http://www.gradualism.co.uk/ Notes from a web designer and small business owner en gradualism@googlemail.com Copyright 2012 2012-03-28T17:24:41+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/in-business-get-a-safety-net-and-an-exit-strategy/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/in-business-get-a-safety-net-and-an-exit-strategy/#When:17:24:41Z Me holding a handstand for as long as it took the shutter to release I’m learning to do a handstand. Until recently, I could only hold it by myself when I was next to a wall, but when I was practicing on the cushioned flooring at the climbing centre last week I managed to hold it up for a count of 5 in the middle of the space. When I tried again at home I couldn’t kick up at all. It’s the knowledge that I won’t hurt myself falling on the soft floor that gives me the confidence to throw my whole body above my head. Today we met up with a business advisor, David Stimson, to discuss how he could provide us with support and help guide us through some growing pains. It was a really useful and positive meeting, which left me feeling so geared up I started practicing hand stands in the garden. I figured if I can get over my fear of falling (or learn how to break it) I can get over my fear of (failing in) business. This is something which David talked about specifically. He said that every good business plan should have a get out clause, so that if things do seem to be going belly up (or head down in my handstand practice), you have an exit strategy. While you’re practicing the handstand you need some kind of safety net, like the wall, which you know will catch you if you go too far. I’m looking for a business advisor to provide us with a similar kind of support at a difficult time in the managing of our business. Part of getting the hang of holding a handstand – as well as having the confidence that you can hold it – is knowing how to safetly get out of it if it goes too far. Talking to a business advisor or mentor is helpful in building up confidence, but having a business plan with an exit strategy gives the ultimate reassurance that (if the ground crumbles underneath you) you won’t get hurt as you fall. North‘s perfected the headstand-into-forward-roll and so can fall out of it safely and gracefully. Safety net and exit strategy in one! Running a business 2012-03-28T17:24:41+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/becoming-your-own-boss/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/becoming-your-own-boss/#When:05:30:00Z 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 The survival stage is when you focus on financial stability and growth. Later stages are when you start to focus on other things, like at the excellence, productivity and efficiency. We’ve already taken a look at some of the later focuses which means we are headed in the right direction. Rita advised that you spend 3 years building a solid foundation for your business but developing a framework for the future at the same time. You’ll only spend 50% of your time on the thing you love When you go start up your own business it is often because you have a specialist skill that you are passionate about selling. Rita Spada pointed out that you will only get to spend 50% of your time doing this, and that 10% of it will be management time (I guess the rest is made up of training and admin etc). This is an important point. You need to be prepared for this in order to save disappointment later down the line. This has been one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn running our business – I quickly discovered I doing more project managing than website development. But if/when you realised this you can organise things in such a way that you get to spend more of your time on what you are most skilled at (by employing administrators/project managers etc – which is what we’ve done in the last 6 months. Some other points Rita made which were struck a chord with me were: …on managingrunning a business is a lonely placethere are more questions than you can answer(but) you get ability to mark you own way in the world …on networking: never stop building your network connect to people that matter leave a part of yourself behind, something that people will [want to] share with others This final point from Rita about networking and making connections is a good one: “Networking doesn’t win you business. Networking wins you connections and connections win you business.”Rita Spada Excellent service and keeping in touch Up next was Elizabeth Sheldon. She runs a digital forensics company based in MK with clients all around the globe. One of the things Elizabeth emphasised in her talk was planning. Budget for leaner times and plan in quarters (e.g if you know Autumn will be slower for you, set aside some money in the Spring). Elizabeth talked more about something Rita had touched on, that people do business with people who they like. Customer service is key. People will buy from you not because you have the best product on the market, but because they like you – you give them excellent service. “Deliver the best service and you don’t have to have the best product”Elizabeth Sheldon