West Coast Bloggers

Presenting Phone Numbers

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:36 GMT

The other day I was chatting away with a potential client, I asked for their phone number, as you do. They replied with 1800 GETT AWEB (no that's not real) . I asked what that was a real number, there was silence for a moment, then “I have no idea,” was the honest reply.

It's not that phone names are anything new, but it did get me thinking.

The use of the phrase (name) as a number was all well and good if I wanted to remember the number. It's well know that people remember words and phrases better in general than they do strings or numbers. Clearly why phone number names are so popular.

However in this situation I just wanted the contact details so I could transcribe them into my client contact record. So a string of numbers would have been fine.

Phrase verses Numbers

Instead, getting the phone number as a phrase meant I had to translate this back into the real number. Which involved finding a phone with an alpha-numeric keypad. Not a really hard call in our geeky household. Then you have to stare at the phone and letter by letter translate the name. Laborious at best.

Sure I could leave the number as is and just do the translation each time I dialed it. Again it's really just a pain when all I want to do is plug in the phone number and ring the person.

I have done a little biased unscientific research on twitter on this topic, to reveal that most people feel the same.

A phone name is great to remember when you are at a set of traffic lights, reading the side of a bus, billboard or if you are just trying to recall the phone number.

However it's a real frustration if you have to dial the number off the phone name alone.

Presenting the Contact Details

It just comes down to the presentation of contact phone number or phone name.

Sure presenting a call to action phone number as a phone name will help the users remember the number. But this will fail if they are visiting the web site in order to ring you. Remember people are often just looking up websites now for contact details as well now.

The solution is simple, present both formats, together. Most savvy web sites do this, but a lot don't.

Having the real number on another page or somewhere else on the page – that is not near the phone name, is also a bad idea. It is just as likely to result in the user going elsewhere, if they can't find the real number quickly enough. Yes, as a user, we are all lazy, we don't want to have to translate your phone name.

It's a simple thing, just remember a user experience is a contextual thing; mainly relating to the environment and context in which the experience is presented. And that people are lazy.

New Bam Creative website

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:09 GMT

We've finally published our latest version of the Bam Creative website. It's been a few years, and we're normally in the habit of updating it every 18 months or so, however we've been crazily busy in the last year or two.

With our recent announcement that we've become an employee owned business, we couldn't help but celebrate by creating a new site. Check it out – and I'd love to hear your thoughts!

The Last Road Block for Your Customers – Web Forms

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:26 GMT

You have built the perfect web site, the colours invoke the right emotional response, the visual imagery leads customers to the relevant information while allowing the audience to personally relate to the site. The content is ideal for the web, not to much but enough to convince people of the service. The major call to actions are in the right locations, and easy to find. Everything is set, the web site is ready to take on the world!

Still no matter how perfect your site is, if the last step, when they encounter the web form, isn't streamlined and usable, the rest is a waste of time.

The other day I ran across a web form that was failing, it was suffering from a series of issues that would basically make most users stop in their tracks.

With any identifying markers removed, I would like to share with you some of the issues of this form, and a few simple steps to fix them.

The Form in Question.

The form was being used for membership of a professional organisation, it is broken down into three sections (fieldsets in this case) The Personal Details, the Payment Options and the Acceptance of Conditions, these are presented here, for clarity I have separated them, but normally they appear on one long form.

There are a good number of issues with this form, I'm not going to cover all of them, but here are a few of the common issues:

Number of Fields - Only What You Require

I have a major beef with forms that are just way too long. You know the ones with an endless list of fields. Clearly this one falls into that category – when you first encounter it you are filled with dread at having to fill it out.

You should consider every field that you put in a form to be a major stumbling block for anyone completing it. Research has indicated that people naturally hate forms and the like, as they slow them down to getting to their goal on the web. When you designing a form this long (with 38 fields) you are not really respecting your users time.

Consideration needs to be given to what is the bare minimum to identify the person joining. Everything else should be removed. If you really want the extra informaiton there are ways of encourging people to complete their online profiles later on.

Trying to capture all the information for a person at sign up in the worst possible time. People are hesitant, and still deciding on the your website. A long form is just going to convince them you are a little bureaucratic .
The Need Print out of the Form

I do know that in some cases long forms like this are developed so people can complete them, print them off and fax, not ideal, but people do it. What needs to be provided is a fax back PDF form or the like. This should be presented on the same page as the online form – preferably at the top of the page.
Fieldsets and Grouping

Yes the form is broken down into three sections. Sections 2 and 3 are reasonable, it's just the first one that is a little long. This can be improved if it had been segmented into personal details, work details and joining information.
Help

With this example there is very little inline contextual help. In today's interactive web, people are starting to expect to see contextual help boxes appear when they tab or focus on a field. These can be alternatively just be accessed by clicking on an appropriate help icon (a question mark maybe). Semantically of course you place this information between the fields and the associated label.
Encouragement Along the Way

Currently there is no inline encouragement on the form at all.

This is a simple thing to put in place; for example every time a user completes a field or an information block (like the BSB / Account Number pair) they get an acknowledgment for their actions that appears inline on the screen. This could be a small tick, thumbs up or the like – appearing near the relevant field.

Using this type of positive feedback adds a degree of trust that the organisation cares about the information it is collecting, as well as a sense of achievement and sense of completion for the user.

Use of this technique can also be extended to inline validation of the form, hence providing instant feedback for any error as well.
Create Steps

Even if we removed all the redundant fields we still have a form that is visually way to long. In this case we are better of presenting the fields in distinct groups of related information, one at a time.

You would present it as two step process – step one personal details and step two the payments, with the terms and conditions confirmation tacked onto the final section. Of course you would have an indicator showing the users progress through the various steps.

As the user processes the form the indicator would show where they were up to in the process. This step wise process allows one to segment a long process into several short chunks that users are more likely to undertake as they are progressing towards their final goal in manageable steps.
Date of Birth

There are different ways to ask for the date of birth, different layouts was work for differently user audiences. It has been shown that it can be easier for some users to select a date of birth from three drop down lists than type it in the format you require.
Clear Labels

The labels on a form have to convey instant meaning for the user, and yet still remain personal so they can relate to them. The order and grouping of the fields should also follow a logical sequence (as recommend above). Labels such as “Optional” mean nothing to a user. With a field like this, people may not even complete it, after all it's optional.
Add White Space

From a design view point all the yellow fields do wash into one large yellow mass, they would be a lot clearer and easier to read if there was a some white space between the fields. It's a simple thing, but cramming all the fields up together doesn't help, if anything it makes the appearance of the form even more intimidating. Remember white space is your friend.
Avoid Multiple Columns

This is one that has been debated quite a bit – should you use multiple column layouts on forms.

Research has indicated that users really like to just run down the page filling out blocks of information as fast as they can. The don't like shooting across a page to complete a postcode, like in this case. However having blocks of fields like the BSB and Account Number field close together is acceptable as these are taken visually as one block of input.
Terms and Conditions

Use of a check box to confirm agreement is really redundant if you think about it. Often these checkboxes are put in place to keep legal teams happy, teams that usually don't want the form on the web in the first place. The checkbox sometimes is also seen as a substitute for a signature. Still there are improved ways to approach this requirement. If the agreement is required what can the user do, join and not agree. No. The user has no choice – they have to agree or leave not completing the form.

Sure the statement can remain, however a better approach would be to have the join button saying “Agree and Join”. That way if you don't agree it is very clear that you can't join.

Using a required checkbox field just forces the issue, frustrates the user, and makes them feel a little like they are being railroaded into agreement.

Also what if my browser produces a cross not a tick in the checkbox, labels like “Tick to accept terms” should be more generic.
Final Submit Button

The final submit button, should be easy to find visually and be in line vertically with the input fields. This allows for an easier path to completion.

However on this form it is like it has been tuck in the corner, with a little reminder that seems like an apology. It's almost like the form is saying – “Sorry to pester you, but if you just click you can join”.

This doesn't really fill you with confidence that your membership application is going to be taken seriously. The submit button should be a big bold statement. After all you want people to join.
Processing the Form

When I tested this form it was something of a shock.

I just wanted to see what the validation and error handing was like on the form, so I submitted a blank form, expecting to get a screen filled with error messages. That's not what happened. I was returned with a list of processed fields, which is fine if you have completed to form, which I clearly hadn't.

It is really important to validate the required fields at least, check for bad email addresses and the like, and return an error message, preferably near the relevant field. Ideally you should validate inline as the form is being completed and recheck server side when the submit button is pressed.

Accessibility issues

A quick review of the accessibility on the form indicates that it's no that bad, fieldsets and labels are correctly used, tab order seems fine. However a few sticky points are present:

Requirement Indicator. The indicator for the field requirement is presented after the field, this will be an issue for some people as they will not be aware of the requirement of the field till after they have moved past it. This should have been placed semantically between the label and the input field. Presentation wise it could remain after the field.
Data Formatting – The use of data types formatting and hints in the input fields themselves can be an issue, especially if the JavaScript does not clear them.

After all the user may not have JavaScript turned on.

It is better practice to present these hints semantically before the input field but after the relevant label.

Also consider from a usability view, when a user has moved into a field the context of the requirement is lost and can't be referenced. This information should be presented anywhere on the form as long as it's in close association with the relevant field, and not in the field itself.
Field Labels – All fields should have labels, even if you don't want to display the label. There are ways to hide them, but from an accessibility view point they are very important.

Something to consider

Now I have no idea if this has been done with this form or not, still I recommend with a form like this that you:

Produce Prototypes

Using Prototypes would have allowed a development team to work with an interaction designer to produce a form that was within budget and still easy to use. Any prototypes could have been tested and fine tuned with the respective audience to determine the best completion and conversion rate for a relatively low cost.
Some User Testing

Finally user test on a iterative developmental proccess with the final form to produce the best outcome could have been conducted on all of the above points.

Remember

A badly designed web form is like putting a roadblock in the way of your users - this is something you really want to avoid.

I know there can be internal issues from legal departments, IT, reduced budgets and the like. Still consider if the form isn't that usable, less people are going to complete it. Sometimes having a bad form design can be worse than no form at all.

The more friendly and easier to use a form is the greater conversion and completion you going to get. Simple really.

Just think about these points next time you're designing a form.

Not a proud Aussie

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:45 GMT

Today is Australia Day. A day that’s really only been celebrated consistently in the last 15 years or so although it was around for most of last century (thanks to Anonymum for passing along this link on the history of Australia Day, an interesting read).

Today I’ve seen a lot of people expressing their Australian pride in various ways, both in the real world and online. Normally I’d be up there among them: I am an Australian in every sense of the word (I was born here, and both of my parents are naturalised Australians, having emigrated from European countries as children).

But today, I am not waving any flags or professing pride in my country. Hell, I’m not even having a barbecue. Today is the first Australia Day where I can honestly say I am not proud of being Australian.

Let me explain why – but first, unlike some other people, I’m not even talking about the rise of this weird “yobbo” pride in the last few years, the goddamn awful Southern Cross tattoos or the “fuck off we’re full” idiots. While the attitudes that these people have is a cause for concern, I don’t think they are the problem.

No, the real problem is the current Australian government and its policies.

Censorship is not the answer

First and most heinous, it was announced late last year that the Rudd government were pushing ahead with their plans for mandatory ISP-level internet filtering, despite less than brilliant results in the official trials and a lot of outcry. A cynical person might point out that the announcement came in the pre-Christmas rush and at a time when news channels were dominated by talks of the Copenhagen climate change talks. Far be it from me to suggest that the government was trying to pull a fast one past the Australian public.

I could talk all day about each of the things that they’re doing and why it’s the stupidest idea ever, but this is not really the place for that. So I’ll quickly summarise for now:

mandatory filtering is a massive waste of taxpayers money
the filter is technically flawed and will not protect children from accessing refused classification material (the primary stated reason for the policy)
the filter is technically flawed and will result in important information being denied to people who might need it, in some cases seriously so – think information about abortion, euthanasia, anorexia, sexually transmitted diseases and drug use to name a few
the filter will slow our already ridiculously inadequate network speeds by as much as 40% in some cases
the government’s blacklist is secret and it and the complaints system which will be put in place is open to abuse by those organisations and individuals whose agendas involve blocking access to information
Senator Conroy has repeatedly stated that only “refused classification” materials will be blocked, and that those things include child pornography, bestiality and sexual violence. But in actual fact, by the very nature of the Australian classification system, anything that hasn’t been presented for classification is classified “RC” – so theoretically, all manner of innocuous and legal items could be blocked under the “RC” banner at the whim of the censors and most Australians will never know about it.

So what can we do about it? The bill has yet to be passed through parliament to make it law (it has yet to be introduced) so if the Coalition and the independents oppose it, it will not become law. So Australians all need to get onto their local Liberals and demand to know what’s what (as far as I am aware, the Liberal party has no official policy as yet on internet filtering).

