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Web Design News

This week: Is the homepage dying? Everything you need to know about HTML5 and CSS3. Solve problems rather than add features. And why you shouldn’t be tied to a process.

Read ‘Don’t lose perspective for the sake of good search engine placement’

Don’t lose perspective for the sake of good search engine placement

Admit it, you want to be number one on Google. We all do. However, if you let it become an obsession it can ruin your site.

This week’s bounty: Online mission statements

Do you remember the cartoon Rabbit Fire where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck duke it out to declare what sort of hunting season it is, with Elmer Fudd chasing them to get something for his pot? Well, I declare a new bounty: Mission Statements.

Read ‘This week’s bounty: Online mission statements’

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Don’t lose perspective for the sake of good search engine placement

Thu, 04/29/2010 - 07:30

This feature is brought to you by Web Directions @media. Bringing together world experts in design and development, over 2 days of conference and 2 days of workshops, Web Directions @media continues to be the web professionals networking event of the year. It also includes the Boagworld Big Breakfast so don’t miss out.

I have never really understood website owners obsession with search engine optimisation. In fact not long ago I wrote an article entitled “Why I don’t get SEO“. Boy was that a mistake!

My post basically outlined 5 reservations I had about search engine optimisation…

It’s a continual investment
It’s manipulating the search engines
It damages user experience
It’s a passive form of marketing
It doesn’t carry the weight of a personal recommendation

Personally I thought I was raising some reasonable point. However, shortly after publishing the post it all kicked off big time. I obviously offended the SEO community and quickly feared for my life. But hey, I often seem to offend people. It must be my winning personality.

kojoku, Shutterstock

Ultimately I think it was a risk worth taking. A number of people wrote excellent responses to my post (1) (2) and it had some great comments .

I discovered I have been unfortunate enough to work with the most evil SEO companies (hence my negative view) and that SEO has a serious image problem.

Worst still, many website owners and quite a few web designers have a false impression of SEO. That is what I want to address in this post, starting with the universal truth – there are no quick fixes.

There are no quick fixes

I am not sure which came first, the website owners unrealistic demands or the SEO companies outrageous promises. Either way both sides are living in some a make-believe world where driving tons of new traffic is as simple as fiddling with the code of your site and getting a few people to link to you.

Back in the real world things are different. SEO is a long term commitment and will not provide results overnight. Always be hesitant of those who tell you otherwise.

Put users above search engines

As I said at the beginning of this post I think SEO has an image problem and it lies in the term ’search engine optimisation’.

The name implies that you are ‘optimising the site for search engines’. However, from what I have learnt this is not the case. Reputable SEO companies always put the user first.

kentoh, Shutterstock

Think about it for a minute. Why do you want to be number one on Google? The answer is almost always to drive more users to your site. Why do you want more users? Again the answer is almost always to convince those users of something. That might be to buy a product or embrace an idea. Whatever the case the entire scenario revolves around the user.

SEO shouldn’t be about making your site more friendly to search engines but about making it more findable by humans.

Now you could argue these are semantics. To make the site more findable by humans it needs to be optimised for search engines. However, if you don’t make that distinction it is easy to start compromising the usability and accessibility of your site in order to gain a higher ranking.

Always remember a higher ranking is not the aim. The aim is to convince as many users as possible to respond in some way to your site.

SEO should reinforce (not undermine) best practice

When you make your goal better search engine placement it can begin to compromise a lot more than user experience.

Done incorrectly SEO can undermine the code of your website too. Before you know it your sites code is stuffed with headings and even in extreme cases hidden content.

You could argue that code doesn’t matter. After all that doesn’t impact our overall goal of converting users. However it does have other significant impacts on…

Performance
Site maintainability
The cost of future redesigns

It can also directly impact those using mobile devices or assistive technology (such as screen readers).

The irony here is that done right SEO should actually enhance the quality of your site’s code. In fact if your web designer has done their job properly your site should already preform well in search engine rankings.

Unfortunately too often web designers do not do their job well and SEO companies resort to excessive code manipulation to improve rankings.

It is important to find suppliers that understand the importance of best practice and respect it so preserving code quality.

SEO should improve not damage copy

In the same way that good SEO should improve code, it should also improve your site’s copy.

The one thing that has made me madder than anything else is when SEO companies screw with a site’s copy. Too often I have worked with companies that want to stuff well written copy with keywords or add excessive words to a page just to increase it’s ranking.

There is no better way of driving users away from a site than making the content of your site long and unreadable.

The bizarre thing is that actually SEO should create better copy, not worse. In order to write copy that ranks well on search engines it is first necessary to understand the terms your target audience use when searching. If used correctly this keyword research should improve your copy encouraging you to writ in the tone of voice and language used by your visitors.

A good SEO company should have a copywriter who can do this research and then write engaging text that uses the language of your users. It is the copywriter you need as much as the SEO wizard.

SEO should be apart of a broader marketing strategy

Many website owners become so obsessed with SEO that they focus on it at the detriment of all else.

In reality SEO should be just one component of a broader marketing strategy that includes both online and offline elements.

A good SEO company should also be able to help you utilise social media, paid advertising and other forms of online engagement to attract a larger audience. They should also be able to encourage your audience to promote your site through word of mouth recommendation.

The traffic vs conversion divide

To a large extent I think the problem of SEO derives from how the industry sells itself and what website owners ask for.

Vitaly M, Shutterstock

In both cases the emphasis is on improved ranking. However as I have already said that is not the ultimate aim. An increase in conversion numbers is what website owners really need. This is achieved through a mix of increasing traffic and converting more of that traffic.

The worst scenario (which I have personally encountered many times) is where the SEO company is responsible for driving traffic while the web design agency is judged on how well that traffic converts. The result of these sometimes conflicting priorities is disagreement.

In the perfect world a single agency would be used for both roles. However, where that is not possible there should be a single metric for all involved. This should be how many people complete a specified call to action.

You maybe saying to yourself that your site has no call to action. If that is the case then why does the site exist? Even an informational site should probably have a call to action such as signup for a newsletter. If it really doesn’t then use another metric like a combination of dwell time and unique visitors to rate success.

Whatever metric we use it should not be how high the site ranks on Google. This is a means to an end not the end in itself.

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This week’s bounty: Online mission statements

Wed, 04/28/2010 - 04:00

This feature is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is an ecommerce solutions made by designers, for designers. For more information visit shopify.com/boagworld.

Before I declare Open Season on these vagrant spacewasters, however, let me backtrack to a question I got on my formspring.me page.

What’s wrong with having a mission statement on a website? (Please respond in words a client would understand.)

My response is at the end of this article but first I want to direct you to perhaps the most plaintive part of this question: ‘Please respond in words a client would understand’. I think there are plenty of web savvy folks out there that have been noodling about on the web long enough to look at a Mission Statement and know instinctively it is the wrong thing in the wrong place. It pains them but it seems to be a business requirement so it is hard to explain what about it jars so much.

If you’ve been trying to put your finger on it then perhaps this will resonate with you: the web is about doing tasks. It starts with a thought and ends (ideally) with a transaction or exchange of information. Very rarely is this enhanced by knowing the company’s internal hopes and wishes.

Three random examples of opening statement for mission statements, that a quick search gave me:

“business is not just about looking down at the bottom line – it is also about looking up at the horizon” – a training company

“(our mission:) to inspire and nurture the human spirit” – a coffee company

“(we aim) to promote the benefit of the inhabitants of Newtown by the provision of an Internet site devoted to the supply of information about the Newtown area, its public and private facilities and its commercial enterprises.” - a local town website

So tell me, how is this ‘content’ (in some cases on the homepage) of value compared to:

“We would like to talk to you about your business. You can call us on XXXX”

“We make great coffee and an atmosphere where you can relax. Here is where you can come and sample it – here’s a voucher for you.”

“Here are pages about the town [link], public facilities [link] and our commercial enterprises [link]. We look forward to seeing you at Newtown [map link]“

After all, no-one really needs to say they inspire the human spirit. They just need to do it.

It reminds me of my three year old who insists every morning before nursery that today he will be a good boy and not do shouting or pushing or snatching. When you are three these things constitute a challenge, after all, but when you are a company giving over a section of your site to say ‘Hey, we don’t plan on f**king anyone over and we never snatch toys and we inspire the human spirit.’ I am left thinking ‘Well, yes. You are a grown-up right? Now get on and tell me what you have that fulfils my needs.’

I think web people get this. After all, we are adept at scanning the crap on other sites so it hardly bothers us. When we are given it as content to work into a page structure, well, that’s when we are left thinking ‘hmm, something about this isn’t quite right’ though we can’t quite express it to a client. It’s because a mission statement should be an internal guiding principle not a public morality lecture. The value in the second statements is that they begin to embody the values the companies purport and – great news! – they can just have them on the site, as part of their everyday content.

So, to finish, here is the answer I gave to the question “What’s wrong with having a mission statement on a website? (Please respond in words a client would understand.)”

‘The space and words given over to explaining what you would like to do would be better spent on doing it, especially if you are selling a product or service. Mission statements are to direct companies and not customers.

The values found in a company mission statement should be naturally weaved through what you offer and how you do it (on your site and elsewhere) so stating it *should* be redundant?

Actions speak louder than words and all that.”

So, go on. In the immortal words of Elmer Fudd ‘It’s huntin’ season’. Imma gonna bag me some Missions Statement for mah cookin’ pot! Wontcha join me?

This feature is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is an ecommerce solutions made by designers, for designers. For more information visit shopify.com/boagworld.

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Web Design News 27/04/10

Tue, 04/27/2010 - 06:30

The web design news is brought to you by Webdesigner Depot. Webdesigner Depot is a popular web design blog covering tutorials, design trends, blogging and inspirational posts. You can visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com and follow WDD on Twitter @designerdepot.

Everything you wanted to know about HTML 5 and CSS3

There has been so much talk about HTML5 and CSS3 that you could be forgiven for zoning out.

If you are like me, you know it sounds cool. However you are having trouble keeping up with what exactly it all does and if you can use it now.

Fortunately there are a couple of resources that will help bring clarity to the situation.

The first is a presentation that covers advances in Javascript, HTML and CSS. What makes this presentation unique is that it demonstrates these upcoming technologies as well as explain them.

Presuming you are using a good browser (the author recommends Chrome) you will get to see everything from native video to CSS gradients in action. It also comes with code that you can just copy and paste to get started.

The second resource is a compatibility table that shows browser support for HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies.

You can configure the table to only show the technology you are interested in (e.g. CSS3). However the nicest thing is that it provides a judgement about whether you can start using that technology today. It also explains why it has made that judgement and what browser is limiting its adoption.

Both resources are worth a look if you want to start adopting these emerging technologies.

The decline of the homepage?

Gerry McGovern returns this week with another controversial post. This time he is claiming the decline of the homepage.

He begins by quoting some figures on the decline in homepage usage:

In 2003, 39 percent of the page views for a large research website were for the homepage. By 2009, it was down to 19 percent.

Another technology website had roughly 10 percent of page views for the homepage in 2008, and by 2010 it was down to 5 percent. One of the largest websites in the world had 25 percent of visitors come to the homepage in 2005, but in 2010 only has 10 percent.

I have no reason to doubt these figures. However, I am not sure they reflect all websites. That said, I do think the principle stands. As Gerry points out…

Years ago people might have thought about getting to the homepage and then figuring out where to go on the site. Now they will use search or external links to get closer to the place they really want to get to. So, for example, people are becoming less likely to simply type “Toyota” into a search and more likely to type “Toyota recall”.

Does that mean the homepage is no longer important? Not at all. It is still an essential navigational tool which users rely on to orientate themselves on a site.

What this post does demonstrate is that political battles over homepage real estate is pointless. The homepage is no longer as critical as it was.

While on the subject of homepage design, I also wanted to quickly mention ‘How To Develop A Homepage Layout That Sells‘. Although not the best article on the subject it does tackle one aspect well. That is the need to prioritise around objectives, rather than allowing features to continually accrue on the homepage.

The process police

I share a lot of techniques, methodologies and processes on Boagworld. From advice on wireframing to top tips for creating an effective call to action. These posts help us to learn and provides structure within which to work.

However it is important that these kinds of posts (whether on boagworld or elsewhere) are seen as guidelines or advice, not as laws that need to be obeyed.

This is something that is covered in ‘The Process Police‘ a 52weeksofux post.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler, Shutterstock

In this post Joshua refers to people he calls process police. These are people who cling to processes as a kind of mantra for improving their websites…

Process is their crutch. The Process Police believe that if they follow the process to the letter, then they’ll be more successful than if they don’t. They use process as a benchmark for success.

However, in reality the world doesn’t work like that…

No process guarantees success. If there were a process that guaranteed happy users everyone would be using it. But design doesn’t work like that: it’s iterative, responsive, ever-changing. You have to react as much as plan. You have to change your process on the fly to react to the marketplace.

Just remember the next time you read an over confident author talking about the ultimate way to produce a persona, that there is no such thing as a perfect way. Take from the article what works for your site and your users, then leave the rest.

Solve problems rather than add features

Let’s face it we all enjoy something new. Designers like the latest design trends, developers want to play with new technology. Even website owners always have endless ideas for new features.

Unfortunately our enthusiasm for the new can get the better of us sometimes and we focus on that rather than meeting the needs of users.

An article entitled “Does your website add features or solve problems?” addresses this attraction towards the new by encouraging us to focus on solving problems rather than adding new features.

The author sums the problem up perfectly…

This eagerness manifests itself as a superfluous new feature, an implementation that is stimulated by a common misconception that adding more features is a market advantage. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

In reality the solution to users problems often lies in taking stuff away rather than adding it.

The post looks at the benefits of simplifying your website before suggesting some ways you can ‘be a problem solver and not a feature inflator’.

Its a great little post that focuses the mind back on what matters and curbs our enthusiasm for the new.

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iPhone design, freelancing, the universe and everything

Mon, 04/26/2010 - 08:00

Ryan: Sarah, what were we going to talk about?

Sarah: I don’t really know – are we talking about a hybrid of kind of freelancing and iphone user interface design?

Ryan: We actually had a question that came in from a lad called Luke which was about getting started

All: You have to ask the beginning question though!

Ryan: Yeah – What’s your biggest cock up?

Sarah: What’s my biggest? Oh, actually nothing to do with Web Design at all. I used to work backstage the same as Rachel. I was doing some work experience backstage at a show called Les Mis in London and I was just doing work experience and basically to cut a long story short they put me on the sound desk at the back. And although I’d always loved the show, I hadn’t seen it before. So they sat me at the sound desk at the back and about a quarter of the way through Act 2 they just started firing guns everywhere, and so I just jumped out of my skin and pushed some of the audio sliders forward at which point the show kind of went into a bit of a mish mash of guns that shouldn’t have gone off, and stuff started happening and I wasn’t invited back after that. *everyone laughs*

Ryan: I won’t be two seconds and I’ll get the question that we were going to answer

Sarah: That’s fine

Ryan: Right. So, Luke Franklin posted this question this morning ‘What is the best path to take to have the best head start into a design career?’Does a University degree help much and once I do the degree what’s the next step. In basic terms, what are the key things I have to do to make myself successful when I start in Web Design?

Sarah: Okay, I’ve probably said it a few times, various different things… But I think specialising is the probably the biggest choice you can make is to specialise in something, whatever your ‘re going to specialise in, run with it. Don’t try and learn everything right at the start because when I’m looking for a freelancer for something I look for someone specific. I’m looking for a Ruby on Rails developer, I’m looking for a PHP developer I’m not looking for someone who’s a little bit good in a few things, I’m looking for someone who’s the best in what they do – not jack of all trades as the old saying goes. But as far as like Degrees and stuff go, I’ve had really mixed views on people who’ve done degrees and i don’t know whether it’s because the of way the courses are run down here but south end and leeds??? is quite an arty kind of place and the colleges here kind of let them do whatever they want to do. Whenever I get portfolios sent to me they’re always quite … Gothic, I think is the kind way of putting it (laugh). They tend to have a lot of band art work in them and stuff that me as an employer I guess, I can’t look at that and see how that could relate to whether they could do the job that I need them to do. So I have mixed views over the whole design course thing. I personally didn’t go to Design College or anything like that. I mean, i did my GCSE in Art but personally, down here they’re not that great. I think they’re great for a basic foundation in a lot of things. I mean, if you’re going to go into Typography then it’s a must but generally I’ve just got mixed views about the whole college thing.

Ryan: I think specialisation, a lot of people ask me about specialisation at the minute, and there’s a lot of people also talking about generalising and doing lots of different things, specially if you’re a freelance Web Designer, you’re kind of expected to do lots of different things and be multi-skilled instead of just specialising because the client doesn’t necessarily know what they’re asking for. You say that you do websites and they expect you to be able to do everything. How do you work? Do you do a bit of everything or do you specialise in a particular area?

Sarah: I do, I do a bit of everything but I think the important thing is that clients come to me for a specialist thing to start with and then just kind of assume that your skills are so, that you’ve got such a broad set of skills that you can achieve these other tasks that they want you to do. I tend to do more of the design side of things whether I like it or not. I actually started out coding when I was younger. I didn’t really do the design side of things at all but as I’ve sort of, got older, whether I like it or not, that’s the path that the people who are coming to me have decided that I’ll take so…

Ryan: So they’ve kind of decided your specialisation

Sarah: They have really.; they’ve kind of decided what I specialise in, and you know, the iPhone stuff is quite a recent thing as well. But I find that they come to me for that initially, and then, because, if you can design for the iPhone, you can design a website. So therefore your skill set will go to that as well although it always started in.. I think not necessarily people will come to you for a specialised skill and then stick with you because they’re comfortable with you and then assume that you can do everything anyway. And usually they’ll still keep you as a project manager, even if you say “Oh, actually, I can’t do this but I know someone who can.. Um.. they always keep you as their sort of ‘go to’ person anyway.

