135. Libraries

Posted in Classic shows on September 17, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show we talk with John Resig on javaScript libraries and address the question what is more important when we release an app: speed or quality?

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News and events

The complexity tax

Don’t you hate it when somebody beats you to the punch? I recently finished writing a report for our biggest client (Wiltshire Farm Foods). It talks a lot about the need to simplify and remove complexity. It is a lesson we should all learn and so I am in the process of turning extracts from the report into a blog post which we will cover in next weeks show.

However, it would appear I have been too slow and that Gerry McGovern has beaten me to it with an excellent post on the cost of complexity. However, where I focus on why simplicity is important, he addresses the underlying causes of complexity.

For me his post is summed up in the following quote…

Most organizations are producing far too much content. Too many emails, too many PowerPoints, too many reports, too many webpages. All this content creation activity keeps a lot of people busy.

If you are part of a large organisation or work on a substantial website you need to read this post.

10 Rules for Driving Traffic Using Forums

What do you do if you have no marketing budget but have some free time to promote your site? Well, there are a number of guerilla marketing techniques you could use but contributing to forums is one of the most effective.

Sitepoint has posted an article explaining why forums are a great way of driving traffic to your site. It goes on to suggest 10 rules for doing so effectively. These include…

Build your profile
Follow the rules
Start by responding
Contribute your expertise
Don’t be a ‘me too’ poster
Don’t self promote
Explain yourself, but be brief
If you’re wrong, say so
Write intelligently and correctly
Negativity is a no-no

This is an excellent article and one that you should definitely read before using forums as a marketing tool. If you do not, you are in danger of damaging your brand, rather than driving traffic.

Accessibility in suit and tie

The life of the corporate web worker who cares about standards and accessibility can be a frustrating one; hampered by office politics and archaic content management systems. In an article on the Think Vitamin site, Bruce Lawson looks at what you can do to make sure your projects are as accessible for your users as possible.

Its a very pragmatic article, which I love. Bruce works from the premise that this is going to be tough and makes suggestions like "some accessibility is better than none". He also talks about the need for ‘buy-in from the top’ but goes on to provide practical tips about how to get that buy in. What is more, his arguments for accessibility were backed up with facts. For example…

Accessibility is good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Accessibility enhances usability for everyone. An April 2004 formal investigation into UK web accessibility (PDF) reported "all users, not just disabled people, would benefit greatly from the measures required to make sites accessible and usable by blind people".
Accessibility has many quantifiable business benefits (PDF). Legal and General, a British financial services company, redesigned its site with accessibility in mind and found:
- 40% traffic increase
- Doubled conversion rates
- Doubled online revenue
- 100% ROI in 5 months

Finally, he looks at how to get content providers onboard through education and getting them writing HTML rather than relying on the WYSIWYG editor.

UK Government Browser Guidelines

Our final story raises an interesting discussion; should you decide which browsers to support based on popularity or capability?

Apparently, the UK government believes we should test on the basis of popularity. In a draft document advising public sector websites, it suggests that if a browser appears in visitor logs as being below an arbitrary percentage of total “unique visitors”, then it should not be listed as being “fully supported”.

On the surface this appears very sensible. However, as Jon Hicks points out on his site, this can create problems. He writes…

It isn’t clear how the supported browser list would be enforced, but I’m concerned that this approach will encourage browser sniffing, a move that will exclude browsers like Omniweb, Shiira and iCab, simply because their name isn’t ‘Safari’. They share the exact same rendering engine, and therefore require no further testing. You can be more inclusive without spending any extra resources.

In other words we should be defining our list of supported browsers based on capability rather than popularity. This is the approach used by Yahoo! and it is one that I would fully support.

The Yahoo model supports all browsers through progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, without the need to test on every browser. Its a neat solution but one that the UK government guidelines specifically say they do not advocate…

These guidelines do not advocate specific development methodologies, for example graceful degradation or progressive enhancement. However, it is widely accepted that sites conforming to open web standards such as XHTML and CSS are more likely to work well across a wide range of browsers.

How come if they are widely accepted, do they not advocate them?

Fortunately there is an opportunity to change things before this is set in stone. I recommend reading the WaSP article on the recommendations and then sending some polite feedback to the powers that be.

Interview: John Resig on javaScript Libraries

Paul:Joining me today is John Resig, who is famous for jQuery and the work that he has been doing with jQuery. John, it is great to have you on the show.

John:Well, thanks for having me.

Paul:I have to say this at the beginning. I have to get this out of the way. I absolutely love working with jQuery, and it’s an absolute pleasure. I remember twittering just a few days ago that every time I start doing anything in jQuery it makes me smile, so that’s got to be a good sign.

John:Well that’s good. I’m glad to hear it.

Paul: What I wanted to do today is get you on the show and not just for me to suck up and say how great jQuery is, but to kind of look a little bit broader at the subject of JavaScript libraries. Because I have to say from a personal point of view my opinion has changed quite a lot about JavaScript libraries and I’m kind of interested in your perspective on things as somebody that’s actually created one. I think the place I want to start is for a long time I had the attitude that you shouldn’t use JavaScript or indeed any library and that you should know the underlying code yourself and all of this kind of thing. Let’s start with the question of how do you know if it’s appropriate to use a JavaScript library? When is it appropriate to use it? What’s your opinion on that?

John:Well, I guess my opinion is it’s always appropriate, and I mean the simple fact of the matter is that there’s two things. One is that when you’re developing, you’re trying to support, generally a large number of browsers simultaneously. This is the same as if you are doing CSS development, JavaScript development, you want to support a large enough market share and you want to make that development process easy. The problem is twofold that you’re going to be encountering weird browser bugs and the APIs, the different utilities the browsers provide, will be different. For example, Internet Explorer provides different ways of handling events from all the other browsers. So what libraries do is that they remove you away from dealing with browser bugs, which is huge. And at the same time they provide a simple interface that you can interact with that will just work ubiquitously.

Paul:Is there a problem there in the sense of, you know, somebody came along and they basically learned to write jQuery for example from scratch, but never learned the kind of underlying JavaScript? Is there a problem there, do people need to know JavaScript before they start using a library?

John:It depends on the library, but I don’t think you do. I don’t think you have to know JavaScript. In a lot of ways, at least in my experience with jQuery directly there’s a lot of people who have used jQuery who have never done any programming whatsoever. jQuery does embody a lot of advanced concepts but you don’t necessarily have to know them in order to make good use of jQuery. I know this sort of translates well into some of the other libraries but one point of concern you brought up was what if someone learns a library but doesn’t learn JavaScript? I used to be more concerned about that, if someone only knew a library and I guess from a purist perspective, that’s a bad thing. Fundamentally, you want people to be getting better at programming JavaScript, not this specific thing. However, I think the reality of it is, is that so many people are just using JavaScript or CSS or doing web design, they just want to get their job done. It’s not really a matter for them of becoming an excellent JavaScript programmer or awesome CSS user, you want to get from A to Z and finish their work in an effective manner that works everywhere. So I think it’s important to realize that this market, so to speak, exists. It’s a very large one. And that ignoring it completely will just leave users frustrated and going back to the simple cut and copy paste scripts that they used to use. So, I think what libraries are doing is they are instilling good standards, they are instilling good practices, even though the users don’t necessarily know about it. And then eventually what’s good is that since these libraries have these good practices that users can always open up a library and read about it and try to understand better what’s going on.

Paul:I guess that’s always been a little bit of my concern with relying heavily on a library is that if you come across something that’s a problem or a bug or something like that, you can’t fix it yourself because you don’t necessarily know your way around the library. What’s your response to people that say stuff like that?

John:Well by the same token if you encounter a problem with a browser you are far less capable of fixing that issue. There’s really no way about it other than that ultimately it would be good to have that knowledge, absolutely. I fully support people who want to do that and I’m writing a second book now encouraging people to do that, to dig into libraries, to learn more, to build their own. What’s important here is that you just don’t, you can’t force people to do it if they, one if they don’t want to or if they’re just not capable. There’s no reason I feel to force a designer, someone who’s a designer by trade to learn the fundamentals of object oriented programming, or functional programming. Theoretically that can help them some way in the future but what’s more important to them is doing good design and I think by helping people keep their focus where it should be. Obviously if a library is able to help programmers program better, that’s good as well. It’s all about helping people keeping their focus and making sure they aren’t down a rabbit hole getting sidetracked.