Electronic Frontiers Australia has a list of ten things that you can do to help. One of EFA’s suggestions is to participate in the Australian Internet Blackout, which this site has done this week as well as my personal blog and our business web site. That’s the black informational overlay that you might see if you visit the actual site (rather than reading this through RSS or Facebook). If you’d like to join in it’s not too late – you just place a small piece of JavaScript on your web site and it takes care of everything. Details on the Internet Blackout site.

The thing is, that most non-geeks don’t really understand what’s going on and as a result they aren’t as concerned as they should be. So the best thing that we can do is educate our non-geek families and friends. That’s why I’m involved with a small group that will be launching a mass-media-friendly campaign shortly.

Apparently, gaming is only for children

Anyone over the age of 18 had better hand in their consoles and PC gaming rigs because according to the Australian government, games are only for children. That’s why they refuse to support an “R” rating for games, instead banning outright anything that doesn’t fit into MA15+ range.

The South Australian Attorney-General, Michael Atkinson, is blocking all attempts to introduce an R18+ rating for games (and due to the quirks of our judicial system, all state attorney-generals must agree in order for the rating to be changed), despite the average of a a gamer being above 30. What’s worse, he’s actually brazenly called adult gamers “criminals”.

That’s not all

There are other issues – for example in South Australia, a law has passed requiring special packaging and other rules for R-rated DVDs displayed for sale or rent. The covers must be black and show only the title – not other text – in small white writing. All R-rated materials must be shelved together. So classic 80’s action flicks are being treated the same way as soft porn and there are so many problems with this that my head is exploding just thinking of it. The bill was introduced by the Family First party and we can bet they’ll be trying similar tactics in other states soon.

All of these issues just show that the Australian government is out of touch with technology and trying to legislate the digital realm the same was as non-digital media.

If we don’t do something about this, we’d better find ourselves a new national anthem because the current one will not be accurate anymore.

“Australians all, let us rejoice
For we are young and free.”

Young, sure. Free, not so much.

Posted from kay lives here

Not a proud Aussie

Web Industry – Lack of Ethics and Morals

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:52 GMT

Ethics and morals should be a big thing in our industry, and yet I'm beginning to think that some people have forgotten all about them recently.

I'll tell you a story.

We have been working with a development company, who support a various range of their own products. Products that one of our clients use. Straight forward, when we have issues with their product we email their support line. The other day we discover that the client's site was down, we trace the issue back to badly written script injection hack. Easy to fix.

This doesn't normally happen often, but it does occur from time to time. Usually it's a attack on the hosts server.

So immediately I began the process of isolating the cleaning the site. No major issue. Having daily backups of all our clients sites does help.

When the site was operational and all passwords have been changed I began the process of determine how this all happened. Seems a vendor support password had been activated once a few hours before and a file uploaded then deleted. Same time the site failed.

I contact the said support vendor. Only when presented with evidence of the compromised systems (via the FTP and PHP log) did they admit to the issue. No assurance of the issue not happening again, no statement that they have changed their security procedures. At least they said sorry, cold comfort really.

Now as a support company surely they have an obligation, if only from an ethical view point to inform their clients that their passwords have been compromised as soon as they are aware of the issue. This would at least allow their client to vigilant and reset any system passwords or the like.

It appears in this case, that the client (my client) was on their own, we have to discover the issue and work it out for ourselves. Despite the fact that the issue is clearly their fault. I know there are legal issues here, but putting those aside, there is the moral issue as well.

Trust and Obligation

If you consider that we have an extreme sense of trust with our clients. After all we have a guardianship to look after their web. We can control their information resources, the presentation and branding for their organisation online. There is a distinct duty of care that we have with each client.

Besides the various legislative requirements of the privacy and client information, do we have an ethical obligation to look after a clients data? Should we tell them when things go wrong that are under our control? Should we be 100% honest with our clients and work with them all the time. Or should we just deliver our service and leave it at that. Should we just play the deny everything game, until we are presented with evidence in an effort avoid any legal implications.

It may seem like a clear issue.

However, if you don't tell your client, this gives your client the impression that you are just in it for the money and aren't interested in them in the longer term. On the flip side if you do tell your client of the issue they may perceive you as incompetent, in that you let it happen in the first place. In a way your are damned both ways.

Still personally I have found that being 100% and up front is the way to go. Clients will respect you for this.

Other Issues of Ethics.

Our industry is just full of moral choices. Not just this duty of care and information guardianship.

As a User Experience Designer I know that I can use my skills to leverage the psychology of design and in fact I can influence customers, leading or tempting them to buy goods that they don't really need. Now just because I can do this, does that mean I should. I can make a lot more money doing this, should I?

This also extends to what industries you will work with. From my view I don't work with the gambling industry, religious groups and businesses that use high pressure sales tactics at any cost.

It could be said that we just have to provide our services and that's it. All this duty of care and information guardianship is just a load of rubbish. It's not like it's in the contract or written anywhere.

This is true, to a degree. Maybe an industry code of conduct wouldn't go a miss for our industry. Mind you I have yet to see any of the fledgling web industry associations move in that direction.

Still till that happens, we all have to make our own personal choices on these issues.

The burning question is what would have you done in the case above, not told your clients? Also where do you draw the line, what type of work would you not take on?

Bad customer support = Unhappy campers

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:45 GMT

I do a lot of front end development, and as a result, I use Adobe Photoshop a lot. I also use Acrobat Professional frequently and Flash and Illustrator enough to warrant purchasing the full Design Premium package. Said Design Premium Package is pretty expensive, so to spread my costs, I'm using the subscription edition. Recently, I had to change my subscription plan, so I cancelled it, and re-subscribed, and so begins my trip down the rabbit hole that is Adobe Support.

Because I had paid for my subscription online, and opted for the downloadable version, I should have received a serial number in my email. I didn't. Thankfully CS4 goes in to trial mode, so I could still use it whilst I sorted out the serial problem. Time to call Adobe…

Firstly, it was neigh on impossible to find the Australian support number on their website - when ever you try to access support, it defaults to you the US - I assume because the subscription edition doesn't have an Australian number. Thankfully, one of my friends had general support number in her rolodex.I call the number, and after 45 minutes on hold listening to horrific elevator muzak, I get through to the product activations. The operator was polite enough - but they have to be - the script they are reading would demand it. I give them my email address (and say yes to allowing them to contact me on it), and then give them my phone number in case I get disconnected. After the operator goes through the rest of their script, she realises that actually I need a different department, and asks if she can transfer me. Whilst I would have though that to be an obvious solution, I play along. Phone goes dead.

I can see why they ask for your number. I left it 10 minutes to see if they would call back. Nadda. So I call them back, another 30 minutes on hold, plus 5 minutes going through the tier-1 product activation script, and the next customer server representative transfers me through. Finally I get to the right department - Subscriptions.Unfortunately, the tier-1 subscriptions customer service representative can't help with missing serial codes, so they take down for phone number and email address (for the 3rd time) and setup an open case in their support console, in preparation for a tier-2 support officer.Now, I play the waiting game. By this stage Christmas has come and I'm away and forget about CS4 for the moment. Due to inactivity (on their part, mind you) it would seem that they closed the job off. Result: No serial number.

I get back from Christmas, and call up again - by this stage I only have a week left on my trial, so I need to get this sorted quick smart. I go through the exact same steps as above (including the phone disconnection), and once again, a ticket gets opened. After 48 hours, I leave a message following up, as I still have no reply. After 5 more working days (By this stage my trial has finished), I ring back. They ask for my case number, which I give them, which returns a completely different customer case. After giving them my email AGAIN, they find it, and transfer me through to subscriptions. Magically, the service agent finds me a serial number and give it to me. Unfortunately, the downloaded version of the subscription trial requires a serial number with only numbers. The one she gives me has letters. Her reasoning behind this is because I didn't install it off the DVD.

So, I've just uninstalled CS4, and I'm waiting for it to reinstall, which has taken (so far) about an hour. I tell you what, the serial number better be right, or shit will hit the fan.To be continued…

UPDATE: It's the wrong serial number.

UPDATE 2: I'm once again waiting for tier-2 or tier to email me back.

Round (parts of) the world in 42 days

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:23 GMT

In what's been a rather shit week both work wise and personally (the later probably leading to the former), some good has come - the final payment has been made on my round the world ticket.

At this stage, the trip looks a little something like this:

I'm hoping to lineup tours of Apple and Google while I'm over there - my mate Luke who works at Mountain View however is getting shipped back to work as part of the Maps team, so it's all very much up in the air at the moment!

All the bog standard tourist attractions will be sighted however including:

Golden Gate bridge
Alcatraz
Washington Monument
The outside of The White House (as I can't get inside without a local member of congress' assistance)
The Capitol
The International Spy Museum
Times Square
Central Park
London Eye
Big Ben
Legoland Windsor

Just to name a few...I'm leaving some time in each city as I hope to catchup with some of the Ruby peeps that live there.

I'm also attending a conference (or maybe more - depends on what gets announced) while I'm gone, there hasn't been an official announcement yet, so I won't spill the beans on which one.

While getting excited about the trip I'm also a little nervous - it'll be my first international trip alone, but hey, it has to happen at some point! I'll be catching up with the family in Canterbury as Bec's over at that time playing hockey on a school tour and mum and dad are using it as an excuse to go back to the UK.

Duty free liquor and electronics here we come!

p.s. If you live in one of these cities - ping me some locations you think might be worth visiting - mattman @ gmail.com

A Review – Fancy Form Design

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:55 GMT

Rating:: 4.5

As I'm designing forms I don't usually have an issue making then usable or accessible within the limits of the clients budget.

However taking the form to the next level technically can sometimes be an issue. This is exactly what Fancy Form Design by Jina Bolton, Tim Connell and Derek Featherstone is all about, designing and building those great forms on the web.

When I first purchased this book (yes I do purchase my books, they aren't usually review freebies) I was a little skeptical as to whether this book would have any content in it that would be relevant to me. This is an issue that I'm running into more and more these days.

I was surprised. I was expecting a dry developer focused book on form design. It is not. This is a good book, well worth the 4-5 hour read. I found that it wasn't just one of those books you read once either, it's also a great reference book.

This book is focused on the front end developer or back end developer that wants to enhance their forms. Even a UX designer like me with hands on skills will get something from this book.

While I was reading this book I was constantly thinking, well that's great, but what about this accessibility or usability issue – yeah I can't help it. But you know not a one or two paragraphs later I was presented with the solution or consideration for those issues. It's great to see a practical book that is on same page as I am.

The Content

Interestingly the book layout parallels the way in which you design and develop an online form. The book itself walks you through a centralised case study for the development of a series of forms. Fancy Form Design is a book very heavy in code and visual examples as well, which makes it a very useful future reference tool.

The first section of the book deals with the planning phase of development, looking at the types of form elements, and the ways they are presently being enhanced on the web. It also looks at the usual competitive analysis process. Moving on to my favourite part the interaction design of the form, now it doesn't spend a lot of time in this area as there are some good books on the market already that handle this area in detail. There is a bit of a discussion on task flows, paper prototyping and wireframing (which I personally think we can do without).

The form design section of the book walks through the usual suspects, of the grid, typography, the use of colour and micro imagery to enhance a form's presentation. This section is about the graphical design only. It's the next section that walks you through the building of the form.

You then get to the bones of the matter, the development of the form structure. There are a good series of examples here on how to build a form correctly to overcome most of the common accessibility and usability issues. Basic issues such as the correct practice for use of labels, error messages, required fields and help text are reviewed and discussed with clarity here. This is an area you might think you know backwards, however it's always worth a review on these matters.

Now we have the structure of the forms it's time to use some CSS to style the final forms. Fancy Form Design walks you through the issues of using various resets and the various ways form elements render in different browsers (I'm looking at you IE) and ways to overcome them. I didn't expect to find anything new in this section, and I didn't, still your mileage may vary on this one.

The final chapter is on enhancing your forms beyond the stylised CSS/HTML layout with the help of jQuery.

This is the section I enjoyed the most in this book. It looked in detail at select menu, radio and checkbox styling as well as conditional question displays, date selectors, password strength indicators and a basic auto-complete. All this is presented in an easy to follow manner, which makes implementing these enhancements progressively on your forms, with jQuery, really easy. There is even a reminder about input validation, doing it on the client and server sides.

Only the downside, I personally think the last section of the form enhancement was a bit to short. I could have done with another 10-20 pages of additional enhancements to the case study in question. A little more detail on the jQuery level would have been good too (small birdie tells me watch for a Sitepoint jQuery Book very soon).

Finally – the last word

Overall it's good book, entertaining, well written, not overly long, full of immediately practical examples that anyone familiar with form design and development can use. It's good to see more of these micro topic books being written than the large 500 page tomes of yesterday.

Side note: why have I been reviewing lots of Sitepoint books of late, well maybe it's something to do with their range of books.