Ryan: The iPhone UI stuff that you’ve been doing, you’re talking a lot about that at the various conferences this year as well, aren’t you?

Sarah: Yeah

Ryan: you can kind of decided that you fancied doing that and you’ve become quite known for now, you’re getting to do working, to do iPhone UI stuff – how did you start going down that path?

Sarah: Um, it was actually a client of mine. I designed his website, and um, a really nice guy, he just decided to take a chance that I’d be able to do the user interface design of his iPhone app. And so, it was kind of, it was all his doing really. he just took that leap of faith that he saw my work, he liked my work. He gave me a chance to do the iPhone user interface design of that app and that came out really well and he got some really nice comments from Apple actually on the app, and it kind of went from there really.

Ryan: And people has just been contacting you because they’ve seen your work you’ve done through that?

Sarah: Yeah, I think it’s also because I’ve got a bit of a different approach to it, but one that people probably wouldn’t;t know from the outset looking at the website, which is a bit strange. But I go through, I just don’t design, I go through how the apps actually work with them as well. Whether they can cut down on the amount of screens that they;re using. Um, whether the actual user interface is working as it should do or how people are expecting the app to work. Um, there’s kind of all that process as well before you even hit Photoshop. So, um, I think it’s been handy to have that kind of background, um, documents to be able to send to other clients, to say, you know, this is the kind of way I work. And I think that actually what sold me, sold the clients on a couple of jobs, to use me to be honest.

Ryan: Did you find moving on to the UI work with the iPhone a natural progression from what you were previously doing or is it a new thing?

Sarah: Um, it’s a bit of both really. I mean, if you’re confident in using Photoshop, um, then you’d find it a lot easier than someone who’s been designing in the browser for along time, or anything like that. But there are some real specifics of working with the iPhone that you just wouldn’t come across in your general Web Design knowledge of what you do day to day in designing websites. You just wouldn’t;t come across it. So from that sense it’s been a bit of a learning curve but it’s also been great because it’s designing for a completely different platform. You’re not just thinking about how things look on a screen. You’re having to think about the fingertip size of the things that you’re designing and whether they;re large enough for people to actually press. And it’s a completely different mind set of designing for the web.

Ryan: And what are you talking about at the conferences this year then? Are you just sharing your experience of what you’ve learned?

Sarah: Well, actually I have to write them down because I get them both muddled up. Um, DIBI conference I’m talking about the principles of iPhone user interface design and at Future of Web Design (London) I’m talking about the ten tips for iPhone user interface design *laugh* so there are two completely different subjects apparently. I’ve got to do two completely different talks but obviously the principles of iPhone UI design always remain the same, so yeah…

Ryan: I guess you’re able to, it’s not iPhone specific things, it’s, you have the experience if someone turned round to you and gave you a completely different device and said, ‘alright, we need to design an interface’ you’ve got all that experience behind you that can say ‘right, this is the best way to design an interface for this device’. Um, so can you see yourself moving into anything else if given the opportunity?

Sarah: To be honest, do you mean other mobile devices?

Ryan: Maybe, maybe other new things that come along like iPad, or any touch sensitive stuff.

Sarah: Yeah, I mean, um, to be honest the iPhone just interested because I’ve got one. I’d interacted with it since the first generation one and I was comfortable with how I used it and things like that. I probably wouldn’t;t be comfortable if it was any other mobile device, purely because it’s, I don;t have knowledge of it therefore there’s going to be someone else out there who’s better at designing for that device than I am. I’d love to go into the iPad when it eventually comes out but I need to get my hands on one first really. To see how that’s all going to work. Um, but as far as specialisation, I’d rather specialise in the Iphone. I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon. I think it’s, you know, probably the most well known touch phone that you can get so, um. I can’t see myself straying away from it anytime soon, No.

Ryan: Okay *laugh*

Sarah: Did that answer? Sorry…

Ryan: It’s good. So What’s attracting to you to designing for the iPad? Is it just something new or just the challenge of designing for a new platform?

Sarah: The challenge of designing for a new platform but also the kind of users who are going to be using the iPad. I think the kind of people, this is going to sound really awful, the kind of people that are going to be using the iPad are not, as we’ve discussed in various blog topics over the past couple of weeks on the Internet. Um, it’s not necessarily made for us with our superior knowledge of how various things on the Mac work and things like that. It’s meant for our Mums really. Mums and Dads who ring you up with lots of questions, how this works, how you get email working. I think it’s going to be a fantastic device for the basic internet user. So I think, on that level, it’s going to be really interesting to see if we can develop websites, you know, I can just imagine sort of developing great buttons *laugh*, and things that tell them exactly where they need to go. But I just think from that point of view I think it’ll be an interesting discussion to be had amongst the Web Design community as to the actual user that’s using it rather than the device itself.

Ryan: Yeah. How do you think that um, how do you think that’ll affect your approach to designing for it? That’s a tough question isn’t it? *laugh*

Sarah: I don’t think it will affect my approach in the way I work at the moment, the whole wireframing and trying to get the user interface working the way people expect it to work. So I don’t think it would change much from that sense. But I think, when you bear in, when you’ve got such good information, perhaps, about who your target demographic is, who you’re going to be designing for, I mean, maybe the iPad will take off with other people but personally I’d just have one because I want to design for it not because I’d necessarily use it. Um, I think the really interesting thing is going to be the ebooks, or ibooks sorry, that are going to be available for it. I think that will be really interesting if they do open them up to the UK market. that will be interesting to design for as well.

Ryan: Let’s talk a little bit more about running your own business and being freelance

Sarah: Ok

Ryan: Dealing with clients in particular. *laugh* Um, how do you find and retain the good clients, well retaining the good clients is straightforward – you do good work and they come back to you. How do you seek out your clients or do they find you?

Sarah: I’m lucky enough now that they find me and I’m kind of quite acute to the warning signs of some clients of whether they’re going to be good ones or not right from the offset of the way they approach you. The first email that you received, whether it’s copied in to a hundred other designers as well *laugh* you haven’t been blind carbon copied . Little things like that kind of bring up warning signals and if I get too many of them I just stay clear nowadays. But at the start, it was a completely different matter. I was taking on whatever clients I could get my hands on and because you have to to start a business. Um, so yeah it’s a difficult one but now I’m in a lucky position of they find me so..

Ryan: We were talking with Elliot earlier and how you increase your rates and that slowly filters out the good clients from the bad ones. Have you found that as well?

Sarah: Yeah, i have actually. It was Andy Clarke, when he called me one day and said, ‘Oh we have this thing called ‘double fridays’ or something *all laugh* He said every friday we just double our rates just to the person who comes, you know the enquiry comes through the door, just to see whether they’d pay it. And that’s how he’s established his rate is from ‘double fridays’ *all laugh*

Paul: I don’t believe a word of it. He makes it up, He doesn’t really do that!

Sarah: He told me! You can ask him, he’s up next, but that’s what he told me is that he just kept doubling until someone said ‘no’. *all laugh*

Ryan: One of the best quotes I ever heard was if the client doesn’t go ‘phooooah’ when you tell them the price then you’ve not charged them enough *all laugh* When they go ‘phoooah’ and ‘okay’ it’s just about right. *all laugh*

Sarah: But rates is really hard on to get right. I was talking to Jon Hicks at the conference in Bristol last year and when I told him what my rate was he went ‘Oh, I thought you’d be more expensive than that’. I don;t know if that’s a good thing or not but, um, I think it’s a funny thing, rates, and it’s really hard to get right and I’ve probably still not mastered it to be honest. But, um, I’m getting there. *laugh*

Ryan: It’s one of the things that you don’t, it’s not written down
anywhere what you should be charging, is it. you kind of learn from other freelancers, other agencies, you kind of feel your way through and hope you get it right eventually.

Sarah: yeah and it’s one of those things that other freelancers are kind of, um, you know a bit cloak and dagger about to be honest. It’s, a lot of people tend to think well it they’re charging that much and I’ve been doing this for x amount of years and I should be on the same. Um, t’s a really hard thing to try and gauge, what your rates should be and how you’re leveling with your peers really as well. Um, but I think it’s more difficult when you’re just starting out as well, but the thing I think is the most important is that you shouldn’t charge, you shouldn’t be really cheap when you start out. Because that caused me no end of problems when I first started out. There was only one client who came to me and said ‘If you do this job for me cheaply, I’ll use you forever more’ out of all the clients that I obtained at the beginning of starting the business, he was the only one to this day that still uses me. The rest of them I didn’t hear from again so that’s like the old chestnut, if anyone says that to you I definitely wouldn’t do it cheaply for them laugh*

Ryan: Yeah I had that recently as well, they said ‘Oh there’ll be plenty more work coming up. I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to drop my rates just for the same reason you wouldn’t sell me a product for cheaper on the proviso that I’m going to buy the next one from you”. They went, “Oh, yeah.”

Sarah: Exactly. I’ve got the best, um, thing to say to people like that now when they say that. I say “Well, okay on the next job I’ll give you a discount then or we’ll bring the price down in level with maybe further work that’s going to happen, but for this one – uh uh, sorry”

Ryan: Yeah that’s good.

Sarah: And generally, that’s the last you hear from then *everyone laughs*

Ryan: They usually turn out to be the bad ones. THey’re the ones you don’t want to be working anyway, aren’t they!

Sarah: Thing is, I think like pricing in the Web industry is really difficult as well. Because we’re on the Internet, there’s no barriers as to who you can use really anymore. I mean, beside from the fact that if you use someone outside your time zone, it’s slightly annoying but it doesn’t stop you from working with someone in America, or in Australia. SO the rates of pay in, between here, America, Australia, India are all very different, in as much as what you can get for your money. So, I think it’s such a difficult one to try and pitch what you should be charging and things like that. It’s really hard.

Ryan: Sorry, I got distracted by the feed going up with people shouting at me for being too quiet and not speaking into the mic properly. I’m sorry, I’m sorry to be mumbling so much I’m sorry! *everyone laughs” So we’ve got another question. Obviously this is the 200th show so what do you think it’s going to be like on show 400? What do you think the Web Design landscape’s going to look like at the 400th show?

Paul: That’s going to be another, 2 years, 4 years? 4 years.

Sarah: 4 years? Wow.

Ryan: That’s going to be 2 years, 400 – we’re on 200 now

Paul: Oh yeah – 2 years. *everyone laughs* No, 4 years, 4 years!

Ryan: 50 shows a year, oh yeah, 4 years.

Paul: Look, you can’t speak up loud enough and you can’t do basic maths. We’re going to have to throw you off

Ryan: Fine *everyone laughs* … sorry, Sarah. Carry on

Sarah: That’s all right. I’m just, I think the Web as we know it could change quite dramatically, um. I think we’ll be using a lot more handheld devices so I think that will be what we see the Internet as rather than how we, the traditional method of how we bring up a browser and viewing a website. I think we’ll have various devices for different things that will pull in information from the web as we know it. Um, but I think it will be a little bit different. *everyone laughs*

Paul: Is your answer to this question “It’s going to be a little bit different”?

Sarah: No!

Paul: I’m sorry, I’m teasing *laughs*

Sarah: It is going to be different, but I think it’s going to be different how we view the Internet, I don’t think we’ll be sitting, apart from us because we’re Web Designers and we have to sit in front of a screen all day. I think for other traditional internet users it wouldn’t be sitting in front of a computer and opening up a Web Browser. I think we’ll be doing a lot more on handheld devices and so change the way that we build websites for those devices. You watch, I bet it’ll happen now and you’ll have to eat your words. *everyone laugh*

Paul: I’m not arguing with you, it’s just that little bit lacking in, ummmm, in detail saying it’s going to be different.

Sarah: Sorry, did I just clarify that for you?

Paul: You did, thank you very much. Much better now. I’ll go away *laugh* I’m in trouble now, I can tell.

Ryan: Just you wait, Paul, in 4 years time the internet will be a little bit different and you’ll be eating your words. *everyone laughs*

Paul: As they’re saying in the chat room, it’s a very hard and unfair question

Sarah: My goodness! They’re sticking up for me?

Sarah: Some of them have been awful today in the things they’ve been saying *everyone laugh*

Ryan: You feel that already, because when you come to the barn, within about a mile radius you lose phone signal here and it’s like your heart stops. It’s like “I’ve lost signal, I’ve lost signal. It’s like your life support machine’s been turned off *everyone laughs*

Paul: hang on! This is my working environment you’re slagging off! I like it here!

Sarah: But you’re not there that much are you! *everyone laughs*

Paul: Okay, you’ve got your own back

Ryan: Okay Sarah, well thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us

Sarah: No problem thanks for having me Ask Andy about double Fridays

Paul: We will, he’s on next I think he makes stuff up

Sarah: He makes stuff up? no!

Paul: Thanks a lot, bye

Thanks goes to Wendy Phillips for transcribing this interview.
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Categories: Featured Blogs

208. My hosting company sucks!

Thu, 04/22/2010 - 18:51

Housekeeping

I wanted to quickly mention Get Signoff. In case you don’t know, Get Signoff is a web application developed by Headscape that allows you to present designs to clients and get their feedback.

For a long time it was a bit of a side project for Headscape but we have recently taken on Ryan Taylor to move it forward. He has been working hard and on the 27th April we have some fairly significant announcements to make about the products future.

To make sure you know whats going on, visit hello.getsignoff.com and signup for our mailing list.

Web Design News

This week: The dying art of design, the disappearance of flash, tasks not goals, twitters developer tools and google rank by speed.

Read ‘Chris Lea on hosting and customer support’

Chris Lea on hosting and customer support

Chris Lea works for Media Temple probably the best known hosting company within the web design world. He shares his advice on hosting and their experience of dealing with customer support.

My five commandments for wireframing

When it comes to wireframes I am a fanatic. I believe they are an indispensable part of the development process. That is why I enforce 5 unbreakable rules.

Read ‘My five commandments for wireframing’
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Categories: Featured Blogs

My five commandments for wireframing

Thu, 04/22/2010 - 07:11

I am a fundamentalist when it comes to wireframing. Its almost like a religious furore. To me they are utterly indispensable and when they are not used it makes me want to smite people!

However, I am not writing this to convince you of the value of wireframing. If you need convincing read “The 7 Wonders Of Wireframes“. But, what I do want to share is my five commandments for wireframing. They are…

Thou shall not neglect to wireframe
Thou shall not wireframe alone
Thou shall not be afraid
Thou shall start with pen and paper
Thou shall test thy wireframes

Let our sermon for the day begin with “Thou shall not neglect to wireframe”.

Thou shall not neglect to wireframe

From my perspective things start to go wrong when you decide to skip wireframing. After all there are always plausible excuses…

This is such a small change it doesn’t need wireframing

The client won’t pay for wireframes

There isn’t time to wireframe

The problem is that these objections simply are not true. Hand drawn wireframes are incredibly quick to produce. For example, creating a sketch of a tiny change to your web site takes only seconds. However the benefit these quick sketches provide, is incalculable. Ultimately they will save time, money and a lot of potential aggravation. Without them, misunderstandings over requirements can quickly creep in. So let me be clear – I believe in wireframing every piece of new functionality even if it is just on the back of a napkin.

Thou shall not wireframe alone

Another big danger I have observed in wireframing is what one of our developers calls the ‘chinese whispers effect‘. This starts with the information architect who produces the wireframe alone. He then passes it to the project manager who gives it to the designer. The designer turns it into a design and finally passes it to the developer. With each step along the line, the vision of what the site should do becomes degraded. Another problem with this approach is that the other team members get little input into the wireframe so it’s possible the information architect will produce something that for whatever reason is impractical. By the time the designer or developer has seen the wireframe it has already been signed off by the client.

I believe the best way to overcome this problem is to wireframe as a group. Get together the entire project team (including the client if possible) and produce the wireframes. This makes it a much more collaborative process and ensures that any possible problems are identified early.

Thou shall not be afraid

The dirty secret of wireframing is that many people avoid it because they “can’t draw” or are “afraid of looking stupid” when put on the spot in a group. Instead they want to hide away and craft carefully considered wireframes. My message to these people is simple – get over it. This fear undermines the power of wireframes. Wireframing should be about thinking out loud. It should involve throwing ideas out there and discussing different approaches. You should come away with a final set of wireframes borne out of many iterations and approaches.

Thou shall start with pen and paper

To keep a light weight, spontaneous approach, wireframes should be initially produced with pen and paper. This also aids group working. It is easy for everybody to participate, to scribble on other people’s work and put together their own ideas. It takes the power away from the person sitting behind the laptop that is plugged into the projector. I am not saying that wireframes cannot become more sophisticated as they are finalised. You can use whatever tool you want from Balsamiq to FlairBuilder or even Powerpoint. However, they should start with paper.

Thou shall test thy wireframes

Finally, I believe wireframes should always be tested. However, that does not have to be a major undertaking. It is enough to show them to three or four people and simply ask if they get it. It doesn’t need to be documented or formalised in anyway. It just acts as a sanity check with somebody from outside of the project.

A personal perspective

Okay so I admit it, I am not really a fundamentalist when it comes to wireframes. I think they’re really important but also recognise my ‘commandments’ do not apply in every company and every situation. The reason I am using such strong rhetoric is because I have seen too many projects falter without the clarity wireframes bring. It’s such a simple thing to do that there really is no reason not to wireframe. So what about you? What stops you from wireframing and what advice do you have to make wireframing more effective?

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Categories: Featured Blogs

Chris Lea on hosting and customer support

Wed, 04/21/2010 - 07:47

This interview is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is an ecommerce solutions made by designers, for designers. For more information visit shopify.com/boagworld.

