A Nice Social Media Story
Yesterday morning, Katy (my wife) and I went to a new store that one of our clients just opened (3Cups.net - the site is going live this week). Chris Butler and Carolyn (his wife) happened to walk in right behind us. It was very nice.
Chris, being the diligent guy he is, checked his feeds yesterday morning and found that one of our clients, Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com found a bug on her site and mentioned it in a Twitter tweet, and she has Twitter and Facebook fused. Now, Jill is one networked lady, so she basically told thousands of people that her site had a bug before we even knew about it. Fortunately, Chris was among those thousands. He promptly issued an APB to our developers and within two hours - early on a Sunday - the bug was fixed and we let Jill know via a comment on her Facebook page.
Managing Your Online Reputation
When I was a college resident adviser, my boss would frequently challenge me with the same irksome rhetorical question-- likely because he knew it vexed me, but also because it was an effective way to get me to really think about how I did my job. He'd tilt his head ever so slightly, raise one eyebrow, and say, "Chris, is perception reality?" I always wanted to answer "no," valuing the absolute truth over what might be someone else's incorrect perception of me. Yet I also sensed that the answer was "yes," because someone's perception could often be their only real experience of me.
So is perception reality? For many companies, the answer is certainly yes. Customers and potential customers will define a company's reputation through their collective influence. Whether by word of mouth, written reviews, news stories, or public complaints, the customer's perception is what shapes the reality of a company's reputation.
Better Form Design
Afshan Kirmani has posted the first a two-part article on how to design better online forms. You can read the full article on Boxes and Arrows in which Afshan uses the example of signing up for a web-based e-mail account to highlight the components of a successful form:
Affordance - clear entry points for the applicant, addressing security issues, consistent design between website and form, a brief overview of the forms requirements and the ability to save form content and continue later
Orientation - clear form titles, progress indicators and progress feedback (especially on longer forms)
Chunking - logically grouping and labeling related parts of a form to promote readability and ease content digestion as well as breaking longer forms onto separate pages
Are you getting the most from your blog posts?
Mark Shipley, who has seriously gotten drunk on some Newfangled Kool-Aid as of late (check out this masterful post), asked if we could send him a checklist that he could run through to make sure his blog posts are getting the visibility they should. In taking his advice, Ive decided to write a piece about this instead of just emailing him the skinny.Thanks to Chris Butler for help on some of these details.
The post should:
Be content-rich and support your companys mission Be between 300 and 500 words (most of the time)Have a carefully considered meta space title, page title and URL which should all revolved around the central thesis statement of the post.The points above are as much SEO pointers as blog pointers. I am by no means a blogging authority, but these tips certainly wont hurt.
Once the post is written you should:
Post it to Digg, as long as it represents new and unique thought. Be forewarned, the categories they make you choose from are quite limiting.StumbleUpon it.Twitter it.Finally, link back to it as you are posting comments to others posts and answering LinkedIn questions.Update 10/21/8: If you have your social media tools integrated, youll get some double benefit from a few of the actions above. For example, you can sync Twitter with FaceBook and Plaxo, so theyd get auto updated with your posts. And, as Mark Shipley describes below, Digg auto populates Plaxo as well.
Self Evaluation: Response to Bakers Common Struggles in Firms, The Changing Role of the Principal
For the next three posts, Ill be doing an evaluation of Newfangled in response to David Bakers position paper entitled Common Struggles in Firms. All of Davids position papers can be downloaded from his site. You have to register to download the papers, but they are well worth it and the registration/dl process is a breeze. The firm that built this site really did a great job with this aspect of it :).
First Struggle
The first thing most principals struggle with is their own personal role, especially if the firm is growing.
This has certainly been the case with me. One of the most cherished aspects of my career with Newfangled is that I have had the rare opportunity to do so many of the jobs here. Ive tried my hand at just about every role weve had, except design (actually, I was recently laughed out of the room by Chris and Justin for a design idea I had). It is a curse and a blessing that Ive thoroughly enjoyed all of my roles here over the years.
Each time Ive needed to step up to the next level of service to Newfangled, Ive lamented the loss of the real joys and comforts of the role I was currently in. The allure and excitement of the new role always trumped my nostalgic leanings, though. Even to this day, I really miss prototyping and growing deep relationships with the clients I used to manage. That being said, shedding the roles that Ive occupied over the years has clearly all been for the best. I am able to have more impact on all of our clients now than I did when I was personally managing every account. I also recognize that this journey is not over.
