Allchorn Blog

Since I’ve recently taken a step back from certain aspects of website design and development (specifically hosting, coding and marketing), I’m delving more and more into the layout and aesthetic concerns of creating a website. That doesn’t mean that I don’t go through the proper discovery steps that precede the design phases, but since I am only consulting on the other topics, the meat of my work is design now.

Being back in the creative cockpit has made me look at ways of sprucing things up using either some slick AJAX or Adobe Flash.

If you know me, you’re probably gasping at the fact that I’d even consider Flash, but I have had a look at things, and if I can pull it off semantically and without interfering with any search engine visibility, I am willing to give it a bash.

The Pitfalls of Flash

My main reasons for not using Flash (on the most part) in the past:

1. Search Engines cannot index flash content (without some form of trickery involved)
2. Sections within a Flash site cannot be bookmarked in the traditional sense either using your browser’s bookmarks OR something like Delicious.
3. Without strict control by someone that knows the pitfalls, it can easily be abused and prove detrimental on a project’s final outcome.
4. Circumventing reason 1, 2 and 3 can add unnecessary time and budget to a project that would make little sense when it comes to ROI.

These have been my major gripes with the use of Flash in the past, although as I’ve also stated in the past, it’s a brilliant and versatile technology that when used correctly for the right thing, it’s results can be amazing.

I reckon that certain aspects of Flash are not going to be changing in any sort of hurry, and as such, I will only make use of Flash when there is either a damn good reason, and that it doesn’t harm things that would be done more effectively in another way. Sometimes KISS just makes more sense.

How Can Flash Be Used Effectively?

Since most of my sites and my client’s sites are built to perform some form of business function, I am pretty sticky on the fact that good, valid, semantic HTML styled with CSS is a must. I think very few people would dispute that fact.

I do very few don’t do Flash only sites, and there are not a lot of industries that can benefit from them. Sure, my friends over at Prezence do a lot of all Flash sites for music artists, movie launches and the like, but that is a very specialised market, and requires the visual versatility that Flash offers. Paul Tooze at Wireframe also does some amazing Flash projects for his clients, but suffice to say, a lot of it is educational and or best suited to Flash’s abilities.

Sure, HTML and CSS could be used to create the “aesthetic” that both Prezence and Wireframe create, but does not offer the same fluid animation and slick motion you can get with Flash. Javascript has come a long way, but it’s still limited and subject to considerable browser issues. Flash however, with it’s pervasive adoption is the ideal candidate to do what it does, and might I add, without any serious competition.

Okay, so you get that I’m not going to be making an HTML document and throwing an SWF (pronounced swiff I believe) file in the middle and doing the rest in Flash. For my clients, that would be search engine suicide!

I am looking at ways of including semantic content for things that are already in the Flash files, and there are some options. One of them is having the content in normal code, and somehow not displaying it (pointless to visually duplicate the content), so the search engines can index you for what you are all about.

There are ways of doing this that will get you penalised by the SE’s but there are some work arounds. Nothing completely fool proof at this stage (or that I can find), but advancements are being made.

Eric Enge discusses this in more depth with his SEOMoz invitiational blog post on A Comprehensive Guide to Hidden Text & Search Engines.

I think the best way to approach this whole thing is the use of flash sparingly, and only as loose elements where they are absolutely required to give some of that visual “wow” factor.

As you might have noticed, I am not referring much to “dynamic” flash where it connects to a database, or has an external XML ot TXT file to feed it content. I’m assuming that this is done if it’s needed. It still doesn’t get indexed by SE’s, hence my search for a viable semantic workaround.

Where To From Here?

Well, I am going to be doing some intensive reconstructive surgery on this website which will be ready in the next few months. Still using Wordpress as my CMS, and still having a good dose of HTML content, but with some embellishments that you’ll either love or hate.

Being the fact that SEO on a website designer’s site is like spending money on marketing the sale of bottled salt water at the beach, I doubt I’ll damage my search engine rankings much.