How-to tunnel the VMware Intrastructure Web Access control panel

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:30 GMT

If you have some sort of *nix (Linux, OSX, cygwin), then simply run the following in a shell:

ssh -L 8222:localhost:8222 -L 902:localhost:902 -L 8333:localhost:8333 your.vmserver.com

replacing your.vmserver.com with your ACTUAL VMware server.

Then point your browser at http://localhost:8222 (This is the unencrypted URL - which isn't a problem, because you are tunneling over SSH)

Note, that this trick really only works if you have an SSH server running on your VMware host.

Improving Your Listening Skills

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:16 GMT

Listening is one of those skills that no one really talks about, and yet listening is critical to User Research and general business as well.

You have to understand, and in some cases even become emotive, with the users you are listening to. Yes we can all listen to some degree, but the reality is this will not be that thorough, there will be gaps, major things that you will miss or just did not understand completely.

It follows in the field of user experience listening is critical. Without it you just aren't going to a able to understand the issues your users are telling you, or worse you will miss important information.

Hearing on the other hand is something we do all the time, it's something that we frankly can't turn off. However listening is very different. Listening is hearing with the processing of the information added in, this takes a reasonably conscious intent.

This is demonstrated by the moment, we have all had, when we are not really paying attention and stop listening to a conversation and are subsequently are lost as we try and tune back in again.

It's Hard to Listen

Years ago I learnt the basic rules of listening, techniques that can help you improve and assist you with becoming aware of your environment when listening to people. It's amazing skills learn 25 years ago are still relevant today.

One thing stands out however - listening is really hard work. It doesn't come naturally. You have to train yourself to really listen and observe. Like any skill it also needs to be practiced or you will loose it.

Unfortunately we are not programmed to be good listeners.

This is because our mind will wander off onto another topic, after it has processed about a 7 to 17 second sound bite of information. During this processing period, your mind is already lining up all the mental, and sensory stimulus or distractions around you, just so it can tempt you with something more interesting. On a side note you also process and will form an option on what you are listening to in this 7-17 second time period as well.

Improving Your Listening Skill

What you need to do is train yourself to listen. To overcome this 17 second sound bite limitation. That's where these tips can help:

Focus.

Give the user 100% attention – remind yourself what you are there to do, to focused on the user.
Remove Distraction.

Remove all distractions, this includes phones, emails, background noise, make the user the focus of your attention. Put a do not disturb sign on the door, and ensure your mobile is on silent mode.
Take notes.

You will be doing this anyway, or should be. Taking notes is a great reminder, it gets you to automatically focus on the person, and distill what they are saying into key thematic elements. Note taking is also great for sequential information collection and reinforcement as it forces you into a routine, that breaks the 17 second processing loop as you are filling it with the over lapping note taking processing.
Shut Up.

You are listening, so you shouldn't be talking that much. No interruptions, the user is telling the story not you. Your only conversation should be with questions to clarify or investigate. No options, no stories and definitely no soapbox rants.
Questioning is Good.

We all know that it's important to ask the right type of questions during an interview. In fact you could have an entire post just on interview questions and strategy. When questioning you don't want to lead the person at all. You need to ask investigative (open ended questions) or confirmation questions that paraphrase what the user has just said. It's a good idea not to use your own words (and avoid the buzz words) – use theirs. Don't evaluate by giving any option with a question. Also watch your body language giving off the wrong non verbal cues. Thinking up questions on the fly is initially not easy, but after a while you will discover that you have lots of time, and the right question instantly, more on this later.
Body Language.

Yes there are going to be non verbal cues, and you have to be observant and pick them up. They could be a change in facial expression, voice tone, a postural shift or just hand actions. These are all important and can indicate an emotion shift. Watch for this, don't be afraid to ask about it gently.
Silence is Good.

It's okay for the user to be silent and think about the subject at hand. This gives you time to watch for those non verbal cues and the like. Be passive, don't interrupt the silent time, especially if they look like they are thinking. Patience is the key.
Give No Advice.

Again it's not about you, it's about the user, let them find the solution, let them see the alternatives. Yes you may need to repeat their own alternatives back to them and ask how the feel about them and such. But this is not the same as giving your person option. The reason giving an option is bad is by doing so it will re focus the listening process on you and will give the impression that you are not listening at all as you have not helped them find the solution at all.
Remove Bias.

Reset you mind for each interview or conversation, don't go into one with any preconceived ideas, bias, prejudices or the like. Remember that each person is different and you can learn lots if you just listen to them. Ensure you start without a preconceived option from maybe age, gender, race, ethnic group, culture or previous contact. You can't assume you know what they are going to say, want or even tell you, they are not you.
Learn to Say No.

If you are really tired, can't focus, don't even try and continue with an interview. You are just going to ruin the results you get as they will be half hearted at best. Better to reschedule for when you can give your full attention. I find the best solution is not to overload the day with interviews, testing subjects or the like.
Practice.

I find it best to really practice listening very intently about 2-3 times a week at first, then after a while you will get better. Ensure that after a listening session you take the time to review what you have done and note down the mistakes you made and what caused them. Also it's a good idea to seek out colleagues to give you honest reviews on your listening skills.

More Bonuses

I have found after a while you become very aware when you are listening. You notice lots of small details, and you will also end up with a large amount of dead time to think. It's almost as if by removing your conversation you have slowed down time, giving you these large slabs of free time in which to process the conversation and respond. Use them wisely.

Another aspect of being a good listener is that you will show people that you care about them and will connect with them. Remember once you find the topic people love to talk about, you often can't stop them, especially when its a topics they are passionate about. Yes this does apply to even ultra shy introverts as well.

Taking the time to listen to someone, will also make them feel good, wanted, understood, this will gain you a lot of allies in the long term.

Interestingly these tips can also be applied to general day to day life as well, so what you have learnt for user research has a number of carry overs.

Can you think of any more techniques you have used to improve your listening skills? If you can please add them below.

Effective Freelance Networking – The Opening Pitch

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 06:13 GMT

I don't know about you, but I have been to face to face networking events where it's basically been like pulling teeth to get the people in the room to talk and discuss what they do and the benifits it has for me. There is nothing wrong with the event itself, it's just some of the attendees don't know how to network.

Networking doesn't come easy, you can't just expect to turn up to an event and it happens, you have to work at it. You have to build the trust and connections with people. You have to get people interested in you and vice-versa.

We are all Lazy

When you are talking to someone you have not met before you have about 10-20 seconds to make a good first impression, that will hopefully spark their interest. It's the first visual and verbal impression that counts. This is why the elevator pitch is so important.

To often people in the web industry do this so wrong, I too have been guilty of this as well. To be really honest you need to kill any techo-babble.

Often people not in your industry just aren't going to understand the jargon or the like. No it doesn't make you look smart. No one wants to have to translate what you have said into something they can understand. We are all basically lazy and would rather just turn off and stop listening to you.

Specialist job titles are as a no no too. They are just going to be meaningless to the average joe. Basically they are show stoppers that can and often do stop the conversation dead in the water.

The only exception is when you are networking within your own industry. You can then use your special industry job title, like say “user experience designer”, but then you have to add on what makes you different from everyone else. What is your speciality, the unique selling point, more on this later.

Giving People What They Want

What you have to so is ensuring the people you are talking to are interested in you, and want to continue the conversation about you and how you can help them. Sadly you maybe the most knowledgable talented person in the room, but unless you can maintain that interest you aren't going to get anywhere networking.

The key to doing this is to give people what they want.

We are self centered. Sorry but it's true. All I really want to hear is what you can do for me. I just don't care what you have done or can do unless it pertains to me. Don't assme that what you want to say to people is what they want to hear, because in reality it isn't!

Therefore it follows you need to make the opening statement count. It needs to focus on the benefits for the person you are talking with, and in a language they going to understand and relate to.

Saying, “Hi I'm Joe, I design web sites”, isn't going to get you anywhere, compared to the approach of “Hi I'm Joe, I design web sites that double the sales and productivity of the business, by providing their customers what really want”.

Now it may sound a little bit wanky, but you have instantly told them what you do and how you do it. It's now that the magical response occurs, “So how do you do that?” Getting to this point is what you want.

As opposed to , “Oh, my 11 year old nephew makes websites.” Instantly, you have been placed in the bottom draw, forgotten.

Building Your Profile Pitch

Now we all know how we should be doing it. That's the easy bit. The hard bit is working out what people want.

There are a number of techniques you can use here to help you determine what people want to hear. My favourite is a little visualisation exercise – first imagine you are in a crowded room, and you can over hearing all the various conversations around you. Now imagine that you cane here the perfect comments that would make you think, “humm that's a perfect client, I could help them out”.

Once you have this, you have the basis of an your pitch. You just have to turn around the context and apply your own information.

Now you just need a good opening statement for the profile pitch, a statement to sell you. You need to build something succinct that is all about you and what you do. Ideally this should be only a small paragraph, a few sentences. I find this is best said in your own words as it will flow into the conversation better that way.

Ideally a pitch should be made up of the following elements :

Introduce yourself.
Overview of your services – a really simple top level overview.
Who uses your services – your target market, this would be your ideal client.
Demonstrate the way you overcome critical issues – from their business view point.
Key business benefits of your services – what are the benefits to their business.
Unique selling point – why pick you over your competitors.

I always find writing a pitch hard. Generally I just starting and brain dumping ideas into a word processor, this I find helps. Then I rework it over and over , refining as I go. Don't expect the pitch to come easily first time around. The first few drafts will just be way to long, and possibility way to technical. Just simplify, condense, calarify and above all present it from the potential clients view, you will get there. This is a bit like writing for a web site.

The final pitch should be such that anyone, yes anyone, even the general public can understand it. Also when you have one, practice it, practice over and over, but ensure you deliver it in a casual tone.

The Gotacha

Now the issue is you are going to have to develop several layers of pitch.

One for general business, one for semi-business social events, and one for your own industry. The pitch will vary in techinical detail and presentation dependant on the audience, but the core will still remain the same – it's not about you but it's about them.

That's my take, what's your tips for developing a networking pitch?

Wake Up! Test Analysts, Do Usability Testing Correctly

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:57 GMT

I'm seeing an interesting trend here in Perth. Recently, job adverts and recruiters looking for Test Analysts to do usability and accessibility testing as part of their duties. Now this is a good thing in a way.

At least the traditional roles of the IT software project are understanding the need for usability and accessibility testing in web and general software projects. I guess something is better than nothing, right?

Well maybe not.

Traditionally Test Analysts are inserted into a project to test software code and specification compliance, usually via various automated processes and the like. Whether the SDLC of project is agile or waterfall in nature, they still have a part to play. However they work is at the end of a productivity cycle, after the run of the development / design team.

It is interesting to note that the type of testing techniques listed do not mention the usual usability testing methods that a usability professional would employ. There is also no reference to using the users of the system as test subjects. It seems that the Test Analysts has to play the Expert Reviewer card and use their wealth of understanding of the usability and cognitive process the users will go through to evaluate the system.

This is a waste of time!

Unless the Test Analyst is a usability specialist they are just going to be wasting everyone's time and money. Yes they are looking at the issues, but this is really just like making User Acceptance Testing = Usability Testing – and we all know about that old chestnut.

Getting a User Experience professional on the team, even just part time, would produce better results than having the Test Analyst cover off the usability and accessibility issues to save a few dollars. At least the UX professional would examine the issue holistically throughout the run, not at the end.

Point to note there is also no reference to User Research or the like, just a reference to supporting business requirements.

Another case of the industry just not getting it, maybe? I suspect that the terms usability and accessibility testing are being dropped in, a bit like a form of buzzword bingo.

Now people tell me, especially Test Analysts, is this just happening in Perth or is the trend across the Australian job market and beyond?

Moving on into 2010

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:24 GMT

So the year has been and gone. A decade down. 2009 was a mixed year for me personally and business wise. It was an interesting year overall now I look back on it with hindsight. It was a year for discovering what I really wanted and achieving a few professional goals. However it wasn't without frustration and disappointment. Time to reflect on it all.

The Professional View

Despite all the doom and gloom with the 2009 global financial crisis, from the business perspective I did manage to keep things moving forward and the dollars roling in. Which is very important for a freelancer with a family. However I'll be honest I did find for the first time in 15 years, that I had no work in the pipeline for a few weeks. This was a bit of a shock from a business view point. But I took solace in the fact that others in the web industry where in a similar or worse situation.

Wrong Directions

One major thing last year frustrated me was my business. The market seemed to be pushing me into a direction that I was frankly not happy with. I have been designing and developing websites now on various levels since 1995, yes I was a generalist.

I have in reality lost count of the number of sites I have designed and developed over this time. I was finding the industry and market as a whole was pushing me into operated the business as a standard web design shop for a while now. Still I get the impression there is no place for a designer/developer combo anymore.

However since 2005 I have been trying to move away from just the standard web design business and into the more specialised User Expereience consultancy / design market. Problem is I don't really think the local market is ready for this. Seems a lot of education is going to be needed in 2010.

So I see 2010 as being the year when I take out all road blocks and focus on moving the business into this direction, away from the rest of the market.