Elizabeth introduced us to the concept of “Touch 7 times” which claims that you need to make contact with someone (talk, phone, email, meet etc) 7 times before they’ll buy from you. This certainly chimes with recent experiences we’ve had with new business enquiries/sales. Even if it is the potential client who makes contact with you first, you need to follow-up —-court them—before you will make a sale. Make friends and network effectively Angela Rhodes has been running her small HR business for over 15 years now. I found I could relate to lots of the things she told us as she talked us through her story so far, like the pros and cons of working from home and the importance of networking. It was a bit of a revelation hearing about how Angela grew her client base. It sounded a lot like how we’ve grown ours. An old school or college friend gets in touch. A friend of a friend emails you. Someone you know recommends you to a colleague of theirs. These people, who then become your (happy) clients, all recommend you to other people— their friends, old acquaintances—who in turn recommend you on to others, and so on. I’ve always had this feeling that the way we’ve grown our client base wasn’t how ‘real’ business work. I thought ‘real’ businesses got found through search engines and advertising and that we are a little bit sneaky to be carrying on like this. But hearing Angela talk about it in this context, reinforced by Rita and Elizabeth’s comments, made me realise we are doing the right thing! I also realised in talking to Angela afterwards that this new business generation model is in fact an incredibly strong selling point. If you tell potential clients that all your work comes from referrals, they will realise that you are being kept in business by happy customers. This serves as a guarantee of good service. Because if you do a shoddy job, no one is going to recommend you. To find a successful business that isn’t paying for advertising means they must be doing lots of things right. Like the speakers before her, Angela emphasised the importance of networking, but she also made a really useful point. You need to know how network effectively. There are so many networking opportunities [here in Milton Keynes] that you can spend a lot of money and time attending, but you need to know how to make it work. You don’t want to just walk up to someone and give them your marketing schpeil. You need to connect with them in another way, on a personal level, before you start talking business. Just try and get to know them and perhaps find something you have in common. You may end up knowing someone socially for years before they come to you for business or find someone to recommend you to. Take homes: new knowledge, confirmations and bubbly! The event had a good mix of learning new stuff and confirming things I already know, or didn’t realise I new already. There wasn’t much time for networking but there was time for a quick prize draw drawn from the attendees feedback forms. And guess what? I won! Thank-you sponsorship! (Now why wasn’t that luck with me when they drew the lucky winner of an iPad at the New Adventures conference last month?!) Conferences & Events, Running a business 2011-02-07T05:30:00+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/notes-on-criticism-in-web-design/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/notes-on-criticism-in-web-design/#When:20:10:12Z 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. At least once a term at Glasgow School of Art we would spend 2 days solid just moving around the sculpture studio talking about each other’s work. For our historical and critical studies we would read 100s of pages of art journals: essays about artist’s work and reviews of exhibitions and interviews with artists. And then we’d be expected to write essays and reviews ourselves. Once you graduate and start making work in the ‘real world’ it can be a struggle to keep getting feedback on your work, because you don’t have tutors and fellow students around you everyday. But hopefully you will have studio mates willing to talk about your work and visits from curators, gallerists and other artists when you’ll need to present your work and take criticism about it. Then, when you’ve finally got your work into an exhibition, there might be a review by an art critic in a magazine or a newspaper. Web designers need criticism too. Ideally we get criticism from our colleagues and peers, either in the office or via IM or on the phone. We practice talking about our work and receiving criticism when we present designs to clients. But what this industry does seem to be lacking is the critical reviews. This is particularly problematic for our industry because so many people entering it don’t have a formal training. They’re self taught. This is a good thing. There are so many resources online for learning web design and development. But where can you learn to present your work and to give and take criticism? The answer seems obvious. Talk about your work on your own blog. But this is surprisingly rare. You don’t see that many show-n-tell blog posts. Good criticism isn’t necessarily positive, but it is thoughtful, well-made