Ten commandments, after several months of web design work in my part. Potential clients, please follow these:
- Have a clear image in your mind about what you want to achieve with your website. Even a draft will do.
- Try to look around the internet for competitors, and scribble down what you like about their sites.
- Educate yourself about what’s the fuss about “copyrights”, and learn to obey them. Don’t tell your designer to “take a screenshot of this site and copy it in mine”.
- Your designer is no teacher. She will help you around the web a little, but don’t except her to guide you step-by-step in how to search for porn sites.
- Understand that you get what you pay. You cannot pay a lousy 200$ and all of a sudden you realize that “my site looks tacky”.
- Your designer isn’t your friend. She just works for you, for some hours per day. Don’t expect that calling her at 2 a.m. will make her happy.
- Content is the word. You must provide your designer with content. No, two competitor links isn’t content.
- Pay in-friggin-time. If you suspect you don’t have enough money for your new site redesign, postpone it until you have.
- For heaven’s sake, don’t insult your web designer. She’s a human being, probably more tech savvy than you, and sometimes she can’t take even the slightest of sly humour, coming of your part.
- Finally, if you think you can do it better than your designer, sit down and do it yourself. Spare her the pain.
Of course, I don’t expect any of my current and future clients to do this. But that would be a happy, happy world for web designers.
client, good client
News Flash!
I recently updated my blog interface to include coComment support.
Do you know coComment? Thanks to Lea, I just recently found it too. It’s the first blog comments aggregator, still in beta. I tried it and it works pretty good, so why don’t you go there, give the people some love and the FF extension a try?
Spread the love. Include coComment in your blogs too.
coComment, blog comments, comments aggregator
A recent trend in web designer blogs, this post. I thought I’d give it a try.
My computer is both the heavenly tool that makes me relax and the infernal tool that causes me so much stress. These things help me enjoy both:
- I run Windows XP, can’t wait for Vista, but deep down, I’m a Mac gal.
- My tools of trade are Firefox, Dreamweaver 8, TopStyle Pro, Adobe Photoshop CS2. (although I regret upgrading from v7.0). My text editor of choice is jEdit. Don’t you dare lecture me about Vim. I hate it.
- I use Thunderbird and Gmail for my e-mails.
- I extensively use the Web Designer Toolbar, View formatted source, ForecastFox, IEtab Firefox extensions.
- I use Microsoft Office for all my office work. Sadly, there is no better out there, at least not for me.
- I don’t really like listening to music for long hours at home. I prefer doing that at work. I used to prefer Winamp for music, but I gave iTunes a try the other day and was left with a sweet aftertaste. I also use pandora.com and last.fm much.
- My RSS feeds are conveniently read by Sage, my favourite RSS reader extension for Firefox.
- I use Google Analytics and my hosting company (go SpoonoHost) cPanel for tracking my websites’ stats. I’d love to give Mint a try, however I don’t have a working Paypal account, because they don’t accept Electron Visas.
- There’s no other online photo application like Flickr, no matter what they say.
- I use del.icio.us for some quick online bookmarks and technorati for searching blogs.
- Newsvine and NowPublic are my favourite news applications.
- Wikipedia is my online library on steroids.
- Wordpress is my blogging software of choice.
- I’m subscribed to a great design magazine, Before & After. For the lowest fee, great design tips in your fingertips. Precious.
- All the rest is Google.
How I Work
