Network Solutions is, I’m sure, a spectacular company to work for, and they have some very satisfied customers.  These facts will not sway my opinion of the company, however.  They’ve been around since the Internet world was dank, dark hole peopled by troll-nerds in basement caves with green and amber monochrome monitors, and memory was denoted by the letter “K” instead of “M” or “G” (which may be the source of the problems I’m about to outline).

Today, I’m attempting to set up a client with a test site so that they can see the superiority of a content management system over their existing static website.  It’s a redesign job that, when I took it, looked like a few fun hours at the office.  In retrospect, I’m going to start charging a “NetSol” fee…

Cute, huh?

That’s right, they’re hosted at Network Solutions (but then, I’ll bet you guessed that already).  So, they’ve given me the accesses I need to make the changes I need to make, and all should be well, right?  Wrong…

I followed every link on their site to find information which should be displayed on the main account management page (even in a little ajax pop-up would be nice).  After an hour, I decided to call the support number which thankfully is prominent.  I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s had difficulty finding something on their site.  Even their site search turns up nothing useful.  Two words, NetSol…  Usability Study…  Perform one. You have the money, and the technology.

I understand, it’s Saturday, so I can’t expect instant service, but I spent 27 minutes on hold, waiting for a customer service rep.  No too awful, except for the fact that the only song in the hold music cue is Pachelbel’s Cannon in D Major.  Once through is enough, but as a divorced man I can think of some pretty bad punk rock I’d rather hear than that tune.

Here’s a piece of advice for anyone with a call center.  If you are likely to have anyone on hold for more than say, five minutes, try playing up Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  I can’t think of a single person who would consider slitting his wrists to stop hearing it, and it likely won’t remind anyone of a wedding.  Not only that, but it’s long if you play the whole thing.  It’ll help pass the time for those 45 minute waits.  When my tech finally did answer, I told her my issue, and her reply puzzled me.  She said, “Oh, your problem is that we do not host that domain.”  Really?  That’s funny, because a quick whois and traceroute says you do.  Not to mention the account information I’m looking at in your account manager…

For some companies, it seems like all their website efforts are aimed at making a sale, and once the sale is made, you’re on your own.  Network Solutions, GoDaddy, and pretty much all the big registrars do exactly that.  The constant up-sell attempts and general lack of post purchase information on their websites is enough to make even the ardent customer groan.  The benefit of GoDaddy is, their site is tacky, busy and loud, so you expect it.  That and the convenient “skip to the end” button when you just want a domain name.  Incidentally, GoDaddy’s hosting is terrible from a technical standpoint as well (maybe more on that later).

If you have an account with Network Solutions, please tell me that you’ve had an easier time finding anything or reaching a technical support representative (and I don’t necessarily mean on the phone.  I mean really reaching them and having them understand your question).  If not, it’ll just cement what I’m saying here.

I, for one, am tired of constant up-sell attempts.  I understand the need for a company to make money, but not everyone needs your stupid website builder, and pretty much no one needs 90% of the other useless crap you try to push on those unsuspecting clients who don’t know the game as well as those of us who are in it.

For prospective clients of any designer or developer…  Have written into your contract the registration of a domain name and procurement of hosting.  Make the contract say you own it, and can switch it at any time, but let them do the work of setting it all up.  That way, you’ll get exactly what you need, and avoid something you’ll regret later (like a half hour of your life lost to Cannon).

I’m not bitter, but I do hope the “let me make a purchase and I’ll let you know if I need anything else” idea catches on.  There aren’t enough hours in the day to keep clicking “no” to other special offers.  As the perfect topper to the support conversation, my tech’s last question to me was, “May I assist you in adding another domain to your account?”

No, dear.  No you may not…

If you own or are considering a website, you’ve probably heard the terms Search Engine Optimization or SEO about a thousand times.  The term (so long as you know what the letters stand for) is self explanatory.  Optimizing your website for search engines sounds like a good idea, as most people still find what they’re looking for using a search engine.  SEO is as much an art as it is a science, and the experts are usually not that far above the folks who do common sense things as far as results.  This makes it confusing, and more than a little intimidating to new folks in the web realm.  Before you pay the possible $50,000 to an SEO pro, let’s talk about how to make sense of it, shall we?  Here are four simple rules (or suggestions).

SEO isn’t as confusing as you might think

Rule 1:  Search engines read text.  If your site has no text, search engines don’t know how to find you.  Examples?  OK, any site done entirely in Flash is an example of a difficult to optimise site (notice I didn’t say impossible).  Flash, while pretty and cool looking when done properly,  is practically useless when it comes to search engines.  I’m not saying not to use flash, I’m saying to use it sparingly.  More on that in another post.

