Tag Archives: hiring

Show 93: dconstructed

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul talks about how to make the most of the footer, Marcus explains why cold calling never works and Gary Marshall shares some great advice on writing content.

Play

Podcast: Download (27.3MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events | Why cold calling never works | Making the most of the footer | Gary Marshall on writing better content

News and events

iPod Touch

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last week you will already know that Apple has just released a new range of iPods including the massively exciting iPod Touch. What is so exciting about the iPod Touch is that it is basically an iphone without the phone. This means it has WiFi and a fully functional web browser. This is a major development in the web design world as it will mean millions of internet enabled iPods and a whole new audience in a whole new context.

What is more Apple has also done a deal with Starbucks where by songs played in Starbucks can be purchased directly on the iPod. I am convinced this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of context / location aware mobile web. It won’t be long before you arrive at a University Campus and access a campus map or go to a shopping mall and access all of the menus of the various restaurants.

With the iPod being such a universal device now is the time to think about how you are going to utilize the power of the mobile web.

Free photo manipulation tools

This week I came across a site stuffed with loads of free photo manipulation tools. These guys have certainly been busy as there are loads of really fun tools including a Mosaic maker, CD cover creator and even a Hockneyizer. However, probably the most useful tool to us web designers is the palette generator. Upload an image and it will automatically create a colour palette based on it. Nice!

dconstruct feedback

This last week also saw the dconstruct conference in Brighton. I was fortunate enough to attend it and got to hear some truly remarkable speakers. I am not even going to try and recount all that was said, however I do want to particularly mention three superb talks.

Tom Coates, gave a mind blowing presentation on shifting our thinking from a website model to a data model and the consequences of this in terms of how we develop applications and how users navigate data. Tom’s presentation really felt like a glimpse of things to come.

Leisa Reichelt gave an inspiring presentation about how we develop projects. Amongst other things she talked about Agile development and I have to say this was the first time it has been explained in language I understood. This talk definitely made me reconsider how we run projects.

Finally, I couldn’t mention dconstruct without talking about Jared Spool’s presentation on experience design. Jared (who is a superb speaker) took us through how to create great experience design, explaining why it is important and how to draw together the necessary skills to make your design stand out from the crowd. Compelling stuff.

The reason I mention all of this is that all of these talks will soon be released as podcasts and I wanted to strongly encourage you to check them out!

170+ Expert Ideas From World’s Leading Developers

The final story today is the release of an article on the smashing magazine website. The guys at the magazine interviewed 50 designers and asked them 6 questions. This has led to an article with 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas.

Its always fascinating to see how other designers work so this article is definitely worth a once over.

Back to top

Marcus’ bit: Why cold calling never works

Ok, to say that cold never works is a bit strong because very occasionally it does. I should also qualify that I am talking about winning quality web design work here.

So, a more appropriate, but considerably more boring, title would be: why cold calling almost never works when selling quality web design services.

But, in my opinion, you don’t really even need to qualify the ‘what’ you are selling. I guess there are certain products or services that can, effectively, be sold over the phone to a person/organisation that you don’t know but I expect they are few and far between.

The word ‘effectively’, in the last sentence, is pivotal to this. I would love to see the ratio of telesales staff costs against actual sales won via the telesales force for, say, a double glazing company over the last year. The fact that I seem never to be called these days by double glazing companies suggests that my suspicions are correct and it simply isn’t worth it.

I don’t know anyone who likes being called out-of-the-blue and certainly, no-one who has actually bought anything through this process. I think most people are instantly ‘on guard’ and mistrusting of a cold call. This has worsened, I believe, over time and has now reached the point where it has almost become a joke.

Anyway, I’m rambling off the point – back to web design.

You can’t create a project that doesn’t exist

This is the main issue. Even if you are lucky enough to find a receptive listener, the chances of calling them right at the point where they are thinking about starting a web project is remote. The best you can hope for is that contact will be made later when a real project does happen.

You may not be talking to the right person

It is very possible that the one successful call that you made after a day’s banging the phone was actually to a chatty junior who cannot make or even influence decisions. Asking to speak to the ‘marketing director’ or ‘person in charge of the web budget’ etc is a recipe for an instant hang up.

Even if you are speaking to the ‘right’ person, chances are they will have to go to other partners or directors and that group will want to know track record, where did the recommendation come from etc.

Making yourself known

Ok, so you can’t actually win work cold calling but you can occasionally start the process of winning work through a cold call. However, I would say from experience, that this cannot be a completely cold call. You need at least one thing connecting you to the person at the other end – and the direct mail piece you sent them two days ago does not count because they will have instantly thrown it in the bin!

The kind of things that can make this type of call potentially worth it are:

  • Work done for one of their competitors (vertical selling)
  • Locality (“we’re in the same town”)
  • Professional connection e.g. a print designer you are close to works for them
  • Social connection e.g. my neighbour Dave Smith works for your accounts department and thought I should call you….

