And it hit me: we are not emergency designers.  We never have been.  We ask tough questions and spend time in discovery and research.  We dig and dig before we ever start designing.  We make recommendations.  We’re not “yes” people; we’re “why” people.  When you tell us your website needs a feature, we don’t just agree; we ask why. Then we push you (and ourselves) to dig up a better answer or provide a foundation to back up your request.

And yet, we end up “hurrying up” more often then I’d like.  We tend to take on emergency projects even though they don’t fit our general mold of process and project management.

It’s not that we can’t build a site quickly; we certainly can.  It’s more along the lines of our initial approach to a project.  Once we get to the design and development stage, we’ve already done our due diligence and the process can fly. But we like to know we got there with good reason and research.  We like to know the stakeholders are all on board with what we’re about to produce, and we like to know that every conversation that needs to be had has been had.

We’ve had a virtual onslaught of new project inquiries in the past few weeks.  And that’s a great thing, of course. We’ve been working hard on great projects and launched this gorgeously redesigned site and have been out writing, speaking and getting to know folks. Our clients give us fantastic referrals to everyone and anyone. We’re busy and loving it.

Of the new inquiries, a handful are really great, qualified, well-fitting projects for our team. Clients who want us to spend the time digging and learning and researching before we build; who want us to labor over the details and create really polished, beautiful web and mobile apps.  Who want us to thoroughly test the products before they launch.

And another handful are looking for “emergency” designers to take over a project that went south or start on something immediately that was supposed to be done last week (I need this 200 hour project launched by mid-February!).

Next time you have an emergency, open this box.

To these emergency clients, how fast we can get them a proposal reflects on how fast we can turn the project around – when in fact, the two are not at all related.  We need time to spend doing our research before creating a proposal. We need time to determine the best platform and approach and our own resource assignments.  It’s a complex matrix and it all takes time to do it well.

That said, we’ve taken on quite a few projects that weren’t going well and turned them around – but those clients recognized that the process would take both time and hard work.  They brought us realistic expectations and we turned out some awesome work.

It’s amazing when expectations meet reality, isn’t it?

I’m feeling liberated in this realization.  It’s yet another “red flag” for my arsenal of client selection tools that help us determine fit for new projects, and a step forward in solidifying our approach to design and development.

Do you find yourself providing emergency design services?  How to you react and how do those relationships turn out?

Starting a new year is a great time to start working on new limits, new approaches and new systems for your business and your life.  So, our intentions are as follows:

For the business:

1. Move to a more client-centric design approach by building partnership agreements rather than one-off build contracts.
2. Make it all responsive. Or at least adaptive. There is no excuse for fixed-width any more.
3. Learn more, and more and more. Every Friday afternoon is designated self-improvement day. That means learning through tutorials or videos, reading or working on personal projects.

Andi‘s intentions

1. More personal communication; less email. Talk it out. Touch base and catch up. Plan regularly scheduled phone calls with all ongoing development projects.  Travel if necessary for kickoff and important milestone meetings. Go the extra mile.
2. Give back to the community. Speak more; attend more meet-ups; finish the book I’ve started writing three different times.  Share my knowledge more.
3. Plan better. Stick to an organized, well-structured project planning approach and spend more time on thorough contracts with detailed SOW agreements.

Charlene’s intentions

1. Go responsive. Just dig in and make it responsive. It’s not exactly a brand new concept. Just do it already.
2. Get Sass(y). CSS is awesome and SASS just adds MORE awesomeness. We all need something new and fresh in our lives sometimes–this is it.

Jessica’s intentions

1. Better time management. Follow the schedules and to-do lists I make, but don’t use nearly enough. Say “no” more, prioritize better and spend less time browsing the wonders of the internets.
2. Write more. I’d be happy if I wrote about just about anything at this point as long as it’s more significant than emails, texts and Facebook updates.
3. Move quicker. Send the stupid email, don’t stare at it in Drafts for an hour. Get things out of “planning” and into “production” faster.

