Best Practices

Sep 17th, 2008

Communicate Hosting Requirements at the Outset

photo credit: fill3r
With most of my clients, I develop their site on my web server. We’ll go back and forth through all the iterations of changes there. When it’s complete, then I move it over to their production server. 95% of the time, this works fine. I recently came across a situation, though, where [...]

Jul 16th, 2008

Lessons Learned From the Online Referral Scorecard

At the beginning of this year, I invested a lot of time in creating a web application that allowed people to keep track of the activity they were doing to build relationships with their network of business contacts. By giving numeric values to the various activities, the scorecard turns the process of tracking your activities [...]

May 7th, 2008

What You Can Learn From Gregory House

For anyone who isn’t glued to the TV every Monday night, House is a TV show about an extremely obnoxious doctor who makes life difficult for everyone around him. He’s manipulative and vindictive. He has no faith in the concept of basic human goodness, and he goes out of his way to embarass and ridicule [...]

Apr 2nd, 2008

10-Hour Days

It seems I hear a lot of stories about workaholic entrepreneurs. They spend 80 hours a week working on their business, and the few hours left over each week goes to their friends and family. I’m the exact opposite. I think.

Mar 5th, 2008

Tracking Your Activities with a Free Online Tool

Not too long ago I took a training course for business owners. The focus was on intelligently developing relationships with other business owners with whom you can refer business back and forth. The key to making this work is to appropriately feed and water these relationships. If you take the right actions, you can have [...]

Jan 2nd, 2008

Price Your Service Like a Product

Up until a few months ago, I always started from square one when I needed to create a quote for a client. I’d go through the requirements for the project and estimate how long each item would take. I’d estimate how much time I expected to spend communicating with the client based on what I [...]

Jul 25th, 2007

Save Time and Money With Web Site Mock-Ups

In a previous post I discussed getting customer feedback throughout the development process. In my opinion, the most important aspect of this is creating a mock up of what the fully functional site will look like before you do any HTML or CSS work. (I believe in the print world, this is called a comp.)

May 2nd, 2007

Include Support Costs in Your Quote

Projects have a natural ending point. You and the client are both satisfied with the work. Checks are cashed, and to-do list items are checked off. A few months later, the client calls you concerned because some particular feature isn’t what they expected. They had signed off on the completed work months ago, but this [...]

Apr 4th, 2007

Tell Your Small Clients About Standardization

I came across a good article yesterday with the title, The business case for Web standards-based development. I like the break down at the end of the article of all the benefits that come with designing a standards compliant web site.
It got me thinking about the clients I’ve had in the last year. Most of [...]

Feb 21st, 2007

Don’t Guess What Your Customers Want

My guess would be most web designers learn this lesson pretty early, but I’d like to add it to the Best Practices canon anyway. You design web sites all the time for all kinds of clients. As a result, you’ve built up a good deal of knowledge about what does and does not work in [...]

Project Management