I’m a website designer & programmer. I can work with anyone, anywhere in the world. I chose to be different and do most of my work in the local region. But like I said, that’s different. Many of my colleagues think more is better, and try to price low and gain money on quantity rather than quality, both of their clients and of their services.

When searching for a service online, I don’t care if you’re looking for website hosting, website design, logo design, custom graphics, or an alarm company (the only item in this list that I’m not providing), you probably want — or need — to know where the person is.

So how do you figure it out?

I wanted to use a specific set of examples in this post. Top-of-the-search engine results with fantastic prices, and absolutely no phone number or address to be seen on their website. Sites that ended up being in other countries. Websites with blatant grammatical errors that obviously still rake in enough cash to get to the top of Google search results on pay-per-click hot topics that are highly competitive.

But they asked me nicely to remove their website address and information from my blog. So I’m removing it. Not exactly sure what offended them about the post, as they were only a live example and it was true that they were in a foreign country, but I’ll remove it to keep the peace.

Some cliches exist for a reason. “You get what you pay for” is one of them. In a vast sea of choices and no education, people choose the products by lowest price. There’s either too much information, or not enough, to educate the consumer into making informed choices.

There are real dangers in sending your money to a foreign corporation. They can be of the most stellar reputation, 100% honest, hard-working people, but you are still never afforded the same protections and conveniences you have working with someone in the same town or at least the same state. It is much less convenient to do business out-of-state, or out-of-the-country. If it’s out-of-state you have the additional complications of figuring out which state/jurisdiction to interpret your contract in, and where you have to travel to in order to arbitrate disputes. In foreign matters, unless you have the type of money it takes to go to International court, you don’t have legal protections no matter what the contract says.

If you are going to a local company, you can check their mailing address, their reputation, get a real referral from someone you know to someone you know you can trust. You can track their professional affiliations, check the Better Business Bureau to see if there are complaints against them. And more.

So how do you figure out who people really are? There is a database that stores their legal domain registration information. There is real consideration to abolishing this information on the web, but in the meantime the more of us who are using it for legitimate reasons (to check on the idenitity of a service before purchase) the better. This database is accessible at http://www.whois.net/

If you enter theirdomainname.com into Whois you can see their registration record. Enter “theirdomainname” in the field for looking up domain registration data. Make sure the right suffix is selected (”.com”) and click GO!

Not all domains show legal registration information online. The domain owner can hide that information by paying their domain registrar a few extra bucks to make even that anonymous…. Then you need to get into some website gymnastics to figure out who these people are, and I am not sure it’s worthwhile. If they’re hiding, maybe they have something to hide. More often, though, people are banking on ignorance. This blog post is to help some people wake up and smell the scandal. The flip side of this idea: If you run a legitimate business, you should not be anonymous on the web, and prospective clients shouldn’t need to resort to the “whois database” method above, just to figure out where you’re located. I get a few junk mails and a junk fax or 3 for having my information up — the worst is the domain-registration related spam, but that’s a hazard of doing legit business on the web.

I suggest you look at people’s Contact Us page and check that their information matches their WhoIs registration — check their professional affiliations and their memberships in local chambers of commerce. Ask if there have been any complaints against them.

If you’re in the local region, you could ask for a face-to-face with the person you’re doing business with. The only way to see eye-to-eye on any project is to actually be able to look someone in the face.

Moral: You pay for what you get.

Good luck!

There is an awful lot of clutter on the web. There ought to be a fine for littering in cyberspace. You’ve seen the kind of junk I’m talking about here and there: content that is there for the sole benefit of search engines, such as white keyword text on a white background, people who spam in blog comments, and even the harmless pages of nonsense that grows like weeds on each of our websites.

In June I tightened ship on my own website. I’ve implemented some new security on the blog software, notably reCAPTCHA, a captcha project by Carnegie Mellon University. Captchas use images containing distorted text that you have to re-type into a form field. The reCAPTCHA project uses portions of scanned/OCR’d books that failed to be recognized easily by computers to test users. Once the text is verified to be read by a human, it helps add books to electronic libraries. So using this method not only foils spammers, but helps with online literature projects.

