever. So I thought it would be really good to talk about it on the show, and discuss some of the issues that come up regarding hosting. So you seemed like the logical person to talk to.

Chris: Well, I’ll do my best.

Paul: So let’s start off by talking about, I’m starting up a new website, I’ve got a new idea, putting a new thing online, I need to tackle hosting. What are the questions I should be asking out of the gate?

Chris: So, understanding what you’re trying to build, obviously, is sort of a key thing. For example, if you were a Rails developer, the guys over at Engine Yard do a really fantastic job of Rails stuff, they’ve got a lot of Rails development going on internally, they employ [Corelis Comitters], they understand that space very well. If you were looking to host, say, a Django-related website, I realize it is a bit of a pimp, but we’ve got some Django-centric options at Media Temple that are specific for that sort of thing. If you’re going with a sort of traditional PHP application, there’s a whole lot of hosts that you could look for. But I guess, obviously, sort of evaluating the technologies you need and matching them up is going to be a good first step.

Chris: A second one, sort of evaluating the size of what you’re shooting for out of the gate, I mean, if you’re really just getting something off the ground and it doesn’t need to be too big, then your costs are going to be significant, so you’re probably going to want to go with some sort of a shared plan, one that is not too expensive. Typically, check Twitter, check forums, and see who has a good reputation, and who doesn’t. A lot of people, sort of with the ecosystem, there are money-back guarantees, 30-day trials, that sort of stuff. Jump in with a couple and see what you like.

Paul: Sometimes, these guarantees of uptime, which always strike me as a little bit of a joke. It’s like, “What does that guarantee you?” Does it mean that you’re going to get, if the site is down for over a certain amount of time, you’re going to get the money of your hosting back? If you’re building an ecommerce website, and the site’s down for however long, that could have a much bigger impact on the amount of money you lose than just the money you’re paying on hosting. It feels like a marketing ploy, am I being really cynical?

Chris: No, you’re not being cynical at all. And its a significant issue that everyone deals with. At Media Temple, which is my personal experience, I have friends in other places too. One of the most annoying calls you get, I mean if things go down, and they do, sooner or later, computers break and so on, you get these guys, and they’re paying in the US $20 a month, not a whole lot, and they’re down 20 minutes or something, or maybe let’s say an hour, and the person calls, and goes “I’m losing tens of thousands of dollars,” and we’re sitting here going “Okay, we’re sorry you’re down, and we’re going to credit you for a month’s hosting,” but if you’re making tens of thousands of dollars an hour, maybe you should be thinking about spending more than $20 bucks a month on your hosting infrastructure. So I certainly think that if you are in a situation where any downtime has a material financial impact to you, I would recommend not getting onto a platform that is shared in some way. Find a VPS platform or buy dedicated hardware for yourself, because you are a lot more guarded with those technologies against other people. A lot reasons things go down, it might not be you, but somebody, somewhere does something really stupid, and it can affect other people. We work really hard to minimize that effect, but it still happens. There’s certain things about the technology that exists today that we can’t guard everything. So if downtime has such a financial impact, spend a little more for a VPS platform or…

Paul: What is a VPS?

Media Temple page on VPS

Chris: Virtual Private Server. So a virtualized server. We got tens of thousands in production at Media Temple. They work great. The idea is that you put multiple customers on one physical server, but there’s technologies that you partition it up, into what looks like a bunch of individual servers. You get into that machine, and as far as you’re concerned, you have a machine all to yourself. It’s actually a smaller piece of a really big, physical box, but it’s just you, and the way that technology works, we have better ways to guard even against the other segments on that box. So I would recommend those, because those tend to provide more stability. Amazon EC2 works that way.

Paul: So it’s like somewhere in between shared hosting and a dedicated server.

Chris: And a lot of times, we do this also, virtualization is a powerful tool, so sometimes, you can get your own box, and really what you’re getting is a VPS, just you’re the only one on the box. And you do that because you have a lot more management tools. It’s very easy for us to provision one of those. For example, a drive on your physical box going bad, we can magically move you into new hardware, you’ll never know. And the virtualization tools give you that. It’s very powerful.

Paul: That’s always a big issue I guess, to a lot of people setting up their sites. They start off with shared hosting, and let’s say that they’re site gets popular, the traffic starts to increase, I guess one of the things you need to look for when you’re picking a hosting company is the upgrade path; how easy is it to upgrade to a dedicated box I guess, ultimately.

Chris: Sure, I know at our company, within the VPS platform, there’s a small, medium and large size, and we push a button, and it changes sizes. And then there’s your own box size. But technically, it is VPS, just you’re the only one on it, so you have the whole box. So we take you from a $50 a month, a smaller server, but it’s still yours, and up through a couple levels of growth. And we’ve done a fair amount of work to make that a transparent process for customers and it certainly happens. You get people, and they start getting popular and they get on Digg or whatever. You know, they started off on $50 a month and suddenly they’re at $750 a month. For them, if they’re that size, it was very easy to transition. They didn’t have to do anything other than call us and say ‘Make it bigger please’, so you know we’re quite proud of that. It’s worked out well for a lot of customers.

Paul: So you mentioned Digg there. The thing I think a lot of people will fear is that they write some stunning blog post that just goes nuclear for a short length of time. And you know, that impacts and takes down their server. You know, is there anything when you’re picking a hosting company, is there any questions you need to ask about that kind of issue and how to avoid it or do you just presume the serving company is dealing with it?

Chris: Well, practically people assume the hosting company is dealing with it. We obviously have tried to do that. Our grid service platform is a very large cluster system that’s made to look like a single system for people but it’s very much designed to handle the Digg effect. You can take a Digg and all of a sudden you’re going to use fifty times the resources you normally do and then when it goes away that’s fine and you sort of only pay for what you actually used up. But in terms of, and I do have to say, this is a little bit perhaps precocious of me, being a performance engineer, But, if you expect that you’re going to get those big spikes you do need to do a bit of engineering yourself. There’s nothing, we or anybody can do to save you if you’ve done something really stupid in your code base. It’s a problem, the worst thing, the hardest problem we face as a hoster is the following scenario. Somebody writes something badly. They don’t know they did it badly but they did. And it gets no traffic so it works great, if you’re not getting any visitors then it doesn’t matter how bad it is cuz it’s going to work. And then they get Dugg or slash dotted or whatever it is and they get a ton of traffic and it just all dies. As far as they’re concerned it worked great three hours ago and now that I have this spotlight on me and all this great traffic it’s dead and I haven’t changed anything.

Paul: So therefore it must be the hosting company’s fault.

Chris: So they call us and we can go in there and look and go hey you did this incredibly silly thing with your database, you needed extra tables and of course it’s going to die and even if the customer at that point knows they did something wrong, they’re still not happy. So obviously people are pushing for that kind of traffic but if you do a little leg work it’s not too hard to find resources these days. A quick Google, and especially if you’re using known platforms like a WordPress or a Drupal and stuff there’s people who will tell you okay don’t use these plugins. Use the caching plugins, set them up and if you do that, honestly, most of the solid hosting companies that are out there, guys like us, guys like Joyent, whoever, they’re going to be able to handle that kind of traffic.

wordpress

Paul: I’d like to give a personal testament to this. That I was actually, I was having a little moan that my site seemed to be running very slowly which I obviously blamed on you guys *laugh* until I then looked at my code and discovered that the WordPress super cache code that had been running quite successfully, I’d screwed it up somehow and it’d stopped working and the whole site had ground down. So it’s a perfect example of ‘it was my fault and not yours’. *laugh*

Chris: Yeah, it’s one of those things and we work very hard to try and evangelise best practices. It’s an ongoing battle and if you’re out there and you have ideas, we’ve got plenty of ways to get customer feedback and we’d love to hear them. But generally, the more knowledge we can spread the better as it certainly saves us quite a bit as well. It’s like being a Doctor, they always say that preventative medicine is much cheaper than treating things and it’s the same thing with hosting. Knowing what you’re doing at the outset and getting it right before you’re in trouble is much much easier than fixing it when you’re already in hot water.

Paul: Yeah, totally. It’s interesting there, you talk about evangelising and going out there and spreading best practice. That kind of brings us on to the area of customer service and that kind of stuff. When people are looking for hosting companies, we immediately look at 100% up time, you know, and all these kind of marketing phrases that are thrown around and scalability but I think there’s a lot more to using a hosting company than just their technical infrastructure. I think customer service is massively important and I was just interested in your perspective about dealing with customer service issues and what kind of best practice you’re seeing in the industry about dealing with customers.

Marcus: I’ve got bags on this. I’d be interested to hear what you’re going to say.

*Everyone laughs*

Chris: I’ll be very blunt. I wish there was something resembling a best practice I could point to in the industry. I don’t think that there is. At Media Temple we absolutely pride ourselves in our customer service. We’re 150 employees plus last time I looked which is crazy because I was like employee 15, you know, but the vast majority of our company is customer support agents. We’re always looking for more guys that are good. 24/7, 365 phone support, ticketing system, we do the best we can and we’re always trying to make it better.

Paul: I’m going to push you a little bit. Phone support. Where do I go to when I phone you? Who am I speaking to and where are they in the world?

Chris: You are speaking to people who are in our main offices in Culver City in Los Angeles.

Paul: See now there we go, for me that is a real killer point. So often you end up in some country somewhere, I mean okay they speak brilliant English but we seem to misunderstand one another a lot of the time and it can be quite a frustrating experience, and the phone network doesn’t seem to be that great. Okay so those people that I’m talking to in your call centres, and I know we’re becoming a bit Media Temple specific… also the level of their technical knowledge is another big thing, because I mean I’ve actually, I’m writing the Web Site Owner’s Manual at the minute, and when I’ve finished writing it it’ll come out, and one of the things I say in that is Hosting. I will actually encourage people to pick up the phone, call the hosting company, find out who you are getting to speak to and what’s their level of knowledge. Because sometimes, I’m a Web Developer, and I ring up and I know more about the hosting than they do. Do you know what I mean?

Chris: Absolutely, back when I did freelance work before I worked at Media Temple, these days I know a lot of system stuff but back then I just knew a lot of PHP and Perl and it was horribly annoying when I would call my clients’ hosting companies for them and I knew more than the guy I was talking to. I’m like, it’s your job to understand DNS, you should know it better than me. At MT we have dedicated, when we hire somebody they go through a regimented training course that’s in place. We have people whose job it is to train incoming tech support people and the curriculum’s always evolving. When people get through that they’re put into a frontline queue but we’ve got a secondary group of people that’s for more complex problems. Obviously we try to get people to graduate.. then there’s a third tier of support past that. Then if you get to them and they can’t figure it out we have a defined pipeline straight into engineering. So typically if the L3 guys can’t figure it out and they hit up one of the more senior admin guys, the admin guys know that this is probably really a problem and I probably really need to look at it right now. It’s something that’s evolved over time and it’s always in flux but it’s something that’s been working for us very well for the past, I’m not even sure when the Level 3 thing … it’s been a year and a half, 2 years and our support manager, Andrew Wong, has done a fantastic job of defining these different knowledge levels and a process for getting customers through them if they’ve got complex problems. That’s where we are today and hopefully we’ll be somewhere cooler tomorrow.

Paul: You were talking about when you were a freelancer and ringing up on behalf of your clients and their Web Hosting. Obviously a lot of the people listening to this show, there are a lot of website owners listening to the show but there are also a lot of freelancers and there’s always this issue of hosting, right. None of them want to deal with it. Hosting’s the horrible bit. Why you got involved with this stuff is quite beyond me. Why anyone would want to have anything to do with it just boggles my mind. So everyone hates hosting. One option is that they tell the client right it’s your problem, you’ve got to find the hosting company but in most cases that doesn’t work so the Web Designer then becomes responsible for dealing with the hosting side of things. One of the things that when we started out, we used Fasthost because it had this reseller package and they had this whole way of managing clients. I’m quite interested in what your thoughts are on that and whether you like dealing with the website owner directly or whether it should be going through the Web Designer. Do you know what I’m getting at here or am I rambling rubbish questions?

fasthost website

Chris: At MT we literally built the company on this idea that we target people that make sites. In the early 2000s we targeted graphic designers and then we moved to the people who were standards evangelists, you know the Jeffrey Zeldman umbrella of people. And now we’re additionally moving into people who are more pure software guys. We’re partnering with jQuery and the Django guys and that sort of stuff. We chase after the influencers, the guys that are in the ‘making’ process. I don’t think it matters too much that your’e talking to someone who is servicing their own clients or someone who’s the site owner. The point is that if we’re providing good customer support it shouldn’t matter. If people know they can call up, and I don’t care if it’s the developer or whoever owns the site, they should be able to get an understanding of what’s going on. Our internal ticketing system is very focussed on continuity. So you can call in and probably not get the same person you called last time, but the person you call is going to see all the notes and understand there’s a history of what’s going on. So our approach is focus on making support as good as we possibly can and as long as that’s true whoever calls us should get a good experience. That’s our goal.

Paul: Which is an admirable goal!

Marcus: What my bugbear with hosting companies has been, is as we were saying earlier, good hosting, you don’t notice it. It’s there in the background and works beautifully. You only ever notice it when there’s a problem. Fortunately there usually aren’t that many problems so what tends to happen with me, and it’s just a personal thing but I’m sure it might ring some bells with other people. Certain companies who I’ve worked with in the past insist that I quote my pin code back at them, this long, great membership number kind of thing, and I can’t find it. And the site’s down – Arrgh – this kind of thing. I guess this is my chance to rant ‘don’t do that!’ You’ll have my name on record, I come from the company just look up the company name, my name, the Domain Name. I don’t need to have to have a pin code because I only ring up every two years. It’ll be somewhere but I don’t need it when I’m panicking today.

Chris: Certainly that is a tricky problem. There are legal issues that we just can’t start talking to anybody. So we do have to have some sort of authentication process. We try to be as easy as possible, you know if you can give us the last 4 of your credit card number you’re probably going be able to talk to us.

Marcus: We can always do that one.

Chris: Typically we say what’s your Domain Name, who are you, are you listed as the contact, what’s your password? Then of course people don’t always have their password but there’s a very fast button that we can send an email that goes out instantly to whatever that email is so if you don’t already know, it’s a 30 second process ‘oh you don’t know, okay I’m going to email that to you right now.’

Marcus: That’s fine. In the example I was giving you, it was ‘we can’t talk to you then, sorry goodbye.’

Chris: Oh that’s ridiculous. I don’t know who it was but…

Paul: It does raise, what we’re getting into, we’re kind of going off the subject of hosting and into the whole realm of online customer service which is so massively important I think. Things like providing as many different mechanisms to contact people. You talked about your great ticketing service but you know, if you’re panicking because something’s gone down you want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to a real human being. So getting that mix right and dealing with that is so crucial to any organisation that offers any kind of service online.

Chris: Yeah, well transparency is one of the huge buzz words going around, right? And we’re trying to eat our own dog food on that one as much as we can. We have 24/7 365 phone support. We have an online ticketing system so if you don’t want to call in you can just write us and it comes up with the ticket and we try and answer.

Paul: And you answer your tickets so quickly is what impresses me. You say that you’re not going to, on the site, it says we’re going to get back to you, I can’t remember what it says but you always get back much quicker than that in my experience anyway.

Chris: We certainly try to. One thing I think has really helped is we’re as active on Twitter as we can be, if there are problems …

Paul: I’ve got a problem with this. I don’t like you guys on Twitter because I can’t have a good moan about you on Twitter without one of you lot getting back to me saying ‘Is there a problem? Can we help’

*Laughs*

Chris: More than that because typically MT is no longer a small group, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of Domains hosted so if something goes wrong chances are it’s going to affect more than one person. And if that happens we Twitter about it, we try and let people know ‘Yes, we know there’s a problem. Yes we’re working on it’ We also have, and if you’re a new MT customer please check this out, on our blog there’s an incident tracking system that there’s an RSS feed for, so if there’s what we consider to be an incident going on, something that affects more than a very small number of people, it goes up there. You can get it in your RSS feed because a lot of the time that’s just what it is. ‘Hey, my email’s not working’ and people just want to know yes, we know, we’re on it. The alarms are going off, whatever, and we’re able to flush a lot of tickets out that way. In our ticketing system if there’s an incident up, and we’re getting these tickets in we can say that’s part of the incident, that’s part of the incident and when we resolve it kind of all gets done at once. But if you are an MT customer please definately, of course things sometimes go wrong but we try and let people know before if we can.

Paul: It’s that customer service level I think is so important and if you look at the really successful companies out there, I think it’s as much about customer service, how you deal with problems, respond to problems and respond to questions, than anything else. That’s why I select companies, is on the quality of there customer service which is what differentiates you I guess. There are a lot of hosting companies out there with boxes that you are putting stuff on to get it out there on the web (massively over simplifying it)… *laugh* It’s the customer service and how you deal with that that makes one hosting company stand out from another.

Chris: If I were advising anyone to look for a hosting company that’s the first thing I would look for – see what their reputation is, for customer service. For us, and for any hosting company, I’ve seen a lot look under the tyres [and see things] that’s not their fault. It is human nature to complain more than to laud praise, but that said, do the best you can to see who’s going to be able to support the kinds of problems… like I said, we’ve got some great Rails options at MT but I know the Engine Yard guys are fantastic at it from what I can tell. If I was going to do a serious Rails app I would probably want to use them. I’m not even going to lie. *laughs* I’m going to give them those props because they really do a fantastic job. The first thing I would look at would be what is their reputation for customer support. the second things I would ask would be ‘who do you buy your hardware from?’…

Paul: Oh okay, that’s interesting I wouldn’t have asked that question.

