Firefox Usage Worldwide in Sep 2009 by ottodv

No modern computer should be without Firefox, it is even being installed by default on our machines at work by our IT team, and hey, it is free for anyone and everyone to download, so if you haven’t already, you should. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

There are a few things you can install to improve Firefox a bit though, and no one within a web design/development agency or similar work place, should be without the following three tools, if nothing else because it will make your life a LOT easier if your end product is web based in the slightest.

1. Web Developer Toolbar: (download here)

Firefox Web Developer Add-on by John Griffiths

Don’t let the name fool you, anyone working with anything web related should have this installed in their Firefox (which possibly should be your main browser for checking web sites). It allows you to check alt attributes for images, it links off to different validators, it allows you to disable CSS, images, it can show you the colour palette of the web site you are looking at etc. In short, if you explore it a bit it will make you sound really knowledgeable on these topics, mainly because you will be.

You can read more about what it can do over at Six Revisions and also over at WebDesign10.

2. Quick Java (and JavaScript): (download here)

Javascript etc

Even though you can switch off JavaScript with Web Developer Toolbar, this makes it even quicker, by placing icons in your status bar.

The benefit with this is that if Flash has been implemented correctly this also turns off Flash on the website, and we very often make Flash web sites/components where you have to check/verify the non-flash version of it. This extension makes this a 2-second job (click it, refresh page).

3. Clear Cache Button: (download here)

No cache image to be found

…and yes, very often the first question a developer will ask you is “have you cleared your cache? Are you sure? Really?” when you approach them with a “…but it isn’t working!?! I can’t see anything new!“.

If you have this installed you can turn this as well into a 2 second job (like above, click it, refresh page), without having to do a massive menu-search-and-find exercise.

firebug by zulsdesignblog

If you are keen on REALLY finding out how web sites work, also check out Firebug.
It will show you download speeds of particular files, allow you to inspect any element of a page etc and is a power house of nifty functions. It even comes with plugins of its own. You can read more about that over at Tech Hail.

Ok. That was actually four add-ons, but that is ok, they are all good.

Have you installed them all?
Good. We just turned up the web savviness a notch.

You can thank me later.

W3C no valida CSS by arrayexception

Blimey, found this in my list of drafts, guess I didn’t finish it because I started it between dishes during Xmas Day and family weren’t too impressed with me typing away on computer.

Anyways, just wanted to highlight that the guys behind the W3C validator (still) need support. Without the HTML validator (and the CSS validator etc) the landscape of what today is “semantic HTML” would have been infinitely different, and regardless of your thoughts on W3C being fast/slow moving or if you like/dislike how they decide things, the validator(s) have been there all along, for you, me and us all to use. They have created assurance where there wasn’t any, they have been a support when you needed them and they have been nagging you and forcing you to up your game when it comes to your code. If you work with front-end code in the slightest they have played a major part in how your work has been shaped.

Now, however, they do need your help. Running, hosting and updating the validators isn’t free. How this can be done has already been said perfectly by Molly so I shall quote her instead:

dsc_5760 by mathiashellquist

We’ve set up a donation system to allow for a number of different donations concepts: Donor, Sponsored, Community Fundraising, and in the spirit of open source and standards, plenty of opportunity to give of your time and knowledge to assist with the work.
It works like this:
* Donor: A donor is anyone interested in donating money to the cause. A micropayment of 1.00 USD if the validator “saves your day” can be very helpful!
* Sponsor: A sponsor is a company or organization that donates to the W3C
* Community Fundraising: There are two badges available at the W3C that link to the fundraising page. If you support the validator, encourage others by placing a badge on your site and blogging about the topic
* Time Not Money: If you cannot or do not wish to donate money, your time is as or even more valuable. There are opportunities to help the W3C maintain and grow validation services. – www.molly.com/2008/12/11/w3c-validators-in-jeopardy/

There you have it. You might notice I have my little badge in the footer, not to say that this site validates (as that would be a lie, but hey, you are here, you are reading the site, and I am aware of that it doesn’t validate) but instead to make it easier for you to donate what you can for a worthy cause, or for you to get a badge of your own.

rss by Jinho.Jung

This is just general information for house keeping issues regarding this site. If you are one of the people who follow this site via the RSS feed, there may or may not be issues in the next few weeks. For my feed I am using the very competent and clever services provided by Feedburner. Now, I am not the only one finding them good, and in fact Google found Feedburner so good they decided to buy the company.