and constructive. Good criticism has to be invited. I think there is a place for criticism online, not on Twitter, but in blog posts and online magazines. We can cultivate good criticism by putting our work out there. One rare example of this is Simon Collison’s Redesigning the undesigned, the blog post which he published to coincide with the launch of his redesign. In his article Simon goes into great detail about the process and thinking that went into the design. He mentions some criticism he received from a colleague and how that changed what he went on to create. By sharing this constructive criticism, we can all learn something it. Also by sharing his thought process, he opens up a space for people to respond. I always found that in critiques at college, you thought you didn’t have anything to say about someone’s work until they started talking about it. We need to know when it is appropriate to offer constructive criticism – if someone just tweets a link to a site they’ve launched, or just publishes a quick blog post with a screenshot of a new site, they probably aren’t looking for serious criticism. How you respond should match what you are responding to, in this case, if you are going to say anything, the written equivalent of a thumbs up is all that is called for. If, however, someone writes a long blog post about their ideas and process, you might want to give some thoughtful criticism back. Khoi Vinh made a call for criticism in his Dear Designer, You Suck article which was written in a thoughtful and constructive way. I wish all the people who spent time reading and ranting about Brendan’s little rant had been reading this article instead. Our industry would be significantly wiser. Design 2010-09-19T20:10:12+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/why-webcontent2010-gets-my-conference-budget/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/why-webcontent2010-gets-my-conference-budget/#When:02:17:31Z 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. Conferences & Events, Content Strategy 2010-06-07T02:17:31+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/beating-the-post-deadline-blues-and-staying-inspired/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/beating-the-post-deadline-blues-and-staying-inspired/#When:04:10:55Z 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. At 7.30 pm this evening, having realised that I was no longer capable of working even though the light evening was attempting to trick me into thinking I could, I wrapped up warm and headed out to collect my veg bag in a grump. I grabbed North’s iPod shuffle because I didn’t feel like listening to anything I knew I had on my own iPod so thought I’d go with whatever random thing turned up next on his playlist. (He also is better at finding uplifting music than I am!) After a couple tracks what do I hear by the familiar voice of Paul Boag coming on to introduce a Boagworld podcast, which I’m just about to skip past because I’m ‘not in the mood’ when I get thrown by his cheeky little addition to the usual introduction “[in a whisper] hire Headscape!” and I keep listening. Next thing I know I’m back home cooking up a nice dinner (including grilled sprouting brocolli – a particular favourite seasonal treat of mine) and feeling totally inspired and switched on about work and web design and the whole sh-bang. The show was the one where Mike Kus and Keir Whitaker from Carsonfied interview Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington from Headscape (the Headscape fellas are usually the hosts of the podcast). And I found this interview fascinating. It was good to hear Paul and Marcus answering someone else’s questions for a change, and they asked all the right questions. All those things that I wonder about whenever I listen to the show. Paul and Marcus aren’t afraid to talk about their own way of doing things as it comes up on the show, but there’s always been some outstanding questions and a general overview of how Headscape is structured and what they process is that I was missing. Anyway, point being it lifted me out of this blue funk I was in. And its silly really, because I usually listen to Boagworld every week because it entertains, keeps me informed, and makes me feel like I’m not working in a vacuum. But because I’ve been so busy working to meet a deadline and worrying about other things I haven’t been listening. Stephanie Hobson tweeted earlier “When I get stressed out I forget to eat and rest, how is this a useful survival mechanism?”@stephaniehobson to which I responded “Why, when I get stressed out, do I forget to do the things that usually cheer me up?”