Barry McGee

Last night I attended the monthly London Web meetup to see Andy Budd present ’7 Tips from 7 Years of Clearleft’

For those who don’t know Andy Budd was a CSS pioneer who started up an agency in Brighton called Clearleft that has been generally seen as a leading light in UX & Web Design over the last ten years.Their clients include Channel 4, ITV, Mozilla & Amnesty.

As the very first book I read on CSS, CSS Mastery, was authored by Andy Budd – I somewhat naively thought that this talk would have a heavy web development angle – i.e. that it would involve strategies of version control, language preferences and project approaches.

This was not the case as Andy confessed early on that he had not written a line of CSS in about 3 years and was now wholly concerned with the business side of Clearleft. 

As it happens, the talk was moreso pitched at freelancers who were thinking of starting their own small agency. Here are my notes;

1. Build Your Reputation Network

Andy spoke about how the majority of Clearleft’s work comes via word of mouth and because of this a lot of prospective clients are the right type of clients as they have personally recommended. Networking is part of your job as that is how you might out what people have the same ideals and working practices as you or your company. People believe/trust other people who they meet face to face – much more powerful than “online” connections. 

2. Specialise, Specialise, Specialise

You cannot be all thing to all men. Pick a couple of areas you are good at and get great at them. Clearleft chose to be UX experts when many clients had no idea what UX was.. and it took a lot of blood sweat and tears to convince them why they should be bothered with UX. “Why should we pay you to do wireframes when no-one else has even mention it?” If you have conviction in your ideas, stick to them. You may also have to turn away work if it doesn’t fall within your chosen remit – this will be difficult.

3. Keeping Afloat should Not Be Your Biggest Priority

Clearleft try to have at least 6 months runway in front of them at any one time – you should not be always trying to keep the wolf from the door because you then take on projects you don’t really want to take on or know you should really take on – recipe for disaster. Compounded by need to then take on cheap staff to work with bad clients.

4. Quality Counts

When Clearleft started, they were anal about quality – everything had to absolutely perfect before it could be launched -however, they started missing shipping deadlines. Compromise has to be reached. Bad designers are always happy with their latest project. Good designers/agencies are always a little disappointed as they know things could have been slightly better here and there.

5. Hire Good People and Build a Culture

Happy staff produce happy work. Team Activities, Conference/training budgets, Hackdays. Hire people who are smarter than you and get to f**k out of their way while they make great stuff. Andy admits he is now the stupidest person at Clearleft.

6. Don’t be Afraid to Turn Down Clients

You’re only as good as your last project and if your gut instinct tells you this client might not be a good fit for your company that’s probably right. If a project is gong badly, don’t blame your clients, blame yourself – you chose to work with them. Some clients will throw money at you and then use you as a resource. That’s not a collaboration and will not produce good work. When you take on shit projects, you can’t take on the really good one that turns up a week later. Clearleft had to turn town 2-3 career defining projects because they had over-stretched with shit projects.

7. You cannot design a website in 5 days

Clearleft never do “Discovery Phase” for free. Many agencies do – quickly and badly – because they’re doing it for free. Setting yourself up for a fall as you cannot understand a clients content/needs/aims/idiosyncrasies in such a short period. Ideally projects should have a 4-6 week exploratory stage with 2 people who will work with the client intimately to tease out the full requirements of the project before committing to longer stage build. 

This was doing the rounds on Twitter and it did make me giggle.. hands up who hasn’t been on a project like this? No-one? You’re all liars.

Not so very long ago, I wondered if anyone ever actually won competitions or were they all a big sham? Well, it turns out some people do win competitions as I found out a few weeks ago that I myself had won a £250 train voucher from Freshbooks after entering a competition on their blog! Needless to say, this was very pleasing to me.

Even though the voucher was advertised as being for UK train journeys only, Freshbooks were so kind as to bend the rules so my lovely girlfriend & I could visit Paris on the Eurostar at the end of the summer, a long time ambition!

Now, dear reader, I would not blame you if you thought that I may now be a little bias towards Freshbooks but I promise, even if I hadn’t won a thing from them I would still champion their service as simply the best online accounting software available today.

Invoicing used to be a pain which I would put off to the last possible minute and despite my best efforts, my record keeping was shambolic at best.

Freshbooks took all this pain away in one fell swoop giving my invoices a consistent, professional feel and best of all, my clients can also login to Freshbooks and check their previous invoices with me. 

