Design, Develop, and Grow
The Google Personalized Homepage is a great tool for adding feeds and also showing the latest posts from Google Reader and Google Mail.
I noticed today that you can now select certain themes for your Personalized Homepage. Most of the themes I tried actually update themselves to local weather conditions. I hope Google allows users to submit their own themes soon.
Whether you’ve been put in charge of your corporate website, or you’re a freelancer who’s been hired on, designing a website for a corporation is never routine. There are turf wars, inner-departmental battles, upper management issues, and precedent that you must deal with.
Typically with freelancer jobs, there is only one client. However, in a corporation, there are many clients that you will have to deal with. These clients could be head of certain departments, divisions, or offices.
Listed below are ten short tips for coordinating clients in a corporate environment. These tips are listed in no particular order.
Sometimes you will have to remind the clients that there is a reason that you are the web developer and they are not. There are times you will have to deal with a client that might actually know something about web development and questions you on a particular design decision. During these intense moments, it is crucial to listen and state your logical reasoning behind making a design decision.
The problem with dealing with multiple clients is that each one has a different idea of how a website should behave. You need to be empowered to make the final decision, however. Design by committee is never a good thing. Establish your authority to make the design decisions and make sure the upper management will back you when your client screams that web sites should never scroll.
When you inevitably step on someone’s toes, it is important that the upper management has your back if a client strongly disagrees. One of your first jobs is to assure the upper management that you are the expert in web development. If a client then starts a fire, the upper management will be able to quickly put it out.
In any working environment, it’s extremely helpful and beneficial to get to know people outside of work. Go out to lunch with your clients. Get to know them. If you start to get to know them on a personal level, the clients will be more willing to help you do your job.
Establishing a style guide is crucial. Style guides not only define the look and feel of the site, but also the behavior. A style guide will also force you as a designer to think through your decisions from beginning to end. The corporation may already have some kind of style guide. If that is the case, use that guide as a foundation for yours. The web style guide should be different, but do not venture too far away from the corporate style guide if there is one.
An example of a good style guide is A List Apart’s style guide.
How you do your style guide is up to you. If the style guide has upper management approval, you’ll have a standard to fall back on when someone disagrees with a certain part of the design.
When dealing with departments or divisions, it is absolutely critical that there is a single point of contact for each one. If you don’t have a single point of contact, then there will be nothing to stop dozens of different people from contacting you and flooding you with content changes, design “suggestions”, and the like.
Allow the clients to see your progress. It’s one thing to constantly ask the client for information and the client has no idea why he/she is doing the extra work. It’s another to show the client the work you are doing so that the client knows what the end result will be. It’s an extra way to show that the client’s feedback and contributions matter.
Make sure you communicate to your upper management the tools you need. If the corporation does their own hosting, make sure you have the privileges to build the website. If the corporation needs to make a hardware/software purchase, make it very clear that without these tools, you will not be able to do your job. The point here is to get what you need up front.
Get to know the names and locations of all of the key players in the corporation. These key players will be upper management, the database administrators, the IT people, and the department heads. These key players can either make your job easier, or make it a living hell. Make sure each of these key players knows why you are there and what job you are trying to accomplish.
While it is important to not overwhelm your clients with techno-speak, it is also important to educate them as to the benefit of the latest design techniques such as web standards. Since most of the clients won’t know the difference between MS Outlook and Web 2.0, educating your clients is more of a “show and tell” type thing. Show your clients why you are doing things rather than telling them about it.
The last tip doesn’t necessarily have to deal with coordinating clients, but it is important to stay on top of your industry. If you are a freelancer, make sure you take the time to learn new skills. If you are a corporate employee doing webmaster duties, try to convince the upper management of the importance of giving you time to learn new skills (such as training and seminars).
I hope you found these tips helpful. If you have your own tips for working within corporate environments, please share them in the comments.
Thank you for reading.
Every designer/developer at one point needs to think of a system to manage their content. Content management systems (CMS) have literally changed the way designers design. With most content management system requiring themes, designers have to design immense flexibility into a layout.
What makes content management systems so powerful is their extendability. Platforms that can be used as a CMS (such as WordPress and Drupal) have a strong community following and have made almost anything possible with the platforms as far as managing content goes.