Right now, I need to dive back into the storyboarding for the new allchorn.com!

Mr/Mrs Client:

“Whip me together a quick newsletter to send to my subscribers. Oh, and make it look like this design”…

I am then handed a design created by a print designer. Background images, fancy fonts, overlaying text etc.

“It needs to look exactly like that and must work in all mail clients.”

Wow, thanks… I’ll get right on it. Should only take me a few minutes… right? wrong!

Designing and coding newsletters… where do I start? Do you think us web professionals have problems getting our work to render correctly in browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari? Not nearly as much as we suffer with the exceptionally poor rendering of the mail clients. Gmail, AOL, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook… they all have their wierd quirks and rules.

Don’t get me wrong, some of these quirks are security related, and I won’t begrudge them the fact that some of them are sterling products and services. But creating email newsletters that look the same, or at least similar in all of them is almost an impossible task. One fraught with immense amounts of testing time and to-and-fro bug fixes.

The Newsletter Designer’s Saving Grace

Thankfully, the people that send your newsletters are aware of the problems and have even gone to the lengths of creating an email standards organisation.

Side Note: First, let me say that if you’re not using something like Campaign Monitor or Aweber, you’re not really sending newsletters. Sorry to be blunt, but you’re doing the equivilant of a flyer drop from a helicopter. Marketing is useless if you can’t measure it.

Campaign Monitor are especially on the ball and actually keep a very informative blog up to date and full of useful information. The most recent of which being an article on 2008 Email Design Guidelines. Read it, either being a client or a designer/coder. It’s worth the extra general knowledge at least.

Aweber are also keeping with the game, and this is actually the service I use to send email newsletters to my subscribers at Circuitchaser.com. They’ve recently introduced some advanced analytical features to better analyse the effect of your email broadcasts.

But now I’m going off topic again…

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)

I probably heard this at school first. It rings true now, more than 20yrs later. Simpler is better with email newsletters. Treat them as a calling card. An enticement tool that allows recipients to visit your website for further information/action.

Keep the images minimal. Don’t plague your visitors with images that make up important parts of your email. A lot of mail clients block images at first and this can break your email if there is important images in them.

Test thoroughly, test it some more, and then when you’re done testing, test it again! There is information out there for this, and believe it or not, it comes from Campaign Monitor no less (helpful guys these aren’t they?).

Summing Up

So Mr/Mrs One Click, quick quick, design me a newsletter; hopefully you now know and understand more or less what goes into creating a newsletter, and when your designer sighs when you give him an hour’s notice to send something important, you’ll know why.

Oh, and if your designer disputes this post’s facts and maintains that he/she can design and code and send a custom newsletter in a couple of minutes… ask them to prove it and show you how they render in (your client’s) mail clients! I bet they either won’t know what you’re talking about or will catch a very quick wake up when they realise what they’re doing wrong. They will probably then go back to their normal secretarial/admin/plumbing/invoicing work that the boss asked them to do an hour ago.

Managing my time is something I used to struggle with. Nowadays, I seem to have more spare time than a lot of people and even making a decent living. I don’t believe I’ve stumbled onto some secret, but rather through reading up a bit about it and actually acting on advice (some good, some bad), I’ve managed to find a happy medium where I don’t work like a slave for a pittance, but when things need to get done, they do.

My fiancee commented today that I’m actually quite diligent about my work time and although I don’t clock in at 8am and clock out at 5pm with a 30min lunch break from 1pm – 1:30pm, I do tend to work a full 8hr day and usually more.

Occasionally (more often than not), I start around 9am or just after and tend to get stuck into some recommended reading. Of course industry related stuff and I attend to most email enquiries and urgent IM discussions in the early part of the day.

The most of the rest of the daytime duties include emailing quotes, writing emails and general client communication and updates. Sometimes with a design comp. being worked on in Photoshop on the extra screen.

