SilentGap

So i’ve taken a fairly big brake from the internet (a whole 3 days) by going up to my family’s cabin in the Black Hills (pictures and video yet to be posted). There’s no internet, and well, when your up in the mountain, there’s not much else, except for a few other cabins. I arrived on a Wednesday, only to find myself waking up on Thursday to 10 inches (and then some) of snow.

It was the perfect mini-vacation (except for the fact that I could still receive text on my phone and everyone decided it would be a good idea to check up on me EVERY day to see how i was doing – you know, if I’m alive, breathing, or dead). Our families cabin is a 2 bedroom, one full bath, with kitchen, dinning, wrap around porch, sleeping cabin (sleeps 4ish), and a huge slate fireplace. The carpet is a short green shag carpet, the kind you can feel the carpet fibers slip in between your toes when you’re not wearing socks).

It was a good time, complete with 2 channels on the tv, and a dvd / vcr player. I watched, Crocodile Dundee I & II, Die Hard I, George of the Jungle, Young Guns and a few other movies, all on vcr tapes, all of them in bad shape. There were Tonka Toasters you could make yourself some toasted desert pies – but you have to be careful, the toasters themselves melt if you leave them in the fire too long (a whole storry right there that i won’t go into). And I brought my MacBook Pro along & managed to get the majority of new mock done for this blog site.

The one problem I’ve noticed when you’re doing something for your own site is that you are your own worst critic. This isn’t anything new, but this past week, it really hit home. Especially since my photoshop skills are not up to par and my creativity doesn’t like to be stretched (unless i’m playing guitar).

So, in just a week or two SilentGap will be sporting it’s new skin & the new platform will be WordPress instead of Blogger (sorry Blogger, not a fan of your features – you just not my type and you don’t do it for me. It was a good time while it lasted, but I must break it off w/ you. Take care), which I’m quite supprised that a producted owned by Google isn’t done up better, but oh well, they can’t be perfect either.

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

So, at 5.30am I was trying to get my kid to fall back asleep (and my swaddling skill’s have yet to improve past the point where he doesn’t get one arm loose), and in the process found myself waking up, wandering over to check my email and my reader. In it was a post recommended by boagworld from A Beautiful Web titled “Time to stop showing clients static design visuals“

The post brings up a few good points, the first one being:

Demonstrating our designs to clients as XHTML/CSS pages rather than as static Photoshop or Fireworks has streamlined our workflow and helped us to set and manage a client’s expectations better than ever before.

And as an example the post points the reader to http://forabeautifulweb.com/demo/2008/09/21/index.html.

I love the idea and agree with the author that a working mock up is extremely handy, and leaves a lot of un-answered questions, answered.

But for sites mock’s that are complicated or too time consuming to turn a static mock into a working build, how practical is this? And when the site requires some Ajax work, how far do you take it if the ajax has to integrate with a database?

Andy Clarke brings up some other good points about having a working mock up, read the full article at http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/time_to_stop_showing_clients_static_design_visuals/

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

Last weekend I read an article from Smashing Magazine on “How To Communicate Design Decisions to Clients?“

In it, Brian Armstrong lists out five points a persons should consider when creating a web design template for a client. After reviewing the list, I thought that they are a few good points for clients to review when looking to redo or restructure their site. Below, are the five points that Brian lists:

1. Pretty doesn’t mean effective: statistics are your friend!
2. Every design should have a measurable goal
3. Your site should have one clear path
4. Remember the swiss army knife
5. Provide performance metrics

What you, as the client, needs to know:

1. From the clients perspective, think about this point. Ask yourself – “What static’s do we currently have on our site?” “What is our site demographic?” “How many of the people visiting our site are returning visitors or new visitors?”

If you’ve thought, “I don’t want to implement anything new on our website until the new design is ready”, you’ve thought the wrong thing. Start collecting stat’s on your site, today! Many don’t want to pay for stats, but how can you tell what your ROI (Return On Investment) is if you don’t have a way to track, analyize or measure the results of your “message”. There are many services out there that are cheap and will give you more infomation then you know what to do with.

If you still don’t want to pay for stats, you can check with your hosting company. Many times they’ll have some sort of free built in stats available. If they don’t, Google Analytic’s or FeedBurner (for blogs) provides free services to start recording these stats. Just sign up for their account, and they’ll walk you through what you need to do.

2. Measurable Goal – Ask yourself – “What do I want to accomplish with this site?” Unfortunately, the answer “Attract more people” is not a very good one. Stop. Think. What do you really hope to accomplish with this site? If your thinking about your church site, maybe the answer could be “I hope to use our site as a social networking tool, so that the people under 35 at our church can stay connected with each other, and meet new new people who will encourage them to live for Jesus”. Now that’s an answer & a measurable goal.

What a client then can do is go back to the statistics they have in place and analyze the results to see how close they are to this goal. From there, they can talk with the designer and communicate with them the results and any ideas they may have to reach this goal.

Stay tuned for Part 2…

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap