Why can’t developers just speak English? – A guide to intra-nerd communication.

Communication is the single most difficult aspect of any development process. It can literally cost millions of dollars. Most of the people who can’t write a ‘hello world’ statement that have to tell me what to program think the problem is that they need to understand more about my job. They hear a couple of us developers get into a room and swap intimidating acronyms and phrases like ‘refactor query methods’ and ‘extrapolate abstraction layers’ and think that what they need to do is understand this gibberish. I don’t know if I could truly relate to the reader how terrible this notion is. Please, if you don’t understand what your programmers mean when they talk about ‘instantiation’ and ‘parsing’, don’t try to understand now. Remember, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. You want to back as far away from that as possible, or you might as well just pour kerosene into your wallet and light a match. We simply want to know what you want to do, and what you want to happen when you do it.

What did you do, and what did you expect to happen.

The phrase “what did you do, what did you expect to happen” was a product of a meeting between several of my co-workers and I as we were trying to determine a way to phrase the instructions of a bug report for a web application that would minimize such infamous bug fix requests as “site broken”, “doesn’t work”, and “numbers wrong.” None of which are even requests.

Of course, the biggest catch is asking a user to ‘repeat’ what they did. They get asked that a lot, and the responses may sound reasonable to all of the non-initiated, but to us geeks getting that information is exasperating to the extent of promoting suicidal thoughts at best. Computers don’t think like us. They take everything so absolutely literal it can boggle the mind of the technologically naïve. Computers don’t make sense to most people. Even those trained to communicate with computers will frequently lose control and shout at their monitors. The most staunchly religious conservatives I’ve seen who work as web developers will stand up and shout shocking threats at inanimate objects that make me feel nervous, and I have an awful reputation of running my mouth like a sailor in front of the most sensitive folks.

So there was some understandable skepticism that these instructions would promote a user to give us the information we needed. But when people came to us with troubleshooting requests and we asked them to do what they did again and tell us what they thought would happen were unlike anything I had seen before. I could actually, for the first time, understand a client. For the first time I knew what someone really wanted. I felt like I had struck gold, found Avalon, and then rode a unicorn.

It’s not a question, it’s a new philosophy.

So it came to pass that I was in a meeting with four other individuals asking me to do something that seemed to make sense to all of them, but when I asked for some clarification they all looked at each other with some silent question which, from the looks on their faces, I could only assume was “how do we stop this alien monster from sucking all intelligence from our brains?” The answer, of course, is to tell the antisocial alien with the creepy beard and magnifying lens glasses exactly what you want to do and what you want to happen when you do it. I finally understood, this wasn’t just a question that was helpful to getting a user to tell me what they did to break a web application that successfully passed all of my unit tests, it was a concept that I had to practice allowing to pervade all of my thoughts as I communicated with non-developers in order to understand, and make myself understood. The question itself may not be much, but keeping that vision in mind has changed my experiences with evaluating requirements with people who still refer to the internet as “the email.” What’s more, as I evolved in my communications with clients, so did they. They came to understand what I expected to hear from them.

This new philosophy in understanding what a client wants transcended the concepts that I had previously held regarding web development. The client hates the development process. They don’t want the development process to be easier; they want to buy the product like they buy a stapler from an office supply store. What’s more, we already know what clients want to do, and what they expect to happen when they do it. And yet so few people are able to deliver a single product that delivers on this expectation to their clients.

Where this change in thinking has taken us.

Lexy Sites can handle all of the needs of 90% of the clients I’ve developed a website for, but every blue moon a client needs something very specific, and if they want to get it as cheaply, quickly, and accurately as possible I hope this advice helps. First, focus completely on the user interface. This is the furthest you can get from 1’s and 0’s that your developer is going to actually understand, and the closest you can get to writing computer code that you will understand as well. Second, be as clear as possible as to what you expect to happen for all use cases with the user interface. Clients are particularly bad about assuming their expectations are obvious, and developers are particularly bad about understanding how things in a company work beyond the user interfaces of the software they develop.

Communication always takes time and effort. There’s no way around that, and it is particularly difficult to communicate to a developer if you don’t know how to write computer code. Just remember that the furthest away from the computer’s logic that your developer is likely to understand your business is the user interface, and so the battleground in the war of developer-client communication should focus almost entirely on the expectations of the user interface.

This post is written by guest author Rachel Modiano.

Rachel is the Director of Marketing for iGoDigital, the leading provider of personalization and product recommendation tools that guide smarter retail. The company currently serves many of the world’s most successful and respected retail brands, including Best Buy, Walmart, Nokia, Lids and Scholastic. iGoDigital is headquartered in Indianapolis, IN and was named to the 2008 “Inc 500” list of the fastest growing private companies.

As I scroll through the pages of my favorite industry pubs, it is hard to avoid the topic of mobile shopping. It’s everywhere! It’s going to be a race to the finish line for the top 500 retailer to see who wins the mobile shopping race.

You might ask why is mobile so important now?

Mobile is changing the way consumers shop. According to a recent Internet Retailer survey completed by Oracle and ATG, 29% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase of digital or physical merchandise using their mobile devices. 40% of online consumers ages 18-34 have made a mobile purchase. That figure is 27% for ages 35-54 and 17% for age 55 and older. What does a retailer need in order to have a successful mobile site? The site needs to be optimized for mobile – the jury is still out on which platform retail should use to launch their mobile site - weather an App, WAP, or m. site is the best option.

The Mobile Shopper vs. the Mobile Researcher

Putting actual mobile sales aside there is another trend emerging – the mobile researcher. Even more than purchasing on their mobile devices consumers are researching products on the web, the survey finds, showing that mobile sites and apps hold potential for boosting multichannel sales. 48% of U.S. adults have browsed or researched products on their mobile devices. Additionally, at iGoDigital, we’ve seen consumers take their researching to the next level with the ability to transition their search from mobile device to web.

This might sound great in theory but let me show you a practical example as to why this multi-channel continuity is so important. I was recently at a beauty store and forgot the SKU number of the makeup I usually use. I know I had purchased the product on my home computer so; I took out my phone, launched the company’s mobile app and signed into my account – under recent purchases there was the SKU of my makeup, clear as day. The connection to my information “offline” was the key differentiator weather I made a purchase or not.

Exponential Impact – Mobile + Product Recommendations

You could also use this multi-channel connection in the form of product recommendations and ensuring the recommendations are accurate regardless of channel. Let’s revisit my makeup scenario again. I am standing in the beauty store, I’ve logged into my account, I have my makeup sku and I click through to the product page to ensure this is my makeup. Along the right hand side of the product page are product recommendations – “shoppers who bought this may also like…” - I see a smoky eye shadow kit and decide that would be great to purchase and try out this Friday night. So I also purchased the smoky eye shadow kit. I went to the cash register and paid for my foundation and eye shadow.

I am going to pause the story for a second – this personalized recommendation was instrumental in increasing the value of my basket, which in turn positively impacted the retailer’s bottom line.

Here’s how a retailers can dramatically increase their basket value by adding recommendations:

Pre- recommendations basket value: Foundation = $38
Purchase total = $38.

Post recommendation basket value: Foundation ($38) + smoky eye shadow ($24)
Purchase total = $62.
Recommendations $ impact = 61% or a $24 impact.

On a single purchase this might not seem like a like a big deal but, let’s say 100 people per day utilize product recommendations to boost their basket value.

Let’s check out the impact:

100 people x $24 basket value increase = $2400 more rev/day
= $16,800 additional revenue/week
= $873,600 additional revenue/year.

You can see how much on an impact recommendations on any channel can make. (For more information on iGoDigital’s ability to add personalized recommendations to channels check out the channel page on the iGoDigital Website.

Connecting The Dots Across Channels

Now that we understand the impact of mobile product recommendation Let’s get back to our story. Later that night, the beauty retailer sent a batch file of in-store purchase history to their personalization provider – this tied my in-store purchases to my customer profile. Now the next time I am standing in the store forgetting the shade of foundation I wear or that awesome smoky eye kit I purchased I’ll be able to connect the dots using my mobile device.

This small nuance is changing the way retailers utilize their mobile platform as well as the impact of additional tools, like a basket builder or product recommendations can make in a retailer’s bottom line. Additionally, retailers need to change their thinking in regards to “window shoppers” or shoppers “just researching.” You never know when customer might jump across channels and become your next customer.

Conversely, when you send out emails with a call to action that takes recipients back to a landing page, you don’t want to confuse those readers by sending them to a Web site that doesn’t look like the company you portray in your email.

This happened to me recently. I got an email from a major airline that featured a color scheme that was predominately the company’s trademark yellow and orange. Clicking through to the airline’s Web site, I was shocked to land on a page that was mainly blue and purple. My initial thought was that I was on the wrong page. What I learned is that the company rebranded its Web site but has not carried the new branding elements through to its email program.

While it’s not unusual for companies to rebrand or to freshen their brand, it’s important to keep some of the old elements—at least on a temporary basis—to bridge to the new brand. You also need to make sure that your email program catches up at the same time. This can be a struggle if email marketing and your Web site are managed by different groups, but the outcome is worth the effort.

When designing your emails, look to your Web site for design elements and incorporate some of those elements into your email. If you have an html Web site, you can even use elements from the Web site to easily design your email.

Remember: it’s all about integrating the same look and feel from Web site to email, and even to printed marketing materials. Carrying a similar look throughout all these customer touch points makes customers comfortable with your brand, which in turn makes them comfortable pulling out their wallets.

Carissa Newton is director of marketing for Delivra, an email marketing software and services company.

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Email Marketing

One particular form of marketing that’s seen significant success in recent years is email marketing, an ever-increasingly popular form of customer contact that’s proven its effectiveness time and time again. According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated an ROI of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. The expected figure for 2010 is $42.08. Furthermore, email marketing effectively enables a company to make direct contact with past, present, and future clients, rather than repeatedly requiring them to visit a website to see current promotions. That’s a good thing since, according to ExactTarget, consumers prefer email for marketing communications more than 3-to-1.

If your company is considering utilizing email marketing, there are three main methods to consider:
Direct promotional email usually asks the recipient to take some kind of action (make a purchase, sign up for something, etc.) and can be used to acquire new customers as well as persuade existing customers to buy again. Consider it the electronic equivalent of direct mail or “junk mail”.
Retention email, conversely, is like a print newsletter whose ultimate purpose is to encourage customer loyalty. While a retention email may still include special promotions or advertisements, the overarching goal is to help the reader. By providing value to your clients (relevant information, help or assistance, entertainment, etc.) you are developing the relationship and further guaranteeing a long-term impact.

The final type of email marketing is simply placing advertisements in someone else’s newsletter, the electronic counterpart of purchasing ad space in a subscription magazine or newspaper.

No matter how you decide to approach your customers in your email marketing, rest assured that the money you invest will not be wasted. Again quoting the Direct Marketing Association, The Ad Effectiveness Survey (commissioned by Forbes Media in February and March of 2009) revealed that email and e-newsletter marketing are considered the second-most effective tool for generating conversions, just behind SEO. You may think you’re saving money right now by cutting your marketing budget, but if you fail to acquire new customers and retain existing ones, you might not have any money at all in the future.

Do you want to know how much the average U.S. web designer makes at a hospital?

How about the average salary for a systems administrator of a school district?

Maybe you want to know just how big is the difference between the average web developers salary in the U.S. vs. India? (hint: it’s big)

If you’re hiring web technologists or just looking to see what your value might be in the open market, then you’ll want to check out our report on web design salaries.

It seems like we’re all into website usability these days.  And why shouldn’t we be?  Usable websites appeal to the masses, achieve record conversion rates, and make the people behind their implementation look like heroes and marketing geniuses.  Indeed website usability is brilliant marketing strategy.

Website usability research is readily available and every major online retailer has taken notice, investing time and energy into usability testing.  As a result, the list of usability experts is growing everyday, including well known names like Jakob Nielsen, Steve Krug, and Bryan Eisenberg.  Retailers and experts alike speak of the importance of user testing – getting websites in front of real users to test usability.

User testing provides essential feedback.  You will be surprised by how your customers use your website. After your first test you may even be shocked by what the users actually did in response to the objectives you gave them.

Fixing embarrassing usability problems before you release your website to the public will help you achieve that good first impression – perhaps the difference between success and failure.  It’s also a great way to discover how you can boost your conversion rates.  After conducting user tests, many companies have found ways to increase sales by tens of thousands of dollars.

Maybe you have an existing website with a problem.  Analytics is screaming that a particular section of your website is a trouble spot.  Analytics data shows you where the trouble is, but it doesn’t explain why you have a problem there.  User testing will show why.

Test a competitor’s website to understand what works and what doesn’t.  Offer to test your favorite client’s other website property – you know, the one you’ve been dying to get your hands on, but can’t convince them it needs an update.

Many times, user testing is the fastest and most productive route to discovering what causes users to get stuck – and leave.  That’s critical information if you don’t want to waste time guessing what to fix.  Once you see a user struggling on your website you’ll know exactly what you can do to correct it.  And it won’t take very many struggling testers for your client or executive management to agree that change is needed.

You can afford it too.  It’s not just for those with deep pockets anymore.

Once upon a time (not so many years ago) the cost to setup user tests was between $10,000 and $50,000.  Not anymore.  With usability experts recommending that you spend about 10% of your website development budget on usability testing (largely by having users try it), anybody can now afford to allocate that portion of their budget to user testing.  The relatively new concept of crowd sourced low-cost online user testing is what makes it possible.

Sites like UserTesting.com are perfect for fast cheap user tests.  Their large panel consists of quality pre-screened and client rated user testers.  You can order a single user test for $39.  You’ll get a video of a visitor speaking their thoughts as they use your website.  You’ll also get a written summary describing the problems they encountered.  There’s nothing to download or install and you can share your results with anybody.  Most tests are completed in about an hour.

How many user testers you need is a point of contention amongst usability experts.  Some argue that for statistically valid and measurable results you need a large number of testers.  Others argue that increasing the number of testers only complicates analysis while decreasing the amount of useful information you’ll get per test.

Let’s take a look at what small scale testing achieves.

Website user testing is a qualitative tool, and is not meant to provide large volumes of statistically significant data.  It’s perfect for quickly finding what causes common problems.

Doing small, frequent online tests could be called guerilla user testing – a low cost tactic that gives you an edge in usability analysis.  You use small numbers of testers to get dense amounts of usability information.  It’s very affordable, easy to analyze, and chances are you’ll find the biggest usability problems first.

There’s something strangely addictive about eating website abandonment rates for breakfast, thwarting embarrassing website launches, and taking out analytical anomalies.  Once you start carrying out guerilla user testing you’ll get hooked.  After all it’s tough not to like being the genius behind website marketing success.

Cloud Hosting

While not a new concept by any means, cloud hosting has certainly moved into the forefront within the last couple of years. What is cloud hosting? Simply put, its primary function is to allow companies to scale up server space almost indefinitely, while only paying for what hosting space they actually use at any given time. (note: that’s a very basic definition of cloud hosting) I know what you are thinking. That sounds like an amazing benefit for a company who has a lot of seasonal traffic, or who expect to increase downloads next month by 500 percent. But what does that have to do with design, and how does any of this affect the designer? Well, to be perfectly honest, we don’t really know quite yet.

Every day, consumers are requiring more and more from each web experience they encounter. Users want more social media, richer content, and more ways to access and share their information. All of this information takes up space on the face as well as the back end of a website. This means more clutter and more time to load. Much like their counterparts elsewhere in the web industry, web designers have been feeling the heat from these demands. Here is where cloud hosting may provide some relief. While no one is quite certain the full impact that cloud hosting will have on the industry, there is one thing we can be sure of. It will breed creativity. Options always do. As cloud hosting gains popularity and exposure, there may be no end to the benefits it may offer resource hungry programmers and designers. Where doors are closed currently, access to nearly unlimited computing power may open them up. New application and software designs. New browser platforms. New code languages being written with the computing power of cloud hosting in mind. The possibilities could be endless. Where designers are concerned, they could be equipped with better tools and greater options. As we all know, having the right tools for the job makes all of the difference. So although we don’t know just how far reaching its usefulness goes, cloud hosting has a lot of potential to be realized as of yet. Hang in their web designers. I know there are a lot of changes floating about in the atmosphere. What may look like an ominous dark cloud of demands right now, with a little luck, could provide some well-deserved shade for you in the coming months.

Who is Magic Toolbox? They’re a team of designers and usability experts who have built beautiful and easy to use tools for displaying product images on your website.

Their most popular tools include:

Magic 360 Plus™ - spin products around and magnify into them.

Magic Zoom Plus™ - zoom into your images or enlarge them on click.

Magic Slideshow™ - over 30 options to create beautiful slideshows.

We asked our subscribers to retweet a message, friend us on Facebook, or simply reply to our email, and then we randomly selected 5 winners. Those winners are:

Elliott Benzle – Shatter Box Web Design

Shatter Box Web Design is owned by Elliott Benzle and has been designing, coding and managing web sites since 2002. Our skilled group of freelance professionals focuses on providing high quality, customized websites for small businesses. We work with customers, no matter what their level of internet knowledge to make sure that they get the most out of their website. Our design process keeps you involved in every step of the creation process from the initial sketches to the final coding. We are able to work within both small and large budgets, making a web presence for your business no matter what size.

Matt Baylor – Natural Selection Web Design

We design and support Joomla! CMS websites. Our primary goal is customer satisfaction. We want all of our clients to succeed in their endeavors and strive to provide them with the tools they need so they can focus on running their business and not worry about the operation of their website.

Graham Robinson – Northern Computer Services

Northern Computer Services offers a variety of services to help meet your personal and business goals. Whether looking for a small Web site, custom application or an e-commerce database driven storefront, Northern Computer Services will provide you the absolute best solution to accomplish your needs.

Debiprasad Sahoo – Indibits

Indibits is a small web development company from India. We are building web applications on open source infrastructures for small and medium businesses across the globe. Indibits is founded by Debiprasad Sahoo, who has a good experience in developing web applications using PHP, MySQL and Ajax.

Iggy Makarevich – IFM Productions

IFM Productions offers a complete web design package, including arrangements for your domain name and hosting; the design, build, testing, optimization and publishing - along with “extras” like tweaking basic on-site SEO tools for each and every one of your pages; verified submission to Google; making you a favorites icon, and so much more.

IFM Productions has satisfied a diverse group of discerning small business professionals with custom tailored, hand crafted web sites since August 2004.

Well, you could probably stand to lose the weight, anyway.

Actually though, it’s quite possible to not only become a freelancer, but to become a profitable one and indeed, a successful one. In my years of experience I’ve learned a number of very difficult lessons on the hard road to bootstrapping your way to freelance success. I could spend a good thousand words or more telling you all of them, or I could cut to the chase and give you la lección más importante.

The number one tip I’d give to any budding freelancer is this: get arrogant.

I mean arrogant. I mean arrogant like Steve Jobs. Or David Heinemeier Hansson.

Now how would a people-friendly, service-oriented youth pastor like myself know anything about being arrogant? I’ll be the first to admit that you may not be able to tell when you first meet me just how arrogant I really am. I’ll seem nice. I’ll listen to your ideas. We’ll talk about what you want to achieve and the possible solutions to get there. But it’s all a facade, because in the end I’ll get nasty and tell you it’s my way or the highway. And you’ll love me for it.

Okay, I may have exaggerated just a bit about our hypothetical meeting, but here’s the honest-to-goodness truth: a company or organization is going to hire a freelancer because they have a need they can’t fill themselves. They either don’t have the resources, the knowledge or even just the desire to get it done, although they know it needs to be. They may be willing to admit that their creative is sub-par in this particular area, and they need you, the brilliant freelancer, to help them out.

And then you blow it by stumbling your way through the phone call, or doubting the quality of your work, or giving in to the awful demands of your pea-brained client.

