Our First AIR App

Posted in Development on February 13, 2009 by Paul Boag

With Adobe AIR now up to 100 million downloads, being utilised by big name players such as the BBC and increasingly invading our desktop Headscape decided to give it a go.

This is a guest post by two of the Headscape developers – Craig Rowe and Dave McDermid

Setting up

Adobe Air is Flash + WebKit + SQL Lite on the desktop. As a Flash developer you can dive right in and use the Air extension for Flash to publish your beautifully crafted swfs and AS code into an installable cross platform desktop app. However, the flash projector has been around for a while doing similar things and we wanted to put our hard earned web development skills to productive use. So we went the HTML/Javascript route.

The SDK is free for download but Aptana provides a rather neat eclipse based IDE in which to work. Handily the new project wizard allows you to import a multitude of Javascript libraries making it incredibly easy to get a new project up and running with your preferred initial setup (we went for jQuery).

The Problem

To make the exercise worth while we needed a real world problem to solve. Trivial examples usually do very little other than increase your ability to copy/paste example code and do your best fireworks night ‘ooo’ ‘ahh’ impression at it. Instead, we chose to add to our server admin experience…

As loving, caring web developers we actively monitor all our servers, and most of our live websites. For a while this was a DOS script, this was then migrated to a Bash script on a Cron job. It worked great, but required a computer science degree to maintain. So here was our problem: we needed a pretty, maintainable and reliable app to monitor websites. All it had to do was let us know when one disappears or throws a nasty error.

Download and try our site watcher AIR application

The Journey

Step 1: The wireframe

A new Adobe AIR project in Aptana comes with an html file named after your application which acts as your main program window. Creating a basic layout with a few buttons, titles etc can be done in a snap. The html, css and javascript are dealt with in exactly the same way as if intended to be deployed as a website (with no browser compatibility worries as we are only targeting the Adobe AIR WebKit rendering engine).

Step 2: The magic

The wireframe identified the main viewer as comprising of an unordered list of sites, each with their current status and edit/check/remove links. This list needed to be persisted, but editable by the user.

If this was a website we may be looking to server side scripting and a database of some nature. However, we had only jQuery and the air libraries. Although SQL Lite was an option we decided it was an over complication for what is a relatively simple, first AIR app. So, knowing that we could use jQuery to manipulate a DOM and the air libraries to save and open local files we opted for XML as a data source.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<sites>
<site address="http://www.headscape.co.uk/" status="200" frequency="30">
Headscape&#146;s website
</site>
...
</sites>

Looking back into our application html file we can see that we are given a readLocalfile() function that returns the string contents. This can then be passed into a jQuery object and manipulated in the usual way.

[The canny among you will notice that this readLocalfile() function is merely a few calls to the flash filesystem classes (using the AIR aliases). In fact at some points I directly call the flash library rather than using the AIR alias. There’s no functional difference, I’m just used to the flash namespaces]

With this ability added to the jquery ajax capabilities the application flow could be easily envisaged as follows:

On DOM Ready read the local xml file
For each site element in the xml create an LI element with the appropriate display and action elements
Fire off a jquery ajax call for each site
Use the response code to formulate a class for the LI to change its display
Fire off any notifications if the response code has changed i.e. e-mail, notification window, twitter post
Set a timeout before checking again
On window close parse the unordered list back into xml and write it to the persistent file

The Stumbling Blocks

Viewing the source of an installed AIR app can be done by nipping into program files (or Applications for the MACs amongst us) and looking in the application name directory. Here you will see the html, css and javascript files that make up the app (so we can continue to learn from others deployments just as we would with a website).

A brief look at the sitewatcher source and the flow described above becomes immediately clear. ‘Sitewatcher.html’ is our main form and it includes script.js as the main driver of the application with the #sites ul as the main containing element. The rest is GUI. ‘PopulateUIfromXML()’ directly completes steps 1-2 and fires off the 3-6 process via ‘CheckSite()’. However dispersed within this are the unusual non-front end website development bits, so we’ll look at those now:

Acting as a System Tray App

Many AIR apps, particularly those to do with notification (twitter, yammer etc) seem to want to run as system tray applications, we were no different.

The process of doing so is relatively easy, and encapsulated in the appropriately named SetUpSysTray() function of script.js. Essentially what we need to achieve is an override of the minimise behaviour, the setting of an appropriate icon and the associated window toggling behaviour.

Window.nativeWindow gives us access to the OS window holding our html window, and we can listen to events on it in much the same way. ‘nwMinimized’ is set to fire on display state changing and, if being minimized, instead docks (hides) the window and prevents the default behaviour.


if(air.NativeApplication.supportsSystemTrayIcon)
window.nativeWindow.addEventListener(runtime.flash.events.NativeWindowDisplayStateEvent.DISPLAY_STATE_CHANGING, nwMinimized);
function nwMinimized(nativeWindowDisplayStateEvent) {
if(nativeWindowDisplayStateEvent.afterDisplayState == runtime.flash.display.NativeWindowDisplayState.MINIMIZED) {
nativeWindowDisplayStateEvent.preventDefault();
Dock();
}
}
function Dock() {
window.nativeWindow.visible = !window.nativeWindow.visible;
}

This works fine but on its own will actually just hide the window from view/the taskbar leading the user to have to use task manager to close it. To ensure that an icon for your application sits in the system tray we need to set an icon for the nativeApplication (the mere presence of which will cause windows to display the app in the systray).

Back to SetUpSysTray() and we’re using a content loader to load the icon graphic into memory, with an iconLoadComplete handler waiting to do the work:


var iconLoader = new runtime.flash.display.Loader();
iconLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(air.Event.COMPLETE, iconLoadComplete);
iconLoader.load(new air.URLRequest("../icons/AIRApp_16.png"));
function iconLoadComplete(event){
if(air.NativeApplication.supportsSystemTrayIcon){
air.NativeApplication.nativeApplication.icon.bitmaps = new Array(event.target.content.bitmapData);
air.NativeApplication.nativeApplication.icon.tooltip = "SiteWatcher";
air.NativeApplication.nativeApplication.icon.menu = new air.NativeMenu();
// Create Menu Items
var openCommand = new air.NativeMenuItem("Toggle");
openCommand.addEventListener(air.Event.SELECT,function(event){
Dock();
});
var sep = new air.NativeMenuItem("", true);
var exitCommand = new air.NativeMenuItem("Exit");
exitCommand.addEventListener(air.Event.SELECT,function(event){
air.NativeApplication.nativeApplication.exit();
});
// Add Items to menu
air.NativeApplication.nativeApplication.icon.menu.addItem(openCommand);
air.NativeApplication.nativeApplication.icon.menu.addItem(sep);
air.NativeApplication.nativeApplication.icon.menu.addItem(exitCommand);
}
}

We simply set the native application icon to be the bitmap data before finalising the sys tray setup by creating a menu to appear on click.

Note for MACs: The minimised event listener is not applied if the system does not support system tray icons. This is to avoid confusion on MACs where a minimise goes to the MAC dock anyway.

Notification Windows

So the app can now run in the system tray and use jQuery to check the sites listed in an XML file at regular intervals. However we need a process of notification. The App could be running on an actively used machine in which case we want messenger style pop-ups. Or it could be running on a separate machine/server from where we want it to send e-mail/other notifications.

In the case of window notifications we took a short cut and used some example code from Adobe Developer Center. This is encapsulated within the DisplayManager.js and Message.js files. Display Manager acts as a queue, dequeuing and displaying on a timed basis if the user is present. This is an important requirement as you do not want a user missing a notification prompt merely because they were away from their desk for a while. It can be easily achieved via the USER_IDLE and USER_PRESENT air events – in this case stopping and starting the poller.

‘CheckSite()’ simply queues message HTML when the response code received is different from the previously stored code. When the queue poller is running (the user is present) the message is dequeued and displayed via Message.js.

At this point it is worth remembering that notification windows are no different to any other native window. It’s just a name we’re giving to the way we are using native windows. They therefore have their own events, contents, position etc and this can be seen by the Message.js code where a new chromeless, transparent native window is created and its contents loaded from the message.html template.

The display process is then as follows:

Message.js stores the message content in a variable on the new window
MessageScripts.js, then running once the message.html dom is ready, sets a listener on the HTML_BOUNDS_CHANGE event before setting the message variable content as the body – ultimately firing the bounds change event
This event is handled by setting the native window height to match before firing the layoutComplete event
On hearing this Message.js makes the window visible, finds an appropriate resting position (in relation to any other messages) and animates it in.

E-mailing

A key feature of any site watcher is to let us know when something bad happens. The combination of emails and an email-to-text service allows us to be notified the minute we spot trouble. This was easy enough in the bash script, using sendmail on the Mac. Not so straight forward for an AIR app. We can’t run sys commands and there is no built-in SMTP server. The solution is to use sockets in AIR. A little hardcore, but it keeps the solution nice and tight.

Anyone who’s sent an email with telnet will know that the principle of SMTP is, as the acronym suggests, simple. Adobe gives us plenty of clues for opening sockets and listening for messages. All we had to do was make sure we sent the right info. There are some restrictions in opening sockets from scripts outside the application sandbox, but for our purposes it worked a treat. With a little trial and error we were firing off emails left right and centre.

The icing on the cake was adding twitter support. With a one-line AJAX call in JQuery and a little config it was a no-brainer. This allows us to keep an online audit in the form of a private tweet stream. For people who check twitter more frequently than their email, it’s handy for notifications. If Twitter let us UK folk receive updates via SMS again then we can ditch email-to-text in favour of Twitter.

Step 3: The makeover

One of the nice benefits to working in the web-kit world is being able to use some CSS3 styling such as rounded corners. So we went to town. The more design that is CSS based and the less that is image based the better.

JQuery UI allowed us to make the entire list sortable in a sweep of the mouse, and the prefs popup tabbed in a blink (suddenly there was heaps to customise!).

The End

Hopefully this post has given you an understanding of how quick and easy it really is to make a useful AIR application. We’ve shown how you can implement a system tray application that utilises notification popup windows and sends e-mails as well as uses local files as a data store. This is not intended as a best practice discussion. It was our first AIR app and developed in a very small amount of time as a proof of concept and so that we could share our experiences with you. We welcome any feedback.

Download and try our site watcher AIR application

A demonstration of graded browser support

Posted in Design on February 12, 2009 by Paul Boag

In my post ‘Effective Browser Support‘ I explained how we should not be looking to make sites identical in all browsers, but rather focusing on usability and accessibility. In this post I demonstrate how that works in practice.

I recently launched a new Headscape service called the Consultancy Clinic. As part of this launch I created a small single page website. Let me use this site to demonstrate how graded browser support can work.

Remember – the idea of graded browser support is to support all browsers so that your site is usable, accessible and at least reasonably attractive. With that in mind lets start with the lowest common denominator.

Starting with the basics – HTML

All web browsers can support HTML. So as a bare minimum I needed to ensure my new website was usable and accessible in raw HTML format. To test this I used the free Lynx Viewer and it returned this…

Consultancy Clinic site viewed in Lynx

So far so good. But what about those browsers who think they understand CSS but don’t render it properly?

The pretenders

Unfortunately when it comes to CSS support things are not black and white. Although some browsers support styling flawlessly, others think they know what they are doing when they do not.

Poor implementation of CSS is the curse of older browsers. Browsers like Netscape 4 and IE 5 offer very limited CSS support and badly implementing what it does provide.

Instead of ignoring these browsers I create a basic CSS file which does some simple formatting. Instead of compromising the design to accommodate the limitations of these browsers, I deliver a simplified version which is usable and accessible.

Consultancy Clinic Website viewed in IE 5

As you can see the design focuses on some simple layout and typography. That way it avoids anything IE 5 may have trouble displaying correctly.

Dealing with IE6 and above

The next step was to create a more sophisticated design for browsers such as IE 6,7 and 8. These browsers understand CSS well but lack some of the more modern enhancements.

It was necessary to hide this enchanced stylesheet from ‘the pretenders’ who would render it badly. To do this I had to use a CSS hack, which was unfortunate. However, older browsers now completely ignore it.

How I did that is outside of the scope of this article. However if you want to know, view the source on the site and look for default.css.

This new design now renders perfectly well in the more modern versions of IE.

Consultancy Clinic website in IE 7

A watermark image is highlighted in this screenshot

There are however, subtle differences between the versions of IE. For example IE6 does not support transparent PNGs and so in IE 6 the watermark on the form does not appear. Although it would have been possible to force IE6 to display this image, it was more sensible to simply not show it. After all the watermark is an embellishment to the design, not a fundamental part of it.

The bells and whistles

Finally I have added some further embellishments to the design for more advanced browsers. For example both Firefox and Safari support border-radius. This allowed me to add curved corners, which are simply ignored by browsers who do not support that style.

Consultancy Clinic Website in Firefox

I was even able to go a step further in Safari because it supports dynamic shadows.

Consultancy Clinic website in Safari

Conclusions

Design enhancements like drop shadows and rounded corners are important, but not to the same degree as usability and accessibility. With finite time and budget, we are better spending our time making sure the site is usable on all browsers rather than getting it looking identical in a few.

With the time I saved not trying to force IE6 to display a rounded corner correctly, I was able to ensure the site looked good in older browsers with a limited understanding of CSS.

Once you accept that your site will not look identical in all browsers, you will be able to build sites faster, cheaper and ensure a broader range of devices can access them. Surely that is worthwhile?

152. War?

Posted in Classic shows on February 11, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Daniel Burka and Joe Stump from Digg discuss the supposed war between designers and developers. Paul talks about using twitter effectively and we ask ‘are you placing too much emphasis on your homepage?’

Podcast: Download (34.0MB)

Download this show.

