What does your site say about your organisation's personality?

Posted in Marketing on October 11, 2010 by Paul Boag

Are users seeing you in the right light? Are they seeing the real you or a phoney persona? In this post I show you how to let your users look behind the corporate facade.

For many users your website is the only glimpse they get of who exactly you are. Most do not meet you face-to-face or even chat with you over the phone. Your website is all they will ever see. If you find that prospect scary then you are not alone. Many organisations not only view their website as unrepresentative of their services but also their personality.

In this post I endeavour to provide some practical advice on how to honestly project your personality online. However to do that you need to have a clear perception of who you are.

Understanding your organisations personality

It’s amazing how few employees have a clear grasp of what their company does, let alone the personality that best represents them. One of the first questions we ask our clients is to summarise what their organisation does in one or two sentences. Many people simply cannot do that.

The second question we ask is “if your company was a person, who would that person be?” Think about it for a minute. Which famous person best represents your company? It’s a hard question to answer. Yet I believe that if your website is to accurately reflect who you are then you need to be able to answer it.

Don’t pretend to be somebody you are not

However the problem does not end with simply identifying who you are. It is also a matter of being confident enough to honestly project that personality. I often encounter organisations who dislike their corporate culture and would prefer to be somebody else. There is nothing wrong with being aspirational in the way you wish to project yourself. However it is important to recognise that if you intend to be aspirational online this also needs to be represented off-line as well. This requires nothing short of a cultural shift.

Overcoming your corporate inferiority complex

In most cases it is better to just “be yourself”. Many organisations suffer from a collective inferiority complex. Instead they need to embrace who they are and be willing to project that online with confidence. I think this lack of confidence is borne from a fear of alienating users. They believe that some of their corporate characteristics may be unpalatable to certain audiences. They might actually be right.

An employee ashamed to work at Microsoft

dragon_fang, Shutterstock

However in my opinion it is better to accept who you are than be something you’re not. You may alienate some users, but your honesty and openness will attract many others. The web is a big place and there are plenty of people out there who see the world in the same way as your organisation and will be drawn to you if only you stand up for what you believe.

That brings me nicely on to the need for transparency and openess.

Be transparent and open

As well is not hiding who your organisation really is, it is important to be open and transparent in the way you communicate with your customers both online and off. Too many organisations harbour the belief that they cannot or should not admit to their mistakes. There also appears to be a culture of secrecy that surrounds many organisations. Although this may work for companies such as Apple the majority of us do not work for Apple and so need to consider a more open attitude.

Stop worrying about the competition

I think much of this closed off mentality comes from a fear of the competition. Organisations believe that to admit their mistakes shows weakness. Although there is an element of truth in this, the benefits outweigh the weaknesses.

Take for example Flickr.com. In their early days they suffered from serious performance problems that angered many of their paying customers. They might have concluded that to admit the problem would have been a sign of weakness. However instead they chose to publicly acknowledge the problem and apologise for their failings. This turned a potential PR nightmare to their advantage and they won a lot of fans because of their honesty.

flickr blog post entitled: Sometimes we suck

Many organisation also worry that making their company too transparent will allow the competition to copy them. Although true, I would argue that it is better to give away some of your intellectual property than it is to work in obscurity. Take for example my own situation. I know for a fact that a large number of my competitors read this blog. No doubt they learn a lot about the way that I work and win business. However I also know that the Boagworld community wins approximately 90% of Headscape’s new business. At the end of the day it is perfectly possible that my competitors will copy some of my ideas. However ultimately they are just going to be playing catch up and I will always remain one step ahead of them.

Another important part of being open and transparent is to recognise your organisation is more than a corporate facade. Instead it is made up of many individuals who all have an influence over the corporate culture.

Recognise that your organisation is made up of people

Why is it that the marketing department within so many organisations actively discourage their employees from talking about their work online? In my opinion employees are one of the best assets a company has in projecting its personality online.

Take for example Microsoft. Among certain segments of the developer community Microsoft is perceived as evil personified. In particular many web developers despise Internet Explorer with a passion. For the longest time the team at Microsoft who worked on Internet Explorer were forced to remain silent and this just added to people’s dislike of the company. However eventually Microsoft began to open up and allow its employees to talk about their jobs and the decisions they made in the development of Microsoft products.

For those of us who have read these first-hand accounts by Microsoft employees on blogs like Channel 9, it has transformed our attitude towards the company. We may still dislike Internet Explorer but although it is easy to despise a corporate body like Microsoft, it is much harder to dislike the men and women who work on the products.

Channel 09 blog

Not only is it much harder to dislike people than corporations, we also feel more drawn to individuals rather than faceless companies. This relationship with people (rather than companies) is particularly important if you are a service based business. At Headscape we actively encourage our employees to blog, tweet and generally participate in the web design community. This is because we know that our clients hire us based on the skills and likeability of our staff. Most people are not impressed by corporate brands, but they are impressed by likeable, highly skilled individuals.

Of course I’m not suggesting that there is no place for corporate branding. After all I fully recognise that first impressions count.

First impressions count

When we meet a person for the first time we make certain judgements about their character and personality based on the way they look, what they wear and their body language. With little else to make judgements on, users take a similar approach online. They make judgements based on the visual appearance of your website and come to conclusions within a matter of seconds. It is therefore important that the design of your site reflects the personality of your organisation.

Because users make judgements about your character based on the way your site looks it is important that the designer has a good handle on your organisation’s personality. That is the reason we ask “if your organisation was a person who would it be?” This allows the designer to picture a particular person when designing the site.

However it is important to stress that it is not enough for just the design to reflect your personality. Your copy needs to reflect it to.

Don’t allow your copy to make you schizophrenic

Content management systems have solved many problems. However the way they have solved some problems has created other more subtle challenges. For example, the introduction of content management systems has meant that a website will probably have multiple content providers. This overcomes the problem of content bottlenecks. However each content provider has his or her own writing styles and this can make your organisation’s character seem schizophrenic.

Image of serious business man holding an image of himself in casual wear looking happy

Worldpics, Shutterstock

As with design it is important that your copy reflects your organisation’s personality. This means that your copy needs a single tone of voice. In an ideal world this would mean that your website had a single web editor ensuring that everything published have that consistent tone. However this is not always possible due to budgetary constraints.

If you do not have a web editor then your organisations website should at the very least have a content style guide. This document should not only ensure consistency in the use of grammar, product names and sector specific terminology. It should also provide guidance for writing with the correct tone of voice.

This kind of editorial control has existed in the print world for years. For example if you compare different newspapers you will find each has its own unique personality that differentiates itself from the competition. This personality is maintained across the publication despite the fact that each issue is written by a variety of different journalists.

The Sun website

The Guardian website

You might think this contradicts my comments earlier about giving different employees within the organisation a voice. I have no problem with employees writing in their own style for content that is specifically associated with them as an individual (e.g. a corporate blog where the author’s name is highlighted). However on more generic pages I believe that the personal style of the writer needs to be secondary to the personality of the organisation.

Conclusions

I find it concerning that so few websites seem to have a consistent tone of voice that extends through both design and copy. Without a strong personality and will within the organisation to express that personality online, websites end up looking bland and generic. This explains the prevalence of ‘corporate blue’ and unintelligible marketing copy across the web. Designers and writers who fall back on these cliches do so because they have no clear image of their organisation’s personality.

Could you easily explain to a third party what the personality of your organisation is? If not then maybe it is time to ask which celebrity best represents your organisation. Why not post your ideas in the comments below letting us know why you selected the person you did.

10 problems your content management system will not solve and how to overcome them

Posted in Development on October 30, 2009 by Paul Boag

Content management systems are often perceived as a silver bullet that will solve all your content problems. In reality having a CMS is not enough. You must also address broader issues associated with the content of your website.

So many website owners hate their content management system. This is often because it has failed to live up to their unrealistic expectations.

Many organisations purchased their CMS hoping to solve a wide range of issues surrounding content production and delivery. In reality, a CMS is only capable of overcoming relatively few. In fact often a content management system will solve one set of problems only to create more. It is these new problems that I wish to address here.

What follows is a list of 10 issues that are either directly created by content management systems or that a CMS will fail to solve.

1. A lack of editorial control

One of the primary reasons organisations purchase a content management system is to de-centralise control of content and therefore remove the bottlenecks that surround posting content to the web.

The consequence of this approach is a lack of central control to ensure the quality and accuracy of copy produced. This can lead to contradictions and varying styles of writing across the site.

Although many content management systems provide the tools for central editorial control, they are not always used and require somebody with the editorial experience.

The Solution: Get an editor

Unfortunately this is one problem that technology cannot solve. What is required is a content editor. Somebody who checks what is being produced and ensures it communicates a consistent message in a consistent tone.

Ideally this should be somebody who has experience in writing and editing online copy. However, the most important thing is that this person feels confident in editing copy, and has the authority to remove inappropriate material.

This person will also require a vision for the site and in particular what personality it should be projecting.

2. A lack of personality

Many websites lack real personality. They either ooze marketing BS or come across as singularly bland. This is largely due to the fact that they have been written by people more interested in communicating facts or selling stuff, than wishing to engage with users.

Websites with great copy that is full of personality, stand out from the crowd. They do more than convey information. They actively seek to make a connection with users in much the same way people do face to face.

Unfortunately the distributed nature of content production through the use of a CMS undermines that.

The solution: Decide on your sites personality

The first step towards overcoming this problem is to define who you are. If your website was a person what type of person would it be? What words best describe your sites character? Is it playful, serious, enthusiastic, or friendly?