Paul:I think that’s the thing that really attracted me to jQuery is as a front-end interface designer was the fact that I could pick it up and run with it very easily. The conclusion I came to is, “OK. Well if I do by some chance find a major problem with it, there’s a massive community of very clever people out there that I can ask and I can get help from.” So, that kind of reassured me, I think. If then, we’ve kind of come to terms with the fact: “OK we want to use a library.” There are so many different ones out there. Run us through some of the different options available and the pros and cons and how do you go about picking which library is right for you?

John:Well it really depends a lot. There’s a coupe questions you need to answer. Probably the most important of which is you need to ask yourself, how do you want to write JavaScript? Because libraries end up augmenting or really changing the style of how you write JavaScript. So, finding a library that you like how it looks. It sounds very superficial, but you like how it looks, you like how the code feels is a great place to start. There’s obviously a lot of libraries to choose from. There’s a select group of libraries whose quality is generally above the others and the popularity of those libraries generally reflects the quality as well. Out of those I pick generally jQuery, Prototype, Yahoo UI, dojo, then also MooTools and sometimes XJS. What’s interesting is all those libraries are open source and they are all the most popular JavaScript libraries. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s just a matter of fact that in the web these open source frameworks are going to improve better and attract more users and generally have better community to surround them. So out of these libraries though you break down into a lot of different paradigms for development. I’ll try to summarize as best I can, but it really is not substitute for trying it out yourself. Looking and seeing some examples you can have a pretty good feel right away. So, Prototype and MooTools, they both extend the native objects of the language. They both try to improve the JavaScript language itself. So they add new methods to arrays, they make strings better, at the same time they provide things like object-oriented code
, and all the way out to doing things like events and AJAX. The normal things that you would expect. But at a very broad level they are trying to improve the overall quality of the language and of the experience. Then you have Dojo, Yahoo UI, and XJS and they are generally very modular, very package oriented and they have components you can easily snap in and out with nice ways of handling dependencies and it can end up being a very cleanly architected style of coding. They really support object-oriented code, and additionally events, AJAX, all the normal stuff you would expect. I would tend to group jQuery a little bit differently in that jQuery is more oriented toward improving the relationship between JavaScript and HTML and that it’s highly focused on searching through an HTML document, modifying some things, just getting in and getting out. Unobtrusive, and it doesn’t provide any language features, it doesn’t provide any object-oriented code writing features, it’s just hyper-focused at the task on hand.

Paul:It strikes me from my experience with jQuery that it’s very much a tool that’s primarily focused at helping front-end interface people implement the kind of functionality that they require from a usability point of view rather than necessarily doing, I mean would you build massive applications in something like jQuery?

John:It’s absolutely possible and people do it all the time. For example, T-Mobile’s T-Online in Germany, they built their entire user area so like their mail, their calendar, and everything using jQuery. So it’s absolutely used for very large projects. What I think is very interesting for jQuery at least is that while we don’t explicitly provide the object-oriented styles that most hardcore developers are used to we provide some very interesting alternatives especially they way it, like functional programming that I think actually end up suiting development very well. It’s very different, I will completely grant that, but it’s still very capable of scaling quite large.

Paul:So if people go out there and they have a kind of play around with these different libraries and try each of them out as you say to kind of find what fits their style of coding, once they’ve found something that kind of codes in the way they would like to, for example for me the similarities between jQuery and CSS made it a very natural fit, but what are the kind of things that you should look for from a functional perspective? What kind of things should be included in a JavaScript library? Does that make sense?

John:At the very core there should be a set of features. Of the libraries that I listed previously they all have methods for doing DOM traversal, so traversing through an HTML document, modifying an HTML document, events, so handling user interaction, animations and AJAX. All of them have some support for that to one degree or another. You can be fairly safe in knowing that if you pick a library you will have that base level. In my opinion those sets of features are probably the most important features and the ones that you end up using the most with your applications. Some people might say in their particular case that maybe animations aren’t as important, or maybe that they aren’t using AJAX, it really depends but for most of the time that set of features is fairly comprehensive. On top of that you really have to start to, once you’ve tried to use it, and once you’ve played around, there’s a whole set of secondary features that you kind of have to dig into, ones that aren’t immediately code-related. Things like the community around a library, the documentation for a library and even the health of the projects themselves.

Paul:What do you mean by that last one, the health of a project?

John:There’s a lot of things. In health, do they have an active development team? Are there developers? Are there multiple developers? It’s the famous hit by a bus; if a developer is hit by a bus will the project still continue? Is there a team will continue? Can you view the source code? Is there a repository where you can go? Is there a bug tracker where you can submit bugs? And finally is there a test suite, is what you’re going to be using going to be tested and analyzed to make sure it stays working. Another point that’s important to bring up is that a lot of browsers now are starting to integrate the test suites of these libraries into their test suite. So for example actually this is a lot of my work at Mozilla, was integrating the test suites of Prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery, MochiKit, a bunch of libraries into our test suite such that if we ever added a change that caused a regression to happen in a library we would catch it and we would fix it on our end. Obviously we would do this in a very smart way, we wouldn’t just blindly be like, “Oh something broke!” We would communicate to the library what the issue was or whatever and this has been very big because now you can, there’s an extra level of safety and security here, in that you’ll know that if you’re using a library like this that it’s going to continue to work going forward in these browsers. That’s an extra level of safety that your personal code can’t provide. I think that’s very interesting. I want to jump back here really quick to the other issues I mentioned.

Paul:Sorry, I distracted you there and we took you off topic.

John:It’s OK, it’s OK, of community and documentation. So community, it can be usually be pretty easy to determine the health of the community. All these libraries will have some sort of a mailing list or a forum that you can go to. Just hopping on there, seeing how many messages are posted, seeing what the typical response is like, how they treat new users, just stuff like that it can be really useful because if you’re just starting out, you know you’re going to have some pretty basic questions. Do they understand your problems? Do they help you out? Doing some searches on Google for example to see how many people are talking about it, or using a service like Technorati or something. Are people blogging about it? Is it positive? Are they having problems? The other thing is documentation. This is also pretty easy to tell. If you are starting out with a library, you’re probably going to start out by doing a quick test, running a simple application just to get a feel for it. When you’re doing that you’re immediately going to be in the documentation trying to figure out how things work. I think you’ll be able to determine pretty quickly if the documentation quality meets a standard that you, because if you aren’t, if the documentation just isn’t that good, you’ll immediately have problems and I guess you will have to resort to the mailing list or the forums or whatever. Secondary is, do they have good examples? Do they have books if you want to learn from a book? Do they have books that you can buy to learn from? So again there’s a whole lot of issues here but what a lot of it boils down to is looking at the libraries, looking at their style of code, does it seem alright with you? Then just doing a quick test with each of the libraries that you’ve picked out, building like a menu or just a basic form of interaction. How easy is it? How hard is it? Does it in fact mesh with you well? This is something you can do over the course of a single day and it definitely shouldn’t take you any longer th
an that. If it’s taking longer than that then you probably want to try a different library. Ultimately you should be trying to use these libraries to make your development simpler and easier. If it doesn’t improve your productivity, if it doesn’t improve the quality of your code then you probably shouldn’t be using it to begin with.

Paul:Tell us a little bit about the kind of plug-in architectures that exists around many JavaScript libraries. Certainly I know there’s a strong plug-in architecture with jQuery. Does the same kind of thing exist with other libraries?

John:It depends. What jQuery has is a little bit unique in that we provide a number of plug-in points that plug-ins can snap into and extend how jQuery works. So they can add in new CSS selector behavior, or they can add in new events or all sorts of intricate additions. Other libraries have things that aren’t quite of the same vane, in that they’ll have modules or packages that you can use. Also another thing that varies is how do the various projects treat these plug-ins? At least with jQuery there’s a dedicated plug-in repository that’s used that plug-ins are listed in that you can browse through, you can see ratings, comments, discussions and things like that. Currently no other framework has something similar to that to the best of my knowledge. It’s much looser, just people uploading, putting things to their websites or Google code or some such. So again, at least to me, what makes plug-ins, jQuery-style plug-ins important is that they are, that there’s extension points and that they are supported by jQuery fully.

Paul: The only thing that I think that I kind of struggle with a little bit about plug-ins, you know I love the idea that there are other people out there that can do the hard work for me in that they can develop something I was looking for, and I love the fact that I can go to jQuery, I can type in whatever I’m looking for and it will pull back stuff. I’m always a bit unsure mind about how reliable those plug-ins are, you know as you’ve been saying with the kind of, the core jQuery library that you’ve created I know there’s a big team of developers working on it, I know that it’s thoroughly tested, I know what browsers it’s tested against, all of that kind of stuff. Plug-ins are a bit more of an unknown entity. Is there any kind of advice that you can provide about judging whether a plug-in or module or whatever is reliable or not?

