Our very own Steve Zehngut has a presentation up for consideration at SXSW Interactive this year and we’d love to have it chosen. About 30% of the decision, according to the SXSW people, is based on the thumbs up of readers. (Personally, I think it’s just a ploy to get lots of links and site registrations, but hey, you gotta play by their rules. Right?)
Steve’s presentation focuses on breaking down the communication barriers that can make working with a developer more difficult than it needs to be. The presentation will cover Interviewing Your Potential Developer, Planning & Project Managment, Using A Version Control System, and Bug Reporting. The session will give the audience a reality check on how to go about working with a developer to get a custom WordPress
site (or any digital project) built on time and on budget.
Questions Answered
- What questions should I ask when interviewing a developer?
- What are the communication pitfalls that I should avoid?
- How can clients get involved in project management?
- What is version control and how does it benefit me?
- What is the best way to handle bug reporting?
So, help Steve out. Click Here To Vote
While there is cognitive recognition of this by most of the clients we work with, this is not a concept that is quickly internalized. In the early phases of many projects, we find that even the most sophisticated and educated of clients find themselves distracted by the lure of pretty graphics way too early in the process. When bidding on projects this is particularly true. A heavy emphasis is placed on visual design and the critical issues of function, how the site is built, special software requirements, and where and how the site will be hosted often take a back seat.
An easy way to send your system details to your developer is 
Your developer needs to implement a workflow where the code has to pass through version control as a way to push changes live to your server. We typically work on all code locally and then push it through version control to a live server. On larger projects, this workflow may include pushing to a staging server first and then to a live server. Either way, the code always passes through version control.
DO NOT use email or instant messenger to track tasks! These conversations tend to get lost in the shuffle. I have found that important parts of the conversation get lost when someone accidentally forgets to cc the group. 
What this app does is generate a “trending topics” list from JUST the people you follow on Twitter. You can sort for words or hashtags by timeframe. If you find a tweet you want to respond to or retweet, you can do that right from that app as well. This is all Friend Trend does. That’s it. And I like it.
So what did they share?
My next step was to categorize the noise. I wanted to get a feel for the kinds of things people felt were important to throw out into the twitter stream. So I put the noise into one of five categories; praise, questions, statements, location, and photos.
His first presentation was entitled, “How To Speak Geek – Hiring And Managing A Developer.” In that presentation he broke down the common communication problem areas the average business person faces when dealing with a developer, and how to fix them. His second presentation was aimed directly at the developers in the audience. “Real-Time Plugin Development” gave Steve the opportunity to get into the nuts and bolts of building a WordPress Plugin. He wrote the plugin, which focused on a more intelligent use of a post’s gallery of images, while at the Wordcamp, then demonstrated the building for the audience. 
But all night long that headline haunted me. I tossed and turned most of the night and went in and out of coherent thought. And I woke up with a moment of clarity. I rolled over and hugged my wife and said, “We need to change Mothers Fighting For Others.” She bit. “How?”
The fact that they are shipping a free children’s book with the app, 
Much to my dismay, Foursquare doesn’t appear to be going away and among the current location-based social networks, it is the leader. But if I’m a business owner, in this case a real estate broker, I don’t want to just sit back and wait to see how the developers at Foursquare are going to move their platform forward. I want to take advantage of the network and make it work for me. First step, understand what it will let me have access to and make sure how I want to use the data is within the limits of their terms of service. The terms are simple enough to get to. Their terms of service are clearly displayed on their API page.
Sometimes I just want the digital world to mimic the analog world. Exactly. It’s rare, but there are times that I don’t want an “vast improvement.” And I don’t want innovation. I just want to continue doing what I’ve always done, without having to change my behavior. I just want to do the same thing, only digitally. And this is the hope I have for the iPad for one specific task – my to do lists.
I’ve really enjoyed reading Russ Leseberg’s “
A New Zeek Design Is Coming: The Wireframes
Steve Zehngut and I have felt for a long time that our site was cluttered and lacking focus.
Of course, I could make excuses and say that this visual clutter is the reason for my consistent lack of consistency in writing here. But I won’t. Those are demons to exorcise another day. Suffice it to say, we need to eat our own dog food and stop putting our site last on our development list.
So, today I submitted my ideas for how the site should be organized to our designer. I must have changed these wireframes 20 times over the past few weeks, but I think I’ve finally settled on something that will remove the clutter, get us focused and make Steve and the rest of the team happy at the same time.
For those who want to play along, I thought I’d share parts of the process with you. The first step – wireframes. For those who are unfamiliar, a wireframe is “a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages.” A designer (in this case, our designer, Kiran) uses this basic visual guide to direct her efforts when laying out her interpretation of the graphic elements. What she delivers back are three or four beautiful graphics that are based on this UI direction.
The graphics in this post represent the home page and one inside page structure and were created using Omnigraffle. I hope you enjoying taking a look into the process. I’ll be back when I’ve got some comps to share.
Tags: clutter, design, focus, wireframe
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