Crunchy Melon » Dealing with Clients

Plan your website content with Jumpchart

Tyler — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:07:26 +0000

I just came across a pretty cool web app called Jumpchart. Basically it enables you to easily plan the content for your website (or more likely a client’s site).

When you first create a new site, you’re presented with the following screen:

Hovering over the content of the page will bring up the edit button. Once you click edit, you can make changes to the content of your page using Textile markup for formatting.

In the edit screen, there’s a handy sidebar of Textile shortcuts that pops up. Clicking one of these shortcuts will insert that tag into your content. Adding headings, lists, links, or form elements is as simple as clicking a shortcut. Once I saved the page shown above, I can see all my changes:

You can also attach comments or files to a page, making it easy to work with your clients on building their site.

Jumpchart also supports a couple more really cool features:

Create pages and sub-pages. You can drag and drop the page order in the sidebar.
Wireframe and Sitemap views – view your content in a basic wireframe format or view a Sitemap of the pages you’ve created.
Export – you can export to html/css or to WordPress format. This is a huge time-saver if you’re setting up a bunch of content pages.

What makes Jumpchart worth taking a look? In my experience clients often have trouble visualizing a website during the design and planning phase. If you’re able to start building the content early in the process, it makes it easier to engage the client in the planning of their website. I’ve also found that being able to look at the content for the site often helps during the design phase as well. Plus with the ability to export to html/css or WordPress, you can easily transition the work you’ve done during planning to the build phase. Check out Jumpchart at jumpchart.com.

Getting your clients to drop IE6

Tyler — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:53:50 +0000

So, we all know that IE6 is horrible. The problem comes when trying to convince your clients they need to upgrade from something they’ve been using for quite some time. Well, now Microsoft is giving people a reason to upgrade. Their Browser for the Better campaign will donate food when people upgrade to IE8. It just might be enough to convince those stubborn clients that an upgrade is in order!

Let your clients edit images without Photoshop

Tyler — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:27:08 +0000

We’ve all been there. Just after you’ve launched your client’s brand new site, complete with a content management system, they ask you “So, how do I upload these files that are 3500 pixels wide?” Well you think to yourself, they just need to resize them a bit. Easy, right? Just buy a copy of Photoshop for … oh wait they barely went for the website price, I don’t think they’ll go for Photoshop too.

Ok, how about finding a cheaper alternative? There are lots of image editing programs out there, but if you’re looking for a quick, easy, and free solution (or cheap, depending on which version you select), you might give Aviary’s image editor called Phoenix a try. It’s a browser based image editor that looks and works kind of like a very slimmed down Photoshop. You can see a sample of what’s possible here.

The thing I like about Phoenix is that you can tell a client “Go to this website and edit your images.” There’s nothing to install, no licenses to buy, it’s an easy way to get your clients editing images quickly.

Oh, be sure to check out the other Aviary image tools too. They’re quite impressive for web-based apps.

Keep your screen clean!

Tyler — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:38:05 +0000

Be it your computer, your phone, laptop, or other device, you don’t want to show a design comp to a client on a smudged up screen. To clean it, try iKlear. It’s a kit that comes with a super soft cloth and a spray bottle of cleaner. I’ve been using it for years to keep my computer and iPod screens clean and free of smudges.

Long proposals won’t win contracts

Tyler — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:05:14 +0000

I’ve done quite a few proposals over the years. Some of them were for big sites, some were for small sites. Sometimes we’d win these proposals, and sometimes we wouldn’t.

One of the things I noticed is that longer proposals really didn’t do anything for us. Some of the proposals I created were quite long and drawn out, listing all sorts of information, reasons why the client should hire us, samples of our work, information about our team, and so on. Often at the end of presenting these proposals, I’d hear “Ok, thanks for that, we’ll have to think about it.” Of course this usually meant, “We don’t want to hire you, but we’d rather not say it to your face.” Hmm, nice.

Over the past few years, my proposals have been getting much shorter. Now they’ve gotten to the point of just a simple email, with a few sentences about how we’d do the project, along with pricing information. And you know what, we win more projects now than ever before. I’ve come to the conclusion that long proposals won’t win you any more contracts. I’d say 99% of the time, when a client contacts you, they already know whether they want to hire you or not. Usually they only want to know two things:

1) Can you make this project happen like I want?

2) What will it cost me?

If you can answer those, you’ll be well on your way to much simpler, more cost effective proposals.