Next put together a content style guide. This will include examples of writing styles that should be used on your website. It will also include guidelines in terms of tone and wording. This document should then be distributed to your content providers.

Producing an effective content style guide is not an easy task. You might wish to consider employing a freelance web copy writer if you do not have somebody in house. However once it has been produced, it should provide everything your content providers need to add some
personality into your copy.

Of course that does still require your content providers to be committed to the cause.

3. Uncommitted contributors

One of the great selling points of having a content management system is that they allow anybody to post to your website. Unfortunately, just because your staff can edit the site, does not mean they will.

It is not unusual to find that content management systems go unused except for by a few individuals. The belief that content management can be easily decentralised is false. There are two primary reasons for this.

Firstly, some people do not see it as their responsibility to provide web content. They see the website as a marketing or sales tool and so should be managed by marketeers.

The second reason is that most people do not have the time. Writing web content is often seen as a low priority and constantly gets pushed out by “real work.”

The solution: Recognise the importance of the web

The solution to this problem has to come from senior management.

The website needs to be seen as a critical business tool and job descriptions must reflect this by making site maintenance a key component of people’s job. This should include website duties being apart of employee assessment.

There is however another reason people do not using the CMS – they don’t know how to use it.

4. Poorly trained authors

When an organisation rolls out a new content management system they almost always offer some form of training. However, in many cases it is not enough.

Normally training consists of an intimidating manual and one off training session. For the few people who are updating the website regularly this is probably enough. However for more infrequent content providers, this is inadequate.

The trouble with one off initial training sessions is that by the time the content provider comes to update the website, they have forgotten what they learnt. Admittedly the information they need may well be contained in the manual, but who reads those?

This can easily lead to only a few people capable of making updates to the site, thereby undermining the very reason for having a CMS in the first place.

The solution: Provide video training material

The combination of occasional users and new employees, means that most organisations need a long term strategy for training people in the use of their content management systems.

We have found that a series of short video tutorials covering key functionality works much better than training sessions or intimidating manuals.

We still run training sessions for frequent users. However, the video tutorials allow users to work through the material at their own pace. Also, unlike a training course they can learn only the parts of the system they actually need.

However, training in the technology is only half the battle. Content contributors also need to know how to write compelling copy.

5. Bad copywriting

The harsh truth is that not everybody can write good web copy. Even somebody who writes brilliantly in print, does not necessarily write well for the web.

There is an art and science to writing good web copy that many people are unaware of. Copy written by content providers is often verbose, un-engaging and hard to scan.

The solution: Provide a structure for content production

The solution is three fold:

First, the introduction of an editor means that content providers do not have to worry about writing perfect copy. It should be the job of the editor to take the raw copy they provide and re-write it for the web.
Second, the training provided with a content management system should extend beyond the functionality and also include advice on writing good web copy.
Finally, by producing a basic template for content providers you can help them focus their writing. A content template should ask questions such as who is the audience, what is the key message for this page and what is the call to action?

However, the problem is not just limited to the quality of content but also the quantity.

6. Bloated websites

Much like this post, most websites end up far too bloated. This is a problem that content management systems only serve to exaggerate.

By removing the barriers to putting content online, you encourage people to add more. However, more is not always better.

Content providers often approach the website with entirely the wrong mentality. They look at the content they have or can easily produce, and decide to put it online because “somebody will find it useful.” They are driven by what content is available, rather than user’s need.

The problem is that the more they put online, the harder it is for users to find the content they want. It is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

The solution: Focus on users and remove

The best solution is to prevent this from occurring in the first place. This is done by fixating on user needs. Before putting anything online ask two questions:

Is the content aimed at your primary audience?
Is the content essential for helping those users complete their objectives?

If you cannot answer yes to both questions, then seriously consider whether putting the content on your website will cause more harm than good.

Of course, you may already have a bloated website. If this is the case then you need to review each page of your site and apply the principles above. If a page fails to cater for a specific use case of your primary audience, then it maybe time for it to be removed.

The problem is that most organisations have people responsible for adding content to their websites. However, few have somebody charged with removing it. This is an important role and one your web editor should have the power and time to do.

However, user needs is not the only criteria for judging the worth of content. There are also calls to action.

7. No clear calls to action

As I have already said, most content providers are focusing on conveying information rather than meeting users needs. However, they are also neglecting the business needs too.

With the exception of marketeers and sales people, few content providers are thinking about calls to action. What is it that you want users to do next? How do you wish them to respond?

Even when content providers are thinking about calls to action, they are focusing on the big actions such as “contact us.” Until the user is ready to take those major steps they are left to wander around the website.

The solution: Always guide the user to the next action

It is important to consider the main calls to action for the entire site. Typically they consist of one or two major actions such as buying a product or completing a contact form.

However, there is also a need to think about the calls to action of each page. Avoid leaving your user with no obvious next step.

Take for example this page. Directly below this article you can take three actions:

Leave a comment
Provide feedback – That leads to videos offering a number of next steps
Read a related post

At no stage is the user left without a next action.

A big source of next actions is your information architecture. Unfortunately most navigation is not focused on users needs, let alone business objectives.

8. An organisational focused IA

An unfortunate side effect of running a content management system is that it encourages information architecture built around organisational structure rather than users needs.

If you look at most organisations CMS driven websites, their information architecture closely mirrors their internal structures. This is because it is easier to divide up responsibility for updating various parts of the site if it is structured along departmental lines.

The problem with this approach is that users do not think in terms of organisational structure. They are task focused and so often an organisational IA is entirely inappropriate. It leads to confusion and frustration among users.

The solution: Focus on user tasks

The only solution to this problem is to stop structuring sites around organisations and start focusing them on users.

Although it is easier in most content management systems to allocate permissions based on a per section basis, there is not normally a specific need to do so. It is just as feasible to give access on a per page basis making it unnecessary to organise around internal structure.

Ultimately your site should be about your users and that includes your IA. However, it does not stop there. The community you build around your site is important too.

9. No sense of community

Increasingly content management systems come with some great community tools. They have forums, comments and integrate with everything from Facebook to Twitter. However, great technology does not build great communities.

Many organisations implement these community features on their site and are disappointed when they are not used.

Worst still some organisations launch these features but moderate so heavily that users respond negatively. Eventually the functionality is removed entirely.

The solution: Build relationship not functionality

It is important to realise that online communities are about relationships and not technology. If you want to build a successful community around your website, you need to actively and regularly engage with users.

This involves having people within your organisation who are constantly talk to users, asking and answering questions, and getting to know people through open and honest relationship.

Of course, the problem here is the same as content production. This is not seen as an official role. Instead it often falls to enthusiastic individuals. If you want your community to succeed you are going to require passionate people who have the time and resources to sink into that community.

And it is a lack of resources that leads us to our final problem that content management systems cannot solve – single language content.

10. Single language content

The majority of invitations to tender Headscape receive for content management builds, request multi-lingual support.

In the end few of the sites we build actually make use of that functionality. In effect they are paying money for something they will never actually implement.

There are two many reasons for this.

The first is aspirational. Many organisations request multi-lingual support because they have dreams of expanding in the future and unfortunately those dreams do not come true. I can at least respect this viewpoint. There is nothing wrong with planning for functionality you might need at some point in the future.

However, the second reason is not so admirable. A lot of sites fail to implement their multi-lingual support because they have not fully thought through what that involves.

Implementing a CMS with multi-lingual support is easy. Creating a multi-lingual website is hard. You have to decide what content is going to be translated. You need to find a translator and then you also need to maintain that content over the long term.

The solution: Think twice before requesting multi-lingual support

There has to be a good business case for implementing a multi-lingual website. Unless you are sure that you are going to make money from a foreign market, it is probably not worth investing in language support.

If you aren’t serious about supporting other languages do not add it to your ITT, at least not as a primary requirement. There is no reason to rule out a CMS for not supporting multiple languages unless you are sure you are going to use that functionality.

Conclusions

You could interpret this post as a criticism of content management systems. That is not the case. I believe content management systems are a valuable addition to most websites. However, as I said at the beginning they are not the silver bullet may perceive them to be.

The success of your CMS is largely reliant on you being aware of its limitations and being prepared to deal with these restrictions. If you do then a CMS could be the best investment you ever make.

160. Education, Education, Education

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

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

Podcast: Download (30.2MB)

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Housekeeping

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

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

News

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

How to create a great web design CV

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

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

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

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

For the complete list of tips read the whole post.

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

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

Design: Make it Memorable

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

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

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

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

Statistics and website owners

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

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

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

That has often been my experience too.

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

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

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

Specialist vs. Generalist: Who Wins?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview: Aarron Walter on Interact

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

Aarron: Thanks for having me.

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

Aarron: Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aarron: Thanks for having me.

Thanks goes to Andrew Marquis for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

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

Remote user testing

Our first email is from Steve. He writes…

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think of this method?

Sounds interesting although it would not be my preferred approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a job

Our second email is a rather despondent one from Andrew…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Series: Building A Better Web Application by Ryan Carson

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

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

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

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

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

158. Home

Posted in Classic shows on March 25, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: We share the highlights of SXSW, discuss home working, and interview Rob Borley about project management.

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Housekeeping

Headscape still recruiting!

Headscape is still recruiting. We are looking for an enthusiastic, talented developer to join our team, working from of our offices in Hampshire. For more information see the job advertisement on Boagworld.

