THE PENDING DRAFT

BOOM

January 27, 2015

This article by Brian Krogsgard (Post Status) came just in the exact right moment to motivate me even more to finally reveal what we’ve been working on.

Like I said, I interviewed about a dozen photographers from different backgrounds. None of those interviewed felt particularly satisfied with their web workflows. There is room in this market. My question is: who will fulfill their needs?

Looks like we’re onto something. More about our little project will follow this week.

Stay tuned!

Post Status – WooCommerce is going after photography

Style Guides Podcast

January 22, 2015

Styleguides.io provides a ton of useful resources on Website Style Guides. You find pretty much everything from Articles to Books, Talks, Tools or Examples. If you’re building Style Guides and didn’t know it yet, you should check it out.

Today Brad Frost announced a new Podcast, where he and Anna Debenham will interview folks making Style Guides. In the first episode they talked with Jina Bolton, Senior Product Designer at the Salesforce UX Team and although i’m usually not that much into audio podcasts i gave it a try and really enjoyed it.

Style Guides with Jina Bolton

The Web Field Manual is a nice and very extensive collection of links and resources – curated by Jon Yablonski, Garret Wieronski and Geoff Tice – for everyone working on the web. Or, in their own words:

The Web Field Manual is a curated list of resources focused on documenting only the best knowledge for designing experiences and interfaces on the web. It is an ever-expanding collection of knowledge and inspiration for web designers, by web designers.

Web Field Manual

Curtis McHale – How do you bill an unscopeable project

January 19, 2015

Just stumbled upon this article by Curtis McHale. Somewhat related to what Chris Lema had to say about his 3 point approach, but this time less about estimating properly but rather how you can bill such projects to your clients. Worth a read.

My experience has been that when as a client sees the money get lower they start getting picky about what actually gets done. You’d think it would be the same as they pay you hourly and the total cost mounts.

But it isn’t.

Curtis McHale – How do you bill an unscopeable project

Chris Lema on Estimating without Requirements

January 17, 2015

Estimating is one of the harder parts of any web business. Estimating without requirements is even harder. I don’t know about you but i often found myself just quoting something, out of the blue, without even realizing how wrong my numbers where, only to find out later on when it’s already too late. Over the years i learned how to phrase my offerings and contracts more precise, educating my clients that some things cannot be known at the beginning of a project, that they understand that those estimated hours really are only estimates etc. but yet it still feels wrong if you have to come back to a client and let them know you need double or more time than what was initially agreed upon. Proper contracts are important, but they only bring you so far. Things happen, things out of your responsibility will go wrong and even those things should also be taken into account when estimating your time. If you run a business you need to be as good as you can get about estimating properly, if you like it or not.

Chris Lema, who wrote a lot of brilliant things about pricing and estimating before, shared his “3 point estimating approach” which he describes as follows:

I use a 3-point estimating approach that I know others use. But often when I come across other’s estimates I find that they’re using the three points differently than I do. And the result is that if you use three incorrect points, your estimate will be wrong as well.

He explains in more detail what he means by this in a short video and it’s one of the best explanations on the topic i came across so far.

Chris Lema – My Approach to Estimating without Requirements

Matt Cutts from Google on WordPress & SEO

January 15, 2015

Matt Cutts from Google gave a talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2009 about WordPress & SEO. While this is pretty old and many things have changed since then (remember this new Google Wave thing he mentions) it’s still an interesting watch.

Zero

January 13, 2015

It’s always a good thing to have a basic starting point at hand when starting with a new project so you don’t have to write the same things over and over again. While there’s plenty of frameworks, starter themes and templates etc. i thought it would be a good idea to have my own little thingy with exactly the things i need, the way i like to write and structure things. So here it is, maybe it’s of any use for you, too.

A starting point to “jumpstart” a project which contains some of the things i wrote over and over again for each project.

Doesn’t contain any styling, html structure or other project-related stuff. Its basically just my preferred document-structure and a pre-configured Gruntfile.js and package.json.

Nothing fancy, but still very useful for new projects.

Check it out on GitHub and feel free to fork, use or do whatever you like to do with it.

Take it apart – A simple regular learning habit

January 12, 2015

If you use code on a daily basis, i’m pretty sure you also have a big pile of functions, classes and snippets that you used over and over again but never fully grasped how exactly they work in detail. That little snippet you found in a tutorial some years ago or that small bit of code you borrowed from a plugin and included in your themes ever since. Because they just worked, without the need to understand every single line of every bit of code you use.

Take it apart

The last weeks i started to make it a regular habit to take one piece of code and take it apart until i fully understand it. Whether that is a function in WP Core (or any other software you’re using) or just a small code-snippet i used over and over again. I take that code, read through it line by line, and if there is just one single comma i don’t understand i stop and google it, look it up on stackoverflow etc. until i find out exactly why it is there and what it does.

The trick here is to only take small regular steps, one at a time. You would be a fool to think you could master Regular Expressions in just some minutes, but taking apart that one function that uses some Regular Expressions isn’t that hard, gets you started and gets you the satisfaction of having learned something new.

You’ll be amazed how much you will learn without really investing a lot of time.

Redacted Font

January 10, 2015

Redacted Font

When building rough Mockups and Wireframes we normally fill text areas with random Lorem Ipsum Text. While this might work perfectly for us, it can confuse clients. First of all, not everyone gets why there’s strange random latin text all over the place, and second if you use just “any” real font it can lead to discussions about font choices too early in the process when you not even started designing those details.

The Redacted Font was created to solve that problem by obscuring text into unreadable blocks. The project is directly inspired by the BLOKK Font which was around for quite some time. David Walsh wrote more about the Redacted Font including some examples on how to use it etc. so i wont go into the details here.

Redacted Font

Sass Guidelines by Hugo Giraudel

January 9, 2015

Coding Styleguides can help a lot when working with multiple developers on a project, but even if you are a sole dev it can be very useful to write down and keep yourself to some conventions. Hugo Giraudel has put together this very thorough guide specifically targeted on Sass/SCSS Code. Definitely something to bookmark.

A styleguide is not just a pleasing document to read, picturing an ideal state for your code. It is a key document in a project’s life, describing how and why code should be written. It may look like overkill for small projects, but it helps a lot in keeping the codebase clean, scalable and easily maintainable.

Sass Guidelines