I can see the comments now: “Aren’t you getting arrogance confused with confidence? Arrogance is such a strong word.” You bet it is. Arrogance is absolutely a strong word that provokes emotion and often intimidation. It’s like confidence smothered with smugness. It can leave people feeling upset and appalled.

But the thing I like about arrogance is it’s abundantly clear in it’s nature. People who know their skill-set and are somewhat arrogant about it get stuff done and they tend to do it right the first time. They have a laser-like focus on the end-result and no amount of feature-creep is going to get in the way. Lastly arrogance in communication leaves no room for misconceptions or confusion. It’s hard to take it the wrong way when someone tells you, “Your stuff sucks.”

You’ve got the training to do what you do best, don’t let anyone tell you differently. Yes, it’s good to be confident. But when your client insists on that flash animation that you can’t skip or they tell you to add so many buzzwords to the copy you’d expect to it be dripping honey - it’s necessary to be arrogant from time to time. Because as freelancers often forget, it’s not just their name out there, it’s yours.

What is PCI-DSS?

PCI-DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards which is managed under the PCI-SSC or Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. The PCI SSC was  founded by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa, Inc. The main driver behind its inception and the resulting PCI-DSS was the increasing financial losses due to credit card fraud resulting from security breaches.

PCI DSS is a series of standards under 6 group areas with 12 sub areas and many sub requirements under those ares. It covers what is requried to maintain a secure cardholder data environment. The security standards range from network security, software and database security standards to physical location policies and procedures. Web applications represent only a portion of the requirements to be PCI DSS compliant. Your can review the full set of standards at http://www.pcisecuritystandards.org

While it may seem as though large companies are the target, they aren’t the only target. They are just the most visible. National news outlets do not focus on small businesses. Small businesses are often the hardest hit by fines levied by their associated merchant account banks when a security breach is found and cardholder data is lost. Not only are they fined, they have to pay forensic investigation costs and may additionally be sued for the cost of reissuing credit cards to consumers by banks who originally issued compromised credit cards.

Furthermore, experts say hackers are attacking small commercial website more rapidly. Criminals are able to access a website’s transaction process and credit card handling to steal credit card numbers. While small businesses have fewer transactions and therefor fewer vicitims, they are an easier target due to more frequent software and network architecture flaws. In many instances flawed software can be found through search engines using common version numbers and software brand references with known vulnerabilities.

How PCI Compliance can impact your business

If you don’t advise, build or implement ecommerce websites, PCI DSS will not affect your business. However, if you advise, build or implement ecommerce websites, PCI DSS will impact how you do business. There are a varying set of consequences that can affect your business as follows:

Acquiring Banks must ensure merchants and independent sales organizations are using  PA-DSS or PABP compliant applications. (PABP is Visa’s application certification prior to PA DSS - Payment Application Data Security Standards complaiant)  According to Visa, the deadline is July 1, 2010. While each card brand can and has set their own deadlines (and in some instances that varies by geographical location) and each acquiring bank can and has sent varying deadlines, July 2010 is a date to be aware.

What this mandate means is that acquring banks are going to take a harder look at their merchants and independent sales organizations, service providers (those providing merchant account services) and pass out fines for non-compliance and/or shut down merchant accounts due to non compliance. Where will you be when your clients are fined or shut down due to the use of non compliant shopping cart software. Will you be left behind for web design and development companies ready to help them navigate through PCI Compliance?

Lawsuits

Nobody likes to mention lawsuits. Right now most of the lawsuits over security breaches are directed at merchants and acquiring banks. These lawsuits are mostly being instigated by banks issueing credit cards to consumers whose card was compromised during a security breach. They are sueing for the cost of reissuing credit cards to their clients, the consumers. Right now, their lawsuits are a hit or miss. PCI DSS isn’t a get out of jail pass for merchants in regards to these lawsuits. Actually, it is no longer a safe harbor against fines. Visa changed their stance from “safe harbor” to “may waive fines” if the merchant was found to be compliant at the time of a security breach.

The tide may be changing. Merchants are getting tired of holding the bag over something they do not fully understand. Seven restaurants in Mississippi and Louisiana are sueing a software development company and one of its retailers over a security breach that has cost them tens of thousands of dollars. The Point of Sales system was hacked allegedly by a Romanian hacker. You can read more about the case at http://radiantsystemslawsuit.wordpress.com/ 

So what does this lawsuit have to do with web design and development? You are either in the position of writing or redeveloping a web application that stores, processes or transmits cardholder data or in the position of advising and implementing a prewritten web application that stores, processes or transmits cardholder data. Guess what, you’re in the same position as the software development company and/or the reseller. You’re a sitting duck for a lawsuit if these types of lawsuits become a trend.

So What Now?

Most small web design shops will need to either stop developing ecommerce websites altogether or make adjustments in the way they do business. You just cannot afford to sit back and ignore the situation.  I currently advise my very small ecommerce clients to maintain a cash-only business where they accept things like PayPal using PayPal’s hosted solution. The other option is to use hosted payment solutions like Authorize.Net’s SIM and Element Payment Services Hosted Payment Solution. There are other options out there. My best advice is to get familiar with PCI Compliance.

Web Out
Des

Desirea Herrera is an amazing web development geek who does web design and specializes in technical training of web development through webinars. A twelve-year veteran of the field with vast experience, Desirea has forgotten more about web design than most people will ever know. You can find out more about Desirea and her projects at Inphotek.

Update Your Website Often

Of course any SEO expert knows the value of updating their website. It draws the attention of the search engines. Search engines aren’t the only reason to continually update your website. Clients want to know that you are staying up with the times. Update your design once a year to reflect the current design trends on the internet for your core client base. Content updates help your site to stay fresh and give the customer plenty of reasons to stay on your website. Copyrights should have the year they were developed, but you should also list current year. For example, list your copyright like this - © 2000 – 2009.  This also gives your potential client an idea of just how long you’ve been in business as well as an idea of your experience level.

Fix your broken site

This is something that shouldn’t have to be mentioned but I’ll put it here because it bears repeating. You simply have to make sure your website is working. It’s not just broken links to outside resources you need to fix, it’s the way your website works in the different browsers. You need an nice clean exciting layout to promote yourself but more importantly you need a website that works. Test your website often. Visit it once a week to check that everything is working in multiple browsers. Make sure all links are still working. Check your site as you check your website’s statistics. You are checking your stats right?

Don’t Be Pushy

You’d be surprised at how many times I’m browsing the internet and find people using the old tactic “buy right this minute or you’ll never see this price again”. While promoting specials are great, reserve most of them for your current clients. Attach real dates to them. And don’t be pushy about it like the above sales copy. No one likes to be pushed into purchasing something, especially in web design. You need to let your problem solving and benefits make the sale. There is also the fact that most large web development projects are custom projects with specific price tags attached to them. When you set a price, you open yourself to projects with unexpected commitments that you cannot recoup. Now that’s not to say that you shouldn’t run a sale occasionally. But, if you do, list the time period of the sale for everyone to see. Just make sure you don’t tell every customer that visits that they must purchase now (today), because most customers will price shop and compare products before they purchase.

Solve Their Problems with Your Services

Most web designers list the product or service features, but that doesn’t tell a potential client how this will help solve their problem. Remember that your website is also your salesman. Salesmen find out someone’s problem so they can fix it. Just the other day I had a young lady come to my door selling a cleaning product.. She was quite good in an infomercial sort of way. The key thing that she did was to get me agreeing with her about my problems and that I wanted a safe product around my pets and my kids. So as you write content for your website, think about how you can get your visitors to agree with you about different problems they are facing. Then, show them how you can fix their problems. Show them the benefits of using your services. It’s easy to say you’re the best web designer, but go a step further and tell the customer what that means to them. In other words, what’s in it for them? If you have trouble defining your benefits, ask the one person that would know best – your customers! If they are happy with your products or services, they will be able to tell you what problem it overcomes and the benefit they receive. Besides, what better way to find out how you’re doing in servicing their needs?

Include Contact Information

As the internet has grown, so has the number of fly by night operations. One day they are here and the next they’ve disappeared. Make sure you have physical address location posted on your website as well as a phone number. This information is reassuring to potential customers. It gives your business a professional polish rather than the appearance of hiding yourself behind the internet.

Make It Easy to Pay

With a web development company, this can be tricky. Most web design customers don’t purchase until they talk to you or have reviewed a proposal you’ve sent them. However, you can still offer them a way to make a payment on your website. The best way is to accept credit cards.. If you don’t have a merchant account already, the easiest way to get set up immediately is through services like Pay Pal, Clink Bank, and 2Checkout. For those of you willing to offer products to the Do It Yourself course, you can sell templates and guides. Sometimes the DIY people end up becoming clients because as you know, building a website is harder than they think. You are then in the position of offering your services to these potential clients.

List Your Guarantees

Everyone wants to feel that if a service or product they’ve purchased is not up to the standards or expectations they thought, that the company will take care of them. And because of that, you should always list a guarantee. It doesn’t have to be a full money back guarantee, but it should be a reasonable amount of time or a reasonable procedure to follow in order to rectify the issues. And better yet, if you have a web application or open source application that you customize for clients, you could allow a limited amount of time for a “test drive”, it will decrease the apprehension some people have about doing business with someone they don’t know.

Include A Privacy Policy

This may not seem obvious but a privacy policy makes your website more professional. When you include a privacy policy, you are saying to your potential customers that you have policies in place to protect them. You’re also saying you’ve thought about how you will run your business. It’s another element to your website that tells the customer that you are not a fly by night operation that will disappear once you have their money.

Include Terms and Conditions

This is also a way to convey to your customers and potential customers how your company does business. This is the place to list exactly how you do business and in what conditions you will offer a refund. You have to take into account that the majority of your customers or not looking for something for nothing. Now I will admit there will always be a small percentage of your customers that will try to take advantage of you, but you’ll find most customers just want to be treated fair and know you’ll take care of them. Setting up the terms and conditions on your website will also help deter people whom you probably wouldn’t want as clients.

Tell Them What’s Next

After they’ve purchased or started the contact process, tell them what the next step will be. If they will be downloading a template or application, let them know when or how they will download it once they’ve completed their purchase. Or, if you will contact them, let them know when you will contact them and how. Or better yet, give them options on a form. Let them choose how you will contact them. Of course, the best way to handle it is to contact them within a day. You don’t want to give them a chance to change their mind. Make sure you explain each step and show them what great customer service you provide right from the beginning.

We preach to our customers all about how important their website is to their business. As web designers it is important to practice what we preach. This list is only a partial list of things that we as web designers and developers need to do to our websites so that they do the sales job we need them to do.

Web Out
Des

1. Regular Communication

Regular communication with your clients does not just mean talking to them about their particular project.  Obviously you do want to be accessible as you work with your clients.  But you should also remain in contact with them long after you are finished working on any specific task.  Regular newsletters, seasonal cards, appreciation gifts, and simple follow up phone calls are all great ways to remind your customers about your company.  The idea is to keep your company in the front of their mind on an on-going basis.

2. Offer Referral Incentives

Your existing customers are the best resource for finding new customers-and rewarding them for those referrals is a great way to make sure they stay loyal to you.  Be sure you take the time to regularly remind them about your incentive program, and be sure to follow through in a timely manner.   Referral incentives can come in many forms including cash, concert tickets, discounted services, and gift certificates.

3. Under Promise and Over Deliver

But perhaps the most important way to ensure your customers remain loyal is to under-promise and over-deliver.  That means giving your clients a reasonable expectation that you are certain you can meet and then finding ways to deliver above and beyond your promise.  Your customers will be delighted when you are finished with their website a whole week before the deadline; or when you are able to add the additional features without having to charge extra the extra time you originally estimated.

These three suggestions are easy, inexpensive and tried and true.  Remember, that as a business owner, it costs more to win new customers from a marketing standpoint than it ever does to maintain relationships with existing ones.  You may want to re-evaluate how you have your marketing budget structured in order to take better care of your past and present clients.  Finally, the key to any of this is to make sure you keep a comprehensive, updated, and well maintained database of your clients and prospective clients (more on that in a future post).

And nobody cared.

I didn’t have the money to join the local Chamber, and I just wasn’t that experienced (yet) at networking. The pounding on the door, the phone calls and the crazy mob never came. Even though I nailed a couple of locally high-profile clients, folks in my area just never caught on. So I steadied on.

Perusing the Freshbook Forums, I landed a gig for guy in Chicago, IL. He and I caught on quick and he liked my work so much that he asked me to quit Upward Media and throw in with him.

What? Are you crazy? I’ve worked hard for the last 4-5 years at building this… nothing. What did I have to lose? He already had more work waiting in the wings, which was better than what I was getting. We ironed out the details and even though we live in completely different states and have never met face-to-face, Rocket No. 9, LLC is by far the biggest success I’ve ever been a part of. And now, I’m very glad I decided to give up on my own “dream” and get involved with this one:

Partnerships are good for creativity. They give you the opportunity bounce ideas off each other. This, as most freelancers know, is a great caveat of freelancing–the socializing or rather, the lack thereof. The commitment to a partnership requires me to check in, get on the same page and just shoot the bull sometimes.

Partnerships are good for accountability. One thing that Colin (my partner) has kept pushing me into is the idea that Rn9 is “every bit as much your business as it is mine”. He reminds me that my ideas, my opinions and my talent are completely necessary to keep the business running. It’s nice to feel needed, but more importantly, it’s great that I work with guy who honest and brave enough to throw the weight of a company on your shoulders, yet you don’t have to carry it yourself. Colin and I both understand what’s required of us in order to keep Rn9 afloat and although we’ve had some difficult times, we have a mutual respect of each other for the burden he bears.

Partnerships are good for business. Maybe it doesn’t happen much where you live, but in my portion of Oklahoma, I’ve found that folks are generally more receptive to actual businesses than just go-it-alone freelancers. Not saying that it’s that way everywhere, and I’m certainly not saying that it’s not my own fault that folks didn’t receive me well, but getting properly established and accredited has helped us out quite a bit.

I don’t know for certain whether or not Rn9 will last forever and be my ultimate destination, but I know that the experience I’ve gained as a business partner–for all it’s faults–has been an experience like no other and I certainly wouldn’t trade it for anything.

As far as recognition is concerned given two different companies the recognizable company will have a higher inferred value. Think of it this way, given a choice between an IBM ThinkPad and an unknown brand laptop which would you choose? You don’t actually recognize that as a better computer. You know IBM and you know what to expect from their products.  

Recognition is built through repeated exposure. These are pre-proposal activities like advertising, branding, and repeated contacts with a customer. You should be advertising and branding your company on a regular basis. You should be talking to your customers through emails and phone calls to keep you fresh in their minds.

The second piece of information is whether not somebody answers all of their questions or responds to what they need. It’s important to thoroughly read through a request for proposal or an advertisement. A good way to keep track is to make a table of the needs that the customer presents. As you build your proposal check off the needs that you address as you address them. This makes it impossible for you to miss something that was included in the request.

The third piece of information is whether or not you were compliant with their requirements. Did you include all the items they wanted in the proposal? Did you answer all their questions? Did you follow the directions they stipulated in submitting a proposal?

After these first three pieces of information have been checked off in the client’s mind, they start to consider the proposal itself. Usually there’s one of three different ways to decide on a proposal. The first way is to look at past projects. They think about how they made their choice the last time and whether or not it worked. The second way is to develop a set of criteria by thinking back are over past situations where they had to make similar decisions. It’s important for you to get as close to figuring out how the client is going to make their decision and what criteria they’re going to use to make their decision before you submit their proposal.

Ask questions about how they’re going to make their decision or what they consider when they’re comparing vendors. Ask them about the last time they made this kind of that decision. What factors guided them in their decision? Ask them if it worked for them.

Next, you need to try to figure out what is their most important need. This criterion should be addressed first in your proposal. And then from that point on everything should be in a similar order of importance as the client has in their own mind. The idea is to organize the proposal in such a way that it highlights the criteria the customer thinks is important. This tells the client that you’re on the same page. You meet the customer’s expectations in the beginning and they don’t need to reach further into the documentation. Mentally the client checks off that you know what they want.

There are three things to remember:

• Make yourself recognizable
• Pay attention to what they need answered
• Follow their submit submission directions

And last but not least understand what’s important to the customer. 

Web Out

Des

Advertising is reaching an audience through a particular medium. Selling yourself to the masses. That’s advertising, plain and simple. Marketing is a whole different animal. Marketing is wrapped up in brainstorming till you get a creative concept. Then building an entire campaign strategy behind that concept. It’s the idea, mostly. I don’t know how, but someone came up with the “Bow-chicka-wow-wah” for Axe™ Shower Gel. Then came the commercials, radio spots, provocative magazine spreads and the general idea that no matter what, if you shower with this gel, women everywhere will automatically be on you like a pack of lions on a small gazelle. All of it centered around that lust-filled cry that the woman on television uttered. No matter all the different forms of advertising was done, there was a lot of planning and thought put into that campaign. And it paid off.

Too many folks only advertise when they’re having a sale or simply because all of their competitors are. Don’t get me wrong–you should get your name out there–but how much money is wasted on thoughtless advertising instead of invested in a good, well-rounded marketing mission?

Get the idea. Formulate a plan. Reach a certain audience. Surround everything with this great idea you have so that anyone who hears it knows who it means. Your company and the concept become interchangeable. And then advertise.

Every task needs to be labeled as business building or money making. Sometimes I find myself doing things that don’t really build my business. Other times, I just don’t really realize how important some activities are to my business. It’s important to focus on what makes money and on what attracts new customers. You should be pinpointing them. 

Money Making

This is the easy part. The obvious answer is any activity you are getting paid to do.  Whenever you are on the clock for a customer, you’re making money. Another way to count an activity as a money maker is if you can sell it to someone else. A couple of good questions to determine if an activity is a money maker are:

• Am I billing someone for my time?
• Can I sell this to someone else?

The obvious answer to “Am I billing someone for my time?” is if you’re working for a client. Another good money making activity is when you’re signing on a new client. Obviously, you’ll be making money from a new client. As for “Can I sell this to someone else?” those activities can be things like designing layout templates and/or programming simple web applications. Hint: They are also good ways to hone your skills.  

Business Building

These activities aren’t necessarily associated with a client paying you money or someone purchasing some product from you. They’re about showing off, promoting yourself and building your business/social network. These are the activities that will get your name known. So how do you tell if you’re building your business? Ask yourself these key questions:

• Am I building my reputation?
• Am I meeting new contacts? 

These are tall questions, some with short answers and others that can be more complicated. The first question “Am I building my reputation?” really is about whether or not you’re doing something that focuses market/industry attention on you. My contributions to this blog and a .Net coding blog are examples of building my reputation. Other examples are things like sending out newsletters with tips to clients. You can also do this through providing good customer service, and building quality example projects.  

The second question, “Am I meeting new contacts?” would include activities that force you to meet new people. Going to Chamber of Commerce meetings, giving business building speeches, and socializing with more people always count towards meeting new contacts. Of course, meeting people isn’t the be all and end all of the activity. It only works if you actually starting landing jobs. Keeping in contact with these new contacts would also count. Things like sending out emails, postcards etc. would count as business building activities. 

Keeping Track

All these things are great in theory. The question is, how do you know you’re being effective? I found the Printable CEO http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-series/  to have a great set of free printable documents to track your time and what you’re doing with it.  

Happy New Year
Des

Them: What do you do?
Me: I am a web designer.
Them: Oh! My dentist also does web design. He/She is really good with Frontpage and stuff. He/She even has their own website. It has something to do with geocities…
Me: Yeah. I do dental work on the side, too. I even have my own drill and chair.
Them: Huh?

I don’t know about any of you other freelancers out there, but this about hits the nail on the head for me. Anytime someone asks me, “So what do you do?” I’m wondering whether I should tell them I build websites or just leave it at “I work with computers. You?”

