109. Rissington?

Posted in Classic shows on January 28, 2008 by Paul Boag

On Show 109. IE8 divides the web design community, Anton Peck talks about imagery, and the Rissington Podcast crew stand in for Marcus.

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Anton Peck on imagery | Listener emails

Unfortunately Marcus is not yet back on active duty but does thank you all for your kind support. However, do not fret. You do not have to endure another show of me waffling on by myself. Stepping into Marcus’ still warm shoes are two giants in the world of web design and podcasting. From the infamous Rissington Podcast we have Jon Hicks and John Oxton.

News and events

Microsoft to automatically roll out IE7

First up I was sent an article by several listeners which seems to indicate Microsoft is intending to do an auto-update of Internet explorer on the 12th February.

When IE7 was initially released Microsoft made the decision to make the upgrade to their latest browser optional. So even though a user had requested automatic updates they would not receive IE7 unless they specifically approved it. This decision not to force users to update frustrated those in the web design community who wanted to wave goodbye to the evils of IE6.

However, it would now appear Microsoft has decided to take the plunge and will be rolling out IE7 as part of the automatic update. Not all users are signed up to receive these updates but those who are will be using IE7 from February 12th (if they are not already).

Expect to see a significant decline in IE6 users to your site very soon. Perhaps it will not be long before IE6 follows IE5.

IE8 divides the standards community

Talking of Microsoft and Internet Explorer, probably the biggest story of the week is Microsoft’s plans for IE8.

IE8 promises to be a huge step forward in standards support and has been significantly rebuilt in order to enable this. However, such dramatic changes in their rendering engine comes at a cost. They fear that by becoming more standards compliant they will break many websites which are not built with standards in mind.

The way they have dealt with this problem is to introduce a small piece of code that you drop into your pages which can be used to specify what version of IE your site is designed to work with. The browser then renders the webpage as if it was that version of the browser. So for example you could specify that a page was designed for IE7 and a person viewing the page in IE8 would see the page as if it was rendered in IE7.

If no browser is specified then it defaults to rendering the page in IE7 that way no matter what changes Microsoft make in future browsers legacy sites are still rendered correctly.

What on the face of it seems like a very sensible plan has caused uproar in the web design community. A List Apart and Eric Meyer seem to be generally supporting the principle while many others including the likes of Jeremy Keith strongly object.

One of the main sticking point seems to be that this approach breaks progressive enhancement. In other words I may choose to implement a piece of functionality on my site knowing that it wont currently work in IE7 but does work in other more compliant browsers such as Firefox. If i don’t add this special code when IE8 comes along it will look at my page see the code is absent and so render it as IE7. That means even if IE8 supports the functionality now it wont use it because it is rendering my site as IE7.

Its a complex issue with good arguments on both sides. In next week’s show Eric Meyer and myself will discuss it in more depth.

HTML 5 is coming

Still on the subject of the future of web design we now turn to HTML 5 which has just been released in draft format. Sitepoint provides a nice little summary of what is in and what’s out. There is also a summary of the differences between HTML 4 and 5 which is very useful as well.

I cannot claim to have read the entire specification yet but I have to say what I have seen contains some exciting stuff. Having HTML tags to define common areas like headers, footers and navigation offers some interesting possibilities and its good to see built in support for video and audio.

The big shame is that practical application of this is still a long way off but its nice to know that there is potential there.

Career advice for web designers

Of course all these upcoming technologies wont matter to you if my predications of a couple of weeks ago come true and we all find ourselves without a job! This week I was pleased to discover I was not the only one with a pessimistic attitude towards the coming year. Robert Scoble has posted a entry entitled “what to do if you are laid off in 2008 recession“, which I thought was a particularly cheery title.

Actually it is a really good post with some excellent advice. What I like most about it is that the advice applies as much to a student trying to break into web design for the first time as it does to a out of work professional.

In fact if you are considering a career change of any kind (or have had one forced upon you) then this is a good read.

Advice includes…

Spend at least 30% of your day job hunting
Start a blog
Share your knowledge with the world
Demonstrate your skills on youtube
Networking
Contact web start ups because they are hiring.
Volunteer
Prioritise friends and family

The list goes on and is definitely worth reading.

Expert interview: Anton Peck on imagery

Paul: So joining me today, as I said at the start of the show, is Anton Peck. How are you Anton?

Anton Peck: I’m doing great Paul. Thank you.

Paul: It’s good to have you on the show.

Anton Peck: I know. It’s about time isn’t it? *laughs*

Paul: It seems like it’s been a while. We haven’t actually had you on BoagWorld before have we?

Anton Peck: No, no. This is the first time.

Paul: But I’ve known you from… Where did we first meet? Was it South By Southwest?

Anton Peck: Yeah. I think we had sorta done virtual communication before then through email, IM or whatever. But we actually first met at South By Southwest last time.

Paul: Cool. So Anton, tell me and the listeners a little bit about yourself. How do you describe yourself? Do you primarily describe yourself as a web designer or an illustrator?

Anton Peck: That’s a tough call. The illustration is more my fancy, my hobby. It’s where my passion lies but the design is what I’ve been doing for a long time. So it’s sort of my trade of skill.

Paul: I see. So you’re kind of torn between two worlds.

Anton Peck: A little bit.

Paul: But fortunately those two worlds do overlap quite a lot which is why we have you on the show today. We thought it would be good to get Anton in really not to just talk about illustration but to talk about imagery on the web generally as that’s kind of his thing really, amongst many others, because you have a growing reputation. You do art-casts don’t you which are like illustration tutorials? Is that a good way to describe them?

Anton Peck: Yeah, that’s probably a good way to describe them. That is the rumor that I do those isn’t it. I don’t do them as often as I should but I do manage to get them out every once in a while.

Paul: And they are excellent. I have to say, I really do enjoy watching them. So let’s talk a little about imagery on websites and the use of imagery on websites. Let’s start off with a really nebulous and broad question that I guess is pretty impossible to answer but I’m going to ask anyway, which is what makes good imagery for a website? How do you go about picking imagery for a website?

Anton Peck: Well there’s a few things and some of them might seem obvious. First of all the images should complement the content of the website so that the substance isn’t too diluted from its original intent. I know that might seem kinda out there and obvious but it’s probably disappointing and surprising that there’s a lot of website owners that would want to put an image on a website because it’s really pretty or cool.

Paul: I guess it’s important to have imagery that relates to the branding or message you are trying to communicate.

Anton Peck: Right because imagery is meant to support the content rather than take away from it. You don’t want to pull everybody’s focus right away to the images but at the same time you want to support what’s already there. The images should have some interesting quality about them which could mean how well they have been cropped or resized. They should be saved at a pretty decent quality if they are JPEG’s or GIF’s. Not over compressed as they can sometimes diminish the personality of the website. When you go to a website and you see that it’s over compressed it really doesn’t look very good.

Paul: So for a relative newbie, an amateur that’s getting into web design, there’s always this question of GIF vs. JPEG. What do you use and when?

Anton Peck: Well for photographic style images that have a lot of… I would say colours but that’s not quite accurate but more photographic style images I would use JPEG’s. Then for images like logos, things that seem very flat and have a limited palette, maybe go with the GIF’s. Although I tend to do that a little bit less now that PNG’s are finding a little bit more broad support among browsers.

Paul: So do you use PNG’s very much?

Anton Peck: Every so often. They compress nicely especially when you use the adaptive palette which is similar to a GIF format but they can actually get a little bit smaller.

Paul: Cool, yeah. That’s been my experience as well.

Anton Peck: It just gets a little tricky when you are trying to do transparency.

Paul: Yes, exactly.

Anton Peck: That’s a whole other discussion.

Paul: Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to open that can of worms today. So any other tips for selecting good imagery?

Anton Peck: Well I would say it’s got to be appropriate and tasteful of course. So that way you can minimise the risk of offending someone or losing possible business. If you might have a certain sense of humour and want to put something on your website, you might have to watch out for how that might appear to someone else.

Paul: And I guess cultural considerations come in there as well. It’s easy to forget that the worldwide web is worldwide.

Anton Peck: Definitely.

Paul: The next big issue that a lot of people face is this whole kind of stock imagery kind of question. You reach a point where your website’s becoming relatively important to your business or you’re a web designer that’s working for certain clients. At what stage do you say that actually stock imagery isn’t the way to go, perhaps I should be getting something specifically commissioned whether that be commissioned illustrations, commission photography or whatever. It’s a difficult line. What’s your opinion on stock imagery? Is it the devil’s spawn or does it have a place? What do you think?

Anton Peck: No, I think it definitely has a place. It offers a great solution for those trying to find a good quality image when they can’t afford a commissioned photograph.

Paul: So what kinds of site do you use for stock imagery?

Anton Peck: I’ve been a fan of Crestock.com lately.

Paul: Ooo! I haven’t heard of that one.

Anton Peck: Yes and actually they have this huge contest going on where you can win a Mac Pro and all kinds of equipment. It’s a Photoshop contest and I happen to be one of the few judges on that particular site.

Paul: Ahh. So what’s this website again?

Anton Peck: It’s Crestock.com.

Paul: OK. I’ll check that out. Sounds good. So does that do both illustration and photography or…

Anton Peck: Yeah. They have a wide range of different material. They have background textures and you can search for pretty much anything there. A lot of it is user supported so if you even feel that you are a good photographer you can submit your work and see if you can even sell it and make a little bit of money off of it.

Paul: Oh cool. So when selecting stock photography, what should you look for? What should you avoid? The trouble with stock photography is a lot of it can look really similar to one another. What advice would you give about selecting stock imagery?

Anton Peck: Well there’s no real secret to it. There’s not a lot of advice either other than just go through a lot of it. Don’t try to find the very first searches you come across as that would be a higher chance it would be used somewhere else. You want to get a unique image, something that’s probably not as commonly found. It’s always a little disconcerting when you come across a new image that you see on 13 different sites like, “Oh that’s the same image used there”.

Paul: Yeah. It becomes obvious that it’s stock imagery.

Anton Peck: Right. So you want to find that unique image.

Paul: Yeah, couldn’t agree more.

Anton Peck: And the only way to find the perfect, unique image is to just go through a lot of it.

Paul: Yes! Which does take time doesn’t it.

Anton Peck: Certainly.

Paul: When it comes to commissioning stuff is there any particular advice you would give there in regards to briefing the photographer or the illustrator? I mean when somebody commissions you to do a piece of work, what kind of information are you after from them?

Anton Peck: Since they would commission me as an illustrator rather than an actual photographer, I’d mainly look at what they are trying to achieve for their website and how they expect it to support what they’ve done. One of the things that I was gong to talk about for commission photography, even though I’m not one, was the benefits for the websites because you can have a one of a kind image that fits exactly what is needed for the page. A photographer can come out to the business and take photos of the staff and location which is obviously something you can’t do with stock photos.

Paul: Yeah, which obviously makes a huge difference. I think often at times people actually want to see that kind of stuff because on the web you’ve got no way of judging what the company behind the website is really like. So to be able to see real imagery of real people and real locations does add some credibility and trustworthiness to a company. It’s not just somebody working out their back bedroom or whatever.

Anton Peck: Exactly what I was thinking, yes.

Paul: OK so you have a budget. How much difference does it make actually commissioning imagery rather than getting stock imagery. Is there really a difference? Is it really worth going out and getting stuff specifically commissioned?

Anton Peck: I would say if you are looking to get high exposure and if you were a big enough business I would definitely say do it.

Paul: So why is that? What difference does it make?

Anton Peck: Well that’s exactly what I mentioned earlier. It’s the one image that you are going to own or the website is going to own and it’s not going to be found anywhere else. Completely unique.

Paul: You do feel that when you go through these thousands and thousands of stock images that “Well, it’s pretty much unique. Who else is going to use it?” but it’s amazing how often images turn up. I’ve got a little program that changes my desktop image on a regular basis and I’ve had this really nice one that I loved and kept for a while which was a cityscape of London that had been made all futuristic and I thought “Wow! What a great image”. And then I’m going on the tube and there’s the same image plastered across the wall. It’s amazing how often they do turn up again.

Anton Peck: Yeah it’s takes away a little bit doesn’t it?

Paul: Yeah definitely. Definitely. You’re an illustrator, let’s get onto the role of illustration. What advances or disadvantages do you think that illustration has over photography. When should you be using photography, when should you be using illustration?

Anton Peck: Illustration’s gonna provide a whole different type of personality to a website that you can never find in a photo. You can create situations, objects, environments that would either be too expensive to reproduce or they just don’t exist in the real world. Things that you just can’t do with a photograph. Again, that’s going to have to be through the interview of the illustrator trying to describe whether the job is appropriate or not. Actually that would be up to the art director trying to commission to decide whether they need an illustrator or a photographer. But custom website illustrations are so unique right now. When you do have a custom illustration it stands out a great deal more than a photograph. I think one of the greatest examples that stands out on the top of my mind would be Andy Clark’s website with Kevin Cornell’s image that he did of that scooterboy, the guy on the scooter.

Paul: Yeah, it looks superb. That’s stuffandnonense.com, if I remember.

Anton Peck: .co.uk

Paul: Oh .co.uk. Well check that out.

Anton Peck: Just try to imagine if Andy would have reproduced that with a photograph. It wouldn’t have the same personality I don’t think. He wouldn’t have been able to pull it off.

Paul: So do you think that photography has less personality generally or is it just the stock photography that has less personality?

Anton Peck: I wouldn’t call it a more or less personality thing as much it would be a different type of personality. It depends on what you’ve going for.

Paul: Do you think there’s some situations where illustration just isn’t appropriate because it would create the wrong kind of personality or is illustration flexible enough to be able to work in most situations?

Anton Peck: No I think illustration is not appropriate for everything. I think there’s probably a time and a place where an illustration is not going to do the job of a photograph. The photograph tends to look a little bit more… I was going to say professional but I don’t think that’s the word for it. There’s a sort of business approach… I don’t know. Illustration is very personal. It’s one of a kind. It seems that if you have a corporation maybe an illustration isn’t going to work unless it’s a certain kind of illustration.

Paul: Yeah I kind of know what you mean. There’s something… A photograph has a kind of… trustworthiness isn’t the right word but a realism to it perhaps that lends itself to certain circumstances.

Anton Peck: Definitely. It’s really hard to distinguish between the two. It would really boil down to the specific case that it was going to be used.

Paul: Tell us a little bit about some of the different types of illustration and why you would pick when. Obviously every kind of illustrator has very different styles but are they any kinds of broad categories you would recommend in certain circumstances?

Anton Peck: Well, let me think off the top of my head. It seems like you have a real nice vector, flowery styles with flat colours like Veerle. Her work is fabulous and it’s all Illustrator. Her style is just so unique. Then I think of Kevin Cornell. His style is so organic and painted. Then there’s styles like my own. I tend to learn for more photorealism in some cases. My own personal gallery doesn’t lean that way too much. There’s a few different styles out there and it’s hard to say when it’s going to be used properly.

Paul: Do you think that some styles date more quickly than others? You talked about that flowery style where you see a lot of art deco type shapes being used on the web at the moment. Do you think that illustration goes through more fashion trends than photograph does?

Anton Peck: I would venture to say yes and in a way. However like all fashion trends, it always comes back. Right now the big popular thing is artwork that looks like it’s straight from the 70′s. The muted brown colours and the nice organic curves, swirls and circles, things like that. Those are going over quite well I think.

Paul: It’s interesting isn’t it. I think there some sites that need to be fashion conscious and on the cutting edge of what’s going on and there are others that need to be generic and long lasting. It very depends on what kind of industry you are in as whether you should follow these trends or not I guess.

Anton Peck: Right. Or then if it seems to expire then you can just change it out and get a new one.

Paul: The glory of CSS, the separation of content from design.

Anton Peck: Absolutely.

Paul: OK Anton. Thank you very much for coming on the show. It’s really interesting that we haven’t tackled the discussion of imagery before.

Anton Peck: I did have one real quick public service announce if you’ll let me have another minute.

Paul: Yeah, go for it.

Anton Peck: For your listeners I’m wanted to just bring up that they shouldn’t take images, and I know it’s kind of obvious, take images from fountain sites or Flickr or Google Image search. That’s just bad practice and they are normally just going to get found out and it’s not a very nice thing to do. If they find images on sites that they like, they can contact the owner to obtain permission.

Paul: And it’s surprising. Often the owners are very happy and flexible to accommodate that. If you take the time to contact them they are often very flattered that you asked. Good piece of advice. OK thank you very much Anton and we’ll get you back on the show again in the future. Good to talk to you.

Listeners email:

Textmate reviewed

Teifion shares his thoughts on Textmate for the mac, an incredibly powerful text editor with a sophisticated plug-in architecture.

I have to confess that I have only opened Textmate once and found myself unsure where to begin. I do know however that Teifion and many other web developers rate it extremely highly and use it as their primary development tool. In the show I pick Mr Hicks and Oxton’s collective brains about its benefits and whether I should make the effort to learn it properly.

Javascript or JQuery

The second listener contribution comes from Will who writes…

I was listening to your last one and you said it would be important to learn javascript for 2008. I know bits of javascript but don’t particularly like it and don’t know ajax yet, however, I have been playing with jQuery and find it much simpler. Do you think it’s a good alternative to learning all of javascript and have you used it at all?

Personally I think it is important to learn a language from scratch and that relying too heavily on libraries can cause problems in the long run. Although there is nothing wrong with you learning jQuery I would suggest it should be an addition to learning Javascript rather than a replacement.

If you want to know if Mr Oxton and Hicks disagree with me you will have to listen to the show :)

To leave an audio comment for the show skype “boagworldshow” or call +44 20 8133 5122.

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)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

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.

107. Running to keep up

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

On show 107: What should you be learning about in 2008, Jason Beaird on web design basics and how to deal with portfolio pages.

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Where to focus in 08 | Jason Beaird on design basics | Listener emails

News and events

Setting expectations

Our first news story today is an article on working with your clients. Specifically it focuses on the subject of setting your clients expectations and clearly communicating with them.

We all work for somebody. We all have clients in some form. Whether our clients are other companies or simply our boss we all know the feeling when they seem to expect something which we believed we never promised.

This article looks at two ways of managing this kind of scenario. First be diligent up front. As the article says…

Setting expectations isn’t difficult, or mysterious, but it does take time and you have to be diligent about it.

Second it suggests being consistent. That doesn’t mean you are inflexible. It means that you need to be consistent in your communications throughout a project. If goal posts move, it is important that you explain the ramifications.

The principles of this article are universally applicable. So whoever you are take a few minutes to check it out.

Great websites do, not say

The next post I found falls into the category of “it’s funny because it’s true”. It’s a post by one of my favourite bloggers Gerry McGovern who seems to rant against websites that spend more time talking about user experience rather than offering it. He begins his rant by focusing on welcome copy…

I don’t want to pass meaningless pleasantries with your website. I don’t want to shake its hand. Or talk about the weather. I’m at your website for a reason. I’m in a hurry. I’m impatient. So kill the welcome, please.

He goes on to criticise sites that waste valuable copy explaining how easy their sites are…

If it’s really easy, why are you telling me it’s really easy and quick? For starters, you’ve wasted my time by making me read your meaningless sentence.

If you ever write copy for websites then you should read this post. If you don’t then check it out anyway if only for the pure entertainment value.

CSS: The All-Expandable Box

My final suggestion for your reading pleasure is a post on the Web Designers Wall entitled The All-Expandable Box. This solves a problem which I encounter all the time.

As you will know if you listen to this show regularly I am a great fan of using ems for typography. I like the idea users can resize their text to suit their own requirements.

The downside of this approach is that it can quickly break designs especially when text is contained within a box. The box will naturally expand vertically but not horizontally. The result is that you loose control of line length. Enabling the whole interface to expand including the box itself is very useful. This article shows you how.

Its a nice clean technique that should act as a building block for much more complex things. So if you are considering doing more ems based design then this should be a nice starting point.

Feature: Where to focus in 08

As web designers we are all busy people. We are in such a fast moving sector that it can be hard to know what is worthy of our attention. Should we be focusing on Silverlight or brushing up on Javascript? Learning Rails or grappling with mobile devices? This week I want to share my thoughts of where you should be focusing your energies in 2008.

Expert interview: Jason Beaird on design basics

Paul Boag: Joining me today is Jason beard author of an incredibly useful and wonderful book that I’ve really come to love. That’s – How would you describe it? Is it a basic introduction to designing?

Jason Beaird: It’s a basic introduction to graphic design principles. The book was really first intended for web developers in fact the initial working title was web design for developers and it kind of expanded into just a introduction to graphic design principles for anybody not just for developers, not people already creating websites. But anybody interested in design really.

Paul Boag: Mmm what’s so great about it is that you’ve kind of really taken time to go over the basic principle of creating a beautiful website. Which I guess is the title of the book, “The Principles of beautiful of web design” that’s the title isn’t it?

Jason Beaird: That’s correct.

Paul Boag: I really should have it in front of me shouldn’t I [Jason laughs] Oh but you’ve got to be fairly impressed that I knew that of the top of my head.

Jason Beaird: I’m just impressed that you have a copy yourself.