As I (like most of western society) have a Google account, the theory is that the transition from Feedburner to Google will be fairly seam-less, and that we will notice little to no change in how the service works. The reality is currently somewhat confusing though, and I right now feel like I’m in between two accounts, and not entirely sure which one it picks up. Last night I could log-in to my “new” account (using my Google username etc) on the Feedburner site, after some confused clicking around. Today I can’t, as in at all, and have to use my old Feedburner credentials. One of the feeds has 0 subscribers, the other one has the old number, both of them pointing to the originating feed from this site.

I’m letting you know I shall hopefully have clarity on the matter in the next few weeks, and that it until then might be patchy on the RSS front. Otherwise: be careful out there.

Edit: Apparently not just me: www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/22/feedburner-needs-to-get-it-together/ can tell you more about it.

Edit2: This article is obviously dated now, and it all seems to be back and working in normal fashion.

Back to the Future?

In April 2008 I wrote a blog post called FW: A question on what the ‘future web will resemble’ where I was trying to predict (well, give my view…) how I saw the web would pan out in the near future. My conclusion, which was based entirely on my own personal experiences and views, was that I would be looking for something somewhere that enabled me to manage “my web”, either on the web or as a desktop application, and which would bring my web to me, as opposed to forcing me to go to all these other sites and services to do various tasks.

I was reminded of that post today when I was reading this article on ReadWriteWeb regarding a “central dashboard”, which in turn linked off to both an originating post by Marc Canter, as this very much ties into the conclusion of my old blog post.

Today however, one year later (give or take) I have expanded on the idea…or “brainchild” if you like, heavily inspired by attending various conferences and listening to people like Tantek speaking about Microformats and hCards, the guys from Dopplr talking about controlled sharing between services etc which has led me to add things to my wishlist, so Marc, if you would be reading this, can we add a few things, not only to the DiSO but also to the services?

One Centralised User Profile

Complex

For example, I would like to have one online profile to update. Not two. Not 20. Not 200. One. It should be possible to synchronise that profile between whatever various Services I would be using. If I add another service, say Upcoming, it should ask me if I would like to start a profile OR if I have an existing profile that I would like to import.

Now people would, rightly so, point out that there most probably will be data disparity between the two services, and what might not be an input field at all on my profile for say last.fm might be a mandatory field on Upcoming, and this is obviously where it turns…tricky (please note, I wasn’t saying this was simple wishes, heck I didn’t even say they were possible) seeing as the amount of stakeholders between services in theory could be nigh on infinite. Just because it is somewhat tricky doesn’t mean I doesn’t want it though, and this is my wish list.

As the “Matt’s” from Dopplr pointed out though, quite a few things on profile pages for the various services we already do use, basically contain the same stuff, at least at the rudimentary level. Besides, the amount of data on a profile page is hardly that heavy nor scary, so if all services could incorporate a flexible system for adding a bunch of fields I think we’d find rather quickly that we have reached a general global profile need quite quickly, and the sites themselves could instead add a “Settings” page (or similar) for the data that is of interest to them and to no one else regarding the function of their service.

One Centralised Friends List

My Facebook Network by dennisar

On that note, another thing I also would like would be One Friends list, that would be easily imported/exported between the services. In my case I have about 400 Facebook “friends”, about 200 Twitter friends (or people that I follow), another 200+ on LinkedIn etc. The vast majority of online friends actually are in that Facebook list though (which is bizarre as that is the service I use the least) and the duplication of friends is massive. It would be awesome if I could manage and maintain one friends list which highlighted when they added a new service, or indeed the other way around, if I added a new service (possibly from seeing some of my friends using it) I could just easily re-connect with these friends in the new service.

