Web Design from Scratch

Couldn’t be a more appropriate and targeted vision statement for ProjectEric.com.  It’s what I strive to produce in all my designs, whether I’m working with a team or individually:

“Keeping it simple is hard. One reason it’s hard is because we so often feel compelled to be doing something “more”, to be different in order to keep the visitor interested. That’s how cleverness creeps in. When you’re creating your web site this little voice can start telling you that it’s too boring, too much like the next site. You feel a desperate need to come up with something with a bit more jazz.”

Members of large design companies or institutions find this quite troubling.  After all, they were hired specifically for the purpose of being creative.  Creativity breeds new stuff.  New stuff makes its way onto a site.  Over time, your site starts to look like a Christmas tree, all lit up with various colors, placements, font types, mindless stock photos, you name it.

So, why have so many designers on staff?  Why not have a few designers, tasking them to simply push conventions, standards, best practices, thus minimizing net new design?

If you buy into “less is more,” then your answer to the last two questions might be, “Darn tootin.”

But I look at it a different way.  Certainly, design conventions breed simplicity.  Consistency.  Ease of use.  I should know; I currently manage a style guide for more than 100 designers.

Don’t Knock It Until You Try It

I never knock “new.”  New breeds fun, enlightenment, creativity, and most importantly, personal satisfaction.  It’s how you apply “new” that’s important.

Consider a new button.  Simple enough.  Let’s say all of the buttons on your site are blue with white text, and the so-called new idea is a red button with white text that changes color as you hover.  Is the idea really new?  Certainly, the basic interaction pattern of a button isn’t.  They’ve been in the web world for years, linking users to an action.  But the introduction of a red button for your site is novel.  Never been done before.  You’re a blue guy.  What’s with this hippie designer thinking red is better?

Indeed, the red button may not be the right solution.  Does it stand out?  Against all the other blue buttons on the page, certainly.  But does it need to stand out; that’s the question.  Why are you trying to communicate to your customer?  What are you driving your customer to do?  How might a red button impact all the other content on the page?  How might a customer treat the meaning of red against blue, in their mind’s eye?

Too often marketers equate “new” with “increased click-through rates” or “higher conversion rates.”  While this is sometimes true, it might sacrifice other important user experience principles: consistency, brand recognition, and organization, to name a few.

Arguments for Both Sides

So it’s painfully clear: “new” is a powerful word.  It means change, opportunity, but potentially degradation as “Save the Pixel” explains.  New ideas are always positive.  It’s how they’re implemented that counts.

I run into recent college grads every now and then.  They’re excited.  Passionate.  A bit naïve.  But willing to roll up their sleeves and enter adulthood.

I love their optimism.  As I get older, I find myself saying “That’ll never work” too many times throughout the week (at least I recognize it).  They enter the work world with fresh eyes, new ideas, and a healthy sense of entitlement that only Gen-Yers can pull off.

But I see — too many times — an “I can” spirit with an “I don’t have the right skills” set of credentials.  I’m not talking about just work-world experience.  Granted, too many big firms today attempt (expect?) to hire newly-minted college alumni and at the same time, expect each one to possess a portfolio of a 10-year veteran.

No, I’m talkin bout skillz. Game.  That thing that tells an employer, “Yes, this guy (or girl) has it.“  It’s that right balance of designer, developer, project manager, theoretical, user-centered IT.

Consider this recent job posting…

Fieldglass, Inc, the leading provider of services procurement software, is seeking a Web Designer-Developer to maintain and broaden the Fieldglass identity in corporate Web mediums as well as some offline creative materials. The position involves the back end programming and front end design and implementation to create an exceptional user experience.

And this one…

Cyclingnews is looking for a talented web designer to work across our group of cycling websites.  We’re looking for a designer/ developer with substantial work in user experience, interaction design and wireframing, and a current portfolio that demonstrates a strong understanding of online design. With solid experience of using Photoshop, you will have an appreciation and flair for design and branding. A good knowledge of HTML, JavaScript and CSS is essential, as well as some experience of PHP sites.

Notice something?

Take a look again.  New role.  Designer-developer.

