Posts Tagged ‘websites’

For­give me father, for I have sinned. Actu­ally, I haven’t, but you prob­ably have. I don’t mean glut­tony, lust, et. al. Hon­estly, some of those really have their time and place. I’m talking about the things that I see over and over, on web­sites big and small, that abso­lutely drive me insane. I make web­sites for a living. If I can’t use yours, or get frus­trated by it and leave, there’s a good chance that your target market (unless they’re more technically-inclined than I am, which they’re prob­ably not) is having an even worse time. Lucky for you, I’ll tell you about it! (Just ask about the time I gave a long speech to a poor phone-line person at my bank because their web­site only sup­ported IE.)

1. Text that isn’t text.

Res­taurant web­sites, I’m looking at you in par­tic­ular. Scan­ning your paper menu and throwing it up on your web­site as an image file or a PDF is the equi­valent of cre­ating a door by drawing it in chalk on the side of your house. Never mind the fact that your SEO is going to hell, that it’s a pain to update any­thing, and it prob­ably looks ter­rible. This is just a night­mare from a usab­ility stand­point. This is pretty vital inform­a­tion, and locking it up in as an image means that the inform­a­tion becomes infin­itely less access­ible. Your users can’t copy-and-paste bits. It’s harder to see on a smart­phone. They can’t resize the fonts if they can’t read some­thing. It won’t con­form to the avail­able space, so they’ll prob­ably be stuck scrolling back and forth, or they’ll miss your great deal on Kung Pao chicken.

It’s 2011. You can use almost any font you want in a web­site now. You can do amazing things with fine-tuned typo­graphy you couldn’t do three years ago. There’s no excuse for lazy-designer tricks like these. Text should be text.

2. Flash.

I’ve said it before, and lots of other people have said it before me, but it bears repeating. Don’t use Flash. Flash is slow-loading, doesn’t work on an iAnything, and gen­er­ally is built quite badly. It gen­er­ally crashes my browser these days (poor Laz­arus­Book). Also, see above, and also below.

3. Stuff that sings, jumps, dances, or oth­er­wise behaves like an over-excited puppy.

I’m the first to admit I’m a bit of a con­trol freak, but most people don’t like it when you hijack their machines without asking first. I was vis­iting a web­site the other day that had the most obnox­ious ad I’ve ever seen—five seconds after loading, this huge man appeared in the browser window and started talking at me. It was terrifying.

Most people know better than to load up their web­sites with giant-obnoxious-talking-man-ads, but there are many subtler examples of this. Links that open in new win­dows auto­mat­ic­ally (I’ll do this on my own if I want, thank you). Music and video that starts auto­mat­ic­ally (typ­ic­ally embar­rassing people with speakers con­nected, and leaving me hunting around to find the offending site). 99.98% of anim­ated gifs, ban­ners, and ads. Let your users con­trol how they interact with your web­site, or they’ll just leave.

You can repent all you want, but if your web­site sings at me, you’re damned to an eternity of anim­ated fiery gifs. (Photo from a street corner some­where in Rome.)

4. Ugly design.

My sister’s in lib­rary studies, and one of her pre­requis­ites is a “web design” course. I told her she could save the $500 that credit prob­ably cost her, and I could teach her the whole thing in ten seconds. Hire a web designer. This isn’t a self-serving state­ment. I don’t care (much) if you hire me, or if you hire some other com­petent designer. You can’t learn design from a three-month course. There’s all sorts of crazy com­plic­ated stuff, both tech­nical and aes­thetic, that goes into design. The reason most people don’t under­stand this is because good design is like a great push-up bra: it sup­ports and enhan­cing its con­tent without over­powering it. In theory, you’re not sup­posed to notice it. But it makes a huge difference.

5. Bad code.

Your web­site should be standards-compliant, semantic­ally coded, and easy to update. If your web designer/developer doesn’t under­stand what these things mean, hire someone else. Sur­pris­ingly enough, there are still web­sites using tables. And frames. And inline boxes. Remember that internet years are like dog years, except longer, and that developers need to be con­stantly learning new stuff in order to make great web­sites. Make sure you hire someone who knows what they’re doing from a tech­nical point of view, and you’ll end up with a web­site that per­forms far better—in terms of page speed, browser com­pat­ib­ility, and search engine rankings—than you would otherwise.

