Chad, 22 Tools for Testing Your Websites Usability

Luke, Analytiks iPhone App
A little while ago I stumbled upon this little app for my iPhone. For those of us that don’t sign in to our Google Analytics often but know we should this app will be very valuable. Analytiks shows me just the important information I’d like to know about my websites on my phone. I can check it quick and get back to whatever else is going on that day. The interface is quite nice. I would ditch the rusted sign look myself but other than that it is fantastic. It is 99 cents in the app store.

Benjam, impress.js
It’s not much in the way of content, but the way that content is displayed. It’s simple… yet eye catching and very intriguing. Makes me very excited about where the web is heading.

Here’s what happened. Every Saturday morning for a month the site shut down. When we called the hosting company, we were put on hold to talk with someone, like that credit card commercial where the man says “This is Peggy.” We were told there was an out of control script running. After multiple weekends we finally got them to tell us what the script was. It was the index.php file which is their homepage. So apparently the hosting company promised unlimited hosting, but had a cap on CPU usage and when people came in droves to the site on the weekend to get information on their product, it shut the site down. We’ve seen this over and over with only slight variations to the story.

What I think is interesting here is to look at the economics. In order to host a bare bones cheap price, the formula is always the same: huge mass marketing, customers are one of thousands or millions, outsource the call center out, and limit access to control the hosting. Though these methods are great for lowering the cost of hosting, they make it nearly impossible for your developers to do much if the site comes down.

What I think people seem to be missing is another calculation, what is the cost of your site coming down? As I mentioned earlier, we saw this again recently but with another company. It was exactly the same kind of thing, the marketing firm said use our cheap hosting, client does, site goes down during their peak traffic of nearly 4,000 visits to the site. My guess is, in this client’s case and the other one I mentioned, literally thousands to tens of thousands of dollars may have been lost in sales in order to save a few hundred dollars a year in hosting.

My point? This is business 101: Don’t step over a dollar to save a penny. Hosting often falls into this category and people think they can go cheap on it. We disagree. If you own a premium website and you are deciding on hosting, ask yourself, if it shuts down how much do I lose an hour? If that number is high or even more than a few hundred dollars an hour, here is what you should do:

1. Find a hosting company that your developers can work with, including support from people who’s true native tongue is American English, or at least the language you speak.
2. Make sure the developers (if they are smart) can fully access the server so that when it is down they can do something about it. If they are not smart, your problems may be greater than just hosting.
3. Monitor the server to make sure it stays up and have the monitoring service text them if it is down, so they can jump in to fix it.
4. Pay your developers or System Administrators to keep the server up to date with patches and other scripts to help prevent malicious attacks on the server.

Unfortunately all of these things do require a small premium, but for most of our clients, the value far exceeds their cost and buys peace of mind that their internet presence is better protected and monitored. If you are really short on cash I think a better idea rather than going cheap on your hosting might be to cut your scope down. If you are interested in our hosting and/or other services let us know. We’d be happy to get you a free quote or consult with you what you should be doing.

Luke – “Find the Twin Sumo” or “No, Your Client is Not an Idiot”
This is an article I need to read often to remind myself to calm down when going back and forth with clients about design. The North Temple clan put a great analogy on the process of working with a client to create a great design. I think the strategy that they propose is something that many designers know and understand, however knowing what you should do when working with a client and putting that knowledge to practice can sometimes be difficult. Give their article a read and apply what they propose next time you are designing for a client.

Chad – Steve Jobs, Superman
With the passing of Steve Jobs lately it seems that the every article is about him. I have learned more about him and his style. He was truly an amazing man. I like this article for multiple reasons. With all the articles out there this one is powerful and short. It also highlights other people not just Steve. But at the end of the article you realize just how powerful of a man he was.

What have you been reading lately?

Check it out here: Magento and Stackable Hosting, A Perfect Fit!

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10 WordPress Dashboard Hacks

Mike, How Wireframing Makes Your Website Designs Better
The value of wireframing comes down to a simple idea: Wireframing forces you to think about your user interface design decisions in terms of user needs first, instead of in terms of what looks good.” While wireframing requires a little extra effort in the initial planning stages, it pays huge returns in the long run. We redesign less frequently, hit deadlines sooner, and best of all, greatly mitigate scope creep. So take your foot off the pedal, assess your client’s business objectives and user needs, and translate concepts into a tangible wireframe. You’ll be glad you did.

Luke, For Better Productivity, Communicate Less
I agree with Joel Spolsky in one of Lifehackers latest posts when he says that adding more people to a project will only slow it down. I think this is especially true in web development. Once deep into a big project a web developer knows where things are and how they are related. If you throw five of them at the same project at some point they would end up stepping on each others toes. There is a chance that if things are planned out right each developer could tackle a specific task and then they could put all their pieces together to make the final piece. To do that though a lot of planning and meeting together would have to happen. This will probably lead to more disagreements and toe stepping. For those reasons I think getting the few people needed on the project and keep them there is the best way to accomplish a web dev project.

A project some of us have been involved with had a budget of X, and a scope of Y. It seemed simple enough that the planning was skimped, and the client wanted to get things moving quickly, so everyone just plunged in. Before you know it, there are things that we told would be done one way, and now they’re changing it and wanting it another way, and features A, B and C come out that they never mentioned to us until long after the budget was fixed. We try to make it work, and scope is now 2-3 times where it started out. Time goes on, and it turns out that the final client wanted something different than the decisions and instructions we were given, and wanted features D through H as well. Red flags have been raised several times, and some renegotiation gets 3X the budget to go along with what at the time was 6X the scope. Everyone is unhappy, because more information keeps coming out that we weren’t given, and the client got something different than what they were expecting because the expectation wasn’t made clear at the beginning, when the planning should have happened. Of course now everything is late too, and still not done the way they wanted, so features I through M make it into the mix, along with major changes to 8 of the existing new features. 8 times the original scope and counting, for 3X the original budget, and nobody is very happy.

What did we learn from that? We need to be much more strict about the planning, no matter how much they beg us to just get started, hoping that getting started sooner instead of planning more will get them to the desired destination faster. That’s like getting on the freeway and driving, so that you arrive faster at your destination, before you bother to figure out which direction the destination lies, and what paths might make sense for getting there on the timeline and budget you’re hoping for.

We often share with people a metaphor about their website is a building, and the plans are the blueprints. It’s relatively easy for an architect to move a wall on a blueprint, because he can just change the plan. But once the blueprint is in the hands of the construction company, and they’ve built the building part way, or all the way, it’s harder to move the wall. A client often thinks “I only need to move the wall 6 inches” but unfortunately that doesn’t change the fact that it is a wall, and would probably need to be torn down and rebuilt in the new location. Granted, not every change is moving a wall. Sometimes they want a window over here, or a door there. Sometimes they want to switch around the plumbing or the electrical. Some changes aren’t as major as others, but they all make some kind of difference when you have to redo or undo something. If they have us paint the room red, which we do, and then decide they want it blue, it will probably cost about double at that point to repaint. If they change their mind before the room has been painted, it isn’t a big deal, unless we already bought the red paint for them. The timing of the decision makes all the difference in what costs are sunk and what work has to be done, undone, or redone to make the changes they want.

The big lesson for me has been that it isn’t unreasonable to spend 4 hours planning a project estimated to take 40 hours, or 10 hours on a project that will probably take 100 hours. It is time well spent, because in the end you get done faster, you can be confident that you understood what they wanted, and it is much more likely that it will be done right. When you can get it done right, on time, and on budget, you’ll have happy clients.