John:I mean you sort of have to use the same standards that you would use in looking at a library. Looking at, what you mentioned, is it tested? Is there good documentation? Are there, how many developers are working on it? Like for example in the jQuery project we started a sort of, sub-project called jQuery Glide in which we’ve taken a whole bunch of plug-ins and actually blessed them and proved them, given them themes, excellent documentation, examples, all this stuff and made them sort of official. We’re doing this more and more, trying to bring in more plug-ins, improve their quality and make sure that they’re up to our standards. There’s still tons and tons of plug-ins that are just excellent, but the issue comes down to that you have to sort of train your eye to look at, and be able to spot when something has good quality. The thing that’s easiest for a plug-in author or a library author to do is to just set up a page that has their code on it and has a basic example. At the very least every single library is going to have that. If you dig in and see that it has documentation, that it has tests, you begin to realize that that plug-in is a much higher quality, at the very least. I think it’s really starting to dig in to these side issues, that you begin to get a better picture of how, of the true nature and of the true health of a particular library.

Paul:Excellent! That’s really useful and I think it’s easy to just look at these libraries and indeed the plug-ins as well and ask, “Well do they have the basic functionality that I require?” But, like you say, looking at things like the community and documentation and things like that are equally important. It’s been very useful John. Thank you for taking the time to come on the show. No doubt we will get you back in the future to talk about some of the specific things going on with jQuery and maybe this book that you’re writing as well, sounds very good. Thanks for your time.

John:Thanks for having me, Thank you.

Thanks to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Quality or Quickly?

What is more important, to reach market quickly or to launch with a quality product?

I received this question from Pete in South Africa…

I have been working on a small web application, which I hope to launch soon. My problem is that I am spending ages tweaking and improving it before launch. I fear that if I spend much longer on it somebody will beat me to market. What is more important, getting the product right or launching it quickly?

It is a good question and one with no single answer. It is certainly something we have been struggling with as we prepare to launch GetSignOff.

To read the rest of this blog click here.

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.

119. Fluid Elastic

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

On this week’s show Ed Merritt joins us to discuss fluid, elastic layouts and we take a look at PHP Designer, a feature rich code editor.

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News and events

Harness the power of "frilly bits"

I love watching design trends come and go on the web which maybe why I love Patrick McNeil’s Design Meltdown so much. One trend that has caught my eye is the move away from the Web 2.0. look to something more ornate.

This style makes use of what can only be called "frilly bits". You know the kind of things, those swirls and ornaments buried in typeface sets but rarely used. They have been around for years, used by blacksmiths and typesetters alike. They turn up on everything from wedding invitations to architecture, and now it would appear, the web.

One of the first sites I saw them was Cameron Molls blog. He is an amazing designer with a very ornate and delicate style (about as far away from my own as possible).

Recently one of Cameron’s readers asked him where he sourced such beautiful ornaments and he has been kind enough to share 25 different sources of similar frippery.

Unfortunately, simply knowing Cameron’s sources will not grant us the ability to design as well as him. However, it is an extremely useful list and definitely worth perusing at your leisure.

The cure for content-delay syndrome

Returning from the world of creativity to the realities of project management, our next post tackles the frustrating subject of clients failing to deliver content on time.

Entitled the cure for content-delay syndrome this article addresses once again the subject of copy-writing.

We have talked about the need for a copywriter many times before. I have encouraged you of the need to engage a professional to craft your sites copy, while at the same time struggling to convince my own clients of the need.

The problem is that ultimately many clients believe they can write their own copy. After all they are experts in their field and know their own audience. Some argue that it takes as long to brief somebody as to do it themselves. When budgets are tight, these sound like convincing arguments and are hard to dispute.

This post suggests that the answer in not to promote the use of a copywriter but an editor. An editor refines the clients text rather than writes it from scratch. This is considerably cheaper but still brings improvements in continuity, accessibility, usability and SEO. What is more, the client no longer needs to worry about the quality of his writing. Instead he can concentrate on "bashing it out" and let the editor improve its readability later.

Its a persuasive argument and gives me hope that I might soon be able to encourage my clients to engage a professional to work on their copy.

The roles of a web entrepreneur

From the role of an editor to the many roles of a buddying web entrepreneur.

We haven’t spoken much about developing web applications on the show (this is definitely something we should try to do soon). Traditionally web design has been a service industry and for the vast majority that is still the case. However, a growing number are looking to add a product line to their offering or make the switch entirely. Certainly this is something we are doing with getsignoff.com

But what does it take to be a web entrepreneur and build web applications? Well, unless you have a lot of venture capital it requires you to wear a lot of hats as explained in this post on Think Vitamin.

From marketeer to customer service representative, you are required to fulfil many more roles than you are used to. Its a challenging undertaking but the benefits are substantial. Get it right and you have a regular income without the overheads associated with a service based business.

Intranets revisited

Another subject that we have neglected on the show is intranets. They continue to grow in importance and yet have fundamental unresolved problems.

In two great posts Gerry McGovern exposes these flaws including the tendency for intranets to become dumping grounds for information and their lack of decent search.

Both posts in their own way focus on the fact that intranets should be about "getting things done". They should provide tangible productivity benefits but often fail to do so. Each post identifies a reason for this being the case.

The first points to the way intranets are perceived. Many see them as an information repository. This appears to be a fancy way of saying "where information goes to die". Viewing an intranet in this way, McGovern argues, is to miss the point. We should only be distributing information if it aids productivity or encourages collaboration.

The second post argues that intranets fail to aid productivity because information is just downright hard to find. In particular Gerry targets search but he also argues there is a wider problem of find-ability. Why is it he asks, that even in the largest of organisations nobody is dedicated to ensuring employees can quickly access the information they need to do their jobs?

If you have an intranet or are involved in developing them, then these are an excellent read.

Feature: Fluid Elastic Design

When it comes to planning the layout of your new website there are just three commonly used website layout structures to choose from: Fixed; Fluid & Elastic width layouts. None of these are perfect; each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages and in this weeks feature we have Ed Merritt with us to disuss them.

Review: PHP Designer 2008

This week’s review is on PHP Designer 2008 has actually been submitted by Simon Jones of Zako Media. He writes…

As a web business, I needed stable coding platform or IDE which would allow me to be as productive as possible. Money was no object so I researched everything available from open-source packages to expensive commericial software. I discovered phpDesigner from www.mpsoftware.dk and was blown away. It’s much quicker than Zend and has most of the same features. phpDesigner has all the usual code highlighting and auto-completion for PHP, CSS, HTML, Perl, XML, Javascript, along with easy buttons to tidy this code on the fly. We all know how hard it is to keep code tidy… now we don’t have to. phpDesigner also allows you to arrange files by project without disrupting the standard windows folder system. If you ever want to transfer away from this software, you don’t need to worry about compatibility.

The smaller features I find most useful are: bracket matching, code explorer (to jump to functions, variables and arrays), code snippet library to store your most commonly used functions from project to project. Tooltip syntax reminders for PHP and rightclick to view PHP.net help page for that function. Finally it validates your syntax on the fly, without affecting performance… all other editors stalled, slowed and chugged away as they scanned the whole file every time a character was added. phpDesigner offers the same ability with very little processor time, as soon as you’ve finished a line, it hilights unobtrusively to show missing semi-colons, brackets etc. A more detailed error message can be accessed. This saves valuable Alt-Tab, Control-F5 time. (or for apple users, switch task and refresh browser) as you know the code is error free before you start.

The software offers links to internal ‘browsers’ for phpmyadmin and php help, has an inbuilt ftp client or allows you to call an external one like filezilla. It helps integrate nicely with Smarty templates and works with phpDocumentor for instant php documentation.

On the longer term projects, it has built in bug tracking information, project and global todo lists.

One of the most important and major strengths with this software is it’s stability. It has a few issues sometimes closing down if it’s travelled through a laptop’s standby mode, but otherwise it has never crashed or lost data in the years I’ve been using it. mpsoftware is obviously passionate about this product as updates are available very regularly offering additional functionality and fixing minor bugs.

