February 7th 2011
I went to a really good event this week called “Managing Directly – Becoming your own boss” hosted by WiM and Milton Keynes & North Bucks Chamber of Commerce. It was targeted at women looking at starting a business. I’ve been running my own business full-time for 3 years now (+ another 4 yrs part-time) but I still feel I have so much to learn.
The first presentation was by Rita Spada, a business woman with over 2 decades experience in business management, now heading up the local Chamber of Commerce. Her talk was overflowing with useful advice and information, it seemed like there was at least 2 hours worth of material being condensed into 20 mins.
Business survival stage can last up to 5 years
A big take away point for me was that a 3-5 year old business is still in its infancy. Rita used a diagram called the Seven Stages of Organisational Development to talk about the stages you go through as your business grows. She explained that you will be in the Survival stage for at least the first 3 years. This made me feel much better about where we are in our business. I think we might actually be ahead of the game (for our age), when I had so often thought we’re struggling to keep up!
This isn’t the exact version Rita showed us, but a more commonly published (according to my online research) diagram known as The Seven Levels of [Organisational] Consciousness Model, originally by Richard Barrett, who based it on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
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September 19th 2010
Every now and then a pseudo-discussion will flair up, in response to a blogpost or a tweet, about online criticism and feedback. There was one such ‘discussion’ on Brendan Dawes’ blog back in January, when I initially drafted this post. For some reason I never published this then. I think I was too mad about the whole thing because his blog post taken on its own was rather weak – it was such a flippant remark – and it provoked some equally flippant responses. But it did raise an important point about a certain lack of criticism in web design which I’m particularly aware of having come from a fine art background where criticism is taught and practiced quite vigorously. To learn how to give and take criticism is one of the main reasons I would recommend getting some undergraduate education.
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Posted by Emily in
Design
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June 7th 2010
I’m going to a conference on called WebContent2010 tomorrow. I’ve been trying to explain to people what it is going to be about, and so I thought I’d get it down in writing before I go, to see how what I learn compares to my expectations.
Working in the web design industry, we’ve gone through all these phases of concentrating on various aspects of the process like the visual design, (and separating design from content with) HTML and CSS, user interface and experience design, information architecture, accessibility, the list goes on. But one massive area which hasn’t had so much attention is content. We are still, in 2010, letting clients copy and paste content from printed brochures onto websites.
When I worked as a front-end developer for another company, there was always a moment post-deadline, when we’d handed over a website and CMS to the client, but we were still bug fixing and tweaking and we’d look at the website and say “Oh gawd, look what they’ve gone and pasted into their About Us page” [snigger]. Followed swiftly by “Oh well, s’not my problem” as we scurried back to that all important CSS adjustment of 2 pixels.
Now I run my own company, when I see something that my client has added to the website which I think is inappropriate or which needs some other attention I’ll send them an email or talk to them about it on the phone right away. I am acutely aware that it doesn’t matter how good our design looks, how well the site is coded or how easy it is to use, if the content of the website isn’t interesting or useful or maintaining the brand identity, then the website isn’t working. I think I’ve always cared about this, but I haven’t always been in a position to do anything about it. Now I’m not in a position to to ignore it.
I have enough difficulty getting clients to pay for copywriting, so convincing them to pay for content strategy is a whole ‘nother hurdle. But it must be done at the beginning. It is always the first question you ask a new client anyway: Why do you want a website? The answer to that question lays down the foundation of your content strategy.
I hope to come away from this conference having more language to talk about content strategy convincingly to clients so I can pursuade them to invest in it. And also gain the toolset to implement a content strategy to make a successful website.
April 1st 2010
I’ve just finished the biggest slog on our current main project, namely the ExpressionEngine CMS development for the redesign of Yogacampus.com. Before that I worked on the user profiling, research & specification and the information architecture, so I’ve been pretty much go go go since we started this project in the new year.
We ran this project a little differently than we’ve done in the past though, so the visual design and front-end development has yet to be finished. It’s worked really well so far actually: we skipped wireframes and went from page descriptions to developing a dynamic ‘prototype’ while we worked on a brand refresh at the same time.
But ever since the pressure came off from meeting my deadline I’ve found myself unfocused, impatient and irritable. I now have a much freer schedule which seems like a great opportunity get on with some of those ‘odd job’ or ‘rainy day’ tasks that are cluttering up my Omnifocus. Or I could be sorting through boxes of our stuff that needs to be shifted into storage in a month when we head off on our North American Adventure. But I am struggling to do any of these things. I’m certainly lacking enthusiasm even when I do get stuff done.
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February 28th 2010
A few people have asked me how I went about setting up the ExpressionEngine meetup I’ve been running in London for the last few months. I didn’t quite know what to say at first because I felt like I just stumbled blindly into it. But as time goes on – we’ve just had our 4th meetup – and questions are starting to come up for me, I thought I’d share what I know and maybe gleen some answers from other meetup organisers out there about the areas I’m unsure about.
Gauging interest
This was easy. I asked a handful of people I knew via the ExpressionEngine forums and/or Twitter who are based in London and the South East if they’d be interested. They all said yes so I figured we were good to go.
