Okay so what is more polite and encouraging of engagement to you?

1: “Hi how can I help you? Now if you let us know how we can get back in touch with you and we will see what we can do.”

or the more adopted standard of

2: “Who are you? How can we contact you? What did you want to say?”

Now if your anything like as human as I aspire to be the former is going to engage you more then the latter, the first understands that you have navigated to the page in order to engage and offers you that chance to engage first before asking you to qualify your message with the mundane contact details. The second asks you for the mundane before engaging with the reason for your navigating there. There may well be some benefits in placing a distraction between the driver of the requirement to converse and the facilitation of the conversation, but I wager they are more of an exception then a rule.

Just to clarify I propose that the layout of a generic contact / feedback form should be:

ASK THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO SAY

then

ASK THEM FOR THERE DETAILS

Quite simple isn’t it and a damned site friendlier and appears more interested in what the user has to say then garnering contact details for your databases.

Go on give it a try, and let us know how it went or simply just add your thoughts in the comments.

I’m not going to talk about how to make accessible forms or even how to make pretty forms that’s been covered elsewhere, what I am going to do is talk about things that I constantly encounter that drive me mad and curse the fact that I ever got involved in the internet way back in the early 90′s and damn my brothers and sisters who build these silly things!

1. Please remember me.

   The worse culprits for this are travel web sites and are the reason I hate using online systems for booking travel. This is the little story, are you sitting comfortably? I pop into a travel agents with my wife and kids, I have there passports and I sit down with the rather dim looking travel agent and I explain that I would like to go to Fiji for a couple of weeks, probably about the end of September. She asks for mine and my families names, dates of birth etc. and goes off to look for a suitable break, there is nothing that month, do I want to try another month?

   Yes sure why not! Okay she says, whats your names, dates of birth and… now come on do we have to go through that again, I just told you, did you not remember?

   Nope says the dim travel agent.

   Annoying is it not?

   Why the hell do we do that online, I know its easier on the severs and ho-has and technical whatsits, but as a user I don’t care, make my transaction easier and I’ll do it otherwise I’ll settle for a week in a caravan at the bottom of the road rather then deal with you.

   For forms that are part of a possible multiple use search, remember what I entered and let me change the variances I want.

2. Don’t tease me.

   The worse ones for these are job advertisement sites where… yes I know you should read a form all the way through before starting to fill it in but they are the old rules and there are new ones now, things have changed… anyway as I was saying Job sites and job applications, I lie to spend time on these an do them properly, crafting each answer to a question, as is fitting for a Creative Director position, and it takes some time but its always at the bottom that they ask you for some form of qualifying information, such as ‘You need to have the write to work in the USA in order to apply for this possible, do you have either a…’ If there is some qualifying information required ASK IT FIRST.

3. Don’t ask me questions I can’t answer, or make me tell lies.

   There are many different instances of this but the one I encounter most is the post code / zip code one. At the moment I live in a fairly rural part of the Republic of Ireland and we have a limited number of online services so if I want most things I have to order them from either America or the UK and that’s fine, its the price you pay for living in a beautiful tranquil and wet part of the world. However another thing that this area doesn’t have is Post codes, I don’t know why, maybe they just never needed them as every one knows everyone else anyway. So when I want to fill in a form an the postcode is mandatory even though I’ve told you I don’t live in the USA and don’t have a pesky zip code, your dumb arsed web site insists that I tell you one or you wont take my money, so I have to lie and make one up.

4. Realize its not always this or that, sometimes its a bit of the other.

   This point is somewhat related to the point above about not making me lie, in that form developers often forget that people are woolly and awkward and there lives don’t fit into one of five selection options so if you are going to ask me something like whats my eye colour is it: Blue, Brown, Red also add an ‘other’ option because they are green, and I’ve known people with eyes of differing colours, yes I know its a stupid example but its late and my eyes want to be sleeping not defining there colour.

5. I’m sorry I don’t understand the question.

   What the hells a whoozit? Its a common problem on the internet in copy & taxonomy (organizing the information into a categorization system other wise known in web design as a navigation structure) to use terms that only industry or company insiders understand, but the wounds cut deeper if its part of a direct question requiring them to understand your grammar in order to respond. There are some instances where the understanding of the terminology is an important positive qualifier for the conversation for example a job application requiring specific understanding, but they are more the exception to the rule then the rule. Use simple language that you granny would understand.

