Posts Tagged ‘process’

So, you’ve decided it’s time for a redesign. All the signs are there, and you’re ready to take the plunge. But where do you start? I’ve seen too many people launch into a web­site redesign without ser­ious con­sid­er­a­tion first, and unfor­tu­nately this can often mean that they’re not get­ting everything they should be from their redesign. A redesign is an invest­ment on your part—both in time and money—and can be a great oppor­tunity to turn your busi­ness around.

1. Get strategic.

Before doing any­thing else, you need to sit down and figure out what you want out of your web­site. The more clearly defined your goals are, the easier it will be for your designer, your copy­writer, and you to direct the pro­ject in order to meet these goals. “I want to pro­mote my com­pany” isn’t a clearly defined goal! You should be thinking instead about who your audi­ence is and what you want them to take away from the web­site. Do you want them to interact with it? Buy products? Send you a quote request? Come back every week to read your blog? Con­sider how you want them to react, feel, and interact with your web­site, and you’ll be closer to having clearly-defined goals.

If you’re having dif­fi­culty defining these goals, it may be helpful to work with a stra­tegic con­sultant, who’ll bring an out­side per­spective to the pro­ject. Anyone out­side of your busi­ness will see it in a very dif­ferent light than you do, which will help you to get a better grasp of what your users are thinking.

2. Eval­uate what works—and what doesn’t—in your cur­rent website

This is the time to be bru­tally honest. If your CEO designed your web­site five years ago, you shouldn’t be afraid to tell him it stinks—if I designed your web­site five years ago, feel free to tell me it stinks! I won’t be offended, it’s prob­ably true. Five years is more like thirty in internet years, and most businesses—and people—will have changed con­sid­er­ably in that span of time. Once you’ve real­ized it’s time for change, you need to be frank in your assess­ment of what’s in place now.

Look at design, SEO, con­tent, and ease-of-use (both for you in updating the site, and for your cus­tomers in using the site). Ask anyone who’ll tell you what they think. Spend a few hours poring over your Ana­lytics to see how users are inter­acting with the site. Better still, drag someone in from off the street, sit him down with your site, and hover over his shoulder while he looks through it. You’ll most likely infuriate him, but it’s incred­ibly useful to actu­ally watch how someone parses your site, and you’ll get an idea of what gets read—and what gets ignored—as well as any ele­ments of the site that are cur­rently causing confusion.

The Alli­ance for Com­munity Trees web­site, before and after. The logo was retained, and we used the same basic colour scheme. The end result was that returning users didn’t feel as though they’d landed on some other site acci­dent­ally, and they wel­comed the change.

3. While you’re at it, ser­i­ously con­sider your branding.

If you’re redesigning your web­site anyway, it may be a great time to con­sider redesigning your logo and branding as well. A gor­geous, well-thought-out redesign is going to have lim­ited impact if your logo sucks. When redesigning, you often don’t neces­sarily want to rebuild everything from the ground up—you’re best off taking what’s there and subtly chan­ging it to make it better. A great way to do this is to change the struc­ture and graphic ele­ments, but retain the same (or sim­ilar) colour scheme and typo­graphy. This way, it won’t be so jar­ring to return vis­itors as it would be if you were to rebuild everything from scratch. Basic­ally, the more estab­lished your busi­ness is, the more estab­lished your branding will (or at least should!) be in your cus­tomers’ eyes. This means you’ll need to make more subtle changes to avoid ali­en­ating your cli­en­tele.  Realign, don’t redesign.

The DVD Edge web­site, how­ever, had a less estab­lished brand and a less strong logo, so we were able to play with the logo a bit. Keeping the overall image means that it’s still not such a dra­matic change, but redrawing it to be a little cleaner and more modern made it stronger.

4. Con­sider a CMS.

I feel like I extoll the vir­tues of Word­Press a lot, but it’s ser­i­ously fant­astic. If you’re already revamping your web­site, and you’d like a way to manage your con­tent more easily, I’d recom­mend get­ting the whole thing built in Word­Press (or another CMS that suits your needs). While you’re at it, you can also add a blog to the site, which is great for bringing in traffic, boosting search engine res­ults, building valu­able con­tent, and increasing con­ver­sa­tion with your users. Static web­sites are out. Web­sites you can update easily and quickly the moment someone sends you a glowing testi­mo­nial are in.

5. Work on your con­tent first.

I’m willing to bet that your con­tent could be better. If you can’t write it your­self, hire someone. Great con­tent is every bit as important as great design, and if you’ve already got great con­tent plotted out, a great designer will be able to work with it in order to make the whole thing come together nicely.