@gradualist Which is the same thing really. We need to rest and eat to keep our brains working and stay healthy, we need to take some recreation/inspiration to keep ourselves sane and happy. Don’t let being too busy get in the way of doing those—seemingly unessential—little things that keep you happy and enthused about life and work. Inspiration, Personal 2010-04-01T04:10:55+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/setting-up-the-london-expressionengine-meetup/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/setting-up-the-london-expressionengine-meetup/#When:23:09:52Z 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. Photo of everyone looking very serious at our 2nd meetup: (L-R of those facing camera) shapeshed, adamkhan, paulcuth, paulstone and long distance member MarmaladeToday who was visiting from the Welsh Marches. Promotion and organisation It occured to me that I should really be using ExpressionEngine to set up a website to promote the event, but I didn’t know if it was something that was actually going to last past one or two meetups. And I really didn’t have the time. So I took advantage of the ‘1st 3 months free’ offer on the Meetup.com website and setup a group on there. I figured being on there might also help in letting more people find out about the group – it’s a known Meetup directory and you can search by topic and by location. I did hesitate about making people sign up to yet another website at first but it didn’t seem to put anyone off. It’s good to be able to see how much interest there is. I’m also finding it easier to remember people’s names when they turn up because I’ve seen the name (and possibly a profile pic) on the group and in the RSVP list. Meetup.com also does a lot of the work for you. If I create a draft meetup event but don’t feel ready to publish it, it will email me to remind me I have a draft waiting. If I publish the event before I’ve decided where it is going to happen, it’ll remind me by email to add a location. And it automatically sends out reminders to the group members when the date is approaching. I don’t want to turn this to sound like a big promotion for Meetup.com but I guess it taught me a lot about what is involved in organising a meetup. It has features like sign or name badges print outs – things I wouldn’t have thought of but which could be really useful. Once I’d created the group/event page I still needed to get the word out. Obviously I’ll always share the link on Twitter. And you know how that can get the word around. I also listed it on Upcoming.org (like a free Meetup.com) the first time (but haven’t bothered since). One of the members, Simon Cox, thought to post it on the EE forum too before I did, but now you can submit it to the official ExpressionEngine events listing and they’ll show it on their homepage. Format Partly as an ice-breaker and partly to give it structure I suggested that attendees might like to give a little show-n-tell about how they’ve used EE meet their needs. I had one in mind that I could give and it wasn’t long before Adam Khan volunteered too. And so our first meetup was set. This format seems to work really well. We’ve had a theme for the last couple meetups – at our 3rd meetup we looked at ecommerce and the last one was add-ons – and I’m gathering ideas for future events on our group’s message board. Incidentally, Meetup.com have now introduced a new Ideas board especially for this. (See what I mean? They think of everything!) Venue requirements Given that I wanted people to be able to give presentations to the group, I needed to find somewhere we could have a quiet room to ourselves. It also needed to be close to a (relatively central) tube station, since people would be coming from all over London and beyond. By happy coincidence, we had just finished building a website for a friend of a friend, Glyn, who’d just bought and refurbished a pub called The Bell near Liverpool Street station. The Bell has WIFI, beer, and an upstairs room that is available for hire, and he very generously offered it to me for free. One thing to point out about having presentations, which always require a screen for slides or a demo: it is difficult for even just 8-10 to be all be able to see the screen of one laptop. If someone is showing slides then you can just about get away with having (the slides copied onto) 2 laptops split between a group of around 12, but for more people or if it is a live demo then you’ll need a bigger screen or projector. One other requirement, that unfortunately our current venue doesn’t meet, is food. Our meetup happens in the evening so most people are coming straight from work and it would be really good if we could have some finger-food to munch on and keep us going. Instead we are currently surviving on beer and crisps 1, though on the one occasion a few of us indulged in a curry delivered from the restaurant opposite, it’d be more appropriate to be able to have some snacks available from the start. Time and Cost As I mentioned the venue isn’t costing me anything 2, but I am paying $72 per 6 month subscription to Meetup.com. It has also sucked up a fair bit of admin time so far. According to my Bubbletimer log I’ve spent 14 hours organising it to date. This has included tasks like: choosing and booking a venue setting up the group webpage/site arranging for presentations and/or writing the blurb for each meetup choosing a date (at one point I did a quick poll to see what dates suited people but I didn’t get many responses so now I just pick a date that I and the presentees can make and go for it. The more members you have, the less you have to worry about picking a date that noone can make.) trying to find PC/Mini