Paul Boag: Well yes I do. And it’s good because a lot of people that listen to this show are not necessarily professional designers we have a lot of people who listen to the show who are website owners but have to do a bit of design in order to maintain their site. We’ve got Developers that developing applications and having to do some design as part of that and we’ve also got people who probably are designers but not full time so are interested in how the professionals go about doing these things. So it’s a really good book for the boagworld listeners and why I’ve been so desperate to get you on the show for so long Jason, so it’s good to have you Jason.

Jason Beaird: So everybody laughs along.

Paul Boag: Well you’re a busy man; you’ve got a lot to do. So I thought what we would basically do is take the chapters from the book and maybe pick out some of the basic principles from each of those chapter and get you to talk about them little bit. So the chapters in your book are layout and composition, colour, texture, typography and imagery and that for a start made me very enthusiastic. Because it’s like really obvious, basic stuff that here are the main issues you are going to come across from a design prospective and you know we’re going to do a chapter on each which I just thought very refreshing and very logical and that’s good. So let’s kick off with layout and composition so tell us a bit about some of the stuff you cover in that chapter maybe and some of the basic principles that non-designers need to know about.

Jason Beaird: Well the entire book is really just basics, in my opinion. It’s just stuff that a lot of people think designers have as intuition and really it’s just stuff you can learn and learning these principle is like learning how to hand code. Really you can a website using a WYSIWYG but understanding the tags and selectors allows you to see inside and know what’s going on. And these are just basic. But really this is going to be the fire hose version of the book.

< p>Paul Boag: Yeah, I’m asking you to compress the entire book into about 20-30 minutes. [Both laugh]

Jason Beaird: I’ll give it a shot. We’ll start out with layout, some of the main principles of graphic design theory is balance, unity and emphasis and learning how to take all three of those and use them effectively in a layout is a pretty good place to start, from a layout prospective. By balance I mean symmetry. Is it divided right down the middle, or does it still feel balanced even though it’s divided into columns? By unity I mean do the elements of the website feel like they are one cohesive thing. You know does it feel like it’s a singular unit rather than a bunch of different bits. Then emphasis obviously is about creating a focal point on the page. And keeping that focal point and understanding where people are going to look and why they are going to look there and so there there’s different ways to create all three of those things. One thing I talked about in the first chapter about balance and creating balance is design proportion which some people call the golden mean or the golden ratio. Really it’s just a rule that if you divide a width by 1.62 just a number called Phi** you get a pleasing proportionate division. And so to make that simpler it can also be known as the rule of thirds. If you divide something by thirds it’s pretty close to the 1/ 1.62 ratio and you can come up with a pleasing kind of division for a navigation column and content area by using that kind of division. But really that’s sort of an overview.

< p>Paul Boag: Yeah, I wonder why the rule of thirds works, did you find out anything in your research about why that is pleasing?

Jason Beaird: I didn’t really find out a whole lot of solid information about it. But there is some out there, pythagorans noticed that it was a very common division in nature things like with leaves and shells had the same division and ratio and then started to develop the concept that anything designed around that is designing around nature so is therefore designing around gods design so you know. So the Romans and the Greeks built there some of their architecture on the golden ratio, the golden mean it’s a stable of graphic design since those times.

Paul Boag: Yeah and it really does work. I remember even back in Art College when I was being taught photography the same principles apply to photography composition you know or really anything you do, whether its print design or web design. So yeah the rule of thirds I think is a good one to take away.

Jason Beaird: Yep.

Paul Boag: Ok, what about colour tells us a little bit about colour because that’s a huge subject that people have written entire books on and you had one chapter so what did you chose to pick out on the subject of colour?

Jason Beaird: That’s the important thing to remember about these chapters is that there are entire books dedicated to each. I feel like was already trying to squeeze it already into the book. But with colour I think the most important thing to remember is that people’s perception of colour depend on their own personal experiences and cultural like right now, red and green means Christmas, for most Americans and most people around the globe whether they believe in that or not it’s just something that we’ve been exposed to so much that that’s the way we see it.

Paul Boag: Yeah.

Jason Beaird: But beyond those personal perceptions and traditional perceptions it’s good to know that there are ways to align colours where you really can’t make too big a mistake. [Laughs] and that are using a colour wheel and to rely on colour schemes that exist. With any rule it can be broken for whatever purpose you want but it’s good to know what the good colour choices look like before you start making your own and relying on color schemes or a colour wheel is a good way to get started.

Paul Boag: I think when you talk about these rules exist to be broken, ok that’s true but the kind of audience you are trying to reach, maybe a non-designer audience kind of playing safe is kind of always a good way to go.

Jason Beaird: That’s true.

Paul Boag: And you know using a colour wheels and stuff. Don’t you also mention in the book about finding a photograph that you like and or is that somewhere else, that might be somewhere else but it’s a nice idea anyway, taking a photograph and extracting the colours from that. I think is quite a nice way of doing it as well. Have you ever tried that?

Jason Beaird:I have tried that, I use that quite often. I don’t know if I mentioned that in the book or not. I mention a few other software based colour chooses and one that come out around the time I was writing the book that I didn’t get a chance to include was adobe kuler, at

Paul Boag: Yeah I think using a tool like that is very handy indeed. Because let’s face it we perceive colour in slightly different ways and what is it one in ten or is it one in 20 men are colour blind anyway.

Jason Beaird: I believe it’s 1 in 10 have slight colour blindness where they can’t tell, usually a red green; where they can’t tell the difference between red and green. Yeah so I mean yes, using a tool is a good idea if you are not a designer who’s really confident in colour.

Paul Boag: Now what about the subject of texture that was an interesting one I was quite interested that that was included in the chapter listings. And I, I intuitively do stuff with texture but I’ve never really thought about it that much so tell us a little bit about why you decided to include that and what advice would you give?

Jason Beaird: That for me was probably one of the hardest chapters to write because it was a lot of intuition and I like to use texture a lot in my own designs and I think that where truly the design begins. But there is not much principle wise to it. You can talk about points and lines and shape and that’s where all visual effects begin. But texture is really about creating a tactile quality and a theme for you website. Whether that is a smooth shape like apple computer with rounded corners and glossy buttons or whether that is a wicked worn look with a brick texture or something that makes it look nostalgia or old or whatever feel you want to create you can do that with texture. And I was trying to just convey that in that chapter.

Paul Boag: Yeah I mean texture kind a gives character to the site in many ways doesn’t it from the kind of grunge look you get through to the highly reflective look, or like what you say, sites like Apple. So what kind of, you talked about points and lines and perhaps you could explain some of those concepts to us.

Jason Beaird: Right you can create any kind of visual effect with just points. I showed an example; a picture of my cat, abbie, created with a dot matrix printer kind of effect on it. It’s just points. And then you can move in and use lines and shapes. It’s just important to remember that lines can create movement, horizontal line doesn’t have as much movement as say a diagonal line or vertical lines lead you up and down the page. It’s important to remember eye movement when you are creating textures. But really it’s just like what I said about creating a tactile quality and theme for the website.

Paul Boag: So as far as people may be, say a developer who has just developed an application and he needs it to look kind of half decent but doesn’t want to do anything too risky incase he screws it up and he’s not a designer. I mean what kind of advice do you give a person like that? Do you encourage them, probably best to stay away from doing too much textual stuff or is that something you should get into?

Jason Beaird: I think it’s something you should think about. Texture can easily be overdone and it can become goofy and silly rather than being professional. And I think it’s just in moderation. The thing to remember is to not leave your website backgrounds on div’s, backgrounds colors on div’s. Create some kind of texture, feel to it, whether that’s rounded corners or whether to go for the minimal stick where you don’t really use background images but rely on negative space. It’s just the fact of going beyond the standard HTML look. I mean obviously with style sheets you can’t just leave it un-styled because it’s styled content has no structure to it any more because, we’ve taken out the tables we’ve taken out the design in HTML and now we are relying on style sheets, so now you really have to build something up. That’s good I think, it makes people think about texture and all these typography, colour all these elements of design. But to think about it and just go beyond the basics. Just try to recreate something that you already like, picture wise, that doesn’t mean stealing the design but looking at another website you think captures the professional look and feel that you are going for and try to recreate that in your website.

Paul Boag: Yeah, it’s interesting that you talk about looking for inspiration. What kind of advice do you give people for a good place to look, should they just be looking at other websites or should they be looking beyond the web a bit?

Jason Beaird: I really believe that people need to look beyond the web. One of the tags for this book is that you don’t need to go to art school to design great looking websites and well I was kind scared of that headline, that professors from collage would hate me for it. [Paul laugh] It’s really true because if you have a passion for it, it will draw an inspiration from all sorts of sources whether it is architecture, or goofy things like traffic patterns or a door that you see, anything really can really inspire a look and feel to a website. Jonathan Stickler wrote an article about how he was inspired by an art deco building and that’s what gave him the design idea for his current website design.

Paul Boag:Yeah, and I thinks that particularly true when it comes to texture and colour as well as you can see textures and colors around you in everything from a plant pot through to a magazine so yeah.

Jason Beaird: One of the other big things from going through a collage art programs is that if you go to school for graphic design you’re not just going to school for graphic design you actually have to take all the traditional art classes, painting, drawing, pottery sometimes, a lot of history and really the reason for that is to create a foundation to a visual exposure to art. So you have this vocabulary and this experience pool to draw from when you are creating other designs.

Paul Boag: You mentioned earlier, negative space when you were talking about texture as another kind of approach to things. Negative space is something I think designers always throw around; it’s a term that we like to use quite a lot. But it’s not something we ever kind of explain. Just spend a couple of minutes explaining how negative space works and why it’s so important, if you would.

Jason Beaird: Negative space is important because it allows you eye to move around things if you had a page completely crammed with text you wouldn’t have any focal point to start with apart from the top of the page. Our eyes usually gravitate towards the center of the composition, so if you think about that you can have an element something around the center of the composition that can lead you to another element. Negative space is really a tool for moving the eye around.

Paul Boag: Right.

Jason Beaird: If you have, like I said before diagonal lines create movement. If you have diagonal lines that move you up towards something else. I gave a few examples in the book; it’s hard to talk about it with having any visuals.

Paul Boag: Yeah I know. It’s frustrating isn’t it? I really sometimes, I really regret doing an audio podcast, it’s a bad choice. [laughs] Ok, let’s look at the subject of typography. I’m guessing it must have been a hard chapter to write because A) typography is a massive subject and B) typography on the web is quite a tricky area. It’s kind of easy to almost easy, as a non-designer, to dismiss typography by going; well there are only about 4 fonts I’m allowed to use anyway so therefore typography on the web doesn’t exist. Why is that wrong, why is that not the truth and how did you squeeze a chapter out of this.

Jason Beaird: Well just like a lot of the chapters there are a lot of books on the subject of typography that go way beyond our experience with web or even print graphic design that go way back to the roots of communication and that’s really what typography is about. Its communication and all websites you’re trying to communicate something so if you can’t do that with pictures and ideas you have to do that with words so the way those words appear to people should become part of your design. It’s on hard with the state that it’s in with the web, having a limited palette of fonts to choose from. But at the same time it’s a good thing, I think for the novice because even though we are limited to this certain number of fonts that everybody has in their computers. Most of those fonts aside from comic sans are decent [laughs] for body text and things like that. The most important thing to remember is that there are other fonts out there and to have sensitivity towards things like spacing between lines and the vertical rhythm. Vertical rhythm isn’t something I talked about in my book because I thought it was an advanced subject but right after the book was published it sort of exploded into a big topic in web design and there’s a lot great articles out there written by other great web designers about vertical rhythm and how that affects your typography.

Paul Boag: So what is vertical rhythm for those that don’t know?

Jason Beaird: Vertical rhythm is just creating a space between your lines that kind of matches up throughout the website so that the spacing in the lines in your navigation area and the spacing in your lines in the content area kind of line up and their not just randomly spaced apart so you get weird alignments between things. It’s creating vertical rhythm, it itself is a good description; you’re creating a rhythm or pattern for your eye to follow down the page.

Paul Boag: So it’s all about basically making sure multiple typographic elements across columns have some kind of relationship to one another and that they are not just higaty pigaty all over the place.

Jason Beaird: That s the way I understand it, that’s the way I think of it is it’s really about creating a pattern and paying attention to the way the text lines up.

Paul Boag: So whatever, bearing in mind that we are limited to such a small set of fonts. What sort of basic advice would you give to someone starting on in web typography. You mentioned line spacing, what are you getting at there?

Jason Beaird: The default line spacing for HTML is very tight. And with tight text like that it’s kind of hard to read And also thinking about the width of the text you are reading . When you are reading a newspaper article or a magazine article the reason the columns are so narrow is because it’s easy, or a book even, it’s easy for your eye to scan a certain width of text and it’s easy for your eye to move to the next line if there is a little bit of space between it. And if you kind of know those basic concepts you can make it a little more pleasing to read that the default set up for typography on the web.

Paul Boag: Yeah, because especially if you’ve got a fluid site you can end up with ridiculously long line lengths if you don’t.

Jason Beaird: Right and I think that’s a lot of the beef people have with fluid layouts is that not only are you taking power from the graphic designer but you’ll also making line widths that are incredibly hard to read. But in my opinion if the user is comfortable expanding the site out to that width, and it’s readable having the line width that long, then obviously they don’t have a problem with it. But you should sort of leave that up to the user if you can. But it’s been proven that it’s easier to read text that’s been set to a certain width.

Paul Boag: Are there certain type faces that are better suited to kind of headings in preference to body’s and vice versa?

Jason Beaird: Well with body text, traditionally it use to be that body text for books and that were set to times or serif fonts because the serifs sort of lead your eye to the next character, but because of the resolution we have with the monitors and the way the text is being presented it’s actually been proven that sans serif fonts are better, fonts like Arial and Helvetica, are easier to read in smaller sizes because you don’t get the kind of resolution, the kind of detail that you get with printed type. And now that’s changing, we’re getting higher and higher resolutions in displays so maybe that will change in the future. But it’s just important to know those kinds of idea when choosing the body type for your website. But when you are choosing a heading, when you’ve got something that is very large it really just matters how the text displays and because you can use images and because you can use things like (scalable Inman Flash Replacement) sIFR to display another font besides the standard 6 or 7 fonts that are available – I call it the ok 5 9 [laughs] that are available across the Mac and web computers, Mac and PC computers sorry. You can choose other fonts that are outside those fonts to use for headers or areas where you want to give a little more design appeal. So there is a world of fonts out there, some good, some corny, that are available, some free and some very expensive that you can use for the headline on your website and it’s just important to be aware of those other fonts. I gave a few resources for free fonts I like www.1001 fonts.com is a good place to go for licensed fonts is a great font boundary, there is just a lot of fonts makers that make excellent fonts, not just for printed material like books but for web designers and people working on the web should be aware as well.

Paul Boag: Cool. So the last chapter in your book talks about imagery and I’m fascinated, and I have to confess that I haven’t read that chapter yet, so I’m kind of fascinated to know what you cover in that chapter as far as using imagery on the web. What kind of advice do you give?

Jason Beaird: Well the imagery. The graphic design doesn’t stop creating the frame around the website. It’s also about formatting the inside which is kind of difficult when you give the power to the user, give them content management. But choosing supporting content imagery is one thing that can really enhance the user experience of the web site. And finding and creating supporting imagery for awebsite content can be very difficult if you don’t know where to look or if you’re not a good illustrator or if you are not good at Photoshop. So I just try to give a basic primer on finding this type of supporting imagery and if you find an image that might work, how to tweak it to work for your needs. I just wanted to give a basic intro to using stock photo sites like iPhoto or stock photo exchange which is sxc.hu is a free stock photography site that is really great it has a lot of images. Finding images and then using them in your site is one way to really enhance the experience for your user, beyond that also I try to warn people from stealing images from Google and stop using the stock images and stock photography that we are all use to seeing in most free publication. I mean really here are a lot of stock images that have been created; the guy with the light bulb over his head, the hands holding the tree that’s growing in the soil in the persons hands. These are clique in the stock photography world you have to be aware when choosing images, to enhance the user experience.

Paul Boag: Yeah, yeah, defiantly , did you cover any of the technical aspects of compressing images or whether to go gif or jpeg and that kind of thing.

Jason Beaird: Yeah I did give a quick primer on jpegs, gifs and pings. And just a quick for everybody, if you are using a photo you obviously want to use a jpeg because usually with photos you usually have a lot of different tones and images. And gifs and pings the file space is based on the number of colours in the image. If you are using an icon type thing or a colour field where you have a limited number of colours then gif or pings are the way to go. And choosing between gifs and pings is really all about choosing between the types of transparency you want to have. Internet explorer 6 and below doesn’t support alpha transparency where you have a sort of gradient from opaque to transparent it just supports on an off. So with pings if you have transparency then you get a pink halo around them. Areas where there is transparency you can’t see it, now there are fixes for that but it’s kind of hacky still and for that reason people still hang onto the good old gif format which has transparency and unfortunately also has animation. [Both laugh]

Paul Boag: So is that one of your rules? Never ever use animated gifs?

Jason Beaird: Actually no it’s not, because I’ve used animated gifs even on my own site if you go to my site jasongraphics.com and hover over the logo it was sort of an experiment toy to play with I was designing my current layout, it was a sliding door type image where I’ve got the still part of the Jason graphics logo and then when you move over it jumps up, the position of the image jumps up so you see the animated moving, like sunrays over the logo. So that’s an animated gif and I’m not ashamed of that. But I think that animated gifs in a lot of ways degrade the professionalism of a lot of websites.

Paul Boag: It sounds a superb book, for anyone that’s not from a design background. Where can they get a hold of a copy, where can they find out more about it, how can they buy it I guess is the next question?

Jason Beaird: Well I’d love you to buy it.

Paul Boag: Obviously.

Jason Beaird: I set a little promo site for the book at www.principlesofbeautifulwebdesign.com were you can kind of hover over, I did a fun little thing where if you hover over each of the chapter names it sort of point s out in the website design itself how the things play a part of the design I made for the promo site.

Paul Boag: Oh cool.

Jason Beaird: Beyond that amazon.com has a good price for the book usually and you can go of course to site point.com to buy directly from them, and most people prefer to do is buy directly from Sitepoint. They sent you lots of emails about books that are coming out and specials. A lot of people are big fans of Sitepoint. I really like them a lot too.

Paul Boag: Yeah if you haven’t checked out Sitepoint before, then it’s worth saying that they are a lot more than a book publisher they have got a huge site with tons of great articles of all aspects of web design and a really active forum as well.

Jason Beaird: The forums are a great place to get involved and a great place to learn new things.

Paul Boag: Thank you so much for coming on the show I can’t say I normally get people on the show to pimp their book and to be honest that wasn’t what I originally ask you to do either. But the more I think about it the more I’ll looked at it, the more I think it’s a perfect book for a lot people that listen to this show if you are starting out in any form of design and don’t come from a design background then I can highly recommend this is a book to check out. Jason, we’ll get you back again in the future no doubt and make you cover some of these things in more depth. But for now thanks you very much for being on the show.

Jason Beaird: I appreciate it, it’s like being on the Dave Letterman show or the Conon O’Brien [Paul laughs] it’s like a status symbol. But I’m glad to be here and thanks for having me on the show.

Paul Boag: Thanks very much.

Listeners email:

A excellent wire-framing tool

Robin:I’m a part-time web developer, committed to web standards, one day I’d like to make it my job. I’m a regular listener of boagworld in my car (traffic jam) going to work.

Remembering your discussion with Marcus about wire-framing (Powerpoint or Visio) i just came across this product: http://www.axure.com/demo.aspx. Looks spectacular although much to expensive for me (still).

Keep up the good work.

Building an online portfolio

Sultan:On the Headscape website I notice you have “related links” and “related pages”. What is the logic of that?

Also in your portfolio section when I click on a thumbnail why don’t you guys link to the actual sites rather than to a screen shot?

First of all let me say there is a lot about the Headscape website which I don’t like. It was built a while ago and our thinking has moved on.

One example of this is related pages and links. The logic was that related pages referred to other pages on the same website. Related links where external links to third parties. However in hindsight I don’t think that is a very clear distinction and should probably be changed.

I am however more happy with what we have done in our portfolio section. We have several reasons for the decision to link to screen shots rather than live sites. These include…

Some of the sites are intranets and not available to the public
Some sites had limited shelf life and are no longer available
We wanted the user to be able to click through multiples sites in quick succession

However, the primary reason is that clients often make significant alternations to the sites we deliver. After the end of the project we simply cannot guarantee that the quality of design and code will be maintained and so prefer not to directly link to the sites.

I am not suggesting that this is the right decision however it is the course of action we have chosen for Headscape.

106. Back to work blues

Posted in Classic shows on January 9, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul and Marcus discuss common mistakes when creating your sites structure and Rachel Andrews shares her experiences of getting into web design.