Paul: Ok, so joining me today is Chris Lea from Media Temple. Great to have you on the show, Chris.

Chris: Glad to be here.

Paul: I kind of wanted to have a chat with you for a while, because, obviously, I host my website with Media Temple, as does pretty much everyone else I seem to come across one way or another.

Chris: We like to think so.

Marcus: The whole world is covered.

Paul: The subject of hosting is not one that you heard talked about massively unless people are complaining. “Oh, my site’s down,” and blame whomever. So I thought it would be really good to talk about it on the show, and discuss some of the issues that come up regarding hosting. So you seemed like the logical person to talk to.

Chris: Well, I’ll do my best.

Paul: So let’s start off by talking about, I’m starting up a new website, I’ve got a new idea, putting a new thing online, I need to tackle hosting. What are the questions I should be asking out of the gate?

Chris: So, understanding what you’re trying to build, obviously, is sort of a key thing. For example, if you were a Rails developer, the guys over at Engine Yard do a really fantastic job of Rails stuff, they’ve got a lot of Rails development going on internally, they employ [Corelis Comitters], they understand that space very well. If you were looking to host, say, a Django-related website, I realize it is a bit of a pimp, but we’ve got some Django-centric options at Media Temple that are specific for that sort of thing. If you’re going with a sort of traditional PHP application, there’s a whole lot of hosts that you could look for. But I guess, obviously, sort of evaluating the technologies you need and matching them up is going to be a good first step.

Chris: A second one, sort of evaluating the size of what you’re shooting for out of the gate, I mean, if you’re really just getting something off the ground and it doesn’t need to be too big, then your costs are going to be significant, so you’re probably going to want to go with some sort of a shared plan, one that is not too expensive. Typically, check Twitter, check forums, and see who has a good reputation, and who doesn’t. A lot of people, sort of with the ecosystem, there are money-back guarantees, 30-day trials, that sort of stuff. Jump in with a couple and see what you like.

Paul: Sometimes, these guarantees of uptime, which always strike me as a little bit of a joke. It’s like, “What does that guarantee you?” Does it mean that you’re going to get, if the site is down for over a certain amount of time, you’re going to get the money of your hosting back? If you’re building an ecommerce website, and the site’s down for however long, that could have a much bigger impact on the amount of money you lose than just the money you’re paying on hosting. It feels like a marketing ploy, am I being really cynical?

Chris: No, you’re not being cynical at all. And its a significant issue that everyone deals with. At Media Temple, which is my personal experience, I have friends in other places too. One of the most annoying calls you get, I mean if things go down, and they do, sooner or later, computers break and so on, you get these guys, and they’re paying in the US $20 a month, not a whole lot, and they’re down 20 minutes or something, or maybe let’s say an hour, and the person calls, and goes “I’m losing tens of thousands of dollars,” and we’re sitting here going “Okay, we’re sorry you’re down, and we’re going to credit you for a month’s hosting,” but if you’re making tens of thousands of dollars an hour, maybe you should be thinking about spending more than $20 bucks a month on your hosting infrastructure. So I certainly think that if you are in a situation where any downtime has a material financial impact to you, I would recommend not getting onto a platform that is shared in some way. Find a VPS platform or buy dedicated hardware for yourself, because you are a lot more guarded with those technologies against other people. A lot reasons things go down, it might not be you, but somebody, somewhere does something really stupid, and it can affect other people. We work really hard to minimize that effect, but it still happens. There’s certain things about the technology that exists today that we can’t guard everything. So if downtime has such a financial impact, spend a little more for a VPS platform or…

Paul: What is a VPS?

Chris: Virtual Private Server. So a virtualized server. We got tens of thousands in production at Media Temple. They work great. The idea is that you put multiple customers on one physical server, but there’s technologies that you partition it up, into what looks like a bunch of individual servers. You get into that machine, and as far as you’re concerned, you have a machine all to yourself. It’s actually a smaller piece of a really big, physical box, but it’s just you, and the way that technology works, we have better ways to guard even against the other segments on that box. So I would recommend those, because those tend to provide more stability. Amazon EC2 works that way.

Paul: So it’s like somewhere in between shared hosting and a dedicated server.

Chris: And a lot of times, we do this also, virtualization is a powerful tool, so sometimes, you can get your own box, and really what you’re getting is a VPS, just you’re the only one on the box. And you do that because you have a lot more management tools. It’s very easy for us to provision one of those. For example, a drive on your physical box going bad, we can magically move you into new hardware, you’ll never know. And the virtualization tools give you that. It’s very powerful.

Paul: That’s always a big issue I guess, to a lot of people setting up their sites. They start off with shared hosting, and let’s say that they’re site gets popular, the traffic starts to increase, I guess one of the things you need to look for when you’re picking a hosting company is the upgrade path; how easy is it to upgrade to a dedicated box I guess, ultimately.

Chris: Sure, I know at our company, within the VPS platform, there’s a small, medium and large size, and we push a button, and it changes sizes. And then there’s your own box size. But technically, it is VPS, just you’re the only one on it, so you have the whole box. So we take you from a $50 a month, a smaller server, but it’s still yours, and up through a couple levels of growth. And we’ve done a fair amount of work to make that a transparent process for customers and it certainly happens. You get people, and they start getting popular and they get on Digg or whatever. You know, they started off on $50 a month and suddenly they’re at $750 a month. For them, if they’re that size, it was very easy to transition. They didn’t have to do anything other than call us and say ‘Make it bigger please’, so you know we’re quite proud of that. It’s worked out well for a lot of customers.

Paul: So you mentioned Digg there. The thing I think a lot of people will fear is that they write some stunning blog post that just goes nuclear for a short length of time. And you know, that impacts and takes down their server. You know, is there anything when you’re picking a hosting company, is there any questions you need to ask about that kind of issue and how to avoid it or do you just presume the serving company is dealing with it?

Chris: Well, practically people assume the hosting company is dealing with it. We obviously have tried to do that. Our grid service platform is a very large cluster system that’s made to look like a single system for people but it’s very much designed to handle the Digg effect. You can take a Digg and all of a sudden you’re going to use fifty times the resources you normally do and then when it goes away that’s fine and you sort of only pay for what you actually used up. But in terms of, and I do have to say, this is a little bit perhaps precocious of me, being a performance engineer, But, if you expect that you’re going to get those big spikes you do need to do a bit of engineering yourself. There’s nothing, we or anybody can do to save you if you’ve done something really stupid in your code base. It’s a problem, the worst thing, the hardest problem we face as a hoster is the following scenario. Somebody writes something badly. They don’t know they did it badly but they did. And it gets no traffic so it works great, if you’re not getting any visitors then it doesn’t matter how bad it is cuz it’s going to work. And then they get Dugg or slash dotted or whatever it is and they get a ton of traffic and it just all dies. As far as they’re concerned it worked great three hours ago and now that I have this spotlight on me and all this great traffic it’s dead and I haven’t changed anything.

Paul: So therefore it must be the hosting company’s fault.

Chris: So they call us and we can go in there and look and go hey you did this incredibly silly thing with your database, you needed extra tables and of course it’s going to die and even if the customer at that point knows they did something wrong, they’re still not happy. So obviously people are pushing for that kind of traffic but if you do a little leg work it’s not too hard to find resources these days. A quick Google, and especially if you’re using known platforms like a Wordpress or a Drupal and stuff there’s people who will tell you okay don’t use these plugins. Use the caching plugins, set them up and if you do that, honestly, most of the solid hosting companies that are out there, guys like us, guys like Joyent, whoever, they’re going to be able to handle that kind of traffic.

Paul: I’d like to give a personal testament to this. That I was actually, I was having a little moan that my site seemed to be running very slowly which I obviously blamed on you guys *laugh* until I then looked at my code and discovered that the Wordpress super cache code that had been running quite successfully, I’d screwed it up somehow and it’d stopped working and the whole site had ground down. So it’s a perfect example of ‘it was my fault and not yours’. *laugh*

Chris: Yeah, it’s one of those things and we work very hard to try and evangelise best practices. It’s an ongoing battle and if you’re out there and you have ideas, we’ve got plenty of ways to get customer feedback and we’d love to hear them. But generally, the more knowledge we can spread the better as it certainly saves us quite a bit as well. It’s like being a Doctor, they always say that preventative medicine is much cheaper than treating things and it’s the same thing with hosting. Knowing what you’re doing at the outset and getting it right before you’re in trouble is much much easier than fixing it when you’re already in hot water.

Paul: Yeah, totally. It’s interesting there, you talk about evangelising and going out there and spreading best practice. That kind of brings us on to the area of customer service and that kind of stuff. When people are looking for hosting companies, we immediately look at 100% up time, you know, and all these kind of marketing phrases that are thrown around and scalability but I think there’s a lot more to using a hosting company than just their technical infrastructure. I think customer service is massively important and I was just interested in your perspective about dealing with customer service issues and what kind of best practice you’re seeing in the industry about dealing with customers.

Marcus: I’ve got bags on this. I’d be interested to hear what you’re going to say.

*Everyone laughs*

Chris: I’ll be very blunt. I wish there was something resembling a best practice I could point to in the industry. I don’t think that there is. At Media Temple we absolutely pride ourselves in our customer service. We’re 150 employees plus last time I looked which is crazy because I was like employee 15, you know, but the vast majority of our company is customer support agents. We’re always looking for more guys that are good. 24/7, 365 phone support, ticketing system, we do the best we can and we’re always trying to make it better.

Paul: I’m going to push you a little bit. Phone support. Where do I go to when I phone you? Who am I speaking to and where are they in the world?

Chris: You are speaking to people who are in our main offices in Culver City in Los Angeles.

Paul: See now there we go, for me that is a real killer point. So often you end up in some country somewhere, I mean okay they speak brilliant English but we seem to misunderstand one another a lot of the time and it can be quite a frustrating experience, and the phone network doesn’t seem to be that great. Okay so those people that I’m talking to in your call centres, and I know we’re becoming a bit Media Temple specific… also the level of their technical knowledge is another big thing, because I mean I’ve actually, I’m writing the Web Site Owner’s Manual at the minute, and when I’ve finished writing it it’ll come out, and one of the things I say in that is Hosting. I will actually encourage people to pick up the phone, call the hosting company, find out who you are getting to speak to and what’s their level of knowledge. Because sometimes, I’m a Web Developer, and I ring up and I know more about the hosting than they do. Do you know what I mean?

Chris: Absolutely, back when I did freelance work before I worked at Media Temple, these days I know a lot of system stuff but back then I just knew a lot of PHP and Perl and it was horribly annoying when I would call my clients’ hosting companies for them and I knew more than the guy I was talking to. I’m like, it’s your job to understand DNS, you should know it better than me. At MT we have dedicated, when we hire somebody they go through a regimented training course that’s in place. We have people whose job it is to train incoming tech support people and the curriculum’s always evolving. When people get through that they’re put into a frontline queue but we’ve got a secondary group of people that’s for more complex problems. Obviously we try to get people to graduate.. then there’s a third tier of support past that. Then if you get to them and they can’t figure it out we have a defined pipeline straight into engineering. So typically if the L3 guys can’t figure it out and they hit up one of the more senior admin guys, the admin guys know that this is probably really a problem and I probably really need to look at it right now. It’s something that’s evolved over time and it’s always in flux but it’s something that’s been working for us very well for the past, I’m not even sure when the Level 3 thing … it’s been a year and a half, 2 years and our support manager, Andrew Wong, has done a fantastic job of defining these different knowledge levels and a process for getting customers through them if they’ve got complex problems. That’s where we are today and hopefully we’ll be somewhere cooler tomorrow.

Paul: You were talking about when you were a freelancer and ringing up on behalf of your clients and their Web Hosting. Obviously a lot of the people listening to this show, there are a lot of website owners listening to the show but there are also a lot of freelancers and there’s always this issue of hosting, right. None of them want to deal with it. Hosting’s the horrible bit. Why you got involved with this stuff is quite beyond me. Why anyone would want to have anything to do with it just boggles my mind. So everyone hates hosting. One option is that they tell the client right it’s your problem, you’ve got to find the hosting company but in most cases that doesn’t work so the Web Designer then becomes responsible for dealing with the hosting side of things. One of the things that when we started out, we used Fasthost because it had this reseller package and they had this whole way of managing clients. I’m quite interested in what your thoughts are on that and whether you like dealing with the website owner directly or whether it should be going through the Web Designer. Do you know what I’m getting at here or am I rambling rubbish questions?

Chris: At MT we literally built the company on this idea that we target people that make sites. In the early 2000s we targeted graphic designers and then we moved to the people who were standards evangelists, you know the Jeffrey Zeldman umbrella of people. And now we’re additionally moving into people who are more pure software guys. We’re partnering with jQuery and the Django guys and that sort of stuff. We chase after the influencers, the guys that are in the ‘making’ process. I don’t think it matters too much that your’e talking to someone who is servicing their own clients or someone who’s the site owner. The point is that if we’re providing good customer support it shouldn’t matter. If people know they can call up, and I don’t care if it’s the developer or whoever owns the site, they should be able to get an understanding of what’s going on. Our internal ticketing system is very focussed on continuity. So you can call in and probably not get the same person you called last time, but the person you call is going to see all the notes and understand there’s a history of what’s going on. So our approach is focus on making support as good as we possibly can and as long as that’s true whoever calls us should get a good experience. That’s our goal.

Paul: Which is an admirable goal!

Marcus: What my bugbear with hosting companies has been, is as we were saying earlier, good hosting, you don’t notice it. It’s there in the background and works beautifully. You only ever notice it when there’s a problem. Fortunately there usually aren’t that many problems so what tends to happen with me, and it’s just a personal thing but I’m sure it might ring some bells with other people. Certain companies who I’ve worked with in the past insist that I quote my pin code back at them, this long, great membership number kind of thing, and I can’t find it. And the site’s down – Arrgh – this kind of thing. I guess this is my chance to rant ‘don’t do that!’ You’ll have my name on record, I come from the company just look up the company name, my name, the Domain Name. I don’t need to have to have a pin code because I only ring up every two years. It’ll be somewhere but I don’t need it when I’m panicking today.

Chris: Certainly that is a tricky problem. There are legal issues that we just can’t start talking to anybody. So we do have to have some sort of authentication process. We try to be as easy as possible, you know if you can give us the last 4 of your credit card number you’re probably going be able to talk to us.

Marcus: We can always do that one.

Chris: Typically we say what’s your Domain Name, who are you, are you listed as the contact, what’s your password? Then of course people don’t always have their password but there’s a very fast button that we can send an email that goes out instantly to whatever that email is so if you don’t already know, it’s a 30 second process ‘oh you don’t know, okay I’m going to email that to you right now.’

Marcus: That’s fine. In the example I was giving you, it was ‘we can’t talk to you then, sorry goodbye.’

Chris: Oh that’s ridiculous. I don’t know who it was but…

Paul: It does raise, what we’re getting into, we’re kind of going off the subject of hosting and into the whole realm of online customer service which is so massively important I think. Things like providing as many different mechanisms to contact people. You talked about your great ticketing service but you know, if you’re panicking because something’s gone down you want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to a real human being. So getting that mix right and dealing with that is so crucial to any organisation that offers any kind of service online.

Chris: Yeah, well transparency is one of the huge buzz words going around, right? And we’re trying to eat our own dog food on that one as much as we can. We have 24/7 365 phone support. We have an online ticketing system so if you don’t want to call in you can just write us and it comes up with the ticket and we try and answer.

Paul: And you answer your tickets so quickly is what impresses me. You say that you’re not going to, on the site, it says we’re going to get back to you, I can’t remember what it says but you always get back much quicker than that in my experience anyway.

Chris: We certainly try to. One thing I think has really helped is we’re as active on Twitter as we can be, if there are problems …

Paul: I’ve got a problem with this. I don’t like you guys on Twitter because I can’t have a good moan about you on Twitter without one of you lot getting back to me saying ‘Is there a problem? Can we help’

*Laughs*

Chris: More than that because typically MT is no longer a small group, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of Domains hosted so if something goes wrong chances are it’s going to affect more than one person. And if that happens we Twitter about it, we try and let people know ‘Yes, we know there’s a problem. Yes we’re working on it’ We also have, and if you’re a new MT customer please check this out, on our blog there’s an incident tracking system that there’s an RSS feed for, so if there’s what we consider to be an incident going on, something that affects more than a very small number of people, it goes up there. You can get it in your RSS feed because a lot of the time that’s just what it is. ‘Hey, my email’s not working’ and people just want to know yes, we know, we’re on it. The alarms are going off, whatever, and we’re able to flush a lot of tickets out that way. In our ticketing system if there’s an incident up, and we’re getting these tickets in we can say that’s part of the incident, that’s part of the incident and when we resolve it kind of all gets done at once. But if you are an MT customer please definately, of course things sometimes go wrong but we try and let people know before if we can.

Paul: It’s that customer service level I think is so important and if you look at the really successful companies out there, I think it’s as much about customer service, how you deal with problems, respond to problems and respond to questions, than anything else. That’s why I select companies, is on the quality of there customer service which is what differentiates you I guess. There are a lot of hosting companies out there with boxes that you are putting stuff on to get it out there on the web (massively over simplifying it)… *laugh* It’s the customer service and how you deal with that that makes one hosting company stand out from another.

Chris: If I were advising anyone to look for a hosting company that’s the first thing I would look for – see what their reputation is, for customer service. For us, and for any hosting company, I’ve seen a lot look under the tyres [and see things] that’s not their fault. It is human nature to complain more than to laud praise, but that said, do the best you can to see who’s going to be able to support the kinds of problems… like I said, we’ve got some great Rails options at MT but I know the Engine Yard guys are fantastic at it from what I can tell. If I was going to do a serious Rails app I would probably want to use them. I’m not even going to lie. *laughs* I’m going to give them those props because they really do a fantastic job. The first thing I would look at would be what is their reputation for customer support. the second things I would ask would be ‘who do you buy your hardware from?’…

Paul: Oh okay, that’s interesting I wouldn’t have asked that question.