One of the benefits of good content management system is the ability for non-techies to update websites. In an ideal corporate environment, every department would be in charge of updating their web content. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and the work usually gets piled onto a webmaster figure. WebEdit Professional tries to make it easier for website collaboration on a large scale. The rest of this article is dedicated to a review of WebEdit Professional and explains the strengths and weaknesses of the application. One thing to note is that for this review, I only had access to their online demo, which means I wasn’t able to try out their install or theme creation process.
WebEdit Professional is geared towards designers/developers who want to allow the clients to update a website themselves. WebEdit allows clients to edit specific sections of a site with a very robost WYSIWYG editor (clients can also edit the raw HTML if desired). Clients are able to create and modify new files and upload images and other objects without the need for an FTP client.
After logging in to the CMS, you are taken to a file manager. The file manager is nothing special, but it does the job. I’m personally not fond of the approach of the file manager because it requires the end user to have a vague familiarity with a file system and the site’s structure. If you’ve ever been in a corporate environment, there are still some people that raise an eyebrow when you tell them to save an item to the desktop.
The CMS allows you to upload a file or start a new page. However, my attempt to upload a file resulted in an error, “A File Name MUST contain a valid extension.” This begs the question of, “What is a valid extension for a file?” For those wondering, I attempted to upload a CSS file.
Defeated in my effort to upload a stylesheet, I decided to create a new page.
When creating a new page, you are taken to a new screen that allows you to select a theme and specify the file’s name.
One thing to remember here is that this CMS is supposed to be geared towards the non-tech savvy people. Is having to select a page theme and typing out a full file name intuitive for a non-techie? I leave that answer open for debate.
Upon creating my new file, I was taken back to the file manager. I would have liked to have been taken straight to the editor rather than having to search for my newly created file.
Central to any CMS is the WYSIWYG editor. In my opinion, this is the make-or-break for any CMS. I have to admit that I was fairly impressed with the CMS until I noticed a few things that I simply could not overlook.
The first odd thing I noticed was this little message at the bottom of the WYSIWYG that said, “FireFox Restrictions.” The popup window that came up after I clicked on the message explained to me about typing in about:config and finding some value and changing it so that the WYSIWYG would work fully. This restriction only affects the Copy, Cut, and Paste portions of the WYSIWYG and does not disable the standard Windows keyboard shortcuts.
The WYSIWYG is very well done, but there are some issues. After adding in a “text box” and typing some text, some weird overlap occurred. I went to view the source code and was stung by the bitter aroma of tag soup.
After seeing this mess, I tried adding in my own doctype and formatting the HTML so the code would actually validate. The CMS actually reversed all of the changes I made that were not inside the BODY tag. The WebEdit Pro website says that the CMS is XHTML compatible. I would love to see a working example.
One other thing that threw me for a loop was the ability to add form elements in a page. I’m really scratching my head on this one and perhaps I’m missing something, but if someone includes a form on a page, someone else is going to have to write the back-end to handle that form (and then there’s form validation). Below is a screenshot of the full WYSIWYG with one form element on the page. For more screenshots of the WYSIWYG, WebEdit has several screenshots available.
One last feature of the CMS I will mention is the ability to select which portions of a theme are editable by the end user.
The areas in blue are the only areas allowed to be edited by the end user. As cool as this feature is, there is one serious flaw in the technique. The same problem that popped up with the WYSIWYG and the “FireFox Restrictions” is a little more prevalent. Until the end user performs all the steps to resolve this restriction, the restricted template is truly restricted. I suppose the end user better use Internet Explorer.
WebEdit Professional is a decent CMS. However, I am reluctant to recommend it because I don’t think its easy to use and the browser limitations are just silly.
I can definitely see why some designers would want something like this so that they can rebrand the CMS and sell it (with a nice profit) to their clients. However, I’m not entirely sure the price tag ($179) is worth the price of this CMS when there are several open source alternatives (including Drupal) that seem to have similar (if not better) functionally and ease-of-use. Drupal, for example, is extendable via plugins while WebEdit is not.
WebEdit has a very well done WYSIWYG, but the non-standard code, browser limitations, and usability issues drag it down. WebEdit is a good CMS for those that need a CMS not requiring a database, but for the price and the features, I would recommend seeking an alternative.
