Kevin Rose on Community

Posted in Web strategy on January 14, 2010 by Paul Boag

At this years at Future of Web Apps I was fortunate enough to interview Kevin Rose, the founder of digg.com about running online community.

Paul: Ok, so I’m really pleased to have joining me today Kevin Rose from Digg and Diggnation. Good to have you on the show.

Kevin: Thanks for having me.

Paul: So, Kevin we had your keynote this morning at Future of Web Apps, which was brilliant, really enjoyed that, and you talked about some really interesting concepts around the subject of community building and that whole complexity that goes into that, and you made some really good points about how to encourage and engage people in community, and you talked particularly about this idea of massaging egos, which I thought was very interesting. Maybe you could share a little bit about that?

Kevin: Well I just think that people don’t really talk about that side of things, it’s kind of like it’s a black art in some ways. People are like “anything that would stroke the ego is a bad thing, and we shouldn’t do that!” but we’re doing that all the time in the features that we build. And you see it even in the most successful sites out there, I think, have figured a way to inflate an individuals self worth, in a way, when they use their products.

Paul: So you want to give us some examples, perhaps?

Kevin: I think that one of the biggest one is Twitter and the follower count and the idea that when you look at that number it’s “whose is bigger” contest between whoever is playing the game, right. So it could be between a couple of different plumbers, that have competing plumbing companies, they have Twitter accounts, any celebrities that are on there. And that’s just one of just a whole slew of different examples from Farmville, which is a really popular Facebook application, that figure out ways to give you certain awards every time you do different things and give you different badges and levels and things like that. I don’t use it as a way to drive the idea of the feature, so I’m not backing into it saying: “Ok, how can I massage the ego?” I think of, what does the community need? What features are we building? And I want to always make sure that person is rewarded in some form of fashion, and that can either be like, I’m digging a story and this is important to me so I want to show that I’ve added one to the overall count and in my profile it can be something where I achieve a certain level based on my contributions to the system, so I’m leveling up inside of a system. And there are so many ways to go about this.

Paul: One of the ones that you mentioned were leader boards, about how in the early days of Digg you had this leader board and then you decided to remove it. The thing that always strikes me from my experience of working with leader boards is that they can actually be gamed in a negative way, which ends up actually damaging the community. And is that why you removed them from Dig? And how did you get around that problem?

Kevin: Yeah, in the early days it was based on the total amount of stories that reached the front page, the stories that you submitted. And so it became this game that for the first six months was a lot of fun for pretty much everyone on the site, because they would look at the number one slot and say: “Ok that’s something I can achieve if I put in a decent amount and effort and work into trying to play this game.” As they grew hundreds and hundreds of stories deep to where you’d have to have a thousand front page stories, people were having a hard enough time getting one story on the front page of Digg, let alone a thousand. So it would discourage a lot of the other people and all of a sudden we had this press articles about how Dig is controller by very small subset of its user base bla bla bla.. so it was something we decided to remove because there was no real way for anyone to break into it once it hit a certain level. Some of the stuff we’re looking at now, well there is a couple of things: one, we plan on opening up a promotion of stories to a whole slew of different, like an open taxonomy, a whole slew of tags, so if you’re in something very niche, like rock climbing or road bikes, you’ll be able to jump into that section and see stories getting promoted in there. And so it’s not necessarily about just that one home page that sees a hundred and some stories a day, it can be about these other small verticals. And inside of those verticals we want to highlight the users data really finding the quality content. One ways that this can be gamed is if you’re saying: ok it’s only by the people that submit stories. Because some people are, I don’t know if they sleep or not, but they happen to be the first one to go out there and always find the best stories and be the first submitter. So, ways that we can get around this is not look at submissions, but also looking at the people that dug this early on, and how accurate they are at predicting whether something is going to be very popular. So, let’s say you’re in the road bikes section and there may be someone who diggs 50 articles a day, but let’s say you only digg 5 a day, but the ones you always digg eventually become very popular within the ecosystem. That means that you’re a very prescient user, you are a user that is very good at predicting what the community is going to enjoy.

Paul: Quality rather than quantity

Kevin: Exactly, so if we can start to structure our leader boards around those concepts, those are very difficult things to game, because even if you do game them you’re really providing the masses with what they want, high quality content. So, and then also lowering that window, so instead of saying it’s an all-time leader board, something that the sum all of your activities over time that would be hard to penetrate, you can say this is leader board of the best users in the last 30 day, or the best users in the last week or two weeks.

Paul: Constantly resetting

Kevin: Resetting, refreshing always making sure, and there might be some people who stick and some that go on vacation or holiday for a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden they’re back to square one.

Paul: Talking about your users, you talked a little bit about putting content live and then seeing how people responded to that and adjusting accordingly. Do you actually ever do any formal usability testing where you get people in and try stuff out?

Kevin: Absolutely

Paul: Ok, so how do you go about doing that, do you select people from the community or how does it go?

Kevin: We typically do it into three different sets of groups: we’ll have what we call our “lurkers to the site”, so people that are aware of Digg but they don’t participate. So they like the home page and understand what we’re doing we’ll invite them in for some usability testing, and then we’ll invite some peop

le that have no idea what Digg is, they’ve never heard of it before. And then we’ll invite our hard-core, on-Digg-24/7, the big stream users, and we’ll take those three groups of users probably 10-15 per group, set them down in front of a bunch of computers and then just walk them through a bunch of different scenarios.

Paul: One of the kinds of advantages of being a well established brand, whether it be pamps(?) or Digg or whatever else, you can try stuff out and you’ll get a reaction from your community and people will tolerate that backwards and forwards. But if you’re a startup – we just interviewed a guy earlier today who literally is him and his mate and they’re launching a startup – they only get one opportunity to make a good impression, really. So this idea of putting stuff out and testing it do you think that always applies?

Kevin: Yeah I do, I think that if you have just bad ideas and you can’t get a product to where at least people are like “that’s interesting enough to where I want to play with it” then you have to go back to square one. So that initial launch is not proving itself then maybe you need to try a different idea, but for us I think that we’ve been very fortunate in that first initial ideas that we’ve launch with have been sticky enough to have a group of users that wanted to continue using the product, and that’s the point where your starting to get feedback from these users or they’re starting to ask you “I’m having a bug or problem with this particular feature, or I want to see this or that” and that’s where I truly believe in the fact that you should release, iterate and continue to evolve as fast as possible.

Paul: Ok, that’s interesting. Can we talk briefly about community and community culture, because I’m fascinated by this idea that as the different applications launch they all develop little cultures of their own, if that makes sense, and Digg has got this reputation as being quite an edgy and has this kind of edginess to it, where there’s the classic one about posting the key for (something??) and they’re quite bulshy, they know what they think, they are very opinionated. How much do you think that that is born out of Diggnation and the fact that you guys present a certain persona in Diggnation and that’s kind of trickled through to who you’ve attracted on the site and how people have chosen to interact on the site?

Kevin: I haven’t really put that much thought into it, but I know that initially during the early days, well we launched before Diggnation so we always kind of had it was an edgy group to begin with and so

Paul: Perhaps it’s just the people you know

Kevin: Yeah, maybe I have some shady friends, no, but I think that there was some of the people that initially came to the site were fans of TagTV, which was the television network that I was involved in and all that, and so these were early adopter geeks and then we started the podcast later and that grew along with the site, but I think that today I really wish there was as many people listening to the podcast as there are diggers, ’cause right now last month I think we did around 40 million uniques on the site and on Diggnation site 150,000-200,000 people, so it’s kind of separated.

Paul: Perhaps the culture was established before has perpetuated.

Kevin: Sure

Paul: Have you found that a problem as you’ve expanded out into new areas? As different people come into the site, are they finding it quite hard to break in?

Kevin: Yeah, I think so absolutely. There’s no one single universal homepage that’s going to suit everyone and I don’t think that you’re ever going to be able to throw millions of people into the same chat room-slash-comment stream and expect them to all get along. So our big push with some of the new redesign and stuff that we’re doing with the next version of Digg is going to be to break up these sandboxes into smaller areas and service a lot more of the long tail of content, so that if my mom comes onto Digg there’ll be something for her to jump into. Versus today, she would look at the front page and be like “I don’t understand all these crazy Internet memes”

Paul: From our point of view as web designers, even the Tech section is too broad for us, we want our own Web Design subsection so that suits us perfectly

Kevin: Absolutely. I’ve been hearing that from the Linux and Unix candy(?) for a long time.

Paul: You talk about this redesign that you’re working on at the moment and we’ve had Daniel on the show a few times and he did our SXSW special where he was very rude to me – but we’ll gloss over that. You talked about in your presentation about how Daniel talked about this idea of simplicity “what can we take away”. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that because that’s something we hark on about a lot so it’s nice to hear you say it too.

Kevin: I think that there is, especially when you get to a certain size, it’s very easy when you’re a small company an you’re five people, like-minded individuals and you’re all trying to build a core product and you know what’s good for the web. Then as you grow into a larger 20, 30, 50-plus person company, you get different opinions and different takes on how to build websites. You have a biz-dev that says “wouldn’t it be great if we had this feature,” marketing that says “it would be great if we could have another banner ad here,” you have the CEO that wants a little something else – there’s so many cooks in the kitchen. It’s important, I think, to always strive to have as least clutter and just a clean, light-weight experience that people can grock(?). People tend to forget that and it’s very easy to say “I want the entire kitchen sink as a feature-set and present all on the same page”. Hopefully there’s someone in charge of the company that can fight those battles, because as you get bigger there’s more and more battles to fight when it comes to that kind of stuff.

Paul: We do a lot of large public sector and very bureaucratic websites – that’s the kind of work that we do – and that’s terrible for that because they have entire committees that are arguing over what content to put on their site, so it’s something I’m very familiar with. There’s a great book which you might have read called “Laws of Simplicity” – have you read that?

Kevin: I haven’t read it, no.

Paul: Superb book! Which talks about exactly this and how to go about simplifying anything, from your life right the way through to a website. It’s really interesting stuff. John Madda, I think.

Kevin: I have to write that down. I am typing it to the iPhone as we speak.

Paul: Do you have any questions you wanted to ask?

Stanton: Yeah, one of the key things I took away from your talk is when you said: “stop thinking you understand your users and learn what they actually do”. You said you do user testing, is there anything else?

Kevin: To be honest I don’t even like user testing. I think user testing is great for the big gotchas, like where you’ll slap your forehead and say “oh boy, I don’t know how we were about to miss that one” just before their products went live. I remember even before launching Digg – I was probably about 3 weeks out – and I was showing my friends, who I respect their opinion on all things Internet, I was showing them what Digg was. And several of them were like “I just don’t get it,” “I kinda understand what you’re trying to do” In my mind, there’s been so many times when you have so many well-educated people give you an opinion one way or another on whether or not something’s gonna work, but until you actually release it and get it in real users hands, you really don’t know what’s gonna happen – and it can go either way. I’m not saying there isn’t stuff you can do to, hopefully, make it go into a positive way. Like when you’re developing a feature, you’re bouncing it off the right types of advisors and people that you trust in the community that can think through some of these problems. But I think that 9 times out of 10 it’s better, rather than try and over-think it and sit there and say “we absolutely have to have this as part of the release” or arguing for weeks on end over how something should go, I’d rather take that time, make a decision: develop it, release it, and if it doesn’t work – worst case – you change it. That’s worst case! So many people forget that, they think it has to be perfect before they get it out there and it’s like “Get it out there!” because they’re just wasting time. It kills me when I watch people going on and on for weeks debating things. When in the same amount of time they could’ve released it, fixed the problems and re-released the code.

Paul: There’s seems to be this perception that the web is some kind of fixed thing that once it’s out there, people have almost got the attitude that it’s like printing a book; there’s no going back.

Kevin: Without a doubt! They think it’s like printing a book. And the other thing is they think that failure is a horrible thing. I don’t see it like that. If you fail at least you’re being real with your user-base. Jump on the blog, write a post and say “You know what, we fucked up there. That was a bad feature, we should’ve done it like this. Thanks for your feedback. Here’s the new feature.”

Paul: There’s a great quote from Winston Churchill who said once that “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm” which just sums it up brilliantly. Any other things?

Stanton: You mentioned building a group of advisors, a group of people you trust and can not be afraid of to show ideas to and get their feedback, even if its bad feedback. And you talked about not necessarily designers or developers. What kind of advisors do you have, not necessarily for Digg ’cause I guess they’re quite high-business-level people, but for small ideas that you have that just bounce off people?

Kevin: I don’t have any official advisory roles on my other projects, but if you’re fortunate enough to befriend people in the industry that you really respect their opinion – I’m always bouncing ideas off of Tony from Zappos or like some of the WeFollow Twitter directory stuff off of Ed from Twitter – you need these guys. Even if you don’t have official advisory roles with them where you’re giving them shares, just to be able to sit down and have a coffee and brainstorm is just such a valuable thing. Even some of our angel investors, some of the best angels can be advisors as well; they’re not just investors, but hopefully you’re allowing them to invest in your company because they’re adding value outside of just the money that they’re contributing. So some of our angels are just extremely well-connected people in the Bay area or wherever, and to just be able to go to them and say “you know I’m having a really hard time with image storage or scalability in this area” and they go “oh, well I’ve worked with a guy here, I know this guy here and let me just set up a lunch “and they send 2 emails and because we both mutually respect that investor, they’re willing to get together with you. Little things like that can be really valuable.

Paul: Kevin, thank you so much. I know you’ve gotta go on and do other stuff, so thank you for taking time to come on the show and maybe we’ll talk to you in future.

Kevin: Sounds good, thanks for having me.

Thanks goes to Simon Hamp for transcribing this interview.

192. Next Generation

Posted in Classic shows on November 18, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: We have interviews with two great upcoming web designers (Jamie Rumblelow and James Proud) as well as a new segment called Elevator Pitch.

Podcast: Download (31.6MB)

Download this show.

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Housekeeping

The Website Owners Manual is finally out this friday! To celebrate its launch, I will be running free public Consultancy Clinics on the 20th November starting at 3PM (UK time). If you would like free advice about your website or would just like to hear the advice given to others, then join the conversation via the Boagworld blog.

News

Mockingbird

A big part of most webs projects is wireframing. A wireframe is a communication tool, a design tool and a specification tool. Without it, there can be misunderstanding and miscommunication.

I have written about wireframing before. In that post I outlined the benefits of wireframing, but I also recommended tools including something called Balsamiq.

Balsamiq is a cross platform application that allows you to quickly put together wireframes that can later be easily edited.

Although Balsamiq is a great application it does suffer from one major flaw (beyond comic sans being its default font!). Balsamiq is great for creating wireframes but is not good for sharing them.

Balsamiq saves files in its own propitiatory format and although it will allow the export of images, this does not work well for interlinked pages.

There is a plugin called Napkee that allows you to export Balsamiq as HTML and CSS. However, this is clumsy at best and still needs to be hosted somewhere.

Mockingbird

Enter Mockingbird. Mockingbird has obviously been closely modelled on Balsamiq and yet has the advantage of being an online application. It can do pretty much everything that Balsamiq can, but also allows you to share wireframes with others. You can even embed them on your own website, so others do not know you are using a third party tool.

So whether you are a web designer producing wireframes for your clients or a website owner building them for your own site, I would recommend giving mockingbird a try. Best of all its free, so there is no reason not to.

More on redesigning

Two weeks ago we featured a Web Designers Depot post entitled “Preparing and planning for a redesign.” It was a good post that focused on what clients need to do as part of a website revamp.

This week a post entitled “Redesign: When To Relaunch The Site and Best Practices” tackles a similar topic. However, what makes this one different is that it is focuses on web designers redesigning their own websites.

It is an interesting topic that certainly comes with its own unique challenges. As the author says:

How can we work on designing our clients’ websites successfully every day and then perpetually neglect our own?

The post goes on to answer this question as well as suggest ways we can avoid our own websites becoming neglected. Subjects she tackles includes:

Why we struggle to redesign our sites
Whether we should be redesigning at all
Finding the time to redesign
Planning a redesign
Updating your brand
Wireframing
Design
Development and testing

The advice is great and although this post is aimed at web designers redesigning their own sites, it has lots of good advice that applies to any website owners. Certainly worth checking out.

Run IE6, IE7, and IE8 on the Same Machine Using Windows 7 XP Mode

It’s frustrating but testing your websites is an important part of our job. To make matters worse, it is much harder to test in multiple versions of Internet Explorer than it should be.

The problem as I am sure you know, is that it is impossible to install IE6, 7, and 8 side by side under the same operating system.

One solution to the problem is IETester. This truly remarkable piece of software allows you to easily switch between different versions of IE and even provides a load of development tools similar to Firebug.

Although there is no doubt that this is an impressive application, it is not perfect. No matter how good an emulator is, it is still not the same as using the real thing. As a result I am only willing to use this for ‘in development testing’. Before launch, I would still want to test in an actual build.

In the past this would have involved running multiple operating system using Virtual Machine software such as VMware or VirtualBox. However with the arrival of Windows 7 we now have another choice.

According to a post on Sitepoint this week it is now possible to ‘Run IE6, IE7, and IE8 on the Same Machine Using Windows 7 XP Mode.’ The post explains that this miracle is possible thanks to Microsoft Virtual PC.

Virtual PC is Microsoft’s alternative to VMware and VirtualBox. It’s available as a free download for most versions of Windows. As a standalone product, it’s functional but offers fewer facilities than the competition. However, XP Mode is Virtual PC’s killer feature. It provides:

a fully licensed, stripped-down, virtual copy of Windows XP SP3.

a clever facility which integrates the guest Windows XP OS with your Windows 7 host. In effect, you can run XP applications as if they were native Windows 7 programs. Although the XP application is isolated, it can still access the host’s files and systems.

The tutorial then goes on to explain how this technology will allow you to run the three versions of IE side by side.

Whatever our role, we should all be testing websites. As a result this is an absolute must read.

How to create clear web navigation menus

Last week I found myself in the unusual position of disagreeing with Gerry McGovern. Fortunately that has quickly changed with his latest post entitled ‘How to create clear web navigation menus.’

Gerry presents four ways you can improve your navigation in his own tongue-in-cheek style:

Stick with conventions

Every year a phone directory is delivered to my home and every year it’s the same. Have they no imagination in those phone companies? I mean, come on, hasn’t A-Z been done to death at this stage? Why don’t they try Z-A for a change?