But remember you are simply selling your professionalism, skills and competence; basically, just the chance to pitch for work when it comes around.

However, I would recommend that the majority of your efforts are spent on a) ‘hot’ calls to people who contact you with real projects and b) your existing clients as they are usually your best prospects.

Back to top

Paul’s corner: Making the most of the footer

This week I thought I would try and tackle a question from Peter in Italy…

Disclaimer, copyright, accessibility statement and privacy policy; these are the links that can often be found in the footer of a page. Why is it important to add this information on a website and what should this information include?

The footer is the graveyard of many websites. The place where links are sent to die. However it doesn’t have to be that way.

Back to top

Gary Marshall on writing better content

Paul Boag:
So, joining me today is Gary Marshal, a technology journalist and author and many other good things as well. Hello Gary.

Gary Marshall:
Hi Paul, how are you doing?

Paul Boag:
Not too bad, good to have you on the show, we had you on once before as I remember.

Gary Marshall:
Yeah it was a couple of months ago now wasn’t it?

Paul Boag:
Yeah it was a little while back. What I thought would be good today is to get you on to talk in broader terms about writing for the web, and writing in general, as obviously that’s what you do for a living. That’s your job, and so I thought I’d kick off with really a question about copy writing and copy writers; do you thing website owners should be looking to get a professional copy writer in to work on their website rather than doing so themselves?

Gary Marshall:
I think it depends a lot on the website that you have, if your doing something where your unique selling point is a fantastic price for a product, then it probably doesn’t matter too much what the copy’s like, but the more important the text of your site is, the more important it is to have good text. So take for example if your site is a brochure then obviously the quality of copy then is really, really important. There’s also the technical side of writing as well, which is not so much a copy writer but more of a technical writer for that so you know, product information, frequently asked questions, support, that kind of thing.

Paul Boag:
What benefit do you get from getting in somebody who does this professionally in preference to trying to do it yourself, where’s the real kind of money earner in it? If that makes sense, the return on investment.

Gary Marshall:
Yeah. Well it really depends on what your sites all about. One of the things about getting a professional to do it is it saves you time, the same way you would get somebody in to do stuff around the house because your time is better spent doing what your good at. But particularly with copy writing, if you get somebody who is pretty experienced in this, what they’re doing isn’t so much writing, but its writing that works. So you know a good copy writer can say more in a sentence than your average guy can say in 700 paragraphs, which is one of the reasons that guys in advertising get paid so much, because they come up with these fantastic strap lines that lodge in peoples minds.

Paul Boag:
Yep ok that’s fair enough. Obviously the main thing that puts off people from getting a copy writer is the cost associated with it and sometimes its just prohibitive, although I have to say that I get somewhat confused that people recognise they cant do design and they get a designer in to do that but somehow people think they can do copy which is somewhat confusing sometimes.

Gary Marshall:
Yeah, it’s not that expensive. If your going to have a multi page, 1000 page website then yeah it is going to cost you a fair whack of cash, but he majority of writers tend to be paid by the word, so you’ll set a rate, and what it is you want to get and the end result isn’t going to be an awful lot of money. Your looking at a couple of hundred quid for a couple of thousand words, its not a lot.

Paul Boag:
No I suppose in the grand scheme of things that isn’t much at all is it? If you think of the amount that people pay for content management systems and design work and usability testing and all that other stuff.

Gary Marshall:
Provided they’re good at what they do. Of somebody is going to polish the text in your website, and make what you do sound absolutely fantastic, if that makes the difference between somebody hiring you or not or somebody buying your product or not then it’s paid for itself.

Paul Boag:
So, making the presumption that there are some people out there that just aren’t in a position to hire a professional copy writer and its just not an option – what advice would you give someone who is starting out writing copy for their own website? Where would you start? What are the most common mistakes?

Gary Marshall:
I think the most common mistakes are thinking from your own point of view rather than from your visitors point of view, I’d say that’s probably the worst offence that you can do, and it’s the old moaner when if you have a frequently asked questions section it’s the questions you hope people would ask rather than the one people actually do ask, you get an awful lot of people where on a website the fist page is the entire corporate history and as a visitor I don’t care, I don’t want to know this stuff I want to know what are you going to do for me why should I hang about here. So it needs to be very much ‘put yourself in the customers shoes’. Have a look at other websites and see what you like about them and what works on those sites. The other thing you need to think about big style is search engine optimisation. I was talking to someone the other day who was saying ‘when we do searches on particular products and particular areas we just don’t come up in the results at all’ and I said ‘do any of these phrases or words feature on your site?’ the answer was no. That was probably why they weren’t featuring in the search results! It might be obvious to you that your search should come up if you look for, I don’t know, web design companies in Brighton, but if you don’t have the words ‘web design’ and ‘Brighton’ in your website its not going to be indexed by any of the search engines. That can be a really difficult one to pull off, you see a lot of  bad copy writing that’s done purely on the basis of SEO, where they’re just trying to get as many different phrases in as they possibly can to try and get it up in the Google rankings and I think that’s counter productive because ultimately your trying to get humans to read this and if somebody comes to your website and the whole thing is stacked with all these meaningless phrases that don’t actually give you any useful information at all, then your just going to go ‘what a waste of time, I’m out of here’

Paul Boag:
Do you think there’s a difference between writing for the web and writing for other mediums?