6. Don’t be a sneaky, nosey parker.

   I can not stand forms that are broken into many tiny pieces that require me to input a little bit of information then submit that bit go and make brew then come back and do a bit more and so on and so forth. Mind use I also get anxiety attacks when I’m faced with massive forms that want to know everything about me.

   As a rule if you don’t need to know something don’t ask, you’ll make my life easier but not making me fill in the name of my first dog. If you do need to ask lots of questions then break the form into groups and use something like a jQuery Accordian to allow me to collapse and show, perhaps even purposefully ignore certian parts of your form, maybe you would even want to develop a scrip that expand the next group of questions when you have finished the proceeding, but still allows me to read through all the questions at my desire.

7. Don’t play games, tell me where I went wrong, and tell me now.

   Imagine the slap you would want to give someone who did the following after you had just told them about your life and they replied with.

   Nope, you got some bits wrong I cant help you until you get them right…

   Any chance of a clue?

   Well you’ll have to look through what you’ve told me and guess what you said wrong, if you are observant ill let you know by raising my eyebrow but you’ll have to keep you eyes open and watch out for the eyebrow raising.

   Thwock, hows you’re eyebrow now I’ve slapped it?

   Even worse is his mate who will tell you that there was something wrong at the beginning and would you correct that bit then send the story on again, to then tell you that there was a little bit after that that was wrong and would you please correct that and send it again, you can only go through that cycle twice before you grab this chap and his mate with an aching eyebrow and bang there heads together (a slight disclaimer: I’m actually a bit of a piece loving digital tree huger and am not actually of a temperament that I would be compelled to physically abuse any person of piece of web code )

For some reason when I originally wrote this article it had another 3 points that seem to have been pushed out my ear sometime in the last 3 weeks and I cant find them in my mind, if I spot them around the place I’ll add them up there, not that anyone going to read the ramblings of a tired, beardy weirdy digital creative director rambling away at nearly 1am. but if you did read it and want to add you own form ramblings feel free to comment.

Please treat this as a living document, feel fit to ask new questions either privately through Rich *at* McCoy *dot* co *dot* uk or in the comments section and I’ll see what I can do in response.

Getting a client Base

I am now going alone and wondered if you have any advice for a freelance web designer and how to go about finding new clients? sorry to ask such questions, but you have seem to have a very good portfolio and clients base.

Firstly good luck with going it alone, it takes stamina, blind faith, supportive friends family and partner, a bit of blind faith and if you can manage it a cash reserve for when things take longer to get off the ground then you had anticipated.

Well often its via the same way that you probably found me, I guess you searched for the term “Freelance Web Designer” in google UK and there I was. that position didn’t happen by luck, hard work, a bit of borrowed know how from folks who know there SEO onions (Thanks Lee), a solid clean web page build and a little bit of magic got me that position.

I’ve also been around a fair bit and had the fortune to work on some interesting projects for recognized names, this helps, it assures folks that I know what I’m doing and have the trust of other folks like them (unfortunately there is no short cut to this).

I often recommend registering with some of the better recruitment agencies! They can often get you interesting projects with agencies where you will get you face known, and its surprising how many folks in Agencies have ‘A little side project they need some help with’ out side of there normal day job. In doing this you will also meet other freelancers either in your field or in complimentary area’s who when they move on may well recommend you for other projects and then you have a nice little snowball on your hands.

….. what’s the best way you get your work, from big companies and little ones, like the *** one which looks great and how you go about pricing them.

In answer to you question, little ones pretty much just come rolling in via website inquiries, bigger projects are just from experience and exposure, the*** job for example I got because the head of Code & Design used to work with me when he was a student on placement, I had just moved from Australia back to the UK and started freelancing, he needed someone to take care of the project so the timing was just right and it happened. Others like *** where through a project manager I worked with had moved onto one of the larger UK agencies and they needed someone near ***, the agency then moved and handed it over to me to look after!