Display Port to HDMI cables to plug people’s laptops into the big screen TV Glyn’s made available to us 3(N.B. This could be another cost you need to budget for – or an opportunity for sponsorship from an AV hire place) looking/appealing for sponsorship, then putting sponsorship received in place (uploading logos/links/blurbs) promoting event on Twitter and submitting to other listings Although I’m getting a lot back in terms of what I learn at the events, it would be nice be able to cover my costs. Meetup.com has some optional functionality to help you with this: one is charging a subscription fee to members and the other is getting sponsorship. I certainly don’t want to make members pay – I think they’re contributing enough by turning up and giving presentations. But I have considered sponsorship. Actually I got some sponsorship (at the last minute) from Brandon Kelly’s add-on shop for our Add-on-tastic meetup: we looked at Pixel & Tonic at the event and link to it from our page and I get a free Playa license in return. But in the long run I have absolutely no idea how much a spot on our webpage/mention at our event is worth… our attendance varies from 9 to 21, we have 52 members and since I installed Google Analytics 2 weeks ago we’ve had 108 unique visits. If anyone can give me some advice about the value of this kind of sponsorship – or other ways you’ve raised funds for a meetup – then please do share in the comments. Or if you fancy sponsoring it yourself, please use this form to get in touch. Result Well, I know I might be a bit biased, but I think the meetup has been a real success so far Apart from being super useful as an opportunity to see and learn from how other people are using ExpressionEngine, I also love just getting to talk shop with fellow web designer/developer/small business owners. Last week we got side-tracked into discussing everything from how we manage our client’s website hosting (reselling or dealing with their—so often—poor choices) to which text editor/ftp applications we use. You don’t have to just take my word for it either. You can read what other members have to say about it here. 1. Yes I know we[Brits]‘ve survived on a diet of mostly this for hundreds of years but this isn’t a purely social event – you actually need to keep a hold of your braincells for some of the topics we’re discussing! ↩ 2. Well, except maybe the odd bit of free design work/website maintenance for Glyn. ↩ 3. I’m still working on this one. I left it to the last minute this time and could only find online shops which would’ve delivered too late. ↩ ExpressionEngine, How to 2010-02-28T23:09:52+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/why-cant-you-be-more-like-the-internet/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/why-cant-you-be-more-like-the-internet/#When:03:45:37Z 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? So you won’t be surprised to hear that when I saw they were promoting a “New Eco Kettle“ in Nigel’s Eco Store newsletter this week my first thought was ‘Damn! they’ve fixed it!’. Unlike with my SAS Freeagent, when they come out with a new release of a product like this, existing users don’t benefit. That leaves us feeling a little sore. I feel a bit ‘used’ – like I was a beta tester but now I don’t get to try out the alpha product. I guess that is what you get for being an early adopter – a feeling which all you buyers of the 1st generation iPhones will know well. I was going to go on a big rant about how product manufacturers need to be more like SAS but I’ve been mulling over the idea this weekend and I just can’t make a real good argument. I can’t see us paying for kettles on a monthly subscription and I don’t like to think about the impact us tossing out our kettles everytime an new version comes out would have on our landfill sites (or lack thereof). I can conclude by siting a completely unrelated example of where an offline product has taken something from the online world and put it to good use. A Word cloud of the most used words in Tiger Woods’ statement, used as an illustration on the front page of the Sport section in Saturday’s Guardian newspaper. Design 2010-02-22T03:45:37+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/mobilising/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/mobilising/#When:16:31:03Z 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. At the beginning of May we will be moving most of our belongings into storage and taking ourselves and our laptops to Vancouver. Thanks to the hospitality of North’s family, we’ll be living and working there for 3 months, with a visit to stay with friends in Chicago for a few weeks in June. And of course we’ll be taking a holiday while we’re there too (a week, on a little boat, touring round the wineries on the shores of Okanagan Lake, oh yes!). At the beginning of August we’ll be flying back to London and will start looking for somewhere to live around the Northhamptonshire – Oxfordshire – Warwickshire border. We’ll be looking for somewhere big enough to allow us to work from home again. (We’ll try not to get too distracted by the countryside walks, the veg patch and the gardening.) Brand