Gary Marshall:
Yes

Paul Boag:
What kind of differences? What should people be doing differently?

Gary Marshall:
The biggest one is brevity, simply because your reading on a screen – you’ve no control over what sort of screen people are going to be reading on for starters, so I might be looking at it on my BlackBerry, you might be using a 22 inch monitor, but web content doesn’t lend itself to huge blocks of text and long, long sentences so you need to think much more visually than you do with the printed page I think, break it up a lot more and have a lot more white space. The way to present it can be important also, even having a bigger gap between lines can make a big difference to whether your text looks appealing or not. Again, work back from the basis of ‘what is it that your visitors are going to want here?’ You need to really start with that. I find that bullet pointing is usually a very good way to approach it. So, you sit down and think ‘what are people coming to my website for? And what is it they’re going to be looking for?’ and answer that first. If you’ve got a bit of spare time go into you full corporate history and everything you’ve done in your life, but concentrate on the purpose of your site first.

Paul Boag:
It strikes me that websites, unlike other mediums aren’t linear, so you have the option to start with the top level brief information and highlights, and people can kind of dig down to the in depth stuff if they want to.

Gary Marshall:
Indeed, one of the things you see in print a lot is the use of ‘pull quotes’ to draw your attention to a particular bit of the body copy, and its basically a sales technique and exactly the same thing works on websites and can be very effective and can encourage people to read more. The other thing I would say is try not to link too much in your actual body copy because every little blue line there is a potential reason for someone to disappear.

Paul Boag:
Ok that’s interesting.

Gary Marshall:
I think it can get in the way – if you’re trying to engage people you don’t want people to go off on tangents because you’ve got this short attention span thing going on.

Paul Boag:
Yeah I can accept that – the other thing as well is that if the page is full hundreds of links it makes it visually quite difficult to read as well.

Gary Marshall:
Yeah and avoid these kind of hover over adverts that infest websites. If it looks like a link I expect it to be a link and if I move my mouse over it and just get ‘find out about hotels in Guatemala’ or something its instantly away from the website. There’s something as well, I don’t know if its true or not but in journalism school they teach you when writing for tabloids you should write on the assumption that your reader is going to be a small child, and I think that can work with websites as well because it really does focus you on getting the information there quickly with the minimum amount of waffle and without going off on huge tangents. And like the old press thing as well where you have all the information in the first paragraph and you expand on it as you go along, so you should be able to chop from the bottom. If you’ve written 500 words, you should be able to chop the bottom 250 off that without losing sense of what you’re doing.

Paul Boag:
Yeah that’s good. So, websites are one thing – your kind of corporate websites and things like that, but more and more organisations are starting to use blogs as a method of communicating. Do you think there’s a difference there? What advice would you give to people writing posts for blogs?

Gary Marshall:
Be sure that you want to do it in the first place. Jacob Neilson quite famously said the other week that businesses shouldn’t blog, and he’s getting a bit of a headline generator there – he doesn’t mean no business should blog, but it can backfire because the nature of blogging is very much off the cuff, very quick reactions to things and that’s fine if it suits your particular kind if business, but if people are coming to your site for in depth information then I don’t think blogging does suit because by it very nature blogging is your most recent thought at the top so if you don’t have regular readers its quite easy to fall into the trap of assuming everybody knows the context of what your talking about, and they might not because you wrote about it 3 weeks ago or 3 months ago. That’s quite a common pitfall I think. The other thing about blogging is because it’s quick and easy it does encourage you maybe not to craft things as well and not think things through. You have got to remember that this stuff potentially hangs about for eternity. So it might be tempting to, I don’t know, slag off the competition or something but it could well come back and bite you later on. I think with blogging, it comes back to any sort of writing – you need to know what your trying to achieve with it because if you don’t have a clear idea of what your blog is going to bring to your website, and what benefit its going to bring to your visitors and customers it’s a potential massive waste of time and effort that you could be spending on something more interesting.

Paul Boag:
Yeah.

