An article on Vitamin by David Greiner from Campaign Monitor sharing some good info on building HTML emails.

For the past year I have witnessed, an unfortunate saga: a web project led by a marketing firm that partnered with an IT vendor gone bad. The marketing firm has some web experience, but not substantial enough to produce the site alone. An IT “partner” was needed for technical resources and experience in the client’s business sector.

Here’s a list of events and circumstances that have transpired with this relationship:

• Partner could not satisfy interface design requirements. The marketing firm ended up doing a lot of extra work not budgeted
• The first demo of the beta site was not ready and had a lot of bugs. The presentation had to be conducted carefully skipping the functionality that did not perform correctly
• During periodic reviews, revisions were not implemented correctly, or in a timely manner, creating more unbudgeted work for the marketing firm
• Requirements continued to be unmet creating a great deal of frustration and doubts of the project’s success. The “partner” even refused to comply with contractual requirements for no legitimate reason
• Subsequent site demos were done with mixed and often embarrassing results
• After site launch, errors were occurring, excuses, assumptions and accusations abound
• Now the focus has turned to contractual obligations and possible litigation

It’s a shame there are unprofessional companies like the vendor in this story. This company lied, cut corners, had no respect for their client, or the project and obviously bit off more than they could chew.

All these issues are a Quality Control (QC) problem. A good QC plan could have brought attention to the trouble early and early usually means with less costs, or consequences.

A good QC plan:

• Is part of the contract or separate service agreement
• Details the QC process
• Lists requirements, tolerances, expectations, practices
• Assigns roles and responsibilities
• Has a schedule for periodic, performance reviews (with short intervals)
• Explains the consequences for failing to meet requirements

Marketing firms, agencies and other communication firms involved in web development often do not have the resources for this responsibility. A solution would be to hire a consultant to handle quality control. He/She would audit the vendor and assure compliance to contractual requirements and make sure best practices are adhered to during development. The money spent on this consultant would have minimized the extra burden on the marketing firm’s resources. If this person had the right skill set, he/she could also have assisted in development at times where the vendor faulted, keeping the quality of the project intact.

Don’t put your company in this situation. Plan for how Quality Control will be addressed and how these risks will be mitigated. You’ll sleep better for it.

Very well done.

http://www.koreus.com/media/animator-vs-animation.html

I’m for copyright protection as much as anyone, but it seems there are times when it goes too far. Three examples come to mind. The most recent is the litigation surrounding the term Web 2.0. The term was coined by a company for a conference, but has grown to represent more than that.

Two other, bigger, instances of copyright protection gone awry are Final Four, the NCAA basketball tournament, and Superbowl. Recently broadcast media and advertisers have had to awkwardly dance around these two terms. Copyright them if you like, but allow the use for reasonable purposes. They have grown to larger than life proportion and it doesn’t make sense to prohibit their use, since most uses benefit the authors. Copyright can still be enforced in case of malicious activity.

I found this story quite interesting irritating. After being in the business of creating visual communication for over 15 years, I have never been a proponent of producing spec work.

The problem here is larger than spec work; it’s ethics -- as the post points out with its reference to the AIGA. Spec work, low-balling, plagiarism, bait and switch, work for hire, and flat-out lying are all related in my book and shouldn’t be done. They ruin the playing field and cheapen the services that are so difficult to keep priced appropriately.

The elimination of these practices has to come from the top, just as any example is set and the little guy always pays the price for such business practices.

It’s simple. Get paid for your work. Do your best job. Be respected. Everyone wins.

Unfortunately, It's not a utopia and you gotta do what you gotta do, but be prepared for the consequences of your actions and don't bitch when your working for half of what is appropriate.

There have been locator services available for sites for various fees, but just a couple years the only way to build an inexpensive store locator application was using zip code longitude and latitude data. This data was available from a variety of sources, but it is all the same data from the United States Postal Service and US Census Bureau. This data worked well, but lacked street level detail. Each zip code had a center-point (long. & lat.) based on population and as a result, distances of locations close to each other were inaccurate and the data was only for the US.

Recently released scientific data allows us to simply create very accurate and detailed world-wide, store locators by using new technologies:

Google Maps API  - This cool API is a free service that allows one to easily embed Google Maps into web pages with JavaScript. It’s still in beta and has a few bugs, but generally works very well.

MapQuest Open API - This API also uses JavaScript to easily integrate routing, geocoding and mapping into your website.

Maybe it's time to upgrade that old store locator.

Here's a shop that knows how to build a site.

With Flash 8 came new and improved Flash detection. Adobe has a nice article/tutorial on their best solution yet.

Establishing a schedule during planning and getting agreement from all parties is an important part of any project. Once the schedule is accepted, maintaining it during production goes a long way to prevent issues that can jeopardize a project’s success.

Momentum
A great deal of effort is consumed during the start-up of any activity. Having stops and starts in production is costly and can ruin a budget very quickly. When a project is moving along smoothly and work is getting completed, effort is directed to the resources doing the work while administration is minimal.

