Looks great. Love the subtle use of texture.

Wez Maynard was having a contest.

Some background

If you haven’t used one before, a grid framework is a great way to speed up your site development. They offer you CSS rules and templates to add to your site in order to line everything up properly without much effort. The two most popular (and the ones I personally use) are the 960 Grid System and Blueprint CSS Framework.

To use a grid framework, you import the included CSS file to your site. The CSS will have various grids with widths and margins all assigned. I’m not going to go into much detail here because both of them have great instruction already available.

The problem

In order to be as useful as possible they offer every grid combination imaginable, so the css files are huge. This is great because you don’t need to set anything up, but can become very bloated and unnecessary for final rendering of your site. The use of another stylesheet is frowned upon as well due to the extra HTTP request.

The solution

Copy only the needed rules to your own css file. Yes it’s that simple, and this isn’t meant to be groundbreaking, but most of the websites I see built on a grid framework leave these heavy css files in there when they don’t need to. So make sure you remember to do this before your site’s live, and enjoy your efficient website.

Let me start this off by saying I’m a huge fan of Google. My last article here focused on how awesome Gmail is (see The Little Things: Behind the Scenes User Experience), I use Google Docs at work and Google Reader to get my newsfix. Google Maps gets me where I need to go and their search really can’t be beat. Overall, they do a lot of things really well.

One thing that I don’t find they do well and I’m no longer using is Google Analytics and it’s not because it’s not useful.

Why I left

To put it simply, the user experience sucked. My main gripes:

• It’s confusing. Just take a look at the Goals setup.
• To look at anything real, it requires that you go to another page.
• It’s ugly. So subjective and vein, I know. But true nonteheless. I like pretty things and Analytics is not that.

However none of those reasons are the reason I left. The reason I ended up finally leaving Google Analytics and using something else is:

I couldn’t find out how to re-add tracking to a site I redesigned.

Don’t worry, I ended up finding it. But I had to Google it. (Maybe that’s their strategy? Haha.) The page that ended up telling me how to do it involved six steps and a screenshot. I had to “Edit” the “Actions” of a profile to “Check Status”. Save for edit, none of those would give you any clue as to their function, and that was the last straw.

Where I went

But then I thought, “Why does it have to be free?”

I’ve disliked Google Analytics for as long as I can remember using it, but I never had any other choice when it comes to the free sector of analytical software. Awstats comes preinstalled with most hosts, unfortunately it overstates your traffic with inefficient ignore rules which makes it less than optimal. Google Analytics is incredibly popular and so I checked them out years ago and have been with them ever since, although I was never truly satisfied with the experience.

But then I thought, “Why does it have to be free?” and found Mint. I’m not going to go over the software right now but you can check out their website for more details. It’s not nearly as powerful as Google Analytics (no Goals, for example) but I don’t care. It’s easy and shows me my website stats. So I gave them $30 and haven’t looked back.

To wrap up

My analytics needs were essentially being met. I could find out the information I needed for no cost and even though I didn’t love the software, I have been using it for years. Then one little thing made me decide I was fed up and had to move on. I decided I would rather pay money for a less complex Analytics program than be frustrated by an insanely popular program I’ve been using for years. You might not agree with me but that’s not relevant to Mint’s pockets.

It just goes to show you how important an easy and friendly user experience really is.

Thoughts?

An example from the King of the Internet

The other day I was applying for a job using my gmail account. I had written a sweet cover letter, edited it and reviewed it a few times, and hit send. What happened next saved me incredible embarrassment and jumping out of my bedroom window: Google popped up from behind the scenes and told me I was an idiot.

No, do not send anyway.

I attached my .pdf, sent, and immediately went to all other mail clients I could find to see if this was standard operating procedure. It’s not. This is Google going that extra step and holding my hand to make sure I don’t fail at the Internet. I’ve never found a better example of having the users best interest at heart before, and here’s why:

1. It’s important

There are a lot of things out there that try to help you, but don’t really need to. This is all well and good but can get to be too much. We’ve all been on a website and by the end of our visit thought “Come on, I’m not a moron.” Having your hand held when you don’t need it can become frustrating, so when using a pop up you have to make sure that pop-up is needed and will be appreciated.