Gary Marshall:
I sound really negative; I don’t mean to be really grumpy today! But I think it’s a bit like in the early days in the web there was always these wonderful ‘do-hickeys’ and logos you could slap all over your website and lots of people did without actually asking ‘does this bring me any kind of benefit whatsoever?’. Done well, blogging can be a fantastic thing on a website. I’ve seen a few examples of it in all kinds of things – I was looking for drum loops for ‘Garage Band’ and I was looking at the various drum loop companies and I found one that the owners blog, and they talk about how they do the stuff, what they’ve got coming down the line, why they think that they’re great and nobody else is and all this kind of stuff and I really quite warmed to them and that encouraged me to have a look on their website and I ended up spending money on it. Other sites that are just plain old e-commerce things and really don’t care. Unless your doing a kind of niche market where I don’t know, ‘golfing grandmothers’ or something then the very fact that you’ve got a niche people are more likely to pay attention to what you’ve got to say. I don’t care if the marketing director of Comet has a blog; I have no interest in what he’s got to say – so adding it to something like that would be a waste of time. I don’t want to read a blog on ‘great big faceless ISP dot com’ whereas ‘Merchant city music’, which is a music shop in Glasgow, I’d be quite interested in what these guys have got to say, so ‘We’ve got some amazing stuff coming in!’ or ‘we were away seeing a band last night and they were fantastic!’. That feeling that your part of a bigger picture can be really effective, particularly with smaller businesses.

Paul Boag:
Yeah, good stuff I couldn’t agree with you more. I think there are a lot of blogs out there that shouldn’t be out there and there are also some places that should be blogging that aren’t.

Gary Marshall:
Yeah I would agree with that.

Paul Boag:
OK thank you very much for your time Gary, it was really good to talk to you again and no doubt we’ll have you back on the show in the future

Gary Marshall:
No doubt!

Back to top

Show 84: Maybe

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul explains why Headscape does Design Testing, Marcus talks about growing your web design and Mark Buckingham provides an introduction to Search engine optimization.

Play

Podcast: Download (24.1MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events

Pagination 101

I came across a great post this week that provides a solid introduction to producing pagination. If you haven’t come across the term pagination before it refers to the navigational elements that allow you to move through multiple pages of results. They often include links marked previous and next or numbers to allow you quickly to jump to a specific page of results.

We use pagination all of the time and most websites seem to have them. However, they are an overlooked function that doesn’t get the attention they deserve. The post I found this week, entitled pagination 101, explains to the reader through examples what make pagination work. Although I am not convinced I agree with everything written here it generally provides some very sound advice.

Personally I love posts like this that cover very basic stuff. It helps remind us not to get so caught up in the cool stuff that we neglect the fundamentals.

Free CSS based design course

John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin have released a free online course that introduces people to CSS based design. If you are still to make the switch from table based design or are finding the change challenging then I would highly recommend this course.

We are not talking about a short introduction here. Rather, this is an in-depth course that builds up over a series of weeks into a comprehensive guide to building with standards. Not only does the course tell you how to build with standards it also explains why which in my opinion is just as important.

Zeldman says no to Maybe

I wanted to quickly mention a post I saw from Jeffrey Zeldman this week. Its not exactly earth shattering stuff but it caught my eye nevertheless. Zeldman, suggests that it is probably a mistake to use 5 star ratings on websites or indeed any other option which allows a neutral answer. The problem is that if you allow people to rate something between 1 and 5 they will often rate it as a 3 because 3 is the most neutral response.

As Zeldman points out this problem is a lot broader than just 5 star ratings. It also applies to any response that allows for people to be uncommitted. Given a choice people will normally take a neutral stance.

As I said, this wasn’t an earth shattering post. But, what it did drive home is that web design is as much about understanding your users psychology as it is about good design or clean code.

IE Net render

I came across a site this week called IE Net Render that takes free instant screengrabs of your site displayed on IE 7, 6 or 5.5. This is a great way to see how your site is rendering on IE 6 or 5.5 once you have upgraded to 7. Its also damn useful if you are a mac or Linux user.

Of course, there are similar services out there but most of them charge and those that don’t are incredibly slow. What impressed me about IE Net Render was the speed with which it returned results. The only draw back is that it does not return content below its artificial fold.

Paul’s corner: Design testing

Headscape has always used design testing as part of its development process and yet we seem to be in the minority. We are often met with a lot of skepticism about the benefits of putting a design concept in front of real users as well as questions about how the process works. As I have received two emails on the subject over the last week I thought it was about time I explained the idea properly.

I have blogged about design testing. How we do it and why we think it works?