So my advice would be get a great portfolio together, get the smaller jobs, service the projects well, do good work and things build on themselves!

What tools for the Job?

Hi there, My name is *** ,im 14 years and im hoping to get an early start in web designing, the only problem is i dotn knwo where to start… If possible i want as much information as possible, like what sorts of software would i need… Just things like that, i hope you don’t mind… Thanks,***

I would recommend going the open source software route it would cost you a fraction of the price of the pro stuff and its easier to get used to the open source before you get stuck in the habits of the expensive software, plus I wouldn’t advocate piracy now.

Try pixelmator for your graphical needs, Filezilla for FTP (the way files get onto your web server from your computer) & Espresso for your coding needs, to start with! Get your self playing and making your own projects and see what you learn and what interests you, then if your liking what your doing great, if not then you’ve not spent a fortune and the pro tolls are cripplingly expensive!

Formal web design course, books or teach your self

I’m a 20 year old studying web design in *** city, hoping to go into web design as a career! I came across your website and wondered if you could give me any advice on where to start as I am very impressed with the type of work that you have done. I am particularly interested in flash and the designing side of websites and have recently completed a course in HTML and web creation just to get me started. I’m interested to know how you started your journey and how you have become so successful in being a freelance web designer. At the moment I am familiarizing myself with Dreamweaver and will be looking into an Open University course in web design and flash as I am currently in full time employment. Am I heading in the right direction? please reply to my email account , I hope you can help, Thank you for your time, ***.

I get a few like this and its difficult to know where to begin, I cant really say if your heading in the right direction or not! I’ve known many designers who have taken formal education to learn the craft, some who from books and many who just taught them selves (my self included, my background is as a fine art sculptor), I personally favor learning by doing, and have always created my own projects to challenge me and push me into directions I’ve not wandered down before. That being said I have been very impressed by some of the folks that have come out of these formal university courses in design, they know all the fancy names for things that I just use and do (that sounds slightly more sarcastic then I intended).

Manage hosting yourself or make a referral?

Hello I have just got my Degree for Business Computing and currently looking for work, as there is not much work around I am freelancing my skills. I looked around your site and really like your work, the major problem I am having is that since I don’t have any actual Web Design work experience I don’t knows how certain areas work in the industry. Like went doing a website for somebody how does the hosting work, do I maintain control of it and bill the clients or do I set it up with there info. It would really help me if I can email you asking these types of questions if I ever get totally stuck. Thank you for your time ***

Regards hosting, I tend to stay away from that side of things, I know of some guys that do it in addition and its quite lucrative for them but for me Its just not something that interests me, getting involved in all the messy heavy lifting stuff. Some guys also subcontract that bit out to and put a little fat over the top when charging, I can’t be doing with all that, I tend to work with a clients host or recommend and introduce someone I’ve used before that hasn’t messed me about, that way I can keep my eyes on what I do best and enjoy most!

Use Twitter to reach out to your community and do stuff for the power of good

I had a good browse through your website and, well, I like your work!

I’m a designer, with a degree in ‘***’, presently working as a tutor teaching interior design at ***. (I’m 30)
I’d like to become a freelance web designer, but I don’t want to be a full time student again…
I’ve been studying dreamweaver on Lynda.com, and I plan to learn flash also.

I thought a good way to learn would be to work (for free) for a good web designer or web design company.

I was wondering if you know any local (*** or ***) web designers who might be open to giving me some advice and/or having me volunteer/learn with them?

Do you think this is a good way for me to go about this?  Or should I just go to a media design school?

Hope you don’t mind all my questions!  Ignore me if you are too busy!

I may be a little biased with regards design schools and all that but I never went to one, I did an Art Degree way back in the 90′s when I was younger and found my self involved in web design when it started, so I’m very much self taught.

What would I do if I was you?!

Well if you want to stay where you are and who would blame you for that, your choices are a little limited in terms of designers to work for however there are a fair few, but there are even more very Waiheke style initiatives that are online that could do with help and its probably better to give of your time to help whats happening on the island then it is to help line a designers pockets. A good way I found of connecting with folks is to get a Twitter account, install a desktop client and set up an alert for anyone mentioning Waiheke and contact them, also mention Waiheke and you’ll soon get contacted by folks. There are a lot of folks involved with projects that have a large online side to them and would be glad of the bodies.