The Personal View

One thing that 2009 did teach me – life is just too short. Way to short to be spent doing things you have grown tired of or even hate doing. It has made me refocus on ensuring both my family and professional life are more enjoyable. Sadly to acheive this I had to let a number of personal projects go – being on the Australian Web Industry Committee was one of them.

The importance of ones health was also re-enforced during the year. This I have always consider this to be of an exterme importance, however I have been a little slack of late. Tis is now changing, which will be reflected in my coming changes in my business direction. No amount of money or anything is worth that much if you can't enjoy it.

So the previous and upcoming year in review:

Major Events for 2009

Speaking at several conferences and to professional groups throughout the year; I just love public speaking and educating people about the web.
Starting up rock climbing (after a very long absence) lots has changed, for the better. Issues are still in finding climbing partners.
Overcoming long term injuries allowing an increase in my training routines.
Resigning from the AWIA committee, this was a person low, but it was for the better.
Writing more consistanly with longer articles. Also writing more business focused articles. This is something again I enjoy.
Attending 5 major web events during the year; despite the economic downturn. Played around with sketchnotes at these events too.
Assisting AWIA in the organisation of several web events. I will miss doing this.
Running Freelance Coffee and attending UXBookclub (Perth) and the UPA Chapter

The Wish List for 2010

To professionally read more, I really need to put aside several evenings a week to do this.
Network more and socialise less. Sometimes networking meetings just become social meetups and have no long term benefit.
Get into a consistant training routine. Main issue here is that I don't yet have a training goal. Time will see on this one.
Change the business direction away from the industry norm, as discussed above. Maybe I need to get back into longer term contracting to achieve this.
Write at least one article a week. Considered doing Project52. This should be easy, but reality will see.
Take more photos. I have been really slack, need to take more photographs and just improve my skills. Especially considering the equipment I brought last year.
Enjoy the simple things. Enjoy the quiet moments.
Get more sleep! Drink less coffee.
Speak at more events, even outside of the web industry – I just get too much of a buzz out of this to let it go.

Yeah I know another year in review article, but in a way it's good to reflect on what you have done or not done for the year.

What about you, what did you achieve?

Adventures in ebooks

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:07 GMT

It seems the must-have device of Christmas 2009 was the ebook reader. I’m seeing an explosion of information and happy post-Christmas reviews.

I myself was excited to find a Sony PRS-600 Touch Edition with my name on it underneath the tree, thanks to my wonderful partner Dave. To be honest, I hadn’t shut up about them for months and the size and shape of the package was about right, so I was pretty sure that’s what it was. Consequently I’d been planning my book purchases already.

I used to read a lot of fiction – ten years ago I used to absolutely devour books, often multiples at a time. But the internet did something to my ability to read books. I was reading so much online every single day, for both my job and for pleasure, that when I did switch off the machine the last thing I felt like doing was picking up a book. A neck injury also meant that reading physical books – say, in bed, where I used to read a lot – became more of a hassle. And reading on screen just got more and more comfortable and normal. I started reading ebooks a little, first on my Pocket PC and then later on my tablet. But the “user experience” of reading on a dedicated device that’s easy on the eyes is far superior to those.

So why the Sony Reader, and not the cheaper and more popular Kindle? Excellent question. Firstly, while there’s no doubt that Amazon have the biggest ebook store on the planet, I don’t like the idea of being limited to just one source for my books. The Sony supports EPUB, the open ebook format, as well as PDF and a whole ton of other formats, and you can load it up with books from any source. In fact, the only major ebook format it doesn’t support is Microsoft’s LIT format – a shame because I already have a (small) number of books in LIT format that I was reading on my tablet.

Secondly, there’s the issue of actually getting books onto the reader. Rather than requiring it’s own wireless provider, the Sony Reader connects up to your PC via USB and you can copy stuff onto it. No matter what they say about wireless providers and the international Kindle (check out the wireless coverage map of Australia here), I can’t get a reliable 3G connection on my own phone in my own living room, so I’m much happier with the syncing option. For a geek i think that’s the ideal situation, although it might not be as good for the less-computer savvy.

Also, there’s the touch screen. I haven’t used the stylus or note taking features much yet, but flicking your finger to flip pages is very cool and a very natural movement, much more so than using the buttons at the bottom.

Another pretty cool feature on the Sony Reader is expandable memory. It supports Memory Stick – no surprise there, it’s a Sony product – but also SD card, which is great because I have a ton of them lying around for my camera and camp MP3 player. So I could put together “libraries” – a tech library, a “current reading” fiction library, a classics library, whatever – on SD cards and have a ton of stuff on close standby when I travel.

Before I get too gushy, there’s also the serious side of privacy and DRM. The EFA have released a comparison of several of the major ebook players on various privacy issues which makes for interesting reading. Basically, if you use a reader that’s closely tied to one of the stores, they’re going to be able to track your purchases. They also include the Google Books service which is not an actual hardware device (at least not yet), but the privacy implications of that are more than a little scary.

As for DRM… I’m going to save that rant for another day. I purchased a title that uses Adobe Digital Editions and the process was a painful albeit interesting one. I’ve also ditched the Sony software (as much as I’m able, anyway) in favour of Calibre, a great open source bookshelf management package.

For the moment though, I’m absolutely loving the screen, the ease on the eyes, the convenience of reading on the device… the overall experience has been fantastic. Highly recommended!

Posted from kay lives here

Adventures in ebooks

Redesigning Midnite

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:54 GMT

Over the years, I have had the great pleasure of working with the Midnite Youth Theatre Company on a number of their Perth based productions. Naturally, I decided they had to have a website!

It started out in a Plone/Zope setup - it was a nightmare - documentation on theming was thin on the ground and getting people to maintain it was even harder as the backend UI wasn't that friendly for those not as technically savvy as the authors of the system.

The site died for a while - motivation was low after the initial failure - then about a year and a half later, we found a home in the Wordpress blogging platform. It was easy enough to tweak for more of a CMS feel, the backend UI made sense - things were on the up.

Thankfully, there's not a "but" at the end of that sentence! The site's had 9 or 10 redesigns since (we went through a phase of having a new theme each time a production was being performed - a management nightmare!) and visits to the site are slowly, but surely, on the increase.

We're slowly outgrowing Wordpress though - it's primary purpose is to be a blogging platform, not a full blown content management system that can incorporate a database of all Midnite's productions (with venue details, 8 different tiers of pricing to display etc), sell tickets (one day, one day....) etc, so it was time to move on.

What we're going to end up with (the bugs are still being ironed out) once the new site is live will be something more flexible and hopefully something that better caters for the needs of Midnite.

I couldn't help writing this post however to talk about the HTML and CSS we're using to build the thing - HTML5 and CSS3 are getting a workout on this project and it excites me (but, as you'll hear, also brought me to tears at points)

The thing I like most about working on the Midnite site pro-bono is that I get a lot of creative liberties - as I mentioned, this design iteration makes use of the new HTML5 and CSS3 specifications that are in development at the moment.

Let's step through some of the new parts of the spec I'm using on the site with the HTML and CSS to match:

Rounded corners

The CSS used to generate this looks a little like this:

-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 5px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft: 5px;
border-top-left-radius: 5px;

Yeah, the browser specific declarations are a little annoying, but hey, not having to do it with javascript or thousands of CSS lines dedicated to images for each corner has got to be a bonus!

@font-face (or Font Embedding)

Guess what - it even works in IE 6 - sure, you have to use a strange format that only Microsoft care about, but it works!

@font-face {
  font-family: 'LeagueGothicRegular';
  src: url('../fonts/League_Gothic.eot');
  src: local('League Gothic Regular'), local('LeagueGothic'), url('../fonts/League_Gothic.otf') format('opentype'), url('../fonts/League_Gothic.svg#LeagueGothic') format('svg'); }

You have to use the .eot format for IE6 and have it on it's own line so it can be picked up and used, but there's a handy tool for generating all the right font files and the CSS markup to match that can be found over at Font Squirrel.

Using the font you've just declared isn't hard either:

font-family: "LeagueGothicRegular", Gill Sans, Verdana, sans-serif;

Sprites

Image sprites aren't new news by any stretch of the imagination - there's talk they will make an appearance in the final CSS3 spec, at the moment however, there's just a placeholder with a lot of discussion about whether sprites belong in the spec and if so, what the syntax should be.

The new Midnite site makes use of them in their current state though, as depicted below:

Once again, here's the CSS:

.season {
  // Unimportant bits left out
  background-image: url("../images/season2010.png");
  background-position: 0 0;
  height: 176px;
  width: 450px; }

And for the hover effect:

.season:hover {
  background-position: 0 -176px; }

Now, I mentioned earlier that there were tears - you've already had the rant about EOT files for @font-face declarations, but there's one for CSS sprites as well!

IE6 and below don't support the :hover selector on elements other that anchor tags, which makes my CSS above somewhat useless in a browser that is only starting now to lose its stranglehold on the market.

Easy fix though - (1) get this file; (2) put the following CSS in your pipe and make IE6 smoke it:

body {
  behavior:url("/styles/csshover3.htc"); }

Hat-tip: make sure that path is absolute (i.e. falls off the root '/') as the URL is relative to the page, not the CSS file location.

Once you have that tiny hack in place, your sprites work in IE6+, FF and Webkit.

RGBA

We're using RGBA for our navigation link hovers (so you can see the stars faintly behind even when you hover)

RGBA is the new kid on the block for declaring colours with their alpha, or transparency set. I'd talk about it here, but Drew McLellan explains it far better over at his 2009 24 ways article.

HTML5

So I've really only spoken about the CSS stuff we're doing to this point and frankly, the HTML5 stuff is more structure than eye candy, but the new

and

tags are getting a workout and I enjoy the semantics of the markup - it feels cleaner to me than having div's all over the place with ID's like #header and #footer.

I'd encourage you to read such good websites as Dive into HTML5 and HTML5 Doctor for more on getting started using HTML5 today - Smashing Magazine also have a couple of good articles, as do 24 ways

6 Ways to Stop Your Customer Experience Going All Wrong.

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 02:08 GMT

Interestingly recently I had a very bad experience booking some accommodation. Out of anything that bad, can come some good. It seems that sometimes we are just loosing sight of the fact that customer (experience) service is in many cases more important than the products we are selling. So I have put together this quick list of what went wrong and how any business can learn from these mistakes:

Answer correspondence

If you offer a method of communication with your customer, be that email, phone, fax, sms, online chat, whatever, ensure that you do in fact communicate with them and reply to any correspondence. Use an answering machine or voice mail for your phone would be a very good starting point. Also review your recorded messages and auto response emails from time to time.
Keep information up to date.

Ensure that the information you provide is current be that on your web site, or with a reseller or the like. There is nothing worse than promoting services that you no longer provide. You do all the work selling then just can't deliver. It just leaves bad feelings all around.
Computer illiteracy is not an excuse

It is nearly 2010, saying that you don't know how to use your website, or even your computer to check for emails is not an excuse. If you are in business you need to get your head around this technology. If you or your staff can't then you really have to seriously look at why you should remain in business.
Appearance and business currency

It is very important to ensure that you don't give the appearance that you are no longer in business. This is essential in an online world. The web is littered with sites that are dead, abandoned businesses, that are no longer in operation. Still they appear in search engines. Usually the average Joe determines if the site is active or not based completely on the currency of the content and professional appearance of the web site. Having not updated your site in six or even twelve months and having the same design as it had in 1998 isn't really going to help you much. Customers will just assume you are no longer in business.
Sell the Service

To often people forget to be able to present your best customer experience you have to forget about the products you are selling, and instead focus on the service that you provide in selling those products. As people really like to interact with other people, so it's often the service that makes the difference in relation to customer loyalty, not the product, but how you delivery it. In an online world this can be little things in the design of the website or your delivery process that provides for that perfect service.
Relate to your customers

Your customers are people. Yes I know it's hard to remember this sometimes, but they are. Often it pays to just stop for a moment and think about what your customers are seeing. What does your business look like from their initial contact with you. Be that from your website, phone or reseller to the final service (even product) provision. Try and relate and understand their feelings, concerns and rectify any nagging doubts they may have. They will love you for it.

Regardless there will be some items that I have missed, feel free to add them below.

User Experience and the Trust Factor

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:54 GMT

Any business needs to present itself in its best possible light to its customers.

With a new customer every aspect of the business is on display, under review constantly as the customer gains the confidence in that business. From the website, initial customer contact to service provision.

We have all done this, be it from the corner shop, a local cafe, a hotel, to ordering things online. It's pretty much a given isn't it, the initial user experience is everything. Or is it?

Recently I came across what was a very bad initial customer experience – not that they aren't that hard to find.

However I found myself pursuing with the experience, defending the vendor. All because of several recommendations from trusted friends.

