using my head

Well, at the January NetTuesday I managed to build a pretty decent-looking website live, in 33 minutes. The lovely Amy from NetSquared has uploaded some video of the presentation, and the videos of the actual website build will be coming soon, I’m told. But in the meantime, you can have a look at the slides from my presentation about how web apps have fundamentally changed the web design industry and web project lifecycles. Some linkies for you:

- Web design before web applications (video)
- Web design after web applications (video)
- View the presentation (slides)

I was really thrilled to see the Meetup attendees gave me a 5 out of 5 rating for the presentation, and I hope they will find the info and tips to be useful. It’s a lot to cover in an hour (both theory & practice), so the slides may be a very broad generalisation, but I do think the concept holds true: making websites today bears little resemblance to the way we used to build them even just a few years ago.

I think the really interesting thing to me is how I now tend to input content first, and do design second. This is completely the opposite of how we used to do things. But it’s a great tip when working with content management systems like WordPress or Squarespace, because it means you can create a design that you know will work with the type of content you have. So often we as designers would mock up something that looked beautiful with a couple of paragraphs of ‘lorem ipsum’, only to find that the design didn’t work so well with loads of text and several photos, which is what the client needed to have on the page. If you’re a designer, give it a try on your next project.

Next Tuesday I will be speaking about how you can create professional-looking websites quickly, at low cost and with high quality. Sounds impossible? Not anymore. The latest breed of web-based applications and tools have totally revolutionised the web industry, and next week I will be sharing my experience of working with these tools.

I will also do a live demo of Squarespace, showing just how easy and quickly you can put together a great little website. In fact, I am hoping to be able to create a full website within the 55minute session, so I’m setting myself a big target! If you are in London next Tuesday and want to see how it’s done, learn more about to the tools out there, hear my tips and pitfalls to avoid, then pop on over to NetSquared and sign up. Everyone is welcome so please do stop by!

What better way to make a fresh start in the new year than to freshen up my website. I have been so busy with clients that I haven’t had a chance to do it in a while, but I set aside the afternoon today and created a new Portfolio page to highlight some of my web design projects. Although design is not the only thing that I do, it’s one of the things I seem to be doing a lot of lately, and it’s nice to group everything all into one place. Creating the page made me realise that I designed, built and launched 12 websites in 2009, which averages out to around 1 per month. I reckon that’s pretty good going for a one-woman band, especially as I also had plenty of other non-design projects and photography work in the mix.

Funny how the changing of the calendar makes you take stock of life and reflect on how things are going. It’s good to have some kind of external force urging us to do so, because it’s not something us humans tend to do enough. I think it’s best summed up in the words of the immortal John Hughes, who sadly left us in 2009:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” - Ferris Beuller

Today marks the launch of my latest Squarespace website: a charity website for the Confectioner’s Benevolvent Fund (aka Sweet Charity). As they are a small UK charity, the challenge on this project was to create a great looking and functioning site on a tight budget, complete with multiple author/editor roles, embedded Flash and an event calendar. The fun part was using their brand name and industry in a creative way to form part of the design. The result of this is the bag of sweets that pours onto the pages, with different types and formations of sweets representing the different page contents conceptually. The client loves the concept so much that they will be using it on their offline marketing material, which makes us both happy.

We’ll be working together in 2010 incorporating the new look into their e-mail newsletters, and I will also be advising them on how they can use some of the latest gen online tools and web apps to streamline their internal workflow, allowing staff more time to focus on the important things: fundraising and helping people who need their assistance. It’s within organisations like Sweet Charity that I feel these web apps stand to make the biggest difference: they are free or low-cost, quick to implement and learn, and they can replace manual or time-consuming activities, usually without impacting on other internal technologies. In a busy charity, there’s never enough time to do things, so anything that can save time or make people’s jobs easier is a godsend. And there’s nothing I enjoy more than making people’s work lives a little nicer.

I have just finished customising a lovely clean, simple and easy-to-read WordPress theme for a new client, Capital Fire and Security. I like the clean lines and the way the blue and white make the photos really pop off the page. This project was another collaboration with the rather wonderful Katrina Dixon a.k.a. The Marketing Lady, who is a real pleasure to work with. Although this was primarily a design & build project for me, I thought I would help out the client with a few SEO tips during the training session. WordPress has a few good SEO features built-in (or via plugins), but the best SEO always boils down to content, content, content.

I think both the client and Katrina were pleased with the results, and I can already see that they are using the blog on their site well, filling it with really useful news articles relevant to their clients. So I can finally stop bugfixing and working around crazy IE6 hacks just in time for Christmas. Hooray!