Fern­wood Pub­lishing went for a com­plete over­haul and a custom-build CMS, while they were at it. The end result is a sleek, easy-to-use web­site that allows them to manage their large inventory of titles.

Con­sider the voice of your website—too many sites read like bro­chure copy written ten years ago by someone with an MBA. If your audi­ence is other people with MBAs, that’s fine, but chances are, your audi­ence is just put off by buzzwords. If you speak to them in an honest and friendly way, you’ll find your audi­ence is much more receptive, engaged, and more likely to hand over their money to you.

6. Hire great people, and let them do their jobs.

Who you hire for the pro­ject is up to you, but I recom­mend at least a designer—obviously! A copy­writer and a stra­tegic con­sultant, as men­tioned earlier, will also be a great help. When you’re looking to hire someone, you obvi­ously want to be sure they’ve got a great web­site already. Unfor­tu­nately, while many people in the website-making industry suffer from pretty severe cases of “carpenter’s house”, their web­sites are the best way for you to determine their abil­ities. Past pro­jects, of course, are also quite telling, as are client testi­mo­nials. Once you’ve found someone that seems like they may be good, send them a few emails. Ask ques­tions. Make sure that they respond within a reas­on­able time­frame, answer your ques­tions to your sat­is­fac­tion, and know what they’re talking about.

Then, hire these great people. Send them your stra­tegic plans, your con­tent, everything you’ve already worked on—and let them build you some­thing great. Design is very much a col­lab­or­ative pro­cess, and a good designer should lead you through the pro­cess, keeping your goals in mind at all times, making sug­ges­tions for improve­ments. Remember you hired these people for a reason, and you should be able to trust their pro­fes­sional guid­ance! If you allow the pro­cess to play out like a part­ner­ship, rather than a dic­tat­or­ship, you’ll find your­self with a much stronger end result.

And I recom­mend that you hire Trig­gers & Sparks.

Busi­ness­wise, the last few weeks have been quite active for me. I’ve heard from lots of new cli­ents and have started quite a number of new pro­jects. I’ve even heard from old pro­spects I’d for­gotten about, and I’ve had interest crop up from new con­tacts. I noticed, how­ever, that while I’m working an awful lot, I’m spending quite a sur­prising amount of time on non-billable work.

Usu­ally, I’d determine this Not a Very Good Thing. It’s always dan­gerous, when you’re run­ning a busi­ness, to fall into the trap of spending too much time working on the busi­ness, and not enough time working in it, but I sus­pect I rather tend to err on the other side, and I could do with spending more of my time making my busi­ness run a little smoother.

So, I may be crazy busy, but I’ve been investing some time into set­ting things up so that my pro­jects can run a little more smoothly, which I expect to be well worth it in the long run.

1. I started using Basecamp.

I avoided using Base­camp for ages. I’m a big fan of boot­strap­ping it, and as a result I avoid any­thing that entails a monthly fee like the plague. I’m also only a one-man op, at least most of the time, so I don’t usu­ally need a great deal more co-ordination than “sending out emails back and forth”. I once installed a stan­dalone pro­ject man­age­ment system, and found it inef­fective: I was spending too much time entering dates and todos and doing admin­is­trative tasks, rather than actu­ally achieving any­thing pro­ductive, and my cli­ents were con­fused by the inter­face and pro­cess. Accord­ingly, I gave up on the idea of pro­ject management.

Then, along came the Night­mare Pro­ject. If you know me, you’ve prob­ably heard of the Night­mare Pro­ject. (Not to be con­fused with the Night­mare Nib­bler, which was actu­ally a Dream Pro­ject, and needs to be added to my web­site very shortly.) I may still be working on the Night­mare Pro­ject on my deathbed. It’s been mis­man­aged; it’s out-of-control; and every day there are twenty dif­ferent emails flying round, indis­crim­in­ately reply-alled. I have no idea if files I’m sent are final, there’s no repos­itory, no organ­iz­a­tion, no whatever. It causes me an immense amount of stress and I have very little con­trol over the situ­ation, as the pro­ject man­age­ment isn’t in my hands at all.

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Giving good feed­back is integral to good design. While I’m sure all designers—myself included–would love to just whip up a gor­geous design without asking anyone else for their opinion, good design can be made better by working within lim­it­a­tions and incor­por­ating the feed­back of others. And of course, we gen­er­ally want to make our cli­ents happy and give them what they want. Accord­ingly, any designer worth his salt will make sure that the design pro­cess includes his client: we make mockups, ask for feed­back, then refine, ask for more feed­back, refine, ask for more, refine—and so on a so forth, until everyone’s happy (in theory).

