Allchorn Design

Having recently been forced to relocate 1000 miles from where I’ve called home for the last 12 years, I’ve had to make some rather speedy amendments to my daily work schedule. The most notable of which is making far more extensive use of my Nokia e61i smart phone.

With 3G capabilities, I’ve hooked it up via bluetooth to my Toshiba Satellite notebook as a modem, but what I’ve discovered is that on it’s own, I don’t really need to lug my compu daypack around with me everywhere I go.

I’m able to browse the web pretty unhindered, including using gmail which I’ve effectively set up as my primary mail client (using allchorn.com) and using Fring for Skype and MSN.

What I wonder though is… At least at this point in time is, am I truly embracing mobile or is this phone a little ahead of the average? I’m sure phones will all get here eventually, but with a full qwerty keyboard… With Opera mini, Fring and Need for Speed all running on my phone… is this the new norm?

We seem to be in a stage of evolution where communication is at the highest point it has ever been, and while some embrace the connectivity brought about through telephones, mobile phones, Skype, email, instant messaging and social networking sites and tools like blogs, twitter, facebook, myspace etc. there are some that aren’t. And I mean “really” arent.

Funnily enough, I respect the choice of those on both sides of the fence. I’m more on the side that makes use of the new technologies, unless they annoy me or are done better by something else. Twitter for instance. It’s something I’ve never really managed to understand the need for. Perhaps that will change, but I find the concept of micro blogging to be a bit odd and unnecessary.

Coming back to the sheer volume of protocols you can use these days, I keep my communication to the following:

• Email
  In order of preference, this is on top of the list as it is the most traceable and effectively indexed form of documenting one’s communication.
• Instant Messaging (Skype & MSN)
  Generally I have multiple IM conversations open to various clients, service providers and colleagues at all times. If you know how to manage these conversations and cut off the ones that are wasting time, this is a very effective means of communicating. I log all conversations, so backtracking to he said, she said is pretty simple. Being stern and honest when you’re busy with tyre kicking friends is a must, and if done politely doesn’t harm your relationship (as far as my experience tells). If someone tells me they’re busy, I leave them alone. Or email them to respond when convenient.
• Telephone
  Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, this device is still the tried and tested standard for remote communication 132 years after it was invented! Alexander’s photograph above.
• Mobile Phone
  Can be the most annoying device in the world, but it also saves lives and offers a 24/7 means of connectivity. Looking past the obvious calling and messaging features, I also use my smart phone as a web browser and IM client.
• VOIP
  Voice over IP would be above telephone and mobile phone if I lived in a country where the connection were a bit more stable. There are some people I know I don’t have any problem chatting to, but sometimes it ends up being a “can you hear me?… I can’t hear you… can you hear me now?…” schlep in which case I pick up the phone and dial their landline number or mobile. A pity really, and a fact that will hopefully change for the better in time… sooner rather than later.
• Fax
  If you really have to. And sometimes you do. I rarely send faxes, and I receive them as an email. This saves paper, and the related storage space, and wastage.

Well, those are what I use.

A (very successful) colleague of mine’s signature features:

• Mobile
• GTalk
• Skype
• Twitter
• MSN
• AIM
• Yahoo!

and another (equally successful colleague) features only his 3 website address. On which you’ll only be able to contact him via email, or twitter. Sure he has a different business model and this works for him. It wouldn’t work for me, nor for Joey (above), but different strokes for different folks.

I had lunch with the exceptionally talented artist Christian Mugnai at Spiga d’Oro today and we had a rather interesting and amusing discussion about things. Chris and I have been mates since we first taught each other swear words when he moved here from Italy… in std 2 (approx. 5yrs old). In amongst all the jibber jabber and catching up we drew some parallels in our work, and trials and tribulations we face daily.

One of them was the inevitable discussion of the value of one’s work. I had the perfect story to let Chris understand how I feel about evaluating one’s work. Here it is, and if you’ve heard it before and I got details wrong, or know the original storyteller, please comment and let me know before crying foul. I will credit the originator once I know.

Pablo Picasso was walking through a park one day and he came across a woman who recognised him immediately. “You’re Pablo Picasso aren’t you?” she stated, and he replied that he was. “You’re my favourite artist!” she exclaimed. “Won’t you sketch my portrait?”.

Pablo agreed to do so and whipped out his sketch pad and pencil. He looked at her with intense concentration, tilted his head to the left, then the right, closed his eyes and thought for a second, opened them and laid 3 lines on the paper with great dexterity.

He passed the paper to the woman who looked at it for a moment, and she cried out “Absolutely incredible! In these 3 lines you have captured exactly who I am! I must pay you for this sketch Mr Picasso, what do I owe you for this?”.

Pablo thought for a second and said it would be £5,000 for the sketch. “What!?” she blurted. “It literally took you 20 seconds and 3 strokes of your pencil?!”.

“No my dear” he calmly replied, “it took me my entire life.”

And that’s the story. If you don’t understand the moral, or what it’s about, just comment and I’ll gladly explain. It’ll actually be interesting to see if anybody “doesn’t” understand.

