Recent attempts to work smarter rather than harder have been an utter failure. As the business grows and we get busier and busier I’ve needed to look at our business practices and workflow. It’s so far not worked out so brilliantly.

I used to write a fair amount of our tools and all of the frameworks and code for our websites and applications. Originally this was because there was little option, there were no free or cheap versions of the tools we needed and the frameworks available were challenging at best. Of course this wasn’t all bad it gave me a greater understanding of the underlying technology and probably increased my coding skills far more than downloading plugins and other people’s code ever would. But, as many people pointed out it did make development a relatively slow and arduous process which in the new age of Agile Development would see me left behind.

It took a while for me to change my ways, I still have an OC like obsession with understanding exactly how everything works and will still rip a framework or plugin to pieces on occasion to make sure it does what it claims. I’m now a complete jQuery convert and massively happy with WordPress. I went halfway with PHP, I tried a bunch of frameworks but just couldn’t get on with any of them so wrote my own, it took about six months (mostly research) but works perfectly for us and allows us to put together full online applications in a matter of hours. It’s not ‘finished’ and never will be, I constantly add to it and improve it but it’s lightweight and flexible and does exactly what we need (and nothing more).

So with frameworks for php, javascript, actionscript and a shedload of standard setups for html and css I’ve embraced the agile, flexible world. Next step was to improve workflow and project management. This is where it’s all fallen down a bit. I really don’t want us to go back to the bad old ways of writing every tool ourselves, I need to sleep sometimes. I’ve spent a lot of hours over the last couple of months researching and testing project management and workflow tools and I have not found anything I would be happy to use. There’s a lot of dross out there combined with a lot of well written but feature-weak applications. The grind now is that I could have probably used the time better to have written something in-house. I still don’t want to but if I can’t find the right tools soon it may be the only option.

We now have two choices: 1) Use a whole bunch of unrelated tools in a haphazard manner, tying them together with apis where possible or 2) write it ourselves.

Working smarter and faster is fine if the quality tools are available but if you have standards you may be better off doing it the long way.

In case you may be able to suggest anything, our primary requirement right now is a decent project/task manager which supports:

• Multiple projects per client
• Client access
• Recurring tasks. This is the absolute most important feature
• A wiki

That’s it. To be fair we did find one piece of software that covers it pretty well but it was way outside of our current budget.

I was going to post this on our business blog but it’s a little too negative, although still interesting and amusing (to me anyway).

I have a minor pet hate/OCD issue: people using tools incorrectly. I’m aware that this is often a bad stance and misuse of tools and techniques in certain areas can create new concepts and push boundaries, but often it just makes life difficult. I have a very specific pet hate which I’ve given up slapping people over because it seems utterly endemic. My hate is the use of Google’s search box as your location/address bar. I have witnessed many many people who when supplied with a url to enter into their browser will go straight to the Google search box (toolbar or homepage), type the url into the search box, hit search then click the first link that comes up. Google is not (yet) the internet. I can just about bear elderly relatives doing this (just) but I have witnessed peers and colleagues (who shall remain nameless) who also carry out this horrific crime. My complaint to peers has always been that it’s a bad practice they may well pass onto their friends, clients, relatives and pets (much like herpes). Apparently it makes no difference, you end up at the same place in the end anyway.

1. You’re increasing the number of keystrokes/interactions to get to your destination. Ok, so it may help if you suck balls at spelling but is that really an excuse for things such as bbc.co.uk? You know who you are.
2. Waste of bandwidth. Yeah yeah, it’s a teeny tiny teeny bit of extra bandwidth being used. It adds up.

Recently I have been vindicated in my slightly twitchy obsession with this. We had a bit of a crisis with a client due to users complete lack of awareness of this basic issue.

A client sent out over 50,000 printed letters to it’s members (they are a charitable organisation). In the letter they included a URL for a document their members needed to download and print. Unfortunately, they didn’t inform us of this in advance. They just added a file to the server and sent out the physical letters. The URL was not massively complex, but a bit tricky, it was mixed case with a subdirectory. Something like http://www.mysite.co.uk/ourfiles/ThisDocumentV2.doc. Due to the nature of the document it was not linked from anywhere on the website itself and it was not sent out by email, private enough to not directly link from anywhere but not private enough to actually protect it.

So letters sent, we were completely in the dark about both the letters and the file, until we started to get bombarded with complaints from the client that the server was down, files were missing, we had broken something somewhere. After some very confusing communication we found out about the letters and the file. The letters had arrived that morning and the client had suddenly been inundated with complaints from users who couldn’t access the file. I requested the client forward the complaints to myself and I’d investigate.

I knocked up a standard apology email including a link to direct download the file but also asking the users if they could try doing whatever they had been doing before and supply us with a screenshot and their browser version – we supplied links to two helpful pages (I have temporarily mislaid) one which explained in very simple steps how to email a screenshot the other which displays your system info in an easy cut-n-paste format. We had a fairly minimal response including one very angry chap who informed me he wasn’t a computer expert and had no intention of sending a screenshot. From the responses we did receive it became very apparent that a lot of people* have no clue where you are supposed to type a URL. Seriously, they were sticking it literally anywhere but the location bar, anything that looked vaguely like a search box was being used to try and access this document, their search bar, Google’s homepage, the Yahoo homepage, in one case the search box in their email client.

The lesson we learned here is to, erm, make sure clients warn us before sending out 50,000 letters with a URL in. We do push for more integration with our clients and with those that want our involvement we make sure we always know what they are up to so we can assist and advise where appropriate, not everyone wants (or can afford) this level of attention and so sometimes these things happen.

We also learned that people can get really angry if you ask them to send you a screenshot.

* An awful lot of people in this client’s target market anyway.

I’ve always assumed I’m the most difficult, argumentative developer/designer in the country. Apparently not, there are far worse and they’re everywhere. A couple of longstanding clients have recently commented on how comparatively easy I am to work with, specifically my degree of tact when dealing with difficult projects. I am not being ironic.

I bitch and moan constantly about some of the work I have to do, friends, relatives and the less knowledgeable project managers look at me like I’m mental and trot out the traditional line “well, it’s all paid work isn’t it?”. Here’s the problem, it’s not about whether it’s paid work or not. Anyone who has entered a creative industry through choice generally has an expectation of the quality of work they will be doing, an expectation of job satisfaction. Sounds pompous, probably is, but that’s the reality. Often I can deal with crappy deadlines and budgets better than bad design and implementation decisions, I don’t expect to have much say on budget or timeline (for agency run jobs), but I’d like to at least have my opinion heard when a client makes a stupid decision which may damage the final quality or outcome of a project.

From a personal perspective, here’s why your developer/designer may be getting the arse with you for what you perceive to be completely reasonable requests:

The constant redo
Asking them to redo the same piece of work over and again because the client can’t quite decide if it should have the blue border or the green border? The repetition can make me very stabby indeed. There’s the next part of the project to move onto and I’ve just wasted a day shifting the same pixels back and forth (or worse a week), and really I already know which is the best decision and have probably yelled it down the phone a couple of times.

The Neverending Project
Mmmm… scope creep the bane of my existence.  Several things here, firstly project fatigue, after a while of staring at the same project you just can’t face it any longer, you need to switch to something else for a while. Adding just another page/button/function may seem trivial but even that ten minute task can make you lose the will to live. Secondly, on a more pragmatic level we’ve probably got something else lined up to be getting on with and if the scope creep has pushed us past deadline there’s someone else on our case about starting their project. Finally, and most importantly, an awful lot of scope creep includes totally unnecessary and pointless additions which I feel (sometimes incorrectly) will have a negative impact on the final outcome, I don’t want to release something crappy and bloated if it can be avoided.

You’re wrong, wrong wrong
Faced with a decision that’s clearly bollocks by a client or project manager I have two options. I can shut up, carry out the bad instruction and take the cash or I can explain why it’s clearly bollocks. The latter has a tendency to go down like I’ve just murdered someone’s granny. Some idiot somewhere has made the clearly bollocks decision and may well be very proud of it (recently: “I’ve used MS Paint to adjust our website layout, can you please implement this”) so there’s a high chance they are going to get offended when you tell them as much, the project manager doesn’t want to pass this message on and so pushes for the clearly bollocks decision to be implemented regardless of how wacky it is, I dig my heels in and explain repeatedly how clearly bollocks it is. No-one is happy. Don’t let the client get involved in the creative process, they’ll only arse it up and piss of those who are being paid to design.

I want to do it properly
Especially with a big project, I might be putting months of my life into a website. I don’t want the end result to be a bucket of sick. It’s partly the portfolio argument, in that I want to be able to proudly display every site I do in my portfolio to try and garner new work, but in reality I never update my portfolio (so rarely I’m not even going to link to it). More seriously, it’s pride in my work, I know that if I release anything that’s got even the slightest issue that’s will be the only thing I will notice when I look at it again, I’ll never be able to show someone the website without apologising in advance for the strange way the menu works or the odd clash of colours in the footer.