So in short there is plenty to get involved with online that will actually be of some tangible benefit it just takes a bit of poking about.

What skills should I learn to be  a Freelance Web Designer?

Just pretend for one moment (if you please) that you were designing me a ‘course’ of self directed study with the goal of being a freelance webdesigner…   Which programmes and skills should I learn/cultivate???

Dreamweaver?

Almost definitely, it the industry standard!

Flash?

To be honest I never bothered, I don’t much care for it but it all depends on the kind of thing you like as to is you bother or not.

Adobe Illustrator (for print)?

I have a passing knowledge of Illustrator and tend to use it more for logo design stuff, so it would be useful to have an acquaintance of how it works but you could get by without it

Basic accounting skills?

I would advise getting to grips with book keeping and getting an accountant to do the heavy lifting, its far to complicated and distracting to take on yourself, plus they will have a better knowledge of the trappings and tricks!

Copy writing skills?

Helpful but not necessary, I write terribly but manage to get by, I tend to refer to the experts when something is uber important

Photography?

Again helpful but not necessary

Photoshop skills?

Absolutely, photoshop or equivalent open source will be your bread and butter, its the cornerstone tool to everything!

CSS?

Unfortunately so, dreamweaver can only take you so far, and its nearly not as daunting as it first looks, first step is to realize its not a programming language, there is a meditative element in constructing CSS with a good cascade and flow!

HTML?

Again this is the fiber of the internet and dreamweaver can only take you so far, plus there will be times where things go wrong and you’ll need a knowledge of html (xhtml) to fight your way out of it.

Search engine maximising?

Kinda, helps to have a knowledge but unless you want to specialist I would leave it at that, its a big sticky field.

Marketing?

A passing knowledge would help!

All of the above and more?

I would recommend also spending the time listening to podcasts on the industry like Boagworld I also recommend Freelance Switch.

I have a list of Podcasts on my site at http://www.mccoy.co.uk/news/podcasts.php
and Books at http://www.mccoy.co.uk/news/webdesignbooks.php
and web sites at http://www.mccoy.co.uk/news/webindustryresources.php

I think that my strengths as a designer are my minimal but strong aesthetic, clear and savvy communication, and user friendly layouts.

All these will serve you well online!

I’m not so much of a tech geek that I love HTML or coding… in fact they bore me stupid!

The trick is learning where to see the beauty in it!

If I master dreamweaver I should be able to avoid having to learn too much about coding right????

Not really, you’ll probably be able to avoid coding but not markup, plus if you know what your up-to you can get involved in adapting off the shelf stuff like blogs etc.

Lynda.com is a wonderful site for learning programs, better than going to a school… at my own pace, in my home, on my mac.  Lynda.com will be my teacher!

I’ve not looked at Lynda I do like her friend ted.com though

I really appreciate your time and advice Rich, thanks again.

No problem at all!

Please feel free to add retort, advice and  comment

I’ve put blogs into there own section apart from web site design / interactive because whilst they strictly speaking are still web sites a different approach is taken from my more bespoke design service. Blog designs are normally much quicker to bring to market and cheaper to commission and in these tight times that proves a great cost effective marketing tool to add to your arsenal. The flip side to the ease and speed of implementation and the power of an off the shelf CMS is the sacrifice of a lot of visual creative freedom and in some cases functionality, but nothing that cant be rectified by good creative though and a bit of technical jiggery pokery by a good 3rd party technical developer.

My blog design and design implementation service involves the use of an off the shelf content management system (CMS) that allows the blog owner to administrate the content them selves without the added expense of commissioning a CMS.

To date I’m mainly working with the Blogger.com and Word-press blogging platforms but all the ones I’ve looked at so far are much of a muchness and I’m fairly confident I could pick up nearly all of them and pull them apart enough to know how to put them back together again to suit the projects needs.

The new portfolio section includes the following sites:

• Affiliate Marketing Blog
• Christmas Gift Ideas
• Chocolate Reviews
• Easter Eggs
• Funniest TShirts
• MP3 Players
• McCoy
• Toy Robots

If your interested in commissioning a blog design or any of my other services then please either Request a Quote or just Get in contact

The design is intentionally unconventional as I fancied doing something that was more exploratory and experience driven. This echos my approach went I first started exploring working on the web way back in the mid 1990′s fresh out of a Fine Art degree, with philosophy and modernist ideals still bumbling about in my mind unencumbered with the pressures or running a successful freelance consultancy and bringing home the vege-bacon to feed my increasingly growing family. I feel that I am now established enough to start exploring those more conceptual parsuts without sacrificing the more pragmatic nature of my commercial work, I suppose that with experiance comes confidence.

Much of the work on there was found on a couple of Zip disks in a shoe box under my bed and a fair amount is pretty obsolete in its mark-up (html) and design but I kept it together for posterity.

UK creative Richard McCoy, a man who was building websites at a time when most of us were still coming to grips with dot matrix printers, has joined The Pond as a senior web design director.

Since 1995 he’s built up a huge amount of digital experience working as a software engineer and senior web designer across a range of industries. In saying that, he has a definite bent towards social marketing.

As a freelance designer, he’s fought for basic human rights alongside Liberty Human Rights and Penguin Publishing, after the British Government proposed a bill to extend the number of days a detainee could be held without charge.

And he recently managed a team of designers and developers at Speakout, a Brisbane charity that promotes world change for the better.

“I love to instill honesty and humanity into my life and work, having poured my heart and soul into pretty much everything online – from banking systems to online communities, artist portfolios to online shopping stores and political awareness campaigns.”

Richard has freelanced at the best web shops around – ones like AKQA in London. And he’s developed some deep sites like ‘Live for the outdoors’ for LBi, an agency widely regarded as the UK’s no.1 marketing and technology agency. (Its Chief Creative, Chris Clarke, kicked off the Cannes Lions International Festival Seminar programme this year so they must know something!)

The Fine Arts graduate still contracts to agencies in the UK from his new home on Waiheke, when he’s not crusading for sustainable living.

If you have a project in mind, or want to expand your digital offering, talk to Clinton. From user interface design and build to project management, art direction and creative team management – Richard does the lot!

1. You shall not make for yourself an idol

   There are many rock start designers, many are very good, many are just good self publicists, acknowledge and read there blogs them but but don’t worship them, or emulate them or use there ramblings as design gospel.

2. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God

   Like so many of these texts this is open to many interpretations, so far I can surmise that it means, Use semantic markup when building a web site, call a heading a heading a list a list so on and so forth. Another interpretation could be, and this is one I wish some people I have worked with would heed – don’t call your self a Designer if your not one.

3. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy

   This is one I am most guilty of, you’ve got to stop working at some point, just because the client gives you the assets on Friday evening and ‘Absolutely must have the work done by Monday morning’ its okay to push back and explain that its not achievable, and that you need to take some time to rest and do other stuff, if you don’t then you whole week could be whacked out of joint and the quality of the work you deliver will suffer.

4. Honor your father and mother

   We all have influences in our work, honor and acknowledge them, people who’s work we saw as a child, mine are Vaughan Oliver, Simon Larbalestier, Dave Mackaen, Hans Belmer, Egon Schiele & Ralph Steadman, who are yours?

5. You shall not murder

   Don’t fluff it up, if your going to do something to kill the design like ‘Making the logo bigger’ then don’t do it, even if the client tells you to and you know it will kill the design, just explain that you love your client and you don’t want them to be accessory to murder, they might be understanding, if they are intent on this cold blooded act, hand them the knife and report them to the authorities.

6. You shall not commit adultery

   On occasion I’ve been given another designers work by a client and asked to improve it or change things or something else unspeakable, sometimes I’ve done it, sometimes I’ve not it all depends on how pretty the design is, but I’ve always regretted it and felt guilty that I’ve not spent the time and love on my own design’s and ended up hiding the bastard children of my affairs by not putting them in my portfolio.

7. You shall not steal

   Pretty self evident, in design its often regarded as a large crime to rip off another designers work, but behind closed doors we all whisper average designers borrow, good designers steal, but it could also be stated that Average designers steal and get caught, good designers are so good at stealing that they don’t, or they are open about her influences (see commandment 4).