Well, we’ve finally completed the initial shell of the new theme. Together with Cobus over at Radiiate, we’re close to completing this site to a point where I can actually leave it alone (aesthetically) for a while…

Please bare with me as I work on populating the portfolio, doing some bug fixing and other monotonous tasks like that.

Since everything’s been a bit of a blur lately, I haven’t had the time to brag shamelessly about some recent work of which I am particularly proud.

The all new BMW X6

I received another photography commission for BMW SA to shoot the Cape Town launch of the brand spanking new X6. A hybrid SUV/Coupe, that has technological advancements in the industry that would make even Montoya proud to have been affiliated.

As is the nature of a BMW shoot, they treated everyone like true professionals and as usual, they supplied me with a showroom car to use for the duration. Not many people would argue with a BMW 530i for a day’s comfortable driving, shooting, driving…

Another great job for an awesome client, and I’m looking forward to seeing my pictures published all over the country.

Initial steps for a Durban Web seminar

I’ve decided to head up a bit of a web designer/developer/marketer meetup in Durban for all those in the area that wish to do a bit of networking and self promotion. It’s really early days, but as word spreads and I find out how many people we’re looking at accommodating, more details will be published here, and maybe on a little stand-alone website.

The idea is to facilitate professional freelancers and companies that do the following:

• Creatives (design, animation, 3D, writing, photography etc.)
• Developers (PHP, SQL, Javascript etc.)
• Online Marketers (SEO, SEM, link builders, writers etc.)

We can all sit and chat and pass cards, stories, clients, projects and tidbits of information back and forth. It works well in Cape Town, and no reason it can’t here in KZN.

Well, sometimes things don’t go according to plan. New offices lined up, huge amounts of effort on a house we were looking forward to spending a good while in and everything on the up and up… all changed in a phone call. That call came from my dad’s house, and it wasn’t my dad on the phone. It was his friend telling me that he’d had a stroke and was in the hospital 1600km (1000 miles) away.

I made it here one time!

Needless to say, priority number one was to get a plane ticket to Durban and tie up as many loose ends as can be tied in 2 days. Kudos to 1time for a reasonably priced ticket at such short notice. Aside from sitting on the floor in the departure lounge, it was a pretty painless trip.

Learning to speak, but the beer still flows

I’m now sitting in a room in Durban a week later. My old man is out of the hospital and we’re on what looks like is going to be a relatively lengthy recovery period. He needs to learn how to speak again, and his right hand side has lost most of it’s coordination and strength. Really though, it sounds worse than it is.

He’s fully alert (or at least as how he was) and understands all what is said to him. It’s a one way street though, as he’s struggling to say things, and writing is not much better. It’s often a guessing game and thankfully he sees the humour in it sometimes. At least some words (f***, sh** and beer) are easy for him… I think they’re ingrained in his psychi.

Internet connection?

Please sign here… in blood, and bring your first born with a DNA sample and proof of address.

Connectivity in Durban… thats a joke. I went down to the local postnet today to use their internet service. A screen, a keyboard and a mouse. Disabled start menu. No Skype, no MSN messenger, and thank f*** I migrated all my mail to the gmail interface or I’d have lost at least 3 possible projects by now.

All of my clients and prospects have been very understanding thus far and hopefully I will be back online shortly. For now, my best bet is sitting at the Musgrave Mugg & Bean and feeding off their wireless hotspot. Not ideal, but I do like their coffee. I’ll hunt down a second hand 3G modem on Gumtree or the like and buy a 1GB bundle to start with. If you’re reading this, I’ll either have done it already, or doing it as you read.

Better news to follow shortly… I hope.

The Collective are a design and branding agency in Johannesburg, South Africa. I’ve worked with the principal designer there, Leigh Dyson on a couple of projects in the past, and we share a few clients.

They do some truly amazing work in the print field and have an impressive client list.

The design of their site was their creation and with a little bit of guidance to make it web-ready it came out pretty neatly. Tailor made to be viewed no lower than 1024×768, it fits nicely in most screen resolutions.

The tabbed navigation is even semantically coded (plain text in a bulleted list) through some nifty CSS tricks. The site is powered entirely through Wordpress with XML files to edit all flash content.

The portfolio items feature a dynamic crumb-trail navigation and pagination on all the sections. The identities section pulls a custom field thumbnail icon onto the page for each item and links it to it’s respective post.

The site is now done with phase one, and soon we embark on the FTP section which will feature a revolutionary file transfer interface. Both uploads and downloads.

A great client, and the site is already showing promise.

Things Evolve, you can’t avoid that

You can’t always predict every facet of a project’s lifespan. Things change and evolve as you work on it. As detailed a scoping document you draw up, there are more often than not extenuating circumstances that influence the workflow and final result of any project.

• client expectations may differ from those of the designers and developers
• additional features may be required mid-way through the project
• features might need to be changed or removed during the project
• as much as we’d love it not to be the case, there are always bugs of some sort to contend with.