This is by no means the full feature list, but more information can be found at www.mpsoftware.dk where they have a free cut down non-commercial version and sell the full version. Compare to other available software and it sounds expensive, but mpsoftware.dk is charging a ridiculously low €39 for a single license with further discounts for groups of 10.

Thanks to Simon for that review.

Listeners feedback:

Can you set up a web design company in the evenings

John Bullock asks: Hello boagworld team, my name’s John and I’ve got a question for you. Basically I’m starting up my own web design company and I’m in what I think is an unusual situation of trying to do it along side my 9 to 5 job which has absolutely nothing to do with computers, it’s actually an engineering job so I actually have no chance at all to work with computers in my normal job. Now I know trying to set up a company alongside your 9 to 5, while obviously tiring, is a very sensible and safe way to do it, is it actually possible? Do you think it’s a realistic way of setting up a company or do you think I would have been better going with the freelance option? It’s great to have the show back after what seemed like a decade and keep up the good work.

Yes it is definitely possible. In fact it is the way the vast majority of freelancers begin. That is not to say it is easy. However, it is the most sensible approach. If you don’t your options are fairly limited…

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

Personally, I am very much against borrowing money. It substantially increases the risk. If you setup loan free then you can get another job if things go wrong. With a loan you are left in debt and struggling to pay the rent.

Build up a freelance business on the side and save the money to pay for the first few months. Also if you are able, land some regular customers. This will give you an existing client base to bring in much needed cash. At the very least you will have a portfolio of client work to show off.

We were fortunate. The web design company we worked for folded. Although we didn’t get any redundancy payment we were able to take several of the clients with us. These not only provided valuable income in the first few months but also allowed us to attract other clients.

Domain names

Robert Prior asks: Hello Paul and Marcus, my name is Robert Prior and I am from Waco Texas, i’m currently a beginner web designer but in the future I would like to set up a small web design agency here where I live and my question is, when you’re trying to get the URL for your company name, how important is it to get different extensions like .net, .info, .tv are those important at all? Or do you just need to get the one main one like the .com name? Really enjoy the show, appreciate all the hard work you guys put into it and looking forward to future episodes. Thank you.

In my opinion your domain name is incredibly important. You should definitely try to get the domain extension for your country and .com as well. We have never managed to get headscape.com but as the vast majority of our business is in the United Kingdom headscape.co.uk has been adequate.

However a good domain is about a lot more than the extension. Personally I am not a fan of these new web 2.0. urls (flickr, del.icio.us, digg). They are hard to spell and hard to remember. In my opinion a good url should be a well known word (or words) even if not directly associated with your product. Headscape for example sounds more like a hair dressers than a web design agency, but at least it is memorable and easy to spell.

Another common mistake is to go for a domain name with hyphens. This never works well as it is hard to tell somebody. For example "headscape dot co dot uk" is much easier then "head hyphen scape dot co dot uk". Also users often later forget that it contained a hyphen.

The ideal domain is also descriptive of the site. For example we were blown away to discover getsignoff.com was available. It describes exactly what we do and is memorable too. That said more recent studies suggest that a brand name (Amazon.com) is more valuable than a generic name (books.com), so if you are forced to choose pick the former.

Finally, be careful to avoid words with multiple spellings especially if working internationally. For example don’t choice a domain like colorTheory.com because it could equally be spelt colourTheory.com.

Many claim that there are no good domain names left. Although it is harder these days getsignoff proves they are still out there. With a bit of lateral thinking (or using one of the domain suggestion tools) they can be found. There is no reason to start randomly start dropping vowels.

113. Hiring

Posted in Classic shows on February 27, 2008 by Paul Boag

On show 113: Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes. Marcus talks about hiring new staff and Paul shares his journey into screencasting.

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News and events | Hiring new staff | Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes | Listener emails

A quick request. We are really in need of some more transcribers to help with the interviews we do every week. The team we have are doing an amazing job but it would be great to spread the load.

If you feel you could help once in a while please drop me an email and I will add you to the list.

News and events

Highly extensible CSS

A while back Cameron Moll released a tantalising screencast of a seminar he was running on Highly extensible CSS. Website today need to be ultra-flexible, dealing with changing content, multiple devices, and user customisation. Cameron’s presentation aimed to teach designers and developers how to build interfaces capable of adapting to the unforeseen.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the opportunity to attend. I was therefore excited to discover that Cameron is about to cover the same subject in a series of four posts on his website, all for free!

So far he has only posted the introduction. However I am really looking forward to the whole series. For now just check out the screencast and see if it excites you as much as it did me…

Video tools

Talking of screen casts I have actually been working on several myself at the moment. We are in the process of redeveloping the Headscape website and have decided to include a couple of demonstrations and presentations.

This means I have been in research mode and I thought I would share what I have found. Firstly, I have discovered a great screencasting tool called Screen Flow. This Leopard only software stands head and shoulders above anything else I have tried on either Windows or the Mac. It is amazingly easy to record and edit your screencast and has some great built in effects. My favourite feature is that it will capture from both a web cam and the screen at the same time. This allows you to cut between video and the screen or even overlay a video feed on top of the cast.

Once I had recorded my video I started to look for somewhere to host it. Although I would be foolish not to put it on Youtube where it will get the most exposure, I didn’t want to use Youtube when embedding on my site. The quality on YouTube is poor and you are limited over length and size. With this in mind I looked at a number of competitors. The winner for me turned out to be Vimeo. The quality is superb, they are much more flexible over length and time, but most of all they provide links to the original file and allow you to customise the interface.

So, if you are looking to create a screencast I highly recommend Screen Flow and Vimeo. Also, if you are looking for tips on how to make an engaging video then check out Ryan Caron’s tips over at Carsonified.

Microformat boost

The last thing I want to mention in this week’s news segment is the growing interest we are seeing in Microformats recently.

For a start Firefox 3 is going to have built in support for Microformats, which will be hugely significant in itself. However the guys over at Yahoo! are doing some interesting stuff in the area too. Yahoo! Micro Search is a new way of viewing search results that include all kinds of metadata including microformats. According to David Peterson at Sitepoint this could allow Yahoo to really challenge Google.

I am not sure whether that is true or not, but I do know it is a great time to start using Microformats. If you want to get started then check out Microformats.org or for you more advanced users have a look at this interesting demo of compound Microformats.

Feature: Hiring new staff

Marcus shares his thoughts about taking on web design staff for the first time.

Expert interview: Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes

Paul: As I said at the beginning of the show, joining me today is Christian Heilmann. Hello Christian, how are you?

Christian: Hello Paul. Why it’s quite fun cause it’s Valentines day & I’m stuck with you as a date.

Paul: Well I’m sorry that you had to ah to endure me on Valentines Day but I’m sure you’ll survive. And um yeah… so basically, the reason that we’ve got you on the show today is we want to talk a little bit, a little bit about javascript. Now we’ve talked a lot of times about javascript before and it’s not a new subject, but I kind-of um… felt it would be worth touching on the kind-of common mistakes that we’re seeing a lot in the world of javascript at the moment. I think um… you know obviously javascript is very in and there’s load of cool stuff being done with it but not always in the wisest ways. Um… and then on top of that, so there’s this kind-of group of people that are doing quite advanced stuff with javascript with maybe not considering all the ramifications of what they’re doing. And there’s another kind-of group of people which are people like myself that go ‘Ewww… look at that, that’s cool I want to start doing things like that.’ And so you know a little, a little knowledge is dangerous as they say, and you know we’ve picked up books like Jeremy Keith’s scripting book and read that and now we think that we can, we can build javascript applications and are kind-of hacking things together. So I thought lets spend a few minutes looking at those, those kinds of issues. So um um… maybe probably a good place to start off if you don’t mind Christian is what advice you’d give to somebody starting to learn javascript so that, so that they kind of avoid some of these mistakes you know from the get go. What good principals, good foundations should they be working on?

Christian: Um… the main foundation is that javascript is a language in its own rights. It’s uh uh… you can not take any other knowledge and try to apply it on to javascript and this is where the two angles actually come where people that come from a higher programming language background trying to find the same principals that apply there inside javascript

Paul: Um hum…

Christian: Or people that come from CSS design background, basically think that it’s as easy as applying a CSS selector to an element that everything will be matched magically…

Paul: Yeah…

Christian: … and not realizing that there is an impact on speed and an impact on how the browser actually finds these things and what kind of mistakes the browser does. The main thing to remember about javascript is ah… there are many different ways of javascript, there are many different environments where it’s applied. So there is lots of really clever things being done right now with javascript, even on the service side and inside frameworks and inside API’s. But there’s also, in the end you would run it in a browser sooner or later. And if that’s where you are going to work the best advice is actually to not trust javascript ever and to actually um… enhance with it but not really rely on it.