I’m also working on editing down my website. I am guilty of using my ability to create web pages so easily as an opportunity to be too wordy. Some websites don’t have enough information, and you leave disappointed that you couldn’t find what you needed to know. Others are too wordy: “Welcome to (this website). We’re so glad you came… have a seat. Would you like some tea while you’re waiting for real content? The bathroom is down the hall.” I’m guilty as charged, in a court of my own self-examination.

I altered the navigation on the site, so it should hopefully make more sense to someone at least passingly familiar with websites. I started out with really obscure labels for the links, now I’m back down to the basics. Practice what I preach: I’m always telling my clients what should be on their homepage, how their navigation should be labeled. I have finally followed my own advice.

As a new service, I’m helping clients with their website “talk” — a website needs to be the executive summary of a longer proposition. The longer proposition can be there, behind the scenes, and you can bring on the content in layers that are carefully crafted to build detail into the subject. However, people don’t need to be hit over the head with a heavy sales pitch, proposal, or autobiography from the get-go.

Tightening up the wording, reducing babble, using bullet lists for main points, taking advantage of proper linking, and proper keyword integration.

People don’t have time to sit through a long reading: they came with something in mind, even if it was just to learn more about you, and then they’re going to go on to the next thing in their life. I’m working on other ways to increase website traffic to my client’s site other than the stinking, lying, cheating ways that some search engine optimization businesses have taken up. It’s a definite art, and it’s easier to do on content that you didn’t write yourself, so for me it’s slow going between projects, and for clients, hopefully it won’t be as slow and inconsistent.

Some of my new philosophies about optimization of websites were covered in my second workshop at the QED Business Edge conference yesterday: “Who’s your website for?” It went over well. More about it later.

Because I’m expanding my business into content development and website planning, I’m starting to subcontract some design work out so I can make room for adding new services to my business. To see what this looks like, see the Rhthym and Rhyme Childcare and Simply FlawlessFaces websites.

I’d like to tackle the theory of AJAXification for a moment, mainly because I was just in the middle of an AJAX-rendered hellish portion of an otherwise OK website.

AJAX is a buzzword and people who even know it are probably some of the few web programmers out there still able to compete over 6-digit salaried jobs.

The simple definition is that AJAX is a browser-side technology — in other words it doesn’t run on the webserver, it runs on your home or office computer — that sends data and fetches data to and from a web server without the need to reload or load the webpage. Only the portion of the webpage that needs to be changed is changed, rather than the whole webpage. It can save time and looks better to the user because the pictures and background of the page don’t need to reload. It can also be a waste of time, as shown in the example below.

With the proper use of AJAX, a web application can swiftly and seamlessly load information and change something on the webpage. Perhaps it can be used to anticipate the user’s next move, load some data on the sly, and have it ready to slip in with some slick javascript maneuver when the user clicks. “Ha, ha! I knew you were going to click that!” This is especially cool when there are fewer choices for what the user might do. Not so great when there is a lot of data to pull from the webserver and not so great when there are too many choices to properly anticipate the user’s next maneuver or when the data being pulled is directly dependent on the user’s input.

The result of AJAX used correctly is a user experience that resembles a desktop application. Google (gmail at least) has it right, and I sure hope their programmers are getting the 6-digit income they deserve.

What annoys me is when AJAX is used to “be cool” — not to enhance the user’s experience.

The application that annoyed me today is the largest area newspapers’ online calendar of events. Perhaps the application ran “slick” in testing with only 5 or 10 events listed. I’m sure it ran very nicely. Especially from their high-tech offices with terrific web service, or even with the servers at the same location.

There’s a mini calendar which shows a bit into next month, and underneath it, starting with “today”, is a huge detailed listing (date, time, name of event, location…) of the area’s events for the next several days.

Each date on the calendar is a link that, when hovered, brings up a floating list of that day’s events. If there were 3 events per day, this would be bright. There’s more like 40. It takes as long to load the floating list as it would to reload the web page. You have to sit there hovering your mouse over the date for what seems like an eternity as it makes a call to the database to pull up and format the day’s events. There’s a nice swirly thing that shows up if you hover over the mini calendar. Without the swirly thing, if I went to the mini calendar to click, I wouldn’t ever know that a “cool” list would eventually pop up. It pops up next to my mouse with a listing so long that when I then move my mouse down the list I eventually hit the bottom of the browser, and the whole AJAXified listing goes away. It doesn’t scroll as I move down. That’s real helpful.

