Working at a web company you could imagine I meet a few designers, the great thing is we each seem to have different tastes in what style of website hits the spot. Just like everyone has their own opinions on the look of the website, everyone also has their own preferred way of building their design. I believe it very important to work in the way you feel most comfortable and efficient.

I have found that overtime my processes have changed and improved, my skill level seemed to show major improvement when I challenged my initial methods of building HTML/CSS websites. I would actively try to build websites diffently each time I built another one. For a while now I have found myself to be most efficient if I do not even create a stylesheet until I have written all my HTML. This is a common method, but one I had never previously used as it never worked for me, I would prefer to work in sections. E.g build the head => style, build the menu => style etc

There are two major reasons why I now build “most” of my websites in this method:

1.    I can create all my HTML without even opening up a browser. On one screen have Photoshop, the other, my mark up. This saves a massive amount of “ALT-TAB” time.

2.    By creating all my HTML first, when I finally do review it I can see how it looks in it’s raw format. It helps to see if the flow of the current page makes logical sense. This is better for accessibility purposes and can help with SEO.

As mentioned, everyone has their own way to do things. The hard part is challenging these processes, stepping outside what you currently do just to try something different. It might not work for everyone, but it has been a substantial help in my personal development.

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For this design I wanted simple icons that looked great when they were very small. Another designer showed me the light and pointed me to an awesome collection called Fugue Icons.

This collection is very impressive boasting over 2000 icons, many of which look fantastic.  I though I would do the honorable thing and again share the love… so here you go.

Some clients on the other hand know a lot more than given credit for.

I recently had a web design project at the company I work for. It was a large project, consisting of a CMS, shopping cart and decent SEO campaign. I knew this client was on the ball as he had multiple online endeavors and was succeeding in most of them. I had sent off my initial homepage mock up, with three call to actions. I received the feedback via email and the client loved the design overall, with one change, he requested 5 call to actions on the homepage.

The email I received was quite thorough and was obvious that there was substantial thought put into these 5 buttons. I strongly disagreed with having 5 different directions to lead the visitor and I put together an email outlining my concerns. I then followed up with a phone call further explaining my email. The client pushed me to give in but I made my case quite strong and told him that ultimately, it was his choice, but advised against it. The client informed me he would think about it and get back to me, then hung up.

Moments later my boss received an email from the client praising that I am,  “on top of my game” and that he was just testing me to see if I was looking into his best interests and not just doing whatever he says to do.

The big thing I find, is that the boss, being the non-technical guy who runs the place, does not always understand how dynamic web projects can be. Webteam’s can be given KPI’s and targets within a business directly related to how much money they bring in for the month. This can be very difficult to commit to, and more often than not, the commitments cannot be kept for reasons beyond our control.

I’m am not saying web designers should be free from KPI’s and targets, I am simply saying the targets should be more than just how many dollars they bring in for the month. Not to mention that a month is a very tight deadline. The reason I think that straight dollar targets are unfair is because designers, who are in positions such as mine, do so much more than just work on projects that will bring money in for the month. Personally, I do an amazing amount of work other than revenue, 60% of my time last week was dedicated to non revenue work. Internal web design work, quoting, project managing and working on projects where the revenue belongs to departments other than my own.

Why is this work never accounted for?

Ultimately it comes down to the fact that I do not believe it to be an accurate measure to set monthly targets when it comes to Web Design. Rarely are any projects started on the 1st of the month and finished by the 31st, maybe a web projects profitability should be measured bimonthly?

If I set my team a target of $10,000 or $50,000 of revenue, surely all the in house work needs to be measured as a part of attaining this target. If I get to 3 weeks in the month and I am only sitting on 20% of my goal due to clients missing deadlines or overwhelming internal work, it is almost impossible to make it up. It is not like a sales team where you can go out and push to try and bring in new clients.

Unfortunately though, some people tend to forget that I am not a salesperson, I am a web designer.

A very valuable lesson that everyone designer needs to know is about having everything in writing. On so many occasions I have seen clients attempt to creep the scope of the project and squeeze just that little bit more for their cash.

Who can blame them, I would do the exact same thing.

For this reason it is our responsibility to be firm and reasonable with our clients. By having physical documentation of everything agreed on, if a client asks for something outside scope, you have solid ground to turn it down and the client will hopefully understand. Below is a quick checklist of items I suggest to keep in writing:

1. Agreed Cost of the design/build
2. A breakdown of what is included for that cost
3. What you need from the client and a date you need it by
4. Feedback on designs
5. Client signing off designs

In past experience I have noticed the big lifesaver to be number 5, Client signing off designs. To often do clients approve a final design layout for a page and when you have built it exactly as agreed on, they get a new idea and expect you to take care of it free of charge. By having the design signed off in an email, you will have the ability to mention and show them that they have approved it and signed it off. You can then act accordingly.

One example of such a situation was I had a client, whom we’ll call Raul Julia. I was designing and building a straight HTML website and Raul Julia had approved multiple mock ups over the phone. just as the website entered the final review stage and was almost ready to go live, the client wanted to completely change the look and layout of the main navigation. I mentioned that he had signed it off and it was too big a task for me to tackle free of charge. Long story short, he denied signing it off and I had no proof that he had, so I had to take it as a loss.

