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Around eight months ago we made the decision to start using Basecamp to manage nearly all our projects.  Prior to the move to Basecamp, we used a patch work of tools to manage our work.  We had an internal wiki we used for many of our task lists and project documentation.  We used a bug tracking system for some of our more intense programming projects.  We used Basecamp for some work.  And for some projects we relied on emails, Outlook task lists, whiteboards and Excel sheets.

While in retrospect this random approach to project management seems dysfunctional, it really wasn’t a huge problem until we started growing and hiring new people.  When you have a small group of people that have worked together a long time, formal process and tools are less important.  You just sort of know how people work, where they saved their files and how they want to be communicated with.  However, this reliance on personal relationships falls apart when the volume of work increases and you have to integrate new employees into a poorly defined process.  It doesn’t scale.

So we started using Basecamp.

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I came across a great article today entitled How to Design for Your Worst Client: You. While the article aims to provide designers with tips for designing their own personal websites, there are some some lessons that anyone working on a web design project can learn from.

“Be as specific as you can on what you would like on each page. That means decide on the content first. I know, it’s a design portfolio. You need something to design though. How many times has a client had you design something without saying what content they want on there, or saying they will get it to you soon (meaning the day before it goes live). Don’t do this to you.”

Too often sites are designed without a thought out content plan in place.  This usually leads to last minute redesigns or sites that are squares when they should be circles.  Content should be where you start, not an after thought.

“There is always someone better than you. Always. But remember: That person’s first few websites sucked. Not only did they suck, they might have been the worst website ever created. So why are you trying so hard to have the best website ever in one shot? You won’t get better unless you start making your own sites.

Stop using other websites as a crutch while you aimlessly wander looking for something to spark an idea. Since you have your goals defined and know what content you want, you can quickly move along until you find the elements that match your needs. Then STOP looking.”

In almost all cases, organizations are better off getting something good, but simple up quickly and then improving in an iterative way over time.  Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

One of the biggest obstacles to getting good design implemented is a dysfunctional approval process, as this article on the struggles American Airlines has had attests.

“The biggest challenge to better design isn’t getting better designers. The problem is organizational, and the hub-and-spoke decision-making process that was originally created to slash bureaucracy–that is, to create more decentralized decisions and less hierarchy. But the overriding weakness, which design thinking makes manifest, is that good design is necessarily the product of a heavily centralized structure. Great design at places such as Apple isn’t about “empowering decision makers” or whatever that lame B-school buzzword is. It’s about awarding massive power and self-determination to those with the most cohesive vision–that is, the designers. Those are the people with the best idea of what customers want. That’s the essence of design thinking.”

While the quote references problems with the way things are structured at American Airlines, I’ve found that organizations of all sizes and shapes have similar structural problems.  No matter how talented the design team, it is difficult to produce good websites unless the end client has efficient structures in place for responding to and approving your work.  Committees are probably good for a few things, but designing websites isn’t one of them.

Entrepeneur Mark Goldenson wrote a great article in Venturebeat last week on the lessons he learned working on his failed startup, PlayCafe.  This passage resonated with me:

3. Know when to value speed vs. stability. Another reason PlayCafe’s complexity hurt us is that developing good content and technology simultaneously required too much time. We tried to make each deep and stable — important, we thought, given our live nature — but we were too slow to iterate in a novelty- and entertainment-based business.

A metaphor I like is that a chess novice can defeat a master if moving twice each round. This generally increases bugs and offends perfectionists, but I agree with Reid Hoffman that if you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.

This is a lesson that applies to all web development work.  Way, way too many organizations tend to turn a web development project into a six to twelve month process, with delays resulting from months of arguments about font choices or waiting on content that sounds good in theory, but no one has time or energy to write. 

In almost all cases, organizations are better off scaling back their initial requirements in order to get something up quickly so they can start making an impact now.  As long as the initial site is built in a flexible platform like Drupal, it should be relatively painless to then launch iterative improvements to the site over time.

A website is not a print brochure.  Nothing is being sent to the printer and a website isn’t something that should ever be seen as finished. 

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire

The current version of our company website has served us well.  It performs well in search engines, consistently generates leads and highlights our most important marketing resource, our blog.  This bit from a blog post I wrote when the new site launched in August of 2006 sums up the strategy behind the current site pretty well:

We finally started making progress when we shifted the focus to our blog.  We decided to keep www.bivings.com really simple and not to overwhelm folks with lots of brochure content they don’t want to read anyway.  We brought our blog content front and center.  Our goal with the new site is to tell the story of our company a little bit every day by writing about the projects we are working on and the things we are passionate about.   We think this will be much more effective than producing some sort of slick, heartless brochure site.

