I have just completed and rolled out a new website for PubHound Public Relations, LLC. PubHound is a Michigan based boutique public relations agency that stands poised to take on the big dogs.

PubHoundPR is owned and operated by Kirsten Borgstrom, who brings years of significant public relations and social media experience to her new company.

Kirsten was the Media Relations Manager for Travel Michigan. Her responsibilities included development and implementation of local, regional and national media relations programs to support the Pure Michigan campaign. Under her direction, Travel Michigan realized a more than tenfold increase in total media placements and generated positive media in national outlets such as USA Today, National Geographic Traveler, The Today Show, Good Morning America and CNBC, in addition to numerous in-state and regional placements.

As if that wasn’t enough, Kirsten also co-managed Travel Michigan’s social media efforts. The team’s projects included the launch of the Pure Michigan Connect blog, Pure Michigan Facebook and Pure Michigan Twitter. The Pure Michigan Facebook presence grew to more than 100,000 fans with Kirsten at the helm and Pure Michigan was named the top-ranked state tourism organization in the country for the use of social media.

Kirsten was great to work with and new just where she wanted to head with her new website. I was pleased to work on the project and am delighted with the final results!

As I noted in a previous article, I have not had good luck at all looking for project prospects using Craigslist. I have found this to be true even when I have seen what appear to me to be legitimate advertisements for web design services. By legitimate I simply mean that the ads are well thought out, present what appears to be a comprehensive review of the needs of the project, etc.

My Personal Favorite Craiglist Ad

I have a WordPress site and need a form fixed on it using javascript. Should take 5 minutes for someone to fix it.

Fairly regularly I see an ad like this on Craigslist. They vary in terms of the choice of words, but essentially what the ad says to me is as follows: “I don’t have any idea how to fix a problem that I have determined to be simple to fix. Even though I have no idea if the problem will be easy or difficult to fix, I am reporting to you that the problem is so easy to correct that I will pay you essentially nothing to take on this project.”

Usually these ads then ask for a resume to be submitted, a portfolio to be made available and references to be checked.

Don’t even try.

Late last week I was contacted by a client who needed some help with a WordPress blog that he had installed and customized. He was on a tight time schedule and wanted his new website completed as quickly as possible. To complicate matters just a bit, the client was on a business trip that took him from his home in Quebec to Los Angeles for the week. The client wanted his new Corrugated-Pipe website to be up and running within the week.

In order to complete this project within both the time frame and budget I had to fall back on some previous WordPress themes I had been working on in my spare time. One of those themes was to the liking of the client and we agreed to utilize that theme, with modifications, to complete this project.

During the next seven days the client and I worked exclusively via email with the client doing almost all of the project review using his Blackberry. I am very proud to say that the project was completed on time and to the full satisfaction of the client. In fact, I completed the website installation, plugin installation and conent insertion while the client was enroute from Los Angeles to his home in Quebec. When he arrived home he found his new website up and running and looking good. He’s happy, and so am I.

It has been my experience that determining what price to charge for web design work is one of the most difficult tasks that any freelance web developer faces.  There are many factors that go into determining value.  Here are my suggestions about how to determine what price to charge for your web design project.

What is Your Experience Level?

What is the value of your experience developing websites?  Is it fair to only charge “by-the-hour” when it has taken you years and years of experience to be able to offer a solution to the problem at hand?  That being said, I think it’s only fair to factor your experience and training into defining a project price.

Is Your Work High Quality?

The quality of your work is subjective, of course.  Step back and try to be objective when determining how good your work product is.  Compare your workt o others in your niche.  Does it stand up to theirs?  Is it superior for some reason?  Or does it fail in comparison.  These are all factors to take into consideration when settling on a price for your project.

How Long Will the Project Take to Complete?

Needless to say, the longer a project takes to complete the higher the cost.  Don’t forget to take into account the necessary research and planning time that goes into the design process.  It has been my experience that most projects take longer than originally anticipated, so plan accordingly.

When Does Your Client Need the Project Completed?