Chris: Yeah and a lot of people don’t right? It’s very easy to buy really cheap hardware. Honestly all hardware breaks. The difference is our hardware is essentially all from HP, some from Microsystems and when their bits break we have replacement parts in 24 hours – always. I’ve dealt with people when things break and they’re like ‘yeah… *pause yeah… *pause’.

*everyone laughs*

Chris: And then qualify if they are providing whatever technologies I need to get my job done.

Marcus: I’ve got one more point. Do they do a really good party at SXSW? *everyone laughs*

Paul: We should be wrapping this up but from a marketing point of view you guys are very smart. You often target speaker’s dinners and parties at SXSW. You really know how to reach a community and how to reach the influencers within that community.

Media Temple SXSW closing party

Chris: Yeah, it’s exactly what I was saying earlier with the target audience that we kind of go after. But those parties we do at SXSW, or speaker dinners or whatever those things are, that’s our marketing budget. It doesn’t come from some kind of hospitality… I don’t know how other companies do it but we don’t do traditional marketing. We don’t spend a lot of money on Google Adwords, you don’t see us in magazines. We try and get out there and talk to people that are making websites, that are making websites better, the influencers, the thought leaders in the space. We’ve been doing it since before I worked there. If that ever stops working for us we’ll figure out a better strategy but I’ve been at MT for 6 1/2 years now and it’s working as well or better today than when I started so we’re going to keep on it.

Paul: Good, I need to keep having good Swag!

*everyone laughs*

Paul: Thank you so much for coming on the show, that was really interesting.

Chris: Thanks.

Thanks goes to Wendy Phillips for transcribing this interview.

Vimeo: Lessons in customer care and community

Posted in Reviews on December 22, 2009 by Paul Boag

In my post I shared my negative experiences with Vimeo. In this video I look at the lessons we can all learn about handling customers and engaging with communities.

I believe in learning from every experience whether positive or negative. I therefore thought it only appropriate to ask myself what I (and by extension every other website owner) can learn from the mistakes of Vimeo.

And of course I simply had to share my thoughts in a ‘non commercial’ video format ;-)

You can read my original Vimeo post here.

Alternatives to Vimeo

Several people have asked me where they can move their videos to avoid Vimeo’s draconian and erratic policies.

If you video is truly ‘non-commerical’ and your concern is not Vimeo’s commercial policy but its limitations on where your video can be displayed then I would recommend Viddler.

However, if like me some of your videos do have commercial content then I would recommend Vzaar which is essentially Vimeo for business. That is where I have moved and have so far been impressed.

Vzaar

8 ways we increased ecommerce sales by 10,000%

Posted in Design on November 29, 2009 by Paul Boag

Discover how Headscape increased the sales of Wiltshire Farm Foods by 10,000% and how you can do the same for your site.

A 10,000% increase in sales over 5 years. Sounds incredible doesn’t it. Just to make that an even more incredible, their average customer is in their 80s! Who said the elderly don’t use the internet.

When we started working with Wiltshire Farm Foods their monthly revenue was a 100th of what it is today.

Of course in reality that success was not down entirely to us. Matt Curry, our client at Wiltshire Farm Foods has put his heart and soul into that website and as I say in Chapter one of the Website Owners Manual, it is the site champion who makes or breaks a site.

The organisation has recognised the importance and power of the web for their business and continually invested in it both for development and also in site promotion. If they had not had the foresight to do that then the site would have failed.

So what do I put the sites success down to? Well, honestly that is hard to say. There are so many factors. However below are 8 things that have without a doubt made an enormous difference.

1. Remove clutter

WFF Product Menu

Too many ecommerce websites are overwhelming. Everything is screaming for the users attention. There are offers, deals and recommended products wherever the user turns. Amongst all of this confusion it is hard to find what you want.

Amazon is like this and so we all naturally presume it must be right. However, one of the first conclusions we came to when working on Wiltshire Farm Foods is that they are not Amazon. Nobody is. You cannot presume that what works for one will work for all.

The emphasis of the Wiltshire Farm Foods website was on helping users find and buy the products they wanted. It is not in anyone interest to overwhelm them with stuff that only we wanted them to buy. It has to be the customer first.

This meant simplifying the site. With so much content shouting for attention, users could not find anything. We had to remove distraction and focus them on key tasks.

Take for example the site’s navigation. We actually hide away some of the ranges offered by Wiltshire Farm Foods. Insanity you might think. Surely this made it harder for users to find what they want? Admittedly for a small minority it did. However, hiding the less popular ranges (like soup) we could highlight the ranges that accounted for the vast majority of sales.

WFF Product Listing

The same was true for product listings. Some users were interested in a lot of different information from dietary content to customer ratings. However, this additional information made life harder for the mainstream users who were only interested in a photo, description and price.

We therefore decided to move all of this additional information on to the product details page. That way it was accessible for those who wanted it without distracting the majority.

WFF Shopping basket

The final area we significantly simplified was the shopping basket and checkout process. As I explained in my post on ecommerce lies, once the user has made the decision to purchase you need to remove all distractions.

The shopping basket is not the time to up-sell or cross selling. It’s not even the time to provide a navigation bar to other products. At this stage you want the user to do one thing and one thing only, proceed to checkout.

Talking of the shopping cart, we also focused heavily on getting it to stand out on the page.

2. Make sure the shopping cart stands out

Too many websites hide the shopping cart away. However, this is a crucial step in shopping and the first of the checkout process. In affect the shopping cart is an ecommerce websites primary call to action.

With this in mind we wanted to make the cart as prominent as possible. We achieved this in three ways:

We made the shopping basket button visually different from the rest of the site using colour
When items were added to the basket it was visually updated (see providing visual feedback video)
We tethered the basket summary to the top of the screen so that it would always be visible even when the user scrolled (see below)

As you can see from the video below, the tethering proved particularly effective and makes the call to action obvious at all times.

3. Provide visual feedback

One of the primary questions in the mind of users when interacting with a system like an ecommerce website is “did I do that right?”

Whether it is adding an item to the basket or filling in a login and password, users are concerned that they are doing things wrong. This is particularly true with a more elderly audience who have not grown up using computers.

It is therefore important to reassure users as they progress through the site. This can be achieved by providing visual feedback when the user takes an action.

For example on the Wiltshire Farm Foods website when an item is added to the basket the user gets multiple types of feedback to reassure them the item has been added:

The photo of the item is highlighted
The ‘add to basket’ button updates
The image of the item visually moves towards the basket
The basket itself updates

As you can see from the video below, the user is in no doubt that the item has been added.

However, the visual feedback does not stop at the basket. When the user is confronted with a form they are clearly shown what fields are required, and which have been completed correctly or incorrectly. This information is updated without the need for page refresh.

Form field feedback

4. The bigger the better

An image can say a thousand words. It is therefore unsurprisingly that the product shots on an ecommerce site are massively important. Even if your audience are not the elderly with failing vision, it is still important to have nice, big, clear shots of your products.

In the case of Wiltshire Farm Foods we have taken this principle to the extreme.

As we saw earlier the product list is essentially a grid of images with the addition of some basic product information. The image sells the meal in a way words never could, and the grid allows us to have large images. However, we did not stop there.

As you can see in the video below, clicking on a product listing displays an even bigger image in the product details. We also allow users to click on this larger photo and display an even bigger version that expands to fill the width of the page. This leaves the user in no doubt about what they are getting.

Of course this is dependant on having decent shots of the product. If you can only invest in a single thing for your ecommerce site this would be it. Spend money on getting the best photography you can. Its worth every penny.

5. Make buttons and links obvious

A continuation of the ‘bigger is better’ thinking can also be applied to buttons and links. Admittedly this might be exaggerated by the Wiltshire Farm Foods audience, but in my years of user testing I am constantly amazed how often users fail to spot important links and buttons.

You will therefore notice how ridiculously big some of the links and buttons on WFF are. However, size isn’t everything (no innuendo intended).

We also gave a lot of attention to appearance and wording too. For example, notice in the image below how the link looks like a link. Also we did not rely on the link alone because the wording of the link doesn’t communicate the action. We therefore added a button that communicates how clicking it will allow the user to ‘view all of our beef meals’.

Link to Meal catagory

The descriptive nature of buttons can also be seen elsewhere on the site. We are very conscious that users do not always read copy explaining buttons and so the button itself needs to communicate all the information required.

Take for example the image below. If all you read was the two buttons you would know exactly what choice was available. The surrounding text is entirely optional.

Example buttons

6. Always be there to help

An ecommerce transaction raises a lot of questions in the minds of users:

Is delivery free?
What if I don’t like the product?
Is my credit card information secure?

In addition there are questions about the site itself and how to use it.

Surprisingly many ecommerce websites seem reluctant to help their customers. Delivery and return policies are buried. Reassurance about security is limited to a tiny badge or padlock. And most importantly you have to search high and low for a phone number.

We were determined to address these problems on the WFF website. In the end we settled on three approaches:

1. The one stop solution

Our first move was to bring together all help into a single section of the site that was prominently displayed in the navigation bar. This avoided the user having to hunt around for different pieces of information.

We then looked at the enquiries received by WFF customer support and used these to identify the top issues. These where then prioritised and presented on the help homepage.

As you can see the top question was “how do I contact you” so we prominently featured the telephone number. This was then followed by questions about ordering and the website.

Help Section

2. The getting started guide

We also took an idea from the video games industry and provided users with a tutorial. However, the idea of the tutorial (which we called a getting started guide) was to guide users through their first transaction.

This is displayed prominently on the homepage and gives users who are overwhelmed by the site a starting point.

Get Started Content Area

3. Context sensitive help

Finally, we also wanted to provide context sensitive help throughout the purchase process. These are small pieces of microcopy found throughout the site nudging users in the right direction.

Example of context sensitive help

7. Handle errors gracefully

No matter how well designed your site or how much help you provide, things will inevitably go wrong.

If you do not want to lose the sale, you must handle the error gracefully and reassure the user they can still continue.

This is particularly important when working with the elderly audience found on Wiltshire Farm Foods. However, it is always wise to give users as much help as possible and not make assumptions about their abilities.

Below are a couple of examples of how we handle problems on the site.

Error message

The first example is an error message that appears when the user fails to login. There are several such messages across the website. However, they all have two characteristics in common:

The message is highly visible – This is achieved either by strong visual branding (as above) or by positioning the message next to field being edited (as in context sensitive help) .
The message tells the user what to do – It is important that messages clearly communicate how the user can overcome the problem.

The example above is probably a little wordy for most websites. Fortunately, our user testing has shown that a more elderly demographic actually reads instructional text! We can therefore take some liberties.

The second example of an error message appears when the user has entered a search term that returns no results. The danger in this situation is that users will conclude the site does not have whatever it was they searched for and so leave.

In reality there are number of reasons why no results might be returned. In such situations provide some guidance on searching. We also went one step further by including a phone number in case all else fails.

8. Communicate your value add

The final lesson we have learnt from working on WFF is the importance of communicating what extra you offer customers.

The problem is that there are so much choice for consumer. How for example could an organisation like Wiltshire Farm Foods compete with such a well known brand as Tescos?

Tescos sell frozen meals and a lot more besides. They deliver to your door and have a much broader range of products (although admittedly not frozen meals).

What enables Wiltshire Farm Foods to compete is their value added service. These include:

Police checked delivery staff
The option to pay cash on delivery
The ability to place your next order with the driver
Delivery staff will even unpack meals and place them in your freezer

When you are trying to each an elderly audience, these kinds of extra services are a real selling point.

Of course, these USPs are no good if users are unaware of them so considerable effort has been put into clearly communicating these on the site. In fact we are in the process of doing even more work in this area.

What are your USPs and are you clearly communicating them on your site?

Image showing WFFs complete service

Is that all?

So if you follow these 8 guidelines will you increase your sales by 10,000%? The answer is probably not.

In reality there is a lot more that affects the success of an ecommerce business than its website. There is the ongoing communications, customer service, fulfilment, and marketing to name but four.

The 10,000% increase makes a good title for a blog post! However, the percentage growth is not really the point. What matters is that by following the advice here you will be guaranteed to see growth and that is what matters.

However, if I could leave you just a single thought it would be this. Wiltshire Farm Foods looks a million miles away from the busyness of Amazon and indeed many other ecommerce websites. Do not just blindly follow the crowd (or even the advice in this post). Instead learn what your users need and give it to them. It really is that simple.

Of course, you might need some help doing that, but even the answer to that is simple. Give Headscape a call ;-)

The biggest ecommerce lies and how to avoid them

Posted in Site content on November 6, 2009 by Paul Boag

I am amazed at some of the advice I read about building successful ecommerce sites. I seriously wonder who writes this stuff! In this post I debunk 5 common myths.

Of all the sites I am involved in at Headscape it is the ecommerce sites that excite me the most.

How can you not get excited about working on a website where the fruits of your labour are so visible and direct? Do a good job and the website makes more money, screw up and profits decline. There is something wonderfully black and white about it.

With such a measurable and obvious success criteria, you would have thought best practice would be well established and generally accepted. Bad advice would be quickly exposed for what it is and successful techniques would rise to the top.

However, it would appear that is not the case. I am amazed at how bad some of the advice is and how much bad practice exists.

In this post I want to focus on five of the worst offenders, beginning with the belief that you can never give users too much information.

1. You can never give the user too much [Wrong!]

Only recently I was reading an article about ecommerce that actively argued for providing users with as much information as possible.

On the face of it, this sounds like a good idea. The more information you provide, the better informed their decision becomes. However, in reality too much information can be overwhelming and lead to choice paralysis.

Compare for example the experience of buying a computer. For you and me this is a purchasing decision we are very comfortable with. However, for the majority of consumers it can be an intimidating experience. It is a minefield because there are too many choices and options.

Recently I bought a Dell netbook. Even as an experienced computer users this was a harrowing decision. I knew I wanted a low end, cheap netbook, so immediately ignored the plethora of laptops and desktops that could have confused my purchasing decision. However, that didn’t make the purchasing process easier. I still had to choice between the Dell Mini 9, 10 and 10v. I had to wade through technical specs outlining the differences, most of which I found unintelligible.

Screen capture from Dell Website

Once I had made my choice, I was presented with even more details and options. I had to select colour, type of hard drive, size of hard drive, operating system and on and on and on. In fact it even made me approve options where I had no alternative choice!

When compared to the limited and clearly defined line up of Apple computers, the contrast could not be more apparent.

Screen capture from the Apple website

More is not always better. If you want to encourage users to buy, then you need to make their choice a simple one. Remove everything but the most important information and minimise the number of choices available. This is something that has been understood for some time in traditional retailing, but has not filtered through to the web.

One retail technique that has transferred to the web is up-selling. However, you should thing twice about how to implement this technique.

2. Never miss an opportunity to cross-sell [Wrong!]

We all know supermarkets do it. You are queuing at the checkout surrounded by chocolate, magazines and other extras. They hope we will be tempted to pick up something on the way out. You go in for a loaf of bread and come out with a basket full of chocolates and a magazine on interior design. Any marketeer will tell you how effective this technique is.

Photograph of a supermarket checkout

Many successful websites also use this approach very effectively. Amazon is always looking for opportunities to cross-sell, based on its extensive knowledge of your buying habits and those of other users. However, even though it is obvious we will buy items on the spur of the moment, Amazon does not always up-sell.

Amazon recognises that the web is not the same as the real world. Unlike supermarkets, Amazon will not up-sell once users reach the checkout. In fact they are careful to avoid any distractions.

Screen capture of Amazon checkout

When the competition is only a click away you do not have the luxury of asking users to stand in line at the checkout, while you present them with additional products. Unlike the supermarket checkout there is no person to guide you through the process. It is user driven and so has to be as easy, focused and fast as possible.

Yes, it is important to up-sell. However, do it before the checkout process begins. Once the user makes a decision to buy, you need to ensure nothing gets in the way of that transaction. Some opportunities to cross-sell are worth missing.

Of course, there is no reason you cannot encourage users to buy again after the transaction is complete. That is where we need to look beyond the website.

3. Its all about your site [Wrong!]

Web designers want to sell you web site design services. It is therefore unsurprising that they concentrate their attention and advice on the website. However, the website is only one small part of a successful ecommerce business. The heart of successful ecommerce lies in service, not the website.

Don’t become so fixated on tweaking and improving your website that you neglect other areas of the user experience. Good customer service extends well beyond the users interactions with the website. It also includes vital components such as:

Email notifications - Do you keep the customer informed about the progress of their order?
Telephone support – Do you allow customers to speak to you directly?
Returns policy – How easy is it for customers to return an item if they do not like it?
Fulfilment – Are you in a position where you can fulfil orders quickly and dispatch them immediately?
Complaints handling – How well do you handle customer complaints? Do you go the extra mile?
Ongoing communication – Do you regularly keep in touch with customers? Do you offer them special deals and discounts? Is it easy for customers to opt out of these communications?

Customers who receive superb service are considerably more likely to make a second purchase and even more likely to recommend you to friends and family.