Some­times everyone really is happy, and the end result is beau­tiful and usable and made of design-love. Other times, though, one of us is going to end up miser­able, and the design can end up so off-target, messy, awk­ward, or down­right ugly, that your designer won’t put it in his port­folio. That’s a bad scene. In order to make the feed­back pro­cess as effi­cient as pos­sible, I’ve rounded up a few tips from years of going through this pro­cess with a rather sub­stan­tial number of clients—of both the dream and the night­mare variety.

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Hiring a designer is a tricky pro­cess. You’ve got to pick someone, some­times out of nowhere, pay him a bunch of money as a deposit, and hope that he comes up with some­thing you love. Chances are good that whatever you need designed is some­thing you care a great deal about (espe­cially if you’re a startup or have a stake in the suc­cess of the product/company/website), so you really want to make sure to get it right. But how do you go about finding a designer that’s going to be a good fit for you?

I’ve never felt the need to hire a designer, what with being one myself, but I’ve cer­tainly been hired by lots of people who are looking, and I’ve also heard all sorts of nightmare-designer stories from my cli­ents. (Yep, for every client from hell, there’s also a designer from hell.)

Here’s what I’d do!

1. Look at his portfolio!

Above and beyond any­thing else, this will give you an idea of what you might be able to get from a designer. Obvi­ously, your res­ults will vary (you, as the client, are an integral part of the design pro­cess), but you’ll be able to get a feel for a designer’s style and abil­ities from his port­folio. If a designer doesn’t have a portfolio—well, quite frankly, this shouldn’t even be pos­sible. If you’re looking to hire a designer who doesn’t have a port­folio or a web­site, there’s some­thing amiss.

2. Ask around.

Ask your friends for recom­mend­a­tions. Most good designers sub­sist almost entirely on word-of-mouth, and with good reason! If you know people who’ve hired a designer, chances are they’ll be happy to refer you so long as they had a good exper­i­ence. You can also check the bottom of web­sites whose design you really like—most of the time, there’ll be a link to its designer in its footer, and you can go from there.

3. Ask questions.

And lots of them! Does he write his code by hand? Does he follow W3C stand­ards? How long has he been in busi­ness? The more ques­tions you ask, the more com­fort­able you’ll feel when it’s time to start working. This will also give you the oppor­tunity to see how your designer com­mu­nic­ates, so make sure that if you plan on doing most of your com­mu­nic­a­tions during the pro­ject via email, you are asking ques­tions over email. If you’ve found a great designer who can’t com­mu­nicate, you will run into prob­lems down the road.

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Shit hap­pens. It may be trite, but it’s true. You can be the most organ­ized, thoughtful, and thor­oughly pre­pared busi­nessperson in the uni­verse, but even­tu­ally, some­where along the line, things will spiral out of con­trol. Sud­denly, your metic­u­lously planned pro­ject has turned into a beast: a mess of missed dead­lines, a slew of thwarted expect­a­tions, or an end product that simply isn’t shaping up right.

I’m a con­trol freak, so of course I don’t let this happen too often. How­ever, last week, a big pro­ject I’ve been working on for some time got away from me. It had been slowly plod­ding along, months behind dead­line and mostly-stagnant, while I worked on other things and waited for the bits and pieces I needed to come in. I figured nothing was wrong, really—sure, we were way behind dead­line, but the client knew that, since they missed their dead­lines, right? The design pro­cess tends to stall if the client isn’t coming up with their end of things (feed­back, con­tent, etc), so I’m used to pro­jects that go into a bit of stasis for a while. I figured it wasn’t a big deal.

Kabloo-ey!

Wow, was I ever wrong. Sud­denly, some­thing happened with the client—I’m guessing that my con­tacts got chewed out by their boss—and they started emailing me three times a day, asking where things were. I was working on a team with a writer and a pro­ject man­ager, plus two client con­tacts, and there was sud­denly a massive influx of emails flying around all over the place, each more aggressive and inflam­matory than the last. I had been working with an illus­trator based out of [some­where far away], and I started to realize he just wasn’t deliv­ering in a timely manner, he’d go AWOL for days on end, and that I wasn’t able to prop­erly com­mu­nicate my client’s vague dir­ec­tions to him. My stress levels spiked, and panic set in. I’m going to fail, I told myself. I’m going to fail, the pro­ject will tank, and I’ll never work again. It’s over for me. Might as well start handing out resumes to cof­feeshops now.

