My shoddy picture taking doesn’t do ‘em justice, but they were awesome. A few minor technical glitches, but they kept their composure and I actually thought that added a nice homegrown touch to it. If you don’t know them, get to know them.
Also, I thought this was the epitome of hipster:
Men’s medium shirt sold out before the show begins.
It’s been almost a year since I sold my car. I thought it might be a bit of a struggle, and that I’d miss the ol’ lady at least somewhat.
I was wrong on both accounts. We moved in October to a place closer to a Metro station, but even before, I was taking the bus to the Metro, and I had no problems at all. In fact I really love it — I get to watch all the suckers stuck in traffic each morning and each afternoon, and not once have I felt anything close to longing for that again.
I had a MINI Cooper S, which is an awesome car. There was nothing wrong with it, and it was a blast to drive and own. However, the warranty was going to expire soon, and those cars are $$$ to keep on the road. Also, it still had really good resale value, and my wife and I could definitely use the cash for our future more than just to have a cool car. I thought I’d miss it more than I do — the only time I ever really miss it is when I see an identical one, which isn’t that often.
Fortunately we live just outside D.C. (often voted the most walkable city in the States), so the transition wasn’t that hard for me. The Metro (for the most part) is great, and always running, and I work only 3 miles from home, so I can walk, run, or bike if need be.
The time to myself in the morning and the afternoon is much more valuable to me now. I can read a book (yes, I did rediscover this), read a newspaper, prep for meetings, and much more. In life as everyone says, it’s the little things that count, and for me this is very true. These little perks are becoming more and more important to me — I’m not sure I ever want to go back to needing a car.
It’s not only better for the world at large (even if only on a small scale, but hey, doing my part right), but I’ve made the fundamental shift away from being car-dependent to DIY-mode. If there’s something I need, then I’ll find a way to get there.
**Note — we do still have a car, my wife needs it for school, but it’s a manly Yaris.
Just got an RFP that included the generic needs, wants, wishlists, checklists, requirements, have-tos, and all that jazz. The thing that stuck out to me was section for Visibility.
The ———— will be easily found on Google searches. Utilize search engine optimization tools.
I have been going about this web design process all wrong I just realized. This is so simple, why didn’t I think of it before: just include SEO-richness in my list of requirements, duh.
Much like I love to add mushrooms on to almost anything I eat, clients like to add their needs and wants for projects as a checklist of sorts. And, for most of the work, this is not a problem, and actually makes a lot of sense.
But for something as finicky as SEO, this is definitely not a good thing. One, SEO cannot and should not be promised on any project. At least not if you truly want the best for the client. Perhaps some designers are comfortable using black hat tactics to show quick results and dump the project on the client–thus not worrying about future results and responsibility.
However, I cannot do that. It’s just poor practice, it’s sleazy really. I feel it’s my obligation as a designer to give a client the best training I can, the best structure for their site, and the best general rules to abide by for the future. I always say right up front that I cannot guarantee anything, and if anyone is doing so, that they should be treated with caution.
This is basically another issue where the client just doesn’t know any better, or they’ve had dealings with black-hatters and they assume it’s just literally a check, and I can do it for them. However, unless this is addressed right away this could end being on me.
With proper education, I’ve always found that clients see the light (so to speak), and actually are very interested in being actively involved in this process. After all, it is their business, and theoretically they know it much better than I do.
I’m not sure there’s anything that can really be done to change these perceptions as a whole (if there is, I’d love to hear it!), but there is a great opportunity to approach new clients and show that we, as designers, care about their business goals, and that we care about helping them get there, but also that there is no one be-all, end-all solution to their needs. We are giving them tools to enable their businesses to attain their business goals, at least, that’s how I view it.
I keep being blown away by the number of companies using this backasswards ‘CMS.’ This should not be labeled as a content management system. A more appropriate label would be control management system.
Ektron is un-robust, un-simple, and un-restriction free; everything a CMS is supposed to relieve.
Yet, time after time, I come across clients who use this bungled piece of tomfoolery dressed as advanced technology. There is absolutely nothing logical about this software, and using it only makes me feel more and more restricted the farther I dive into it.
I often think of this as the Constant Contact of the CMS world. They blew up on the scene, impressed companies with money that didn’t know better and are just grandfathered in them. I mean, how can anyone seriously want to use them? Everything they ‘profess’ the CMS can do can be done in an open source platform, and it can be done easier.