Screenshot from Customer Service Matters

Visit Bruce’s blog Now

It is even possible to substantially reduce your marketing spend if you make customer service a priority. Instead your reputation will spread through word of mouth.

Do not misunderstand, I still believe that getting your website right is extremely important. Small things can make a big difference in the eyes of your users. Take for example security.

4. Users care about security… badges [Wrong!]

There is no doubt that users care about online security. In fact there is still a large proportion of people who are unwilling to buy online for fear of credit card fraud. The media has done an excellent job at ensuring the public are suspicious of online transactions, even though they are willing to hand over their credit card in a restaurant.

Whether the users concerns are justified or not, we need to take them seriously if we want people to buy.

Many ecommerce businesses spend a lot of money ensuring their sites are secure. How then do they choose to communicate this massive investment to their users in order to reassure them? – They slap a badge on their website!

Adding a small Verisign or Mcafee badge to your checkout page is not enough to alleviate users fears. At best they are free advertising for the companies involved. At worst they are entirely ignored because they look like banners.

A screen capture of a website with no security information except a Verisign logo

A better approach is to tackle the problem head on. Add copy to your website addressing this issue and the steps you have taken to ensure the customers security. Do not rely on a single graphic to say all that needs to be said.

5. Amazon is the template we should all follow [Wrong!]

This final lie is probably the most widely held of all. There is a belief that because Amazon is so successful, all ecommerce websites should follow their example.

There is however a number of flaws in this argument:

They don’t get everything right (nobody can).
They are partially successful because they were one of the first ecommerce websites to market.
Their reputation and brand recognition allows them to get away with a lot.
Users are familiar with their site and its eccentricities.

In short, what works for them will not necessarily work for you. Too many website owners blindly copy Amazon because they are seen as the leader in ecommerce. Not only is that flawed for the reasons I gave above, it also removes the possibility of you ever being better than Amazon or innovating in anyway.

Amazon Homepage

Don’t get me wrong – I believe there is a lot that can be learnt from Amazon. However, I do not believe it is in anybodies interest to blindly follow their lead.

Bonus lie: Ecommerce is easy

Probably the biggest lie of all is that ecommerce is easy. Admittedly off the shelf solutions such as Shopify make it extremely easy to build ecommerce websites. However, building the site is only the beginning. The real challenge comes in:

focusing your site,
deciding on when to up-sell,
providing great customer service,
communicating clearly
and learning from others.

Creating a successful ecommerce business is a long term commitment and you will need to continually evolve both your website and strategy.

So, what about you? What ecommerce lies have you heard? What great advice would you like to pass on? Post in the comments below.

5 common ecommerce mistakes

Posted in Web strategy on April 20, 2009 by James Greenwood

In the first of a series of guest posts James Greenwood shares some common ecommerce mistakes.

Ecommerce has revolutionised the way trading is being carried out, has created completely new enterprises and has provided existing retailers with a platform to trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

However, having developed and worked with retailers over the last 10 years to help them create their ecommerce offering, there are still critical mistakes being made.

Given this article has been written for Boagworld, and that Paul in particular loves a “top five” list, here’s my top five mistakes being made by e-retailers:

Mistake 1: Poor checkout Procedure

Unless you’re one of the “big boys”, forcing shoppers to register an account with you is likely to be a big mistake. There are very few online shops which get our repeat purchases and so warrant an account. On a big name site, I’m happy to sign up for an account as I’m more than likely going to use you again. Think Amazon.

However, for most eCommerce sites, I’d recommend the following:

From the basket screen, collect the customer details (Billing Address, Delivery Address etc). This should all be on one page, and not the “Step 1 of 5” method of 10 years ago!
Once this data has been collected, ask the user if they’d like to store their details with a password. Inform them that by doing so, it would enable them to retrieve their details when they next purchase, that they’ll be able to track their order or that they’ll be added to a mailing list. The key is to offer them something in return!
Take the order regardless of account creation or not.

You’ve not put anyone off from purchasing with you and also tidied up your mailing list to one of genuinely interested contacts.

Mistake 2: Failing to analyse all of your data

And, no, I don’t just mean check Google Analytics (although of course, you should be doing).

Every visitor to your site, whether they purchase from you or not, is revealing a wealth of information which if used properly, can improve your offer to the e-shopper. In fact, visitors who are not purchasing from you are almost more important to you than those that are….

Firstly, a good eCommerce platform should store lots of data about your shoppers. Basket data should be stored in the database, and any free text searches that are made on your site should also be stored too.

Get in to the habit of checking to see what items are being put into baskets versus the items being sold – you may well find that an offer on a particular line means you sell more. It might highlight that you need to reduce the price on a particular line, or it may highlight an issue with UI. Either way, using basket data allows you to react – this data is gold.

The same principal applies for free text search – knowing what people are searching for on your site allows you to cater for their needs.

Mistake 3: Confusing shoppers with categories

We’ve all seen them – categories with nothing in, categories with one product in or multiple categories on an eCommerce platform with a handful of products.

Don’t die by category overload – arrange them logically and simply, and provide your shoppers with means of filtering their results so they can find what they are looking for without having to rummage around surplus categories.

Mistake 4: Not being aware of how users are shopping

The advent of the tabbed browser has caused a problem for many e-retailers. Shoppers can now compare products side by side more easily now. Even less experienced Web users who only use the browser that came with their machine are now being encouraged by Internet Explorer to browse using tabs.

Ensure pictures are sharp and informative, ensure descriptions are complete and full (there’s an SEO benefit in this too) and ensure that your prices are competitive. Oh, and don’t milk delivery charges!

Following this advice should mean than when side by side with a competitor, your store is the one which gets the cash.

Mistake 5: Not looking after your hard earned shoppers

It is easier to look after an existing shopper than it is to attract a new one. Don’t hide telephone numbers or email addresses on your site; always ensure that they are prominent. It might be that I want to ask a question before purchasing – encourage me to do so!

Once I’ve purchased, keep me informed with what’s happening with my order – if it’s on backorder unexpectedly, let me know. The chances are that I’ll understand, but by not informing me, my reaction is likely to be different. Don’t make me chase you to find out about my order – get in first!

So, selling online is as easy as that then?

To ensure a high percentage of visitors purchase, is it really as easy as making your checkout procedure easy, analysing data to find out what it is that I want to buy, ensuring I can find the product I want easily and then offering me a great deal on price and customer service values?

Well, yes, actually it is.

However, a great looking site that’s easy to find in the search engines, is marketed well online and offline and is easy to navigate also helps. That’s another article….

About the Author: James Greenwood

James is a director at media agency Strawberry and keeps a blog with articles and site portfolio. You can also follow him on twitter.

160. Education, Education, Education

Posted in Classic shows on April 8, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: We speak to Aarron Walter about teaching web standards. Ryan Carson starts a series on web applications and Paul talks about remote user testing.

Podcast: Download (30.2MB)

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Housekeeping

A couple of quick pieces of housekeeping to kick off with…

Huge thanks to Ryan Taylor, Paul Stanton and Sarah Parmenter who did a stellar job standing in for myself and Marcus on last week’s show. They were actually far too good and I have already started receiving requests that they become the permanent hosts! Anyway, if you didn’t hear last week’s show then make a point of downloading it.
My second piece of housekeeping is a quick plug for Bamboo Juice, a grass roots conference taking place in Cornwall on the 24th April. Myself and Jeremy Keith are just two of the speakers in what will be a packed day. It’s so good to see smaller conferences like this springing up outside of London and so I would encourage as many of you as possible to attend. Best of all its only £99 (£79 for Boagworld listeners!)

News

To be honest, what with SXSW and my week’s holiday I am feeling completely out of touch with the web design world. Fortunately, Mr Stanton is continually updating our twitter feed with juicy stories. I have therefore picked 4 that caught my eye.

How to create a great web design CV

Poor old Smashing Magazine. People do like to tease them (myself included), but they write some damn useful articles. A recent example that caught my eye was ‘How To Create A Great Web Design CV and Resume?‘.

This post is essentially two articles in one. It starts by asking 10 designers to design a hypothetical CV for a fictional individual. Each designer writes a short paragraph about their chosen approach and you get to look at some nice examples.

The second part of the post provides 10 useful tips for creating a great CV. Suggestions include…

Make it printable
Have a summary
Link to online projects
Show your personality
Keep it simple and understandable

For the complete list of tips read the whole post.

Its a good post, but I am not sure whether producing a ‘designed CV’ is entirely necessary for web designers. If I was hiring a print designer then I would expect a CV to look impressive. However, if I am recruiting a web designer I think I would be just as happy receiving a cleanly designed CV that links to a stunning portfolio website.

There are a lot of differences between designing for the web and print. It is possible to be good at one and not the other. Therefore, a printed CV doesn’t tell me much about a persons capability as a web designer. That said, a well designed CV isn’t going to hurt your cause!

Design: Make it Memorable

One tip that could have gone in the Smashing Magazine article, is to make your CV ‘memorable’ and not just ‘flashy’. This picks up on the theme of a post over at 37 Signals entitled Designers: Make it Memorable.

The post talks about the difference between making something visually appealing and actually memorable. Too many sites are impressive but fail to leave a lasting impression. At one point in the post the author writes…

I started to recall those amazing Flash Sites of the Day. You know those sites that get passed around via IM in your office on a slow day? Simply amazing design and programming. Problem is: I can’t for the life of me remember what those URLs were much less the company/product that was being featured! Isn’t that the point with those sites? That the impact should be profound so that you remember Product or Company X?

This is a lesson that all those involved in the web design process need to learn. Whether we are designers or website owners, we have a tendency towards thing that provide the wow factor. However, often it is the thing that makes us go wow we remember rather than the message being communicated.

Statistics and website owners

Our next article of the week is an ‘all too brief’ post on web stats entitled How to Sell Statistics to Clients.

The post focuses on a common problem – most website owners know they should be tracking website statistics, but don’t really know what they are looking for. In fact the author writes…

In my experience, the loudness or frequency of a person’s request for web statistics is inversely proportional to their understanding of them.

That has often been my experience too.

He goes on to identify three ways that we as web designers can help rectify this problem. These are:

Providing cheat sheets that help the client understand terms like ‘hits’ ‘page views’ and ‘unique users’.
Add web metrics training into the budget of your projects.
Provide summaries and reports for the client on key metrics such as conversion rates or sales.

To be honest this is a much bigger problem than can be covered in a short blog post. Too many website owners think that having Google Analytics will solve their statistics needs. However, having the data is not the same as understanding it. If this information is misread it can lead to bad decisions about the future development of a site.

Specialist vs. Generalist: Who Wins?

The final post this week is of interest to pretty much everybody who listens to this show. It asks which is better – the Specialist or the Generalist.

This is an important questions for both web designers and website owners. As web designers we need to know whether we should be specialising in a specific area of web design. It is important for our careers and our businesses.

As website owners we want to know whether the pain of dealing with multiple specialist suppliers is worth the increased expertise you would receive over a generalist.

It has to be said the article is written mainly from the web designers perspective. However, I think there are lessons to be learnt for all sides.

The post outlines the pros and cons of both approaches, but ultimately comes down on the fence when it says…

There are advantages to being in both groups, but I think the only way to be truly successful is by being a little of both. You can be a specialist, but in order to be able to develop a profitable business, you may need to be able to supplement your specialty services with some add-on services that may not be exactly in line with your focus.

Personally, I think it depends on how you define specialist. The type and level of specialisation can vary massively and the way you position yourself will define your success. For example, you may specialise in a certain discipline (e.g. Ruby on Rails development) or in a specific market (Higher Education).

Ultimately, whether you are a website owner seeking an agency or a web designer forging a career, it is all about balance.

As a web designer, if you specialise too much you will not find work. If you generalise you cannot differentiate yourself.

As a website owner you want a web designer who is enough of an expert to deliver an outstanding solution, but you do not want so many specialists that your project turns into a nightmare.

Interview: Aarron Walter on Interact

Paul: Hello, and so joining me today is Aarron Walter. Good to have you on the show, Aarron.

Aarron: Thanks for having me.

Paul: And the reason we have Aarron on the show is because he is going to talk about a new initiative.. is ‘initiative’ the right word, Aarron?

Aarron: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Let’s go with that. A new initiative from the web standards project, called Interact. Now, let’s kick off, Aarron, by maybe you telling our listeners a little bit about what Interact is.

Aarron: So, whilst Interact is an open curriculum framework, basically we’ve been recognising that the Web Standards Project has been around for a long time and we’ve done a lot of things to try to get standards into industry. And to a certain degree we’ve made some big triumphs in that respect, but there are still a lot of websites out there that aren’t following standards and people that are sort of behind. And we saw the Achilles heal as to why that’s not happening, as really, education. So, you know, our medium’s really young and it hasn’t really found it’s bearings with how we’re going to marry industry and education, so whilst Interact is a curriculum that has a series of courses that teach not only web standards, but best practices.

So there’s of course the stuff that you would expect from WaSP which is the front-end development courses that teach progressive enhancement and semantic markup and that sort of thing. But we have six learning tracks that include foundations; there’s a course in there that’s like an intro to internet concepts and how people can use the internet to teach themselves and use RSS, that sort of thing.

So there’s front end development, there’s a design track, there’s server side development, there’s user science and then there’s also professional practice. So what we’re trying to do is create a collection of courses that are very modular, to try to get these into schools. And we recognise that not every school is just going to take the entire curriculum and integrate that into their program. You know, if you’re a Computer Science program maybe you’ll take a course or two, if you’re a design program you’ll take a course or two, or even just grab the assignments or look at our competencies.

Each course is based on competencies, which are the things a student has to master before they can pass a course. And then the evaluation methods: So each course has assignments, it has exam questions, it has readings that come from Operas own web standards curriculum – we’ve been collaborating with them. It has textbooks, it has pretty much everything that an educator could need to teach a particular topic.

Paul: Okay, so is this something that is then aimed entirely at educators, or if somebody wanted to get into web design and they were trying to learn it in their spare time, could they just go to this and use it in isolation by themselves?

Aarron: To some degree, I guess they could, but Operas web standards curriculum is really learner-centric, so if you’re trying to teach yourself, that’s probably the place to go. But ours is very much focused on educators, because we feel like there’s a lot of great resources out there on the web if someone wants to teach themselves, but there’s not a lot of great stuff for educators to get stuff into their courses.

Paul: So, when you say ‘educators’, I mean what kind of level are we looking at here? Earlier you mentioned schools. Are we talking about school age, or are we talking about higher education? What are we covering here?

Aarron: I’d say our primary target is higher education, colleges, universities, even training programs to some degree. But we are also seeing some of our content in high schools as well and we’d like to see that more. Especially foundations courses like the web design one course or the internet fundamentals course. If students could go into college with a solid foundation, then they can start to focus more on "What can I do with these techniques?" than theory and concept.

Paul: So is this design to be fairly international or is it quite U.S centric in the way that it’s written.

Aarron: We want it to be very international and the people that have worked together on this are from lots of different places. We’ve got some folks in Europe, Canada and of course some folks in the U.S, so it is in an international group that’s coming together and we’re actually working with WaSPs ILG group – that’s the International Liaison Group. And we’re working on, this year one of our big goals is to try to get a lot of our content translated to different languages.

Paul: Okay, so there will be multiple language versions of all of this as well at some point?

Aarron: That’s the direction we’re heading, yes.

Paul: So, I mean, how did this come about in the sense of, you know, well, how did you get involved in it for a start and what was the motivation behind it?

Aarron: So, I’ve been teaching for the past ten years in different schools in the U.S and colleges and universities, but I’ve also been working in the industry as well. And I got on WaSPs mailing list, I just joined the mailing list and started to talk to some folks and then they invited me to join – it was a year ago, I guess it was at the very beginning of 2008 – and so I joined the education task force who created the Interact project. And basically there were ideas about the curriculum and I’d heard lots of people say "Yeah, what we really need is, you know, education’s way behind" and they’re happy to point fingers and "We need a curriculum", but it just never was really transpiring from anyone coming from the industry and so we kind of just decided we need to do this. And I’ve helped create curricula before as a faculty member at the Art Institute of Atlanta and so I had some ideas and we had a really great group of folks that are in the education task force – people that are educators and people that are experts from the industries. So, yeah.. actually South by South West was where this all started, which is pretty amazing, of course there are lots of great people there. So Glenda Sims, who’s one of the heads of WaSP these days introduced me to Chris Mills from Opera who was working on his project and we kind of had some drinks at the Geeks Club bowling event and we just kind of went crazy talking about these ideas. And Steph Troeth then Leslie Jensen-Inman and we all had these ideas, and then we just set a goal for ourselves in 2008 at South by South West and we said "In a years time, we’re gonna be back and we’re gonna have a curriculum." and that’s what we did. This year we launched our curriculum at South By.

Paul: That’s quite an impressive turnaround for the amount of information that’s in there. How did you draw everything together? Where did it all come from?

Aarron: Well, we met every week online and we talked and we established a course template, which really helped us. The stuff that we really needed to put in these foundation courses, we all know what needs to go in there. It’s just a matter of getting around the pedagogy or the educational part of it. So we developed a template for assignments, a template for a course and a template for learning modules which are basically like, you know, a teacher could teach a concept like let’s say, HTML forms in a weeks time. So we developed those templates and then from there we just assigned courses to different people and we used a wiki and we just met regularly and.. I gotta say, you don’t have to have a huge group to develop a curriculum.You just have to have a few people who really have their heart in it and.. we have some amazing folks, so..