But appar­ently I’ve now got this big bad logical-calm-adult brain going on. It told the pan­icky screaming little kid inside my head to shush, and started fig­uring out how to fix things. Now, a week later, the pro­ject is nearly fin­ished (well, sort of), my stress levels are reduced sig­ni­fic­antly, and I’m working with a new illus­trator who’s turning stuff around at light speed and gets my client far better than I do.

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Bad cli­ents are notorious among designers. We com­plain about them con­stantly, we’ve devoted a hilarious-yet-heartbreaking web­site to them, and we swap horror stories like badges of honour, rolling our eyes in empathy and disgust.

We spend so much time com­plaining about the bad cli­ents that it’s some­times easy to over­look the good cli­ents. Lately, I’ve been working with a few really great cli­ents, and I’ve been so happy because of it. Where a bad client can make you feel as though you’re losing your soul, a good client reminds you of why you fell in love with design in the first place and makes you feel as though you’re doing a good job. It’s the sort of warm-fuzzy feeling I asso­ciate with boys who bring me flowers and strangers com­pli­menting me on my shoes.

Win­ning your designer’s love, regard­less of any other factors, will mean that you will receive a level of ser­vice and quality that sur­passes that most Trouble­some Cli­ents receive. When I love a client and feel that my client respects me as a pro­fes­sional, I invest more of my mental ener­gies into their pro­ject. A good client makes you want to do an amazing job, where a bad client exper­i­ence will often just make you want to finish as fast as pos­sible and get the heck out.

So, how do you go about making sure you’re the greatest client ever, and ensuring your designer feels as pas­sionate about your pro­ject as you do? Here, a few tips culled dir­ectly from my Dream Clients:

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Before I decided to become a designer, I held a whole array of jobs over the years to make my rent. I wrote for an online magazine and acted as “web­master” for a local IT com­pany during high school. I was briefly a knife salesman, before I real­ized I can’t sell any­thing. I worked at a gas sta­tion on crack alley, serving coffee from the self-serve coffee counter to very con­fused cus­tomers. I was a maid for all of an hour (before I quit). I was a crossing guard, a security guard, and the world’s fastest (and sur­liest) Subway employee. How­ever, by far the oddest employ­ment I’ve ever had came after my trans­ition to a “career”: I take my clothes off for money.

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In the interest of con­tinuing my forays into self-directed and hand-generated pro­jects, I’ve been taking a screen­printing class at the fant­astic Roberts Street Social Centre the past few weeks. It’s been fant­astic, and I’m so glad I took a class instead of learning it myself—while I do love teaching myself new skills, the setup would have been extensive and it may have been more dif­fi­cult to find the motiv­a­tion to “go” to class each week, whereas with a defined class time, I was forced to show up or lose my oppor­tunity. With pro­jects and to-do lists con­stantly piling up, I may oth­er­wise have aban­doned the endeavour for sleep.

The time-crunch, how­ever, meant that I needed to accept imper­fec­tions. Now, anyone who knows me knows well that I’m a tiny bit per­snickety: I’ll spend half an hour adjusting the kerning of a font until it feels just right, I’ll go back over a design that’s already been client-approved in order to “fin­esse” the whole thing, and I typ­ic­ally com­plain that Pho­toshop won’t zoom to a level any higher than 1600%.  While I really do believe that this is a valu­able tend­ency in a designer (and, in fact, I sus­pect that most graphic designers are by nature a touch anal-retentive), it’s also a major hindrance in an industry that is so intensely deadline-driven.

Fin­ished thank you cards, each one screen­printed by hand! I’m not happy with the heart design at all–the lines are sim­ul­tan­eously too thick AND too thin. I think I might prefer this redesigned with more of a skull/vine design in the bottom-right corner.

This is why often my self-driven pro­jects are fin­ished late: while client pro­jects are often do-or-die, if the client is myself, I’m often con­tent to let my expected dead­line pass me by in favour of pro­du­cing work that’s closer to “per­fect” (it’s never actu­ally per­fect, of course.) This is why it took me three months longer than expected to launch my new web­site, and why my Valentines were barely even printed and ready to go by the four­teenth. Given that it’s easy to sour on your own work after obsessing over it too long, this delay is a dan­gerous thing. Wait too long, and the whole thing ends up needing to be scrapped and started all over again!

But with the screen­printing class, I had no option (other than flak­i­ness, which I’m giving up as a life­style choice as much as pos­sible). So I showed up for my second class with a design that wasn’t per­fect, telling myself that it was just a learning pro­ject, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t right. I’m just learning! It’s okay to screw up!

The thing I started to realize as I got into the printing pro­cess is this: everything that looks like a fatal error to me is basic­ally invis­ible to everyone else.  (Not a major rev­el­a­tion, but some­thing I ought to con­stantly keep in mind, because I never seem to remember it.) The fun­da­mental flaws in the ini­tial design weren’t nearly as glaring or as apparent to others as they were to me.