refresh and website redesign Our plan has some pros and cons with regards to our business goals this year. On the up-side: since we will be living rent-free for a few months, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to put client work aside and work on our own website’s redesign. We’ve been wanting to look at rebranding ourselves, or at least doing a brand refresh for a while now. A big part of this job will include moving our website onto ExpressionEngine too. So we will not be taking on any new client projects between May to July, but we will continue doing small design jobs and website maintenance. At least that is the plan*. *Since initial drafting this we’re already reconsidering this, as a new project has come up that we really don’t want to turn down. This is always the problem with redesigning your own website – you never feel like you can prioritise that work over client projects. View from North’s sister’s flat in Vancouver with Cypress mountain in the distance Expanding our team The down-side of our plan is that we’ve been considering getting in some extra help, by way of a part-time administrator/office manager/book-keeper/project manager. (This is going to be tricky since we need a little bit of a lot of different roles. I don’t even know if you can get one person who can do all of that.) It seems like kind of bad timing on our part to be looking to hire someone when we are going to be away for 3 months, and moving location. Unless they can work remotely? Obviously I support remote working in general, but might this be the one role that needs to be ‘on location’? Or is this what VPAs are for? If you have any experiences or ideas about this please let me know in the comments. Conferences The kind of view we hope to find in the countryside, found on Globrix One thing I am going to miss while we are away are the conferences. I won’t be able to go to FOWD and I’ll miss the first @media run by the Web Directions team. But I will still have the opportunity to go to dConstruct and I will definitely be attending European EECI2010, which I’m hoping will be in Leiden again. I did consider flying down to attend the San Francisco edition of EECI2010 since I’ll be on that side of the North American continent, but I think I’d rather go to the European conference so that I can meet more ‘local’ ExpressionEngine developers. I had been hoping that An Event Apart might be in Chicago while I’m there, but its in Boston this summer and I don’t think my conference budget will stretch that far this year. I’ll be blogging here about how business goes while we’re on the road. Or you can check out our moving to the country blog for more on that side of things. Have you tried taking your business ‘on-the-road’? Or have you upped sticks and moved your operations from an urban location to a more rural one? I would love to hear your experiences. Personal 2010-02-10T16:31:03+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/reclaim-unproductive-work-time-by-time-tracking/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/reclaim-unproductive-work-time-by-time-tracking/#When:01:03:12Z 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!). Screenshot of BubbleTimer before I started writing this today BubbleTimer is an online application, and what you’re seeing above is basically it. You add your activities down the side, as many as you like. You can add and delete them whenever you need to. Then you check off your time in 15 minute increments by filling in the little lozenges. The 15 minute segments encourages you focus on each separate activity for longer without jumping around so much. As you can see from today’s example, my BubbleTimer records often make me look a bit A.D.D. The problem with “multi-tasking” is that if I’m all over the place, I’m most likely to be forgetting to track what I’m doing in BubbleTimer too. This is when I resort to one or two other tools. The history of my web browser Firefox, and a “web-based time management and analytics tool” called RescueTime. Firefox‘s history records every single webpage you visit as well as the date and time* when you visited it (*Safari, unfortunately, doesn’t track the time, which is partly why I don’t use it!). Considering probably 90% of my time is spent using a web browser, a quick look at the history for the last hour will likely show me where I’ve been and so reminding me what I’ve been working on. Firefox history screenshot from Monday Or not. You’ll see in the screenshot of Monday’s Firefox history that I either took at 3 hour lunchbreak, or I wasn’t using my browser for a change. In this case, if I have forgotten to track what I’ve been doing I’ll take a look at my RescueTime account. To use RescueTime you need to install an application on your computer which tracks what software and websites are actively being used. RescueTime activities by hour from another day By viewing the complete report I can see what activities I was engaged in for this particular hour down to the minutes and seconds. This should usually remind me what I was working on so I can go back to BubbleTimer and fill in the bubbles. And don’t forget the billable hours too! Here is a