Avoid audience based navigation

We once dealt with a department of agriculture who had the following menus: Farmers, Producers, Exporters, Researchers. What if you were a farmer who was also a producer, who exported most of your produce, and who right now wanted to do some soil analysis research? Where should you click?

Be consistent

Have a consistent place for your navigation. If you use the left column, keep it there. Don’t start shifting the navigation into the center or right columns as you go deeper into the site.

Avoid quick links

“Come, little links, gather round,” said the designer to the links. And the little links gathered round, all happy and expectant.

“Well, the good news is that we think you’re very special links and because you’re so special we’re going to call you Quick Links,” said the designer.

“Quick Links!” they shouted in unison. Then a silence fell and a little voice was heard to say:
“Master designer, does that mean the other links are Slow Links?”

I am being to wonder if Gerry is loosing the plot ;-)

Interview: The next generation

This week we are doing something a little different for our interview segment of the show. We have two great interviews with two up and coming stars of the web design scene. There is some real talent emerging and we are keen to showcase their work and passion here on the show.

Jamie Rumbelow

Paul: So, yet another interview from Future of Web Apps and this time we are talking to Jamie Rumbelow. Good to have you on the show Jamie.

Jamie: It’s great to be here, it’s unexpected and …..

Paul: … and cool

Jamie: … and very cool. It’s very cool to be here on Boagworld

Paul

Anna: Hello Anna

Paul: There we go, good. Anna likes this, so much I know. Um, yeah, so we thought we’d get you in. Um, I know nothing about you. We’ve talked a bit on Twitter

Jamie: We have

Paul: But that’s about it, so tell me a bit about yourself, your background, a bit of what you’re doing and that kinda thing

Jamie: Right well, um, well my name’s Jamie

Paul: Ok

Jamie: Jamie Rumbelow and I’m fourteen so I’m still…

Paul: Excuse me! You’re fourteen!

Jamie: Fourteen

Paul: Ok, I just wanna establish that, that’s fine

Jamie: So, I’m, I’m, I’m kind of a developer, um but not quite cos I’ve still got stuff to do…

Paul: Yeah

Jamie: Like school and…

Paul: (laughs) just GCSEs and stuff like that, yeah

Jamie: You know, um, yeah I’m trying to get my name out into the scene. I’ve been actually started to do talking, I’ve been kinda launching a â€˜speaking’ career

Paul: Yeah

Jamie: So I’m hoping to follow in the footsteps of the great Paul Boag

Paul: Oh well, you know

Jamie: Um…

Paul: Don’t laugh Anna. Show respect

Jamie: Well yeah, I spoke at Tomorrow’s Web which was a conference run by a guy called Grant Bell and it was all about young people in technology

Paul: Yeah

Jamie: And Anna spoke at it too and um it was, it was really good a day, wasn’t it?

Anna: Hmmm, yeah it was really good

Jamie: So yeah, really enjoyed that, um…

Paul: Ok. So, I mean…..you’re fourteen and you’re trying to get your name known in the scene. Um, that’s quite ambitious to start that at fourteen. Why? Why, why are you so desperate to kinda get in there now?

Jamie: Well, I’ve always been quite enthusiastic and quite…..driven, um, and I really want to, you know, come out of school, come out with…….education (laughs)

Paul: Yeah that would be good

Jamie: Yeah but actually having made a name for myself and already have people knowing about me, interested in stuff I do, so that eventually, when I do actually launch as a full time career I’ll already have good grounding to work on. But it’s not just that, I want to meet cool people and I wanna do stuff like this, cos I…..you know, meeting loads of amazing, great people it’s a really really good benefit.

Paul: So, I mean, you know do you find with the…you know….as you wanna do loads of speaking stuff, you’ve set up and run your own event as well

Jamie: Yeah

Paul: So, tell us a little a bit about that actually before I go on to the next thing

Jamie: Oh well, it’s called Cambridge Geek Day, um, I had the idea …last year, in December and my mum said â€˜It’s the most expensive, time consuming thing you could possibly do, why are you doing it?’ And she actually forbidded me from doing it.

Paul: (laughs) So that went well didn’t it! (laughs again)

Jamie: Yeah, so anyway, I, I hid it from behind her back, um, for ages…..and you lying to your mum, it’s really…..

Paul: That’s not good. Kids don’t lie to your parents

Jamie: Yeah exactly. But I knew….I knew that I could pull it off. Anyway I got sponsorship

Paul: Really, you managed to get sponsorship?

Jamie: Yeah. I got sponsorship from loads of really really good sponsors. I got loads of great speakers lined up and……anyway it’s all steaming ahead right now. So I… my… I woke up to 300 T-shirts being delivered to my door and my mum had no idea about it. So I just told her that I got sponsorship and she was very fine with it

Paul: Your mum is very cool, I have to say. That is impressive after she banned you

Jamie: But yeah, I think she was just worried about me cos, you know, I’ve got more important things to do.

Paul: Yeah

Jamie: So yeah (laughs) back to the point. Um, yeah so it’s a conference for developers, it’s about developery topics

Paul: Right

Jamie: And that’s kind of…because that’s what I know about, that’s what I do, I’d rather run a developer conference than a design conference, purely because…….

Paul: Yeah. And it’s the same…..specifically young people or…

Jamie: No, no, there aren’t enough young people in Cambridge

Paul: In the Cambridge area

Jamie: So, I did an internship with a company called Broader Sheet. Have you heard about them?

Paul: No I haven’t actually

Jamie: Well they’re making an intelligent news aggregator, um but they’re a small start up and they work from the Red Gate offices, have you heard of them?

Paul: Yes

Jamie: Um, so I was in the Red Gate offices and Red Gate do a start up incubator where they have loads of start-ups working within the offices and getting the food and that sort of thing. Um, and I met loads of really really cool people, really passionate, intelligent people, in Cambridge, doing start-ups stuff and being…..you know, so I thought it would be a really great opportunity to kinda capitalise on that amount of people and it’s a bit of a faff to come to London and go to Brighton and you know all the places where the conferences are held. So I thought I’d run my own one

Paul: Yeah, good for you…totally. So when’s that happening?

Jamie: November the 21st

Paul: Ok, so not long then

Jamie: No, not long at all, we haven’t started selling tickets yet but depending when this is out, if it ever is (laughs)

Paul: It will be out don’t worry

Jamie: We’ll probably be selling tickets by then. Tickets are gonna be Â£60

Paul: Ok

Jamie: But with that you get coffee when you’re….and biscuits and tea and stuff when you arrive and during all the breaks and you also get a two course meal for lunch. Um, and we’ve got an after party and it’s gonna be well put together and I’m making sure it’s high quality

Paul: See, I mean, that…. you gotta say is really impressive because so often I’m like, encouraging you know people to start up local groups and to get meeting up and if there’s nothing in your area then just to do something. And people always come back with â€˜Oh I don’t know if I could do that’. And you think, no disrespect, but if a fourteen year old could that then you know then these guys who are web professionals should be able to do it. So, I think you’re a…..you’re actually incredibly inspiring from that point of view.

Jamie: Well, I’m honoured, thank you

Paul: (laughs) So, I mean what’s the plan? You’re gonna do your GCSEs. Are gonna go through the normal career path of GCSEs, A Levels, University? Or what, you know….have you got any thoughts on that?

Jamie: Well, I wanna do A Levels, purely because……it’s shows a certain level of intelligence, you know to have A Levels and they’re good qualifications. Um, but I’m not quite sure about Uni. Now a lot of people who are young and have already got a bit of a head start in the tech scene didn’t go to Uni, Anna included

Paul: Yeah, Anna for example, yeah

Jamie: So, I don’t know whether it would be so much benefit….educationally. As far as life skills go, maybe it would be good, so you know, be able to grow up a bit and live by yourself and that sort of thing. But I think I’d still be able to cope with that so…….my family want me to go to Uni but I don’t particularly want to

Paul: Well, you know you don’t have to make that decision yet which is helpful

Jamie: No, plenty of time

Paul: So I mean…….Ok let’s get your perspective on the web scene as it stands at the moment because you know there’s a lot of old crusty people like me that are, you know, saying what the next big thing is and what we think is important and all of the rest of it but I’m quite interested in your perspective you know…you’re gonna be…so…..let’s say you…….let’s say you went to University, so you’ve got two years of A Levels, well you’re fourteen at the moment so it’s two years until your GCSEs isn’t it

Jamie: I’m doing….I’m starting my GCSEs this year, I’m in Year 10

Paul: Right, so that is one or two years……one…two until those are taken? Let’s say two. Then another two years A Level, right? Let’s say you didn’t go to University, cos otherwise we’re getting too far ahead. So, let’s say four years time, what do you think you’re going to be doing when you come out and start work? What do you think is gonna be different?

Jamie: Well, I think the….I think the Web’s being opened up a lot more in terms of actually a platform rather than just a resource. So, I spoke about this at Tomorrow’s Web and it was talking about how the….that actually from the very beginnings of the Web it was always documents, it was always……you know just information linking to one another. No we’re starting to see things popping out from that like the Web 2.0 movement, and Google Wave, which is really cool

Paul: Don’t tell me you’ve got…….

Jamie: I’ve got a…..do you want an invite?

Paul: Yes, I flippin’ do

Jamie: Ok, I’ll send you an invite

Paul: Thank you. How come he gets a copy of Google Wave before me?! How did you manage to swing that?

Jamie: Oh, I was in the Developer Preview and…..

Paul: Ah, that’s just mean…..

Jamie: Oh and I know Bob from Huddle, he’s CTO at Huddle ….I think

Paul: God, he’s fourteen and he’s better connected than I am. That’s really irritating

Jamie: I’ll send you an invite

Paul: No more. No more of these young talented people. We’re not interviewing anymore young, talented people on the show. It’s just depressing. Anyway, sorry you were saying…..cool stuff

Jamie: So, yeah Google Wave is really cool and I don’t think it’s the end all solution to communication on the Web, definitely not. And it’s…..the Developer Preview especially was mediocre in terms of implementation, how it was written, it was buggy, the user interface was terrible, etc. Um but I can see the ideas behind it and the way it’s going forward and I really think that within a few years if we…..I think we really need to re-think how we talk and how we use the Web to communicate. Cos as I said it’s very kinda…..almost linear conversation, it’s been….you know we’ve always had bulletin boards or blogs with comments that you know…emails, all these communication platforms that we have on the Web aren’t particularly…….well they’re not particularly suited to the Web

Paul: Mmmm, and even if you ….email is like the kinda equivalent of the page-based stuff is just sending letters backwards and forwards isn’t it?

Jamie: Exactly. It’s like faxing

Paul: Instead of things like APIs and stuff like that you know you’re passing data backwards and forwards which in much more inline with Google Wave and passing….you know….chunks….packets of data of information backwards and forwards, so….

Jamie: But APIs really excite me

Paul: Oh do they?

Jamie: Yeah A) from a techie point of view cos I you know…um and also cos you can do so much with so little code, so little time and you can actually make some really cool stuff. This guy called Chris Harlman

Paul: Yeah I know Christian

Jamie: Yeah, he’s good fun

Paul: Yeah he is

Jamie: Um, he’s the …..he’s the Developer Evangelist for Yahoo I think

Paul: Yes, that correct, something like that

Jamie: And he’s been preaching YQL a lot and YQL is this um….SQL-like which is the query language that communicates databases. But YQL is like that but for the Web so you can query APIs effectively and then it all goes to Yahoo, Yahoo caches it, it will go to Yahoo servers, all that sort of thing but it’s all actually really really well thought out and well put together and his blog is all powered by YQL. So, it’s got all his presentations, all the books he’s written, all of the events he’s going to… from up coming, he’s photos from Flickr, he’s tweets from Twitter, all of his social presence is all combined into this one through a couple of YQL codes and I think it’s really cool that now we can do that. I think that we just need to start thinking about how we can use that data in different ways and just expanding that more and making that even…..

Paul: So that’s the kinda stuff you’d like to get into when you’re actually…in the…

Jamie: Yeah, maybe

Paul: Maybe?

Jamie: If I don’t…if my ambitions of being a rockstar don’t….you know…….turn out, yeah

Paul: Yeah, don’t pan out. I think you’re going down the wrong route for that, I have to say. You’re mixing with the wrong crowd if you wanna be a rockstar.

Ok well, it’s really good to talk to you Jamie and it’s good see the future of Web Design is safe, that there are people like you out there and that you’re getting stuck in now. I hope it’s a real encouragement to…..cos I know a lot of students listen to this and so it’s really good to hear that there are other young people out there getting stuck in. So, thank you very much

Jamie: Thank you

Thanks goes to Debbie-Jayne Reyes for transcribing this interview.

Also one quick note about the geek event Jamie was organising. Unfortunately this has had to be delayed. However, if you follow Jamie on his blog then you can find out when it is rescheduled.

James Proud

Paul: Ok, so joining me is James Proud from GigLocator. Good to have you on the show James.

James: Thank you for having me.

Paul: Now basically I’m doing this interview because Anna told me that you’re really cool and you talk some great stuff and I needed to get you on the show, so Anna is here too. Come on say “Hello”.

Anna: Hello.

Paul: And she’s now going to ask all the questions. Go Anna.

Anna: Oooh.

Paul: I’ll break you in. So first of all, tell us about GigLocator.

James: Sure, well GigLocator is a live music site, basically. Its completely worldwide, so whatever country, genre of music, artist and we will hopefully have all their past and upcoming gigs, and you’ll be able to easily find the tickets for the gigs so you don’t have to pay through-the-nose, for example, if you saw a gig on ticketmaster and it was £20, if you come to us you might see was the seetickets gig link and that’s £15. So you can get the cheapest tickets always up to date and you don’t have to miss out on gigs and its just making it a lot easier to go to music you love without have to trawl through all the ticket sites etc.

Paul: And you said you created this yourself and with one other guy?

James: I have got a co-founder. He’s mainly dealt with all negotiations with the ticket providers, I’ve done the design front-end and back-end stuff.

Paul: The immediate thing that springs to mind is: flipping heck that’s a big lo’ job to undertake! You’re looking at being worldwide here and you’ve had to arrange and negotiate with all the ticket providers.

James: Yeah, it’s been quite hard, he’s been dealing with people in the Czech Republic and GermansÉ Yeah it’s quite hard, but we’ve managed to get a lot of good data.

Paul: Ok, so you’ve got some good data, but all of these ticket people all round the world have all got their different systems, how the hell do you build something like that?

James: Three months of building a system that can normalise all of the different types of data. So whenever we get a new feed in, for example, you have a really decent feed that has all the artist names and the address of venue, then you find another feed that doesn’t have the artists name, it’ll just have ‘the artist name – Live Tour’. So all you’ve got to work with is ‘Madonna’s Live Tour’. So you’ve got to build a system that can decipher that its actually Madonna performing though you only have that title. They might only give you the name of the venue, so we’ve got to deal with finding all these things and putting them all together, but things are going quite well and we managed to sort it out.

Paul: That’s pretty impressive. So is this venture capital funded or is it being boot-strapped, how are you going about building it?

James: We are boot-strapping at the moment. We didn’t want to go down the route of getting seed funding early on because I could build it without the funding so we’ve just basically knuckled down and lived without money for a bit, but we’re going very well at the moment.

Paul: That’s quite a scary thing to do, did you work somewhere previously?

James: I was doing my A-Levels and doing some freelance work on the side, so I used to work with my co-founder for Coca-Cola music, Universal music doing freelance work there and that got us into the live music space. Then 6 or 7 months ago I said ‘I’m not doing freelance work anymore and I’m just going to focus on this’. So i’ve not earned any money for our consultancy and he’s just done small jobs on the side to pay for server costs, and it’s going fine.

Paul: That’s a really brave decision to make. So how old are you?

James: I was 18 a month ago.

Paul: Ok, so you’ve come out of A-Levels straight into this. That in itself is a big thing to do. You have the thing: ‘Do I go off to university? What about my career path?’ Why have you gone down this route?

James: I’ve taken a gap year out, so at the end if this goes tits-up I could go to univ, but the rate that things are going now I hopefully won’t. I’ve never really wanted to work for anyone else at all and I saw this as a chance at an idea and I was getting some great feedback so I thought let’s just do this and focus my time on it.

Paul: Its really interesting, this is what ScrunchUp is all about, which is now online and up and running. Little cheer from Ryan in the background there. This is something you struggled with as well Anna, what you’re doing: you did freelance for a bit, now maybe you’re looking for a permanent position. Do you ever regret not going to university?

Anna: Of course I do, all my friends are at uni, they’re all having fun, they’ve got it quite easy. Sometimes I feel like I’m not ready for this. I don’t regret not going because I just think working is better for me, but I do sometimes wonder: ‘What would it have been like?’ So either way I would’ve regretted my decision.

Paul: You’re just someone that’s ‘glass half empty’ kind of person. The green isÉ ‘The green is always grasser on the other side’? The grass is always greenerÉ

Anna: One things I wanted to ask you James, has your age got in the way of what you do or has it helped you?

James: When I was first developing, it got in the way because I couldn’t spend my whole waking life doing it so I’d have to go to college. So now that it’s finished its no longer a factor. It’s helped in a way, I always tried when doing work before launching before I had to show my face I never really promoted my age I just didn’t think it was important. But it’s helped me the fact that people are amazed that you’ve done this at this age, but I’ve done coding since I was 9 and I was paid at 12.

Paul: You got paid? Hang on, you got paid to code when you were 12 years old?

James: Yes.

Paul: I fell really old! When I was 12 they didn’t have blooming computers! So what’s next then? Is this actually launched and up and running?

James: Yes it’s been up and running for about 7 weeks, the reception, the things that have happened are amazing, it’s phenomenal.

Paul: Give me some examples.

James: Im now getting paid to speak at places. I was on the TV.

Paul: You were on the TV? Tell us about that, being on the TV’s cool.

James: A couple of days ago Channel 4 were looking for someone that runs a website but also has experience with Google Wave and I did a small piece on the news about Google Wave and how it affects me as a web developer and a site owner.

Paul: Ok, let’s go off on a complete tangent because I haven’t played with Google Wave. What’s it like? Is it as good as everybody says it is?

