Electronic Portfolio

numbers

I have worked on the following www sites:
www.bowralbarns.com.au
www.stewartdudley.com
www.wildcraft.com.au
www.bcdcc.com.au
www.aspirepublishing.com.au
www.rosamond.com
www.havenproject.com.au

Things I have learned about the www:

1. Changes happen I have been doing www site design work since the early nineties. It keeps changing. What is state of the art today may be as useless as yesterdays paper in a week. Currently, CSS, xml, search engine marketing, auto responders and blogs seems to be all the rage, and it is getting better all the time to get the content delivered efficiently.

2. Style or Substance There is this paradox between the content and the delivery system. Research and usability studies go a long way toward finding balance between content and good graphic design. The new CSS coding has allowed for some very beautiful interfaces (see www.csszegarden.com) and done away with tables on the whole. But there needs to be balance. Also, flash sites are beautiful and until recently they were invisible to search engines. With new xml sitemaps, that is no longer true. Also, article publishing on a regular basis seems to act like miracle grow for Google.

3. Team effort In 2005, I went to the Thunderlizard Productions www design conference in San Francisco, and one of the presentations was on "the nine pillars of good web development": Research, site strategy, technology strategy, content strategy, Abstract design, technology Implementation, content production, concrete design and product management. Many of these talents of course overlap, but it is a rare thing to assemble a team such as this, and rarer still to find any one person who can do most of these themselves. I did this entire site myself... but I don't recommend it.

4. Search engine marketing Search engines are powerful forces, and the rules keep changing. If you are online and no one can find you, forget it. Which is all about search engine optimization. There are companies making squillions specializing in this. It has to do with fuzzy logic, and a whole lot of algorithms. Get professional help if your site is depending on these for success. (see www.webmama.com) Always list yourself with Google (and Yahoo, etc) with a sitemap.xml (visit any number of free sitemap creation sites online and follow the instructions.) It is like catnip for search engines, same with regular article publishing. (See www.interspire.com)

5. What succeeds I was at a design seminar once and Jay Chiat (I think) of Chiat Day Advertising said "write down on a piece of paper what constitutes success for you." It is important to have a goal, especially online. It is important to objectify what you are looking to do online. Make your message clear and your audience a real person. Start with you: try the exercise above it may surprise you.

6. Web writing "Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick someone- a real person you know, or an imagined person- and write to that one". -John Steinbeck. The sad reality of online communication is you have less than ten seconds to connect with someone, make it count. Tone, brevity, action.

7. Humor If you can make someone smile, you have made the world a better place. Doing it online has become increasingly challenging. There is not a software available that substitutes for wit and humor. Yet (see number one).

8. Strategy What works for someone, may not work for someone else. Leverage the latest technologies and trends to improve your site and the interface. Do research, and lots of it. Know when to break rules, give visual weight to important messages. If you do not have a creative brief and/or a content brief, stop, back up. Spend as much time or more planning as you spend building a site.

9. It doesn't matter (from my hero and friend Milton Glaser who wrote me an email saying: "it is good to be older and wiser.")

"Last year someone gave me a charming book by Roger Rosenblatt called ‘Ageing Gracefully’ I got it on my birthday. I did not appreciate the title at the time but it contains a series of rules for ageing gracefully. The first rule is the best. Rule number one is that ‘it doesn't matter.’ ‘It doesn't matter that what you think. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn't’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn't matter.’ Wisdom at last." - Milton Glaser

10. Optimization www sites communicate, sell, create a recognizable brand for the client, style counts, but will not work if no one finds you. Phase two of most good sites is optimization. Keywords, Google analytics, and descriptions, along with constantly upgrading and adding real content is like catnip to the search engines. Otherwise known as SEO.