If you’re a freelancer or small business, I implore you to try Freshbooks, you’ll not be disappointed.

(*Links to Freshbooks in the post have my referral code attached, sure why not?)

Big news in my life – after (just shy of) 5 years at the BBC, I’ve handed in my notice and I’m set to leave in the middle of June for pastures new.

I’ve throughly enjoyed working for the Beeb and because I’ve had 3 different roles over the last 5 years, it doesn’t really seem like I’ve the same job for that time – quite the opposite in fact.

I remember when I left University back in 2007, I felt I had pretty much got this web dev thing cracked. It was only when I joined the BBC and met some of the truly talented people working for the Beeb that I started to understand how much I still had to learn.

However, a couple of months ago I felt the time was approaching when I should seek out fresh challenges.

The BBC was great in that the websites I worked on were used by millions each week. However, the BBC being what it is, as a web developer you can be limited in what you can use. For example, I once tried to use reCaptcha on a site as the BBC internal Captcha system was outdated and horrible. I was then referred to the BBC legal department who swiftly crushed that ambition with a 1 tonne spool of red tape. Google Analytics is another example of where the BBC has to internally re-invent the wheel. Big corporations have processes and that is a fact of life.

I’m very excited to be joining The Other Media as Front End Developer where I’ll have the opportunity to work with some prestigious clients such as Paul Smith & Ben Sherman on their e-commerce offerings.

Moving to an agency will be a big change from the BBC but I can’t wait to get started.

Now that I use a Macbook Pro solely for developing on, testing webites in any version of Internet Explorer is something of a pain in the posterior.

If you’ve any experience of developing sites on OSX, you’ll know that testing Internet Explorer is far from straightforward & probably the most reliable way is to download a huge VM (Virtual Machine) image from Microsoft and run it using something like VirtualBox or VMware Fusion.

However, these are typically unreliable as they are a huge memory hog, prone to regular crashes and you have to keep them maintained and up to date. The Microsoft provided images are also time limited and have various licencing restrictions.

Searching for alternatives, I stumbled upon Vaasnet IE9 Virtual Machine which can be connected to using the free Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection For Mac client.

The full instructions (all four steps!) don’t take long to get you up and running.

There are a range of Virtual Machines on offer including IE6-9 – all of which can be used for a very reasonable $0.99p/h.

You can then launch a VM, suspend & save it for future use (though you are charged for storage) or delete the VM entirely which emans you pay nothing until you next launch a new one.

Quick, cheap and easy to use. IE Testing on a Macbook sorted.

About 18 months ago – I owned no Apple products. However, once I purchased my first iPhone, the downward slide into the inescapabale lair of Apple ownership began. I now have an iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro & as of this morning, an Apple TV box.

I didn’t start this week wanting to own an Apple TV box – in fact, I didn’t start this week wanting to own any TV box at all, but then I disocvered that the recently launched iPhone/iPad BBC iPlayer app & the RTE Player app have Airplay capabilities. It was then rather inevitable that I would own an Apple TV box soon.

However, the main point of this scribe is not to extol the virtues of Apple products but the ease with which I was able to purchase an Apple TV box from the store this morning.

Being Christmas Adam, I had expected the throng of people in that temple of consumerism that is Westfield to be nothing short of disgusting and queues mandatory.

However, upon eneritng the Apple store I found a very well staffed “Express Purchase” table to the right of the door as I went in, less than three and a half steps in the door.

I uttered the words “Apple TV please”, a card reader appeared, my receipt was emailed to me and before I knew it, roughly 55 seconds later, I was on my merry way.

You may be thinking, well, of course, that’s how the modern shopkeep works these days, isn’t it? Well, to that question, I beg of you to try and purchase an electrical good from Currys or Dixons where you’ll have to brace queues of people, fight for the attention of a retail assistant and invariably at some stage be forced to provide a myriad of information that will almost definately include your postcode & shoe size. I was advise you to allocate at least 30 mins of your time for this excercise.

On a related note, I almost bought a DVD in HMV yesterday – I had it in my hand, having already made the decision to purchase. I then caught sight of the snaking queue of roughly 75 people being served by three underworked tills and thought better of it. I’ll just get it on iTunes.