Because the idea exists that “computers do the work for you”, folks everywhere who commute to an 8-to-5′er assume that us so-called “web designers” basically sit around surfing the web all day. Part of it’s laughable, and part of it’s somewhat angering, because we’re looked at as though we don’t have a “real job”. How many of you reading this got into the field because it was so darned easy? I didn’t think so. Building websites isn’t done in a pinch, and yet a large portion of the general public tend to see it that way.

I figure the only way to really get folks to take us seriously is to change the way we portray ourselves. Like telling someone what we accomplished with a certain project. Instead of saying “I design websites”, tell them “We had a client that was spending $500.00 a month on paper applications. By moving them online, we saved them 75% of that cost.”

Another good way is to jump the gun a bit and directly describe how you could help whatever company they work for. Get the name and description of their company and create your own solutions on the fly.

Them: What do you do?

Me: Well, who do you work for?

Them: XYZ Company. We build lamps.

Me: My company helps XYZ get to where they can sell lamps online and education the public about lamps. We also make it easier for Google to find them and get more folks to buy their lamps from XYZ.

Of course, these are just a couple of ways that we could change the face of freelancing in a way that leaves them thinking, “I’ve got to hire them!” Instead of “Pbbth. Slacker.” I’d love to hear some of yours. How can we make the public see what we’re really about?

I also love the holidays because it’s a great opportunity to give back to the clients that helped pull me through the year. One thing that has always come up is “How can I keep it from getting stale?” No, I’m not talking about  making sure the cookies are fresh; I’m saying how do I change it up? How do I keep from the client saying, Oh boy! Another batch of cookies?

First off, don’t give them cookies. If you must give candy, get something tailored to their profession. A great example of which can be found at The Chocolate Vault.

I might get some flack for this, but I would recommend not getting them something with your company’s name on it. Yes, I know that you want them to remember you, but there’s better ways to do that than to get them that coffee mug that has your logo emblazoned across it. That sort of thing gets put in the cubbard, along with the feeling that you are “all about the money”.

On that note, I’d also recommend against giving discounts to clients for more work around the holidays. First off, you might be too swamped to handle it, either through work or family stuff. Secondly, again, it just looks like you’re trying to get more work and it’s all you care about. Seems a bit hollow, to me. C’mon, folks! This is the time for celebration and being real with your giving. Put this on the same level as giving something to a long-time friend. You want it to be personal.

I would offer though, that you could give a client discounted work for the holidays if they’d really benefit from it. If they are just pouring work into you and have remained loyal for all these years, etc. Then cutting them some slack on pricing for the holidays might be just the gift they could use and really appreciate.

Be thoughtful. While planting a tree in their name or naming a star after them might be unique to an extent, are they really going to appreciate that? If they are an eco-green-type company, then probably. If they are a llama-wholesaler? Probably not.

Avoid the cliche gifts. Always get a card (and sign it by hand, please), but don’t get keychains, t-shirts, ball caps or coffee mugs. I liked the items listed at findgift.com Also, make sure that your gifts are useful as well as impressive. Do something that will really say to your client, “I appreciate you.”

Send your gift early. I’m already guilty of failing this one, but early November is probably the best time, because it will stand out from the crowd of meats and baked goods that they receive in between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Keep track of your responses. Were your gifts well-received or hardly noticed? Take note and shift things next year, if need be.

Don’t be stingy. Did you hear me, there? Do NOT be stingy. Don’t buy bulk keychains because you got a deal on them. Crack open that wallet and spend the money. If you do a good job, you’ll likely get a return on your investment. Additionally, you might opt to follow the practice of giving bigger gifts to clients who bring in bigger checks. I heard about someone who said if a client brings in $XXX.00, then they get an iPhone for Christmas. Gift cards could work, but get them a full meal at a restaurant, not $10.00 from Wal-Mart.

You might also consider going traditional. All your clients in your hometown? Send them something that represents the local football team. This lawyer talked about the amazing feedback he got from giving live wreaths. Plenty of other great gift-giving info in that post as well.

All in all, be sure to retain the idea that it needs to be personal, unique and would be the same as walking up to them, looking them right in the eye and telling them, “I really appreciate that you chose to do business with us. I hope this shows that.”

What are some successful or unsuccessful gifts you’ve given in the past? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Advantages:

Being a niche focused firm gives us the ability to:

• become an industry leader
• learn the industry well and save the customer half the work
• become recognized in the industry as a preferred provider
• create testimonials and case studies based on similar businesses
• create and sell products, services, or applications specific to the industry
• get noticed by industry publications, associations, awards, etc.

Rye Armstrong - Avtec Media Group, Credit Union Website Design

As a industry specialist, your clients become more interested in ongoing business dealings with your firm rather than just hire a generalist on a project by project basis.

Phil Marzo - RestaurantIdentity.com, Restaurant Web Design & Marketing

Being a niche focused firm allows us to have a retainer based business model. Instead of billing on a per-project basis with smaller retainer fees - usually maintenance and hosting - we now use a solely retainer-based business model. This regularity means that our turnover and workflow can be correctly estimated month-on-month and we do not suffer - as much - from peaks and troughs, which is very important in today’s economic climate.

It has also reduced the number of companies we compete against. We carefully studied the web design market and picked a niche with few “specialist” providers. It was easier to become the leader of that niche and the de facto company our target audience turns to get a website.

Lastly, we have little to no price competition. During our setup phase we implemented processes that allow us to realize economies of scale by reducing development time. Price competition and lower project bids became a non-issue and we have more flexibility over our margins.

Leo Ludwig - Accountant Websmiths, Websites for Accountants

Beyond being just a web design firm, our clients use us as a research tool (we act as consultants for their business) which builds an incredible degree of loyalty. We have clients that have been with us for over ten years.

John Hernandez - RESI, Real Estate Website Design

After nearly a hundred legal-industry websites and marketing campaigns, we know a lot about what works and what doesn’t. We know to advise a marketing director or partner where the potential speed bumps exist in development and how to present to the firm internally, how to get buy-in from lawyers not directly involved and other important factors specific to our industry.

Further, with a focus on law firms we are constantly asked by current clients how earlier clients did something, especially when the earlier clients may be high-profile in the industry. Being able to talk about previous experiences puts the client at ease knowing that we’ve been down this road before.

Jason P. Lisi - LISI, Law Firm Website Design

Simplified and more powerful marketing as you only need to develop differentiation that appeals to one market.

Stephen E. Anson - perfectpatients, Chiropractic Web Design

Search Engine optimization is much easier because you only have to optimize for one industry and set of key phrases.

Christina Archer - Dental PC, Dental Website Design

Disadvantages:

The disadvantage is the obvious of having all of your “eggs in one basket” or industry. If that industry declines, new competitors emerge or clients choose to bring their design and development in-house, this can potentially limit the size of your marketplace.

Kent H. Tewell - L.E.T. Group, Hotel Website Design

We intially invested a relatively large amount of time and money in developing our “products”. This was done to ensure that the blueprint we developed was flawless because it is going to be used a number of time to realize the economies of scales mentioned earlier.

Web designers are creative people and after years of working on the same market segment, they might become frustrated to have to create yet another website for your niche. Allowing them to work on ‘outside’ project assures that their creative juice keeps running.

Leo Ludwig - Accountant Websmiths, Websites for Accountants

Some disadvantages of being a niche focused firm that we keep a sharp eye on are:

• Becoming too focused on a specific industry and miss other opportunities
• Skills becoming too specialized
• Getting too comfortable and lagging behind technology trends

Rye Armstrong - Avtec Media Group, Credit Union Website Design

Did you find this post interesting? Please subscribe as all my posts are focused on helping design companies and freelancers improve their business!

Any advantages or disadvantages that were missed here? What has your experience been with niche markets?

This is the first in what I hope to be a regular series focusing on additional revenue sources for design firms. I’m a huge believer in A/B testing, multivariate testing and conversion optimization.  Essentially, the art and science of improving the effectiveness of a website - whether the end goal be a purchase, sales lead or simply increased page views.

Just recently, we added an arrow to the signup form on Handbag Planet and increased conversion over 50%.  I also added an arrow on a client’s e-commerce site and increased conversion over 10%.  This is just an example of what one small element can do.

Benefit #1: Numbers-Based Sell

One of the big benefits of conversion optimization is that it’s completely numbers based.  It’s an easy sell to clients and once you have proven success with a few clients, it gets even easier.  We’ve all run into those clients and potential clients who don’t understand why design is truly important.  You won’t have that problem with conversion optimization.

Benefit #2: Long Term Revenue Source

Conversion optimization is an on-going process and can generate long term revenue for your company.  Eventually, you will reach the max effectiveness of a website but for large websites it may take many months to reach that point.  The best online companies such as Amazon, Google, Zappos and Overstock never stop testing.

Benefit #3: Low Learning Curve

Study sites that are known to convert well and do a lot of testing.  Follow the resources listed below.   You won’t become a conversion expert overnight but you can still have a dramatic effect on a client’s website with only a few hours of study and experimentation.

Benefit #4: Satisfaction for You & Your Client

And ultimately, this is what our jobs are truly about.  Building the most effective website possible for clients.  There’s nothing better than a client’s reaction when you tell them their site is now twice as effective as it used to be.  This does wonders for your word of mouth marketing and client referrals.

What do you think about conversion optimization as a service?  Any positive or negative experiences?

Useful Posts & Pages
64 Elements to Test, Test Length Calculator, 108 Ways to Boost Your Website’s Profit, The Secret to Painless Google Website Optimizer

Useful Blogs & Webinars
Grok Dot Com, Marketing Experiments, Get Elastic

Useful Books
Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to GWO, Call to Action, Web Form Design

I want the blog to be a useful resource for designers and I’m really tired of the “1001 best resources for blank” regurgitation.  The blog also needs to fit into the rest of the site and the directory.

To that end, I’ll be focusing solely on meeting the unique needs of web design firms and freelancers from a business perspective, not a “design tips” perspective.  My future posts will address client relations, management, outsourcing, marketing and more.  I will also do frequent interviews with and profiles of leading design firms. If you have any suggestions or requests, please leave a comment.

Two posts I’m working on right now include E-mail Marketing for Web Designers and Advantages & Disadvantages of Niche Design Firms.  If this sounds interesting to you, please be sure to subscribe!

1. {cycle}

{cycle} is definitely my favorite Smarty command. You pass it a string of comma-separated values and it cycles through them. I mostly use this, as the manual demonstrates, for zebra striping tables or comments or any sort of list.

{section name=rows loop=$data}
<tr bgcolor="{cycle values="#eeeeee,#d0d0d0"}">
   <td>{$data[rows]}</td>
</tr>
{/section}

2. {foreachelse}

In php, I normally do things like if count(array) > 0 then foreach the array. This essentially uses two statements and messes up my code. Smarty takes care of this for me with {foreachelse}:

{foreach key=cid item=con from=$results}
    <a href="contact.php?contact_id={$cid}">{$con.name} - {$con.nick}</a><br />
{foreachelse}
    No items were found in the search
{/foreach}

3. {insert}

Smarty’s caching mechanism is one of it’s best features. Caching your pages can really cut down on your page’s computation time and speed things up. Normally, even if only a small portion of your page is dynamic, you can’t cache the whole page. Smarty takes care of that however with the {insert} function. They work like normal {include} functions (which work just like PHP’s include() function) except they do not cache the included file, even when the rest of the template is cached.

4. {counter}

Before I realized there was a {counter} function, I would use the {assign} function to do x = x + 1. {counter} handles all of that for you with a number of other great options including direction (count up/down), skip, start, print and assign. Extremely useful for any time where you need to create a numbered list out of a database or API call.

{counter start=0 skip=2}<br />
{counter}<br />
{counter}<br />
{counter}<br />

will output:

0<br />
2<br />
4<br />
6<br />

5. {html_table}

You have to use tables sometimes. {html_table} is an easy method to output the HTML for the table without using a {foreach} and inserting all the HTML yourself. For example, this PHP:

$smarty->assign( 'data', array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) );
$smarty->assign( 'tr', array('bgcolor="#eeeeee"','bgcolor="#dddddd"') );

and this Smarty:

{html_table loop=$data cols="first,second,third,fourth" tr_attr=$tr table_attr='border="0"'}

will generate this HTML:

<table border="0">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>first</th><th>second</th><th>third</th><th>fourth</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr bgcolor="#eeeeee"><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>4</td></tr>
<tr bgcolor="#dddddd"><td>5</td><td>6</td><td>7</td><td>8</td></tr>
<tr bgcolor="#eeeeee"><td>9</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>

6. The Debugging Console

When building a large app or working with an app I didn’t build (more likely), figuring out what variables are available and what there values are can be a real pain. Rather than sticking a bunch of echo or var_dump commands in the PHP, I simply called up the Smarty debugging console. The debugging console uses Javascript to popup a window that shows you the names of all the included templates and the assigned variables for the current page.

There are three options for calling up the console.

1. Set the $debugging config variable to TRUE. The console is always shown when this variable is turned on. Useful when you’re in the middle of development.
2. Set the $debugging_ctrl config variable to TRUE. In this case, simply add SMARTY_DEBUG in the query string of the page you want to debug. This is useful when you want to debug a live site.
3. Use {$debug} inside a template when you want to debug just one template. Useful when extending a live site or editing just one template.

Did this post help you? Did you know it all already? What else do you like/dislike about Smarty?

The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living. - Harry Bertoia

I’ve been working on an upgrade to the web design company directory and this design was intended to launch with the upgrade, but it’s been taking too long to complete the development and the blog was really hurting in the previous design.  So for now, this design will only be on the blog and I’ll get the directory upgraded as soon as I can.

The design was created by the extremely talented Evan Agee of Agee Design.  Evan was an employee of mine at Auction Floor, Inc. (which we both left last summer) and I’m extremely happy to have collaborated with him on this design.  I really look forward to having it up on the directory as well.

It’s not a 100% complete yet, but I’ve got some client work I’ve got to get done this weekend.  The sidebar in particular needs a little focus.  That said, what do you think so far?  What’s good?  What needs work?

The point of our posts was not that a large company or a freelancer is better or worse because of their size, but that there are some advantages and disadvantages that generally come with size. I think we both wrote our posts focusing on the average large design company or small design company. We were not trying to stay that this is what ALL large or small design firms are like.

The real key is the quality of the company and people who work there, not the size. With that in mind, Calvin and I have co-written this post with 10 little tips, 5 from each of us, on ways to select a great design company.

1. Interview 2-3 of their clients
   Don’t just call their clients and ask what they think of the design firm, prepare a list of detailed questions beforehand. Ask about budget, communication and delivery times. How much did the design firm interact with the client? Think about what’s most important to you and ask their client about it.
2. The devil is in the details
   Most attention-detailed people pay attention to detail all the time. Call them at a weird hour, what does their voicemail sound like? Is it professional or an afterthought? Can you tell the last time they updated their website was? Was it recent? Consider all the details of the designer’s website because your website might be next. Do they have a written contract? As it should be, for most businesses, this is a must. But for others, a written contract is just a detail that’s not important.
3. The questions they ask
   When you do contact a design firm, you should be extremely prepared and have a very good sense of what you want. Even still, the designer will should always have a lot of questions. Analyze what kind of questions they’re asking, Can you think of something they’re forgetting to ask? Does it sound like they’ve worked on projects similar to yours before?
4. Ask for samples of documentation they’ve provided to clients
   If you’re talking to a freelancer or very small firm that typically only works on relatively simple projects, this may not apply - but for a larger firm or if you have a larger project, be sure to ask this. Many design firms provide more hands-on training and support and less written documentation, but this is a good question to ask regardless. You should get a good feel for their perspective on supporting the client after the project is complete.
5. Ask who they’d recommend
   This is a relatively well-known trick, but I’ve never had a potential client ask me before. E-mail all the local design firms or designers you can find on LinkedIn.com and ask who’d they recommend besides themselves. Simple but extremely effective. Hint: Connect with me on LinkedIn.com, I’m connected to about 500 web developers.

For the next five tips, read Calvin’s Post: 10 Great Tips for Choosing the Right Web Design Company Regardless of Size – Part 2. If you liked this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed. My next post will offer some great tricks for the Smarty template engine.

TechCrunch launched a new design today.  As one the of the few blogs I actually read every day, I’m extremely glad to see this new design.  The old design was too cluttered, slow-to-load and too bright.

The new design is a pleasant change to a much more minimalist look with a clean interface.   The navigation is more logical and well-placed.  The site’s HTML isn’t valid, but I don’t really care.

The biggest change is a switch from Full Post to Excerpt.  While I like the look and feel of this change a lot, I find it’s much more difficult to read all the stories as I normally do.  Fortunately, they thought of that and placed handy Next/Previous Post links at the top and bottom of every post. This will probably be great for their pageview count and advertising revenue which I’m sure they didn’t consider at all…  There also appear to be more posts on the homepage.  I’m not sure what affect this will have on SEO or anything, but it is nice to be able to quickly review all the new posts.  Overall, I’d say the change to excerpt is an improvement.

The sidebar is also much cleaner in appearance.  Rather than being a complete distraction as in the past, I feel it’s almost worth having.  The CrunchBoard Jobs and Seesmic widgets standout a lot more to me now if only because they blend in more.

There’s a lot less green and little more grey in this approach.   Some of the commenters were complaining about the site looking too newsy or traditional.  Personally, I love the new appearance.  It’s a more accurate representation of what TechCrunch is today.

I have two negative comments.  Their new featured posts widget is centered on the homepage and on the sidebar of every post page.  The background color (light tan/yellow) for this widget just doesn’t seem to fit with the green and light grey. I’m not exactly sure what I’d do instead, but I’d experiment with it a little more.  Maybe go with a dark green or dark grey header and a light grey body.

Secondly, the footer seems seriously underused.  Over the past months, a lot of attention has been paid to blog footers in the design community.  I think this is a great trend and well thought-out footer can be a tremendous benefit to a website.  Maybe I’ll design a footer for TC and see what they think as a follow up post.

In summary, I’d have to call this redesign a great success and even overdue.   Nice job, TC!

Update: Here’s some additional reviews:

DailyBlogTips:  TechCrunch Got Redesigned

Mark Evans: TechCrunch Redesign A Sign of Things to Come

reaact.net: The TechCrunch redesign

Online Media Cultist: TechCrunch redesigns: over undesigned?

Devlounge: Design Critique: The TechCrunch Redesign

And it looks like TC already addressed the background color  of the featured post widget and edited it slightly.  Still not quite perfect, but definitely much better than the original version.

1. Large design companies have much better project management tools, processes and experience. They make sure projects and deliverables are accurately defined as well as schedules and expectations. This is critical to any medium to large project.
2. Large design companies typically have a greater attention to detail (at least good companies do). Case in point: I have a client (a software company) who hires me to do design customization work on their software for their clients (cable companies). One of their clients recently hired a large design agency to redo their site. This design agency sent me a 13 page PDF with a mockup of every page in the software so it would perfectly match the site the agency was building. They went over every minute detail with me. They didn’t have to do this, no one else ever has - but this is part of their job. They’re paid to make sure that their client’s brand is presented 100% perfectly every single time.
3. Large design companies write more documentation. For most smaller projects, this isn’t a huge deal, but for larger projects it’s a must. Most large companies should have processes in place to create detailed documentaion such as a website style guide.
4. Large design companies can provide better support. They don’t go on lunch breaks (all at the same time). Their kids don’t get sick (all at the same time). The billing department will be familar with your account history and their billing policies. If a developer is in a car wreck and in a coma for three months, another developer can step in and take his place (having that detailed documentation and programming guides help here).
5. Large design companies have individual experts on staff. Most freelancers and small companies will probably know a lot about website design, but they won’t have a full time graphic designer, web programmer, interface designer, copywriter, SEO expert and social marketer on the payroll. Not only that, but all these people have friends and their own personal support network. More experts will have eyes on your project at a larger company.
6. Large design companies have a history of excellency (or at least decent mediocracy). They’re big for a reason. They’ve been there and done that. Those big-name clients on their client list trust them.
7. Large design companies have less risk. Less risk of the owner dying and crushing your project. Less risk of the company going under. Less risk of getting over their heads and not knowing what they’re doing. Sure, it may cost more and take longer - but if you randomly chose a large design company your chances are probably better that you’ll get a decent website than if you randomly select a small one. Which is why it’s important to very carefully choose your design company, large or small. For help with that, read Jonathan Kelly’s article on Xemion on Choosing a Web Design Company or another great post from Calvin Cox, 8 do’s and don’ts when choosing a web designer.