Paul: So, what kind of response are you getting so far from H.E institutions? Are they interested in adopting it? If they are, how are they going to go about that, because, I mean, my impression is that it always takes forever to get a curriculum approved at a university or whatever. So I’m just interested in how that process is going.

Aarron: Yeah, education is.. one of it’s benefits is that it’s slow to move, so once it gets a solid foundation it keeps that solid, but you know, one of it’s drawbacks is that it’s slow to move. And so we’ve got some schools that are really excited about it and generally the folks that.. you know, it’s only been a couple of weeks that this has been live, we’ve got some folks that are really excited about it and those are folks that were kind of headed in the same direction themselves. So we’ve gotten some responses from schools in Europe and some schools in the United States that are interested in pulling some stuff in. And we have a school that’s looking at using a lot of our content right now. So we’re in the early stages of trying to get this out there. I think the easiest part is building the curriculum, because we know what needs to go in there. The hardest part is getting it into schools. So one of our strategies is to get the endorsements of folks in the industry, so we’ve gotten endorsements from Google, from Yahoo, from Adobe, from W3C, from Opera, from Mozilla – they’re all just super excited about what we’re doing and that sort of brand recognition can help us get our foot in the door with schools. And of course going out to conferences, we’ve got folks at the European Accessibility conference right now, talking about it, so we’re just trying to get out there and let people know.

Paul: Excellent. That sounds brilliant. I mean, I know that a lot of people that listen to the Boagworld podcast – there’s a large number of students that we’ve got listening and I often get complaints about this, that what they’re being taught at university bears no resemblance to what they’re hearing on this podcast. And I’m hoping that that’s because the podcast is right and the university is wrong and not the other way around. So if they’re listening to this and they’re getting really excited about it and, you know, they’ve gone to your website and they’re seeing the curriculum – I’ve got it on front of me now and it does look really exciting – how do they make this happen in their institution? What would you encourage them to do?

Aarron: So, this is the interesting thing – that so many of us have complained about a problem, but there aren’t a lot of people that will take that complaint and turn it into action. So if you’re a student or if you’re an educator what we need you to do is, there’s a page that’s called Advocate Standards (http://interact.webstandards.org/advocate/) – you can get to it from the homepage of http://interact.webstandards.org. It kind of just describes what standards are, why they’re relevant to you and we need people to share that information with their teachers, we need people to share just this website with their colleagues and show them the testimonials of the people who believe in this and want students to come out of schools with these skills. So we need people to act in a bottom-up sort of way, you know, grass roots. Take this to your classroom, take this to your teacher, take this department chair and just let him know. That’s the most powerful thing that people can do right now.

Paul: I mean, what I’m quite excited about from looking at this curriculum is that it contains a lot more than "Here’s how you code in X language" or whatever and even has got more in it than just design and user experience stuff. All this stuff about professional practices is very exciting too. Could you perhaps tell us a little bit about that?

Aarron: Yeah, so professional practice, we want people to not only get the concrete skills of "I can code a standard compliant page" or "I can construct a usable website", but we want people to be able to present their about their work and you know, be able to survive in a real career in the web. And so professional practices is going to have a series of courses to do that. We’ve got some pretty exciting ones that are coming up. There’s ‘writing for the web’ – it’s going to be a really cool one, that Alan Hussain from a List Apart is going to be creating. And we have a presentation course that’s coming down the line. So, we’ve got a number of those coming up.

Paul: That’s quite interesting, you just said something that I hadn’t grasped which is that there’s more to come here. That this isn’t the end of the line. It sounds like you’ve got lots more that you’re still developing. Is that right?

Aarron: Yeah. We call it a living curriculum, because you never write a curriculum and then you’re done. Especially in our industry, things change so fast. is what of course we’re going to be working on this year. Our design track is light right now and we want to try and address that ASAP, so we’ve got Dan Rubin and Ethan Marcott, are working together to create a foundation design course, that is specific to what web designers need to understand. And we also have Dan Mall is going to be helping us with a Flash course and Aral Balkan is also going to help us with some flash stuff too. We have a lot of stuff going on this year for new courses, so we hope next year at South By when we see everybody that we’ll have a brand new stack to add to Interact.

Paul: Excellent, so do you kind of envisage, from an institutional point of view that, like we were saying, it takes a long time for a curriculum to get approved and that part of the problem has always been that, by the time it’s approved it’s out of date, when it comes to the web. So is the idea that you’re going to get institutions to buy into the Interact curriculum in its evolving nature so that they always get the most up to date version of it. Is that the kind of plan? They’re not grasping one moment in time from it, if that makes sense?

Aarron: Yeah, exactly and we want to take some of the hard work out of being a teacher. I speak from experience, there’s so many things you have to keep track of and trying to keep pace with a lot of changing technologies and concepts, that’s hard on top of the umpteen other plates you’re spinning. So that’s exactly what’s going to happen, is that our courses, they’re not chiseled in stone, they’re published on the web, they’re in an expression engine and we’ll change those as they need to be changed. But that said, we need to strike a balance, because we can’t be chasing every new technology all the time, we have to evaluate and there has to be foundational concepts that remain steady. Separation of presentation and content, that’s steady foundation concept. But new technologies or techniques, they might change.

Paul: Okay, I mean, the whole area of education and web design is massively exciting and there’s so much going on at the moment in so many different fields. I mean, from your perspective, what else out there is really exciting you at the moment that you’re seeing.

Aarron: There’s so much, I just feel like last year that I just saw so many companies, organisations, individuals that, it seems that everyone just was pissed and they just walked out their house and they were headed in one direction until it was like everyone sort of meets up in one big mob. And so, what Opera’s doing, what Chris Mills has done with the 55 articles that he’s brought together and edited for Opera Web Standards Curriculum, that’s huge. Those are all rolled into WaSP Interact as our recommended reading, so that was fantastic. Yahoos Juku project, if you’ve heard of this it’s quite amazing. Nick Fogler, who’s the running Juku – Yahoo actually has a training program, where they bring students that are not employees, they’re not hiring them. They bring them in and they train them to be front end engineers over the course of a few months. And they’re doing it because they’re trying to solve this problem on their own. So, we’re talking with them about how they’re solving problems and looking to collaborate and discuss what we can learn from them. John Allsopp who runs Web Directions (the conference series), he brought myself and Chris Mills and Steph Troeth together with a number of other experts and we did Ed Directions, which was a day long workshop that taught teachers how to teach these concepts in their classroom. So there’s just so much stuff that’s happening right now and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Paul: Exciting stuff. It sounds like it’s a really good time and it’s great to have you on the show. How you manage to fit all of this in alongside earning a living too is quite beyond me, but it’s really good that so many people are volunteering and pitching in. That’s great. Okay, let’s get you back on the show, I guess in a years time and sees what’s changed. But thank you very much for coming in now and I will talk to you again soon. Thanks.

Aarron: Thanks for having me.

Thanks goes to Andrew Marquis for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

We have two emails this week dealing with two totally unrelated subjects.

Remote user testing

Our first email is from Steve. He writes…

Catching up on past podcasts, I listened to the episode on User Testing (#150). A method I’ve used that I haven’t heard tossed around much is remote user testing using a screen sharing program like GoToMeeting.

I used this for usability testing of our Intranet and it has several advantages:

No need for people to come to central testing facility, or you to go to them.

The user is at their own computer, so more comfortable.

Ability to record the entire session (screen and audio) so others can look at it later.

Tester can conduct testing while in his underwear only (I didn’t do this, but you could.)

What do you think of this method?

Sounds interesting although it would not be my preferred approach.

It’s easy to become a snob when it comes to usability testing and so let me make it entirely clear – any usability testing is better than none.

If you have no budget for user testing, test on friends and family. If time is tight, test on a colleague sitting nearby.

In the same way, if you are having trouble arranging sessions then use Steve’s approach. Something is always better than nothing.

That said, I do have some concerns with remote testing. These include…

It sets a minimum bar of technical competency. A user has to be able to connect to the system in order to participate. I know this would have been beyond the capabilities of some test subjects I have worked with.
It is less personal. Face to face usability testing puts users much more at their ease and allows you to build a relationship that facilitates honest feedback.
It does not allow you to read non-visual signals. Users will often pull a face or shift their positions when they are frustrated. As a facilitator you need to be able to see these signals and ask what they mean.
You are not seeing exactly what the user is seeing. You can only see their screen. You cannot see other distractions such as TV in the background. You cannot see the position of their keyboard and mouse. You have a limited field of view.

My preferred approach is to test in people’s homes. Not only are the users more relaxed, you also get a unique glimpse into their world. You see where they access the web, you learn about their home environment and even gain a better understanding of their character.

However, we do not always live in a perfect world and so would definitely use remote testing if better options were not available.

Finding a job

Our second email is a rather despondent one from Andrew…

I have one question, In the past you’ve talked about hiring new for staff, but as far as I can tell you’ve never discussed how to look for a job. I’m currently looking for a career in the industry, but I can’t get a resume to any company or even talk to someone of said company. Almost all the businesses I’ve approached (or at least tried to) either work from home, are no longer at that address, or no longer in business, and actually are just freelancers. And when I find a job posting online its for someone far more experienced then I am. I’m completely demoralized.

You have my sympathy Andrew and I have to say its a tough time to to break into any new sector including web design.

I am also probably not the best person to answer this question. I have been completely unemployable for some time now due to my ill defined skillset and opinionated character :)

So, I am going to try something different with this question. If you have some advice for Andrew, post a comment below. That way we can get the Boagworld community helping each other.

In the meantime here are a few random ideas from me…

Give up on the cold calling technique. Randomly contacting agencies is largely a waste of time. You have to get amazingly lucky to contact an agency who happens to be currently recruiting.
Try for an internship. Admittedly you will not get paid, but it is a foot in the door. You get a chance to improve your skills and also get to know the people in the industry within your area.
Be willing to move. There are jobs out there but they are often further a field.
Put yourself in a neat little box. Potential employers need to know what you do. Are you a designer, a coder or a server side developer? Companies don’t know what to do with people who know a bit about everything.
Start networking. The best place to find job opportunities is by attending conferences and meetups. Even if you cannot afford the conference itself, turn up at the parties and stand in the halls. Just get yourself out there.
Register with recruitment agencies. As an employer I hate recruitment agencies because they cost me money. However, we do still sometimes use them and it doesn’t cost you anything to be listed with them.
Ensure your website is perfect. The first thing I do when I look at a potential employee is check out their website. Their site has to be outstanding. It needs to look amazing, be well coded and rich with great content that demonstrates a passion for the web.

Hopefully that helps Andrew and keep an eye on the comments for more advice.

Series: Building A Better Web Application by Ryan Carson

Ryan Carson: Hi I am founder of Carsonified a small web company in Bath, England. I am an American as you can probably tell, as for living in England I have been here about nine years. So a little bit of history about us real quick so you know who I am. I have a computer science degree and I have been involved in building four web apps and we are building a fifth truvay.com which will be released later in 2009, and we have sold two of our webapps dropsend.com and heyamigo.net. So the stuff that I am going to share with you today are lessons I have learnt the hard way basically as we have built web apps.

So the first thing I want to talk about is the Admin area that you will build for your web app. What a lot of people don’t know is that the Admin area is really the key to good customer service. If you haven’t enabled really easy customer service then it makes it hard to actually please your customers when they have problems so the first one to make sure you build into your admin for your web app are one click refunds so if someone calls and complains and says hey I am having trouble this month I am really frustrated please help you want to be able to just go into the admin do a search for their email address, their name or their company or anything and bam one click and refund their last invoice and what this does is it gives you, it gives you the ability to just make them happy right away. With a lot of web apps these days on recurring billing you will probably be charging people 5,10,15, $20 a month so losing that amount of revenue in return for really making a customer happy is super important. So make that easy for yourself to refund that money.

The second thing I would make it easy to do is have one click password reset that automatically sends out email with the new password, so with Dropsend it was really hard to reset people’s passwords and that was the number one request people had problems with, they couldn’t remember their password. So if I was to do it again what I would do is I would actually build the admin so I could forward an email from somebody presuming they had sent it from the email address of the account, forward it into Dropsend or the admin and it would automatically know that what it needed to do is reset the password for that email and then it sends out a new one so literally you do not even have to visit the admin area to reset someone’s password you just forward an email that would be amazing, so that’s the way I would do it next time.

The next thing I would do is also doing a one-click resend invoice. So a lot of people they don’t understand they can go into their "My Account" area of a web app to see their past invoices and what they will do is they will just email you and say hey you know I need last month’s invoice. If it is hard for you to find that or send that it is going to make you less likely to help that person so I would do a search on the email address show a list of invoices bam one click and it emails them a pdf version of the invoice. That’s another, that leads me onto another area that I would like to talk about that is invoicing. If you are doing recurring billing sort of every month billing your customers make sure that you are not re-inventing the wheel I would recommend a web app called Spreedly.com and what it is basically it is a web service for recurring billing they have done all the hard work, written all the code, the code for the Dropsend recurring billing was at least I think 1200 lines of PHP and it was good solid code but it was really hard and painful to write. So I would recommend don’t re-invent the wheel use a service like Spreedly because it is making calls to an API if later you decide you don’t want to use a service like Spreedly any more that layer has been abstracted out so you could replace it with your own billing system or another one and it won’t kill you, but I would say hands down don’t rebuild reoccurring billing it is a real pain in the ass.

The last tip I would say about your admin area is make sure that it is easy to give your customers credits. you want to be able to login search for an email address and just give them, hey I want to give them five bucks towards next month, ten bucks just to make them happy and you will have lots of happy customers. So that is my five minutes of tips, thanks Paul for letting me be a part of this. Take care Bye.

GetSignOff goes public

Posted in News on October 20, 2008 by Paul Boag

Today GetSignOff finally opens to the public. It has been an interesting journey.

Part of my reason for writing this post is obviously to pimp GetSignOff and to encourage you all to check it out. However, I also want to take a moment and reflect on the lessons learnt so far. This is Headscape’s first application and we have got some things right and some wrong. I wanted to share all that I have learnt.

However, let me begin with the blatant advertising…

What is GetSignOff?

GetSignOff is an application aimed at web designers. It allows you to present designs, manage feedback and handle multiple iterations of a design concept. However, most of all it is designed to help you get sign off from clients.

It has loads of cool features…

Can be used to approve mood boards, interface elements, imagery, personas, storyboards, site design concepts or any other element of the web design process
Fully customisable CSS and visual appearance
Use your own customised domain name
Up to 30GB of storage
Manage unlimited numbers of clients, projects and designs
Create and manage multiple versions of each design
Add notes directly on your designs
Check to see if a client has viewed a design
Receive notifications via email and RSS
Each client can support multiple logins
Restrict client logins to specific projects
Easy to use interface (ideal for clients!)
Clear sign off procedure to ensure everybody knows when a design is approved

Okay, I have pimped it enough now. Signup for a free account and try it yourself.

What we have learnt?

Building a web application is nothing like building sites for clients. It has been a real eye opening experience and we have learnt a lot on the journey. At the minute my head is spinning but I wanted to share a few random thoughts. Apologises for their rough and ready nature…

Beta users rock! – The best thing we did was release a beta. Getting feedback from real users blew away our carefully laid plans and ‘all knowing’ attitude. Our beta users came up with some awesome ideas, and found horrendous bugs. However, even when they criticised the application they were amazingly encouraging. I can never thank them enough and would encourage anybody building an application to take a similar approach.
Cherish your users – I know saying ‘customer service is important’ has become a cliché but that is because it is true! People are so grateful when you answer their enquiries quickly and efficiently. You can defuse an angry customer by simply being helpful and attentive. It is not difficult.
Keep it simple – The temptation to add more and more features is overwhelming. People come up with great ideas and you have the overwhelming desire to use them. However, resist this temptation. I am so glad that I have read both Subject to Change and The Laws of Simplicity while developing this app. Both have encouraged me to keep things simple.
Don’t rush into features – There is also a desire to implement great ideas quickly. Somebody suggests something so good that you just have to add it. The trouble is this can lead to all kinds of complications. I have learnt it is better to consider an idea for a couple of weeks before implementing.
Pricing is a bitch – I hated this part. We looked at the competition, considered the value to the client and still couldn’t settle on a price. Unfortunately, it was hard to rely on feedback from beta users in this area. After all, they wanted it to be as cheap as possible. In the end it was Ryan Carson who helped the most. He warned against under pricing and rightly so. I think we all have a tendency to devalue our own work.
You only get one chance – This is currently terrifying me. You get one chance to make a first impression. I know the current wisdom is to release early, but if you release crap then users will never come back. Hopefully we have struck the right balance between quality and getting to market quickly.
Treat it like client work – This project stagnated for ages. It was something we wanted to make happen, but slipped because of paid client work. The way we kick started the project was by pricing and running it as a piece of client work. Only then did it get the priority it deserved.
Don’t fear competition – The first time we heard about a competing product we were gutted. By the third and forth we were in danger of slipping into despair. However, actually there was no need. Competition is good. It spurred us on and we even learnt from mistakes our competitors made. However, most importantly of all it made us focus. Until then we were trying to build an application that met the needs of anybody wanting design sign off. After we became aware of the competition we focused our app on meeting the needs of web designers. We decided to go niche and it was the best thing we could have done. While our competitors struggle to meet disparate needs, we focus on the requirements of a single target audience.