Podcast: Download (29.5MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Common mistakes of site structure | Rachel Andrews on building your web design career | Listener emails

Just a quick little request before we kick off today’s show. I need to get some more moo cards for the boagworld podcast (I am too tight to get proper business cards). Anyway I am having trouble with what to put on the cards. I was going to put a nice image on the cards but when I thought about it I couldn’t think of anything appropriate. In the end I decided to include tiny snippets from the reviews people have written about the show. However, being typically British with our self deprecating sense of humour. I decided to use the negative reviews rather than the positive ones. I have some great stuff such as “Paul has an ego that doesn’t need boosting” and “truly crappy jokes”. However, I need more. So, if you have 5 minutes this week drop me an email with a short, witty and hopefully not too rude review of the show. Let the venom flow :)

News and events

Internet Explorer 8

So the last time we did the news before Christmas Microsoft were under attack from Opera for its lack of standards support. Well, things have moved on since then and it is looking like Internet Explorer 8 is shaping up to be a very nice browser indeed. For start IE8 has passed the Acid 2 test published by the Web Standards Project. This is a definite commitment from Microsoft to provide comprehensive standards support and should be applauded. Jonathan Snook explains the ramifications of this as well as making some predications of his own as to what IE8 will look like. According to him we can expect straightforward column layouts, grid positioning and improved javascript support. Best of all if Jonathan is right we might see IE8 out in beta by the summer and in final release by next Christmas. Maybe then we can look at dropping support for IE6.

Using CSS to diagnose problems

Although there is still a lot of CSS not supported by browsers such as IE it is incredible what is possible with just what we have at the moment. Eric Meyer recently posted an article suggesting that you might want to consider using CSS to diagnose issues in your HTML that need resolving. In his article he uses CSS to find out where markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content. For example he uses CSS to visually highlight all images that have an empty or missing ALT attribute.

This isn’t an entirely new ideas. In fact Marco Battilana proposed a similar approach to highlight accessibility issues back in July 2006. However, Eric has taken it that much further and offered an excellent way of not only highlighting problems to yourself but also to your clients who maybe editing HTML.

Common accessibility mistakes

Talking about highlighting accessibility mistakes I came across a great article that does exactly that. Basically the article focuses on the fact that website owners can often be over enthusiastic when it comes to accessibility and start overusing HTML attributes designed to help accessibility. The result is that we can often do more harm than good. The article looks at the alt and title attributes which are often verbose or repetitious. It also looks at tabindex and accesskeys that can cause confusion and conflicts with normal browser behaviour. If you are applying any of these attributes to your code then I highly recommend you cast your eye over this article.

Basic design principles

The final story this week is an amazing series of posts by Patrick McNeil over at Design Meltdown. The reason I say they are amazing is because they are immense and I confess I am yet to read all of them. As you probably already know Design Meltdown tracks trends in web design and shows examples of sites that highlight these trends. Using the same example based approach Patrick looks at the fundamental principles of design and deconstructs them expertly. He covers Emphasis, Contrast, Balance, Alignment, Repetition and Flow in a screenshot packed series of posts that are a must read for anybody starting out in design. In the past I have always recommended Jason Beaird’s book “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” for those starting out in design. In fact we have Jason on the show soon. However, if you don’t like reading books or want to save a bit of money then Patrick’s analysis is a credible alternative. Check it out.

Feature: Common mistakes of site structure

Just before Christmas I wrote my final blog post for the year on creating the structure for your site. It is a topic that I have been thinking a lot about recently because of various projects I am working on and so it was fresh in my mind. In particular it occurred to me how much harder producing a good site hierarchy is than it first appears. In fact I see the same common mistakes occurring again and again. It is these mistakes I want to look at in today’s show. Read Common mistakes of site structure.

Expert interview: Rachel Andrews on building a web design career

Paul: OK, so joining me today is Rachel Andrew from EdgeofMySeat.com. Hello Rachel. It’s good to have you on the show at last.

Rachel: Hello, Paul. It’s good to be here.

Paul: I feel like I’ve been trying to bully you to come on the show forever and ever and ever, but it hasn’t worked out for one reason or another, but we finally got you here, so that’s good news. So uhm, Rachel, when I came to kind of putting together what I was going to do, talking to you. I suddenly realized I didn’t know you very well. I’ve heard a lot about you and I’ve heard a lot of other people say good things about you, which has gotta be a good thing, but I didn’t know anything about your background or kind of how you came to be involved in web developement. So, I thought it might be quite interesting, if It’s ok with you, just to spend a few minutes talking about how you came to be a web developer. How did you get into this illustrious career?

Rachel: Uhm, completely by accident, really. It wasn’t something I intended to do. My training is as a dancer. I was going to dance. That’s all I ever wanted to do.

Paul: All right.

Rachel (laughing): So, the part where I ended up doing this surprised everyone, (Paul laughing) especially my programmer father. (Rachel laughs)

Paul: Ahhhhh

Rachel: We didn’t even have computers in school when I was in school. I’m showing my age.

Paul: Yeah, I know the feeling.

Rachel: Yeah, so, and I remember when I was, I don’t know, either 13 or 14 there were two guys that came in and said, “All of you will need to know about computers in your future careers.” And I was like, “No I won’t. I’m going to be a dancer.” and they couldnt tell me why I would need computers and so I felt quite pleased with myself. So, yes, it wasn’t on the radar after all.

Paul: So, how did you go from dance to web developement? It seems a bit of a leap there.

Rachel: Well, I know this is a fairly technical career, and I was working back stage for a quite a while and when I decided to quit dance for various reasons, I was working in the west end and I managed to my way into a back-stage techie job.

Paul: OK.

Rachel: I did work as a choreographer and I knew a reasonable amount about sound and lighting and could my way in. So, I worked back-stage in the west end and for a year and a half on Charlston and on The Mouse Trap.

Paul: Right, I see.

Rachel: So, so that was it. So, it wound up to be a technical kind of job and then I found myself pregnant with my daughter. And you cant go heaving around stage equipment while pregnant.

Paul: No.

Rachel: So (laughing), I found myself with some time on my hands. It was really that I even started using the internet.

Paul: Oh, ok.

Rachel: I was fairly young and didnt know anybody else with a child and pregnant.

Paul: What kind of… how long ago are we talking about here?

Rachel: Well, the said child is now nearly 11.

Paul: Right.

Rachel: So, quiet a while ago. ( laughing)

Paul: OK.(laughing)

Paul: So, in the relatively early days of the Web then to some degree…

Rachel: Yes. Yeah and I mean thats really so very important in that at the time there wasn’t actually that much to learn and I was chatting to people on for the parents on the forums because as I said, I didn’t know anyone with a baby and I didn’t know anything about babies. So, (Paul: Ahhh) I was using the web just to talk to other people in the same situation. And then if you wanted to put anything online there wasn’t Flickr or all of these hings. You really had to build a web site.

Paul: Right. Yeah.

Rachel: So, you know, once my daughter was born, I started putting together various HTML. So I could put together a web site telling people about her and things like that. And that’s what everyone did.

Paul: OK.

Rachel: You chat in the discussion forums and you build web sites. Uhm I don’t know… I quite liked that. That was always good fun. So, it didnt take that long before people would start asking me if I would build them a web site.

Paul: Mmhmm

Rachel: And… and at the time there was so little to know. You know, it was a bit of HTML and you had to do some basic things with images. As time went on, I realized I was actually quite interested in, what at the time fewer people were doing which was writing things with Perl which was about the only thing that anyone used to do things like guestbooks and (Paul: Yeah) posting forums to email. It was very, very limited at the time in terms of what people were doing on the server side. I sat down with the Orilley Camel book and taught myself Perl.

Paul: Oh Right, OK. (Rachel laughing) As you do.

Rachel: As you do. Obviously

Marcus: Or not, in my case.

Rachel: Yeah, well… I was bored. (all laughing) I had a baby. You know? Nothing else to do. So, that’s really how I got into doing the back-end stuff via such a strange route and I didn’t really realize what I was learning or if there was real reason to do so. It was interesting to me.

Paul: Do you think there was any advantages or drawbacks to taking that kind of route. I mean I know that most of us that entered the web in the early days did it through some convoluted route in preference to having some kind of formal training. Do you think the people that are coming along these days are going through a proper… you know, going through some kind of computer training course or whatever? Do you think their at a disadvantage for not learning it themselves and discovering it themselves.

Rachel: Well, yeah, but I think things are so different now. I mean back then, it really was a case of: You learned HTML. You learned a little bit about how to make graphics work online. And maybe, if you’re very pushy, you learned some Perl. (Paul: Yeah) And that was it. There wasn’t a huge amount of decisions. I mean, even just to start learning to do this now, you start having to think, “Well, which language do I want to learn? What is the best thing to be learning? Where should I put my time?” (Paul: Yeah, totally). You know, I was just kind of sitting with a little 486 computer and thinking, “You know… this is quite interesting. Look, I can do this!” But we were all just discovering what we could do at the time. Whereas now, if you’re looking at this as a career and what’s going to be best right from the start, before you’ve even gotten started, you know? (Paul: Yeah) So, It’s very different. And It’s very difficult when people always say, “Well, how did you get started? Have you got any suggestions on how I can get started?” And It’s so different now.

Paul: That’s probably one of the most common emails I get. It’s, how do you get started and what languages do you start with? So, I guess you really didn’t have a lot of choice. (Rachel (laughing): No…) It was Perl or nothing, wasn’t it?

Rachel: Really, I mean, yeah, there were other things around but generally people were writing in C, Javascript, and Perl. And the web host I happened to have, had this server which you were allowed to run your scripts on. (Paul: Oh, ok) (Rachel laughing) They were still slightly nervous of it. You know, it was just one server you could run things on. It was a quite good community around that. People would help each other out on how to do things.

Paul: So what advice do you give people who do write with those kinds of questions as to what languages to start with? What do you say?

Rachel: I think the important thing is to learn something well. At the end of the day, once you’ve learned one launguage, you can usually swap to something else. It’s the concept that’s the hard thing. (Paul: Yeah.) Understanding based design or understanding just the basic constructs of any language. Once you’ve done that, you can usually swap to something else. I usually say that PHP is a pretty good choice. Just because It’s out there, everywhere. (Paul: Yeah) You’re going to be able to easily find somewhere to run it. You can set up your own development environment without having to spend any money, really. You can get that all set up. And there is lots and lots of help and there is a great community around that. And to be honest, PHP is what we tend to develop in now and most of the time.

Paul: I mean, It’s quite interesting that you talk about those early days and how you basically got into it because you became a mother. But the early days in the web, and to be honest, to some extent now, there arent exactly a huge number of female developers around. I mean, it seems to be a very male dominated thing. Did that put you off? Did that create barriers to you?

Rachel: It didnt really at the time when I was learning because I came out of a very male dominated profession anyway, (Paul: Oh, OK.) having been working back stage. So, it didnt, worry me. And also at the time, I was just interested in learning it. I think out there in the work place once I became employed doing this, I encountered all sorts of strange situations where people really couldn’t quite get their head around the fact that I was technical and not like a designer or not something else that cliquey females are doing. I was the head of a technical team and went to help someone with a computer and I was the most senior person on the team. And they said, “Oh, can you not send one of the boys down?” (Paul gasps) I then said, “I can send one of the boys down. They’re not going to fix your computer for you, but I can send them down if that’s what you want.” (all laughing) I mean, so people were a bit taken aback, I think and don’t immediately assume that I do the job that I do (Paul: Yeah.) and are much more comfortable of putting me in a designer area.

Paul: Well, that was the mistake I made, isn’t it? (Rachel laughing) The first time, I suppose. I was the typical male chauvinist pig and presumed you are a designer, which I don’t know why. I think it was the hair color, more than anything.

Rachel (laughing): To be honest, I am not particularly hung up about it. It’s not something I get terribly upset about. I find it sort of intriguing that people just assume that. I’m not… you know… I’ve work in… sort of male dominated jobs for a long, long time now and I think if I got terribly upset about these things I wouldn’t be doing it. It is interesting. But in other ways, it works for me. When I was going for job interviews, for instance, if I’m the only woman who walks in and there are lots and lots of men, they’re going to remember me. (Paul: Yeah) And in the same, you know, if I’m pitching for work it’s a talking point. You know, people are always interested as to why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Paul: Damn, and here I was thinking I was asking original questions!

(Rachel and Paul laugh)

Rachel: I think sometimes, it does work for me because do remember. They would think can’t a woman do something a bit unusual?

Paul: Do you think it’s a problem within the industry or would you just think It’s one of those things and what will be will be kind of attitude?

Rachel: It’s really hard to see where it’s a problem. I think It’s a problem if girls or young women who are looking at career choices are being put off because they don’t see female role models out there. And, there’s lots of reasons why. There are women around doing this and tend not to be so high profile. (Paul: Yeah) I mean the reason that I’m not touring around all the different events and things is because I’m a mom. (Paul: Yeah!) You know, and I think that’s the same for an awful lot of women. I talked about this on my blog once and got loads and loads of women contacting me going, “Yes, exactly!” We’re the one’s doing the majority of childcare. I know there are men in that position too, and I’m not saying there aren’t men who are having to be… going to pick up kids at 3:00 or whatever it is. But it does tend to be women and It’s often the women who make that choice or wants to spend time close to the kids when they’re very little. My daughter is getting older but even so, I still wouldn’t be happy about, say going to a different country and leaving her here to go to an event.

Paul: Yeah. I mean to be honest, even for this interview we kind of have to fit it in around you taking your child somewhere, Marcus has got to do a school run in a minute. You know, so, it’s all part of the kind of… yeah… It’s nice we’re in a position where we can kind of fit our work around our families. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Rachel: Yes, it is. And I think that’s possibly one of the reasons why there aren’t so many high profile women, because it takes time to raise your profile. And without me quite looking, I’ve been able to do that through writing, which I can do at midnight or whatever. If you’re going to get out there and get around to all the conferences and things, you know, and look at what other people who are considered to be my peer group and what they’re doing. I just couldn’t physically do that. (Paul: Yeah, totally) Because, I don’t want to. I don’t want to spend a lot of time away from my daughter right now. Maybe in 6 years time, she will be very disinterested in spending any time with me.

(Rachel and Paul Laughing)

Paul: Once she’s a teen-ager, you won’t want to be with her either.

(Both continue laughing)

Rachel: Exactly, you know, so things change but there are quite a lot of people with quite young children and actually more and more so. It’s quite funny, I feel like I’ve got quite an old child for the group of people that I speak to. There are lots of new developer babies out there.

Paul: Yeah, well Marcus is old and decrepit.

Marcus: Well, just to depress you, Rachel, what happens when they get older and become teenagers, they just rely on you as a taxi service.

Rachel: Well, I get that as well. That was the case today. I was ferrying mine and two others back from the

Marcus: The only thing I would say though is, we went through a period about 6 months the beginning of this year, trying to recruit new developers. And we only interviewed one woman out of probably a dozen candidates

Paul: I think that it’s worth saying that’s because we only have 1 woman apply, rather than we segregated all the women who refused to interview.

Marcus: That’s what I meant. Yes, well put Paul. We literally had only 1 woman apply, so yeah… I don’t really know why. Maybe it just seemed like kind of a boy’s area at the moment. I suppose, from what you were saying about the fact that you’re not inclined to go out there and sort of go out on the circuit like Paul does. I suppose until that happens, and maybe younger women who aren’t thinking about motherhood yet, are the ones who are going to be out there raising the profile of women and hopefully, this sort of “boys’ club” type mentality will sort of just fizzle away.

Paul: I mean, It’s quite interesting that you say, how you talked about how you managed to raise your profiles through writing. Tell us a little about that. How did you get into writing books? Because, you seem quite prolific. I did a quick search on Amazon to see exactly how much you’ve written and it seemed to go on for quite a long while.

Rachel: Yeah, there’s quite a few. That was, again, like most things, I tend to say, “Oh yes, I’ll have a go at that!” and then worry about it later. It was a long time ago, I had written some stuff for the Macromedia Web Site about Dreamweaver.

Paul: OK

Rachel: And it was Glasshouse who contacted me and said, “Oh, would you write a couple of chapters for a book?” A couple of chapters, that would be alright, you know (laughing). (Paul: Yeah, no big deal). So yeah, I wrote a couple of chapter for a book and it kind of went from there, really. I like writing. I enjoy… I’m much more from an arts background really than technical. So, I do enjoy writing and putting things across that way. So, yeah, it just went from there. And then when someone said, “Oh, will you write a few more chapters?” Yeah, ok, that was alright. (laughs) And before I know it, I’ve got this great list of books.

Paul: Yeah. It’s a very time consuming thing to do. I mean, beyond the fact that you obviously sound like you enjoy doing it. Do you find it beneficial from a publicity angle for bringing in work?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I think people tend to see you as an expert if you’ve got things in print; if you’ve written things. It does sort of depend that you do know what you’re talking about. And especially with what I do, which is much more… It’s not like I have to show a nice portfolio of pretty things. This is what I can do. What people are doing when they hire me or hire my company is they are hiring us for our expertise. And they have to constant that we actually are experts; that we know what we’re talking about. So the writing does help in that because people assume that if someone let you write a book, you must actually know what you are talking about.

Paul: I mean, I get emails from people asking how do you go about raising your profile. I’m quite interested as to whether you stumbled into this. You know, you talked about you were writing for the Macromedia web site. Did you go out purposefully, intending to write for them or did it just kind of happen? How’s that come about?

Rachel: Again, that really just happened. But because I was writing on my own blog, and I was writing… you know, I was helping people out in forums. (Paul: Right) You know, if you’re out there doing things, people do notice. I mean certainly with things like magazines and books and you know, varies sites that want articles. There are people out there that are looking for people to write all the time, because there’s actually an awful lot of people who know what they’re doing but there are fewer who can express it and express it in a way that someone new to the concept is going to understand. If you are able to do that, if that’s something you can do and you are doing that on your own site or are helping people out in forums and things then it will get noticed. And there are quite a bit of places you can be submitting I suppose, to, you know, Site Point and Vitamin… There’s quite a bit of other sites that accept good content. (Paul: Yeah.) It means that you have to write a few things that you’re not paid for to get going. You can find then, that you can start putting together a body of work and say, “Well, this is the stuff I’ve done.” It’s not in It’self something that you earn a huge amount of money from. I think people who write for a living must have to work incredibly hard.

Paul: (laughing) Or be incredibly good. One or the other.

(Rachel and Paul laughing)

Rachel: Both I think, both. As something that helps raise your profile for the other things you do. If I found it an absolute chore, I don’t think I would do it because you don’t want to be sogging away at things you can’t stand in the hope that it will get you some profile. But it is one way to do it and It’s certainly a way to do it if you are in a position where you can’t get out to lots of events or you’re not someone who wants to do public speaking. I’m not keen at all on public speaking. I much rather hide behind the computer (laughing).

Paul: A proper developer. That’s what I like to hear.

Rachel: So, you know, It’s another way of doing it, because I do sort of think of the public speaking if you’re going to be thinking of conferences as being something that would really get that profile up there. No one has really met me until fairly recently at any events because I didn’t get to anything really. And yet a lot people would have known of me and the stuff I’ve done because of the lighting.

Paul: I mean, you talk about that you use this as a mechanism to you know, to increase your profile for the other work that you do. So, perhaps we ought to talk about the other work that you do. I mean, you run a company, “Edge of My Seat” which is edgeofmyseat.com. How did that start? You obviously from going… from being an enthusiastic amateur, you must have gotten a job in web design, I’m guessing. How did you go about getting that job and from there, how did you end up running your own company?

Rachel: Well, I… When I decided I actually wanted to go back to work… I’ve been doing bIt’s and pieces while my daughter was quite little and I decided I wanted to go back to work and it was really tail-end of this whole dot com era. (Paul: Oh, OK.) And so, I ended up heading up a technical team at Property Finder. (Paul: Oh, OK. Yeah, I know.) Which was very much on the technical side and we managed the servers and things like that rather than even doing any development or very much development. There were other people who were more on the development team, although we still did bIt’s and pieces. I did that for a while and the whole sort of dot com thing was starting to fall apart really, at that point. And I moved to another dot com company who built portal sites for accountants. So I know quite a bit about stage integration (Paul: Wow. What an exciting life you have). Yeah, but that’s the time where things really weren’t looking that stable and I felt, well I can actually do this myself. And at least then I would know where I was in terms of whether I was going to get paid by people. The problem is being employed in an unstable situation is that really, you can work a whole month and get to the end of the month and find out that nobody’s paying you. (Paul: Yeah.) And so I figured that actually, I may be better off setting off on my own. And so people had asked if I would take on bIt’s of freelance work and things. And so, I actually purchased a printer’s trust because at the time I was a young single mom. I’m not so young anymore but I purchased a printer’s trust and this in 2001. And they basically gave me a small grant and loan to get the company started. So, I had about a month’s money when I started. (laughing) I didn’t have the dot coms, so I kind of had to work. (Paul: Wow!) It’s a good way to start a business, you know (Paul: Yeah.) … make or break really. If it doesn’t work, we don’t eat.

(Rachel, Paul and Marcus laughing)

Marcus: I remember that feeling very well.

Rachel: Yeah.

Paul: Yes

Rachel: But it makes you really dive into it. The nice thing was, because I was paying for a child, mind you, at the time, I actually only had to earn half of what I had earned because I could keep her home with me.

Paul: Ahh, ok.

Rachel: So, I must have cut my expenses by being able sort of work around my daughter’s schedule and things. So, that kind of worked out alright and really, it went from there.

Paul: So how did you begin to win the business in that first month of, “Oh crap! What have I done?” (Rachel and Marcus laugh) You know, where did the work come from?