Woohoo – how exciting. Those nice people over at Imagine Publishing have put together a nifty guide called the Blogger’s Handbook, which covers all the major blogging platforms, advice on setting up and designing blogs, and info about how to make blogging work for you. And yours truly is featured on page 114 in their feature on Squarespace.

It sure is nice to be recognised out of the millions of bloggers/designer-developers out there. And speaking of Squarespace, I have set up a showcase of my Squarespace projects, so hop on over to UsingMyHead on Squarespace if you fancy learning a bit more.

When a photographer colleague of mine approached me to help him create a new website to showcase his work, I was quite excited, because the project allowed me to exercise a little creative thinking on how he could easily create photo galleries that didn’t look like the bog standard stuff you usually see these days.

I like to tailor the job to the client, and make something that slots right into his or her workflow, rather than forcing poeple onto a particular tool or platform regardless of whether it’s right for them. So, because he was already using Adobe Lightroom to process his images, it seemed like a good idea to base the website on the galleries that come built into Lightroom. But they are a bit boring and pretty limited in terms of customisation. And the client wanted a really individual website that visually represented what his photography was all about: edgy, modern imagery.

The final solution was for me to build a custom HTML framework that houses embedded versions of the Lightroom galleries. This means that the client gets all the visual appeal of a bespoke site, with all the ease of exporting and uploading galleries directly from Lightroom. He didn’t have to learn anything new, and he gets to take advantage of a tool already built into his normal working environment. It’s great to be able to work in this way, and I look forward to other projects where I can help people save time or make their workflow a little simpler. That’s what gives me the greatest satisfaction in life. I don’t think of this kind of project as a ‘design’ job: to me it’s all about helping people. Check out the results here.

Web Designer Magazine

I was thrilled and honoured to find that one of my client websites is featured in Web Designer magazine this month. The Festinho website is listed as number 4 in their top 24 fave Squarespace websites, which is rather nice. The Festinho site has been a collaboration between myself and Raz at Auralmassage, so we are both chuffed to bits to find that our fellow web geeks think the site is pretty special. Pop on down to you local newsagents and pick up issue 162 if you want to see for yourself (we’re on page 70). Yay!

I’m back in the UK after my long trip back to the States, and while I was away, my latest Squarespace site went live: IT recruitment and consulting service provider Populo. This time I had the pleasure of working with Katrina Dixon, aka The Marketing Lady, who is working with Populo on their marketing. It was great to have a partner on the project, and I think the results are a polished site that promotes and explains Populo’s offering in a really appealing and engaging way. I hope I have the opportunity to work with other marketeers this way in future.

This project was particularly interesting for me because the client wanted to use Squarespace in a somewhat unconventional way: the blogging functionality has been adapted to act as a job listing tool. While it may not provide all the bells and whistles of a fully-featured job engine, it certainly does what it needs to, and demonstrates that with a little creative thinking, web platforms such as Squarespace or Wordpress can be adapted to work for almost any type of business or website.

Blogging functionality can be used to house any information that needs to be presented chronologically and/or categorised, whether it’s news, events, job postings, recipes or properties for sale – yet the word ‘blog’ has very specific connotations to most non-web-techies. I often wonder if there needs to be a rebrand of products such as Squarespace and WordPress, who are known primarily as ‘blogging’ platforms, because it’s sometimes difficult to get past the associations with this word when recommending these products to clients. Maybe in future there will be some clever term that sums up the capabilities of blog tools without the baggage of that word.

The latest launch in my increasingly long string of Squarespace websites is www.vandervord.com – a wedding photography website.

In this case, the client already had a website that was built years ago, and it really needed a fresh look. But the real frustration for the client was having to go through a middle-man to update his online portfolio. As a sole trader working in the current financial climate, he also needed to save money wherever possible, and it just didn’t make financial sense to have to pay someone every time he wanted to add a new photo or update his photography packages. The great news for him is that Squarespace costs about the same as web hosting alone, and once the initial design/build is out of the way, there are no additional costs for him moving forward. Now he can update the site whenever he wants – without having to worry about whether adding or changing something will affect the bottom line.

As usual, Squarespace’s easy-to-use interface was a big hit, especially for this client who didn’t want to have to learn anything complicated just to change a word or photo here & there. And the really fantastic news is that Squarespace’s search-engine-friendly design (and my advice on SEO) means that he’s already seen an increase in enquiries coming via Google, so I reckon the project will more than pay for itself in the first booking alone. Anything I can do to boost the business prospects for small businesses really makes me smile, so I am thrilled with the results on this one so far… and so is the client, which is nice. In fact, he liked the web designs so much, I have also designed business cards and stationery to match the shiny new look. So a big ‘yay’ all around I think!