Yet, many traditional higher-ed institutions offer a focus in one or the other.  Graphic design vs. computer science.  Art vs. code.  Liberal arts vs. bachelors of science.  Too many interviewees have one, or the other.  Rarely both.

Some of the more successful institutions offer graduate degrees that combine the artistic with the technical.  My alma mater, Florida State, used to offer a concentration in Interactive and New Communication Technologies.  It combined graphic arts with code.  It has since been incorporated into a media production-focused program, but word has it that it’s about to be distinctive yet again.

That’s a good thing.  If these job postings are any indication, the wave of the future for web-focused graduates is to combine the best of both worlds: the touchy-feely with the analytical programming.  As ad agencies shrink to stay efficient and big companies churn out more with less, the name of the game is know it all.  Be more well-rounded.  Vary your skillz.

The days of the interaction designer who can only wire frame, the visual designer who can only work in Photoshop, and the editor who can only write, are over.  Long live the designer-developer….

3 Web Design Planning Mistakes

I’ve been a part of some fairly large projects in the past that – how can I say – missed the execution mark.  Slipped milestones, cost overages, scope creep.  You name it.  I’ve witnessed it.  It’s web design; wild results come with the territory.

The misses occurred, not because of lack of execution, but because of undocumented execution.

To be sure, everyone understood the basics: when major milestones needed to be hit, when design reviews were to take place, how many resources needed to be assigned.

The devil is in the details

What we found was more subtle.  We simply never wrote the details down.  We expected things of each other.

Here are my favorite three subtle project management details that can lead to pain if not caught early. From what I could tell, had we simply written some of these expectations down – and of course, had the project manager enforced them – who knows how much time, cost, scope and Aspirin could’ve been saved.

Define the Audience in the Briefing Stage, Not the Design Planning Stage
I’ve worked on several projects where the design director asks questions of the end user demographics after a design brief has been created.

That’s backwards.  Understand the audience to understand the design parameters (among other things).  A good example: what paragraph font base would you choose if your end users were 65+ as opposed to 18-30?  Granted, that’s an extreme example, but proper end-user analysis informs the design planning phase, not the other way around.

Define File Formats in the Statement of Work (If Possible)
JPEG, GIF, or PNG images?  MOV, FLV, or MPEG videos?  Yes, it’s a big deal to not have them defined.  No, you shouldn’t wait until you’re loading them into the system for the first time before deciding what format to use.

I expected that the videographer was going to deliver Flash video in FLV format for me to plug into the site.  I had a perfect Flash player to utilize: easy to incorporate, configurable design, and it loaded quickly on run-time.  Instead, I received 100 MPEG files, the one format that this player didn’t support.  I had a choice: find a new player, or ask the video guy to re-format all 100 files.  Had we simply decided up front, it could have saved me 10 hours finding a new player that was just as configurable as the original.

Content Writing Is a Separate Milestone
Many clients I work with believe that all writing is ‘webbable.’  In other words, documentation recovered from company PR documents or print marketing material can simply be converted to HTML word-for-word.  Not only is this ill-advised, it’s the worst way to look at content writing for the web.

Web writing is unique: it must be scan-able, concise, and easily readable.  To accomplish that, treat web writing as a separate milestone in your project plan.  Planning to ‘import’ editorial into the development phase of any web project is doing your client a disservice.  Don’t expect writing (whether it be web writing or writing ‘importation’) to occur as the last pixel is being put in place.

I’d hate for your marketing site to sound like this!

Slick concepts, state-of-the-art Flash animation, fancy logo design. Throw in some new business cards and an annual report at a reasonable price and any proposal can be made to look like a world-class offering.

Don’t forget the steak.

ProjectEric merges the art of web design with the meaty science of project management to launch sites on time, on budget, and in scope. Every time.

A full-service web design firm, ProjectEric caters to small businesses and non-profits across the country, serving up just the right amount of mouth-watering design solutions. Then we heap on a serving the best project management money can buy, ensuring that design milestones are never missed, expectations are always exceeded, and projects are always completed with you – and ultimately your customers – in mind.

The goal: create a web presence that targets the right clients at the right time, in the right way. While it’s no different than most other marketing channels, ProjectEric’s transforming approach merges branding strategy and creative design &  development with real business goals.