Rachel: Well, at the time, what I realized was that because of how the dot com was collapsing, everyone was getting rid of their developers. But they still had all these applications. And something I’ve always been good at is picking up on other people’s stuff and working on it. So, probably, uhm, September ’01, which was like a terrible time to start a company (Rachel and Paul laugh) and really for the first two or three years was taking stuff that was already built and was falling apart, or the developers had gone or had all sorts of problems with it and just fixing it or adding bits to it. And I did lots and lots of that which, during this time of recession, really, was actually, really good work because there was plenty of it. Everything had to have been built while they had lots of developers and they had money and things. And so I sort helped things limp along a lot. And what this sort of lead to really was this idea of doing development for design agencies. (Paul: OK.) And focusing on doing really good development to support really nice design. That really is what we’ve moved on to do now. Most of our clients are designers or design agencies. And they do a really good design, and then they hand it over to us and we look after it and we make sure it will work. (laughing) That’s actually a really nice way to work because it means we get to work with some really nice stuff, anyway, well designed stuff and we have people who care about what they do. (Paul: Yeah.) And we get to do the development side of things that we enjoy. Sort of working with people rather just sort of chucking things over the fence and throwing it back.

Marcus: The point your picking about picking up what other people have done and fixing it and that kind of thing… did that not kind of cause you problems with development platforms and having to deal with lots of different types of languages and that kind of thing?

Rachel: Yeah. I had learned ASP by that point and a bit of Java. And I tend to not have too much problems swapping from one thing to the other. Certainly, I mean then, it was a lot of Perl and my class PSP. Because that was, at this sort of time, they were really the two things that you were seeing things built in. So, I used to do either and then I started doing PHP as well around the same time. So, I’ve always been quite happy swapping between languages, swapping between databases. (Marcus begins to speak: I think the reason why…) It gets a bit much if you do too many in one day, you know, because you start putting semi-colons in the wrong place and stuff. It doesn’t really bother me too much. I mean, its nice to be able to concentrate one thing. As I said, we tend to build new stuff in PHP. But, I’m generally quite happy switching around.

Marcus: I suppose, the reason why I was asking is we’ve come across a few briefs that we’ve been sent in the past where it seemed like the perfect job for us but the development platform in particular has been something that we just don’t work on. Do we want to invest on that kind of platform just so we can go after this job and quite often, we’ve thought to ourselves, “No, we don’t.” So, I guess that’s where the question is coming from.

Rachel: Yeah, I think in terms of new stuff, you kind of do have to focus unless you’ve got an awful lot of people able to create your own libraries and things in different languages. So for new stuff, we do tend to choose PHP but at the time, what I was doing was just picking up on stuff. It was less of a problem really because I was just fixing stuff that already existed.

Paul: You seem to have done very well over the last few years and Drew has come and joined you now and you seem to be branching out a bit into the area of training. That seems to be something that’s come up.

Rachel: Yup.

Paul: I’m quite interested, you know… it’s great you’re there and you’re able to offer training courses. You do have a basic CSS training course, I think (R: Mmmhmm) and you’re talking about doing an advanced one, is that right?

Rachel: Possibly going to do that. We’ve had a few people ask. (Paul: OK) So, that’s what we’re thinking of doing.

Paul: So, I mean, the question now is who trains the trainer? How do you guys stay on top of the latest things that are emerging and how do you keep up with what’s going on?

Rachel: Well, basically, because we are doing it all the time, I think. The difference between us and a training company that just does training is that actually what we’re doing is, we’re using this stuff all the time. It’s the same as when I buy a book. I’m writing a book from the point of view of someone who has to do this. You know, who practically is doing it. And it’s the same with the training. Obviously, we’re constantly reading up on new things and trying things out in browsers and trying to get around problems and just by the day to day work that we do. So, that’s really what we’re bringing to a training course. For two or three years, people have asked me if I would do training. But until Drew joined, we just didn’t have the capacity. It comes down to one of those things that have to be arranged. So, it wasn’t saying that I really felt that I couldn’t do, but Drew was making to do it as well. Its great fun. Its an enjoyable… its actually enjoyable to be face-to-face with people. Especially writing a book and then the feedback you get as the occasional email that people say, “Oh, I really enjoyed that!” or, “Why did you say this? Its rubbish!” (Rachel and Paul laughing) Actually being face-to-face with people and seeing how they work through the course is really, really interesting and great fun.

Paul: Cool!

Rachel: So, yes. It’s been good.

Paul: Excellent! Well, thank you so much, Rachel, for coming on the show. It was really good to hear how you got into things and how your career has progressed. Even if it’s somewhat chaotic along the way. Although I can associate with that (Rachel laughing) kind of bouncing from one thing… We’d set up Headscape in January, 2002. So we were only 3 months behind you, so we understand your pain there.

Rachel: Yes, well it wasn’t the best time, really.

Marcus: We were both made redundant from a dot com in December, 2001, so it was necessity that got Headscape, I think.

Paul: Yeah. Always the best way. OK, thank you very much, Rachel, uhm and I’m sure that we will get you back on the show again if you’re willing at some point (Rachel laughing) in the future. Alright, thank you.

Rachel: OK.

Listeners email:

So just before we wrap up the show I wanted to share with you an idea sent in recently by a listener (sorry I can’t find your name)! A number of you have written in since we said we were going to change the format of the show with ideas about how things could be improved. One idea that particularly appealed to me was a new short section at the end of the show where we read out some listeners emails. These emails could be a question, comment, recommendation or indeed anything else you think others maybe interested in. So whether you have a tip for improving your sites search engine rankings or just want to tell me how ignorant we are then drop us an email. Write in soon as we need content for next weeks show!

105. Christmas Cheer

Posted in Classic shows on December 19, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul suggests some gifts to buy the geek in your life. Marcus talks about wireframes and Matthew Paterson talks about the Email Standards Project.

Download this show.

Clear:left winner

Congratulations to Ryan Downie who is the lucky winner of the Clear:Left training competition. Ryan will have his pick of either a place on the CSS Mastery.

If you didn’t win do not despair. There are places still available on both courses for a mere £345 + VAT. I have attended Jeremy Keith’s course on AJAX and have to say it was superb. I am sure the CSS course is just as good. Go to the clear:left website for more details.

News and events

Opera goes on the offensive against Microsoft

Without a doubt the biggest story of the week and in many ways the year is the fact that Opera is filing an antitrust suit against Microsoft. This story is huge, not because one browser manufacturer is litigating against another (something that is a common occurrence) but because of the strange ripple effect this seems to be causing in the web design community.

However, before we get into the ripples lets look at the antitrust suit itself. Operas beef seems to focus on two areas. First, they object to Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows (surprise, surprise). Second, they are complaining about Microsoft’s lack of commitments to web standards.

Call me an old cynic but this whole thing stinks of a massive PR exercise. This is especially true when it comes to the complaints about standards. As Eric Meyer points out, the timing of this claim seems odd to say the last. If the suit had been filed before the release of IE7 it would make some kind of sense. It was certainly true that standards support in IE was very poor. However, IE7 is a huge step forward and Microsoft seem to be active in its development of IE8.

To me this just looks like an exercise in pandering to the gripes of the web design community. It was as if Opera knew it wouldn’t get a lot of support for the whole “unbundle IE” argument and so threw in the standards issue to drum up some support.

However, as I have already said, the Opera antitrust suit is not the most interesting part of this story. The real clincher is the spin off discussion that has emerged sparked primarily by a very provocative post by Andy Clarke. He argues that this suit makes the position of the W3C CSS working group untenable. Andy asks how Microsoft and Opera can work together to create the next generation of CSS when they are in legal action over exactly that issue. This has led to a much wider discussion about how the W3C works and highlighted a divide between how browser manufacturers and designers see the world. Without a doubt there is huge frustration at the glacier speed at which the W3C moves. This is largely due to the challenges faced by browser manufacturers in implementing the specifications.

But the story does not end there. This frustration with slow progress seems to extend beyond even the W3C to also encompass the Web Standards Project which was setup precisely to push for better standards support. Some very prominent figures are even questioning its role.

If we as web designers want to pressure browser makers to provide better standards support then we need to invest in organisations like WaSP. They need to have the kind of funding that political lobby groups have. This will enable them to employ full time staff to constantly lobby and educate browser providers on what web designers need. In my opinion we as web designers need to put our money where our mouth is and start giving financing to organisations like WaSP so they can be more effective.

Boagworld christmas appeal

Talking about putting your money where your mouth is, I would like to thank everybody who has been kind enough to give to our Christmas Appeal. We have been raising money to support an orphanage and school in an extremely poor part of India. The idea is that you pay for anything of value you have received from Boagworld. Ask yourself how much have we taught you on the show? How much have we entertained you? Then decide how much you would pay for that and give that money.

So far we have received £465 and we are still collecting. Even if you hear this show after Christmas we are still collecting! To donate something or for more information go to christmas.boagworld.com.

The best CSS designs of 2007

Not only is Christmas almost upon us, the year is about to draw to a close. This makes it the time of year when bloggers look back at the year just gone and compile “the best of 2007″ lists. Normally I am lukewarm about such things however there is a great list over at web designer wall. They have compiled the best of CSS design in 2007. If you are in need of inspiration this is definitely worth a look. There is some truly stunning stuff here.

Talking of rating design you might also want to check out commandshift3.com which is basically hot or not for web design. When you visit the homepage you are shown two designs and you click on the design you prefer. Not only does it allow you to vote for designs it also lets you look at the best and worst based on votes received. This makes it a great site for inspiration and for learning what not to do!

Marcus’ bit: Quick and Dirty Wireframes

So a couple of week’s ago I wrote a post on the use of wireframes in web design. Marcus couldn’t come up with a decent topic to talk about himself this week so has decided to reuse my post and pass it off as his own! ;)

Paul’s corner: Geek Gifts for Christmas

For my segment of the show this week I decided it might be fun to look at Christmas presents. Specifically what you should buy for the geek in your life. In order to avoid it sounding like a wish list for myself the items I have picked are items that I own myself and can personally recommend.

Ask the expert: Introduction to the Email Standards Project

Hello world of Boag, I’m here today just to give you a really quick introduction to the Email Standards Project, a new community effort that has launched recently.

If you’re a web designer, and you’ve ever created HTML emails, you will know that getting them to look reasonably consistent across the major email clients is hair-pullingly frustrating.

At least with websites, there are only a few major browsers you have to worry about, and thanks to the Web Standards Project they are much improved from the days of the browser wars. With email you have at least 12 email clients with big shares of the audience.

Unfortunately, HTML email is still stuck back in 1998 with that Celine Dion song from ‘Titanic’ – nobody wants to be there. Over the last 10 years, web designers, and particularly web standardsy type designer, have generally taken a ‘Just Say No’ approach to HTML email. ‘Don’t send it, don’t read it, pretend it never happened’.

That approach has not been a spectacular success – millions of people still sent HTML emails, but because the designers wouldn’t touch them they were hideously ugly and just made designers hate them even more.

HTML email is here to stay. It is the default format in many clients, and sometimes it really does give a better experience for the reader than plain text. The Threadless newsletter is a great example – the send every week an email with pictures of the latest shirts. Trying to describe the shirts in text is nowhere near as useful. A picture is worth at least 1,000 words!

So here we are in 2007, and in order to get reasonable rendering, designers are having to dust off their table coding skills to get things working in Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo, Thunderbird…it goes on.

At Freshview we deal with designers every day through Campaign Monitor and MailBuild who are struggling with this problem, and we finally decided to do something about it. That is where the Email Standards Project came from.

Together with a few other people we’ve put a site up at http://www.email-standards.org (email hyphen standards dot org), and you will find a link for that in the show notes. The central idea of the Email Standards Project is that we want to work with designers and with email client developers to improve support for web standards in email clients.

It’s not one of those sites that is all talk and no practicality though – jump onto the site and you will see a bunch of tests we have done to work out exactly what does, and what does not work in all the major email clients as far as a core of normal HTML and CSS like padding, margins, floats, lists and so on.

If you’ve seen the Acid test for browsers, over at the Web Standards Project, then this is basically the same idea except for email. We’ve already had some contact with some of the big email client representatives about our results, which is really exciting. Check out the blog for updates in that area.

If you know the pain of designing HTML emails, and you want to support the project, then there is a section on the site that covers that too, and we’ve had a huge number of people offer to help, and some great feedback from people like Jeffrey Zeldman and Cameron Moll.

If you are a website owner, and you want to know why this matters to you, then check out the site for an article on why web standards are important for email, or talk to your web design firm. As is often the case, it comes down to money – better standards support means less time spent getting things to work, and more time on the actual design.

So thanks for giving me the chance to say a few words about the Email Standards Project, and I hope you all do get a chance to checkout the website, email-standards.org.

Happy Christmas!

That about wraps it up for this week’s show. We will be back with a slightly amended format as from Wednesday the 9th January. See you then.

104. Give us your money

Posted in Classic shows on December 12, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul shares 10 tips for getting designs signed off. Marcus looks at how to present to a prospective client and Michael Slater introduces us to Ruby on Rails.

Podcast: Download (25.5MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Marcus: How to present to a prospective client | Paul: 10 tips for design sign off | Michael Slater talks about Ruby on Rails | Question of the week

Housekeeping

All change

I have a bit of housekeeping news before we go any further with the show. I am changing things around a bit with my podcasting line up. After a chat with Dan Oliver from .net magazine we have decided that I will no longer be doing their show. They have some great plans for it in the future but it just didn’t make sense for me to keep doing two very similar shows. Before people start emailing, no we haven’t had a falling out and I still love Dan very much… if only I wasn’t already married.

The good news is that this allows me to introduce some more guests onto this show and bring in a bit more discussion. In order to accommodate this we will be having just one feature section each week instead of my bit and Marcus bit. Some weeks I will do it and other weeks it will be Marcus.

The final aspect of all of this is that we are going to start recording the show together rather than over skype. This should deal with the audio problems we have been having as well as making for a much better dynamic.

Christmas giving

I thought it might be nice to use the mighty power of the Boagworld listeners to raise a bit of money this Christmas and wondered if you might all be so kind as to help.

We have been doing this show for well over 2 years and have never charged or done much in the way of advertising. We are therefore wondering if just this once you would dip your hands into your pockets and give a bit of cash.

I want to raise some money for a charity I have been personally supporting for a while. A friend I grew up with now runs a school and orphanage in a very rural part of India. The kids they work with have far from the best background and the school is the only hope they have of breaking out of their circumstances.

I wont emotionally blackmail you with sob stories (because I know you are hardened cynical geeks) but simply ask that you give me some cash in return for the two years of free shows I have given you.

Because I am unorganised and only thought of this a couple of days ago we are going to simply use my paypal account to collect donations. I will then pass the money on to the charity. So to give a donation just use the bottom below (be warned its not the most intuitive system ever but you are all clever chaps. I am sure you will work it out).

Give to the Boagworld Christmas Appeal

News and events

24 ways is back

My first story of the day is actually 12 days late because it is the re-launch of 24 ways. In case you haven’t come across 24 ways before I should explain that it is an advent calendar for web designers.

Each day in December leading up to Christmas they publish an article written by some of the leading lights in web design (oh yes, and me). The articles are somewhat random but also incredibly practical and hands on. Articles range from creating a never-ending background to working with online maps.

But don’t panic that you have missed the first half of advent. You can access all of the previous days. In fact you can even access the last 2 years of articles. Ample to keep you amused while we are away over Christmas.

Tips for development and design

If 24 ways isn’t enough to quench your thirst for knowledge then let’s throw two more articles into the mix both of which provide some top tips.

The first is for all you developers out there. The guys at Blue Flavor have shared their top 10 tips for a successful development project. The article includes great advice like, always create a functional spec and talk to your clients. Interestingly one of the suggestions is to use a version control system. This is also a tip in our second article which is aimed instead at designers.

Jina Bolton has written an interesting article for Think Vitamin entitled “creating sexy stylesheets“. Like the blue flavor article this one lists 10 tips. However this time they are for producing better stylesheets. Now, although I would argue that nothing makes CSS sexy this is still a very useful list. The tips for organising your CSS file and building your own framework are particularly good.

So if you are into top 10 lists then you should be happy this week whether you are a designer or a developer.

24 wayswhich post articles on web design over the Christmas period. Well, I was asked to contribute to the site so I wrote an article entitled 10 tips for design sign off. Although some of the tips have been covered on the show I thought generally it would make a good segment for the show.

The problem is that getting design sign off can be one of the most challenging parts of the web design process. It can prove time consuming, demoralizing and if you are not careful can lead to a dissatisfied client. What is more you can end up with a design that you are ashamed to include in your portfolio.

How then can you ensure that the design you produce is the one that gets built? How can you get the client to sign off on your design? (Question of the week

What tips do you have for getting designs signed off?

Come on you cheap skates!

Posted in News on December 10, 2007 by Paul Boag

Okay I have been doing this blog and podcast for over 3 years now. It’s about time I parted you from your cash.

Other than a bit of money from Google Adsense I haven’t made a penny from you. Every week you listen to the podcast and read the blog but what do I get in return… nothing!

Well, okay that isn’t strictly true. I get loads of emails encouraging me and it has to be said the podcast has been good for business, but that is not the point!

This christmas I want something more!

Picture of some of the kids from the Bethesda project

For a while now I have been supporting a charity run by a friend I grew up with. They run a orphanage and school in the heart of rural India (Chinnia Kalvarayan hills,Tamil Nadu). They take in kids that have no family left and teach many others who would normally have little in the way of formal education. They give these kids a chance to change their lives and to become something more. In fact they have been so successful that the children are starting to look at higher education. For example one girl called Rachel is now training to be a doctor in China even though she had never been on a bus let alone flown to another country.

The trouble is sending somebody to study as a doctor in China is expensive and they have more kids that want to do similar things. That is why I am after your money.

But I know you lot. You are hardened cynical geeks. You don’t care about the poor children ;) So ask yourself this: How much is the information on Boagworld worth to you? How much have you learnt or how much has the show entertained you? Surely its worth at least £3. Maybe even more!

Once you have made up your mind give that amount to my Christmas appeal…

Give to the Boagworld Christmas Appeal

Of course, because I only thought up this idea an hour ago I am not very organised. There is no impressive site and no fancy campaign. Just give to my paypal account and Ill pass on the cash. As simple as that. After all, you aren’t impressed by well designed websites… are you?

Why not support the cause on your site?

If you fancy going one step further than giving me all your cash why not support the cause by adding the donation link to your own site. You don’t need to call it the Boagworld Christmas Appeal. Call it whatever you want as long as people give us money!

103. Bargain basement

Posted in Classic shows on December 4, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul looks at doing usability testing on a budget. Marcus explores the perfect working environment and we review writemaps an excellent online tool for creating site hierarchies.

Podcast: Download (29.2MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Marcus: The perfect working environment | Paul Bargain basement usability testing | Review: Writemaps | Question of the week

News and events

Improve your javascript

There seems to be a lot being written about Javascript at the moment, much of which should really help those of you like myself that have a basic grasp but really need to move on to the next level. First, there is a post by Christian Heilmann entitled Javascript Shortcuts that is aimed at teaching dummies like me how to code better. Its actually a very good post and helped me to grasp some shorter ways of working with Arrays and if statements.

There is also a post by Roger Johansson that lays out the basic rules of unobtrusive Javascript. Great for those of you who are old school Javascript coders and need to come a bit more up to date. Most of the points are obvious if you have worked with unobtrusive javascript before but there are also some nice extras like…

Work for the next developer: Make maintenance easier by writing logical code with clear variable and function names and commenting where necessary.

Finally, PPK has updated his DOM compatibility table that catalogues browser support for various DOM modules. I have to confess that some of this went over my head but it is still useful for understanding why a piece of Javascript is not working in a certain browser.

The guys over at Blue Flavor are having a go at answering the million dollar question this week; what makes great design? To be honest I am not sure if this is a question that can really be answered, but I have to say they have a hell of a good go!

Nevertheless it is a good article to point clients at if you need to explain why they should pay more to make their design stand out from the crowd.

Better web forms

On the subject of great design being in the detail I thought it was worth mentioning a great article by Garrett Dimon on Digital Web. Garrett is an information architect and has the most amazing eye for detail. By making small changes he has a significant effect on the sites he works with.

In his article he takes the registration form from ebay and makes a series of small alternations that improve its usability and readability. By tweaking things like the position of labels, the division of fields and the weight of headings he turns a very average form into something that is so much more accessible.

Forms are tricky things to work with and most designers hate doing so. However, reading this article should inspire you when next to tackle a form.

Building an inspiration base

Talking of inspiration, my final news story for today is another one from Blue Flavor. This time they are talking about how to build a reserve of inspiration that you can draw upon. Inspiration is a subject I seem to come back to often and with good reason. It is very easy for designs to become formulaic and it is important to be constantly looking for new sources of inspiration.

This article is in itself very inspiring suggesting a number of ways to find inspiration that I had not previously considered. Although it covers the obvious such as keeping a sketch book or photographing things that give you pause, it also suggests looking through cookbooks and even standing on your head (and other changes in perspective).

I am not convinced all of these ideas will work for everyone but if your going through a dry patch it is definitely worth a read to see if you cannot spark some inspiration.

Marcus’ bit: The perfect working environment

Recently we received a question asking about our working environments and specifically what your working environment should be like when you code.

I’m going to swing this a little wider and look at working environments in general rather just concentrating on one’s own desk. This is something that both Paul and I have a great deal of experience of so I expect he will have as much to say on the subject as I do.