6. Business-speak.

A web­site is not a bro­chure. Most people reading online have the atten­tion spans of drunk gold­fish. Keep things short and scan­nable and people are more likely to read what you’ve written (says the woman who reg­u­larly writes 1000+ word blog posts). Stop using business-newspeak to make your­self sound more important. People no longer care about that sort of thing (unless they’re in gov­ern­ment, in which case, aim for as dry and nap-inducing as pos­sible). The internet is a scary place, full of fraud and Nigerian princes. Speak with a voice that’s genu­inely yours and people will be more inclined to trust you.

7. It’s broken.

About three years ago, I bought a box of some­thing from a cer­tain unnamed food com­pany with ini­tials in their name. I’ve never bought any­thing from them since, but they gave me a card and a number at the time and signed me up for their mailing list. When I tried to unsub­scribe, their web­site demanded that I submit both my email address and the number on the card that I’d never used and had lost. I put up with their irrel­evant weekly mail­ings for some time until I finally found my card and unsubscribed.

When I did, their web­site told me it would take ten days to remove my address. Really? Ten days? Is your data­base main­tained in a note­book or some­thing? That’s utterly ridicu­lous. The best part was that after two weeks, they were still emailing me, and I had to send a long, cranky email explaining how broken their system was and that I really should be able to unsub­scribe without put­ting as much effort into it as one typ­ic­ally does when get­ting a divorce. (They never responded, but I haven’t received any more emails—yet.)

This is a more minor example, but I’ve seen lots of web­sites that are broken in more major ways. Con­tact forms fail and there’s no fall­back email address. Shop­ping carts that don’t check out. Val­id­a­tion routines that main­tain “Buenos Aires” is not a city in Argen­tina (I lived there. Trust me, it is.) Test your web­sites, make sure they work, and fix them if they’re broken.

Jesus died for your sins, not so that you can throw the word “syn­ergy” around like it’s going out of style. (Photo from Tierra Santa, the reli­gious theme park in Buenos Aires. Don’t worry, Jesus later rises, in giant animat­ronic style, from the hilltop.)

So hire a designer already, and save your­self for the sins you can really take pleasure in.

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.

As I men­tioned in last week’s post, I’m working on stream­lining a number of my pro­cesses. The most important, and I think accord­ingly the most com­plex, of these pro­cesses is that by which I develop web­sites, which is often some­thing of a mish­mash of various meth­od­o­lo­gies and tech­niques. Since I build so many Word­Press web­sites (and I do believe it’s magic), I’ve been focusing on devel­oping a sort of gen­eric tem­plate for Word­Press web­sites. This includes the theme itself (and its cor­res­ponding frame­works and depend­en­cies), but also a col­lec­tion of plu­gins that I use on every site. Akismet and All-in-one SEO Pack are so ubi­quitous as to be obvious, but I’ve been working on a list of others that are almost uni­ver­sally useful. Most of them improve upon the core func­tion­ality of Word­Press straight out of the box, and so demand very little from either user or designer.
Here’s my list (at least for today).
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Walking home the other day, I saw a new tattoo shop had opened up near my house. “Classy Tattoo Par­lour”, the sign pro­claimed in loud, all-caps serifed let­ters. Of course, it was in a strip mall, so even if it were the classiest joint in town, full of ladies in bee­hives smoking from mile-long cigar­ette holders and men in fine suits drinking scotch (it’s pos­sible that “classy” and “debauchery” are con­fused in my mind), there’s some­thing of a dis­con­nect there.

It got me thinking about how often com­panies mis­rep­resent them­selves, some­times inten­tion­ally, and some­times acci­dent­ally. In a world where we all have less “face time” with companies—I’ve worked with all kinds of cli­ents I’ve never met, and some whose loc­a­tions I’m not sure about at all—it’s easy to see where our poten­tial cli­ents might not be as trusting of us as they ought to be. If a cus­tomer doesn’t trust a com­pany, he’s unlikely to give the com­pany any business.