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News and events

How to film video case studies

Increasingly your web strategy is about more than a website full of pretty pictures and well written copy. Video in particular is playing an increasing role, whether it is embedded in your website or shared via YouTube.

Video can be used in all kinds of ways from product demonstrations to viral marketing. However, a growing use for video is customer case studies.

This week 37 Signals have published a fascinating insight into how they created their customer case studies for Highrise. The article covers everything from…

How they chose who to interview
The way they shot the videos
What questions they asked
How they conducted the interviews
How they edited the videos
The time they spent preparing the whole thing

There is little written about producing quality videos and even less about customer case studies. Without a doubt these kinds of videos are extremely powerful and so it is great to read quality advice about their production.

Effective communication in web design

Smashing Magazine has posted an excellent article that I would highly recommend to all website owners. No, it is not my excellent Twitter article that I will cover later. It is actually an article entitled – Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design.

In essence it talks about how to communicate on the web through both copy and visuals. It is a comprehensive overview (if somewhat superficial) of all the key considerations of communicating effectively through your website.

The article focuses primarily on your website, largely ignoring broader communication issues. However it does tackle…

The different methods of communication – Images, text, titles, icons, design styling, colour, audio and visuals.
The challenges of clearly communicating – This includes the curse of too much copy, the need for personality and much more.
What you should be communicating – Your company vision, the websites offerings, the benefits to your users and calls to action.

It also nicely demonstrates how the design and copy work together to communicate your message. This is something I will be discussing with Jeffrey Zeldman in an upcoming show.

Do we place too much emphasis on the homepage?

Following on nicely from my recent post about where we invest our money, Christian Watson recently wrote about one of his clients who requested a homepage redesign.

In the article he writes…

Sure, I could refresh the colors and move some content around. But is this a good use of my time and her money when the home page represents 20-25% of page views?

It is a good question. Christian goes on to argue that we often place far too much emphasis on the homepage and that in fact it is little more than a gateway page to direct users to more important content.

He uses a nice analogy borrowed from Jared Spool. He compares the homepage with a hotel lobby…

When visitors arrive at your hotel, certainly they should find that the lobby represents the hotel favorably. It should be attractive, spacious, with elegant lighting, welcoming colors, and the odd feature here and there.

The lobby should make it easy for the visitor to orient themselves â€” to see where the front desk is and where the lifts are. It should make it easy for the guest to find out any important information at a glance â€” upcoming events or where the conference is being held.

However, hotels are ultimately judged by the quality of their rooms.

It is an excellent post that provides real food for thought.

Interview: Joe Stump & Daniel Burka on War Between Designers & Developers?

Paul: So I am really excited to have joining me today Daniel Burka and Joe Stump from Digg. Hello Guys

Daniel: Hello

Joe: Hey hey

Paul: I have had both of you on the show individually and Joe you were on not long ago were you really…

Joe: ermhh yes a couple of months ago maybe

Paul: What can I say, we cannot survive without you. So erm but I though lets bring the two of these wonderful people together and talk about designer,developer relationships and how the two of them get on together working at Digg. I mean I have to say this is just a rip off really isn’t it, it’s a rip of a panel you did. Was that Future of Web Design (FOWD) you did that panel?.

Daniel: Yes it was Future of Web Design in New York. I think we are rehashing the panel at South By South West (SXSW) this year so if anyone is there it would be awesome if you dropped by.

Paul: Excellent, I need to persuade you two to come along to the SXSW live Boagworld as well, but I will hassle of of air so that you can back out if you want to without committing yourself live in a interview.(Paul laughs). OK so lets kick off by talking about the designer and developer relationship and really I think that it strikes me there is a lot of mythology around this that you know designers and developers hate one another and I am not convinced it actually works like that in practice. When you guys did your panel at FOWD you actually were agreeing on a lot of points so I though we would start of by maybe highlighting some of the differences and then look at ways of working together er mm further down the line so lets talk about to begin with what you guys see as the main differences in outlook I guess between designers and developers. How do you look at the world in different ways, do you think? Maybe Joe do you want to kick us off. How do you think developers see the world differently to designers?.

Joe: Sure I think erh developers are definitely, their default kind of response erm is that they would rather, I always make the joke that coders by default are lazy, good coders are extremely lazy people that’s why they’re good coders because they want to automate as much of their lives as possible. Ermm so I think that erm developers tend to get a little complacent when it comes to the actual erm product sometimes because they are so busy and so interested in and so worried about the actual code or the more nerdy side of things you know like are we running the latest greatest versions of different softwares. Developers also tend to be a lot more interested in what the new hip nerdness is as opposed to what’s actually going to make the product better for users, you know so like I have been in product review meetings where people are like “well Why isn’t this new version of some strange bizarre open web specification that nobody has ever heard of ahead of some major forward user feature” . (laughs)

Paul: (laughs)

Joe: So ermm I think that that tends to be like a big difference. The designers you know it is their job to be curators of the website in my opinion and kind of move the user experience forward and often times developers don’t have a whole lot of interest in that. (laughs)

Daniel: On the flip side of that if we are both going to slag our own professions ermm I think designers are often you know pushing unrealistic goals. They are interested in building you know the perfect product and you know aiming straight for that instead of looking pragmatically at doing things in steps and figuring out what is technically possible and I think there is also a gap where designers can only see sometimes what features that they can view and don’t understand, don’t see the vision, of where developers can see you know amazing things they can you know do pro grammatically that designers just aren’t envisioning.

Paul: Yeah

Joe: I think that’s er is another key difference that I know that there is a lot of, there have been struggles and tensions between Daniel and I in the past over this idea of a holistic approach to design where where Daniel designs his vision and his vision is normally version 10.0 and I am looking at you know the technical roadmap and things that I need to do and like I am OK well lets talk about version 1.0 and then we can start talking about 2.0 like, developers are much more focused on an iterative process as far as releasing, you know like small chunks, reducing risk etc. etc. and designers tend to kind of like go well erm you know it is like I wanna build a pyramid it’s like great well how about first we start out by finding some limestone and then we work our way up to building a pyramid.

Daniel: So what you are saying is we have got a fantastic optimism. (laughing)

Joe: Yes

Daniel: But I think that’s partly it. Developers are very interested, as Joe was saying,in mitigating risk and in a lot of ways designers are very adverse to even thinking about risk and want to think about opportunity. So I think this is kind of the crux of the whole thing and what we are trying to talk about on that panel is that both of those views are super valuable and if you manage to find the right mix of those two things then you can develop a fantastic product that is both concerned about risk and pushes the boundaries of what is possible.

Paul: Mmmm I remember one point that came out from the presentation which is one that you made erm Joe which is about the dangers of if that mix is not right. It is always the designer that’s in front of the client or the boss or whatever ermm the kind of realism of the developer is kind of left out of the process and ideally the developer either needs to be involved in those kind of meetings or there needs to be a conversation that happens between the designer and the developer before anything is ever presented. Is that kind of, do you still feel like that is that still a valid point?.

Joe: Yeah, I feel that is a extremely valid point for two reasons erm and this is a discussion that Daniel and I just had yesterday in fact. The thing is as a developer the reason I want to be involved early on in the development or in the design and like development of the product phase you know when requirements are coming together and when you know the first kind of formations come out of the clays so to speak is because two reasons. One ermm and they all kind of come back to this same kind of problem, is that the designers and the product people don’t know the system, the actual bits and bytes that like you know go into making the product, as well as the developer like the data and the code and the actual systems and stuff like that and how they are put together. So Often times two things happen Daniel comes up with a design and there is like one small minute detail on the page that would require you know one of the largest computer farms in the world to calculate in real time. Whereas in lots and just as often as you know that happens where it is like Daniel I can’t calculate that number in any meaningful way on a regular basis so you gotta remove that. But just as often as that happens because of you know as a developer I have such like intrinsic knowledge of the relationships in the data and what data we are storing and stuff like that just as often I am like well why don’t we expose this data or do this and Daniel is like I did not know we could do that actually I totally would have done that if I had known that that was possible or feasible.

Daniel: Yeah and that’s, especially that side of things designers often hear the first part Joe is talking about, the you know well that is just not possible or more difficult than you think. Any designer that has worked with a developer has heard that aspect of it you know and that is of course very valuable but it is the other side of things that I think people fail to leverage most frequently is the ability of developers to see different patterns than you in the data and come up with those suggestions, you know it might still be your call whether or not that is a valuable thing for the user but just hearing these ideas coming out is is amazingly valuable. That has shaped a lot of Digg.

Paul: So would you say that is a kind of you know a common mistake that maybe designers make with developers that they don’t communicate enough with them ermm

Daniel: Absolutely

Paul: yeah

Daniel: Designers often see developers as mules its like I made this thing go build it and that is a bullshit attitude, its terrible.

Paul: mmmm what …

Daniel: Its not just designers either all product people have a tendency to do that. In some ways, as Joe was talking about developers being involved in the process, at Digg we’ve got a pretty good structure where design actually falls under the marketing team and in some ways I see design as a bridge between marketing and business development you know product interests and the development team. Because I am often sitting over here and I hear you know someone from business development or marketing throwing around an idea and I am like “I’m no developer but I have a good sense of what the developer sees as important and you’re talking crazy talk like that is going to be nuts” and they are about to go and pitch that to a potential partner and you know like every week I put the brakes on from that kind of thing I am like listen you need to talk to Joe you need to talk to a developer because that what you are talking about is going to be months of development and you are promising it to a partner in two weeks that’s nuts and so I like that in you in some ways the design team can often be a bridge between product marketing people and the technical teams.

Paul: Joe from your perspective what kind of, you know as your communicating with Daniel and other designers within digg looking back where do you think you’ve made mistakes in your relationship with designers?.

Joe: Ermm I mean the mistakes that I often make ,its a not even a mistake are I don’t wanna say are what we do are like flat out mistakes it’s just more ermm you know being a bit more reserved and not necessarily defaulting your answer to no. Err You know I think that Daniel often talks about how a natural tension between design and product and development is actually good for the product because you have eventually, as long as you can keep that at a good tension and not you know bad or where things are breaking but ermm I think often times developers are quick to say no. You know they will be sitting in a meeting and it is just immediately no I am not going to discuss that when in reality if they sat back and let the idea germinate you know they would, Its kinda weird because I have in a lot of meetings where things were, where the developers were like be oh my god that is an amazing product but we will never be able to build it and so it is like they want to build it but their default is to avoid risk so they say no. So a lot of the times when I talk with Daniel now and this is something I like quit doing I try not to say no unless it is just like blatantly in black and white no way that is possible kind of thing. I might let the idea germinate more I might no say no immediately I might want to go back and spend a couple of hours thinking about it if it is actually feasible because maybe you know. That’s what engineers love doing they love solving difficult problems and if you are saying no to difficult problems then you are failing at what your passion and hobby is. Ermm so I think that ..

Paul: There is also an aspect is there not of not just saying no but explaining why you are saying no so that the other party is kind of educated into the kind of problems you face so as Daniel said earlier that they can be the bridge to you know business development or whoever else.

Joe: Yeah absolutely, I am the king of analogies at this point ermm but the other thing that developers erhh, this is extremely common that they utterly fail at is that they think for some reason that they are like the target demographic of the product so they will come into a meeting and say this product will absolutely fail because it doesn’t have key binding so I can keyboard shortcuts it’s like nobody uses keyboard shortcuts like in the real world, they are all mice people like you know. It is stuff like that that a lot of the time developers are like “this will never work unless you have least 14 completely nerdy niche features in it” you know and I think developers too often you know they do that and that is just silly.

Daniel: Hey guys that’s been a special problem at digg,since we started of as the pure technology side so it was seen as by developers for developers and you know we have obviously branched out from there and now we have got other interests I want to make sure peoples mums can use the website and that’s you know certainly a , you make different choices based on that.

Paul: I mean it is very timely from my point of view to have this interview with you because on Friday we had a internal meeting in Headscape where we talked about all kinds of production things and one of the things that came out of the development team was this desire to be involved in the process more and err to have their say more and just to be included earlier. So I am quite interested in you know because obviously you guys have been working together for a long time what kind of practical advise would you give to a , maybe this is just a question for me and not for anyone else, but what kind of practical advise would you give for designers and developers working together within the organisation. How can that relationship work better?

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely involving your development team earlier in the process but that doesn’t necessarily mean sitting around brainstorming right at the beginning of a feature with them. I mean I try to sit down work out an idea get it 20% of the way there, you know work out some of the basic issues figure out what this thing really means what’s at the core of it you know it might be ten different features together but what are we actually trying to achieve with it right so at least get that far even throw down so basic wire frames or some really basic comps and then present it to the developers its like listen this isn’t just an idea I came up with you know last night I just want to spill my entire brain out in front of you it is something at least I have thought through you know I have put a few things through my brain and now here is this totally unformed, not totally unformed, slightly formed idea but it is not baked you know don’t wait until you have got it baked and then you are so disappointed when the development team says well that’s not possible or have you really though about this and you have got this complete package already made up in your mind but come to them with a least you know the kernel of the thought out idea and get them to poke holes in it. Get them to push it in other directions and show you what else you could be doing and then go back to the drawing board again.

Paul: What about from your point of view Joe?

Joe: Well yeah, So ermm I agree with Daniel in some sense on that I think it is crucial to before you take it to developers to formulate a cohesive problem or hypotheses. Like if you come to the developers with a half baked problem that you are trying to solve you are going to get like, they are just going to run wild with it and it is like you know difficult sometimes to keep developers focused when they get excited about a problem. So have a formulated problem that you know you have a small idea of how you are going to fix but not fully baked. The other thing too and this goes on both sides of the aisle it shouldn’t be get developers plural involved and it shouldn’t be get. like a lot when you are first germinating that idea and you haven’t really moved it forward start small and then continuously expose it to more and more people errmh because I find if you involve too many people early on in a the process whether it is designers, developers, product people things tend to , you tend to loose focus quickly and everyone wants you know it’s kind of like port barrel spending and major bills its like everyone wants to piggy back extra features and stuff and pet projects that they have wanted for so long into like some major new feature.