In summary, most of these really depend on the size of the project. Larger projects or projects from larger companies with brands to protect should normally go to larger companies. Small projects, especially from small companies, are great for freelancers and small companies.  Regardless of company size, selecting a professional web design company is more important than anything else.

Am I wrong or crazy? What do you think?

Personally, I’m sick and tired of the convention coverage already so I thought I’d put my own twist on it and take a detailed look at the convention’s websites.

Republican Convention

The Republican website is XHTML Transitional and has both invalid CSS and HTML.  An even bigger deal in my mind, is the complete lack of alt tags and support for screen readers.  For an event of this magnitude, I would expect better.  The design is very clean and except for the pastel colors in the main content area, I like the look and feel.  It’s very clean and gives off a good visual impression of “power”with the dark blues.  The river background is a great touch and really brings the design together.  That said, the background’s repeat pattern is pretty noticable.  The background is also 3000 pixels tall with most of it being just a dark blue color.  It should just be a 1000 pixel tall pattern and use the CSS repeating and BODY background color to set the dark blue color.

I like the fact that the domain name for the website is RepublicanConvention.com in comparison to the Democratic Party’s DenverConvention2008.  I think this is good for marketing, SEO and driving repeat traffic both now and in future years.  Just much simpler.

From a content standpoint, the site doesn’t focus enough on potential convention visitors.  It has information for delegates, but no links to the Minneapolis/St. Paul visitor websites.  Most of the content seems focused around trivial “facts” for the media and bloggers, but lacks any real depth to the content to truly engage visitors and create genuine buzz or excitement (sort of sounds like the entire Republican party…but that’s another matter).

On a scale of 1 to 10…I’d give the site a 7.

Democratic Convention

Unlike the Republican site, I was able to quickly identify the designer of the Democratic site as Betsy Kimak, an independent web design consultant.  Big kudos to Betsy for getting such a nice and highly-visible project.  Betsy only appeared to handle the design of the website though, not the development.

The site is coded XHTML strict with valid HTML!  The CSS is very close to validating.  The site appears to be much friendlier to screen readers and users with difficulty with low contrast.

Unfortunately, I do not care for the Democractic site design near as much as the Republican site.  While I really like the header’s grunge affect, my overall impression is one of weakness and not strength.  The site is practically devoid of any dark or bold colors.  I’m not saying such colors are necessary for a good design, simply that color theory and impressions matter a lot in political campaigns and this site simply doesn’t measure up to my expectations.   The design is not a bad design, I just don’t think it’s the best fit for this site.  The background is also very light and while nice, it doesn’t extend to the entire width of my monitor (20″ widescreen?) and comes off a little strange.

The content of the Democratic site is much stronger though than the Republican’s site.  The sole exception is making a rotating sponsor list front and center on the site.  Maybe it brings in the bucks, but it just seems really tacky to me.  The rest of the site is focused on events, visitors and even how the convention the “greenest” convention in history.  The content of the site seems much deeper and includes links and information on visiting Denver.  Overall, I believe it does a better job of meeting the needs of the website’s visitors than the Republican site.

On a scale of 1 to 10…It’s just a 6 in the design department, but I have to up it to a 7 for the content and increased usability.

In Conclusion

Both website’s have the appearance of being slightly overlooked in the media campaign.  I’d expect a bit more out of both parties.  You can tell the difference in focus when you read Dustin Brewer’s comparison of the candidate’s websites. The candidates obviously spent more time and money on their websites and while that’s the be expected, it wouldn’t take that much work to really increase the effectiveness of both of the convention’s websites.  I’ve probably missed a lot in the comparison as well so please point out where you disagree with my opinions.

<script>utmx_section("Your First Test")</script>
<!-- YOUR HTML GOES HERE -->
</noscript>

Ignore the strange , that’s just the way GWO works. Once you’ve implemented the script, you then upload alternative versions of your HTML to the GWO website. GWO will insert the alternative versions of the HTML randomly to your visitors to test which versions perform better. You can test page layout, button color/sizes, ads, textual content, navigation structure or anything else you can imagine.

The problem occurs when you want to test dynamic pages or the same section of HTML across multiple pages. For example, I want to test a different product page layout across my site (because no single product gets enough traffic to reliably traffic). I cannot insert HTML into the GWO script because the HTML will be different on every page.

The secret (which many of you may have already figured out, but it took me a while so hopefully this post will help some of you) is to insert CSS or Javascript ONLY into your GWO script. View GWO as a rotating CSS/JS file, not as actual HTML. This may involve using CSS to hide or change various aspects of your page and I’ve even used GWO to alter the HTML structure via Javascript on pages I did not have full control over. Before, your code might have been:

<script>utmx_section("Your First Test")</script>
<h1>Large Product Title</h1>
<img src='bluebutton.gif'>
</noscript>

Now you can do the below and apply the same test to every product:

<script>utmx_section("Your First Test")</script>
<style type='text/css'>
.producttitle {
font-size: 24px;
}
</style>
<script type='text/javascript'>
document.getElementById('addtocartbutton').src = 'bluebutton.gif';
</script>
</noscript>

This is a very simple example, but the power of this concept is that you can now test large sections of your entire site. You can use CSS to move switch the positions of content sections or hide all the product prices for your category pages (early testing shows this actually improves the conversion rates on one of my sites…).

If you have any questions about GWO implementations, please ask in the comments and I’ll be happy to assist.

Seals
Seals matter.   Most sites should see conversion increases of 10-30%.  Which seals are most important/work best?  You’ll have to do your own testing on that, but they definitely make a difference.  According to a recent national survey by Consumer Reports, more than 71% of online shoppers look for third party seals.  The key is place them where they matter most.  Security seals should be on checkout pages, BBB seals should be homepages and product pages, etc..  The goal is to give the visitor the security they need to take the next action, whatever that might be.  There are many different kinds of seals ranging from general business seals, security scans or SSL seals.  I doubt most consumers can tell the difference between the types of seals, but obviously the more well-known brands should carry the most weight.  Common seals include BBB, McAfee (formerly Hacker safe), Trust Guard, Hacker Proof, Control Scan and Verisign.  McAfee, Trust Guard and Hacker Proof all offer some sort of conversion increase guarantee.

Testimonials
I always discounted testimonials in the past because obviously they can’t be be verified and maybe many others ignore them as well, but a significant percentage of visitors do not.  Depending on the site and quality of the testimonials, typical sites should see conversion boosts of 5-50%.   Rather than rehash it all, read this excellent post from Grokdotcom on the Dos and Don’ts of Testimonials.

Alternate Payment Options
Depending on what you sell and your target customer, this could be a major or minor factor.  When I began accepting credit card payments instead of just PayPal on my web design company directory, my total sales went up over 25% despite the fact that every single one of my advertisers probably has a PayPal account. People use different payment methods for many different reasons, including security of their financial information, no credit card and protection from fraud.  Try PayPal, Google Checkout, eCheck, Moneybookers, Bill Me Later and eLayaway.  As a side bonus, sometimes you can save quite a bit with an alternate method.

There are many other ways to boost conversion rates, but I’ll be saving those for a follow up post.  As I said at the beginning of the post, if you’re not doing ALL you can to optimize your website and give your customers security, you’re not doing enough.

Most importantly though, TEST TEST TEST. Do not implement any of these options without testing your site.  Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer makes this super easy.  My next blog post will feature my #1 tip on how to implement Google Website Optimizer in seconds so subscribe to RSS now (<-call to action, we’ll see if it boosts my blog subscription rate).

Hmm. Yes, by all means, we want to avoid the time and consideration professional designers offer and go right to the lowest common denominator of grade-school dropouts whose portfolio’s crown jewel is a logo for their dad’s wholesale llama manure clearing house. We definitely do not want any in-depth communication. We do not want any understanding of the company, the brand, or the direction and aspirations of the organization.

In a nutshell, this is what you’re asking for if you work with these guys:

• You’re doing the work whether you like it or not. Payment is irrelevant. You only get that if you actually “win” the “contest”.
• Even if you do win, you don’t win much. (They seem to encourage low prices, as stated on their how it works page.)
• You lose your copyright privileges and you apparently can’t even take a public stand if your designs are stolen. Read their copyright page for more on that.
• You’re also asking for a royal slap in the face from folks like me and other real designers.

Freelancers: if you really care about your work and the design industry, do NOT use 99designs or others like it to gain clients. You’re hurting yourself and the rest of us too.

Business owners: if you really want someone who will take the time to get to know your company and present an informed and well-rounded design, might I suggest someone from the Xemion Web Designer Directory?

Here’s Kevin’s article (warning: contains some strong language)

NOTICE TO COMMENTORS: I understand that this is a hot topic and has drawn more than it’s share of criticism and support. I would like to stress however, that no matter how strongly you feel in one way or another, comments with nasty or distasteful portions will be deleted as soon as we find them.

Conversely, the barbershop I was served by an grizzled, old guy who muttered. He didn’t really talk to me and if he did, it would be hard to hear with the TV and the trimmer going. He had no clue I was in five weeks ago (probably because I was helped by someone else, but that even furthers my point) or how I liked my hair. I got no shampoo and the massage was from sort of machine that felt more like a jack-hammer. The decor looked dirty and old. The whole process made me FEEL unimportant.

The barbershop charges a mere $11 for a cut, the salon: $37. That’s a 250% increase for the salon even though the end product, my haircut, was exactly the same. How would you like to increase your rates 250%? The key is providing a customer experience that supports that rate and attracts clients who are willing to pay it (because many won’t). Here are some ideas at improving the customer experience:

• Look upscale. This includes every part of your business, such as invoices, letterheads, envelopes, e-mail signatures and marketing materials. Obviously your location, signage, furniture and decor may play a part. If the client sees it, it has to be perfect and seamlessly match your company’s brand.
• Know the client. Keep detailed records on the client’s likes and dislikes. This includes everything from color preferences to favorite sports teams/tv shows. Some clients prefer phone calls, others e-mails or in-person meetings. Make sure all your staff keeps the notes in the same place. If there’s ever a transition with your team, the client should not have to go through a major get-up-to-speed curve with the new team member. I cannot tell you how many new clients I’ve gotten simply because the previous firm dropped the ball during a transition.
• Be proactive. You are the expert. Come the client with new ideas, even after the initial project is completed. This is also a a great way (maybe the best way) to drum up new sales. Long term, being proactive will increase both customer loyalty and word of mouth.
• Pamper the client. Make the client feel important by doing little things like including SASEs in invoices and hand-written Christmas cards. Give away sports or theater tickets. Even more importantly, make the client feel trendy/cutting-edge and encourage their belief that they made a good decision in hiring your firm. Tell them how great you, as an expert (and your friends/colleagues), think their new website is and what an improvement from the previous site.

Remember, shifting to a more upscale market means changing your target market…..at the end of the day, I’m still a cheap sucker and I’m going to the barbershop

The most common types of problem blogs I’ve run across are the “day in the life” blog and the “I haven’t written anything for three months” blog.

Why are these problematic? Because the only way that a blog can help you market yourself or your business is if it is actually providing something of value to its readers.

There’s nothing wrong with an occasional “day in the life” post, but if that’s the primary content of your blog, it probably isn’t doing you much good. Likewise, there’s nothing wrong with taking a week or two off from blogging, but if you go months without posting anything new, who will notice when you finally do post?

I think that a significant portion of both problems are caused by the fact that the authors don’t know what to write about. So here are three ways to write valuable content for your web design blog, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

1. Write about web design for non-designers (and non-developers for that matter)

When writing for a general audience, you don’t have to go into technical details, but you may have to explain things that you think of as simple because they aren’t as familiar with the field. The biggest advantage of writing for a general audience, though, is that you have more opportunity to sell your services since they probably don’t have the knowledge to do things themselves.

2. Write for other designers and developers

Writing for others in your field means that you won’t have to explain most basics, but you usually have less opportunity to sell yourself, since your readers are likely your competitors. You do, however, have the chance to sell services which complement those of your readers (for example, back-end development to front-end designers). And when you write on technical subjects you’re more likely to learn from the feedback of others in your field.

3. Write about related subjects

Writing about related subjects is a good way to interest both a general and technical audience. Good articles can also help you to demonstrate that your knowledge extends beyond just web design and that you are a well rounded business person.

What sort of related subjects should you try? Posts about marketing, business practices, and yes, even blogging, can work quite well.

Which to try?

Personally, I think the most effective approach for most web designers is to write a mixture of these types of content. Start with the sort you feel most comfortable with, and gradually start writing the others. A good mix of valuable content is the most important step in getting a good mix of valuable readers.

Do you have any suggestions for writing in each of these areas? If so, let us know in the comments!

Information architecture is the art of organizing information on a website in a way in which it is easily found. That’s the one sentence version, anyhow.

Information architecture (IA) is the art of organizing content into a logical structure. In websites we need to organize all the information logically and put it in together for it to make sense to our users.

Websites are supposed to answer questions that the a user has and help users complete tasks. If a website makes it easy for you to complete your task, then you know the information architects were effective. If a website has clumsy navigation and you have a hard time finding the information then we know whoever did the architecture on the website was not successful.

How do I recognize Information Architecture?

Before asking how I visualize IA, you may want to know why you need to visualize it. The main reason is if you have to explain what IA is to others. IA is not a tangible thing and the field is new and not many people out there understand exactly what it is. That’s why in this article, I am going to give you the whole picture of IA in layman’s terms, so you have a complete understanding are able to communicate that to other people.

You can recognize IA, by noticing the search systems and classifications/categorizations of a website’s architecture. But, it’s just not the navigation links that is IA, it’s the way information architects, categorize the structure of the information on the site.

Here is an example, let’s say we are looking at a clothing store’s online shopping cart. The types of clothing could be broken down like this: t-shirts, other shirts, jeans, casual pants, shorts and accessories. This is information architecture, it’s just not the words or the links, its how it is categorized.

Another example perhaps is the way content (words) are grouped on the homepage. If you look at any website – well most websites - for example the content is usually grouped into paragraphs or chunks of information, this is also information architecture.

IA is much deeper in the links on a website and how they are placed. IA refers to the content and the way in which we find it. It might be that we search for it, we could use a quick links side bar, either way it’s how we find the information.

Why information architects?

By now, we all know that IA exists without architects. If we want to create useable websites with easy to find information in complex environments, then we need architects. Without the proper professional knowledge and skills we would have a web of mess, much like it was with the crazy flashing buttons before we had web designers.

Imagine mortgages without mortgages specialists or schools without teachers. Information architecture without architects isn’t going to work either.

But more likely, none of these things will. In my career as a freelancer I’ve watched numerous other freelancers rise and fall, step out and immediately lose their footing, or get off to a bumpy start. I must admit, I’ve made the same mistake a time or two: misconception.

I’m not talking the kind of misconception that happens when a client expects a $2000 website for $200 or that they figure their new e-commerce site will be as successful as Ebay overnight. The misconception that I’m speaking of has been widespread ever since the dot-com bubble burst and every 5th grader and their dog became a “webmaster”.

It lies in our communication: Bob decides to start a beef business. He gets a loan from the bank, a building to house the business in and even takes out an ad in the paper and the phone book. What’s missing? Bobs-beef-business-dot-com, of course!

Opening the phone book again, he flips through it, pausing and grinning at his wonderful 1/8th page ad. He continues flipping until he reaches the W’s. Let’s see… aha! “Web Design”. He picks up the phone and begins to call.

An hour later, he calls the “webmaster” that was fifth on his list, because they can do it for the least amount of money. He doesn’t need to check his website or his portfolio. The bottom line is all that matters.

The misconception happened between the lines. Bob called and said, “I need a website for my new business. How much?” The designer said, “We have starter packages that include 5-10 page web design for $500″. Bob says, “Great! You’re hired. When can you have it ready?”

How many of you have made this mistake? I know I have. A few of the new freelancers may not even catch it. As freelancers, we very often have to wear different hats to survive. If we can’t cut it in sales, accounting, customer service AND design, we won’t eat. We’ve perused the internet for many hours and we know what looks good, what gets a good rank in Google and what keeps people coming back. So why do we continue to convey ourselves as just another name in the phone book? The solution here is we need to position ourselves as industry experts rather than hired help. We’re not just good at making websites, we’re darn good at it. Any Joe Blow can create a website with Dreamweaver and a GoDaddy account. Why should they hire you if they don’t understand the importance of getting a specialist involved?

Sometimes, it takes awhile for a mistake to become a mistake. When the internet was still in it’s infancy, not a lot of people had an email address. The phone book was still pretty popular, and usually, the easiest way to get more information on a particular company was to call them. As a result, there weren’t a lot of contact forms on websites. A simple mailto: link would suffice. As another supporting factor, not too long after email got popular, so did spam. Junk emails flooded our inboxes to the extent that we quit seeing email as a huge step forward in communication and began to see it as a necessary evil.

Thankfully, that’s changed. New steps taken by Google and others in their email services have put spam in it’s place for the most part and made it fun to have email again.

And still, the mailto: link hangs on. It’s everywhere.
Why? It’s outdated and inefficient. When you click on the “contact us” link of some site that is coded with a mailto: link it will open up that user’s local email. Or at least, it will try to. For those of you like me–who keep their email on the internet–it may not respond at all or may even freeze up your browser.

Now you, the business-owner who owns that domain name–what sort of impression do you think you just made on that potential client/customer?

Many of you might think this is just a rant against substandard code and my personal experience on certain websites, but underneath it all lies the single principle that we all need to remember.

Harvey MacKay had an interesting way of showing ties at the mens suit store he worked at: He picked the three that would look the best with that suit and let the customer pick from the three.

Keep it simple, folks. Make every decision as easy as possible for them and their decision to hire or buy from you will be just as easy.

1. Get a name

2. Get a logo

3. Get a design

4. Get some content

5. Get a subscribe-to-beta-launch-e-mail-list button

6. Get some funding

That’s all there is to it folks!

How many new clients do you want?
Seriously, write a goal and then write how you’re going to achieve it. What marketing will you need to do to attract these clients? How will you engage them? Do you need to increase your marketing spend? Do you need to hire new staff to support them?

How much revenue do you want per project?
$1,000? $10,000? $100,000? What’s your target? Focus on revenue per project more than overall revenue as a goal. It’s much more objective and easier to create specific steps. This number should be greatly influencing your marketing efforts and your target client. Are you happy where you’re at or do you want to move up to larger and more up-scale projects?

What percentage of projects do you want from existing clients?
Think about this and be proactive. Don’t wait for clients to call you. See my 3 things you can do right now to get sales post. Setting a goal for this number makes you instantly aware of how you’re doing in this department.

What do you want to achieve as designers/developers?
This is a little harder to quantify but it shouldn’t stop you from trying to do so. These can be personal goals for freelancers or even team/company goals. Maybe you want to get a design featured in a leading CSS gallery. Work on an open-source project or create a useful mashup. Find some way to improve your skills and your teams skills.

How do you want to benefit your community?
This is a concept that gaining more and more acceptance in society. How is your company going to give back? I mentioned open-source earlier but this also applies on a local or global level. Help clean up a neighborhood park or give a donation to Kiva. The important thing is to think about it and have a plan.