James: It’s quite good, but at the moment it’s lacking features. But Google’s made it so open that people can make features. So today they released it to 100,000 people. So hopefully with all of the developers that are now on it some amazing things will happen, give it a month or so and it should be quite a good platform.

Paul: That’s the big hurdle, you can build a great app, but if no one has heard of it then you fall down. Especially when you’ve spent so much time negotiating all these deals and developing it. So how are you – you’re boot-strapping it still, you haven’t got a lot of money behind you – how are you building a bit of momentum behind this?

James: We were at FOWA today, I was invited to come down. I got a free ticket. So I’m doing a bit of work with Sun, promoting it that way. But we’ve not actually gone full steam ahead with our PR or press because we are waiting to develop a few exciting new features that we think a lot of people will be interested in. So we’ve built a solid platform that does what it does: gigs, tickets etc making sure that’s perfect. But now we’re building on some extra things onto that so later in the month we’ll release those and alongside that we’ll start doing press.

Paul: So how are you intending to do it, or is it mainly your colleague that’s doing that?

James: The press stuff? Well because I’ve been doing all the speaking and I’ve been around London and all the events, I’ve built up a good relationship with quite a lot of people. So we are going to be targeting some music related stuff, just try and get it out there. Whatever that it takes. I’ll do anything. Take one for the team.

Paul: That’s a good entrepreneurial spirit. I like that very much. Have you got any more questions?

Anna: Yeah, so where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?

James: I’d like to say a year or so after I’ve had my exit. Either this is doing tremendously well still, or its had the exit. But hopefully I’ll still be working for myself working on fun things whatever it may be.

Paul: So that’s the plan, to go for an exit point where you sell the app and move onto the next thing?

James: Yeah, I think everyone is looking for their big exit. It’s either an exit or an IPO. If you’re money orientated. Work for the love of it. No I love it, its a great thing, it’s my life.

Paul: You could build a lifestyle business, for example, the business I run is a lifestyle business. We run the company so that it gives us a good standard of living and we’ll run it forever like that. Im not criticising, but looking for an exit is a different way of doing things. Well that was really interesting, i think its great to talk to people that are actually out there building these web apps but not with massive budgets and not ‘in the Valley’ and all the stereotypical stuff, you’re boot-strapping it, there’s just a couple of you guys doing it and it’s still possible.

James: It’s not about having a mass of money, it’s about losing control of your company. Why would you want to be a minority shareholder in a company, it’s your baby. I personally wouldn’t be motivated to work if it wasn’t mine still.

Paul: Of course. Thank you for your time and we’ll get you back on in the future.

Thanks goes to Simon Hamp for transcribing this interview.

Elevator Pitch: A/B tests.com

We are introducing a new segment to the show this week. It is called Elevator Pitch and is produced by our very own Paul Stanton. The idea is that Paul interviews companies who have a product that might be of interest to you guys. They give a quick elevator pitch and Paul asks them some questions.

We start the series with ABtests.com.

Stanton: OK so today I am here with Joshua Porter, Hello Joshua

Joshua: Hi Paul;

Stanton: How are you doing?

Joshua:I am doing good, what time is it there?

Stanton: It is about 10:30 in the morning.

Joshua: Ok it is still dark here so

Stanton:(laughs) So where abuts are you based

Joshua: I am north of Boston in a small sea coast town called Newburyport, Massachusetts

Stanton: Ok so is it night time there? I can never figure out the timezone differences.

Joshua: yes it is still dark, nobody is up so this is usually when I get most of my work done actually

Stanton: Nice and quiet I guess

Joshua: Yes absolutely

Stanton: So we have got you on today to talk about a website you are involved with called abtests.com, so give us the elevator pitch, what it is and why you made it.

Joshua: Sure, so yes its abtest.com and it is a really simple site the idea is that we upload and allow other people to upload the results of A,B tests. For those not familiar with A,B testing it is really pretty simple if or while you are designing a web page or screen in a web application you might design two separate instances of that page and then test to see which one works better. So you split up your traffic your audience coming to the page into two and 50% of the people see design A and 50% of the people will see design B and then you measure to see which audience converted better against some goal you have set up. For example say you have a sign up in a web application and you have a sign up page and you want to test two different variations to see which one works better, that is essentially the gist of A,B tests. The reason why we created the site was for people to share their tests with others so the way it started was I had been doing a bunch of testing and I had seen some people online writing up some of their tests and what I found was that I always found the results really fascinating. So for example we have some write ups on the site now where people have provided two screenshots of design A and design B and the only thing different is simply the placement of the call to action button, the primary sign up button and after doing testing it turns out that sometimes the placement actually matters, if you place the button in a place on the page then you actually get more people clicking on it. So these sort of things fascinated me and I had seen a few of them written up in blog posts and things online but I wanted a lot more of them and the designers that I have talked to really liked that concept as well so we created the site. I created it with a couple of guys from a start up called performable that I am involved in as well. You know we are kind of seeing where it goes at this point. We have had a lot of interest in it and we have found some interesting issues around it such as for example some people will never upload the results of their test because they want to keep them secret but others see it as a great way to promote their startup or something like that.

Stanton: Right so you are not actually providing the mechanism for people to do A,B tests this is simply for people that have had results and want to publish them and share them with other people, that right?

Joshua: Right now yeah, we do have quite a few things in the works but we will not be providing like a piece of software that allows you to do A,B testing. We might provide some other software that does things in and around testing, ermm but there are plenty of tools out there one of the tools the most popular one is google website optimiser which is a free tool which allows you too do A,B Testing and one of the folks who is promoting abtest.com with us is kissmetrics they have some tools in that space too. So we are not going to compete with them in any way.

Stanton: OK so how long has the site been running for now?

Joshua: The site has been running for about a month now I think

Stanton: OK and roughly how many tests are up there now

Joshua: We have er gee I don’t know what the number is 12 or 15. I haven’t actually been spending as much time as I wanted to on the site because I am actually working on a startup and building some other software. But we are .. the big challenge again is kind of getting people comfortable with the notion of sharing their tests. That is kind of the big challenge now so we are working on that.

Stanton: Sure, it is quite amazing to look through the stuff that people have put on there and you see the screenshots side by side and you have to look closely on them to see what has changed because it shows how just the tiniest change in either the text or the placement or the colouring in some cases can lead to quite big percentage improvements on calls to action so I think it will be really useful for people to come and have a look through and hopefully share their own tests as well.

Joshua: Yeah, one of the big findings that we are seeing is that testing like this or viewing the results of these tests really changes peoples perceptions of design, I mean it is kind of a pretty big insight to some people to see that OK you know the colour of a button does change things, the call to action copy can have a dramatic effect so what I hope kind of for the site and the test results is that teams can take them back and start talking about real design issues and hopefully push to the background things like politics and emotional debates and “this is what I think” and so this is what we are going to try type of arguments and say you know what testing really does work. lets really start testing things. I think at some point teams will start focusing more on really important things, like their users, the words that matter to their users, the things that motivate their users and really kind of return to the basics of design.

Stanton: Great so you have kind of given us a couple of hints to where the site may go in the future, have you any other plans

Joshua: SO two things I am working on right now. One is to really fill out the site with information how to test. as I mentioned we are not planning on providing a tool to test, but people want to know what A,B testing is. They want to know how to do it and they want to see examples of what other people have tested so they can get a idea of what they should test. That has been one of the biggest surprises that people do not know what to test so people you know have the question shall we test another colour?, should we test different copy or different button styles? whatever. So that has been a big thing so we are going to round out the site with a bunch of information, content basically around where to test and some of the interesting topics. So for example actually I am working on some copy now that is what A,A testing is, a version of A.B testing but is a version of testing where you test the same thing twice so 50% of people, you basically segment your audience into two parts and the two parts seem the same thing and that might sound like a ridiculous idea because you are testing the same thing twice but it is actually valuable thing to do early on when you are getting into testing because it tells you how much noise is in your system. So if you run design A versus design A itself and you have some difference there, so one has slightly higher conversion than the other and of course all of the numbers you get from testing are fuzzy to a certain extent the question is how much, so if you have some variance there and you know there is noise in your testing setup and you know that is your margin of error. So after you do A,A testing then when you move on to A,B testing you can say the margin of error is about 1% so then in that case if B outperforms A by 1% you know it is not really, it may not be a significant result because there is that much noise in your system to begin with. Anyway tat is just one example of some of the content stuff we are going to fill the site out with going forward.

Stanton: So sounds really good. A,A testing is something I have never heard of before so that is quite interesting and I will guess you will become quite a good resource for all this testing, for people to go to.

Joshua: yes I hope so.

Stanton: So where can people find out more information.

Joshua: So they can go to www.abtests.com check it out we are actually going to push some changes up soon that allow you to view tests and view related tests so hopefully it will be easier even than it is now.

Stanton: Good stuff, well thank you for that

Joshua: Thank you Paul

Stanton: We will hopefully check back with you in the future to see how things are going.

Joshua: Great sounds good.

Thanks goes to Shaun Hare for transcribing this segment.

Are you always looking for a new challenge?

Posted in News on November 18, 2009 by Paul Boag

Headscape has a position available for the kind of person always looking for new challenges and experienced in marketing and managing startup projects.

For nearly eight years Headscape has been producing outstanding websites for our clients. However, although we enjoy delivering sites for our clients, that is not the end of our ambition.

For some time now we have been actively developing our own projects both online and off.

We have developed Boagworld.com, a prominent source of web design information. The award winning Boagworld Podcast is the longest running and most popular web design podcast catering for all those who design, develop and run websites on a daily basis. It has a vibrant community and is beginning to generate significant revenue for Headscape through advertising.

Headscape has also developed its first product – Getsignoff. Getsignoff.com is a tool for managing the design sign off process and is aimed at freelancers and web design agencies. Initial sales have been encouraging, but we would like to grow and market this product further.

Finally we have also started running workshops and consultancy clinics to further broaden our revenue streams. As with getsignoff, these need further promotion and management to become truly successful.

We have no shortage of ideas and have put some of them into action. However, what we need now is somebody to champion these ideas and take them forward. Are you up for the challenge?

What we are looking for

We need somebody who has experience in managing and promoting startup projects. Somebody with drive and enthusiasm. Somebody always looking for a new challenge.

We are looking for somebody who could:

Grow and help monetize Boagworld
Relaunch Getsignoff and champion its development moving forward
Manage and promote upcoming workshops
Assess the feasibility of other ideas as they emerge and put together business plans for those with potential

However, most of all we are looking for somebody who can help us shape the non service side of our business. In consultation with the Headscape directors you would form your own role, identifying and pursuing new business opportunities.

Is this for you?

So are you interested? No doubt you have questions. Why not get in touch by emailing [email protected]. Please include a CV and any thoughts you might have as to how you see the role developing.

166. Boldly Go

Posted in Classic shows on May 20, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul shares 10 ways to put your content in front of more people, Emily reviews Bubble Timer and we discuss the role of gender in design.

Podcast: Download (23.4MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

Housekeeping: Facebook

Good news everybody! Boagworld now has a Facebook page. I know, its exciting isn’t it. Contain your enthusiasm, you are making a scene.

Seriously though, I wanted to let you all know because I am aware I spend most of my life refusing friends requests on Facebook. I made a decision early on to keep Facebook for personal friends rather than a promotional tool for Boagworld. I always hate refusing people and should have setup a page or group ages ago. Somehow I never got around to it.

Anyway, the Boagworld Facebook page now exists so make sure you take a minute to join it.

News

Google supports RDFa and Microformats

The big news of the week is Google’s announcement that they will now be supporting RDFa and Microformats.

Both RDFa and Microformats are methods of marking up information on a webpage in such a way that it can be understood by a machine. Google now understands four such types of embedded data. These are…

When Google discovers this type of data on your website it will enhance your search engine results to include the data.

An example Google search result including a review

Yahoo has offered support for embedded data for some time. However, Google’s market share gives a considerable boost to the Microformats community and is of massive interest to those interested in SEO.

However, before rushing to check if your embedded data appears in Google’s results, you should be warned that it almost certainly will not. According to Jeremy Keith Google has only implemented this feature on a small subset of sites. However, he goes on to say:

The list of approved sites will increase over time so if you’re already publishing structured contact and review information, let Google know about it.

Nevertheless this finally gives a solid business case to implement embedded data, which I have been advocating for some time.

Launching a new blog

I have often talked about the importance of running your own blog. I have explained how having a blog is an opportunity to share your expertise and is important in winning new business or advancing your career. However, in all that time I have not once given any advice about launching a blog. This is a definite omission on my part.

Of course one approach is to soft launch your blog. This gives you the opportunity to build a backlog of posts and find your voice. However, there are other occasions when you need to make a splash when you launch. If that is you I recommend reading 10 Ways to Launch a New Blog with a ‘Bang’.

This Web Designer Depot post provides some great advice that costs virtually nothing:

Prepare amazing content in advance
Run a viral twitter campaign
Guest post on other blogs
Interact with your user base

However, it also makes some suggestions for organisational blogs that have a budget for launch. These include:

Give away prizes
Host a launch party
Hold a contest

Of course many of these suggestions are just as applicable to those looking to breath new life into an existing blog. So if you have a blog, read this post.

The creative process

There is two posts that have emerged this week that offer two very different perspectives on the creative process. Both are worth reading if you are a designer.

The first is written by Keith Robinson over at Blue Flavor and is entitled Don’t Lose That Creative Thinking. At its most basic level this post is a rant. However, as rants go it is extremely thought provoking and inspiring.

In this post Keith rails against constraints and convention. He argues we are too often constrained by technology writing “Let’s let technolgoy work for us! Not the other way around” and that too often we choose to blindly accept conversational wisdom instead of thinking for ourselves. He writes:

What ever happened to creativity and opinionated thinking in design? Has science and data removed the artistic? What about trusting your instinct as a designer and making the way for future innovation. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to sit back and watch people do the same thing over and over and then turn around and question someone who’s making a creative stand.

It is a definite call to arms and although somewhat extreme at time you cannot help but be inspired to create more and compromise less.

Talking of inspiration I also want to mention The Evolution of a Website Design by Mike Kus. The post tracks the evolution of the StackOverflow website that Mike has been designing over the last few days.

Stackoverflow website

The reason I mention this post is that it fascinating to see the process of another designer. What makes this even more interesting is the fact that Mike is relatively new to web design coming as he does from a print background. Seeing his process really brings home some of the points raised by Keith in his post. Mike seems unconstrained by technical considerations and web conventions. As a result the work he produces is both original and beautifully crafted.

Launch a business not a side project

We end today with another post from the guys at Carsonified. This one is from Ryan Carson and is titled “Launch A Business, Not a Side Project“. In the post Ryan shares his own experiences of launching web applications and provides a wake up call to those of us who have focused so heavily on getting an app out of the door that we have forgotten it requires business mechanisms to suppport it.

Notice that I refer to “us”. That is because most of what is written in this post mirrors our own experiences of launching Getsignoff. When we were building Getsignoff all we could think about was getting it launched. However, as Ryan points out in his post, this is only the beginning of the story. Even though I have warned clients against it many times before, I had the “build it and they will come” mentality.

Ryan focuses on 4 key areas that are often forgotten by web developers in the scramble to get an app live. These are:

Making time for marketing
Assigning recource to kick ass customer support
Spending money on advertising
Using A/B testing

As Ryan writes:

The majority of apps were built by small web design firms or freelancers who bought into the dream without really understanding how much time it takes to make an app succeed.

This is so true. It certainly was for us. Although we have great plans for Getsignoff, it has been a painful journey and you can bet that any future development will be backed by the business processes to make it a success.

Feature: 10 ways to put your content in front of more people

What is more important – driving traffic to your site or encouraging as many people as possible to see your content? Believe it or not, they are not one in the same thing. In this week’s feature Paul looks at 10 ways you can make sure your content is seen by as many people as possible.

Read ’10 ways to put content in front of more people’

Audible recommendation

This week I would like to recommend The Long Tail by Chris Anderson on Audible.com. The Long Tail is a superb book that I would recommend to anybody running a website especially if it is an ecommerce site. The book examines how the web has changed the value of information and commodities. It looks at the huge opportunities available to reach ever more niche markets and make money from the long tail.

Best of all if you sign up with Audible you can get this book totally free. Simply go to www.audiblepodcast.com/boagworld and claim your free credit.

If you want to listen to it, Audible has it! With over 60,000 titles and virtually every genre, you’ll find what you’re looking for. Get a free audiobook and 14-day trial today by signing up at www.audiblepodcast.com/boagworld.

Listeners feedback:

Bubble Timer Review

Hi Paul, hi Marcus and hello to the Boagworld listeners, my name is Emily and I am here to submit a review of a time-tracking application called Bubbletimer.

First of all I have to make a little apology for the sound in the background. I work from home and it turns out I live on quite a noisy street which I have to say I don’t really notice until I try and make a recording and then all sorts of weird sounds in the background, so please excuse the background noise.

So I’m submitting a review of Bubbletimer in response to show number 158 where Paul talks about the reality of home working which is also a blog post on the Boagworld website and it was actually the blog post which really inspired me to want to make a response, in particular a comment by XX who asked about how Paul tracks his time. I immediately wanted to make a response, which I did in the comments but I thought I’d share it here to share this fantastic time-tracking web application that I use. It’s called Bubbletimer and basically what it does is it tracks time in 15 minute increments by activity and then by day and it produces reports for your chosen time period, say a week.

There is a 15 minute time chime reminder which reminds you to track your time and forces you to consider what you’re doing and whether that is what you’re meant to be doing or whether that’s the most productive thing you could be doing.

There is also a mobile web interface which can be quite nice if you’ve got an iPhone, you can be online all the time. There are also multi-user capabilities in that you can share reports with others so if you’re working in a team you can see how much progress everyone else is making.

What it doesn’t do is; it doesn’t convert time to time slips, it doesn’t integrate with an invoicing application and it doesn’t recognise when you’re inactive or when you’ve changed tasks, as I know some time tracking applications can do.

So really it’s for self-employed people, freelancers or those working on fixed-price projects who want to track their progress on that project, or anyone who needs help motivating themselves in getting things done. It’s not for employees because of it not having time-sheets or integrating into a invoicing scheme, I’d say it’s not good if you’re self-employed or a freelancer working on an hourly basis.

