Educate

Try to educate both the client and management. Much conflict is the result of a basic misunderstanding between one or more parties. Very often assumptions are made about the level of understanding that has been reached, both on the part of the developer/designer about the management team and on the part of the web company about the client. Left unchecked this can result in the project taking a turn for the worse. For example it is quite common in the industry for people to use words/terms they have heard being used but have never really fully understood what they mean, or for a client to misunderstand an explanation they have been given and were to embarrassed to ask for clarification in case they would appear silly. Do take time to ensure that everyone really is on the same page. It is worth the effort at an early stage and will definitely nip problems in the bud.

Empower clients. Make sure they are freed up from thinking about web stuff and focus on what they do know, there own business. Educate them as to their role in the process. Once they realise that you do not expect them to come to you with a web solution in mind they will be able to relax and provide you only with the information you expect from them.

Often clients don’t know how to take their business forward, step in and educate then as to the possibilities that are available. Keep them focused on the business aspect of the process and later you can spend sometime translating all the information and requirements you have collected into a suitable web solution.

Communicate

Make sure that your communication is good, polite and frequent. Make sure there is no ambiguity, whether it is in an email or during a meeting. Take time to provide clients and management with a plan. Make clear your assumptions. From the start make sure everyone understands what will be included and what will not.

Never say never, but instead point out that some things will have to wait for a future stage of the project. Remind the client that they cannot have a low budget ,feature rich solution delivered in a short period of time. Often it is better to provide a phased development process, introducing new features after the initial website has been launched. Make sure you communicate to the client that this approach is in their interest and in so doing hopefully you will build a relationship based on trust. It is also vital (and this cannot be stressed enough) that the client can provide you with good quality content at an early stage in the project. This is undoubtedly the biggest contributing factor to a successful web project.

Iterate

Create a process of review that allows input at the correct time during the development process. If you are unable for whatever reason to get feedback from the right people at the right time then another approach may be to employ a certain amount of flexibility in the design and/or build of the web solution. However this flexibility must be covered in the cost of the project, so build it in to your budget. If you have educated all the stakeholders properly and if the communication lines are keep open and unambiguous then there may be less need to build in this flexibility, and with constant iteration and review the process should run smoothly.

Content collection is a thankless task usually bestowed on someone who already has a job to do and who has very little incentive to go the extra mile for you. They neither get paid any more nor is there any extra time in the day for them to collect the content for you and still carry out their daily duties within the organisation or business. This is especially the case when the decision maker does not have a good handle on the nature of the project and the heavy workload involved in putting together the quality, spell-checked, proof-read and while organised content needed to make the project a success.

It is vital that the client and all parties involved really understand the importance of this content for the success of the web project. Make life easy for them, provide them with a clear and detailed explanation of the content you will require for the project along with a staggered time-line that ensures that all the critical content gets to those who need it early on in the process and the less critical stuff like news stories, FAQs etc are left till later.

From management’s perspective

As with most aspects of the process they will usually be in the dark about this, and will just expect everything to be dealt with in a professional manner so that they can continue to nurture their wonderful relationships with their clients. Oblivious to the reasons behind their PMs’, designers’ and developers’ frustrations they can often insist that projects continue even though the foundation is not in place. Unfortunately, while it may keep clients happy in the short term it has devastating consequences for the quality of the web project and ultimately its success. As the developer/designer or PM it is up to you to communicate this to your manager or sale executive, ensuring they understand fully the importance of getting the content and its role in the overall project.

From the project manager’s perspective

Most project managers (PM) when asked will tell you that their single biggest headache is in the acquiring of content. In my experience I have even known them to offer to generate/create the content out of shear frustration! A good PM will take it upon themselves organise and filter all incoming content, so as to remove this headache for the designers/developers. Of course PM are not often equipped to deal with content from the perspective of the designer or developer but in this case just simple organisation into folders, consistent and meaningful naming conventions and versioning are always a great help. Pm’s will also be responsible for contracting out any copywriting or photography that is needed and should ensure they have factored in extra time in the content collection process to allow for dealing with third parties.