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ExpressionEngine •
How to
February 22nd 2010
Celebrating software as a service, wondering why other products can’t be more like it and enjoying seeing the web’s influence on print design.
I try not to subscribe to newsletters which I’m not going to read but there are a few in which I usually find something interesting or exciting to look at. Two of these appeared in my inbox this week. One from my online accounting application Freeagent and the other from an online shop I buy from occasionally called Nigel’s Eco Store.
Freeagent were writing to announce that they’ve released a new version of the application. I perhaps got a little over-excited about the features they’ve added. But the new functionality includes some things I’d specifically been waiting for, like linking an expense to a project without ‘rebilling’ it (useful if you charge a flat rate). In one way you could say that these features are things that always should have been there, but you know what it is like when you design things for the first time. You don’t always get it right.
Like my kettle. I bought one of these Eco Kettles last year. I was seduced by the promise that you can measure exactly now much water you need to boil. I always found with a regular kettle that I’d boil at least twice as much water as I need and that seems like a big waste of energy. Not to mention the impact on our electricity bill, considering how many cups of tea we make in a week, with 2 of us working from home every day.
Anyway it turns out that although the kettle does indeed let you only boil as little as 200ml water (and is probably saving a tonne of energy), it has some annoying little ‘bugs’: you can never get the last bit of water into the boiling chamber; the lid leaks and its a bit of an effort to push the button down (not such a biggy for me, but for elderly or arthritic users I’d say this is a major usability flaw). And it isn’t particularly attractive now, is it?
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Design
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February 10th 2010
Following on from my look back at 2009 I wanted to share my plans for 2010. This might seem a bit late to talk about plans for the not-so-new year, but there are some big changes afoot, and I needed a little time to get my own head around them before sharing the news.
Leaving the big smoke
This view is actually one of the good things about our current home & office.
My partner North and I run our own business. It is just the two of us and we work from home. We rarely meet clients in person and when we do, we go to them or meet in town. We like living in Hackney, but we don’t feel like we’re taking advantage of what London has to offer any more.
We’d been thinking we might move out of London in a few years time but then a noisy neighbour moved in next door and ‘broke the camels back’. Having to put up with his loud bassy music for a few hours every afternoon made us sensitive to the rest of the noise surrounding us: the busy road; the live music at the pub opposite; the kids hanging out on the corner with their car stereos cranked up; the list goes on.
So this year we’ve decided to test out the theory that, as self-employed designers of the WWW, we can work from anywhere.
Our test is two-fold.
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Posted by Emily in
Personal
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January 23rd 2010
I have been running my own business full time for 2 and a half years now and one of the most difficult things to learn has been how little billable time you actually get done in a day/week. (I was reassured to read this week that the well established designer Jon Hicks is still getting used to this too.)
What I found most frustrating about this situation—aside from the fact that I’d have no bills to send out—was that I didn’t know where my time was going. I would spend 8 hours sat at my desk 5 days in a row and then look at a measley 10 hours of client work logged and think –
“What the hell have I been DOING?”
Then I discovered BubbleTimer. It took me a while to come round to the idea, but I have been now been using this little application for a year. In helping me keep track of what I have been doing, it has prevented me from completely losing my mind (and giving up on my business!).
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January 15th 2010
One thing I found out about at this month’s ExpressionEngine meetup is this Client Guide which has generously been shared by Kyle from Headspace Design. They have produced a very nicely designed documentation file for their clients, which they are sharing in PDF format as well as the original InDesign files so that you can brand it and edit it with your client’s own details.
When I made my first EE site I spent a long time writing up a documentation file. It was written in HTML and linked from the “User Guide” link in the Control panel. This covered lots of the items Headspace included in theirs, like how to upload files and marking up your text. Ultimately though, I felt that a system which required such detailed documentation couldn’t be very user friendly, which is why – over time – I built up a must-have collection of extensions and plugins which simplified some of these tasks.
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January 11th 2010
I spent the latter part of 2009 thinking what a stinker of a year it had been. Mistakes I’d made to do with estimating the timing on some jobs meant that the summer months were an incredibly stressful time. But in thinking about writing this blog post (and reading yours) I’ve realised there were lots of good things that happened last year too. Let’s start with the positive.
The Good
ExpressionEngine: workshop, development and meetups
It’s been a big year for me and ExpressionEngine, the CMS platform which I started using in 2008 and on which I have now developed over 10 websites. Here are some of the reasons why:
- I attended Jamie Pittock’s ExpressionEngine workshop at FOWD where I learnt a whole bunch of useful tips and had some major light bulb moments. But I was also reassured that, on the whole, I had been approaching EE development the right way.
- We launched 5 websites developed in ExpressionEngine. Three of these were designed by us, the other 2 were development-only projects involving other designers/agencies.
- I started the London ExpressionEngine meetup. We had our first meetup in September when there were about 9 of us. The attendance more than doubled at our 2nd meetup in November. So far it has been a really nice bunch of people – they’re friendly, easy-going and keen to share their knowledge.
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