Daniel: It is just simple death by committee

Joe: Right

Paul: Yeah Yeah OK That’s interesting a little random question I remember going to a talk once where, and I can’t remember who it was who was giving it, where they suggested that errmh designers and developers swapped roles for a while. Where you try and sit in the other persons shoes and I was just interested whether you two had tried anything like that?

Joe: That would be disastrous for me. (laughs)

Daniel: I I mean I appreciate development roles and I am you know somewhat technical for a designer but yeah I know I have never done that but I have always worked so closely with the development team like at silverorange where I worked previously to digg there was only ten of us and I sat in a room with developers all the time. I worked in their code with them and worked on problems as a group so I think I, you know I have never worked in a place like say you worked in a big enterprise and your in this classic where designers are in one office and developers are in the other office and you toss stuff over the wall yes then I think that would hold value at least go and sit in the other office, go work in the other office for a few months just hear the other discussions that are going on because there are a totally different set of concerns a totally different set of values than what you are doing and if you don’t at least appreciate and understand that, and not just understand it so you know what you are fighting against but understand it to know what is important and how you can work with it then you know you would be really missing out.

Joe: I think I am ermhh I think I am kind of spoiled at Digg because you know I work with two of the webs brightest, you know Daniel and Mark Trammell as well so I actually push back on my developers pretty frequently where they you know we will leave a meeting and they are like I really really completely disagree with what Daniel or Mark are doing with the design and you know I tell them all the time like look you are not a designer and you definitely not at the level that those two are at and you sometimes have to defer to them and trust that they are doing their job and they are doing it well you know and ermhh I think developers don’t do that often enough they make these assumptions that you know the arty-farty designers are doing stupid shit again and that’s not the case. I mean they would not be especially where we are at at Digg and what not I mean Digg is able to be very picky with who they bring on and the people Daniel has brought in to design are extremely competent at what they do err so I am probably not qualified to answer that question because I am so spoiled at Digg but that is a common problem I see from developers where ermhh they don’t let the designers do their job and they try and be designers when in reality you know they do not have the experience or the expertise so.

Paul: Lets talk about conflict resolutions, sounds very grandiose but basically you know how do you go around resolving a situation where you know OK you kind of respect each others skills and you respect each others competencies but you know where some feature is suggested by Daniel and you know and you Daniel from your point of view it is absolutely core to what you are trying to achieve you know it is extremely important and then from a technical angle Joe it just seems incredibly complex and very very difficult. How is the eventual decision made as to whether that feature should be implemented and in what way it is implemented? How do you go about resolving that difference?.

Joe: Ermhh Well I mean I think as far as making the decision whether or not the feature makes it in, because there is actually two possibilities when it comes to the conflict resolution. Whether or not a feature actually makes it into the product and in what capacity does that feature make it into the product and I think in the former whether or not the feature actually makes into the product if Daniel comes to me and he’s resolute like this feature has to be in the product the feature is going to be in product. I am always going to defer to Daniel on on, if he feels that strongly and is that passionate about it you know and it is not something completely hare-brained like I want magic ponies to come flying out of the screen I am going to defer to his expertise on the fact that feature needs to be in the product. Where the conflict resolution comes into it is what capacity is that feature going to come into the product like a perfect example of I think of something where there has been we have had a recent discussion at Digg and where this has happened we have, and I talked about this probably in our last talk but, there are these little green badges on the digg buttons and they indicate one of your friends has dugg that story and when you hover over the digg button it shows like a little sample of the people that have dugg it. Ermhh So those were causing significant strain and problems with our systems and our code and on our databases so I came to Daniel and of course again as my risk aversion developer brain was coming to Daniel I was like Can we axe this feature until we can figure out how to like fix it. He was like “No” that feature cannot absolutely be axed and then we came to a resolution which was a short term solution until we can get a better solution in place where operations now have knobs they can dial down so the green badges don’t show up on stories older than 48hrs, they don’t show up on stories that have more than say 5 or 600 diggs and stuff like that. So the conflict resolution came in basically making trade-offs in how that feature is surfaced in works ermhh at our scale more often than not what that means is that Daniel has to give up the notion that everything is in real time. The feature will work it is just that it may take you know thirty seconds to a minute for an action to be distributed across the entire system, that is probably more how things are now at Digg so.

Paul: What about from your point Daniel, when do you back down over something and when do you keep pushing on it? How do you decide you know how serious Joe is about something and whether you should keep pushing or not?

Daniel: Right I mean it kind of comes down to you know when I am looking at the product I am not thinking of any one feature, I am thinking about the whole set and I want it all to work together and so you know I know I want to push out six different features this month and if I push and push Joe to do the one really hard one well that is going to affect the other five I wanted to get done. So any feature is tied to other features and it is also based on a time line if I want something done in a certain time line and that’s just not possible well then I have to start making compromises so you know you have to be realistic and then at the same time you have to realise developers work well with shame and so if you tell a developer well I bet a good developer could do that (All laugh) they will go back to their cube grumbling at you and figure out a more efficient way to do it.

Paul: OK. So now we are getting into the realms of how to manipulate each other.

Daniel: Absolutely.

Joe: That’s definitely err one that I agree does work but is not a trick you want to pull out of your bag too often.

Daniel: No it is the same with designers too, it is like I want to do this really complex thing, no way I can explain that to users in a way they will understand. “I thought you were good” arhh shit I will go back and try that again.

Paul: That is quite interesting what you just said there because so far we have talked very much about you know designers initiating features and that kind of stuff I mean are there situations where the developer is the one initiating features you know just said there a developer wanted to do something really cool and you said you couldn’t explain it. Does it run that way as well? or is it always the designer who drives first?.

Daniel: No Absolutely that happens at Digg, it happens sometimes at Digg so Joe yesterday sent me an email that had two big feature ideas in it. They may not be things we implement this month but maybe later on this year. I was looking at them and you know it is easy to disregard well he is a developer he does not understand what’s going on with the product but you look at the ideas and they are strong and they fit in with what we are doing and now I am trying to figure out you know how they make sense in the big picture I guess. So we have got a brilliant development team a lot of people over there with great ideas and we try to sit down, you know I guess Kevin has been doing those where we do meetings once a month I guess where developers if they have been working on a side project you know something they have always wanted to build into Digg they can present this at the Digg ideas meeting.

Paul: Ah OK

Daniel: A bunch of those products will make it into the full Digg I mean its awesome these brilliant people go and throw around crazy ideas and show you what is possible.

Joe: I think err yeah I mean I agree with that you definitely have, it is a two way street erm largely stuff comes from product at this point the Digg ideas meetings is definitely helping that you know open that up and kind of what I would call level that playing field a bit. But one of the things I think developers are in a in a unique position just like Daniel I work with people across the entire companies so I know initiatives that are going on in marketing I know initiatives that are going on in PR and biz dev etc. and you know if nothing else developers are very good about noticing and pointing out and discovering patterns and err a recent product that made it out that err was a developer initiated product was Digg dialogue because basically I noticed this common pattern where business development and Marketing and PR were setting up interviews and then like reaching out to people to like conduct interviews using the Digg engine kind of thing and I was why don’t we bake this into like a cohesive feature that’s turnkey because you know business development like Daniel was saying earlier lots of times they are just making these one off deals you know and they don’t really recognise when there is a product to be had there erm so that is another one that recently went out. It was like I recognised a pattern and baked this into something cohesive and move it forward.

Daniel: That is a good example of where we are being lazy some people want to do this one off thing over and over again and it is a bunch of work to don it each time well like we will just build a system to do it and we won’t have to do all the work every time. It was great.

Paul: OK that is really good lets leave then with one final question or one thing from each of you. Which is if you could give you know one piece of advice to either designers or developers on how to kind of interact with their counterpart what would that one piece of advice be?. Lets kick of with you Daniel what would be your one piece of advice to designers about dealing with developers?.

Daniel: My one piece of advice would be to see the big picture, you know aim for version 10 like we were talking about earlier and know what you want to build in the future but be realistic enough to back it up and build it in stages. You know waiting and building a feature over six months and eventually launching it is a terrible way to develop and it’s a terrible way to design having an idea of where you want to be in six months but realising in one month increments is so much better you’ll end up in a different place but at least you know where you are heading and you can adjust that goal as you go forward

Paul: Yeah. Brilliant. Joe what about you?

Joe: Ermhh I would say to the developers out there that there is different shades of no ermhh that you know there is the, the default should not always be no and remember what I said about the conflict resolution you should be deferring to the people that are experts in their field by default for the most part and to work on compromise in how the feature operates and make your concessions and have them make their concessions rather than just defaulting to saying no to the entire feature.

Daniel: And as a developer push to be involved early in the process, even at Digg we struggle with that a lot and as a designer I appreciate when developers want to be involved I want to hear their opinions you know it is fun to have them involved I hear all kinds of crazy stuff I never even considered that’s awesome.

Paul: Excellent. Thank you so much guys that was really good I appreciate you coming back on the show yet again. It was really good to get your perspectives together on that relationship because it is one a lot of people struggle with. So it is good to hear that it can work most of the time. Thanks for your time

Daniel: Thanks for having us on Paul

Joe: Bye

Thanks goes to Shaun Hare for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

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

10 harsh truths about corporate websites

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. You need a separate web division

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Managing your website is a full time job

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

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

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

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

3. Periodic redesign is not enough

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

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

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

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

4. Your site cannot appeal to everyone

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

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

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

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

5. Your site is not all about you

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

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

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

6. Design by committee brings death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. A CMS is not a silver bullet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. You have too much content

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

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

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

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

10. You are wasting money on social networking

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

151. Budget

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

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

Download this show.

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Housekeeping

Two pieces of housekeeping this week.

WCAG2 Video

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

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

You can watch my Introduction to WCAG2 here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the excellent tips that have already been submitted here

News and events

IE8 Cometh!

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

According to the IE blog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15 Tips for Freelancers Starting Their Own Business

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

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

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

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

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

Facts and Figures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sprite Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feature: 5 options when website budgets get slashed

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

Listeners feedback:

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

With that in mind you can contribute in three ways…

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

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

Listener Review of DropBox

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

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

Dave writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Font Embedding on the Web

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

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

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

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

Be good to hear your thoughts?

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

I was pretty impressed by FontBurner but as Laura said…

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

Later in the thread Dvan went on to say…

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

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

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

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

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

5 options when website budgets get slashed

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

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

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

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

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

1. Realign rather than redesign

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Simplify

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Prioritise and phase development

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

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

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

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

4. Reuse and recycle

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

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

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

5. Move beyond the website

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

Video: Introduction to WCAG 2

Posted in Accessibility on January 26, 2009 by Paul Boag

I recently gave an internal presentation at Headscape about WCAG 2. A number of people expressed an interest in seeing it so I made a point to record it.

At the end the presentation I references a stripped down version of the guidelines found here.

I also refer to a quick reference guide to WCAG 2 that can be found here.

Apologises

Apologises for the poor audio quality of this video. Unfortunately the decision to record the presentation was made at the last minute and so we didn’t have a proper mic setup arranged. You can also tell it is not quite as slick as my normal presentations :)

~~I would also like to apologise for the lack of transcript of this video.~~ Again, it was not my initial intention to put this video online as this was an internal presentation containing my initial thoughts on WCAG 2. I am still learning a lot about the new guidelines and will publish a more considered article when I have a better understanding of the subject.

Feedback

On that subject, I would be interested to hear your feedback on the thoughts I present. Do you agree with my interpretation of the new guidelines? Have I misunderstood anything? Are there other elements I should have addressed? Your thoughts would be appreciated in the comments.

Update: We now have a transcript!

Thanks go to Anna Debenham who braved the horrendous audio to transcribe the presentation. If you cannot face the video we do at least now have a written version!

Paul: Ok, this has worked out a little bit weird because the idea initially with this presentation was that it was really about bringing us up to speed with WCAG2 now that WCAG2 has been released. But I made the mistake of mentioning it online and several people said "ooh, can you record that?" so now it’s a little bit of both, a little bit of a presentation to you guys and a little bit of a presentation that will go on the web.

Paul: So as you guys probably know, WCAG2 has now been released, and as accessibility is a big part of what we deliver and we talk a lot about accessibility, we need to be up to speed on it and we need to know what we’re doing. Obviously accessibility has become such a part of what we do day in and day out that we don’t necessarily think too much about it, it’s almost an intrinsic part of what we do, but with changes to WCAG2, or with the arrival of WCAG2, there have been differences, changes, things that have altered, so I want to make sure that everybody is up to speed with it. Feel free to butt in with questions, that’s absolutely fine.

Audience: Will the video be able to see the screen?

Paul: The video will be able to see the screen. Ok, so, WCAG2. Basically, WCAG1 came out in 1999 which is a good old time ago, in Internet terms that’s like forever, and there was a real need to make some changes and improve WCAG1. Let me just pop back and just explain.

The Journey to WCAG2

Paul: So, yeah, like I said, WCAG1 came out in 1999, it quickly dated as technology evolved, and some of the guidelines actually became harmful in a way. So you guys know that for example, we don’t always take note of what they say about Access Keys, we don’t always take note of what they say about "make sure you put text in an empty form field" and things like that. And WCAG1 was very much built with HTML in mind, and obviously the web is a lot broader than that and there are a lot more formats about. But unfortunately development of WCAG2 was very slow, and also fraught with controversy. I mean, famously with Joe Clarke who is an accessibility expert wrote on A List Apart "to hell with WCAG2" because it basically had become a bit of a joke, because it was very generic; they were trying to write a set of guidelines that really made no effort to mention specific technology because they didn’t want it to date like WCAG1, but the result is it became unreadable and nobody could understand it.