So, how do you go about estab­lishing your credibility?

1. Answer your emails, please!

This has got to be one of the most valu­able things that you can do for your busi­ness, espe­cially if your sales are mostly gen­er­ated via the internet. Email is the method by which most cli­ents will reach you, and if their first few ques­tions go unanswered for lengthy periods of time, they’re going to think that this will always be the case. If you’re working with someone who’s halfway across the globe, email com­mu­nic­a­tion is sud­denly ten­fold more important, and if you don’t respond to your emails, your cli­ents will simply assume that you’ve run away with their money and pro­jects. I emailed a com­pany a simple ques­tion about their product three days ago and have still heard nothing; at this point, I’m highly unlikely to pur­chase any­thing from them. Even a simple “we got your email, we’re looking into it, and we’ll be in touch soon” might have suf­ficed, but it’s simply irre­spons­ible to ignore an email for any more than forty-eight hours.

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Last week, I made an important, life-changing decision. One that I should have made years ago, but I’ve cow­towed to abuse for too long. From here on out, I will no longer be devel­oping web­sites that work in IE6.

I will, instead, be using the fab­ulous IE6 Update script on all of my web­sites. (There’s even a Word­Press plugin. It’s going to be so simple, it’ll almost be auto­matic. In fact, if you run a Word­Press site, could you just run out an install it, right now? I just did. It feels good.) I won’t even bother trying to check what I’ve cre­ated in IE6 any more (though I’ll admit I didn’t often).

According to Net­mar­ket­share, almost 17% of the internet still uses IE6. That’s utterly insane, given that IE6 is nine years old, three ver­sions out-of-date, and famed for being the scourge of the internet. If you’re bored one day, sit a web designer/developer—or whatever hybrid you prefer—down and men­tion IE6. I can almost guar­antee you’ll get a frus­trated or sickened face, and maybe a string of explet­ives, if you’re really lucky.

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Yes­terday, I received two emails from dif­ferent cli­ents, both inquiring about building WordPress-based web­sites. I responded, as I usu­ally do: “Word­Press is awe­some! I love building sites with Word­Press! Let’s do it!” I’ve found that I’m using it as the back­bone for a lot of my web­sites these days (including the entirety of this one!), and I love it more and more the more time I spend with it.

Why?

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When I was working on my new design for this web­site, I spent a lot of time eval­u­ating my options for image dis­play, as it’s one of the most vital ele­ments of the site. I had very spe­cific require­ments for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the gal­leries, and the ease of imple­ment­a­tion. I spent forever looking through all sorts of Word­Press plu­gins, hacks, and stan­dalone solu­tions, and even­tu­ally settled (grudgingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the Sim­pleViewer plugin.

Of course, after spending forever (I stopped counting some­where along the line) spent making it work pre­cisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my port­folio is now dis­playing with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth happened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My con­tact form plugin had also deac­tiv­ated itself without my noti­cing some­where along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the Sim­pleViewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and imple­menting the change, so things are going to look ter­rible between now and then.) I found an altern­ative that I think will be better, and sim­pler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every port­folio post and upload new gal­leries: Gal­li­frey, based on Gal­ler­iffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll recog­nize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Word­Press’ built-in gal­lery func­tions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to imple­ment my triple-bordered image dis­play that I wanted ini­tially for this site. Sim­pleviewer, you were fant­astic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

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After all the hectic-ness and flurry of activity that was the big web­site launch, I took a whole day off for the first time in ages. I curled up with a blanket and read a good hun­dred or so pages of The Master and Mar­garita (which I highly recom­mend), then went out to a Christmas party dressed as, depending on how you see it, either a very large, very talk­ative present, or a Vegas wait­ress on Christmas.

I felt so refreshed the next day that I very nearly made it a whole weekend off work! After all, what are Sundays for if not cat­naps and hot baths, and gen­eral relax­a­tion? How­ever, my photographically-inclined room­mate was applying for a job, and her tumblr web­site was doing a ter­rible job of show­casing her skills.