James’s intentions

1. Give back more. Finish the next version of one open source project, start another one, and help others with theirs. Use GitHub to interact, not just for versioning things.
2. Play and learn more. Tinker with new technology on a weekly basis. Watch more screencasts. Read more books. Always have a podcast handy.
3. Take over the world. Muahahahaahaaaa!

Keith‘s intentions

1. Find a balance between efficiency and properly documented code/projects.  We work in a client driven business – budgets and timeframes conspire to sacrifice the proper documentation of code and projects for on time delivery. this year i want to find more of a balance – a few extra hours documenting code will make future updates easier and save time in the long run
2. Take more pictures! My hobbies shift from year to year and I’ve been ignoring this one for too long. I want to shoot more panorama shots of the downtown St. Pete area. Here’s one that i took in Charleston.
3. Work on pace.  Ever hear the old saying “start out like you can hold out”?  I’m going to work on applying that this year. Too often, I procrastinate; looking for motivation to tackle a big project and then code in a burst. I’ve found that if I work steadily, but more slowly, I can get more accomplished because I end up turning out more code.

Now you’ve seen ours and you can hold us accountable (seriously – hold us accountable!).  What are your professional intentions for the year?

Here are a few key lessons we learned in 2011:

Charlene: Repository. Repository. Repository!

No matter the size of the project, if you’ve got more than one person working on a website your best bet is a versioned repository for safekeeping. This year I worked on my first large project with over 10 developers in different locations. Oddly enough, we had minimal issues as we all chugged along updating, committing and updating again to the repository. During an earlier project, which I must mention was much smaller in scale and included only three developers, large chunks of work had been written over several times which caused obvious frustrations, etc. And so the repo went up and so did productivity levels. Duh.

Jessica: Work with amazing people. Always.

Here’s the thing about life: we’re all (hopefully) going to be here for a while. One of the things I figured out early on in life is that you should love what you do. I use the cliche “If you love what you do, it won’t feel like work” way too often because I think it’s 100% true. And believe me, I love the internet! Then I learned, it’s not just about loving what you do, it’s about loving who you’re doing it with.

Work with people who care deeply about those around them (like Andi). Work with people who are great at what they do, and embrace attack new learning opportunities and challenges (like Charlene with GitHub earlier this year). Work with people who are passionate about the quality of their business and brand. Work with people who make you laugh. Work with people you want to grab a beer with. Work with people who inspire you and push you to be a better person.

Keith:  Preparation and planning are key to a successful project.

No matter how many times I have heard this in the past, I still have to fight the urge to just jump in and start coding right away. Spending the time up-front to plan out what I’m going to do results in cleaner code and more efficient use of the client’s budget. Projects are dynamic and we can’t anticipate every problem, but a little preparation goes a long way in smoothing out the bumps along the way!

Keith: Communication is more important than you think it is.

This year, I’ve learned all about the value of keeping clients informed. A small note to update them on your progress (even if you don’t have anything to show them) helps them to stay involved.

It works with co-workers too! In the crazy web world of multitasking and complex projects, it really helps to let everyone know what you’re up to and what you’ve done. Document everything you can in a central location so everyone is up to date. It doesnt have to be a novel – a few short sentences will keep everyone on track. It reduces duplicate effort and empowers everyone on the team to fix issues rather than having to rely on a single person.

James:  There’s still a ton to learn.

I’ve been at this web design & development thing for most of my adult life. It’s only getting faster and more complex, and that’s really exciting. 2011 reinforced the lesson that building a library of modern resources and taking the time to sit and absorb new ideas and techniques (be they from books, blogs, or screencasts) is vital to our profession. Never stop learning. Play with new ideas. Be curious.

Andi: Communication is the key to managing expectations.

Managing expectations is one of the most important aspects of project management. When there is no clear process and we let projects sway and bend, clients and team members don’t know what to expect (or when).  The problem we continually encounter is that every client is different.  Some come to us completely prepared to immerse themselves in the process; others have other obligations and commitments that keep them from being totally involved.  We need to make them fully aware of what’s to come when we start the process, and keep them apprised should anything pop up to change that process.