2. It’s completely user-centric

It exists for the sole reason of making sure you succeed at what you’re doing. There are no ulterior motives, it’s not “helping” you buy more products, it’s just keeping you from being frustrated and embarrassed.

3. It’s unobtrusive

They didn’t go the route of a message displayed to all users. It only pops up when necessary. They know that most people are going to remember to attach their file, so they only whisper to those who didn’t.

A mail client is something that’s hard to be good at. That is, it’s hard to be better than the others. You can simplify your interface, you can put important features in easy-to-find locations, and you can send the actual mail. But e-mail has been around a long time, so differentiating yourself isn’t easy to do. Most people try to add more features on the front-end to make themselves special, in any facet of business, but sometimes you need to step back and think about how you can help somebody who isn’t asking for help. Thanks for having my back, Gmail.

Should you be doing it?

It seems like these days everybody has an opinion when it comes to advertising on your blog. Some (most) think that you must. I mean, it’s pretty much free money that you’d be missing out on otherwise, right? (No, but we’ll get to that later.) Others, lovers of great design, copy purists and the web 100.0 elite think it’s terrible. It ruins aesthetics and cheapens your content. I mean, are you a trust-worthy resource or a salesman?

The value of time

The first camp undervalues you. You’ve decided to monetize your blog, make it professional, and now you’re going to settle for $.30/click from Google or a hundred bucks per month from Buy Sell Ads. This is what a few hours per day is worth to you? Don’t think of it as “extra money”, think of it as what it is: a business venture. Do the math all beginner bloggers are afraid to do and you aren’t going to be happy.

The second camp undervalues you even worse. They don’t think you’re worth anything at all. They’ve decided your blog should be an altruistic source of knowledge for nothing. This isn’t malicious or even intentional, it’s just some still subscribe to the pre-burst money-grows-on-trees, field of dreams way of thinking, and don’t think of a blog as a legitimate business.

Why did you start your blog?

No matter how many clicks you get, what dollar amount of products you sell, or the numbers on your traffic graphs, you’re making somebody else more money than you’re receiving.

This is important. Did you start your blog to solely to express yourself or to make money? If the first, maybe advertising is for you. If you’re only putting a little bit of time towards it, have a steady day job and think of your blog as a hobby, then in a sense Adsense, CPA and affiliate ad revenue is “free money”. Unfortunately, once someone sees some of this money they start shifting in the second group.

Distractions

The problem with advertising is you’re working for somebody. No matter how many clicks you get, what dollar amount of products you sell, or the numbers on your traffic graphs, you’re making somebody else more money than you’re receiving. The reason that company can pay you$ .30 for that click is they feel they can make more than that with it. This is all well and good when you’re doing this as a hobby, but what about when you’re selling a product? There’s usually only one click per view, do you really want to give it away so fast?

“But I’m not selling anything”

That’s the first objection, but is it really true? I see a lot of web designers with blogs; they’re selling design services. I see a lot of blogs with newsletters used to sell highly targetted products to trusting listeners. I see talented people who indeed are not selling anything, but they could be. Think really hard about whether you want to use clicks for advertising revenue, or if they’d be better suited for another purpose before littering your sidebar with them.

So when should you advertise?

Here’s where the opportunity cost comes into play. This is the first day of any economics class, but for some reason people don’t think in terms of economics and business when building their blog. You should advertise when advertising makes you more money than something you could provide. This usually means big traffic. If you sell web design services, but only charge $750 per site, and somebody wants to pay you $1000 to advertise on your blog, then advertise. The only way to find out if you’re being as profitable as you can is to test it out.

If you are advertising and selling a service or a product right now, a book for example, try it out. Strip away advertising for a bit and see the conversion. If you have an advertisement for your book in the sidebar, and Google advertisements above your post, replace the Google ads with another book ad. If your conversions go up and net you more than you made last month, keep going in that direction. If not, either go back to advertising, or work on improving your book conversions.