In addition to running the firm, I am currently our sales department and marketing department. If we choose to take the next growth step, to a 25-30 person firm, I am going to have to shed those roles, too - and that is probably going to be the toughest transition Ive had. I suppose that is a rule though, as the firm grows and youre required to move farther and farther away from the real work, it gets more and more difficult to do so. My sales role is my main way of interfacing with our clients and clients-to-be, and I love it. Losing the personal connection and the control that I enjoy in this role is going to be extraordinarily difficult. Maybe well choose to grow, and Ill have to make the break, but maybe we wont. The important thing is that I know that if we do, I have to.
The principal being willing to go through these changes is one thing, but many of the employees have to do this throughout a companys growth stages as well. Im curious to know, what have your experiences been with this?
Steve falls back in love with TextMate
I have a love/hate relationship with TextMate. I love its power and customizability... I hate how slow it is working with files on a remote file system. My coworkers hate it too because every time TextMate hangs up on me I pound my desk in frustration. The problem is that TextMate refreshes every file in a project every time it regains focus after youve used another program... this can be a looong wait if your connection is slow or you have a lot of files in a project. Well my frustrations have been cured by Ciaran Walsh who has written ReMate a plugin that disables TextMates automatic project tree refresh and replaces it with a context menu to manually refresh the file tree only when you need to.
Now my only frustration is having been a chump for not knowing about ReMate sooner.
What makes a great employee?
I just read HubSpots interview with Todd Defren. One response caught my attention:
What Do You Most Value In Employees/Colleagues?
Humor, loyalty, eagerness and patience. If someone has a dark cloud over their head, it brings the entire office down.
Yup, that nails it!
The Project Management Role in a Web Firm
A few years ago, when we decided that wed accept the growth that was kindly being forced on us by new clients, we knew there would be problems. We grew roughly from 6 full time employees to 18 in about three years time. We were aware that many businesses in the marketing sector go out of business when making staffing leaps such as this one. What we didnt know was what those problems would be exactly - but we had an idea.
We were fairly sure that we were going to have a hard time staffing programmers. We thought wed have difficulty finding good ones and training them quickly enough to deal with our clients increasing demands. While there have been a few bumps along that road, weve been blessed with a great programming crew of four guys, Jim and Steve from the Providence office and George and Nolan here in the Carrboro office. Supporting them, we have Mike and Dave, who make sure that the programming role is more efficient and enjoyable as time goes on.
These days, were selling more work than ever, and it is not uncommon to have one or more of the four programmers asking us what they can do with their free time. This is a good thing.
No, programmer staffing was not the pain spot we targeted it to be. We got sucker punched by the role of the project manager.
Three years ago, I managed every project Newfangled had. As we started to grow, it became clear that I could not simultaneously do this while also handling all the sales and the general running of the company. So, the age of the project manager began, and it really has been in flux up until this quarter... phew! It has been an intense ride.
I believe that weve figured out how to staff and grow our PM staff. This might sound elementary to a lot of people in the marketing industry, but our reality is a little different from the standard agency model. The main reason is that we have hundreds of clients, any number of whom might have a simple or complex need any day. A Newfangled PM has to be well versed in all of our legacy clients websites, in addition to managing new projects.
Ill spare you the history of all of our attempts at growing this group and cut to the success. What weve finally figured out is that it is about the team. Each PM now has a dedicated assistant, a PMA, if you will. The PM role is responsible for managing new projects and (coming in 2009) proactively reviewing our legacy sites, and helping clients improve the sites weve built for them over the years. The PMA role supports the PM in the new project, mostly through doing the prototyping work, and is responsible for managing all of the miscellaneous client requests that come in each day. This last part is important. It was these requests (which varied greatly in count from week to week) that would make our PMs time unmanageable. Now, the PMA role adds an extra layer of support and accountability that the project managers need in order to truly be the guiding, creative and available resources our clients need them to be.
Despite knowing that we tried our absolute best, I feel badly it took us this long to get it right. Fortunately, we have a lot of very patient and wonderful clients who are going to have their socks knocked off now that weve finally figured this out.
Creative Questionnaire: Sixten Abbot
Sixten Abbot is the Art Director (as well as a photographer and copywriter) at Sullivan & Co., a communications and marketing firm in Providence, Rhode Island. Sixten, which means victory stone in Swedish, told me his parents named him after one of the tragic main characters in the 1967 film Elvira Madigan. When hes not spending his free time as a semi-professional band photographer, youll find Sixten piloting his kayak through the icy winter waters of New England.