Marcus’ bit: Growing a web design buisness

Got this question from Andrew:

Last year I started my web design business from a back bedroom with very little experience and an old copy of Dreamweaver! I’m pleased to say I’m still here and the business is growing steadily. Your forum and podcasts have been invaluable and offered loads of great advice and support and no doubt helped many others in my position so thank you!
My question for you both is have you any advice on managing the growth and development of a web design business? As a one man band, when is a good time to take someone on, or could I realistically work with freelancers all the time? It seems that to take someone on is very costly (not just in terms of skills) but if I want to expand the business and our services for clients I can’t do it alone. Should I hire someone who can do everything, or someone who can sell leaving me to do design and development work? What are the pitfalls that I should look out for?

Any thoughts or insight into your experiences would be really helpful.

Interesting question, and one we have a lot of experience of but… one I feel I need to add a caveat to. What I am about to say is my personal opinion and does not constitute legal advice!

Ok, the easy bit first:

Sales people

Bless ‘em… we had enough bad experiences of sales people during our tenure at our previous company to know that the only people who reliably sell the services of a web design company are the people that own it.

I’m not saying there aren’t any good sales people out there, just that selling quite highly priced solution based work does not fit well with the standard sales ethos. Sales people like products. They like products with set prices (that they can cut). They like having demonstrable ROI.

Design, in particular, is very hard to put figures to. I can’t tell a company that redesigning their site will boost sales by X or Y percentage. I can talk about brand values and the importance of conveying quality online but I can’t put hard figures to it.

Most web design sales involve responding to a tender with a lengthy proposal and subsequent pitch that is tailored for that particular prospective client. It usually draws from all aspects of the business – design, technical, consultancy – and therefore needs someone with a good understanding of the business to put it together. I.e. the company owner/director.

Who to employ

Headscape currently includes the following general production roles:

  • Designer
  • Developer
  • Project manager
  • Information architect
  • Testing facilitator

Again, the directors tend to share IA and testing with the project managers. Project managers are invaluable members of any team but if you are looking to employ your first member of staff you need to get a designer or developer on board first.

Look at your own skills and see where you’re lacking. Maybe filling the gaps is the right way forward. However, that may only be appropriate if you’re looking to take on more complex work and simply doubling up on what you already have may be the most prudent move. Often, a new project win will point towards who the right person is.

When we started we had Paul doing design and some technical work, Chris doing project management and me doing sales. At the time, we had a great client that kept firing Flash work at us. We outsourced a couple of times but eventually ended offering a permanent position to one of these guys (he is still with us, as is the other guy who we outsourced to then!).
You mentioned hiring someone who can do everything – Chris, who was the first guy to join us, is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades so was perfect for us at the time. As we have grown though, we have looked for more and more specialist people.

Permanent or freelancer

Taking on freelancers can often mean the difference between being able to deliver a job or not. However, they are expensive and will badly erode your bottom line if you do it all the time. So, ask yourself – if I had an employee instead of a freelancer over the past X months, how much would I have saved?

Employees are a responsibility though and need looking after . One thing we have learned over the years is that happy staff make for more productive and more effective staff. As we have mentioned recently, Headscape has started encouraging everyone to spend a few hours each Friday afternoon working on anything they like. We get together monthly to present our ideas to each other – best idea wins something cool.

But sometimes you have to have to be prepared to make some very tough decisions. The bottom line is that the company always comes first. One final point though – and in the words of the late, great Douglas Adams – don’t panic! It is very easy to see things as much worse than they actually are.

Ask the expert: Mark Buckingham on SEO

This week we have Mark Buckingham on the show from netseek.co.uk to introduce us to the world of search engine optimization.

Mark helps dispels some myths surround SEO. He discusses best practice and talks about specific techniques such as keyword density and link popularity.

To be honest I felt like we only just scratched the surface of the subject of search engine optimization and would be keen to speak with Mark again. Its such a massive area that it is hard to know where to begin. So, if you have any specific questions you would like answered on SEO then drop me a line at [email protected] and I will get Mark back on soon.

Book recommendations

Finally, I just wanted to let you know that I have finally sorted my act out in regards to my reading list. One of the most common emails I receive asks me if I can recommend a book or what I am currently reading.

Now, I posted a list of recommended books ages ago but I never got around to updating it. Well I have finally done so and also gone a step further by creating an RSS feed of any books I read (be warned these will not all be web design related).

I promise to keep both the post and RSS feed up to date from now on!

Show 63: More than iPhone

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

This week on Boagworld, Paul looks at whether it is possible to build HTML emails with CSS, Marcus discusses how to write a good brief and Christian Heilmannwades into the current Javascript library debate.

Play

Podcast: Download (21.2MB)

Download this show.

To subscribe directly within itunes click here

News and events

Seems like there is loads going on in the world of web design this week and we struggled to narrow it down to four items. However, this is our pick of the best:

Getting a job as a developer

Christian Heilmann has written a post on his experiences of hiring developers at Yahoo! He gives some really sound advice to any developers in search of employment. Definitely worth a read if you are considering a change of job.