In conclusion

This is basic stuff, but when people build their blog it happens slowly, so people don’t always realize what’s happening or what money they’re missing out on. Sometimes you need to step back and take an objective view of it all and see if what was working for you last year is still what’s working for you now. Hope you enjoyed the post.

I’ve been thinking about getting into making and selling themes on ThemeForest in my spare time. It seems like a good way to make some extra cash with some ideas lying in your head going to waste. Because it’s such a huge website, the top sellers on ThemeForest make quite a bit of money. During my research I checked out what was selling the most on ThemeForest, when it comes to premium Wordpress themes. I checked the top 10 or so sales of all time and then a lot of the recent top-sellers, and there were definitely patterns that emerged as to a feature-list that ThemeForest buyers really respond to. I decided to share my findings with you, faithful reader.

1. Options panel

Don’t even think about putting a Wordpress theme up on ThemeForest without an options panel. I don’t even think I found one without it in all the high-selling themes I looked at. It makes a users experience much better and adds some premium value to your theme. The options panel is really where you find the controls to the remainder of this list.

2. Many page templates

A portfolio template, a blog template, an “about” template, the list goes on. The more the merrier when it comes to custom page templates. This makes your theme appeal to a wider variety of potential buyers, and was another one of the “must-haves” I kept seeing time and time again.

3. PSD files

People who buy your theme want to be able to customize it as they see fit. This is why there needs to be a feature-rich options panel and multiple page templates. Another way to customize a theme is to alter the PSD files. Including them gives your users almost unlimited colour selections and lots of editing capabilities if they so wish.

4. Lots of widget areas

Again with the customization. There are many places somebody might want to put content, so it’s best to make it as easy as possible and give them as many choices as you can. This includes going beyond the sidebar widget, and adding a few footer widgets, a widget above and below the post content, etc. The possibilities are almost endless.

5. Lots of documentation and good support

Part of the reason for buying a premium theme is the support. If you have questions, you want them answered. Stop the questions early by providing lots of documentation right out of the box. Go one step further and offer as much support as possible for your product. Some popular theme sellers even had forums setup.

6. Social networking support

Obviously social networking is really important these days. Make sure to have support out-of-the-box for Twitter, Facebook, etc. The more the merrier. After paying $32 for a theme, nobody wants to have to scour the internet for plugins right away just to start using their new website how they want.

7. A very detailed theme page

Some pages on ThemeForest aren’t very detailed. The top sellers theme pages are. Let your potential customers know all the benefits right away. People browse quickly when searching for themes, so have easy to read bulleted lists and all of your features right up front for them to see.

In Conclusion

You can see a few recurring themes in this list. Number one is that theme-buyers want customization. They want to be able to easily put things wherever they want, however they want, and in whatever style they want. Make sure to let them do this. There were some other aesthetic consistencies such as jQuery sliders and font replacement tools, but the main theme was customization and support. These people are paying a premium, make sure to give them a premium product.

I hope this article was useful, now get over to ThemeForest and check out their excellent selection of Wordpress themes.

Possibly the most important business book you’ll ever read.

I’m going to start this review off with full disclosure: I’m a 37 signals fan. I like their products and business model, I read their blog and I watch their videos. Obviously, I had pretty high expectations for this book. That being said, it lived up to all of them.

Rework was written by Jason Fried and David Heinmeier Hanson of 37 Signals fame and is what I’m going to call a new business book. It aims to rewrite the rules of succeeding in business with a fresh, down-to-earth approach. In all 12 chapters the authors give advice contrary to everything you’ve been taught about business success. (“Emulate drug dealers? Huh?”) They aren’t saying these things just to be different, though. They make sense. That’s what so promising about this new business crowd. How we’ve learned in the past has been based on trust and tradition; the future is based on logic through proof and transparency.