From the designer’s perspective

Good design is all about communication and not decoration. In order to provide the client with the best possible website the user centric designer will usually insist that they need the content before they can come up with the fancy comp/visuals to show the client. After all, how can they design the layout of a page without knowing exactly what has to go on that page. There will always be some flexibility and if the Information Architect has done a good job it may be possible for the designer to do their job knowing the nature of likely content, just so long as this information is detailed and not vague. Regardless there is no substitute for having the content up front.

From the developer’s perspective

Like the designer there is just no substitute for having the content upfront. Few things are more frustration than figuring out a process or solution based on a provisional content, only to realise when the real content arrives that the solution or process is no longer optimal. Most developers take great pleasure in providing excellent solutions and exceeding clients expectations with that extra piece of functionality or even the very straightforward and simplistic but effective process. It is extremely demoralising to have to start over because the content you thought you were getting doesn’t materialise or is different in its make-up. To a certain extent agile development cycles, iterative programming and continuous review can in this day and age help to alleviate the frustrations somewhat. But for most small web projects,  there is no substitute for just having the content up front.

So how to we get content up-front

I wish I had the answer. I think there are few approaches that may work.

Educate the client : If they truely understand the importantce of the content perhaps they will themselves take a more pro active approch rather than just delegating the role to someone else. Also if they are aware of the workload involved they may be prepared to free up some time for their content providers rather than expecting them to fit it into their already busy schedule

Motivate the client : Financially, provide them with a two-tier pricing matrix . One price with say a 10% discount, if content is provided by a certain date, and is of suitable quality. The second price kicks in if the content is not forthcoming. If you use this approach it is important to point out to the client that it is in their best interests to provide you with the content for the sake of getting the best quality solution and in so doing they get an added caveat of a discount.

Help the client: Provide them with all the tools they need to make the process easy. Content collection documents, check-lists, time-lines . Recommendations for copywriters or photographers. Even examples of the format of the content you need to make their web project work best for them. If you leave them alone thy will quickly loose focus and become demotivated. Keep in contact, dedicate a few hours a week to sit with them and talk them through what you need.

The client

I am talking about the business owner, or their representative. In short the person or persons who have commissioned the website to be built.

What characterises the client

• High expectations, but with no understanding of the process required to attain these expectations
• The desire for a quality, cheap solution in a short period of time – (can’t have all three!)
• Wants (a) even though they actually need (b & c) – often refers to a website they have seen believing it is the answer to all their problems, unaware that much better solutions often exist.
• No interest in problems until after they happen – not quick to take on-board warnings and often see these as an indication of pessimism or a ploy to squeeze them for more money.

The web company

Here I refer to any company who’s business it is to provide web solutions to the client. More specifically I suppose I mean those responsible for the day to day running of the web company and not the actual creative team or developers. Some people refer to them as management

What characterises the web company

• Wants as little hassle as possible – isn’t there some sort of “magic bullet” web solution that cuts out all the hassle?
• The desire to be able to generate cashflow – invoices must be paid regularly to take care of the running of the business
• The desire for a “product” that they can resell, “off the shelf” – this makes good business sense, but is not always in the clients best interests.
• The desire to ultimately exceed the clients expectations and build relationships – repeat business and renewable revenue streams have been the goals of most businesses since the turn of the century and probably before.

The ethical web professional

I do not mean to imply that some web professionals are not ethical, that is not for me to say. All I want to illustrate is that some people in the industry care passionately about producing the best possible solution and others just go through the motions in order to get paid.

What characterises the ethical web professional

• An understanding that each project is unique and must be treated as such. – There is no such thing as a one solution fits all approach. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
• Is rarely concerned with the day to day issues such as building client relationships or cash flow and invoicing strategies (unless of course you are a freelancer or run your own business in which case this is paramount).
• Wants to make sure all clients decisions are made based on full information. – If we are sure you have understood all the information presented then any decision you make is of course the right one, until then we will continue to try and communicate this information and make our recommendations.
• Wants to make sure they themselves are in possession of all information and content in order to provide the best possible solution. We cannot provide you with the solution you deserve unless we are in possession of all the information we need. It may seem annoying and unnecessary to you, but trust me it is in your interests to deliver it to us.
• Wants the best solution for all their clients first and foremost, obviously the success or failure of our clients website will reflect on us.
• Is aware of the difficulty in managing these three diverse and often conflicting stakeholders

Conclusion

Well I suppose the point of this post is just to identify that there are often 3 and at least 2 different takes on the whole web development/web design process. There is no better way to resolve these issues than to educate and communicate effectively. I hope this is a good place to start.