The sooner the project needs to be completed the more it is likely to cost.  Why?  Because working on a short time line often involves putting in overtime, working weekends and holidays, and taking other steps to meet the deadline.

If you want your project done quickly, you should always expect that it will cost more to complete.

What’s Your Gut Feeling About the Client?

With experience, all freelancers begin to develop a “feel” for their potential and current clients.  Will the client be easy to work with?  Will the client be accessible to answer questions as they occur?  Will the client provide content in a timely fashion?  Does the agreed upon design process involve approval by multiple people or various levels of management?  All of these factors – and others – can help  you develop a gut feel about your client.  Price your project accordingly.

How Busy are You?

Supply and demand applies to your time as well.  If you are swamped with work you may wish to price your potential projects higher.  You only have so much time to commit to your workload, and how you price your projects will play a significant role in how many projects you have stacked up at the moment.

On the other hand, if you are experiencing one of the slow times that we all experience from time to time, you may want to drop your prices some to win the current project.

Can You Offer Anything Your Competitors Cannot?

Do the services you offer differ substantially from those of your competition?  If so, this works to your advantage when pricing your project.

Are There Any Special Features Required by the Project?

Will client training be required as part of the project? Does the client want a Content Management System to update their own content?  Is the client experienced enough with the CMS to not need extensive training?  How many people will need to be trained?  All of these factors, and others, must be considered when determining what to charge for your project.

How Badly Do Your Want This Project?

If your are short on work at the moment, then you probably have an incentive to price the project lower to give yourself a better advantage to win the project.  Another factor to consider is the exposure that this particular project may offer you.  Is it for a high profile client that is likely to offer your future exposure that will more than likely bring more work to you?  If so, you may want to take this into consideration when developing your project price.

I would be interested in hearing what factors you take into consideration when determining the price you charge for your web design projects.  Please leave a comment and let me know your tips and suggestions.

I am a big fan of the Seinfeld television show. To me, the show epitomizes middle class America comedy in a way no other sitcom has ever managed to do.

In one particular episode, for some reason that I can’t recall, Kramer decides he’s at the time in his life to go without underwear. In a particularly funny scene with Jerry and Elaine, Kramer announces to the world that “I’m out there Jerry and I’m loving every minute of it!”. Free at last, free at last.

What does all this have to do with website design you might ask? Well, read on and let me tell you the rest of the story.

Free at Last from Internet Explorer 6.0

While developing a new website I was faced with the standard task of breaking down the CSS and XHTML code to insert the necessary hacks to make Internet Explorer 6.0 behave. As we all know, IE 6.0 does not comply with web standards and presents nightmare scenarios for web designers who feel they should continue to support this outdated piece of software. The original version of IE 6.0 was released in 2001, making it almost nine years old. Heck, IE 7.0 has been released for a couple years now and IE 8.0 is the current production browser from Microsoft.

I don’t know what came over me, but as I delved into the code and begin to write my IE 6.0 hacks I had a revelation: Enough is Enough. I am through with IE 6.0. I will no longer support it, code for it, or otherwise let it enter into my life as a web developer.

What a breath of fresh air. I immediately felt free from the bounds of some unseen master who has been imposing his will on me for years now. But no more. Finished. Done. Ended. Complete.

I’m Out There World and I’m loving Every Minute of It!

My best wishes to those who continue to use Internet Explorer 6.0. Your trusted friend will continue to serve you in some fashion, but not well I am afraid. Good luck and good riddance!

As for me, it’s time to move past the “boxers” or “briefs” stage of my life. It feels great being “out there”!

I am currently cross browser testing and trouble shooting a new website project that I am working on. It’s coming along nicely and will prove to be a nice website for my client. However…

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate designing websites so that they still function in Internet Explorer 6.0. If I haven’t mentioned it lately, consider this to be a definitive declaration on the subject.

I hate Internet Explorer 6.0!

If there is anyone out there who doesn’t hate it, please leave me a comment and support the reasons you don’t.