I’ve already put together some documentation to use as a skeleton for every new project, and anticipate much clearer direction at the start of each project going forward.  We’ll all know what’s going to happen, when, and if any obstacles pop up along the way.

————-

What did you learn in 2011 that you think would be helpful to our team or the web design community?  Helpful to your business or others?

This list is not about those obviously annoying websites. This is a list of the things that many of our clients don’t think about as annoying but that can quickly turn a happy, trusting new visit into an annoyed, frustrated departure.

1. Unexpected detours and interruptions.  You wouldn’t have very many long conversations with a friend who repeatedly cuts you off in the middle of a sentence to change direction, would you?  How about if they asked you irrelevant questions or to share personal information while you’re telling a story?  Make sure you don’t interrupt your visitors while they’re reading or learning unless it’s subtle and important.  Make sure your detours are well-labeled and interruptions kept in the sidebars or footer of an article, page or post.
2. Insulting your visitors’ intelligence.  ”Click here” in association with a huge button-shaped illustration (or, really, in association with any obviously underlined link)? Constant, lengthy explanations of even the simplest of tasks on your website is insulting and demeaning (i.e. To register for our newsletter, enter your email address and click “Submit.”).  If you have to write a full sentence to explain what a person should do next, you need to either a) redesign the page/process or b) stop insulting your visitors.   Probably both.  Pay attention to your analytics and employ mouse and eye tracking services like CrazyEgg to determine your site’s hang-ups, then fix them visually.
3. Impersonal and unfriendly language. The web is, by nature, an impersonal medium.  We sit alone while we surf, interacting with the zeroes-and-ones manipulated before us.  And the third-person, buzzword-laden marketing rhetoric of the web makes it even more inhuman.  Submit?  Seriously?  How about “Go!” or  ”Send!”?  I remember working at a pizza joint in college and they actually had a mirror next to the telephone.  We were expected to smile when we answered the phone because people can tell when someone is smiling while they speak.  Somewhere along the way, we lost that smile in our voice.  Some great startups and web companies are leading the way in using friendly language – and I’m excited to keep pushing my clients in the same direction.

I have a much longer list than this as we deal with so many projects and so many ideas, but I’d love to hear what annoys you when you’re surfing … or what you have to convince your clients is annoying.

Here are my favorite WordPress “base” themes from which we design.

1. Thesis Theme for WordPress (affiliate link):  We design 3-5 blogs every month.  We almost *always* use Thesis as our base theme for blog design.  Granted, we generally forego the built in customization options and use our own custom styles and functions, but the off-the-shelf styling is awesome.  For small budgets and small projects, we’re happy to leave it to Thesis.  Great layout, well-considered padding between modules and page elements, simple and easy-to-use built-in functionality.   The $87 price tag for the theme is worth the saved hours of styling. Some examples of blogs/sites we’ve designed that use Thesis theme:  Curvy Girl Guide,  Aromahead blog, The Spohrs are Multplying, Barefoot Foodie, The Healthy Home Economist, Sea Critters Cafe, MomCorpsNYC, Momma’s Gone City and the list goes on (and on).
2. Carrington: The Carrington theme is a free base theme that is built specifically for designers and developers.  We’ve used the Jam version (just add markup) a few times and it’s a great theme for more robust content management projects.  There are pre-built blog and mobile version, which are awesome for off-the-shelf layouts.  The Carrington theme has a great support and development community so is constantly growing with WordPress enhancements, which we love.
3. TwentyTen: Oh yeah!  Finally, a default theme worthy of being our canvas.  We literally shred this theme when we use it as a base, but it’s still a huge time-saver in development.  For instance, do you see anything left of TwentyTen at this site?  Or this?  Those are both built on TwentyTen, but you wouldn’t know it – and none-the-less, it saved us hours of time.

We’ve used and customized and built so many themes over the years that we finally created our own fantastic framework that combines the best elements of all of our favorite base themes.  We’re excited to be launching Big Sea Themes this summer – but more on that later.

What are your favorite WordPress base themes for your designs and what do you love about them?  What do you think is missing?

