In the spirit of trying something new, I’ve had an article published on the excellent Find Networking Events site.

Click here to learn what to do if your web site designer has gone out of business.

I’m a web designer.  (You probably noticed that.)  So when looking for services and assistance for my business, I choose providers who have a top notch, efficient, and well constructed web presence.  After all, you wouldn’t choose an architect who lived in a ramshackle house, you wouldn’t choose a chef who hated food, and as a web designer, you wouldn’t choose to place your business in the hands of people who still view the web as a threat to their current business model.

Unfortunately I’m now dealing with two of them.  The first is my business bank, Lloyds TSB.  Their online banking system is a text-only interface, circa 1995, which has one, count ‘em, one image – a heavily optimised jpeg which says “continue to online banking.”  The whole site goes offline for “maintenance” between midnight and 4 AM, which is when we freelancers tend to be hitting our stride.  And the online banking interface’s contact mechanisms literally do not work.  I have now used it to contact the bank about various matters three times.  Anything sent through the interface disappears into a black hole.  You don’t get a confirmation, you don’t get a tracking number, you don’t get an email, you don’t get a callback, you don’t get a letter by post, and you certainly don’t get a personal communication from your assigned “Relationship Manager”, whatever that is.  It’s as if you never contacted them at all.  Today I phoned them to complain about the third instance of a  lack of communication from them and when we eventually got around to discussing the specific issue, the information they gave me over the phone was different from the information provided on their web site.

It’s safe to say I’ll be leaving Lloyds as soon as possible.  The web to them is still some newfangled gadget that they don’t expect people to actually use.  Like many banks, they market themselves as building a personal relationship with you, but I can’t even get them to answer my support requests.  Are they going to understand what I need to grow my web business?  Absolutely not.

The second clueless service is the Public Contracts Scotland web site.  This is the site which lists all public sector tenders in Scotland, with everything from buildings to vehicles to roads to schools to laundry to the Commonwealth Games covered.  Now, every business advisor in Scotland tells you to register on this site.  (It must be in their prepared script.)  So imagine how you feel as a web professional when you see where your profession is categorised: “Other Information Communication Technology.”  Yep, we’re lumped into “Other”, below Call Systems, Consumables, and Reprographic Equipment.   Not surprisingly, the most recent tender listed there was obviously written by a committee of people who have secretaries use their computers for them.  It was so full of pie-in-the-sky jargon which belied a complete ignorance of basic web use that I ended up laughing out loud at it.  Because I’m signed up for email alerts in my “category”, I have to put up with getting alerts for new contracts for the provision of audiovisual equipment.   It’s pretty clear that I’ll never get any business out of my registration there.

It’s staggering to think that in the year 2009, the web itself is still chucked into an “other” catch-all within a subcategory.  Do I want to spend my time putting myself out to people who don’t feel that my profession is worth a name, or do I want to focus on people who view the web as an integrated process – I.E., not the public sector?  It’s a no-brainer.

I’m a member of the surprisingly useful WordPress group on LinkedIn, which counts just under 3,000 WordPress obsessives professionals in its roster.  This week several dozen of us were targeted by a very dodgy (and likely fake) member recruiting people for a “job” that resorted to every cliche in the book.  The candidate would basically use all that hard-earned WordPress wizardry to create up to 500 identical template web sites on certain topics which scrape information from Wikipedia and would refer site visitors to professionals in that business sector who have paid for the advertising space on the site.  There would be no salary or compensation, and your income would be based on a share of the sales commission revenues “your” sites earned in profit at the end of successful commercial transactions, which, in this particular business sector, could take years.

As for the person behind the “business model”, one of his claims to fame includes stalking and physically assaulting one of his employees as well as her three year old child over money he claimed she “owed” him.  Frighteningly, the job offer asked – illegally – whether you have any kids.  Think about it.  Not even the most psychotic Glasgow gangster would stoop that low.

One of the tenets of the No-Spec campaign is:

At the end of the day, there is a certain irony in spec work. A prospect requesting it is ultimately saying, “My project isn’t important enough to hire a professional who will take the time to understand my situation and goals and invest the time needed to create a suitable solution.”

You could well amend that statement to say that if someone doesn’t want to hire a professional above board, there’s a reason for that.

Anyway, details are available on the LinkedIn WordPress group.

Here’s a little trick I just invented.  When using WordPress as a CMS, we often configure it so that a certain post is showcased as a “featured article” on the home page.  That post may well have an image in it.  But for a project I’m currently working on, the design brief calls for the featured article’s image to be displayed as the background in a photo-frame style on the home page, like this.

