We recently sat down with Ryan Singer, lead designer at 37signals, to ask him several questions that are on web designer’s minds. He talks about copywriting, being a project manager, frontend development skills, handcoding and where to find inspiration. Here’s a transcription of the interview …

What websites do you usually go to for design news, inspirational, or tutorials?

I’d have to say probably my favorite place right now for inspiration is ffffound.com. It’s not really web design exactly but it’s a lot of really cool imagery, a lot of cool colors, shapes and stuff like that.

As far as design news, I don’t know if there’s anything so interesting out there that I’m really watching for, but there’s new great design in all directions, coming from all different places all the time. Things like poster design, new typography ideas, etc.

Is there a particular web designer that you’re looking up to right now?

You know, I’m seeing more and more good design actually all the time. However, I can’t say that I have a favorite right now.

Generally I’m seeing just a lot of cool stuff and stylistically, style continues to advance. But the copy and the clarity isn’t necessarily getting better. I’m not seeing very many sites where I think, “Wow this was really well thought out and well written. I still don’t see a lot of that.

Why is there a lack of copywriting skills among web designers?

Nobody seems to be talking about it. Where are all the blog posts about how to make really super-clear content?

The thing that’s really easy to look at and copy are pixels, color combinations and type. I think it’s really hard to look at a website as a writing project because as a designer, we have all these magic tricks we can do with our CSS and our HTML and everything and we kind of have to put that in the back and make that take a back seat to, “do I really have anything to say here?”

Last week I posted to our blog about Jacob Neilsen’s site, praising the the Alertbox articles. Each one is completely crafted as a piece of writing. Something to be read and understood and digested. I love the way certain points are bolded and the way the whole thing is structured is really well thought out. I think it’s a really inspiring example of great copy.

If you’re a designer who doesn’t do any writing, you’re going to hit a brick wall in your career at some point.

What books can designers read to get better at copywriting?

One of my favorite books is by a guy, William Zinsser, it’s called, On Writing Well. That was an inspiration for me and I remember reading that and feeling like it really helped me a lot.

What’s the one skill that new designers focus on?

You gotta start handcoding! It’s the number one basic craft of web design, if you don’t handcode then you’re not going to be able to move into doing web app interfaces, which is really what I’m doing now.

You’re not going to able to work on applications or collaborate on code or make apps, websites that really have a lot of behavior unless you get into handcoding, so I think that’s like the barebones thing that for sure everybody should be doing.

What software do you use for coding?

I happen to use Vim, which is a little bit of a nerdy tool, but a lot of my coworkers use Textmate and love it. A lot of people say that BBedit is great and I also hear that Coda is really nice. There are all kinds of options out there.

As a designer, do you need to understand frontend development?

The more you understand about frontend development, the better designer you’ll be. If you are really familiar with handcoding and you understand basic HTML markup and you know how CSS selectors work then you’re really well prepared, for example, to use the fact that jQuery and Prototype both have a way to refer to pieces of your mark-up using CSS selectors even though your not using CSS.

If you’re designing web app user interfaces, then I think it’s important to get into understanding how an MVC framework works like Rails or Django. If you can understand how your templates fit in to the view, as the “V” in MVC then that’s a huge leap. You can really start doing work with programmers and you can have ideas and you can make them into reality instead of just making designs and handing them off to somebody and hoping that someone else can plug them in.

How do you learn about MVC?

It depends on your situation. If you’re a designer and you work with programmers already (who are friendly) then just ask them questions. They can really get you started on the right path. Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions – they’ll appreciate the fact that you’re trying to learn.

If you are a little more programming minded and you’re on your own, there’s all kinds of stuff you could read, a basic primer on Rails would help a lot.

Getting into programming in general is quite useful. Before I did web design I setup Access databases and Filemaker databases and stuff like that. Jason Fried did the same thing actually – he started with Filemaker databases, and I think that basic understanding about how does a database work, just what are the pieces and trying to visualize, how could I display that or how could I manipulate that data, is a really good kind of foundation level.

What is a typical day in the life of Ryan Singer?

Ugh, it’s pretty busy lately. We are a small team and we try to do a lot with a few people. We actually just brought on a new designer, so we’re up to three designers now which is going to help. I spend a fair amount of time designing UI for new features. We always design the interface first, before building anything.

So part of my day is actually designing new features, another part of my day, because I’m also working as a product manager here, is to figure out what we should be doing next and who’s going to be doing it.