But, in Internet time, two and a half years is an eternity, and it is time for us to take a fresh look at the site.  Starting with the homepage, we are starting to go through through Bivings.com section by section and figuring out what improvements we want to make to both copy and design.  We go through this process with our clients all the time, but for obvious reasons we can’t write about it.  Since we are our own clients on this one (which is always a dicey situation), we figured we would write about what we’re doing as it happens as a way of soliciting feedback and educating people on how the process works.

With that, here is a quick summary of what we’re trying to accomplish with our homepage redesign:

• Better explain what we do through a very straight forward homepage Flash feature.
• Show examples of the projects we are working.  We really don’t do this at all now. 
• Better highlight some of the research we are conducting and our contributions to the open source development community.
• Continue to feature the blog, but to a lesser extent than the site does now.  Our blog readers generally go directly to the Bivings Report, so we don’t need to make the homepage of our marketing site quite so blog heavy, although we do want our new users to find headlines quickly and read it.
• Modernize the site design and clean up the site’s CSS.

With those goals in mind, click here to view a rough wireframe I developed for the new Bivings.com homepage.  Let me know what you think in the comments, as I’ll be simultaneously posting this here and distributing internally for feedback.  Stay tuned for more updates as we get further in the process.

Due to low prices and marketing muscle, Go Daddy is the first name that comes to mind for me when I think of domain registration.  Over the years, I have purchased a series of domain names that I manage through the site, and have even bought hosting services from them out of convenience on occasion.  I have been consistently appalled by the Go Daddy user interface throughout the time I've used the service. 

Yesterday, I got a renewal notice for one of the domains I own and logged into Go Daddy to reserve for another two years.  In an era where most e-commerce sites have worked to make it as easy as possible to buy goods with as few clicks as possible, Go Daddy has taken the complete opposite approach.  It took six clicks for me, as a logged-in account holder whose credit card is on file, to renew my domain.  Previously I had always chalked up Go Daddy's horrible interface to incompetence, but upon close review it is pretty clear that the interface is purposefully clunky, and that Go Daddy is putting a lot of barriers between the user and the final purchase step in an effort to manipulate them into buying additional services.

It is the online equivalent of the candy and trashy magazines in the check-out line at the grocery store.

Here is a summary of the six steps I had to take to get to my final payment step (click on images to see full size versions).

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A few weeks ago one of the projects Bivings works on, the Pickens Plan, won a Reed Award for best use of social networking technology.  Since its launch in July, the Pickens Plan has recruited 1.4 million supporters and built a social network, Push.PickensPlan.com, consisting of 200,000 hardcore activists. 

Following are a couple of the key elements of the Pickens Plans’ social networking strategy that helped ensure their success:

(1) Internal Social Network

Push.PickensPlan.com, an internal social network built in Ning, launched immediately after the Plan itself was announced in July of 2008.  Push was not originally seen as an integrate part of the overall strategy.  This excerpt from an interview with Pickens Plan online strategist Heather Lauer, shows how the strategy evolved:

“Our expectation was the other networks (like Facebook) would be stronger because they have a built-in audience, but it was just the opposite … Ning turned out to be much stronger” in terms of community-building and driving people to the Pickens Plan site.   The further surprise was that the community, originally conceived as a sub-objective, is now the most important platform for effecting the political change sought by Pickens and his staff.

I think having the internal social network available right away was a key to the networks eventually success.  Push allowed the Pickens Plan to immediately provide supporters with a way to self organize around the Plan’s principles.

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As a required companion piece to this post, I have grudgingly crafted a review of the 5 sites that are on the lower end of the design scale. Some of these campaigns have no budget, and others are just a few years behind the times. Some others are just lazy. Although none require any real commentary, I need to take up some space on this blog and I think you’ll agree that I’ve done just that.

Kevin Scott

“Congress is broken and we need to fix it”, states Kevin Scott. At least it says that on his campaign site. This is where I might make a broken site joke, high five Todd and call it a day. But I’d rather focus on the awesome stars and stripes bastardization and glimmering flash treatment that Team Scott chose to waste time on rather than put some actual content on this little gem.

