One of the things that I find disappointing about what I do is that the care I take in creating clean, valid sites pretty much flies right out the window once the site is launched and in the hands of the client.

It’s not their fault, usually. Even when I build a site in a CMS and take a lot of time setting up the WYSIWYG editor to guide and specify the types of content they can add, it still gets screwed up and it just gets worse over time.

I’m a regular reader of 456 Berea Street and last night I found this excellent post about helping clients keep their markup clean. This is a really great idea, and I plan to implement it on the next site I build.

Basically what it does is insert some styles into the CSS that make any deprecated elements (like font tags or centers) show up as big and red so that the client can see them (and actually know they’ve done something that has a negative impact on the qualit of the code).  This visual is critical because no matter how many times I tell someone, even a very savvy client, not to use that but to use this instead, sooner or later they’ll do just that. But being able to see it, that’s big. And helpful.

My client Rob Palmer, an exceptional wildlife photographer who specializes in birds of prey, is taking an extended trip across Europe and the Middle East over the next three months. He’s just started posting photos in his blog - check it out and keep checking back, there should be new photos every day or two.

This morning I was party to an interesting discussion - in a company’s identity materials and website, what does ‘full-service’ imply? Is it a term that’s just used way too often and without a lot of thought? Is it valuable, or just trite?

One of the people at the meeting was of the opinion that the term ‘full-service’ has been used so often that it’s often meaningless. That is, people say it but don’t necessarily do it.

In terms of techie fields, like web development and IT, saying that you’re full-service could mean many different things. Some at the table agreed that it’s better to get to the point - don’t offer a dry laundry list of everything you do (because that’s not really possible or advisable) but do boil down the most important functions you provide in a well-thought-out shortlist.

If you just say ‘full-service’ you’re putting the burden of understanding what exactly that might entail in your company’s case on the client. You’re making assumptions about what they know about your field.

On the other hand, I’m thinking something just the opposite. That if you do provide a shortlist of the services you offer - and you’re a geek and your clients are most often not - you’re not really throwing the ball in their court. If they don’t understand a word you’ve written, are they inclined to seek out your company, or are they inclined to think that you’re soaring above them with tech-speak already and go elsewhere?

I think for fields that people often find intimidating, like IT and web work, saying ‘I’m a full-service company’ implies that you can handle whatever a client needs. This may not always be the case so I think you have to really think about it before you slap a ‘full-service’ label on your brochure, but if I were a client that knew nothing about websites and how they worked and what they were good for, I’d be more inclined to go with a developer who said they were full-service rather than one that listed all of their skills one by one.

It seems to be a fine line between turning people off and offering far more than you reasonably can achieve (unless of course you’re a real company and not a freelancer!). Perhaps a short synopsis of the top three or four ways you help clients, rather than a list of the services you offer or simply saying ‘I’m full-service,’ might be the better way to go.

The reason this interested me is that I’m relaunching my website this week, and on my announcement postcard I of course had the term ‘full-service.’ I rethought that today and instead made it a sentence stating a few key points about what I offer. I’m not opposed to styling myself as full-service by any means, but this seemed more focused and I want to appear focused as I start this rebranding process.

This is really great.

One of my clients, a consultant for whom I did a site that launched about 18 months ago, read a story about SEO in the Wall Street Journal and it lit a fire under him. Today we met and he told me about his plans to expand the value of his already informative web site.
This client is an internationally-known expert in his industry. He already has a nice resource section with a good representative sample of his extensive book collection on his web site - now he wants to expand that resource area to include the links he gathers, articles (his own and other useful writings he comes across), industry news, and a bookstore (I’ll be using an Amazon aStore to capture his library).

All these things, coupled with some SEO work, are great ideas. They’ll contribute to his credibility, will likely be useful to industry colleagues and his own clients, and will hopefully increase traffic to his site.