In reality we are just at the beginning of our journey. We have so much more we want to do with GetSignOff. However, there is no doubt that today is a significant milestone.

All I would ask of you is that you give the product a chance. If after signing up for a free account you like it, tell your friends and blog about it.

139. Brand

Posted in Classic shows on October 15, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show we’re joined by Ryan Carson to discuss building an online brand. We look at promoting your site with minimal budget and Marcus shares his views on working in an office.

Podcast: Download (33.1MB)

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News and events

Understanding progressive enhancement

Its funny how we spend our whole lives telling clients to avoid jargon and yet web design has more jargon than most. Every few months we seem to make up some new term that is thrown around like everybody knows it.

In reality some we have never heard certain terms, while others seems so similar to one another that the difference escapes us. Take for example ‘graceful degradation’ and ‘progressive enhancement’. Have you heard of them? Could you tell me the difference?

I have to be honest, I couldn’t. In fact in a few weeks you will hear an interview I recorded with Paul Annett from clear:left where I make a comment about graceful degradation and he said ‘no its more like progressive enhancement’. I had no clue why one was right and the other was wrong and I am supposedly a web design expert. Does that make me thick? Possibly. However, more likely I just missed the memo on that one.

The trouble is we are all too busy looking intelligent to clearly communicate with one another.

I have to some extent criticised A List Apart (among others) in the past for perpetuating this kind of ‘in the know mentality’. However, I am now being forced to eat my words (gratefully so) as they published an excellent article on Progressive Enhancement and why you should care about it.

Now if only somebody could explain what Web 2.0. really is.

A free conference (kind of)

I realise that some of the advice I give on this show is unrealistic for some. For example, I talk about the importance of attending conferences. However, when a conference can cost hundreds of pounds it is not always possible.

One alternative is to listen to the podcasts that most conferences published. Unfortunately, they are slow to appear and are hard to follow without being able to see the slides.

Fortunately, the FOWA in London has significantly raised the bar and other conferences will be forced to follow suit.

FOWA has released video of most talks. These appeared within hours of the speaker taking the stage, and are beautifully done including both speaker and screen.

There are also ‘highlights reels’ for most talks. These are a cut down version of the presentation, ideal if you are too busy to watch the whole thing.

With some of the most influential people in web design taking the stage, this is an invaluable resource and Carsonified should be congratulated for making it freely available.

Design Float

Talking of useful resources check out Design Float. Design Float is basically a Digg clone. However it is a clone aimed at designers.

I have to say I don’t like sites that rip off Digg. I have huge respect for what people like Daniel Burka and Joe Stump are doing at Digg. I hate to see people directly ripping off their work (normally badly).

However, Digg does have one flaw. It doesn’t serve the niche very well. Even Kevin Rose recently said: "We don’t really do a good job of servicing the long tail of content." And he is right.

As a web designer, categories such as technology or design are just too broad for me to bother following Digg regularly. Until this problem is resolved, Design Float is an alternative.

Design Float allows me to only see stories relating to web design and although the smaller community means that stories are posted less regularly, what is posted is pretty good.

I recommend checking it out. However, if you are a designer don’t just limit yourself to web design posts. Also look at the other design posts. There is some pretty inspiring stuff there.

Can we stop supporting text scaling?

Finally today, a post by Dave Shea in which he discusses page zooming.

Most modern browsers now support page zooming. The only exception is Safari and that will soon change. This allows users to zoom an entire page, not just the text. Obviously this is beneficial to those with visual impairments. However, is also exciting for web site owners and designers.

Traditionally websites have been forced to support text resizing. This significantly increased development time as well as making design integrity challenging. As text scales, designs often breakdown especially when fixed sized images are involved.

With page zooming these problems go away. It provides the designer with more control and reduces the costs of development. A cost normally passed on to the website owner.

Dave asks whether it is time to support page zoom rather than text resizing. As can be seem from the comments, there is no wrong or right answer. Nevertheless it is an interesting question and one you might want to start considering for your own site.

Interview: Ryan Carson on Building an Online Brand

Paul: So I’m really excited to have joining me today Ryan Carson from Carsonified. Good to speak to you Ryan.

Ryan: Thanks for having me Paul. Good to be here.

Paul: It seems that we are crossing paths more and more often with me doing various things with Future Of conferences and you guys kindly giving discounts to my listeners, so it’s good to finally actually have you on the show.

Ryan: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Paul: So the reason I have asked Ryan on to the show today is to talk a little bit about building an online brand. Carsonified have got lots of different brand identities going on with obviously Carsonified itself and then Future Of and ThinkVitamin and various other things. Ryan’s a bit of an expert really, or he comes across like that anyway, at building an online brand and I wanted to talk to him about how he’s gone about doing that. But before we get into that, Ryan, tell us a little bit about the background of Carsonified. How did it come into being, so to speak? How did it end up being what it is today?

Ryan: Well, it was kind of born four years ago. It started off basically as just me in our top bedroom. I used to be a developer in a web design studio and when Jill and I, my wife and I, got married four years ago we just decided to start our own company. At that point it was just me and I was trying to build web apps and attempting to make money and didn’t really do a great job of it. Then I kind of slowly moved into doing sort of more workshops and things and then we built our first proper web app, which was DropSend, and then we just kept growing and growing and doing more web apps and more websites, for ourself not for clients, and then we launched a couple big conferences, Future Of Web Apps and Future Of Web Design, and all of a sudden now we’re about eleven people. Located in Bath and just love what we do and are really excited to be part of the web industry. So that’s us kind of in a nutshell.

Paul: It’s quite interesting, the approach that you’ve taken. You’ve come from the same background as the vast majority of us yet your business has gone in a completely different direction. You haven’t gone down the road of delivering solutions to clients but you’ve done this quite eclectic thing of a bit of web apps here, conferences here. Was that an intentional thing or has it just kind of naturally evolved that way?

Ryan: It kind of naturally evolved but my mother, and your mom always knows you best, she always said there’s a vein that’s been running through my life for a long time, which is just connecting people. I don’t know, for whatever reason I just get a lot of joy out of connecting people and physical events are just a great way to do that. I’m passionate about the web and therefore it’s kind of like, well, connecting people in the web industry, in the technology sector is just kind of made sense. It did start off with this thing called BD4D which you probably don’t remember, By Designers For Designers. A friend and I did that and it was bd4d.com which is now gone but the idea was we got together designers for free just at a bar and people showed their work. It was in London originally and it kind of took off and I think then it was always just a for fun thing. We called it the Creative Fight Club. I think that was kind of the genesis of our events career. We don’t really see ourself as an events company we see ourselves very much as lovers of the web and technology and we just kind of happen to connect people at events so, it just kind of worked that way. I’m also not a big fan of working for clients because it’s just so hard. I really respect what you guys at Headscape and any web designer web developer because constantly doing work for clients is really hard work and it’s fun but it’s hard and because we run our own conferences and build our own web apps thankfully we’re our own client which gives us a bit more freedom. So that’s kind of how we ended up there.

Paul: It depends on how you look at it Ryan because from my point of view you’ve got thousands of clients while I only have one at a time because you have all those users of your apps and the people who come to your conferences. You’ve got far more trouble in my opinion.

Ryan: I guess you could look at it like that but they tend to be less demanding. They’re not paying us thousands of pounds each so it kind of. But you could look at it like that. We try to treat all of you who come to our show with the same respect as clients, it’s just a shorter term, lower economic value relationship.

Paul: OK, so let’s talk about brand a little bit and profile and stuff like that. Carsonified has kind of built quite a significant online profile and I’m just quite interested in some of the techniques that you’ve used to achieve that. You know, how have you made that happen?

Ryan: OK, well I think underlying everything we do is genuineness. I think that we care very much about honesty and being genuine and being kind and friendly and that sounds a bit fuzzy and happy but that’s just kind of, I don’t know, the way we are. And I think that’s been the key to our success, that when we do things people know that we’re not trying to pull the wool over their eyes or secretly sell them something. We have a genuine interest in the web and the tech industry and so when we do things people kind of know there’s real people that are behind this, we’re not some company. And I think we’ve always been very personal and very human and very transparent and I think that at least set the stage for being successful, but obviously we just follow through with pumping out tons of hopefully valuable content. We see building a brand as basically building friends and I think that on our blogs and through our tweets and at our events and through our communications we try to treat everybody as friends and that’s kind of, I think, a little bit of the key to our success.

Paul: I like that idea of talking about treating people as friends. I think that’s a good way. Too many people treat people as potential customers in preference to actually having any real interest in them as human beings I guess. So it’s good.

Ryan: Well yeah. I just kind of think about who do you like being around? I mean, It’s your friends and there’s a reason for that. I think why does business have to be different? Of course there’s an element of professionality but when you go to the pub and you relax it’s because you feel comfortable with people and I think that whole idea should permeate business. You know with your friends you just buy them a beer, but with your customers there’s significant money being exchanged I think that should involve even more trust than friendship. Hopefully our customers, our attendees and our sponsors really believe that we’re doing the right thing for them. You guys probably do something very similar when you work with your clients. You want them to know that you care about them. That this isn’t just about money that you actually are trying to build something beautiful and worthwhile for them.

Paul: Yeah. I mean it’s interesting. You talking about friends reminds me a little bit of the Innocent smoothie guys that I heard talking at Fuel, which is obviously one of your conferences, where they were talking about how they refer to their customers as family, don’t they? And I always thought was quite a. It sounds naff when you say out loud, referring to your customers as family but if you kind of treat them with that kind of respect, I don’t know, it’s good but it depends on how you get on with your family I guess.

Ryan: Yeah. It could be good or bad but the problem is that would never work if you didn’t actually think Innocent cared about you. If you looked on their bottle and there was E numbers and preservatives and stuff you’d think, “Well, they talk this stuff, but they don’t really seem that committed to doing this.” So I think it really needs to be backed up with a sincere and real effort to support. I mean, we’ve been talking about accessibility, this is a good example, at Carsonified for years. You know, “Yeah we care about accessibility and it’s a great thing,” but we don’t actually know what we’re doing and so we just met with AbilityNet yesterday with Robin and we said we want to get serious about this. I know that you guys are really good at accessibility and sort of putting our money where our mouth is. We want people with disabilities to be able to attend our shows and to use our websites. Let’s actually spend some money on that and get serious about it so at the bottom of each page we’re going to put a little thumbs up symbol that will go to a site that explains why accessibility is important to us and what we’ve done to move towards that with also sort of some tips and hints for people who are disabled like how can you use this site better and get more out of it so trying to put our money where our mouth is really.

Paul: Yeah. I tell you one of my favorite moments I ever had at one of your conferences was, I can’t even remember who the speaker was but the question that came out for the panel was about promoting your business and can you do that outside of San Francisco and California and this guy said you had to be in California you had to be at San Francisco if you wanted to launch a web app and you stood up afterwards and you completely laid into this guy and you said, “No no no, that’s not the case, blah blah blah.” But it does strike me, you know, you’re a Bath-based company and Bath isn’t exactly the beating heart of the web design world and I’m quite interested as to whether you feel that that’s been a barrier to you in any way, being based where you are.

Ryan: That’s a great question. It makes it harder, for sure. You know, we have to go to London to have meetings to go to drink, parties, to network, blah blah blah, but the way we make up for that, and I think a lot of your listeners won’t be in London necessarily or New York or Silicon Valley so this is applicable to all of you out there. It’s all about being visible on the web. And you guys do a good job of this as well. You just have to get yourself out there. So we blog as much as we can, we tweet as much as we can. We try to gather a community around us and that’s the way we make up for the fact that we’re not in London or Silicon Valley. I was going to say another important thing about building a brand, and this fits into that, you need to have an opinion in order to be heard, and that means that you have to be comfortable with the fact that people will completely disagree with you sometimes. You know I think in a way I’ve been successful at building a brand because I’m willing to say something that pisses people off really. You know and I think it’s only interesting to hear from someone who has an opinion. When Paul Graham said that “You know you need to be in the startup hub,” it just really made me angry, because he was basically saying to every one of us, well, you know you’re just kind of screwed, and I just thought, “You know what? That’s just not true, and it makes mad and I’m gonna sort of put my reputation on the line by going on stage and disagreeing with you, a well known entrepreneur.” And if I kind of was afraid to do that you know, not so many people know about et cetera. So yeah, get out there, blog, be as controversial as you can, you know as long as you’re being genuine and be ready for people to say mean things about you really.

Paul: Talking about mean things and people say mean things about you. You’ve come under some criticism for being somewhat pushy in your self-promotion. Do you think that’s kind of justified in any way? Do you think maybe there’s a cultural difference there, the fact that you’re American and are us English more uncomfortable with marketing and promoting ourselves?

Ryan: Yes, I think there is a cultural difference. But I’m also kind of, I like to think I’m friendly but I am sort of a brash person. I’m not afraid to tell you my opinion and do what I think I need to do. While being kind, I don’t want to sort of hurt anybody, but I think there is a cultural difference and I do think that, I mean my wife is English so I’m obviously very familiar with English culture now and British culture and I think there is kind of a slight uncomfortableness with getting on stage and blowing your own horn. I think that in the UK we need to get over that. Not change our culture here but be willing to admit that in the UK if we don’t start to step up to the plate and start talking about ourselves, the rest of the world’s just gonna carry on in the tech space. Mike Harrington, he’s not going to shut up. You know and unless we really start to kind of compete with that and start talk about all of the great things that are going on in the UK and really kind of get out there I think unfortunately it means that the startups and the web designers and web developers that are British are going to start to fall behind in the world stage. For instance, I was trying to think, who are the rock star developers in the UK? Who can you name? I mean I can name a couple but who do you think?

Paul: It’s hard. It’s hard to say. I think there are more rock star designers than there are developers. You know you can think of people like Rachel Andrew, and Drew. Two that spring to mind. Jeremy Keith is kind of a developer but maybe not really.

Ryan: Matt Biddle. You know, there’s a few but it’s just. It’s not the plethora that are sort of being spoken about, in the US particularly, but I have no doubt there’s just as many talented people here. It’s just that, that hesitancy to say, “I’m going to do my own startup. I’ve got a good idea. I’ve got what it takes. I’m gonna start talking about it.” It’s just less common over here. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing and that everyone here should change but I think if you want to build a brand in the web space you just need to admit that I’ve got to get out there. You know I had an interesting conversation with Alex Hunter who is sort of really big in Virgin, The Virgin Group, he’s high up and he’s met Richard Branson a bunch of times. And you know what was crazy? He said that Richard was really shy. And I was like, “Really?” That’s a great example I think of a guy, he’s obviously driven and I don’t think everyone should be like Richard Branson but he’s obviously driven and he understands that in order to get Virgin talked about, to build a brand he’s got to be kind of crazy and get out there. He’s always hanging from helicopters or you know flying spaceships and you know, that’s why people talk about him.

Paul: I think there’s also a little bit within the web design community here in the UK of kind of almost false modesty and a little bit of trying to persuade the world that we’re being very altruistic in what we’re doing and not being up front. I receive criticism for the fact that I’m very open about the fact that Boagworld is a marketing tool and that we make money out of it.

Ryan: But it’s the truth.

Paul: Yeah, exactly. So I think I prefer to be up front about those things, than kind of hide them behind a faÃ§ade of false modesty to be honest.

Ryan: Well yeah and that kind of goes back to my thing I said earlier about being genuine. I think you’ll always be better off if you’re genuine. And of course we’re sort of painting with broad brushstrokes here, but there’s some very talented people here and I just think, let’s get on our soap boxes and sort of shouting back at the Americans really. And people are doing it, I just think there should be more of it.

Paul: Talking about effective marketing tools, ThinkVitamin, let’s talk about that for a little bit. ThinkVitamin is a website that you run which is basically web design related and web app related kind of articles and stuff like that. I’m guessing that was set up as a marketing tool. Tell me a little bit about why it exists and how you came about setting it up and what its aim is for you.

Ryan: Yes. So thinkvitamin.com has two purposes. It’s to build good will and to give back to the community but it’s also a marketing tool and those things are actually very related. If we pump out great content we give away for free it will be valuable, but those of you who read thinkvitamin.com will also probably come to our shows. It’s a symbiotic relationship. We’re very happy to do that. There is a little bit of altruism there, we do actually want to provide good content and give it away for free but we also realize we needed a platform to talk about our shows. We kind of kept calling in favors like, “Do you mind blogging about Future Of Web Apps?” and “Can you mention it?” We just thought we need to build a big site that people go to so we can tell them about that and we’re fortunate to have great connections. We know people like you and Molly Holzschlag and Kevin Rose and just big Internet people and they all agreed to be on the advisory board and really that’s just a group of people that we trust that occasionally write for us but we’re actually taking ThinkVitamin in a new direction where we want it to pretty much become it’s own little business. So we’ve hired a full time Editor named Simon Mackie and he was really high up at SitePoint actually. And he’s come over and he’s taken the reigns and we’re gonna, yeah we’re gonna basically grow that team and expand that out into its own little business.