WCAG2 Reborn

Paul: But, things did change. Major changes were made to the WCAG2 draft and things did improve dramatically. They really listened to the community, and the language in it now is much clearer. So what I want to do now is talk a little bit through what WCAG2 includes and what it doesn’t, and how we’re then going to go about implementing it and how it affects us.

Principles

Paul: Ok, so let’s look at the structure of WCAG2. Basically WCAG2 has 3 tiers to it that you need to know about. Tier number 1 is the idea of Principles. So this is kind of the most generic of the tiers, you know, it’s really kind of aimed at the kind of things you would tell a board of directors that doesn’t really understand anything technical, that doesn’t really understand accessibility at all. And there are 4 principles which are the foundations of web accessibility and these principles I’ll come onto a little bit later.

Guidelines

Paul: Underneath each of those principles are Guidelines. So, within each principle there are 3 or 4 guidelines or a number of guidelines that is different for each principle. But there are a total of 12 guidelines, and these are goals that you should be working towards in order to make your content more accessible to users.

Success Criteria

Paul: Under each guideline, there are Success Criteria. So now we’ve really hit the nitty-gritty, these are kind of specific, measurable goals that you’ve got to achieve. And this is how you judge whether your site is WCAG2 compliant, if you like. So, this is the really important level if that makes sense, but it’s organised within this hierarchy of guidelines and principles.

Techniques

Paul: Now, actually, there is kind of a 4th tier as well which is techniques. So you’re trying to, maybe as designers, you’re trying to conform to the Success Criteria, well there’s a whole load of different ways and different techniques that you can do that and you could read about those, and you could make up your own techniques if you wanted to, but there are some laid down that can help you get going.

Working with WCAG2

Paul: So those are the 3 levels that WCAG2 is built around. Now let’s dive into those a little bit. I had to think about how much detail I want to go into in this room. Obviously we don’t want to go into every technique that you could possibly apply and we don’t even want to go into necessarily every success criteria. That’s really for you guys to look through afterwards. What we are going to do is look at those guidelines and those principles, and hopefully help you to understand where WCAG2 stands over stuff.

Perceivable

Paul: Ok, so, the first… heh, totally illegible text, isn’t that great. Very accessible!

Audience: (laughter)

Paul: So the number 1 principle is Perceivable, and that’s 1 of your 4 principles that you’ve got here. And perceivable is basically talking about "information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways that they can perceive"

Audience: (laughter)

Paul: Unlike that! (points to presentation)

Audience: (laughter) Is the rest of the presentation like this?

Paul: Yes.

Audience: (more laughter)

Paul: You actually don’t need to read this anyway which is very useful. So, Perceivable is basically about "can you see it?", that is it as far as the principle is concerned, and the answer is "no you can’t". But perceivable then breaks down into a series of guidelines. So, let’s have a look at what these guidelines are. So basically, perceivable is broken down into 4 guidelines. And if we talk through each of those it should give you an idea.

Text Alternatives

Paul: The first one is text alternatives. So this is stuff we already know. "Provide text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language." So this really applies to things like video, audio, forms that you create, and interestingly CAPTCHA is particularly mentioned here. And that is a particular accessibility problem that hasn’t been particularly well solved I don’t think.

Time Based Media

Paul: The next way that Perceivable works itself out is in time-based media. What we’re talking about here is that you need to provide an alternative for anything that is time-based. So here we’re talking about captions for video, sign-language maybe, media alternatives, but it also applies to live and pre-recorded video. So if you’re streaming stuff, then you need to think about this as well as with stuff that’s pre-recorded. Now, it does take into account the difference between "crap, how are we going to make streaming video accessible?". If you read into the guidelines it does give some good advice there. So that’s not quite as scary as it first sounds.

Adaptable

Paul: Anything that we produce needs to be adaptable. In other words, content can be presented in different ways. For example, a simpler layout maybe for people with cognitive disabilities for example. Really, this boils down to things like using semantic markup, meaningful order in your HTML so that if the CSS is stripped away it still makes sense in the order that it is presented, and not relying on colour and other sensory elements to convey information.

Distinguishable

Paul: And then finally it’s got to be distinguishable. So it’s about making it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background and that kind of stuff. So we’re talking here about contrast, colour, and control over things like audio and video, that kind of stuff. So that’s where we’re at with perceivable.

Operable

Paul: Let’s move onto the next principle which is Operable. So, Operable is about user interface components and navigation, and making them easy to use so that somebody can use them whatever disability they may have. So this again breaks down into 4 different guidelines, the most obvious of which is Keyboard Access. So everything that we produce has to be accessible via a keyboard. So, for example, the Flash video that we’re currently creating for the Wiltshire Farm Foods home page needs to be keyboard operated, alright? Which I bet it isn’t at the moment! And to be fair, it’s part of production, I’m sure they’d put that in at the end if I hadn’t reminded them. That existed under WCAG1, so there’s nothing different there. So everything needs to be keyboard accessible.

Enough Time

Paul: You also need to provide enough time for people to take in the information that they’re being presented with. So giving the ability to pause, stop and control time based material is really important as well.

Seizures

Paul: You’ve got to take into account seizures, some people can have seizures triggered by animation and that kind of thing, so there are various limits that the guidelines lay down about flashing objects and stuff like that.

Navigable

Paul: And then finally it’s got to be navigable. So this includes things like skipping content, having descriptive page titles, tab order, links that make sense out of context, lot’s of headings, that kind of stuff. Is this all making sense?

Audience: Yes, apart from time-based media, I don’t understand that.

Paul: Time-based media, we’re talking about video and audio. So let’s say you had… one of our podcasts. So, there are certain things we need to ensure. One is that it is operable, in other words, a user can pause the podcast if we get annoying, or they want time to take in the information that we’ve said, but the other thing is that we also need to provide an alternative way of them getting it which is why we provide the show notes that we do and the transcripts and stuff like that.

Audience: Ok, well that kind of fits under Text Alternatives and giving it control so it’s under Operable… I just don’t get where it is under perceivable, as a perceivable thing, it has to be perceivable?

Paul: Yeah, basically.

Audience: Video, audio… all has to be perceivable then?

Paul: Yes. Some of these principles and certainly some of the guidelines do overlap to some degree. But when you draw down to the Success Criteria level, of how you actually apply these things, then there are more specific techniques. I think what they did is create a load of success criteria, and then kind of chunked them together in meaningful groups, but sometimes they’re not so meaningful. But it is a vast improvement on WCAG1 as far as being able to understand it.

Understandable

Paul: Ok, talking of understanding it, our next one is Understandable. So this is the next one of our 4 top-level principles, so everything you produce has to be understandable. So what does that mean? Well that results in 3 guidelines. It has to be Readable, Predictable and has to be able to provide Input Assistance. So how does that work itself out in practice?

Readable

Paul: With Readable, we’re talking about making content readable, text content mainly. So this works out in things like setting the language in your HTML, you know, setting what the language is in the header, avoiding using jargon, finally we’ve got a decent reason to go back to clients and say, you know, "you can’t use that kind of language, nobody understands it!". Also things like abbreviations need to be explained, and also reading level as well, and that’s something I really want to get through to a lot of our clients because a lot of our clients, especially the public sector clients that we have, have this attitude of "well of course, people that look at our site are of post-graduate degree people, and they have excellent reading level", but that doesn’t take into account things like people that speak English as a 2nd language, who can be very intelligent but not particularly good at reading, also people with Dyslexia can be incredibly intelligent but not particularly good at reading. So reading level is an important aspect of it.

Predictable

Paul: For it to be understandable it also needs to be predictable. So with this we’re talking about things like consistent navigation, and no uninitiated changes. And this is a particularly important one in our world of AJAX and JavaScript and all this cool stuff that we’re doing where we can often trigger events without asking the user’s permission first. When I say "asking for permission" I mean they haven’t clicked on link or they’ve not initiated it in any way. Users need to initiate these actions… and no pop-up windows without them clicking first to trigger a pop-up and being aware of what’s going to happen. It’s all about making it understandable and making them aware of what’s going on.

Input Assistance

Paul: The last guideline under Understandable is Input Assistance. So this is going into the realms of when we do forms, how do we handle errors, what kind of feedback do we give to the user, what labels – are things clearly marked up as labels, are they descriptive of the fields and the forms and that kind of stuff. We’re also talking about help, what additional help are you provided in terms of tool tip and contextual help and anything else that you care to mention. So that’s Understandable, that’s what that principle is driving at.

Robust

Paul: The final principle is Robust. "Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies." In other words, what we build has to work on everything.

Audience: What about AJAX?

Paul: I think that’s where we get into the realm of progressive enhancement, that it’s fine to use something like AJAX as long as, if the AJAX is taken away, it still operates. Or, you provide an alternative version, the guidelines do actually accept that you can do alternative versions of something. So Gmail is a good example of that, Gmail, it actually doesn’t work if AJAX is turned off but they do provide an HTML only version of it which does the same thing. I’m not a great fan of that because it’s twice as much stuff to maintain, and one version become out of date and all the rest of it. My preferred technique is to build it so it works normally, and then to layer on the JavaScript and AJAX on top of it to provide enhanced functionality, which is what we guys have been doing pretty much all along and we need to continue in doing that.

Compatibility

Paul: So that Robust principle actually only comes down to one guideline which is Compatible, so that’s about maximising compatibility with current… listen to the wording of this… Maximise compatibility with current and future user agents, so we also need to be looking forward as well and predicting the future which is always good. But that’s where it comes back to using solid, good code that is’nt reliant on lots of hacks in order to get it to work, and it goes back to the conversation that we’ve been having recently about browser testing, upgraded browser support and that kind of stuff as well. So Compatibility and Robustness is the last principle. The other thing I should have mentioned with Compatibility is this also includes things like validation, making sure that your code validates, and just generally other markup type stuff.

What, no AAA, AA, A?

Paul: Ok, another thing that might have occurred to you is AAA, AA, A.. Priority 1, 2 and 3. Priority 1, 2 and 3 are still there, there are still those levels of conformance, but I get a real sense from the tome of this document, and this is just my personal opinion, people watching this video who know a lot more about accessibility might jump all over me on this, but my sense is that they were playing down those 3 levels of conformance. To be honest, I think I’m pretty keen on that. I don’t think those levels of conformance have done a lot of good generally speaking, because I think it’s kind of developed a checkbox mentality amongst some of our clients "We must be AA compliant" or "We must be A compliant" and they’re not actually thinking about the needs of the users, they’re just ticking the boxes so they meet some quota that has been established somewhere. One of the things that’s quite interesting, and I’m not sure if it’s a change from WCAG1 or not, I couldn’t find the reference in WCAG1 but again someone will correct me no doubt, but conformance in WCAG2 seems to be on a page-by-page basis. So you’re no longer in a situation where you want to claim conformance so you’re claiming conformance for an entire site, but you’re rather conforming on a page-by-page basis. And this allows you to basically pick-and-mix the level of conformance you want to reach on any particular page which is much, much more sensible because there are some elements where you might be building a particularly complex application that really isn’t going to manage being AAA compliant, whereas the rest of the site is AAA, and this one page isn’t. So it’s giving you the ability to mix and match. In fact, in the guidelines it says "It is not recommended that Level AAA conformance be required as a general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy all Level AAA Success Criteria for some content. In other words they’re saying it’s just not possible to be AAA in some situations, so don’t even try.

Start With Basics

Paul: So how does this relate to what we do on a day-to-day basis? Well, I think the language we use with our clients pretty much will remain consistent with how it was with WCAG1 which is that we need to start of by encouraging all our clients to start with the absolute basics. A lot of people are put off of accessibility because of the enormity of it, of all the things they’ve got to do. And even to be single A compliant there is quite a lot to do if you’ve got a site that has never been built to be single A compliant before. So I think our attitude has got to be that you work towards this over time, it is an ongoing process, you don’t need to do it all in one big go and that you need to start with the absolute basics, the quick wins, the stuff… you know, it’s the 80/20 rule, 80% of the problems that people are going to encounter from an accessibility point of view is caused by 20% of the accessibility issues if that makes sense. So we can solve a small number of issues but have a big impact on the site. So we’ll start off with some real basic stuff. Things like putting in "alt" and "title" attributes, providing alternatives to media, things like video and audio, being aware of JavaScript and the problems that JavaScript can create if it’s not implemented correctly, providing resizable text so that the user has the ability to either increase or decrease the text size on sites, to build everything to be standards based because that makes it so much easier in future.

Audience: Aren’t we moving away from resizable text?

Paul: We’re moving away from the resizable interface where the whole thing scales up and down, but there’s no reason why we can’t keep the text itself rescaleable. The layers should be able to push up and down. It has to be said with resizeable text, it is becoming less of an issue. The reason it’s becoming less of an issue is because browsers now have this zoom functionality built into them. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet to be able to drop resizable text entirely is my current feeling… I’ve got mixed feelings about it. But the obvious aim we’re going for here is to be single A compliant.