Believing otherwise is naive. If things on your initial agreement don’t evolve during the design and development phases, you can rest assured that there will be some form of maintenance, additions, changes, repairs or unforseens following launch.

You can’t turn lead into gold

Coming to grips with the fact that things will grow and change, you also have to look reality in the eye. You have to realise that a poorly conceived and hastily carried out project isn’t going to grow into a solid, stable and flexible one.

Making some good choices early in a project’s lifespan is imperative to the successful deployment of a website. Things to consider before starting work:

1. Have you done your homework?
   It’s important to know what you can budget on your web project. It’s not too difficult to look at the expected ROI to justify the expense. By setting a target amount of conversions to have it pay for itself you’ll know what you can afford, and a good website design consultant would be able to tell you if thats realistic or not. You do realise that just publishing a website doesn’t automatically guarantee success? Have you looked at the cost implications of online marketing?
2. Decent web hosting
   Do you own your domain name? Does your host do daily backups? What kind of support do they offer? Do they have all the technologies installed to launch your site? If all these questions were answered with a yes, or a favourable response, then you’re probably on the right track.
   Three last things I’ve learnt over the years…
   1. You do not choose your host based on price!
   2. You do not choose your host based on price!
   3. You do not choose your host based on price!
3. Development team
   It should be obvious, but it’s overlooked time and time again. Your nephew’s best friend might be able to get a little bit done for you… he might even do it quite well. But when he gets offered a job getting paid more every month than you’re willing to pay him for one website, he’s going to take it.
   A website design company needs to be sustainable, and for that, they should preferably show some form of business longevity.
   Client references? Ask, I know I’d be able to give a list of happy clients to contact if you were considering me for some work. If they don’t, either they’re so big that the NDA’s don’t allow them, or they simply don’t have.
4. Design team
   First and foremost here: Print Designers are NOT Web Designers! Web interfaces designed with a print mindset more often than not result in an unusable mess. The coding of which can be more than double the amount of time and money spent than having it designed by an experience web interface designer. Thats not to say that collateral assets cannot be sent to the website designer by the print designer with style guides, colour palletes, CI document etc. Just leave the the page layout and interaction design to those that know it best.
   Portfolios are an important way to gauge the creativity of a team. A good grasp of effective colour use, usable layouts and the general aesthetic value of their work.
5. Technology
   Believe it or not, I won’t even type one acronym in this part. The question here is… do you want to use an open source system (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Typo3 etc.) because it’s free, or do you want to use an open source system because it’s used by such a wide community and will be supported at least in the forseeable future? If the latter, do you know if you can get the support you need in the country (or at least timezone) of your residence? Really? Do they work in their pyjamas or are they legitimate companies like those you chose for development?
   Your other option is to go for a fully supported, homegrown system. Developed, maintained and supported by the people who initially made it. Sometimes this is the best option. They should have the longevity and sustainability that you need.
6. Marketing & Maintenance
   Are you going to maintain content of the site yourself, or at least in-house? Does the vendor of the technology or development team (often the same people) offer training? If something goes wrong with the site, are there people on call to fix it promptly? Remember, it’s not always their fault… it’s like a car. You can’t get angry at a vehicle manufacturer when your tyres wear, or cam belt needs replacing can you?
   Marketing your website is a multi faceted process. It’s best explained by people like Christine at Altersage. It’s a serious topic and one that your development and design team have to take seriously, or don’t take them seriously… seriously.

Conclusion & Footnote

This post was sparked by a repair project we’re currently doing. It was a project that started small, on a very small budget, then as it grew it started to trip over itself. Regardless it grew more, changed development teams who made it worse and now it’s broken and in need of a considerable amount of fixing. To the extent of requiring a re-do.

It’s not the only time I’ve encountered this, and I think it’s safe to say that some people never learn, no matter how many times it happens to them. Hopefully after reading this you’ll be wise enough to not let it happen to you.

A good foundation laid by the right people with enough initial research to give you a better chance at success is what it’s all about.

Matt from Wordpress announced today on the official blog that the new version has just been released. Since the blog post shows the high quality version of the tour of the new version, and my internet connection is pretty borked today, I’ve embedded the lower resolution version for you and me to watch on my site.

Time to watch…

Well, that actually looks like a decent set of new features. I especially like the ability to restore previously saved versions of your posts. I will upgrade shortly, but as I often do, I’ll run it locally for a week or two before committing it to my live site.

In amongst some really interesting projects we’re working on, I read. And while reading the usuals, I was quite intrigued to note that some of my colleagues at FormFunction and Altersage were writing for and being published in Mail & Guardian Online’s relatively new website Techleader. I slowly turned green, and thought I’d ask Joey what it takes to be an author on the site. He put me in contact with the powers that be, and they approved me quite rapidly and sent me my author’s login details.

After a brief foot finding session in a user interface that I am more than familiar with (Wordpress MU), customised to be inline with their company, and surely tightened up for security, I wrote a piece that you can’t go wrong on. A top 10 list of open source software…. for Windows Vista no less.

I did this last night (9th July) and tonight I am the featured contributor. Maybe a flash in the pan start, but I’m chuffed.