The Experience

We were looking for last minute accommodation in a nearby town. Having reviewed the available accommodation on the local tourist bureau web site, we selected one that met our dates and various requirements. We were advised to approached the accommodation provider directly. So we did…

This when the bad experience started. The website was something from 1998, plus it just didn't seem to render correctly in any of our browsers, even Internet Explorer 6. Okay this is not that unusual in the accommodation trade as secondary accommodation directory sites (like the tourist bureau) or reseller vendors like wotif tend to do all the promotional work for the accommodation. Still it was a little off putting.

Anyway we used their online form and emailed them with our requirements and requested dates.

Time went by, two, three, four days, other emails were sent – no reply.

Maybe they where no longer in business. A quick check on a satellite photo from last month on Nearmaps showed they where still operational. Maybe they are just not that Internet savvy.

It was funny at this point I was making excuses from the vendor. Wanting them to shape up and be outstanding, a beacon of customer service with a rough exterior.

So we resorted to the old school methods – the telephone.

We rang them, mid morning, usually the best time to get any accommodation provider I have found. No answer, not even an answering machine. It's at this point real alarm bells went off. I contacted the tourist bureau in question, yes they confirmed the business was still in operation, they suggested that we must have just been unlucky.

We rang at different times over the next few days, until we finally go someone on the phone. They explained in detail they were busy, and what did we want…

Clearly at this point I had somehow fallen into the set of Fawlty Towers. After some strained conversation we determined that they didn't have the accommodation we were looking for. And yet they were advertising that they did. This fact they were not in the least bit concerned about.

After another phone call we learn that the same accommodation was available, just with one day difference. However they were clearly not prepared to tell us this unless we asked.

It gets better, to date we have never got a reply to the emails.

And finally it came time to confirm the booking, again it took several phone calls to reach one flustered employee. Who at least this time was helpful – Basil Fawlty mustn't have been on duty that day.

The Trust Factor

Why did we even bother with this accommodation provider. Why did we give them chance after chance.

It was the trust factor. It was because we trusted the reviews and recommendations we had been given face to face from friends about the accommodation provider that really made us put aside the bad (well no service) that they were providing.

It's something to consider, that recommendation factor, reviews, testimonials from real people, given freely, independently can be the key factor.

Despite all the bad experience and warning signs, all that is put aside, as appearances can be deceiving, but a word of mouth recommendation is worth pure gold! This we should be using on the web, as small business embraces the social media of the web, the recommendation of your customers is king.

Something to consider.

November trip to Ubud, Bali

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 06:36 GMT

Recently, Meredith and I spent a few beautiful days in Bali, Indonesia. I did have all intention to write a mini travelogue and publish it here, but in the weeks we've been back, it's been crazily busy at work and in life.

We arrived late Monday evening, sans children (who had Meredith's mother staying with them). My brother Charlie happened to be in town, so along with his friend, Rani, they were kind enough to pick us up from Ngurah Rai Airport, and in the middle of the night, we made our way to Nyuh Kuning, a small and quiet village just south of Ubud town center.

Our chosen hotel, Saren Indah, is tucked away on the southern end of the Monkey Forest, near the top end of Jalan Nyuh Bulan.

Replete with beautiful gardens, an inviting swimming pool, outdoor Bale style restaurant (open 7.30am – 10.30pm), and two story buildings housing the sixteen rooms, the place was fantastic. Either side of the property were rice fields, and although we stayed in one of the Garden rooms (lower floor), we're assuming the views from upstairs would be great.

We ate and shopped, practised our Bahasa, and rode our two hired motorbikes, for the next four days, before sadly heading back to the airport early Saturday morning for the trip home. If you are considering a few days of downtime, you couldn't go wrong with booking one of the many cheap flights to Bali, and relaxing in Ubud for a few days.

I've uploaded two videos that I took from the handlebars of the bike, using a loaned GoPro camera, designed for the purpose. This video shows a quick ride around Nyuh Kuning, and this video shows our ride from Jalan Hanoman in Ubud, over to Goa Gajah (Elephant Cave).

Terima kasih (thank you) for reading this post; I trust you'll enjoy the videos!

Image: Photo of the reception Bale at Saren Indah Hotel, Ubud.

Scaling a Rails application - Part 1

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:32 GMT

I'm by no means a "scaling expert", but I've recently been doing a lot of research into scaling web applications and the best ways to go about it.

What you see below is a rough guide based on what I've learnt - it's not scaling gospel or even an accurate or thorough discussion of all different techniques or schools of thought that can be applied to scaling.

So, what does this series of posts cover?

What scaling is;
When/who you should think about scaling;
The web server (two parts: the box and the software);
The static assets;
The database;
The Rails code; and
Caching

What scaling is

In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged. For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added. An analogous meaning is implied when the word is used in a commercial context, where scalability of a company implies that the underlying business model offers the potential for economic growth within the company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaling

When to scale

Generally, the consensus seems to be that if your a start-up, fresh out of the oven, scaling is a waste of your time. Get some users first and build your product!

Scaling is generally something you consider when your current server setup is getting hammered and the growth of your applications warrants taking things to the next level.

The web server

The box

If you're going to be doing high traffic sites, you'd be stupid (in my opinion) not to get your own hardware - the cost of entry for some relatively good gear isn't that high and in the long run, the flexibility and power that comes with having your own hardware outweighs the hassle.

I'm running a Dell PowerEdge 1850 which is housed in a datacentre here in Perth (which makes sense for what I'm hosting on it) - it's not new, but it doesn't need to be - the only reason it was being disposed of by the company I bought it off was because the three year warranty had run out - during the three years however, it hadn't failed once and had been the primary domain controller for the organisation in question.

Something to consider carefully is location and if your site is targeted at an international audience, then you'll certainly want to pick a location to keep that new server of yours in a DC where there's good international pipes available (Perth isn't really blessed in this particular area).

When picking a datacentre, look for something with n+1 redundancy, diverse entry points for both data carriers and power (preferably off completely different feeds) and good security - taking a look at what carriers provide feeds into the facility is also a must.

The software

For the operating system, I'm a fan of Ubuntu server edition - I'll admit, I've not tried much else (FreeBSD and Debian) and I always come back to Ubuntu - I think that's mainly because my first experiences with Linux were on an Ubuntu box. I keep the install down to the bear minimums - build_essential, iptables, fail2ban, denyhosts, mysql, nginx and a local postfix instance are all that are running (there's probably some other things, but you get the idea - no need for fruit)

Personally, I use the nginx (/engine-x/) web server - it's fast at serving static assets and it knows when to get out of the way if I want to pass things off to my Rails app. High profile websites including Wordpress.com and Github are using nginx with great success when it comes to high traffic scenarios.

Another part of my setup is Unicorn. Unicorn is written to make use of a number of existing system elements (threads, balancing, etc) which makes it stupidly efficient. For more, see this article by Ryan Tomayko called "I like Unicorn because it's Unix".

Here's my config file:

upstream unicorn {
  server unix:/var/www/example/current/tmp/sockets/unicorn.sock;
}
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name  example.org www.example.org;
  access_log  /var/log/nginx/example.access.log;
  location / {
    root /var/www/example/current/public/;
    if (-f $request_filename) {
      expires 60h;
      break;        # Static asset
    } if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) {
      return 503;   # Temporarily unavailable
    } if (!-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) {
     # error_page 500 501 502 503 504 /500.html;
      proxy_pass              http://unicorn;
    }
    proxy_set_header        Host $host;       
    proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP       $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    client_max_body_size    10m;
    client_body_buffer_size 128k;
    proxy_connect_timeout   90;
    proxy_send_timeout      90;
    proxy_read_timeout      90;
    proxy_buffer_size       16k;
    proxy_buffers           32 16k;
    proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
  }
  # output compression saves bandwidth
  gzip              on;
  gzip_http_version 1.0;
  gzip_comp_level   2;
  gzip_proxied      any;
  gzip_types        text/plain text/html text/javascript text/css text/xml application/x-javascript application/atom+xml;
}

I also use Passenger from the gang over at Phusion - it's fantastic for getting things going straight away and doesn't require too much hassle - it's what I use on my development box and for smaller sites where I don't need to fiddle with things in the same way.

That's a long enough post, hopefully I'll get the next section on static assets and the database up soon.

It's important to remember that this is just my opinion, based on my experiences to date (which are somewhat limited given my age) - take everything with a grain of salt and always do your research before diving into something this big.

Time for a change

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:16 GMT

So you may have noticed that all the old content on this site is gone and it looks, once again, different.

After some mulling, I decided it was time to move on - the content the previously resided here was out of date or pointless.

I'm starting fresh, the results of which will be seen shortly with my post on scaling with rails (from a novice's perspective) - I'm hoping that over Christmas and into the new year I can generate some new and relevant content on Ruby, Rails, servers and also life.

If you've reached here looking for something you consider to be of national importance, get in touch and I'll take a look at restoring it or overhauling it to be current.

cf.Objective(ANZ) Day 2 Wrapup: more wizardry than you can poke a mouse pointer at

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:37 GMT

Wow, this is late huh? Day 2 of cf.Objective(ANZ).

Day two started early for me, as I woke early to spend some more time polishing my presentation. After meeting Kevin Roche at breakfast, I decided to go to his session on “Fusebox Scaffolding” first up, over Terry Ryan’s session “ORM Basic to Advanced”.

Kevin demonstrated a project he’s been working on intermittently for some time, which allows users to generate basic Fusebox starter code simply by pointing the scaffolding application to a database. The resultant files can then be tweaked and customised as required.

Kevin’s system uses a template system developed by Peter Bell, which allows developers to write their own output templates using CFML itself – a mind-bendingly clever concept. Kevin will be releasing the SQL Server version of the code soon, and is looking for developers interested in helping out with Oracle and MySQL versions.

Next I had a choice of Dan Wilson’s “Model Glue 3: Gesture” or Mark Szulc’s ColdFusion + LiveCycle = Enterprise Innovation”. I chose a third option: make final last minute panicky adjustments to my presentation, which was up next.

Finally I was up, opposite Ron Hopper’s “Behaviour Driven Development with CFSpec”. I’d reversed the colours in Dreamweaver to try and make my code samples easier to see on the projectors, which were quite low contrast, but an unintended side effect of this was that it was hard for me to see my mouse cursor, which made things a little more difficult than they had to be. Nevertheless, the presentation went well and there were some nice comments in the Twitter stream (admittedly, mostly from my friends).

After another tasty lunch of various wraps, sandwiches, salads and cake, followed by a show of card tricks from the Magic Industries camp, “The Ancient Art of Software: Wisdom of the ages applied to today’s software developers” with Toby Tremayne was on at the same time as Mark Stanton’s “Masters of WAR”. I’d heard that there was going to be fire in Toby’s presentation so that’s where I headed.

Toby is the best known magician in the ColdFusion world today and his presentation presented the four archetypes of magic practioners: The Trickster, The Sorcerer, The Oracle and The Sage. Describing the traditional attributes of the four, Toby then likened each to a type of software developer, using well-known members of the ColdFusion community as examples, with strategies to help acolytes ascend through the ranks.

And of course, there was magic – Toby made a cube disappear from a wooden chest, produced a list of words provided by random audiences from a locked box displayed at the beginning of the session, and finally burnt a card marked with audience supplied words in a wall of flame before producing it again, only slightly singed, from the deck.

Straight after, I chose to see Mike Brunt’s “Clustering ColdFusion” over Terry Ryan’s “Extending ColdFusion Builder” – not so much because I have any need for clustering in the projects that i do, but mostly because Mike is a well-respected expert in that topic as well as a very funny bloke, and I wanted to see what he had to say.

Mike didn’t disappoint. As well as imparting some good advice – for example, the default install settings for ColdFusion are mostly incorrect for high performing sites – he also delivered some humorous gems.

After afternoon tea, the very last sessions of cf.Objective(ANZ) for 2009: “Testing Testing 123” with Robin Hilliard, and “Using a Java Domain Layer with ColdFusion” with Jaime Metcher. I went to Robin’s session, wherein he promised that anyone who took up unit testing as part of their development process would, within one week of starting, have an epiphany about the usefulness of the system and would never go back.

He then demonstrated using RocketBoots’ own testing framework, RocketUnit, and how he uses it to unit test continually while coding the model layer of his applications, ensuring logic errors are caught right away.

And then it was over. Assembling everyone in the ballroom for Closing Remarks, Mark Mandel thanked everyone involved and acting as barrel girl, I drew the winners of the three raffles from the attendees who had completed evaluation sheets: one copy of ColdFusion Standard, one copy of Flash Builder and one copy of Fusion Reactor. The organisers present toasted with a glass of champagne and then it was time for us to vacate the venue.

See you all next year!

Posted from kay lives here

cf.Objective(ANZ) Day 2 Wrapup: more wizardry than you can poke a mouse pointer at

My chest filled to explode

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:40 GMT

Apologies to David McComb. For those who do not follow my twitter feed, I will tell you what happened over the past few days.