Ok. Well, one could live with that — instead of hovering and getting a hand-cramp, how about clicking on the date. As one would expect, the listing under the mini calendar changes to start with the date selected. However, this incites another AJAXified call to the database to fetch several days’ events and replace the vast majority of the content on the webpage. Again, this data pull results in a long “load time” for the javascript (AJAX) to pull the data. It’s nice that the sidebar dancing ads don’t change, but exactly what time are you saving? Does this make you look “smarter” and “slicker”? Maybe…to the advertisers since you suddenly have nothing to do but stare at their glowing undulating ads.

But let’s say I want to peruse today’s events, and pull up the event details for items I’m interested in in another window, or in another tab, of my browser? Then when I’m done selecting a bunch, I can look through the event’s details…

Because these aren’t real webpage links, it ignores my attempt to open the link in another window. They’re all “javascript links” and when I click them, the entire page goes away, even if I’ve attempted to open it in another window or tab. To get back to the mini calendar or listing, now I have to get the whole page by going “back” in the browser. That’s not the way I want webpages to behave. At all. I’m a tab-oriented person. I let pages load in another tab and look at them when I’m good and ready.

All this time my laptop fan is going nuts, the load on my laptop was increasing, my laptop was getting hotter, and it was a waste to even be on the page. I have better things to waste my time with, like ranting about the abuse of AJAX!

This is just one example of a webpage that needs an AJAX Anonymous support group. Perhaps they never thought through what the user would do, how they would expect it to behave. They created a webpage Frankenstein monster based on what was “cool”. It’s not EASIER. It’s not CHEAPER. It’s their self-aggrandizement at stake. “Look, we have AJAX!” — so what?

It doesn’t help that I went for an interview with that company a year ago and they kept asking me if I knew AJAX and I kept saying “Not Yet.” I still say not yet because I’m still not convinced that anything good would come of it. I’ve seen very very few things that would REALLY be enhanced by the use of AJAX. AJAX is not the killer tool to make a website cool. A website is either cool or not, regardless of the technology behind it. If doing something in AJAX would really make the experience better, go for it. Gmail is cool because it rather closely replicates the experience of a desktop email application. I hardly use it, but when I did, I was suitably impressed, then went back to my own email app.

An online shared calendar doesn’t need to be AJAXified like this one was, though. I would have preferred to load each day’s events in a separate tab, or view event details for selected dates in different tabs so I could keep flipping between them and comparing times and locations to see how many events I could attend.

What this AJAX stuff does to search engine optimization: Since search engines ignore javascript, all that data means nothing to them. Terrific on a private area of a website, horrible in a calendar application.

So, in conclusion, if you’re looking for AJAX because you heard that AJAX is cool, ask to see some good and bad AJAX in action and talk to an expert to decide whether or not AJAX would enhance your users’ experience given what you’re doing on your website.

If you really do know AJAX, please stop people before they ruin their websites with it. You have a moral and ethical responsibility to guide people correctly in how they use their websites.

Please curb your AJAX. Good boy. Sit.

It seems that many customers who come to me have not planned their website or print project. My normal flat-fee prices don’t include this time-intensive service. I would really have to get into the company in question, to almost become a temporary staff member, to plan out their website for them from soup-to-nuts.

I’m now offering project planning services, both for website design, content and feature planning, and for print design campaigns and marketing strategies. My usual services require design briefs, copy (content), assets (photos, logos, multimedia, and all other materials) and a list of features provided up-front. I will provide only cursory project planning assistance, guidance, or advice during project intake. I will not write for you, research for you, draw up diagrams, etc.

What my project planning services will provide will depend on each company’s needs and budget. Prices will start at $100 for something relatively simple like site diagramming and navigation planning, and from there the sky’s the limit; you tell me your budget, and I’ll come up with a list of what services your budget allows for, or you give me a list of the services you’re looking for, and I’ll come up with a price. Or we can do hourly rates, I’ll come on-site, and I’ll become a member of the project team.