There is also a segment of web artists who try to be all things to their clients, yet lack the skill set of writing CSS.  They tend to leave buttons as images and / or embed text in images.  This is fine if you do it properly but if you do it wrong, no search engine traffic.  It’s far better to use style sheets and text in every place you can.

Rule 2:  Search engines have customers too.  Odds are, you have a website as an extension of your business.  If so, you have customers (or want some).  As a business, you provide your customers what they want.  If you didn’t, they wouldn’t stay customers for long.  Search engines are the same.  Searchers come to them to find the page most relevant their search.  If engines sent searchers to pages that had nothing to do with their search, you guessed it…  The searcher wouldn’t come back to that engine.

How does this information help or hurt you?  Well, Google, for instance, puts a lot of time and energy into making sure the results to searches are accurate and relevant.  This means that they find all the ways people cheat the system and make their search engine ignore those people (or actively shun them).  That way, the searcher finds his 18th century Amish swimwear and not a site about how to make a billion dollars in ten minutes on the Internet.  Make your content match your audience (after a few weeks, this post might rank for Amish swimwear).

Rule 3:  Get your link out there.  Every blog post you read, comment on it (including this one).  Every forum you visit, leave a comment (constructive).  In the comments section of most blogs and forums, there is either a slot to type your website, or a signature block in which you can type your address.  Put your web address in your e-mail signature, on your business card, carve it into a tree…  Just get it out there.  What does this have to do with SEO?  Search engines count the number of links back to your site.  More = good, and your rank goes up the more you post.  Enough said.

Rule 4:  Don’t stress about SEO.  Take a more Taoist approach to it.  If you want more organic search traffic, write more about your topics of interest.  Nothing is more relevant to search engines than a well written article on the subject a searcher is looking for.  What this means is, if your website does not have a blog, you’re wrong.  Blogs are the best way to get free traffic, and I’d go so far as to say building your site on a blog engine is one of the smartest things you could do.  WordPress handles 90% of the SEO stuff for you, so why not take advantage?

This is a cursory overview of what I do for SEO, and I get a lot of first page Google results for very little time investment.  I do it as a part of all the sites I design, and on whatever CMS my client uses. What do you do?  I’d love to hear about it (even if you think I’m an idiot, and I’m doing it wrong).  If you have anything to add, feel free to do so in the comment block below.

I routinely check web viewing trends as far as what browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions the bulk of the web is using.  I feel it’s part of any designer / UI -  UX engineer’s job to do so.  Sometimes the trends make me happy, like the most recent ones about IE6 (the bane of all web design existence).  IE6 is now at about 12% market share.  What this means is, as designers, we can finally stop writing hacks to make sites work properly in it.  I digress…

One of the main reasons to continuously check is to make sure we, in the industry, are doing right by our clients in what we recommend.   Several years ago, it was standard practice to design fixed width sites (sites that don’t adjust for the width of the screen) that worked well with 800 x 600 screen resolution.  Why?  Because a huge number of screens used it.  These days, less than 4% of screens use this resolution so it makes no sense to design for those people (if that’s you and you don’t live in Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s time to move up).  This brings me to the point of the article.

Pretty, ain’t it?

You may not know what a screen resolution is, or why it’s important.  You don’t need to.  My job is to help you understand how it affects you.  As of January of 2009, over 93% of browsers use a screen resolution of 1024 pixels (think of them as dots) wide or greater.  Once again, happy news.  This cements the idea that a fixed width layout can be designed to fit neatly within this screen resolution.  The 960 Grid is a simple CSS framework (I know, big technical jargony words again.  I promise to explain) which makes use of almost the entire screen width of a browser on a 1024 pixel wide screen.

What is CSS?  It stands for Cascading Style Sheets.  CSS is a set of instructions to your browser that explains how it should display the parts of a page.  Some browsers are smart (Firefox, Chrome, Opera and sometimes Safari) and some are really, extremely, very stupid (IE6 and increasingly, IE8).  They all have quirks, but some are better than others at the important stuff.  Their intelligence is derived from the way they handle standard CSS.  There’s a whole science to making certain browsers understand what should be simple instructions, but that’s another story for another day.

So, 960 pixels doesn’t sound like 1024, does it?  There is a good reason for that.  If you look to your right you’ll see a vertical scroll bar.  That takes up between 20 and 30 pixels depending on your browser and your operating system settings.  Now we’re down to 1004 — 994 pixels.  There is sometimes a bit of a border around the browser window which sucks up more space.  Let’s assume a happy medium of 999 pixels of viewable space.  That gives us what’s called a trough (an area of nothing) on either side of the content that’s about 15 pixels wide.  That’s perfect.  What about on my 1680 pixel wide screen, you ask?  Well, there is a significant difference in the trough, but it still looks nice.