Chris: Yeah and a lot of people don’t right? It’s very easy to buy really cheap hardware. Honestly all hardware breaks. The difference is our hardware is essentially all from HP, some from Microsystems and when their bits break we have replacement parts in 24 hours – always. I’ve dealt with people when things break and they’re like ‘yeah… *pause yeah… *pause’.

*everyone laughs*

Chris: And then qualify if they are providing whatever technologies I need to get my job done.

Marcus: I’ve got one more point. Do they do a really good party at SXSW? *everyone laughs*

Paul: We should be wrapping this up but from a marketing point of view you guys are very smart. You often target speaker’s dinners and parties at SXSW. You really know how to reach a community and how to reach the influencers within that community.

Chris: Yeah, it’s exactly what I was saying earlier with the target audience that we kind of go after. But those parties we do at SXSW, or speaker dinners or whatever those things are, that’s our marketing budget. It doesn’t come from some kind of hospitality… I don’t know how other companies do it but we don’t do traditional marketing. We don’t spend a lot of money on Google Adwords, you don’t see us in magazines. We try and get out there and talk to people that are making websites, that are making websites better, the influencers, the thought leaders in the space. We’ve been doing it since before I worked there. If that ever stops working for us we’ll figure out a better strategy but I’ve been at MT for 6 1/2 years now and it’s working as well or better today than when I started so we’re going to keep on it.

Paul: Good, I need to keep having good Swag!

*everyone laughs*

Paul: Thank you so much for coming on the show, that was really interesting.

Chris: Thanks.

Thanks goes to Wendy Phillips for transcribing this interview.

This interview is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is an ecommerce solutions made by designers, for designers. For more information visit shopify.com/boagworld.

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Categories: Featured Blogs

Web Design News 20/04/10

Tue, 04/20/2010 - 05:34

The dying art of design

There is a great but challenging article on smashing magazine this week for all you designers.

Entitled “The Dying Art of Design” it challenges us as designers to stop focusing on tool and techniques but instead focus on creativity and originality.

The author writes…

The diet of a typical designer is low in in-depth content and high in inspirational lists, tutorials and freebies. A review of blogs and our poll of design professionals shows a clear trend in the informational diet of creatives. They consume a lot but bypass a deeper understanding of design. In-depth articles and case studies are the least-read articles. Over 75% of the articles that designers read are either design tutorials or inspirational lists.

This has certainly been my experience on Boagworld too. My most popular posts have been those light on content and heavy on inspiration.

He concludes my writing:

While modern design tools and resources certainly make our many tasks easier, they don’t always improve our work. Tools and shortcuts are temporary. Great design is timeless. The best tool available is sitting in our heads; we just need to upgrade it once in a while.

Chris Bence, Shutterstock

Twitter introduces tools for developers

At this weeks official Twitter conference (Chirp), Twitter announced a new raft of development tools that can be found at dev.twitter.com.

These tools make it easier than ever to integrate twitter into your application or website. In fact it opens up the ability to integrate in ways never before possible.

For the majority of us the most exciting part in @Anywhere that allows you to integrate Twitter seamlessly into your site with just a few lines of Javascript.

New features include…

If you make heavy use of Twitter to support your website then this definitely worth checking out.

The gradual disappearance of flash

I have developed a reputation for being anti-flash. However, when you read the beginning of “The Gradual Disappearance of Flash” you will consider me a friend of flash developers everywhere!

The author begins:

Given the widespread adoption and advancements of modern browsers and JavaScript libraries, using Flash makes little sense.

He then goes on to deconstruct just flash is no-longer necessary including…

The improvements in standards
The iPhone and iPad lack of support
The proprietary nature of flash
Progressive enhancement
Support for video in HTML
And more

Fortunately before he is burned alive by the Flash community he does begin to tone things down focusing on the strengths of flash. However, you can tell his heart is not in it.

Despite the bias of the article I do feel he has a point. There are fewer and fewer reasons to use flash and no excuse for building entire flash websites.

He could be right, perhaps we are seeing the beginning of the end for Flash.

Old school marketing techniques don’t work online

Talking of uncontrolled rants Gerry McGovern is on good form this week. In his post “Web customers care about tasks, not goals” he shares his experiences of trying to hire a cleaner online…

I was at a house cleaner website and this lady was smiling out at me with her hands behind her head. Hello. I need a cleaner. She’s not going to do much cleaning for me if she has her hands behind her head. And she’s saying to me: “Book a cleaner and get time for you.”

That was a big breakthrough for me. For years we’ve had a cleaner and I never really understood why. But this website educated me. It’s all about time. And then this hands-behind-her-head-big-grinning-lady asks me: “Are you looking for a cleaner?” Well, duh. Actually, no. I’m looking for a set of golf clubs, but for some wholly unfathomable reason I typed the following text into Google: “house cleaner”.

bikeriderlondon, Shutterstock

His point here is that marketeers are applying principles of offline marketing to the web. For example conventional wisdom says that you need to sell the benefits (e.g. book a cleaner and get time for you) to the consumer. However, that doesn’t take into account that web users have already recognised and acted on their need by searching. What we need to do is facilitate the fulfilment of that need, rather than create the need in the first place.

Gerry sums this up at the end when he writes…

The cleaning websites I went to told me truly useless things I already knew but didn’t tell me the things I really wanted to know: hourly rates, whether they worked in my area, whether they cleaned on weekends.

I think a lot of us still need to learn these lessons.

Google ranking now affected by site speed

We have known it was coming for a while but finally it has happened: Google now partially ranks your website on speed.

However, no need to panic yet. According to Sitepoint…

[Google says] “while site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page” and at the moment, “fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal”.

Of course as they go on to point out 1% of all Google searches would still be a huge number of sites.

kropic1, Shutterstock

Sitepoint goes on to share a number of ways you can improve the speed of your site many of which I mention in my own post ‘5 ways to give your site a speed boost in less than 30 minutes‘.

Looks like performance is going to be the next big thing.

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Categories: Featured Blogs

Building and running a successful community

Mon, 04/19/2010 - 04:26

Patrick: Hello? Can you hear me?

Paul: Excellent stuff Patrick. Oh, we got a picture on the wall.

Ryan: Oh, yes.

Patrick: Our night begins.

Paul: Lets set you up then Patrick. You know, it’s a real pleasure to get to speak to you. I don’t know, this is where you gonna say: “Yes, have met hundreds of times.” Have we actually MET before?

Patrick: At SXSW.

Paul: Damn!

Patrick: We went for dinner, remember that? You send a tweet out, and I showed up, I think you were at the Omni? Maybe? And we had dinner.

Paul: I remember, yes!

Patrick: And [fox?] was there.

Paul: Yes, yes, yes. I am being really thick, I am sorry.

Patrick: It was really brief. So it’s evening out. It was at SXSW, so no one really remembers much.

Paul: You have no idea how many names I have already got wrong today, and how much I have screwed up. But by this stage in the affair, I am gonna let myself off of that. Patrick, thank you soo much for coming on to the show at the point where we are beginning to lose the plot.

Patrick: Thanks for having me.

Paul: If we are not coherent in our questions and we are not making sense, then please feel free to make up your own questions, and answer them yourself.

Patrick: I have got a list right here.

Paul: Why don’t you start by introducing yourself for people that don’t know you.

Patrick: Sure, so again I am Patrick O’Keefe. I run the iFroggy Network at ifroggy.com. It’s a network of websites that is covering various interests, communities, blogs, etc. I have been managing online communities for over nine years, coming up on ten years. And I wrote a book called “Managing online forums”, which is a practical guide to managing online communities and social spaces.

Paul: OK. It sounds like you said that a few times before. That was very slick.

Patrick: I have, it needs to be short.

Paul: I guess so. We were just saying you also do a podcast now, the SitePoint podcast? So you are obviously a professional podcaster, very slick.

Patrick: Euhm … [starts laughing]

Paul: Euh…

Patrick: No, I have been hosting podcasts for a few years. I hosted a show called “The Community of Men” show, about managing online communities, for a while, for a year and a half, like 2005 to 2006. We posted a SitePoint podcast from pilot to now, I think it’s episode 49ish, it’s temporal lead, and I also host a show called , which is about plagiarism and copyright infringement, co-hosted with Jonathan Bailey.

Paul: Cool. I really enjoyed the SitePoint show. It’s really good, and I was just encouraging people to subscribe to it.

Patrick: I heard that. Thank you.

Paul: But where I get really passionate is with your interesting …

Marcus: Passionate Paul, passionate.

Paul: Oh, I am not allowed to say passionate. It’s the banned word for the day. Don’t ask me why. Where I get really enthusiastic then, is with all of the stuff that you do in relationship to community. Community is something that I have been involved with since the very early days of the web, I was involved with one of the first online communities called The Well, I was involved with the early days of GeoCities. So to see you writing a book on communities and forums, and that kind of thing, it’s just soo cool to see people addressing that kind of issue, and talking about that.

Tell us a little bit about the book and why you felt the need to write it, and what kind of things it covers.

Patrick: Well, thank you first and foremost for the kind words, but you know, I write, I don’t know, I like to think I am writer. I have been a writer, for you know, 10 years for various online publications and so one, and I am passionate about online community. As I said I have been doing it for 10 years, direct management, responsibility, it’s something I enjoy doing, it’s something I have done for a long time, and that is sort of how the book came about, putting two things together. Having experiences that I wanted to share, that I thought could help people, because that is really the value: if you help people or not. And I like to write, so I put the two together, so the book took me about five years in all, from idea to publishing, I took my time, and I went on my own schedule, threw everything in there that I thought would be good. Everything that I know is in that book. So that is sort of how it came about, I just wanted to share that knowledge, and it is something I am passionate about.

Paul: Cool. Obviously the thing that may jump into people’s minds is that you started writing this book five years ago, and the landscape has changed massively over that time, and now there is social media and all of this kind of stuff, you know it is no longer just about managing forums, it’s about managing communities that are dispersed over lots of different places, from Twitter to Facebook, to everywhere else.

Do you feel that the principles are still pretty much the same?

Patrick: Well, I like to think that, or actually a friend of mine Lee LeFever of CommonCraft who said that “forums or sort of the basis or part of the foundation of social media”, so all these tools that we have now … I love Facebook, I love Twitter, but we have all these tools, and they are all great in their own way, but forums are sort of a standby, I don’t think forums are going away, I think the text based communication in a thread is basically what a forum is, when you really get down to the nuts and bolds, and I think that is something we will want to do. For as long as I can see people want to talk to each other on text, they don’t want to see each other necessarily, like we are right now, they don’t want to talk to each other maybe all of the time, but text, I think, is here to stay. And we are dealing with a lot of text based mediums and I think a lot of the same principles apply, whether you are talking about a chat room, a group, people still use Yahoo groups, called groups, I am on a Yahoo groups mailing list right now! So for communities that’s great. But there are all these older tools that we have, like mailing lists and so on, and they are text based, and the same principle sort of applies: having guidelines, and making sure those guidelines are followed, and encouraging healthy discussion between members, regardless of whatever kind of space it is. Those values tend to stay true.

Paul: Yeah, because ultimately people are people. And community is about people, rather than about the technology and the mechanisms through which they communicate.

Patrick: Right. That is basically it, and I think even though the title of the book, or I might talk about forums A LOT, forums are just one thing. When you look at Facebook, you see forum like components. You see threaded conversations, you see text discussions, the discussion tab on Facebook groups, and fan pages. You look at MySpace, there is similar things, you know. It’s hard to draw comparison to Twitter, but you are looking at threaded conversations, then I think all these community spaces have local rules, things that not need to be adjusted and accounted for, that are for them only, but at the same time there are overriding guiding principles that apply to a community in general.

Paul: Yeah, absolutely, I entirely agree with that. I mean, there are still a group of people that are kind of somewhat hesitant about communities, and about social media. Especially website owners, especially for relatively large websites, there is a fear associated with running a community, they might even pursue social media being a bit of a bandwagon thing that everyone needs to get involved with. Why do you think that website owners like that really should be taking communities seriously, and engaging with the people that visit their websites?

Patrick: Well I think there is a couple of different things.

First, I like to think that everyone has a community. Whether or not if you are a business or a public persona -obviously private persons are not included in that category. But if you are company, if you are a public personality, someone who is out there trying to sell something, trying to get an audience, you have a community. Now, that community is the community who uses your products, who like what you do. Everyone who does something like that, from toilet paper to anything else, has a community. People who like their product. And the question is whether or not you acknowledge that community and engage with it. And you don’t have to necessarily engage with it. There are companies that have been around for a long time, that probably don’t engage with their customers as they should be. They offer a good price, and you know that should be the focus, and that is why people use it. But, at the same time, you know, this community of people who is behind you, can be very valuable in all sorts of ways: improving your product, spreading news. It is effectively a captive audience of people who want to know whatever it is you are doing.

So, if you can take advantage of that, obviously you can be doing yourself a service as a business, and there is a lot of different benefits to that as well. It doesn’t have to be an onsite community, it can be Twitter or Facebook. You know, there is different needs, and you need to filter through the different services. But, if you go where that community is, there is usually not a whole lot of downside to creating a relationship.

Paul: No, I mean, yeah, you are spot on there in everything you are saying, and I have been trying to encourage clients for a long time to really engage with communities. What can of different ways do you think a website owner can do to go about engaging with their visitors? What are the different options that are available to them?

Patrick: Well, I mean there is [an endless list?] of different options. I think if you are talking about it actually being on the website, you are probably talking about some form of hosted community, and if it’s forum software, or if it’s even a blog – a blog is a community, it has comments, you know it’s a community – and maybe blogging is an easy place to start for someone, where they could simply talk about the business, talk about the things they are doing, initiatives they are being undertaken, ask questions, that’s an obvious one, ask questions of customers and see what they say. I think that is a simple thing that you can do on your website. Forums are a little more engaging, a little more responsibility there, a bit more work I would say, but it can be very rewarding. Because if you can cultivate the community on your site that is around a brand – that is kind of a challenge – especially for smaller brands, that is a pretty big challenge, but if you can do it, then again, I think you have that really strong captive audience that is sort of waiting for whatever cool thing you have coming next. And a way to share it, and to talk about it, to help improve it, and that is a golden thing. That is the main way that businesses make money from community that actually sell a product.

Actually you can make money through advertising and other things, but a business that has a product to sell, a community like that are just waiting for the next product to come out, and they want to talk about, share it, and prove it, and buy it.

Paul: Yeah. I mean one of the big things you do see a lot of people, established communities, established organisations, a lot of communities, recognise the value of it, jump in there, they get a forum build on their site, they open a Twitter account, they start their Facebook page and then they are disappointed with the results. It doesn’t turn out as they expect. What are the kind of common mistakes you are seeing from organisations, as they are trying to build communities. Where are they going wrong?

Patrick: I think though, the biggest thing is: community is hard. I mean, it is easy to have people out there talking about you, but it is a whole different thing to actually build a community on your site, and have a lot of people contribute. This is a hard thing to do.

BUT, I think one key to it is that first of all there needs to be commitment, from an organisational standpoint. I think that if you launch a forum, and you expect it to be active in a month or you are cutting the cord, just don’t do it at all. Don’t even make the commitment in the first place. There needs to be a long term commitment – and I got this from Shaun Diddy Combs – but he says that he is not a sprinter, he is a marathon runner. That’s how your community is. It’s a marathon run, it’s not getting from point A to point B in sixty seconds, it’s a long term commitment, and that is resources, that is people, that is money. And if you are not going to make that commitment then I don’t think you should go all out, and you know, regardless of what you do, starting small is always a good idea.

So if you start with, let’s say a Facebook fan page, then you get some traction there, you get some activity, get some discussion going on. Then maybe you have the community, you have the ware with all to launch a stand alone community on your own site, and engage in a deeper way, you have people actually on your website, you have a deeper access to them.

But starting small, and growing, not trying to do too much at once, not launching a full forum, a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and every other social profile you can think of, all at one time. More often than not, I think that might lead to just a lot of inactive profiles, and I think at the end of the day you might want to have 1 active one, versus 10 inactive ones or 10 moderately inactive ones.

Paul: Hmmm. I do think a lot of people jump into traditional forums way too early. I mean, there is some really obvious challenges with forums, where you are having threaded conversations and there isn’t a lot of traffic, there is not a lot of people who are using it, you know, messages can get lost in this kind of hierarchy of threads and you can feel like the only person at the party. While compared to something like a Facebook page where the discussion is very linear and everybody sees what’s being written, or even a mailing list or something like that, they are much kind of entry level tools, in my opinion. Is that the same kind of approach that you take?

Patrick: Well, I started with forums, so that’s my perspective on it. I think it was a different time when I started launching online communities. In 2001 I launched KarateForums.com, so eight years later, nine years later – God I feel old – but you know I think that it depends. I think it really depends on the situation, what your needs are, what you can do. I think that when you look at a Facebook fan page, what do you see? A lot of short comments. And I think that is what it is primarily build for. Even though people can sit there and type for a while and post a long comment, they just don’t know, there is a discussion tab, but you can’t tell me that that discussions area is more intuitive than a forum. People aren’t usually familiar with that format. It’s just not, and I mean, I think that is even a bigger challenge maybe once you have the Facebook fan page, transitioning those people into having a deeper discussion, rather than having them just drawing by and say “Hey, I love this product!” You know, how do you connect to those people? How do you get talking to them? And I find that Facebook fan page questions maybe aren’t the best way to do that, but at the same time they are better than nothing. There is a lower barrier entry, it’s a lot easier to get started with a Facebook fan page. No forums, community in general, managing a community you are directly responsible for, not just a fan page, but an entire operation, it’s hard. Like I said, and if you can build that kind of community before launching a forum, that is helpful.