I was riding to work on Friday morning, when I started having a pain in the chest. Mild pain which I have been getting recently when I push myself on the bike, but because it is accompanied by a bout of nausea, I always put it down as stomach related. Instead it was angina and last Friday morning it did not go away in a couple of minutes after easing the pace.

So I stopped at the nearest train station intending to catch the next train to work. However, the pain did not go away while waiting for the next train and the nausea got worse. So instead I caught the next train home. About 10 minutes into the trip, I realised I was having a heart attack, my chest pains where much stronger, it felt like my lungs where being crushed. I was having trouble breathing and I was losing sensation in my left arm.

I rolled my bike out of the station and got home quickly, dropped the bike off, announced to Angie I was probably having a heart attack and walked across the road to the ambulance depot to get help.

I was then rushed to Fremantle hospital, while being told I should of called the ambulance from the train and they would of come and met me and saved 10 minutes, which could of made a big difference.

The reason I was being rushed to Fremantle hospital instead of Rockingham hospital which was closer, was Fremantle has a specialist coronary care unit, which I got to see at close hand. I was in the Fremantle emergency department for a little over 10 minutes, as the prepared me for surgery. Then I was in surgery, getting a blockage in an artery which supplies blood to the heart cleared and making sure it stayed open by inserting in a steel tube.

Because the operation was only done under local anaesthetic and a big dose of morphine, once I was in post op and I located my phone, I was tweeting about it a little over two hours after I realised I was having an heart attack.

48 hours after the operation, I was out of hospital, with no permanent damage to my heart. My lifestyle is about to change, I need to take drugs to reduce the thickness of my blood, my blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol every day for the rest of my life (even though only my cholesterol was above average). Lose a few kilos and eat less bad cholesterol ( reduce my intake of cheese, eggs, chocolate and fried noodles, because I eat little dairy or milk).

So a big thank you to everybody at the Kwinana ambulance depot, the Fremantle Hospital Emergency Department and Coronary Care Unit, without you I probably would not be alive right now.

cf.Objective(ANZ) Wrapup, Day 1: Holy brain burn, Batman!

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:09 GMT

I’m writing this on the plane on the way back to Perth from Melbourne after two mind-blowing days of ColdFusion conference goodness at cf.Objective(ANZ). I’m surrounded by screaming babies, someone behind me keeps kicking me in the back and the person in front put their seat back the second the seatbelt light went off, meaning my notebook’s keyboard is pressed into my chest and typing is next to impossible. And there’s only three hours left to go. *sigh*

Huge thankyous are due to the whole cf.Objective(ANZ) team for pulling it off – conference hosts Jared Rypka-Hauer and Steven Hauer, unfortunately neither of whom could make the trip down under; Jim Louis, meeting planner extraordinaire (“meeting planner” being the US term for what we would refer to here as an “event manager”); and my fellow Australian and New Zealand based committee members Barry Beatty, Toby Tremayne, Andrew Mercer, Kai Koenig and especially Mark Mandel, who did an unholy amount of work in the leadup to the conference.

A great committee is not enough: conferences don’t happen without the generous financial support of sponsors; the expertise and willingness to go the extra mile of speakers; and of course, the people who buy tickets and come along. So credit is due to all.

Despite the fact that I was tweaking, refining and testing my own presentation right up until 15 minutes before I went on stage, I only managed to miss two sessions the entire conference. But given that there were two simultaneous tracks, there were a whole stack of difficult decisions that had to be made.

Here are some notes from the presentations that I got to see:

Ben Forta and Terrence Ryan: Opening keynote

The conference was kicked off by host Jared Rypka-Hauer via a pre-recorded video, during which is strongly suggested that we make sure that Jim didn’t have to buy his own drinks. Then it was over to Mark Mandel to introduce the keynote session: the original CF guru Ben Forta.

Ben gave an overview of the current state of ColdFusion, including the marked increase in developer numbers since Macromedia was acquired by Adobe. The message he was preaching: it’s a good time to be a ColdFusion developer.

Ben didn’t spend much time on stage however, handing over to evangelist Terry Ryan. Terry ran over some of the coolest features: in CF9 and shared some of their internal performance figures which clearly show how much faster CF9 is than previous versions: again, good news for developers.

Andy Welsh: Getting Social with CF

After morning tea, faced with a choice between Andrew Muller’s session on publish-subscribe RIAs and Andy Welsh on “Getting social with CF”, I elected to go to Andy’s Facebook-focused session. While I don’t have any plans Facebook applications anytime soon, I was interested in the technology and impressed with how far the platform has come. Andy had plenty of warnings for us, however: Facebook don’t give any useful support to developers, they change things constantly and without warning (with the side effect that the documentation is often out of date), and in peak times (i.e. lunchtime) things on Facebook grind to a halt. Despite all this, there is huge potential in the market – as Andy said, that set of challenges is nothing small businesses and freelancers don’t face daily – and Andy will be releasing his “Angry Ape” framework for building Facebook apps in CF sometime shortly.

Kai Koenig: Creating Online and Offline Workflows with CFPDFFORM

After another break, it was a choice between Mark Mandel’s session “Rapid OO Development with ColdFusion Frameworks” or “Creating Online and Offline workflows with ColdFusion’s CFPDFFORM” with Kai Koenig. Kai’s like the “big bro” I never had, so I decided to show my support upstairs in the Heritage Room. In the session, Kai examined just what was possible with ColdFusion’s PDF functionality, versus what was possible with the much more expensive LiveCycle services, and urged developers to be sure that they actually needed the full LiveCycle before letting their organisations commit to the purchase. He talked about situations where hybrid online and offline PDF workflows were needed, and demonstrated a customisable PDF Christmas card generator that he had worked on.

Andrew Mercer: Future Proofing Your Application Development

After a very nice lunch of sandwiches, salad and little cakes, I decided to miss both Andrew Spaulding’s session “From Flash Catalyst to Flash Builder and ColdFusion: The Ultimate RIA Workflow” and Mike Schierberl’s very popular session “JVM Tuning and Optimisation” to spend some quality time in my room with my presentation. But I made sure I made it back in time for fellow West Australian Andrew Mercer’s session “Future Proofing Your Application Development”, up against Indy Nagpal’s “Improve ColdFusion Development Process: Using Decentralised Version Control with Testing and Continuous Integration’.

Andrew took the bold move of presenting with no slides. He described some common scenarios faced by programmers of various skill levels and the possible outcomes. He reiterated the idea that design patterns solve a particular problem – and if you’re not having that problem, then you don’t need that design pattern. He also urged developers not to feel pressured into diving into OO development if they don’t understand or don’t have need to.

Andrew also talked about three relatively new “lite” frameworks, which have each been designed as a antidote to the trend for the major frameworks to be large and cumbersome. The session had plenty of time allowed for audience discussion and a spirited discussion of various frameworks ensued – several attendees myself included) expressing a fondness for the days of Fusebox 3 when development was much simpler and more fun.

Justin Mclean: Connecting Hardware up to ColdFusion

The final session of the day was a choice of Justin Mclean’s “Connecting Hardware up to ColdFusion” or Geoff Bowers’ “Cascading View Inheritance”. Given that I’d seen Justin’s session in Perth at Edge of the Web which had used Flex code samples, and had in fact ordered an Arduino starter kit of my own, i decided to catch his presentation again and see if i could pick up some extra ideas as this time he was using ColdFusion sample code.

The hardware referred to in Justin’s presentation title is in fact a small hobby electronics component set made in Italy called Arduino. A number of different components are cheaply available, enabling developers to cobble together anything from pointless flashing LEDs, to useful environmental sensors of all descriptions, to fighting robots and even web servers. Justin has just released his ColdFusion library for developing Arduino applications in ColdFusion to RIA Forge.

All in all, it was an exhaustingly busy day and I came away with a head full of ideas and new knowledge. After dinner with a whole bunch of conference-goers at a Japanese restaurant called “Chocolate Buddha” in nearby Federation Square, I managed to tear myself away from the bar after just one beer, and work on my presentation for the following day.

Stay tuned for my day two wrap up!

Posted from kay lives here

cf.Objective(ANZ) Wrapup, Day 1: Holy brain burn, Batman!

You too can be a Successful Freelancer

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:27 GMT

I was honoured to speak on day one of Edge of the Web 2009. My presentation, You Too Can be a Successful Freelancer, contained both personal stories of my freelancing years, as well as some of the material from my book, The Principles of Successful Freelancing.

I had a great time preparing it, and then delivering it to a enthusiastic audience (a huge thanks to you if you were there!), and have uploaded the slides to my SlideShare account. You can see them embedded below. The slides were featured on the SlideShare front page the day after I uploaded them – thanks SlideShare!

You can see a number of the presentations given at Edge of the Web 2009 on SlideShare here.

Image: Photo by Richard Giles. Original photo here.

RGBa backgrounds in IE

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:54 GMT

RGBa is the new black, with support in most modern Safari 3, Firefox 3 and Opera 10, you can have semi transparent elements. Only there is no support currently in IE for RGBa.

However, you can easily fake it for backgrounds of block elements in IE with
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=1, StartColorStr='#aaRRBBGG', EndColorStr='#aaRRBBGG);
The filter gradient places a alpha channel colour gradient over the background. So as long the background is transparent, the start and end colours the same and the alpha (aa) channel a value greater than 0 (fully transparent) and FF (fully opaque), you get a block element in IE with a RGBa background. You can see an example of RGBa in action in IE

The simplest way is including in your CSS
background: transparent ; background: rgba(255,0,0,0.5) ; filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=1, StartColorStr='#88ff0000', EndColorStr='#88ff0000');

Which is clean and simple, even it does deliver you invalid CSS. There are two problems, if a browser does not support RGBa and is not IE, (eg FF2) the block element background will be transparent. I do not think that is a major issue right now. There are a handful of browsers outside IE in use that do not support RGBa. My main concern is future proofing, the next major version of IE (the beta is due within a year) will support RGBa (as well as HTML5 and some CSS3 according to sources) and as usual will maintain backwards compatibility with earlier versions of IE. So you will get a semi transparent background colour overlaid with a semi transparent gradient.

The solution, is to provide a stylesheet to all browsers and an extra stylesheet to IE8 and below with conditional comments. So your CSS will have:
background: fallback color RGB or hex ; /* background colour for browsers that are not IE that do not understand RGBa */ background: rgba(R,G,B,a) ;
Your HTML will include (note don’t try and cut and paste from here as grab the text file instead):

And ieonly.css file include:
background: transparent ; /* needed to clear the background colour */ filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=1, StartColorStr='#88ff0000', EndColorStr='#88ff0000');

If you don’t believe me and do not have IE6, here is the screenshot. And I was not the first one to suggest this method for implementing RGBa in IE, Hedger Wang did some time ago, and even suggested using canvas to provide the transparent background to FF2. I only found his example while finalising this post.

Ben Forta in the house: ColdFusion Week down under!

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:02 GMT

It’s been a long haul but next week – November 12 and 13 – is the cf.Objective(ANZ) conference in Melbourne, Australia.

Although I’ve only just recovered from the Edge of the Web conference here in Perth, next Wednesday morning I’ll be getting on the plane to Melbourne for three days of geek nirvana, CF style. We know it’s going to be huge because that almighty CF guru, Ben Forta, is making the journey too!

As is typical when geeks geographically converge, there will be a number of other events happening around the conference:

In Sydney, there’s a CF User Group meeting and then drinks with Ben Forta and fellow CF evangelist Terry Ryan, starting at Adobe’s offices at 2pm before moving on to “a pub somewhere”. Check the CFAUSSIE mailing list for updates.
The 11th of November in Melbourne will be the FarCry Dev Camp, at Melbourne Law School. Come along to this free event to learn about the future direction of the open source FarCry framework and CMS as well as in-depth technical sessions, case studies and “general developer tom-foolery”, according to FarCry’s benevolent dictator Geoff Bowers.
Then of course there’s the conference itself. Tickets (and hotel rooms) are still available but you’d better get in quick. There’s a ton of great speakers, including but not limited to Andy Welsh on using social applications with CF, Kai Koenig on the PDF features in CF, Justin McLean on connecting hardware to CF, Kevin Roche on Fusebox Scaffolding, Dan Wilson on ModelGlue 3, Robin Hilliard on testing… plus Terry Ryan and Ben Forta, plus Australian Adobe staff Mark Szulc and Andrew Spauling and a whole stack of others. I’ll be presenting on doing damage with CFGRID, and my fellow West Australian Andrew Mercer will be talking about future proofing your application with some of the new light-weight frameworks.

The conference wouldn’t have happened without the support of some very special sponsors, so a big shout-out to platinum sponsor Adobe, gold sponsors RocketBoots and Daemon, Silver Sponsors Nova Host and Magic Industries, bronze sponsors Gruden and Railo, and supporters The Rohans and Ventego Creative.

Hope to see you there!

Posted from kay lives here

Ben Forta in the house: ColdFusion Week down under!