Also I love, I just love, getting into Rails and making things work too, so I do a fair bit of programming everyday. As much as I can plug stuff in, I do it.

Do you think being a product manager has helped you become a better designer?

No, not at all. I think that it’s the opposite actually. When you’re wearing your ‘Manager Hat’ you start to create a barrier between you and the designers and developers that are actually implementing the app.

It’s really harmful to the product because anytime you have a separation from the one whose coming up with the ideas and the ones who are doing the work, it’s a bad thing.

As a designer, is it important to be interested in the business side of things?

No. Either you’re interested in the business side or you’re not. However, if you have an understanding of what compels people to make buying decisions and how marketing works, you can feed it into your design work.

Okay, well with that, I think that our time is up, thanks so much for your time.

Yeah sure thing, thanks for chatting.

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In this edition of “Event News” we offer you the chance to save up to 50% of FOWA 2 day conference passes, announce new cities for the upcoming Stack Overflow Dev Days series of conferences, reveal new speakers and details of the new uber-cool workshop venue for Future of Web Apps London and give you the chance to take to stand side by side with some of the UK’s biggest names in web design in our FOWD Tour “Call for Speakers”. Read on to find out more.

Future of Web Apps 2009 Summer Sale

To celebrate summer finally hitting the UK shores we are having a Future of Web Apps 2009 summer bonanza on 2 day conference passes.

• 10 seats at 50% off (save £167.50)
• 20 seats at 25% off (save £83.75)
• 30 seats at 10% off (save £33.50)

If you’re not quick enough to grab one of the first 10 there is still a chance to save some pennies as the sale will continue with the further 50 discounted passes.

Details of the summer sale will be announced via Twitter (http://twitter.com/carsonified/).

Stack Overflow

In May we announced “Stack Overflow Dev Days“, a series of 1-day conferences in five different US cities for programmers for only $99. The original five cities of San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington DC and London UK have now been joined by new dates in Boston, Austin, Los Angeles, Cambridge UK and Amsterdam. Five cities (San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington DC and London UK) are entirely sold out and tickets are selling fast for the remaining five. As Joel Spolsky (Co-founder of Stack Overflow) says:

“The conference is for programmers. The conversation is going to be hard core. Speakers are going to be writing code.”

Topics include:

• Android
• Objective C and iPhone development
• Google App Engine
• Python
• jQuery
• ASP.NET MVC
• FogBugz 7.0
• Mercurial and Distributed Version Control

Further info and booking here: http://stackoverflow.carsonified.com/

Future of Web Apps London – New Speakers and Workshop Venue

Over the last few weeks we have completed the line up of speakers and workshop presenters for the Future of Web Apps London. Recently announced speakers include Bruce Lawson (Opera), Lynne D Johnson (Fast Company magazine), David Prager (Revision3) and our amiable business track host from last years event Simon Wardley (Canonical).

We are also pleased to announce that we will be hosting this years workshops at Wallace Space St. Pancras. It’s right up our street, centrally located and has an endless supply on Innocent Smoothies, cookies, snacks, coffee and wi-fi for all workshop attendees.

• Copywriting Fundamentals for the Web (Relly Annett-Baker – Poppy Copy)
• Kick-ass Online Marketing Techniques (Alex Hunter – Virgin)
• How to Build a Web App from A-Z (Mike McDerment – Freshbooks)
• How to build Facebook Connect + openID into your Site (Dave Morin – Facebook)
• Building Web Apps Using Atlas (Francisco Tolmasky – 280 North)
• Setting up Your Web App – Powerful Alternatives to LAMP (Chris Lea – Virb)
• Site Building with Drupal (Addison Berry – Lullabot)
• How to Build Accessible Web Apps (Philip Strain – Ecliptic)

Further info and booking here: http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/london/

Future of Web Design Tour Call for Speakers

Following on from our recent FOWA Tour we are back on the road in September with the Future of Web Design Tour. During September the FOWD Tour 2009 will hit four UK cities to bring you 2 FREE hour long web design tutorials per event, an afternoon of great talks from some of the UK’s best known web designers as well as a quick fire speed networking session. Tickets are only £59 (+VAT), student tickets for £19 (+VAT) are also available.