Another idea you can do is, to just, well hopefully you have some means of communicating with your customers already. You have a fan club, a mailing list, even the bills thing. However you contact them on a regular basis, you must have some way of saying “Hey, by the way, we are launching this community in the future, and we would like to invite you behind the scenes for an exclusive look, and get your feedback on it, and have you help us improve it. We love your thoughts, we love you to be part of this exclusive community that’s invite only”. And maybe you get 10, 20 people, people who love the product, people who responded to that call out. And then you start building a private community behind the scenes, before you launch, so there is activity already there. And then by the time it does come time to actually launch, then you have some momentum already going, and that makes it a lot easier. So I think for the most part I always like to have some pre-launch community, some sort of private access community that is going on, and we where we can have something going the moment we launch.

Paul: Yeah. That is the big thing, isn’t it, ending up with an empty community the moment you kick off, and then you do have that problem of being the lonely person in the room. I mean, what about, one of the big things that people worry about is scaling their community. So as their community grows, it becomes harder and harder to manage and it could get expensive, and you want a return on investment. What kind of advice do you give in terms of growing a community?

Patrick: I think, Darren Rowse at problogger, on a panel he said something that I think that is pretty fitting. He said: “If you have three people, love those three people.” I think that is how I look at community building. We grow one by one by one. And maybe for some it’s one, two, three, four, five. Maybe for others it’s one … two … and so on. But as [..] going only one person at the time. So the people you already have on your community, those are the people that you should be spending a large amount of your time embracing and encouraging and appreciating. And if you appreciate those people then it will grow through those people: word-of-mouth etc. Having that activity helps you grow. Now as far as supporting a community in general, I mean it’s a website, so a lot of the same online marketing principles apply of course, but I think activity is just a big thing. I think being involved.

A lot of people launch a community – and I hope this is going down in occurrences – but it seems, and I don’t know if it is, where people just expect it to happen, and they go away. Community isn’t like something you come and visit just once a week. I mean you can visit every other day, that’ll be OK, but it’s something you need to be there for. You need to engage and participate, start threads, reply to people, ask questions, talk about things. Whatever presences you have already, promote it through that – if you have a website already in place – obviously it should be linked – a lot of people don’t do that very well. If you have a Facebook fan page already, then it all should be integrated into working together.

When it comes to growing activity, things like contests or give-aways obviously are not novel or new concepts, but they can be effective. I like contests that give you something tangible, not like referral contests where people can sign up for a member, and that member never posts. But actual contributions and articles, and things that can be judged on their merit. They really add to the community, those can be really helpful things. Activity is just a big thing, because all your marketing endeavours, if you spend money on Google Adwords, if you buy advertising for your site, the effectiveness of those campaigns all go back to whether or not your community is already active. Because when people come, that’s one of the things they’ll use to make a decision on whether or not they’ll stay.

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. How do you deal with … , a problem that we have with Boagworld is that I could only invest so much time in the forum, but there was a real desire from the community for the forum to grow, they wanted to get into the forum. And the way that I solved the problem was actually to take those people that were most enthusiastic about the forum and give it over to them, and give them the power, make them community leaders. Is that the kind of approach you would encourage? Does that work? Can we volunteer community leaders? Or have I done it horrible wrong and should I fire them all?

Patrick: I don’t think you have done it horribly wrong. That makes sense. I am a one man operation, with little resources, I’ll be honest.

So I run a network of forums, and I am primarily responsible for them. I do have a volunteer staff that have very little requirements. They are people who have enjoyed the community, most of the time it is them giving back and maintain something that they themselves have benefitted greatly from. Obviously there are small benefits in there as well. But at their core, they are volunteers, and I think that is a great thing, to have people be passionate about the community. I mean I am passionate about the community so that’s ironic, but I think that’s a great thing, but I think it is important to have guidelines for those people, so that they know exactly what their responsibilities are, how they are supposed to go about these responsibilities, and so on. And that there is someone who is overseeing it, I guess, is what I always say. Because I review things that my staff members do, so if they remove a post, or if there is some sort of violation, we have a system of documentation behind the scenes that they logged it in there, and now I see it, and 90% of the time, 95% of the time, what they did is in line perfectly with what our guidelines say, what I want them to do. But there is that 5% where I want to correct it, so that we are consistent so that members are treated 100% the right way, to set the tone for any future things that they should do. Because I always want it to be a 100% correct whenever we take some staff related action, so I think having some sort of over sighting documentation system is important, but beyond that, having the volunteers that love the community is a great thing to do.

Paul: So you talked about providing guidelines to your community leaders. The question that comes out of that is: What kind of guidelines are we talking about? What is it that community leaders need to know in order to be able to effectively run the communities effectively for you.

Patrick: So in my case they are more moderators. I don’t really let anybody have … For example I am the only one who bans people. The less people you have who can ban people, the more consistent the bans are. So that’s why I have it that way, but other than that they have moderator authority to remove threads, any thread or post in public, just contact members to notify them about those violations, and etc. So I have a set of example staff guidelines on the book website, where people can download and see what my guidelines look like.

Paul: Where is that?

Patrick: That’s managingonlineforums.com and there is a link in the sideboard Downloadable Templates and you can download the staff guidelines that I use myself, and you kind of can get a sense. But, basically what they are, they talk about what you do.

So for example: You can remove threads. What do you do? Do you delete them totally or do you move them to a private forum where we can see them later? Or we can have them if something should come up in the future. That sort of thing.

So we tell what their responsibilities are, how they go about executing, what is expected of them? That could be staff related duties, that could be “We expect you to be an example to everyone of this community.” I kind of view my staff members as not just moderators, but people that other members should follow. In an example they should be the example member, so that everyone sees the ideal way of participating in our community. So it just talks about … think of it like: at a corporation you might have an employee manual, it’s not that hard core maybe, but it provides some guidance and some details, because I think if you have nothing then people can do anything. And you know it’s easy to say common sense should apply, but my version of common sense and someone else’s version of common sense may differ greatly. It’s good to have something I can point to and say OK, well this is how we do this, it’s right here in the guidelines, and keep it in mind for the future. And it’s always easier to do that then say: “I had this thought in my head, which no-one has access to”. Perhaps you shouldn’t do that.

Paul: Yeah, and you got to present something to people where they got a really solid line. They know what they are doing, they know where they stand, and there is no uncertainty in the situation, but both in terms of your community leaders, the rules that they abide by, but also that of the entire community I guess.

Patrick: Right. Exactly.

Paul: So, looking forward. How do you think communities are going to evolve on the web over the immediate future. Do you think we are going to see some substantial changes on how communities grow and how communities interact with one another, and how organisations can make use of community.

Patrick: You know, I think what tends to change is the technology. You know, and that is not to say that forums themselves, or … I mean like video for example. YouTube is a community, a video community, there are video communities out there, it’s not that really around text based, although text based comments tend to be a big part of it. I think technology is for the most part what changes, we see new things come up, like a new platform like Twitter, a few years ago, or Facebook etc. where you have this community space. As we talked about earlier, some of the same principles still apply. I think good management strategy doesn’t change as easily as software.

That is why, in my book, I didn’t talk about phpBB version 1 or [..] version this or BBPress or whatever, it’s not about the software, there is tons of good software out there, and there will be more good software out there. What will determine your community success in the end, is the people part of it. How you manage people, how you cultivate their community, and all those things that are actually going into managing actual people, that are irregardless of software. Software doesn’t matter. You have tons of good options these days, so much different from when I started ten years ago, and there was phpBB version 1, and that was it. Like, I mean, literally, that was IT. There was uBB back then, which cost a ton, and now you have so many good options, so many good open source options, software is no longer the issue, it’s the people that matter, and I don’t think that will ever change.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, ultimately the same rules … almost the majority of the rules that you would apply to an online community would equally apply to running an offline community.

Patrick: Right.

Paul: Because ultimately it is about people.

Patrick: Yeah, exactly. Offline community and online community, you know are similar. I always try to take that stigma away from it, because there are people who think: “Online community: it’s not genuine. This is online, you’re at a screen, a computer screen, you are not face-to-face to people, that is not REAL community”. But it is, I mean, why do people meet offline? Because they have common interests for the most part. They want to talk about something in common. Why do they meet online? Same thing, you know? So that’s how I view it.

Paul: I mean, I guess, the major difference, at least from my experience is that people are less reserved online. They will be blunter and things, especially textual communication, things can be misunderstood easier. So there is a … do you perhaps need to think twice before responding online, you know compared to offline. But other than that it is very similar, very similar.

Patrick: Right. And yes, [..] “irregardless” is not a word. Thank you, thank you very much.

[Laughter]

Patrick: I knew it as soon as I said it, OK, I am just kidding.

But yeah, I think that is very true, and I think obviously what I have to say is that the online world, the internet as a whole, has made the good things better, you know, you look at charity endeavours and things, and you see like Haiti and whatever, and just the amount of the money that was raised it can’t be duplicated 10, 15, 20 years ago. There is just no way.

Paul: Yeah.

Patrick: But is also makes the bad things worse. It makes bad people, it gives them more of an anonymous opportunity where they are not as easily spotted maybe, as they would be offline. So good things better, bad things worse. And that applies to community, it applies to how you handle yourself online and how much that amplifies. You just said “being careful of what you say”, but hey, it’s also access to those people who want to have conversations and to share information.

Paul: Mmmm. Well excellent! Absolutely excellent! Really enjoyed chatting with you Patrick. I wish we could chat for longer, but Ryan has got carried away with endless guests, more than you can possible ever image on one show.

Patrick: You know we have been talking about having you on the SitePoint podcast, and us, or one of us on your podcast.

Paul: Yeah.

Patrick: So you know, maybe just one day it won’t be just talk.

Paul: Yeah, one day. Perhaps we ought to do a joint show. That’s what we should do. And then we can double it up and get twice as muchfor our money.

Patrick: Well, I appreciate you having me. And congratulations on having the 200th episode. And I guess we’ll see you at SXSW.

Paul: You certainly will. Can’t wait for it. Look forward to meeting you there. Bye.

Ryan: See you later.

Marcus: Bye, bye.

Paul: Brilliant stuff, I mean I love the subject “community”, and it’s something I could talk about absolutely endlessly. Possibly, I mean, for fear of getting gushy, possibly because Boagworld has been the success it has been because of the people that pitched in, and you know, from Ryan, to Paul, to Anna and then all of our community leaders as well. And all the people that transcribe the show. I am constantly amazed at how much effort people will put in, to something that, really they don’t get a lot benefit back other than listening me waffle at them once a week.

What are you laughing at Marcus?

Marcus: Emma Bolton here, seemed to have totally missed Boagworld 200: “Can anyone give me a summary of what was just said?”

[Lots of laughing]

Marcus: Superb.

Paul: Yeah, that’s not going to happen, I am sorry to say.

Marcus: But we are recording all of it.

Paul: We are recording all of that. I think that the further into this I go, the more I think we need to basically release this content in every possible way, to justify the amount of effort has gone into doing it.

Ryan: I have now squeezed Jonathan Snook into our last free half-an-hour.

Paul: Oh, for crying out loud!

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Content Clinic Giveaway

Mon, 04/19/2010 - 03:55

This competition is now closed: However, you can still book a content clinic

I’ve got a 30 minute content clinic session left in my diary and I’m going to give it away for free before he gets back.

If you fancy 30 minutes of first aid for your site content, then send me a tweet to @RellyAB telling me what content on your site needs emergency surgery, why I should take a scalpel to it and the tag #hcc1904 for a chance to get a complimentary content health check.

I’ll pick a winner at random just before 5pm BST.

And, as always, I’m available to discuss massaging the kinks out of your about page, pummeling your content descriptions into shape or any aspect of your content’s health.
Book into the outpatient department at our content clinic page.

Relly
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207. Content isn’t compost

Fri, 04/16/2010 - 02:20

Web Design News

This week: How to be the worlds worst project manager and how to alienate visitors. Also, why FAQs are failing and why page weight still matters.

Read ‘Do you need a content strategy’

Do you need a content strategy?

Are you investing in your content? Do you have a strategy? If not then help is at hand. You need a content strategist, but who are they and what do they do?

Review: The best wireframing tool yet?

When there are so many wireframe tools that help plan your website, finding the right one can be challenging. However, I think I have found a real gem.

Read ‘The best wireframing tool yet?’
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Review: The best wireframing tool yet?

Thu, 04/15/2010 - 09:57

This review is brought to you by Web Directions @media. Bringing together world experts in design and development, over 2 days of conference and 2 days of workshops, Web Directions @media continues to be the web professionals networking event of the year. It also includes the Boagworld Big Breakfast so don’t miss out.

Wireframes are absolutely crucial to any web project. Most of the time these can be as simple as a hand drawn sketch. However, there are occasions when you want something a little more sophisticated.

Maybe your wireframe needs to be more interactive. Maybe you just want it to look more impressive for the client. Whatever the case, there are no shortage of tools that will do the job.

From web apps like Balsamiq and Mockingbird to desktop software like Omnigraffle or even Powerpoint, there is no shortage of ways to wireframe.

Each have their pros and cons but all seem to fall down in one fundamental way – It is hard to share your wireframes with the client. For example Mockingbird is a great wireframing tool, but clients who use IE cannot view them. Balsamiq suffers from a similar problem where wireframes can only be shown as images.

These tools are all great for internal development. However, as a communication tool with the client they fail miserably.

However, while at SXSW I ran into a chap who has built a tool that overcomes this problem. The app is called Flairbuilder.

Present your wireframes to clients with ease

Like Balsamiq, Flairbuilder is an Adobe Air application. This means it is cross platform unlike many of my previous software recommendations.

Building in Flairbuilder is similar to other wireframing tool. It is quick, easy and fairly intuitive.

Things get interesting when you have finished and want to show the client. At this point you have a couple of options.

You can email the saved file to the client and tell them to open it using the Flairbuilder online viewer.

Alternatively you can upload the finished wireframe to your own server and send the client a URL which automatically loads that file into the viewer. e.g.

http://www.flairbuilder.com/viewer/?url=http://www.boagworld.com/sample.fbp

Because the viewer is built in flash it is accessible to anybody with the plugin and provides a consistent viewing experience independent of browser or operating system.

However it isn’t just Flairbuilder’s sharing capabilities that makes it so good. It is also the functionality of the application itself.

Everything you would expect and more

Flairbuilder does everything you would expect from a wireframing application. You can add, edit and remove pages. You can insert boxes, text, form elements and other screen objects. These can be dragged around the page and edited to your hearts content.

However, Flairbuilder is not designed primarily as a static wireframing tool. It is designed as a powerful prototyping application. Elements are not static. You can add events to them in order to make them interactive.

We are not just talking about linking pages together either. In Flairbuilder it is possible to…

Show and hide elements
Display popup windows
Create carousels and slideshows
Build working tabs
Insert usable accordions

The list goes on.

In short Flairbuilder is the most powerful wireframing tool I have yet to encounter.

A reasonable price

What makes it even more amazing is the price. Admittedly it cannot compete with Mockingbird which is currently free. However, for the additional functionality you get over something like Balsamiq (priced at $79) the $99 price tag seems very reasonable.

Any drawbacks?

With me heaping all of this praise on Flairbuilder you might be under the impression I am being paid for this review. I am not. The creator did give me a free copy, but he did so without ever asking for anything in return. The reason I am writing this review is because I am honestly impressed with the product.

However, it does have one drawback. It can become slow when dealing with large wireframes. When you start adding in a lot of imagery (not something one often does with wireframes) it seems to slow the whole system down considerably. This can prove very frustrating at times.

That said, a recent update seems to have gone some way to improving the problem and I am sure more updates will follow shortly.

Finally, if I was being super picky I would say the application has a small learning curve when you start. This is hardly surprising with so much power under the hood. However, this could prove problematic if you are new to such tools.

Do I recommend Flairbuilder?

So do I recommend this application? Absolutely. At least, I do if you want a tool that can build complex wireframes and prototypes that need to be viewed by a wide range of people.

If on the other hand you just need something simple for your own reference then a free product like Mockingbird maybe the way to go.

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Why you need a content strategist

Wed, 04/14/2010 - 06:12

This interview is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is an ecommerce solutions made by designers, for designers. For more information visit shopify.com/boagworld.

I have a confession to make. Sometimes people ask me, casually, what it is that I do. And up until now I have always shuffled my feet, crinkled my brow for a second and settled for

‘I’m a writer. For websites, mostly.’

‘Oh, like blogs and things?’

‘Yeah. Mostly. Yeah.’

This is a 24 carat lie. And I need to stop it.

So, humour me. Let’s pretend we are stood having a quick coffee in the break at a conference. I’ve asked you what you do and you say that you run a business, selling through different channels but recently you’ve noticed a pick up in interest in your website. I nod and say

‘Yeah, I work on the web too.’

‘Oh really? What is it that you do?’

‘I’m a content strategist.’

‘Oh. Er, is that like a consultant?’

‘No. Well, sort of. Anyway, sit down. I’ve prepared a lecture with slides.’

(You can see why this might not work out so well in reality)

I am the ambassador for your poor, maligned content. Content has for too long been the ragged step-sister in the web fairytale. I am her fairy godmother and I’m here to ensure we all live happily ever after.