First of all, a few parameters. I have used the term web developer/web designer to cover anyone who is starting out in the web arena. You may have aspirations to progress into a programming role, a design role or indeed a mixture of both or even some of the more specific roles like information architect, user centric designer, experience designer. Regardless of which path you take you will all need a firm grounding in HTML and CSS, and regardless of which path you take these skills will be invaluable on your journey.

Attention to detail

By far the most important of these , particularly in relation to writing HTML and CSS for the novice developer/designer, is attention to detail. This is particularly important for the brave of heart amongst you who will embark on this journey armed only with a text editor, and I would highly recommend this approach. It is all very well to be able to drive your fancy new WYSIWYG, but what are you going to do when it breaks down and you have to go tinkering under the hood. Take it from me, learn how to hand code. It will be worth the endless hours of heartache and pain.

• Check every line of code
• Make sure opening and closing brackets are there on all HTML tags
• Make sure all opening and closing HTML tags are there (remember some tags are self closing <img src="" />)
• Make sure all your equal symbols are there
• Make sure all your quotation marks are there
• Make sure you have spaces where there should be spaces and none where there should be none.
• Spell check and proof read your all your content
• Check all your links

Now might a good time to go and find yourself a checklist of all the things to check as you go. I could provide links but as you will see from the next points it is upto you to learn how to learn. So start now.

Ability to teach yourself

Again I cannot emphasis the importance of this enough. In order to progress in this field, probably just like most others, you must be prepared to learn new skills and enhance and improve your current ones. You must be able to motivate yourself and spend as much time as you can, getting to grips with and keeping up with the ever changing industry standards, benchmarks and techniques. Don’t expect to progress if you cannot. There are more than enough sources of information, insight and tutorials online for this purpose. Learn how to use google, read blogs, subscribe to RSS feeds, listen to podcasts and watch tutorial videos. Welcome to the Worldwide University of the Internet. This is self learning or no learning time.

Ability to develop good problem solving and bug solving techniques

You will, and you can be sure of this, very early on in the process of learning HTML and CSS come up against problems. It is vital both for your sanity and your ability to meet a deadline, that you develop skills to be able to deal with these problems. Arm yourself with as many tools as you can, Chris Pederick’s Web developer toolbar is a good place to start, and learn how to use them. You will find them invaluable. Remember the importance of validating your code, I refer back to attention to detail, which cannot be overstated enough. ( I have lost hours as the result of missing “=” signs or quotation marks).

Establish a process you can go through, with any HTML , CSS problem to get to the bottom of it. the first step in fixing a problem is finding the cause. I personally use some or all of the following when working with layouts problems for example.

1. Validate your HTML and CSS to make sure you have not done something silly like remove a starting tag and forgotten to remove the ending tag
2. Apply a background colour to all block elements on the page, making sure all colours are different. This gives you a great insight into how all the elements on the page sit in relation to one another.
3. Some people swear by using borders for the same reason, to display the layout of each element, although I always found the extra pixels could throw pixel based layouts into disarray. (You mean you haven’t studies the Box model yet, why not!
4. You can achieve a similar effect using the web developer toolbar, in particular the outline drop down menu

The important thing is to develop these techniques early on and be able to pull them from your armoury if and when they are required.

If you can master these 3 skills you are well on your way to becoming a better web developer/web designer.

Some great keyboard shortcuts to take advantage of for power users, but equally well driven using the mouse only. It is great to see software that is so obviously led by the usability issues rather than the programming logic. It is clear that it has been designed around how people actually use RSS feeds. I particularly like the list view which has just enough information to assist my decision as to whether I want to read anymore, keyboard shortcuts then allow me to toggle open and close the item, open it in a new tab, add tags, star it for future reference. I can mark all items read in a particular folder. Simply holding down the shift key allows me to navigate at a folder level rather than an item level. Its all powered by AJAX and uses common like yellow fade technique and some modal windows. Another great advantage is simply being able to access one list from any location and any machine. Just like social bookmarking like ma.gnolia and del.icio.us have made favourites and browser bookmarks archaic, google online hosted RSS reader has done the same thing for RSS readers.

I think some transparent messages (as seen on website URL) rather than the text message that appear currently would be a nice touch.To make it even better I would like to see drag and drop functionality for sorting and categorising your subscriptions.

Its integration with firefox as one of the options for manging RSS subscriptions seals the deal and Google Reader as far as I’m concerned takes the RSS Crown.

• Simplicity, easy to use and compact
• Platform/Browser compatibility
• Good documentation
• Extensive community – I need something with some longevity and plenty of resource driving it forward
• Readily available examples of implementations – again a large community helps
• Good range of plug-ins for day to day development requirements – remember why I need it in the first place
• Something that assists me in my job of creating better user experiences on websites – Is it used by people of like mind
• Unobtrusive – easy to implement in an unobtrusive fashion
• Easily updateable , preferably no maintenance on my part

I am not an accomplished programmer, so I am less interested in whats under the hood and how it is all implemented behind the scenes and more interested in how these clever and talented programmers have provided me with a useful tool for web development. With this in mind I do hope that one day I will be able to grab the basics and use them to create my own useful components. The fear being that I become an accomplished googler and a magpie excelling at stealing other peoples work and not creating any of my own.

Who are the contenders?

For me I think it is between two, namely; jQuery and mootools

jQuery

jQuery is a Javascript library that takes this motto to heart: Writing Javascript code should be fun. jQuery achieves this goal by taking common, repetitive, tasks, stripping out all the unnecessary markup, and leaving them short, smart and understandable.

Mootools

mootools is a very compact, modular, Object-Oriented javascript framework. Its unique design makes it extremely crossbrowser, easy to use, and a snap to extend with your own code. It comes with a choice of more than fifteen scripts, plugins and add-ons

Whats my verdict

I wouldn’t look beyond either of these two. Both have great documentation, I particularly like visualjquery as a quick reference

I am currently in favour of JQuery and plan to stay so for the foreseeable future unless mootools pulls something out of the bag. I hope that jQuery integrates nicely with CakePHP which is to be my new endeavour…or one of them.

If anyone has any other suggestions I’d like to give them a look.

We now have, and I’ll be brief, vastly improved CSS support including @import and media type. We have support for AJAX!, RSS and tabbed browsing with close icons, all the main stays of the modern browsing experience. Oh and did I mention automatic updates, CAB installer or exe via active sync. We have nice bookmarks management, Good useability features like text size switching, find on page feature,variuos layouts, single column, desktop layout and panning. So now I may actually try a little harder to do truely cross device versions of my websites, heck at this rate in a few more months it may be worth it. I will certainly be more inclined to use the iPAQ to casually surf the internet.

You can download the windows installer or the mobile cab installer here.It just goes to show how far the project has come that it has its own page on Mozilla, I used to have to trawl server directories to find the nightly builds. You knwo I think this time next year it will be standard on all mobile devices…

A lot of my day is spent preaching about the virtue of building websites based around objectives and with users and their tasks in mind. So I thought it was about time I started to practice what I preach. My first stop was to check my site statistics and visitor patterns to try and establish how the site was being used. Now unfortunately my traffic is not particularly high and one could argue that to carry out such an analysis is pointless. I don’t disagree, however you have to start somewhere, sometime so why not now in preparation for the influx of visitors I will get , one day!