This, again, is where it turns tricky though (but as stated above, this is my wish list, not a blueprint, if you don’t like my wish list either complain in the comments or write your own), as there is one thing I know for sure: I do NOT want to share everything with everyone. Grouping of friends is really important, and to be able to allow me to target my content to those groups would be absolutely crucial, seeing as I have my mum, my boss, most colleagues, my heavy metal friends, my old role playing buddies, heck I even have (the few) “normal” friends on there somewhere etc on the various services and I most definitely could imagine sharing things with some of those groups that would be downright inappropriate to share with another group.

Also, as with Twitter, there might be people who I think I’m “friends” with and they think I’m not really their best buddy, and therefore they might not want to read my updates.

Fictional Example

So…say that this is the normal behaviour of Services in the future. A typical (but fictional) usage example might go something like this:

half empty half full by the|G|™

I sign up on Upcoming. It asks me if I would like to use my OpenId or create one, and I pick my existing OpenId. When it comes to the profile it offers me to either create a new user profile or to import one from my existing services. I choose to import my last.fm profile and Upcoming takes me to last.fm, where I again login with my OpenId, to verify that I allow Upcoming to in fact use my profile data.

I tweak my Settings page on Upcoming, which is now (this is the future, remember?) separate from the profile page, to make the site behave like I would like to. I then would like to find some mates. Again I am given the option to import a list of friends from another service, and I choose Facebook (that is where everyone are after all and it could be my One Central Friends List), and Upcoming takes me to Facebook, where I of course login with my OpenId and get to a page where I allow Upcoming to use my friends list. I don’t want to import ALL my (400+) friends to Upcoming though, only the select 30-40 that I choose to import. All is well, my 40 mates are in, and I get to split them up in 3 separate groups, “Metal Heads”, “Uber Geeks” and “Photography friends” to allow me granular control over what I share with which group.

Then I add my Upcoming details to my (DiSO?) Dashboard and I can manage the whole thing where I am, when I want. Or something. Over course: a few weeks later a couple of newly found friends have connected with me directly via Upcoming. When I login on Facebook it detects that I have “new friends” and asks me if I would like to import “the difference”, which I do.

…not really a conclusion on this one…

Happy ending?

Those are the two big additions I have, at least for now, but hey, in Social Networking/Apps/Media one could argue that your user profile (ie You) and your friends list (ie Your Network) are quite important and…umm…big.

If we could add that functionality to the various services it would make the DiSO Dashboard even more powerful, in particular if I could manage it all from it.

Thoughts? Comments? Scroll down.

Details

This is a re-post of a blog post I wrote for another blog which is now defunct. The post itself is sort of timeless though so figured I could put it on this blog as well, if nothing else to archive it.

Just tying together an e-mail I received with an article I read and my general thinking of late (which was actually based on my flat, and what isn’t working in it, though it is shiny enough), I think we (as a generic mass of web site creators) too often overlook “the little things”, all of which combined create the overall feel, or lack of, for a product.

Looking at a forest from afar usually generate “big, green” and even “over there” when someone describes it whilst not being in it. If you ask someone who actually is in the forest what they see, they look at leaves, branches, roots sticking up, rock formations, butterflies, birds and their singing, and all sorts of things, and they are pretty detailed in their description. Quite often it is that level of detail that forms the foundation for their feelings towards the subject matter, good or bad.

Another angle

Through the leaf by sbisson

This has had me thinking lately about approaching design of web sites from the other angle, and to this end the e-mail I refer to, that was pointing to this article over at Think Vitamin written by Paul Boag, came in rather perfectly timed to my inbox. Paul says it a lot better than I could (please follow/read the links) but the consensus was basically to look at a site design not starting from the landing page or “home page”, but from the lower level content pages and work your way “up” to the home page. The theory being those pages amass the main bulk of content of the site anyways, so we’d better get those right, right? Besides, you don’t know where the user enters the site, do you?