So how do we extract the post’s image as a background?  To start, the “picture frame” has shadows, so I kept it as part of the div’s background image itself.  So we start with the white box in place already.

First I styled a div for the featured article to fit within the “picture frame.”  I won’t repeat this here, as the way you choose to style your feature is completely up to you.

Then I wrote the code to extract the title and excerpt tags from the latest post in the “Home Page Feature” category.  You can read about how to do it here:

http://wordpressgarage.com/code-snippets/display-posts-from-specific-categories-on-a-page/

I then created CSS styles for the title and excerpt tags.

Now on to the image.  This article will explain how to write a call that will retreive and display images from a post.  After following the guidance in that post, I then enclosed the call within a div, div class=”backgroundfeat”.  It’s important to then style that class so that the image displays behind your title and excerpt tags, but in front of the picture frame.  In my case I went with
z-index: -10;
position: absolute;
left: 0;
right: 0;
top: 0;
bottom: 0;

And voila – the post’s image is now the feature story’s background.

Remember that the image you upload to your post must be sized exactly to fit within the picture frame.

PS – by “picture frame” I mean a thing that holds pictures, not an actual web site frame (god forbid.)

I have had an unusual fortnight of work which has involved a lot of repetitive cutting, pasting, clicking, and circular mouse movements for the work required on two different projects.  There’s simply no way to get around it.  Predictably, my hands are a bit stiff and sore, and my right hand tends to go ice cold from lack of circulation.  Lucky for me, while digging through my desk trying to find something or other, I found my Cat’s Paw hand exerciser.  I’d completely forgotten about it.

What a difference it makes!  60 seconds worth of stretches with the Cat’s Paw leave my hands feeling absolutely normal and healthy again as if I hadn’t touched my computer at all.  My right hand even starts to warm up immediately.  Who cares if the product is so simple that it’s almost silly?  It actually works.

Got the November 2009 issue of .net magazine through the post yesterday, went off for a swim and took the magazine with me in my bag, went for a cappuccino after the swim and sat down to read the magazine, and found myself quoted on page 14. After laughing out loud in a way that made other people in the cafe look at me funny, I skimmed through and found myself quoted again on page 106.

See what happens when you try to take a few hours off work?  No rest for the wicked!

Thanks to Gary for the hat-tip.

Yesterday my post on what goes into a good web design contract got a pingback from Smashing Magazine, so I’ve been enjoying a happy little spike in traffic. The ensuing discussion raises the question of whether web designers should provide clients with backups of their site files and what they should charge for them.

The answer is: bloody hell, of course you should be providing your clients with file backups; and no, you shouldn’t charge for them.

I provide my clients with a backup of both the site files and the database on the handover CD that goes to them upon site launch.  If the site is a WordPress site, as is 90% of my work at the moment, I activate the WP DB Backup plugin and set up a regularly scheduled backup. The backups are automatically emailed to me and, through an email filter, go straight into a designated folder. I don’t ever have to deal with the files; they are simply there “just in case.”  For larger clients, the backups go directly to them, and they are trained on what they need to do with the files during the tutorial process.  Backups for all clients are also regularly uploaded to my offsite storage account.

If, in a worst case scenario, something happened which required me to restore a backup for a client, I would simply charge them my standard hourly rate.  It has not happened yet.

Providing a file backup does not invalidate copyright for any party.  As long as you have defined rights to files and content in your contract, the stated rights still stand no matter how many backups are produced.

If you refuse to create backups for your client, be aware that there are utilities and programs they can use to download sites themselves.  You can protest if you want and even threaten to take them to court, but good luck finding a lawyer willing to represent you.  Suing your own clients for a situation that you are completely responsible for creating yourself is a no-win scenario.  Web design is not about creating an aggressive environment where you are constantly trying to paint your client into a corner, and vice-versa; if you feel it is, it’s time to find a new career.

All in all, backup processes, whether performed as a one-off or on a regular basis, are completely automated and run in the background.  Contrary to what a lot of dodgy designers might moan, it’s not difficult, it’s not expensive, and it does not create a lot of work for them.  I regularly hear horror stories from frustrated business owners whose dodgy designers never gave them any site backup and want to charge them upwards of £100 to make one.  Bull.  I laugh at designers who charge their clients for backups, because aside from being daft, it proves that the designer is a bad businessman.  Backups are not a “product” and they are not a stream of income.  If you want to increase your earnings, raise your hourly rates or factor in two hours of billable time at the end of the project for handover creation. Charging for backups is the sure sign of a designer who has no confidence in his professional abilities.  It smells desperate.  And desperation stinks.