When it comes to usability, 960 will cover most of the bases unless you happen to be HavenWorks.com.  That site is broken.  When designing a site on a 960 grid, there are lots of options.  You can set a background image that takes up some of that white space on larger screens, you can make it two columns, three columns and in rare cases, four columns.  You can do all this and still leave a enough space for a little margin between the columns.  Look at the home page of this site as an example.  It’s a three column layout while the subsequent pages are two.

The 960 grid system works well for most applications.  Do I use it exclusively?  No.  Some designers do, but there are reasons not to.  Mostly they revolve around target audience.  For most applications, the 960 grid works for web design.  This will likely be the case until 1024 pixel wide screens go away and are replaced by 1280 (or something else).  Talk to me about what would be right for your site.

I like to design websites.  I like it so much, that I occasionally take on a pro bono project provided it’s for a worthy cause (either that or if a friend of mine has a good idea that’s just for fun).  I have a list of friends who are also designers with whom I converse about design related things and the state of the profession.  We even trade work and referrals on some occasions.

Why would we trade work, you ask?  It seems, on the surface, that giving your potential client to someone else is silly, but look at it from the perspective of the client.  Have you ever met someone who you just knew you couldn’t work with?  There are many reasons you might not be able to work with someone, from the person just rubbing you the wrong way to irreconcilable differences of opinion.  In the design realm, it helps to be adult about those cases.

There are a whole slew of reasons to recommend a client to another designer, not the least of which is style.  No designer is everything to all potential clients.  If my style doesn’t match your business model, attitudes or direction, does it make sense for you to hire me?  Networking with other designers gives us an opportunity to make sure the client gets exactly what is asked.  As any decent designer will tell you, style is vital, especially where a company identity is concerned.  A good image can make a company as surely as a bad one can sink it.

Not all logos send the right message

Have you ever seen a logo and thought, “What was that guy thinking?”  There is a question of style that was never asked when you see things like that. The client either didn’t think through what was needed or didn’t understand that a logo is one of the more important decisions that a business can make.

So what’s the deal with spec (speculative) work?  Firstly, we’d have to define it.  If you come to me and say, “Design me a logo and if I like it, I’ll pay for it,” what should I say as a rational person?  I can think of a few monosyllabic replies which would apply, and the only one which is proper is “no.”  If you were a home builder and someone came to you with a proposal like that, I’m sure you could relate.  That’s what spec work is.  Do the work, and get paid if it is accepted.

You can see how shirts could be lost with this business model.  So, why would anyone chose to do it this way?  Well, the answer is simple.  Many would be designers join the various websites which promote this concept and start cranking out work for people they’ve never met and businesses they know nothing about.  They usually do it to start a portfolio, but some do it to see if they have what it takes to be a designer.  Either way, somebody loses, and usually both sides.

Personally, I think spec is a blight on the design industry.  Not only is it unfair to the potentially hundreds of other submitters (the poor saps who didn’t win), but who ultimately owns all that work?  Does the creative who came up with it, or the company to whom it was submitted?

What about plagiarism?  In the spec community it seems to be rampant.  Let’s say that you have a spec contest to design a logo, and award goes to a 14-year-old kid in Plano.  Did he steal that logo or portions of it from a local company?  Maybe.  You’ll find out when the lawsuit papers show up.

Most good designers don’t want to get a client specification followed by a paycheck.  They want to get to know you, your business, your clients or customers and find out what will appeal to everyone involved.  Speculative work cuts out that personal part of the process.  There is no way to nail a design of any kind on the first try, and believing it should go that way is only going to hurt the client.  Most designers will have an open loop, gathering feedback from multiple sources as they go through the process.  That 14-year-old kid in Plano…  Not so much…

I support initiatives aimed at ending speculative work, but at the same time, I know that those initiatives will not completely eradicate it.  There is obviously a market for it, or there wouldn’t be so many places to have it done.  The only way to stop this unfair, unethical practice is to educate would be buyers of the dangers.  Potential lawsuits, potential missed opportunities and potential business failure are all inside the realm, because design and branding aren’t things to just get off the plate.

Think about that when you shop around.  I’m biased against spec, naturally, but if you look past the surface and into the heart of the matter, you would be too.

I use the GIMP for almost everything.  Before you Photoshop purists go and scream at me, pointing out the reasons I’m an idiot, just hear me out.  I know that GIMP doesn’t do CMYK (at least, it doesn’t do it well), and that the user interface isn’t the way you like it, but I use it just the same.  There are the people who will be angry that I didn’t include their pet image editor in this article (Paint Shop Pro and the like), but really, in my world there are only the two.

Let’s face it.  If you aren’t a designer who does print and screen work, investing in Adobe Creative Suite version whatever isn’t on your short list.  The majority of people in the world who have a legit copy of Photoshop probably couldn’t tell you what half the functions are.  For that matter, don’t even bother asking them what a plugin is.  That leaves a minority who do know all about the Photoshop experience, and they tend to be professionals (or people who stole it).