Paul: Um hum…

Christian: So if there is a window print link, then this link should be generated with javascript and not just be an ‘href’ javascript window print because if somebody doesn’t have javascript or for some reason javascript’s broke, or the engine doesn’t work in your environment then you click the button and nothing happens. And there’s nothing worse than uh promising an end user something that you don’t deliver in the end.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: The other thing is that uh… when you start from javascript, one of the first things to remember is that you should always learn the if statements and learn that they’re your best friend. Like never do: ‘apply something’ BUT IF ‘something’ THEN ‘apply something’. So if you…

Paul: Umm…

Christian: Try to access a heading with an ID for example, and then you don’t just do: HEADING ID ‘something’ = ‘something’… cause it might not be there.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So basically test for it, before you apply it. When you follow this principle through with all of your programming, this kind of defensive programming, then you will (we will) definitely write good javascript in any programming language really. Over the years when you get more and more experience you just learn more and more ways how the technology that you use fails…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: …rather than actually succeeds. So you learn how to avoid the biggest pitfalls.

Paul: I mean, you always hear this thing don’t you about um… that not all browsers support javascript or that not all users have javascript turned on. I mean how real a problem is that? Is that being overly cautious to worry too much about that kind of thing or is it a real problem? Are there actually a lot of users out there that… that don’t have javascript for one reason or another?

Christian: It’s impossible to say. Its statistics and it’s a bit like flash. When you when you look at flash statistics and you hear like a 99% have it enabled on the Adobe side, then you’re like ‘Oh yeah really.’ because these are the only stats that you find…

Paul: Um hum…

Christian: …the company that delivers that is a bit like… yeah, I think that the Microsoft help pages with have a lot of hits from people with Windows.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So um… it’s not really a problem I don’t see the problem at all. I see the problem of people… uh, architecting and designing applications around the premise that javascript will be there, and everything will be happy and work.

Paul: Mmm hmm…

Christian: If you write your applications like javascript does not need to be there, but is nice when it’s there and actually makes it a lot smoother, then you don’t have a problem…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: I don’t buy this whole argument of like… oh AJAX is so cool because we don’t’ have much traffic on our servers any longer. It’s like yeah, but you never know the environment that javascript is run in. It could…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: …my mobile phone, it could be it could be an iPhone, it could be it could be an old browser. I just bought myself this eeePC that doesn’t have much memory. It’s uh… you can never expect the end user to actually cater their hardware to your needs…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: So it’s pretty… it’s pretty unsafe to actually rely on it. So even if the statistics are ridiculously low, it doesn’t really matter because you don’t want to deliver a bad practice and deliver a bad experience to users.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: And then there’s, of course, the SEO problems as well. If you have a navigation that’s dependent on javascript and doesn’t show anything – or you make elements clickable that shouldn’t be clickable, then you won’t have search engine spiders following these links and your sites won’t be indexed.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: Same with accessibility. When you make something clickable that is not clickable by default, like a ‘span’ or a ‘div’ or whatever, then you can not expect a user agent actually to allow people with assistive technology or people that use a keyboard to use the same application because browsers are just not clever enough for that.

Paul: Mmm. So what about people, um… starting out as absolute beginners – what are the most common mistakes you’re seeing them make when they start out doing javascript?

Christian: A lot is copy and pasting and hoping that nothing breaks…

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …and ah… also um… a lot of it is skimming tutorials. A good tutorial writer will tell you a lot in the paragraphs between the code examples.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And um… just going through the code examples and trying to figure out what’s going there yourself and copy and pasting it does not really make you a good developer. This information was put there for a reason and actually explains you the smaller bits that you need to know about the language. ‘Cause most of the javascript errors that actually happen in the real world is not because you did a coding mistake, but because you made an application mistake that you expected a browser to do something. Or you expected an application to give you the right information back, where as you didn’t test for it. So um… I think trusting tutorials and uh… just copy and pasting code without actually knowing what it does is a very dangerous thing.

Paul: Mmm… Would you apply that same principal to frameworks? You know and not under… if you don’t understand what a framework is doing then it is probably best to avoid it.

Christian: Well it’s a matter of what it does. I mean uh… the last few years in web development have become a lot more transparent than before and that’s… Firebug is actually to blame for that.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: It’s great because you can look at code that is generated by javascript or a backend application and you always know, you can always analyze the whole document ñ what’s doing on there if you know your Firebug. That’s another thing that I would actually tell any developer that would start with javascript to get his head around it’s like java… uh… Firebug is a great great way to learn from other people’s mistakes and also to monitor what’s going on in your scripts all the time. When it comes to library’s, that’s a bit of a different story because um… I had a bit of foot in mouth moment there when I proclaimed in the past that most library’s are bloated and unnecessary and um… now I am part of a library…

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …and uh I’m also I also talked to media AJAX to a lot of library developers and I realized that all the libraries do the same thing. All of them actually make the pain and the uncertainty that is browsers out there bearable for you.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: So um… if you don’t understand what the source code of jQuery is, or the source code of the YUI is that does not mean that you shouldn’t use it.

Paul: Okay.

Christian: Other people have had that problem before you and loads and loads of people find bugs and submit bugs and help these libraries get better. So now a days if you are a new javascript developer I would basically say that you have learn the syntax, you have to learn the standards like what does DOM scripting mean, how does event handling work – but by all means if you go into a production please please use a library.

Paul: Oh okay.

Christian: Because that one take the cruft of all the fixing and uh… hacking that you have to do to make something work away from you.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: It’s a matter of what you do. I mean if you’re doing a high traffic Twitter clone, or whatever, that runs an error application then you might have to these fixes – but you’re not necessarily going to do that as a new beginner.

Paul: Okay yeah… that that’s a very different opinion than I’ve heard in the past and it’s quite interesting to hear the other side of the argument. It’s good. So what about… what about dangerous people like me? So you know… where I knew nothing about javascript but I decided: ‘Yeah, I really need to learn this’. So I got a couple of books, I’ve read a couple of books and I’m kind of up and running but I’m not… you know I’m not a developer. I’m not somebody that’s an expert. You know… what other kind of common screwups you’ve seen people like me make?

Christian: Um… It’s tricky to say. It’s like most of the time, what these kind of people do is also try to solve problems that other technologies have with javascript.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: Which is sometimes cool, but sometimes it’s also thinking about there’s a reason why that doesn’t work. So um… I mean the classic is… the classic is like rounded corners and things like that. There are loads of javascript rounded corner solutions which on the outskirt look like they are really clean solutions. This is also might be to put a class on a ‘div’ and to put a bit of javascript in and then everything has rounded corners and there’s no harm done.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: That the javascript needs to inject a lot of HTML and probably is slow doing so. It’s the other side of the story it’s uh… I think people like you, that are just enthusiastic about it and basically want do it are not necessarily savvy of the implications that it has.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So the uh… the information that we need there is that we need a lot more tutorials on um… how javascript impacts performance. And we are starting with that already in the development network and other people are doing that as well, but there are lots of mistakes being done as well there. The other problem that I see with people that have just started with javascript, is they apply… they find one solution, they find one library then they become the biggest fan of that library then everything else is rubbish.

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: And uh… that is a very dangerous attitude as well because you will not be, you will in your career work for different clients that will use different libraries as well. So you shouldn’t make yourself dependent on only one but understand what the benefits of each of them are and where you should apply them.

Paul: Um huh.

Christian: And how they actually make your life easier, or how they make your life less easy, than another competing product. So the implications there is that a lot of people use these newer libraries, or newer ways of using javascript, to actually make javascript behave like their favorite language or their favorite technology. That’s why people went nuts with every javascript library came up with the CSS selectors.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And that’s great because now I can go fifty levels deep in my CSS selector and the javascript finds what’s in there. While this is already an indicator that your HTML is not necessarily good structure

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …and it also means that if you change your HTML in the future you also have to change that path, or if you don’t change that path then your javascript will break.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And a lot of libraries break silently as well. So instead of just getting the error in your face that you’ve basically screwed up, you will not know what’s going on and will wonder what’s going on.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And when that happens that’s normally when people, like you, fire up emails to the library developers and tell them that their product is rubbish.

