Design & Develop - a website design & development agency

April15th

I tested fate and she dropped an anvil on my head

Posted in: Cool Tools
Dear Opal:

Always save your open Firefox tabs to bookmarks at the end of your day.

With a dirty look,
Me.

It seems Microsoft pushed through an update last night—I neglected to disable Auto Updates on the Vista machine. Drat.—resulting in a reboot and costing me SIX SETS of research-filled tabs for three different projects.

It serves me right, especially when I mused to someone yesterday that I really should save them in case something went wrong. (Look at that: foreshadowing and irony in one moment. That English degree comes in handy in the most unexpected ways.)

Firefox tabs are a huge part of my day: I generally have a number of browser instances open with multiple tabs running to organize my projects, do research, and compare ideas. I have a number of Firefox plug-ins that help me out, but compared to the browser windows of my colleagues, I have a pretty light list. With regards to bookmarks, Xmarks (recently rebranded from Foxmarks) has been a huge help as I move between my laptop and desktop systems, as it synchronizes between the two and removes the “which computer did I save that on?” moment. But, of course, that doesn’t save me from myself when I neglect to bookmark things.

This morning’s little incident encouraged me to go look for a solution:
- Auto Bookmark All Tabs: an experimental plug-in which saves all of your tabs when Firefox closes.
- Tab Saver!: restores closed tabs or the previous session of tabs.
Of course, the simplest solution of all: Bookmark > Bookmark all Tabs or Ctrl + Shift + B. One small habit that may become as compulsive as Ctrl + S.
March23rd

Getting the best value for your web budget

Posted in: Learning the Ropes

This has come up a few times in the last month, while we’ve been bidding on projects for the summer months. When looking for an agency to create your new or improved website, it’s important to know and be able to articulate what it is that you need from your web presence.

It may seem basic, but I can assure you that it is not.

My advice to anyone seeking a website is to define who is using the site, what they want, and what you want from that interaction before engaging agencies or seeking RFPs.

By a significant margin, the clients who have projects that go smoothly are the clients who know what they want their websites to achieve.

Our process at Design & Develop begins with an audit (or a series of audits, depending on your project scope), which we use to define a client’s audience, intentions, and goals. This helps us deliver what clients need and want, however, the process as a whole works better when a client begins with answers that we can help refine and clarify.

You know the saying “the devil is in the details”? It’s utterly true with website development. The difference in hours between a portal with 4 sub-sites and a website with 4 sections is enormous.

The more you know, the more we can help: clients know their businesses, we know the web.
March21st

Live: Insurance Know-How

Posted in: It's Alive!, Print Design, Website Design

Helena Smeenk Pritchard of Insurance Know-How was an absolute gem of a client. She knows who she is, what her company does, and where she wants to go. This project was a real collaboration between Design & Develop and Helena, and the results are beautiful.

Included in the project: business cards (dye-cut and matte finish), photography, binder covers and spines, website copy reviews, and a content-managed website.

Visit Insurance Know-How.
March10th

Goals

Posted in: Learning the Ropes

In all of the scramble to get jobs done recently, the fire-to-fire scenario for projects has become a big item on my fix-it list. Nothing drives me more crazy than running from job to job without thought about best process or improvement.

So, how do I carve a whole lot of items off of my to do list and focus on providing that better level of service? My answer came from an exchange with Rachel Cornell of ProNagger.com, in which she reminded me that for a project to get done, a person has to actually want to do the work. Nagging doesn’t work on a people who avoid tasks because they don’t actually want to do them; nagging works on people who need encouragement and accountability to keep them on track.

I’ve been creating The List daily, and it’s out of control. There’s no way I can get it all done, which freaks me out, resulting in me dragging my heels on the jobs. I build stories about how there’s no way I can succeed, rather than doing the jobs and succeeding.

Oh. Wait. That looks like a waste of time. [insert me smacking myself upside the head here]

So, only 1 goal today: get as far as I can on each of the items on my list by using the timer method.

I set the timer for a period of time (in today’s case, 30 minutes). I sprint on a task for 30 minutes or until it’s done, which ever comes first. Then I go take a quick break, refresh my glass of water, and do it again. And again. And again. My projected outcome: at the end of the day I can walk away from my desk knowing I accomplished something and I can show progress to an entire list of clients.

Let’s see how it works.
March5th

Should I stay or should I grow?

Posted in: In Theory

Growing up thoroughly doused in print media, I have expectations that pages are fixed widths. Locking things down to a minimum size tends to give some consistency to the job, and it certainly make things easier to design. Except, wait. What about clients who want flexible designs? (Often stated as “why doesn’t it fill my screen when I maximize my browser?!”)

Let’s use this design as an example. Insurance Know-How, in part, is about making the insurance pitch an approachable, comfortable conversation. Locking the site down to a specific width seems, well, counter-intuitive. Or, as my professor would have said back in Rhetoric of Web Design “the design isn’t reflexive of the content.”

There’s a part of me quaking. Ethan discusses fluid design in terms of maximum widths. The design can grow up to a certain point, and then the CSS tells it to stop. Awesome, because nothing irritates me more as a web-user than having to resize my browser window down just to have a line length I can tolerate for reading text. (Which is to say, I vote for readability over cool-factor every time.)

Where I start to shake, though, is minimums.

In the Insurance Know-How site, I can let the tabs grow or shrink. I can let the main content column overlap the imagery on the left to a certain extent (assuming I’ve placed Helena and her logo in the background so that the column migrates left as the columns shrink, unfettered by a fixed-width image). The menu items can get closer together.

It’s the what-if factor of taking it too small – way too small. Text starts flowing in directions that don’t work, or get cropped off. This is where I need to rein it in. Going fluid means getting away from that excuse box of “minimum screen size” but that minimum still factors in when I consider practicality.

I do not need to consider the what-if of a user viewing the site at 400px wide. Realistically, as long as the site is still presentable at 800×600 and I’ve given viewers that fluid flexibility on top, I’ve done my job well. Smaller than that says to me, at least in a North American context, that I’ve gotten into the handheld realm and I need to consider alternate layouts and CSS for that application.

Going fluid layout means I can address viewers who are not on the same technology adoption curve as my local market without holding my locals hostage to the constraints they thought were over 5 years ago.

Sounds win-win to me.

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