Build Over Time

Paul: So all of this is about building accessibility over time. Taking the guidelines by themselves is not going to be enough, and taking this checkbox mentality that I talked about earlier is not going to be enough. Once you’ve done these quick fixes, the next step on from that is to start consulting with your community. We need to encourage our clients to start talking to their users and find out what accessibility concerns they have. I also think, which I think we’re quite poor at, that we need to start testing with real users some of the accessibility stuff that we do, and the big problem there is persuading clients to pay for that. It’s really hard to get clients to pay for that kind of testing but I do think that it’s a really useful thing to do, and there are organisations out there that provide people you can get in to do testing, or that you can send sites out and they test with them. So, testing with real disabled users is really worthwhile. I think it’s about identifying major issues and dealing with those first, just pragmatic kind of prioritisation of issues, something you do with usability. With usability you look for the quick wins and the showstoppers and those you deal with first, exactly the same with accessibility. Now, what the major showstoppers are for those navigating the site need to be dealt with. And over time you build towards AA and AAA compliance if you can. But you only do that maybe on some pages. The big concern clients have and the reason they get into this check-box mentality of saying "we’ve got to be double A or we’ve got to conform to the WCAG guidelines" is fear, a fear of litigation. Especially our bigger clients, they’re really worried they’re going to get serious issues. But I think it’s important to stress with clients that litigation doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t suddenly have come through the post a writ saying "you need to come into court about this accessibility issue on your site". It doesn’t happen like that. What happens in reality is the user complains. And if the user is repeatedly not heard and not listened to, and not responded to and not cared about and rejected, they get angry enough to maybe approach someone like the RNIB who then take it on into litigation for them. That’s the reality of what happens.

Quick Response

Paul: So as a result, you can diffuse that by responding to complaints quickly. So as you’re building up over time with the accessibility policy, if someone does complain, you need to write back to them and you need to deal with that issue straight up. Ok, so that’s how the client should be dealing with all this and there’s loads more I could say on this but I don’t want it to go on forever.

Headscape’s Approach

Paul: Let’s briefly talk about Headscape and our approach and how we should be approaching the subject of accessibility.

Establish Approach With Client

Paul: Well first of all I think everything that we do in our approach should be in conjunction with the client. I don’t think necessarily we talk enough to the client about accessibility. Some clients are just so bamboozled by it that they want us to take control, others want a say in it and what to be reassured that we’re doing something about it. So I think there’s a dialogue that we need to make sure happens. And if a client just wants us to take control of it, that’s great. If they want to be involved in the process, then that’s great to but we need to engage with the client and talk to the client more about it.

Remain Pragmatic

Paul: The second thing and I think this is really important is that we need to remain pragmatic in our approach to accessibility. Everything I’ve been talking about before like building up accessibility gradually, about doing the quick wins first and the show stoppers and that kind of stuff, that’s all pragmatic. I don’t want us on one hand to ignore accessibility, and it needs to be an integral part of everything we do, but on the other hand you can become extremist about it. We could spend hours and hours trying to get something to work in every conceivable user agent in the world and we can worry about every type of disability to the point where it becomes like a paralysis that stops us actually doing anything. So there’s a real balance that we need to strike here. And we need to strike that with our clients and working with our clients.

Have a rationale

Paul: Now I think it’s worth saying that if we decide not to comply with a guideline for whatever reason, we need to have a rationale for that. So we might not conform even to single A compliance in certain situations, although to be honest I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but if we do decide not to conform, we need a damned good reason why not. In other words, we need to have thought about it. And the other thing about accessibility is that we always think about it at the end of the project. It’s too late by then, we’ve built everything. So it really needs to become an intrinsic part of everything that we do.

Responsibilities.

Paul: Let’s talk about the idea of responsibility here and whose responsibility accessibility is within Headscape. Basically I’m going to say, everybody. One of the absolute great things about WCAG2 is because it’s got this 3 tiered approach, it is "accessible" to everybody. It’s understandable by everybody. So therefore it can be everybody’s responsibility to keep an eye on accessibility. And so this is how I think it should split down.

Sales/Client – Principles

Paul: Marcus and Chris and the Client should be worried about principles. The Operable, the Perceivable, those basic top-level principles. And you should be looking at anything that goes out from the company and going "well is that really operable?" So you can take a very top-level approach to it. And I think as you talk to clients as well you take this very top-level approach to it. That’s the level you guys should be working at.

Guidelines – Project Managers

Paul: Project managers, I think you need to be looking and understanding from the guidelines point of view. So you need to go in and read what those guidelines are, and you need to be sure that you understand them. And as you look at any work that goes out from the company, you need to be thinking "does it conform to those guidelines?" You don’t necessarily care about the nitty-gritty of how those are measured, or the nitty-gritty of how they’re achieved, but has that guideline been met? That’s the level you need to be working at.

Success Criteria – Designers and Developers

Paul: Then when it comes to the designers and developers, you need to get right into these guidelines. And you need to understand the success criteria and how to apply the guideline and how to make them work in practice.

Check Everything

Paul: So basically, we need to be checking everything that goes out the company for accessibility. And I have to say I’m making the mistake of saying this on camera, but I think we’ve got a bit lax recently when it comes to accessibility. We reached a point where it was becoming quite intuitive to us, and we were doing it quite naturally, and then as a result of that, we stopped checking because it was the natural process of what we were doing, and then bad habits start to seep in again. So WCAG2 is a great opportunity for us to say "ok, we need to start reviewing everything we’re doing as it goes out again". So I’d really, really encourage you to check everything.

Needs to be second nature

Paul: basically we need to get to the point where this is second nature to us, so that we’re doing this intuitively again, but not to the point where we’re no longer checking.

Audience: Clients often say "what’s the difference? If I just got for single A compliancy, what won’t my site be reaching?"

Paul: I have to say that I think I would stop talking about double A, triple A and single A compliancy. I don’t think there’s really any value any more in talking about that to the clients.

Audience: I think there is because having the page by page conformance is a really good thing and that we can now argue that yes, we can now make the majority of your site triple A compliant, but for a page full of videos, we can make it single A compliant.

Paul: Ok

Audience: Clients will continue to reference it in briefs. You can’t not talk about it.

Audience: I think it’s actually quite a strong thing.

Audience: is it a page by page compliance, or template by template compliance?

Paul: I think it has to be page by page because the content that goes into the page, into the template, could invalidate it. This is why I think it’s something that should be downplayed. I accept the clients will still talk to us about it, but clients still talk to us about doing speculative design, it doesn’t mean we do it. I think there’s an education thing there whereby we need to move clients away from being obsessed by double A, single A compliance, and to start thinking about accessibility policies. What is there accessibility policy and what is it that they are trying to achieve on their site? Our base mark is going to be single A, it’s always single A, and I think it should continue to be single A.

Audience: but if you don’t talk to them about it, you could argue that less caring clients would just say "well why would I do anything about it, bottom line?"

Paul: Yeah, I said you shouldn’t talk about single A, double A, triple A, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them about accessibility and the improvements that accessibility brings because for people that have got that sort of attitude you don’t want to talk about the disabled if they don’t care about the disabled, you talk about search engines, and that’s the best way to sell accessibility, by talking about search engine placement. That’s the reason you want to be accessible for people who have that kind of attitude. For those that care, and are talking about single A, double A and triple A, you need to say to them "well actually, conforming with any level, it’s great that you want to do accessibility, and certainly single A should be an absolute minimum, but we’d encourage you to start working up an accessibility policy and looking at your site as a whole and say could this area do more in your site, your accessibility policy should do real world testing with real users…" all kinds of things.

Audience: So you think that we should be encouraging large organisations that have accessibility policies themselves that refer to double A, triple A, to try and persuade them to kind of move away from that?

Paul: No, not necessarily, I wouldn’t go that far. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that they’re a bad thing, I’m saying they’re not the be-all and end-all. And at the moment I feel like the vast majority of clients think they are the be-all and end-all. They’re obsessed with putting that little badge on the bottom of the page. And it’s not about putting badges on the page. The trouble with institutions that have these policies of single A, double A and triple A is that these policies are in place for the institution, not for the user. And that’s my problem with them. That’s why I think we should try to break that mentality with clients. And I accept that sometimes we’re going to lose, and that’s fine. Exactly the same goes when we were talking about browser support. I accept sometimes we’re going to lose that battle as well. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and fight it.

Audience: I just wondered why WCAG2 still does it, because yes, you’re right basically, and accessibility requirements should be based on user requirements and not ticking boxes, so why is it still in there?

Paul: I think it’s in there because… my impression… I hate talking about accessibility on camera! You remember what happened last time in the podcast? It was just a nightmare! I think the reason it’s still in is because some of those success criteria are hard to meet. Some of them are damn difficult. When you start talking about streaming video, you’ve got some difficult challenges there that need to be met. So I think as a result, what the W3C is saying there is that we accept that some of these things are difficult to do. And we accept that you’re not always going to be able to do them, so we’re going to make them triple A. But come on guys, some of this stuff is dead simple and we should be doing it, that’s single A. That’s my impression of the mentality behind it, and that’s a great mentality, but it’s when someone changes that to being guidelines, which is what they are, to being rules, really instilled by Moses and presented to the people. You know it’s not that and I think that’s an important differentiation to make.

Where to Start

Paul: I know what you guys are like, especially designers. Ok I’m making sweeping generalisations here. But, if you guys go along to the WCAG website and you look at the WCAG2 guidelines, it’s horrible! It’s intimidating and it’s scary and it goes on for pages. And there’s a lot of text around it.

Audience: There’s no pictures? (laughter)

Paul: There’s no pictures! The design isn’t even very good. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken that page, I’ve literally all I’ve done is I’ve stripped out the explanation text in front of it, and the waffle at the end of it, and I’ve left you with just the set of guidelines so it looks like a slightly less intimidating list. Not much but slightly. So that’s up at http://www.headscape.co.uk/WCAG2 so if you go to that, you can get just the actual list of criteria. There’s also, on the WCAG2 website, there’s a thing where you can go and you can say my site uses tables, my site uses video, my site has this and that, and you untick the ones that it doesn’t have and it narrows down the list of success criteria to only show you the ones that you need to care about. So you might want to check that one out as well. Ok, so that’s basically all I have to say, are there any other questions before we wrap up?

Questions

Audience: Clients are going to ask us the 1 minute elevator pitch. What’s the difference between WCAG2 and WCAG1? What would you highlight as differences?

Paul: I think there’s a bigger acceptance of things in the world other than HTML, so things like Flash, PDFs, all that kind of stuff, there’s much more reference to that kind of thing. It’s much better written, much better organised. I think it’s more pragmatic. It’s a little bit more… I think it will last the test of time more. It’s hard to pin down exactly what I mean by that. There is actually a document out that talks about the specific differences between WCAG1 and WCAG2 if you wanted to get into that level of detail. And to be honest, I couldn’t tell you what that is yet because I haven’t looked at it in that much depth myself.

Audience: I think you and I do need a couple of the more detailed stuff, to get the guidelines, just one or two examples basically. Something that’s new between WCAG1 and WCAG2, and also some of the differences between single A, double A and triple A. The streaming video is an excellent example.

Paul: Just go along to http://www.headscape.co.uk/WCAG2 and you’ll be able to see those different levels.

Audience: It seems like, an almost unwritten principle, or unwritten in your list of principles. It’s technology agnostic.

Paul: WCAG2 started off as so technologically agnostic that it wasn’t understandable.

Audience: WCAG1, the first line is all about "it must be W3C technologies".

Paul: Yeah, it will pretty much accommodate anything. You know, it talks in terms of audio and video. It doesn’t mention Flash for example specifically, at least I don’t think it does, but it refers to those kinds of things. It refers to documents that are not HTML. I’m saying this as much for the video as anything else, I’m still learning about it as well. So I think it’s going to be a learning process for a while for us to really get to grips with this, and truth be told we probably should have started a little sooner than this, but it’s not radically different from WCAG1. This is as much getting us back into the habit of thinking about accessibility as anything else really. Ok?

Audience: 1 more question. Are they new Keynote animations?

Paul: Yeah, they are new Keynote animations.

149. White Hat

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

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

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Housekeeping

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

Web Design Introductory Training

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

The two courses are…

HTML and Web Standards for Beginners – 19th February

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

Beginners CSS – 20th February

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

For more information visit edgeofmyseat.com/training/

Bamboo Juice

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

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

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

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

Consultancy Competition

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

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

News and events

More on jQuery

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

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

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

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

Getting started with HTML 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web design trends for 2009

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

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

The trends listed include…

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

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

Your website can thrive in a recession

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

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

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

He goes on to say:

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

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

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

Feature: Becoming Number One On Google

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

Listeners feedback:

Customer testimonials – Are they worth it?

Question from Dave Rupert –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you make your site feel safe

Kevin Dees asks an interesting question on the forum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However a few things have come to mind…

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

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

148. Recession Cheer

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

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

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Housekeeping

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

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

News and events

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

A roundup of 24 ways

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

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

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

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

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

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

WCAG 2.0. is official

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

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

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

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

Issuu Smart Look

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

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

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

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

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

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

A List Apart discusses content

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

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

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

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

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

Feature: Effective Browser Support

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

Interview: Andy Budd on how to recession proof your business

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

Andy: Hi Paul. How are you doing?

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

Andy: Are you running out of guests or something?

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

Andy: Aww, you do yourself a disservice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy: I guess so, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

What's in a name?

Posted in News on December 5, 2008 by Paul Boag

I am proud to announce that the Boagworld podcast has won this years .net magazine award for best podcast. However, I do also have some regrets.

It is getting embarrassing now. When I setup the Boagworld website and subsequent podcast it was just a personal side project. The name was a silly in joke. I put no consideration into it.

In the dot com boom I worked for a startup called TownPages. I headed up a team of designers who unsurprisingly enjoyed taking the piss out of me. One of those designers (a guy called Rob Crook) took offence at me having two monitors, while the rest of the team had to make do with one and so coined the term boagworld. He painted me as an empire builder, drunk with power :) The name stuck and eventually I bought the domain. It became a form of self deprecation that referred to my over inflated ego.