Talking of changing jobs, if you are a developer considering a career move then you might want to take a look at the developer position currently available within Headscape.

Global free stock imagery

Luke Sanderson (an old friend of mine) has taken the Google Coop and configured it to search all of the free image stock libraries from one place. Saves a bit of trawling around looking for that perfect (free) image.

The future of flash

Now, I don’t know much about flash but I know a man who does and he has just posted his impressions of the Flashforward keynote at MacWorld. He talks about Flash CS3, flash on alternative devices and reveals some fascinating stats on the take-up of Flash 9.

iPhone

Apples announcement of the iPhone seems to have caused a lot of excitement in all quarters not least the web design community. Brian Fling believes it could “revolutionaries the web”. Personally I find myself agreeing more with Cameron Moll who takes a more cautious view.

Agony Uncle: HTML emails built using CSS

This week has seen the discovery that Outlook 2007 uses Word to render its HTML emails rather than IE7. This severely limits what is possible when it comes to HTML emails and standards. It was therefore very topical that this week’s Agony Uncle Question is about using standards with HTML email. We look at what is possible and what is not referencing articles both on the A List Apart website and Campaign Monitor.

Ask the Expert: Javascript Libraries

The debate about the value of Javascript libraries has been raging for a while now but seems to be back with vengeance at the moment. That is why on this week’s show we have Christian Heilmann sharing his thoughts on the question, “Javascript libraries: Friend or Foe?”

Review: Pro CSS Techniques

Pro CSS Techniques is a new book by Ian Lloyd, Jeff Croft and Dan Rubin aimed at experienced CSS developers looking to take their skills on to the next level. Jonathan Snook provides an excellent review on this book that we reference in this week’s show.

Clients corner: Writing a web design brief

Writing an effective brief for web design agencies will not only make the selection process easier but helps to avoid potential miscommunications over requirements further down the line. In this week’s show Marcus looks at the issue of invitations to tender and how to go about writing an effective brief that will help your project run smoothly

Oh yes… don’t forget the boagworld meetup

Podcast 43: The business of web design

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this week’s show, we cover: running a web design agency, what employers look for when hiring a web designer, the best stats package in the world, should we stop testing in IE 5, and running multiple versions of IE on a single PC.

Play

Podcast: Download (26.0MB)

Download this show.

To subscribe directly within itunes click here

Help us out. Complete our podcast survey

User questions: Running a web design company

This week’s show is a little different. We answer a series of questions from listeners about running a web design company. Questions include:

  • How do you go about pricing projects and in your experience what hidden costs are there?
  • How do you bill projects? Do you use payment points? Do you have different rates for different people? Do you charge by the day or by the hour?
  • What skills does a freelancer need beyond the basic CSS, HTML and graphical skills?
  • How do you assess potential web designers when hiring?
  • How do you manage a company that primarily works from home offices?
  • What is your number one tip for running a successful web design company?

In the news

There are some interesting news stories in this week’s show:

ClickTales

This week sees the launch of a new online stats tool. Nothing particularly newsworthy about that I hear you cry. Well actually there is. ClickTales has an awesome set of new tools including the ability to view flash movies of your user sessions.

Visit the ClickTales site

Read the techcrunch review of the service

Gerry McGovern speaks out

This week sees the posting of an excellent article by usability guru, Gerry McGovern. Gerry gives a gentle reminder to all designers not to forget the basics of web design in our rush to implement the latest cool piece of technology.

Read Gerry’s Article

Read my response to his comments

The end of support for Windows 98

Microsoft has finally decided to stop supporting windows 98. On the show, we discuss the ramifications of this for web designers. Is now the time for us to stop, by default, testing in IE 5?

IE 7 Beta 3

It looks like the third beta of IE 7 is facing some problems. Users have been reporting a plethora of bugs including problems with installation and slow performance. Could this spell a delay in launch?

Review

In this week’s show, we look at your options for testing in multiple version of IE on the same PC. In particular, we focus in on running free virtual machines either using VMware or Microsoft Virtual PC.

For more, view my post; Why IE doesn’t play nicely.

Download any version of IE (or indeed any other browser) from Evolt.

Also in the show…

Paul talks about the need to develop in compliant browsers first. Marcus shares his thoughts on presenting your proposals and we both discuss the new look and feel for boagworld.

Podcast 32: In-house vs. outsourcing

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

Decisions, decisions… develop in house or use a third party web design company? This is discussed in this weeks podcast along with other bits and pieces.

Play

Podcast: Download (23.9MB)

The decision of whether to develop your website in house (by taking on additional staff) or outsource it to the third party web design company can be a tricky. This week Paul and Marcus look at the pros and cons of both approaches as well as throwing in some additional options for good measure.

Download this show.