This is where it tied into my own thinking of late; never finding enough time to actually design my own various personal sites I had been thinking I perhaps should start with the little things; favicon, search form field and button, comment forms, list styles etc, and that it all, when put together, would look really cool (in my mind at least). This is where I also started realising that quite a lot of what we try to do (not only for my personal sites, but as web professionals), in the end, boils down to forms, which isn’t the sexiest of topics, but clearly one of importance to get absolutely right.

Different priorities

Measure success

I mean my designer colleagues would like sites that “look good”, me as a techie would like a site that “works well”, but what clients most often ask us for involves forms in one way or another, and said forms are often after thoughts to the design and the function of the site. In fact, pretty much the entire exercise of the site(s) often boil down to a sign-up form, a send-to-a-friend form, order forms, contact forms etc. It is all, not surprisingly really, very business led.

If it looks nice, well…nice. If it works well, well…fine. “How many users signed up?“, “How many more units have I sold?” and “Which of my old customers signed up for the new product?” are all questions it will all boil down to for the client when answering to their boss regarding Return Of Investment which is the only thing the boss really cares about.

Your site visitor is a potential friend – treat them well

Hel Fucking Vetica by jazzmasterson

This is of course where Khoi Vinh’s post about an upcoming book regarding forms (yep, those are 3 separate links) struck a chord with me. That post links off to another site by the book author as well as another article on the subject of Forms For Financial Institutions, both which highlight problems, and actual failings leading to customer drop off, with forms. And yes, you can probably learn a thing or two, even if your day job isn’t about financial institutions.

It also ties in nicely with my campaign at work in trying to get my colleagues to push back on clients that request massive sign-up forms “just in case” or “because they can [ask for it]“, for which I’m using 37 Signals Ryan Singer’s, of Basecamp fame, excellent session at FOWD London 2007 as ammunition, and you can find his presentation over here.

Not Rocket Science, is it?

Rocket Science

Now, Ryan just approaches the sign-up process with a logical and clear mind and a load of common sense, but my oh my was it refreshing! Simple things as “it is more difficult to make things up than to tell the truth” and “make it easy for the users to sign up and play around” all the way to “only ask for more details when it is needed” and “the users don’t care about your product, they care about how cool they look when they are successful solving their task [with your product]“.
That last one can be a sticking point for clients. The realisation that customers actually might not value the clients brand as much-ly as the client does sometimes seems like a mind hurdle for the client. It is only when you realise this though, and that the customers might turn to the competition, especially if they don’t have a 7 page form to fill in, where it might actually affect the bottom line. Better get those forms right eh?

Small things to keep in mind

It could also be that the competitions favicon in the customers bookmarks leads the eyes. It could be any number of small things. So do yourself a favour for your next project:

• Design from the ground up, create content pages before you create the main landing page.
• Remember the forms, their layout (in different browsers…yes, do test…), and please please please think about where the error messages go on the screen.
• Of course, style your forms so the are appealing and simple to fill in in the first place.
• Create your favicon (yeah, I’m a big fan of those)
• Yes, the site icons does matter.
• …as does the hover states.

…so yes, of course, the Devil is in the details.

Have any more suggestions or comments on what usually is forgotten but shouldn’t be, or that perhaps have heightened your browsing experience lately? Please let me know.

It has been on my mind for quite some time, seeing as I have access to top class hosting on both continents, and I figured there wouldn’t be too many site visitors on new years day in any case. The main reason for the move was simple: the majority of my site visitors (70%) are based in UK and/or Europe, and having the site physically closer to the visitors means less “hops” and better response times.

The actual move was surprisingly straight forward, even though I (in a slightly wine induced state at 04.00 in the morning) forgot to take any type of back-up of anything. However, there probably is, and will be, some anomalies happening on the site until I’ve encountered them myself and corrected them.