Mess vs tidy

Marcus' desk (hell hole)

Ok, I have been brave and posted a picture of my office, in its current disgusting state, onto the site. It is appalling – no question. I hate it like this. I keep talking about tidying it up but I reckon it will take at least a week to do it!

Does it make me any less productive to be honest, I’m not sure. The instant answer is to say “no, of course not”, but I am sure I would rather be in here if it was tidy, so it’s certainly possible that I would get more done.

I don’t believe that there is any real benefit to working in this type of squalor. It’s really easy when you first set up an office not to bother spending the tiny amount of time required to organise yourself. This is a mistake. File stuff away regularly (in a sensible way). If you don’t well, just look at the picture.

Music vs silence

For me (the musician), it has to be silence. I am not absolutely sure why, but I think this is because I mostly write as opposed to design or code stuff. I also think it’s because I listen to the music rather than it just being background. This is either shows a weak mind or an outstanding empathy for the musical arts you choose ;-)

Other people

One thing that the questioner didn’t get into was whether or not it is good to work with other people around you. I think that the healthiest option here is to mix it up. Working on your own all the time as we have done for years, is great with regard to getting things done. You can really hone in on a task and give it your all. Headscape’s office is open plan with anywhere between 4 and 10 people in it at any one time. I struggle to write in this environment as I’m too tempted to talk to other people.

But, working on your own all the time can be counterproductive. You are far less likely to bounce ideas around and learn new stuff. Teams tend to be more focused and productive if they work together regularly.

Working on your own for years can lead to stagnation and a lot of staring out of the window if you don’t really fancy a particular task. I tend to measure my desire for a job based on the amount of tea I make during it!

How to organise your day

I tend to check email as it comes in and I respond to IM and phone calls immediately. I can’t help it. I often think that it would be a good idea to check email, say, every 2 or 3 hours and not let it interrupt what I’m working on. I guess this is the salesman in me thinking that every contact is a good lead.

Paul tends to block out chunks of time for tasks and won’t let himself get interrupted during this time. This has got to be more productive than the flitting around method that I adopt.

We’re all different

The main thing to recognise with working environments is that we’re all different and react differently to various situations. Some people like to lock themselves away, others feel lonely working on their own. I think employers need to recognise this and, within reason, try to provide the best environments for their staff on an individual basis.

Paul’s corner: Bargain basement usability testing

Okay so lets pretend that your boss refuses to pay for usability testing, you have no budget of your own and yet you are determined that the site will be as easy to use as possible. What do you do?

Today I want to look at how you can carry out usability testing without spending a penny. Of course if you can afford $19 per test subject then you can afford this an interesting little service discovered by Tom a boagworld listener.

Review: Writemaps

I have never managed to find a tool I like for creating site hierarchies and getting them signed off. However, recently I found something that is definitely getting there and I wanted to share it with you.

Question of the week

What is the best online application you cannot live without?

A better information architecture tool

Posted in Reviews on November 30, 2007 by Paul Boag

I have never managed to find a tool I like for creating site hierarchies and getting them signed off. However, recently I found something that is definitely getting there.

You wouldn’t think it is much to ask for all. All I want is a simple tool for creating site maps that I can show to the client and get him to sign off on the site hierarchy. Okay so I am actually a bit more demanding than that. I guess my actual list of requirements would be as follows…

It has to be easy to use and not have too many unnecessary options that just get in the way
It needs to look nice so I can show it to the client and it looks professional
I need to be able to print it
I need to be to save it in a format that I can easily send to the client
In an ideal world I would like to be able to work on it collaboratively but I accept that might be asking for too much.

Sure there are a lot of site tools around but they all seem to fall down on one of above criteria. For example something like Visio or Omnigraffle are great but are overly complicated. There are simpler products out there but to be honest most of the ones I have used just produce damn ugly site maps. There are a few online tools which are pretty simple and produce nice site maps but they always seem to mess up when it comes to printing.

A while back I received an email from a guy who had developed a site map tool called writemaps which he wanted me to mention on the show. I took a look hopeful it would meet my criteria but unfortunately it did not. I wrote a polite email back explaining that I felt there was more work to be done on it before I was willing to endorse it and that was the last I heard from him until recently.

The site has now had a complete overhaul and I have to say I think it is superb. If you share similar requirements to me when it comes to creating a site hierarchy then this tool is for you.

Easy to use

It has a clean simple interface that requires minimum effort to create a site map.

Screen capture of writemap showing the clean user interface

Visually attractive

It has an attractive design which I would be more than happy to show to any of my clients. The only downside is that currently you cannot differentiate between different page types (all pages look the same). However other than that it looks great.

Screen capture of writemap showing the version of the interface without the edit controls

Great printing

Although the printing isn’t perfect yet it is still extremely good. I did encounter some small rendering issues (which I also encountered when zooming) however overall the result is very satisfactory.

Screen capture of writemap print view

Lots of saving options

It allows you to save online, create a backup or even save as XML. Unfortunately it doesn’t save as an image but I guess you can always do a screen capture.

Sharing

Best of all you can share a site map with somebody else. You can even choose if that the person can edit it or not. Great for showing the client.

Screen capture of writemap's sharing preference window

This is a huge step forward from the version I originally saw and so I suspect things will continue to improve over the coming weeks and months. Also I have only touched on a few of my personal highlights. You can also do many other things like..

Add notes to individual pages
Associate a page with a live webpage
Show or hide branches on complex site maps
View the site map as a hierarchical list instead of a tree

If you find yourself having to produce site hierarchies and if you need to get clients feedback on them then this is definitely the tool for you. Best of all it’s free so sign up for an account at writemaps.com

Show 102: Worktime blues

Posted in Classic shows on November 27, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul looks at why you should have a training budget and how to spend it. Marcus looks at capturing requirements and Roo Reynolds introduces us to the possibilities of virtual worlds and their impact on web design.

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Marcus Requirements capture | Paul: Spending the training budget | Roo Reynolds on virtual worlds | Question of the week

News and events

10 Absolute “Nos!” for Freelancers

I know that many of the people that listen to the boagworld podcast are freelancers so I keep an eye out for stories that appeal to this group. I was therefore drawn to an article in my news reader entitled 10 Absolute “Nos!” for freelancers. It’s a great article that lists 10 questions asked by clients to which the answer should always be no.

The questions include classics such as “Can you show me a mock-up to help us choose a designer/developer?”, “Can I pay for my e-commerce site from my website sales?” and “Can I just pay the whole amount when it’s done?”. Almost without exception I agreed with every item on this list. The only exception is “Will you register and host my site?” because I think a lot of clients expect this even if it is a pain in the arse. Of course, the fact that I work for an agency rather than as a freelancer could be colouring my view on this one. However, whether you are a freelancer, an agency employee or just an enthusiastic amateur this is all good advice.

Making the most of working with designers

Adaptive Path are an agency I really admire. Not only do they produce some cutting edge work they are also some of the foremost thinkers in the world of web design. I was therefore understandably interested when one of their clients recently asked them how to make the most of working with a design agency.

The resulting blog post called “Making the Most of a Design Engagement” is a fascinating collection of tips that is definitely worth a read.

The subject of how an agency and client engage is something that I have posted on a number of times [1], [2], [3]. However, reading the perspective of another agency (especially one so well respected) is very enlightening. What I found most encouraging of all is that they obviously struggle with the same kind of client issues we all do.

Whether you are somebody who commissions web designers or whether you are a designer yourself take the time to read this short post.

How Open ID will change your site

Just before I went away on holiday (did I mention I had been away?) there was a new post on the Think Vitamin website about OpenID. I am a big fan of OpenID and have spoken about it before on the show. However, its a tricky concept to explain. At its heart it allows you to login to all the many services you use on the web from one single site so having to deal with only a single username and password.

I sincerely believe that if you are building a new website that has any form of login then you should consider including an OpenID login. The problem at the moment is that you will have to do this in addition to the normal login process. You might wonder if it is worth the effort.

The article on the Think Vitamin site does an excellent job at explaining just how significant OpenID is going to be (even though it exaggerates it in places). It explains the background, the problem and the possibilities. If you haven’t looked at OpenID yet or are sceptical about its worth then the Think Vitamin is a great place to start.

Good practice when working with Tag Clouds

Tagging is everywhere these days. From Flickr to Delicious every site seems to have tags. Even blogs like this one has tags. Tags are a useful alternative form of navigation that allows users to quickly find related content no matter where it is in the sites hierarchy. There is no doubt they are powerful and incredibly useful especially on larger sites with a lot of content.

The problem is that they are relatively new. We are still working out how to successfully integrate them into our websites and what role they play. Fortunately a recent article entitled “Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples And Good Practices” attempts to establish some best practice for tagging and makes some suggestions about their design and integration.

If you are doing some design work with tags or if you are looking to add tags to your own site then you may want to take a look at this post. My only word of caution is that it only tells half the story. It addresses tag clouds but says little about how tags on individual pages should be displayed.

Marcus’ bit: Requirements capture

While Paul has been buddying up with Mickey, Donald and Pluto, I have been working with a UK higher education institution at the very early stages of their website redesign project.

One of the things that we have been discussing in detail is the process we will go through to capture requirements and set objectives for the site. I thought I should share them here.

Existing site review

I have looked in the past at carrying out an expert review relating solely on a site’s information architecture. A site review takes on board some aspects of the existing site’s IA but is more general than that.

I tend to look at the following site features very much from a usability point of view:

Navigability – can I find things?
Consistency of navigation
Visual hierarchy – consistency of the design
Writing style
Processes – search, making a comment, ordering etc
Terminology
Content – grouping, repetition, wide/narrow mix, internal/external mix etc

The main purposes of the review are:

To highlight to all stakeholders what the site issues are
To highlight to all stakeholders positive aspects of the existing site
To suggest possible solutions to issues
To explain the processes involved in achieving goals

Stakeholder interviews

We have found that interviewing key internal staff (i.e. content owners) and sometimes key users, is the most valuable exercise in creating a requirements and objectives document.

Each interview is done on a one-to-one basis to ensure that people say what they really mean! The interviews are semi-structured which means that we will create a script of questions but will happily allow people move off-track.

The interviews aim to gather opinion on the site’s user base, weighting of content, issues and opportunities.

Work together

Though we are usually brought in as experts to consult on this type of process it is imperative that the client is involved at every step of the way. This is because one of the purposes of the exercise is information gathering. For example, creating user personas based just on stakeholders interview input may miss something that discussing/reviewing with the web team would not.

Create the document

What we are trying to do is record all findings in a manner that can be used as a basis for all the work to follow – IA, design, copywriting, build etc. In other words – create a list of requirements for the new site and give them an order of priority.

It needs to get into detail to be useful. A recent review we carried out contained over twenty specific opportunities for the site, which target audience groups each issue related to and how the site could deliver each opportunity.

This was coupled with a detailed list of requirements per audience group – 25 audience groups with over a hundred requirements. The requirements we also graded for importance into ‘must haves’, ‘should haves’ and ‘nice to haves’.

Paul’s corner: Spending your training budget

I recently received a question from Harry asking “what approach do you take to training?”. He has some budget set aside and is wondering how he should spend it. As I am always keen to spend other people’s money this seemed the perfect subject for me to talk about… read keeping your skills sharp.

Training course give away

While I am on the subject of training, the guys over at Clearleft have two training courses coming up on January the 24th and 25th in Brighton. The first is CSS mastery by Andy Budd and the second is Bulletproof AJAX by Jeremy Keith. If you would like to attend but cannot get your company to produce the £345 + VAT for the early bird fee then I might be able to help. I have one free place to give away to either course (your choice) for a lucky random winner. We will announce the winner on our Christmas special so entries need to be in by Friday 14th of December. Just send me an email with your name and contact details with “clearleft competition” in the subject line.

Ask the expert: Roo Reynolds on virtual worlds

Paul: Okay, so joining me today is Roo Reynolds who is a meta verse evangelist for IBM, Its nice to have you on the show Roo

Roo: Hi Paul,

Paul: What on earth is a meta verse evangelist?

Roo: That’s a good question, I guess a meta verse evangelist is someone who helps people understand the very exciting and confusing area of virtual worlds.

Paul: Ah, virtual worlds. Now the people listening to this show might be thinking what has that got to do with web design, why have we got someone one on here talking about virtual worlds and I am quite happy to admit that that’s not our normal fair. Its not what we normally cover on the show but I wanted to get Roo on partly because um, well to be frank we grew up together didn’t we pretty much

Roo: we did we were family friends for many, many years

Paul: yeah, which was very bizarre to then discover the he is a kind of world authority on virtual worlds. so that sounds very dramatic doesn’t it

Roo: A thought leader?

Paul: A thought Leader

Roo: I remember inheriting your old star wars toys Paul

Paul: There we go, So I set you of on a good direction in your career by getting you into Sci-fi early. I am now taking all of the credit for all that you have achieved since then.

Roo: Its all thanks to you (giggle)

Paul: yeah (hahahaha) Well um, but I though it was quite interesting. I was doing a presentation where one of the things I wanted to talk about in this discussion was upcoming and emerging technologies and how they would affect things and I wanted to talk about virtual worlds and realised that I knew absolutely nothing about them so I gave Roo a call and we had a chat on the phone. Then I got educated so I figured I ought to pass on that education to everybody that listens to this show so that’s um, a bit of the background. So lets kick of the with the first questions. So what exactly are virtual worlds and why do you think there is so much hype surrounding them at the moment there has been lots of talk about, you know, things like second life and that kind of thing. Perhaps if you could explain them a bit, and explain why there is so much enthusiasm about it at the moment

Roo: yeah I can try. So I guess I can ask you to think about it. as it a good an example anyway, probably the most popular example of a virtual world. At the moment. So these are things which are kind of digital online environments or as some people would describe the as multi-user virtual environments its that kind of online social space. So to the untrained eye they might look a lot like game but there are no game elements inside virtual worlds or rather there are but they exist within the broader world. So something like second life doesn’t really have any point there is no final point no enemies to kill there is no “x” level to achieve its just a world and if you want to inhabit that world and build a shop or you want to habit that and be an explorer and wonder around finding interesting things and talking to people then that cool as well.

Paul: Hmm, I mean the immediate thing which comes out of that is well, you know, what is the point. Why do people take part in virtual worlds and what kind of ways are people using them

Roo: Yeah, there are a lot of different answers to that, almost as many answers as there are different people really so as in the real world there is not point. people make up their own point they decide that the are going to make a lot of money or they are going to be an artist and be well known or open a sex shop or whatever it might be and people will have different personal goals which they set themselves. So really any goal is a tangible thing that people will almost determine for themselves

Paul: So I guess in many ways its like the web itself it’s a tool and how chose to use that tool is largely up to you

Roo: Yeah exactly. And within that you will get lots of different things, I mentioned some, you will also get games within that so people play chess inside virtual worlds and people do all kinds of crazy things. Yeah I guess the answer to your question is really why is there so much hype about them, its because over the last 12 months or 16 months or so the press has been covering this is quite a bit way. That turned it into a kind of hype feeding frenzy. Garner had a very famous prediction about how 80% of active internet users by 2011 I think it was will be using virtual worlds and will have an avatar. Not necessarily in second life but in a virtual world. And all of this make people realise that this might just be the next “big thing” its gone from being the kind of space where people will, I don’t mean this in any derogatory way, everyday people will would hang out in to becoming a space that a lot of big companies and small companies and advertising and marketing firms are really getting interested in. You know we have all seen “the web” in that ,very early in my career, was the web being picked up by corporation and some people almost missed the boat and had to catch up later on

Paul: So Why do you think this is going to be the next big thing? Why do you think a virtual worlds are going to be you know, you talked about how some companies had to play catch up on the internet you almost imply that this I going to be as big as the internet is. Did I miss interpret that or do you really think its going to be incredibly significant and if so why?

Roo: Well, I think it is always going to be a subset of the internet, you know, this is just another communications media and its probably will remain a subset of the web. There will always be a place for flat 2D content, But once you start getting into 3D social stuff and giving people a real time opportunity to relate to each other and see each other and this sense of presence where you can see what the other is paying attention to. For me joining a circle for the first time, a circle of people talking and I walked up to it, and you know people took a step back to invite me into that circle. That was a really compelling moment to me. It was also a real eye opener that the “real world etiquette” that we see in society all the time actually was playing out for real in this virtual space as well. In terms of why it might be the next big thing a lot of different elements are coming together at the same time here, we finally have, almost complete availability of broadband, certainly in this country and in the west. We have got fairly powerful machines now that have 3D graphics accelerators and sound cards, this is something which is now also happening in corporate environments as well as at home. There is kind of a point in time where the… someone might describe it as a tipping point where there is this lot of interest and we have seen this massive press interest, but also big companies getting involved, you know when you see Sony with their playstation home project which is going to be like a lobbying environment for the playstation 3 its been delayed a little bit, but that is really the kind of mass Market application for virtual worlds and it is things like that which really opened my eyes to where this might take is. This is not going to be a niche thing with a few geeks hanging around and some would argue that it has never been that. Really virtual worlds have been attractive to creative people and to the people who feel like they want to kind of express themselves and share things, Its not full of 16 year old boy with glasses sitting in their bedrooms and really there is a difference between games, traditional online games and Massively multiplayer online role-playing games And a space like virtual worlds that allows them to be attractive to the mass market . So yeah I wouldn’t say it is going to replace the web or even be the largest portion of the internet. But there is certainly a growing space for these virtual worlds

Paul: so what, I mean, I can understand how some people are maybe making money out of being involved in virtual worlds where, I don’t know, where they are creating things which they are selling inside that virtual world, but what about other companies, how are larger organisations using it. For example, how do IBM use it?

Roo: well, we are maybe quite weird in because we do an awful lot in virtual worlds. We do everything from recruitment too employee discussions and meetings. although of course we cannot use a virtual world for confidential discussion, we certainly have the types of meetings we would have in public spaces, like conferences, we also have virtual facets to real world conferences like forties a really big conference we run, and we had that for the first time happening in second life running in parallel to the real world event so people who could not make it to the real world event could at least attend. They could see and hear some of the presentations and they could mingle and network. So like I said we are a bit weird in that in that we do so much, that’s partly because we are such a big company. Now a lot of other people would look at it and say they have a very particular need or desire, something they want to get out of it and for some people historically it has been marketing, or advertising, it has been to reach a wider audience or to reach them in a different way. Which is more playful and allows them to be really participants rather than just eye balls

Paul: yeah, I mean one thing you said was earlier was that you referred to virtual worlds as a subset of the internet and the web. Its another that that going on online. One of the things which strikes me is that if you do something, in something like second life, say if you run a conference that conference is kind of just fenced into the second life world so its not going to get picked up by search engines, its not going to be very accessible and things like that do you think that there are going to be changes in that, do you think there will be more crossover between virtual and maybe the more traditional web

Roo: yeah absolutely this is one of the areas that really excites me at the moment, this whole area of interoperability and that needs to be not just between different virtual worlds but also between the web and virtual worlds so this idea of the virtual universe sort of thing as a virtual world or virtual worlds is something that IBM even throws this term 3D internet around quite a lot. In a kind of evolutionary next step when you look at virtual worlds today they tend to be proprietary walled gardens and actually a lot of people would compare them to AOL in the mid nineties but actully when you start thinking about how they may interconnect, and that inset just moving your avatar from world of war craft to second or habbo or whatever its actually much more interesting than that. Its things like bringing you wallet with you your friends list with you being able to blur the lines between virtual worlds and bring content in from the web and share content back out to the web, these things are beginning to be possible and in some ways one of the reason I think second life is so successful because it does have the ability to make request to web content and bring that in so you have dynamic stuff going on. But that is still very early days and I think that we will probably see a massive focus and in fact the big conference in san hosa very recently where this came out in a very big way but a lot of companies will be wanting to get together and its very, you know the will is definitely there to have a real focus in the next few month on interactivity

Paul: I mean so, I am kind of very aware this for many of the people listening to this show that are kind of a mixture of designers, developers, you know, people that are running websites that a lot of this is very theoretical and it is not something they would be directly involved in at the moment. I mean do you think there is anything that they should be doing, that they should be aware of when it comes to virtual worlds. Is this an area you think they should be keeping an eye on or doing anything actively.

Roo: Yeah, I guess most people I talk to even if they are not going to rush out tomorrow and buy some space in some virtual world and um, you know its not for everyone. But most people who I talk to at least want to stay informed once they have got that hook in their head that this is, you know, I obviously find it very interesting but people tend to come away with the a sensation that this might go somewhere and there is enough evidence already today that its fairly compelling, if you look at it on the “garnet height curve” this idea that things go though a life cycle of interest it haven’t yet peaked the top of that and it is now falling back down into this trough of disillusionment in the long run what might happen it might reach the stable plateau where it will actually become a really useful space that interesting work will happen and kind of follow the same progression as so many technologies before it. Most people come away with the feeling that they want to keep an eye on it. Now I guess if I am going to step back a little bit and look more broadly at what is going on, on the web then for web designers and for almost all of them, this is very big on their radar the whole area of social online collaboration and this whole “web 2.0″ umbrella which you started talking about a year ago if not longer and has been you know really quite large for me, that fits very neatly into this same space. What you are talking about are people sharing content and whether that is a a chat or something they have built themselves you know, you look at a world like second life and most of it is not built but the company that runs it. As with youtube and del.icio.us and as with flickr and so many other popular services and site these days, it is built by its users. So maybe it is something people need to be aware of maybe its something which will gradually fit into a growing mentally of this is how the web works. Yes it happens to be 3D at the moment on the popular ones and yes they are not all currently delivered through websites, mind there are plenty that are, and there probably will be an increasing number that are delivered though the browser. So yeah, if people find this stuff interesting then they should keep an eye on it, maybe read a bit more about it.