What’s great about this application is that you can track your non-billable time and for me that’s been a real lifesaver. I am one half of a small web design partnership and I do lots of accounting, quoting, emailing and lots of tasks that are not specifically billable, or billable tasks that I’ve already quoted a set fee for, so with this I can measure the actual time spent against what I’ve quoted.

Of course you can also use it to track how much time you actually spend on ‘Social Networking’ every day, you know, see how long you actually spend on Twitter or commenting on blog posts. Another example of one of the tasks I’ve been tracking with it is my bookkeeping and it’s really been useful for me to see how much time I’ve spent on that and whether I ought to think about hiring a bookkeeper part-time because I can look at my reports from a week or over a month and see how much time I’ve actually spent doing that.

It’s a really simple, easy-to-use interface, there’s some really nice details in there like the ‘scribbles’ when you complete a 15 minute bubble of time are different, so there’s kind of a texture to it there. It’s also growing to accommodate popular feature requests as requested on the Get Satisfaction forum, which is really responsive if you have any problems, or if you have feature requests, I’ve seen new feature be introduced since I’ve been using it.

Now I shouldn’t end without telling you that it isn’t free, there is a cost, but it’s just $20 a year and I think it is well worth it for someone who wants to get things done. As I said my name is Emily and my Twitter name is @gradualist you can find out more about me there, thanks for listening!

Do you have a tool that you swear by? Maybe a web design tool, or just a tool that keeps you organized? If so send us an audio review we can put on the show.

The role of gender in web design

We have received an interesting audio question from Dennis. He asks whether any of our clients have expressed a concern over the gender of our designers. He cites his own experience where a female client said his designs were too ‘practical’ and not ‘fun enough’ because he was a man.

First off, I have to say that your client sounds rather sexist to me! The implication that men cannot design a ‘fun’ site is absurd.

That said, gender does play a part in a designers style. For example, women are much better able to perceive colour than men and so tend to make better use of colour. However, gender is just one of many factors that shapes a designers style. Other factors include:

Cultural background
Design schooling
Personality
Design leaning (e.g. illustration, typography, photography)

The list could go on. The point is that what we perceive as masculine or feminine design, is not solely produced by the associated gender. There is overlap and a blurring of lines.

Where I think things get more tricky is when a male designer is asked to design for a female audience (or vice versa). This is more challenging because good design involves empathy with the user. Unsurprisingly it is harder for a man to put himself in the position of a woman. However, it is probably no more difficult than for a young person to visualize the needs of an older user. It is the ability to do this that separates a good designer from an exceptional one. The key is thorough research into the target audience and an ability to steer clear of preconceptions and stereotypes.

161. In or Out

Posted in Classic shows on April 14, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul announces Micro-Boagworld, we discuss the pros and cons of outsourcing web work and see what recommendation the Boagworld forum has to offer.

Podcast: Download (20.2MB)

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Housekeeping

For a while I have been toying with the idea of doing a Micro-podcast that works in a similar way to Twitter but with audio. It would provide the opportunity to share hits, tricks and reviews too short for the main show. My problem was that I needed an application which made this as easy as posting a tweet. Anything more and it would prove too demanding.

Fortunately a new iPhone application has launched that does exactly that. Called AudioBoo it allows you to record 3 minute audio snippets that then get posted to a website, twitter, facebook and a podcast feed.

I am therefore pleased to announce Micro-Boagworld…

View Micro-Boagworld posts here

Subscribe to the RSS feed here

News

Pricing and projects

Alyssa Gregory has written two good posts this week both relating to the pricing of web projects.

The first post tackles the notoriously difficult subject of How To Estimate Time For A Project. After all, time is money.

Estimating how long a project will take is tricky and although this post doesn’t provide any magic formulas it does provide good solid advice.

As well as considering the obvious deliverables Alyssa also recommends time for project management, reviewing work, debugging and client turn around. Finally, she recommends adding a buffer for the unexpected.

Of course, she doesn’t discuss how all of this time translates into your final price. How much you charge is a matter of conjecture. However, in a second post she does explore a related subject – How To Raise Your Rates.

In this post, she handles the sensitive subject of how to tell a client that you will be raising your rates for future projects. She suggests five techniques you should employ…

Give Notice
Set a schedule (make increases annual for example)
Make it fair (keep the increments small and manageable by the client)
Send it in writing
Balance it out (Balance your increase with an incentive – e.g. a special, a one-time discount)

Its all good advice and important too. As your skills and experience increase, you will need to ensure your rates reflect that. Knowing how to hand those rate increases is vital if you want to keep your clients happy.

IE8 and IE6

Microsoft have announced that IE8 will be released via the Windows Automatic Update starting on the third week of April.

The final version of the browser has been available since March and yet adoption has been sluggish. Hopefully Automatic update will change this trend significantly. However, it does not guarantee universal adoption. Although the update will be marked as important users will not be forced to upgrade. In fact Microsoft has released a blocker toolkit so corporate users can avoid the update entirely.

Worst of all, it is likely that the update will impact the numbers using IE7 more than IE6. IE6 users tend to be hold outs and are unlikely to upgrade now when they did not upgrade to IE7.

The only hope is that many IT departments have a policy of running a version behind the current release. If that is the case, the arrival of IE8 may encourage some of them to adopt IE7.

The entire web design community is keen to reduce its level of support for IE6 and hopefully this update will allow that. In fact, another post this week entitled – 10 Cool Things We’ll Be Able To Do Once IE6 Is Dead – points out just what a wonderful world it would be.

Once IE6 is gone we will be able to…

Use child selectors
Make full use of 24-bit PNGs
Use attribute selectors
Use a wider range of display properties
Use min-width and max-width
Throw away 90% of CSS hacks (and 90% of the reasons for needing them!)
Add abbreviations that everyone can see
Trust z-index again
Save time and money
Enjoy ourselves again!

Simple and impressive design techniques

Last week I was doing a consultancy clinic with a developer who wanted advice on designing his website. He was a great coder but did not have much experience designing.

Although I recommended The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird it would have been great to point him at the latest Smashing Magazine post – 10 Simple and Impressive Design Techniques.

This post has some easy to implement techniques that are ideal for developers trying to improve their design skills. Techniques include…

Adding Contrast
Using Gradients
A Better Use of Colour
Improved Letter Spacing
Changing Case
Use of Anti-Aliasing
Adding Imperfections
Implementing blurring
Careful Alignment
Trimming the Fat

Read the whole articles for more details and great examples of these techniques in action.

Influencing user behaviour

A big part of good design is guiding the user to complete the actions you want. Influencing user behaviour can be achieved through a variety of techniques. However, it can often be hard to know where to begin.

One resource that might help you influence user behaviour is The Design with Intent Toolkit. This is essentially a printable ‘cheat sheet’ that suggests a variety of techniques you can apply to your projects.

The techniques do not just apply to web design but all aspects of design. Consequently not all of the techniques will apply. However a lot do, ranging from the use of metaphors to setting up good default options.

Some of the techniques contained in this cheat sheet are also beautifully demonstrated in another post I wanted to mention. Entitled 12 Excellent Examples of "Lazy Registration" it addresses the problem of user signup.

Essentially it is a post that showcases methods for getting around the problem of user registration. As the post itself says…

Signup forms have long irked the casual visitor. During the process of discovery, nobody wants to stop and fill out details before they can "unlock" the rest of the site’s potential.

It has certainly been my experience that signup forms are a barrier and so it is interesting to see how different web applications have overcome the problem.

Feature: When to outsource web work

Your in charge of your organisations website. It has become moderately successful and now you have a decision. Do you hire a full time web designer or outsource to a web design agency?

Read the full article

Listeners feedback:

In this week’s listener feedback section we look at a series of recommendations from the Boagworld forum…

A good introduction to Javascript

Jake writes: I’m curious as to whether or not anyone on the forum has strong opinions on a good introductory javascript book? And by introductory I mean something that’s more about initial learning steps such as syntax, etc. and then talks about best practices.

Doug answers: You might want to look at one of the books out for coding in jQuery, if you’re planning on going in that direction anyway. As for how to learn javascript I usually push people towards Lynda.com.

Matt also replies: Awesome book – DOM Scripting – I’d start with this before jQuery as I think you need some javascript knowledge to use jQuery to its fullest.

A good but free survey tool

Simon asks: I want to create some simple(ish) survey’s to get clients to fill out after a training session. I know of some paid for solutions, but does anyone have any suggestions for any free tools?

Laura replies: For something short, I’d use the survey function on PollDaddy. You can get up to 100 responses, and I think ten questions. Ten isn’t many, but you can do conditional branching for free, which is rare, and good.

I’ve also used SurveyMonkey before, it’s clean and simple.

A review of Clicktales

Peter shares his experiences of Clicktales…

On the recommendation of Paul, I tired out ClickTales.com; and I have to say the results have been interesting (sad, in my personal case) to say the least.

For those of you not in "the know", or missed episode 141, ClickTales is an app that lets you record and review the actions of your website’s visitors. And I’d agree with Paul: inexpensive, revealing, but limited in essence because you can witness what a user goes through.

In my case it was most effective because my results have been telling me that I should redesign my website’s structure completely… so I decided I should start from scratch all together and redesign. :)

Web Design for ROI

Bill reviews Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus…

Each year I find one or two books that really stand out. This book, Web Design for ROI, changed the way I look at current eCommerce projects and helped me identify better strategies for building web sites.

Rich adds: I agree this is an excellent book.

Not too much new for a seasoned pro like myself, but I did still learn a fair bit and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in websites that make money.

Pro Paypal e-commerce

Finally, Ian shares an extensive review of the book ‘Pro Paypal e-commerce‘. Ian writes a very thorough review but here are a couple of highlights.

I thought this was a great read. It’s not often you finish a book and feel confident you have all the information you’re going to need to complete your project. The book isn’t just technical but also has lots of useful nuggets on business practices and background on payment systems in general for those that are unfamiliar with them at this level.

I feel confident in recommending this book to anyone who is involved with developing E-commerce systems or is going to be in the future. The author Damon Williams has a very readable style that is mercifully faux-humour free but never dull and explains everything clearly and concisely and despite its relatively low page count at 260 pages or so, still manages to cover a lot of ground without ever feeling as if it’s being too terse.

For more reviews about everything from web design books to software visit the Boagworld forum. We are also going to do some cool new stuff on the forum over the coming weeks. Keep an eye on it. We have already added a Jobs category for those of you who are looking to hire a web designer, so be sure to check that out.

160. Education, Education, Education

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

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

Podcast: Download (30.2MB)

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Housekeeping

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

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

News

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

How to create a great web design CV

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

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

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

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

For the complete list of tips read the whole post.

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

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

Design: Make it Memorable

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

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

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

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

Statistics and website owners

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

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

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

That has often been my experience too.

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

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

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

Specialist vs. Generalist: Who Wins?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview: Aarron Walter on Interact

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

Aarron: Thanks for having me.

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

Aarron: Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aarron: Thanks for having me.

Thanks goes to Andrew Marquis for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

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

Remote user testing

Our first email is from Steve. He writes…

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think of this method?

Sounds interesting although it would not be my preferred approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a job

Our second email is a rather despondent one from Andrew…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Series: Building A Better Web Application by Ryan Carson

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

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

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

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

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

155. Attitude

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

On this week’s show: Paul asks if web designers have a bad attitude. Marcus talks about contracts and we take a look at working with browsers.

Podcast: Download (27.6MB)

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Housekeeping

I have a couple of pieces of Headscape news I would like to quickly mention.

First, Headscape has some office space we are looking to rent out. If you are looking for a small office in the Hampshire area and like the idea of working alongside us, then check out our video tour of the Barn.
Second, Headscape is also recruiting. We are looking for an enthusiastic, talented developer to join our team, working from of our offices in Hampshire. For more information see the job advertisement on Boagworld.

Finally, just a quick reminder to sign up to attend the live recording of Boagworld at SXSW. We would love to see you there.

News and events

For much more web design news follow boagLinks on twitter or signup for our RSS feed.

Atlas wows FOWA

FOWA Miami has been in full swing over the last week. The line up of speakers was impressive as always. However, judging by Twitter one session stole the show. That was the guys from 280 North showing off a new product called Atlas.

Atlas is built on Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-like applications that run in a web browser.

280 North have already demonstrated the power of Cappuccino with the release of 280 Slides, a browser based version of Keynote.

However, Atlas takes things to a whole new level. In essence it provides a GUI environment within your browser to build powerful desktop like applications. It allows you to build Cappuccino applications without writing code.

When you first watch their video demonstration it really blows your mind. I in no way want to take away from what they have achieved. However, after I got over the initial impact, I realised I had seen this before – It looks very much like Adobe Flex.

Now anybody who listens to my show knows I am not a huge fan of flash. However, I have to wonder if Flash is not better tool for building complex web applications. I can see no real advantage to building it in Cappuccino. In fact as Drew points out in ‘The cost of accessibility‘, Atlas throws up all kinds of accessibility considerations, even if you ignore the fact it is built on Javascript.

Watch the video of Atlas in action, read Drew’s post and then compare it to Flex. Once you are done, post your thoughts in the comments. I would love to hear what others think.

Safari 4 is out in beta

So while we still patiently wait for the arrival of IE8, Apple have gone ahead and released its first beta of Safari 4.

Available for both the PC and Mac, Safari 4 has some impressive UI improvements and a considerable bump in performance. Apple claim that their new browser is 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3.

When it comes to UI and features Safari 4 ‘borrows’ heavily from Firefox and Chrome. New enhancements include…

Top Sites, an attractive display of frequently visited pages
Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages
Cover Flow for history and bookmarks.
Tabs have been moved above the menu bar in a direct rip off of Chrome.
Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses
Smart Search Field, using Google Suggest
Full Page Zoom

For us web designers, Safari 4 brings 3 key benefits…

It is substantially faster especially for Javascript heavy websites
It is the first browser to pass ACID3 so its standards support should be excellent
It has built in web developers tools, which are essentially a rip off of Firebug.

Generally the browser has been well received, although I note that Andy Clarke has expressed some concerns about the UI, especially in regards to tabs. He wrote…

Tabs in a real-world filing cabinet don’t change size according to how many files you have. Don’t mess with the metaphor.

I can see where he is coming from and have to agree. However, most of Andy’s comments are minor niggles and overall this is an impressive improvement. For more personally, safari now stands head and shoulders above other browsers.

Cross browser testing

Although the arrival of Safari 4 is exciting, it does bring yet another browser to test on. Increasingly browser testing is becoming unbearable.

To make matters worse it is not always easy to run these browsers side by side. IE is famous for being terrible in this regards. However, it is not alone. Even running Safari 3 and 4 together takes some hacking. Fortunately a post this week entitled: ‘How to run Safari 4 beta and Safari 3 on the same mac’ explained how.

There are also a growing number of services that aid in the process of browser testing. As with everything on the web, the problem is finding them. Luckily a website called the Freelance Folder has brought 7 testing tools together in a handy list.

Some of the services are free, others are paid. Some provide screenshots while others allow you to navigate your site. All allow testing in most versions of modern browsers.

The list includes…

Read the whole post for reviews of each service listed above.

jQuery browser fixes

Unfortunately no amount of testing is going to make up for the shortcomings in browsers. Whether it is a lack of border-radius support in IE or Firefox failure to render text-shadows, every browser has its limitations. In fact there are quite a few things that it would be nice if any browser did.

Fortunately Javascript can help overcome some browser limitations and even enhance them where they all fall short.

Of course, the downside is that plugging these holes is a lot of work. That is unless somebody has already done it for you. That is why I was so excited when Stanton pointed out ‘15 jQuery Plugins to Fix and Beautify Browser Issues‘.

This post lists 15 jQuery plugins that provide some incredibly useful browser enhancements such as…

Rounded corners for IE
Get browsers to display columns of equal height
Cross browser text shadow
Fixed position footers
Preloading images
Fixing IE overflow problem
Increase the size of click targets
Vertically Center An Element

A word of warning – Using third party plugins is fine if they are coded well. However, use too many and they may conflict causing problems. Use with caution and with a light touch!

Feature: 7 Harsh Truths about running online communities

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

Listeners feedback:

Contracts and legal stuff

I went to have a look on the forum for a good question and found this posted by Dave:

I am in the process of sorting out contracts and legal stuff. I came across this article – http://24ways.org/2008/contract-killer – from 24 ways and Andy Clarke and I think it is a fantastic example of a contract which is well written and doesn’t sound too stiff (if you know what I mean). Does anyone else have any examples or tips when writing a contract.

Why have a contract in the first place?

Bearing in mind I have never actually had to refer to one of the hundreds of contracts Headscape has produced in the past seven years, this is a fair question.

The main reason is that it focuses both parties’ minds on the job and what is required to make that job happen. It’s a kind of comfort blanket too knowing that if anything does go wrong, there’s a bunch of stuff in place to help resolve it.

How do we do it?

We split all of our contracts into two separate documents: a ‘Statement of Work’ and ‘Terms and Conditions’.

The Statement of Work is simply a description of the project written in ‘standard’ English. Roughly speaking, it’s a more solid version of the original proposal replacing, for example, ‘We could design X’ with ‘Headscape will design X’. It covers tasks, responsibilities, testing, technologies, project management, timescales, pricing, payment milestones etc. Basically, it is a detailed outline of the project that could be compared to the ‘Schedule’ of some contracts.

We have a standard set of terms and conditions that ideally (from our point of view) just simply refer to the statement of work in question therefore binding our terms and conditions to that particular project.

Our terms and conditions are written using fairly legalistic terms. Though this can sometimes mean that our clients, who may not be versed in legalese, have to take advice on what we’re proposing, I can’t remember a single complaint. I guess what I’m saying is that this appears to be the norm and taking legal advice on any contract, written in plain English or legalese, has got to be a good idea.

I agree that legalese can by irritating. Although I can understand a fair amount of it, it has taken a long time for me to learn even the small amount that I do know.

I once had a lawyer tell me that, when he was attending a class at law school on the subject, the teacher said that legalese existed only to allow lawyers to charge the rates that they do. I think his tongue was in his cheek, but on reflection, this actually makes sense if you view legalese as a kind of legal code that takes years of study to master.