I had my bike stolen this week from outside my place of work. As annoying as this was, it’s kind of my own fault (in a way) as I skimped when buying the bike lock whereas if I’d invested a little more, I’d still be enjoyed a two-wheeled commute as opposed to my current two-legged affair.

I thought I was saving money at the time but having no insurance (it wasn’t actually worth insuring to be fair), I’ve now lost the £40 I could have got for it on Gumtree, which I had actually planned to do next week as I’m moving (typical!).

I was also asked to look at a website this week, as the owner was having alot of issues with it. I had previously quoted this person for a new website but had heard nothing back from them.

As it turns out, they had opted to go with someone else who had agreed to build their site for a considerably cheaper sum. Now, six months down the line, major cracks are starting to appear and I had to gently tell them they’ve paid for a steaming turd.

“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” Red Adair

There is a well known saying, “You get what you pay for“, yet many people still seem to believe this does not apply to web design & development. If it looks ok, and it seems to work, job done!

However, I would say to any serious business owner who is offered a website for a seemingly “bargain” price, if it looks to be good to be true, it probably is.

Similarly, I’ve found that when stuck in the throng of a project, with impatient stakeholders and impending deadlines, it’s all too easy to slip in a couple of quick hacks to achieve the desired effect.

While this is a short-term win, it is ultimately adding to a mountain of technical debt that will come tumbling down around you somewhere down the line. This will inevitably lead to bigger bugs, increased workloads and more pressingly deadlines.

Quite simply, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. I learnt this the hard way, and now so have my feet.

I have an shared hosting account with Dreamhost on which this website and many others sit. Before Christmas I had noticed that, quite regularly, I would check this site to find it down. I would then check my other sites and they were down too. When I contacted Dreamhost, they would apologise for the downtime and my sites would be back again.However, it did worry me that if my sites were down this often when I was manually checking them, how often were they down when I wasn’t checking them? Although this site isn’t an e-commerce site, I believe all sites should be treated as though they are, i.e. – if my site is down for 1 hour, what does that result in lost revenue?So, I began to research automated trackers and quickly discovered Pingdom – a little tracking bug which will allow you to monitor your site’s uptime. It’s quick, easy and free (for a single site). They also have an iPhone app so you can check your website anytime, anywhere. This is an example of the summary you can get from the web interface;

I monitored my site for a month and was amazed to find that my server had crashed over 500 times in one month amounting to over 8 hours of downtime. This was clearly not acceptable but armed with these stats I was able to shout very loudly (but politely) at Dreamhost, and to their credit, they did offer straight away to move me to another server which I was able to do with minimal disruption. They also offered me a partial rebate for my hosting bill in line with their 100% Uptime Guarantee.Since moving servers, my average server uptime has now been consistently above 99.65%,?? however, I can now be safe in the knowledge that I’ll know very quickly if my server starts to under perform again and take immediate steps to rectify it.If you’re a site owner, I recommend you implement similar safeguards as a matter of priority.

Last week, the Online team at BBC Northern Ireland launched a pretty mammoth project, the new Ulster Scots portal.

This was the culmination of over a years work from planning to deployment and also marked a first for BBCNI in that it was the first site to launch on the BBC’s dynamic web application platform. This road wasn’t always smooth but it managed to come together in the end without it turning into much of a handlin.The application was built by London based dev house, Airlock, and aims to help complete learners get up to speed with Ulster Scots quickly and easily while also providing more seasoned enthusiasts with plenty to chew the cud over. The foundations of the site were laid by the long running Radio Ulster programme, A Kist o Wurds.As it is a language orientated site, there was a big emphasis on audio. As with Ulster Scots being a very gutteral sounding language anyway, the muckle of audio & video available is a great resource for users new to Ulster Scots.It’s quite a colourful language and I was personally very surprised how many Ulster Scots words and phrases I already use in everyday life. Check the site Ulster Scots site out for yourself and let me know in the comments if you have any particular favourite words or phrases.

This week, Google launched their own Apache module, designed to optimise your page speed.Since Google announced last year that it will, in effect, take into account the page load time when ranking websites, it would make sense for every website owner to take advantage of this.However, most website owners have shared hosting and as such have no way of adding Apache modules to their servers. Google seems to be working closely with GoDaddy as a launch partner but the good news for Dreamhost customers like myself is that they have already made this option available from the control panel.Here is a short video to show you how to turn it on for your respective domains.