Paul: Where is a good place for them to go then to wrap up, as far as if they want to find out more information or want to read up about the potential of it, where would you recommend they start by looking?

Roo: well there are a lot o very good blogs out there, if they have a very academic mind then they and want to read some really good writing on the subject then the best one I can think of is http://terranova.blogs.com/ , its one that I have guest authored for, but not the one I regularly write for, the one I regularly write for is http://eightbar.co.uk/about/roo, which has got a growing profile in the space of virtual worlds, That is written by a bunch of IBMers writing about what they find interesting. I have a personal blog a personal blog at http://rooreynolds.com if anyone wants to follow that although, please don’t all come at once

Paul: (Laughs) its really not that popular out podcast that it would…

Roo: no you are paul, you wouldn’t know how popular you are, but you are.

Paul: That’s okay, Thank you very much for you time , I think it is interesting we spend so much time on it with the immediate here and now problems, but every now and again it is nice to poke out heads above the parapet and see what is going on a bit further afield; so thank you very much for time coming and being on the show

Question of the week

Do you think virtual worlds are going to be a mainstream method of online communication or are they a novelty doomed to failure? Answers in the comments.

Intranet delusions

Posted in Web strategy on November 2, 2007 by Paul Boag

Every business can benefit from some form of intranet whether it is a collection of online tools or a large corporate system. The problem is that many organisations make fundamental mistakes in how they approach their intranet.

I have been asked a number of times to talk about Intranet development and I have always avoided doing so. This is partly because I am not an expert in the field (although that doesn’t normally stop me talking about something!) However, it is also because intranets are a massive area and one in which so many mistakes are made. There seems to be a huge amount of naivety about developing and running Intranets. Against such a backdrop I am somewhat unsure where to begin.

In the end I have decided to take 5 of the most common misconceptions about Intranets and see if we can shed some light on why they are wrong.

A money pit

“The intranet is not important like the website. It doesn’t generate a return on investment”

This seems to be a common perception especially among senior management. Unlike a website, the intranet isn’t perceived as business critical. Instead it is seen as nothing more than a hole into which money is poured. The problem is that an intranet doesn’t typically generate revenue. However, it does generate a return on investment.

The real benefit of an Intranet is in productivity gains. If used a correctly it can:

dramatically reduce the time to access key information
act as an effective method of disseminating information
be a way to manage workflow
become a key component in improving communication

Accessibility free

” I don’t need to worry about accessibility because I know exactly who is using the site”

The perception that you don’t need to worry about accessibility on an intranet is naive. Just because you don’t have users with disabilities at this stage doesn’t mean you never will. Moreover, accessibility is about a lot more than the disabled. By building your intranet with accessibility in mind you can offer up the chance to deliver it to other devices such as mobiles.

Finally, many people who are not registered as disabled have accessibility issues. This is especially true with an elderly user who may have poor eyesight or arthritis. Building your intranet with accessibility in mind can improve the usability for everyone.

Browser specific

“We only need to design for Internet Explorer 6 because we use that across the entire company”

Single browser support on your intranet is a risk. Building for the peculiarities of one browsers can easily come back and bite you later. A company wont stay with the same browser forever. Even an upgrade from IE 6 to IE 7 could easily break your site. Build from a solid base of web standards and you have the confidence that changes to the browser platform will have a minimal impact.

The other advantage of this approach is that it is entirely possible to open up parts of your intranet to suppliers even if they do not share the same IT infrastructure as you.

Employee motivation

“Its not like a website, people are required to use the Intranet as part of their job”

It is true that people are expected to use things like the intranet as part of their job. However theory and reality are very different. I have seen many intranets effectively abandoned because they were just too difficult to use. It is quicker to use other methods (such as the telephone or email) to find the information required.

An intranet will only succeed if it:

has the right information
is easy to use
is engaging

Some of the most successful intranets are those that work as hard to be sticky as any website would. Adding social features is a good way of doing this as well as making sure your site has the right “killer” applications. However, most importantly you need to ensure that the site is easy to use and people can quickly find the content they require.

Unregulated content

“The idea is that everybody adds and maintains the content. It doesn’t need a web master”

In a utopian world an intranet should not need a web manager. Each employee should add and maintain their own information on the system. However, the reality is that this doesn’t happen. Some people are simply too busy to “mess around with the intranet” while others upload far too much erroneous “stuff”.

An intranet needs a web manager in the same way as a website does. It needs somebody to be a guardian for the content ensuring that the right stuff is online and organised in a logical manor.

Conclusion

Developing intranets is a huge subject and one that I shall return to in the future. However, hopefully these few misconceptions have helped challenge your thinking of how to approach their design and build. Although designing an intranet is very different to designing a website, it is actually surprising how much they have in common too.

Show 100: Live!

Posted in Classic shows on October 30, 2007 by Paul Boag

So here it is. The long awaited 100th episode of Boagworld.com

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

The audio quality isn’t as great as it could have been, there is a lot of background noise and we are even more rambling than normal. However, this is our 100th episode and we are both proud and excited to have got this far.

Sorry, but there is no transcript of this show. There was just too many people talking and too much background noise to make that viable. I hope you will forgive us.

Thanks to all who turned up or emailed us. If your question doesn’t appear we apologise. We had 2 hours worth of material to reduce down to an hour. However, for a more complete record of the evening (including video) check out Ryan Taylor’s post on the evening.

More thoughts on the 100th show.

Thanks to all of you who support the show. We really appreciate it!

Show 99: Don’t panic

Posted in Classic shows on October 23, 2007 by Paul Boag

This week on Boagworld: Paul looks at the growing importance of the favicon. Marcus talks about what to do when the work dries up and Rob Borley looks an alternative approach to storing data in your CMS.

Podcast: Download (24.9MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Marcus: What to do when the work dries up | Paul: Favicons – small but significant | Rob Borley on an alternative approach to your CMS | Question of the week

100th Show

Just wanted to say a big thank you for everybody who came along to the 100th boagworld. For more information on the evening check out my 100th Boagworld blog post. A special congratulations to the 4 winners of a years subscription to .net magazine and to Anna who won a CSS beginners course run by Drew and Rachel at edgeofmyseat.com.

Also live on the show we announce the winner of the FOWD competition.

News and events

Shift in the web wind

Molly Holzschlag likes to generate discussion on her blog and has raised an interesting subject in her recent post “shift in the web wind“. In it she says:

The latest Dot.Com boom is declining as far as I can tell. Are we on the edge of another Dot.Bomb?

Its an interesting question and one that seems to be appearing on an increasing number of sites.

Personally I have to say that I have become concerned about the state of the web at the moment. Not because I believe we have necessarily reached the point of a collapse, but because the boom we have been experiencing is unhealthy. I am in no doubt that we are now experiencing a bubble very similar to that of the dot com era. There are far too many copycat companies out there and the share price of companies such as Google are disproportionate to their revenue. What is more, once again we are seeing the majority of these companies leaning on advertising as a revenue stream. Advertising is very fickle business model because any dip in the overall economy and advertising is the first area to be cut.

So is everything doom and gloom? Are we about to all be out of work? Certainly if you work for a web 2.0. company or the majority of your clients are web 2.0 companies, then I would be twitchy. However, for the majority of us I don’t think there is much to be concerned about. Even if the bubble bursts there is going to be no shortage of web work around. The majority of web designers don’t work on web 2.0. sites. We work with offline businesses that have an online presence. These sites are not going to stop trading just because some high profile web businesses fall. The web is too well established this time around.

If it wasn’t for the fact that it will mess up people’s careers, I would welcome the crash. I think the current state of the sector is unrealistic and the larger the bubble grows the bigger the ‘pop’ when it bursts.

Best practice in email

Most organisations rely on email to communicate with their customers on mass. Whether it is order confirmation, special offers or regular newsletters, email is an essential tool in our web strategy. The problem is that our emails have to fight there way past junk mail filters and increasingly they fail to do so. This isn’t necessarily because we are sending out spam. In most cases it is because we are just ignorant of best practice when it comes to email delivery.

Fortunately this week I came across a great article that suggests some best practice when it comes to using email. This isn’t a list of ways to trick spam filters, rather it provides all kinds of great advice about running any kind of email campaign. From technical advice about CSS and HTML to common curtsy like don’t attach large files, this article really does contain some excellent advice. Finally, it also contains an invaluable list of tools for checking how likely your email is to be classed as spam. If you send out email to your customers then check out this article.

Flash based galleries for your images

So everybody thinks I hate flash. I don’t! I just think we need to think twice before using it. Like any technology we need to use the right tool for the job. However, sometimes flash works well and can really enhance the user experience. One such occasion is when we are building image galleries. Sure, you can build nice static galleries or even produce something impressing using Javascript. However, flash can do some stunning stuff with images.

Even better is the fact that there many flash based gallery systems out there that you can just drop into your site with minimal effort. Whether you are showing off your portfolio or building an image gallery for a client you might want to consider one of flash based galleries reviewed in Smashing Magazine.

20+ tools for working with AJAX

If Flash is not your thing then you are probably into your AJAX and Javascript. If that is the case then check out mashable which has a list of over 20 great tools for work with AJAX. The list consists of a mixture of AJAX loading images, frameworks, reusable scripts but probably most usefully sources of advice. They include some great stuff for those starting out building with AJAX including a noobs guide and also a wiki of common AJAX mistakes.

If you know Javascript already but haven’t done anything with AJAX then take a look. It really isn’t as intimidating as some people like to make it out to be!

Marcus’ bit: Don’t panic

Marcus looks at those times when the phone’s not ringing, your inbox is empty and you just lost out on three pitches in a row. No matter how much you tell yourself not to worry, it starts to creep up on you.

Paul’s corner: Favicons – small but significant

In my section of the show I want to look at favicons. Favicons are those 16 by 16 pixel graphics that appear in your address bar, bookmarks and various other places. They maybe tiny, but they are becoming increasingly important. I look at why Favicons are worth your attention.

Ask the expert: Rob Borley on an alternative approach to your CMS

Paul: So joining us on the show this week is Rob Borley who is, what is your job title Rob actually, I should know this but I don’t?

Rob Borley: (Laughs) Ye you should I think you gave it to me.

Paul: Oh did I?

Rob Borley: Technical Manager officially.

Paul: Uhhh… But basically Technical Manager/Lead Developer/anything vaguely techie goes in his direction.

Rob Borley: Basically it’s my fault when it breaks.

Paul: Yes, so if you want to get pissed at somebody about the boagworld forum there’s your man.

Rob Borley: (Laughs) I knew this was going to come up.

Paul: Well obviously it was going to come up.

Rob Borley: (More Laughs)

Paul: So if you haven’t gathered, Rob works for Headscape, the web design company that myself, Marcus and Chris Scott run and no he shouldn’t be blamed for the boagworld forum, he is actually trying to fix it, but his skills just aren’t up to the job.

Rob Borley: Oh, I see, I see, I see… (Laughs)

Paul: (Laughs) But why I’ve got him on the show today isn’t actually to be rude to him about the boagworld forum, but it’s actually to talk about our content management system because I get a lot of questions asking why content management system Headscape use and what one we would recommend and stuff like that so we’ve just got through a kind of major rebuild of our content management system and so I thought OK lets get Rob on the show and have a little bit of a chat about it and how it works and what it does. So I guess Rob the question to kick off with is why did Headscape decide to develop its own CMS rather than go with an off the shelf one, because there are so many off the shelf solutions around it kind of seem absurd in some ways?

Rob Borley: Umm, ye I guess when you first look at the problem, as you say, there are lots of CMS solutions around but the reason we kind of work from our own is because it gives us complete control over what we’ve got so if there’s a problem with it, we know were the problem is and can go in and fix it but more likely if there’s some new functionality we need specific to our clients we’re able to just go and build it and develop it very quickly because we know exactly how the thing works. Often these off the shelf CMS’s are trying to do everything because they’re in competition with all the other products out there and so they’re vastly complicated, they do lots of things we don’t need them to do and they’re not generally as useful for the client as what we’ve got as a result, because they’re designed by techies, techies know how they work and they’re generally far too complicated for average Joe user out there. What we’ve build is tailored specifically for our clients needs and hopefully is intuitive and easy for them to pick up because it’s designed for them.

Paul: Would you kind of, you know, are you being more brash in that your saying all web design agencies should be developing their own CMS’s or is that something specific to our requirements and the type of clients we have?

Rob Borley: I think when you look at our client base and the sort of projects that we get, a vast majority of our projects are based on our CMS technology now and so, I mean, if we were doing just one or two projects here and there then it would probably make sense for us to get to know our favourite brand of CMS and use that, but as a vast majority of our clients are using this technology it’s actually more productive for us to develop with our own, because we can just keep reusing stuff and add any new development or any area that we can add to it, we can then use it for future clients as well.

Paul: Hmm… So we had a content management system, it seemed to work, why then did you, actually no it wasn’t just you, you and Chris persuade me and Marcus to spend huge quantities of money on re-doing it from scratch?

Rob Borley: (Laughs) Well the first iteration, well I say the first iteration, I think we’re up too officially CMS 3 before we started this new one, it naturally evolved, it came from the need of one client wanting a CMS and then we thought “hey this is a good idea” and things got tagged on and other things got tagged onto that and it just became this, evolved almost organic mess of Darwinian thing which worked and held together and did it’s thing but had never been properly designed, it had never been build for a specific purpose, it was all just kind of mashed together and so as we came to the conclusion that most of our clients are going to be using this we took the opportunity to build a new one from scratch to do it properly. That’s the general theory.

Paul: So what’s different with the new one to the old one?

Rob Borley: Umm… Well there where a few extra features like there’s a more complicated, well I say complicated, more in depth permissions system for pages and parts of the site, there’s also some work flow stuff we’ve added but the main difference is actually what goes on underneath and so this time around we build the whole thing on XML data structures.

Paul: OK.

Rob Borley: Which probably doesn’t mean a great deal to a lot of people out there, but what it means to Headscape, it’s actually changed the way that we develop projects and the way that we work, and it means a lot more less techie people can get down to the nitty-gritty of designing the data and the way things work.

Paul: So, give me an example of how that kind of works in practice?

Rob Borley: OK, so an everyday clients might come to us and say “We need a CMS to create” I don’t know, “hotel vacancies” and so what we’d have to do with previous versions of our CMS is go off, create the data structure in the database, write the logic in the server side pages and the database logic and techies would have to do that because your talking about writing ASP or .NET or PHP or using SQL Server and it’s a very techie orientated job. What we’ve done now by using XML is all the actual logic for the data structure is done in what’s called an XML Scheme which is basically a text document which describes the data. So it means that an average person in the company, who not particularly techie, so a designer or a project manager, a tester or someone can actually sit down and write a document that describes the data, feed it into the system and we’ve got our new area of data, our new “hotel vacancies” structure straight away. So it can be done much, much quicker.

Paul: So if I’m understanding this right, which I probably should do (Laughs)…

Rob Borley: (Laughs)

Paul: lah lah lah, so what we’re talking about here is basically that traditionally with a database you have a serious of hmm… well lets say for example in the “hotel booking” example you gave lets say the hotel had a name, a description and a price range, in the database that would have appeared as three fields basically, it would have been a name field, a description field and a price field.

Rob Borley: Exactly.

Paul: And then your code would have had to, on the back end, would have had to create form fields for each of those that would input into the database and on the front end you’d have to pull, ya know, your code would have to pull out those three pieces of information and display them on the front end, is that correct so far?

Rob Borley: Exactly right yes.

Paul: Right, so what your describing now if I’m getting this right is that basically you wouldn’t have three separate fields in the database, you would just have XML code for those three elements.

Rob Borley: That’s right.

Paul: And then the code both front end and back end looks at the code in the database and just pulls them all out and just displays them as form fields for inputting or text for out putting?

Rob Borley: Exactly, all the logic for that is already done so as soon as the XML is fed in, the back end displays the form fields to fill out the information, the front end pops out the raw XML which we can then style and apply your fancy CSS to.

Paul: I mean that’s quite incredible because like you say then, someone like Charlie who’s one of our Project Managers, can just go in and define, ya know, say we wanted to add, I don’t know, ratings to that list and then suddenly it will just miraculously appear on the front end and back end without any additional coding from you. Is that right?

Rob Borley: Exactly.

Paul: Wow.

Rob Borley: And often, so we’ll be half way through a project and a client will come along and say, “oh, well actually I don’t want that text field there, I want this text field” or “I want this drop down” or “I want this particular text field to be on the front end” and they’ve never mention it before, ya know, it’s typical client changing things as they go along and the Project Manager can just go in there and change the scheme and it does it, it’s done.

Paul: So there are lots of people using this XML/database technique?

Rob Borley: We like to think it’s quite new.

Paul: Oh really?

Rob Borley: Yes. I’ve personally not come across it being used before, but I’m sure there are people out there who are going to correct me on that. (Laughs) But it is quite new.

Paul: It would be quite interesting to know actually, if you are listening to this and you know of somebody doing a similar thing, drop me a line on [email protected]. It’s just kind of interesting to know. So what about, umm… have you kind of made any changes that have kind of made expanding the functionality more kind of modular or anything like that? I mean beyond this XML?

Rob Borley: Ye.

Paul: Is the architecture designed in a different way?

Rob Borley: Ye, so previously it was built on ASP Classic, which is not best for modular design, it’s quite difficult then to move functionality around and re-implant it else were. This time we’ve built it in .NET, in an object orientated way, so the theory being that when somebody else comes along and say “I want this addition to the form builder” or “I want to add a rating system” or “I want to add a product management system/stock management system”, we can literally just, that goes in as a block of code, we call it in an object orientated way, we can turn it off for some clients and so hopefully you build it once and it works for everyone that wants it.

Paul: So does that mean we’re going to have a consistent version of the CMS basically applied to, no we won’t because if a client asks for a new module that’s not going to be on the previous clients ones.

Rob Borley: No, so we won’t roll it back to previous clients, but there’s the potential, as we build stuff up, the potentials great for using in future projects because core of code to use as a base for all the projects.

Paul: So there’s like a core, what do they call it? Kernel of code that will stay the same and all the other modules are built around it?

Rob Borley: Ye, and the idea is that the kernel is kept as small as possible, so that the actual “guts” of the CMS are as tiny as possible and then it’s used to call all these extra modules when it needs it.

Paul: I’ll tell you another completely random question.

Rob Borley: (Laughs)

Paul: That I got asked recently, that you may be able to answer, you mentioned that we’ve built this CMS in .NET and that we do do a lot of .NET work, umm… the question that I got asked was somebody was going on about how it’s hard to produce standards based code out of .NET or Visual Studios, do you know what they’re talking about?

Rob Borley: No.

Paul: No?

Rob Borley: (Laughs)

Paul: Well it didn’t make a lot of sense to me because we produce standards based code don’t we?

Rob Borley: Ye, all of our code is output to your specification actually Paul.

Paul: Ye.

Rob Borley: (Laughs)

Paul: Anyway it just confused the hell out of me that one so I thought I’d ask you about it.

Rob Borley: (Laughs)

Paul: So, what next then is guess is the thing you would kind of ask? Is this a model you think is going to service for a long time going forward or are we going to have to go through this process again in a couple of years?

Rob Borley: I certainly don’t see us having to redesign it again for a long, long time. I mean this seems like it’s going to work and it’s easy to add and extend, I think that’s the key, it’s also very portable, because all the data structures are all XML based, if we for whatever reason decided to ditch Microsoft and move over to PHP and mySQL, all we’d have to do it re-write the logic that calls the XML in and out.

Paul: Oh OK.

Rob Borley: The data structure stays the same to the potential for importing it to other technologies as well as extending the functionality is there, it’s going to be a lot simpler than it would have been in previous versions of things we’ve done.

Paul: That’s very interesting isn’t it? I like that a lot. OK so just to wrap up then, if people wanted to learn any more about this kind of approach, I know your saying there isn’t much around about this kind of stuff but is there any way you would recommend people start having a look?

Rob Borley: Umm… Well the key behind it is storing XML so that’s were you’ve got to start, you’ve got to start with actually storing XML in a database and using the XML data types that the various database engines use now and then pulling the data out , so if you’ve got a good grasp of XML and XSLT then you can actually use whatever server side language you like so if you into PHP, or ASP or .NET or Ruby or whatever you want to do umm… getting to grips with the way the XML works is going to be the place to start, there are lots of places to check that out, W3 Schools is probably the easiest place to start, so the base technologies are standards it’s just what we’re doing with them that slightly different.

Paul: Ah… I think you need to write a blog post on this Rob so that people can access it.

Rob Borley: Your going to let me loose on boagworld Paul that very brave.

Paul: I’ll let you loose, if you write something I’ll put it onto boagworld for you.

Rob Borley: (Laughs)

Paul: Once I’ve read it, edited it and removed all the rude comments. (Laughs)

Rob Borley: Good idea.

Paul: Because you really need something else to do. You seem to be sitting around doing nothing so lets get you doing something constructive. (Laughs)

Rob Borley: I think so, hence I’m on this show.