I’m not sure. I guess my only concern in producing a contract using layman’s terms is if it is dismissed in the event of a dispute.

Our terms and conditions include the following:

The date of the contract
Who the contract is between (actual legal entities)
Definition of terms
Obligations
Deliverables
Payment
IPR (who owns what, what they can do with it, and when)
Confidentiality
Liability (often the biggest sticking point)
Default
Termination
Communication
Governing Law (which country’s law applies)
Signatures of the parties (most important!)

It’s not a fight – be prepared to negotiate

It is quite rare that our terms and conditions come back with no amendments. We believe that responsibilities and liability are evenly balanced but often a client’s lawyer will disagree. A cynical person might say that they are looking for issues to justify their fee, but it is possible that a particular point may not be right for some clients.

For example, we include the line “The Contractor shall have the right to incorporate, in a readily viewable location, a credit and hypertext link in the Deliverables.” In other words we can have a ‘Web design by Headscape’ link on the site. Some clients object to this and, if so, don’t make a big deal out of it. Just go with it.

However, there are times when you will think certain amendments or additions to the contract are unfair. Be prepared to stick to your guns but make sure you explain why. If you’re in any doubt, take legal advice.

Some organisations will flatly refuse to sign our terms and conditions and insist that we use theirs. From our point of view this is not ideal because these terms and conditions are usually created for contractors that have absolutely nothing to do with web design. They often talk the physical delivery of deliverables and the like but, experience has suggested to me that these contracts, generally speaking, are all very similar. The only thing that we insist upon in these cases is that the statement of work is referenced in the client’s terms and conditions.

Make sure the damn thing is signed!

Bearing in mind the effort that is put into creating these documents, always make sure that they are signed. This sounds obvious but I have had the odd clients over the years that, to avoid their internal legal team, has given the ok on the documentation but always found an excuse not to sign it.

It’s easy to say ‘well, we’re getting paid’ in these situations but, if things go wrong, you will
not have a leg to stand on.

So, in summary, contracts are good for everyone and worth investing effort in them and make sure you take legal advice if you’re not sure what you’re a client is asking you to agree to.

151. Budget

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

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

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Housekeeping

Two pieces of housekeeping this week.

WCAG2 Video

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

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

You can watch my Introduction to WCAG2 here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the excellent tips that have already been submitted here

News and events

IE8 Cometh!

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

According to the IE blog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15 Tips for Freelancers Starting Their Own Business

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

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

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

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

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

Facts and Figures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sprite Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feature: 5 options when website budgets get slashed

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

Listeners feedback:

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

With that in mind you can contribute in three ways…

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

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

Listener Review of DropBox

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

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

Dave writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Font Embedding on the Web

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

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

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

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

Be good to hear your thoughts?

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

I was pretty impressed by FontBurner but as Laura said…

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

Later in the thread Dvan went on to say…

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

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

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

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

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

Never work for free?

Posted in Working in web design on January 30, 2009 by Paul Boag

I recently said on twitter that you should never work for free, but is that really true? Are there occasions when it is okay to do web work for no financial return?

Please note: This was a very hastily thrown together post in response to a twitter conversation. Sometimes 140 characters is not enough!

Unsurprisingly this strong statement got a reaction. Of course, there are occasions when you might choose to work for nothing, but not as many as you might think.

Let’s look at some of the reasons people give.

“It will be great publicity”

Will it? Will it really? People say that all the time but do not both to consider the statement in detail.

Take for example my case. The comment above was born out of a joke I made suggesting somebody might want to migrate the entire boagworld to WordPress for me because I was too lazy. People started to offer to do this for free because they thought it would be good publicity.

Think that through for just a second. I had agreed to no kind of publicity. However, lets imagine for a moment I had. What is the best publicity I could offer? A link on the site? A mention on the podcast? Would that for a minute make up for the hours/days of work that would have to go into that migration exercise. Of course not! The return on investment is just too low.

Before agreeing to do a project because it will be good publicity, ask yourself whether that time could be spent publicising yourself in other ways that are more effective.

“I work on a open source project”

In my opinion this is not working for free. This is investing in a product you use on a daily basis. You work on the project to enhance it so the end result is more valuable to you.

“It will be good for my portfolio”

Sure it might be, but as with publicity there are probably better ways to spend your time to improve your portfolio. What about developing your own site? What about building a web application?

There is a value in working with real clients. However, a client that does not pay is not a real client. The relationship is different because they are not paying for your services.

“I cannot charge friends and family”

Agreed. You cannot charge family. I myself am currently building a site for my dad and I wouldn’t consider charging him.
However, I feel a bit differently about friends. Why is it acceptable for your friends to ask you to build a website for free? If I had a friend who was an architect I wouldn’t ask him to design me a house for free! I certainly wouldn’t ask my friend who is a doctor to check me for prostate cancer!
My point is that we work in one of those professions where people feel they have the right to ask favours. I don’t think that is fair and I don’t believe we should allow friends to abuse our friendship.
Finally, I know that my close friends wouldn’t ask me to do a website for free. They have always offered to pay and admitted I rarely take it, but at least they offer.

“It’s for charity”

I am torn over this one. I have done charity work for free but I am coming to believe it is a mistake. Even a minimal charge helps to establish a better working relationship.

Charging has two benefits. First it gives you credibility and the client has to respect that you are a professional. Second, it gives the charity the right to comment on and participate in the build. Often if you do not charge they don’t feel they can say anything if they are unhappy.

One approach I have used in the past is to charge the client and then donate the money back to the charity at the end. That way you have the benefits of a paid relationship without the guilt :)

By taking this approach you are stressing that your skills are of value and should be chargeable. The donation is a separate decision which you can decide to make if you so wish.

Conclusions

If you follow me on twitter or listen to the podcast you will know I give away a lot of my time and money for free. I run a youth group, participate in a church and give away a substantial portion of my income.

However, I draw a distinction between my profession as a web designer and my personal life. I believe what we do is valuable and so should be a chargeable service.

Of course, I also recognise that this is an intensely personal area and everybody has to make their own decisions. I just hate to see people undervalue their skills. You are worth more than ‘free!’

143. Partnership

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

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

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News and events

Obama top technology promises

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could Microsoft consider adopting Webkit?

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

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

Ballmer’s response was surprising to say the least:

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

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

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

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

WCAG 2.0 resources

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

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

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

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

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

Prototyping with XHTML

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

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

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

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

Feature: A Partnership of Cooperation

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

Listeners feedback:

Marketing a web application

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

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

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

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

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

Font management

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

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

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

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

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

Improving your site with user feedback

Posted in Site content on October 27, 2008 by Paul Boag

Users can be invaluable when deciding how to move a website forward. We should always listen to what they say. However, sometimes that is easier said than done.

Whether you are a website owner or a web designer, listen to your users. Whether you are running a web application like GetSignOff or developing content driven websites, listen to your users.

We all know that user feedback can be invaluable for improving our sites. However, knowing something and putting it into practice are different things.

There are two problems with listening to users:

How to listen to them in the first place
How to decide what is valuable feedback and what is not

We will never pay more than lip service to the idea of users shaping our sites unless we overcome these obstacles.

Collecting user feedback

Everybody thinks they know their audience. However, in reality they probably do not. When was the last time you actually asked a user his opinion? You may think you know what they want but you can’t be sure unless you ask.

Fortunately there are a number of ways to collect feedback from users:

Face to face

From focus groups to usability sessions, meeting users in the flesh provides unparalleled feedback. Meeting users allow a level of interaction unavailable through other methods because they allow two way real-time interaction.

This creates a better empathy and connection with users. You can get inside their heads by watching their mannerisms, listening to their tone of voice and even observing the way they dress. All of these subtle elements help construct a picture of the type of person they are.

Admittedly face to face meetings can be difficult to arrange. However I would encourage you to settle for nothing less. You may not do it extensively, but make sure you do it at least once.

Web stats and search queries

In my post ‘use web stats for more‘ I explored what could be learnt from analysing web logs and search queries. I explained that web stats could be used to find and resolve problems with usability, accessibility and content. I also looked at how monitoring search queries reveal what users really want from your site and the mental model they use to find your content.

In short, web stats are an invaluable source for identifying trends in behaviour and expectations.

Questionnaires and surveys

Probably the most traditional and most favoured form of collecting user feedback is the ‘survey/questionairre’. One reason they are favoured is because they identify broad trends in much the same way as web stats.

Personally I am not a fan of this approach, especially when used in isolation. Tracking broad trends through statistical analysis does not encourage empathy with users. As is pointed out in the book Subject to change, empathy is an important aspect of successful web development. Without empathy you will not truly understand your users.

Also, in my experience there is a difference between what users say and what they actually want. Users often request features and functionality when in reality they value a simple user experience. Without a two way discussion with users it is hard to identify the underlying needs.

Finally, unless users feel strongly about a site they are unlikely to complete a survey. This polarises results suggesting extreme opinion where it does not exist.

I am not suggesting surveys are useless. The problem is how they are acted upon. Many treat survey results as absolute. In fact it is necessary to ignore some results and read between the lines of others.

Third party web applications

The final way of collecting user feedback is through a new generation of community tools. Sites like Get Satisfaction and User Voice allow two way interaction with users. Users can submit suggestions, questions and complaints online and you can respond in kind. This happens in an open forum allowing anybody to participate in the discussion.

This open format (when compared to the predefined questions of a survey) encourages a more personal discussion and provides opportunity for a deeper level of discussion.

As with surveys the people responding are likely to be more polarised in opinion. However, because of the interactive nature of these services it is possible to dig a little deeper and understand the underlying issues.

Personally, I have found these services an invaluable way of building a closer relationship with users and better understanding what they are looking for.

Of course, whatever method you use to collect feedback it must be assessed. You need to determine what must be acted upon and what can be safely ignored.

Assessing user feedback

Once you have engaged your users, you will be amazed at the quality and quantity of suggestions. The problem becomes deciding what to implement.

I have had this problem for some time with both Boagworld and more recently GetSignOff. I have established 4 criteria I use to judge whether I act on a suggestion or not. These are:

Level of feedback – How many people are making the suggestion? If it is a substantial number then you should seriously consider implementing the idea. However if it is just a vocal minority then you may wish to think twice.
Source of feedback – Who is making the suggestion? Are those people your core audience? It is easy to find yourself implementing functionality for a group of users who provide no value to your business or site.
Cost of implementation – Consider return on investment when deciding on whether to implement a suggestion or not. If it is time consuming to build and expensive to implement, then the benefit to your users and your business must be high.
Impact – Finally, consider the broader impact of adding new functionality or content. Will it introduce complexity into your site? Will it break another part of the site? Will it distract users from your call to action or undermine business objectives? Often implementing a suggestion can have surprising consequences.

There is no doubt that listening to users can be an invaluable way of improving your site. However, ask yourself how you intend to gather their feedback and respond to the results.

GetSignOff goes public

Posted in News on October 20, 2008 by Paul Boag

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

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

However, let me begin with the blatant advertising…

What is GetSignOff?

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

It has loads of cool features…

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

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

What we have learnt?

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

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

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

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

A dedicated follower of fashion

Posted in Development on October 15, 2008 by Paul Boag

My name is Paul and I am an addict. I lust after anything new and shiny. But is that really wrong?

I cost Headscape a fortune. If its new and shiny I want it, and being an impetuous child I am I normally get it. Whether it is a new online service or the latest Macbook Pro, I spend company money like no tomorrow.

In many ways I feel guilty about this. However, should I really feel guilty? Is there value in my addiction?

Normally I try and justify my new purchases individually, arguing I need them to do my job. Although, these argument have some truth I think there are better justifications for my ‘habit’. In fact as I have been agonising over whether to purchase the new Macbook Pro, 3 things come to mind. The new and shiny…

Inspire me
Cause innovation
Give me confidence

Let me explain what I mean.

Inspiration

There is no doubt that the ‘new’ inspires me. It encourages me to look ahead and think about where design and technology is going. The ‘shiny’ also inspires me. It inspires me to produce something better. Something easier to use and more attractive to interact with. The joy I get from playing with a well designed gadget or a beautifully crafted web application, makes me want to give that experience to my users. Experiencing the exceptional work of others makes me want to be exceptional too.

The opposite is equally true. Experiencing the disappointment of using something that did not meet my expectations can inspire as well. Learning from their mistakes and a desire not to repeat them, are valuable experiences.

The new and shiny also inspire me to innovate.

Innovation

One of my most valuable roles within Headscape is to cause us to innovate. Whether it is introducing new approaches and techniques into the company or sitting with a client inspiring them about the potential of their site. This role is vital in the ever changing world of web design.

But how do you innovate? By being inspired by the new and shiny. I learn so much from good design wherever it is. For example the design principles of Apple has fundamentally altered my attitudes towards the web. From them I have learnt that simplicity is more important than features. Would I have learnt this from reading a book about Apple? Possibly. However, the experience of using Apple products everyday has helped drive that message home.

Equally, if I was a person always happy with what I have then I would never innovate. Innovation at its heart is about wanting more, wanting better. Without those of us who lust after the ‘new’, technology would never improve and design aesthetics would never change. It would be a dull stagnant world.

Confidence

This last point may cause you to laugh, but the ‘new and shiny’ gives me confidence. This happens in two ways.

First, it gives me confidence in my sales role. Gadgets impress. Sad, but true. Walk into a sales meeting with the latest gadget and people respond. I remember walking into a number of presentations back in the day when tablet PCs were the ‘in’ thing. Every time I would get comments and every time it put the presentation on the right foot. Am I saying we won work because of my gadget? Not at all. However, it did break the ice and start a conversation.

However, the more important way that the new and shiny give me confidence is through a knowledge that I am exposing myself to the cutting edge. I do not want either myself or my company to be in the long tale of web design. I want us to be at the forefront of our industry and to do that we need to be experiencing the forefront of design and technology.

So there you go. Am I putting forward a valid argument or deluding myself to justify my habit? You tell me.

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?

Podcast: Download (27.5MB)

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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.

Quality or quickly?

Posted in Web strategy on September 15, 2008 by Paul Boag

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.

The advantage of launching early

The prevailing wisdom is to launch early. The logic goes that by launching quickly you can be first to market and then refine the offering based on user feedback.

There is certainly something to be said for being first to market, especially online. It is easier to build some buzz around your product if it is an original idea. You can also establish a customer basis more easily when there is little choice available. However it is not without its drawbacks.

The disadvantages of launching early

You only get one chance to make a first impression. If a user does not like your product they are unlikely to return. They will therefore never see improvements you make later. The customer is lost.

Also, by launching early your competition has the chance to adapt before they launch. Few ideas are truly original and somebody somewhere will already be developing something similar. If you launch too early they have the opportunity to adapt their offering to undermine you.

Of course, the danger of delaying launch is procrastination. That has certainly been my experience. The idea for GetSignOff was formed over a year and a half ago and we wasted far too much time. Be careful you do not make the same mistake and spend too long obsessing over details.

How to make a decision

When to release is dependant on two factors, what you are releasing and who it is aimed at.

If you are releasing a traditional website it is important that the quality is high. There is no option to slap on a beta label, and users are less tolerant of problems.

If the product is a web application the decision is dependant on the nature of that application. If it is business critical, the users will have a lower tolerance for problems. However, if it is something like twitter then downtime and problems are more easily accepted. After all, the inability to twitter is not the end of the world (not that you would guess that from some peoples reaction).

The second factor that determines when you launch is audience. For example the audience for GetSignOff are other web designers. Although you couldn’t find a more critical audience, they do understand that a new product will have bugs. They are also experienced enough to work around usability problems and muddle through. However, if your audience is not so computer literate they are more likely to give up and try another site.

Fearing competition

There seems to be a fear of competition among web developers. They have this desire to be completely original, and so rush the launch of their application.

However, competition is to be expected and choice is good. I have received numerous apologetic emails and twitters from people pointing out the competition to GetSignOff. Their tone indicates that this is the end of the world. In reality it is to be expected. Even if GetSignOff was identical to its competition it would not be a problem. There are enough customers to go around. The web is a big place.

Take baked beans for example. There are a lot of varieties of backed beans and they are all basically the same. They do not even taste different. However, all of these varieties can exist side by side in the marketplace quite happily. There is enough demand.

In conclusion, there is no need to rush to market. Take your time and get your product right. However, be careful not to procrastinate and remember that you will need to tweak your application long after launch. No matter how careful the planning, you will not get it right first time.

Can Google Chrome topple IE?

Posted in News on September 5, 2008 by Paul Boag

Without a doubt the biggest story of the week is that Google has launched its own browser called Chrome. At the moment the browser is only available for windows although a mac and linux will follow shortly.

The launch of Chrome has generated huge publicity and I am sure you are already aware of its emphasis on stability, speed and support for web applications. You probably know too that it is built on webkit so CSS support is good.

The question is whether we will need to start testing our sites in Chrome? Well, take has been strong with figures rising up from 1% to over 6% shortly after launch. But is Chrome going to finally overcome the dominance of Internet Explorer or just cannibalise the market share of IE’s rivals? That is harder to judge.

The browser that finally topples IE will not do so because of quality, but because of brand recognition. If IE was going to fall because of its poor feature set or dodgy rendering it would have done so already. The problem is that most people are quite happy to use IE. It is pre-installed and ready to go. Indeed many simply associate the web with that little blue E.

Sure, other browsers have made remarkable inroads into IE’s market share. However, they have probably pushed as far as they can go. The rest of the market are those people that just don’t care. They know IE, they are familiar with IE. Why change?

Extract from the Google Chrome comic

However, if anybody is going to change that status quo it will be Google. Although many associate that IE icon with the internet, when they click on it they go to the Google homepage. Google has as dominate brand, maybe even more so than Microsoft. If anybody can pursued the hold outs to swap, it is Google.

Google has a huge profile. Never have I seen a browser featured on BBC national news, but today they mentioned the launch of Chrome. They also have a lot of eye balls and with Chrome featured on their minimalist homepage you can expect downloads to go through the roof.

Who knows if they will pull it off. What I do know is that this will certainly be damaging for other browsers especially Firefox which has been heavily backed by Google.

128. Details

Posted in Classic shows on July 30, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this weeks show I’m accompanied by our Producer Ryan and Researcher Stanton. We Interview Dan Rubin on the Details of Design, and answer your questions on managing a bigger team and terms and conditions.

