MrQwest

Points Brighton — Points Mean Pixels

Tuesday saw the second Points (Mini Conference, Brighton) event take place. This has fast become my ‘must go to each & every’ mini conference. I wrote about the first one back in October last year but to recap, it’s a small evening event curated by a really nice chap called Mike Street. It’s aimed at those who have day jobs or can’t afford big conference costs so this event was priced at £6, (that’s not a typo — six pound); the first Points event was free! It has 3 or 4 speakers doing 20minute presentations each with breaks inbetween and the now infamous Points Bazaar (read: raffle!). Better yet, all proceeds go to Charity and this time round, it was Tia’s Trees – a great charity based in Brighton run by Remy Sharp.

Joined by my good friend Kris Noble, Dean Faulkner and Mike Simmonds, we caught a train from East Croydon to Brighton… except the trains were knackered (when aren’t they?). Our train was headed to Brighton even though the sign said Victoria. We sat patiently waiting for the train to leave and then over the tannoy came a dull and bored voice saying “Sorry for the delay, we’re still wiating for the train driver to turn up”.

Angry face ensues

Anyway, we arrived at The Skiff (A pretty sweet co-working & meeting space in Brighton) to an already busy room. Mike had managed to pack the place out at 35 (awesome) people. We grabbed a beer and set ourselves down. Soon enough, we were chatting with old & new friends! I like events like this.

Amber Weinberg was up first. We’ve met briefly before at CroydonCreativ.es but it was great to see her in action giving a talk, and it was a great talk on mobile development and building desktop-first instead of mobile-first. I can see arguments for both sides of the coin but I kinda like the desktop-first approach. Amber stepped in for Paul Mist who was due to speak but had to cancel at the last minute due to illness. It’s a shame as Paul has some great thoughts, but it was great to see Amber talk!
w: amberweinberg.com
t: @amberweinberg

Next up was James Seymour-Lock who gave a presentation on achieving client goals. How best to work with your clients and make them happy. A very client-centric approach. It was great to hear the talk as it’s something I’ve been wondering about recently.
w: simpleasmilk.co.uk
t: @jamesslock

A brief break ensued which allowed people to use the facilities, stand outside in the fresh cool Brighton air or grab a drink & converse with friends.

Third talk of the evening was from Krystian Szastok and he spoke about SEO. Now I’ve always been skeptical about SEO, it seems a very black-hat kinda thing trying to game the system so in all honesty, I thought this talk would be quite boring – but in actual fact, Krystian injected humour into his presentation which really helped to grab my attention and I actually came away thinking how I could put his SEO points into good use. He shared several tips on how to get 80% of the reward with only 20% of the effort! Good work!
w: bozboz.co.uk

The Points Bazaar was up next, a plethora of prizes from Five Simple Steps, Wear You Belong, No Starch Press, A Book Apart, Hatched, T/OD London, Etipsy & Tumbler and BozBoz. Due to the number of prizes, most of the winners walked away with a tee & a book! I was fortunate enough to win a FiveSimpleSteps tee (been after one for ages!) and an ‘Introducting HTML5’ book by Remy Sharp & Bruce Lawson — Good stuff indeed!

Last talk was by David Pomfret, a dude who’s only recently entered the web scene after doing print design for most of his life. His talk was about typography and choosing the right type for the job. I loved his talk, his slides and his enthusiasm for what he was talking about.
w: simpleasmilk.co.uk
t: @pomennedy

And that was the end of a very very enjoyable evening amongst friends. I can’t wait for the next one and in all honesty – It’ll be a sell out in a very quick space of time!

Trust me!

<3 GIT

GIT is pretty awesome. I’ve written about it once before but I’ve (stupidly) not used it in about a year. Time to change that though.

I recently launched the new CroydonCreativ.es website and yesterday, I created a repo and put the source code on github to allow visitors to the meetup to contribute to the site. In the space of 24 hours, a whole bunch of talented folk including James Broad, Phil Wareham and Simon Cox have all submitted code that makes the site so much better.

So to you generous and amazing folk who’ve submitted and fixed my (badly written?) code, you’re all awesome!

Reference numbers with SimpleCart.js

Recently, I’ve had a couple of client projects pop up that required a shopping cart facility but only on a small scale basis. The odd single item / service for sale. Nothing that warrants a big commerce solution which covers every eventuality.