So we sat down together, spent about half an hour combing through pho­to­graphs of trees, and even­tu­ally pulled together this quick-and-dirty little web­site for her. It’s using the same image-display script I use for my own site, and there are still a few kinks I’ll need to work out, but it’s a good example of what can be pulled together in an evening if you’re motiv­ated enough.

Do check out her web­site—she does some lovely work, and she’s looking to do more!

About 95% of the work I do tends fall into the “logos and web­sites” cat­egory, but every now and again I’m given the oppor­tunity to work on some­thing a little dif­ferent. One of my favourite “little dif­ferent some­thing” is the resume. I’ve designed a number of them, and I always enjoy them. They’re chal­len­ging from an inform­a­tion hier­archy point of view, and people really notice them. I’ve heard all kinds of com­ments, in part I think because people are so used to seeing the same boring MS Word tem­plates.

Julie Smith is a Toronto lawyer whose resume I recently designed. She sent her resume out to two dif­ferent com­panies one day, and was given an inter­view on the second. Later, she passed along this com­ment from a headhunter:

Your resume looks fant­astic! One of the best I’ve ever seen!

So, if you find your­self facing unem­ploy­ment (I’m not going to use the “R” word, or even the “D” word, but do feel free to ruminate on the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate in whatever manner you’d prefer), you should invest in a custom-designed resume! It’s cheap, it’s fun, and it may even get you a job. And I get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone out.

I’ve had the cra­ziest last-little-while: per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally, oth­er­wise. I took my first vaca­tion in years and dis­ap­peared into the Mayan jungle for a week, and I’ve just recently returned from just shy of a full month spent on-the-road, living out of suit­cases and back­packs and the trunk of my car. It’s been utterly fabulous–exhausting and refreshing sim­ul­tan­eously, and just what I needed to return to my life & busi­ness with a clean brain & slate.

I have many stories and pho­to­graphs, which are forth­coming. For now, two new pro­jects: the hol­iday cards I mean to do every year, and a redesign and rear­chi­tec­turing of Fern­wood Pub­lishing.

The Good: Digsby is gor­geous. I love the gigantic fluor­es­cent “down­load” bar that gets OS-specific after you click on it. I love their coming soon page, too, although I might have pre­ferred to find an actual download.

The Bad: No more Digby. I’m trying hard not to think about it because it makes me sad. Why aren’t there more beau­tiful & clever, highly sat­ur­ated things around? (I am hap­piest in tech­ni­colour). I don’t under­stand why “reality” is so inter­esting. There’s enough reality right out­side my door; I’d rather the fantasy when I’m looking to get out of my head.

and the Ridicu­lous: Minggl thinks “b3k 4w5″ isn’t a valid postal code. It took me three tries to figure out they wanted me to cap­it­alize it. Ser­i­ously? Canada Post will deliver my mail if I forget the majority of the address and scrawl it upside down with a six-inch-wide marker, but some web app that isn’t ever going to send me mail can’t val­idate a lower­case postal code?

Also, why are all web apps named by dys­lexic five year olds now? I miss real words.

but appar­ently I’m not. I’ve actu­ally had “update web­site” on my to-do list for the last three or four weeks. In the past week it’s actu­ally been upgraded to “update web­site PLEASE” and “for the love of EVERYTHING, UPDATE WEBSITE ALREADY”. I’m starting to sus­pect it might be easier to switch over from my custom-built Ruby on Rails powered site to a cus­tom­ized Word­Press site, which could easily handle everything my RoR is doing with a much easier-to-use backend (not that manu­ally editing data­base fields isn’t easy).

I’ve been using Word­Press for everything lately, and have totally fallen in love with it. I seem to always be a little behind the curve on web trends (as a side note, I’m now on Twitter, though I still don’t really under­stand the point entirely) due to my gen­eral dis­taste for trends (if everyone likes it, it can’t pos­sibly be any good, right?). But I really wish I’d dis­covered the power and flex­ib­ility of Word­Press earlier on—it’s bril­liant and I’m begin­ning to use it for more and more of my client projects.

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