Paul: That’s interesting.

Ryan: It’ll be better for the readers. It kind of was dying. The publishing schedule was going down and I think we realized, “Man this is so valuable we have over 50,000 RSS subscribers, closer to 70 if you count the news feed,” and we thought, “This is great, we should grow it.”

Paul: Yeah. I mean it’s interesting in some ways you’ve kind of taken the same approach that we have at Headscape using ThinkVitamin that you could have created a blog on the Futures Of website and you could have put this content there. There’s actually a value in separating it out and making it a standalone thing. It feels less salesy I guess. The same way as I could have posted my Boagworld stuff on the Headscape site. You know it could be the Headscape podcast instead of the Boagworld one. All the rest of it. It just comes on a bit too strong if you do that I guess.

Ryan: I totally agree. And it’s interesting because I had a good conversation with Mike at FreshBooks, and freshbooks.com for those of you who don’t know is an app that helps you send out invoices. He had this blog and he was really slogging his guts out on it and at freshbooks.com/blog or something and he said, “I don’t get it. No one’s really reading it,” and to me it was obvious for that reason you just said. Well it’s clear that this is just a marketing tool. Why would you put a blog on your company’s site, on your product’s site? It’s just kind of obvious and that’s exactly why we haven’t done it for our events, you know we put occasional updates there but it’s hard. As much as I like Web 2.0 Expo or something I would never read a blog from Web 2.0 Expo. It’s just too blech, you know what I mean?

Paul: Yeah totally. It’s interesting that the other thing that you’ve done, which again is something that I do, which is that you haven’t just relied on people coming into your sites, whether it be ThinkVitamin or the Futures Of sites or even the Carsonified site. You’ve made a big deal of kind of going out there and using tools like Twitter and Qik and YouTube. I’m just interested as how effective you’ve found those things.

Ryan: I find Qik to be really effective, or Qik, however the heck you say it qik.com and I was really shocked as soon as I started broadcasting was that just tons of people were interacting and I almost couldn’t wait to do the next one. Annoyingly 3G is kind of spotty in Bath so it makes the quality a little bit bad but I’d highly recommend Qik or any other comparable service. It’s so fun you just take your phone with you, I had to get a kind of crappy Nokia phone or something, because I use my iPhone for normal business but just grabbed it from the 3 store, got a plan I think it’s 20 pounds a month that gives you unlimited data which you’ll need if you’re streaming live video from a phone, and whenever I’d walk to Starbucks or something I’d just turn it on and start talking and people would show up because the way Qik works for people who don’t know is you actually see comments live on the phone screen.

Paul: That’s very cool.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s great for interaction and any tool you can use to interact with your fans will increase your connection and that friendship. It will show you want to be real and you want to connect with people and I think hopefully we’ve achieved that where people think, “Gosh you know Carsonified we know who’s there we know it’s not a company it’s really these people that are there and they’re interested in hearing from me and talking to me,” so that’s been good. YouTube has been amazing, I mean I hate YouTube, it’s ugly, it’s a bit crude you know but man there’s just a lot of people on it. I used this cruddy little video camera, filmed myself giving some tips about business, threw it in iMovie, put some music to it and popped it on YouTube and I think I can’t remember the figures it’s up to, it’s up to like 10 or 15,000 views in literally like two hours work.

Paul: Yeah, I keep meaning to get around to that myself and I’ve never quite managed it.

Ryan: Now you can use a Flip camera. Flip is just a type of camera, you just record and then it’s got a USB dongle built right into it. You pop it in and it actually automatically uploads it to YouTube.

Paul: That’s nice.

Ryan: There’s a couple tools you can use to make it easier. And then Facebook, I’ve been using Facebook a lot just to connect with people and remember people’s birthdays and say hello and just be a friend to them. The more connections you can have to people the better, which builds your brand and I feel that, like a mercenary when I say that, and I don’t like it, like I do believe it’s just a better way to live to connect with people and it happens to build your brand which is great and I like that as well, but I think it’s important that you need to be genuine and actually care about people for this to connect.

Paul: What about Twitter? How have you got on with that? Have you found that a useful tool?

Ryan: I love Twitter. And it’s been probably the best way I think for me to communicate I’ve got I think around 4,200 followers now and I don’t know why people follow me. I don’t think I’m particularly interesting but I do whenever I tweet I try to imagine if I was somebody else and I was reading it if I would find it interesting. I think with Twitter don’t tweet too much, maybe a couple times a day max. If you tweet too much people unsubscribe.

Paul: That will explain my problem then, I tweet too much.

Ryan: I still follow you so it’s not too bad. But you know Evan Williams had a good tip he said you should tweet things every so often that you’re not quite sure if you should tweet because they’re a bit too personal or a bit too blech, because that’s the type of stuff that’s actually fun and interesting to read. Initially we had a twitter account for Carsonified and we deleted it. I think we decided that that was kind of exactly what not to do. People don’t really want to hear from a company, they want to hear from you.

Paul: That’s almost the same as having a blog on your own corporate website isn’t it? Having a kind of corporate Twitter account. After saying that we have set one up for GetSignoff but more as a for announcements. If something goes down with the service or if we’ve done some bug fixes or stuff like that. By far the majority I do via the Boagworld Twitter account which is just me talking about my life. I agree with what you’re saying about putting personal stuff there as well that people seem to like to know what’s going on with each other’s lives. I like to know how Jackson’s doing. People like to know, I don’t know. Making it personal, it’s about that personal connection again isn’t it really?

Ryan: Definitely. And I think that that’s the future, you know just in general. Humankind you know it’s just kind of being personal and not hiding anymore behind companies or brands or policies or terms and conditions. It’s about, “Hey, how can I help you and how can I take care of you?” and that’s just a better way to live and it will massively benefit your company which is great. What’s interesting though is that everybody, including us, continues to look at the Signal vs. Noise blog from 37signals and kind of scratch our heads it’s like, it’s the one blog where it is a company blog, I mean yes it’s called Signal vs. Noise, but it’s on their domain, and yet they have over 90,000 subscribers. It’s funny because I think everyone is kind of, “How do you do that? I want to replicate that.” In the end I think you know, they were kind of first. You can’t have that many of those type of blogs and I think most of us are gonna have to be happy with just doing a good blog that is real and personal whether, and I mean ours is carsonified.com and it seems to work and we have about 4,000 subscribers and for us that’s a pretty good number. We should post more but that’s something I haven’t quite figured out yet and I’d be interested to hear from your listeners what they think about that. Is it possible to have a company blog that people care about or is it just not possible? I don’t know.

Paul: I think what you said there about being first is quite significant. I think originality goes a long way. I mean even with the Boagworld podcast. Simply the fact that I was the first web design podcast it seems to give it a momentum that keeps things going, you know because you keep delivering the goods so to speak which obviously the guys at 37signals really have done. I think there is a momentum in being first in something.

Ryan: Yes and that’s probably the secret sauce.

Paul: OK, So let’s wrap this up with kind of a last question which is: What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs seeking to increase their profile? Let’s have some kind of top tips if you’ve got some.

Ryan: OK. The first tip I give is to start connecting with people that you feel are influential. You know, spend some time and try to get out and physically meet these people, get to know them and to not be creepy about it, but to get out there, to get in front of them and to get to know them. See if you can do something to help them out, to get on their radar, and I think building sort of a group of friends that trusts you but is also influential is just instantly valuable. So I’d do that and you can use all the tools we talked about for that: Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. but physical meeting is always the best. I mean you want to have a beer with people.

Paul: And you say you do that by trying to help them out in some way? Because that’s always the difficult thing. It’s all well and good to say, “Get to know influential people,” but how you do that’s the tricky part isn’t it?

Ryan: Well my dad always did something that worked. If it was someone he really respected or cared about and wanted to get on their radar he would find an article about them in a magazine and he’d actually go to a framer and have it framed and then write them a personal note and just kind of say and send it to them and say, “You know, I bet you haven’t had time to actually frame a picture of your article so I thought you might want this for your wall.”

Paul: What a genius idea. I love it.

Ryan: And it’s genuine. I’m not trying to get anything out of you but I respect you and here you go. It’s very subtle. You have to be very careful to not try to sort of bribe people. If you come across that way it’s exactly what you don’t want to do. If you feel, and kind of think deep down, “Do I actually want to be friends with this person or am I trying to use them?” I think you should steer very clear of a person if you just think actually I don’t really like this person I’m just trying to get something out of them. But if you think there’s some synergy there, that’s a great way to do it. Remember people’s birthdays, it’s just a nice thing to do. Stuff like that is a great way. Most people’s friends don’t even do that for them. I’ve had people send me stuff and you know it just makes me smile and I’ll always take their call or answer their email now. So I think that’s a good idea.

Paul: Any others?

Ryan: Um, other tips. Um, probably put a real emphasis on customer service and build a real base of caring in your company. Not just for your customers but for your own team. I think that your team will never be able to treat your customers well if they don’t think that they’re treated well. So I think as entrepreneurs grow and they start to hire people I think it’s important to remember to take care of your staff first and then your customers second. And a really great resource for that is what zappos.com does. Zappos.com has an amazing company culture. They have this book called the Culture Book and every year it comes out and you can buy it and it’s basically a bunch of testimonials, thousands of them from the Zappos employees about why they love their job. And it’s just packed full of ideas of how to take care of your team and it’s a great inspirational resource. I think you can either get it on eBay or Amazon or you can buy it straight from Zappos. A couple hopefully useful tips?

Paul: Yeah that’s excellent. Ryan thank you so much for coming on the show, it’s been really good to get you on and I think there’s some really good useful advice there for anybody looking to kind of build an online brand so thank you very much and no doubt we will have you back again soon.

Ryan: Thank you, it’s an honor.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Site promotion with minimal budget

Our first question is from Adam in the boagworld forum:

I have got a site that needs an awful lot of promotion to work, and have got very little budget to do it with. I could probably spend a little bit on Google AdWords but on nothing else. So, how can I promote my site for little money?

Adam went on to tell me it was a charity website. This makes it challenging. As Adam said…

There are thousands of Charity sites, and many better funded, and just altogether bigger.

In this situation search engine optimisation or Adwords is going to be tough. The competition is fierce and so it will be expensive to be highly ranked.

The other problem with a charity site is that unless it is niche (e.g. bird protection) the potential audience is open ended. However, with limited resources there is little point in targeting ‘the general public’. You will have no impact on such a broad audience.

Target a specific group as it will be easier to gain momentum within a smaller audience. For example, there are Christian charities who do general humanitarian aid. Even though anybody could be a potential supporter, they instead target other christians. Therefore they are well known in that circle. Better to have a lot of support from a niche audience than a small amount of support across the general populous.

Once you have picked the audience use three techniques to reach them:

Offline promotion – Engage with your audience offline as well as on. Attend conferences, produce offline promotional material and target magazines your audience reads. As web designers we often forget to power of offline marketing.
Social marketing – Identify the social sites your audience You should be wherever your audience is interacting. Finally, seek out key figures who your audience admire and respect. See if you can get them on board and encourage them to promote your site.
Editorial promotion - Find out if your audience reads online blogs or magazines. Offer to write articles for these sites. Do not overtly promote your charity but instead write content which will be of interest to the audience. Failing that make use of comments to join in the discussions and increase your sites profile among that audience.

However, be careful. In your haste to promote your site do not spam. The key is to offer something of value. You must earn the right to promote your site.

Sitepoint has an excellent article entitled ‘10 rules for driving traffic using forums‘. Although it is focused on forums, its advice is applicable to most forms of online promotion.

Office Or Not

This from Brad:

A question from Canada! I’m a long-time listener of the show, and I thank you both for your entertainment and inspiration.

A little bit of background first… Two years ago I co-founded a small web development company, and to date we have not yet invested in office space. As we slowly move on to ‘higher profile’ clients, we find it increasingly important to have someone in-house, to answered the phones, do the books, etc, etc, so we can focus on growing the business.

That said, I’m obviously touching on a huge spectrum of possible questions, so I’ll try to narrow it down. I don’t think this is something you have covered specifically on the show before…

Is office space really important for a creative business? If so, what steps would you recommend. And if not, are there better areas to spend $2000 / month?

If I had been asked this question only two years or so ago I would have said that office working for a web team is not important at all. If anything, I would have said that home working was better. The following extract from Paul’s blog, written in 2005, underlines this:

The benefits of a virtual company

By virtual company, I mean we do not have a central office. Each member of staff works from home and we communicate and file share with tools such as Skype, CVS and Groove.

People are often curious about an entire company home working and ask how well it works in reality. My answer is usually that it is brilliant. From the employee perspective, you do not have to commute and you can see a lot more of your family. For example, if I were still working for IBM when I used to commute an hour and a half everyday, I would only see my 2-year-old son at weekends. As an employer, I love it because my staff tend to work the hours they would commute and generally home working is seen as a big bonus that keeps people at the company longer. Not to mention the savings made on premises.

Communication really is not a big problem. There are so many tools out there these days that help, and broadband means that even telephone conversations are now free.

Paul goes on to say that the only drawback of home working is that it lacks the social aspects of working in an office.

Not true I’m afraid. Though of course home working does give you an environment to ‘get your head down’ without interruption, what it really lacks, that phone/email/IM cannot replace, is creative collaboration. People simply do not bounce ideas around like they do if they work together.

Our current office is open plan and there’s nowhere to hide yourself away. This has meant that I haven’t really frequented it that often – I need ‘calm’ to write. However, watching particularly our development team grow and work really effectively together underlined to all of us the value of working together.

So much so that we are about to move into our ‘dream’ offices where there will be a mixture of open plan spaces and areas where we can work quietly.

So (finally!), in answer to Brad’s question, I think that office working is better for the business in the long run and I would say warrants the additional associated cost (though beware the costs, they can mount up – another podcast topic I think). That said, we have managed for nearly seven years before doing it properly (i.e. pretty much all of us will be in together most of the time) so it won’t necessarily damage you if you leave it awhile.

Choosing a hosting company

Posted in Development on September 5, 2008 by Paul Boag

Hosting companies are a dime a dozen. They all offer very similar packages and all seem competitive on price. How then do you choose between them.

Presuming that your site does not require anything particularly unusual in terms of hosting, you will be faced with a plethora of providers to choose between. Some will be temptingly cheap in what is a competitive marketplace. However, be wary of buying on price alone. There are a number of other criteria you should consider:

Uptime
Support
The control panel
Limitations on growth
Hidden charges

Let’s take a look at each, starting with uptime.

Uptime

The last thing any website owner wants is for their website to be unavailable. Many hosting companies therefore provide uptime guarantees. Figures range from 95% uptime right through to 100%. But what exactly are they guaranteeing and is it something you should worry about?

In most cases uptime guarantees are worthless. They do not actually guarantee that your website will be available 100% of the time. This is merely a figure they are striving for. If they fail, they will compensate you. However, the nature of this compensation varies. In most cases it involves refunding a portion of the money you pay for the hosting. However, this could be insignificant compared to the losses in sales. You should always clarify what compensation is being offered.

Remember that even the largest organisations have downtime. It is a problem that can never be entirely avoided. Websites can be unavailable due to connectivity issues, poor code or any number of reasons beyond the control of your hosting company. As a result they often specify exclusions from compensation in their terms of service.

In short uptime guarantees are meaningless. They are simply a marketing tool. Instead, search for reviews of the hosting company or look at their support forum. If their are lots of complaints about downtime think twice. However, in most cases the service offered in regards to uptime is fairly universal.

Instead of asking how often your site is likely to go down, ask what happens when it does? What kind of support can you expect?

Support

Support is arguably the single most important factor in choosing a hosting company. Whether it is your website going offline or a piece of functionality not running, it is inevitable you will have problems with your hosting. You will need to quickly reach somebody who can help.

But how can you tell if a hosting company offers good support? Look for the following things:

24/7/365 support – When your website is offline you need to be able to get help instantly. Check that your hosting company offers support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week 365 days a year.
Telephone support – There is an increasing trend towards email only support. However, technical problems can be hard to diagnose and prolonged conversation via email are time consuming. When your site is offline you need the immediacy of a phone call. Ensure that option is available to you.
Speedy response – Whether contacting your hosting company by email or phone you should expect a speedy response. It is unacceptable to be sitting on hold while your site is down or waiting days for a response to an email query. I recommend calling the technical support telephone number before you sign up for their service. How long do you have to wait before you get to speak to a real human being? Also, send a question via email and see how long it takes to get a reply.
In country support – Personally I prefer speaking to local support staff. Being put through to call centers in far flung locations can be frustrating when discussing complex technical problems. If you do not share the first language of support staff misunderstandings are easier. By calling the support number before signing up you can establish whether there will be communication problems.
Knowledgeable staff – Another drawback of call centers is that they are often manned by individuals with limited technical knowledge. This can be frustrating when endeavoring to resolve technical issues. Ideally you should be able to speak directly to the individuals manage the web servers. If you are not technical ask your web developers to speak to the support staff at the hosting company before signing up. They should be able to judge their technical competency.
Technobabble free support – Talking to technical staff can be equally frustrating if support staff are overly technical. Being confronted by technobabble when you want to find out is why your site is down can be extremely annoying. By calling the support line before purchasing you should be able to get a sense of their communication skills.
Self service support – Contacting technical support is the last resort. In most cases you should be able to find the answer to questions yourself through your hosting companies support site. Look at their site and see if they have frequently asked questions, a knowledge base, forums and most importantly a list of current known issues. Facilities like this can save time so make sure they are available.