1. New home page
2. Improved content
3. Added new footer
4. Changed colour scheme slightly
5. Added portfolio

New home page

The site was suffering from the usual problem of users arriving at the homepage and leaving shortly thereafter, probably none the wiser as to what was going on in the site and with only the current latest post by which to decide if they would venture in. A few and I mean few had a quick peruse at the about me and a couple of other pages, seeing just enough to say, “right this won’t be going in the RSS Reader”. I always knew the homepage was weak, I just never got around to doing anything about it, exhausted as I was after finishing my bespoke blogging framework (Aside: “why didn’t I just learn php and go with wordpress?”, mental note: learn php and move site to wordpress before 2008!) But well now I

have and hopefully it may entice a few of you to venture into my labyrinth.

I have considered the kinds of things first time users might want to do , while also facilitating the user with the uptodate and changing content. The most recent post is singled out and balanced off with a new area for a feature where attention will be drawn to one or more items throughout the site that are new, this area will also talk about what is up and coming, hopefully encouraging the reader to check back if it is of interest or maybe even subscribe to the feeds.

Improved content

Now I am well aware that the best designed, structured and thought out website/blog is useless without quality content, and I am the first to admit that this is an area where I can improve. I mean to do so and soon. As someone who subscribes to a lot of quality RSS feeds I could simply act as a traffic warden pushing people on through to the latest goings on on the interweb, but well whats the point, is that just a statement to say “Oh look how uptodate I am” or “Hey I’m on the bandwagon come to me to hear whats hot and whats not”. Not much creativity there, not really adding anything of worth to the soup, more like an ego exercise or maybe that is too cynical after all we need people pushing the good agendas and helping to educate and inform. Anyway I digress (aside: “seems to be a bit of a habit of mine”). So back to the redesign and again a quick acknowledgment that the content has to improve.

Added new footer

It is widely accepted that it is at the bottom of the page where a site can lose the user. All I have tried to do is offer a few alternatives for them before they do so and more importantly if they do choose to go that maybe they follow some of the links I offer, which are to other parts of the web related to this site. Sounds like I want the user all to myself..;) Anyway I think it does a reasonable job at attempting to guess the kinds of things people may be thinking about and giving a few useful options before losing them completely. I’d love to here some opinions on this, even by the non development reader(s).

Changed colour scheme slightly and a few fonts

Aesthetically I was more than happy with the look and feel, the colour scheme having been taken from some digital photography, all centering around the north antrim coast and underwater, was fine but did get a slight update, just to provide the right emphasis on the sub heading tags. Likewise a few heading tags were emboldened and font sizes played with to get what I felt was the right contrast with the textual content. I also moved away from what i thought was an overuse of serif fonts and back to the old faithful Helvetica, can’t go wrong with that!

Added portfolio

Added a portfolio. Why? Well i suppose to show you guys what I do and let you judge for yourselves if you think it is any good. If you are not a designer or developer I suppose some of it washes over your head but having said that i think everyone has a valid opinion about a website how easy it is to do what you want to do on it and how visually appealing or otherwise it is. So please feel free to comment on any of them. My big thing is accessibility and usability, semantically sound markup.

Included in the portfolio are subsections for projects and videos, The video section includes a selection of video footage mainly underwater or of Gracie the pup. I intend to add to this regularly and may have to consider moving them to a video hosting site to overcome bandwidth issues if they arise. At present they aren’t steaming just progressive downloads done with flash. Great quality even if I say so myself, the compression algorithm is fantastic. The whole portfolio is presented using Lightbox but I will be playing around with this, though about trying thickbox, we’ll see.

So there you have, maybe the regular readers didn’t notice the changes, if you are new you won’t have known anything different but thats what I did and thats why i did it. Still to come, more fun in the sandbox, particularly as google has finally added some detail to our area and well you’ll just have to come back to find out…..

Dave, I want to blog recipes

Oh what to do, what advise to give, with great knowledge comes great responsibility. There are options here. Professional, Free, hosted blogs being the most obvious, maybe not quite what you need. besides it will compete with my old bespoke CMS based blog app that you have used for nearly 3 years and believe me mine can’t stand up to the challenge..Did I mention your transition to wordpress in the near future?

Anyway my recommendation for you and with the risk of starting a ‘bowyeresque’ fad.. I give you NING for creating and sharing social web apps. Now use it wisely girls.