How will you build your awareness/expertise level?
Create a concrete path towards becoming an expert in your field. Again, this could be applied on a local level or a global level. Write a blog, write a guest posts, lead local seminars or appear on local business talk show. There are many ways to boost the awareness of your company as an expert.

These are just a few of the goals you can set for your professional web design company and they apply to businesses of all sizes. What are some of the goals you’ve set for your company?

Portfolio on the Homepage
The homepage is your first opportunity to engage a website visitor. What the majority of your potential clients are looking for is your portfolio (check Google Analytics or Crazy Egg and tell me if I’m wrong). Make a good first impression by putting the most impressive pieces of your portfolio on your homepage. For some excellent examples see Brand Aid Web Design, alterimaging website design and Ocean 19 website design.

Detailed Contact Information
I realize many of the firms listed in the directory are one-man freelance shops. Nothing wrong with that at all, but you definitely should list a phone number and a physical address on your contact page. I see far too many companies that simply have a form and that’s it. It simply looks unprofessional and scary from a client’s point of view. If you have to, just make the phone go straight to voicemail. There are ways to make addresses look more professional too (use Suite instead of Apt and I’ve heard you can use the Post Office’s address with a Suite # instead of the P.O. box). For a couple of examples see Rise Creative Group and Gravitate Web Design Studio.

Personnel Profiles
Another misstep is not including any information on the company’s employees. This is an important part of establishing a connection and relationship with a website visitor. Again, look at your stats and see which pages are visited the most. A bio of yourself if you’re a freelancer and at minimum the company management if not every employee if you’re a larger company should be included on your site. And don’t just write a history of your life, use this area to continue to sell your services and expertise. Some good examples are Upward Media (freelancer), LunaWebs Design and GHI Internet Services.

Sell Yourself with News
Use a news section to announce awards, website launches or case studies. Many design firm sites already have a news section, but it’s either out of date or really doesn’t have a sales focus to it. It’s important to generate news that impresses website visitors. Don’t just announce a new site launch, include a a quote from the client stating how pleased they are with the result. When you follow up with existing clients, as how their website is doing and see if there is a news article you can’t write (sales increased 400%, business doubled, etc.). While slightly out of date, I like the news on these two sites: Slingshot SEO and LunaWebs Design.

Though I’ve not been doing it as long as others, there are certain policies in freelancing that I’ve learned the hard way. Aside from the normal TOS that makes it’s way through every gig, there’s this unwritten code that should always be at the back of your mind any time you’re on the phone with a perspective client or handing out your card. These are rules that I refuse break or even bend, because I’ve learned what they cost me the last time I did.

1. Always work for Jesus. As a Christian, I’m obligated to adhere to biblical principles at home, at work and in all areas of life. Jesus is first. Period.
2. Never work for family, friends or neighbors (they know where you live.) This may not apply to you, but I’ve found (and heard) that family, friends and neighbors will often have unrealistic expectations pertaining to what you’ll do for them and how you’ll do it. Think about it: a purely professional relationship is so much simpler. If things don’t work out, you can (sometimes) part ways on good terms. However, if you take a preordained relationship and sour it with a business deal gone wrong, it tends to hang over your head and someone usually walks away with a sense of resentment or bitterness.
3. Never do a job on a handshake. This one may seem strikingly clear, but even in my own experience, I’ve been much too lax in this area. Not surprisingly, every single project that was done without written contractual agreements has failed. For both the sake of your client and your own–get it done right. Get it done in writing.
4. Always get a deposit. I had a client call that needed a rush job and I didn’t ask for a deposit. What’s worse, that client insisted that he’d have to “pay me in a couple of payments”, each one spread out over 60 days. It was a small project that took 34 hours in one week to complete (that’s on top of my full-time job in IT) and because I did it on a handshake, it ultimately failed. I’ve never received payment of any kind nor heard from the client.
5. Promise and deliver. Over-deliver if you can. Notice, I didn’t say under-promise. I’m a firm believer that you should let your yes be yes and your no be no. Find ways to over-deliver that will benefit your client but not leave you under paid.
6. There are always sacrifices. Choose them wisely. Sacrifices come in many forms: you sacrifice time with your family if you take on too much. Sacrifice your own reputation if you cut corners in quality of service. You might sacrifice money by taking on job over another. Not all of them are bad, but trust me, there are always sacrifices. Don’t be hasty.
7. Encourage and pursue loyalty. Statistics say that it cost ten times as much to gain a new customer than to retain an old one. Reward those who have been with you for awhile. If you’ve a designer that saved your neck a couple of times when you were busting at the seams with deadlines, buy them a steak dinner or something (in addition to normal payment, of course). Loyalty is what separates your greatest assets from your greatest liabilities.

Kent Shaffer of Bombay Creative hits the nail on the head:

“That is why it is vital to have great design because those who know nothing about you will judge you by your appearance. Aesthetics are a powerful thing. Whether graphic design or product design, your appearance shapes how others perceive you.”

Are you where you want to be in your career as a freelancer? If not, I encourage you: get better. Get good at what you do. You might be pretty decent at it now, but getting better will never hurt.  This article comes out of my personal desire to become a better designer. I think I’m already pretty good at it, but heaven forbid that I stop learning how to improve. Mark my words: the moment you stop learning to hone your craft is the moment you stop advancing.

You may not even know you need better time management. If you work in the creative industry, you probably do. Here are some things to ponder:

1. Do you always seem rushed when nearing a deadline?
2. In an effort to keep the client happy, are you stretching yourself thin and doing plenty of “little things” that you’re not getting paid for?
3. Do you find yourself getting sidetracked, either by other people or other tasks you’ve suddenly remembered?
4. Are you lacking in goals for business and financial success? Are you just rolling with the punches and taking what comes?
5. How often do you find yourself forgetting things and breaking your word because you’d forgotten to do something you said you’d do?

First off, you need to understand something: Time is a non-renewable asset. That is, these minutes that I’m spending typing out this article-I’m not getting them back. The time you spend dealing with that belligerent client or working those “pro-bono” cases-you aren’t getting that back either. “Wasting time” takes on a whole new meaning when you understand this.

Secondly, we freelancers need to realize that our time is our time. Why did we become freelancers in the first place? Tired of working for the man and wanted to be your own boss? Realized you could make more money working for yourself? You just like meeting new people? Great! It amazes me how many freelancers still work like they’re working on someone else’s time. Understanding that your time is your time is both liberating and horrifying. If things bust, you can’t blame your manager. If you can learn to say “no” when you really don’t have time, you’ll get things accomplished and let other people know that your time is valuable. Keep this in mind, though-If you have to say “no”, suggest a later time; time management isn’t about blowing people off and being selfish.

Jim Wideman, one of my mentors on time management, has this to say:

If you can’t manage your time, you’re always stuck reacting to people and situations. You’ll never be effective. You’ll never be a strong leader. But with time management, you’ll amaze even yourself.

He also points out that managing your time isn’t just about getting lots of stuff done. It’s about getting the right things done. If you’re like me, then you might remember things best when you write them down. In this case, I’d highly recommend Remember The Milk, or RTM for short. It’s a fantastic application that integrates well with Gmail, too! Actually looking at your tasks and seeing what you have to do can not only give you a better picture what to say “no” to, but it can increase your productivity by prioritizing as well.

Lastly, I believe every successful freelancer is only as good as their name. I believe that a good name is worth more than money in the bank. If you are constantly saying things and then forgetting to do them or having to do them later than you said, you are indirectly being dishonest. Too many people chalk their tasks up to “I’ll get to it when I get to it” and never take a good hard look at what they’re doing and whether or not it’s effective. I think this is one of the primary causes of burnout-people do so many menial tasks that they lose their sense of self-worth and lose sight of what’s important.

I could go on and on about all the great tools that I use for time management, but I’d like to hear from you: what are you using to get stuff done effectively? Let’s hear it in the comments.

First Impressions
Let’s start with you. It’s important when you’re just starting out to put your best foot forward. To get clients you need to be professional. You should look and act like a professional. Professional dress depends on your niche market. If you’re looking for clients in the legal field (lawyers), you’ll need to appear in business dress suitable for a courtroom. If you walk into a lawyer’s office expecting work dressed in jeans, tennis shoes and a rock band shirt, you’re probably going to be disappointed. A lawyer isn’t going to take you seriously. That being said, if you walk onto a cutting horse trainer’s ranch in the clothing you’d wear to visit a lawyer you’ll look like a “city slicker” and not get the kind of respect you’d need to land the work.

Start With a Network
One of the biggest ways that web designers get new clients is through word of mouth referrals. This is normally done through happy clients who refer new clients to you. If you don’t have any clients then you’ve got to come out of the dark and be seen. People won’t know you’re doing web design until you tell them. And no one will refer clients to you if they don’t know what you do or if they haven’t heard of you. Since web design is a service that requires trust on the client’s behalf, word of mouth is the norm.

If you don’t have an extensive network of clients to refer you to new clients then you need to expand the number of people you actually know. You can start with family and friends. This depends on how well they understand what you do. I still have my mother’s words ringing in my ears “It’s just a little ole website.” Um yeah Mom…. Right. It’s not to say that family and friends can’t help you out but be sure they actually understand something about what you do for a living.

After family you’ll need other resources for meeting people. Some good places to network are your local Chamber of Commerce, various clubs and associations in your region. You can also join organizations like Business Network International where networking and lead generation are the primary pursuits. The Toastmasters organization is a good place to develop your speaking capabilities which can parlay into speaking at your local Chamber of Commerce. You’ll need to have a nice business card when you go to these events so that you can pass it out to everyone you meet. There are excellent business card companies online that will allow you to inexpensively create a business card. The real key is to get some visibility.

Niche Market Networking
All of the above works fairly well. If you think about marketing itself, like commercials, you’ll have an understanding of what I’m talking about. Take for instance a commercial for a toy. Where would you find that commercial? Typically on a TV channel that shows cartoons and children’s shows. The target market is children. In marketing you’re trying to put your product in front of your target market. If you’ve defined toy-makers as your target market then you need to go to the events they attend and advertise in the magazines they read. It’s about being where your target market will see you.

Online Networking
Local networking is a great place to start but you should be doing a variety of networking. Participating in online forums like Xemion’s forum is a great way to network with other web designers and developers. The more you help your fellow web designer/developer, the more authority you gain. I know most think in terms of the signature links seen at the bottom of the posts for search engine optimization purposes but we’re not talking about SEO right now.

The key is to become an authority. Blogs will help lend that air of “authority” to your overall impression. You might think that helping other web designers/developers is counterproductive. The fact is that helping others can lead to virtual teams of designers and developers who develop symbiotic relationships doing subcontracts for each other. In this day and age, no one is an expert at everything. It’s important to realize that concentrating on specialized skills will make you more money over time. As you write about your particular specialty more work comes your way.

James just posted a nice article on LinkedIn. It’s one of the places you can network with online individuals. Some of my best clients and partnerships have been gained through online connections. Facebook, MySpace and others like it can contribute to your finding online connections for more work. The key is to participate and interact in these networks.

Show Them What You Have
I don’t think I can emphasize this enough. You need a portfolio. If you don’t have one, start making one. Build websites for nonprofits and/or dummy sample sites. Make up a city and build a site for each typical business in a city. People won’t know what you can do until they see it.

Advertise
People won’t come unless they know you’re in business. Networks and referrals are generally where most clients will come from but don’t leave out advertising. Lots of businesses don’t know anyone who knows someone doing web design and development. It’s hard for them to find a web designer. A few suggestions are things like putting out fliers at local businesses, running newspaper ads and setting up a yellow pages advertisement. The one thing you will want to do with any kind of advertisement is track where your new clients are coming from and pour money into those advertisements that are producing while cutting out the ones that aren’t producing clients.

Getting Their Names
Building a list of potential and previous clients is one of the most important ways to build a business. These are people who have prequalified themselves by buying from you or supplying their contact information to you. Obviously you need to keep in touch with past clients. This keeps you fresh on their minds when someone asks them for a referral. The other side are new people for whom you haven’t yet done any work. How do you get new contacts on your list? One way is to create a survey. You can survey them about what they know about web design, how they found a web designer if they have one or even if they think they need a website. Normally you’ll have to sweeten the pot with something to entice them to fill out the survey otherwise they may not supply their contact information. A simple one page site from a template with their content pasted into the site is a good way to get the ball rolling. You could also end up with a much bigger client. The key is to get their contact information.

Once you build your list, it’s important to develop a habit of contacting them. Contact them when you have a new website in your portfolio or a new service to offer. You should also contact them about topics in web development that might interest a business. Things like SEO and website marketing. Think about what concerns your current clients might have that you’ve answered. Use that information to create interesting articles to send to your list. Once the people on the list know how much you care, the more likely they are to hire you. It’s part of building trust.

Offer Something Enticing
When I offer services or develop a proposal, I always hold something back. This gives me something that I can offer to a client as a “freebie”. We all know how good we feel when we get a “gift”. It makes us feel special. Making your clients feel special is probably one of the top things you can do for your business.

Clients like good service. If you aren’t responding to their needs daily, you’re not doing your job as a consultant. Over delivery and quick response is part of what will separate you from the competition. It’s also what clients will spread by word of mouth. It’s that fast customer service that can make a difference. You don’t want your client thinking you’re too busy for more work do you?

Job Boards
I’ve played around with the job boards in the past. I’ve actually gotten a few clients off Craigslist. I want to caution you about these places, the clients are generally cheap. They are looking for a bargain. Micah stated before that you can get away with discounts and kickbacks to clients so that you can get your name out there but at some point you do have to stop. The bidding system that works on the job boards like elance can really degrade your morale. Use these sites with caution. You’ll have to be cheaper than the other guys to start out and risk being known as the cheap guy.

I’ve gone over most of the methods I’ve ever used or learned. If you’ve got some other methods that might help other web designers please leave a comment.

Web Out
Des

Am I crazy? Why is this trend spreading?

Secondly, I would like to tell you about the speakers today.

First speaker this morning was Indi Young of Adaptive Path speaking about Innovation and how it is overrated.  Young made three points at first. One is that currently we have hit a wall with innovation. Saying that currently we now are innovating current products when it fact we should be working on completely new products that can be innovative.

She then went on to say some of the most important things you need to remember when you come up with an idea, is that you have to think about the fact you still need to be able to manufacture, deliver and convince people to buy you innovative idea. Which of course can make innovation very expensive.

The one thing that stuck out in her talk was that if you focus on people rather than the product you will succeed with time. This I thought was excellent advice and wished she hadn’t just told everyone!

Next me and all my bags (purse, laptop and the prize I had received for having my blog post mentioned - you visualize this not being easy  right?) over to “The Future of Web Interfaces” with Cameron Adams. First I must say Cameron was a very well spoken individual, very easy to understand and he made sense!

Cameron chatted about the fact that currently users have a multitude of platforms, screen resolutions and ways of viewing our content. And that is what makes our job difficult. He stated, “each different person has a different view and they all want to do something different”.

He then went on to talk about dynamic interfaces. Stated that there are really two types. Developer driven interfaces and user driven interfaces. We discussed the pros and cons of each. The developer driven interface needs a deep understanding of what your users want. The user driven interface is something that is coming soon and is already in beta at BBC. View the site here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/.

Cameron stated users are like information omnivores and they are getting more demanding. Someone in the audience brought up an excellent question, with user driven interfaces, how do we approach the customer service  aspect which these new interfaces.

Now off to, Information Visualization as a Medium with Erin Rodenbeck of Stamen Design. Stamen talked mainly about maps in which you think would be boring. But surprise, surprise it wasn’t.

He showed different examples of where his company has used live data and compiled it and displayed it as a usable easy to read map. One of his projects were cabspotting.org which traces San Francisco’s taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. And Oakland Crime Spotting which is a map of crime in the Oakland Area.

On to Anil Dash with Putting Social Media to Work. Anil Dash is the Vice President of Six Apart. His talk was of particular interest as he talked about business cases and how to show the CEOs and CFOs of your company why they should be using social media.

Social Media is changing the way people communicate and larger business’ are having a hard time adapting to this change. He stated the main real why an IT manager would automatically say no to a new project is budget, real estate, time and resources. He also mentioned that when presenting the business case the technology we propose we need to make sure it is safe, reliable, scalable, measurable and manageable.

An easy way to over come this is point to current success with the technology and tie it to where others are failing.

The How and Why: UI Case Studies  with Daniel Burka was my next stop. Daniel Burka is a partner at silverorange and is one of the Digg team. And Daniel is from Prince Edward Island - a fellow Maritimer….

Daniel talked about three different UI Cases. The digg story, digg comments and pownce -original design. He walked us thru each of the steps and talked about why and what the reactions were. In the end we were given some useful insight on how to deal with these types of projects. Overall it was a very interesting, speech.

Jeffery Zeldman was the opening keynote today and his topic was titled: Return of the Web Standards King. Jeffery’s speech was one of the speech’s I most enjoyed. He is an very animated speaker and made it interesting and easy to listen. Jeffery Zeldman is the brains behind A List Apart. He also is an author.

Jeffery talked about web standards - what a surprise. He told us that originally when he began the Web Standards Project, the designers and developers were not creating better sites they were actually creating more versions of sites. Simply because no of the browsers were standards were complainant. So designers were creating sites using browser detection and once the browser was detected it would send the user to a website designed specifically for that browser. His speech was full of some of the history of the web. Which I found very interesting.

I also had the opportunity to here  Josh Williams give his speech on Bedroom to Boardroom. Josh is the founder and CEO of Firewheel Design, Blinksale, and Icon Buffet.

Josh spoke about the process he went thru going frm having a boss, to being a freelancer, to assembling a team and starting a company. Josh also chatted about how he ended up moving from a top notch design firm in Texas to product development.

Right before lunch there was one more session with, Tara Hunt titled, Government  2.0: Architecting  for Collaboration. This was another great speech in which I thoroughly enjoyed. Tara spoke from the perspective of the user, not the Government. She spoke abou the difficulties in budget and resources that many of the government agencies have.

One project she mentioned which sparked my interest was the CalTrain project. In short the Caltrain project is where developers took note of the horrible schedule that CalTrain website had. The developers then took the schedule and create an easy to navigate map. Which explains where the trains run, what services each stop has and when the next trains are coming. You can view the iamcaltrain.com website yourself.

She then went on to speak about how regular people are getting together and helping the government understand the technologies and what they can do with the data they so secretly guard now. I was surprised to find out something like this was in my back yard titled Transit Camp Vancouver - visit the website to learn all about the great collaboration that is happening to help the web.

After lunch, I was able to hear “Plays well with others” with Brian Oberkirch. Who is a marketing consultant focused on social media.

Brian spoke about all the different social media sites  and having different logins and how we should be using or working on new services in which we can combine all our profile data and friend lists’. To make life easier for ourselves. He states, “The social network fatigue users feel the  and inefficiencies of multiple social apps. He showed on some examples of projects which are currently developing way to begin to do it.

Warren at Techvibes.com put it perfectly when he blogged,”Brian  said the technology, in applications like OpenID, oAuth already widely available now, while the Creative Commonsmovement helps to propagate ideas of openness and sharing.”

From there it was on to Jared Spool, whom I must say was one of the most animated speakers. Which was great for me as I was starting to tire. He kept me engaged and listening. Jared spoke about what makes a design seem intuitive.

He started by explain that in technically a design can’t be intuitive. But that’s his short cut to explaining it. He talked about what not being intuitive meant and he stated, “Not intuitive is when users don’t know what to do” this usually leads them to become frustrated.

He also spoke about the “Knowledge Gap” which is the point between what users know before ( from their past experiences ) and what users need to know to either use the website or application. He explains that this is where we start designing and that the is where design helps the user by educating them - without them knowing  and they reach the point where the user knows how to use the application. An unititative application would not each this point. Where an initiative design would make this easy.