As most of you know, I strive to develop websites that conform to currently accepted web design standards. I write my code to be valid both via the CSS file and the XHTML markup.

Although it takes a bit more time to design a website to conform to these standards, it always seemed like the right way to design a website. It also feels good when your product is pronounced to be Valid by the various validation tools.

I stumbled upon a website today that appears to me to be the least valid website I have ever seen. Bar none. As of today, there are 2017 validation errors when the XHTML is checked. Wow. That’s a lot of errors.

Can you find a website with more errors than this one has? That’s the challenge for today!

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P.S.
Just to balance things out, the University of California Spanish & Portugese Department is one of the most valid websites I have ever seen. The good folks over at Accessites.org highlighted the UC Spanish & Department website over a year ago.

How’s that for contrast?

One of the struggles I have had recently is determining the best way to allow my clients to update the content on their websites. Although there are a myriad of content managment systems to choose from, in my experience most of them are too complicated for the needs of the clients I normally work with.

I have personally become a convert to using WordPress as the backend for most sites that I design. By doing so, I can update most client sites from anywhere in the world through the WordPress web based interface. This is a great advantage as I am no longer tied to the various desktop software applications in my office in order to accomplish most updates.

With the exception of blog themes that I have done, none of the clients for whom I have setup WordPress as a CMS system have ever updated the content on their sites. Not a single one. This isn’t a client failing, but rather I feel that WordPress is just a bit too complex for most clients.

Enter CushyCMS

Earlier this week I stumbled upon a simple content management system called CushyCMS. In keeping with the claims made at their website, CushyCMS clearly is simple to use. It took me five minutes to setup CushyCMS to control the content at one of my own websites. Five minutes.

The CushyCMS interface is simple, intuitive and user friendly. It’s hard for me to imagine any client who will not be able to use it to update their content. I look forward to using it on a client site that I am currently developing.

One of the best features of CushyCMS is that it allows the web developer to control which particular page sections the client can update. No longer does the developer need to worry that the client will disrupt the navigation elements on the page, for instance. By applying a simple CSS class class="cushycms" to any page element, the developer is able to limit the client to only modifying the content of those particular elements. Brilliant idea and integrated nicely into the CushCMS package.

Although I have only been testing CushyCMS for several days now, it’s clear to me that I will be able to use it on many future website projects. I recommend that you take a look at CushyCMS to see if it meets your needs and those of your clients.

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As you may have noticed, I have implemented a “Featured Post&” module on the top of my main blog page. This module displays information about a particular post that I want to display more prominently.

I have been considering adding a feature like this for some time, but until I received some inspiration from from Philip Moore over at Big Square Blog I really had no direction on how to begin.

Philip suggests using his technique to display a post on a static WordPress Page, but I opted to use it to display a feature post on my main index template page. I used the code Philip supplied and tweaked it for my own use. Philip’s basic code assumes that you are going to display the content of your most recent post. However, in my situation I don’t want to display the most recent post. Instead, I want to identify a particular post and have the content of this post displayed in the “Featured Post” area of my blog.

After considerable thought, I decided to use two WordPress custom fields to accomplish this task. After spending an hour or so reading information about custom fields over at the WordPress codex, I opted to useI one custom field as a logical marker to identify which post to display. I used a second custom field to contain a very brief introduction paragraph describing the post. Depending on your particular blog, you may actually be able to use the WordPress the_excerpt() function to accomplish this. However, since I use a fairly detailed excerpt for each of my posts, I found that they were too long to be of use in the small “Featured Post” area.

Combining Philip’s technique with custom fields allows me to control the “Featured Post” implementation from within the WordPress dashboard. Simple, clean and effective. I am really pleased with the results.

How do you like my “Featured Post” module? Can you think of a way to use this idea on your blog?

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Is it just me?

It seems that there is no middle ground. Either I have several projects under development at one time, or I have nothing to do. There never seems to be a middle ground. Busy, busy, busy. Or slow, slow slow.

When it rains, it pours. But in between, it gets awfully dry around here. How is it with your web design business?