Why use CSS Zen Garden for CSS3 demo

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:18 GMT

For those who have not seen my Edge of the Web CSS3 demonstration I used the CSS Zen Garden HTML. Why, because I wanted to use somebody else’s HTML, mainly because I wanted to show it works with any HTML and that most people would be familiar with the site.

I will not submit it, because Dave has not accepted any new submissions almost two year, my demo is far from the visual standard of most other design and I broke one major rule the CSS does not validate.

There are no hacks in the CSS just lots of browsers specific declarations like:

-moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 7px rgba(0,0,0,0.66);

And even worse Microsoft specific declarations, which break the W3C rules for CSS

filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow(OffX=5, OffY=5, Color='#AA666666', Positive='true');

As I said in my presentation, the important thing to know about validation, is why your code does not validate, if you know that, then validation is irrelevant.

CSS3 presentations at EOTW09 and WebJam11

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:57 GMT

I really enjoyed developing my presentation for Edge of the Web. The research and experimentation was a lot of fun. Explore the demo using CSS Zen Garden HTML and seriously try it in IE6, the WebJam presentation with some even more outrageous transitions needs Safari4 ~~or FF3.7~~ and a little exploring with a mouse.

Progressive enhancement with CSS3

View more documents from Nick Cowie.

What I learnt is enough from probably a dozen blog posts, so hopefully I will be writing lot in the next few weeks.

Edge of the Tweet

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:31 GMT

There is less than two weeks until Perth's second ever web conference; Edge of the Web 2009 gets underway, and the excitement is building!

One large element of the social aspects of web conferences is the ‘twitter back channel', you know; the thoughts and musings of people who are attending the conference posted on Twitter.

With this in mind, I thought it worthwhile to go through the impressive speakers list, and link those who are on Twitter so you can also watch what the speakers are saying, before, during and after the crazy week we have planned.

Derek Powazek @fraying
Anil Dash @anildash
Alex Payne @al3x
Dmitry Baranovskiy @DmitryBaranovsk
Gary Barber @Tuna
Ruth Ellison @RuthEllison
Lachlan Hardy @lachlanhardy
Simon Pascal Klein @klepas
Kevin Yank @sentience
Miles Burke @milesb
Ash Donaldson @ashdonaldson
Matt Balara @MattBalara
Matt Didcoe @mattman
Scott Gledhill @gleddy
Nick Cowie @nickobec
Myles Eftos @madpilot
James McCutcheon @jamesmcc
Justin Mclean @JustinMclean
Darcy Laycock @Sutto

Remember, if you are attending Edge of the Web 2009, you should use #eotw09 as the hashtag. It'd probably be a good idea to also follow the @eotw Twitter account too!

Ideas 6: The Edge of the Web Edition

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:26 GMT

Perth has had it's day in the sun, by holding the last five Ideas events, but now it is Brisvegas' go. The theme: Edge of the Web, because we have two speakers giving you exclusive previews of their Edge of the Web presentations: Ash Donaldson presenting Designing to persuade: Shaping the User Experience and yours truly blabbing on about Stuff They Never Taught You at Website School.

We will be at the Plough Inn, Southbank on October 21st 2009. So if you are in Brisbane, and have been meaning to get to an AWIA event, now is your chance!

Members are $45, non members are $55. Bargin.

See you all then!

WebWiz Sydney 2009

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:24 GMT

Australian Web Week is just a couple of weeks away, and the team at the Australian Web Industry Association have created quite a unique event for the occassion.

Instead of the usual pre- Web Directions South Port80 drinks and pizza affair, which we've held for the last few years, we're introducing a new event to your calendar: WebWiz.

The concept is great; there will be a panel for four web experts, plus an additional two contestants hand-picked from the audience to compete for ‘millions of dollars worth of awesome web kudos'.

Guaranteed to be a great way to spend a Tuesday evening in Sydney!

All the gory details are:

Tuesday 6th of October 2009
from 7:00pm
Top floor
Pyrmont Bridge Hotel
96 Union Street
Pyrmont NSW 2009
(Google Map)

Entry is absolutely FREE – however there are only limited places available, so I suggest you head straight over and RSVP now.

During the evening (which will include free nibbles and a cash bar), we'll also be announcing some of the finalists for the Australian Web Awards, just to make it even more exciting!

I hope that you can make it!

The League of Moveable Type

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:04 GMT

I just admire The League of Moveable Type. While a lot of font foundries are still working on licensing issues with embedding fonts in PDFs. here a couple of font designers discovered @font-face and went lets make the world a better place. By creating The League of Moveable Type, convincing a few fellow font designers to join them in releasing fonts with an open source licence suitable for embedding with @font-face.

I am on the Edge of the Web

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:58 GMT

Well I am speaking at the Edge of the Web Conference in Perth in November. The title Progressive Enhancement with CSS: Or how I stopped worrying about IE6 and starting loving CSS3.

The aim is to show how you can use CSS2 and CSS3 to improve the experience of visitors using modern browsers, while not blocking access to those people still using older browsers like IE6. I want to convince the audience, that you can build sites that do not have to look the same in all browsers.

I will be looking at what CSS2 and CSS3 you can safely implement now. The main provision it must not break IE6. It does not have to work in IE6, just have a safe fallback position.

The presentation is not aimed at people who read Surfin Safari, CSS3.info or similar sites and then go off an experiment with what they have been shown. That is what I do

I know I will be covering those I covered indepth before like opacity/transparency and @font-face. Are there any other CSS2 or CSS3 properties you would like to see me cover? Otherwise I might go all shock and awe with transitions ;-)

Cleaning up Word HTML

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:27 GMT

If you are like me, on occasions you have people want to paste directly from Word into CMS or Wordpress. I was bemoaning the fact, that you either end up with Word HTML or lose all the formatting, when a colleague of mine, Steven Miles suggest I use JavaScript to clean up the HTML and provide the some code.

So this is what I created to clean up Word HTML, you paste the HTML is to the editable div, hit the button and if you are using Internet Explorer the converted HTML is copied to your clipboard. So you can paste the clean HTML (note it is HTML code) straight into the CMS editor in HTML mode or WordPress.

Note, while you can use JavaScript to add to the clipboard with Internet Explorer, you need to use Flash to copy the contents to the clipboard for other browsers. I have not do that yet. Mainly because Internet Explorer is the corporate browser and this was created for work.

So have a look under the hood, see how it works, take the code and modify it for your own use. It appears to be working for what I need, but maybe needed to be modified for your situation.

* does not currently work in IE8, I need to investigate further *

Edge of the Web 2009 program announced

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:53 GMT

The full exciting program for Edge of the Web 2009 has now been announced, and you can peruse the fine speakers and their topics over on the Program page.

Now, I could be biased (hey, I'm speaking at the event!) but I truly believe there's a great line-up of talent, those locals, as well as those coming from both interstate and overseas, to our humble city to share their wisdom at Western Australia's own web design and development conference.

People like Derek Powazek, who I saw speak in New Zealand earlier this year, Twitter API superstar, Alex Payne and well-known blogger, Anil Dash are visiting Australia for Edge of the Web.

In total, there are 22 kick ass speakers who will entertain, educate and invigorate you to push the web further. Add these to the great workshops and the black tie Australian Web Awards gala event, and you've got one great week!

The best part is, if you get in right now and register, early bird pricing is in place until September 15 (that's right; only a week left!) which means you can save some of your money (hey, spend it on drinks at the number of social events which will also happen around the days before and after, and evenings of, the conference).

Don't just take my word for it. Hit your favourite micro-blogging platform and ask your colleagues, or search for blog posts reviewing last years event. I'm positive you'll love being at the Edge of the Web 2009!

Be quick organising those tickets though; the fun begins in only eight weeks time…

Want a copy of my book, Free?

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:42 GMT

Everyone loves a freebie, right? Well, here's a great freebie – a PDF copy of the book I wrote last year, The Principles of Successful Freelancing.

All you need to do is visit this website, and either follow @sitepointdotcom on Twitter, or put your email address in the box to get a download link.

I'd like to also suggest you follow me on Twitter, whilst you're at it. :)

Judging by people's reactions, this 10 day only giveaway will once again be HUGE.

The team at SitePoint did the same thing some time ago, with another book. The result of that twitaway was 13,000 new followers in under a week! That's a great jump in followers for anyone over any period of time, let alone an increase like that in a week. You can read all about that campaign over at TwiTip.

I hope you enjoy the book (so much so that you'll buy the real paper version too!), and remember, this only lasts for the next ten days.

John Siracusa on Snow Leopard

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:59 GMT

John Siracusa on OS X Snow Leopard:

Got all that? A nearly two-year development cycle, but no new features. Major new frameworks for developers, but few new bugs. Significant changes to the core OS, but more reliability. And a franchise rejuvenation with few user-visible changes.

It's enough to turn a leopard white.

…and we still don’t have day-light saving

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:25 GMT

It is 2009 and some people still do not get accessibility

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:45 GMT

At the Gov2.0 taskforce roadshow I ended up in conversation with a representative of one Department bemoaning the fact the Government will not give them extra money to make their websites WCAG 1.0 level 2 compliant.

I said it does not cost more to build a WCAG 1.0 level 2 compliant website if your developer knows what they where doing. The two developers sitting either side of us ( one state government and one private enterprise) agreed, yet this person kept saying it costs more money.

The private enterprise developer then asked why don’t you include the requirement for WCAG 1.0 level 2 compliance in their website tender. The response it is too expensive. Asked if they ever tried, no it is too expensive was the response.

It is not 2000, when Maguire vs SOCOG decision was new and fresh and understanding of website accessibility amongst developers was limited. For the past 10 years, Australians website developers and Government Agencies have known the Disability Discrimination Act applies to websites. If you can not build a WCAG 1.0 level 2 compliant website in 2009, you do not need extra money to fix it, you need to look at website business practices and bring them into the 21st century.

Moving a virtual machine from VMWare Fusion to VMWare Server

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 08:44 GMT

I am running VMWare Fusion 2.0.x at home, and VMWare Server 2.0.x on my Ubuntu workstation at work. I wanted to move a virtual machine created on VMWare Fusion to VMWare Server.

Some gotchas that I've come across:

64-bit and VT mode

64-bit virtual machines are only supported on CPUs that have VT mode.

Fusion-only feature not handled gracefully by Server

If your .vmx file has the following line, remove it.

serial0.fileType = "thinprint"

VMWare Server does not support this feature, and crashes when you try to import the virtual machine.

Networking

After importing the virtual machine, when you power it on for the first time, VMWare will ask you whether you moved it or copied it. Tell VMWare that you moved it. Otherwise, you will have to manually update the ethernet adapter settings to get networking back up.

Yep, Software Engineering is dead

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:06 GMT

You know that feeling you get when something you've been taught to believe in gets discredited and because your belief was tenuous at best, the walls come tumbling down around you and then you have a huge weight lifted off you shoulders?

Pascal just posted this on the 220 mailing list. Amen. It's something that I'm pretty sure I've been articulating for a long time. Whenever someone has asked me why software is hard, I always use this analogy:

If you ask a Civil Engineer to build you a bridge, it is easy to spec out. You know how far the bridge has to span, what sort of foundations you need, and as a result you can make a recommendation about what sort of bridge you need. The Engineer can build you a little model - you can look at the model and say “Yes! That is a bridge. That will do nicely”. They can mathematically model the bridge to make sure this doesn't happen. They build the bridge and if it allows things to cross from one bank to the other, you have a success.

Unless you are building “Hello World”, a Software Engineer's life isn't so simple. You have different platforms, users, stakeholders, contexts - it gets exponentially harder with every feature that gets added. I once did a unit at Uni called Formal Methods which tried to mathematically model software. It was stupid. The code we modelled was like, nine lines long, and required a 32 page proof (I didn't even get close). Stupid.

Of course, academics have been trying to shoehorn software into engineering for ever. In first year, they taught us UML which I guess is similar to architectural drawings or flow diagrams or something. I'm sure UML works really well when working with the waterfall model of software design, which has strong ties to old school, proper engineering. I couldn't imagine having to go and update hundreds of UML documents every time a minor change was required. We are also taught in first year, that the waterfall model is pants in the real world, which by association makes UML nothing more than a nice thought experiment. (I'm still bemused by the number of Software firms that put it as a requirement for graduate Software Engineers - basically because coming up with job descriptions for inexperienced programmers is really hard).

Sure you can argue that testing is a software technique that we (should) use, but this is the exception to the rule. I guess the conclusion we need to come to is that Software isn't an engineering problem - it's a people problem. (Some may say, it's a creative problem - that's also true, but buy me a beer and I'll explain that traditional engineering is too, so the argument doesn't further my point). This in itself is a problem, as (gross generalisation ahead) boffins who like coding, tend not to deal with real people very well.

Further discussion on our internal list suggested that creating software products is the way to go. I think I want to agree with this - there are many examples of off-the-shelf products that are extremely popular: Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop etc. In these situations, the customer works with in the workflow of the software, and that seems to work. So do we as developers need to convince our clients that the feature they want may not be needed? Do our clients actually know what they need? Of course this view is not with out it's flaws either - users will generally be working against the software, rather than with it. Is working with a sub-optimal solution better than battling with requirements and budget overruns?