News and events

The best of SXSW

Well, SXSW is over and I am back in the UK. But what happened at the conference? What was the big news this year?

That is actually a hard question to answer. There is so much at SXSW that it is almost impossible to get a sense of everything that is going on. Even if you could attend every panel that isn’t always where the real action takes place.

The real conference often happens at the parties and in the corridors. In fact, more than one spontaneous panel was started via Twitter, thanks to official panels being full.

Panels this year ranged from the downright dull to all out flame wars! One that I unfortunately missed was "Is Spec Work Evil!". However, Marcus attended and tells me it was particularly fiery. Personally, I am very much against speculative work as I have said before. However, not everybody would agree and the panel seemed to reflect this diverse opinion.

One panel I did make was Paul Annett’s amazingly inspirational talk on Easter Eggs and design twists. The talk focused on the little things you can add to your site to make users go ‘oooo that’s clever’.

Too often I neglect such ‘bells and whistles’ in favour of usability and accessibility. Paul demonstrated how these different priorities can sit side by side without compromising each other. He showed some great examples including the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo and the vines on the Silverback website.

The final panel I want to mention is ‘Being a UX Team of One‘ by Leah Burley of Adaptive Path. To be honest the title of this one was a little misleading (at least from my perspective).

What I took away from this session was that design should not be a solitary activity, solely reliant on the creative inspiration of one individual. Leah seemed to be arguing for a more collaborative approach especially at the wireframe stage. She proposed that all of those involved in the project should sit down together and hammer out the wireframe designs.

This addressed two separate problems we have been having at Headscape…

The developers concerns at not being involved early enough in the process.
The question of who should do wireframing – the designer or the IA person.

Best of all Leah’s presentation was very pragmatic. She provided lots of practical approaches that encourage idea generation and collaboration. I highly recommend listening to the podcast of this when it is released.

Browser testing and IE6

In other news, there seems to have been a lot written about browsers this past week. Three stories in particular caught my eye…

.net Magazine seems to have hopped on the ‘dump IE6′ bandwagon – My opinion is the same as that of Jeremy Keith as expressed in last weeks show. It is not a matter of dropping IE6. We should instead being deciding whether we wish to offer it the same level of support as modern browsers. I am entirely in favour of providing IE6 with a basic stylesheet that avoids its shortcomings. However, I dislike the idea of dropping it entirely.
Microsoft has released SuperPreview this week that allows Windows users to test different versions of IE simultaneously. I have to say this looks like an impressive tool. It allows you to view IE6 and IE7 side by side. It also has many other tools that may also be useful. Support for IE8 and other browsers will follow and although it is currently in beta, I think it will quickly become an indispensable tool for Windows based web designers. Just a shame there is no mac support!
Finally, Sitepoint have written a brief outline of how to create the perfect browser testing suite. Ideally for those starting out it lists various online browser simulators, virtual machines and desktop browser emulators.

Browser testing continues to be a pain in the neck and I for one would be willing to pay for a decent way of streamlining this whole process. This is especially true now that IE8 has been officially released and we have another browser to add into the mix.

A simplicity case study

A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of simplifying your website. Well, this week Gerry McGovern has written the perfect case study to support the argument I was putting forward.

‘Removing poor quality content increases customer satisfaction‘ talks about how the Microsoft website consists of a staggering 10 millions pages. Of those pages 3 million have never been viewed!

The post goes on to explain how the Microsoft Office team took a different approach with their site by removing irrelevant pages. According to McGovern…

By weeding the garden, the top task pages became easier to find. But just as importantly it became harder to find a minor task page when you were looking for a top task page.

In short, removing pages reduced noise. Disturbing though it sounds, I think we could all learn something from Microsoft’s example.

An introduction to Microformats

My final post today comes from Richard Rutter’s blog. It is basically an introduction to Microformats aimed at the non-geek. He wrote the post because he recently found himself trying to explain microformats to a client and could not think of a good post that covered the subject from their perspective.

Personally, I am not sure it is necessary to tell a client you are implementing Microformats. The cost of adding them is so small and the benefits so hard to explain, that you maybe better off just doing it.

That said, this is an excellent post and if you are struggling to understand the point of Microformats, this is certainly worth reading.

Interview: Rob Borley on Project Management

Paul: So, joining me today is Mr. Rob Borley. Hello Rob.

Rob: Hi Paul, how are you doing?

Paul: Very well indeed. Good to have you on the show. It’s been a little while.

Rob: It has, It has. It’s weird hearing the show above you, um rather than being below.

Paul: Oh yes, because you sit upstairs, don’t you?

Rob: Indeed.

Paul: Do you actually hear it?

Rob: I do. It’s like have a little base bin ?

Paul: Awh. So, um, we have kind of been thinking for a little while that we need to get someone on the show to talk about project management. And the idea was we’d get some high profile web design project manager to come in and talk about web design project management. Then I realised, um, that I can’t actually think of any. You know, I really don’t know of any kind of web design project managers out there, other than obviously the people that work at Headscape.

Rob: Well, maybe there’s a gap in the market.

Paul: I think there is a gap in the market.

Rob: (unintelligible) celebrity project manager.

Paul: Well I think that’s somewhat of an oxymoron, but setting that aside, lets shift around a bit, yeah, so, um, so we thought, lets get you on the show. Um, now, you’re quite and interesting case because you started of as a techie.

Rob: Yes.

Paul: And you became a project manager.

Rob: Yes.

Paul: And, so, um, let’s start by talking about the role of project manager. How would you describe your core role? What is it that you do? I should know this I guess.

Rob: Well, you mean other than manage projects.

Paul: Ok, you just have to make a joke out of it. But you know what I’m getting at.

Rob: Yeah yeah. I mean, I guess, um, the main thing that we do is shovel shit, really. We deal with crap. You know, the main thing project manager would do is a filter between clients and the production team for the project. I mean, there are a couple of stages I guess. So you’ve got the planning part of the job, which is essentially working out what it is you need to do, um, making sure you got the results to do it, plotting a nice time line so they can all fit as far as having deadline. And then you’ve got the people said, because really project management is a people job. You need to know how to get the most out of all the people that are in your project team, um including the client. You need to include the client in your thinking, always. Yah, that’s essentially what we do.

Paul: Yah. It’s a people person thing. I always thought you were so charasmatic. Ok, so, I mean, I guess the question is, if you look at the kind of, if you look at Headscape, and the way that we’re organised, we’ve got four developers, four designers, and three project managers. I mean, that’s a lot of project managers. And, you know the question is, why, why have project mangers at all? Why couldn’t the designers and the developers do the job? Why couldn’t it be spread across multiple people? Justify you exsistance, Rob.

Rob: Yeah, this question kind of makes me nervous here. I feel like I’m re-interviewing for my own job. Not that I interviewed in the first place, but, I guess in one sense, if you were in a small project environment, you could almost get away with one person. If, you know, its a one person job, you could get away with them managing themselves for a limited amount of time. Um, but, as soon as you get beyond jobs which are more than one person, um, and go on for an extended period of time, you start needing to provide some glue to stick things together. You need someone whose got an overview of everything that’s going on. You know, the developers have got a very developer mindset about the way things happen. Designers are the same way, they know about the design stuff. Um, but actually translating what the client wants and feeding that into both areas and bring them together is what’s missing, if you don’t have a project manager.

Paul: So, to some degree, project management becomes necessary with scale. The bigger the projects, and the more complex the projects, then the more a need for a dedicated project manager.

Rob: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I guess the real role of a project manager in these situations is the facilitator. You’ve got all of these tools which are basically your resources, your developers, your designers, um, and you need to be able to enable them to work effectively together to produce what the end product is going to be.

Paul: So here’s a question that I didn’t pre-give you, in advance, which is always the best type. Why, why, why become a project manager? What made you – because you were heading up our technical development team, you were, you know, you were doing very well. Why did you feel the need to get involved in what you call shit shoveling?

Rob: Well, I think my main motivation was, Headscape was growing, and we started employing all of these younger, more dynamic, much more talented, better looking developers, that were basically going to show me up. So I figured that before I got shown in true light that I was going to need to move somewhere else. Um, no, well that’s partly true. Really, I think, its the people’s aspect that I’m really interested in. A good project manager is someone who is able to understand how his resources or how her resources work and how your clients work, and joining the two together. Um, while I quite like writing code really, I’m not passionate about it. So that side of it, you know, I reached as far as I wanted to go, and I really enjoy the people thing.

Paul: Ok. So what other, I mean, what other kind of characteristics do you think make a good project manager, obviously the people skills you talked about, what other, I mean if there are other people out there going well actually I’m not that passionate about coding, or I’m not that passionate about design, but I am passionate about the web, I do like the web design process, perhaps project management is the way I ought to be going. You know, what skills, what characteristics do they need, what personality traits do they need?

Rob: I think well, you need to be able to plan. Um, you know, planning is very very important. If you plan well, then your project will usually go well.

Paul: I like the cornification in that.

Rob: You have to be able to predict the future is helpful.

Paul: Yes.

Rob: A major part of what we de in the planning stages is assessing risk. You know, so, we’ve got what we’re starting with, we’ve got what we want to achieve, and we’ve got a time scale, now we need to work out what things might appear that are unforeseen, which are going to affect us reaching the time scale. So being able to foresee the future is helpful. Um, and so planning, being quite analytical and thorough. The logical background I have from being a programmer, a developer, is really helpful because you have to approach project management in a very analytical way, to make sure you don’t miss things. So there’s that side of it. And then there’s communication skills. You not only need to be able to communicate with a client affectively so they show that you understand what they want, um, and they understand where you are with the project, and they’re happy because a happy client makes everyone happy. But you also then need to communicate that with the various personalities in your team. You know, whether thats the developers locked up in a dark room with no social skills, or the crazy charismatic designers who…

Paul: You’ve just gone with stereotypes that so don’t apply. If I look at our team, no offense to our designers, they’re the ones that sit in the darkened room with their nose right pressed against the screen. And the developers are the ones that are crazy and never do any work.