And last was Gina Trapani creator of A better Gmail and create or Lifehacker.com. She explained what a better Gmail was - as I was unfamiliar and some of the difficulties she encountered and how she overcame them.

All in first day was a good one!

Screencasts. Most of my clients use a Content Management System for their websites, so I’ve taken the time to create a number of screencasts that would help them out in performing simple to semi-complex tasks involving updating their website. It’s a small thing that I’ve been thanked for over and over again.

Passwords. I make it a point to hang on to passwords that my clients give me, whether it be for ftp access or the CMS or whatever. On more than one occasion have I been requested to retrieve said password because too long had gone by since the client had used it.

Chocolates. I distinctly recall reading an article while in college about an Art Director in charge of hiring a junior designer but coming up with no real contenders. He remarked something to the effect of: “I know it’s nothing to do with talent, but the hopeful-designer that brought me cookies would at least be remembered.” Being the sponge (and fountain) of useless knowledge that I am, I hung on to that tidbit and remembered it the next time I was applying for a job. You never know. That brings me to my next point…

Details. I spent several years in a large volunteer youth ministry. Amidst the thousands of kids there, there were a handful that I saw each and every week. I cannot tell you the look in their eyes when you call them by name. If you can sneak it out of them, catch your client’s birthday, or one of their kid’s names. If you go through the trouble to remember (or jot down) little details about the client, they’ll be more helpful, advertise you more, and be more likely to forgive you if you screw up.

So those are a few of my little things that make a big impact. What are yours? Let’s hear ‘em in the comments.

So where does this bring me?
As we grow in our careers, client and marketing take over our lives. We’re constantly asking ourselves where is the next lead, what’s our next project. These are important focus areas in our careers. We have to feed ourselves and our families. However this constant pressure to get new work can take some of the joy out of our career. A career is something you enjoy. We have to remember this fact lest we fall into a rut.

In The Middle
Somewhere between meeting client needs and gaining new clients there is a middle ground. It’s the ground we use to grow as web designers/developers. It’s important for everyone to learn something new because you have to stay on top of web design trends. This can put additional pressures on you. Sometimes I’ve thought “How can I possibly stay on top of everything?” You can’t but you can keep up with most of the trends.

Where’s The Fun?
Pressure is the enemy of fun. How do we combat that simple need to perform better than the next guy? How do we move forward? It comes down to remembering when you started. What was fun about web design? Why did you start? For me as I said it was satisfaction. It’s important for us to find that satisfaction again. I’ve found it when completing a client’s website but that’s not the only place to find satisfaction.

Don’t forget to Play
I spent a year getting a teaching credential and during that time I taught kindergardeners through high schoolers. What I remember the most of all that time was if a lesson was fun the kids responded better to it. They remembered it longer. By taking a leaf out of my own teaching background, I’ve found that learning can be fun if we take the pressure out of it. Last year I spent some time in photoshop playing in a simple design contest for no prize and nothing for a website… just for fun. It was on a discussion board for a series of books by one of my favorite authors. It was fun bringing the book’s characters to life. Nobody got work because of it, we just patted each other on the back.

Go Play
We need to take time out each day or once a week or once a month to just play at our craft. No pressure just play. It’s the playing that got many of us started and it’s the play that will make us better. It’s a time to relax because the outcome doesn’t matter. This weekend I got interested in using ffmpeg for video uploads and conversions to flv format with asp.net. I completely forgot my sense of time. After 7 hours of research, trial and error I have a small working upload button that transforms an avi to a flash video file. I don’t have a client for it but I do have satisfaction in doing it. So I did play this weekend after all.

How do you play? Let us know.

Web Out
Des

This is an obvious one. As a freelance designer you need connections. Now don’t think just because the conference you are going to will be filled with you competition, you can’t network.

For example I am heading this week the Web Directions North conference, here in Vancouver, BC and I am going to run into a lot of my competition. This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t network. I am going to network and I am going to make sure to come out of this conference with many business cards and some new friendships.

You are probably asking, why? Well those people I connect with probably won’t all be designers. They could be internet marketers, PHP developers or Flash gurus. Having all these additional resources in my network can only benefit me. As my friendships grow I may learn from them, I may meet new contacts thru them who turn into clients or I may team up with one of these new connections. Either way it’s a win-win situation.

Learning –

Chances are even if you learn just one new thing, it’ll be worth it. Conferences don’t have to be long or even technical. Usually if your butt is in the seat, you will learn a few new things.

As professionals in a rapidly changing industry we need to be on our toes! We need to know about new technologies, ideas and stuff going on around us. A conference may do just the trick. Like this conference I am attending this week, I plan on sitting in on all the topics I can. Some of the topics are not directly related to what I do but I want to learn all about them none the less. Bottom line… conferences are a great way to continue your professional development.

Revamp of what you know –

Possibly the conferences available to you aren’t conferences in which have high profile speakers and experts from around the world coming but, you can still benefit. Even attending some smaller conferences can help your brain start moving. Maybe the speaker(s) have a different perspective on something. This enables you to think outside your normal thought process.

For example just last week I was at a Mangers’ Toolbox event with Michael Linehan of Marketing Alchemy. Now maybe it was because it was 730 in the morning, but some of the first few things he talked about were pretty - roll eyes. Oh guess I should tell you what he was talking about. His topic was How to build a powerful, inspiring and effective website. Basically the first 30 minutes were a little dry. After that things started to perk up though. I was able to listen to and learn so different ways of explaining things to my clients.

I also disagreed with a few things that he had said but, with questions in hand I headed up to him after the speech – introduced myself and handed him my business card. From there I started asking my questions or explaining that I didn’t agree. He graciously answered why he had said some of the things (we had a different view on page rank). It was very refreshing to have this type of conversation with another expert. As a freelance designer working possibly from home I know a few of you could use an invigorating experience with someone at your level and in your industry.

That’s it – Three reasons why you should attend a conference. See you at the next conference!

Where to Start
The first thing I do is a Google search. I want to find out who is most likely to be found on a search engine. Bear in mind that some industries will have offline leaders who are well known in real life. These are competitors you need to ask your client to provide.

Once I have a list of 3-4 competitors, I start off each by taking a screenshot of their sites. I’ll take a look at how that business describes its services. I’m specifically looking for their Unique Selling Point. What’s different about them compared to my client and to the other industry leaders? These are the things that help you figure out what makes a competitor unique in their industry.

Investigating Interactive Activities
Once I’m familiar with the competitor’s claims, I’ll investigate the website to determine what activities a visitor can perform at the website. How does their website interact with the visitors? How much content do they have on the website? How does the website keep their potential customers involved?

Investigating Integrating Activities
At this point I want to discover how the competitor integrates their offline business (if they have one) with their online business. Is the site a customer service website used by their current customers or is it a site whose goal is to entice new customers?

Investigating Personal Services
Most sites have some sort of personal service area whether it’s a simple FAQ or if it’s a full blown interactive program that allows them to design their own product from pieces they purchase from the website. Sometimes this is what differentiates an industry leader from an industry wannabe. It’s up to the web designer to discover the services that a competitor might offer.

Investigating Global Reach
It might seem like a particular company can only provide a local service. This is wrong. One company I investigated for a client blew me away. They provided a product and service that seemed like it could only be delivered locally unless it was done through a large chain store. Boy was I wrong. This particular company had built up enough web traffic with potential clients from all over the US. What they did was create a lead system. Any clients they couldn’t service themselves, they referred to other companies for a small referral fee. It gave them a global reach and a new revenue stream.

Summing Up Strengths and Weaknesses
At the end I’ll sum up the strengths and weaknesses of a particular competitor. This is my opportunity to point out features that my client would benefit from having on their website. It’s a great place to up sell features to your client for their website.

Client Doesn’t Want All That Stuff
You’ve got to be careful not to overwhelm your client with the competitive analysis. If they only asked for a few things for their website it’s important to give them a quote based on those features. They may or may not read your proposal all the way through to the end. Larger clients tend to look all the way through the proposal. Add the Competitive Analysis and your added recommendations after you’ve given them a cost summary of what they first asked in their website. The Competitive Analysis can highlight these extra features for the future.

Good Luck with your Competitive/Comparative Analysis

Web Out
Des

Secondly, post links to your website and your portfolio.  If you regularly update your blog, post a link to it too.  An infrequently updated blog gives off a bad impression, so don’t link to it unless you’re posting at least every other week.

Once your profile is ready, connect to as many people as you can.  This includes clients, vendors, friends, colleagues, past colleagues, family, etc..  If it’s not a close acquaintance, be sure to include a personal note stating who you are and how you know them.  From now on, attempt to connect to everyone you meet.  Building your network is extremely important.  When a search is conducted on LinkedIn, contacts are often ranked by the number of connections they have.  Plus, the larger your network the more often you will show up in searches.  Get as many recommendations as you can (tip: recommend your connections first).

Those are the basics. The real key to finding new work on LinkedIn is participating in the network and increasing your visibility.  The best way to do this is by asking and answering questions on LinkedIn Answers.

Answers are by far the most visible part of the LinkedIn community.   Answering a question helps someone out and establishes yourself as an expert in that field (it will show up in your profile too).  Many questions are often along the lines of “Do you know someone who does…?”  Be sure to state that you have experience in that area and you’d be happy to help (if you truly do have experience in that area).  And if you answer enough questions in a particular category, you’ll be shown as an expert in that category.

Asking a question also increases your visibility.   If you need help with something business related, LinkedIn is a great place to ask.  Keep your tone and grammar professional at all times.

It’s important that you be genuine with all your answers and questions.  Make sure your answers are detailed and relevant.  LinkedIn is just like networking in the offline world.  It’s a great place to meet people and help them fix their problems.  If you simply try to hand out business cards, it won’t do any good.

The second great way to pick up new clients is through a recommendation.  Recommendations can come from a connection’s profile or from a connection answering a question.  The easiest way to get recommended is by recommending others and remaining active in the network and in their lives.

If you’ve found any clients on LinkedIn and have any additional tips, please share!

Requests from potential clients
These types of requests are my top deal breakers.

I’ll tell all my friends. You’ll get lots of work.
This is probably the first thing any beginning web designer will hear and its usually a friend that says it. Beginners tend to get picked on a lot. Funny thing is that this particular thought process never seems to go away. Even after 10 years in the industry I still get this offer. I guess they think because I don’t have loads of sites in my portfolio that I’m starving. Imagine their shock when I tell them that I teach web development, design and windows programming.

While this request might sound enticing, it usually doesn’t work. What kind of friends does someone who can’t or won’t pay have? Probably other friends who can’t or won’t pay. How many plumbers out there would fix your plumbing just because you might refer them so new clients? Micah had a post on how to give a client a break without looking like the “cheap guy” in web design. Go back and read it.

It shouldn’t take long for an experienced web designer
This one really fries me. I really don’t understand how someone who doesn’t know a thing apparently knows how long it will take a web designer/developer to build anything. My favorites are always when they ask for a clone of MySpace, Facebook, Ebay or something of that nature. Usually these requests come with impossible schedules. These requestss are usually accompanied by ridiculously low budgets. Educating some of these clients will sometimes work but not always.

Add my site to your portfolio to make you look good.
We all know that a strong portfolio of previous work helps you get new clients. They all want to see what you’ve done. However, (And this one really steams me off) this statement normally comes from the bottom feeders. They really can’t afford your services. I normally counter requests like this with “Well why don’t you give me your service/product for free. I’ll wear a tshirt that shows I used your product/service or drive the car or …” It’s essentially the same. I’ve even had a request that “allowed” me to have a link on their website. Well sorry, it’s normally in my contracts that all my work comes with a link back to my website. This can be negotiated out of the contract.

If you really need to build up your portfolio I recommend that you build a fake town with fake web businesses. I’ve seen this done before and had done it myself. Domains are inexpensive, pick one and do the work for yourself. Potential clients will see your examples and use them to judge if you’re a good fit for them.

I have this great idea for a website
I’ve been through this request and even once looked at base code for the idea. I really love as a programmer when they want you to build all the functionality then only take 10-20% of the profit when they start “selling it”. This type of request is really more of a venture capitalist request. You need to ask the person to send you a business plan since they are asking you to invest whatever you would charge to build this website into their business. If they believe in the project so much, they’d be willing to pay for it out of their own pocket or find a real venture capitalist or angel investor to pay for the site to be built.

What really irks me about these types of potential clients is that they try to get you caught up in their dream. This is really only an attempt on their part to entice you to build their website in the hopes that one day you’ll actually get paid if they are effective in marketing the website. So before you sign onto a project like this go through the same due diligence as a venture capitalist.

Current Unprofessional Clients
And despite being able to pay there are still clients who will almost always be a tad over the top.

The Crier
While I didn’t personally have a client like this, I did so some subwork for another developer who had a client that actually cried on the phone because we couldn’t drop everything and respond to their requests at their whim. While I’m sure crying over emotional trauma is appropriate in some professions, this situation was just unreal. I was never so glad as to know that I never had to talk to this client on the phone or via email. It was all handled by the other developer.

I did get certified as a Help Desk Analyst and Help Desk Manager to teach these classes and I can see where some of the techniques would help in this situation. The best technique is to use their first name. You have to get their attention. The next step would be to establish that you understand their emotions but NOT that you agree with them. You should say something like “I understand that you’re upset about….. ” You want to acknowledge that they’re upset but not agree with why. At that point you can adjust your conversation to help them with their problem.

The Screamer
I’ve never personally had a person scream at me on the phone for anything related to web design. Unfortunately I’ve heard others having this issue. These types of clients aren’t really great clients. They are trying to bully you. Of course you would never hear a client screaming at you on the phone or in person if you were a lawyer. That wouldn’t be productive to maintaining a good relationship with your lawyer. Guess what, it’s not productive in any business.

The key again is to use their name. Talk calmly and don’t get caught up in the anger. It’s not conducive to reaching an agreement. In the end it may be best to “fire” this kind of client. It all depends on how much abuse you’re willing to take.

The Sad State of Affairs
Unfortunately as web designers and developers we’re all going to face these at some point in our careers. It’s a given. They key to success is how you handle it.

Beginners will always get the bottom end of the barrel. That’s a given but what isn’t is how you should handle it. As a beginner, look for ways to hone your craft without giving it away too hastily. My best advice is to stay away from businesses that aren’t willing to pay you for your services. Build websites for yourself to build a portfolio or build them for worthy causes like the local dog shelter or the homeless shelter. You’ll probably get better attention from doing a site for a worthy cause than for a fly by night operation without any real plan for success.

As for unprofessional clients that use their emotions to batter you into the ground, this is where you as a business person can really shine. Handling them smoothly without losing your cool can really turn you into a hero or give you the incentive to drop the client in favor of a better prospect.

If you’ve got another unprofessional client story, please post it.

Web Out
Des

Sadly enough, I don’t know how that story ends. I didn’t tell it to leave you dangling with suspense either, but instead to tell you how much I believe in that story and how much I respect what those guys did. Why? They lost their customer base. They may have lost millions. But they gained the respect of me and others, I’m sure. How? Because they chose to have a commitment to excellence. Executing with excellence should be one of your biggest priorities, no matter what you do. Here’s how:

If you screw up, handle it gracefully. You know how the back of your car insurance card tells you never to admit fault in an automobile accident? Doesn’t work in the business world, buddy. If you know you goofed, so do they. Handle it in a humble way and you may be able to salvage it, all because you were willing to admit you were wrong and did what you could to fix it.

Evaluate and revise broken processes. I know an airline that saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by simply removing a single olive from their salads. Who noticed? The one who made the decision, that’s who. They saw an area that could help the company that wouldn’t hurt the customers. Evaluate every process you have and make sure it’s the most efficient and effective way of doing it. Never, ever do things just because “that’s the way we’ve always done things”. If you think that way, you’ll never grow. Remember: If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always had.

Reward loyalty and faithfulness. You might be providing a service, but the customers, clients and staff that stick with you are the ones you’re indebted to. Be sure to let them know how invaluable they are to you. One of the best ways? A simple hand-written note.

Websites And Stores
The concept is similar to looking at a large company. You have a headquarters that determines pricing, products and other administrative needs. Normally a company’s headquarters also collects sales data. Each physical location or store has a layout and selects different products from the main catalog to sell within the store.
Magento represents the same concept. Each website represents a company headquarters with different products, customers and administrative needs. The stores represent the different ways in which a customer can see the products your website sells. Magento can handle multiple stores and multiple websites.

Website Structure
Magento is structured to have the ability to produce multiple websites. Websites as we know them separate data and sessions. Taking those 2 key pieces of information Magento has built a cart that can handle multiple “websites” from a single interface. A website in Magento shares it’s configurations with a series of stores. Stores in turn handle language localization, product visibility settings and how the store is displayed. Essentially you input all the base information in like your products, customers, and order information into the website while the store determines how the website looks to the end user.

Store Interfaces and Themes
Interfaces represent a collection of themes which contain the frontend design files like css stylesheets as well as the interactive components like javascript files. They lay within a very specific folder structure that the system uses to collect the information to apply to the store layout.

The key is that the structural layout information is contained in XML files. Now you don’t need to know XML inside out to be able to use the XML files but you will have to learn which attributes you’ll need to change to adapt the layout of your pages. There are also files that contact the HTML markup blocks placed within the folder structure. As a designer/developer you can alter the XML and/or the HTML markup blocks yourself.

Fallback Method
The fallback method that Magento has in place makes it easy to alter structural elements on the page without having to reinvent the whole layout. You simple create a new skin folder for the new theme, apply your specific change to that specific area then make adjustments in the administration panel. Layout changes are going to be a snap with this feature.

Awesome Tool
The team presenting the Magento Cart introduced a very neat tool from a design perspective. They mentioned that it will be in one of the next releases but that the short code to implement it is in the user forums at Magento. With a simple admin switch this code will place red path markers around each structural block on the page. You can use this to find the file you’ll need to alter the contents of that block. After having used other carts without this feature, I was impressed. The time you’ll save by having this tool is amazing!

Find the Magento Ecommerce Cart at : http://www.magentocommerce.com/
While you can download Magento right now, the cart isn’t scheduled for official release until March.
If anyone else attended the webinar please post your comments.

Web Out
Des

The two most important elements of getting an “OK” on a design concept are keeping the client in the loop and listening to them along the way, and educating the client adequately. The problems that you are most likely to run into are #1 the client doesn’t understand why you did what you did, or somewhere along the line you took a left turn when they were expecting a right turn.

Now I must stress that I am not advocating that you should simply be a “yes man/woman” and do what ever the client asks, or that the client is always right. Only that you are going to have a much more difficult time justifying all of your decisions with a finished concept than if you explain the decisions along the way. In fact, you will find that your design decisions will be taken more seriously if you keep the client educated and informed. After all you are the expert, and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter if the client likes it as long as the site user likes it (but that is a whole other post).

Educating the Client

The first step is educating the client to the process, and this is one of the most important steps. Inform them on how you come up with design concepts, what you will use to make design decisions (whether it is content that will be on the page, resolution restrictions, users age, accessibility, etc), at what points will you show them design concepts, what filler text is, if you use it, how they should look at and observer the design concepts.

Make sure the client understands the important of usability, scalability, resolution, download speed, or any other aspect that you want to incorporate into the final website.

Failing to do this and you will run into the client that likes or dislikes a concept for reasons that really are not applicable. Maybe because of how it looks printed out, or maybe they will dislike breadcrumbs because it is “redundant.” I once had a client who picked one design over another because they thought it felt more “content rich,” which was a result of one having more filler text where the other simply had white space at the bottom. Either one could have been equally “content rich.”

Keeping the client in the loop

Keeping the client in the loop is all about developing stages for your design concepts. At each stage you will hand over the work thus far, explain your reasons, and get approval to move forward. This way it is much harder to make a wrong turn, and it is harder for a client to change their mind or question your design decissions.