8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor

   If a design sucks its YOUR fault, don’t blame the client for making you do something that broke it, if your in that position, push back explain why it wont work, if your unable to convince the client try two things, the first is try and make there suggestion work, the second is book your self on a assertiveness training or hypnosis course (I’m looking to book one myself as I’m far to accommodating). If neither of these work then just shut up, finish the job and don’t put it in your portfolio, just don’t slag the client off, they had there reasons no matter how bad you thought they where.

9. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife

   I’ve once or twice taken on what where in my perception lesser jobs in order to get a slice of a clients bigger pie, don’t do this, because I found that I was always thinking about the clients metaphorical wife rather then the job in hand ‘so to speak’ and you never end up servicing the current project with any great satisfaction and as a result you’ll probably do a bellow par effort and never get invited to that party where your invited to covet the neighbor’s wife with permission.

10. You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor

    This was a hard on to differentiate from the previous commandment as once I had that picture in my head it was hard to shift, but I think it could be interpreted into this… Don’t be tempted to shoe horn a clients design asset in to a Design if it doesn’t fit, no matter how cool you think it is, if it isn’t going to gel well then leave it out, if you don’t there is a good chance that you’ll make everything involved all grubby.

So are you a sinner, go on confess?

Overview

We are all pretty much convinced of the accessible benefits of using lists for web site navigation or at least we should be, however its not always easy to get your head around how to make this work for relatively large navigation’s without the use of a database.

Over my many years of designing and building web sites I have developed a system that allows me to create navigation system that in one place holds all the primary navigation elements needed for a site but that allows me to hide and show relevant subsections dependent or requirements and can then be re-utilised for a no maintenance site map.

I am assuming that if you are going to use any of the stuff I talk about here you at least have some knowledge of html & css structure as I don’t want to bog things down with a discussion of minutia.

Benefits of this approach

1. Building and maintaining web sites can become pretty time consuming so anyway we can make publishing new pages and sections as easy and quick as possible can only be a good thing, and by using this method you simply add your new page to a centralised list of pages and it will automatically update the navigation on all pages and keep your site map up to date at the same time.
2. By having all links on all pages you open the web site up to being indexed by search engines without compromising the user experience.

Tools

Now in order to do this you will need the following

1. A basic understanding of HTML & CSS
2. A web site that can run either asp, php or Coldfusion
3. An understanding of how to do a server side include
4. A computer of some description and your favourite html editing and ftp software
5. A functioning mind, pair of fingers eyes and a modicum of patience

Now please ask your parents to leave the room or it wont be a surprise now will it?

Build the list

The first thing we need to do is build the list in a blank html file with no html or body definitions as we are going to reference this page as either a php or asp server side include (make sure you make all links relative to the root of the website though), for example I will use the following.

Which will give us this:

Quieting down the children

The first thing that must happen is to close down all the nested lists and we do this in the css (cascading style sheet) like thus:

This then makes the navigation as displayed to the viewer like this:

But search engines still see everything, all the links the whole ka boodle!

Speak in turn

This is all well and good but now we need to turn on the relevant navigation sub sections for the right sections? Glad you asked I was just getting to that bit, We do this but inserting a unique class in the body tag of each section for example for section two we change <body> to this:

And in the CSS we add this array to take care of all instances up to three sections you can carry on and add as many as your site demands, what this is doing is creating conditions so that if elements such as the correct site section and navigation group are aligned then the correct sub navigation will be displayed:

This way we can simply turn on and off sub navigation sections by altering the class in the body of the HTML document, so for section 2 we get.

Identifying the speaker

But why stop there? Why not also height the current page through the navigation? We do this by adding an extra class to identify the page in the section so the body tag for the first page in section 2 will look like so:

then in the CSS we create a section to deal with the styling when all the elements are aligned like this

this should give us this:

Recycling the navigation

Now we can use the same navigation to dynamically build the Site map simply by pulling in the same server side include, changing the body class like so in the html we go.

and in the CSS we sing.

For illustration and variations of styling and usage please take a wonder around:

This very site you are looking at & Shopping-Organic.Com