Self service should also extend beyond support. Most hosting companies also provide a control panel for managing your site.

The control panel

Calling technical support every time you want to change the password will become frustrating. That is why most hosting companies provide a control panel for basic maintenance. This includes, managing email, changing passwords, uploading files, backup and accessing site statistics.

Evaluate the control panel and discuss it with your developers. If the hosting company does not have a demo available on their site, call and ask for access to an example. If nothing else this will demonstrate how responsive their customer service is.

Once you have access, ask yourself whether it provides all the functionality you require? Is it easy to understand and use? For example, how does it handle the management of multiple sites? This is particular important as your online presence grows.

Limitations on growth

As your site becomes more successful you will become more ambitious in your plans, and visitors will flock to it in ever larger numbers The question is, will your hosting company keep up with this growth?

In order to answer this question you need to understand three things:

Can you manage multiple websites centrally? - You may start with a single site but if it is a success you could want to launch more. It could be a sub-site that supports a marketing campaign or a site dedicated to a subset of your audience. In either cases the site will need managing. You will want to avoid multiple logins to administer multiple sites. They will need to be managed centrally. Check with your hosting company that they provide a single interface to manage multiple sites.
What is the upgrade path? – As your site grows in terms of visitors and complexity you may find the need to migrate from shared hosting to dedicated. You may even need to upgrade your dedicated box to something more powerful. It is important to understand how this process works. You want to avoid the need to backup your entire site and install it all over again. A good hosting company should make this a seamless transition.
What happens if you exceed your bandwidth limits? – The more successful your website the more expensive it will be in term of bandwidth. Most hosting plans come with a bandwidth limit. This is because the hosting company has to pay for each piece of data a user downloads from your site. They therefore have to cap how much data they allow to be downloaded. Normally this is more than adequate for most site. However, what happens if you exceed your bandwidth limit? How much extra is it going to cost you and what happens if you exceed your limit unexpectedly without a higher rate package in place? Will it costs you even more? Does the control panel provide a way to monitor current bandwidth use?

It is not just bandwidth that can become expensive. You may discover there are other hidden charges too.

Hidden charges

Some hosting companies can appear to be inexpensive on the surface but have a hidden cost. Establish what is included in the monthly charge and what is not. I have encountered hosting companies who have made additional charges for:

More than a predefined number of email accounts
Advanced email functionality such as exchange server or spam filters
A technician to physically restart your web server
Add-on technologies
The ability to run databases
Access to website statistics

The list could go on. There is nothing wrong with hosting companies using this form of modular pricing. In fact it can keep the price down if you only require basic functionality. The problem comes when they do not clearly communicate these additional costs and they therefore come as a surprise.

The above is a draft extract from Paul’s upcoming book ‘The website owners Manual‘. To get instant access to the rest of Paul’s book signup to the early access program.

Lessons from the O2 failure

Posted in User experience on July 7, 2008 by Paul Boag

I don’t want to start ranting about the debacle that was upgrading via the O2 website, from my iphone to the iphone 3G. However, there are a couple of things we can learn about good site design from their mistakes.

Like most of the British population (or so it seemed) I tried to upgrade my first generation iphone for the new iphone 3G. Following the instructions I received from 02 I went to their website and then spent the next 2 hours battling to place my order. This horrendous experience raises some interesting points.

Load test - If you are expecting shit loads of people to hit your site at the same time then run some loading testing against it!
Don’t cause a panic – Announcing there is limited stock and that you are going to sell on a first-come-first-served basis is going to cause a rush.
Provide alternatives – Don’t force users into only purchasing through a website. Allow them to purchase via phone or store too.
Keep it simple – The whole process could have been streamlined. Adding a text message as a method of authentication was unnecessarily complicated and caused problems.
Avoid AJAX – On a site that is going to be hit by heavy traffic, avoid using unnecessary AJAX. It was impossible to jump to the appropriate place in the process. Instead I was forced me to start from scratch each time the page hung.
Use cookies – By using cookies they could have saved me considerable time entering my information again and again.
Clear messaging – Despite completing the process I am unsure of whether I have an iphone coming or not. The site needed to make it clear whether an order had been successfully placed.
Error handling – When things went wrong with the site it didn’t respond elegantly. Some carefully written messages could have cleared up a lot of confusion.
Better labels – One label asked me if I wanted a bolt on package. It didn’t explain what that package was or what answer was required. It just gave me a blank text box. What was I supposed to type into it? Should I leave it blank? Why was it a text box and not a dropdown menu? Was this the reason my submission was failing?
Email confirmation – It would have been nice to receive an email confirming or rejecting my order.
Waiting list – For those who failed to place an order before the product ‘sold out’ there should be an alternative. Never turn a customer away. Either offer the chance to pre-order with an estimated delivery date or at give the change to register to be informed when new stock arrives.

Update: Alex made some excellent additional points in the comments and I wanted to mention them here too. He added to my already extensive list:

Get a CDN or virtual servers – If you’re expecting a lot of traffic in a short time, look to share the load. Think about placing your critical functions (such as an online shop) onto a platform that allows you to deploy additional servers on demand (often called Virtual Private Servers) – such as Amazon S3 or similar. If you can’t change onto something like that – you can still help your server by moving images, CSS and javascript onto another server, or even a CDN. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that contain copy of your key files to help spread the load.
Have a backup plan (or have two!) -
If you have something really high-profile, have a backup plan, or two! In this case, O2 DID have a back-up plan… they had a ‘failover’ site… which was a simple one-page form to take down customers details. The only problem was it didn’t work when it needed too… it failed too!
Brief your call centre -
Knowing that some customers were likely to experience trouble accessing the site (or even just getting confused placing an order), you should make sure that you brief your call centre staff – put on extra staff and make sure that they can take orders too, and know what to do.
When I called O2′s customer services, they couldn’t offer any help as ‘upgrades were online only’. Additionally they couldn’t check if my 3 times I put my credit card details in were registered (they weren’t as it happens).
If all goes wrong… the call centre is your last line of defense, and O2 dropped the ball here too.

Update 2: Well, the iPhone 3G has now launched in the UK and O2s website continues to fail users. This time Apple was forced to turn away customers from their stores because they were unable to register them with the O2 site. The reason why: The O2 website would only work in Internet Explorer. This provides us with yet another lesson to learn…

Build for your audience – Consider who your target audience is and what requirements they have. In particular consider their accessibility need to make sure you never turn away people wanting to give you money.

All in all it was badly handled and I am pissed off. Can you tell!

119. Fluid Elastic

Posted in Classic shows on May 28, 2008 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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…

Wait to be made redundant and hope you get a payoff
Live off the kindness of friends and family (a guaranteed way of losing friends)
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.

108. Future of

Posted in Classic shows on January 23, 2008 by Paul Boag

On show 108: The differences between work for an agency or being an in-house designer. Hosting bandwidth intensive content and what happens when Paul designs a web design conference.

Podcast: Download (22.7MB)

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News and events | Daniel Burka and Leslie Chicoine | Listener emails

Unfortunately Marcus is not on this week’s show. His Father died a few days ago and obviously he has lots of stuff to deal with. Hopefully he will be back next week. However, if you are desperate for your Marcus fix then check him out on Nevermind the Buzzcocks.

News and events

Future of Web Design

Imagine for a moment if you will that an email lands in your inbox asking you to create your perfect web design conference. Who would you invite to speak? Daniel Burka from Digg, Andy Clarke maybe? What about Jon Hicks or Jina Bolton?

Well that is exactly what happened to me when the guys over at Carsonified asked me to chair this years Future of Web Design conference. They asked me who I thought my dream line up would be and together we worked on assembling them. Sure, there were some restrictions, apparently raising the dead caused a problem and hosting the conference on the moon was out of the question. However, overall we did pretty damn well.

So on the 17th and 18th of April in London I get to attend (and contribute to) my dream conference. The line up includes all the people I have already mentioned and more. The only thing missing is you guys. It would be really cool to have a bit of a boagworld meet-up while we are there so get on over and sign up today. It will cost you £145 including VAT or £480 if you want to attend my workshop as well.

However I know some of you are poor students or have tight ass bosses so we are also giving away two free tickets. If you want to win the two tickets email me with FOWD in the subject line with your name and contact details. We will pick a winner in a couple of weeks.

Advancing advanced search

My second story of the day is an excellent post on the Boxes and Arrows website. It tackles the subject of advanced search. Search generally is possibly one of the most neglected aspects of website navigation. This is amazing as it is the primary means of navigation for 50% of those who use websites.

I have seen some stuff written about search results but next to nothing on advanced search. What is more advanced search is not only ignored by writers but also by users. Few choose to use the functionality it provides, only turning to it as a last resort if all else fails.

In this article Stephen Turbek suggests that we need to re-design advanced search from the ground up. Instead of advanced search being a tiny link often overlooked, it should be an integral part of the search results page where complex filtering can be carried out through a graphical interface. Its hard to explain exactly what he is talking about without seeing the examples he gives so definitely check out the post.

If you ever have to work with search then this is a must read.

Starting from a blank canvas

Next up is a blog post from Cameron Moll on how to start a new design. We have spoken before on this show about how hard it is to come up with a design from scratch. Nothing can sap your creativity more than a blank sheet of paper (or empty Photoshop file!).

Cameron gives some good solid advice including sketching rather than diving into Photoshop and also drawing from previous work. However, he also suggests some less well known approaches such as starting with a grid and (most interestingly) working on the core content first. On the latter point he is referring to the fact that we often tackle things like headers and navigation first only coming back to the content at the end. Moll suggests this should be the other way around. This is good advice as it focuses the designer on what the site is really about rather than the interface used to navigate it.

You suck at Photoshop

My last find of the week is a really superb set of tutorials I found on youtube. I am not entirely sure how useful they are but they are definitely entertaining.

Most screencasts maybe informative but are often deadly boring. Not so with “You suck at Photoshop”. These basic Photoshop tutorials have a twist as the person recording the screencasts vents his rage at a cheating wife. Check out the video below and you will see what I mean.

Expert interview: Daniel Burka and Leslie Chicoine

Paul: OK so joining me today is Daniel Burka from digg.com, hello Daniel.

Daniel: Hello Paul.

Paul: Nice to have you on the show again, it’s been a while.

Daniel: Well thanks for having me again.

Paul: We’ve also got Leslie Chicoine joining us as well from satisfaction what’s the url again, remind me.

Leslie: Sure it’s getsatisfaction.com.

Paul: getsatisfaction, that’s the bit I was missing, I should have been prepared and had that on my screen, but there you go I’m badly organised. And of course how can we do an interview without having Marcus here as well, hello Marcus.

Marcus: Hi Paul.

Paul: laughs

Marcus: getsatisfaction.com, you must be able to sell that for millions to a porn agency.

Paul: laughs

Marcus: laughs Sorry, I’m off on one already.

Leslie: I’ve heard those jokes so many times.

Marcus: Yeah, ok, I’m so predictable.

Leslie: laughs

Marcus: I always have to ask people from America were are you and what’s the weather like? I know it’s a really boring English thing to say but it really is horrible over here at the moment.

Leslie: Well we’re in sunny San Francisco, I think the weather about 55 Fahrenheit right now.

Paul: Yeah, that’s so unfair isn’t it? Why do we live here, I just don’t know why we continue to live in Britain in winter.

Daniel: I was just in Canada last week and it was like 20 below freezing so it’s really nice to be back.

Paul: I bet laughs

Marcus: Not that cold here that’s for sure, it’s just wet, it rains all the time in the winter.

Paul: So Daniel, I’m dragging it back to the subject now Marcus if you hadn’t actually noticed while you go off on weird tangents that’s fine. Daniel we’ve had you on the show before and so hopefully our listens will be familiar with your background and if they haven’t heard of digg.com they should be ashamed of themselves. Leslie your new to the boagworld podcast so maybe should kick off with you, and if you could just tell us a little bit about getsatisfaction and a little bit about yourself and your own background if you would.

Leslie: Sure, well let’s start with getsatisfaction, basically I’m trying to re-do what customer service is there’s a lot of depressions happening on line about companies and how companies aren’t getting involved so we’re trying to get companies and customers together in the same space. Talking about products and issues and ideas for the future and yet we’re also trying to make sure it’s a level playing field so that neither side has control of the conversation so we’re acting as an intermediary allowing true conversations that are open to the public and that everyone can see and anybody can get involved in, but we’ve actually got people talking about customer service for companies, the companies aren’t there yet but getsatifcation.com/apple is a very popular section and there’s nobody from apple on the site yet. But there are also sections like the one for google and the one for twitter and we have google employees and twitter employees involved. It’s a very different take on customer service because it’s not just customer service rep it’s people who are programming, people who are designing, people who are in the HR department, all getting involved and having much more direct contact with customers

Paul: So do the companies all have to pay in order to participate in this or is this a free service? How does this work, what’s your business model?

Leslie: Well, all the features we have right now are free; our business model is still being developed, not to say that we don’t have one, we just have a lot of different directions and we want to make sure that whatever direction we take fits them in our philosophies, but we’re hoping that in the future for us, we see the potential in the analytics and the data that we collect. Your on the site are your telling us a lot about the different products and the services that your using and can tell companies to make connections between what products you use and like, and what other products and service you might also be interested in.

Paul: Yeah, of course.

Leslie: We start collecting more information about who you are and why your there in the first place.

Paul: Well I guess the other great thing, if you thinking of building a web app of any description then this is a great mechanism that already exists to handle the customer services enquiries you get without having to build all the functionality that is needed to do that as well so I imagine your attracting a lot of smaller companies as well?

Leslie: Yeah, it’s actually been a really interesting display, we’ve got small web apps, we have larger web apps such as google, digg.

Daniel: Even pounce is on there, I mean when we set up pounce originally and we wanted a way to communicate with our users and we immediately just set up a satisfaction page, signed up and it’s been great for use.

Paul: Yeah.

Leslie: Yeah, that’s all pretty easy, another thing actually too I forgot to mention, what’s truly great about the service is often times there customer service issues that span multiple companies so a great example was a guy who was having trouble getting a refund on an airplane ticket and he wasn’t sure if it was American Airlines or expedia.com so through the site he was able to post the issue to both sides and have them both look at it and communicate together there.

Paul: Personally Leslie what is it you do at satisfaction?

Leslie: Sure, I’m a designer, kind of an open title primarily I do a lot of UI design, I do a fair amount of contact development, I actually design a little bit of the business strategy as well we have developers who actually do the coding but most of what I do is wire framing.

Paul: Oh.

Leslie: My background though is actually game design.

Paul: Really?

Leslie: Really. laughs

Paul: So, that seems an interesting leap to go from game design into kind of a web app like this. Is it a big difference?

Leslie: It’s not really, because so much of what I learned in games design was how you design mechanics that let you create particular types of dynamics so you want people to act a certain way or, well in our case we want people to have a really positive attitude and there’s actually things in the design that makes people happier and make the conversation more open and positive, everything from the wording that we use to how we break down the steps, try and keep it all simple, if you go to the site you’ll notice it’s all very white and clean and light and that again add to that kind of feel and it helps people be more communicative.

Paul: Hmm… Interesting stuff, so the reason we thought we would setup this call today is really so we could talk a bit, well it was a conversation I had pervious with you wasn’t it Daniel about the fact that you come from an agency background and you used to work for a company, what’s the name of the company again?

Daniel: Silver Orange

Paul: Yes, that was it and they were what you would call a normal web design agency and while you were doing that digg was one of your clients is that correct?

Daniel: Yeah, so I helped found Silver Orange there were six of us what started the company back in 99 I think, but yeah we were a pretty typical boutique web job.

Paul: And what interested me about the conversation we were having previously, was the way you kind of when from working at Silver Orange across then to working for digg so you’ve kind of gone from working at an external agency were you had lots of clients and that kind of stuff, to working as an in house designer on a single project and I thought that was quite an interesting discuss and quite an interesting area to cover and you mentioned Leslie to me, and that you’d been having a similar conversation in a coffee shop somewhere with her and we though lets setup a few minutes and have a chat about some of the kind of ramifications of that and I guess the good place to start is, perhaps Daniel that you kick us off, what you see the difference being between working as an in-house designer somewhere and working for an external agency, is there a big difference?

Daniel: Absolutely, I mean it was actually quite interesting, I was back in Canada last week for some awards, kind of a yearly state of the union meeting and I’m still involved with the company a bit, I went back there for that, again this exact same discussion with one of our designers, and he was really jealous that I’m currently re-designing the digg comment system and he thinks it’s really interested that I’ve designed it twice now and I’m coming back again and doing it a third time and that kind of iterative development is something you frequently don’t get to do in the agency environment. That’s one of the real pro’s of working, I think as an in house designer is that you don’t build something and just hand it off you get the chance to build it, received feed back, watch how people use it gage some metrics over time and come back an re-design it and continue to improve something.

Paul: I mean, would you agree with that Leslie? Is that one of the things that attracts you working at satisfaction?