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DISCLAIMER: 4chan contains many images at which you should not look at if you are under 18…in fact, some of the stuff on this site I don't want to look at regardless of my age.  Visit the site at your own risk.

4chan is an addictive little site that is also incredibly useful.  Why haven't you heard about it before?  Well, chances are that you have, but you just did not know it.  4chan is the original source for some of the Internet's best memes, including Rick Rolling, so i herd u like mudkips, and LOLCats.  Yes, those highly time-wasting Internet phenomena all started from the same source.

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In putting together the report we released last week, The Use of the Internet by 2008 Senate Campaigns, my co-workers took the time to identify the websites of everyone running for the Senate this year.  Since my co-workers already did the hard part in finding the sites, I figured I’d cruise through the list and pick out my most and least favorites from a design perspective.    Presented below are the best designed homepages of the group, in my opinion.   I’ll write up the worst later in the week. 

(5) Mark Warner (D-VA)

There is no shame in coming in 5^th place. My father said that to me after a disappointing 11^th place finish in the Pinewood Derby.

Although there is a hint of Obama-borrowing here, I liked this site for its generous use of white space and logical placement of content/actions. The splash page sign-up is of course a real slap in the face but at least the skip through link is not hidden. My eye goes directly from the (only mildly annoying) logo to the contribute option to the actions. Everything on this homepage is easy to instantly recognize and quick to find (and then dismiss in my case).

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In my last post I made some remarks pertaining to the McCain campaign website team borrowing the tone of the Obama site. I thought it was a good upgrade to an already well designed site overall. When I popped over the McCain site today, however, I was surprised at the latest similarity. The backlit blue light that the Obama team uses on every page has now made its way to McCain’s latest promotion, McCain Nation, a grassroots event planning/searching tool.

When the Obama team first started using this illustration technique, I really liked it, and it’s been beautifully rendered. But they use it for every promo and now the crowd of wispy supporters that comes with it no longer look like race-less Americans supporting Barack Obama to me…they look like charging albinos. Or ghostly Skynyrd fans. They frighten me. Now the McCain gang wants to start in with the heavenly beams of light and surely the faceless zombies can’t be far behind.

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Announced yesterday on the Facebook blog, the redesign of Facebook has finally arrived. After several delays to the new aesthetic, the developers have finally released the new platform to the masses. More AJAX, tab-centric, and a more versatile API… Here's a quick listing of some personal pros and cons with the new design.

Pros

1. Tabs! I am a sucker for tabs. They are easy to organize and keep content from becoming cluttered. My biggest complaint when the Facebook team released the API was that too many people's profiles were becoming littered with third-party applications. These apps were visually detracting, and had nothing to do with what I found Facebook to be most useful for (keeping in touch with acquaintences). With the new redesign, one can stick all their scrabble-playing-super-wall-poking ugliness on its own tab and I'll never have to go near it.
2. More intuitive photo platform. I didn't post a screenshot of my photos tab, but it is a far more intuitive way to access other users' photographs. It borrows heavily from the minimalistic UI of picasa, and now I don't have to go searching through a user's profile for a link to find their albums.
3. Better use of horizontal space. Facebook finally spread its wings a bit. The redesign makes a much better use of horizontal space, and avoids feeling clausterphobic by combining this new feature with the tabs, mentioned above. The wider limit also allows third-party developers much more freedom when it comes to mapping the UI of their applications, so I expect to see better things than graffiti and super wall.
4. Improved 'friends' module. With the redesign, the friends module was improved. Now you have a choice as to how many thumbnail pictures to display, as well as designating which ones (there were some third-party applications to have "favorite friends" displayed on the previous facebook design, does anybody know what they were called?) if you would rather permanently display your best friends.
5. Smart use of AJAX. The AJAX on the new design is both aesthetically pleasing and purpose-driven. The way I like it to be.

Cons

1. Advertisements in my face. I remember when Facebook had no ads. Then it had text-based ads. Later, they adopted vertical banners. Now, they've put those vertical banners front and center. With the decreased clutter on the pages (which is a good thing!), it leaves the advertisements to stick out like a sore thumb. With the previous design, I found I could largely ignore advertisements if I just pretended they were another annoying application.
2. More clicks. My preference for tabs aside, the prosecution points out that there is something to be said about having all "crucial" profile information contained on one page. When I need to know if the young lady in my rhetoric and composition class has awful taste in music or not, I have an additional click to consider. Multiply this by lots of young ladies and you're talking about a serious time investment.