The first step to any good design concept is developing a creative brief. It sounds like extra work, but it will help your design time itself and prevent unnecessary revisions. A creative brief essentially outlines all of the elements that the design should incorporate and consider. Often times it will cover the typical user, the feel the site should have, and the reaction users should have.

So for example it might say that the typical user is a 25 year old male, it should feel exciting with a lot of movement, bright vivid colors, with a grungy style.

Once that is outlined the client will understand why you went with the grungy look when they like the clean white look.

The next step is wire framing. I am not going to spend a whole lot of time explaining everything about wire framing, but I will describe the basics. Wire framing is simply using solid objects and shapes to show where all the elements of a site will be located. It is a great way to build a site that has great user experiences, as you are forced to think about best placement of key information and content rather than focusing on what “looks best.”

Once you have the wire frame signed off you can move on to the actual graphical mock up. You could fully develop the mock up and hand it over to the client, but I like to take it a step farther and get approval on photography, color pallets, and typography.

Like I said in the beginning of the article, it really sounds like a lot of work. It will save you time, I assure you. In addition, it will help you produce a better design as well. Between working faster and producing better work you have added benefits including more free time and higher hourly pay.

Generally speaking proposals are sales documents. They are meant to impress your potential client with your professionalism and expertise. They also give you a chance to really think about what it is you are proposing to do for the client as well as figure out an estimate of the time it will take to create the website.

How To Start
I normally start out with a template I built in MS Word but you can use your editor of choice. This template includes headers for each of my proposal sections as an image file in Word. Each section is labeled and includes my logo in the header. Many of the sections like the qualifications and my company descriptions rarely change so I have them already in my template. This is so much easier to handle than copying and pasting from document to document.

Sections
At a minimum you should have a title page, cover letter and a Statement of Work. I normally only do this for the smallest of projects which are few and far between for me these days. I’ll include an Executive Summary which summarizes what the client needs, what their goals are and what I recommend. I like to back this up with a larger Recommendations section followed by a Features section and a Benefits section. It’s important for the reader to see just what the features will do for them. It also helps to have a real example of a site with that benefit. I might also have sections describing my services, methodologies and a base schedule which again can be used in the base template and altered as needed.

A general guideline you can expect from a Formal Request for Proposal:

• · Executive Summary containing a brief description of your project development approach and costs
• · Corporate information including financial details
• · Qualifications including previous clients with contact information and relevant URLs
• · A description of your development process
• · Asset and draft delivery methods
• · Project stages
• · Milestones
• · Quality control
• · Testing
• · The proposed team and their qualifications
• · Proposed schedule
• · Costs and payment details
• · Terms and conditions

The above list is from this excellent article from June 1998 http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/columns/writerfp.html

Mockups
This is an area that I see web designers over the fence. Do you give the potential client mockups before or after you sign a contract with them. When I first started designing websites I certainly did this but it’s somewhat counterproductive to design mockups for a project you haven’t won. One potential problem is if the client doesn’t like your mockups. They may choose someone else based on their mockups although you could be the better choice. What I choose to do these days is just include throwaway layouts I’ve done for others or myself that were not chosen for a particular project. They are identified as samples to display design competency. I follow that statement by indicating that the client will participate in the design by helping choose colors and typography for the site. BTW, great little tool for your clients to experiment with typography : http://typetester.maratz.com/

Length
I’ve written short proposals and long proposals. The key to length is understanding your client. Some clients will appreciate a longer template with lots of content while others will quickly flip through to the cost sheets. Your content needs to be geared toward your client. I find that bullet points and bolded text help call their attention to important points I am making in my documents. It’s close to the way you write for the web. People reading proposals are going to scan them rather than read front to back. Once they narrow their decision down to your work they’ll go back and read the document a little slower. This is why it’s important to include bullets and bolded text. It’s eye catching.

Writing Style
A key to my success has been the ability to maintain a business tone within the documents. This means writing in the third person. While you can start out writing to a specific person using “I” and “you”, a professional business tone doesn’t use “I” and “you”. Go back through the person to person tone and change it to a professional business tone by removing the “I” tone. The proposal is all about them after all.

I hope this gives everyone a few helpful points on writing professional level proposals.

Web Out
Des

Resources

http://technicalbusinesswriting.suite101.com/article.cfm/developing_winning_proposals
The Contents of a Winning Proposal

http://blog.popstalin.com/writing-a-website-design-proposal/
Writing a Web Design Proposal

Well some of that is true. Some of it is some what true. Blogs are great marketing tools but the catch is you have to be good at blogging. Not everyone can be a blogger. Even I am not the greatest at blogging but I am working on it. The best thing to do is try it out. I wrote an article awhile ago about why you would need business blog. If you have a business and want to use your new found weblog, it’s worth reading.

Now that you’ve decided that you need a blog, you’ve got to find a blog that works for you. There are a few options are there for you.

Blogger

Blogger is one of the easiest to get up and running and is best for new bloggers. There are two options with Blogger. You can have the blog publish to your domain or you can create a blog on a subdomain on blogger.com. Blogger is completely free and easy to set up. How easy is it to get started with Blogger, you ask.

All you need is a Google account. Sign up for a blog at Blogger.com create a name for you blog, decide where you want you blog to publish (your server or at blogger.com), pick a template, set up your settings and then you are ready to start blogging.

Wordpress

Wordpress is another option. Wordpress is also free and it’s easy to customize. Wordpress also has the ooption of hosting the blog on your own domain. Both Wordpress and Blogger are easy to use and have a very friendly admin interface. Both also have great support forums for help. The difference is, that if you are installing Wordpress on your server you need to download the software and upload the files to your web server (some hosts provide this free). Where Blogger on the other hand there is no software to install and all you have to do is fill out a short form to publish your blog on your own domain. The downfall of Wordpress is that you need a MySQL database installed for it to work – and with blogger no database is needed.

Moveable Type

Moveable Type is a more advanced blog authoring tool. They call it “professional”. MT (Moveable Type) is free for personal use and a business licenses start at $235.95. MT does also offer a hosted solution which is Type Pad created by Six Apart. Hosted solutions start at $89.95. The benefit is that MT has many more options then the free blogs, including community blogs, forums, and custom fields. Another benefit is that MT has a dedicated support team, for when things don’t go well.

Good Luck and Happy Blogging!

Additional articles on choosing the right type of blog:

Choosing a blogging platform

Choosing a name for your blog

Choosing a niche for your blog

Turns out I wasn’t the only one affected. DreamHost mistakenly billed customers for an estimated $7.5 million dollars and then laughed about like it was no big deal. I’m not laughing and neither is anyone else judging by the comments. Some users were billed $9,000. Fortunately, I had an expired card on my account and wasn’t actually billed.

What impresses me most though, is the quick reaction from LunarPages. Not only do they sling some mud DreamHost’s way, but they offer all affected customers a $40 coupon for switching to LunarPages. Plus, they point users to Digg the DreamHost story.

1. E-mail all your existing clients asking if they have any work that needs done. Often clients have a project they’re considering or haven’t got around to yet.
2. E-mail all your existing clients asking if they know anyone who needs work done. When I ran my freelancing company, I got 75% of my business from referrals, but you can’t just be passive about this. Let your clients know that you’re seeking more work and ask if they know of anyone you could contact or they could pass your information to.
3. E-mail all your existing clients PROPOSING a project. Be proactive! This is by far the best way to get new business. It’s important that you understand your client’s website and goals though. Do not propose new business for the sake of it, but propose something that will really be of benefit to them. Use your expertise and knowledge in the web development and internet marketing world to stay abreast of new opportunities for your clients. Not only does this get you more business, but it also insures that your clients will never leave you and are even more likely to refer you to their friends and associates. Strive to become an essential member of their web development and internet marketing team, not just an outside contractor.

I am constantly surprised at how any web developers (and for that matter, any contractor) simply do not implement these steps on a regular basis. At minimum, every client, current or old, should hear from you every three months. That one simple habit will dramatically increase your business.

Any freelancer worth their salt will tell you that word-of-mouth is an important form of advertising. I don’t know the statistics, but I’ve talked to numerous business owners who say that word-of-mouth is their main source of advertising. They might put an ad in the paper or the phone book and maybe even have a TV spot, but I’ll bet you money that the majority of their business comes about because someone told someone.

We’ve all heard that “a satisfied customer will tell one person, an angry customer will tell ten.” And though I have no desire to belittle the importance of keeping your clients happy, there may be a bit of a caveat to happy customers - Why are they happy? What are they telling others? You see, we’ve all probably had that opportunity to do “spec” work or a project for next to nothing in order to build the portfolio, gain a client, etc. But that person who gets a heckuva deal from you won’t blab that they got wonderful, trendy work from you - they’ll brag about how they got it for a song. And their friend who comes to you will be looking for the same deal.

How to avoid it: If you must give a discount of some sort, be sure to invoice the client with the standard project fee and list discounts accordingly. It might not look like it will save you much but if you have a valid reason for the discount - and not one that anybody and everybody can apply - then you’ll be justified when you charge this new client your standard rate. This will prevent you from getting more work than you can take on for a whole lot less money because you’ve become known as the “cheap guy”.

We’ve all been aware of the background behind the browser war. Browser vendors implemented proprietary elements, DOM and event handling models. Most frontend web developers despise Internet Explorer for its buggy handling of standard code. It requires us to go back and tweak our code to make it work in the Internet Explorer browser.

That was then this is now
Everyone knows about HTML 4.01 being the last of the HTML versions. It came in 3 different flavors: Strict, Loose, and Frameset. Commercialism blurred the original intent behind HTML which was just the content. Designers and commercial enterprises wanted to present their content in an eye appealing way. Because designers had changed the focus of its usage, experts designed XHTML 1.0 which is a complete rewrite of HTML using XML to define the element tags and attributes. It focused on separating content from presentation. It also has 3 different flavors Strict, Transitional and Frameset.

Just when we thought that HTML was dead it’s been resurrected. HTML 5 was accepted as a proposed standard last year by the World Wide Web Consortium. This is the prequel to becoming a recommended standard by the W3C. I know what you’re thinking because I thought the same thing. Why would anyone decide to resurrect the HTML markup language?

Well it all started…
In 2004, a little group called WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) decided to look at how web designers worked. With that information they got working on the specifications and redefinition of HTML to coincide with how web designers actually worked on the job. They are proposing a sequel to HTML V4 called HTML V5. The W3C has taken notice of their efforts by voting to adopt HTML V5 as a proposed standard last year. It hasn’t been accepted as an official recommendation but then neither has XHTML V2.

What’s The Difference?
The goal behind XHTML has always been the separation of content and presentation. XHTML v2 is also focused on the separation of concerns. Some of our biggest concerns are server interaction and programmability of on page elements. One of the current innovations within XHTML v2 is the XForms module which adds support for interactive logic, validation rules and computations without using Javascript. It also eliminates key-value pairings from the form input tags with a very rich XML structure. What that allows is subforms and repeating elements. It’s aimed at building elegant solutions that maximize accessibility.

HTML V5 is a completely different approach. The guys at WHATWG have documented the practical use of HTML. They are proposing features to make our jobs easier. WHATWG has been developing HTML elements with default behaviors that support interactive components like menus and toolbars as well as data grids.

So where do you stand?
The vendors have been consulted and actively participating in the HTML 5 proposal while XHTML 2 has been officially supported by the W3C since inception. It may be out of our hands as the browser vendors decide to implement one over the other. Read up on the resources I supplied below and sound off.

Web Out
Des

Resources
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/x-html5xhtml2.html?S_TACT=105AGX08&S_CMP=EDU HTML V5 and XHTML V2
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/16/1656245 Slashdot’s conversation on the topic
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/html5_xhtml2_and_the_future_of_the_web/ HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web
http://xhtml.com/en/future/x-html-5-versus-xhtml-2/ XHTML 5 Versus HTML 5
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166 Tim Berners Lee on the new HTML Working Group for HTML 5

They implemented this “service” under the guise of protecting us from front running by register/locking the domain for us. But anyone can go back to NSI and purchase the domain, the only thing they’re preventing is the domain being registered by another registrar. This is simply an anti-competitive move and a very slippery slope for the domain industry. Other registrars will be forced to do the same thing if the practice is not stopped and pretty soon 4 days will turn into 30 days and the entire industry will become completely locked down.

Hopefully you don’t purchase your domains from NSI anyway, but if you do, please stop now and whatever you do, don’t search for domains at NSI. For the full scoop and additional updates, visit Domain Name News.  If you’re looking for a good registrar, I highly recommend NameCheap.  Note: I’m slightly bias as I designed the previous version of NameCheap’s website.

Yup, you’re blind and you may not know it. Of course after reading this you’ll understand why you’re blind. To make matters worse you fixate on things and can’t seem to hold your attention on webpage sections for longer than ¼ of a second.

It actually goes back to how your eyes work
When you read a webpage or a newspaper, your eyes don’t just scan smoothly across the page, they actually jump from one chunk of information to the next and fixate on them for an average of .25 seconds. The movement between each fixation is called a saccade. It takes normally about 0.1 seconds to move from chunk to chunk. After a point you pause to comprehend those chunks as a group. The fixation is the pause and focusing on a chunk while the saccade is the path between those fixations.

Fovea or Field of Vision
The fovea is a part of the eye which is responsible for sharp central focusing which is what we use to read. It’s surrounded by the parafovea which is surrounded by the peripheral are which is a low vision area. The peripheral vision area is just outside of the central focus area. Right now pay try to stay centered on this article but actually become aware of what’s around that area without moving your eyes. You’re seeing that outside area but not in focus the way you see this type.

Mapping Your Designs
It all starts with eye tracking research. Poynter Online http://www.poynteronline.org/ has done several eye tracking reports. It’s all about how users actually read online and in print. While we don’t work in “print” we can still apply eye tracking research to our designs.

It all comes down to the fixation points and the saccades or paths between them. It creates a roadmap on your webpage. Fixation points or “anchors” can be anything that catches the peripheral vision. Peripheral vision catches motion and contrast. These are much easier to seen than details. Once the eye jumps to the anchor point it can focus on the details of that area.

It’s your job as a designer to figure out what your visitor wants to do and utilize that information to help them accomplish that task while achieving your goals for them. By combining the 2 goals together, you can determine appropriate chunks of information and activities to put together.

You combine this chunking activity together with peripheral vision attractors like contrast, larger fonts, white space and movement to attract the eyes to important chunks of information. It’s these fixation points that keep the eyes moving from content chunk to content chunk on the page. This creates a map on your website.

Eye Miles
The guys at Stompernet went over what they called “eye miles” in a recent video post. An eye mile is 5200 pixels. They measured eye miles between pages and found that those sites with lower eye mile movements on a page were actually easier on a user. Restful sites had lower eye mileage than other sites. Restful sites are easier for users to find the things they want and to use them.

These guys also discovered during their research that making your site easier in terms of finding what they want to do with page chunking and fixation points actually improves conversion rates. People stay longer on sites that are easier to traverse quickly for information.

Easier is better even when it’s not.
Something else the Stompernet guys mentioned that stuck out to me was his concept of “Cost Calculating”. The idea is that we actually are making mental calculations based on perceived effort and time usage. How long will it take me to click that link and look at that information? Users are making judgments that sometimes don’t really reflect the value of following a link based on their available information. The key is to make available information compelling enough to balance the cost in your favor as well as making it easy to follow the roadmap to where you want your visitors to go.

Tools To Help
As luck would have it, the Stompernet guys created a Foveal Gaze Tool called StomperScrutinizer http://about.stompernet.com/scrutinizer that allows you to view WebPages so that you can see how the foveal field of vision and the peripheral vision are conceptualized on your designs. It’s a good tool that I used on my own site. And yup, I’m in the process of redesigning now. OUCH!

Ok the Foveal Gaze Tool is really useful but when it comes down to it users are real people with real habits. So one more tool I found is RobotReplay http://www.robotreplay.com which actually records how users are moving their mouse across the page. I’m just testing this out myself right now so I don’t have any results. However, if you use it do give us some feedback.

Web Out

Des

To frontend developers IE is the bane of our existence. It takes one street smart designer to overcome the lack of compliance to web standards. The next release of IE 8 will overcome those obstacles. IE 8 developers announced that IE 8 passed the Acid2 test implemented by the Web Standards Project.

Acid2 was implemented by the Web Standards Project as a test to help vendors building browsers test their compliancy to web standards. It was written by Ian Hickson in 2005. Previously there was the Box Acid Test which Acid2 replaced.

Acid2 tests the following web standards:

• Alpha transparency on PNG images
• The object element
• Absolute, relative and fixed positioning using CSS
• The CSS box model
• CSS tables
• CSS margins
• CSS generated content
• CSS parsing
• Paint order
• CSS line heights
• Hovering effects

Many of the browser vendors have worked hard at passing the Acid2 test. And while it seemed as though Microsoft was ignoring web standards, it’s official Internet Explorer 8 does pass the Acid2 test. They even released a video of it as seen here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=367207

In the world of web design this is great news. I don’t know how many times IE has made me bang my head against the keyboard. Of course the key to this success will be the adoption rate from users. It’s still a step in the right direction.

Web Out

Des

If you’re a web designer, having a well-designed resume is extremely important. It’s important for all job-seekers to have great resumes, but for you, as a designer - this is your chance to strut your stuff and make a big impression. It’s also important because all the other designers competing against you should have great resumes, so yours is just average, you’re in trouble. I’ve hired designers before, it makes an impact. When I’m hiring, I want an employee who loves all facets of design and has an eye for detail.

I recently noticed Kevin Fox was leaving Google for an undisclosed startup. For those of you who don’t know, Kevin Fox was the Senior User Experience Design Lead at Google. He worked on Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader. His resume is published on his site so I thought I’d take a peak. It’s one of the best resumes I’ve ever seen (and I’m not even talking about his impressive work experience).

Below are five things I gleaned from Kevin’s resume that will lead you to creating your own perfect resume. For comparison, here’s my resume (it’s a little dated). They’re pretty similar, but Kevin’s is better.

Step #1: Stand out from the crowd
Be different. Don’t ever use a standard font in your resume like Times, Arial or even Georgia. Try a different layout. Kevin was thoughtful enough to include the fonts he used in his resume (Gill Sans, Hoefler Text). On my resume I used Frutiger. Now, I advise against getting too wild or using colored paper - but definitely don’t look “standard”.

Step #2: Make them remember you
Put your name in large text. When they think of candidates, make sure they think of your name first.

Step #3: Put the important stuff first
Hopefully, that’s your extensive work experience, but if not - put whatever is most impressive first. If you’re student, get some experience! Help out a non-profit or a friend, do something to give yourself that leg up above your competition.

Step #4: Your contact info isn’t important
One of the things I love above Kevin’s resume is that his contact info is all the way in the top right - out of the way. If they want to contact you, they’ll find your phone number. Don’t put it between your name and your experience. Think like the usability expert you are, help the user “scan” your resume.

Step #5: List your skills and expertise
Don’t be shy, tell it all. This might be the most important part of your resume, so maybe it should go first.

Bonus #1: Show your personality
You’re applying for a creative position, have some fun! Of course, it helps when you’re Kevin Fox and you can have any job you want, so keep it limited.

Bonus #2: Watch the competition
Keep copies of other designer’s resumes that you like for reference. I actually just noticed that I had an old copy of Kevin’s resume saved (he changed “Mobile Interfaces” to “Small-screen Design” under expertise…interesting). I also have resumes saved from Abie Rose, Katie Newell and many others.

What are your tips for creating the perfect resume? If you’re an employer, what do you look for?

So what really makes a good web design company? No one can accomplish all the roles that a website design requires. One of the biggest keys to my successes was to recognize the talents of my colleagues and leverage their talents with mine. I have a colleague who can write beautiful CSS Zengarden quality designs. I recognize his skills in layout designs as much better than my own. While I still do some frontend design, most of the time I hire out my frontend design. A good web designer or developer recognizes their weaknesses and finds team members to fill in the weak spots as needed.