Most of our clients run WordPress. Big surprise. WordPress is the most design-friendly open-source publishing platform available. But WordPress isn’t always the most developer friendly framework out there. And if you are trying to use WordPress as a full featured CMS, you’ll probably end up relying on more than a few plugins. Out-of-the box WordPress just won’t do everything you’ll need it to do.

While this is not a definitive list, here’s a list of plugins I recommend you try.

Members

Used for: Member Management
Link

My favorite plugins are plugins that don’t try to do too much. As a developer, every site I work on has unique challenges and I’m looking for plugins that, instead of solving one specific problem, provide me with tools to solve a whole range of problems.

Justin Tadlock’s Members plugin doesn’t try to be a full-scale member management suite. What it does do is give you the tools you need to accomplish any member-related task you need. You can create new user roles and capabilities, restrict posts and pages, make certain that parts of any page or post ‘restricted’, or even lock down a whole dang blog by making it private.

Adminize

Used for: Site Administration
Link

Now this plugin is super handy if you’re working on a highly customized client site where the end-user will not need access to many of WordPress’s default functionality. Adminize let’s you control basically every aspect of the administration pages and which options are available to which user roles. Want to hide theme administration from even other Admins? This plugin will do it.

More Fields

Used for: Custom Field Administration
Link

These days there are lots of plugins that will help you create input forms for custom fields. Flutter, Magic Fields, Supple Forms, Custom Post Templates, etc, etc. More Fields has always been my favorite. It went through a brief period in which it lost support, but since being revived by Henrik Melin and Kal Strom has regained its rightful place at the top of the list.

Why? For one thing, it’s very simple to deploy. The UI is intuitive and clean, with plenty of options, including additional WordPress TinyMCE instances. But the primary reason it’s the best is that it has a very small database footprint. All the data for the plugin is stored in the options table which means it scales well. WordPress is a performance hog and so we always want to avoid plugins that further degrade database performance. Flutter is especially notable for having a large footprint.

W3 Total Cache

Used for: Performance
Link

Man, if you’re running a large site with lots of traffic, you probably already know that you need a good caching plugin. But if you haven’t used this plugin yet, you’re really missing out. This plugin combines all the object and file caching techniques that made WP Super Cache so popular with more advanced caching methods like code minification. Really cool stuff. Will save your life if you ever go viral.  Here’s a Yoast Video on the plugin that will help explain why you should use it.

PodsCMS

Used for: Content Management
Link

Full disclosure: I’m a contributor to this project so I’m clearly a little biased. Pods is not for every site or every developer.  Pods is a development framework for advanced content management.

Imagine a course catalog where you have teachers, classes, curriculum, semesters, documents and prerequisites. As a developer you’re faced with keeping all these straight, building a valid input interface for each, and performing complex queries all across the site. Building this site without Pods would be a nightmare, with Pods it’s a breeze.

Pods can also be a great performance booster. It has a bit of a database footprint because it actually creates additional tables for each of your content types. But for large datasets it will significantly reduce the strain on your database server.

Your Plugins?

The only problem with a top five list is that good plugins get left off of it. What did I leave off and which ones are on your list?

My biggest learning this week:  Think it all the way through. Design.  Content strategy.  New opportunities.  Site structure and implementation.  Be clear about what’s next.

A few golden nuggets of the week:

• When someone approaches you with a golden opportunity, understand that in most cases, they’re expecting the same in return.  One hand washes the other, so to speak.  This can work for you or against you – but think it through from both perspectives.
• When you’re designing an interface, it’s ok to break UI rules if it works best for the user – especially when no one else is going to use it.
• If you’re going to try to do something different, to be bold, be sure to think through the entire implementation – not just the homepage.  Where do we go from here?
• We all have to make compromises and need to learn what to fight for and what to let go.  This is a hard lesson when it comes to design, but we need to remove emotion from the equation and keep it as impersonal as possible.
• Even if you think something looks awesome, if the colors remind someone of a childhood trauma, it’ll never fly.  (That’s ok.)

It was a week of big lessons – but I anticipate there being a lot more “hey here’s a cool JQuery technique I tried!” next week as I get rolling on actual design and coding again.