Podcast: Download (23.0MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

News and events

Silverback Launches

This week has seen the release of Silverback, the highly anticipated app from the guys at Clear:Left. After months of speculations about what Silverback actually was, the “spontaneous, unobtrusive, usability testing software for web designers” is finally available for download.

We’re sure a majority of you know all about Silverback, but for those of you who don’t, Silverback, which is available exclusively for the Mac, is Clear:Left’s answer to convenient usability testing on the go. Utilising the iSight and screen capture facilities of the Mac, user’s experiences can be recorded and reviewed at a later date, taking away the costly and often difficult to setup up approach of using specialist equipment like multiple camcorders which can lead to hours of time spent trawling through video footage.

PatternTap

Whether you’re a designer or developer, there are many occasions where you go on the hunt for inspiration in interface design. Normal CSS Gallery sites give you great examples of full site design, but usually don’t focus on the small details of interface design. The only site i’ve ever been aware of is Christian Watsons “Elements of Design“, which is a great resource showing examples of elements like comment forms, calendars & date pickers, footers, image captions and so on.

There’s a new site I’ve come across this week called PatternTap.com which also wants to collect these design patterns and focus on specific elements of design and to help you to reference, collect and organise them for your own needs.

PatternTap is shaping up to be an absolute goldmine of inspiration, and looks like it will build into a large resource of design element exmples. There’s currently 46 collections, everything from 404 pages, audio players, pagination and search boxes. It let’s you create your own “lightbox” style user sets, so you can keep your favourite examples organised for future reference.

I’ll definitely be adding this to my toolbox of design inspiration links, and recommend you give it a look too.

Google App Engine Update

This week also sees the release of a small update to the Google Apps Engine. The Google Apps Engine allows developers to build applications on Googles own infrastructure. I have to admit that the Google Apps Engine is not something I’ve developed with personally however that doesn’t stop us talking about it so let’s run through the list:

Firstly you can now have up to 10 apps on your account as opposed to the previous limit of three 3, the Engine also limits developers to 1000 files per application, so the increase in the number of apps you can now have is a welcome addition.
Time windows for Dashboard graphs: Zoom in on the data in your dashboard to get a more accurate picture of whats going on. You can zoom in to see graphs for the last 24, 12, and 6 hour periods.
Log files can now be downloaded in plain text.
And finally you can send email as the logged in user: If you’re using the users API, you can now send email from the email address of the currently-logged-in user were as before it was only possible from the administrators account.

S3

So some of you may be aware that Amazon’s S3 service suffered from some 6 hours of downtime recently, this echoes the issues of service availability that happened back in February.

For those of you who don’t know, the S3, or “Simple Storage Service” is a scalable and inexpensive data storage infrastructure, which allows you to store and retrieve any amount of data.

So this is a fantastic idea – in theory, it means that if you’re developing a large website or web app and need lots of storage, you don’t have to pay for huge webhosting plans with lots of physical diskspace, you store your assets “in the cloud” as it were, and you’re charged based on how much storage space you, and how much bandwidth you consume.

Lots of large sites rely on the S3 service for their storage needs, Twitter, BaseCamp and SlideShare to name but 3 and the recent downtime has raised the age old issue, “are we putting all our eggs in one basket?” Jonathan Boutelle put it best in a recent blog post, stating “When S3 goes down, the internet goes down”. Aral Balkan also wrote recently urging people to have contingency plans in case events like this happen again, stating that the Open Source Google App Engine SDK could be the answer.

Interview: Dan Rubin The Details Of Design

Paul:Joining me today is Dan Rubin who I recently saw at the @media conference. Good to see you or speak to you again Dan should I say?

Dan Rubin:Good to speak to you Paul.

Paul:It was good to meet up with you at @media. It feels like a long time since we met up and it was great to hear you speaking there. That was a first for me.

Dan Rubin:Thanks. It was a privilege to be able to help out Patrick it being very last-minute.

Paul:Oh was it?

Dan Rubin:He sent me an email about two weeks prior saying someone had dropped out and of course I wasn’t going to say no.

Paul: laughs

Dan Rubin:It’s been over 10 years since my last trip to the UK, so it was a great opportunity.

Paul:Cool. Well I have to say considering you only had two weeks to put together the presentation, it was truly phenomenal. It was an excellent presentation and I really enjoyed it. You were talking about ‘design is in the detail’ I guess was the kind of subject you were tackling?

Dan Rubin: I’ve been talking a lot lately about the level of detail, the attention to detail and the design and I’ve done a couple of presentations with Brian Veloso over the last year on that same kind of topic. This was an extension of that injecting some of my own little personal preferences into the talk and got to cover things like typography and some of the simple practical things that you can improve very easily that result in a big improvement and typography, and little tricks in using grids, not on how to make them but how to actually implement them and how they can help workflow and bring things together and make layouts tighter and better without
that much effort and the same thing with digital transformations in photography and a lot of pixel detail that a lot of people don’t notice and its all about the subtle level of design.

Paul:I got this vague feeling that as you were talking you were a little bit appologetic for some of these manushi that kind of individually you sit there and go ‘how is anyone going to notice that?’, but accumulatively they have this effect on the design don’t they?

Dan Rubin:Well that’s the thing. It comes down more to feeling than seeing but its about as a designer what you feel with your eyes more than anything else and how that translates to what users or viewers or readers also feel but since they don’t know it is there, they are likely to never actually see it, but as a designer you’ll know it is there, you can see it, and the trick is to get it to the point of you can still see it but it is not really visible it is just felt.

Paul:A subconscious expression?

Dan Rubin:Yes.

Paul:You covered loads of tips in your presentation and there was some excellent stuff in there but if you had to pick out one that has the biggest impact on a design, which of the many things you talked about would that be?

Dan Rubin:I think what it would be is to really underscore trusting your eyes and it seems a really simple concept and whenever I put that up on the screen you get giggles from the audience. The truth is many of us don’t actually take the time as designers to just step away and look at what we’re working on. It doesn’t matter whether it is for screen or print. The medium is a material at this point and it is just having faith in what you see and what you feel. That’s what being a visual creative is all about. It is trusting what you see. It is the same as being a good musician comes down to trusting what you hear and sometimes we forget that, and we start getting into designing based on the rules or how we think we are supposed to do things or designing on technical limitations alone. When we do that we stop using our eyes.

Paul:It’s interesting in the presentation you talk quite a lot about some of the details and the mechanics of design. You were talking about font sizes going incrementally up, your heading and your sub headings and there being a mathematical relationship in their sizes. You talked about being consistent in your margins and padding and how all those things inter-relate. Are we saying that design is something that can be learnt and it is a mathematical thing and it’s a set of rules that you just adhere to? Or is there some sort of underlying artistic thing, some people just know how to do it and it’s not something that can be learnt. What’s your opinion on it because I get mixed feelings from you? On one hand you talk about these rules and on the other hand you talk about stepping back and looking at your design and it feels more kind of arty-farty if that makes sense!

Dan Rubin:What a load of questions and rightfully so! It’s something I’ve written about before years ago and had a bit of back and forth on the topic with Paul Scrivvens of 9 Rules, with him arguing that you don’t need any natural artistic ability because he didn’t think he had any, yet he was clearly doing things that looked good. I was arguing the opposite but when it comes down to it it’s really not something that you can say definitively either way. Just as there are people who naturally seem to be good musicians or good athletes or good at math and programming, there are people who seem to naturally be good at design and any kind of creative endeavours. It is really difficult to tell whether that seeming innate ability has come from something that happened in very early childhood development or if they were born with it. I do think that however difficult it is to put a finger on it, once you get old enough, especially to the point w here probably most of your listeners are doing what your doing for a living already or you are thinking of changing from one thing to another, you’re past that point of subconscious development where you need to put conscious effort into something and you can. I think you can be trained to do most of the things designers do. You can even train yourself to see the way that creatives see. The older you get the harder it becomes to incorporate into the way you view the world. That is a big part of it. That comes down to sometimes the different personalities. How hard is it to put a finger on what makes you ‘you’. I would say as a teacher, and I spend a lot of time teaching high school students over here about music as well, since that’s my other passion, and it’s specifically not just playing music but it’s specifically singing which is one of those things that you can either carry a tune or you can’t. I’ve also seen kids who can’t carry a tune when they start singing learn how they train themselves. They learn the proper muscle memory, and it’s amazing to see what people can actually accomplish when they put their mind to it. If you are listening out there and you want to become a better designer or maybe you’re not a designer and you’re a programmer or a web standards junkie, and I can say that because I am one too, and there isn’t any reason that you can’t become a better designer, or become a designer from scratch if you realy really want to.

Paul:I think that’s really important to say because I think so many people are intimidated from getting involved in design because there’s almost a bit of snobbery. If you’re not artistic, you’re not artistic there’s nothing you can do about that. I personnaly don’t believe that that’s true. Like you say I think there are some people that are naturally inclined that way but I think a lot of the principles that you were talking about in your presentation pretty much anybody can pick up on and do, which is what encouraged me so much hearing you talk.

Dan Rubin:That is one of the reasons why one of the reasons I say one of the most important thing is to trust your eyes and that’s instinctual. These rules, as a good teacher you have to teach these rules. When you start learning any discipline the first things that you are taught are the basics.The basics are things that many people, once they learn enough, don’t conciously think about, but what you find if you deconstruct their work is that they are doing them, they have incorporated into their flow into their process so it’s second nature to them. What we think of as instinct is really just experience.

Paul:Yeah. One of the things you did mention in the presentation that grabbed my attention is you talked a lot about texture and adding more texture to your design and about how that creates a real feel. There seems to be a slight skism, I don’t know if that is the right word, but like 2 different camps in design at the moment. People like yourself, Elliot Jay Stock is another example that does very rich, very textured design. It’s absolutely gorgeous. At the other end of the extreme you’ve got people like 37signals doing this minimalistic functional design. How do you feel those two sides fit togeth
er? Is there a role for one or the other or have they both got their place

Dan Rubin:I really think that both have their place and more than that it’s popular to create divisions. Not just these days, if you look at any industry that spends a lot of its time looking at itself, like we do, you start to find reasons to create little clicks within it or factions or what have you. If you just ignore those splits that happen because we spend way too much time looking at what we do and try to deconstruct it and answer that question of ‘why’. What you find is that it’s all the same thing. When I talk about texture it is important to understand that it doesn’t just mean rough or ??bulap or brick. Texture can also mean smooth and polished and speaking directly about 37signals for instance. I’ve used their apps and I’ve loved them since the first time they came out. If you look at the first versions of Base Camp and Backpack, before their incremental re-design they’ve actually added the little drop shadow over time. If y ou look at it as a designer you see the flaws in the way they’ve done it because it doesn’t look real and it just ends at some edges, it has hard edges, but that’s not the point. The point is they added it because it created a separation, they added it because they felt it needed it. The rest of the interface doesn’t need any other texture because it isn’t supposed to have a feel to it. It’s actually supposed to totally get out of the way and there are different approaches to minimalism. You can use minimalism in subtle detail where you add in things like I was showing in my presentation, or you can use minimalism where you keep taking away and 37signals apps feel right, they always have felt right to me so as far as I’m concerned that means they’ve hit the nail on the head. It shows when you see people trying to recreate the application interface and theat style that 37signals uses and they get stuck in this pattern of adding things, like they feel ‘well, that’s 37siganls l ook so I think we have to add things to make it better, to make it better, and they never work as well because it’s not just about that. So the answer is, and I try to underscore this when I talk to people about this or present about it or even write about it, as much as these things can be presented as rules and definitive this is the way to do something. the fact is you have to do what works best for you and your particular project or circumstance or situation, and you also have to be open to the fact that what works for you right now might change. It might be different next year, next month or next week, and being able to adapt to your situation as a designer specially is really important, because you have to adapt if you’re doing client work, you have to adapt from project to project, because your style might work for one client but you might need to tweek your style to do what’s best for another client. If your working on your own applications, what works for your users now might not work for your users once they become users that have used your app for a year and they’re experts now.

Paul:You talk about tweaking your style. How easy is that, do you think, to do in reality? I mean I’ve got a very strong style in my design, and I really struggle and I look at someone like Cameron Moll’s style and I just love it. I love the light-handed feel, he’s very delicate, beautiful design, and I wish I was more like that, but there is no way I can make myself become like that, or can I? Is there a way of changing your style?

Dan Rubin:I think we’re all naturally mimics. I’m not going to dig into my opinions on human adapability too much. I spend a lot of time thinking about that as far as evaluating how people use things, whether it’s interfaces or products and it’s interesting to start to see those patterns but you can see it on a global scale too. Historically human beings are species very, very adaptable and that happens on macro and micro levels. If you want to adapt your style you can. You look for the inflences you want to model yourself after. This is just how people learn to be designers when they’re starting out, or learn to be artists. When I took my first watercolour and oil painting classes when I was 11 or 12, the way we learnt was to recreate examples that were painted by masters. So learn how to use the brush strokes they use, to learn how to mix colours the way that they use them, to learn how to use the tools the way that they use them becau se you only discover your preferences and your style by mimicing, copying others. You find out what works and you decide what works for you and what doesn’t. So changing how you design and how you see is not necessarily easy, because at a certain point you’re reprogramming muscle memory and from my experience with singing I know how difficult that is to do. Once muscle memory has been built up to the point where you don’t think about it and you just react, it’s very difficult to break that down and re-build it. Difficult does not mean impossible.

Paul:That’s really interesting that you say that because I’ve always very much struggled to design in any other way than I already do, but I obviously need to push myself in this area. Talking of 37signals, I’m sure you have been following their recent post and various reactions to it about skipping Photoshop, and how they move straight into building with HTML and CSS and I just wondered what your opinion was on that.

Dan Rubin:I know I’d get roped into this discussion somehow. There has already been some great responses from people like Jeff Croft and Mark Boulten to the 37signals post on that, and even interestingly enough a follow-up post sourced by 37signals announcing that they were looking for an additional designer for their team that can push them into different directions that they havent been going naturally. That comes back to the whole adaptability and willing us to change and being open to it. In the argument itself I can’t say I always start in Photoshop or Fireworks or some sort of visual tool. I think Jeff said 37signals starts with a visual tool, it’s pencil and paper. I think even if your tool is a marker on a whiteboard to a certain extent everybody tends to start there, even if you don’t start there you start with a picture in your mind. So there’s some level in the process where a visualisation is occuring, if that’s fair to say. When it comes down to it why does the tool that you’re using to visualise really matter? It starts in your head if you’re a primarily visual person you can either realise that vision by programming it and seeing it in the browser or using Photoshop as a tool. All of these are just tools when it comes down to it, they’re not the end result. They’re just part of the process. I’ve done both. I’ve built straight from XHTML and CSS many times and I do tend to find that most visual designers that have weighed in on this conversation also find that in my opinion the result ends up being more simplistic. that’s not necessarily to say bad. It’s just different and you’ll find that the tools that you use as a visual creative influsence the end result because that comes down to constraints. 37signals of course is huge on constraints and you do save time when you’re doing straight HTML and CSS, you skip a lot of the temptation to play around like I know I do with layers and layer setting s and percentages of opacity. I spend a lot of time playing when I’m in Photoshop, I don’t think that’s bad. That’s part of the creative process when using that tool. When I used to paint which I havent done in way too long. I would play with my
palatte, when I was doing oils my palatte and my palatte knife was tool before I got to the canvas, and I would play with mixing my colours ‘and that’s not quite right’ and ‘wait and go over here’ and sometimes you get it onto the canvas and it doesn’t look the way you want it to and have to wait for it to dry and then you paint over it because that’s what you do with that tool. When you’re doing watercolours you don’t have that forgiveness of the tool, you have extra constraints, so you don’t experiment as much putting it on the paper, putting the paint to paper because you know once it’s dried and there you can’t go back. you can’t paint over it. So you adjust your style depending on the tools and the workflow and it’s all good, it ‘s just all different and you have to I think do yourself a favour and experiment to find which works best for you and don’t be afraid if you’re working on a project and you think ‘this doesn’t feel like it needs a lot of subtle gradients and lines and shadows and Photoshop work. I might just be able to build this without using Photoshop at all’. So do it if it feels like that will work best go that route. If you feel the opposite go the other route. If you feel like it should involve a lot more natural media pull out your watercolour pad and paint something and scan it in and incorporate that

Paul:It really down to the right tool for the job thought process.

Dan Rubin:Exactly. The thing that 37signals does really well is stick to their guns. They state their opinion so firmly that people can easily interpret it as law and I think that’s very important. In any industry it’s very important to have people who do that, who can stick to what they believe so strongly and apply it so universally that it creates this set of rules, but it doesn’t mean that they have to be followed or cant be partially followed or bent or broken and you find just as much as 37signals is enfatic about skipping Photoshop. There are other people who would never in a million years go straight to HTML and CSS, doesn’t mean that either camp is right.

Paul:OK. One last question just to wrap this up. We’re running out of time but there’s something I wanted to ask you which is: We’ve been already talking about that there are people that may be want to learn to be better designers, to find their style and to move into this area, perhaps they’ve been a developer background and they’ve been previously put off exploring design because they have been made to feel inadequate. What kind of resources would you encourage people to look for or look at in order to get going I guess?