The GIMP (Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

The GIMP has several things going for it.  First, there’s the price.  I don’t care who you are, but coming up with a better price than free is a tough sell (except that you intend to pay me to use your software).  Second, I’m a big fan of multiple monitors so the GIMP model of not having a stage surrounded by tools is great.  I use four monitors in sort of a cockpit (or command center, as my friend Mike says) configuration.  I put the tools box on one side of the image, the layers / paths box on the other and then I have this huge image area to work with.  With Photoshop, I’d have to stretch the stage across several monitors, and that’s just hard to manage.

Another thing I like about it is the unbelievable number of built in functions.  It must have been a year before I even figured out what most of them were for, and why I needed them.  Many of them you’d have to pay for if you wanted the same thing in PS.  In fact, pretty much every PS plugin I use, I’ve already installed in the GIMP.  That’s right, with a little tweaking, it can run PS plugins.

Then there’s the simple scripting language that allows me to take a long process that I do over and over and make it a button click.  Seriously, can life get better for the lazy?

I know there are thousands of tutorial sites on PS, but most of them want you to join and pay fees to see how to do things that you can go on YouTube to find out for free.  With the GIMP, I have yet to find a tutorial I had to pay to see.  By all means, correct me if I’m wrong.  You can go to Deviant Art and get more brushes and textures than you know what to do with (which is true of PS as well), and making your own is a snap.

So, why do I advocate the GIMP for everyday stuff like cropping and red eye removal?  I believe the idea of great software that is both professional grade and open source is one that should be supported.  My clients always ask me what they should use to make cool pictures for their websites, and if they should buy Photoshop.  I like to let them play with it first.  They get overwhelmed in short order.  They have the same reaction to the GIMP (why is the concept of layers so daunting?), but when I tell them it’s free the choice is made.

That being said, I have and use Photoshop.  I must.  Until a printer can take an RGB GIMP file and make a card or brochure out of it that doesn’t look like it came from an RGB file, or the good folks who write the GIMP come up with a workable CMYK option, I’ll just wait.  It isn’t all that hard maintaining two environments, and I don’t even know if the GIMP folks have any intentions of making the fix.  I’ll keep GIMPing and evangelizing it at the same time.  Maybe then Adobe will reduce the cost of PS to a level that will allow those who don’t earn money with it to use it without piracy.

If you’re in the market for a website, and you haven’t heard about blog engines and Content Management Systems (CMS), you haven’t been in the market for long. The main issue people have with websites in general, at least in my experience, is maintaining them. Folks feel intimidated by learning “HTML” or “programming” (which incidentally is never an issue, because what users do is NOT programming).

These days, there are hundreds of solutions to that problem, but in the interest of time I’m only going to talk about my favorites. What are those favorites, you ask? WordPress, for one…

WordPress started out as a blog engine some years ago, and was based on a wonderful development model called MVC (Model / View / Controller), which is WAY out of the scope of this article, but still awesome. The idea was simple. Make it so that non-coders could run a decent blog without doing a ton of work keeping things uniform. It has evolved onto a full fledged content management system with e-commerce capability and so many free plugins you’d be hard pressed to find that what you need doesn’t already exist.

So how does that translate to helping the aspiring website owner? Well, these days, WordPress has gotten so easy to use, it’s on par with figuring out how to send an e-mail. If you can do that, you can use WordPress effectively.

It can update itself, it can let you know when it needs something and it can take the guesswork out of keeping things uniform. So what’s the catch? Well, quite frankly, there isn’t one. It can be got for the low bargain price of $0.00 and comes as an option on every Linux hosting plan under the sun (more on that in a future article). There are so many free themes (essentially templates) available for free that the enterprising individual can get himself up and running with a cool look in minutes. Setting it up is so easy I taught a 60 year old client to do it in about two minutes (almost said “a cave man can do it”). Did I mention it’s free? It is…

The next great CMS that I recommend is Joomla (or Mambo, because from where I sit, there is little difference). It has come a long way from the old days, and can do some amazing things out of the box. It is not as easy to learn or manage as WordPress, but it’s still pretty easy. I recommend Joomla or Mambo to clients who have complex requirements and want to grow beyond just a commerce or marketing site, or that have a team of people who will be managing the site. Like WordPress, it tells you when it needs updating, and won’t let you do the wrong thing when editing files.

Joomla is also completely free, though more of the premium plugins that you may want you’ll have to pay for. There are hundreds of them, and for most of the things you want to do there is a plugin readily available.

As time progresses, I fully intend to write a few articles on how to do the simple things in both Joomla and WordPress, but you’ll find hundreds of tutorials all over the Internet on most of them. I simply want to put a new spin on those articles and help new users avoid some common mistakes. Experience goes a long way, and while I could do it for you (for a fee) I hate busy work.

Stay tuned.