A content strategist looks after everything on your website that communicates with your audience. When we first meet, I ask a lot of questions about how your business works, what messages you want to get across and what your business’/ products’ best features are. I look at (and sometimes create) the wireframes and the proposed information architecture of your website, consider interaction instructions, and whether a message is best explained with a screencast or a series of step-by-step by pictures. It all starts with a spreadsheet and a four point plan:

Audit

I look at all your existing content across all channels, brand guidelines and any styleguides you might have.

I gather all that information into a couple of documents to guide our next steps. This means I put my eye over as much as your content as I possibly can, noting aspects of it in a spreadsheet for later reference, looking for good examples, articles that might need revision, items that are outdated, trivial or redundant, how searchable it is, what metadata there is and lots more besides.

Shutterstock

After this I write editorial and authorship guidelines to guide the creation of future content. This means you have a singular place to refer to writing style, references to trademarked products, product description guidelines, tone of voice for articles and brand guidelines for online use.

This bit is vitally important as the outcome is an in-depth knowledge of what is on your current site, what should be on your new site and how it should sound to your readers, which every single person writing for your site can benefit from. The result will be disciplined content, that sounds consistent, on message and smart.

Plan

Now I have these documents that help me work out what the content should sound like, I can commission new articles, revise product descriptions, rewrite that redundant ‘about us’ page, remove the company mission statement that no-one reads. But to do it right, and in the right order, I work with an information architect to find what really needs to be on the site.

We start out by considering everything we could do – a company blog, a youtube video diary, a screencast for product use, regular articles addressing customer concerns, a weekly email out – and then focus on what will help with the goals of the company and of the users of the site. An important consideration is ‘What is possible?’. Is there someone responsible for this content and keeping it fresh and accurate? Are there resources for creating a video diary? Is there a budget for content (and if not, why not?!!)

Shutterstock

I create a workflow to ensure there is a regular flow of new content and that it meets the standards we have set – either from within the company or commissioned from content creators, who can be briefed with the styleguide we created.

Creation

Let’s do this thing! We set in action the plan we have created. Sometimes I am responsible for creating this content, or seeking out people that can, and other times there is a dedicated content creator (or team) in the business, or someone from each product team.

That said, writing for your website shouldn’t be an extracurricular activity appended to anyone’s work description. Your content deserves better as it is the hardest working part of your website.

Let me say that again:

Your content is the hardest working part of your website.

Shutterstock

Your content sells your services, captures the interest of potential customers, guides users through your site to achieve the goal they set out to do, instructs them on how to purchase from you, collects their information, lets people know the terms and conditions for a transaction with you, describes the unique collection you have for sale, rewards them for their brand loyalty, introduces customers to the positive experience they get shopping with you.

(At this point, I hope your coffee has been left to go cold and you are nodding, agog at the revelation of what a content strategist does, and taking notes to take home from this imaginary conference we met at. Remember? You asked what I did, in the break, and I broke out into a lecture?)

Taking care of business

So. How do I know if this content is doing what it should? There are two aspects to this. In the short term, I like to do some testing. A/B testing or multivariate testing of some aspects of the copy or a new screencast helps identify if your users are adapting to the new content well. Web analytic tools will also help measure if the content is doing the job you want it to do.

Right back at the beginning, when I was asking all those questions about your business and your current site, I was looking for the areas the content could improve and what about your business it could improve. Whether it is reach, penetration, upsell, customer retention or brand recognition (or any of a dozen more), we can use analytics to tell us if people are doing more with your site now than they were previously, or what might need tweaking.

And here is the long-term goal: Keep revising your content. A content strategist will rework the original audit to keep track of what had been created. Sign off on a project will involve the ceremonial handover of a spreadsheet telling you what you have, how it is performing, what is key to keeping it fresh, who is responsible for it within your content creation team and when it needs refreshing.

Content that gets written and then left to rot is no more of interest to your customers (and the health of your business) than the August 1997 copy Good Housekeeping in your doctor’s surgery. You only read it if there is nothing else. Unlike in the waiting room, your customers have plenty of other choices to go read on the web. Make sure the content you have keeps them reading and has them coming back, regularly, for more. Too many sites are a compost bin of rotting content that never gets reviewed, updated, polished or considered at all until someone thinks it stinks and gives it an annual forking through and turning over. That’s when content starts to seem like a big deal.

But here’s the thing: You – Yes, you! – can start this content revision process today!

Start by looking at what content you have right now and if it really matches up to what you would be telling your customers if they were sat with you, at your desk, or in your showroom, factory, wherever. The biggest difference you can make to your site is to look at every which way round your content, copy and those little interactions you make with every user. I promise you’ll find something that sparks a new idea for creating more custom.

So, go! Do it now! Open a spreadsheet program and type:

Start a content revolution, one page at a time.

(I’m so sorry. You just stopped for coffee in the break at this imaginary conference and I’ve gone into a full spiel about my work and it’s gone cold. Let me get you another one.)

And good news! Now if anyone asks what I do I can say ‘Here, take a look at this post on the Boagworld site.’

Even better news! You can discuss your content with Relly in her content clinic.

This interview is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is an ecommerce solutions made by designers, for designers. For more information visit shopify.com/boagworld.

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Web Design News 13/04/10

Tue, 04/13/2010 - 06:14

How to be the world’s worst project manager

Project management is a thankless job. Most of us undertake it reluctantly and yet moan about those who do it as a full time job.

At Headscape we have 3 project managers for a company of 18. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? However, we have learnt that setting our designers and developers free from the burden of project management does wonders for their productivity and having somebody constantly available for our clients makes a dramatic difference to customer satisfaction.

Unfortunately smaller agencies or freelancers do not have project managers. This shifts the burden of project management onto the client or the person actually building the website. The problem is that these people often do not have much experience or training on how to run projects smoothly.

Fortunately Sitepoint has a bit of advice for those of you who are landed with managing projects. Entitled “14 Ways to Be the World’s Worst Web Project Manager” the post outlines a number of ways you can improve how you manage projects. It does this by highlighting 14 ways things can go wrong and explaining how to avoid these pitfalls.

Whether you are a website owner running a project or a freelancer dealing with clients this article is a good read.

Infrequently asked questions

Does your website have an FAQ section? Chances are it does. Most websites seem to have them these days.

The question is why? Do we have FAQs because users find them invaluable or do we have them as a sales tool or dumping area for stuff we don’t know where else to put?

Stephen Gracey certainly doesn’t have much time for them. He writes on A List Apart…

FAQs often read like a fictitious back-and-forth conversation between the eager, inexperienced user and the wise, venerable expert, covering all the basics from the beginning, and urging purchase at every step:

Q: What is this product?
A: It’s a widget. It’s the best widget you’ll ever find. You should buy one.

Q: Is it hard to use?
A: NO! It’s the easiest widget on the market. You should buy one…

On the whole, FAQs like these patronize users.

Personally I tend to agree. For a long time I built websites with FAQ sections. However I have seen them abused so many times, that I have lost faith in them.

In his post Stephen goes on to ask if FAQs are ever appropriate and if so how they should be used.

Despite his negative attitude to FAQs he actually writes a constructive article that suggests the best ways FAQs can be used and outlines scenarios where they are actually appropriate.

If your website has an FAQ section or you are considering adding one, please read this post.

Loses some weight

You work out everyday and eat a healthy diet. However you could really do with losing some weight.

No I am not encouraging anorexia, I am referring to your website.

For fear of sounding old, I remember the days when websites had to be under 50k to be usable. Anything larger would take too long to download.

However todays websites have become fat and bloated. What made us suddenly think this is acceptable?

Sure, most of us have broadband and so speed is not as big an issue. However as Sitepoint explains in “minimising page weight matters” there are still 3 good reasons for keeping your website lean…

10% of users in western countries still use dialup.
Internet use in Asia and Africa is exploding. However their connection speed is typically slower.
Mobile devices are quickly becoming a major method of accessing the web and yet have slower connections than their PC cousin.

Personally I would add a couple more reasons to the list…

Google is considering making performance a factor in how they rank websites.
Jacob Nielsen reports that speed considerably impacts a sites usability.

Fortunately there are loads of things you can do to make your website faster. For a start you can read my post ‘5 ways to give your site a speed boost in less than 30 minutes‘.

How not to alienate visitors

Engagement is the ‘in’ phrase at the moment. We should all be ‘engaging’ with our users. Marketeers and website owners are particularly enthusiastic about the idea and not surprisingly. Talking to your users provides a lot of benefits…

It can improve your product and site
It can reduce costs
It can encourage users to promote your brand
It improves customer satisfaction

The list goes on.

However, despite this enthusiasm among marketeers and website owners many seem to continually put barriers in the way of that engagement. From hiding phone numbers to overly demanding forms, it would seem that many are actively trying to discourage their users from talking to them.

In his post for boagworld, Andy Wickes looks at the problem and suggests a number of ways you can make yourself more accessible to your users. In particular he looks like…

Social networks
The telephone
Contact forms
Asking questions
Thanking users

If you are struggling to engage with users this may be a useful starting point for identifying what is going wrong.

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Getting started with ecommerce

Thu, 04/08/2010 - 08:02

Paul: Right, shall we talk about e-commerce, because I thought that might be something interesting to deal with. It follows on from the Perch conversation in a lot of ways. One of the challenges you’ve had to face surrounding commerce and working on e-commerce sites. I guess my first question is – there’s a lot of people who are wanting to sell stuff on their sites, a lot of people kind of go in from huge online retailers right the way down to someone that wants to sell their local band’s album. Where do you start when working on an e-commerce site? What are the initial things that you consider when developing an e-commerce site?

Drew: Hmmm…

Rachel: The first thing really that you need to think about is how are you actually going to take payments. Disregarding your actual shopping cart type stuff on your site, right from the outset you need to think about how you’re going to take payments. And there’s a whole bunch of options for that, and a lot of that is going to depend on the type of client and what they already have. If you’ve got someone who’s already got a physical shop, they’ve probably already got a merchant account with the bank.

Paul: Right.

Rachel: So most likely are going to want to take their payments through that merchant account, which basically is the bit that allows you to accept credit cards. If you’ve got a merchant account you’re able to accept credit cards off your own bat, you don’t need to use somebody else. The thing you should never do, and I still encounter people trying to do it, is think "Oh, it’s alright! I’ve got a PDQ machine or got some other way to take transactions, either over the phone or when people are there in the shop. I’ll just store the credit card numbers and then offline I’ll put them through my PDQ machine." And I still encounter people who think that that is OK. That is not OK. That’s not OK from your card agreement point of view because internet transactions are different, they’ve got a different level of liability and if your bank find out you’re taking internet transactions in that way, they will close your account.

So that’s really important, that people understand that dealing with taking payments online, even if they’ve already got that merchant account, that they need to speak to their bank and arrange to have that ability.

Paul: Marcus, have you got some kind of jingle going on? Because everybody in the chat room is screaming and shouting.

(Noise in the background)

Paul: Yeah. So it’s definitely that camera, OK. Right, I’m narrowing it down guys, we are getting there! We’ll start this whole conversation again.

Marcus: Don’t have to, as long as you can remember where you were.

(Audio from a few seconds ago plays in the background.)

Everyone: (Laughs)

Paul: Alright, now turn that down.

Marcus: How’ve you managed that?

Paul: I don’t know, cos I’m clever.

Rachel: I like the fact that I get a moo-ing camera, that’s excellent!

Everyone: (Laughs)

Paul: Is it back now? It is, I can see it going up and down!

Everyone: (Laughs)

Rachel: I really don’t make this noise.

Everyone: (Laughs)

Marcus: It’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone…

Paul: Oh it’s gone! Right, so we’re now safe. Rachel, you no longer moo!

Rachel: (Laughs) Excellent!

Paul: I have no idea what happened there guys, I’m really sorry. I blame Marcus, because he’s in charge of sound.

Marcus: No, it’s Dave.

Paul: It’s Dave! It’s Dave! Dave heads out of the room and everything broke. Ok, that’s one. Someone should keep a note, that should be a first drink of the day. Every time we make a major screw-up.

Marcus: Ok, but who gets to have the..

Paul: Let’s pick Dave as the person that has to drink every time. What were we talking about?

Everyone: E-commerce!

Paul: That was it, we were talking about e-commerce. Let’s talk some more about e-commerce. Talking about the things you need to consider, and I’ve got no recollection at all to what you were saying (laughs).

Drew: Talking about people not taking…

Rachel: I think I was saying moo. (Laughs)

Drew: …about people not taking the responsibility of dealing with credit cards seriously.

Paul: Right, yes!

Drew: Because that’s something you do see a lot, I mean you see people emailing credit card numbers around.

Rachel: You see people storing them in plain text in text files in a database, it’s not as much as you used to, but it does happen. I think people don’t really understand all of the bits which go into taking payments, particularly if you’re using your own merchant account. Because you’ve got various bits; You’ve got your merchant account, so if you’ve got an account with HSBC or whatever that allows you to accept credit cards. That’s one part of the jigsaw, the other thing you then need is, because you can’t take these credit card payments actually yourself, you shouldn’t be generally storing them anywhere. Very very few circumstances should require you to store credit card numbers.

You need what’s called a payment gateway, which is the thing which allows you to send your credit card details securely. They actually do the processing, check it’s valid and then hand that off to your bank and the money goes into your account. All of the big banks have their own, or you’re hooked up with one. So you have the NatWest Streamline and Barclays ePDQ, things like that. If you’ve got a merchant account, your bank will be able to tell you who they use. You don’t necessarily have to use your bank’s one, there are other ones. We like PayPoint, which used to be called SECPay.

Paul: I’ve never come across PayPoint.

Rachel: PayPoint are great, they’re great for developers, they’re very very good.

Marcus: I remember SECPay.

Rachel: Yes, well PayPoint are SECPay, it’s the same company. They’re great, they offer payment processing facilities and they work with all the major banks. Your bank would be very happy if you said these are who we’re going to use if you’re gonna go the whole hog and have your own merchant account, be able to accept your own credit card transactions. Of course, what a lot of people do these days is use something like PayPal, which means you can have that ability to take payment online without having to have a merchant account.

A lot of people, if you’re a new business, you might find it difficult to sign up for a merchant account anyway. You tend to sort of need to be established and things before the bank will be happy to give you one.

Paul: I mean the problem with PayPal obviously is that they seem to take an enormous slice compared to most other companies.

Drew: It depends what volume you’re doing really. For low volumes, PayPal works out cheaper. Because you’re not having to then pay for all the expense of the payment gateway, the traditional payment gateway.

Rachel: Because you have monthly charges and things, as well as your transaction charges, you normally have monthly charges for having the merchant account and a monthly charge for the payment gateway.

Paul: Yeah.

Rachel: So actually if you’re doing low amounts of transactions and not a huge amount of money, you may find actually that PayPal works out cost effectively for you.

Drew: The nice thing about PayPal is you’re paying per transaction, there’s no ongoing fee. So if you don’t make any sales, you’re not paying any fees. You’re only paying a percentage when you’re successful really.

Paul: Yep, that makes a lot of sense.

??: We paid £20 a month…

Drew: Oh yeah, if you upgrade to a bigger PayPal account with more features, then yeah, you do start paying.

Marcus: From the chat room here, "They take a big slice, take forever to process and support is awful".

Rachel: Yeah, I mean I think that’s the thing with PayPal is that people do have issues with them, and also not everyone’s clients are going to be happy to sign up with PayPal, or to even use PayPal. They’ve got a bit of bad press.

For us with Perch, most of our clients are very happy to use PayPal, they’ve already got PayPal accounts and that’s fine, but for a more traditional store that might not be the same. I think you do have to look at your customers a bit, and are they likely to be happy to do that. The nice thing about PayPal is that it gives you an easy "in" to all of this. You know, if you’re starting out, maybe you can’t get a merchant account or you want to test the water before you get a merchant account and go to all that expense, and also the expense of developing for it, PayPal gives you a really easy "in". You’ve not lost anything; If you decide it’s not working out, you haven’t got an ongoing charge, you’re not tied in for any length of time to use it. So it’s a good option, and there’s things like Google Checkout as well.

Paul: Yeah, I’ve never used Google Checkout, what’s that like?

Rachel: I’ve not actually developed for it yet. I hear tell that it’s relatively difficult to develop with, because people seem to be having problems, but I’ve not actually developed something for it.

Paul: Ahhh OK. So what are the things you need to think about from a technical perspective when you’re working on an e-commerce site? You’ve mentioned a few things, but what’s the key considerations from your point of view, as people building it?

Rachel: It depends on what you’re going for, if you’re using your payment gatewaym or with PayPal particularly, what you tend to end up with is what’s sometimes referred to as pay-page, which is where you go out to a third party site, the card details are taken on the pay-page by that third party, and then you’re transferred back to the site to finish the transaction.

Paul: Yeah

Rachel: Typically from a technical point of view, what happens then is a transaction ID is sent back so that you can do any post payment processing; Send out the download software, or passing on ready for shipping, or sending emails, or whatever it is you do after payment. The nice thing about that pay-page integration is that you never touch the credit card details. You don’t have any liability for them and they go out to the payment gateway and it’s all taken there. And of course that means you don’t have to worry about that. This is something that’s becoming a real issue because of something called the PCI DSS compliance which means that you have to comply with all sorts of things if you take credit card details, and that comes into play even if you just pass those details over and never actually write them down or store them. You still have to do all sorts of things with your server; making sure you’ve got the correct firewalls and have security scans and all kinds of hassle. So really we tend to recommend people do the pay-page thing, not do an integration where people take payment on their own site. Just because you then don’t then have that liability.

Drew: For a long time it was considered best practice that you keep the customer on your side the whole time, you manage the entire experience, you take the credit card details and in the background you pass those off for processing. But there’s a couple of things really, this PCI DSS is one big issue these days with the legislation that as soon as those credit cards touch your server at all, then you’re liable for all sorts of extra overheads that you really don’t want to be dealing with.