Paul: Exactly, alright Rob thanks very much for coming in, that’s really interesting, a lot of that I’ve kind of grasped at some level because you’ve told me I need to understand it but ye, that’s really helped.

Rob Borley: (Laughs)

Paul: Thank you very much.

Rob Borley: No problem at all.

Question of the week

Are we facing another dot com bust and if so what affect will it have on you? Answers in the comments.

100th show is in the can

Posted in News on October 22, 2007 by Paul Boag

Saturday night we recorded the 100th episode of Boagworld and an excellent evening it was too.

100 episodes of Boagworld. Its hard to believe. What started as a little side project has turned into a major part of my job. It demonstrates just how important time to ‘play’ is in this industry no matter how small your company. I really want to thank Marcus and Chris for their willingness to let me experiment with new stuff and I am glad to say that it has paid dividends in the case of the podcast, which is now one of our primary ways of attracting business.

However, although the business benefits of the show are encouraging they are nothing compared to the excitement I have felt watching a community grow up around Boagworld. I think what overwhelms me the most is not the size of the community (which in the grand scheme of things is tiny) but the quality of people who are involved. I have never participated in a community where there was so little flaming or bitching. Everybody I have ever met associated with the show have been helpful and encouraging.

Take for example the group that turned up to the recording of our 100th episode. For a start I was impressed they even came. With the combination of the rugby and the tube closures it was incredibly anybody was there. However, what was even more amazing was the lengths they went to…

There was Yaniv who had travelled all the way from Belgium to be at the recording. Not only that but he had come bearing Belgium chocolates for everybody to share.
There was Jamie Knight who suffers from a serious case of aspergers who braved London and the crowds to be with us.
There was Jamie’s friend Alan who came along with him and entertained him all weekend.
There was Anna, a sixth form student from Harfordshire who not only travelled down by herself but turned up with a 100th episode cake.
There was Ryan and Paul who had both travelled down from Leeds for the evening and adopted, Anna making sure she was made to feel welcome.

I could go on but I am sure you get the idea. The sense of community was overwhelming and just so encouraging. Add to this the endless stream of emails I have been receiving as well as the great guys over in the forum and I certainly feel re-energised to continue with the show.

I see a lot written about the The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory but that has certainly not been my experience of working with online communities. You guys have been a constant source of encouragement and I want to thank you for it.

Show 98: Flybe Farce

Posted in Classic shows on October 16, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul looks at the ongoing role of the website manager. Marcus looks at when to allow a loss leading project and instead of an expert section we are looking at the ultimate web design reading list.

Podcast: Download (18.7MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Loss leading projects | Ongoing role of the web designer | Web designers reading list | Question of the week

Housekeeping: Prizes and problems

A free ticket for FOWD (New York)

With the 100th boagworld show coming up on the 20th October I am beginning to feel guilty. After all its going to be such a great time and all you poor Americans are going to miss out. I know how hard done by you all are and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t offer something as compensation.

Fortunately the guys at Carsonified are insuring that at least one of you poor hard done by Americans have something to cheer you up! They are offering you the chance to win a free ticket to the Future of Web Design conference in New York City between the 6-8 November. The ticket normally cost $195 and you get to see great speakers such as Jeffrey Zeldman, Andy Clarke, and Ryan Singer.

Now obviously this is not as good as going to the recording of the 100th boagworld but you will have to just struggle through. For your chance to win a ticket simply email me your name by the 22nd October and we will pick a random winner. For more information on the conference itself visit futureofwebdesign.com.

Download problems

From time to time I get emails from you complaining that episodes of Boagworld are getting cut short in itunes. Its rare but does happen. Unfortunately this is one of itunes less publicized ‘features’. I just wanted to say that the files are complete, the problem is that the connection gets dropped part way through and itunes thinks it has finished. If this happens to you simply delete the file and re-download it from scratch. It almost always comes down fine second time.

News and events

Em Calculator

Personally, I love using ems. Although I don’t use them extensively on every site I build but I do use them a lot. They strike me as the perfect compromise between the pixel perfect control of fixed design and the accessibility and flexibility of fluid. Ems based sites scale as the user increases text size providing a rudimentary zoom functionality.

However I am not claiming that ems are perfect. They are not always the most appropriate solution and have their own technical difficulties. One personal problem I always had with ems was working out the sizing. The problem is that ems inherit from one another. 1 em may equal 10 pixels in one part of the HTML but equal something entirely different deeper down because of inheritance.

I always hated maths and so it is unsurprising that this inheritance issue made my brain want to dribble out of my ears. You can therefore imagine my relief to discover this week that somebody has built a great little em calculator that works out this nesting for you. Simply set the base size and then add the nested tags and em setting for each. The calculator does the rest.

Check it out. I guarantee if you work with ems regularly you will think it is a real time saver.

How to disarm 10 difficult client observations/requests

Next up, a great article about dealing with clients. We all know what it feels like, client after client churn out the same old comments…

I’ll know what I like when I see it.

or…

I love beige; can we get more beige in this?

… the list goes on. These kinds of questions are horribly frustrating and despite the fact that we hear them time and again we are often left floundering as to how to respond. This article lists 10 such comments from clients and proposes some ways to respond to them.

Obviously everybody has to respond to these questions in a way that suits them. However, it is still interesting to see how others suggest you answer these questions. Check it out and then post how you would respond to those questions in our comments.

The resurrection of downloadable fonts

Next up, the return of the downloadable font. Some call it the Holy Grail of web typography. Others just believe it would be used and abused. However, whatever you think you cannot deny that being able to define whatever font you like on a website is something that there is demand for.

The idea has been around since 1998 but different implementations of it by browser manufacturers meant it never gained traction. However according to a number of courses including Robert Nyman it looks like it is back on the cards again.

Both Safari and Opera have now implemented a standards based solution to the problem called @font-face, which is certainly good news. However, until IE and Firefox follow suit this is still not going to get a lot of traction. We will have to wait and see.

Creating better user personas

I feel like I have been talking about user personas a lot recently. They are certainly a tool I have been using for a long time and with good reason. I find them incredibly useful in focusing the designer and client on who they are developing for. They help to define functionality, content, tone and design.

However although I have done an introduction to personas on the show I have avoided going into too much depth. Developing a really good persona is a skill and I am far from an expert. However, if you do want to learn more about personas then you should consider reading Ten Steps to Personas a relatively short article outlining some more advanced techniques.

Now I should warn you up front this is not the easiest of reads. It is certainly more heavy duty than most of the things we cover here. However, I wanted to mention it because I know many of you are already using personas and this will take you to the next level. Also if all else fails it has a very useful chart outlining the steps accompanied by lots of pretty pictures ;)

Marcus’ bit: When to allow a loss leading project

Even after going on at length in this podcast about making sure that contracts are in place, tasks are recorded in detail, requirements consultations are paid for and project management effort is not underestimated – all to avoid under-charging – sometimes there are occasions when you should take a hit and do a project as a loss leader. In this week’s show Marcus explains why loss leaders are sometimes a good idea.

Paul’s corner: Ongoing role of the website manager

While writing my book I have been thinking a lot about the role of the website manager. In particular it has struck me how underestimated the role is. One aspect of the job that is particularly overlooked is the long term commitment involved. In the book I talk about what that ongoing role is and what companies need to consider if they are going to properly support a website over it life. Fortunately my publisher is keen for me to share my thoughts on various aspects of the book so I have put together a blog on the ongoing role of the website manager.

Web Designers reading list

Instead of doing an ask the expert section this week I thought I would answer the single most common question I get from people who listen to this show…

What books would you recommend.

This is something I have blogged and spoken on before but I am going to give you my latest list of top picks based on my ever growing reading list.

Question of the week

What books would you recommend about web design? Answer in the comments.

Ongoing role of a website manager

Posted in Web strategy on October 11, 2007 by Paul Boag

Although there is a general acceptance that a website manager is required to “make the site happen” (as in go live) there is little or no conception in many cases that there is an ongoing role there.

Many organizations and individuals simply underestimate the enormity of the job faced by website managers/owners, failing to grasp that it is an ongoing commitment. It is our job as web designers to make clients aware that running a website requires somebody to be responsible for it over the long term. Every website requires a website manager.

This lack of understand about the role of website manager probably explains why it is often a fairly unrecognized position despite the fact that the website itself is considered an important asset. Although there is a general acceptance that a website manager is required to “make the site happen” (as in go live) there is little or no conception in many cases that there is an ongoing role there.

It is almost as if there is a “build it and it will run” mentality, where the organization fails to grasp that a website manager is needed throughout the entire lifecycle of a website to ensure that it evolves and remains successful.

A good website manager need to be constantly fulfilling three roles…

Evaluating site objectives
Refining the site
Promoting the site

Evaluating site objectives

A website manager should be constantly evaluating the objectives of his website and asking if changes need to be made to its overall vision and direction. This kind of assessment does not need to occur on a daily basis but should be done at least every six months (more often if things in your organization move quickly).

These reviews should consider questions such as:

Have the underlying objectives of the website changed?
How is the site performing against its success criteria and do those criteria need to change?
What is the competition doing and how are we performing against them?
How has the target audience changed and what response are we getting from them in regards to the site?

Refining the site

On a more practical level the website manager should also be refining the site in response to changes in these objectives. If the success criteria for the site are not being met, then steps need to be taken to address the problem. Equally, if the competition is luring away your visitors then the site needs to be altered to encourage them back.

This continual “tweaking” of the site can manifest itself in three different ways:

Changes to the front end interface of the website
The addition, deletion and editing of written content
The introduction of new functionality

For example a luxury holiday booking service might respond to increased competition in the sector by adding a flight price comparison tool to the site (new functionality). A tool like that is very appealing to some users and will draw them away from the competition. Equally, they might look at adding regular reviews of existing destinations (new content) to encourage users to keep coming back. Finally, they might refine the design based on user feedback to make it easier to navigate and improve legibility (changes to design).

Responding to user feedback is often the best way of refining the website, which is why ongoing usability testing, polling and analysis of site stats is so important.

Site promotion

Although it is possible to get online marketing specialists to help with the promotion of a website I have seen some organizations fail to allocate budget to this task. As a result it often falls to the website manager to pick up the promotion of a site.

Site promotion needs a definite ongoing commitment. The number of visitors coming to your website will slowly decline if you do not actively promote it.

You can promote a website in a number of different ways.

Offline promotion – Offline promotion includes letterheads, business cards, signage, phone systems and other marketing collateral.
Email marketing – Email can be a powerful marketing tool to drive new traffic but also a good way of encouraging existing users to return to your website.
Search mechanisms – Search mechanisms are more than good placement on Google. It also includes pay per click campaigns and social networking tools.
Guerilla marketing – Guerilla marketing is a catchall term for lost cost marketing methods. It includes techniques like forum speeding, viral marketing, blogging and even podcasting.

Site promotion requires more than mere lip service. It needs dedicated resources (either internally or externally) on an ongoing basis. It is important to decide early in the process who is going to be responsible for this work.

Show 97: FoWA

Posted in Classic shows on October 9, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul proposes tactics for overcoming design by committee. Marcus talks about extracting a budget from clients and Dan Cederholm compares pixels, ems and percentages.

Podcast: Download (27.0MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Extracting a budget from your prospects | Avoiding design by committee | Dan Cederholm on ems vs pixels vs percentages | Question of the week

About 100th episode

We really want the 100th episode to be as interactive as possible while keeping the format of the normal show. So with this in mind here is what we have in mind for our live show…

News – This will be the top 4 news stories that have most effected web design since the shows launch in August 2005
Marcus – Most unreasonable client
Paul – The worst web design mistakes of all time
Ask the expert – Ask Paul and Marcus any question you want whether it is related to web design or not

You can either turn up on the night and contribute or send us an email or MP3 with your contribution to any of the above areas.

News and events

Gossip from FoWA

I wanted to share a little about the FoWA conference I have just attended. It was absolutely superb and I am extremely glad I attended. The speaker line up was excellent and the subject matter was inspiring. There was a good supporting expo which was great as it prevented the problems that have occurred previously of sponsors touting their wares in the speaking slots.

However, I am not bringing it up simply to gloat that I was there and you weren’t. I got to speak to some great people and leant a few things that is worth passing on. Firstly, it is very apparent that the power of podcasting as a marketing medium is really on the rise. I had a long chat with David Prager and Jay Adelson about Revision 3 the company that produces Diggnation among other shows. It sounds like things are going great for them and they are pulling in some big name advertisers. However, the advertising model is not the only approach that is working within podcasting. The other is the promotional approach where you showcase products that subscribers can then buy. This is perfectly demonstrated by Wine Library TV hosted by Gary Vaynerchuk that allows you to purchase the wines reviewed in the show. I was fortune enough to meet Gary at FoWA and it is obvious that it is passion for the subject and strength of personality that makes the show work.

Of course the real power of podcasting was demonstrated in the live taping of a diggnation episode. I estimate that approximately 1200 people turned up for the recording and it was more like a rock concert than a geek conference. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht (the hosts of the show) were pretty much mobbed after the show by insane fans. It was almost scary and drove home the power of the medium.

I could talk about some of the great speakers I got to hear including a stella performance by Daniel Burka who gave his first ever conference presentation. However, I don’t have the time to cover it all so want to share instead a couple of rumors surrounding Google. The first is that the fabled gPhone from Google is in fact going to be an operating system rather than a specific hardware device. If this is true it could well introduce yet another platform for creating cool web based mobile applications. Finally I wanted to mention the imminent announcement of Google in relationship to its APIs. It would appear Google is about to open up its many online offers from Gmail to Docs allowing third parties to build web applications based on them. This will really open up the opportunities for developers to really innovate.

The average website visitor

The next news story of the day is yet another list from Smashing Magazine (this is getting boring now). This one attempts to bring together some general stats on website users from various sources. Although the article acknowledges that really you need to look at your own stats it does explain that from time to time you want a more general picture of the average web user.

The post therefore lists 8 facts you should know about the average user. These include (but are not limited to)…

The most popular browsers (bet you can’t guess!)
Most common screen resolution
Most popular operating system
Most popular browser family worldwide
Most popular browser in Europe
Most common browser size

Getting started with Photoshop

We know that not everybody who listens to this show are web designers. Some of you are developers, clients or students. Some of you are just starting out in web design. If you fall into any of the above but want to get a better understanding of a key tool of the web designer then you maybe interested in a new article by Sitepoint. This detailed tutorial is an introduction to using Photoshop.

This is an amazingly detailed introduction that covers everything from the user interface right the way through to working with Alpha Channels. As you can imagine it is a long read but if you have the time I cannot think of a better introduction to this hugely powerful image editor.

Waking the sleepers

Last up today is a post by the guys over at 37 Signals. The post is primarily written for those running web applications but actually the principles apply to a much broader audience. It is looking at the subject of sleepers. Sleepers are those users who sign up for your service but never use it (or stop using it). This clearly applies to web applications but is also applicable to ecommerce sites or even sites that offer newsletters or other registered features.

It asks how these users can be reinvigorated and encouraged to become active again. Using an email from StumbleUpon as an example the post suggests so good ways of breathing some life back into your users.

If you are struggling with an apathetic user base this is worth a quick look.

Marcus’ bit: Extracting the budget from clients

So here’s the situation: I receive an invitation to tender in my inbox from a potentially good client. The brief is well written and, for the most part, the requirements are clear. The first thing I do is check the timescales, second is to see what the budget is. But what if the brief does not include a budget? How do you extract the budget from the client?

Paul’s corner: Avoiding design by committee

So I have now reached chapter 4 of my book writing marathon and in line with my commitment to recycling I want to share with you some of the content from my initial draft. Chapter 4 focuses on the role of the client in the design process and one of the big challenges that they face is design by committee. Of course, avoiding design by committee is something designers want to avoid too which is why I thought it would be a good subject to cover on the show.

Ask the expert: Dan Cederholm on ems vs pixels vs percentages

Paul: So one of the most common questions that I seem to get time and time again as far as CSS is concerned, revolves around working with ems and pixels and percentages and what to use when and how to work out what you should be using and all of that kind of thing. So, I thought, “Let’s get an expert in.” And so, I have Dan Cederholm joining me. (Dan Snickering) Hello, Dan.

Dan Cederholm: Hello Paul!

Paul: Don’t snicker! You are the expert for today.

Dan Cederholm: (laughing) I’ll try to be. I’ll put on my “expert hat”.

Paul: Just go with the flow, its fine.

Dan Cederholm: I will. (laughs some more)

Paul: Okay. So Dan, like I said, this is a common question that we get asked and I’m just interested in your opinion about “When’s the right time to use what combination? Should we mainly be using ems? Should we mainly be using percentages? Should we be going pixels?” What’s your take on the discussion?

Dan Cederholm: Well I think it, in a very politicianesque way, I’d say it depends. (Paul laughing) And this call is over. I could just hang up now (Dan laughs).

Paul: Okay

Dan Cederholm: No, I’m just kidding, it depends.

Paul: Depends on what then? (Paul laughs)

Dan Cederholm: Yeah, so it depends. Now are you referring to strictly font sizing or units in general for boxes and things?

Paul: I mean, there’s lots of different things isn’t there? (Dan: Yeah) There’s kind of, do we make, you know, when we design a whole web site, should the web site be fixed width? Should it be hybrid? Should it be fluid? Should it be built so its elastic? Let’s start with that as the discussion.

Dan Cederholm: Okay. Width in general… Well, I think, like I said, it does depend. It’s a tough decision to make depending on the site and depending on what’s in the site and the design and that kinda thing. It can be tricky. I love EM based design. And that’s what I use currently on SimpleBits and a few other sites that I’ve done recently. But, I’ve actually been sort of re-thinking that because its difficult to do… to drop in say an image or something that’s fixed width in that design and still account for that fixed element to be cut off or to look odd when the text is re-sized or if the text, the base font size is different. To me, the difficulty with an em-based layout is sort of the fixed image problems. So, for instance, on SimpleBits, for my blog posts I’ve been wanting to do more visual stuff like drop in an image from Flickr or a photograph or something.

Paul: Sure.

Dan Cederholm: But that becomes difficult because its em-based. If the image is a fixed pixel width, obviously its hard to just drop that in and design around it so that it looks like its meant to be there, you know?

Paul: Mmm Hmm

Dan Cederholm: And now there are tricks that people have experimented with, with em-based and setting the image width as well.

Paul: Right

Dan Cederholm: But that, of course, gets tricky when if the image is blown up it looks, you know, it will look terrible or shrunk down or won’t look as nice as it would if it was re-sized properly. To me, that’s the biggest drawback to em-based layouts. So, depending on the site, if the site is not image heavy or if you’re not going to be doing a lot of that sort of image stuff, then em-based styles can be excellent and they can provide, sort of that flexibility, almost like zooming in and out just by changing the font size.

Paul: So would your recommend that over, say, a percentage-based layout?

Dan Cederholm: Well I think that… I like the… They each have their own, sort of pros and cons. The percentage-based layout is great as well. So that’s fluid, or liquid, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Dan Cederholm: And that, that gives a little more control to the reader, because they can stretch their window out. Now, the main problem there is the “max-width” and “min-width” in Internet Explorer 6 and below. So, the common problem with that, or why people don’t use liquid layout is if you stretch the window out really, really wide, then line length becomes a problem with readability.

Paul: Mmm Hmm.

Dan Cederholm: But, that can be solved by setting a max-width to certain things. So in IE 6 and below, that’s not supported aside from some javascript hack or something. But, liquid layouts do offer that extra control for the reader. Some people… its weird, its like a religious sort of divide. Some people hate liquid layouts. Some people love them or swear by them. Its interesting how people can get. It can be a heated debate with designers. I found… it’s interesting with uhm… so, the iPhone came out over here in the US and I found liquid layouts actually look far better in the iPhone because of that small window width and that becomes even more of an advantage on a smaller screen. As opposed to fixed-width layout or even an em-based layout, the viewport isn’t necessarily computed correctly and you don’t take advantage of the full screen, whereas with a liquid layout, it does.

Paul: So when you do, say an em-based layout or a full liquid layout, what about things like margins and padding? Do you do those in the same settings or do you do those using pixels, or how do you work with those?

Dan Cederholm: Yeah, that’s a good question. So, one of the … the tough parts of a liquid layout or percentage-based IS margins and padding, because often times you need to add extra elements to add padding around, say if you want a fixed gutter width between columns. Unless you’re specifying percentage, like let’s say its a simple 2-column layout. The left column is 70% and the right column is 30%, which equals 100%. You can’t say the 70% block has a margin right of 10 pixels because now its 100% plus 10 pixels, which doesn’t work.

Paul: Yeah.

Dan Cederholm: So, you could either… there’s a couple choices… You could do a percentage gutter, so you have like 70, uh sorry, 65% with a 5% right margin and then 30% on the other side. Or, the other option would be to add another element sort of like a div that’s inside of each and the add a pixel amount to that without a width at all. So, there’s extra markup involved there. One of the things I like about ems is that instead of worrying about percentages, ems are… you can add… its easier to add gutters and padding with ems because the math works. (Dan Laughs, Paul agrees) So, you’ve got a whole width for the layout of say, 70 ems, or whatever it is and then you can break that up doing the math properly with the width of the columns and the width of the gutters as well. So, percentages are tricky because you can’t go above 100% and you can’t take away from a percentage with a pixel amount.