Rob: (unintelligible) something about reading personalities. No, but you see my point. You’ve got these almost extremes, especially in the web, I guess, in the web world, you’ve got these extremes of personailities which somehow you need to be able to communicate with and put it all together and so, yeah, that’s an important skill. I think the third area, is to be quite relaxed about life. Because things will go wrong and do go wrong, it doesn’t matter how well you plan and how good you are at predicting the future. Stuff will appear that is completely unforeseen and will completely throw (unintelligible). And everyone gets really upset and people will shout at you and it goes a bit nuts. Um, and if you go nuts as well, you project team falls apart, because they look at you as the calm rudder in the storms of life. I can feel my other project manager buddies laughing at me, um, but if you’re calm and you can not get stressed at that but actually see, try and find a clear path through a very stressful situation, then really helps.

Paul: I would so be the worst project manager in the world. I’ve got the attention span of a newt, I’ve got no organisational abilities and I get stressed at everything. So overall, I think I’d fail.

Rob: Yeah, stick to web celeb.

Paul: Yes, I’ll come up with some other title that sounds good. Um, ok, so you talked about this really is, I can honestly say, a foreign area to me. Right? You talk about planning a project upfront. I’m not a planning person. Right? And there seems to be so many variables involved in a project and so much as you say, that can potentially go wrong. How do you plan it? I mean, you know, the kind of thing that you always talk about, when you talk about project management is endless gantt charts that seem to be outdated in about 5 minutes, sort of kicking a project off. How to you effectively plan a project?

Rob: Um, well, we do use a gantt. We always start a project with a gantt. And, um because it seems like thats what project managers are supposed to do, so we justify the time with a gantt. Um, but you do need, um, I think assessing risk is something that is vital in successful project management. Its something that we’ve been doing at Headscape, um, increasingly more over the last year or so otherwise this need to actually spend time highlighting what could actually go wrong here. So, you look at, I’m not going to be able to think of any examples now, but a particular, let’s say you building a shop or something. So potential things which could delay that project would be: the client not getting around to telling you what the products are on the shelf and content population is a big risk on meeting a project deadline, because it is out of your control. So, its like, I need the content by this date, and he needs to put the content in by X date. If the client doesn’t do it, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Paul: I’m guessing integration must always be a big risk. Integrating with third party applications.

Rob: Exactly, so if you’ve got some sort of third party database or a web service you’ve got to pull in, something that you’ve done a bit before, but you don’t know anything about, that’s a risk. Because you can guesstimate what’s going to happen, but its unforeseen. And so, the trick is basically, to find all the tasks that have these risks and then multiply (unintelligible) an hour by some random number. And then make the rest up as you go along.

Paul: So what about once the project gets going, how, what techniques and tools maybe do you use for monitoring and controlling the process and trying to keep on top of everything.

Rob: Yeah, I mean, there are lots of tools out there, obviously, lots of funky web-based ones, um, there is no substitute for talking to you team. Um, trying to (unintelligible) email or basecamp or something is impossibly without talking to you team. So, communicate. It’s a big part of what we do. You have to talk to the people doing the work, you have to talk to the clients, um you have to keep the lines of communication open. Um, but as far as actually keeping track of what’s going on, we do use basecamp, um which is great for managing lists, basically, you manage lists. So from our gantt shell, we’ll break it up into a series of tasks if you like, wide areas, um, and then, (unintelligible) ask people to add comments to them and take them off and then we’ve got kind of an overview of where our project is. Um, and hopefully from there, and when we’ve got the gant shell, we’ve got some dates, some milestones and reminders like you should have done this by then, um and so, you use that to kind of keep track of where you are.

Paul: Cool. What about, so that’s kind of dealing with the internal side of things. What about when it comes to the client, I mean, you talked about, you said earlier, a happy client makes everybody happy kind of thing. So what makes a client happy? What are the things that really, or perhaps turn it around the other way, what are the things that really piss of a client and where can it really go wrong?

Rob: This is really where the people side of it really comes in because every client is different. Some clients want you to talk to them for five hours a day, hold their hand, you know, spoon feed them, and some clients just want to know when it’s finished. So initially, when you’re kind of trying to assess your project team, if you like, your resources and what you’ve got, assessing the personality of your client early on, will really put you in a good place. Um, but, I guess, general principles, if you’re honest, it helps. Um, so, be realistic about what you’re telling your client is going to happen. Don’t promise the Earth by yesterday. Because then you won’t deliver and then they’ll get upset. If there’s going to be a problem, if things have slipped for some unknown reason, then tell them as soon as you know. Tell them as quickly as you possibly can. Um, manage their expectations is kind of the phrase that we use a lot. You gotta manage you clients expectations so that they’re not expecting something that you can’t deliver. And um, and then that limits the amount of upsetness that they get.

Paul: Slippage is a big one, isn’t it? This kinda whole area of things like, you know problems you kinda face, things, like slippage, scope creep, non-delivery, I mean, how do you have any kind of broad techniques for dealing with these kinds of things, or is it just kinda communications thing again.

Rob: It’s mainly I think a communication thing again. Um, part of the planning stage is trying to asses these risks and so you try and build in contingency to cope with those, and if you’re building enough contingency, you deliver the project early and that makes everyone really happy, even if its a long project, you deliver it early, you’ve exceeded their expectation also. Um, so I think, if somethings going to slip, I think you should say you’ve got to be honest. Sometimes things are just out of your control, so you’re two weeks before the end of a project, you in the middle of snagging, your lead developer goes down with appendicitis. There’s nothing you can do about that, and so you just need to communicate with the client and hope they take it well.

Paul: So wishing everything works out, I’m loving that approach. Ok, so, um, let’s finish of with a piece of generic advice. Either people starting out in project management or those that have had project management foisted upon them. You know, whats the kind of one piece of advice that you would leave for people?

Rob: Get to know your team. I think that’s the main thing I would say. Um, its kind of like, when you drive you car, you’re environment is a very organic, dynamic thing, you know what it really what’s going to happen and the only thing you’ve got to get you through it is that you understand you car. You know almost instinctively how it works, how to drive it it, if you get to that situation with your team, then whatever the project throws at you, you kind of, you can deal with it. If you understand how you client is going to react to a certain situtation, you can intincfully deal with it. And it keeps the stress levels low. You need to find ways of managing your stress levels.

Paul: There you go, that’s great advice. Thank you vert much for that, it was wonderful. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Rob: My pleasure.

Thanks goes to Meredith Marsh for transcibing this interview.

Feature: Home Working

I was recently contacted by a friend of mine Marieke Guy about writing a guest post for her blog on remote working.

I have been working at home for over 7 years now and am a great believer in the benefits. However when I actually sat down to write the post, I realised just how long it has taken me to find the right way of working.

As a large number of people who listen to this podcast work from home, I thought I would share my experiences to date and my hopes of where remote working will take me in the future.

The reality of home working

7 Harsh Truths about running online communities

Posted in Site content on February 23, 2009 by Paul Boag

In ‘10 harsh truths about corporate websites‘ I highlighted some of the problems I perceive in how companies run their websites. However, many organisations are not content to simply run a website, they want to run an online community too.

Don’t get me wrong, I am excited to see organisations embracing the idea of community. I have been involved in running virtuals communities since 1996 and in 2004 I wrote about the business benefits of community. To this day I encourage Headscape’s clients to build relationships with their users.

A well run community can…

Drive traffic to your site
Generate a passionate, evangelistic users
Encourage repeat traffic
Help develop your products and services
Save you money

This is not a ‘rant’ against community, or even corporations running communities. It is an argument against the way they sometimes choose to do so. I continually see the same mistakes being made by organisations. It is time that they faced the harsh realities of running an online community.

1. Technology does not create community

When clients ask for help to build a community, they almost always talk in terms of technology. “We want to add a forum to our site” or “can you create a profile system”.

In ‘10 harsh truths about corporate websites‘ I write about how a CMS will not solve your content problems. In the same way a forum will not create a community.

Vanilla Website

Community is about people and relationships, not technology. The technology is the easy part. You can have a forum like Vanilla up and running in minutes, but it will take months of hard work to build a vibrant community.

If you implement the technology and just sit back then your community will fail. The technology merely allows you to engage with your community in the same way as a telephone lets you talk to your friends. It is a tool and nothing more.

2. Show some commitment

I have already said that building a community takes time, but it also takes commitment.

Too many website owners start communities only to give up when they do not see fast results. A community can take months to get off the ground and years before it shows real returns.

It also takes ongoing input. To make your community successful it must be nurtured on a daily basis. When a user posts, you need to replying promptly. Until your community is well established it will need monitoring multiple times a day.

You also need to demonstrate commitment to the individuals that make up your community. You need to take on board their input, address their concerns and encourage their contributions. You need to show you care.

3. Learn how to lead

As well as caring for your users, you also need to know how to lead them.

This is not leadership in the ‘managerial’ sense. These people are not obligated to listen to you or do what you say. You need to inspire, excite and encourage them.