Paul: (Laughs) Yeah… I can’t disagree with that. That’s the kind of thing that I’d do probably. Um… what about, I’ll tell you the one thing that I’ve come across is that… I’m kind of competent enough to write functions to do a lot of the things that I need to do. Nothing really complicated, I couldn’t build anything too sophisticated, but you know enough to get me by. But then as I’m kind of looking at other people and what they’re doing um… a lot of them are using object orientated type techniques in the code that they are writing. There’s me hacking away with little functions and there seems to be some transition across object orientated approach when you kinda hit a certain level… you know why, what’s the benefits of that? Why do people take that kind of approach?

Christian: (Laughs) Um… It’s been very beneficial in other languages, and other environments, especially when the environment is rather sophisticated.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Then ah… you seen for example action script. Action script has been as much as a hacky javascript. Yeah, look what I can do if I do it this way language and now with the Flex frameworks, and Adobe opening up more and more to the java world, um… it’s getting more and more into structured ways. And the structured ways are hard to understand for somebody who is not from that background.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And I can safely say that, I’m not myself. So I um… I have a lot of problems with like properly, or massive structures, and frameworks. But when you see people do proper action script, for example, or do Rhino applications for the server in javascript, or some of the things that are happening with javascript 2… that there is a reason for that and the reason for that is the scalability is just so much bigger.

Paul: Right.

Christian: It’s uh… basically you can extend an object and I can reuse a class and I don’t have to worry about that. It’s like I start building these little small components, all of them in themselves tested and unit tested, and I know they work. And then I can build a bigger application from them.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Basically without really needing to know to test these things ever again.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: That’s how things like PEAR and PHP and Perl libraries work as well. It’s people extending these kind of already existing bits, and bobs, rather than starting from scratch every time.

Paul: Mmm hum.

Christian: Most of the time for the little web development things that we do like the AJAX form or the Constentina navigation that’s not necessarily needed, but when you write a library for example, and it grows, like YUI is growing or like jQuery is growing as well… then you need to adhere to these standards ’cause otherwise everyone will just submit their own code in forms that are just terrible.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And there’s not much magic to it. I mean I get annoyed when I see javascript guys going on stage and saying like: ‘Well guys, this is a function and when it’s an object it’s a method and…’ and why should I know this? Well you should know this because you need to communicate with other developers as well sooner or later.

Paul: Umm hmm.

Christian: And these people speak that lingo and rather than you having to explain yourself for 15 minutes you could communicate in 3 minutes.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And that gives you more time for lunch break.

Paul: (Laughs) …or drinking…

Christian: So the worlds of hard core programming and javascript are actually getting closer and closer and seeing some of the things that browser vendors come out with and some of the other software that builds on web technologies that is being built at the moment, I don’t think that we can actually rely on our being the cool cookie web developer anymore.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: It’s a bit like we have to have broaden our horizons the same way that backend people have to broaden their horizons when it comes to using javascript, but you can only make someone understand your problems when you understand how they tick.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Otherwise you start preaching to the choir.

Paul: Yeah. Okay here’s the last question to wrap up with. I’m going to open it up and let you rant uncontrollably. What are the worst mistakes that you’re seeing at the moment made with javascript, just generally.

Christian: Uh. The worst mistakes that I see are that people write little scripts for tasks over and over again.

Paul: Okay.

Christian: The same task and I see them actually tying the interface a lot to the javascript. So…

Paul: What do you mean by that?

Christian: Instead of making a javascript that actually creates the things it needs, there will be HTML that is just not necessary where the is not javascript available.

Paul: Okay yeah.

Christian: So instead of starting with the proper HTML and CSS structure, you basically have this whole gumph of HTML because there’s the javascript to clean it up anyways.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So um… basically the main tip is you will never ever be able to replace a proper HTML structure. It doesn’t matter where technology is going because technology will go away from that sooner or later, but at least a human could actually go there and see that there is a structure.

Paul: Mmm hum.

Christian: And that there’s a way to convert this to something better in a second step. If you’ve created a lot of spaghetti code with like HTML and javascript mixed in and lots of little scripts in there, then you will never be able to convert that to something better in the future and this is what we’ve been running in circles for years and years. We’ve never been improving things, we’ve just been fixing things and adding little bits, and bobs, to it.

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: The other thing that I keeps seeing is well the fan boy thing, about javascript libraries and of the academic way of some people measuring javascript. You have all these like, I mean there’s people that spend like weeks finding different javascript includes and script libraries and measuring how fast they are on their computer…

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …generating twelve thousand objects and trying to put them on dominoes. Show me the application that needs that done, then your comparison actually makes sense.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: It’s the same as CSS. You have like ’10 Most CSS Tricks That You Never Knew’ or ’10 Most Beautiful Naviagations’. It’s like list blog posts digging their way through the internet.

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: And it’s the same way there right now, like I can appear immensely cleaver if I just put loads and loads of effort comparing things to each other. Instead of saying ‘this’ means use ‘that one for this one’ and ‘use that one for this one’ cause the benefits of that one library is ‘this’ and the benefits of the other library are ‘that’.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: It normally is like, ‘Oh yeah… that library won.’ or ‘All of the others are bad’.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And that’s never the case.

Paul: Hmmm.

Christian: We have to get away from this putting things together randomly and making up an application, to a proper web application design and I’m going to be in New York at the end of the month, no actually beginning of next month at AJAX Worlds and my talk there will be about how to do javascript design and javascript architecture of big applications.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Christian: That’s going to be quite interesting feedback from the audience I’m quite sure about this, but it’s a matter that we grow up, we actually have to grow up as web developers and take our stuff serious and actually make sure that we don’t build for ourselves – but we build for the guy that comes after us cause that will always happen as well.

Paul: Yeah… and that’s really good advice.

Christian: If you think like that, then you will never write bad code and sometimes people just have to suffer that themselves before they start doing it.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: It’s always clever to think of yourself as the javascript god that can do things better anyways, but some times it’s good to leave your superhero skills in the corner and just do something that works and that’s understandable and spend some time documenting for the next guy that has to take it over from you.

Paul: And I think that applies to everybody you know people, even people doing HTML or CSS or server side stuff thinking about the next person is, yeah, hugely important.

Christian: Yeah.

Paul: Thank you so much Christian. That was very useful and I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show on Valentine’s of all days. Good to talk to you Christian and we’ll speak soon.

Christian: See you soon. Bye.

Listeners email:

Rolling out new features

Our first listener comment is from Alex who has come up with a clever little approach for educating existing users about new features…

I just listened to show 112, where you mentioned Christian Heilmann’s javascript walkthroughs. These walkthroughs reminded me that I wanted to do something similar for our website, except I wasn’t able to squeeze it in before the deadline.

My workplace decided on a total revamp of their website, and the final design had some substantial visual and navigational changes. Among other changes, disparate logins had been consolidated into one login button. Of course, now we had the problem of habitual users; because the website hadn’t changed for several years, how do we now try to avoid several hundred support calls asking where the logins have gone?

Well, the obvious solution is to not make such drastic changes. Going for evolution, not revolution and whatnot. Failing that, is something like Christian’s walkthrough popups. However, these would still show up for new users, for whom this information would prove totally useless.

Here’s the solution I had planned:

A couple weeks before the new site or feature launch, we use javascript to set a cookie. This accomplishes two things: 1) we target people who have javascript, so we know the popups will work for them, and 2) we’ll know they were at this page *before* we changed the design or added a feature. Now, once we launch, we check for that cookie using PHP (or other server-side scripting). Why do this on the server side? Well, it lets us avoid even inserting the popup code for people who don’t have the cookie. If the cookie exists, we can then delete the cookie (so they don’t see the walkthrough again), and then insert the walkthrough divs and javascript.

Even though I didn’t get a chance to implement it, maybe this will help other people prepare for site overhauls.

What a great idea Alex. Existing users rarely like sudden changes to the sites they use regularly and often need a lot of help making the transition. This is an excellent way of doing that without confusing new users with unnecessary information.

Content management and CSS

Our second listener contribution is a question from Adrian…

Thank you very much for the show – it has been so helpful!

I have been given the job of creating an Intranet site for a small business. After listening to your shows I would love to create this website using webstandards and have been learning CSS. As well as this it is important that the users of the site can modify the content via a CMS.

So my questions are; can both of these things be satisfied? Also is it possible to design the website using webstandards and then “plug” a CMS into the already created website?