And I tried.  I really did!  (Ok, I didn’t try that hard, but I gave it a couple weeks.)

This was going to be: the year that I went digital.

So idealistic was I:  I’ll scan all of my documents! I’ll use iCal and Evernote and the ‘To-do’s’ in Mac Mail!  I’ll put everything in Basecamp!   No more lists and scraps of paper all over my desk, I thought.

I work all day on a computer and rely on my iPhone for everything – this will be easy!

First, there were client meetings.  Added to iCal: check.  To-do’s based on emails in my inbox:  added to the To-do list in Mail: check.  But wait – now where does it go?  Where’s an overall list of ‘to-do’s'?  And I have to remember to plugin my phone to sync my calendar.  And there’s a totally different to-do list in iCal!  Then there’s Evernote and learning to use it for the tool that it is. . . Desktop app syncing with iPhone app . .. and more lists.  It started taking me as much time to add something to my To-Do list (and figure out how to sync it with everything) as it does to just complete the task.

Needless to say, I still have my scribbled notebooks on my desk, and I broke down and bought a day planner this week too (to add to my library of day planners I’ve had since 1994 – which make for neat scrapbooks and memory albums for me).  I essentially scurried back into the hole from which I came, quickly.  I guess I wasn’t ready to make the change, to commit.

I got to thinking about the ways this applies to building websites, building online businesses and social networks.

Whenever we build a new website for a client, we’re essentially building them a new way to interact with their clients or customers.  We’re giving them a different voice, with different methods of publishing and creating information.  We’re asking them to add these new methods to their daily routine – because the web, after all, requires that sort of dynamic interaction.  We put everything on a CMS these days – and we ask our clients to change things, add things, keep it fresh.

I’m putting together a few social media packages for clients right now that include a blog, Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts.  They’re easy enough to set up, but I’m not sure my clients understand the commitment they require.  We can’t just ‘build it and they will come.’

Successful online communication, if you’re not already doing it, requires a total change in the way you go about your day.

That’s the hard part.  There are some of my clients who ‘get it’ – they understand and are ready for that challenge;  they wade in slowly but with both eyes open, embracing the new opportunities the web can provide them.  And then there are those who don’t fully trust what an online communications strategy can do for them.  They balk at daily updates and laugh at Twitter’s value.  I build those websites – but when I’m done, I’m not excited about the future of the new site.  I’m sad, knowing that my new baby will sit untouched for months, maybe even years -  well past it’s usefulness.

(If you’re going to invest in a website, make sure you’re ready to commit to using it.)

So how do you incorporate all of these new communication tools into your life?  How do you make your investment really work for you?  Stop thinking about your web presence as a brochure, and start thinking of it as a voice.

1. You’re working with a new client that has a unique question:  a blog post idea or FAQ question pops into your head!  If one client has this question, others might too.  Write about it!
2. You see something interesting on an industry news feed: Tweet it!  Share the link!
3. You just sent out the biggest order ever – or one that’s a especially remarkable:  take photos of the packing process and share them on Facebook!
4. A client tells you how pleased they are with their new fill-in-the-blank from your company: add it to the testimonials page and ask them to write a review on your Google Local listing!
5. You just signed a deal to provide something previously unheard of in your industry – the quickest installation or revamp or largest whatever it is – get out your Flip video camera and record it!  Use your desktop movie editor (iMovie, Windows Media) to edit a quick video together and post it to your Flickr and YouTube and Facebook accounts.  Add it to your website.

I completely understand that we are all busy people, and continuing on the path of least resistance requires the least amount of effort.

But the rewards that come from making these changes – the rewards of building your online presence, creating that online community and establishing your online credibilty – those rewards are worth the effort.

I’m not sure that the rewards of moving my calendar and to-do lists online are as great – so I don’t feel too bad about not committing 100% – but in an effort to show my clients that I get it – I am going to incorporate Evernote into my life as much as possible, and start getting used to organizing things digitally.  Each day, I’m going to take a small step to changing the way I organize my life, so that maybe, just maybe, 2011 will be the year.

6 Places that Flash Does Not Belong