Running a community requires you to be more like a politician or preacher than a manager. You need to mobilise people around a common cause and stamp your personality on the community.

Unfortunately there are few course that teach these kinds of skills. However, I would encourage you to look at great leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and even Barak Obama for inspiration. These men can teach you a lot about engaging with people and encourage others to follow your direction.

Photograph of Barak Obama

4. An antisocial community is your fault

As the leader of your community, your personality sets the tone. As a result if the community behaves in ways you do not want, then you only have yourself to blame.

I have seen many bloggers write about the negative comments they get on their posts. In most cases this is due to the tone they themselves strike in their writing. Although there are exceptions I believe that users will respond in the same voice you yourself set. If you are irreverent, then so will your users be. If you are rude, expect rude responses.

A good example of this is the social news website digg.com. Digg has developed a reputation for its ‘harsh and juvenile’ comments. I believe this comes from the leadership of founder Kevin Rose in his associated podcast Diggnation. This irreverent, comically and highly entertaining podcast has set a tone that has been carried across by users into the comments.

Diggnation Homepage

This is not a criticism of diggnation. Digg.com has become very successful because of their passionate community. It is merely an observation that you reap what you sow.

5. You need to swallow your pride

Another aspect to leading a community is the need to learn humility. No matter how well you run your community, you will mess up. When you do, how you respond is of crucial importance.

Because of the ‘distance’ that the web affords, people are often more critical than they would be face to face. Feelings are overstated and there is an inability to read the non-verbal signals we normally rely upon. This can often lead to confrontation and disagreement.

I have seen communities fail because the organisation alienated its community by responding badly to criticism.

If you want to run a successful community you must swallow your pride and never respond defensively to criticism. Instead acknowledge the comments and thank people for their honesty. Ask others what they think and hopefully they will come to your defence. If not, then you must seriously consider whether the criticism is valid. If it is then you need to admit your mistake and correct it.

By admitting you are wrong, it is possible to heal a relationship with your community and actually leave them even more enthusiastic about your brand than before.

flickr blog post - Sometimes we suck

6. Stop trying to control the message

If you work in marketing some of these points may make you feel uncomfortable. It feels messy and you do not have control over your message. Unfortunately that is the reality of community.

Community is not marketing in the traditional sense. It is not a broadcast medium, it is a dialogue with your users. Failing to grasp that will rip the heart from your community and force it underground.

I have seen unsuspecting companies experience a terrible backlash from a community simply fed up with being sold at rather than listened to. Users do not want a sales pitch or a feature list. They want the opportunity to feedback and a chance to help shape the future of the product or service they use.

Another tactic for controlling the message is to moderate. In extreme cases I have seen organisations moderate every single user contribution that appears on their site. However, I have also seen companies quietly remove negative comments made about their products and services. This is enormously counter productive because people feel censored and will go elsewhere to express their feelings.

That is the trouble with community, you simply cannot control it. If you do not allow it to flourish on your site and engage with it there, then it will pop up elsewhere where you have no control over what is written.

Adobe complaints on Get Satisfaction

7. Nobody likes to be alone

The final harsh truth I want to raise is that “users don’t want to be alone”. Too many organisations launch a forum with a plethora of topics and discussion areas only to have it lay dormant and unused. The reason – it appears empty, so what is the point of posting.

Before you can even consider adding community features to your site you need a critical mass of users that want to get involved. A lot of companies add community features not because users are asking for them but because management wants it. Communities like that rarely succeed.

Also there is a tendency to go straight for a forum. However, a forum requires a substantial number of users to work. Contributions can often become buried in some thread or topic and remain unanswered because it is never seen. If your community is small you may be better starting with comments, reviews or a mailing list. User contributions are much more likely to be noticed using these tools.

Finally, make sure you are seeding the discussion through new topics of your own. Asking lots of questions is a great way to stimulate discussion and prevent people from feeling like the only kid at the party.

Conclusions

After reading this you might feel that running a community is too much like hard work. You may decide not bother at all. However, that would be a mistake.

The ultimate harsh truth is that your users will be talking about your website, services and products, whether you want them to or not. The only question is whether you want to engage in that discussion.

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)

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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

Why speculative design is wrong

Posted in Design on February 6, 2009 by Paul Boag

Many web design agencies are refusing to do unpaid design work before a contract is signed. This is not because it is damaging to them. It is because they believe it is damaging to their clients. But why?

On the surface asking a web design agency to produce some design concepts before you sign on the dotted line appears to be a good idea. After all, it allows you to assess the quality of their design work and see whether they have understood your brief.

However, if you scratch the surface of this once common practice, you quickly expose the flaws. Here are just five…

1. It costs everybody money

In order to remain in business every company needs to recover their cost of sale. This includes web designers. As speculative work is part of the sales process, they ultimately have to charge you for it. The web designer is forced to roll the cost of that work into the project if they win.

However, it is worse than that. The web designer also has to recover the cost of speculative design done for jobs he did not win. This means that if you choose to work with an agency that produces speculative design, you are paying for their failed sales pitches! Why should you be paying for other people’s design work?

2. It is about selling not delivering

As somebody who used to produce speculative designs for years, I can tell you that doing this type of design work is not about delivering a solution the client actually needs.

Speculative design is about impressing the client and creating the ‘wow factor’. The target audience is the client and not the end user.

Being a good web designer is about encouraging the client to make tough choices. A good designer will challenge your preconceptions and suggest better ways of meeting your business aims. However, they are not going to take that risk in the sales process. They will play safe, showing you what you want to see, rather than telling you what you need to hear.

The danger is that if you then hire this company the speculative design is adopted for your site. Ultimately you end up with a solution that fails to meet your businesses needs.

3. It is wasteful

Even worse than actually using a piece of speculative design is throwing it away. I have worked on many projects where the design work created as part of the sales process is discarded on project commencement.

What was the point of producing a piece of design only to discard it? Because ultimately you (the client) are paying for the design it is absurd that you would then choose not to use it.

Of course the reason you discard it, is because it is not fit for purpose. Not only was the design was created to sell, it is also largely uninformed.

4. It is uninformed

No matter how good the brief you distribute to agencies, they are still not going to have all the facts.

Good design comes from being well informed. The designer needs to understand business objectives, success criteria, brand personality, competition and numerous other factors in order to provide the right solution.

Most of all the design needs to emerge from an understanding of your users. Until the designer can interact and empathise with your users, he can produce nothing more than a superficial solution.

5. It ignores the collaborative nature of design

Finally speculative design ignores the collaborative nature of the design process. Good design is not just about a designer having a moment of inspiration and producing a master piece. Design is not the same thing as art.

Design is a collaborative process between the designer and the client. The designer may have the expertise in design aesthetics and usability, but the client knows their business and target audience.

If the designer works in isolation he cannot hope to produce a rounded design. Without mood boards, sketches and initial concepts there is no dialogue between client and designer. The design will only tell half the story.

Example Mood board

To request speculative design is to deny your own importance in the process.

The alternatives

So where does that leave you? If you should not ask for speculative design, how then can you assess the design skills of agencies?

The answer obviously lies in their portfolios. However, in my opinion it is about more than just looking at ‘pretty pictures’. In order to know whether a design has been successful you need background information.

I recommend that where a portfolio piece is relevant to your sector or project, you request the contact information of the client. This provides you with the opportunity to speak to that client and find out how well the design fulfils their business objectives.

Speaking to the client also gives you the opportunity to find out more about the designers. Did they understand the brief? Did they provide positive suggestions? Did they deal with criticism well? Were they flexible and understanding of broader objectives?

Ultimately there is far more to be learned by talking to existing clients than requesting speculative design.

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.

Tips for a transformed twitter

Posted in Marketing on February 3, 2009 by Paul Boag

Paul Carter from New York writes:

Paul, I notice that you have been lamenting a lot on twitter about it becoming a marketing tool. Is that really wrong? Shouldn’t we be embracing and using it?

I sent my first twitter in November of 2006, only 7 months after the services launch. For me it was a way to keep in touch with new friends I had made at the Refresh 06 conference. It was less intrusive than instant messaging and less formal than email. I quickly became hooked.

For the longest time it was the tool of geeks. My friends laughed at me as I sent tweets from the pub, my family stared blankly as I explained the service. However, that has all changed now.

Like Facebook before it Twitter is everywhere at the moment. It was even recently discussed by Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross on the BBC in front of 4 million viewers. It has become mainstream and increasingly it is being used as a marketing tool. There is no going back.

However, Paul is right. I am wrong to lament what Twitter once was and should embrace it as a tool I can use. Nevertheless like everybody, I need to be careful how I use it. I do not believe Twitter users will allow the tool to be reduced to a broadcast mechanism for pimping the latest blog post or special offer.

So how am I choosing to use Twitter?

I guess the first thing to say is that I am not a Twitter success story. Sure I have nearly 4000 people following me but that pale into insignificance when compared to others. That said, Twitter is turning into a third string of my online presence, alongside this blog and podcast.

With that in mind let me share with you a few tips that have helped me better utilise this interesting new tool.

1. Above all, keep it personal

Although twitterers like CNN breaking news have been very successful, generally I feel corporate twitter accounts are a mistake.

In my opinion twitter is about person to person communication and not a broadcast tool for faceless corporations. To use it in that way is to miss the potential of twitter.

Does that mean you cannot have a twitter account for your organisation? Not at all. For example if Vitaly Friedman created a twitter account you might not recognise the name. However, if he used the name SmashingMag you are more likely to follow because you know the Smashing Magazine website.