Come mid afternoon (around 3pm onwards) I reach my creative peak, and generally get stuck into something which requires a fully operational mind. This is my time spent on important quotes, writing scope documents, conceptualizing strategies, ploughing through design concepts and generally doing all the meat of my work.

This peak time can go well into the night with only necessary breaks being in the way of me working right through (eating, bathroom and the occasional clear-my-mind walk around the house). I generally don’t let it go past 11pm though, and if I start early, or there is some important “domestic” thing to do (grocery shopping etc.), I can usually pick up on things the following day.

If my time is not filled or I am waiting on someone to send something through before I can continue, I usually get stuck into improving my efficiancy by building templates for important documents, honing my skills by watching or reading tutorials, and working on new design concepts for my own personal projects which I may or may not ever use.

I believe that if you have a passion for what you do, you need to treat every moment you can as one that can be used to improve on what you know and how you do things. This has made me a bit of a forum junkie, and my online browsing experience is heavily modified and optimised to my interests using the Google Home Page.

There is heaps of advice online about time management, and my method won’t work for someone merely trying to make money. My day is structured around someone who is passionate about the internet, computing, design and running an effective, professional business.

I don’t wear a tie if I can avoid it, I prefer people not call me after hours (within reason) and I have the freedom to pick and choose when, where and how I work. As long as my clients and I (and my bank account) are happy… whose to argue with my lifestyle?

Last word: Creative productivity does not come from 8hrs of scheduled labour. Productivity in a creative field comes from passion, diligence, patience and hard work that doesn’t necessarily keep office hours.

Please note: This is all meant in good humour, but it’s the gospel truth, so pay heed.

Really people. I know it’s exciting when you first start using the internet and you think:

“wow, imagine if there was a web site where people could list their company, and I could charge them to list, and I can target every industry and niche and small mom and pop side cafe in the known universe, and I’ll be RICH beyond all my wildest dreams!… muwahahahaha!”

Do you think you’re the first person to consider this?

Do you think that with the nature of the internet being such that you can create web pages in freely downloadable software packages, upload it to low cost, or even free web hosting provider’s servers using more free software and even integrate a database into the site with even more free software and technology… nobody has thought of this before? Surely not!

Sorry, someone has thought of it… and quite a few people at that, and over quite a few years, and some have poured millions of $ into the idea!

Take for instance the most obvious example. The Yellow Pages. A few years back, it was pretty badly made in this country, and me being in the business of developing websites often heard this justification of building their silver bullet website to compete with them. Even then I politely declined.

Here are some excepts from real emails to some of these enquirers:

“…to be perfectly honest, I am not entirely certain as to the viability of the job in question. I think the job is going to cost more than it’s going to be worth as the system (while inventive) is too close to many, many other web directories. I just think the market is too flooded.”

“…I pride myself in my ethics and honesty in business. As such, I feel it is my obligation to decline the offer to carry this project out for you but I do wish you the best of luck…”

I can also state that the projects those emails related to were passed onto other web companies who eventually abandoned them or are still trying to develop the system years later and are still not close to what you’ll find on the yellow pages or something like dmoz.org.

The Web Directory’s Saving Grace – Niches

The one place I’ll gladly admit a web directory to being a worthy addition to the internet is when it is niche related and only focuses on a certain industry or topic.

Take for instance, a directory about motorycles. Listing shops, tyre fitment centres, battery suppliers, leather, gloves, boots, helmets, accessories, spare parts etc. Now that is a legitimate an useful service to the web browser and one I’d readily bookmark if it’s content was up to date and reliable.

Keeping a directory up to date can constitute immense admin labour. Especially if it grows to a size that will actually be making money for you to buy more than a 6 pack every quarter. Bare this in mind, and remember that time is money. Especially if it’s not your time…

Well, thats enough about that, and I guess I’ve got that sufficiently out of my system.