Current Project:
I wish I had the luxury of working on just one thing! At the moment, Im trying to wrap up a moderately sized site with a custom flash piece, just starting a national logo redesign, doing some writing for a local energy companys brochure… and theres always other little things: retouching, color correction… the list goes on!
First step in my design process:
I guess it depends on a lot of things: first, what you consider the first step – naturally, you try to gather as much information as possible. In addition to the client, theres the competition, the audience. These days, people seem to want to design for everyone – but thats as successful as design by committee, i.e., not at all. Even if the audience is broad, they have things in common. The best thing is if you can make a connection to an individual that you know, and design for them. Not their individual taste, per se, but as a gut check. As much as the industry would like to deny it, this is an art as much as a science. Trust your instincts.
Aspect of design I give the highest priority:
Usability, usability, usability. A close second would be suitability – is it appropriate?
Method for overcoming creative block:
Do something. It wont be good, but just get started, like automatic writing. Nobody keeps track of your bad ideas, so dont be afraid to get them out. Because the good ideas are always just beyond them, on the other side.
One typical myth about web design:
800x600. Seriously. Windows default resolution, on a 15 monitor, has been 1024x768 for years. With browser chrome (you know, tool bars and stuff, not Googles Chrome browser – how confusing is that?), the above the fold measurement is somewhere around 900x500, depending.
Most challenging aspect about web design:
Microsoft. Couldnt be happy with the W3Cs standards, they had to invent their own.
Most underrated aspect of web design:
The flexibility necessary to account for vastly different amounts of content. In a printed piece, there are ways to work around things like product groupings that vary; you can run them in, smoosh them together… You cant really do that online. It requires more forethought, and sometimes there isnt time for that, so its conceivable that even a well-designed site can have a really ugly page when all is said and done. That should never be true for a printed piece. So despite its flexibility, the web is really quite unforgiving.
When I first knew I wanted to be a designer:
Heh. I hate to cop to it, but honestly – it was when I realized I wasnt going to be an illustrator. Freshman year at RISD. It was an easy decision, when youre surrounded by that many talented illustrators – I decided it was better to try to be good at something that I had less experience with than to try to get better at something I was only moderately good at.
Inspirations:
John Maeda, Laurie Anderson, Joshua Davis, Colin Moock, Yugo Nakamura, Tobias Frere-Jones, Richard Feynman, John Williams Waterhouse, Benjamin Franklin.
Oh, visually? Anything I can get my hands on. I think a lot of us are still looking at echoing analog processes, somehow. Theres an unknown quality in the result which I think resonates with the human spirit. Its part of what makes some design warm and others cold. The more analog, the more error-prone the process, the more we recognize the human hand behind it. Do I sound like a Luddite?
Favorite tool:
Its stereotypical, but – Photoshop. Especially ironic in light of the above, but fifteen years with somethings hard to let go of, you know? And analog processes require so much infrastructure. And, if I may be allowed to stray from the strictly design tools here, two cameras: my Holga S and my Pentax k20d. Although if theres anything Im looking forward to, its REDs forecast DSLR.
Favorite design resource:
Gotta be Communication Arts; they set the standard.
The one typeface for a deserted island stay:
Hoefler & Frere-Jones Requiem family. Gorgeous and quite extensive. Second choice would have to be Helvetica Neue – it never ends.
Bookmarks:
Hmm. Ive actually stopped using them because I bookmarked too much, too quickly. But sites I hit often: boingboing, wired, pharyngula, slashdot, Giant in the Playground.
Design-related book I highly recommend:
Its probably too much of a given, but: Bringhursts Elements of Typographic Style. Or Eric Gills, An Essay on Typography. I know, I know – Im a product of my education. And I have to admit, I havent read a book on design (or directly related to design) too recently. What can I say? My tastes are too broad for me to spend my time away from the office reading about stuff thats directly related to what I do in the office.
Currently reading:
Like my current projects, there are just too many of these to list them all. I recently finished Naomi Kleins, The Shock Doctrine. Not for the neoconservative at heart. Also, lest you think me too intellectual, I also just finished (for the first time) Orson Scott Cards, Enders Game and Xenocide.
Life lesson:
It doesnt matter what the salary is – the people you work with are the most important thing. No amount of money can make up for misery.
If I werent a designer, Id be...
Its the same answer I gave over thirty years ago: when I grow up, I want to be an artist or a scientist. I guess design sort of splits the difference.
Some cool jquery plugins
Dev snippets has a list of cool user interface jquery plugins.