When I finally decided to create my own site Boagworld seemed the obvious choice. The site and podcast was me sharing about myself, why wouldn’t I choose Boagworld?

Four years on and it has become an embarrassment. Winning the .net award has particularly driven home how bad a choice it was.

Boagworld has long since stopped being about me. It is about the community and those who contribute to it. The success of the show is down to a whole bunch of people:

Marcus Lillington – He didn’t even get a mention in the .net magazine!
Ryan Taylor – Who produces the show every week
Paul Stanton – Who finds all of our news stories
Anna Debenham – Who publishes the show and edits the interviews
The interviewees – Who come on the show every other week and share their knowledge and experience
The forum leaders - Who make the community such a vibrant and friendly place.
Those who leave posts in the comments – Many say blog comments are negative and aggressive. That has never been my experience on boagworld. You guys add genuine value in what you post.
Those who contribute to the show – Your questions, jokes, and reviews have added an extra dimension that was lacking for a long time.
Our transcribers – Who painstakingly write out a transcript of every interview we broadcast. It blows my mind that people do this for free!

Trust me, this is not false humility on my part. I am more than happy to shout about my personal achievements. However, I have noticed the more I hand control to the community, the more successful the show has become. Perhaps there is a lesson there for other website owners.

So am I going to change the name? Of course not. I think it is too late for that. Anyway I suspect many of you would object. However, it does make you realise just how important it is to get your branding right from the beginning.

144. Scale

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

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

Podcast: Download (28.3MB)

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News and events

How much should you charge?

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

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

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

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

A plethora of accessibility posts

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

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

A business case for deleting content

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

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

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

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

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

12 principles for keeping your code clean

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

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

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

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

Interview: Joe Stump on Building a Scalable Site

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

Joe: Oh, good to be here.

Paul: Have we had you on the show before?

Joe: Ah, not that I’m aware of.

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

Joe: Sure

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

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

Paul: OK

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Ah, OK

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

Paul: Wow

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

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

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

Paul: Laughs

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

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

Joe: Aha

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

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

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

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

Paul: Wow

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Laughs

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

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

Joe: Sounds like a plan.

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

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

Paul: Yeah?

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

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

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

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

Joe: It’s not in San Francisco.

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

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

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

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

Paul: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Oh, yes yes.

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

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

Joe: Laughs.

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

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

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

Joe: Thanks Paul, bye.

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

Listeners feedback:

Top web designer applications

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

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

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

Sending out bulk emails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

143. Partnership

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

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

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News and events

Obama top technology promises

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could Microsoft consider adopting Webkit?

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

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

Ballmer’s response was surprising to say the least:

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

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

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

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

WCAG 2.0 resources

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

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

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

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

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

Prototyping with XHTML

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

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

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

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

Feature: A Partnership of Cooperation

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

Listeners feedback:

Marketing a web application

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

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

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

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

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

Font management

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

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

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

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

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

A partnership of cooperation

Posted in Web strategy on November 7, 2008 by Paul Boag

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

I am horrified by some of the stories I hear from clients and web designers about failed web projects. In most cases the problem has been not with the project itself, but with the relationship between client and supplier.

Although we are learning at Headscape, we have discovered three principles that will help both designers and clients work better together. To run a successful web project you need:

Mutual respect
A defined relationship
A positive attitude

By building these characteristics into your relationships there is a much greater chance of success. Let us look at how.

Learn mutual respect

It is disturbing to hear how some web designers refer to their clients. There is an underlying feeling that clients are stupid and just hamper the development process.

In reality clients are normally a key component and extremely knowledgeable. The client usually has a better understanding of their business objectives and target audience. They know what they want to achieve through the website and will have to work with it over the long term.

The client is the sites advocate, evangelist, defender, content provider and more. He is the driving force behind the site and deserves the designers respect.

However respect is a two way street, and clients often undervalue web designers. This is especially true in in-house teams although it also occurs when hiring external agencies.

Clients often reduce the role of the web designer to a pixel pusher. They micro manage designers effectively ignoring the extensive experience the vast majority bring to the table. Everybody has an opinion about design, but good design is not about personal opinion. It is about fundamental rules of layout, typography, colour theory and more. It is the designer who has expertise in these areas, and the client needs to respect this.

This lack of respect is often because both parties misunderstand their respective roles.

Define the boundaries of the relationship

Both designer and client have expectations of their role and that of their opposite. However, these expectations often differ. For example, if a client has not worked on a web project before they are unlikely to be aware of their role. This can lead to the client straying onto the designers territory or failing to fulfil their own obligations in the eyes of the designer.

At the outset of a project define the boundaries of the relationship. The client’s role in particular needs to be clearly defined.

Clients should be focusing on three things:

The business objectives – The client understands the business objectives associated with the website. Therefore, they should be constantly asking whether the design fulfils these objectives and if not explaining to the designer where they believe it falls down.
The needs of users – A good client should have an insight into the behaviour and character of their target audience. The client should assess designs not based on personal opinion, but within the context of the target audience. They should ask how users will react to a design, not what you think of it personally.
Problems and not solutions – Many clients endeavour to find solutions to perceived problems rather than communicating the problem to the designer. For example, a client should not suggest that a design is changed to a specific colour. Instead they should express concern that the target audience may not respond well to a particular colour. The designer can then decide on the best way to resolve the problem. If the client does not communicate the underlying problem, but merely suggests a solution, he is straying onto the designers territory. This prevents the designer from doing his job properly.

Of course, it is not just what you say but the way you say thing.

Build a positive attitude

Interestingly that both designers and clients perceive the other as a barrier. Designers believe that projects would run smoother without the objections of clients. Client perceive designers as negative and constantly undermining their ideas and suggestions.

Personally I rarely say ‘no’ to a client. Saying ‘no’ ends the discussion and leads to confrontation. It also fails to communicate the problem or identify a way forward.

Does this mean I do everything my clients ask? Not at all. Instead I provide them with enough information to realise that their suggestion may not be the wisest decision. In short I say ‘yes we could do that’, but then go on to explain the consequences of their suggestion.

However, you should not stop there. Also ask the question ‘why’. The other party may make a suggestion that seems ridiculous, but they will have had their reasons. You need to know what those reasons are. By understanding them you maybe able to provide an alternative that keeps everybody happy.

Maintaining a good working relationship between client and designer is not an exact science. However these approaches have gone a long way to improving the way we work with clients. Hopefully they can do the same for you.

142. Community

Posted in Classic shows on November 5, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show Ryan and Stanton cover the news in Paul’s absence, we’re joined by Mark Boulton to discuss design by community and Marcus reminds us to keep positive.

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News and events

Typeface.js

There are many solutions to insert custom fonts into your designs, whether it’s the good old CSS image replacement techniques, SiFR or FLiR, we’re really just biding our time until font-embedding through the @font-face rule becomes widely supported in the browsers (we’ve covered font-embedding before in show 129) But for now, there’s another technique on the block called typeface.js which uses browsers’ vector drawing capabilities to draw text in HTML documents.

Browsers have, for a while, supported vector drawing – Firefox, Safari and Opera support the canvas element was well as SVG, and IE supports VML. The Typeface.js project uses this vector capability to ‘draw’ the fonts within your webpage.

There are a couple of caveats, while the ‘drawn’ text is selectable, it’s not highlighted (though this should be remedied in future versions) and the fonts have to be converted first through a tool available on their website. But this might be a nice little fallback if the users browser doesn’t support @font-face.

Sell Your Web App

In our next news item Ryan Carson, owner of Carsonified, has this week published a blog entitled “Sell Your Web App: Lessons I Learned From Selling Dropsend” and as you would expect from that title he shares his tips and mistakes when selling his app and it’s a very interesting read.

He talks about considerations like choosing the right merchant account, anticipating high lawyer and accountancy fees and off course being discreet, don’t blog about your sale!

He’s also prompted for people to leave their own tips in the comments so if you’ve sold a web app yourself head over to thinkvitamin.com and share your experiences as well.

Lessons learned while building an iPhone site.

Theres a nice article on the Flickr Blog which details some of the lessons they learned while building the popular iPhone version of the Flickr site. They go into detail of subjects such as “don’t use a javaScript library or CSS framework”, “Load page fragments instead of full pages”, “optimize everything” and making sure to tell the user what’s happening through visual indicators.

If you’re developing iPhone apps, or are even just thinking about it I’d recommend giving this article a read before you start work, it may save you a lot of time down the line.

Free Site Validator

Our final news item brings our attention to a service blogged about by Roger Johansson at 456bereastreet.com. Roger was looking for a way to validate his site without having to do every page individually and what he found was freesitevalidator.com.

The service automatically craws each page of your site and checks it for validation, as well as giving you a report of any broken/dead links. Also known as Link Rot!

The service looks really useful so be sure to check it out.

Interview: Mark Boulton on Design by Community

Paul: So as I said at the start of the show, joining me today is Mark Boulton. Good to have you on the show Mark.

Mark: Good to be here.

Paul: It’s nice to finally talk to you, we met up for the first time just a few days ago now.

Mark: Yeah, it was it was about a week ago.

Paul: It was great to do so. I talked about you a few weeks ago on the show as well when we were talking about a recent blog post that you wrote. But we will come on to that in just a minute. What we are going to talk about today with Mark is that he has done the unthinkable from a design point of view. Haven’t you really?

Mark: I have really yes.

Paul: You’re totally insane and so I wanted to pick you brain about why you have chosen to do the unthinkable. Before we get onto that, all of this resolves around some work your doing for Drupal. Tell us a little bit A) about what Drupal is and B) what you are doing.

Mark: Drupal is a Content Management Framework I guess, that allows people to build websites and its an open source project, it’s been going for quite a while now. I think seven years or so. The software is on version six now and it has a very large user base. Probably three hundred or so registered users.

Paul: Three hundred users?

Mark: Three hundred thousand!

Paul: Ah ok.

Mark: So it’s a pretty enormous project really, and with it being Open Source these are all very passionate developers. It’s quite a developer centric platform.

Paul: Ok.

Mark: The community, with it being open source the community contribute quite a lot to it, with modules and themes and that kind of thing, plugins. Our involvement in the project is redesigning drupal.org, which is kind of the home on the web of the framework, so you can go there and download and read documentation. But it’s also the home of the community, which is a pretty huge one. So it’s very exciting.

Paul: So tell us a little bit about the design process that you’re using, and this is what you blogged on and what kind of caught my attention and struck me as a ridiculous idea and what on earth were you thinking about?

Mark: Yeah, well I’ve been working with Lisa Raquelt who is a user experience researcher and kind of strategist. She started very early on in the process. She started blogging about it with the Drupal Association, who represent the Drupal community, who engaged us on the project. They are very happy with this being an open source project. They’re very happy with us to talk about it. Which is completely opposite to the way you normally work with a client.

Paul: Yeah, totally.

Mark: Normally you sign NDAs and it’s very closed doors. You don’t want to tell the competition, its the complete opposite, which is terrifying. Lisa started blogging about it and got really really great feedback from the community, really valuable feedback. Then I then started blogging about some of the design work we were doing. We are redesigning the wordmark and the branding currently. And I thought I may as well just jump in feet first here and see how this goes, which is totally contrary to the way I’ve been working in the past and the way your mind tells you you should work. You just shouldn’t openly talk about design because you’d think that it’s very subjective and everyone is going to have their own opinions, which is true. But we blogged about it a couple of weeks ago and it’s where my blog post on my own site, markboulton.co.uk, came about was I had a lot of people including yourself Paul. Who were saying I was insane, why are you doing this? And it’s this notion of design by community that’s very different to design by committee. Which is what a lot of people was telling me, "You can’t design by committee, it never works." Which is true, it never does.

Paul: So why do you think we are so hesitant as designers to talk openly? Is it fear of the subjective, is it that we don’t like people looking at our designs before they are finished? Why are we so hesitant do you think?

Mark: It’s a really interesting question that. I had an interesting conversation with an architect a couple of weeks ago about the exact same thing. A lot of architects don’t open up. A lot of designers, maybe product designers. An insight into the way somebody works and as designers we all work very differently and sometimes it’s a very private process. To expose that it’s almost like going out shopping with no clothes on. Suddenly you’re exposing the way that you work to everybody, to judge you, and people will judge you. It is a terrifying thought. I think part of it is also schooling. If you’ve done art at school, which most designers have done, most visual designers. You slave away on a piece of art and it’s not finished yet and it’s not finished and you don’t want anyone to look at it until it is finished, so I think there is an element of that as well. When I released two versions of the Drupal wordmark, for feedback they were very much just sketches. They were right in their first iteration. I would normally never do that but I thought let’s see what the community thinks.

Paul: So what happened when you released those two sketches?

Mark: It was carnage. Initially it was quite painful sometimes to listen to some of the comments to be honest. I think anybody takes their own work personally. If someone then attacks some of your own work with necessarily seeing any of the context and that kind of thing, then it can smart a little bit. But I’ve written my own blog for a while now and I’ve got reasonably thick skin, so it wasn’t that bad. What did come out through all of the comments were trends. Trends started to emerge. So from people’s subjective opinion, if enough people were having the same kind of subjective opinion, then that becomes less of an opinion and more of trend. And it was really those trends were looking to identify, that we could feed back into the development of the design.

Paul: It’s interesting there you talked about the fact the people who were seeing this stuff didn’t have the context. Did you not prepare the ground in any way? Did you not tell them why you took the approach you did? Or did you literally just put out the branding there and go, "What do you think?"