It is not the name that matters so much as the tone of posts. In my opinion your tweets should be more than an endless string of press releases and links. It should include personal content and a dialogue with followers.

This is important because it enables you to make a connection with your users. An open and honest relationship with users is very powerful. It builds trust, loyalty and engagement. It encourages repeat traffic and word of mouth recommendation.

2. Learn from others

I have learnt a lot about Twittering just by reading the tweets of those I admire. Merlin Mann for example injects a lot of humour into his posts and his followers really respond to that. Darren Rowse on the other hand strikes a good place between recommending content others have written with promoting his own posts.

As well as examining the style of others you can also examine statistics. Use a tool like TweetStats.com to examine how often others tweet and how often they reply to their followers. All of this helps to build up a picture of what makes a successful twitterer.

There are also a growing number of great sites which give advice on how to get the most out of twitter. One of my personal favourites is TwiTip that covers subjects such as “The Merit of Twitter Competitions” and “How To Get Unfollowed On Twitter“.

3. Get a good desktop client

Without a shadow of doubt the most powerful twitter client currently available is TweetDeck. This air application not only runs on Windows, Mac and Lynx but also provides a range of superb tools for managing your life on Twitter.

With TweetDeck you can create groups, filter tweets, monitor certain subjects as well as tweet, reply and retweet posts.

In fact it is so powerful that it can be somewhat intimidating at first. Don’t let that put you off. Check out this short tutorial into TweetDeck’s core features and you will be up and running in no time.

4. Use twitter on the road

If your twitter account is going to be personal as well as professional then you will almost certainly want to use it on the road. One option is to simply use Twitters mobile website. However if you are fortunate enough to have an iPhone then there is a wealth of Twitter clients available to you.

I think I have paid for and tried almost every twitter client on the Iphone, but the winner hands down is Tweetie.

I love Tweetie. It has a clean, easy to use interface, and yet is packed with powerful features including the ability to:

Handle multiple twitter accounts.
Navigate reply chains.
View twitter trends and perform custom searches.
Access complete user profiles.

In many ways it is even better than TweetDeck because it has much of TweetDeck’s power, but in a much cleaner interface. If only they did a desktop application!

5. Tracking the results

Although I have already mentioned TweetStats, that is just the tip of the statistical iceberg.

There are an ever growing number of tools you can use to track your activity on twitter. However, the ones that really interest me are those that track click throughs. What I really want to know is if I mention a link in twitter, how many people click through.

If the link is one on my own sites I could use Google Analytics using their URL tagging tool. However, this is somewhat fiddly and only applies if I am linking to my own site. What is more these URLs can get long, which is a problem when limited to 140 characters.

Fortunately there is a tool called TwitterBurner which solves these problems. It shortens the URL and tracks all click throughs even to sites you do not run yourself. Best of all it is now supported from directly within TweetDeck (although not Tweetie unfortunately).

6. Follow as well as be followed

Always remember that Twitter is a two way conversation. A big part of successful twittering is about replying to those who tweet you.

Twitter is also not just about who follows you. It is also about who you follow. One service that I find particularly useful is Mr Tweet.

Mr Tweet will provides two type of information.

First it suggests people you might want to consider following because they fall within your broad network (people who are followed by your friends).
Second it suggests those from your list of followers who you should follow back.

For each of these people it provides various stats including:

The number of followers they have
The chance of them replying to you
How often they update

This is a great way of extending your network of contacts and potentially increasing the chance of your tweets being retweeted. Its also a great way of meeting new people!

7. Integrate whenever possible

If you are intending to use Twitter for anything other than personal use it needs to be incorporated into the rest of your web strategy. That means it needs to linkup with your other online activity including your website and other social networks.

There are no shortage of tools that help you do this from the basic twitter widget to a tool for sending your tweets to facebook.

One tool that particularly caught my attention is called TwitterFeed. It posts content from an RSS feed to Twitter which is a useful way of updating your followers about new posts.

However, use any tool that automatically posts to Twitter with caution. It can easily become annoying if used too much. Also it lacks the friendliness of a personal post.

8. Don’t over think it

Of course the problem with all these tools, statistics and analysis is that it can suck the spontaneity and personality from your tweets.

Although some of those late night drunken tweets are best gone, you want to avoid your tweets becoming too sterile.

Let me explain what I mean. I am naturally a fairly good public speaker. However, once I was sent to a public speaking workshop. They taught me all the techniques you should use to be exceptional. However, instead of it improving my skills it made me so amazingly self conscious that I was paralysed. I was over analysing what I was doing.

The danger is we do the same with Twitter. Sure, Twitter can be used as a marketing tool but that doesn’t mean it cannot be fun too. Don’t let articles like this suck the joy out of twittering!

An interview with Freelancer Magazine

Posted in News on August 2, 2008 by Paul Boag

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

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

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

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

Absolutely!

So how are you enjoying your vacation in Scotland?

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

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

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

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

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

Any future plans for video podcasting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

125. Copy

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

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

Podcast: Download (30.4MB)

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News and Events

The clever chaps at Carsonified

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

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

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

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

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

Adobe make flash searchable

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

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

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

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

Colour blindness on the web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feature: Copy with Personality

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

Interview: Elliot Jay Stocks on Going Freelance

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

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

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

Elliot: Thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: That would be superb.

Elliot: Yeah.

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

Elliot: And they’re a rival podcast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Selling yourself in the nicest way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elliot: They are aren’t they.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elliot: Yes that would be a good test.

Paul: It would be.

Elliot: Something to aim towards perhaps?

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

Thanks to Curtis McHale for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

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

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

Let me address each in turn.

The .mobi domain name

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

Size – Mobile devices have smaller screens than a PC. No matter how clever the mobile browser is a considerable amount of zooming and panning will be required to view a conventional website.

Controls – Not all mobile devices come with a QWERTY keyboard and none come with a traditional mouse. This can create problems on some sites, especially those with mouse over effects.

Context – Probably the biggest reason for creating a mobile version of a site is context. Mobile devices are not used sitting at a desk. They are normally used on the go. This affects the type of information being requested as well as the level of concentration being given to the task. When it comes to the mobile web context is king.

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming a WordPress specialist

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

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

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

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

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

Copy with personality

Posted in Site content on July 4, 2008 by Paul Boag

Too much of the copy I read on websites is bland and uninspiring. Its time to add some personality.

If your website was a person what type of person would it be? Is it young idealistic and carefree or a portly middle aged business man that likes to play golf on the weekend?

The chances are it is neither. In fact it probably has no personality at all. It may have pretty graphics which set a tone, but it is the copy that should add the character.

Unfortunately most online copy is a mixture of various styles and tone. Website owners simply do not consider what personality their copy is communicating.

However, copy doesn’t need to be this way. Let’s look at three examples of great writing.

Lynx shower gel

Photograph of Lynx shower gel

For my shame I buy Lynx shower gel. This is surprising because their product is aimed at teenage men (something I have long since stopped being). The copy on their bottles reflects their audience and definitely communicates a very strong personality; that of an oversexed young guy desperate to get laid…

Want skin she can’t wait to get her hands on? Lynx Smoothing Shower Scrub with cactus milk exfoliates and energises your skin to keep her coming back for more.

I particularly like the way they refers to ‘cactus milk’ rather than Aloe Vera. Aloe Vera is mentioned a lot in women’s beauty products and that is not at all appropriate for this image conscious male audience.

I want one of those

I want one of those is a website that sells a variety of gadgets and gizmos. It is trying to project a fun, light-hearted persona full of ideas and great things to do. Its copy reflects that.

Waboba Ball

Take for example the Waboba Ball that they sell. Basically it is a plastic ball you throw around in the sea. There is very little to say about it but that doesn’t put off the copy writers on this site…

Named after the rare and sacred Waboba goat found only in the high Annapurna (not sure there’s a low one), this ball, whilst devoid of hooves, hair, horns and questionable eating habits, is just like a goat, and even bounces on water just like a goat does. Hmmm. Perhaps it isn’t named after the goat after all, we just looked up goats and it seems that they tend not to bounce on water, or anything else come to that. The Waboba Ball however miraculously does bounce, a lot. This brilliant invention is what larking about in water was invented for. Forget lobbing plastic discs at each other in the pool or at the beach, this hackey-sack sized little monster bounces off the water like you wouldn’t believe.

Genius. What it lacks in real selling points it makes up for in character.

Innocent Smoothies

Package shot of innocent smoothies

Innocent are masters of good copy. Their packaging is a work of art from the “stop looking at my bottom” message on the bottom of their bottles to the “enjoy by” notice rather than the normal “Use by”. Their website too has some gems of good copy that simply oozes personality…

We were wondering if you’d like to join the innocent family. Don’t worry – it’s not some weird cult. It’s just our way of staying in touch with the people who drink our drinks i.e. you. Every week we’ll email you our news and give you the chance to win lots of drinks. We’ll also invite you to nice events like the innocent village fete and maybe send you the odd present if you’re lucky. Finally, we’ll very occasionally ask you what you reckon we should do next, as we sometimes get confused.

Its self deprecating, its friendly and most importantly it draws you in, pursuing you to keep reading.

So what about your site? Admittedly the above examples are all fairly light hearted and friendly. Not all websites want to communicate this type of personality. However, all organisations should demonstrate some kind of personality through its copy. Its time to decide what that personality is.