Rework is a quick read. It has big margins, illustrations, and short rapid-fire sentences. But the amount of experience and great advice is equal to that of a book three times its size. With topics ranging from productivity to progress to hiring to promotion, even to damage control, practicality soaks every page. And nobody could say it better than Jason Fried himself: “Concise is what we do. No one should be reading a business book for days. Read quick and get back to work”.

Rework teaches to be as small (and thus agile) as possible, seek outside funding only when absolutely necessary, and make money rather than spend it.

This book isn’t for everyone, though. Some people’s definition of success is lots of employees, fancy offices and big bureaucratic board rooms filled with executives and departments. Some people love the thrill of finding venture capital. These things go against the efficiency mantra preached here. Rework teaches to be as small (and thus agile) as possible, seek outside funding only when absolutely necessary, and make money rather than spend it. These are the kinds of ideas a profit-minded individual should have lots of fun implementing, and why this book is a must-read for anyone that owns a business, is thinking about owning a business, or even works for a business.

I can’t say it better than Seth Godin did on the front cover: “Ignore this book at your own peril”. The business world is changing and books like Rework are what are going to help you adapt. Because after all, if you stand still while everyone moves forward, you’re going to be left behind.

More information on Rework can be found on Amazon and on the official website. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson can be found tweeting @jasonfried and @dhh respectively, blogging on Signals vs. Noise and doing work as the company that was the basis for this book on 37 Signals.com.

A story on hatred for your users and fans

The other day I decided that I needed to invest (for free) in a good note-taking program for my Blackberry. After surfing the internet and reading reviews for the pathetic amount of choices available I settled on Evernote. After installing the program I was prompted to register. This makes sense since Evernote backs up your notes to a web server and makes them available anywhere, however there was one big flaw.

There was a captcha. And not just any captcha, but a captcha that didn’t seem to work. The doctors tell me I have pretty good eyesight, and this wasn’t a difficult looking jumble of characters but I still wasn’t allowed to register after 4 tries. So I didn’t. The glaring ridiculousness of this was staring at me and laughing. Here I was, on my Blackberry, not being allowed to use a program because I’m apparently not a human. (I am, by the way.)

There are two possible trains of thought that led to the inclusion of a captcha in this instance:

1. Evernote thought that it was plausible for a bot to buy and register a Blackberry with internet service, navigate to the Evernote website, download it, and try to register it in an attempt to spam itself with private notes.
2. Evernote was too lazy to make a separate sign-up for people coming from the mobile version of Evernote.

So which is it, friends? Regardless of the logic it was unnecessary. This is an extreme example, of course, as I usually see captchas on blogs and upload-friendly websites, but my sentiment is the same: There’s no need to annoy people with captchas with so many alternatives out there for spam prevention now. And that’s my gripe.

Here are some of those alternatives

1. A simple question

   My favourite! I know, it’s 2010, and asking a simple question sounds silly when you could have an image and a script that knows what the image says! But it’s much more user friendly. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, “5 + 2 =” and you fill in 7. Perfect!

2. A plugin

   Askimet is very good at catching spam on my blogs. There are other plugins that are apparently even better. Use them. This is only for blogging or CMS software but most places I see captchas are built on those platforms anyway.

3. Manual spam-checking

   I know. You’re too busy. You get a whole 1,000 hits per month on your blog and a few of them are spam and you can’t be bothered. Come on. If you have a low to moderately trafficked website it’s not too much trouble to ask you to go through your to-be-moderated comments and check them out every few days.

Or do you hate me?

Because I’ll tell you, for every 3 captchas I come across I’ll fail one of them. And leave.

For discussion

Do you agree? (You should.) Am I being a whiner? (I’m not.) Do you have any other alternatives that you’ve seen work?

If you run a design-related website then community links are a great way to get traffic to your articles. Community links are links to specific posts, usually placed in the sidebar of a website, that anybody can submit. They’re moderated so don’t just go submitting unrelated posts and spam, but if you have something you feel would help the design community, it’s silly to not post to these. There are lots of sites that accept community links, and I submit to something like 30 of them but a lot of them just don’t get me any traffic.

