The Questions

While many of the question were totally normal and I don’t remember what they were a few took me totally by surprise. They asked me how my day was going. I know they didn’t really care but it made me smile and want to continue working on the form to see what other jokes they had in store for me.

Basecamp - How's your day?

Later they ask me if I’d date Basecamp if I was single and Basecamp was interested. Of course this is even funnier so I continue working on the form.

Would you date Basecamp?

Then we get to the end of the survey and we have three totally irrelevant but interesting questions.

3 more funny questions

Sure I know that those were silly but they brightened up my day. I wonder if they found conversions increased with funny questions like that? I’m willing to bet that they did.

The Conclusion

So why do so many sites/surveys/forms have to be so bland and boring? Something a bit out of the ordinary makes you memorable. Sure there are probably some haters out there but does the humour act as a good filter for people who are just going to be difficult anyway? I think it does.

The Issue

Working in the web industry means there is lots of news to follow. Tons of new developments all over that you are expected to keep track of. If you don’t keep track of the latest developments you can quite quickly find yourself using outdated techniques.

I use Google Reader to organize all my feeds. It’s great for moving through lots of feeds quickly to get the good stuff. Follow a few friends and they can share items you missed. Google Reader is accessible from any internet connection on any machine. Jump on the Google Gears bandwagon and offline reading is only a sync away. But Google Reader sucks…

Google Reader sucks for one thing though…reading. Yeah that’s right Google Reader sucks if you actually want to read the articles in your feed.

Google Reader is just not pretty. Sure the blue links with purple for visited links is accessible but boy the experience of reading is sadly lacking. Sure you can install HelvetaReader and get some nice typography and drastically improved looks for links but it’s still has a long way to go. It most certainly doesn’t make reading an enjoyable experience, reading in Google Reader is a utilitarian experience.

The Experience

I personally miss reading as an experience. I miss sitting and enjoying a good book. Yeah I know that much of those times are gone but the web could learn something.

Most sites are full of flashing little banners for adds (I know people need to get paid). Though they say ‘content is king’ it’s really only lip service it seems.

A book is just words on paper. You’re not getting distracted by that cool flash add. You sit and experience the story, experience the content.

I want blogs to start taking some of this experience into their design and layout. Drop the flashing adds. Tone down content all over your sidebars. Provide the user with some beautiful typographic layout in the body copy and let the other things fade to the background.

Yes I do realize my site doesn’t totally mesh with this idea, but a redesign is in the works.

The Reality

So despite all the charming things I said above the reality is that putting time into a blog is a lot of work. At some point there has to be a payoff and for many people it is financial. Financial comes in a few forms. It can be the adds. It can be the referrals for clients.

Most of those payoff’s require some form of advertising and some way to pull the focus off the text and onto your services or your adds and contact forms. But let’s see if we can leave off a bit and let the reader focus on what they came to see, the content.

So I have been doing what any designer does. I bought a copy of Snagit, which I will review later, and started capturing contact forms and form fields that I liked. I also tried to interact with the forms to see how they worked overall.

The Finding

Do you know what I found??? Lots of very beautiful contact forms that really were not very nice from a usability perspective. Sure the forms fit well with the site. Yeah they are gorgeous but they provide little to no visual feedback regarding which form field you are in. They provide no tooltips (a note for myself as well). All you have is, in some cases, a very tiny blinking cursor to tell you where you are on the form.

The Need

As designers it is our job to ‘make things pretty’ as much as we hate hearing that. But more than that we need to make things easily usable. You don’t have to be a usability expert to do this. Rollovers are a very common thing to include in a site design. Any good design puts them in their navigation. We put them on links. Why no love for contact forms and form fields in general.

The Resolution

Here is my resolution. I am going to ‘pretty up’ my forms and form fields but not at the expense of usability. The next versions will offer tips for content entry. They will have rollover and active states. I will not be lazy.

Now I said it so hold me to it.

ugly website

• You have rotating graphics on your site
• You have used the blink tag
• You have used b or i tags
• You’re updating content regularly without a CMS
• You’ve continually added information without ever addressing how that information is laid out
• Your site looks anything like these
• You paid less than $1000 for your last ‘corporate’ website
• You said the words “make the logo bigger” at any point in the design process of the last site
• None of the files on your server have .css at the end
• You used the “auto website” feature provided by your website hosting company
• You downloaded a free template for your site
• Your website is older than most of your wardrobe
• You had the website designed by a ‘friend just starting out’ or a family member

So anything to add to the list?

Talk to the Boss

To start with I would suggest that any in house designer talk to their project manager, if you’re lucky enough to have one, about the problem. That is what I did the first time it happened in one of my projects. Sitting down with your project manager, or boss, and talking about the problems that come up with adding ‘just one more thing’ to each project can get you a long way.

Statement of Work

Just as any freelancer would do, an in house designer needs to create a document that maps out the scope of each project. At my job we fill out a proper creative brief for every project and then list out the requirements and get it approved by the involved parties. It includes due dates and a statement reminding them that any added features moves the due date.