There’s plenty more that gets on my tits on a daily basis but it’s nice outside and I don’t want to stare at a screen all weekend. Generalising horribly, if your developer or designer doesn’t get the nark on with you from time to time, they probably don’t give a crap about their work and could work a little harder at it (or they are bottling it up and will one day come at you with a sharp pencil).

A beautiful dance, reflecting the struggles of mankind in an act as simple as sending a mass-email.

We meet once a week…
I’m emailed that week’s marketing email.

and we talk of what’s to come…
I insist we put a delay on the delivery so they can properly proof read it, fair chance no-one has yet, they insist it’s MEGAURGENT and must be sent IMMEDIATELY, NO DELAY!!!

We take our first steps…
I correct the horrific spelling errors and lightly proofread the mailout. I would proof-read it more thoroughly but hard to do so when being constantly questioned IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET?

The dance proper begins…
I queue the mailout up to be sent in an hour and send them test copies. They say URGENT SEND NOW NO DELAY!!11!! I insist they read the test copies and check them. They say URGENT SEND NOW NO DELAY!!11!! (for even a 20 minute delay will weaken their marketing message until it is nothing but a fine morning mist dissipating in the sun. I pretend I have gone deaf and leave the delay on.

We conclude our dance for this time.
Two minutes before the mailout is queued to go I’m contacted with MEGAURGENT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT!!111!! For why? Because there were some glaring inaccuracies and the name of the MD was spelled wrong (again).

And onto the next time, when it will be as though we haven’t already done this a thousand times before. Each time fresh, the same steps, although with slightly different timing.

In the spirit of trying to cram far more into the first quarter of the year that is probably healthy I’ve been learning AS3. Just completed (well make ready for initial release) my first AS3 application. It’s a file browser/selector for the php content management system I’ve been writing since January. The CMS has been pretty successful so far, clients have been very positive about it’s ease of use and the flexibility of the code means I’ve already re-purposed large chunks of it for other projects (mostly small budget web-template systems). There’s still a lot of functionality I’d like to add to it if time allows and I’d love to make it open source and more extensible but right now I don’t have the time.

The only horrible flaw with it was the file management system, although you could upload files, group them, add meta data and assorted other stuff, the act of including one in a content page (as an inline image, link or whatever) was a pain in the arse. It was mostly done through a plugin in TinyMCE which wangs up a popup with a list of all the files uploaded to the file library as clickable links. This is fine if you have 5 files and you know the filename of the file you are looking for but it becomes ungainly and irritating if you have any greater number of files. So for my first AS3 app I put together a nice file browser which gives you thumbnails all nicely paginated with a set of filters (alphanumeric, by file group and by file extension).

It has a couple of bugs which will need to be ironed out and I’d like to completely update the layout and some of the functionality to make it a bit of a smoother process. There’s a couple of flaws with the usability which I want to address BUT overall I’m pretty happy with it for a first version and a first AS3 project. I’ve integrated it with a couple of our client’s CMS systems and I’ll see what the feedback is like.

Click here to play with the online demo

Woo! One of my photos has been used in a photo guide of Prague (with my permission).

(I do still live, but very, very, very busy).

Here is a lesson by example. This is absolutely not how to deal with your designer. This is more common than makes me comfortable.

I’m off to stick my head in the oven.

A quick holding page that appeared to transform into something a little more flamboyant than expected. For Moonshine PR

Moonshine PR Holding Page

Hopefully Emily doesn’t beat me to death when she sees what I’ve done to her website. I very nearly animated it in flash but fortunately (for you and her) time is short tonight.

I have just launched the Shinytastic website v1.0 – http://www.shinytastic.com

Again I am not 100% happy with it, but I suspect it’s a case of being too close to be able to look at it properly. I’m going to be spending more time on it later in the week (hopefully). This month sees me hit ten years of doing this stuff for cash and this the first time I’ve had a website advertising my services. This is possibly the hardest site I’ve done in years. I think the homepage needs a good rehack and the template is possibly over-simple. I’m willing to take the risk on it. I’m not lacking work right now and (outside of this blog) I’m not going to be overly promoting it for a while so I’ve got a chance to hack it about and improve on it in the interim. To be honest I look around at a lot of my peers and they all seem to be as damn useless at their own websites as I am, regardless of the quality of the work they do for their clients. Am I just making excuses now? Possibly, but it’s two in the morning. Goodnight.

Shinytastic Screenshot

Quick design/mockup for my Dad’s new business. Needs a bit of tweaking and cleaning up but not bad for a couple of hours work.

InkyStuff Website Mockup