You need to recognize your strong points, work on your weaknesses and hire others to work on the parts you can’t get done. If you have a larger company, you hire employees to work for you. It’s ok not to be great at all facets of designing and promoting a website.

How far has “Web Design” come?
In the early days we were all “webmasters” which as I said has fallen out of popularity. Web design companies now include so many different skill sets. Besides web designer who sometimes does the layout comps or sometimes that’s done by the graphic designer/artist working in Photoshop followed by the web designer breaking down design into frontend code. Of course sometimes they call a web designer a frontend coder particularly if they are incorporating Javascript or AJAX. Then we have web developers who program the backend of a website in a number of technologies ranging from PHP, Ruby, Perl, ASP, ASP.NET with anyone of a number of databases from Access to SQL Server, MySQL and/or Postgres. Copywriters often work with Search Engine Optimization Experts as well as the newer Search Media Optimization. The point is that new job descriptions have expanded in the last 10 years and will probably continue to expand as new technologies are developed.

So what makes a good Web Design company?
To be honest, anyone can learn all of those jobs or a few of them and really know their stuff. However just as “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and so is web design. The best judges are clients. They choose a web design company based on their current needs. Sometimes those needs are small and satisfied by a guy using Frontpage and other times they can only be satisfied by a team of developers working for months to produce a dynamic website with hundreds of pages and customer interaction and community building features. It’s all in the eye of the client. Big or small, cutting edge or just getting started, each web design company can find work and do well in web design.

Customer Service is the Key
What differentiates one web design company from another? It’s customer service. How many of you have gone into a restaurant received poor service or bad food then returned to that restaurant? My biggest successes with clients have always come when I delivered good customer service and what the client asked for in the first place. Delivering 110% always sweetens the deal in the eyes of a client. It’s also a great way to get referrals. Referrals can drive a web design company from obscurity into a thriving business. So ask yourself, “What have I done for my clients lately?” then follow through and do something more for them. They are your bread and butter.

Web Out

Des

I started using Contribute for clients when the small business clients I had started asking for an affordable way to update their own website. Many of my clients are in the equine industry, which are even more behind the times than many other small businesses. Contribute make it as simple and easy for them as possible.

Easy Setup

Contribute has many advantages. Set up is by far the easiest I have seen. The user simply downloads Contribute on their computer; the designer can easily add a user to the website. Doing so simply emails the user a connection key – this key includes FTP information for the website, passwords and usernames. The user simply clicks on the connection key that comes as a attachment in an email and after a few simple steps – Voila, the user is all set up to start updating their website in Contribute.

On page editing

One of my biggest pet peeves is the content management systems (CMS) site structure setup. In many CMS’, to edit a page you have to go to first go to the site structure, which is basically your website’s site map, then choose the page you would like to edit. The problem with this is that it can be difficult to figure out when page is which. Contribute eliminates that whole problem. All you have to do to edit any page in your website is either paste the whole website address in the address bar in Contribute or use the left hand pages menu, which shows all your pages, its easy just click thru them.

Easy to publish pages

So your page is complete, you have made all of your changes, now you need to put it on the website, right? It’s easy. Simply save the page to your computer (Ctrl + S) then click the publish button at top and your new page is live on your website.

Keeps the design intact

From a designer’s perspective, it’s an excellent tool. It makes it very easy for the design to remain the same. As a designer all you have to do is create a template in Dreamweaver (Contribute works seamlessly with Dreamweaver) and create editable areas on the website. This makes it easy for the client to keep your design but also have fresh content. The best way to do this when designing is to design knowing people will be edit the content and other pages might be longer than others and some shorter. Just keep that in mind.

Multiple user capability

Contribute works well for both small businesses and medium size business’ which may have different departments who in turn maybe responsible for their section of the company’s website. Contribute enables multiple users, with 4 different levels of editing rights. Contribute automatically checks whether the pages a user is trying edit is already being edited by others, in order to prevent conflicts.

Difficult to add pages to main navigation

One of the downfalls of Contribute is, if you have locked navigation for design reasons, it is difficult to have edited by other users, who may not be so web savvy add pages to main navigation. This is something I usually do, to keep the design consistent – I lock the navigation and allow only text and images to be edited by other users. It is however simple to create a new page, but users won’t be able to find it unless you link to it from another page.

Dynamic Websites, not so fun

If you have a website that is database driven, don’t use Contribute. Contribute outputs static pages. It is best suited for brochure ware type websites. If you have a dynamic website, you either need a dynamic CMS or a webmaster.

Works only on your computer

The only way you are going to be able to update your website from anywhere is if you have Contribute installed on your laptop. A down fall of Contribute is that you can only update your website, from the computer in which Contribute is installed.

Who Contribute is made for

Contribute is made for small business owners with a static brochure type website in mind. These websites may have content that changes on a daily basis. This saves the small business owner the hassle of having a webmaster or paying a design firm to simply make small changes. Also, if different departments of a small-medium size business are responsible for their area of the website, Contribute is perfect.

Over the past few weeks, I have been reviewing many content management systems including Marqui, Ektron, IMIS CMS and others. After looking at many of those Contribute is a breath of fresh air, for the small business website. However, Contribute does have its limitations. It is simply an FTP program and page editor. It is not a complex CMS.

I think it would be much easier if we quit dreaming of success. That right, I said stop dreaming of success. There’s nothing so unproductive and depressing than “dreaming of success.” You’ll spend so much time thinking about how things would be so much different or how much happier you’d be “if only”. Baloney! Pardon me for sounding like an episode of Dr. Phil, but it’s true - the only one standing in the way of your success is you. Quit dreaming of success and be successful. Be successful on a regular, constant basis. Have goals. Meet those goals and celebrate in your own way. If you’re consistently successful, staying successful becomes easy. Notice, I said “consistently” not “constantly”. The worst way to get your success is to do it 24/7. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Pick your nose up off the grindstone every once in awhile and enjoy life. You’ll find being successful is a lot more enjoyable that way.

But who am I to be the web design god and determine who is good-enough and who is out? Most of these so-called “bad” web design companies have portfolios listed. I’m sure if I contacted some of their clients, they’d tell me they were thrilled with their websites. Maybe they have an awful graphic designer, but their web application programming is amazing. How do I know?

I see four possible solutions:

1. I make an arbitrary decision
   Based simply on my opinion, I will leave out the worst of the worst. If there is doubt about whether or not a company gets in, I’ll let them in. This is what I’m leaning towards.
2. We create a panel to overview every site
   A panel of 3-5 web design experts will review every site listing. The panel must unanimously decide a site should be left out, otherwise it’s listed. (If you’re interested on being such a panel, please leave a comment)
3. I create, with your input, a list of guidelines
   I would prefer this option, but what conclusively says this company is ok, this one is bad? But what would the guidelines be? Graphic ability? Usability? Web standards? How can I test development ability?
4. Leave things as they are and let the clients decide
   All clients should do due-diligence on their web design company. That said, most clients simply don’t understand design and that poor design really hurts the professionalism, usability and sales-potential of their website. I could publish some prominent resource pages with instructions on selecting web design companies. I already have such pages, they’re not just very prominent at the moment.

So, I ask you - my advertiser - what should I do? Some of you stand to be removed from the directory (or at a minimum not allowed to renew). The rest of you will be listed in a selective directory known for having excellent design companies.

I don’t know how many quotes we’ll get (only one so far), but hopefully it will be a useful service to you.  Please contact us if you receive a great referral from Xemion, we’d love to know!

We all learn by example. It’s the one thing that’s touted no matter what business or activity you are pursuing. Find someone who is successful and copy them. No one can deny that Donald Trump is successful. So what can we learn from Donald Trump when he’s obviously not a web designer?

Focus

It’s not enough to just wish for something. You’ve got to follow through with what you want. This week we’ve talked about New Years Resolutions and things to do in 2008 to make it a better year. We’ve made plans for the year. We’re all taking action. One of the things Donald Trump advised during this hour long program was to believe in yourself and not fear risk. He said “Giving up is not an option”. Obstacles are really only opportunities to making yourself better. He was even asked by an audience member what was his worst mistake. His answer was losing focus. Focus on what you want so that you can get to that point. You need to think like a winner and focus on the future not past failures. Look for opportunities and think positively about them.

Knowledge is Power

Trump talked about knowing your business because subject knowledge is the key. The more you know the more likely you will be successful. One thing that stood out to me during this program was Trump’s opinion about surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you. He actually said “You need to be smarter than the people that work for you.” WOW what a statement! Now we all know this isn’t possible when you’re starting out in web design. You’ll need to go find the smart people and hang out with them whether it’s in real life or online. When I don’t know something, I listen intently and don’t say much. Keeping your lack of knowledge to yourself can be just as important in your venue. Lurking and learning is the key when you’re starting out. Knowledge will give you confidence in front of your clients and in front of your colleagues.

Do your homework. Knowledge isn’t just about knowing your subject, it’s also about knowing your client’s subject. Find out about their company, their business, their industry. Preparation puts you one step over the competition. It’s also a good way to figure out the problems a client might be having and solve them. You also want to find out what you have in common with your client to bond with them. What do they do that you can emotionally hook into them with? The more they relate to you the more powerful the bond. Sometimes winning isn’t about being the best, it’s about being someone the client can relate to emotionally.

Work with Passion

Do you like what you do? Trump said that real estate isn’t for everyone. He enjoys it and when he’s at one of his hotels he’s on vacation while he’s working. He enjoys what he does. Most web designers like what they do. That usually isn’t the problem. What I’ve found to be the problem is leaving yourself open for someone to take advantage of your passion. Love what you do and be who you are but be careful of wanting to much. Don’t ever let someone take advantage of your skill set. It never ceases to amaze me what some people will give away. I am always telling my students to NEVER give it away unless it’s for a worthy nonprofit organization. If you have to give it away, why should anyone pay for it? If you need a portfolio, make up fake work and work for yourself. I’ve seen it done a number of times. It’s effective and I still do this when I don’t have work.

Be Yourself

An odd moment in the show was a young guy with bleached white hair spiked in all directions dressed in nice trousers with a shirt n tie came up to Donald to ask a question. Donald instantly latched onto his hair and the way he looked. He said “It’s important to be who you are. Don’t change.” When the young man told him that he was in real estate, Donald told him “You’re at a disadvantage but you know that right?” Of course the guy told him he knew it. Donald told him to continue being who he was and not to change. Who you are gives you confidence. While wearing surfer shorts and shirt wouldn’t be appropriate during the show, the hair was still the core of this guy’s personality and passion. I myself used to ride racehorses. There is nothing like the realization that no client saying “No” to me is ever going to hurt the way crawling off the ground after a 1200 lb animal slammed me down to give me confidence to go out and find a new client. We all have additional skills and passions outside of our web design world. These define us as much as web design defines us. Life gives you confidence and passion.

The Competition

The Donald advice was to enjoy your competition. There is nothing like competition to push you into being a better designer or developer. Competition is the impetus that makes us expand our capabilities and extend our reach beyond what we thought we could do. Watch the competition and learn from them then beat them at their own game. What’s your local market like? Who’s your competition? What are they doing that’s working? Have you found out? Embrace your competition and make your business better than them.

Revenge

Now this topic didn’t and did shock me when Mr. Trump started talking about it. I did have the impression that Donald Trump is driven to succeed and drive his competition under his heel. He did go on about getting even being very satisfying. I think the key here is to understand that the need to prove yourself against the naysayers and the people who say you can’t do it can drive you to success. That success can be all the sweeter when you’ve been told no many times. My IT career is littered with negative family members who’ve had to eat their words. It makes me a little smug sitting here thinking about it right now. It’s not the only place that I’ve let my determination and tenacity drive me to succeed and it certainly won’t be the last place I do.

So let’s tie it all together. Focus on what you want with the passion that led you to web design. Outsmart the competition and impress the clients with your knowledge. Let the competition and the naysayers be the whip at your back driving you to higher successes. Most important of all, be who you are… a web designer.

Web Out

Des

1. Make resolutions you can stick with. There’s no harm in creating resolutions, but the fact remains that most of them don’t last past March. Why? Because they’re unrealistic. The best chance you’ve got in creating resolutions is keeping them S.M.A.R.T. (specific, manageable, attainable, realistic, timely)
2. Learn something new. This year, I’m beefing up my knowledge in e-commerce. Is there some kind of new code, marketing strategy or design tool that you could learn? Learning something new not only increases your skill set–allowing you to reach a larger audience–it also keeps your life interesting and prevents you from working on the same old stuff day after day.
3. Meet someone new everyday. I’m telling you, you don’t understand the potential of stepping outside your comfort zone to reach into someone else’s life. Who knows? Your next big client could be in front of you in the supermarket.
4. Become an expert in client relations. You probably know that it cost tons more to get a new client than to keep an existing one, so make every reasonable accommodation to keep your existing clients happy. Need some help? Here are 7 innovative ways to thank your client.
5. Evaluate yourself. Are you running every process, every job, every bit of documentation and discussion first class? Check and recheck. Humble yourself to submit to the criticism of your clients, peers and staff. Make sure your website, contracts, communication lines and resources are all in check. Execute with excellence.
6. Take plenty of time off, you slacker. You are not doing anyone any favors if you burn yourself out. Stick to your “office hours” religiously and I’d recommend keeping a Sabbath–that is, a day off a week–even if it isn’t Sunday. Do not DO NOT let your wife or kids hate your job because your busting at the seams with deadlines.
7. Get help. If you’re more of an introvert, it may be difficult for you step out and cry for help. But come on, folks–this is Web 2.0. There is so much help and resources out there, you have to take advantage. Join a club, a board, or just scour the galleries, if you have to. Find someone who does it better and become their pupil.

The original title of this post was “8 ways to make 2008 great” but I realized that once you get started down this road, it becomes more difficult every year. Besides, I don’t like just gushing information for no reason, and no one is trying to reinvent the wheel, here. Regardless, I believe that these tactics (a few of which I have to discipline myself to do this year) will greatly increase your successes this year. Happy New Year and here’s to a great one!

Limits
The article gave a list of things you should consider when you’re writing your resolutions. The first one is to limit the number of resolutions. That wasn’t hard to do. I ended up with 6 resolutions. Maybe a bit more than I had intended to have at first but then one of the other tips forced me to setup 6 resolutions.

Business Vs. Personal
The deciding tip was to make your business and personal resolutions at the same time so they don’t compete. I thought about this really hard. The balance between work and family/friends is something that must be maintained to sustain a healthy life. As any small business owner will tell you “It’s not easy” but you do have to do it. None of us can spend all day at the computer working or on the phone planning. We have to balance our lives. Let’s just remember “We work to live not live to work”.

Being Specific
A lot of us make plans to “Make More Money” in the New Year. How much more? The key is to be specific. I seriously had to think about how much I could make beyond what I made in 2007. You need to be realistic. You also need to challenge yourself. Think about how much you work now and how you want to work this year. You should also be thinking about how much your skills have improved since 2006. Find some specific number that is reachable, challenges you and fits into your schedule. Of course money isn’t the only resolution on my list but we all agree “Make More Money” is one of the top business resolutions.

No plan is a plan to fail
To succeed we must plan for it. Web designers do it all the time as they write proposals for clients. We plan for our business when we start it. New Years Resolutions are just another way to plan for our success. Listing the steps and your timetables is a great way to get motivated. I am fairly good at making future plans but not daily plans so I made a daily plan for myself. This will give me a chance to stick to it. I can chip away at my resolutions day by day. You should use whatever system works for you and your business whether it’s day by day, month to month, or by setting deadlines.

Review Your Progress
This is probably one of the most important things you can do. We all know how easy it is to forget our resolutions each year. How many have you succeeded at losing weight? In order for your business plans to work you have to review your progress. Every few days or months you should have something to pat yourself on the back. You’ll also need to be able to adjust your plans if they are not working.

So what plans have you made for 2008?

Web Out
Des

So what should a good web designer to do about it? You Teach.

How do you teach a client who doesn’t know, understand and may not even want to know about web design. The first thing to do is look at what they do know. For instance, most people don’t understand computer networks and how the internet work so they have no understanding that the domain must be registered and the website must be hosted. An easy explanation is that the domain is like getting a phone number and the hosting company is like buying a house. Your website has to have a phone number and a place to live. The client understands phone numbers and houses. We’ve just hooked our concepts to things the client already knows.

Another thing that has to be thought about is explaining how long it takes to build a website.

Some clients will accept whatever you tell them. However others will question you and then there are some who will say things like “You know how to do this so it shouldn’t take you that long.” You need question why someone who doesn’t know anything is telling you how long it will take. There are telling signs of lack of knowledge that we all recognize. Be sure to pay attention to the signs and do not get suckered into a time constraint you are not capable of meeting. One way to make sure that someone understands the importance of your job is to compare it to a contractor building a house. You are building them a virtual location on the internet and they need to understand that it does take time to construct the frontend and backend code. Plans have to be drawn up just the way a contractor works from the plans an architect builds. So comparing yourself to a contractor, architect, interior designer and landscaper as well as a plumber and electrician are all good courses of action. Most business owners actually have concepts about the amount of skill and cost of those types of professionals. They also understand the diversity and time constraints of those activities.

The key is in the perceptions of the client.

A client has very few preconceived ideas about web design or they have very skewed perceptions of web design. My favorite concept comparison deals with the skewed perceptions some small business owners have about web design. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the client or potential client who tells you “I’ll have my teenage nephew design it for me for (insert cost in the very low range).” My comparison for this situation is: “Would you have a teenage kid pick a physical location, purchase the land, build your building, do the landscaping and interior decorating as well as stock the shelves?” In essence this is the scope of a web designer’s job. It is part of your job to ensure that your potential clients understand and appreciate the scope of your profession.

Anyone have any other comparisons that would work for web design? Please feel free to respond.

Web Out
Des.

1. Links have been changed to out.php?id=XXXX instead of a straight link
   I know this switch will probably make a number of our advertisers unhappy and I was very reluctant to make it but I feel it was needed. Recent events and comments from members of the Google team have made it clear that Google frowns upon the selling of text links in any form. The directory derives a great deal of traffic from Google (we’re currently ranked #2 for “web designers”) and I don’t want to do anything to endanger that status. On the upside, this change will allow us to finally implement click-tracking, a feature many advertisers have requested.
2. Listings are sorted randomly
   Previously, listings were ordered by the purchase date. While this was great for the first guy, it really sucked for the last guy. From now on, all listings will be sorted randomly. Sponsored listings will still be shown above free listings and the Google/Yahoo ads. I believe this will be a fairer policy.

Is this a wise decision or should I have told Google stick it?

NOTE: An e-mail notification of these policy changes was sent to all advertisers who agreed to receive the Xemion newsletter.  If you did not receive or missed the newsletter, it can be viewed here.  If you’re not on the list and would like to receive the next newsletter, be sure to login to your account and check the “Receive e-mail from Administrators” checkbox.

Even more exciting to me is the expansion of the directory into more of a community-focused site with the launch of this blog and the merger with my DevLobby forum. I’ve got a great deal more planned so stay stunned (subscribe to the RSS feed)!

Compensation, if any, would be low and primarily limited to revenue sharing (of which there is currently none). The benefits would be a mix of free marketing and SEO links. Xemion is ranked #2 for “web designers” and a myriad of other terms and is one of the most-visited internet resources for people looking for web design firms. This would be a perfect opportunity for a web design company owner or freelance designer.

The blog would focus on web design industry trends, resources and news with very in-depth content. I want the blog to be an extremely high-quality resource for web developers. The ideal blogger would post at least 4-7 times a week. I’d be willing to accept posts from guest bloggers from time to time, but only posts of the utmost quality. Very in-depth and interesting, not generic “how-to”s, etc.

If you’re interested, please contact me and be sure to include links to your portfolio and existing blog as well as three titles of posts you would right.