Dan Rubin:Whether you’re starting from scratch or just trying to improve what you already have it’s important to touch on a couple of specific areas, and those are typography, layout and working with colour. This applies just to design because it’s worked whether you’re designing on the web or designing in print or branding or whatever you’re doing. Typography is kind of my first love with design and if you want to learn about typography you have to go out and buy ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’ by Robert Bringhurst. It’s the bible for typographers. It’s really easy to read too because he’s a well respected Canadian poet as well. He just happens to be an excellent typographer and book designer, so if you are in a rush, you cant get to the book store or Amazon right away Mark Boulton’s series ‘Five Simple Steps To Better Typography’ is a great place to start as well and he references a ton of other good resources. Start there if you a re going to start online but no matter what buy ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’. When it comes to layout there are a lot of things that you can learn about layout but you’ve got to learn about grids, even if you never use them. Do yourself a favour of learning and I’ll reference Mark again, actually I’ll reference Mark in all three of these. He’s got great starter tutorials about this stuff so ‘Five Simple Steps To Designing Grid Systems’ is really a great place to start. Cameron Moll has written about Griding The 960 and read up over on Khoi Vinh’s site about grids. ‘Grids Are Good’ is a great demonstration as well, and if you want to get a physical book to hold ‘Grid Systems In Graphic Design’ is a great, great phyisical book and I think it’s important to as web designers to also reference ‘Print’, because Print is where all these design rules come from and typography rules and colour rules, so learn from these different implem entations and you’ll figure out things that you can do that you didn’t think about, because you haven’t seen them on the web. So ‘Grid Systems In Graphic Design’ is by Josef Müller Brockmann I believe would be the pronounciation, look that up. Colour, and this is something that’s very preferential maybe but read up again Mark Boulton’s ‘Five Simple Steps To Designing With Colour’. He’s great at teaching, he’s great at communicating all these things. Also play around with some of the online tools like Adobe Kuler, is fun. Look at what other people are putting together, look at combinations, again feel is important. Whatever feels right for what you’re trying to do. Another cool tool is Colorjack. You got a couple of ways of mixing colours and it’s really, really cool to look at. Finally on the topic of colour whenever using colours in an interface please be aware of the different types of colourbl indness that exist, and there are lots of tools online. Photoshop CS4 will have some tools built in as well but there are plug-ins that you can get right now for all sorts of tools and online tools as well that allow you to see what you’re designing, or even just a colour palatte. See them through the eyes of someone that has these various colourblindness afflictions and make sure that whatever you do doesn’t render something unuseable to what ends up being a large percentage of the viewing public when it comes down to it.

Paul:WOW !! That’s a good set of resources !! My word.

Dan Rubin:You didn’t think I’d be that prepared did you?

Paul:That’s a superb list. I certainly didn’t know about all those posts from Mark Boulton. there was some great stuff in there – Thank you very much Dan. Just to say that Dan’s talk at @media will be no doubt going live at some point and you’ll be able to download it and listen to it. Definitely do that, it was superb. So check that out. You will be able to go the shownotes for this episode for all those links that will be useful as well. No doubt you won’t be able to remember them all. Dan thanks for coming on the show, it’s very much appreciated and we will get you back on in the future.

Dan Rubin:Thanks very much for having me Paul. It was a pleasure.

Thanks to Sarah Galley for transcribing this interview.

Linkage

You can find Dan Rubins site, Superfluous Banter here.

Typography

Layout

Colour

Listeners feedback:

Managing a Bigger Team

Jon asks: We are a company of 4 people – myself (owner, design lead and general business development/project management person), one designer, and 2 developers.

We are hopefully about to merge with a slightly larger company in a neighbouring town who have slightly more staff than we do (7 in all), and who have more of a project management structure – 2 project managers, using the services of 1 designer, 3 developers, and 1 designer/developer. I would end up as owner/MD of the enlarged company.

My question is really about project management? What do you think is the best organizational structure for a company of 11 people? I was feeling pushed on the project management side before this merger came along, and the merger will bring 2 project managers with it. How does Headscape do it for example – I think you have project managers there – do the designers and developers report to project managers, or do the project managers pick from a pool of design and development resource as required? What are your thoughts generally on the whole project management side of things.

A-ha… this is part two to a question I answered a few weeks back relating to pricing work after two companies merge. I wanted more detail at the time and now I have it!

Comparing to Headscape, we have 4 designers, 4 developers, 3 project managers, 2 business development/analysts and 1 lazy good-for-nothing called Paul … seriously though, Paul effectively markets Headscape and I have to say he’s rather good at it (ungrits teeth…)

Following the merger Jon will have a team of 11. As he is new MD, I think it is imperative that he much reduces the design and PM aspects of his role and concentrates on bringing in business as there are quite a few more mouths to feed.

That leaves roughly 3 designers, 5 developers and 2 PMs. Depending on the work you’re doing I think that is ok especially considering Jon can bolster both the design and PM groups if needed.

Regarding the allocation of work, project managers should rule the roost. Full stop.

It is their job to manage resources. Delivering projects effectively and on time means that they must know that they are in charge regarding who does what and when they need to do it by. A certain amount of fitting the right person to the job should be done but generally, the rule should be that the next piece of work goes to the next available person. This would be particularly useful advice in a merged company where it would much easier to keep going back to ‘your’ guys because you trust them.

One thing that has worked really well for us is to set invoicing targets for the project managers. We don’t operate performance related targets but it still really helps to focus minds on hitting milestones at the end of months.

Terms and Conditions

Adam writes: I am developing my own web application. In summary, it’s a site with user submission of content in a social networking format with video uploads. Anyone can register an account.

I of course have to try and write Terms of Service for this and I am getting stuck. I am wondering what Headscape uses, especially for Getsignoff, and whether you found a pre-written terms of service, or had a specialist write one.

What’s your solution to the problem, and what should / should not be included.

I have to confess to conferring with Headscape’s fount of all legalese knowledge on this – our MD Chris Scott. I tried to get him on the show but he’s still a little jittery after the last time all those years ago… anyway, Chris put together the TOS for Getsignoff and these are his thoughts on it:

For Getsignoff I looked at the TOS of other online services like Harvest, Basecamp, Youtube and Flickr. I’m not a legal person, but this gave me enough material to be able to identify the key issues that I thought we needed to cover in our TOS.

I assembled this into a brief for our legal adviser that was part overview of what we wanted to achieve and part draft TOS using adapted clauses from other TOSs.

Our legal adviser pretty much re-wrote what I had given him but this was from a position where he had a good understanding of how we wanted Getsignoff to work.

The bottom line with this sort of thing is that you really need to get a professional legal person to assist.

123. Plight

Posted in Classic shows on June 25, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this weeks show we review Textmate and the Top 5 Tips for Web Designers and we discuss the plight of in-house designers.

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News and events

SPAM meltdown

It is always with fear and trepidation that I mention HTML email. It inevitably leads to a torrent of comments ‘educating’ me about the evils of HTML in email, and that we should only use plain text.

Although personally I wish HTML email was never invented and try to limit its use, I do accept it is here to stay. Despite its many drawbacks it is statistically more effective than plain text from a marketing perspective.

You will be hard pushed to pursued a client to forgo HTML. Inevitably we will have to produce HTML templates occassionally. Of course, being conscientious, when we do produce HTML emails we want to ensure they look great and are well coded. This leads me to a couple of stories worth mentioning.

The first is that Patrick McNeil (of Design Meltdown fame) has launched a new site called Spam Meltdown. The site showcases examples of great email design in much the same way as Design Meltdown does with websites. Patrick has done an amazing job on this site and he has my sympathy because he is subscribed to over 1000 mailing lists! The designs he showcases are organised by style, colour, industry and topic. As with design meltdown this categorisation approach works really well. You can quickly find inspiration by looking at categories that are relevant to your project.

The second news item worth mentioning is that Campaign Monitor have updated their chart for CSS support in email clients. Campaign Monitor is a service which allows you to send HTML newsletters, but they do a lot more than just take your money. They are actively involved in improving standards support among email clients through the email standards project. Next time you are trying to produce an HTML email template check out their CSS support grid as it will clearly show you whether a particular CSS property is supported.

Form Analytics

While I am on the subject of cool services like Campaign Monitor, I also want to mention Clicktale. Clicktale is a service that allows you to track users as they move about your site and even anonymously record their actions. The last time I mentioned them this disturbed many people who saw it as an invasion of privacy. However, I see it as a valuable tool for learning about user interaction and improve site usability.

If you share my view, then you maybe interested in a new service they are starting to offer. You can now not only track users as they click around your website, you can also watch how they interact with forms.

In addition to video recording, the new form analytics service also provides three invaluable reports…

The time report – This shows how long users spent completing each field.
The blank report – This provides information on fields that have been left blank on submission.
The refill report – Which highlight fields that have been completed incorrectly.

If you run a site that requires users to complete long or complex forms then you will see the benefit of this service. On a high trafficked ecommerce site this would be invaluable, substantially reducing the number of users dropping out at checkout.

Art direction hits the blog

This week has seen the launch of Jason Santa Maria’s new personal website. For those of you who do not know, Jason is the creative director at Happy Cog (Zeldman’s company).

Normally, I would not mention the launch of a new personal website. However, Jason has done something very interesting. His new design is well executed but plain. It certainly is not as inspiring as his other work. The reason for this simple approach is that it is a framework upon which he will build.

The idea is that each of his blog posts will have a custom design to accompany it. The design will therefore reflect the content. In effect he is bring art direction to his blog. This is a bold experiment and something that Zeldman has written about before.

Although I am fully behind the idea of bringing content and design closer together, I do have some reservations. First, there is a possibility that the constantly changing design could make navigation around the site confusing. Fortunately from what I have seen so far that will not be the case. Jason has been careful to ensure key navigational elements remain in a consistent location and have similar styling wherever you are in the site. However, if other designers were to adopt this approach would they be so careful?

My second concern is a purely practical one. If each article not only needs writing but also designing, will that reduce the amount Jason posts? In other words is a blog really the right place for this type of art direction?

However, despite these reservations I am really pleased Jason is trying this approach. A personal website should be the place to experiment and try new things. Too many blogs (including my own) are cookie cutter solutions with some pretty graphics slapped on top. Its superb to see somebody doing something different.

Prototyping

My final news story of the week returns to a subject we have touched on recently. How do you wireframe a modern web application with its high level of interaction? In show 120 I mentioned that one approach might be to utilise flash. Today I want to point you at an article on the List Apart website, which suggests that building prototypes maybe better than struggling with wireframes.

When I first saw this article I was hesitant. After all I can barely pursued my clients to pay for wireframes let alone a full blown prototype. However, the more I considered what was being suggest, the better the idea seemed.

The majority of time spent getting an application working is spent on bug fixing, browser support and non-core functionality. The rough ‘outline’ of an application can come together very quickly. What is more, unlike wireframing, a prototype can be used as the basis for the final build. It does not get thrown away like a wireframe.

The article also points out that prototypes are better for demonstrating difficult concepts to clients. They encourage earlier collaboration between designer and developer, and provide something substantially better to user test against.

With almost every new website having some form of web application, we all need to consider how to better conceptualise their operation.

Feature: The plight of the in-house designer

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

Reviews: Textmate and Top 5 Tips for Web Designers

We have two reviews this week by our lucky competition winners Teifion Jordan and John McFarlane. Teifion and John will be going to this year’s dConstruct in Brighton.

dConstruct is the affordable one day conference for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications. Tickets cost £125 inc VAT and went on sale yesterday so be sure to check it out.

Textmate by Teifion Jordan

Hi, I am Teifion Jordan, I am reviewing a program created by someone far smarter than me. I am going to be looking at Textmate. Textmate is a Mac only application though there is a similar editor called eText Editor for Windows.

First impressions of Textmate are that it’s pretty sparse, it looks like any other editor. I throw it a PHP file and it colours the text in, just like any other editor would. The colour scheme can be changed, both text and background colours can be altered, which is quite a neat touch. I can even make parts bold, italic and underlined which is a neat touch. It requires knowledge of Regular expressions but I can actually add in more rules for what to colour in! I used this to make variables used as array indexes appear differently, something I have wanted to do for some time. Not since I was a toddler, but definitely some time.

But enough moaning about how the program itself is both smarter and better looking than me, I wanted to try some code. I found that if I typed "foreach" in a PHP block and hit tab, I was presented with an entire foreach loop. Closer inspection revealed that there were dozens of snippets and commands for PHP and dozens more for each of the many languages and some things that were not languages. With 5 minutes of effort I had setup Textmate to post my blog posts for me, I am now one step closer to not having to put any effort at all into blogging.

It is possible to create your own snippets and not at all hard either. I now have one to tell me that I am beautiful and another to create a PostgreSQL query. I can also write new commands, I can write them in command line script, Python, Ruby and PHP to name a few. All of the commands are completely open sources, so you can see what’s already been done, and sort of plagiarise that sort of work for your own means. Except plagiarism is bad so don’t ever do it.

I can edit columns, I can write new snippets, commands and even entire languages, I can Regex, I can manage projects with a hierarchal file structure. It’s like before I was walking but now I’m on a push bike. I can’t make use of the ability to run down pedestrians until I learn how to do balance and pedal. Okay, the running down pedestrians was a bad example but anybody that is still listening and not calling the police must have understood it so I’ll continue. There’s nothing I can’t do in Textmate, I just need to look at the extensive online manual to learn it. And there I think is it’s biggest failing.

Textmate is a really lovely program to use but it’s so complicated. Coda, as a contrast, is a more intuitive application but it is to Textmate as a spade is to a chainsaw, that is, meant for a different problem and with fewer moving parts but also with the ability to digs holes? I’m sorry, my mind wandered. What I meant to say is that Textmate is great for dealing with code but not so much the design which is what apps such as Coda excel at. I’ve now been using Textmate for 10 months and I still think there is potential to unlock, though, that might be because I’m a thickie.

I suppose I should wrap this up by saying that I would heartily recommend anybody thinking about writing lots of code to give TextMate a good look. It takes a lot of time to get a lot out of it, but there really is a lot to get out of it.

Thank you very much for listening, I hope this was at least semi-informative

Top 5 Tips for Web Designers by John McFarlane

Hi, I’m John McFarlane and this is the first ever review brought to you live from my living room. Today I’m reviewing a post that has been submitted on the boagworld.com forum. The title is "Top 5 Tips for Web Designers". I’ve been reading through the replies and I’ve put together my top 5 top tips.

In at number 5 submitted by richquick, allow time and money for personal development, read blogs, buy books, attend conferences, experiment and learn new techniques and technologies.

In at number 4 posted by Jayphen, surround yourself with designers, whether they’re colleagues, real world contacts, online contacts, forums, podcasts. The more you talk about design the more you learn and I’d like to add to that e-mail designers for advice and let them know your experiences.

In at number 3 posted by some guy called Paul Boag, develop with the latest best practices, ensure you separate content, design and behaviour. Make sure everything you build uses progressive enhancements.

In at number 2 another one by Paul Boag, it’s an obvious one but one that can’t be put across more clearly, know HTML, CSS and javaScript inside out, you need to know the core technologies that underpin the web back to front. I’d like to add to this point, the basics of HTML and CSS are easily learnt but don’t be fooled into thinking that you know enough, you really need to know these subjects to an advanced level. This will benefit you when your implemented the latest best practices.

And that brings me on to my number 1 tip and that is love your job, I think if you love this industry and have a passion for web design, I think those qualities will guide you to achieve your goals. So enjoy your development and don’t rush yourself too much. Take the time to develop the right way, build contacts and friends and embrace the industry as a whole.

That about raps up this weeks review. I hope you’ve enjoyed the very first show live from my living room. Thank you and goodbye.

Listeners feedback:

Newspaper columns on the web

Adrian writes: Hey guys, long time listener from the states. I’ve been working on a new personal site lately and I’ve become fixated on the idea of using newspaper style columns. Since you two seem to know a thing or two usability, I’d figure I’d ask for your thoughts.

It seems like most people view them as a print concept that doesn’t translate well online but seeing as most screens these days are widescreen and vertical space is taken up by menu bars, docks and browser extensions, going horizontal strikes me as a logical solution.

I appreciate the logic. It is true that more computers than ever have widescreens and that vertical space is at a greater premium than horizontal. However, I would think very carefully before employing newspaper style columns. As I see it there are two concerns:

The usability concern

As you point out, people reference usability concerns as the primary reason against newspaper columns. In a newspaper, copy runs across several columns with the eye darting from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. This is acceptable because the user can view the entire newspaper in a single glance. There is no such thing as a scroll bar.

On the web it is different. You are unable to predict the height available in a browser window and so users will almost certainly have to scroll. This means the user will scroll down one column as they read and then have to scroll back to the top to start the next column. This is far from a pleasurable reading experience.

It is also important to consider width as well as height. As you say newspaper style columns works well on high resolution, widescreen monitors. On anything less the story becomes unreadable with narrow columns and short line lengths. The alternative is to allow both horizontal and vertical scrolling. But as I am sure you, know this is the ultimate usability error and should be avoided at all costs.

The technical concern

There are also technical considerations to take into account. How will a story be split over multiple columns? Currently this cannot be done in CSS, although this may appear in CSS3.

One option would be to manually layout each block of text. However, this isn’t going to be practical with anything other than the most static of sites.

The only option is to use some server side code. However, even this is not without its problems. Consideration needs to be given to inline elements such as images or quotations. What happens if they appear at the end of one column? Does a quote get split? Will the design accommodate larger images? What happens when text is scaled?

Although all of these technical problems can be overcome, you are forced to ask whether it worth the effort. This is especially true considering the serious usability concerns.

Estimating dev/creative work

Kirk Henry asks: I’m not sure if this should be listed as a question or not but her goes. I’m a Creative Director for a dev shop with some very large fortune 500 companies and a problem I always seem to come across is difficulty in the estimating process. We use excel documents, have some standard hours for comps but have to do custom estimation for multi media projects etc… my estimates are always pretty decent but I want to know what you guys use or what software you would recommend. I have been listening on itunes from the start and love the show.

Ok, this is probably the most important subject that we (and I mean the web community) don’t talk about. Why? I think, because it’s difficult to pin down a method of reliably estimating a project and, more so, we’re all guilty if underestimating time and again… these are my thoughts:

The first thing to ask yourself is ‘how serious is this project?’ I have a sixth sense for requests for quotes that fit into the following brackets:

‘We have this idea but have no idea how much it will cost and we want you to do all the research work involved in scoping it. Of course we won’t pay for the research and there’s no way we’ll pay sensible money for the work once we know what it is’
‘We have a supplier that we want to work with but my boss says I need a couple of other quotes’
‘Us guys in sales and marketing have been doing some blue sky thinking and want a quote to redevelop Google….’

You get the idea – timewasters. You need to deal with these requests quickly – this is how I do it. Have a chat with whichever department(s) would do this work if it ever materialised – get them to give you wide ballpark figures. Add in PM and contingency and send them an email. 99 out of a 100 won’t even bother getting back to you. Some will, but they’re usually trying to get free scoping (‘can you give me a bit more detail on how you reached those figures’).

Anyway, I’ve ranted long enough timewasters, back to Kirk’s question.