The plight of the in-house designer

Posted in Web strategy on June 19, 2008 by Paul Boag

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

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

1. Coding with others in mind

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

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

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

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

2. Seeking out like minded people

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

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

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

3. A demonstration speaks a thousand words

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

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

4. Impose some structure

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

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

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

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

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

5. Encourage internal charging

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

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

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

6. Be the authority

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

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

7. Exude confidence, personality and enthusiasm

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

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

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

8. Broadcast your successes

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

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

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

9. Understand the politics

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

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

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

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

10. Stick to the facts

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

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

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

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

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

109. Rissington?

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

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

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News and events | Anton Peck on imagery | Listener emails

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

News and events

Microsoft to automatically roll out IE7

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

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

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

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

IE8 divides the standards community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HTML 5 is coming

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

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

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

Career advice for web designers

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

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

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

Advice includes…

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

The list goes on and is definitely worth reading.

Expert interview: Anton Peck on imagery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anton Peck: A little bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: So do you use PNG’s very much?

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

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

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

Paul: Yes, exactly.

Anton Peck: That’s a whole other discussion.

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

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

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

Anton Peck: Definitely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anton Peck: It’s Crestock.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Yeah, couldn’t agree more.

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

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

Anton Peck: Certainly.

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

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

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

Anton Peck: Exactly what I was thinking, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anton Peck: .co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anton Peck: Absolutely.

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

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

Paul: Yeah, go for it.

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

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

Listeners email:

Textmate reviewed

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

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

Javascript or JQuery

The second listener contribution comes from Will who writes…

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

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

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

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

104. Give us your money

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

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

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

Housekeeping

All change

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

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

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

Christmas giving

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

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

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

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

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

Give to the Boagworld Christmas Appeal

News and events

24 ways is back

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

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

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

Tips for development and design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What tips do you have for getting designs signed off?

Show 97: FoWA

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

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

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

About 100th episode

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

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

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

News and events

Gossip from FoWA

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

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

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

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

The average website visitor

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

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

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

Getting started with Photoshop

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

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

Waking the sleepers

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

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

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

Marcus’ bit: Extracting the budget from clients

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

Paul’s corner: Avoiding design by committee

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

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

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

Dan Cederholm: Hello Paul!

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

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

Paul: Just go with the flow, its fine.

Dan Cederholm: I will. (laughs some more)

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

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

Paul: Okay

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

Paul: Depends on what then? (Paul laughs)

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

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

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

Paul: Sure.

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

Paul: Mmm Hmm

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

Paul: Right

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

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

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Mmm Hmm.

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

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

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

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

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

Paul: Right.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

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

Dan Cederholm: Right, exactly.

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

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

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

Paul: Yeah, I do too.

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

Paul: Ok so what…

Dan Cederholm: Having that control is important.

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

Dan Cederholm: Right.

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

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

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

Dan Cederholm: Oh, right.

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

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

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

Paul: There’s no perfect solution here.

Dan Cederholm: Yeah, there really isn’t.

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

Paul: Bleh!

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

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

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

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

Question of the week

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

Advice for CMS users

Posted in Accessibility, Site content on May 23, 2007 by Paul Boag

I have been putting together a document for work that provides some basic advice for people who work with content management systems. It covers things like accessibility and writing for the web.

Introduction

Although content management systems enable anybody to publish content to the web, they do not guarantee the quality of what is published. Many content managed websites are hard to use, inaccessible and poorly structured not because of any failure in the design or technology but simply because the quality of content is poor.

This document aims to introduce the reader to good practice for generating web content. In particular it focuses on advice about writing for the web and ensuring that what is produced is accessible to the widest audience possible.

Writing for the web

Writing great web content is a particular skill. Although it shares some characteristics with writing for other medium, there are many unique elements too.

Two traits make writing for the web, particularly challenging. Firstly is the perception that most people have that computers are being cold and impersonal. Many see technology as the enemy and so a good copywriter has to work hard to ensure their copy has a friendly and approachable tone.

Second is the fact that users rarely read pages in their entirety, but rather scan read. The emphasis is on looking for the next link that will take them one step closer to their goal.

Below we investigate these two challenges in more depth and suggest some possible solutions.

Writing style

Well-written copy should be both engaging and accessible. In other words it should overcome people’s inherent suspicion of technology and ensure that, as wide an audience as possible understand what is written.

Engaging with the user

Computers are immensely unfriendly. This is mainly due to their total inability to interpret or communicate the more subtle forms of human communication such as body language and tone of voice.

The result is that most people find interacting with a computer a cold and frustrating experience. However, there are techniques you can use to avoid the problem. These include:

Using a personal tone

By ensuring that your copy is friendly, informal and approachable, you help to counteract the inherent lack of personality associated with computers and the web. Even on a relatively formal site add more informality than you normally would in order to offset the users default perception.

Writing how you speak

If you are experienced in writing more formal offline documentation, writing in a more informal manner can be difficult. Although there is no one catchall solution to this, writing as you speak will certainly aid comprehension and generate a more informal feel.

Avoid being patronizing

The danger of writing in a more informal tone is that you overcompensate and your writing style becomes ‘chummy’ and patronizing. The writing as you speak rule comes in useful here. Picture your audience and ask yourself whether you would speak to them like that in a face-to-face meeting.

Making your copy clear

The W3C accessibility guidelines clearly state:

Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.

In other words ensure that your reader can understand what you have written.

Many people make huge assumptions about what their audience understands and careful consideration needs to be put into this subject. Particular assumptions are made in regards to:

Jargon

A common pitfall is the use of abbreviations and acronyms within web copy. The assumption is that your target audience will already be aware of the jargon used. However, this is an entirely false assumption.

You cannot always assume that your audience will be aware of every acronym around. For example there are so many acronyms within web design that it would be impossible for one individual to know them all.

Secondly, the reader maybe relative new to your target audience and so still learning much of the ‘lingo’.

When writing copy ensure that whenever possible jargon is avoided and where that is not possible that it is accompanied by an explanation. We discuss acronyms and abbreviations further in the accessibility section.

Reading level

There are reasons why tabloid newspapers like the Sun sell so well. One of those reasons is because they require such a low reading level. As many as 40% of the population have a low literacy level and yet little consideration is given to their accessibility needs.

Even when writing for a well-educated audience you cannot make assumptions about their reading level. Many people suffer from attention deficit disorder, dyslexia or other conditions that could affect their ability to process what you have written.

Below is some advice on how you might go about improving comprehension of your copy:

Simplify punctuation – People suffering from a low literacy levels struggle with long sentences that include a lot of complex punctuation. Keep your sentences short and your punctuation simple.
Be consistent – There is often a desire when writing copy to vary your language to prevent a document appearing repetitive. Although this has its place it does make copy harder to comprehend. Where possible, use terms in a consistent manner across the whole site.
Use numbers not words – By simply referring to 1223 instead of ‘one thousand two hundred and twenty three’ you increase comprehension dramatically as well as shorten sentences and aid scanability.
Specify clear actions – If you wish a user to complete an action (for example to click on a button) clearly specify this. Do not assume the user will instinctively understand what is required of them.
Use imagery – The saying ‘an image speaks a thousand words’ is very true for low literacy users. If an image will help to convey the meaning of a page be sure to use it to support existing copy.

Although the techniques above are of particular benefit to low literacy users, they do actually offer benefits to all users. Ease to comprehend copy aids the speed at which information can be digested and helps users scan copy as we are going to look at next.

Making web pages easy to scan

It can be a depressing realization that users will probably not read your carefully crafted text. However, the sooner you accept this reality the sooner you can start to adapt copy to aid users in their hunt for information.

There are a number of techniques that can be used to help a user quickly scan through a page and identify the information they require:

Front loading

Front loading applies in two different contexts. Firstly, front-load the page by including a summary of the entire page right at the beginning of the document. This helps the user ascertain quickly whether the page is relevant to them or not. Secondly, front-load each individual paragraph so that the main point is first. Ideally a paragraph should only make a single point (see 2.2.2) but if it is longer then the user can get the gist by reading the first sentence.

Keep it short

Usability expert, Steve Krug recommends in his book “Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” that a copywriter should take his copy, edit it down to half its original length and then half it again. This sounds like an impossible task but it is often easier than it appears. By removing repetition, marketing speak, and ‘happy talk’ (content with no real substance like ‘welcome to this site’) you will quickly find your content substantially reduced.

Keep paragraphs short

As well as keeping the page as a whole sort, you should ensure individual paragraphs are short too. Each paragraph should make a single point as this aids both user scanning and comprehension.

Keep sentences short

At a micro level you should also endeavor to keep each individual sentence as short as possible. Again this aids scanability and comprehension but also helps to remove any unnecessary ‘waffle’.

Break your copy up

As well as breaking up copy into short sentences and paragraphs you can also aid scanability by using other techniques as well. Look at each paragraph and ask yourself the following:

Can I associate a heading or sub heading with this block of text?
Could this paragraph be reduced to an easy to scan bullet point list?
Is there a key message in this paragraph that users need to instantly see?

If the answer to the last question is yes, then you might wish to use a breakout box (also known as a pull out). This is a technique originally introduced in magazines to ‘hook the user’. They would take a key line from an article and highlight it in someway (usually in a separate box) to draw the reader into reading the rest of the article. The same technique can be used on a web page to draw a users attention to a key point that they maybe searching for.

Many good content management systems (including Headscape’s own CMS) provide this functionality.

Accessibility

We have already touched on the importance of accessibility when talking about writing clear copy, however accessibility extends beyond simply the copy you write.