Also in this weeks show:

In-house vs. outsourcing

The decision of how you are going to resource your web project will radically affect not only the price of the project but also how that website develops in the future. It is therefore important to understand the options available to you and to know the pros and cons of each.

Although there are some alternative approaches that I will discuss later, you basically have two options available:

  • You can use internal resources within your organisation to develop your new web project. This can either be existing staff or new employees that have been recruited specifically to work on the website.
  • You can outsource the project to a specialist web design agency who can work either on a fixed price or time and material basis.

Either option has both its advantages and disadvantages:

In-house development

In short, an internal development team demonstrates a greater commitment to placing the web at the heart of your business

If you envisage that your site is going to need ongoing support and development (beyond basic text amendments that could be completed via a CMS) then hiring in-house staff may well be the best way to proceed. Although this does produce an ongoing financial commitment in the form of salary, equipment and training, it will ultimately be cheaper than the higher rates you will be forced to pay an external agency. An in-house development team will not only understand your business better than an external agency but will also be in a position to push the virtues of the web internally on an ongoing basis.

In short, an internal development team demonstrates a greater commitment to placing the web at the heart of your business and a vision to ensure your site evolves overtime instead of going through sporadic redesigns.

Outsourcing your web project

External agencies are often better placed for dealing with more challenging sites.

Of course having an in-house team isn’t always appropriate. For a start the ongoing financial commitment may simply not be an option even where site evolution is the preferred approach. Secondly, external agencies can sometimes have the advantage when it comes to complex and cutting edge sites. External agencies are normally larger than in-house teams including more specialists in specific fields (e.g. accessibility, usability etc). In addition because of the competitive nature of external agencies there is more pressure on them to keep up-to-date with the latest innovations and developments. As a result they are often better placed for dealing with more challenging sites.

Finally there is a danger in some organisations that the in-house web team can become “institutionalised” whereas an external agency will bring a fresh perspective that can challenge internal preconceptions.

Management mistakes

Of course the biggest factor in undermining in-house teams can often be mistakes made by management and not anything to do with the team itself. One such problem is recruiting the wrong person for the job. Often smaller organisations will recruit a web developer when what they really need is a web strategist and evangelist. Although coding and design are important skills, a smaller organisation needs to have somebody with business acumen that can help the organisation identify opportunities to utilise the web and to promote its use internally.

However, probably the biggest mistake made my management is ignoring the internal team they have. As a member of an external agency who works with in-house teams on a regular basis, I am constantly amazed how often we are brought in only to validate what the in-house team has already been saying. It is as if our presence is required simply to mediate in the internal politics that can often be found in larger organisations.

Other approaches

Of course choosing how to develop your website doesn’t need to be a black and white choice between in-house or outsource. There are in fact a number of other options to suit different organisations:

Ad-hoc specialists

For larger organisations it may sometimes be appropriate to bring in specialists to compliment an existing in-house team. For example specialists in accessibility, usability or design can often work well alongside an in-house team primarily made up of coders.

Part time contractors

For smaller organisations that cannot afford fulltime in-house staff but who wish to enjoy the benefits that come with that approach, there is the option to take on a part-time contractor. These individuals will probably have 2 or 3 websites they manage on a regular basis but still will be able to work more closely with you than an external agency.

Maintenance contract with an external agency

Although probably the most expensive approach, maintenance contract with an external agency does provide the best level of service. If the agency provide the right kind of service this can be very much like working with an in-house team. The agency will really get to understand the business, evolve your website on a regular basis and still provide all of the benefits of an external agency.

Conclusion

In many ways the title of this entry is somewhat misleading. The decision between development in-house or outsourcing is not a black and white one. Different solutions are right for different organisations. However I believe one thing is universally true, whether you use an external agency or in-house staff, you need a “website owner” within your organisation who is the project manager for any work done and the evangelist for the site within your company.

How to ruin a design

Posted in Design on by Paul Boag

I don’t have a proper post for you today. I guess its more of a rant than anything else. Why is it that some of my clients just can’t make a decision on their design?

I have a client at the moment (I wont use names to protect their identity and my income from them) that is going around and around in circles over the design I have created for them. When they first saw it they loved it. Raved about it in fact. However they then started picking over tiny details until now they aren’t sure about any of it.

Well rather than just moan about them I thought I would see if I could get to the bottom of what causes this kind of situation. After all they are not unique.

This is what I have come up with:

Design by committee

One of the most common problems with choosing a design is that more than one person is involved in the decision making process. Because design is subjective you will get a different opinion from every person you show. The more people you show the more opinions you get. If it is necessary to keep all of these people happy you often end up with the lowest common denominator at the end of the day and then nobody likes it.

Can’t see the wood for the trees

Often clients get too close to the design. They think about it too much and end up over working the problem. Its something that as designers we are trained to avoid. “Know when to stop” was one of the first lessons I learnt as a professional graphic designer. If you look at something too long and work on it for too long you will end up ruining it. Its so important to step back and maintain perspective but often people fail to do that.