Now you know. Bear with me, it will all be back to normal pretty soon.

User Experience diagram by Paul Veugen

When creating a web site or other online content it is really important to ensure you haven’t broken SEO. Taking it even further, it is today (in the UK) a legal requirement to make that content Accessible to people (and devices), to ensure it is possible for your users to get to that content. This is also often where the misunderstandings begin.

Very often SEO/Accessibility specialists are being asked to “weave their magic” and to “do their thing” too early on in the project, already when there is no actual real ready-to-go-live content. It is too often being asked when the site consist of pretty pixels filled with “Lorem Ipsum…”. There is no text to extract keywords or to make cunning headlines from. Even worse, the request itself shows a deep lack of understanding to the task itself, and usually confirms that a checkbox on a project plan needs to be ticked so “why not do that now even though we are behind on the other things”.

So, lets clear this up a bit whilst keeping the nitty-gritty details out of it.

SEO, roughly and simplified, consist of three parts

Black Magic SEO, SEO Comic by ByronShell

1. Making sure there isn’t “too much” code (front-end, ie HTML/JavaScript/CSS) in the pages that will hinder search engine spiders scanning and indexing your content. You quite simply don’t want to much code to be “in the way” of the spiders as they’ll get tired and wander off. This is normally sorted by having coders that understand semantic code and W3C standards working on designs that are signed off.
2. SEO after that usually happens in teams that know and understand how buying keywords and cross site linking work. Those keywords then get deep-linked into either specific content pieces of the web site or link back to the home page.This obviously requires a few things in itself: An existing URL (to give :Google: etc something specific to link to) and a site map where the various pages actually respond to visits by the search engines when they want to verify the content and the keyword actually are relevant to each other.If you do this on a staging server (or in a non-live folder) you have to remap the entire thing as your linkage otherwise will point in the wrong directions.
3. The most important one: Content. Well written content at that. Content is King, and this is probably the area of web site creation where it is most painfully obvious.If in doubt, try almost any search term in :Google: and look at responses from :Wikipedia: which categorically ends up amongst the first responses, all without pretty pixels or amazing teams of SEO specialists fine-tuning and tweaking the content or buying keywords.Knowing when to repeat content and keywords and when not to also require skills (or at least an understanding) from the content editor/copy writer.

Things that often are misunderstood with Accessibility:

edilco-contemporary-decorative-staircases-3 by homedesignss

1. “Checking all the checkboxes in the check list is the most important thing”. Well, no.This request usually comes from someone at client side not fully understanding what this actually means, and being relayed to someone at agency side who also don’t fully understand it, so lets clarify: if you indeed can tick all the boxes, well done. It is not a bad thing, so don’t take this the wrong way.It should be noted it isn’t the be-all-end-all though.

   If you have tried to check them all, but have a decent reason to why one in particular can’t be checked without spending 100% more time/budget on it, you are usually off quite fine still, and if you in your attempt to make your site/service Accessible have tried to check them all and failed to check one your site is most probably going to be one of the leading sites out there when it comes to an Accessibility perspective.

   Just like code validation it could be seen as a target, but it doesn’t have to be the goal. Our goal should not be to display various logos from Bobby or W3C, our goal should be to create an Accessible site for as many users as possible. If you, for whatever reason, fail to check a box, tell your users how/why on the Accessibility statement, and if at all possible, point them to an alternative source for that content.It should also be noted that the checklist itself often is dated compared to new technological advancements and increased capability of the tools disabled people are using. At times, checking every Accessibility checklist check box can, depending on your target audience, create a less Accessible experience, which leads on to…

2. Accessibility Statements. It is a debated point, where some claim they are useless and some say they are really important. Depending on how you treat your Accessibility statement they can probably help.Remember though: this is not where you “brag” about what you’ve done, in a business language so dry it turns into a misguided PR campaign in itself.Instead this is where you have a golden opportunity to communicate with your users in a language they understand, and where you tell them what you have done, what you haven’t done and to otherwise help them to navigate your site/service in alternative ways.However, until you’ve actually done the work, and figured out what you have/haven’t done, it makes little to no difference in having the statement itself as it then will be in a state between either empty or a wish-list-yet-to-happen, which obviously can be a good thing, but it then should be called “work-in-progress statement” or something.