It is definitely possible for content providers to update content built using CSS. In fact it is easier, and allows the designer to maintain more control over the design. Traditionally content providers had to make all kinds of design decisions when adding content. If they needed to add a heading they had to decide what that heading looked like. If they wanted to make a piece of content stand out, they would pick a colour and font size to make that happen.

However, when a site has been built with standards the content provider doesn’t need to worry about what content will look like. They simply say this is a heading by defining it as an H1 and the CSS will decide how to style this. Equally to make something stand out they mark it as strong and the style sheet does the rest. Simple.

The only problem is that some content management systems do not have WYSIWYG editors capable of supporting this approach. They are still focused on giving the content provider design control. Fortunately there are editors out there that do think in this way. A good example is xstandard although there are others. These can just be dropped into your CMS.

Finally, it is certainly possible to plug standards based code into a CMS. Infact, it is actually easier because the style and content have been separated. A content management system is (as it name suggests) primarily concerned with content. It doesn’t care about how that content is styled. Nothing makes integration easier than nice clean meaningful markup, unencumbered by formatting.

Show 93: dconstructed

Posted in Classic shows on September 10, 2007 by Paul Boag

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

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

News and events

iPod Touch

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

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

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

Free photo manipulation tools

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

dconstruct feedback

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

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

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

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

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

170+ Expert Ideas From World’s Leading Developers

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

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

Marcus’ bit: Why cold calling never works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may not be talking to the right person

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

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

Making yourself known

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

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

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

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

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

Paul’s corner: Making the most of the footer

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

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

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

Gary Marshall on writing better content

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

Gary Marshall:
Hi Paul, how are you doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Marshall:
Yes

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

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

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

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

Paul Boag:
Ok that’s interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Boag:
Yeah.

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

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

Gary Marshall:
Yeah I would agree with that.

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

Gary Marshall:
No doubt!

Show 84: Maybe

Posted in Classic shows on June 26, 2007 by Paul Boag

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

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News and events

Pagination 101

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

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

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

Free CSS based design course

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

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

Zeldman says no to Maybe

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

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

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

IE Net render

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

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

Paul’s corner: Design testing

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

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

Marcus’ bit: Growing a web design buisness

Got this question from Andrew:

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

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

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

Ok, the easy bit first:

Sales people

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

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

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

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

Who to employ

Headscape currently includes the following general production roles:

Designer
Developer
Project manager
Information architect
Testing facilitator

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

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

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

Permanent or freelancer

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

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

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

Ask the expert: Mark Buckingham on SEO

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

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

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

Book recommendations

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

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

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

Show 72: Neverending Beta

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

On this week’s show: web stats meet usability testing, Apollo and why it is important, working with corporate colour palettes and how to sell your web design services.

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News and events

This week appears to be the week of never-ending betas however I have managed to squeeze in some pointless fun and an article about accessible content management systems:

Click2Map

There seems to be a growing number of tools out there that make the management of Google Maps easier. One that I have just discovered this week is Click2Map. You can easily and quickly add custom markers by entering an address (even if you are outside of the US). It is still in beta and needs a lot of work (for example you cannot integrate the maps directly into your site) but it is still great for a quick and easy way of linking to locations.

Popuri.us

Another “beta” service I spotted this week is Popuri.us. This site provides SEO reports on your site including rankings on Google, Yahoo, Alexa, Delicious and Technorati. Currently it seems to be suffering from some performance issues; nevertheless it gives a good indication of your online visibility. Of course if you are a Firefox user you may find the SEO add-on more convenient.

Finding an accessible CMS

One of the biggest complaints against content management systems is that they are often not very accessible. Gez Lemon has been kind enough to do an analysis of a whole bunch of them for us and provides a great article on the pros and cons of each from an accessibility point of view. If you are considering implementing a CMS and care about accessibility (which you should do) then check this out.

Arial vs Helvetica

So you think you know your typefaces? Maybe you are even a bit of a typography snob? But, can you tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica? Of course you can, at least that was what I thought until I actually tried.

Selling your web design services

So this week’s client corner is seriously lacking advice for clients (sorry about that). Instead Marcus takes a look at the subject of selling your web design services. Surprisingly for Marcus, he has written fairly comprehensive notes on what we covered so here you go…
You may build the best websites in the world but if you do not know how to sell your services then nobody will hire you. Web design, like nearly everything, is a competitive marketplace and simply being a good designer/developer is not enough. You also need a sales and marketing hat.
That said, it does seem that there is more work out there than agencies to do it.

Cold call?

Don’t buy databases of ‘quality’ contacts in a particular sector. I may be cynical but I reckon the vast majority of these ‘leads’ were tricked into supplying their details. You’re trying to sell solutions to your potential clients’ online problems not pallets of dog food. I my experience, cold calling is a waste of time and effort – the only way you’ll win work is if you’re lucky enough to call someone when they’re about to release a tender.
The only exception to this rule are local businesses where picking up the phone and saying ‘hi, we’re just over the road from you and we’re really good at what we do. If you ever need the services that we provide please do include us in any suppler selection process you intend to go through’. If they’re friendly why not meet up for a beer (see Love Your Clients)…

Focus on a specific market sector

If your only case study is a sewage works site then go after other sewage works sites first. This is common sense: you have a proven ability to produce a website with probably very similar features to the one the other sewage site wants. You have a real, live working example to show them and a client who will (hopefully) say nice things about you.

Tender sites

I get asked about these a lot. They are (I think) better than straight cold calling but not much. Golden rule – don’t do any speculative design work as some may be a scam. I think most of these are simply there because a lot of tenders are required to be competitive but the client already has a preferred agency. I have generated a ‘nose’ for when we are making up numbers so, if you get that feeling, be brave, walk away…
Of course, try to talk (and I mean talk not email) to the client. Be bold, ask questions about how many others are going for the project, what is the budget (we need to know to be able to provide the most appropriate solution), are the deadlines set in stone etc etc etc… If you’re getting negative feelings… guess what… walk away…
If you do decide to go for something off one of these sites, I recommend the following as a response:

boiler plate ‘Why Us’. You should already have this in another proposal. Up to 10 pages of skills, experience, examples of design work and above all USP.
No more than 2 sides of A4 of ‘your solution’ i.e. a summary.
Tasks by task breakdown of price (inc. payment terms with at least a third up front (‘on delivery’ if you’re really worried about the client!)

The trick here is to start at the bottom. Do the task breakdown first (it may put you way over budget if you know it – if so, walk away) which will lead to an obvious solution summary then tack the ‘aren’t we great’ on the front.
The idea is to put as little effort in as possible without making it look that way.
Much better idea to…

Market, market, market!

There are so many ways to market yourself. For example, you can drive round your local neighbourhood shouting through a loud hailer if you like! Headscape’s marketing effort is focussed virtually solely on Boagworld now. The point is, try to find something that you can do that you feel passionate about and will get people either ringing you directly or, just as good, recommending you to others.

Know when to walk away

It is the hardest thing in the world to do, but it is important that you know when to turn down work. There are times when the clients requirements are unrealistic or the job is simply too big. On other occasions, the chance of winning a job does not justify the investment involved in pitching for it. There is a natural tendency to want to run after every piece of work, but sometimes you just have to say no.
I got the impression listening at SXSW that the agencies I most admire (e.g. Happy Cog) simply wait around for projects that they are interested in and the clients should be damn grateful! Or maybe that was the impression that Mr Z wanted to convey.

Ask an expert: Aral on Apollo

Aral Balkan is one of my favourite speakers and this week in the “ask an expert” section he puts his enthusiasm and humour into an insightful introduction of Apollo. Apollo is a new development platform from Adobe that allows web designers to start developing desktop applications.

Working with corporate colours

This week’s agony uncle question is based on something I found in the boagworld forum. Pecko asked whether we should use Photoshop to convert corporate colours for the web or whether we should do it by hand. A lot of the people on the forum argued that you should allow Photoshop to take the strain but in the show I argue that we should do it by hand. My argument was based on something I had read before and yet I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I had read it. I eventually found it was from a brilliant article by Jason Santa Maria on 24 Ways. I hope he will forgive me for not crediting him on the show.

Review: ClickTale

I was recently asked to beta test ClickTale, a new statistics-tracking tool. Not only does it provide you with all of the basic web stats you would expect, it also allows you to watch recordings of how users interact with your site. You can see their cursor move around the screen, watch them scroll and even move between pages. The product is currently in closed beta but it is definitely worth keeping an eye on because it is extremely powerful and acts as a passable alternative when usability testing is just not an option.