The dev site looks like a relic of table-based design from ‘98. They only support Windows, and the web portal only works fully in Internet Explorer. Those two facts should be enough for anyone who knows anything about web to throw up a red flag. Their dev PDF says they support PHP, yet while chatting with a support tech (they are good at that I’ll at least say), I was told they don’t support PHP…hmm.
I haven’t even got into the price–when I was first researching CMS’ a few years ago the price was $12K / year.
That’s right $12K for one year.
Gadzooks! This CMS better create the self-automated / self-updating website that clients are often dumbfounded does not exist.
Much like Constant Contact, Ektron sounds nice and shiny, but when you get down to it, it limits you everywhere, preventing you from getting into the nitty gritty of a site and being able to make your site fully kick ass like you need it to.
An easy enough sell off of Ektron is just the price, but this short post should be enough for any IT manager to realize if they are in bed with Ektron, it’s time to get a move on before getting into any more trouble.
I’ve had enough. Outside of the design community (and sadly even within it), design just doesn’t matter (enough) to the masses. Unfortunately, there are a ton of sites with great content and lots of traffic, but design does and will always take a back seat to ROI.
I’ll admit, I’m a stickler for great web design. Okay, I’m a total snob, big whoop. When browsing a site I frequently check the code as well as the CSS to see how well the sites built, how it’s built, how they use type faces, and if I’d do anything different with it. I know it’s rare for people online to do this, probably only .5% to 1% do this sort of thing, and they are obviously invested in the web somehow (i.e. design, development, seo, social media whatnot, etc.), but good design is really, really important to me.
Note: for web design, I’m grouping everything together: the design (layout, type faces used, attention to detail, subtlety, etc.), how it looks in various browsers, how well the site is built, whether the site owner(s) are active socially (blog, twitter, etc.).
However, most people don’t care about any of this, or are even conscious about this. With good design, this is how it is supposed to be: there, but you don’t really notice it. But with web activity, I wonder if people are just accustomed to a general lack of design, or less importance on design, i.e. most people just don’t give a shit.
I for one, do give a shit. Sure content is very important, but where does good design fit into the equation? For my part, I read a lot of blogs that have poor, poor designs and almost illegible typography. Thank god for readability, or I’d never be able to read online. Then there are all the awful B2B sites I come across. It’s amazing that people think that good enough is just that, good enough. Pay a designer a bit to make your content readable, and I’d guarantee you can see some ROI from that.
The future of the web is being relevant and there for your customer. If I’m your customer and I get to your site because it looks relevant, I won’t be giving any business to you if you can’t at least make your content readable.
Unfortunately in the web world, we’ve all come to expect immediacy in every sense of the word. So, I can understand why some clients don’t understand that a good website takes time. Maybe it’s just me, but for the most part I really like dealing with clients. From start to finish, I think it’s a (for the most part) fun process.
I typically find there is a substantial change from beginning to end in terms of a clients understanding, expectations, interest, and role in the web process. Of course, this is only if I do my job correctly, and if the client(s) is willing to learn how to better build their brand.
I get the feeling that some designers really don’t like to work with clients. I can understand that sentiment on the most basic level, but this goes against the fundamental purpose of design: to effectively communicate a purpose, but for someone specific (aka clients).
Without clients, there would be no need for design, or no need for non-biased design, only just design that we, as designers, think is needed.
Sure, some can be a pain in tookas, but as I see it, it’s our job to not only deliver the most effective work we can, but also to temper their expectations, and educate them on why certain things are done, and how (for them) to take an active role in the ongoing evolution of their brand.
Each and every time I deal with a client, I learn something new. Whether it’s a better way to explain something that I’ve had trouble doing so in the past, or I get better at reading clients expectations and determining how best to work with them. Most importantly, I learn how to better interact with people. Given that social media is what it is today, most social interactions are not really social, aka face-to-face. So, getting more comfortable presenting, discussing, and walking through my work with new / current clients is something I find very valuable each and every time I do so.
Plus, each time I find myself being able to empathize a little bit better with them, which can help me assuage any fears they may have, and help to prevent them from being ‘clients from hell.’
Last, but certainly not least, the better I am able to communicate with a client, the better I am to deliver what they want and more. The better I get at delivering more than what they expect, the more they are willing to recommend me. And the more I am recommended, the less I have to sell myself–and that, to me, is priceless.
Yegads man. It’s not what I envision for the clients site, just a potential layout.
This was my fault though. We met about redoing a client brand and their website (although in ass-backwards way, but neither here nor there), and was decided I should find some sites that we liked the layout of. I should have said no, but I though, sure, no problem.
Wrong.