screenshot of a more focused day tracked in BubbleTimer. A day of client work, tracked in 15 minutes segments in BubbleTimer At the end of the week I need to make sure all my client project time has actually been logged, so that I won’t forget to bill for it. At this point I will print off a summary report which shows the total time spent on each activity for my chosen time period. A ‘good’ week’s summary, with additional notes. Once I’ve printed off my summary I add up all the billable hours and check that they’re logged against the relevant project’s timesheets or added to an invoice. Most of my projects are quoted for in advance so I use this paper based Task Project Tracker (from The Printable CEO series) for this. For the few separate invoiceable tasks I have done, I will add the time to Freeagent. Productivity assessment – how am I doing? The BubbleTimer summary report is crucial for seeing the bigger picture and it gives me a bit of a reality check about how I’m doing productivity wise. I’m learning not to feel stressed out when my billable hours only add up to 30% of my work time. Instead I look at what I HAVE been doing. It was a complete revelation when I first started using this app and I realised that I was getting things done after all. I was managing new business enquiries, doing the bookkeeping, dealing with IT issues or keeping up with the latest industry news online. I have another chart from The Printable CEO series called “When is something worth doing?” which I have stuck on my wall. This helps me remember that generating new business is equally as valuable as time spent on client projects. It helps me focus on what is important. (In fact, I need to reorder my activities in BubbleTimer according to importance. Then I would be able to see how productive I’m being at a glance – the more bubbles filled in towards the top of the sheet the better). There is another potential benefit of being able to see exactly how long I’m spending on all these other tasks. At some point I might want to consider getting a book-keeper or an administrator in to help me with these tasks. Since I’ve been tracking how long I’ve spent on them, I know how much work I might be able to provide a part-time freelancer with and I’ll be able to estimate how much it will cost me too. The working title for this blogpost was something along these lines “BubbleTimer has improved my productivity and maintained my sanity” It didn’t seem to fit once I’d written the article in full, but the statement holds true. If you feel like you are being unproductive or work is making you feel a little insane, I recommend getting serious with your time-tracking! My review of BubbleTimer on the Boagworld Podcast (00:38:32 – 00:43:56) Transcript Project 52 stats: Week 3, Post # 4 Time spent: 5 hours How to, Productivity 2010-01-23T01:03:12+00:00 http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/expressionengine-client-documentation/ http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/expressionengine-client-documentation/#When:23:44:22Z 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. Screenshot of my lengthy instructions for using the native EE 1.6.X file upload functionality For example, before nGen File Field and FF Matrix came along I used Mark Huot’s File Field (either way) combined with Imagesizer so that the client didn’t have to use the built in (and overly complicated) Upload File area. I also use Leevi Graham’s TinyMCE plugin to provide a WYSIWYG editor for them. No instructions are needed at all to explain how to use this nGen File Field and FF Matrix combination These add-ons make lots of the explanations in Headspace’s documentation unnecessary for my clients, but there are still some general overviews of the Edit pages and filtering which would always be useful. If you are new to ExpressionEngine and curious to find about more you’ll learn a lot about it by reading this guide too. It is interesting to discover this now, because I have just made the decision to stop offering documentation; it took me so long to customise each time (because I was adding instructions for the particular set of add-ons and weblogs which I was using for that site); and my clients always seemed to call me before they remembered to look at it anyway. Seeing Headspace’s documentation is making me rethink this. Perhaps I will make a more generic overview of EE like they have done, leaving out the site specific details. If/when I do this I will definitely share it here, so if you’re not following me on Twitter just add a comment here to be notified when I post this. General purpose instructions on using the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor The other nice thing about sharing your documentation file is it exposes how you are using ExpressionEngine. I noticed in Kyle’s guide that he seems to be using the Gallery module to offer crop/resize tools even when the site doesn’t have a Photo Gallery per se. Do you provide your clients with a user guide or other form of documentation? If so, in what format and do they use it?! Transcript Project 52 stats: Week 2, Post # 3 Time spent: 1:45 min ExpressionEngine 2010-01-15T23:44:22+00:00