Then, as I pro­ceeded with the printing pro­cess, I real­ized that I hadn’t been as pre­cise with the first colour “plate” (the red accents) as I would have liked. (In screen­printing, each colour is printed inde­pend­ently of the others, much like a tra­di­tional CMYK plate-printing pro­cess that I learned about in school, but never actu­ally had a chance to wit­ness.) Accord­ingly, when I printed the black “plate” on top of the red, the regis­tra­tion often didn’t line up per­fectly, and there was an overlap.

Then some­thing funny happened. I could, in theory, have used an acetate sheet to register and measure the place­ment of every single print to ensure a per­fect output on every single print. I thought about it, briefly, and then threw cau­tion utterly to the wind, and just started printing willy-nilly. Prints came out with white where red should be, and red where white should be, and instead of breaking down into tears or tan­trums, I care­fully put them on the drying rack with the others. Not only was I not upset, but I actu­ally dis­covered that I rather liked these mis-fit mis-prints! Who­ever knew?

And really, where I’m so gung-ho on the hand­made pro­cess anyway, it’s about time I learned not only to accept, but to embrace my mis­takes. (Are you listening, brain? I’m talking to you.) Mis­takes are often the most inter­esting part of a piece of work, and they so often gen­erate new ideas and con­cepts that might oth­er­wise forever remain undis­covered (gravity, nylon, peni­cillin, chocolate-covered bacon). And espe­cially when some­thing is hand­made, part of its appeal lies in its imper­fec­tions: signs of the inher­ently flawed human touch. So often the aes­thetics of error (cracks in pave­ment, burned-out build­ings, rips in a sheet of paper) are more inter­esting, alive, and vibrant than the ster­ility of pixel-perfection.

Can you spot the errors? I bet I can find more than you can!

Now, if only I can apply that sort of thinking to everything else I do, I might finally be able get some sleep!

So if you’ve been any­where within a ten-mile radius of me any­time in the last week and a half, you’re prob­ably well aware of The Big Card Pro­ject. I took it upon myself to design a set of six macabre Valentines, thinking it’d be a a fun little pro­ject that’d get me away from the com­puter, make me feel more cre­ative, and force me to relax a touch.

Thumb­nail sketches. This is how things started. I hate showing people my sketch­book because things invari­ably look like they were drawn by a blind five-year-old. Basic­ally, I’m just trying to get the com­pos­i­tion right.

Of course, I forgot to factor in the fact that I’m a crazy work­aholic per­fec­tionist with an insom­niac streak a mile wide whenever I get really pas­sionate about a pro­ject. My little lark of a pro­ject kept me up late, made an utter war­zone of my apart­ment, and still took far longer than I’d anticipated.

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I usu­ally use Scripta­li­cious for my AJAX needs, but I’m working on a set of AJAX-ified forms on a web­site that’s already using jQuery, so I figure hey, it can’t be that hard to change over! Twenty minutes later, cue the loud cursing and growling. I mean, the whole thing seems far more powerful, but every time I’ve wanted to start imple­menting it, I’ve been turned off by how com­plex it seems to do simple things. (Like slide down a div window, which I hope to have accom­plished before I turn 30. On a side note, I’ve been feeling old because I turned 25 today, until my little sister sent me a mes­sage saying that I’m “plenty young, for a pres­ident!” Which I sup­pose is tech­nic­ally true, so I don’t feel quite so washed up anymore.)

Anyway, back to my jQuery-induced head­ache: this very helpful thing to the rescue! If I can stop being dis­tracted by the gor­geous site design, I might be able to figure this stuff out, after all, without having to spend all day teaching my brain new methods of pro­gram­ming. I do so love pro­gram­ming tutorials written for designers. Thank you, pretty col­ourful website!

Have I men­tioned how much I love my cli­ents? I checked the mailbox yes­terday and found a box full of deli­cious chocolate muffins (thank good­ness cus­toms didn’t open the box!), accom­panied by this note:

Hi Sarah,

So sorry to hear that you lost a con­sid­er­able amount of work when water spilled on your com­puter. While chocolate zuc­chini muffins (no nuts–in case you’re allergic) won’t bring the material back (wouldn’t that be great), per­haps they can fuel the recre­ation pro­cess. Just want to let you know that we can be patient for an ulti­mately high-quality product.

Cheers!

ACT

How utterly sweet & lovely is that? I am an incred­ibly lucky girl to get to work with such fab­ulous clients.

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determ­ined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearran­ging. (more…)