My good friend Stu Robson pointed me in the direction of SimpleCart.js by Wojo Design – a simple JavaScript based cart solution that integrates with a few popular merchants (Paypal, Google Checkout etc) and allows you to sell items / services with a real quick 5 minute set-up (seriously)!

I’ve put this to use on a project already however that project required an invoice or transaction number to be displayed on both the buyer & seller transaction notices. The project involved selling tickets for an event so we needed a constant transaction ID to ensure only one ticket existed per purchase and no one was trying to pull a fast one.

Paypal provides a transaction ID but it’s different for both the buyer & seller. Presumably because they are different transactions (buyer > paypal & paypal > seller). It’s an annoyance that they’re not the same.

So I trawled the internet, browsed the Github issues page and even tweeted Wojo design but to no avail. I couldn’t think of a way of getting the transaction ID to match across buyers & sellers.

And then just as I was nodding off last night, it hit me – or at least a rough workaround )!

I jumped into my HTML and added the following code to my item title: –

<?php rand(0,10000); ?>

So this meant that each item in my cart now had a random number attached to it which was generated on page load. If the buyer follows through the sale and clicks buy, that random number is passed to Paypal, is shown on both the buyer & seller notifications.

Hurrah!

Now I know it’s not bullet proof. With random numbers generated, there could be an instance where the same number is generated twice but for the purpose of what we’re doing, it’s a non-issue. Moving forward though, this idea could be solidified and made into a non-repeating ‘reference id’ that works!

It’s always the simple things eh?

Payment Terms

I recently spent a couple of hours revising my paperwork and the more administrative side of things relating to freelancing as the next 6 months looks like it may get a bit busy for me.

I hate dealing with contracts. I really hate dealing with them. I hate writing them, I hate issuing them and I hate getting clients to sign them. I know they’re necessary but to me, it feels like there’s no trust in an agreement and the relationship feels like it gets off on the wrong foot.

oh hai, I can build you a website, but I don’t trust you so sign this so I know I’ll get paid.

Doesn’t feel right.

Anyway, I digress. My payment terms needed some TLC. Currently, they’ve been 14 days from date of invoice which has worked nicely on small projects. I’ve tended to request 50% at midway through the project and the remainder on finish. This has always been open to negotiation though and if I know the client well, it’s often been 100% on completion. But as I said, this needed revising.

twitter to the rescue! A posted a tweet earlier asking how others mapped out their payment terms and after a flurry of replies, I managed to get a rough idea of how others do it.

So, in this entirely unscientific process of garnering responses, the outcome seemed to be an percentage up front, x after mid point and the balance on completion.

Some others also suggested a deposit and then an invoice every week or two as the project progresses. Andy Clarke mentioned that he bills 2 weeks in advance which is his deposit and then weekly afterwards so he is always 2 weeks ahead.

Makes perfect sense if you’re working on a time-based project as opposed to a fixed sum basis.

Speaking of which, the general consensus of people said they expected their monies within 7 days of invoice. I agree with this and John O’Nolan made a very good post about this very topic.

So for me, I think I’ll be revising my terms to this: –

25% upfront, 50% on design sign off, 25% on completion. All payments due within 7 days of invoice.

Invoice increases by 5% after every month of delayed payment upto a maximum of 15% increase.

How do you do it?

Designing in the Browser

I was thinking only on Monday this week about how somehow, my design process has moved from designing in Photoshop to designing in the browser — and crucially — how I’m not really a fan of desiging in the browser.

Coincidentally, Sarah Parmenter wrote a blog post on Monday which essentially echoed my thoughts.

Like everything, designing in the browser has a lot going for it. When you’re demoing a site to a client and they announce that they don’t like this colour or that border, a quick CSS edit later and they’re happy. Also designing in the browser means you’re halfway through your build before you even get sign off as it’s all HTML + CSS. You can roll in responsive design or media queries to demonstrate how it’ll run on other devices.

But—and here’s the crux—designing in the browser generally (but not always) means losing flair and some of the design details that you’d normally produce whilst mocking up in Photoshop or Fireworks. Sometimes, things just work when you’re producing comps and that can translate directly to your HTML & CSS whereas you miss that when designing in the browser.

Again, similar to Sarah, I feel like I need some sort of mood board or composition which provides art direction to my design. Otherwise it looks like big chunks of text with some added colour. As nice as that can be, it makes some sites look rather similar.

Saying that though, it’s suitable and ideal for text-heavy sites, where the content is the design. But for certain types of sites, producing mock-ups is essential.

What’s your thoughts? How do you do it generally?