Services may include:

• Serving in the capacity of a knowledgable aide in the process of project planning
• Company profiling
• Supplying principles or relevant persons with questionnaires for the project
• Corporate history review
• Mission statement assistance
• Research into your competitors marketing materials or website
• Market research for design related to your specific industry
• Review of your current marketing strategy, advertising, materials, website, etc.
• Business marketing development
• Content planning
• Feature planning
• Step-by-step planning of a website or printing campaign
• Website navigation and hierarchy planning
• Guiding your representatives through the creation of an RFP or design brief
• Suggestions for assets or copy to be included in the project
• Composition of a creative brief on your behalf
• Storyboards, mockups, thumbnails, or sketches
• Composition of custom color schemes for the project
• Stock photography, font, or clip art research
• Copy editing, and review or copy writing
• Acquiring permissions or releases for included materials
• Supplying lists of materials to submit to Eclectic Tech or other contractors

If you choose to use another vendor to complete the project outlined, I can offer:

• Overseeing project progress and resolution, quality control, communication with vendors
• Vendor research (printers, programmers, designers, etc.)
• Supply vendors with materials for the project

These services don’t alleviate the principles of your organization from their responsibilities in project planning: I will need to interview them, acquire lists of materials, names to get releases for photography, a company history, supply of old marketing materials, and more. What this does is add another member to your web design team who is knowledgeable, insightful, and entirely dedicated to the one project, which allows your principles to concentrate on other projects with the assurance that if something is needed from them, it will be brought to their attention.

Often the topic of starting a “great” web business comes up, and in my age and wisdom (being both old to be a freelance web programmer, and one of a minority of women in the field) — there’s two ways to go: thinking “in” the box = come up with new brilliant technology, patent it and hire people to program it better and faster than anyone else can so you can quickly market it. If it climbs to the top before it is cloned you become the next target for people trying to out-do your website. This track is getting VERY old, VERY fast. Mainly you and your absolute best friend need to be programmers to do this (think Microsoft, Google…) because you can’t trust anyone with your terrific idea. Also it has to be so ground-breaking that only the best (read: smartest, wise, long-range thinking) of venture capitalists will see the end of the rainbow where the pot of gold sits. If it is easy to get the funding for your idea, someone probably is making it already.

Thinking “out” of the box = coming up with a way to use normal everyday technology to do something that fills — rather than creates — a real need or niche. It’s cheaper, faster, and if it really IS filling a need, it’s going to spread by word-of-mouth, and it won’t be “just a fad”. This technique aims lower and comes in under the radar — no billion dollar baby here — but it’s safer, less stressful, and you don’t have to be a programmer, generally speaking. The programmer is unlikely to run off with your baby if it doesn’t look like a “google killer”.

The problem is that great ideas are easy — the means to really make them work is the harder part (invention = 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration). I’m frustrated with people who want to “share” the rewards of their great web program idea (equity sharing) of up to 50%, but won’t be doing any of the actual work to make it hang together and be practical. If someone comes to me with a truly great idea (and I have NDA’s if they don’t), I can find them a great programming team, but the team will probably want cash on delivery, not equity. More “google killers” die every day than make it. They’re not original ideas, and if a site dies before it makes money, there’s no equity and it’s a huge waste of the programmer’s time.

Imagine that someone turned to you and said, “I have a great idea for a newspaper! I’ll give you the ideas, you develop the newspaper and run it, staff it, write for it, etc. I’ll give you 50%.” That approach frustrates me. People don’t get it. I can translate it to dozens of other fields — “I have a great plan for a house, you just have to build it. Then you can live on the top floor, and I’ll live downstairs. Ok?”

Somewhere in there people are cheapening the act of programming. After all, it’s just bits and bytes, right???

The Internet mimics life in a “survival of the fittest” way. I don’t pretend to know what’s “cool” or “hot” anymore — I work with “useful” I won’t get rich but that wasn’t in my personal game plan. I have my own great or good ideas, some might make me money, some won’t but will look really good on my resume.

Then there’s the flip side of this: If you’re not the head of the programming team and you’ve paid someone to build the google killer — what if it works? Now you have to program new features, fix bugs, etc. You either need to re-hire the same team, or get a programming staff. You go on Craigslist and choose the person who claims somehow to be able to fulfill your great Internet dream, but if you have this beautiful web baby together, are you really ready for that long-term commitment with a total dweeb with no business sense?