If you’re a designer, what else should go into a handover package?

Aside from file backups, the most comprehensive inventory of what designers should include in their web site handover packages can be found in Shirley Kaiser’s book, Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists.

If you’re a business owner:

Business owners should clarify the handover and backup arrangements with a potential designer before hiring them.  Make sure that you will receive a handover package at the end of the project containing all the project files and documentation as well as a backup of the site at launch.  If the topic of file backups causes temper tantrums and threats of extra fees from the firm, how are they going to react if something actually goes wrong?  Additionally, asking about backups can unveil facts that some designers would rather keep hidden.  I have indeed seen cases where the truth only came out at this stage that to create a backup, the “designer” would have to ask the people who actually do the work…in Delhi.  Choose a designer with integrity who will not micromanage their relationship with you and can be trusted to make the best decisions for your business.

It’s funny cos it’s true…

I went networking last night.  Overall I enjoy networking.  What I don’t enjoy is something I have to deal with pretty much every day of my life:

“So where is the accent from?”

I realise people are just trying to be polite and make good conversation, but does it not occur to them how much it drives me up the wall to be be placed into the same conversation every time I open my mouth?  At an event like last night, I end up answering the same cursed round of questions (so where is the accent from, so what brought you here, so how long have you been here, so do you like it here?) about 15 times.  On a good day, it’s annoying.  On a bad day, it makes me feel like what I came to call the “foreigner freakshow”, where people are only interested in hearing cutesy human interest stories out of someone from that place they see on TV.

Everyone – from networkers, to doctors, to the lassies behind the till, to waiters, to bankers, to strangers on buses – wants to run through the same questions with me.  Every day.  Multiply that by 365 days a year times seven years, and it’s small wonder I’m ready to scream.  It’s also why I generally avoid taking taxis.  If I don’t run through the same tired round of questions – which make it clear that I’m now a local – the driver assumes I’m a tourist and tries to charge me £35 for a three mile trip.  Ye cannae win!

I wish people would understand that I don’t hear my accent, nor do I hear other people’s accents.  I only hear words.  I was quite self-conscious about my accent when I first moved to the UK, and realised very quickly that it was a quick route to complete emotional paralysis.  So I stopped caring about my accent, and remarkably, so did many in return.  But I forget that other people only hear the intonations and nationality, and not the words and context.  People can’t of course see with their eyes that I’m now a naturalised British citizen.  Legally and emotionally, I have more in common with them now than I do with friends in the US, and I can’t help but wish that people I meet here would approach me from the starting point of what we have in common rather than what makes us different.

The irony, of course,  is I don’t have either an American or a Scottish accent now.  My accent is hovering somewhere over the Titanic.  After years of complete immersion in Glasgow, I don’t sound remotely American, and Americans don’t sound at all like me.  But I’m miles away from sounding Glaswegian or Scottish.  It’s not something I do on purpose, it’s simply the natural progression that all languages take (as my former boss in Washington will tell you with a 56-slide power point presentation).  I sound like me, basically.  I can’t be categorised.  And if you want to really annoy someone in the UK, be someone who can’t be categorised and ranked into a tiny little box on the spot.  It’s waving a red flag to a bull.  So the questions will continue every day.

In my business, I won’t work with people who are seeking to make an issue out of my nationality and accent, positive or negative.  Another experience learned the hard way.  After my disastrous role in the public sector came to a quick close, I learned from a company mole that – as I’d suspected – the only reason I’d been hired was because the managing director thought I would be the “token American” in the company, chirping feelgood enthusiasm and that sort of pish that aligned with his touchy-feely-huggy way of thinking.  My skills, expertise, and talents meant less in his mind than the qualities he assumed I toted around in my genetic makeup.  It was devastating and yet so obvious.  When you get a job, you assume you have been hired because you are the best person for the task, not because someone else expects you to fulfil their ill-informed national stereotype.   I learned I had to take steps to protect myself from wasting any more of my best efforts on someone else’s twee “tokenism”.  So after that experience, I decided to make my nationality a non-issue.  I just wish, when I’m trying to talk about what I have to offer and only receive tedious trivia questions in return, others would do the same.

</kvetch> or </whinge>, depending.

This amusing data was in my Statcounter blog stats this morning.  It’s obviously a would-be spammer checking to see if previous spam comments got through, meaning this blog would be ripe for the picking – which it’s not.

You almost have to feel sorry for this guy.  You can’t help but visualise some loser sitting alone at home in the dark in Houston checking blogs for spam gibberish, probably still thinking he can make thousands of dollars every week out of it like the banner ad said he could.