I’m so happy I have some clients like this that see the huge potential of their web sites and aren’t interested in stopping at a glorified brochure. My client is constantly involved in reshaping the boundaries of his own knowledge about his work, and now he will bring his own clients and colleagues into the loop, so to speak. It’ll be interesting work.

While cleaning out a big stack of magazines recently, I came across this article in Print that I’d marked as potential blog fodder.

In part, this article is about the current proliferation of design tools that help non-designers create something all their own - a t-shirt, a set of thank-you notes, business cards, and web sites. It brings to mind a recent article in another magazine that discusses how a few small businesses built instant web sites using tools found on GoDaddy, Homestead, MSN and other services, and became overnight sensations.

I can see why this might be a scary trend for us professionals - giving the potential clients the opportunity to make something themselves for which they might otherwise hire one of us. The tools are better, more readily available and easier to use. They have ‘built in skill’ - the results can look pretty good, even without design expertise on the part of the client.

But think about it. These folks that utilize GoDaddy’s Website Tonight - are they creatiing something truly special? Is it unique? Or is it something that looks more or less identical to 5,000 other sites that used the same template? True, it’s inexpensive. But is it accessible? Is it search engine-friendly? Is it ‘good’ as in high-quality design?

Do non-designers know the difference between homemade design and professional work? I think that many do. Sometimes it’s obvious, and sometimes it’s not.

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I was lucky to gain a client last year who is a business and life coach. Every so often I’ll run into an issue in my web design business that needs an outside point of view and I give her a call.

I’m happy to refer to her as my business therapist. She has this strange ability to understand aspects of my business better than I do - she always comes up with something that I never thought of, and that is totally obvious once it’s out in the open.

For example: I have a new hosting client that’s in an office full of Mac users. I’m not a Mac user myself. This client has repeatedly had problems with email on her account, and I can’t replicate the issue. They have no in-house IT, so my business coach suggested that I establish a working partnership with 2-3 IT professionals here in town so I could make reasonably informed suggestions in cases like this.

Well, duh…. I’m working on that this week.

One of the other things that I like about working with her is that the first few times we met, she made me write a list of characteristics of my ‘ideal client.’

I have yet to meet this ideal client, but whenever I get together with my business therapist she has me rethink and refine this list of features. What started out as a fairly general checklist has now become a tool that helps me answer the question ‘is this a client I really want to pursue or not?’

It’s helped me focus my target clientele more precisely. Although I wouldn’t say I’ve really established a niche, I’m certainly a lot more aware of what kinds of clients I’d rather not have. The list is really more a way to weed out un-ideal clients than to find perfect ones.

Last Friday I met with the owners of my latest site design, C and T Iris Patch, for a launch meeting. It went really nicely. I like it when clients are gung-ho to learn something new, and enthusiastic about the fact that I try to use applications that make it as easy as possible for them to conduct their business.

In this case, I used OptionCart for their 3000+ item catalog, with the Mal’s E-commerce backend. I’ve talked about both before. I really can’t say enough about OptionCart - I love it because you can drop it into any existing HTML or PHP-based site using includes and it works. It looks pretty good right out of the box, but with a minimum of customization it blends right in with the look and feel of the site in general.

The admin panel for OptionCart is very simple, compared to other products like X-Cart or ZenCart. It’s intuitive, doesn’t have that many functions, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

This client in particular is selling a product without a lot of options associated with it (i.e., the flowers don’t come in multiple-sized containers) and just needs an easy way to manage selling online. OptionCart is perfectly suited to a catalog that’s very robust, works great but doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. Clients are comfortable with it because it has an intuitive interface and the choices on what to do are well-defined and fairly obvious.

In short, it’s a cart that makes the administration end of things easy to deal with and kind of ‘invisible’ - it works without you being aware of it most of the time. That’s my favorite kind of website functionality.

Today I finished up my five-day stint for TCG, and my supervisor asked me to continue working for them on a 15 hours-per-week basis indefinitely. That’s great for me, it works well with my other client work, and they said they were very happy with what I’d produced for them so far. Good all around.