This upfront work in organizing a project gets everyone on the same page. If this type of process is not in place where you work it can be an uncomfortable thing to implement but in the long run everyone will be much happier.

Get Help & Put your Nose to the Stone

At the end of the day despite your best planning sometimes features will be added and dates will stay firm. At that point you really don’t have a choice but to put your nose to the grind stone and maybe hire some outside help.

This feature creep with no due date creep is a perfect opportunity to hire freelancers. Since it is not possible for you to get the extra work done in the same amount of time extra money will need to be spent to hit the due date. Hiring outside help also helps people realize the effect that ‘one more thing’ can have on a project.

I have actually had the boss no longer require a feature once the cost of a freelancer was factored in. It will get done but in the second stage of site launch not the first.

So in house designers/developers how do you avoid scope creep?

On some sort of regular basis you should take your site to the dentist though. In this instance I would equate the dentist with an outside consultant hired for a site evaluation.

As you continue to work with the same content it becomes harder to bring fresh eyes to the site. It’s harder to see the problems on a site because there is a reason, at least as far as your concerned, that it is laid out that way. In many ways having the same people always looking at the site to evaluate it is kind of like everyone patting each other’s back to tell them how good a job they are doing.

Back to the teeth comparison. I have always thought my teeth were healthy. They’re straight, and clean and don’t hurt. Then I went to the dentist and my teeth that looked good to me ended up being in need of a overhaul. It took a specialist to look at my teeth and see the bad parts. It takes a specialist to fix the problems.

There are problems on any long term site. New information gets added to the site that wasn’t originally planned for. The site become a little inbred and has poor elements scattered throughout. It’s hard to notice this when you work with it everyday though.

Specialist

Like going to a doctor that specializes in teeth your website will benefit from getting specialists to do a site evaluation on a regular basis. Maybe with the new wave of social media you decide that you should be more open to your users so you hire a social media consultant to give that aspect of your marketing an overhaul.

If your users indicate that it’s hard to find things on your site you should hire a user interface specialist or accessibility specialist to do a site audit. They can help you become more user friendly thus increasing the interaction on your site.

Git er Done

It’s all well and good to hire these specialists and get the recommendations from them but it does you no good to do nothing with the recommendations. Just as it would have done me no good to go for a check up and then not go back to face the drill. It may be painful, we are invested in our work, and it may cost a fair chunk of change but the important thing is that at the end of the day we have a healthy site that serves our users better.

Over at Freelancer Magazine there has been a great series of articles on the Freelancer Bootcamp. A great list of awesome tips to really keep you clients in what is a tougher economy.

How about some marketing advice now. Mike Smith (just guessing cause of the URL) has a cool post on 17 things you are probably not doing with your marketing. Ranging from the old school but essential business cards to writing for Hubpages. I actually used to do the latter and may have to pick it up from time to time with a new article. I’m not so sure about the directory submissions though. Some reading I have done leads me to believe that one day google will clamp down on those who are listed in directories that aren’t specific to thier market.

Tieing in with the last article nicely is an article on good SEO practices. All the basics are covered here. I do believe that meta tags have some relevance to search engine results but definitely not as much as they used to have. I would advise that you have good meta tags but really concentrate on producing quality content. As the article states your title tag is very important for good rankings.

Finally today is a post on How to spot a dud client. If you’ve been freelancing for more that 2 weeks you’ve had a call from a client that just doesn’t quite sound right. Often you end up taking at least one of these dud projects on without realizing what happened. Well here are some things to watch out for. If you see them in your clients get out now.

Next up today is some feature previews for WordPress 2.7, which I am really excited about. Overall the interface is cleaned up and the publish features have seen a huge revamp. You can also now mass edit posts or pages which would make any categories you need to change a snap. There is a huge list of things that will make your WordPress install easier to manage so go check the post out.

If you have hung around any design related forums one question you will hear is “What do I charge for …” It comes up over and over again. Freelancer Magazine has a great post on how to price yourself. Whether your just starting out or have been at it for a while have a read and check out how you price projects.

Finally today check out a post on embedding fonts for the web. Most web designers I know would love to have typographic freedom with their designs and it currently looks like this dream future is not so far away. For a good review of the situation as it stands check out the article. Don’t forget to see all of the articles that are linked as sources as well.

Sitepoint’s article basically advocates that you can use the types of sources above to save some money during these tough economic times. Looked at from one perspective they are absolutely correct. By outsourcing some parts of your work to these sites you will save money over what a professional freelance designer could cost you.

Did you really catch what I said there though? How would you feel if your clients decided to go to one of these sources instead of coming to you? If you design logo’s you would probably agree that logo design does not cost $5.00. If you agree with the last statement why would you do the same to other designers?

This article also made me think of sites like Elance, that do bidding on freelance projects. Often it seems that the lowest price is the law (to pull from the famous Zellers saying). While it could be a good way to start to build your portfolio I would not encourage anyone to work with any of these sites for very long.

Ultimately if you are willing to crowdsource some of your work don’t complain when your clients start to do the same. You already started to devalue the industry and your own profession when you voted with your wallet.