Continuity
Continuity is an essential part of any creative process. Once a designer, or programmer is in their “zone” they are very productive and the quality of work is at its peak. After a long break, it may be impossible for a designer to get back into the same mind-set to finish their work as intended. Technical people also loose their perspective and have to spend time and effort to pick up where they left off.

Risk
The longer a project takes to complete the higher the probability of failure. This risk is often overlooked, especially by the client, since it’s the supplier’s responsibility to complete the project successfully. Business needs, creative direction, financials, technology, and resources change over time. The project may be affected by any of these changes and require a change in scope.

Cash Flow
Delays affect cash flow in several ways. Billing may be delayed if it’s contingent on milestones, or deliverables and expenses my be higher because of availability, or market rates. Available funding may no longer be available.

Take Precautions

Although work stoppages may not be preventable, there are some ways to plan and create incentives to keep a project on schedule, or minimize the impact they have:

• Have clauses in your contract that address how delays will be handled.

• Do not have your billing contingent on deliverables or milestones. Get paid on schedule even though work may be stopped.

• Only guarantee rates and/or expenses for a specific time period.

• Designate desirable stopping points at milestones so productive stretches in the schedule won’t be interrupted unnecessarily.

• Check resource availability for worst case scenarios, have back-ups and include this extra expense in the project cost.

• Don’t begin work until the schedule is agreed upon.

• Work in short cycles that naturally create stopping points.

I haven't found many sites about designing. Sure there's hundreds of sites that showcase work and have information on the act of producing the work or the author's experience, but not many that have information on designing from a academic or intellectual perspective.

Design Observer is just that

It’s very difficult to estimate time to complete work even for experienced people. As a project manager, I often have to rely on developers and designers to provide estimates on how long it will take them to complete their assigned tasks. I am surprised at the inaccuracy of the results, but have found some commonalities.

People usually underestimate time required to complete work, and not just by a little, often as much as 50%. After some discussion with team members, it became apparent that unless people had a previous example on which to base their estimating, they had difficulty imagining how the new work will happen. People generally just run through the core activity and estimate how long it should take, not would take.

Rework is also not considered. Sometimes it is because they assume it will make them look bad when they have to justify their estimate if they have included rework. Other times it is because they think they won’t make mistakes this time. Having an inaccurate estimate is far worse than doing something twice. Nothing is accomplished in a straight line.

Start-up time and close time are also not included. Discussing issues, looking for resources, reading documentation, configuring software, installing updates, obtaining permissions, refreshing one’s memory and getting “in the zone” are all part of the task at hand and must be included.

One technique I use that has been very successful is to estimate how long it will take to do the core task with no rework, then double it.

Another situation that adds complexity to estimating time is when the person who will actually end up doing the work is not the one estimating the time to do it. Even two people with comparable skill sets may take quite a different amount of time to complete the same work. Some people are more detailed and double-check everything; some are more organized and have less start-up time, while others are just faster. If the lowest common denominator is used there is risk of the estimate being excessive. How does one find the average or better yet a weighted average? I’ve used:

Weighted Average = (longest time estimate * .75) * 2

I like to err on the high side.

A project I’m working on now requires an accurate time estimate. To achieve the desired level of accuracy I’m going to try a few techniques.

Bottom Up - Considered an accurate method, bottom up sums small activities into larger units of work. Risks here are bad estimating of activities and too small of activities causing bloat.

Top Down - Estimate time for larger units of work, divide the time into the smaller activities that make up the larger units, and make any adjustments.

Analogous - Compare the Bottom Up and the Top Down estimate to completed, similar projects for accuracy. Risks here are differences in teams and forgotten issues that affected the project.

Hopefully by approaching the estimating process using three techniques accuracy will improve and validate the results. We’ll see.

Microsoft has launched a suite of new products geared towards the interface design and development market - ala Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects and the like. I don’t think Adobe is too worried at this point. Microsoft’s reputation on developing good graphics software is far from exemplary and FrontPage and the Visual Studio IDE editor are barely usable.

The three Expression products are Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer and Web Designer. Each has its own specialty, but they are made to work together and work with Visual Studio rounding out a full design-build environment.

Hopefully the usability and general attractiveness of Microsoft built software will improve because of the increased exposure and access to this type of software in PC-land. Not that design products are Mac only, but there is a huge rift between developers that are visually sensitive and those that live on function alone.

A new underlying technology that is integrated into these products is XAML. Similar to how SVG works, XAML is going to allow graphics to be applied and transported in new ways not really possible today. Another new technology is WPF a direct competitor to Flash's format.

Maybe stodgy Microsoft can give cool Adobe a little competition, but I won’t hold my breath. However, they are bringing new technologies to market; making a big effort towards web standards, interoperability, compatibility and open source initiatives; and bridging the gap between them and everyone else.

I have a peeve and need to rant.

I don't know how many times I've seen companies with a positioning statement that begins "The Art and Science of..."

Business is not art, or science. Business is business and most companies do "something" to make money and "something" is perceived as a necessary evil.

Another phrase beat to death is "Exceeding customer expectations".

No kidding. Who strives to disappoint?

Advice to corporate marketing gurus: Be specific. What makes your company unique? If you can't think of something, don't say anything.