Leslie: Definitely, there’s something about being able to see a project through and then check back on it again and again, but I think that’s one of the things that makes it difficult, you no longer have and perspective, so we’re were talking about, particularly at the coffee shop, when you working at the agency, you come in and what makes you special is your new perspective and when your working at a company, you no longer have that so you need to make sure you can somehow come back fresh to the same project and when you iterating, bringing in new eyes, trying to see what needs to be changed becomes a challenge.

Paul: At one point in the sentence there you said again, and again…

Marcus: laughs

Paul: And I heard Marcus snigger at that, he obviously picked up on that as well. I mean that’s the thing, as somebody who works for an agency I have to confess, I think I would go absolutely crazy working on one website over a long period of time, probably because I’ve got the attention span of a newt, ya know do you ever long for that variety of work to work on?

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely, it’s usually really fun when you’re working for an agency especially clients who give you a lot of leeway and a lot of respect, that you walk through the door and you immediately see 80% of the problems on there site and you say, listen this is what you need to do, this is what you should fix and you get immediate reaction, it’s really fun right?

Paul: agrees

Daniel: You can bring so much change so quickly and somewhere like digg for instance, I mean I only have one or two sections of the site now that I’m looking at were I’m like, ok there’s still huge room for improvement here I know want to kind of tear it down and think of it from scratch and in all the other places there’s kind of refinement, refinement, refinement and it’s way more challenging and that’s what makes it fun but it’s also a bit more tedious, it’s not something fresh.

Marcus: I was gonna ask what the different skills you need, but I think you’ve kind of answered that, maybe being more dog-eared and determined, are there any major different skills between working on multiple projects and working on the same site all the time?

Leslie: Definitely, I think especially when your working at a company verses an agency the projects your working you have to have a better understanding of there application though out the rest of the business so when we’re iterating and we’re working on small details, the changes we make are for business needs or metric things that we’ve gotten so that kind of judgement is not something that I personally had as much experience with when I was working at an agency, and actually the team that works on getsatisfaction was initially a consultancy but it was weird have the whole team have to switch over.

Paul: Oh right.

Leslie: So initially when we were a consultancy the actually people who weren’t really involved with what projects we chose or really even finding out that much about the company, the founders were the one who really had to do that research and now we all have to do that kind of research.

Daniel: I was interesting because I was in a different position at Silver Orange as one of the founders, ya know I did have quite a say on which projects we take especially the UI projects were I was working more solo with a client, ya know, if I didn’t want to take a project we wouldn’t take it, working with clients I kind of got to know there business a lot before I started to get into it, you learn as much as you can, kind of a week or two to get into a project but at somewere like digg or like pownce, it’s a lot more about thinking strategically and thinking much more in the long term because if you pin yourself into a corner it’s literally yourself and you’re the one who’s gonna have to be able to dig yourself out of it later on.

Paul: Do you guys every, digg and getsatisfaction, ever bring in external specialists from time to time?

Leslie: Definitely, we were talking about needing fresh perspective and bringing new people in is always a great way to do that. We occasionally, what we do is we have design sessions and we have guests whom we get their opinions and show them what we’re doing and see if they have new ideas.

Paul: I mean it’s quite interesting that isn’t it because I mean we do a lot of work for a whole variety of different clients and you go to these different companies and they have internal design and development teams and you think why are we actually being brought in here were they’ve got the skills in house but they’re not really utilising what they’ve got and there’s a perception that if you bring in someone from the outside they’ve somehow got more skill than perhaps an in house team, do you feel more or less valued as an in-house employee than you did perhaps externally?

Leslie: laughs You don’t get that same sort of shiny, new feeling as an in-house designer I definitely feel more valued at this point than I did in the consultancy because one of the burdens of getting things right is on my shoulders now. So you really just can’t throw my ideas out the window. But it is actually interesting when people coming into a company, you can see in people’s eyes; they get a little nervous right? That the person coming in is gonna be more valuable than them right?

Paul: Yeah.

Daniel: I’m so excited, I’ve just hired another designer at digg, so there’s three of us now, and he’s awesome and I’m so excited to get someone in here who, a, can code better than me and b, he’s bring an entirely new perspective to the site, so ya know, it’s really nice to have fresh eyes so this is the best of both worlds because a, he’s now an in house designer and b, he’s just joined so he’s like completely fresh too it and I’m gonna capitalise on that as much as I can in the next couple of months before ya know he gets too deep in it a get’s into the aquarium.

Paul: I suppose you haven’t really been doing it that long, being an in-house designer but do you think there’s a point were you have to move no, when you think perhaps you’ve been there too long and been institutionalised into a certain way of thinking?

Daniel: I don’t think so, I mean I know this older guy who used to be the creative designer at apple, and the creative director a Polaroid ya know a bunch of really big companies and he’d been in the same job for a decade I think, but he was able to think incredibly creatively and leverage the people under him too bring the best into projects. I think as long as your able to adapt, I mean you can’t just keep coming through the door and doing the same kind of work all the time, I think your able to adapt to that in-house philosophy, I think you can definitely keep at it.

Leslie: Yeah I don’t have that much experience with that, but I think that’s the way too do it. Even with just the year that I’ve had at satisfaction you find yourself having to play a lot of games or do things to freshen the project or freshen the work.

Daniel: Right. I find too, like at somewhere like digg there’s so many different projects within the whole. It’s not like I’m working on the homepage every single day this year, that’s one very minor part of the site, you break down projects into components, like re-designing the comments is very different to re-designing the user profiles, I see them as very independent projects obviously tied stylistically and ya know from a user interface strand point they’re tied together, but they’re very different challenges which mixes up your job a lot.

Paul: What’s quite interesting with both your experience is that you’ve worked for agencies that worked on these applications your currently full time involved with and you saw that point with digg and satisfaction were you thought, ok, it’s not the right business move to have an external agency now, we need to bring that in house and I’m just kind of quite interested as to what happened in that process and whether you’ve got much of an idea of what that tipping point is, were you go from thinking yeah we can use an external agency for this to a point were we really need to do this in-house?

Leslie: I’ll let Daniel answer that one.

Paul: laughs

Daniel: So for digg it really happened that, originally it was a project Kevin had and was just throwing it around and wanted to see if it would get traction, and when it started to get traction he hired Silver Orange to come in and re-design the interface so it was a lot more usable and the site was gaining momentum gaining momentum and it kind of got to a point were they started thinking ok, this is a serious business, it’s got viability and they decided to start a company around it, in a much more serious and methodical way and that was kind of the point were they decided, ok, one of those positions is gonna be a designer, I’d been coming down, probably once a month down to San Francisco from Toronto and I one point Kevin was like, you should really move here, so he convinced me to move down and even for the first bit it was kind of interesting, I hope a lot of companies can do this kind of thing, it was quite flexible, I was working one week a month on Silver Orange project, so it was good for digg because they didn’t have to pay me as much and at the time there wasn’t enough work for a full time person and that way for me it was a nice period of time because I had the best of both worlds, I’d work on a bunch of client projects one week a month and then long term in house designer three weeks out of the month.

Leslie: It was a totally different situation for getsatisfaction because we had the whole company as a team look for a project to start, so for us it was really letting go of our client work.

Paul: Okay.

Marcus: I bet that’s hard.

Leslie: At satisfaction we let go of most of our development work first and let go of our design work and then turned this completely into satisfaction. But I did have that period like Daniel were I was saying were your working on lots of projects and along side your long term project.

Marcus: I can’t imagine slowly giving up project work; I guess it’s the sales man in me. I find it hard to turn any business away.

Leslie: Yeah, it’s actually very difficult to let people go when they want you and they still need you to do work for them.

Daniel: Silver Orange have actually got an idea for a project and they’re thinking of totally scaling back, and I don’t think, well we’re definitely not gonna drop all client projects but we’re talking about cutting down and a few people on the team, ya know kind of pumping other projects and drawing in other people as they’re required, and I think that’s also an interesting strategy as long as you can be disciplined enough to commit enough time to it.

Leslie: Yeah, I think our team decided up front that there was a stopping point that we would not be disciplined enough and that we would have problem with time being spent on things that were interesting or new instead of the core project.

Paul: I mean we’re looking, ya know we obviously knock around different ideas and web applications, we perceive, are a way of expanding the business rather than necessarily replacing one with the other so well I guess there are lots of different ways of slicing the cake I guess.

Daniel: Yeah, that’s the same philosophy Silver Orange is likely to follow.

Paul: It’s interesting.

Daniel: I mean it’s frustrating when you’re building other peoples projects all the time, you know you’ve got the skills in house to build something awesome, but smart people come up with ideas why should we be building for them when we can do it ourselves. laughs

Paul: Yeah, completely.

Marcus: This is so familiar, we’ve been having, well since day one I guess the simplest example is your own website in an agency, that always gets put to the bottom of the pile and we’ve been thinking about developing different applications for quite a while now but just trying to get people off paid projects and onto that, is, well it’s impossible.

Paul: laughs

Marcus: Well were we’ve got to now is, proper contracts have been written up between two different departs within Headscape if you like so that it is an official project, these set applications we’re working on at the moment.

Paul: When you say it out loud like that Marcus is sounds so pathetic.

Leslie: laughs

Marcus: But it’s true.

Paul: laughs But that’s how we’re getting around the problem. But I’ve got to admire this all or nothing approach or right we’re gonna go for it, but anyway.

Daniel: I think there’s actually something really curious about the bay area, I think it’s really different in attitudes here like ya know, figure out what’s the worst that can happen, ya know and if the worst that can happen means things don’t go so well in 6 months and you can barely pay your rent, if that’s the worst that happens then what ever just go it. And I think that’s why so many projects here get off the ground. I think that’s great. There’s a real sense of optimism here.

Leslie: And a lot of support too, if you’ve got an idea. There’s very few people here who are secretive with there ideas. They’re always talking about all their ideas and sharing and talking about building something rather than trying to hide it.

Daniel: But it’s competitive too. The people here, ya know there’s such a big audience for a lot of these products it’s like why should we quibble over the similarities of our projects lets just find a way that we can do stuff together and throw around ideas and it’s really fun.

Paul: Yeah it’s good. So for a lot of the people that are listening to this show, some of them are students that are coming out of university and are looking for their first movement into the web design world. We’ve got other people that are, what I would call enthusiastic amateurs who are looking to move full time into web design, you’ve got lots of different ways you could go these days if you’ve got web design skills I guess choice number one if you go say go for it I’m gonna build my own web application, choice number two is you could go a join a web agency and work on a variety of third party work and choice number three I guess is to become an in-house designer for a company, whether that be a trendy web 2.0 company or whether it be an in-house designer for I dunno on-line banking or whatever, how do you go about making that decision and what advice would you give people about were to begin? Are you going to damage your career if you start off by working in one place? Should you be doing lots of different types of work, ya know, what’s your advice?

Leslie: I think we both sort of agree that the real thing your looking for is good people, so whichever of those situation gets your around other great designers, other great teams with projects that your excited about, it probably doesn’t matter as much as you might think that it would.

Daniel: Right.

Marcus: It’s a bad question Paul.

Daniel: If I was getting into the industry right now, I wouldn’t want to get into a huge agency were I don’t know what sub-section of that agency I’m going to be in, what team I’m gonna work on, I mean joining a group of less than 15 you can get a good idea of who your actually gonna be working with and that kind of apprenticeship with really brilliant people is easily the best way to advance.

Paul: Yeah, I like that, I like that a lot. I must admit I hadn’t thought of it from that perspective and yes Marcus it was a rubbish question.

Marcus: laughs

Leslie: Well that’s the one that everyone’s asking.

Paul: Well yeah, we get asked that question all the time. My mistake is I should have asked what advice do you have for people starting out in there career, I shouldn’t have constrained you by giving you these different options.

Leslie: I don’t think this is just starting out. This is something your constantly asking yourself, am I in the right spot and I doing the right thing to advance my career, but as for actually starting, once again come back to this all the time, if there are good people around me then I’m in the right spot.

Paul: Yeah.

Leslie: If I’m inspired by the people around me I’m in the right spot.

Paul: I’m gonna have to move Marcus I’m sorry. I work with you…

Daniel: laughs

Leslie: laughs

Paul: laughs He’s used to it, he likes my abuse. laughs

Marcus: I’m also not a designer so.

Paul: No, your not, that’s very true. Although I don’t think I consider myself a designer anymore either.

Marcus: You took the words right out of my mouth Paul. laughs

Paul: I just thought I’d beat you to the punch.

Marcus: You did.

Paul: Okay, thank you guys for coming on the show, that was really, really interesting, you came up with some really good stuff and yeah I’m sure we’ll get some really good stuff back after listening to you. Thank you for coming and we’ll get you on the show again soon.

Marcus: Thank you.

Leslie: Thank you.

Daniel: Thanks a lot Paul.

Listeners email:

The cost of bandwidth

Eric: How do you deal with high bandwidth sites without bankrupting your clients? Is the quality of downloads compromised with these “unlimited bandwidth” sites?

Well Eric I have to confess that I have largely avoided the escalating costs of hosting this podcast thanks to the kind sponsorship of switchpod. However, for those of you who haven’t managed to gain sponsorship or who are looking for solutions for clients then there are numerous options available.

As Eric said in his audio question there is Libsyn which is a well known multimedia hosting provider that has amazingly competitive rates. I am not quite sure why Eric has an issue with them as I have heard very good things about them.

Another option is to host your video or audio with the Internet Archive. This service is free although I hear reports that performance can be an issue.

Of course if you are dealing with video then there are a whole host of possibilities from youtube to viddler. Some services are better than offers so be careful. For example some resize your video or limit the file size and length.

If you are hosting for clients be sure to check the terms and conditions of these sites as some of them preclude their use for this purpose. Also check ownership as you can be signing over the rights to reuse your video to the site owner.

Lastly in response to Eric’s concerns about the download quality of unlimited bandwidth sites, I have to say I have yet to experience any. I can see how this could be a problem when you get to really big numbers but that is not something that has effected me. Sounds to me that Eric might have been talking to companies trying to justify their own inflated prices and limited offers.

Working with audio

Harry: Given that you like to receive questions in audio format, can you, or any other boagers recommend any software that does the job?

We certainly do like receiving audio questions Harry (I notice that yours was an email!) Also now we are doing a listeners email section it is even more important. That is why we have made it even easier. I have signed up for a skypein account which means you can send me a message either by skyping boagworldshow or by calling 020 8133 5122.

However, lets just presume for a moment that you want to record and edit audio for another reason beyond commenting on boagworld. As a web designer or website owner you probably don’t have to do much audio work. As a result you won’t want to shell out a lot of money. I would therefore recommend you check out Audacity. Its a free audio editor for both the mac and PC which is as good as many of the professional packages. It provides all of the basics you need and exports to a number of different formats. Definitely worth trying out.

So now you have no excuse not to send an audio question, comment, or suggestion into the show.

The personal touch

Posted in Site content on July 20, 2004 by Paul Boag

Computers can seem very impersonal at times so it is important to do everything possible to make your website seem more friendly and approachable.

Computers are not the friendliest of machines. They always seem to take what you so literally and never come across as very helpful! This can make the internet seem quite an impersonal place at times. It also doesn’t help when you are trying to encourage a user to purchase your product or service. Many seem to be taking the approach of developing sophisticated software that appears more human however I believe that at the end of the day nothing beats the personal touch. This article identifies a few ways that you can make your website seem less foreboding and more approachable. The result will hopefully be an increase in sales:

Writing style

The way your copy reads has a huge effect on how people perceive your website and therefore your company. Copy should be friendly and approachable without being overly familiar. Avoid the hard sell or the use of corporate mumbo jumbo. Be succinct, direct and friendly. For more information on writing for the web click here .

Phone

Always have your phone number prominently placed on your website. Preferably make it a free phone number in order to demonstrate that the users call is important to you. Make sure the phone is manned when you said it would be and is always answered promptly and professionally. A website without a telephone number gives the impression that the user’s queries are an inconvenience that should be avoided. By placing the phone number prominently on every page you are communicating a desire to help with any problems a user might be facing.

Email

I am constantly amazed at how many websites fail to have their email address available to their users. Often you find it buried deep within the site and then it is an address such as [email protected] . This leaves me wondering if I should be writing to this address. Make sure your email address is always visible and that it is something obviously like [email protected] . You may already have an enquiries form on your website but that is not always the most convenient approach for a user who is paying to access the internet by the minute. You should always offer an email address as well as a form. When you do receive enquiries via email be sure to answer them quickly. This means that you must check your email regularly and then respond immediately. Remember while they are waiting for your reply they are checking out your competition! Although it is possible to set up auto responders which send an automated response to any emails you receive this doesn’t replace the human touch.

Live Chat

Live chat is a relatively new approach to dealing with customer enquiries and is offered by a number of companies. Basically it allows the user to request a chat session with a member of your customer services. A small chat window opens and the two parties are connected. However on top of that it also allows you to monitor users moving around your site in real time and offer them the opportunity to chat if they appear to be having difficulty. What really sets this approach apart is that it is more instant than email but more anonymous than the phone. Users can ask their questions but easily walk away at anytime if they become uncomfortable.

For more information on live chat check out:

Live Person

Human Face

I went to a website recently that handled enquiries beautifully. I clicked on an enquiries link which took me to a page that not only provided an email address and phone number but also the name and photograph of the person I would be speaking to. This really made me feel like I was going to talk to a real human being in preference to a faceless corporation. It totally changed my attitude to the call.