But the other thing is that there are far fewer payment gateways than there are online shops. People are likely to be more familiar with someone like WorldPay, or PayPal, or Google Checkout than they are with you, as somebody who is selling online. So the customer may well have more trust in who you’re using for processing than they do in you.

I know that from a personal point of view, when I’ve been looking for something online trying to find the cheapest price. You search around and find some odd looking store, and you don’t know anything about it, it’s just turned up in google and they’ve got the thing at a good price. If you see that they’re using a payment provider who you trust, using WorldPay or someone, you know that "Ok, they’re decent enough to get an account with (someone like WorldPay) and I can go back to WorldPay if I have any issues with this transaction". So it gives you a bit more confidence with buying from someone who’s reputation you ‘ll not necessarily be familiar with.

Paul: Absolutely…

Rachel: Clients will tend to say that, "I want control of the basket, and I want the payment to happen on my site". I think often when that’s asked, they haven’t really though through what they’re then going to have to deal with. There’s a huge amount of liability, there’s an awful lot of work that’s going to have to be done. It’s going to mean they’re going to have to have a more expensive hosting account for instance, because you’re not going to pass PCI DSS on a shared server or shared hosting account. So there’s a whole load of stuff that you’re going to have to worry about because you’ve touched those credit card details. Only in a tiny tiny way passing them on to the API.

So I think generally, we tend to try and guide people to using pay-page. Some of the providers, PayPoint, you can brand up the template so that they can look like your site. I don’t think purchasers are particularly upset by going out to a third party, they’re used to it. They’re used to going to a third party to make payment these days. As long as you can capture the output of the payment and deal with things on your side, you don’t have to destroy the experience because of that, you just need to design around it really, and make sure people know what’s going on when they go out to that third party.

Paul: Yeah, what about user considerations since you’re working on an e-commerce website, are there certain things you consider really important to think about when designing and kind of creating the front end part of all this?

Drew: Yeah, I mean for checkout processes it usually pays to be as straight forward as possible, in terms of your development techniques. Really, just in the same way as you do with design, you just strip away the distractions. It can serve you well I think to not try and be too flash. Just the process of taking payment details or whatever it is, just be straightforward, clear and reliable because you don’t want that part of your work to be the bit that’s letting you down. You don’t want people to be encountering weird JavaScript validation issues while they’re trying to sign up for an account because you want to get them through that boring process as quickly as possible. So that’s definitely a consideration, not trying to be too swish.

You need to think about, really from the outset, when you’re dealing with e-commerce stuff, the details like; How are you going to deal with delivery? How is delivery charged? And they’re the sort of thing that you not only need to communicate to the customer quite clearly but also you need to understand before you pick what sort of solution that you’re going to develop. If you’re going to use an off-the-shelf system, if you’re going to have to develop something bespoke, if you’re going to use a service like shopifyor something like that. You need to consider what your scheme is for charging for delivery; Is it that you charge by weight?, or do you charge by number of items? Does it become free after a certain value? There’s all these different ways which seem quite commonplace but you need to make sure that you can deal with them technically.

Paul: It goes back to what we were talking about earlier about thinking about things like VAT, and delivery charges as you say, discounts, refunds…

Rachel: Discounts are always an issue (laughs)

Drew: Discounts are a major major headache. If you think about all the different ways you can express a discount. Just go into a supermarket and look at the different ways they do discounts.

Marcus: Three for two.

Drew: Yeah, three for two, or buy one get one free.

Rachel: Or buy this thing and get this other thing free.

Drew: Yeah, or buy 4 of these and get this thing half price!

Everyone: Yeah.

Rachel: And people don’t think through this, people say "I want a simple e-commerce system for my site"and you start asking the questions, and they’ll say "Oh yes, we want the ability to do special offers", then you say "But what sort of special offers?" and then they come out with "Oh well we could do this, and we could do this or we could do that" and I think particularly if you’re building custom stuff. Obviously if you’re using third party shop or cart or whatever, then your gonna be able to say "Well, you’ve chosen to use this solution and this is what it offers". If you’re developing custom e-commerce and shopping carts there are so many details, and you really do need to tie those down at the beginning because you can really get scope creep. E-commerce sites are the place where we see the most scope creep and the most of where clients come back and say "Oh, you know what would be really handy if we could just do…" y’know? There’s so many different variations in, say, things like shipping, If you’re dealing with some physical products and some electronic downloads, you don’t charge someone shipping for electronic downloads and there’s so many different things that you need to consider. They really do need speccing out very very well from the outset.

??: We had a client once, who wanted us to basically create an area in the back-end of the e-commerce site that we were building for them that would basically allow them to create rules relating to discounts. And you think like "eh uh", it’s not gonna happen.

Drew: It gets mindblowingly complex, we tend to go one of two ways. Deciding on a type of discount they can do quite easily, so they can offer a 10% discount, or a 20% discount or something like that, but not combinations of products equal… this sort of thing. Or we can go down the other route of just putting the system in place and saying "Right, when you need to do a special offer, hire an hour of our time, and we’ll write the code for that special offer and that’s going to work out an awful lot cheaper than trying to build an enormous system that will deal with any sort of discount. Just come back to us, the maths isn’t complex. We’ll just sit and write it and then that’ll be in your store" and do it that way.

You think of the complexity that must be in supermarket till systems, the ways they deal with all those discounts, it must be mindblowingly complex and you really don’t want to be taking on the burden of that level of code inside your application. Because it’s just going to be very expensive and you’re going to have to maintain that code going forward.

Paul: My wife’s just arrived! Hello Cath!

Everyone: Hello Cath!

Cath: I come bearing food…and drink.

Everyone: (cheers) Yay!!

Paul: Are you gonna set up in the other room?

Cath: Yes.

Paul: Cool.

Cath: I’ve done it already.

Paul: Oh, you’ve done it already?

Cath: Oh, and by the way the GPS doesn’t work and you don’t … (not close enough to mic to hear)

Paul: Well, you got close enough.

Cath: So I’ve spent about a quarter of an hour driving around the countryside.

Paul: Well that’s ok. I’m getting told off live on a show by my wife!

Everyone: (Laughs)

Marcus: Sorry Cath, can you do it again later? But into a mic?

Everyone: (Laughs)

Paul: We’ll get you in properly in a minute Cath.

Cath: Bye!

Paul: Bye Bye! … Ryan!

Ryan: Yes.

Paul: Sorry, didn’t mean to shout into the mic. We‚Äôve got Elliot coming on soon?

Ryan: Yes we have.

Paul: Which is great

Drew: I should just say, we’ve also been asked… I’m wording this carefully… to "please can you produce magic" by one of our clients. Those were their exact words, "We would like magic".

Paul: How would you respond to that?

Drew: This was in an email, "we would like you to create some magic".

Rachel: We get asked for the "wow factor", I’ve not quite defined what the "wow factor" is and how it relates to me as a web developer but yeah. I like definable things.. I’m a programmer, I like definable…

Drew: I think that’s where I was going, with the discounts, is outline exactly to the point, "We’d like this form of discount, this form of discount" and apply that to a particular process.

Rachel: I think it’s fine saying these things can grow organically and we can decide when we get to whenever, but I think that’s gonna make it more expensive. If you know you want to do things to a tight budget, and get it done on time, you need to have that sort of stuff specced out at the outset because there’s just so many different combinations of things.

Paul: Someone’s put in another good thing which you get sometimes. Is it "zebedee"? says "It doesn’t ‘pop’ enough".

Everyone: (Laughs)

Drew: A design that "pops".

Marcus This is where we need the HTML5 audio tag. (Laughs) just get it to go "pop" "pop".

Everyone: (Laughs)

Paul: That’ll teach ‘em!

Thanks goes to Ruchard Adams for transcribing this interview.

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Categories: Featured Blogs

How not to alienate visitors who just want to talk

Wed, 04/07/2010 - 04:38

It’s an age old gripe amongst web users. The over-long form. Field after field of questions and tick boxes when all we want to do is ask a question. A simple question:

‘When is this product likely to be back in stock?’

But still we are asked for our fax number, postal address, age, marital status and whether we have any ‘dependents under 18 living with us’ The mind boggles.

Now we’ve lived amongst marketeers long enough to realise that this is their work. This is an opportunity to gather as much profiling data about a consumer as is possible in order to

assist in customer relationship marketing
better inform the brand of their audience’s habits
aid new product development
a combination of the above

While I’m no fan of these forms, I count myself as at least 30% marketeer and am therefore aware that in my experience alone, this data has always gone to good use. To providing a better service / product / experience.

What I find remarkably absent though, is the website owners willingness to engage their audiences in a dialogue on their terms. I accept that I the website owner would like all this information, but do I deserve it? Do I? Well, in a lot of cases, no, you don’t.

If I want to open a dialogue with a brand via their website, I want it on my terms, and I often care little about the future requirements of that brand, no matter how earth-shattering my responses might be to a short questionnaire.
To that end I thought I’d give a few examples of how we can build better websites, where we deliver dialogue to our users, rather than just delivering data to our clients. And then perhaps, we can make people care about our needs, by good old customer service.

Social Networks

If you feel your audience have a significant presence on these networks then be sure you do. Publicise how to get in touch with you on these networks, and when people do respond in a timely fashion. If that is there chosen way to make initial contact, then respect that, and in time you will build their loyalty. Answer queries and in time if that prospect decides to enquire about your product or service then they will call and you can ask all the ancillary questions you might have then. By that point they are a hot prospect and already favourably disposed to you and will do so willingly.

Telephone Numbers

Provide one. Always. There are people out there who will always prefer to call. I know because I am one. And if that is their choice, then do not put obstacles in their way. Don’t make someone search endlessly through the site to find it. Don’t make them read pages of FAQ’s and Knowledge Base articles before presenting a phone number after one last click of a ‘Was This Information Useful – Yes/Know’ button. Make it easy to open a dialogue, and then if you have a genuine need for profiling data then you can always ask if they would mind asking a few questions over the phone.

After you have answered their questions first of course.

Contact Forms

If we haven’t already said enough about these already, then some further observations. Your customer has a query about you. The very least they need to raise (IMHO) are the following:

What my query is:

How would I like to be contacted regarding this?
When am I likely to get a response?

Now this is a very slim form by anyone’s standards. But at its core is the idea that you are putting as few obstacles in your audiences way as possible, and providing them with a chance to choose how they are contacted and informing them as to when that will be. Deliver on those last two and you are in business. Again, the dialogue is made easy, and is delivered on your audience’s terms.

Ask Questions

Why is this one so often overlooked? You have a CMS. You might even have a blog. You might even have comments enabled. You want to know some information about your audience, and yet you still build forms so convoluted that to ask a one line question I must still answer 10 unrelated ones. Ask questions of your audience on your site. Add them into comments on your blog. And provide an email address where if they would be so kind, they might want to send their thoughts / ideas about such and such. Again, any dialogue is on their terms. Entered into at their own will, with as much or as little effort required as they see fit.

Credit Where Credit is Due

Quite often a customer will ask good question about your product. You provide them with a swift answer and then pat yourself on the back for your helpfulness and timely response. The trouble is you have scores of similarly confused customers you could also benefit from the same help. So post the question on your site – ‘Mr Andrews of Lambeth asked a great question – where do I find the off switch on this petrol chainsaw?’ – Well, it’s on the handle, just by the power cord. Thanks Mr Andrews!

Credit your audience with asking a valid question, and then broadcast that to your other clients. Some of the best customer service is born out making public that you are only human and like everyone else, sometimes make mistakes.

Mind Your P’s and Q’s

Be grateful. For goodness’s sake, be grateful. As Paul has said in the past, people are aware that their opinions and their data has a value to brand / business owners, and so if they give their time and their opinions to you free of charge then the least you can do is be grateful. If you are a small business or a start-up, then this could be the only chance you might have to have a one-on-one relationship with your customers. If you deal only to 10 or 20 clients then you have no excuse really not to have a close relationship with them and to provide a good customer experience. Larger organisations have to use a more automated approach down to sheer volume. But even these, in fact primarily these, can benefit greatly from making their experience suit the user, rather than the website owner.

So there it is. Think for a minute about what is really going to drive the sales process. Are you a more profitable business because you know all there is to know about your prospects, or because you are accessible and helpful when dealing with your customers? Do you deliver what they want, or what you want? Is your website a barrier to real contact, or is it a conduit for it?

Food for thought.
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Categories: Featured Blogs

HTML5 and CSS3 with Inayaili de León

Tue, 04/06/2010 - 05:58

Paul: Best talk of the day! Yeah, you can come and join us – you can throw out Drew. It’s really good to have Inayaili on the show. She is one of those quiet yet very significant figures within the web design community, that is there in the background doing some absolutely great stuff. I think she has been writing some stuff for 24 ways recently, which was very good, really enjoyed that, and has got some other great stuff going on, so we welcome to the show Inayaili.

Hello Inayaili.

Inayaili: Hello.

Paul: It’s really good to have you on. Thank you for coming all the way to the … I was going to say studio.

[lots of laughing]

Paul: [exaggerated voice] “Thanks for coming into the studio today”. So, we are going to have a bit of a chat about CSS3?

Inayaili: Yeah.

Paul: I thought I better check that. Ryan? Is that alright for you? CSS3? Yeah, it meets Ryan’s approval as well, so that’s really good. OK, we have kind of been building to this all day really, we have kind of mentioned CSS3 a couple of times.

Inayaili: I don’t know if you have noticed but I think we are halfway, euh…

Marcus: We are, this is halfway

Inayaili: … through the …

Paul: Of for fuck sake.

Marcus: We only have got six hours to go.

Paul: Ooh, whoa.

Marcus: I can’t work out, my recording thing I am doing here, says I recorded seven hours of audio. How can that possible be? Oh, it starts on 1, that’s why.

Paul: Because the whole space time continuum is [???]

Marcus: I answered my question. It starts on one hour.

Paul: I have got far too many windows open here, let me close some.

Marcus: Yes, we are halfway – jipee!

Paul: Wow, that’s worth celebrating. I am getting really cold in here as well.

Marcus: Shut the door.

Paul: Shut the door. Is that alright for a minute. Is everybody else getting a bit nippy? Good stuff. Right. Halfway joke by Marcus. That’s a good idea, as we got a few minutes.

Ryan: What’s that good one, you had …

Paul: Go on Marcus, go on my son. Will you hang a minute, I …

Marcus: Someone actually send me an email with a joke, but I can’t remember if it was any good or not.

Eum, am I allowed to tell a blond joke?

Paul: After I have just been telling everyone off in the chat room, for commenting on people’s personalities and personal appearances, and stuff like that, and then YOU want to tell a blond joke.

Marcus: Eh, eh, peoples … do you want to be more detailed about that at all, Paul?

Paul: No.

Marcus: No? Ok. Euhm, …

Ryan: Why would you [tails of into a giggle]

Paul: Strange Marcus, I don’t understand it. I have only been working with him seven years.

Marcus: No, I don’t want to tell that joke, it’s rubbish.

Paul: Goh, blooming heck, take your time mate. We’ll just sit here.

Marcus: Here we go.

[Cow jingle kicks in]

Paul: Oh, for crying out loud. That, that has to go! That was the thing that was endlessly looping.

[Jingle stops]

Marcus: Yes.

Paul: [reads from the chat room comments] “Paul has an actual egg for a head.”

Ryan: Excuse me, what is your conversation about?

Marcus: An actual head. There is a joke.

Ryan: We can’t keep people from following.

Paul: Yeah, I understand that. Can we kick that person? Actually there are a few people being a bit dumb.

Marcus: I can do a Christmas joke.

Paul: Yeah do … Nooo!

[background laughing]
[...]

Marcus: Blame them!

[giggling]

Marcus: Two men, two snowmen standing in a field.

Paul: Yes.

Marcus: One says to the other: “Do you smell carrots?”

Ryan: Carrots for noses.

Marcus: That’s actually quite a good joke. I know it’s kind of traditional not to have any reaction, but that is not a bad joke.

Carry on.

Paul: Is that it? Can we move on now? Let’s talk about CSS3.

Marcus: Oh no, I am just going to interrupt.

Paul: Let’s talk about …

Marcus: That’s a good set of interruptions.

Paul: You’re not going to interrupt Inayaili, because she is far too nice.

Marcus: No, I am going to interrupt you.

Paul: You can’t do that, it would be like …

Ryan: She came all this way.

Paul: It would be like, I was going to say kicking a puppy, but people get upset about that.

Inayaili: And I brought cupcakes.

Marcus: Yes, exactly.

Paul: And you brought cupcakes. Yeah. That’s made up for the fact that Relly couldn’t be here. In fact we ought to have the cupcakes brought in. I feel they should be coming in.

Right. Let’s talk about CSS3 and get to grips with some of it. Can we start really basic for people, because not everybody has the time to kind of look at CSS specs and read all the articles on it. So give us a really good idea of what kind of things does CSS3 allow you to do.

Inayaili: Well, I think the main thing it allows you to do is to have a cleaner mark-up. So when you are creating your HTML you can have a much more semantic, with less classes, with less id’s, markup. And it allows you to target some elements without adding a class.

Paul: Right. So we are talking about the improved selectors there. Things like the nth child.

Inayaili: Yeah. And then of course there are the other, more visual things: like adding text shadows, and border radius and box shadows and stuff, much more easily.

Paul: Sure. OK. So why, you obviously started talking a lot about CSS3. Why have you got excited about it? Presuming you are.

Inayaili: Yeah. Exactly because of that. I can just create the most, cleaner markup possible, without having to create lots of divs, and lots of spans, and all that mess we used to do before, and so much more flexible. You don’t have to have Javascript to do some things, and especially because I don’t really do Javascript. So I like to do things in CSS – if I can.