The domino effect

This is a bit tricky to explain but I have seen clients do it again and again. They look at my design and generally really like it but there is one thing they are not sure about. Instead of going back to the designer and saying “I am not sure that typeface is working” they come back and ask me to change it to Arial. However when that doesn’t look any better they ask me to change something else in the hope that the second change will sort out the first change. This process can go on and on without end. I guess it is partly to do with the point above because they make small changes which end up throwing the whole design out of balance and no amount of additional changes will fix that. They have lost the bigger picture.

Micro management

My clients pay me a lot of money to build them a web site. I am not cheap and they could certainly get somebody to do it for a lot less money. So why do they hire me and not some student working out of his back bedroom? Well I would like to think it is because of my experience. Certainly that is what I am often told. However a surprising number of those clients that say exactly that then go on to micro manage my design. I have had clients tell me to move a box one pixel to the left or to the right. I have had clients ask me to change type size, colours, positions or any other design element you can think of. In short they design it themselves and just use me as an intimidate between them and the software they don’t know how to use. What a waste of money! If that is the way they want to work they should hire somebody a lot cheaper. Why spend all that money on me if they don’t value my opinion or experience. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but it just seems common business sense to me.

Conclusions

So do I have any conclusions… well no, not really. Perhaps this is just a warning to those of you out there hiring web design companies. The client can make or break a project. You can hire the world’s best web design team but if you aren’t managing them correctly your web site will not reflect the skill of the people you hired.

I am not saying you should just go along with every suggestion the web design company makes. Rather I am saying stick with what you know well. You know your company and you know how to sell it. Let the web designer translate that knowledge into the online medium.

Needs Based Design

Posted in Design on by Paul Boag

Find out how your website should meet the needs of your users rather than your internal staff or web design company.

A lot of people have talked about needs based design, but given the number of terrible sites out there (almost all of them), the message clearly hasn’t gotten through.

Case studies

SmarterKids.com has a great home page. Instead of wasting real estate on merchandising that’s not interesting to most people, it uses its home page to guide users into the section of the site that will be most helpful in filling their needs. The home page uses the left hand column to ask how old your child is. Based on that first click, you’re whisked to product areas geared toward your child. This is in stark contrast to sites that organize products by catalogue numbers or internal company structure. Other sites would put all board games, for instance, in the same category. In fact, eToys.com doesn’t even have a "Board Games" category. I found Monopoly through a search but no way to browse for it. A parent would have to sift through plenty of products and figure out individually which are intended for children of a specific age. By organizing products by categorisations most useful to visitors (themes such as "Pretend Play" or "Construction"), SmartKids.com helps customers get to products faster and makes its site seem more personalised than it actually is. As an aside, if you do want to register at SmarterKids.com, it’s easy. One optional checkbox that really amuses me says, "My child is talented and gifted." Who doesn’t check this box? People who think their kids are stupid?

The Missing Link

Take a good, hard look at your navigation. Most companies organise their sites by product line or service type. That’s fine if your users understand everything about the organisation of your site. But I’ll bet you a lot of money they don’t. Try the following experiment:

1. Pick a page on your site with a lot of navigation on it (secondary or tertiary navigation, not just the main navigation bar of your site).

2. In the content area of the page, put a little box. We’ll call this the "needs-based box."

3. In the needs-based box, put short statements or questions that anticipate what most likely brought the user to that page. On the "About Us" page, for example, the box might list items that can be found in that area of the Web site, such as, "How do I know you are reliable?" and "How much do you cost"

4. Next, try to imagine what the user was trying, but failed, to complete a task and that his failed attempt led him to the current page instead of the correct page. In the needs-based box, add items that are not in that page’s category. Continuing with our example, you might put, "What is your phone number?" and "Do you operate overseas, too?" (In our example, those items might actually be in the "Contact Us" area, not the "About Us" area.)

5. Put five or six links in the "needs-based box."

6. Watch your traffic patterns for two weeks. I’ll bet you more people follow the links in that box than links in your navigation, even if the box’s links go to the same place as the navigation links.

Very important to note is these questions and statements are not just the site’s categories and labels turned into sentences. In fact, that is to be avoided. Making "About Us" into "I want to know more about you" doesn’t work. You must figure out the user’s need. "About Us" might instead turn into "I need to talk to a human" and "Are you hiring?" What pages should you try this technique on? Look at your Web analysis software to find the most common "exit" pages. These are the pages people view right before they lose interest and leave your site. Try to figure out what people might have wanted to do on those pages they were unable to. Put up a needs-based box, then watch your site traffic. If done correctly, those pages will stop appearing on the list of your highest exit pages. Let me know how you make out.