Paul: Yeah.

Dan Cederholm: Take away, or add with a pixel amount. So if you want fixed width gutters with liquid layout, it often requires extra markup to do that.

Paul: What about when it comes to typography? Are you suggesting always go with ems in situation like that? Because you’ve then got to add just more complexities too. You’ve got keywords that you can kind of throw into the mix there as well.

Dan Cederholm: Right. Right. Yeah, I prefer… in my own work, I prefer to use the keyword as a base. So, I’ll use “small” as a base on the body.

Paul: Right.

Dan Cederholm: And then use percentages for going up or down from there. So, headings may be 120% for a heading or whatever and then paragraphs would be 90 or that kind of thing. I like that because to me its sort of, ok, this is a base line. I know its not going to be the exactly the same in all browsers but I’ve had good luck with getting pretty damn close cross-browser sizing that way. The other way to do it is with ems and there’s a great article by Richard Rutter, actually, about sizing text with ems that he wrote a few years ago. And he explains a way of using a percentage as a base to knock it down to.. oh, are you familiar with it?

Paul: Yeah.

Dan Cederholm: And then that sort of… you can relate em units to pixel amounts. So, if you’re used to sizing text with pixels but want to use ems, he explains a way of sort of knocking down that base so that the math becomes simpler and using… specifying ems but thinking what that would be in a pixel amount.

Paul: Yeah, which is the approach that I normally use. The only thing that kind of (Dan: It is? Okay.) does my head in about that is that obviously ems inherit from one another.

Dan Cederholm: Right, exactly.

Paul: And that’s where it gets really confusing.

Dan Cederholm: It really does, doesn’t it? I mean especially if you’re nesting more than one level deep. Then the math becomes mind boggling.

Dan Cederholm: And so that still happens with the keyword percentage model that I use often… the same problem… so when you’re nesting percentages, things start to get a little weird. It becomes a little difficult to do the math but I found that I’m not often nesting too far… you know, more than maybe two levels or so when I’m sizing things. And if I am, then unfortunately, I have to do the math or try a different approach but, yeah, that is a tricky part of ems or percentages. In a perfect, ideal world, I think the designer could specify pixel, right, and then the browser would resize it from there but, you know, IE actually 7 and 6 and 5 don’t let you resize the text and I’m kinda baffled why its still a problem in IE 7. So, that would be ideal because the designer can say, “Look, this is what I intended to be as a base and this is gonna look the same across browsers for the most part for most resolutions and then the user can always over-ride that.” I mean, the user should always be able to over-ride that. But, unfortunately, for baffling reasons, they chose not to let someone do that in IE. So, that goes back to, I guess, your site statistics and if IE is a low percentage, which is probably not going to be the case for most sites, you could sort of weigh that and can say, “Well, I’ll go with pixels.” And, I mean, a lot of people do go with pixels now anyway, and just not worry about it. But I tend to, you know, I bump up si… I don’t wear glasses, for instance, and I bump the text size up on a lot of sites.

Paul: Yeah, I do too.

Dan Cederholm: And so, if I’m doing that, and I have pretty good eye-sight, I imagine a lot of people would as well.

Paul: Ok so what…

Dan Cederholm: Having that control is important.

Paul: Yeah. So, one last question before I let you go (Dan: Yeah) and get back to your normal work… You were talking about browsers there. And so, Internet Explorer 7 has come along with sort of this zoom page functionality.

Dan Cederholm: Right.

Paul: How does that enter in all of this? Does it change the landscape in any way?

Dan Cederholm: I think it definitely helps. That’s what sort of baffles me even more. I’m using the word, “baffle” a lot today. (Paul laughs, Dan chuckles) Why they would add the page zoom to IE 7 but not allow you to re-size font set in pixels. So, I think it helps in a way but the problem there is that it will… your viewport stays the same. So, when you zoom the layout, you’ll start to get horizontal scroll bars and you’ll have to sort of navigate the page that way, whereas just zooming the text, the viewport stays the same and you can read the page a little easier, I find. I mean, it’d be interesting to talk to someone that has low vision and uses, you know, zoom or text bumping up on a regular basis. I think that that’s sort of the… the downside I see to it is that its, it can help but, let’s say that you’re looking at a block of text and you use the page zoom feature and you’re window is small. Let’s say you’re on a small screen device or something or at least you’re monitor is small or whatever. So, zooming in will make it easier to read but you might have to do some extra navigating of the windows to keep reading that. Whereas bumping up the text, you shouldn’t have to do that. It should stay within it’s container and the window should just… yeah, you’d be scrolling down but you won’t be scrolling horizontally.

Paul: I mean that’s a particular problem, isn’t it? With fluid designs, I’ve noticed, with a zoom function that as soon as you start zooming on a fluid web site,

Dan Cederholm: Oh, right.

Paul (continues): you immediately get horizontal scroll bars. Which to me, is ridiculous.

Dan Cederholm (laughing): Right, right. Exactly! Right, so in bumping up the text in a fluid design, should be, I think, should be a lot more… better an experience. That brings up a good point though, with em-based design. Now, when you’re bumping the text with an em-based design, the entire layout, if they layout is set in ems as well, the whole layout will expand. Sort of like zoom, but… So, that’s something to consider as well. Where the layout could go beyond the viewport, you could get horizontal scroll bars as well there. So if you have an extra wide layout in ems, that can be an issue. Just bumping it up one notch or two notches could cause that sort of scrolling problem.

Paul: Yeah. So, the long and the short of this, is there’s no right answer, is there?

Paul: There’s no perfect solution here.

Dan Cederholm: Yeah, there really isn’t.

Dan Cederholm: I mean, like a lot of things in web design, there’s not… yeah, it sort of just depends on a case-by-case. I mean, people fall into sort of things that work for them, you know, like I use the “keyword/percentage” thing and that just seems to work. Other people like the em-based approach to text sizing. But neither one is really right. I think you’re correct in saying there is no real right answer at this point. It will be interesting to see how CSS evolves and affects the way we layout pages. Just the other day, I was looking at the CSS 3 grid layout draft.

Paul: Bleh!

Dan Cederholm: Yeah. (laughs) Which is pretty amazing. And maybe we’ll be able to use it in the next fifty years.

Paul: Well on that cheery thought, (Dan (laughing): Sorry) I’ll have to grapple with CCS 3.

Paul: Thank you so much for your time, Dan. I appreciate you coming and explaining the different options that are available.

Dan Cederholm: Ahh! Its my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Question of the week

Pxels, ems, percentages… which do you use the most? Answer in the comments.

Marcus on budgets

Posted in Web strategy on October 8, 2007 by Paul Boag

A week or so later, the client calls to say that our proposal was probably the best of the lot but, in the end, we lost out on price..

This is a guess, but I would say that 7 out of 10 ITTs do not include any budgetary guidance. So, I phone up to discuss budget. The private sector is either amused or affronted that I am asking and I am basically told ‘you tell me’. The public sector simply states that it is not allowed to tell me.

I then spend a day or two of my time preparing our proposal. This is often followed by us being shortlisted, so I drag Paul out of deepest Dorset and we both travel to present our pitch. A week or so later, the client calls to say that our proposal was probably the best of the lot but, in the end, we lost out on price.

Anyone who ever got involved in a pitch will now be nodding their heads.

I don’t want to get too cynical here so, I should say that this scenario happens less often these days. This is firstly because I make a positive effort to combat it – that I am going to share with you – and secondly, clients understand the difficulty it can cause so are less likely to keep their budget under wraps.

So why do we need to know

The first reason, and most honest reason, is that we don’t want to do a lot of unpaid pitch work when there is no chance that our price will be accepted. Who would? It’s like having 10k to spend on a car then going and asking to test drive an Aston Martin. You are completely wasting the Aston dealer’s time. (I’m not suggesting a correlation between Aston Martin and Headscape by the way!)…

But this goes both ways – the client’s time is also being wasted. Ok, so it may only be the time to read the proposal and reject it, but what if all the bids are too expensive? Then the client needs to go through the whole process again.

The second reason why we need to know budgets relates to what we would like to include in a proposal over what we need to include.

For example, take usability testing. We always highly recommend that a client pays for at least one round of usability testing because it will definitely improve their new site – no question. But, not doing it doesn’t mean they’ll end up with an unusable turkey. It’s just more likely that any usability issues will crop up after launch.

So, do I include usability testing or not? Another good example of this is additional design concepts. Some clients love the idea of being presented with multiple design concepts, but I am less likely to include them in a proposal where I don’t know the budget.

How to find out

I have found that the best way to discover a budget is to simply provide a ballpark total, usually accompanied by a list of ‘likely tasks for this type of project’, in an initial email or telephone response. This usually gets the discussion going, even with those public sector people who ‘cannot’ discuss it.

Expect a lot of people to dismiss you out of hand. This is good. Don’t be tempted to ‘just go for it’ anyway because you like the client or work is short – you will regret it.

Others will say that the ballpark is ok. This is not as good as getting into a proper discussion about what priorities they might have but it does mean that you are not wasting your time and you do have a chance of winning the work.

The only real risk with this approach is that you misinterpret the requirements and produce an inaccurate ballpark.

Another way

Finally, there is a less confrontational approach that I sometimes use that involves modular pricing. We break down our pricing into quite detailed tasks for all proposals but when I really do not have a clue about a client’s budget, I will often separate pricing into ‘core’ items and ‘optional’ items. This has proved to be a very effective method of presenting price.

I tend to go down this road with prospective clients who have had personal recommendations about Headscape. It is likely that price has already been discussed so the prospect already knows what our rates are.

The Geeks alternative to golf

Posted in Web strategy on September 19, 2007 by Paul Boag

As a diehard geek/web designer I have developed a number of other techniques that allow me to network and sell my skills.

I have never been a great fan of golf. As far as I can see it is a silly game that ruins a perfectly good walk. For the longest time I didn’t get why so many people played it. I especially did not understand why successful business people wasted so much time hitting a small ball around in a field.

One day I mentioned my dislike of the sport to a golfing friend and his answer surprised me. “I don’t like it much either” he replied. “Then why do you play it?” I asked. He responded by telling me that he played with potential or existing clients. In short it was a sales tool. Golf is a boring slow paced game that allows ample time to for “networking”. My friend had plenty of opportunities to subtly sell his services.

Personally I don’t care how good a sales tool it is; I have no intention of taking up golf. However, as a diehard geek/web designer I have developed a number of other techniques that allow me to network and sell my skills.

Blatant networking

Most of us have already heard of Linkedin (www.linkedin.com). Aimed squarely at the business community its objective is to connect you to new business contacts through mutual acquaintances. At its heart, it is all about sales. It gives suppliers a chance to connect to potential customers through referrals, while buyers feel more confident in the supplier because it comes as a recommendation from an existing contact.

However, although it seems great in principle, I am yet to win any work through it. As somebody who isn’t really a sales person it feels heavy-handed and slightly aggressive.

An alternative is to make use of one of the many social networking sites out there. The first that springs to mind is myspace but no self-respecting professional would be caught dead there, so we need to look a little further. The answer seems to lie in facebook that appears to have exploded in popularity recently. I am continually amazed at just how many of my clients have a facebook page and just how many new contacts I am making through my facebook account.

The reason facebook works well is that it is not as formal as a company website. It is your “personal” page and people respond better to individuals rather than to organizations. It is far easier to ask a quick question of a person on facebook than complete a contact form on a website and risk being hassled by a sales person.

Of course you have to give people a reason to add you as a friend on facebook. They have to see a value in the relationship. What can you offer them? What do they get out of the association? This brings us nicely on to the “aren’t I clever” approach of social networking.

The “aren’t I clever” approach

Making contacts through sites like facebook is not enough in itself. Although it gets your name in front of people on a semi-regular basis it does not associate that name with quality work. Some degree of self-promotion is also needed.

Telling the world how great you are is always difficult. The problem is that if you do it the wrong way you come across as arrogant and nobody wants to work with somebody like that. The best approach is to not directly promote yourself at all but allow your knowledge and expertise to do the talking.

The most common way to achieve this is through a blog. By writing about your experience as a web designer you will naturally start to communicate your depth of expertise in the field. Blog posts demonstrating your experience are reassuring for potential clients because they show that you “know what you are talking about.” If you take the time to write your posts in plain English and avoid web design jargon then you will also be educating potential clients at the same time. This adds real value from their perspective and makes them more likely to subscribe to your posts.

Of course not all of us are great writers. However, there are alternative ways of promoting your expertise. If you are a designer your blog might consist mainly of example designs that you have produced with short explanations of your approach. If you are a coder you might want to focus on releasing code snippets that others can reuse. The important thing is that you express your knowledge and passion for the subject.

For me a podcast worked best. I found myself frustrated by only blogging as it was much harder to express my enthusiasm for the subject. By podcasting more of that passion comes across. Another advantage of podcasting over the written word is that people get to know you better. They feel like they have made a real connection and that helps when generating sales leads. However, podcasting is not for everybody and you need to discover what is right for you.

Giving away your genius

Although it is great to demonstrate your knowledge, many people are concerned that this gives away their competitive edge and intellectual property. The reasoning goes that if I tell the world how I code a particular solution or how I approach a certain aspect of web design, then my competition will use that knowledge.

To some extent this is a legitimate concern. Indeed, I know that many of my competitors listen to and learn from my podcast. However, ultimately I believe the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Prospective clients respond so favorably to an open attitude and the knowledge you communicate through that approach that it wins far more work than is lost through loss of competitive advantage.

Another important point to consider is that the more you blog and talk about your expertise the higher your online profile and the more likely you are to be found. If you post content online it will help your search engine ranking and if the content is good then you will find more people linking to you. On the other hand if you fail to post for fear of losing your competitive edge then people will not discover you in the first place. Don’t allow a fear of your competition to hamper your marketing strategy.

Of course the danger with blogs, podcasts and social networks is that we hide behind them. Sooner of later we have to confront the real world.

Don’t forget real life

As I said at the beginning of this article, I consider myself a geek. One of the things I have observed about geeks is that many of us find face to face interaction difficult, especially when it comes to self promotion. We tend to shy away from such opportunities and hide behind technology. However, this is a serious mistake. If we are seeking to generate new business and increase our profile then we have to get ourselves out there meeting people.

There is certainly no shortage of opportunities available from conferences to meet-ups. Start by engaging with the web design community. Sure, some of them will be the competition but many will work for in-house web teams or agencies in search of outside expertise.

Conferences are a good way to meet people but meet-ups are even better. These informal gatherings of web designers are superb for networking because they provide many opportunities to chat and socialize. From Barcamp to Refresh there are literally thousands of these get togethers all over the world and they happen on a regular basis. The best place to start is by searching on “web design” at upcoming.org.

One problem you might encounter is that you may have to travel. Many events like these tend to focus on larger cities so if you live in a more rural area you could find a lack of events nearby. Personally, I live in the middle of nowhere but I still make the effort to go up to London because I am persuaded that face to face meetings are important.

So you have attended a meet-up and made a few contacts, the question is how to keep in touch and build those relationships? That is where twitter comes in.

Why twitter?

Take a moment to think about the problem. You have met somebody for a couple of hours at a meet-up. You get on well and feel it is worth keeping in touch. You could swap telephone numbers but why would you call them? You certainly don’t know them well enough at this stage to call for a chat! You could exchange email addresses but what reason would you have to write? People get enough junk email as it is without you pestering them. What you need is a lightweight and informal way of keeping in touch so that the next time you meet you have something to talk about. Twitter is the answer.

By adding a new contact to your twitter list (and vice versa) you can track each others thoughts and activities. My contacts on twitter post about their work, where they are going, their home life, all kinds of random pieces of information. By following this information I will have something to talk to them about next time we meet. I will know that one contact failed his motorcycle test or that another has just enjoyed a holiday in spain. It gives us something to discuss.

Equally, if they are following my twitters then they will know about my life and I will remain in the forefront of their mind. That way, the next time work becomes available for which I might be suited, they will remember me.

In short twitter keeps the relationship fresh even when there are long gaps between physical contact.

Of course, this technique only works when both parties are on twitter. However, more and more people are joining up to services like this and certainly many web designers are already using it.

Quick fire tips to social networking

So there you are. The geek alternative to golf. Social networking sites, blogging, podcasting, meet-ups and twitter. However, let me leave you with three pieces of advice that have been invaluable to me in my online interactions.

First, resist the temptation to actively sell. When it is so easy to block you the last thing you want to do is push your luck. If the prospective client can see your talent through your blog and is in regular contact with you through twitter or facebook then they will come to you when they have work available.

Second, use an actual picture of yourself. When registering for facebook, twitter or any other social website there is a temptation to use some clever icon or cartoon as your profile picture. Resist the urge. If somebody has met you for the first time at a meet-up they may well not remember your name when you ask them to be a friend on one of these sites. However, if they see your picture they are much more likely to recall you and hit add instead of block.

Finally, never dismiss anybody. If you become focused on sales and networking you may find yourself judging people by their potential value. It is a mistake to shun somebody because they are “just a student” or a junior designer. I have learnt from personal experience that anybody has the potential to bring in business. A junior designer can recommend you to his or her boss. A student will one day graduate and work for a company. Everybody has a value to your business and you should not ignore anybody. Anyway, to do so would be downright rude!

How much to blog?

Posted in Site content on August 29, 2007 by Paul Boag

I recently received a question from Dan about ensuring the quality and quantity of his blog posts. With so many of us blogging I thought it might be an interesting areas to cover.

Over 66% of blogs have not been updated in over 2 months and anywhere between 60% and 80% are abandoned within their first month. It is very easy for a blog to go from a good idea to an embarrassment.

The main problem is that blogging is a lot more work than people expect. Regularly coming up with quality content over the long term is a significant challenge and many individuals and organisations find it hard to keep up.

Many bloggers struggle with getting their posts right. They feel the pressure to post regularly but also want to maintain the quality of what they put out. I think Dan reflects the feelings of many bloggers in the question he sent to me…

For as long as I can remember the prevalent thought has been that the key to success for blogging and podcasting is to post frequently and on a regular schedule. Now, this made a lot of sense because websites had to get visitors to comeback manually to find new content. But now in the age of RSS feed is this advice still as important as it used to be if at all? Also in terms of how web managers spend their resources is it more important to do a few updates with stella quality or to manage your time so that frequent updates are the priority?

I get the sense that Dan is keen to lighten the load and understandably so. However I think that by doing so he may undermine the effectiveness of his blog.

Let look at the two questions he raises.

Do I still need to post regularly and frequently?

Dan is right when he says the prevalent thought is that bloggers should be posting frequently and on a regular schedule. However, I believe this is about more than drawing people back to your site.

The amount and regularity with which you post depends very much on why you are blogging in the first place. If you are blogging purely for fun then it really doesn’t matter how often or how regularly you post. However, if you blog for more commercial reasons or even to build your personal profile then it does matter.

Blogging is a powerful way of continually keeping your brand (whether that be personal or corporate) in somebody’s mind. For example if I only posted once every few months the chances are you would soon forget about me and fail to include me in that invitation to tender for that great web project you are working on! Equally by posting regularly you build an expectation (either consciously or unconsciously) and users start to miss your when they are not there. For example, every time I take a week off of recording boagworld I always receive emails saying that the show was missed. Even the absence of a post can keep your brand in people’s mind if you are posting regularly enough.

Of course Dan’s point about RSS feeds is a valid one. In a world of RSS the need to constantly encourage people back to your site is less. However, you need to be careful not to make assumptions. Yes it is true that if you are aiming at the geek audience there is not the same need to post regularly and frequently. However, if you are aiming at a mainstream audience I wouldn’t be so sure. Feeds are still a long way from being universal and many users still do not know how to get notifications via RSS.

There are endless debates online about how often you should blog. To be honest there is no single answer. It depends on multiple factors including audience, subject matter and the popularity of your blog. However as a rough starting point I would encourage most people to blog at least once a week. Of course if you have a particularly popular blog that figure might be nearer two or three times a day!

However, blogging isn’t just a matter of frequency its also about the quality of the posts. That brings us nicely on to the second part of Dan’s question.

Is quality or quantity more important?

Should the emphasis be placed on posting regularly and frequently or on ensuring a high quality of post? Personally, I am not sure that this is the best question to ask. I think instead the question should be “how do I create something relevant to my readers?”

If you are writing a blog aimed at academics then the chances are the emphasis should be on quality. If you are writing to friends and family they are probably more interested in hearing from you regularly. However, for those of us who have an audience somewhere in between there are ways that you can have the best of both worlds.

Consider defining a list of several different types of posts you can add to your blog. Some of those types can have an emphasis on quality while others can be quick and easy so they can be used more regularly.

Take my blog for example. I post the show notes which tend to be very detailed and take a long time to put together. Then there are opinion pieces like this one, which are more frequent but not quite as detailed. Finally, there are links to other resources. It takes seconds to bookmark and comment on a link and so these appear on a much more regular basis. By using these different styles of postings you can ensure a frequency on your blog without losing the quality of what you are publishing.

Conclusion

Obviously, there is a lot more that can be said about blogging. Indeed entire books have been written on the subject. However, in answer to Dan’s question I strongly believe that posting frequently and regularly is still very important. The trick is to do this without overly compromising the quality. Having different styles of post will help with that but you may also want to get others involved in posting. The only downside of this in my experience is that a lot of people who offer to “help out” fail to deliver the goods.