Though this list above is not extensive by any means it would be a good start if more people knew at least some of it by heart, so they therefore understood why some things can’t be done in the order they are being asked to be done. If it helps one project understand the value of creating a site for its users first and foremost we can do the other bits, such as SEO and Accessibility statements, as well, because they are important, true enough. They are not more important than the actual content though, and never will be.

A somewhat likely meeting… by Don Solo

Some time ago I, and several other colleagues, was asked by my managing director if I could help out answering what the “Future Web Will Resemble”. The following was my email reply to him, but I think it holds up as a blog post as well. I have expanded/clarified it slightly and also corrected obvious spelling mistakes or punctuation.

For me personally: I think the future of the web will be more geared towards offline, only managed online, so these are some that pop up in my head right now. First the ingredients:

Facebook novelty wears off

Facebook. by mujitra (´･ω･)

There is already talks about “Facebook adaption rate in UK dropping off” and similar for most online social networking sites. Facebook suicides are common, I have several friends who have killed their Facebook profiles. In short, after the first “love” has died out with social networking people start to think sites like Facebook actually drain more energy than it gives. Besides, deleting apps you never wanted sent by “friends” that you have lost touch with (probably for a reason), isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

Non-instrusive services and “communities” gain better foothold

Many places

In the backlash of Facebook, enter services like Flickr, Upcoming, Dopplr and Twitter. They ask nothing of you. They don’t show you ads. If you want to contribute, fine, they will help you do so, if you don’t want to, just browse, and in the cases of Flickr and Upcoming they actually help you sort out things in your offline world, only making it visible online. I am part of several groups in both Flickr and Upcoming where I meet the other group members more or less regularly and the only common denominator is that we are members of the same site/group and that we share interests (Photography, Gigs, Web Development etc).

Unlike Facebook, which allows me to keep in electronic touch with “friends” I normally don’t socialize with any longer, Flickr and Upcoming helps me do things off-line, with likeminded people. Flickr and Upcoming are apps-free, clutter-free, spam-free, ad-free, clever and to the point.

Adobe Air and desktop apps that go online

Flickroom – BETA by johnpiercy

I also think “online” will be different from a marketing perspective, with desktop apps built in Adobe Air, that connects to the internet but doesn’t take the long route via your browser.

This also will mean we know a lot more about the user and their setup, not to mention their interests which means we will know if they are interested in what you have to sell, AND that they have capabilities to see anything/everything we throw at them.

API’s

Twitter API book by Channy Yun

Application Programming Interfaces (API) will hit home everywhere on most sites that have/provide data and/or services.
API’s are about enabling other sites to connect to, and use the data provided by your service. What better way to market your excellent service than to let someone else (users and other services) do it for you? Flickr, Upcoming, Twitter, Dopplr, Google Maps, YouTube etc are all excellent examples of this and their API’s have played a big part in their spread and uptake.

iPhone’s competition forces changes to how we see, and create, mobile internet

iMac & iPhone by @NickyColman

It is not a secret that the iPhone has already done this, but only for its current users. What the iPhone has highlighted though is the benefits of being able to use mobile internet in a proper graphical way (often via an API with a new presentation layer), much like what we are used to in our computers (WAP anyone? Didn’t think so…). iPhone took the first step, now Nokia, SonyEricsson, Motorola, Samsung etc, who hold the larger chunks of market share are all dying to get in there, all of which is a good thing for us as creators of services. Microsoft has signed deals with Nokia for pushing out Silverlight, Google Android starts off with the HTC phones, but will expand their offering soon to other phone makers.