That’s why I made this list. These are the 5 places that have gotten me the most traffic over the past few months. Unsurprisingly they’re also the best sites to read if you’re looking for some design articles. So if you don’t want to waste your time submitting to hundreds of websites, then just check these ones out and enjoy the quality traffic.

Design Newz

Design-Newz is run by Spyre Studios and exists solely as a community news site. It boasts a very clean layout and quite a bit of traffic. They don’t let just any article in, but the ones they do post are tweeted and shared around quite a bit. A lot of this comes from @designnewz where each new post is tweeted out to over 24,000 followers, and then ReTweeted a bunch. Only thing is your TweetMeme counter won’t go up, theirs will, but quit complaining they’re giving you traffic.

TripWire Magazine

The Tripwire Magazine community news feed is unique because besides a link being placed in the sidebar and tweeted to 4500 followers via @tripwiremag, they also make a post every few days of recent community links. They have a strong following and have contributed quite a bit of traffic to me. They’re quite lax on what they accept as well, so as long as it’s design related and not of tremendously poor quality you should be fine.

Dev Snippets

Dev Snippets is a collection of useful web design articles and code snippets. If you have something very useful for designers then this is a good place to add your link. It gets a lot of traffic and I find that people search it and go deep in the archives a lot, so you get residual traffic for a while instead of lots of traffic one day and none the next.

Color Burned

Colorburned gets a lot of traffic and sends a lot of traffic. Simple as that.

Script and Style

Script and Style is the pickiest of the bunch, I’ve found, but also the most respected. They only approve high-quality articles but like Design-Newz, all this site is is community links. This means once approved you get seen by a lot of eyes, and not just in the bottom of a sidebar.

Abduzeedo

To post a community link on Abduzeedo, you have to register. Once registered however, your link goes up immediately. I don’t get the most traffic from Abduzeedo, but I get a fair bit, and it’s instant. Don’t spam them as they’re a great site, but definitely take advantage of being able to immediately see results from your community link endevour.

Honourable mention: The Web Blend

The Web Blend is a Digg-esque community-based news site where users vote on articles they like. The reason for submitting to The Web Blend over the other sites like this, is that your link will get tweeted out to @thewebblend’s 3900 followers and @iblend’s 4700 followers.

Hope you enjoyed the list, now get to submitting!

Further Reading and Discussion

If you enjoy submitting links like this, and want to try submitting to other sites as well then here are some roundups:

10 Places to Promote Your Site
100 Places to Promote Your Design Work for Free
114 Best Resources for Promoting Your Design Related Articles
41 Websites to Promote Your Design Articles and Resources
60 Promotional Websites to Promote and Submit Your Design-Related Articles and News

Are there any that I’m missing that you’ve gotten great returns from? Let me and others know in the comments.

I know, I know, “but I do the work of 3!” Still, you’re one person. So why, in this web 2.0 world of transparency and avatars and tribes and trust agents are you constantly writing in plural form? I view a lot of portfolios and so often I see one-man operations with copy reading like this:

“We’ve been designing totally rad awesome websites for over 5 years. With skills in HTML, CSS, Ajax and PHP we have the know-how to get the job done right. Whether you come to us for a simple homepage designed or a full-fledged eCommerce solution, we guarantee that you’ll leave satisfied.”

Does this misrepresentation not put potential clients off? Is it working or is it just so rampant that when a freelancer sits down to write copy they immediately go there?

I don’t know; that’s why I’m asking.

It screams to me of somebody trying to be something they’re not. Somebody who wants to work for an agency but couldn’t, is embarrassed that they’re working as a freelancer, and so they try to fake it. I’m not trying to make fun of anybody or be cruel or get laughs etc. here; that’s honestly the first thing that comes to my mind.

As I said, love it or hate it, we’re living in the age of transparency now. Knowing what I know about the social web, it just doesn’t seem to mix with this kind of advertising. Yet I see it every day. Not just in design, either, but in lots of occupations. I don’t get it.

Does anybody have any thoughts? Do you do this? Does it work?