Mark: Yeah, there is a reasonably sticky situation with Drupal, particularly with the wordmark. They have a kind of logo at the moment, which is a kind of drop with a face on it. And that logo at the moment is under GPL so it can’t be trademarked which means the Drupal Association can not protect their own property, as it were, because this logo is under GPL. Which means that anybody can take it, change it, completely mess around with it. Which is fine, the community have been doing that for a long time now. So when I took on and blogged about this redesign of the wordmark, there was not the context, the business context, was perhaps lacking because I felt that I could not provide that business context. Because I was the designer and that should really come from someone else, and that was a little late in coming. Which is why the first blog post really didn’t go down too well, because I assumed the audience knew that this project was happening. As it turned out, it actually wasn’t. They didn’t know and it was all a bit of a mess, but it’s kind of smoothed over now, with later iterations and there’s been more blogging done by the Drupal Association. Which has provided the rationale for redesigning the branding.

Paul: Right, so there is a lesson to be learned there I guess of the importance of providing context and why stuff is happening and why you are taking the approach you are I guess.

Mark: Absolutely yeah, I think context is really important, especially for branding and logo design and that kind of thing. Just providing, and I was very aware of this when I blogged it. We all saw what happened with the London 2012 logo, when that is released very early without any context, it’s either misunderstood, or just hated or really liked. I’d rather have that kind of opinion anyway, than somebody kind of going, "Yeah, its alright."

Paul: You prefer to create a strong reaction.

Mark: Yeah, either positive or negative, because those are the reactions you can act upon. Anything in the middle is kind of gray, middle ground. That’s actually very very difficult to take on board and move forward with. So any kind of negative or positive reaction, you can take that on board, which we did. But the context for the Drupal logo is going to be the other stuff around it, which is the branding, the tone of voice, what is said on the page, the design, the other design elements around it, how it interacts with the existing kind of drop because they are still keeping that as a mascot. So it’s how all of that works together was perhaps lacking at this early stage. Which is why perhaps, going back to your initial question, designers don’t actually release very early on because the context isn’t there yet.

Paul: Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. When it came to the feedback, so you were obviously asking for feedback here, were you setting any kind of constraints on that feedback? From time to time I’ve talked on the subject about how to get design signoff and that kind of thing and one of the things that I always say is, "Don’t just say, ‘What do you think?’" but actually kind of try and guide the type of feedback you want and give a context to it, is that something you did?

Mark: Yeah. Not initially, which was why we had to.. The initial blog post didn’t really go down so well from an actionable sort of feedback point of view. Because I felt that a lot of the design questions I wanted answered. I think it was too early and I hold my hands up for that. I think it was too early in the process for me to blog about that. The second post that I put up I asked for specifics on whether or not the word mark needed a capital D or a lower case d and whether or not it needed, we were developing the idea of a secondary icon with it which is a splash and whether or not it needed the splash or not. We got some really great feedback because that focused people’s attention. That provided a really great selection of trends which have fed back into the next iteration. The first post was a bit of a free for all to be honest. Nothing really useful came out of it, which was a shame.

Paul: I mean you kind of, you talked about trends. Do you think that that is kind of, those trends that you see emerging, have the way that you have taken those on board has it been a kind of anecdotal trends or are you talking statistics here? Were you kind of marking down how many people you know said, "Yes, there should be an uppercase D." or whatever or are you just kind of taking on a feeling? Does that make sense?

Mark: Yeah. It was kind of taking on the feeling. More qualitative than quantitative at this point. However, for the cap D or lowercase d we could have just run a poll which in hindsight we should have done, is just had a tick box for each question as it were. However I’m always a little, I actually quite like a lot of the qualitative feedback because people were saying, "Yes cap D and splash," but then they go on to say something else. If we just reigned it into a simple poll then we would have lost all that really great, valuable feedback, because it’s that that provides context for their answer.

Paul: Yeah, I mean you won’t necessarily know why they’re saying a capital D.

Mark: Exactly, and there was enough of people saying the same kind of thing in those comments for it to be a pretty good trend for us to act upon. And it also throws out more heads about them on as it were. There was a lot of valuable comment from the Drupal community especially. And that we would have spent six months trying to research the ins and outs of that community, the history and the culture because there is an awful lot, you know. It’s been going seven years and there’s a lot of people in there. I would have been around â€˜til next year trying to fully understand that community if I hadn’t adopted this open way of working.

Paul: It’s quite interesting, isn’t it? I mean when they were coming back and you were seeing a trend emerging very definitely one way or the other over something, were you always going with that decision or were sometimes you saying "Well actually, although everybody’s saying we should go with a capital D or whatever, I’m not going to because of X, Y and Z."

Mark: Yes. I think there does have to be somebody who is willing to make a decision on something that needs to be decided upon. If fifty percent of people said, "I like a black website," and fifty percent of people say, "I like a white website," the compromise is that you end up with a gray website and nobody wants gray. So, what we’ve done especially with the cap D and lowercase d for example there was pretty much an overwhelming response to, "Yes it should be lowercase d," because it’s kind of more attractive aesthetically and all the rest of it. However we’ve chosen to go with uppercase D and that is because of business requirements and also because of the ties in with the documentation. We’ve revised the word mark now where the uppercase D is actually a lot better than the previous version. Perhaps when I posted initially the lowercase d and the uppercase D were not really on an equal footing design-wise. The uppercase D needed a lot of refinement and again perhaps that skewed the results, skewed the comments and so we’ve actually reversed the general trend there and said, "Actually no. We think we should go with the uppercase D for this reason and this reason," and that will continue throughout the whole process. We’ve got to remember, and it’s very important, that the Drupal Association hired us for our expertise and if we feel strongly about something then hopefully we’ll go ahead with that and we’ll push back on any feedback.

Paul: I mean it’s quite interesting. You talk about, "as we go through this process." So it sounds like you’re gonna keep going down this line, that you’re gonna, you know, as you create say, the website interface that you’ll expose that.

Mark: Yeah we are. If you have a look on groups.google.org and do a search for the redesign group in there we have set in a bunch of dates in the calendar for gathering community feedback. So we will be posting up a link on Thursday to the prototype we’re developing and we’ll be doing that for the next six to eight weeks. Every other week we’ll be posting a link up there to gather feedback throughout the weekend. So we’ll be posting it up on Thursday/Friday morning and then we’ll be kind of locking off comments on Monday and then all of those comments will hopefully try and establish some trends and feedback. That’ll then feed back into the next iteration. So we’ve pretty much set a precedent here and we’re gonna be designing in the open â€˜til the final curtain call, as it were.

Paul: Excellent! So how do you feel this differs from design by committee? Because from chatting to you when we met up whenever it was I got the distinct impression from you, you saw this as a very different kind of experience, but why, what makes it different?

Mark: Yeah, well I’ve been involved in design by committee quite a few times. I’m sure a lot of designers have and generally in those instances you’re in a boardroom or a meeting and there are several people, maybe twelve tops, and they all have very strong opinions. Generally, as I said in my blog post, there might be an alpha male in there or two sometimes. People can rally around the loudest voice, so all of a sudden that becomes the opinion. It can be a very, very difficult environment to work in because there are so few people, all with a very loud voice. Design by community is a different kettle of fish really because we’re designing for essentially 300,000 clients and the wider web community as well, we’re not just asking the Drupal community for feedback here, we’re also asking the wider web community for feedback. Anybody can get involved in this, it’s not just for the Drupal community. So anybody can. So if you feel like, talking to the listeners here, if anyone feels like weighting in with their comments, please do. Because it’s very important to us that the wider audience is reflected in this redesign and not just designing for the Drupal community. So it’s a very different process I think, because we’re kind of staffing back a little bit. We’re not in a meeting room with twelve people trying to come up with a solution. We’re putting stuff out there. We’re asking for comments from a lot of people who are thankfully providing comments, which is great. Really thoughtful feedback, then we can try and establish trends and then it’s those trends that we act upon. It becomes a little less subjective. That’s the idea anyway.

Paul: It’s the scale that turns it into trends rather than just an opinionated person I guess.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right. And you do have to, like I said initially, sometimes it’s difficult to read a bit of a flaming going on on your blog posts, you know, because there are quite a few people out there who will be very passionate about this project. They’re very passionate about Drupal because they’ve got a lot of time and money, a lot of people their livelihood is dependent upon this platform. So we have to really take that into account that this is serious for a lot of people. We’re not just redesigning a website here, we’re actually providing a platform for a community to do their work. So it’s pretty important stuff.

Paul: So, I mean do you think that this is a kind of a peculiar situation? You know, is the Drupal project unusual or would this be a kind of approach you would encourage for other designers working on other types of projects?

Mark: It’s a really interesting question. I mean I’ve worked waterfall methodologies in the past so you get your, you do your research, you do your initial designs, they get signed off and then you build your website, it’s very linear. And after working at the BBC for so long I realized that, because we worked very iteratively at the BBC that actually a more iterative approach was actually more valuable so to take that client-side approach, and the agile software development approach, to take that commercially with design is actually very difficult. But with the clients we are currently working with, that’s the way that we work. So we don’t work in a waterfall methodology, we work very iteratively upon fixed time scales. So we have a week per iteration for example. Now the feedback thing, the only difference really between Drupal and any other big project is the fact it’s open source and has a very, very big active community who are used to working in this way. I think that’s the critical thing is that they’re used to people putting software updates out early, feedback and they get changed and honed down until the final version is released but it’s just the way that they’re working so we have to kind of slot into that culture and it’s not a culture that design thrives in actually.

Paul: No, I can imagine.

Mark: No it’s a very difficult environment for design because, and it goes back again to one of your initial questions about wanting to sit there and craft a solution until it’s finished. Well that goes counter to the way that this open source culture works. They want to see stuff early. They want to feed back. They want their say. So as long as you kind of understand that and they’re not being grouchy or attacking you in any way they just want the very best for the project. So yeah, it’s worthwhile considering it as a working approach. Certainly the iterative approach is worthwhile considering for any project but the getting feedback early, if your audience is big enough then give it a go and see how it works. You know if you speak to me in six weeks time I may have a completely different conversation. This is really very much a work in progress and we’re just seeing how it’s going. It’s not been done as openly in the public before. I can’t really remember any projects from a design perspective that have been like this. It’s fairly unique. Which is really great, it’s exciting. So we’ll just see. We’ll see what happens.

Paul: Yeah, very interesting stuff Mark. Thank you very much for coming on the show.

Mark: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Paul: And we will wait with baited breath to see future blog posts as to how the experience goes to the bitter end.

Mark: Please do because I’ll be blogging about it pretty much constantly throughout the life of the project.

Paul: We’ll keep an eye on that. Thank you very much for your time and we’ll get you back on soon enough.

Mark: Great! Thanks Paul!

Paul: Bye bye.

Mark: Cheers. Bye.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich and Andy Kinsey for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Keeping Positive

Got this question from Bill (remember him?!)….

I have just found out that the potential new project I have put loads of work in to winning is not coming my way. I wrote an extensive proposal, did some unpaid mock-up work, attended a presentation and jumped through every hoop thrown my way.

I was told by the client that it was ‘very close’ but on this occasion I had not been successful. Gutted.

How do you guys at Headscape cope with these types of rejections?

To be honest, and this is from a lot of bitter experience, it’s hard and some are harder to take than others.

I do, however, have a few thoughts and pointers that may help. Firstly, you can help yourself by weeding out the enquiries that you will never win.

Are these people worth your time?

Check out the email address of the enquirer. If it’s gmail, hotmail, yahoo or similar then chances are your potential client is just looking for free consultancy from you. I.e. they have an idea and have no idea what’s entailed in making that idea happen. And they certainly will not pay you to research it.

Secondly, and I am only aware of this possibility in the UK, but you can check up on a company through the Companies House website. This tells you all sorts of useful information about how long they’ve been around, their liquidity etc. You may change your mind about responding to a tender sent from a dissolved company.

Talk money

There is nothing more frustrating than being told that you are ‘way out of the ballpark’ after putting hours, even days, of effort into a proposal.

Ask people, up front, what their budget is. Explain that you need to know it to respond with the most appropriate solution for them. An example I often use is usability testing. Everyone knows that testing, preferably many times throughout a project can only be a good thing. But that said, not doing any testing doesn’t automatically mean that your client will get an unusable turkey for a site.

If you don’t get anywhere by asking then create a 2 or 3 paragraph solution with associated tasks (a mini proposal I guess) and email that to the potential client with an associated ballpark price. If they still want you to deliver a ‘full’ proposal then, chances are, your ballpark is within their range.

Ask/listen

Ok, so assuming you think that responding to the proposal is a good use of your time, you now need to read their brief in detail noting questions you have along the way. You will make a number of assumptions about what is the correct solution for this client while you are reading.

You need to talk to the client to confirm their answers to your questions but you also need to listen to their responses to ensure that your assumptions are correct. It’s very easy to arrogantly assume that ‘you know best’ because you’ve been doing it for years.

This also applies to your written proposal. Don’t describe and price up what you think the client needs – go through every point in their brief and respond to it accordingly. If it is plain obvious that something they’re asking for makes no sense at all, then tackle it head on and explain why they shouldn’t be doing it.

Stick to your guns

We decided, quite a while back, and for very good reason, that we would not do any unpaid mock-up design work. In some cases this has been seen as a positive thing (once it has been explained) but with other potential projects I’m sure it has adversely affected our chances of winning the work. However, we should stick to what we believe is right. Chopping and changing presents a negative image to both potential clients and our staff.

If you do decide to present initial mock-up ideas don’t be tempted into iterating them further. Any client who asks for is again asking for free work and is most definitely to be avoided.

Be gracious

Sometimes you just have to accept that you’re not the right fit with certain companies – even if the initial phone call or meeting went really well. It may well be that someone else delivers just the thing that really swings it for the client – sometime you just don’t know what that is.