I can’t wait to be so busy with people I’ve looked in the eye and shaken the hands of that I can’t afford to even GLANCE at another Craigslist ad. I love my clients dearly, but you don’t know how rare it was that the people I dealt with BECAME clients at all. I certainly wouldn’t want to become business partners with some guy with the “next killer app” idea and had to actually look on Craigslist for a programmer. So wait — your only experience is the front end of websites as a user, and you think you can somehow manage a killer web application programming team? That’s an incredibly poor business move and you’ll get laughed out of the bank. And you want the programmer to work for nothing but equity? That’s spec work.

That brings me to another thing: Have you ever had one of those managers who knows absolutely nothing about what you do? It happens in IT all the time, but much less so in other professions. BUT if you’ve ever heard a nurse bitch that someone “stepped in” as the head of the nursing staff from a business-only background, you might get the idea. In most large corps — and this is a place where Microsoft does NOT get bad rankings — the heads of the corporation have NO IDEA how to produce their main products…much less have a clue what their IT department does sitting at their computers all day.

It’s never a good idea to manage something you don’t understand. Ever.

On that note, are you interested in a basic web programming class?

I want to continue to offer e-commerce at a reasonable price, and that reasonable price will not be tagged on oscommerce. Oscommerce will easily be double the price of any other shopping cart going forward. The program is a beast, and as long as it’s been around, it’s turned into a Frankenstein monster.

To extend the program through “contributions” requires hacking it to bits. I installed only one or two modules that installed without having to individually hand-edit program files, but note that these modules completely and utterly REPLACE files from the base oscommerce installation, just as the ones that required hand-editing rendered the program un-upgradable.

This is point #1 in being absolutely and utterly unable to upgrade the package once installed and so-called plug-ins (read: hacks) are added.

This implies that oscommerce does not have “Hooks” - - no points at which contributions can easily be put into the program execution queue without disturbing the original files.

The templating of the program out-of-the-box is absolutely unforgivable. There is no separation of logic and design on the back-end of the program. Each are enmeshed within each other. One contribution forcibly ripped the template code out of the program code and separated them. I’m both grateful that someone went through the trouble and appalled that doing so was needed — again this absolutely breaks the ability to upgrade the program.

I think I’m very spoiled by PmWiki. I never have to hack the program code to add a feature. Ever. That’s Patrick’s duty. Cookbook recipes (plug-ins) are kept separately from the program code. There are an abundance of program hooks to slip custom code into. The base install can be upgraded with or without the recipes being upgraded, with a minimal chance of breaking recipes, since the hooks serve as an API layer in the program, and rarely need to change how they behave.

I’m tempted to write in a shopping cart module, because oscommerce is the exact opposite of everything I’ve learned about a good, extensible and maintainable package.

I will be trying Zen Cart next. I now know enough about oscommerce to install it and even customize it, but I am not able, in any good conscience, to recommend it to a customer, and my price for installing oscommerce must be double what I thought it should be.

I have to apologize to the Frankenstein monster for having insulted him by comparing oscommerce to him. Oscommerce is far more of a hack than one body being combined with another brain.

Simple, instantly recognizable features are shown over and over to be preferable in web design. Sites that are cluttered, or have many distractions, are not instantly appealing to people; they have to have formed a good impression of the company before ever seeing the website to have a favorable view of the company. Here are the features that constitute a good web design:

• the site must be findable by those who seek it (cf search engine crawlers should find it, the web address should be in print ads, in the phone book, in TV or Radio ads, the domain name must be as short as feasible but easy to remember)
• the site is usable for both the company, its employees, and its visitors
• careful consideration to navigation, and the names in the headings
• simple drawings are used rather than photographs
• pages are read (by English language readers) from the top left to right, down the page
• there are established rules for color coordination and contrast that designers are trained in, and the stable web color palate is limited
• emotional and cultural impressions of colors should be considered

When designers are pushing designs that are non-standard, you can be assured that your website visitors will be confused. If navigation is hidden or in a different-than-usual place on the screen, or labeled in an obscure or arbitrary manner, your customers will quickly be frustrated in their attempts to find the information they need to make decisions regarding your company. If your site looks like something that might win awards, you might get some extra traffic when the awards are announced, but you’re doing far more for the designer than for your business — how many customers will come from the award announcement sites, ready and willing to buy your products? It’s more likely that other designers and design firms are looking at your site to add to their repertoire of ideas to sell to other companies.