The review you just read was a paid review for WebEdit Professional. This is my first paid review I have attempted and am open to any feedback (positive or negative). Thank you. – Ronald
Bes Zain — a former Gravatar moderator — helped contribute to this article.
As reported earlier, the Gravatar Public Beta is live. Within this review, you’ll find screenshots and my opinions of Gravatar’s new features. Please note that Gravatar is a paid service ($10) if you want more than two gravatars and/or more than one e-mail address.
Since I was already registered for Gravatar, I didn’t need to re-register which was nice. And my old Gravatar was there as well. The main screen — dubbed My Gravatars — shows which gravatars you have and allows you to add additional gravatars and/or e-mail addresses.
Since I didn’t particularly like my old gravatar, I decided to add in another one. Gravatar allows you to upload a picture from your computer (the file I used was 1.55 MB) and crop it from there.
One thing I’d like to see here is a status indicator for the image upload and also a limit on the file size uploaded.
Now that I had my spiffy picture uploaded, I wanted to crop it. Gravatar conveniently has a cropping tool that allows you to easily do this. One thing I did notice is that the cropping tool gives you much more control when the picture is at a higher resolution.
Once my gravatar was all cropped and ready, I got to rate it. As tempted as I was to rate my gravatar “X”, I decided to give my gravatar the Disney friendly “G” rating.
There is a potential for abuse here, but I’m glad Gravatar decided to allow users to rate their own gravatars. However, I foresee a problem with the reporting mechanism for abuse. What if it takes too long for an offending gravatar to be taken down? What if the admin is on vacation or something?
When reporting an “under-rated” gravatar, all you can enter in is the offending URL and an explanation. What I think should happen here is that the user can enter in the gravatar’s URL and give the gravatar a suggested rating. If enough users change the rating (say from G to X), then the offending gravatar is automatically changed to a neutral image until the owner of the gravatar changes it and/or the rating.
The owner of the offending gravatar would get a message telling him/her that the gravatar has been labeled as offensive. The owner can then appeal the offensive rating or change the gravatar and/or rating, which will then go into an admin queue. This takes the admin mostly out of the loop and makes the users the moderators.
After uploading, cropping, and rating my gravatar, I had way too many choices to chose from. However, if I want to add one more gravatar, I would have to pay $10 a year. Rather than do that, I selected the gravatar I just uploaded.
Removing a gravatar is simple as well. Just hover over the gravatar you wish to delete and click the bright and shiny red “X”.
It sounds like from this WordPress Podcast that Tom Werner is planning on turning Gravatar into a pseudo-MyBlogLog.
I’m not incredibly convinced Gravatar will be able to pull it off, especially since Gravatar has had such a shaky start. MyBlogLog can almost be a full competitor since it offers a full profile, community, and avatars for comments as well. Gravatar will be playing catch-up for a while if anything.
However, MyBlogLog is bloated and Gravatar (right now) is extremely easy to use, especially for those who don’t own blogs. If Gravatar starts turning into MyBlogLog and still has the admin/server difficulties, there will be nothing to stop people from flocking to MyBlogLog for good, especially since MyBlogLog offers a great amount of services for free.
I also don’t personally see Gravatar surviving very long unless the service secures some serious funding, and right now ten dollars is a little much to pay for more e-mail addresses and gravatars.
I suggest giving Gravatar a second chance and checking out the beta. The service is much improved over what it was before and very easy to use. I foresee a significant problem with Gravatar as far as abuse goes, however.
My skepticism is high as far as the survivability of what I think is a valuable (but not ten dollars worth) service. MyBlogLog is a viable competitor, but it carries a lot of baggage that Gravatar doesn’t have at the moment.
Right now the service is still in beta and is having its ups and downs. If Gravatar cannot reliably stay online and functioning past the beta, I predict that the Gravatar launch will not be a success, especially since the service has already left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.
Gravatar is having a public beta right now. The site was down earlier, but appears to be up right now. I truly hope this is the beginning of the new Gravatar and not the end. I’ll try to write a review (no promises) this weekend after I’ve been able to adequately test out Gravatar’s new capabilities.