If you do lose then you need to accept that you win some, you lose some. It often happens that these things happen in streaks which can be very frustrating. We found ourselves turning away superb opportunities earlier this year simply because we were too busy.

But always try to bring a positive attitude to any rejection because it is possible that these people will contact you again for further work (though beware that you are simply making up numbers!) or they may recommend you to others. They won’t do either if you react badly to the rejection!

140. Launch

Posted in Classic shows on October 22, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show GetSignOff has finally launched, we talk about how to use web stats to improve your site and we answer your questions about roles with web design and should you help clients with hosting.

Podcast: Download (25.2MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events

Acid3 receptions and misconceptions and do we have a winner?

The team that develop WebKit, the open source web browser engine that Safari and the new Google Chrome are built on, have just announced that the engine passes the Acid3 test developed by The Web Standard Project (Wasp).

So what is Acid3?

Acid3 runs a series of tests against a given browser and produces a score, the goal being 100/100. This score is generated from how "standards compliant" the browser is. For example whether it supports CSS2.1 styles such as "inline-block" and "pre-wrap", if it supports SVG-Fonts, what DOM features is supports and a whole range of other criteria.

So WebKit passes!

Does this mean we should ditch Firefox, IE and all the other browsers in favour of Safari or Chrome, well no, and that’s what Lars Gunther is talking about in his article over at WaSP.

It’s great that tests like Acid3 exist and that browser developers endeavour to build better browsers because of them. All in all it results in a much better experience for the average user and makes our lives as Web Designers much more hassle free.

6 Things To Like About Dreamweaver CS4

So Dreamweaver CS4 became available this week, 15th October to be exact and Alex Walker over at Site Point has been having a play and has shared with us 6 thinks he likes about the new release. Check out his article for details of each, but a summarised list is:

UI/Workflow Improvements
The Related Files Toolbar
Code Navigator
Live View
Advanced JavaScript Interpretation
Making JavaScript Unobtrusive

From reading the article these improvements over the previous version look really promising. One feature that really caught my eye is "intelligent code completion" for JavaScript and the most popular libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Prototype etc, the same way it does for HTML!

It would also appear that Adobe are making big improvements to the "Display View" of Dreamweaver, which has historically been the stigma plaguing most "professional" designers who use it. The "Display View" now has integrated code navigation, so you can use it to jump to specific elements within the page and Adobe have also built WebKit into Dreamweavers core so you can run your site through the software to test JavaScript, rendered CSS, server-side code etc.

So will these new features encourage more people to use Dreamweaver?

7 Ingredients of Good Corporate Design

Smashing Magazine has published a great article that discusses 7 ingredients to good corporate design. They break the discussion into two elements:

Design as artistic representation, which consists of:
- Logo
- Typography
- Colours
Design strategy, consisting of:
- Brand
- Quality
- Community
- Culture

It’s important to understand that corporate design isn’t simply of a graphical nature but is intrinsically linked with your strategy, the goals that you set and how you implement them and this article is well worth the read.

Launch: GetSignOff Goes Public

Monday GetSignOff finally opened to the public. It has been an interesting journey read more here.

Feature: Using Web Stats for More

We all use web stat tools like Google Analytics for tracking marketing campaigns. However, they can also be used to improve your site. We discuss this in this weeks feature.

Listeners feedback:

Salesman seeks designer/developer

Got this audio question from Andrew:

Hi Paul, hello Marcus and hi to all the people who work at the show. I live in Canada so hearing your nice English voices through my headphones is great. My name is Steve and I’ve done some freelance web design for clients in the past, but the part I enjoyed the most was the selling cycle; being able to explain to the client what a standards based website could do for them and then persuade them that investing in such a site would be wise for their business. I bet there’s a lot of designers and developers out there who are absolute Jedis when it comes to coding CSS and HTML but really hate the selling part. And then there are people like me who can really sell well but I wish I could work with people who are amazing at building websites.

My two-pronged question is as follows:

Is there a website or another resource that would allow people like me, who love web design, but are more business/marketing oriented to touch base with people who are in the opposite situation? And I’m thinking more than just a job board here, I guess the best analogy would be something that Marcus might be familiar with – adverts in the back of music magazines that would say something like ‘band seeks drummer’ or ‘talented singer needs people to play instruments’.

My other question: how did you guys do it at Headscape, were you all great at coding and someone had to get pushed out the door and start selling or were there very separate roles from the beginning?

Ok, part one first (I’m original aren’t I)… the ‘band seeks drummer’ analogy is good but I much prefer a dating agency analogy! Cuddly, financially sound salesman WGSOH seeks quiet, intense, practical developer for fulfilling relationship. :-)

As far as I am aware, sadly, this service does not exist. Forums, like the Boagworld forum, have got to be your best bet.

Right, part two. Much as I would love to claim that I used to be great at coding before they kicked me out of the door to do the selling, it would be a blatant lie. When Headscape started, the three of us came from different disciplines – Paul was designer/tech (it’s true!), Chris was project manager and I was salesman. We soon didn’t have enough design/tech resource and started to recruit but the fact that a) Chris was organising and pushing projects along and b) that I was concentrating on bringing in new work meant that we were running things like a larger agency (more efficiently and with less risk) very early on.

I have banged on about how important effective selling is in the past many times so won’t repeat myself here. The only thing I will say is that having totally separate roles is not necessarily a good thing. Even now, we don’t have very separate roles. Chris and Paul are both heavily involved in the sales process and always have been. In my view, it is the responsibility of the company directors to se
ll.

But, added to that, Chris and I also do a lot of consultancy work (requirements analysis, IA work etc), and Paul still does design work. This is important because it keeps our ‘hand’ in. Getting too involved in one role can often lead to a lot of potentially out-of-date talking, and very little ‘doing’.

Do/should you help clients’ with hosting?

Hi all

I’m just about to do a ‘simple’ website for a friend (aka my 1st client) which will try to market something he is looking to rent out. Whilst I’m confident I can do the website, I’m not sure how far I should go with helping/organising his hosting. The client doesn’t know anything about hosting and doesn’t have any hosting space with his broadband provider.

Now I don’t really want to get into organising hosting unless I have to, so I’d just like to know what the ‘norm’ is in this regard? As a web developer/firm do you automatically sort out hosting, do you get the client to do it and then give you the hosting password so you can upload the site? Is it even a good/lucrative idea to get involved in sorting this out as part of the ‘service’? Can people suggest what they do please?

Thanks, Alex

This question came from the Forum and there are already some interesting posts in response. The biggest issue here is:

Can you support this website?

Can you provide support if the site goes down in the middle of the night, on Christmas Day, or even when you’re on your two week break to Spain?

If you decide to sell hosting then you become a middle man between your client and the hosting company. Your client is contracted to you to provide and support hosting, not the hosting company. Of course, you have a relationship with the hosting company where they will provide an agreed level of support but… you are still the person that has to deal with your clients’ issues as and when they arise.

At Headscape we are completely open about this with our clients. We tell them that we only provide support (of any kind) on working days between 9am and 5.30pm. We’re not set up to do anything more than that.

However, we do offer hosting for those clients that feel that the level of support that we offer is enough. We have our own managed platform and we also act as a reseller for a large hosting company.

The solution for those clients that require a superior level of service is simple. The client buys the hosting directly thereby taking you – the agency/freelancer – out of the loop. We specify technologies, discuss the level of support required, amount of bandwidth etc with client – we will also set up the site on the web server – but the client orders and pays for the hosting.

This has worked really well particularly for the larger, busier sites that we have developed.

All that said, if you act as a reseller, and you have enough clients, you can make a decent profit via hosting. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that it doesn’t involve any work keeping all those clients happy and up to date. If you have enough clients to make money out of hosting then it’s very likely that you will have regular hosting issues to deal with and constant renewals to deal with.

My friend and colleague, the long suffering Mr Scott, has many times said that he wished we had never touched hosting simply because it often ends being a constant irritation that gets in the way of project work and rarely pays for itself.

GetSignOff goes public

Posted in News on October 20, 2008 by Paul Boag

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

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

However, let me begin with the blatant advertising…

What is GetSignOff?

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

It has loads of cool features…

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

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

What we have learnt?

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

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

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

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

Headscape web of shame

Posted in Working in web design on October 16, 2008 by Paul Boag

Every web design company has its secrets and Headscape is no exception.

At Headscape we pride ourselves on our professionalism and quality of work. However many of team members have embarrassing secrets best left hidden. However, that is not in my nature so here they are for all to see…

Marcus Lillington built his bands website in Dreamweaver. Don’t expect it to validate (or work).
Pete Boston is now one of our project managers but in the dot com boom he used to slice tables with the best of us.
Craig Rowe maybe an excellent developer but his site is hosted at his mates house. Think yourself lucky if it is online when you access it.
Dave McDermid has the talent to build GetSignOff but never finished his own website.
Mez Hopking lets the side down with his occasional drunken photo.
Rob Borley (a project manager) is so busy running his takeout website that he hardly has time for clients anymore.
Ed Merritt saves all his best design work for his freelance career.

139. Brand

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

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

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News and events

Understanding progressive enhancement

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

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

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

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

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

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

A free conference (kind of)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design Float

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we stop supporting text scaling?

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

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

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

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

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

Interview: Ryan Carson on Building an Online Brand

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

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

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

Ryan: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan: But it’s the truth.

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

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

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

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

Paul: That’s interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: That’s very cool.

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

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

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

Paul: That’s nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: What a genius idea. I love it.

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

Paul: Any others?

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

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

Ryan: Thank you, it’s an honor.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Site promotion with minimal budget

Our first question is from Adam in the boagworld forum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Office Or Not

This from Brad:

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits of a virtual company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A dedicated follower of fashion

Posted in Development on October 15, 2008 by Paul Boag

My name is Paul and I am an addict. I lust after anything new and shiny. But is that really wrong?

I cost Headscape a fortune. If its new and shiny I want it, and being an impetuous child I am I normally get it. Whether it is a new online service or the latest Macbook Pro, I spend company money like no tomorrow.

In many ways I feel guilty about this. However, should I really feel guilty? Is there value in my addiction?

Normally I try and justify my new purchases individually, arguing I need them to do my job. Although, these argument have some truth I think there are better justifications for my ‘habit’. In fact as I have been agonising over whether to purchase the new Macbook Pro, 3 things come to mind. The new and shiny…

Inspire me
Cause innovation
Give me confidence

Let me explain what I mean.

Inspiration

There is no doubt that the ‘new’ inspires me. It encourages me to look ahead and think about where design and technology is going. The ‘shiny’ also inspires me. It inspires me to produce something better. Something easier to use and more attractive to interact with. The joy I get from playing with a well designed gadget or a beautifully crafted web application, makes me want to give that experience to my users. Experiencing the exceptional work of others makes me want to be exceptional too.

The opposite is equally true. Experiencing the disappointment of using something that did not meet my expectations can inspire as well. Learning from their mistakes and a desire not to repeat them, are valuable experiences.

The new and shiny also inspire me to innovate.

Innovation

One of my most valuable roles within Headscape is to cause us to innovate. Whether it is introducing new approaches and techniques into the company or sitting with a client inspiring them about the potential of their site. This role is vital in the ever changing world of web design.

But how do you innovate? By being inspired by the new and shiny. I learn so much from good design wherever it is. For example the design principles of Apple has fundamentally altered my attitudes towards the web. From them I have learnt that simplicity is more important than features. Would I have learnt this from reading a book about Apple? Possibly. However, the experience of using Apple products everyday has helped drive that message home.

Equally, if I was a person always happy with what I have then I would never innovate. Innovation at its heart is about wanting more, wanting better. Without those of us who lust after the ‘new’, technology would never improve and design aesthetics would never change. It would be a dull stagnant world.

Confidence

This last point may cause you to laugh, but the ‘new and shiny’ gives me confidence. This happens in two ways.

First, it gives me confidence in my sales role. Gadgets impress. Sad, but true. Walk into a sales meeting with the latest gadget and people respond. I remember walking into a number of presentations back in the day when tablet PCs were the ‘in’ thing. Every time I would get comments and every time it put the presentation on the right foot. Am I saying we won work because of my gadget? Not at all. However, it did break the ice and start a conversation.

However, the more important way that the new and shiny give me confidence is through a knowledge that I am exposing myself to the cutting edge. I do not want either myself or my company to be in the long tale of web design. I want us to be at the forefront of our industry and to do that we need to be experiencing the forefront of design and technology.

So there you go. Am I putting forward a valid argument or deluding myself to justify my habit? You tell me.

138. Freeform

Posted in Classic shows on October 8, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show the entire boagworld production team answer listener questions.

Podcast: Download (25.5MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

Watch the behind the scenes video

We were really excited to have all of the boagworld production team in one place. This included…

Anna Debenham (the show’s technician)
Ryan Taylor (our producer)
Paul Stanton (the master of our news feed)

They came to visit myself and Marcus at the Headscape office, so we thought we should record a show at the same time.

Obviously, the normal format was not going to work with 5 people, so we decided to do something different. This week’s show is a panel based question and answer session. All the questions were submitted by listeners and thanks so much to those of you who took the time to send them in. Sorry we didn’t manage to do them all.

The show was recorded live and so is a little rough around the edges. I apologise if the audio is not up to our normal standard.

Also, because of the somewhat chaotic nature of this week’s show there are no show notes. Apologies to those of you who follow the show in written format. Normal service will resume next week.

Head Conference

For those of you waiting for the boagworld discount to the Head conference, your wait is over (almost!). On Friday 10th October for one day only the price is going to be slashed by 20%. You don’t need a discount code. Just visit the site on that day and buy a ticket.