Overall, I'm pleased with the new Facebook design. I think it's a step in the right direction, which is a personal first. This new implementation puts the criticisms of previous redesigns into perspective. I'm sure the previous flaws helped shape the success of this release. Anything to add?

Catch some pictures of the redesign after the break.

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We just recently finished updating most of the Wordpress sites we maintain to Wordpress 2.5, so our normal process would be to monitor for security issues and wait a bit before upgrading again.  However, in reviewing the features of Wordpress 2.6 we may have to make an exception and upgrade sooner rather than later.  Seriously, it is like they read my mind and added the new features I wanted most.  Specifically:

(1) Wordpress now tracks your revision history, so you can now revert to old versions of your posts should you desire.  This will come in handy.

(2) You can now add captions easily to your images in Wordpress.  This feature is already present on the Wordpress-driven CNN Political Ticker (see image on right for sample).  (more…)

As someone who was born in the generation that lives, breathes, writes, eats, sleeps, and drinks the Internet, I have become jaded with how many useless and uninteresting websites that I have found over the years.  It seems like every time that I sign online, I am bombarded with a flood of websites that I could easily do without.  There are certain sites, however, that are so useful and innovative in their clean design and functionality that I would be at a loss on the Internet without them.  As an Independence Day present to the readers, I decided to share these with you. (more…)

Yesterday, the New York Times launched a beta version of Times People, a lightweight social networking feature that allows readers to connect around NYT content.  Currently, Times People can only be used as a plugin in Firefox (this will change soon) and functions as a social bookmarking tool similar to del.icio.us or Mento.  CNET’s The Social has a good overview of Times People, complete with a video interview with the folks at the Times that created the tool.  Mathew Ingram, Mashable Silicon Valley Insider and DigiDave all have good reviews up as well.

When I try out tools like this, my first instinct is to figure out if it is something I will be using on a regular basis.  With Times People, the answer is clearly no.  Although I visit nytimes.com a few times a week, I am not really actively engaged with the site.  I’ve never left a comment.  I’ve never explored the restaurant and theater reviews.  I don’t live in New York.  I basically drop in on the Times site to get the paper’s take on the “story of the day” or when someone links to the site.  In summary, I’m not the target audience for Times People.  The tool is clearly aimed at people who have a stronger relationship with the Times brand than I do.

I think Times People has the ability to grow into a very useful for people who do have that relationship.

Some have criticized the tool for being too limited in focus.  I think its modesty is actually its greatest strength.  Times People is trying to complement the way readers are already using the site, not change the behavior.  That’s smart.

Let me explain.

Sites for newspapers like USA Today have full bore social networks built right in.  Users can set up full profiles, upload pictures, maintain a blog, friend other users, etc.  They function like a mini version of MySpace or Facebook. It just feels like too much. There are many, many better platforms for maintaining blogs, sharing photos, etc.  Why would anyone want to do all of this stuff on the USA Today website?  I’m left thinking about the old cliche that the decision about what to leave out is just as important as what you leave in.

Times People recognizes that the New York Times brand is its content.  Instead of trying to shift activities like blogging and photo sharing to its website, the Times is adding social features that complement activities readers are already performing - leaving comments, reading stories and writing reviews.  The focused nature of the tool also allows it to evolve organically as the Times reviews how people are actually using it.  This is how the best websites always approach thing.

I have no idea whether Times People will be a success or not. But for experimental features like these, I think starting small and taking an iterative approach is always a good thing.

Photos on news site are often made deliberately small and/or buried in annoying Flash slide show software. Good photography ends up getting marginalized. Boston.com recently launched a dead simple photo blog called Big Picture that shows how powerful online news photography can be if you out of the way and let the pictures tell a story. Big Picture’s formula is simple: present high resolution versions of outstanding photography in a blog style, with a minimal amount of accompanying text. The results are compelling, as this post on an uncontacted Amazon Basin tribe shows.

Alan Taylor, who came up with the idea for the Big Picture, explains the thinking behind the piece in a blog post:

When I see quality photography consigned to the archives, or when I see bandwidth readily given up to video streams of dubious quality, or when I see photo galleries that act as ad farms, punishing viewers into a click-click-click experience just to drive page views - those times are the times I’m glad I was able to get this project off the ground (many thanks to my friends within boston.com).

Check out the Big Picture.

<via Jason Kottke>