As a content management system user, you are required to go beyond just writing the copy. You are also required to enter the copy into the system so that it can be displayed on the site. This requires you to ‘markup’ your copy correctly.

The importance of markup

So what exactly is markup? Markup is the method by which you tell the browser what the content you are entering is, so that the browser knows how to display it to the user. This markup is usually written as HTML.

So, if for example you want to tell the browser that something is a heading you would mark it up like this:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

or a paragraph would be marked up like this:

<p>This is a paragraph of text</p>

Of course, one of the main attractions of most content management systems is that you don’t have to know how to write HTML. Instead the content management system will add the code for you.

Historically content management systems didn’t even try to understand what any individual piece of content was. Instead they let you as the content management user, style the content to look however you wanted. So instead of telling the system that this is a heading you simply made it look big and bold so users of the site would know.

Although this sounds like a good approach in principle, it actually opens up a whole load of problems that are too extensive to cover here.

More modern content management systems, such as the ones deployed by Headscape, ask the user to explain what each piece of content is so that the system can add the proper HTML code.

The way the content management user does this is normally through a drop down menu of styles much like you find in Microsoft word. You simply select a block of text and choose the style which best describes that text.

Marking up content in this way brings a whole host of advantages including (but not limited to):

The ability to redesign how an individual style looks universally across the entire site without editing each page.
The ability to change the appearance of styles based on what device is accessing the content (for example a mobile device style).
The ability for screen readers and other assistive technologies to understand the site.

In short, a well marked up piece of content will be available to a much larger audience and is easier to change and adapt.

Text alternatives

Well marked up content is not the only way to improve the accessibility of your site. Another is to provide text alternatives for elements that some users will not be able to access.

The most common example of this is with the inclusion of images into your pages.

There are a number of reasons why a user may not be able to see the images on a page. These could range from viewing the page via a mobile device to the user suffering from some form of visual impairment. However, whatever the reason the solution is the same; add alternative text that describes the image.

Alternative text is only visible to users who cannot see the image and so does not impact the design in anyway. The method of adding alternative text will vary between content management systems but in most cases (including on the Headscape system) you will be asked to add some text when you try and insert an image. A good system will go as far as requiring alternative text before approving an image for insertion.

A common mistake that is made with alternative text is to use it as a caption for the image rather than a description of the image. The difference is subtle but important. An image of Marcus Lillington our sales director might read ‘Marcus Lillington is more than happy to speak to you about your requirements’. This would be a caption rather than alternative text. Alternative text should describe the image and nothing more. So in the case of our example it should read simply; ‘Photograph of Marcus Lillington – sales director’.

Finally it is worth saying that the principle of alternative text does not apply just to images. It should apply to any screen element that can only be understood visually. That includes Flash, video, audio or other plugin.

Meaningful links

Another common accessibility mistake is with link text. When a content management user creates a link between pages it is not uncommon to see links with phrases like ‘click here’ or ‘read more’. This presents a problem for two reasons:

Firstly, users who access the web using screen readers often have all links on a page read back as a list in order to save listening to every piece of text when all they want to do is find the next link. A link like ‘click here’ means nothing when read out of context.

Secondly, many users will scan a page looking specifically at the links. They don’t read the text before or after the link so again they see it out of context. The result is that, like screen reader users, terms like ‘read more’ mean nothing.

This problem is easily avoided by ensuring that all links make sense out of context. So instead of linking the words ‘click here’ in the sentence ‘click here for more news’ you simply link to the phase ‘more news’ or ‘news archive’.

Acronyms and abbreviations

Earlier we talked about how where possible jargon, acronyms and abbreviations should be avoided. However there are occasions where that is not possible.

In such situations your choices are very much dictated by the functionality provided by the CMS you are using. Unfortunately, many content management systems are not particularly helpful in this regard and you maybe limited to typing out a description in brackets each time.

However, more modern content management systems such as that provided by Headscape, allow you to select an abbreviation style. You can then enter the full description and this becomes available to the user without destroying the flow of your text.

This is achieved in a variety of ways but the most common is using a dotted underline. If a piece of text has been marked up as an acronym or abbreviation it will appear to the end user as text with a dotted underline. When the user moves her cursor over the text the cursor changes to a help symbol and displays the full description as a tooltip.

This provides a full description to users encountering a piece of jargon for the first time, without getting in the way of those who already know what it means.

Using tables correctly

Web design has changed a lot over the last few years and so have content management systems. One of the most significant changes has been a move away from table-based layout.

Table-based layout is a technique that uses tables to position content on a page. However this is an abuse of the table feature in HTML and can cause significant accessibility problems especially for users running on older PCs or using mobile devices.

We therefore strongly recommend that using tables for layout is avoided at all costs. Instead clearly markup the content using the descriptive styles provided. The system will do the formatting and positioning.

That said there is still a place for tables. Tables were originally intended for tabular data (data made up of columns and rows, like that found in a spreadsheet). If you have information like this you wish to include on a page, then this is when you should use a table.

Working with imagery

Although we have already spoken about imagery in the context of alternative text it is worth noting that there are other accessibility issues relating to imagery you should be aware of:

Animation

Animation can be a problem area if not handled correctly, so generally speaking it is better to avoid the use of animated imagery unless it helps explain the content in someway.

The main reason that animation can be problematic is because certain forms of cognitive disability can be made worse by flashing animation. It can prove distracting and make it harder to process the content being read.

If animation is to be used we recommend:

That the user is given the ability to disable the animation
That the animation is not too rapid so that it proves less distracting

Colour

Finally, it is worth noting that a considerable proportion of your users will suffer from some form of colour blindness. For example almost 1 in 10 men are colour blind. In addition it is possible that other users will be accessing your site through black and white monitors on mobile devices. It is therefore important to ensure that any imagery you use is not reliant on colour to communicate information and that there is sufficient contrast between foreground and background colours.

These two issues are addressed in the W3C guidelines on accessibility:

2.1 Ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color, for example from context or markup.

2.2 Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen.

Further information

Hopefully this document has been useful in outlining some of the basics of writing content for a website. However, we have obviously only been able to scratch the surface.

If you would like further information, please do not hesitate to contact Paul Boag (the author of this document) using [email protected].

The geeks gone soft

Posted in Working in web design on August 8, 2006 by Paul Boag

Today is my eighth wedding anniversary and so I have decided to take some liberties with this blog. After all, while most men say I love you with flowers or chocolates, a geek says it with a blog post.

Recently I was asked in an interview how I dealt with the stress of running my own web design company as well as podcasting, writing and keep on top of the latest innovations in web design. To be honest the question caught me somewhat off guard. My job is far from being the most stressful one in the world. but at times, it does get to me. Running your own business can take over and if you are not careful you can quickly find yourself "living to work" rather than "working to live". Fortunately, my family and in particular, Catherine my wife, prevents this from happening and ensures my stress levels remain under control!

Cath is so incredibly supportive of what I do and yet does not let it take over my life. If it was not for her constantly dragging me away from my laptop, I would be forever lost in a world of CSS code and website validation. She strikes a perfect balance between reminding me about what is important in life and accepting that sometimes I just have to work.

The last eight years have been awesome but it has been the last four (since we set up Headscape) that have proved just how incredible the woman I have married really is. Recently diggnation featured a story that explained why women should date a geek. It is a really funny article but also contains some nuggets of truth (at least for my marriage). One such nugget was:

Here’s the deal, sweet and simple: Your geek will worship the ground you walk on. He’ll be so happy that a pretty girl like you paid attention to him that he’ll be at your feet. He’ll adore you as if you were his queen.

And that’s exactly how I feel. Catherine is not only "pretty" in appearance but also in personality. I would be lost without her and I thank God everyday that she continues to pay me attention.

Getting to know your users

Posted in Marketing on August 5, 2005 by Paul Boag

No matter how dedicated you are to producing a user centric website it is all too easy to loose sight of your users needs. One way of keeping them front and centre is to give them a face and a name.

It is something the advertising industry realised years ago; it is easier to develop a campaign for a person with a name and a face than it is to develop for a theoretical demographic group. With that realisation persona sketching was born.

What is a persona?

Persona sketching is a fancy name for a simple idea (trust the advertising world to come up with a fancy name for it). Through a combination of imagination and good old fashion research, you endeavour to build up a picture of a typical user. A persona often covers things like:

Occupation
Gender
Age
Marital status
Hobbies
Web usage
Location

How to build a persona

Unsurprisingly, to build an accurate persona can be a time consuming and expensive process. However in web design where the budgets do not compare with the world of advertising there are ways of ensuring that your personas are as accurate as possible without breaking the bank. Some methods might include:

Speak to those within the organisation who have contact with end users
Talk to friends and family, see if you can find anybody who is a potential user
Look at the competition and try to find out what sort of face they put on their users
Talk to other stakeholders and get their perception of the end user

By combining these "rough and ready" techniques with a good dollop of imagination, you should be able to come up with something like this. Try to ensure that the personas you develop have a sense of real personality about them. Detail helps a persona feel more real and easier to associate with.

Depending on the size of your site and the breadth of your audience, you may end up developing a number of personas each one representing a different target audience.

Using your personas

Once you have all of your personas in place you can use them throughout the development process from design to final implementation. Think of them as a plumb line against which you measure all of the decisions you make. Continually ask yourself how Sara would feel about filling in this form or whether Paul will have the patience to wait for this to download.

How effective persona sketching is can be debated but I have found it a helpful tool in the past to focus the mind especially when a site has to appeal to a very wide demographic.