OpenID will hit home

OpenID

OpenID, already being adopted by the big names out there, will mean that users only will need one login, for all their online needs, despite them being signed up to various services by various providers. You don’t have to remember hundreds of passwords any more.

Conclusion: So…the future of the web will resemble…

Computer says no_ by benjibot

Data owners will realise that it is more important for people to use and trust their service than anything else, as this builds current and future revenue streams. This will lead to sites and services that are specialised, but really good at what they do, with API’s that make them accessible on all devices (mobile or not) and especially within other services you might be using (Facebook or not), possibly by tying them all together in an Air desktop application created by someone like Netvibes.

Or it will be completely different and you can either ignore this e-mail, or save it for future pub laughs.

under by -Travel Man-

I have spoken about the details as a topic and their importance within web design/development elsewhere but just to continue on the same topic I read this article at A List Apart today which delves further into the importance of details when presenting creative concepts to clients, and getting it 100% right.

Now, all of the tips given in that article are sound and reasonable, and I agree on pretty much the entire article, but I also know from experience that what Joel describes in his classic Iceberg article is completely true as well, even to this day. And the two completely contradict each other.

Worlds Apart

Unsolvable puzzle?

It is obviously the combination of knowing both those two contradictory facts that creates a problem for developers. Most non-developers have a real problem understanding the complexities, thinking and planning that goes on behind/before/during development. -”How hard can it be? It is all THERE!! ” *pointing at screen with pretty Photoshop mockup*

When it comes to web/marketing led development those pretty mockups from the designers quite often is what sold the project to the client in the first place, so there is rarely a way around this, the projects are most often only given go-ahead after visual designs have been presented. Too often the question “what does it look like? ” is treated as more important to “what can it do? ” or “which business problem are we solving? “.

Pretty pixels rule

Pretty pixels

I think this is because these presentations mostly are held by marketing people in the agencies, and the audience often is the marketing department of the client. They like pretty pixels. It makes the product feel more tangible. “Brand exercise” has become synonymous with “where is my logo placed in relation to the other things on the screen, and what prominence does it have? “, and quite often forgetting that brand loyalty can be built by providing an awesome service that actually helps people to do things (apart from crying of happiness by looking at the clients logo) BUT that will take some time to actually develop/realise.

If it doesn’t exist already someone has to build it from scratch. Quite often that someone is working in my team and he/she will need time chipping away on lines of code, which doesn’t take the creative much further visually…it can even appear to have ground to a halt because “nothing new seems to be happening! ” (and even more commonly, as the development takes time the client thinks it is alright to do changes to the designs whilst waiting, often without realising that adds even more development time).

But…what does it DO?

Cool…whatever it is…would you buy it?

Also, I often say “my team takes designs and from them they create experiences ” but that is only true if there is an experience to be had in the first place. Surely said brands “do ” something. Can’t they “do ” it, or something in line with that, online? Here’s a thought: if you can’t think of something you actually can do/give to your clients, are you ready to have a campaign/site/service/advertising?

The trend setters all errr…work!

Innovations-slightware by Slightware

Pretty much all the big brands online are based on good services first and foremost. I’m pretty sure google (Search, Maps, Mail, Notes etc), scrapblog , twitter, flickr, upcoming, youtube, netvibes etc didn’t start their life spans as pixel perfect Photoshop mock-ups but instead started as a wild wacky idea and some experimenting from bored (or very lucky) developers somewhere, who were given a challenge by someone wanting to solve a [business] problem no one had thought about previously.

I’m not saying fun/entertaining marketing/advertising (only) exercises doesn’t have their place, they do (and luckily we get to do quite a few of the good ones at work thanks to daring clients), but I AM saying the request “Make it more Web 2.0/Interactive please ” is tricky to implement unless said exercise actually DOES something. “Shall I Ajax it up a bit then eh? ” when it isn’t needed surely can’t be the best way to spend money for the client. We can of course do it. Should we?