Some months I get contacted several times a week about new projects, and convert about one third of those contacts into signed proposals and money in the bank. But some months go by without any inquiry whatsoever. I am in the middle of one of those droughts at the moment. Tick tock, tick tock.

What do the rest of you do to keep busy during these slow times?

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Can I construct a website that works correctly in Internet Explorer? I think I can…I think I can…I think I can. Can you?

Designing websites can be frustrating for many reasons. I love making a new site, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes the frustration is maddening. Just today I was finalizing the text content for a project I am working on. Everything was coming together as planned. The client had provided timely content. The project was nearing completion. Things were looking good.

But then, as if the Gods of Web Design knew that I was almost finished, the client pointed out some sentence spacing issues on one of the pages. I immediately went to the page in question and things looked perfect to me. But as always, I switched windows and viewed the page using Internet Explorer rather than my standard Mozilla browser. Sure enough, there was a sentence spacing issue rearing its ugly head – but only in IE.

After doing some brief detective work, I narrowed the problem down to the use of the ^superscript tag. It appeared as though raising certain characters to superscript, such as the trademark character, was causing IE to force the sentence that contains the superscript downward, causing the space between the sentence and the one below it to become narrower. To see what I mean, just view this post and this paragraph in IE and you will see the problem. The problem is present in both 6.0 and 7.0 versions. Ugh.

Further detective work, which included searching the sitepoint forums, finally resulted in a solution to the problem. I added the following to the superscript CSS markup:

sup {
	vertical-align: text-top;
	font-size: 65%;
}

The result is a workaround solution that no longer causes the sentence spacing problem in IE. It’s not perfect, because the superscript characater is not truly raised above the adjacent text, but rather is just a bit smaller and sits up against the top of the adjacent text. Not perfect, but in this case good enough to make the site display correctly in IE.

If anyone has a better solution to this problem, I would love to hear about it. In the meantime, I will just continue to hate IE. Or perhaps I should just follow the advice of Rob Mason over at Sponge Project!

What’s the deal with website clients and their inability to provide text content for their websites? How in heaven’s name do you get your clients to provide you with the content for their new website?

I know that this subject is something that virtually all web designers have to cope with. Many of us learned the hard way to demand a significant down payment before we even start a new project, and that of course protects us to some degree from clients who simply never provide the content.

In reality, even this technique fails, at least in my experience. By the time I am asking the client for text content I have finished 95% of the project, yet have only been paid for 50% of it. On more than one occasion the client never provided the content and simply forfeited their deposit. When this situation occurs we both lose, at least the way I see it; the client paid half and received absolutely nothing, and I did more than half the work yet was only paid for a portion of it.

In theory my client contract protects me against this eventuality. All of my contracts have a clause that makes the full project cost due and payable if the client has not provided the content in a specified period of time. In some cases my contract has required that all the content be delivered in ninety days, and in other contracts that requirement has been stretched to 180 days. But in my experience it is usually not beneficial to try and enforce this clause when a client refuses to provide content. The price point of my typical design project is such that taking the necessary legal action against these clients is not cost effective.

Perhaps there is no good solution to this problem. I guess I am just frustrated because to me, writing comes naturally. I have never understood why clients drag their feet and struggles with it. I don’t see any simple solution. I suppose I need to simply anticipate this problem as part of every project and be happy when the unusual client provides timely content.

As always, I welcome your comments, tips, suggestions or antecdotes regarding these laggard clients. Please help me understand their lack of motivation or direction – or at least make me laugh at some of your stories.

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I have just completed my first WordPress theme that I am willing to release to the public.

The theme is a two-column, business like theme with plenty of white space. I think that it looks quite professional and is best suited for websites that are after that type of look. The theme is valid CSS and XHTML strict. It is also Section 508 accessible. It’s not perfect, but for someone fairly new to WordPress I am quite proud of how it turned out.

If you are interested in using this theme for a WordPress project of yours, please contact me and I will zip up the files and send them to you. I do intend to make it available for direct download, but that will have to wait until another day.