Paul: There is an argument, isn’t there, you brought Javascript up there, that some of the things you can do with CSS3, actually begins to kind of stray on the territory of being behaviour, rather than design. You could argue things like hover state is already an example of something that is actually behaviour. So should we be doing those kind of things in Javascript, really? If we are going to be all semantic and all kind of correct about it. HTML is your content, CSS is your design, behaviour is your Javascript. Should actually these things be done in Javascript or is that just a bit [tails off]

Inayaili: I think that, euh, I am going to give the easy answer: It depends.

[Laughter in the room]

Inayaili: But, euh, it really does depend. If it is something, just a nicety, something that is going to be a little detail on the website, it’s not really crucial to be visible by everyone, and it can be easily done in CSS, much easier than with Javascript, then why not?

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. I think it is about pragmatism, isn’t it.

Inayaili: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: You do what the right thing is in any particular circumstance. I mean the other, I guess argument, against doing lots of CSS3 at this stage is one of browser support. Talk us through a little bit where things are with browser support, you know, what supports what and you know what can you start to do. You probably don’t know it all of the top of your head – that’s a really unfair question. But what is, you can be general, fudge it, make it sound like you know what you are talking about [laughs].

That’s what I do.

[Laughter in the room]

Paul: You don’t remember exactly what every single CSS is supported by what version of a browser – or is that just me who doesn’t know stuff like that.

Inayaili: Yeah.

Paul: OK. I’ll shut up at this point. Now then, would you like to answer that question and dig me out of the hole, thank you.

Inayaili: Yeah, well, it’s very hard because Internet Explorer, until 8, still doesn’t support CSS3, CSS3 selectors, so it is quite hard knowing that the most used browser from 6 to 8 doesn’t really support that. So you have to be careful in a way, you have to look at your stats, you have to see what your users are browsing the web with. But I think that most things are supported by Firefox, Safari, Opera and then CSS3 is not supported by IE.

Paul: OK. So how then do you justify doing work with CSS3, when there is so much dogginess surrounding the support, and it is so patchy, and things like that.

Inayaili: Well, in terms … One thing that I really like using with CSS3 is the advanced selectors. They just make your life really, really easy. Like if you are styling text, adding margins to paragraphs, and headings, and stuff like that, you can do it much more quickly with CSS advanced selectors. And if some browser doesn’t have a specific margin or a specific padding it is not going to break the layout. You have to be careful that way. There is also some nice Javascript plugins they have been made recently to support the CSS3 selectors for IE. That is really, really helpful. And I also usually use a tool that is called Modernizr, to [tails off]

Paul: Yeah, we mentioned that earlier.

Inayaili: So, you can kind of, euhm, it’s not having doubled the work, it’s not having to do the CSS for one browser, and then for another browser, with Modernizr you can kind of adapt your design based on which CSS properties the browser supports or not.

Paul: Sure. I mean, you wrote, I just had it on the screen. You wrote an article. This is just a little bit a move away from CSS3, but it does kind of all relate. You wrote an article for 24 ways, euhm, about having a field day with HTML forms. Which I thought was really interesting about some of the new stuff that can be done with HTML5 as well, and kind of combining that with CSS3.

Inayaili: Yeah.

Paul: Do you want to talk through some of that kind of stuff? That was a really interesting article and not everybody has probably seen it.

Inayaili: Euh, about what I talked on the article?

Paul: Yeah. You can’t remember, can you?

[Laughter in the room]

Paul: I wouldn’t be able to, and I can’t even remember what I wrote about this [year?] It’s nothing like throwing a curve ball in, isn’t there?

Marcus: I’ll save you for a minute, because I just love, a tweet from Matthew Panel [spelling?] here, which is: “Jeezes, is this Boagworld stuff still going on? Damn A-listers wasting my bandwith.”

[Lots of laughter]

Paul: Get him on the show. Tweet him back and say “Come on”.

Marcus: Yeah, ok.

Ryan: We can get him on Skype.

Paul: If we can get him on Skype, get him on.

Ryan: Get him to ring Boagworld.

Marcus: He is complaining about the lack of John Oxton on here.

Paul: Ooh, why didn’t we get John Oxton on?

Marcus: Because I can’t think of everything.

Paul: But I rely on you to think of everything. See, I just think it is quite interesting. I have got to say, I have got to be honest with you, that I haven’t, that I haven’t looked massively into HTML5, and CSS3 yet, I kind of know what they do in principle. I have had a little play around with them, but I have not actively used them yet, because I keep feeling it’s not quite there, it’s not quite time. But I think to some degree…

Inayaili: I disagree.

Paul: Yeah. I know you do, and that’s what I am interested in, because I think somehow, I am falling into something I know is wrong, and I know a lot of other web designers feel, they look at something like CSS3 and they go: “Oh, browsers don’t support CSS3″. Like it’s a blanket statement – if that makes sense. You know, that CSS3 has been taken as a whole, you know where some bits of it do have support – which I guess would be your argument, would it?

Inayaili: Yeah. I think people just dismiss it by principle and don’t bother looking at what could be done. They shouldn’t be doing that really. You should definitely …

Paul: I feel told of.

[Inayaili giggles]

Paul: Yeah, but, I mean there are some things that are … It is true it is not a thing set in stone, like box shadow has just been dropped from the spec, so … Has it really?

Inayaili: Yes.

Paul: But I like box shadow.

Inayaili: Yeah, I know, lots of people did. But the specs were just too complicated. There was no consent as to how it was supposed to work, so they just decided to drop it for now. For now.

Paul: For now? But that is a classic example of something. You see that just makes me worried. Because I would have used box shadow.

Inayaili: Yeah, but if you had actually read the specs, you could actually see.

[Consternation and laughter in the studio]

Paul: I feel under attack here.

Inayaili: You could feel that vibe that this isn’t really working right, that well.

Paul: Right.

Inayaili: There were lots of red notes saying: “Is this really right?”, “Maybe we should forget about this for a while”.

And even in other things like: I was just reading the text spec on my way here, and if you go to the spec it says: “we are considering removing multiple text-shadows”. So a text will only be able to have one shadow, and if you actually follow the development… I mean you don’t actually have to read the specs. One very good thing that I actually think people should have to do is at least subscribe to the decisions that are made for the CSS. It is something like every two weeks or something? It’s like a five line post. That only tells you ok, CSS box-shadow has been dropped, and it’s something that will be useful. And if you are interested it is something that you should …

Paul: Because that’s the big thing. You have actually answered that. I was going to come back with an aggressive response, but you have answered that. Which is I think is, the average web designer feels like they are sinking under todays work. They try and keep on top of what is relevant right now, just to keep up, you know it feels like a race web design, you know, trying to keep up all the time. And then you’re turning around and say now we have to read W3C specs. I am not Jeremy Keith, I prefer to put a bullet through my head. You know? And here you are saying that there is actually a nice little summary you can subscribe to. Where can you get hold of that?

Inayaili: If you search for, I think it’s like CSS3 workgroup, or something like that.

Paul: CSS3 working group [typing]. See what we get back. We have got 12 hours to waste so… [laughs]

[reads search engine results]CSS current work.

Ryan: This is the future Paul, it is not a waste.

[Laughter]

Paul: So here we go. Here is the …

Inayaili: There is probably a blog link under navigation.

Paul: “blog“, yeah, I got it.

Inayaili: So, that’s the short summary.

Paul: Oh, that’s the summary? So you can just subscribe to that blog? And you get a nice little summary.

Inayaili: It’s not like you are going to get a five posts a day, it’s very random, I think.

Paul: Now, I have got to say, this is not the most friendly document in the world. I have just read the first line.

Inayaili: You don’t have to …

Paul: [Reads from the document] “CSS WG has no problem with depreciated DOM active”.

Inayaili: No, you don’t have to understand everything. I don’t understand everything.

Paul: Oh, OK.

Inayaili: But some things are relevant and occasionally there are some relevant things, like OK, box-shadow, which has been dropped. And you would have…

Paul: And I would have gone into a panic. An run like: “[Shrieks] I have been using that!”

Inayaili: Yes, exactly.

Paul: So what, I mean that is a big issue. You know. If I kind have gone to a client and designed them a site and I had used box shadow. Sorry, I am being quite pushy over this, but you have been to me, so … And then suddenly that has been removed from the spec and is removed from support in the browser. That site is going to break. And they are going to come back to me, quite justifiably, and say “Why did you use an unsupported, unset in stone piece of technology?”

Inayaili: Euh, well, in that case the site wouldn’t break without box-shadow.

Paul: Yeah, the box-shadows would just disappear.

Inayaili: You just wouldn’t have the shadows. So you have to be careful that way.

Marcus: There is also the argument that if you don’t pay attention to what is happening on the W3C and you don’t contribute to the talks and discussions, then you can’t complain about specification, because you have shown no interest in it, and you have not contributed to any of this.

Paul: You have got to vote, otherwise, …

Marcus: If you are not going to be involved with it, and you are not going to talk about it, then you can’t complain about it.

Inayaili: One thing that is also important to understand, and I was just talking to Jeremy Keith outside, and he agrees, is that you don’t have to use the CSS3 to contribute. It’s very useful if you just go there, if you just try a few things, you don’t have to read the whole thing. That’s quite boring. But if you do your own things, try a few experiments, see how stuff could be used in real life, and then you send them your examples, or you send them your comments with an explanation on why you think something won’t work or something won’t be useful. And that is something the W3C are always looking for, like real examples to base the specs on.

Paul: Yeah, I mean it is difficult, isn’t it? Because, you know, OK, I just keep coming back to this. An everyday designer like, you know, I don’t know, Ed sitting through next door, doing his work in the other room right know.

Marcus: Will he be offended at that? Everyday he designs.

Paul: But he is!

[Laughing]

Paul: Alright, but he is not, he is NOT Jeremy Keith. Do you know what I mean?

Marcus: Nobody is Jeremy Keith.

Paul: He doesn’t, he can’t think conceptually. So what I am saying is that only a certain group of people is getting to really play around with this technology, and really… you know there is people like Andy Clarke, people like Jeremy Keith, that got the time, because of where they are in their careers …

Marcus: They are not being [..] by bullying project managers.

Inayaili: I don’t think it is because they have the time. I think it is because they are really, really interested in what they do.

Ryan: Yeah, outside of work it’s not. It’s not just a work thing, they do it in their own time.

Inayaili: I think if you really, really – I don’t like using this word, but passionate – about what you do, you will have an interest outside of 9 to 5.

Paul: Oh, absolutely, I do agree with that. I do agree with that. I also, there is a question if, you know, do you have to be, I am trying to think of the term, do you have to carry a certain reputation before anybody takes a blind bit of notice of you. You know, if I …

Inayaili: No.

Paul: OK.

Inayaili: The other day I was writing a very short post for my blog about the use of multiple columns in text and I was just doing some very basic examples just to try, just to make sure the example was working, and I was trying in Safari and Firefox and I noticed that one thing, it just wasn’t doing what the spec was telling it should be doing. And I thought: “Oh, maybe I just should report it to both Safari and webkit and Mozilla”.

Paul: Right.

Inayaili: And I just did a quick comment on the bug report website and it was actually like five minutes later it was actually introduced as a bug in Firefox.

Paul: Oh.

Inayaili: So, it doesn’t matter who you are.

Paul: That’s brilliant.

Inayaili: You can contribute.

Paul: So in your experience it’s been a very open process.

Marcus: It’s just about being bothered basically. Isn’t it?

Paul: Yeah.

Inayaili: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Paul: You see. But perhaps, it is just me or not, or a lot of other people, but you just presume you are not really going to get anywhere. You know, that you are just another voice in the crowd.

Inayaili: Yeah.

Paul: Perhaps I am being naive. You have been involved a little bit in this kind of process as well, aren’t you? Rachel? What has your experience been of dealing with these working groups and talking to them, and that kind of stuff.

Rachel: Certainly in the past with web standards project things. I suppose my experience is always been fairly positive. In that I think that generally, groups are just interested in what you have to say.

Paul: Right.

Rachel: You know, I don’t think there is any kind of wall up that says: “No, we only listen to people with this kind of reputation”, or whatever, but you know, …

Paul: Oh, that’s good.

Rachel: I think, it’s … you just have to get out there and start talking about stuff you care about really.

Paul: Right. I think that’s brilliant. You changed my view over that. I made perhaps assumptions that were false in that situation.

Inayaili: And for that example I just gave you, I didn’t have to read the whole spec, just to do my bit, I was just literally reading a very small proportion of the spec, just to write that quick blog post. And I came across a bug.

Paul: So is there any other kind of, moving on from that a little bit, is there anything else you get really excited about CSS3. There are people out there, that are like me, and maybe haven’t done their homework as well as they should be. What do you want to let them know about, that will make them go out there and get them stuck into this, and having a look.

Inayaili: I started to be really excited when I started to understand how CSS3 makes my life easier.

Paul: Yeah.

Inayaili: And, makes clients have to pay less, because you are spending less time dealing with some things that would take a long time, to work cross browser.

Paul: Can you give me a really good solid example of that. You know, what could I do with CSS3, that would make my life simpler.

Inayaili: Well, I am just looking at the example of the 24 ways post. And it just makes your life simpler coding forms in a big way. You can target different types of input and different labels, very easy.

Paul: So, this is using those advanced selectors, you were talking about.

Inayaili: Yeah.

Rachel: And I think another thing that I have certainly found, but I wrote on 24 ways about that as well, is in situations where you don’t have control over the markup. And that happens quite a lot.

Paul: Ahaaa!

Inayaili: Yeah.

Rachel: It’s that, if you are dealing with some CMS for instance, that spits out a load of markup, and you want to put rounded corners on something, or you might want to inject markup into that. But you can still target that CSS3, and have the effect.

Inayaili: Imagine you have a table, a data table, and you want the rows to have different colours.

Paul: Alternate.

Inayaili: Like you want red, blue and green. Red, blue and green. Red, blue and green. You can do that with CSS in like literally 30 seconds.

Paul: Rather than having to put a class on each one.

Inayaili: Yeah, and if you are really worried about “Oh it won’t show up on IE”. You can use one line of jQuery, or a little Javascript plugin and it will work, if you really … It’s not something that is going to affect massively the look of your website. It is just a background colour in a few rows. But it’s just instead of building this very complex Javascript thing, you can do it in CSS like that.

Paul: I mean, that I really, really get. We got a client at the moment where that is a perfect example. They got a website of something like 33,000 pages, it’s a big institutional website. And, you know, we are redesigning their site, and it’s all in a content management system, and all that content has been put in, you know, by various content providers. And we now got to go in, and that content has got to remain the same, but we have to redesign the site around it. So the HTML is staying the same. So it’s a really good example where maybe some of these advanced selectors will be really beneficial. And after all isn’t that what we said about HTML?

The Zen Garden right back in the early days. “You can change the whole look of your site without changing the HTML”, but really, we were fibbing a bit, weren’t we, until relatively recently. You would have to put bits in it.

Inayaili: If you have to go to the table and actually add a class in it for each row, you are doing it wrong. Well you are not doing it wrong, but you are over complicating.

Paul: You are not living the dream.

Rachel: And it is presentational as well. When you are sticking that kind of markup in, in your document it’s actually you are doing it, because you want something, it’s a presentational thing, you want to make striped tables. You shouldn’t have to stick something in your markup to make striped tables.

Paul: Yeah.

Rachel: It’s completely a presentational thing.

Paul: Yeah, completely. Ok, that, you have got me. You have convinced me.

Inayaili: Good.

Paul: You have got me on board. And actually, the bit that gets me most is that it takes us one step closer to that real ability to separate content and style. And THAT I am entirely behind. Especially for some of the, you know, the big clients that we deal with, there websites are too big to be changing huge amounts of content, so that is brilliant. And even for smaller websites, that’s obviously still very very relevant stuff.

Inayaili: But even for a smaller thing. Imagine you have a list of items and you have a margin for every item in it, and you don’t want the last one to have a margin, because it doesn’t need a margin and if it does have a margin in IE6 it is fine, but you can remove that with CSS from all the other browsers.

Paul: The other idea that always gets me, is that when you have a menu item, and you divide the menu item with a border-bottom. I bet you don’t want it on the last one, you can remove it. If it’s there it’s not the end of the world.

Inayaili: Yeah, it’s fine.

Paul: Exactly. Yeah, brilliant. Brilliant stuff. Thank you SO much for coming in and chat about that. Much appreciated and you are hanging around for a bit, aren’t you?

Inayaili: Yeah, I am.

Paul: Excellent stuff. Brilliant.

Thanks goes to Joke de Winter for transcribing this interview.

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206. The future of web standards

Thu, 04/01/2010 - 17:50

Housekeeping

Because of the Easter weekend, my birthday (presents still welcome) and the fact that Headscape is actually making me work for a living, there will be no show next week. The next show will be on Friday 16th.

Web Design News

This week: Does the fold matter after all, 5 quick ways to improve your sites usability, how to blog when you’re not a writer and ensure your projects run smoothly.

Read ‘Zeldman And Ethan Marcotte On The Future Of The Web’

Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte talk about the future of the web

Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte talk about the third edition of Designing with Web Standards as well as discuss the future of the web.

Design and copy pirates: Should you care?

Websites like Copyscape make it easier than ever to find other sites who have stolen your copy. However, should you care and how can you stop thieves.

Read ‘Design and copy pirates: Should you care?’
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Design and copy pirates: Should you care?

Thu, 04/01/2010 - 07:23

This post is brought to you by the Future of Web Design London. The Future of Web Design conference is bigger and better than ever before with two tracks and a brilliant line up of speakers. More information visit http://boagworld.com/fowd/.