Brutally Succinct: curating web designer resources

Posts by: "Cheryl"

The brutal truth about web design

On March 12, 2012 By Cheryl

Are clients to blame for being bad?

On December 13, 2010 By Cheryl

When your client needs a really easy CMS

On January 15, 2010 By Cheryl

Do you always have a good written document to fall back on should your client suddenly get amnesia? Even in the best of worlds, clients are busy people like the rest of us and a bit of critical information from a phone call six weeks ago is not going to be necessarily retained if it’s not codified in a written contract document.

Now, we all know none of us are lawyers (unless you, dear reader, are one!) but this article, The Bare Bones That Every Freelance Contract Should Have, hits some excellent points. (It’s always advisable to have your legal professional review your paperwork for accuracy and applicability in your state, province, county, etc.)

If you’ve been designing and/or developing websites for a while you’ve maybe learned the hard way (I know I have) that not having clearly articulated expectations of what the parameters of the project are, who is required to do what, and what happens when it all goes pear shaped are hard-core necessities.

If you want, share in the comments what your experience has been in this area. We’ve all been there!

Designer? Stop. Read. Now.

On December 5, 2009 By Cheryl

Is wireframing an important step in web design?

On November 15, 2009 By Cheryl

Do you employ wireframes as part of your web development process? If you’re like me, you might sketch out ideas on paper. Or at other times I’ve gone into a graphics program (Photoshop) and moved labelled blocks around to approximate where this or that page element should be. I’ve also used OmniGraffle (disclosure: I’m on Macs) — though now I’m tending toward Curio to collect all project inspirations and elements in one place.

But there’s a goodly selection of SaaS sites that provide, for free or for a fee, the opportunity to create ultra-simple diagrams of how you envision the web site (home and sub pages) laying out: logo sized thusly and over here, accordion element there, list of recent tweets over on the right, etc.

Grace Smith is a true Twitter resource (recommended follow for web designers) and in her review of Mockflow has generated some good discussion about wireframing alternatives (see comments).

So, how do you handle your wireframing and/or what software or service would you recommend?

Designer with CSS puzzle?

On August 24, 2009 By Cheryl

Are you a (wo)man or a mouse?

On August 9, 2009 By Cheryl

If your WordPress gets hacked

On June 30, 2009 By Cheryl

Web designer or want to be one?

On June 28, 2009 By Cheryl

Poll results: WordPress 2.8 is released

On June 14, 2009 By Cheryl

A random sampling of web designers was asked to react to the news that WordPress 2.8 was being released 10 June (2009). Here are the results:

Question 1: Will you immediately download it and upgrade existing sites? 100% answered “no”.

Question 2 asked (if replying “no”) why not? (One could check more than one box.)

4.3% don’t use WordPress currently 87% like to see a new version in use for a while for any bugs to work themselves out 4.3% will wait to see if clients contact them about it 21.7% will advise clients of the upgrade and then wait for clients’ contact 4.3% don’t like what they’ve heard or seen about the new upgrade

Freeform responses (“other”) included these observations:

Upgrades aren’t “knee-jerk automatic” as the upgrade needs to demonstrate that it’s going to really improve their (the clients’) sites or offer maintenance and/or security improvements. Plugins are a concern. Will the new version break any? Several mentioned that they’ll install it in their own “sandbox areas” to see any changes/improvements for themselves, but won’t necessarily move beyond that (for reasons mentioned above).

Thanks to all who participated. We hope to make this a regular feature.

Stop. Read. No more business burnout.

On May 26, 2009 By Cheryl

Grab a Perch, a ‘really little’ CMS

On May 22, 2009 By Cheryl

Billing, client service, the bad economy

On March 22, 2009 By Cheryl

Yet another CMS, this in the education arena

On March 21, 2009 By Cheryl

Are you an introverted anti-social nerdmeister web designer?

On March 19, 2009 By Cheryl

Help Desks are a necessity for web designers

On March 6, 2009 By Cheryl

Script & Style is a new site to hit regularly

On August 22, 2008 By Cheryl

Script & Style is a fairly recently-developed site of the type that collects high-quality articles spotted around the web that are useful to web designers and developers.

A project of Chris Coyier (whose name you might remember from my enthusiastic mention of his CSS-Tricks.com site) and David Walsh — if I’m remembering correctly, this is the same pair that put together the Band Website Template as well: Chris with the visuals and David with the programming.

Back to Script & Style — you might expect it to be a bit sparse, being a newer site, but it looks like the fellas have raided their stash because I’m back 25 pages into the archives and still going strong.

Each of their articles is not simply a headline link but describes what they found useful about the article to which they link. And you run the gamut here: MooTools, free icon sets, and someone’s best tutorials on converting PSD to XHTML is what’s in my browser’s page view right now, if that gives you an idea.

Based in WordPress, the site itself, with it’s pleasing half-and-half design, is a good way to kick start your design and development engine. So put it on your frequent visit list or RSS feed today.

This CSS tutorial + tricks site is better than best

On July 22, 2008 By Cheryl

10 Things Any Web Developer Worth Their Spit Should Know

On July 10, 2008 By Cheryl

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