First question – do you know the budget? If yes, then you are looking to fit a scope into a set amount of effort. Can you do it? Will the ‘client’ be happy with the scope that fits their budget? Do they understand what that scope is (especially if you have reduced it to fit their budget)? DO NOT get creative with your effort allocations just to fit within the budget. Either ask for more (up front) or walk away.

If you don’t know the budget then you are looking to scope a project from scratch. If it’s a really big project then ideally you should be being paid to scope it as we’re looking at business analysis and consultancy here.

Break down the project into rough task areas. It’s likely that you’ll have done other projects that include similar tasks so you’ll know efforts on these (though ask yourself if you got it right last time). For the ‘new’ tasks, break it down further and you will probably find other smaller tasks that you have done before. For the really new stuff then you need to talk to an expert (designer/developer/IA) and get them to think the task through. They will provide you with an informed guess. That’s right – guess. Because people are guessing it is really important to overestimate fixed price projects. This is the cost to the client of having a fixed price.

Don’t forget to charge for meetings (if 3 people are attending then charge for 3 people!). Project management is notoriously undercharged. We have a rule of thumb of 15 – 20% (and that’s probably light).

The golden rule of estimating is don’t be tempted to lower your probably already too low price just to win the work. Be prepared to walk away.

As far as tools to help with estimating go, MS Project is great at separating tasks, linking resources to tasks and giving you a good idea of how long things will take. But, I tend to find that it is over the top at the quote stage and tend to stick with Excel.

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.

118. Geo

Posted in Classic shows on May 20, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this weeks show we look at geocoding, Tom Coates talks about Fire Eagle and find out how we achieved the tabbed menu effect on the Headscape website.

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News and events

New tools for web designers on the way

A few months ago the guys over at clear:left put up a holding page for an application called Silverback. Exactly what Silverback was became a topic of much discussion and a considerable amount of buzz.

This week Andy Budd has finally revealed exactly what Silverback is on his blog. He describes as…

An OSX application to help people run their own low-cost Guerrilla usability tests. It captures screen activity, records audio and video from your built in iSight, and then composites it into a handy Quicktime movie for later use.

I have been fortunate enough to play with an early beta and I have to say it’s a great idea. It has the edge on other "screen capture” programs because it is designed specifically with usability testing in mind. For example, you don’t need to export the movies as soon as they are recorded. You can save them until you have finished a day of testing when more time is available.

If you ever do user testing get yourself over to the Silverback site and signup for the beta.

It would of course be remiss of me not to mention GetSignOff.com as we are on the subject of tools for web designers. Like clear:left Headscape have been developing an application and this week we provided our first walkthrough showing exactly what it does.

In essence GetSignOff is a web application that allows you to present designs to clients in a more professional manner, manage the feedback you receive from them and organise the multiple iterations of each design.

To really get a sense of what it does you need to view the screencast so be sure to check it out.

Effective online delivery of video

There can be no doubt in anybodies mind that online video is huge. It has taken a long time to arrive but with broadband so widespread it is now a reality. Increasingly users are expecting video content from websites and it is up to us as web designers and owners to deliver.

Delivery is fairly straightforward when you can use sites like YouTube or Vimeo. However, that is not always possible. Constraints on size and quality can make these services unsuitable. Not to mention their over demanding terms of use. So what do you do if you are forced to host and deliver video yourself?

My advise is to read an excellent article on the Digital Web Magazine that looks at the various approaches for delivering video over the internet. It explains concepts like progressive download, RTMP streaming and HTTP streaming. It is a superb source of information for anybody who has to host and deliver their own video content.

Some Javascript slight of hand

Our next story is some slight of hand by Robert Nyman.

I find myself increasingly using Javascript to show and hide content. However, being a well behaved standards designer I have to be careful how I build pages. I avoid hiding content with CSS because if I do and Javascript is disabled, users have no way to show the content again. Instead I use Javascript to hide the content so that if it is disabled the hidden elements will show by default.

The downside is that you can get flashes of content because Javascript has to wait for the page to fully load before it can hide content.

Fortunately Robert has come up with a nifty little workaround where he uses Javascript to load a CSS file, which in turn hides the content. This happens before the body has been loaded avoiding the flash of content.

If like me you occasionally suffer from content appearing when it should not, then bookmark this approach for later use.

Overcoming creative block

Our final news story today is a post on overcoming creative block. Creative block is something we all suffer from whether our job is perceived as being a creative one or not. Every job requires some degree of creativity and we all know what it feels like to stare blankly at a computer monitor unsure of where to begin.

This post provides a list of excellent tips on how to overcome brain freeze from going for a walk to throwing away the piece you like most. It really is a superb read. Another one to bookmark for the next time your creative juices fail to flow.

Surprisingly he has missed my number one technique, sitting on the toilet… or is that just me?

Feature: Location Aware

The web is full of exciting innovations at the moment. However, it is geocoding that personally excites me the most. In this weeks feature I explain what it is and why I believe it offers so much potential.

Interview: Tom Coates on Fire Eagle

Paul: Ok, so joining me today is Tom Coates from Yahoo. Good to have you hear Tom

Tom: Nice to be here

Paul: So I’ve just been hearing from Tom that he’s got a massive line up of interviews to do for a product that he’s been involved with called Fire Eagle. So he’s talking to the Guardian, the BBC and lots of important people, but thank you for sparing a few minutes to talk to us too. We’re very honoured.

Tom: No problem at all.

Paul: So, lets kick off for those who haven’t come across Fire Eagle before. I think you talked about it at dConstruct last year.

Tom: Yes

Paul: That was when I first heard about it, perhaps you could tell our listeners a little bit more about what it is, and what it does.

Tom: So Fire Eagle is a service that helps you share information about your location, online. So that’s both for people, and more importantly for different sites and services. The other side of it is that it sort of fixes a problem with the development community for the use of applications that use your location. In that it makes that process much easier. So in principal, it means that from a user’s perspective, you can capture information about your location and use it in lots of different places. And from a website owners perspective you can start to think about how your service can respond to someone in the world without having to do a lot of donkey work.

Paul: So it’s not primarily, in itself, like another web application like Twitter where you’ve got to sign up for and take part in it? I
t’s more of a API framework type of thing.

Tom: Well, when you think about it, it is both, because if you think about it as a place to sort of store information about your location. We give you the tools to go in and update that information, decide who to share it with, and manage that information. So in some ways it’s like your location preference page, which helps you control that information. So yes you do sign up for it, it uses a Yahoo ID, the same one you use for Upcoming and Flickr, but really, once you’ve started capturing your location or sharing it with particular services, you don’t really need to come back. We’re not trying to build a sexy fun service for day-to-day use, but we’re trying to make something that makes it easier for you to build, and other people to use, services.

Paul: OK, so how exactly does the service work Tom. I’ve seen other location based stuff where you have to do horrible things like enter grid references or terrible stuff like that. How do you use Fire Eagle?

Tom: What you do with the site, is you go to the site, and you log in with your Yahoo Id and you do a simple terms of service thing, which asks how often you want to be reminded that you’re sharing your location. From that moment on you’re up and running. The simplest thing to do, is go to a web page called where am I, and you can type in your address and, we will work out where you are in the world, and we’ll plonk it on a map. Now that in itself isn’t terribly interesting. So the interesting thing about it, is that we’ve opened up the API’s so that anyone in the world can build something that could update your location, and anyone in the world could build something that could use your location. So we have an application gallery, and you could go along to that, and on that at the moment there are services like Navizon, which work out where your location is by nearby wifi signals. Or Loki which is from SkyHook the same people who power the iPhone location thing, and Dopler and all kinds of stuff. You can tell those services that you’re OK sharing that information with Fire Eagle. So I have an application on my phone at the moment from Navizon that works out where I am every 10 minutes and tells Fire Eagle where I am. So that location just sits in Fire Eagle and then I can decide to share it with people. So as an example a plug-in for movable type that Ben Trott has built and that means that you can put on your blog, a little map of where you are right now which is quite fun. What we do is, to help maintain your privacy, you choose which services you’re comfortable with sharing your location with, or get an update from. You can say to what level of granualarity you’re comfortable sharing with it. So you can say, just share my city, or my state (if you’re in America) or your neighborhood or your exact point. Then you can hide information at any time, or delete all information in the system.

Paul: Oh, OK.

Tom: So basically it means that you would go and find one really good way to get where you are, or lots of little ones all around the place that compliment each other, and sort it out into the middle of this little repository of data, that you can then say, yes I’d like to use this on Flickr, or on Facebook, or on moveable type, or wherever.

Paul: So the way you’re describing it is that there are multiple entry points into it, where you type in your exact location, weather it’s your mobile phone updating it?

Tom: Yes

Paul: You know I even noticed from looking at the site that you can now Twitter your location in.

Tom: Yes

Paul: And that there are multiple output points, where it’s going to Movable Type, or to wherever else.

Tom: Yes

Paul: So what type of things are we going to see with this. What are you expecting people to develop? Is there any cool stuff at the moment that you can tell us about?

Tom: Yeah, well there are a fair number of cool things that have already come out, which is kind of interesting. I mean one of the things on the engineering side – so there is a bit of a problem with location based services, and everyone’s been talking about it for a very long time, you know they have all these kinds of things that you couldn’t find friends more easily, or find out things about your neighbourhood or whatever. And the problem is, and has always been, that it’s quite hard because what you have to do is, every time you want to use an application like that, you have to install another application on your phone, or go through another extended rigmarole about how to do it. So our plan is that we take that away, so what you basically do is you find any piece of software that gets your location usefully, and you install it, and it updates Fire Eagle. So from that moment on any application in the world that is Fire Eagle enabled can go and get that. So any website in the world could respond to where you are, without ever having to build the thing that works out where you are. So some examples – Navizon as I said is this lovely little application that runs on most mobile phones, captures your location. There is a thing called Fire Bot, which is a Twitter Bot, and on that one you can do a Twitter direct message, with a text string of where you are. So you can say I’m in San Francisco, or I’m in London, or I’m in.. as I am now, at Yahoo’s offices at 125 Shaftesbury Avenue. And you can type that in and you can then share that with all the applications you’re comfortable with. We’ve also taken Cell ID information, so if you have a mobile phone, many of those on a technological side expose the Cell ID. So that’s the tower, or mobile phone mast kind of thing. Quite a lot of people are doing interesting mappings based on that. That in particular is at a very early stage so we don’t actually get much good information from that, but, you know we do take in all different types of data. You could have a GPS log coming from a mobile phone, or anything that could get long/lat coordinates, or anything that could get text string of the place you’re in. On the other side, is the things that could use it, which is where the fun starts. There are all kinds of things that people have built. And more coming. So there is a service that Leonard Lin, the founder of Upcoming made for us, called FireBall, and FireBall was particularly useful in San Francisco in the last couple of weeks because of the Web 2.0 Expo that was out there.

Paul: Oh yeah.

Tom: And the idea with that was you could either send a Twitter message of where your location was, or if you were getting it from FireEagle, it would automatically use that. And at any point you could say "Where are my friends” and it would go to Twitter, find out all your Twitter friends and plonk them on
a map for you. And you could do that on the iPhone as well because it would send you a file that could then be opened by the Google maps thing. So you could literally call your little maps thing on the iPhone and it would say "Here’s where all your friends are”, which is really lovely, and really nice, because it’s all about your friends there.

We’re building a Facebook App, this is no particular secret, we’ve talked about this before, and its going to be one that means you can decide to share your location on Facebook with your friends, which is going to be quite fun. A guy called Simon Willison who I used to work with, who has built a thing called WikiNear. There are over a million geo-coded articles in Wikipedia, which basically means someone has put in the longitude and latitude of where the thing talked about in the article is. So Simon’s thing is a little web page for your mobile phone, and you bring it up and it says "Here are the 5 nearest interesting things to you”.

Paul: Cool!

Tom: Which is pretty fun, so you can wander around London and here’s the British Museum and you can click on that to go to the media wiki page to talk about that.

Um, there are other things like that, I mean LightPole is a little company that we’ve been working with. They’re doing things like local services around you, which again is mobile phone focused. A company called Outside.In, they do things like try to work out where all the blog posts and news stories are about, and they can bring that information to you if they know where you are – and they are going to get some of that information from FireEagle – which is really cool. So as I said we’ve got this Moveable Type thing. So there are all kinds of stuff that is going on at the moment. We build these wonderful little widgets, which I really like, they are for OS 10, and one of them is a little updater. You can type in your location, press a little button and it will update it to FireEagle. One of them tells you the weather where you are right now. So if you travel a lot, it will give you the weather forecast of where you are. And one of them shows you nearby flickr photos, so it just goes and gets those geocoded photos from Flickr and gives you every day a little photo montage of all the cool things that are going on around you. So lots of interesting new uses really.

Paul: It’s interesting you mentioned Flickr. I mean you can imagine the reverse of what you just described with Flickr, so if your location is been taken each time, it would know the location where you took that picture and geo-code that picture on Flickr. Is that the kind of thing that you’re planning to do?

Tom: I mean there are a lot of really interesting uses based around geo tagging. So whenever I write a blog post, it would be really awesome if my Moveable Type blogger could go and look up on FireEagle where I was, and say "This article was entered here”. So you could say "What do you think about Gordon Brown in Edinburgh” as apposed to "What do you think about Gordon Brown in London” or "Wales”, and that would be really fun as a good way of slicing through this enormous amount of blog posts that are out there.

Twitter messages as well, that would be lovely – it would be really great if every time you wrote a Twitter message they went and grabbed your location, and you could say, well I want to explore the public conversations going on in my neighborhood right now. That would be lovely. Um, and with Flickr as well, when you click on a photo on your phone, uploading it immediately. If you havn’t got the location on that device, being able to get it from FireEagle would be really useful. And you know obviously whatever amount of information they can get, so perhaps FireEagle only knows you’re in London, that’s still useful – you know you can still help people find photos just because they are in London. Or if they are at an exact point that’s also good. The only thing about Flickr is that often people take photos and upload them later. And at the moment because we want to make sure that we’ve thought about all the implications, and we don’t want to weird any one out, we’re making sure that we don’t keep any ones history.

Paul: Oh Ok

Tom: So it’s literally just your current location we look after for you.

Paul: Ah, that’s good.

Tom: Yeah we’ve talked to a lot of people about this, and we have been very careful about the privacy and control. These are the two watch words of the project. We are incredibly conservative, we don’t want to worry’s any one out. So at any time you can press a button to hide your information. Information will still come into FireEagle, but it won’t go out. Or you can delete all your information on FireEagle at one time, so we won’t keep any records at all if you do that. At the moment we don’t keep any location history at all – any tracking, or location history there. And we even by default will send you an email once a month saying "Are you still OK sharing”, and if you don’t reply to the email, or you don’t click on the link in the email, then we’ll stop immediately. It’s just so there is no risk of you doing anything, you know, accidently, exposing it in ways you’re not comfortable with.

Paul: I mean when I first heard you talk about this it struck me as hugely exciting, that location based information is an area that I’m massively excited about. And I think there is so much potential to add a new level of context, you know, on the data that we see on the web. Something that has been very much lacking since the beginning. And there is so much potential here, for pretty much anyone listening to this show, whether you’re a design or a web site owner.

Tom: Yeah

Paul: So where would people start to find out more information about this. Where’s the good place to begin?

Tom: OK, so one of the parts of the project that took surprisingly the most time, was actually making sure that the documentation was really good. At the moment it’s an invitation only service, so we have a few thousand people using it and testing it at the moment. We’re opening it up to more invitations pretty regularly. It’s only been out in the wild about 6 weeks. So if you’re interested in using FireEagle, just go to the website, put your email address in the box, and over the next few weeks we’ll be sending out more invitations.

Paul: And what’s the website address?

Tom: Oh, it’s FireEagle.com

Paul: OK

Tom: So that should be nice and easy to find. On that site, if you can get an invitation, and if anyone spots us around the
place, ask us, because we have little cards we can give out. There is extensive documentation on how it works, that really falls into two big chunks. Partly it’s this use of this new standard called OAuth. Which is a really good way, meaning sites can talk to each other on behalf of users, and you can set your preferences around that. So getting your head around OAuth is really useful because so many services – I think Google and Yahoo have both announced that there is going to be support for OAuth as a standard now. So that’s really great, we’re all really happy about that. And the other side, is the FireEagle APIs themselves, which are very simple, sort of three main ones. 1. Where is the user. Again, all of this only happens if the user has given explicit permission for this service to see it.

Paul: Sure

Tom: One is update the location of the user, and one is ambiguous query, so such as, you say you’re in London, which is great, but there are hundreds of London’s in the world. So there is one service where it says "which London” and you can say "this one”. So they are the three core queries , it is very very simple. We have another couple of ones, for particular web services, to bring back users of my application within that particular area, like SOHO or London.

Paul: Yep

Tom: Another one, bring back the hundred who have updated their location most recently. So just think, just to make it easier for developers to build useful services.

Paul: Cool, that just sounds really exciting, and I can’t wait to see some of the stuff that is developed in the future. Tom, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Tom: No problem, I hope that was useful

Paul: That was incredibly useful, and I’m sure there will be a lot of people hounding you for invites, well there probably already are thousands of people hounding you for invites. Have you got any idea when it’s going to go "Full Open”?

Tom: Yes, I do have an idea when it’s going to go full open.

Paul: But you’re not going to tell me.

Tom: Well its within the next couple of months. We want to make sure we’ve had conversations with some really interesting people, so that we have some really cool stuff to show off at the same time. So you’ll just have to wait and see on that line I’m afraid.

Paul: Oh, so that’s really exciting and thank you again for coming on the show.

Tom: No problems. Cool.

Thanks to Nathan O’Hanlon for transcribing this interview.

Give Away: Fire Eagle Invites

So as we mentioned in the interview, Fire Eagle is currently in beta, but if you can’t wait for the full release and want to get playing with it right away your in luck. We have around 20 invites available for boagworld listeners. To claim one, e-mail [email protected] with the subject heading of "Fire Eagle Invite" and Ryan will send you your code, while stocks last…

All tickets have now been claimed!

Listeners feedback:

Tabbed menus?

David Bridle writes: How did you get the tabbed menu to work in the headscape website?

When writing the answer to this question, it turning into quite a lengthy explanation. So I wrote a blog dedicated to it, which can be found here.