The issue was not whether I could find sites I thought would work well as a starting point, but whether I could find sites with the right content for the end result. I should have realized that no matter what I sent would cause some issues. Even people in an agency have the same initial human reaction to live content–it’s not the right market, or it’s salesy, or whatever their objection may be, it’s just natural.
So, after a bit of objections, I pointed out that we should be looking only at overall layout and what the sites in question have to say, or what they have to offer.
I figured that my colleagues could get past this and look at this in a high-level, but lesson learned. Nothing against them of course, it just happens to us all.
Next time, I need to do a bit more before, and create some wireframes for this purpose, and then we can talk about content, but not before / during. Foolish, foolish man.
Promoted Tweets—that’s what they are being called.
It was only a matter of time before something like this had to happen–Twitter had to monetize their efforts.
I am intrigued by this, but I’m also very wary.
I am intrigued because, unless Twitter has just been pulling the wool over our faces, they do generally care about user experience and making it very difficult for spammers to cloud my stream. They have always been very transparent about their efforts, and they have made great strides in the past 6 months or so to prevent excess spammers from following me. I believe they have the best of intentions with this effort as well. Sure they do want to make some money, but I see no reason why they would slack on this in their effort to provide the best possible experience with these Promoted Tweets.
If I search for web design work in DC, and I get a promoted tweet about a large design firm, then that’s not really going to help me out. Or if I search for allergy remedies and get generic search results like I normally get on Google where the big names just buy every term and don’t focus on what I want, then that’s also not going to help me out. But if I search for a DC social media group, and a company who sponsors a lot of social media events locally has a promoted tweet, then I can see some benefit.
However, I am wary about this because it may provide just another avenue for spammers to do what they do best: steal money and annoy the shit out of me. I assume Twitter will have some semi-arduous approval process, or maybe even an Apple-like iron curtain, but there is sure to be some way for spammers to get around this.
I suppose there’s no real way to monetize something without taking some amount of spam along with it, but I just hope they remain user-centric, steadfast and vehemently against spam as they have of late.
To anyone who claims to be a web designer and only knows how to use the clone tool in Photoshop, but not how to use a <fieldset> in HTML: get with the program.
It’s 2010, and we as web designers, need to know (at least) basic HTML, CSS, PHP or ASP, JavaScript, and a bit about databases. We can’t just do everything in Photoshop, hand it off to a developer and expect to get steady work. Nor should we.
Knowing a bit about these things is not difficult at all, there are literally thousands of websites dedicated to sharing the love and how-to’s for all of these and more. We just need to take the time learn this stuff.
I was a printmaking fine art major in school, and while it was fun and creative, I knew I didn’t have the moxie to do that for a living. So I started playing around with some HTML and CSS, and then grew from there. Granted there is a learning curve, and some of the sites I built early on would be scoffed at by the community now (and for good reason), each and every time I code a new site I learn something new and how better to do it in the future.
Besides needing to know how to do basic programming, by learning these skills, it helps you become a better designer. I say this because you can do almost anything in the web, but the optimal word is almost. The worst is designing a beautiful page / site in Photoshop, then when it comes to the real thing, you realize that you can’t make it look quite the same, and having to explain that to a client–they don’t like to hear that sort of thing. You start to be able to anticipate what is possible and what is not.
Two other skills that we need to have nowadays are basic SEO principals and social media involvement.
With SEO, you don’t need to be an expert, in fact I’m not sure it’s possible to be a great web designer and an expert SEO, it just takes so much time and involvement to stay up-to-date on both. But, you do need to know how to code and setup a site to start off on the right for SEO-wise. You need to be able to tell the clients what they need to be looking for, and how to update their site as needed to try to optimize it the best they can.
And with social media, if you aren’t actively involved in it yet, do it now. It’s fun, easy, great for networking, you can get WOM business, you can share your ideas, and you learn. A lot. Twitter is where I started, and I find a ton of value with this day in and day out. I was hesitant to get on facebook b/c of running into people I didn’t intend to, but it’s okay. 300+ million people on here–you can’t beat that potential. Learn FBML, or how to add static HTML to facebook, it’s not hard, and it increases your value even more. Try to get on dribbble, and if not there, get on other sites where you can post what you’re working on for other designers to view and critique.
It’s all about being more than Photoshop–it’s not that hard, it’s actually fun (at least I think so), and it makes you so much more marketable to current clients and to new clients.
Are you a new-age web designer, or are you afraid of the HTML-dark?
The lineup for Lollapalooza ‘10 was just announced — looks alright, but Green Day and Lady Gaga, for realz?
Definitely less than avg. compared to previous years.