I can't help to think that there is something we are missing. It would seem there is a disconnect between what our clients want and what we can provide. If you look at the classic project triangle, your client wants to minimise price and time, and maximise good (I hope my English teacher isn't reading this), where as we want to maximise all three. So the crucial “pick two” part flies out the window. Either we start sacrificing the good, re-negotiate the price, or try to stretch out the project to restore the balance - none of which makes for happy clients.

Well how about adding fat to the quote? In theory, this is fine - if a client sees value in an “inflated” (but more likey a realistic) price then everyone is happy right? Well, not really - software development is much like homework assignments: You start out with plenty of time, and the best intentions, and then end up pulling an all-nighter to get it finished - and you still only get a C at best. I suspect this is because it's impossible to lock down requirements of an abstract problem. This isn't only because of the difficulty in describing what we don't understand, but because we don't even know what half of the problems are going to be.

And this is our quandry - how can we estimate unknowns? Not just “we haven't seen this before but it looks like X” unknowns, but “What the hell? How is that even possible?!” unknowns. Other areas of Engineering encounter these problems occasionally - we get them all the time. So, the solution (he says as if there is one) is to minimise the risks and/or consequences of these unknowns. Jobs that deal with people do this all the time. If you work in marketing, you can postulate all you like - you can't be sure how a campaign will work until it does. Marketing is reactive.

When you make a change you can't be sure what will happen. Sure, you can put an ad in the Yellow Pages year after year, because it has brought in on average Y leads per year - but there is no guarantee this year will be the same. It seems that the humanity-based sciences are happy with this, but quantitative-loving geeks don't like that. Hell, binary is black and white, not Gray.

So, perhaps the key is to treat software as a living breathing thing. Agile programming and iterative development can help, but they are means to an end - they don't work with out communication and understanding between people. We need to break down the barriers between provider and client - the question is: Is that even possible?

Twitter and the Tour de France

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 08:25 GMT

I am fan of procycling an particularly the grand tour events, the Tour De France (TdF), Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana. It all started years ago when I started cycling and SBS started showing selected stages. I quickly realised it is not the best cyclist that wins, but a combination of cyclist, team and strategy and I was hooked.

Back then, I did not look for information online while watching the TdF. I would always catch up the next morning with the results and preview that day’s stage. Over the years that has slowly changed. Last year, while watching the Tdf, I used FriendFeed to talk to cycling fans and kept up to date with various websites. Even managed to find streaming video to catch stages before SBS started broadcasting and some stages of the Vuelta.

However, everything changed at the Tour Down Under when Lance Armstrong introduced Twitter a large number of top professional cyclists. Once you found them you get a better understanding of what is happening and finding out the news quickly. For example Levi Leipheimer broken wrist and having to abandon the tour, the same way most news outlets did by a Lance Armstrong tweet. Again today’s abandoment by Tom Boonen via a Steven de Jongh tweet.

In addition to riders, you have twittering team managers, mechanics and other personnel, cycling journalists as well as other cycling fans. The big advantage of being in contact with other fans on twitter is you can find resources quickly, including streaming video, I watched every stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré and Giro this year, thanks to Twitter. When races did not have streaming video or audio, there was a twitterfeed of what was happening in the race.

A few tips

Search on #procycling hashtag, find the hashtag for the event, for the Tour de France it is #tdf and open a search window in tweetdeck to follow a race.

Follow Steephill and Cycling Fans for the latest resources.

Go follow some procycling twitters and you will often find that procyclists follow other procyclists.

Links from my BarCamp presentation Web 2.0 in WA Gov

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:54 GMT

My presentation was done with little preparation and no slides, but I used a number of sites as examples, so at VelvetSarah’s request, here are links to those sites.

State Premier's

Blogs

Transport Security Blog what a Government blog should be

State Library of Western Australia blog

Facebook

School Leavers WA unfortunately their facebook page is not available now.

Twitter

Others

Ask Your Customers the Hard Questions

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:45 GMT

Here's a question for you. When your last project finished, what was the final communication the client received from you? Was it a bottle of wine and card, a “Thanks for the work, call me if you need anything,” or just an invoice in the mail?

It seems to be very common for us designers, developers, freelancers, and businesses to be keen to talk at the start of a project, but shy to speak at the end.

What we really need to do at the completion stage of projects is to thank the client for their business, and then ask them some hard questions.

Why do I say hard? Well, maybe it's the human condition, but we as service providers don't like to imagine that clients are ever anything but absolutely impressed with our work — but I have to tell you, the truth is that they often aren't.

Think back to the last time you were out for a meal. When you paid, the waitperson probably asked you about your experience. In answer to “How was everything?”, you probably mumbled something like, “It was good, thanks” — even if you didn't feel that way.

Why? Few of us like confrontation. We don't like to give neutral or negative feedback (unless it's within the relative anonymity of an online auction web site!) and we don't like receiving it, either.

However, feedback is very important to us, as individuals and as businesses, in order to grow and improve — even if that does mean we open our ears to possibly negative feedback as well.

The next time a project wraps up, consider emailing your client a link to an online survey. I have found people are far more willing to be honest completing a form instead of speaking directly to you.

Ask them what they liked most about the project — and then ask them what they liked least. You really do want to know. It could be something really simple that you or your firm is doing over and over, with every project, assuming clients like it when in fact they don't. This habit or process could be holding you back from success!

In my business, we've been seeking feedback in this way for a few years now. We get some great feedback, both positive and negative, which helps us tune our processes and our services to better suit the next customer. We've had some really crazy input, too — for example, our coffees were too strong, or we were so good that the client was going to miss our weekly meetings!

There are countless survey software systems available, many of which have a free plan. Alternatively, it's a trivial matter to whip up your own web-to-email form. The trick is to avoid asking questions that are too leading: “Did you find our design team very enthusiastic?”, or that allow for only yes or no answers — keep questions open. Keep the form brief, too — if it goes on for pages and pages, clients will be hesitant to complete it.

The next important step is to act on the feedback. It may warrant a call or meeting with the customer for further details, or speaking to team members (or yourself) if there was something amiss. And remember to give praise where it's due — we all enjoy a pat on the back from time to time!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 418 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

Want to help Australia's web industry?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:59 GMT

The Australian Web Industry Association is having our Annual General Meeting next month, which means we've once again got a number of committee positions available for nominations and voting.

The positions are typically for a period of two years, and involve a 1-2 hour monthly teleconference (Eastern States committee) or face-to-face (if in WA), as well as participation in our committee email mailing list (time requirement varies with role, typically 30 – 90 minutes of reading/replying per week).

The reward, being a volunteer position, is the great feeling and fame(?) that you are steering Australia's longest running web industry Association, and helping shape events (such as Edge of the Web and Australian Web Awards), education and other activities that AWIA are involved with.

There are seven positions on the 12 member board this year, so there is no better time to get involved!

Nominations close at midnight, Friday 24th July. The only prerequisites are that you need to be a financial member of AWIA, and have a keen interest in the web industry. We encourage members from all states to be involved – this ensures a better national coverage.

To nominate for a position on the board, please email a nomination, consisting of a 50-100 word biography to secretary@webindustry.asn.au before the deadline. All nominee statements will be published on the AWIA website allowing people to read about you before voting (if required) at the AGM.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below, catch me on Twitter (@milesb) or via email using miles@webindustry.asn.au

Secrets to a Great Sales Proposal

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:20 GMT

Egomaniacs who are their own favorite topic. We all know someone like that, right? But are we in danger of coming across that way in our sales proposals?

Pardon, I hear you cry! How could we sound like this? Well, for a start, do you spend the first few pages covering all the awards you have won, and the bright history of your team? How far into the document before you learn what the prospect wants? Are the prospect's objectives even covered in your proposal?

Iâ€™ve read many sales proposals from web companies over the last decade or so, and it still amazes me when I come across this type of example: a mind-numbing twenty pages in length, with pages 1 to 16 about the web company, and page 17 the first sign of discovering what the prospect wanted.

How did I get my hands on this proposal? Well, our company won a job, and the client gave me this blundering document to show what not to do in business. We shared a laugh reading through the novel-length sales pitch togetherâ€”where they also took the liberty of misspelling the client's name on the covering page!

The secret of successful proposals is to focus on what the prospect wants to hear. They want solutions to their problems, benefits for their projects, and most of all, they want to be convinced that you understand what they need. Sixteen pages talking about yourself (especially at the beginning) is subconsciously stating that you believe you are far more important than their project!

You should mention who you are and what you do, but after their project details, and one or two pages should suffice. Or perhaps make it a separate document entirely.

Make sure youâ€™ve included the basics: timeline, budget, and deliverables. Reiterate your understanding of the prospect's requirements, and make sure your proposal clarifies how your solution will help them.

Spell-check, then spell-check againâ€”misspelling a prospect's name is just plain lazy. Use short sentences, avoid long paragraphs, and keep the entire proposal succinct; a technical specifications document can run to dozens of pages, but a sales proposal shouldnâ€™t. Speaking of technical, donâ€™t get all abbreviated on the client. The average prospect doesnâ€™t know what half the abbreviations we use mean, and we shouldnâ€™t expect them to, either.

Sell benefits, not products. You may have a great content management system, email gateway, or other product, but talk about the benefits of these, not the product features.

Include testimonials or links to similar projects if you can. This shows you have a proven track record, and understand their requirements.

If you lack any design skills, ask a colleague to give the document some sparkle, and then use this as a template. A polished document is clearly marked with headings, sub-headings, and block quotes (if required).

Conclude the proposal with a call to action. Donâ€™t just end it with a price for the job. State what the terms are, and make it easy for the prospect to action the starting process. For example: “Send this page back, signed and dated, and we can commence immediately” is far better than a dollar figure on the last line.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 417 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.8

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:50 GMT

I've upgraded to Wordpress 2.8 (from 2.5). I promise never to be so lazy again. Please let me know if you experience any problems with the site.

Thank you.

I promise, there are real posts coming soon.

The first SchwaCMS goes live!

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:10 GMT

After the last announcement of MadPilot’s new CMS, I'm proud to follow it up with the announcement of the first site to use Schwa as it's backend: Greenvale Mining NL.

Greenvale was designed by the ever-so-talented Adrianne from bird.STUDIOS, and was sliced by the latest edition to the twotwenty family: Niaal Holder from Speak.

We have a number of sites being launched over the next couple of week so watch this space!

Dear clients…

Wed, 27 May 2009 02:02 GMT

Please watch:

Introducing meftos.com

Mon, 25 May 2009 10:35 GMT

I've been pretty busy lately, and haven't had anytime for some good old fashioned hacking. I've also been copping some flack for letting my ruby-fu lapse (it seems a lot can happen in three months. Actually a lot happens in three minutes), so I decided to clear a couple of hours last weekend to have a play with GitHub, haml and sass, and just to generally get friendly with ruby again.

I recently read a couple of articles about the doom and gloom around URL shorteners and how if a couple of the big ones collapsed the entire intergoop would fall on it's face. Whilst that is a little bit of an over exaggeration, there is some food for thought in that statement. I was also reading about the collapse of magnolia (I know - old news. Sue me). Many an innocent bystander lost many months or years of bookmarking just because one site went down. Whilst I'm a fan of the cloud, I'm also a bit of a control freak, so this was a little scary.

I've been using del.icio.us for a while, but only for the bookmarking facilities, not the social part. And even though Yahoo probably won't go broke any time soon, I was wondering what would happen if they decided to close the big bookmarker in the sky down. So meftos.com was born.

meftos.com is a personal bookmarker and url shortener built in Rails. It only has one user (you), and you host it yourself. From a URL shortening point of view, there is no one point of failure - sure if a number of individuals remove their servers, you will have some broken links, but that if far less impact than one mega site bombing.

If you have a server that can run Rails, you too can install your own copy - feel free to skin it, and change it's same. All of the source code is on GitHub, and I'm told you can nearly use it out of the box on Heroku. Play around, feel free to kick the tyres. There is still some stuff to do - namely search, better user management (There is no simple user management gems in Ruby any more - I'll probably have to write my own) and some other bits and pieces, but it seems to work ok.

More importantly, I got a little glimpse again of why coding makes me happy. That should keep me warm on those cold, winter nights…

West Coast Bloggers

Presenting Phone Numbers

Phrase verses Numbers

Presenting the Contact Details

New Bam Creative website

The Last Road Block for Your Customers – Web Forms

The Form in Question.

Number of Fields - Only What You Require

The Need Print out of the Form

Fieldsets and Grouping

Help

Encouragement Along the Way

Create Steps

Date of Birth

Clear Labels

Add White Space

Avoid Multiple Columns

Terms and Conditions

Final Submit Button

Processing the Form

Accessibility issues

Something to consider

Produce Prototypes

Some User Testing