Above: The Real Raul Julia

Ultimately, the client will generally want changes and it is at your discretion whether you charge them for it or not, personally if the changes are minor and few I am happy to cover them for the sake of the client – designer relationship. There is a line though and it is the web designers responsibility to draw it.

Now this Julia, had sent an email to Raul, clearly in an attempt to squeeze just a tad bit more dollars from Raul’s ever so squeezable wallet. Basically this email went like this…

Microsoft IE8 release

With the recent release of Microsoft’s new browser, IE8, it has brought to light that websites previously designed for IE7 and older versions will render incorrectly in the new IE8.

… blah blah blah …basically meeting IE7 needs and not industry standards.

The websites I am monitoring for you, ??? and ??? both require Style sheet adjustments (CSS) and possible page templates to make them compatible in IE8.

I can offer you 2 solutions,
1. A “quick fix” for both sites which would force IE8 to render its content as IE7 internally from the page templates. This would take approximately 2 hours total.
2. Amend the CSS (Style Sheets) and affected page templates to industry standards on both sites. This would take approx 6 hours total for both sites.

… blah blah blah Regards, Julia.

Now you’re probably thinking that, yes, this email is correct about the potential rendering differences, although solution 1 is a bit expensive for a copy and paste job. To some extent I agree, but then I hear that due to the fact “IE7 needs and not industry standards,”  Julia has taken down both of Raul’s websites until the CSS has been fixed. What a joke!

Due to some minor CSS differences between browsers, Julia has attempted to force Raul to hand over some extra pennies, claiming that the site will not work until it has been fixed.

Above: The Real Raul Julia

I immediately told the salesperson to get Raul on the phone to Julia and make him put the site back up immediately, which he then did, but I just couldn’t believe it. I mean, imagine that, upselling every client in your database between 2 – 6 hours of work everytime a new browser is updated or released. Firefox 3.0.12 was just released a few days ago, now… if I play my cards right I could have a lot of work coming up.

Once I had taken a nice look, in my haste and excitement I continued on and forgot to bookmark this site, and it was lost to me.

I looked around for it a few times but came up empty handed. I couldn’t remember the name, author or even how the hell I found it.

Well, I was just stumbling around again and… I found it

The icon set is called Crystal Clear and was created by Everaldo Coelho. The icons are 128px squared and are split into 6 categories:

1. Actions
2. Logically, actions (app icons)
3. Applications
4. Devices
5. File Systems
6. KDM
7. MIME-Types

Now that I have found them, I thought I’d best spread the love. So I suggest you run on over to the Wikimedia Commons website and have a look at this really nice set of icons. Take me!

Wordpress is simple to use…

and with a HUGE community to back it up, Wordpress has proven to be a very powerful CMS. It is SEO friendly, has many useful plugins, has a ridiculous amount of free templates available and has great documentation to help get you started.

One of the first few Wordpress templates I created is a theme called Gentle Breeze. The website was a gift to my girlfriends mother who loved the idea of a online journal. You can view it here.

As you can see it has quite a feminine feel to it and I wanted it to be very simple and open. The sitebar is dynamic and the template has been tested in all major browsers… including IE6.

You are welcome to use this template free of charge for a non-commercial website. I only ask if you could please email me a link so I can see it in action.

Click here to download Gentle Breeze

First.

The following script will 301 redirect from a non WWW to a WWW. Meaning if you enter the url: http://domain.com.au it will automatically be redirected to http://www.domain.com.au. It is a personal preference, I think the having the WWW in the URL looks nicer, but not everyone will agree.

I have also read that it can help with SEO by removing any possibility of Google thinking there may be duplicate content. When linking to your website it is always best to pick one form (with www or without www) and stick with it, this script can help if the link is out of your control.

If for some reason this is causing issues with your server try the following code. (It seems to work better with Joomla! 1.5)

Second.

The following script is to remove the ugly “index.php” on your homepage you can sometimes get when linking back to it.

For example: http://www.domain.com.au/index.php would simply become http://www.domain.com.au. I think that the URL without the index.php look much more attractive – again just my opinion.

In the past when I had deleted a page on a website for one reason or another, I deleted it and that was it. I had no thoughts about what search engines have indexed it, what external sites may have been linking to it or even the overall power and relevancy of the page itself.

These days as soon as one page has been deleted or moved, I ALWAYS perform a 301 redirect to the new URL, a related URL or back to the homepage. This ensures any value the page had is not entirely wasted and may be transferred over.

To perform the redirects I use a .htaccess file with the following very simple code:

301 redirects using htacess can be very powerful. If I have moved an entire 200 page web site over to a new domain using the exact same structure and I plan to transfer all existing search engine rankings across, my best bet is to perform 301 redirects for each page.

Obviously, we don’t want to create 200 redirects manually so this can be easily avoided using the following.

This code would sit in the htaccess file of the OLD domain name. If I had this htaccess on my current URL (web-design-melbourne.net), any URL would be redirected to newurl.com.au. For example:

http://www.web-design-melbourne.net/testurl.html
–> would become –>
http://www.newurl.com.au/testurl.html

This is a powerful 301 redirect script using htaccess and I have used it without error countless times.