Podcast 51: Better Google Listings

Posted in Classic shows on September 26, 2006 by Paul Boag

We all want better listings for our sites on Google, but search engine optimisation often appears to be a dark art and a morally murky area. In this show, we explore the issue and provide some practical advice.

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Google accounts for over 49% of all searches and has one of the most complex and closely guarded search algorithms. It is not surprising therefore that your website ranking on Google can be a subject of much pain and frustration.

Ranking criteria

The exact nature of how Google ranks websites is largely unknown. However, it is generally accepted that the following items are a major contributing factor:

The age of your domain name
The amount of content available to the search engines
The amount of websites linking to your website and their popularity
The information architecture of your website
The quality of a page build
The relevancy to the end user

Page Ranking

A broad-brush indication of your rating is Google’s Page Rank. This numerical value provides some idea of your success in search rankings. There are numerous ways of viewing your page ranking but probably the simplest is to install the Google Toolbar.

Page Indexing

Another important factor in ranking your site is the accessibility of your content to Google. Google can only list your pages if it can access them. You can easily find out how much of your site is indexed by typing the following into Google:

Site:yourDomain.com

This won’t return every page as it will consider some pages duplicates. To see all pages click on the link at the bottom of the results.

Inbound Links

Of course probably the most significant factor in your page ranking, is still inbound links. The quantity and quality of links are crucial in how well your site is rated. You can view how many sites link to you by entering the following into Google:

Link:yourDomain.com

What does Google look at?

So when Google visits your site, what exactly is it looking for? Well, Google pays particular attention to the following elements on your pages:

The page title
The body content
Your meta tags
Headings
The naming and destination of links

Of course Google cannot index everything. It struggles with some content and cannot access others at all. Below is a list of the more troublesome elements. Although these elements can be used on a site you should not rely on a search engine being able to fully index them:

Images
PDF documents
Flash
Multimedia content

SEO Good Practice

Understanding how Google works is one thing, improving your listing is quite another. Below are is a list of good practices I have picked up while researching the show. These should go a long way to helping you improve your sites placement. However, ultimately search engine is a specialist area and you may wish to consider outsourcing this work if you are able.

Identify a list of keywords to focus on. Keep it short and specific. Trying to ranking highly on lots of broad phrases will prove impossible.
Endeavour to include keywords in your page URLs. Look at the address for this page. Notice that it repeats the title of the article. Does your site do this or does it have incomprehensible URLs?
Use Heading Tags and keeping the H1 tag for the page title rather than the title of the site.
Make sure that every page has real content rather than lists of links. I recommend at least 50 words per page.
Wherever possible using keywords in your links (both in the body of the page and within navigation).
Use breadcrumbs through the site.
Try to keep keyword density at around the 5% mark.
Separate your content from your design by using CSS based layout.
Make sure any Javascript you use is unobtrusive and degrades nicely.
Ensure that meta data (keywords and descriptions) is unique to each page and not generic across the whole site.
Remember that content only accessible after submitting a form is invisible to Google.
Wherever possible, link to other content within your own site using consistent link descriptions.
Ensure all images have an alt attribute (alt tag).
Make sure your site has a sitemap.
Look at your competition and analysis what SEO steps they are taking.

Conclusion

Improving your ranking on Google can be a slow and frustrating experience. It is not unusual for a website to take 4 months to be fully listed and even longer if it is a new domain. Even more frustrating is the fact that Google keeps much of its algorithm a closely guarded secret, which means that much of what we know about improving rankings is educated guesswork. Despite that, we cannot ignore Google. They are a dominant force in the marketplace and search engine listings are a vital component of any online marketing strategy.

Also in this show…

Also in this week’s show we review CSS – The Missing Manual, take a look at a standalone version of IE 7 and check out a new automated testing suit. In the news we also see @media go global and have a look at the latest Web standards advice from A List Apart.

Podcast 45: The importance of art direction

Posted in Classic shows on July 31, 2006 by Paul Boag

This week on boagworld, we get all pretentious and arty as we talk about the need for “art direction”. We share a few tips on how to ensure your site can expand easily over time and we look at what is in the news.

Podcast: Download (19.7MB)

Download this show.

To subscribe directly within itunes click here

Art Direction

Every other creative sector has it and yet the web seems to thinks it can do without. Art Direction is the cornerstone of the advertising industry and yet is sadly lacking among web designers to the detriment of our sites. In this week’s show, we discuss Art direction; what is it, how does it relate to the web and how to go about using it?

The discussion is largely based on an article I posted a while back about Art Direction. I suggest you check that out for more details on what we cover.

Art direction on the web

In the news

As normal there has been loads happening in the world of web designer over the last week:

IE 7

There has been yet more discussion surrounding IE 7. Think Vitamin have released an audio interview with Chris Wilson (lead developer for IE 7) confirming that IE 7 will be released as an automatic update but unfortunately will not be marked critical.

Also on the IE front, the Web Standards Project seems to be saying a somewhat premature goodbye to IE 6 while Firefox have pulled off a bit of a PR coup by registering ie7.com.

Designing through the storm

A list Apart released its latest edition this week with an excellent article aimed squarely at the designer community. Designing through the storm really gets to the nitty gritty of producing designs in the face of artistic block and difficult clients. Superb advice!

A call for greater professionalism

Egged on by John Allsopp, Molly is back on the subject of Web professionalism. Although I agree that the web design industry needs to "grow up" and start acting more professional, I am slightly unsure of whether Molly’s call for a charter is really going to help matters.

Google offers accessible search

This week Google has released a new version of its search engine weighted towards websites that offer improved accessibility. Aimed at the visually impaired community it aims to return results that give greater emphasis to sites that are friendlier to this audience. However the new engine is not without its problems.

Also in the show

This week we also look at how to build your website in a way that enables it to evolve gradually over time as well as review an excellent article on search engine optimisation drawn from a new book entitled "Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists".

Web design podcast episode 4

Posted in Classic shows on September 13, 2005 by Paul Boag

On this weeks boagworld.com I am without Marcus due to various technical problems with Skype. However, we hope to have Marcus back with us next week so he can continue to show his ignorance then.
Our main subject for this week is “how to improve your search engine rankings”.

Podcast: Download (11.2MB)

To download the latest podcast click here.

Below is a brief outline of the things covered in this week’s podcast as well as links to some of the articles mentioned:

Search engine optimisation

Here are my pearls of wisdom ;)

Part of a bigger strategy

Remember your search engine optimisation work should just be a small part of a bigger marketing strategy. Search engine placement is not good enough by itself.

Search engines are not all that!

Search engines have their place but they also have their drawbacks:

Delays in seeing results
An unpredictable outcome
Need for constant attention
A passive approach to marketing

Learn more about the problems with search engines.

Consider quick fixes

Because search engines take time to index new sites, consider using pay-per-click advertising until you gain the positioning you want from the main listings.

Visit Google Adwords site

Stay focused

Make sure you have a clear focus for your website. Ensure your links, content and navigation are built around that focus and that you do not deviate from it. A lack of focus will dilute your ranking on your chosen keywords.

Use web standards!

For fear of going on about web standards, make sure the code you use is semantic. Your HTML should describe what content elements are, in order to tell the search engines what is important and what is not. For example how does a search engine know what a title is unless you give it a heading tag?

Learn more about web standards.

Don’t make the search engines work

Although search engines can index PDF files and flash sites they cannot do it as well as they can index HTML. Therefore avoid using these plug-ins wherever possible in order to improve your ranking.

Link popularity

Encouraging others to link to your site is key to a successful SEO campaign. However, focus on the quality of links not the quantity. Ensure people that link to you are relevant to your subject matter and have a good page ranking.

Learn more about link popularity

News

Dreamweaver 8 is out!

I have just finished downloading the new Dreamweaver 8 upgrade but haven’t had time to review it yet.

View Dreamweaver’s new features here.

Firefox 1.5 is now in Beta

Firefox have released 1.5 in Beta. I hope that this will go some way to continuing its battle against IE especially how IE 7 is in Beta. Personally, I still prefer Firefox because it has some excellent web design tools as well as the Web Developers Extension.

More move to web standards

More and more big name sites are adopting web standards. This week the GAP and Slashdot jump on the bandwagon.

Google ranking factor checklist updated

The site which lists the alleged factors that effect your sites ranking on Google have been updated to include the latest changes made.

View Google Ranking Factors site

Review

Because of this weeks theme, I review SEO Elite, an excellent tool for improving your site engine positioning.

Learn more about SEO Elite.