Who, where and when:

Belfast – 2nd Sept 2009

• Andy Clarke (AM: Extreme Typography Makeover: Malarkey Edition – PM: Method In My Modness)
• Drew McLellan (AM: Making Your Content Discoverable with Microformats – PM: Cost Effective Web Development)
• Chris Murphy and Niklas Persson (PM: A picture is worth a thousand words)

Bristol – 9th Sept 2009

• Elliot Jay Stocks (AM: The Perfect Portfolio – PM: The Importance of Beauty in Absolutely Everything)
• Bruce Lawson (AM: How to build a HTML5 Web site – PM: The Future of HMTL5)
• Paul Boag (PM: The Battlefield of Design – Designers vs Clients)

Glasgow – 14th Sept 2009

• Drew McLellan (AM: Making Your Content Discoverable with Microformats – PM: Cost Effective Web Development)
• Andy Allan (AM: Getting Started with Adobe Air)
• Patrick Lauke (PM: Keyboard Access Essentials)
• Steve Pearce (PM: TBC)

Leeds – 16th Sept 2009

• Paul Annett (AM: Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design) – PM: Top 50 Rookie Mistakes and How to Avoid Them)
• Simon Collison (AM: Developing Your Ultimate Package – PM: Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design)
• Brendan Dawes (PM: Useless. Pointless. Beautiful.)

Like the FOWA Tour we would like to give you the opportunity to join us on the FOWD stage. We have kept open one afternoon session in each city, if you have a great idea for a talk about the “Future of Web Design” head on over to our online “Call for Speakers” form (http://bit.ly/YuGHA) and let us know. We will be announcing the chosen talks in the first week of August.

Further info and booking here: http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/tour/

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterjlambert/97671748/

In this 11-minute interview we ask Kevin Rose, founder of digg and WeFollow five questions about web entrepreneurship. In case you don’t have time to watch the interview, we’ve summarized Kevin’s answers below.

Feel free to share your answers to these questions in the comments below. We’d love to hear your perspective.

What advice can you give new web entrepreneurs?

1. A great way to gain traction and get coverage for a new web app is approach a well known person and offer them something valuable in return for trying out your service.Example: Tumblr asked Gary Vaynerchuk if he would use their service if they gave him a spot on their home page.
2. Have your 30-second pitch perfected so when you get a chance to meet an influential blogger or member of the press, you can communicate the purpose of your app succinctly.
3. Attend conferences and throw little parties around the conference. Do it on the cheap and just get people mentioning your app like: “Hey, I’m heading to the YourAmazingApp party. Are you going?” This is much easier because of Twitter as news of small ‘lighting-parties’ can spread quickly.

You’ve managed to raise your profile in the industry. How did you do this?

At digg we didn’t focus on getting press coverage. We just focussed on making an amazing product and believing people would talk about it if it was truly great.

When we started getting press enquiries, we focused on telling a bigger ‘human-interest’ story to the publications, which were much more likely to get front-page coverage, instead of a simple mention in a small column.

The lesson is this: figure out what makes your app interesting as a news story.

Should start-ups create a videocast like you’ve done with diggnation?

Absolutely. Every company needs a spokesperson who is willing to be the public face of the company and participate in the community.

As the diggnation podcast started to grow, digg fans began to make it their goal to get a story mentioned in the podcast. This increased the prestige of the site and also fan loyalty.

How do you balance marketing with working on the product?

That’s an interesting question. Earlier today I was running off to another interview and Daniel Burka (the lead designer at digg) showed me a couple designs as I was walking out of the door. I didn’t have time to properly sit down to discuss them and Daniel said “Kevin, can we please just get you in the office a bit more to discuss these kind of things?”

It’s a tough problem and I still battle with it at digg. I’m not sure I’ve gotten the balance 100% right yet.

What do you want to be remembered for when you die?

I want to be remembered for being a part of the web revolution that really changed the way that humans consume media and news.

I’m also hoping to launch my own tea range and be known as a connoisseur :)

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The video interview

Relational databases, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and various commercial products, have served us well for many years. Lately, however, there has been a lot of discussion on whether the relational model is reaching the end of its life-span, and what may come after it.

Should you care? Which database technology should you be using?

Of course the answer is “it depends”, but that’s not very helpful. Let me ask you a few questions to help you figure out which technology is appropriate to your particular application. Then I can give a few pointers so that you can find out more.

First of all, calm down. Chances are that your current database is perfectly fine for now. But you might want to keep an eye open in case you notice some symptoms which show that you are pushing the relational model to its limits. Some symptoms relate to the structure of your data:

• Do you have tables with lots of columns, only a few of which are actually used by any particular row?
• Do you have “attribute” tables where each row is a triple of (foreign key to row in another table, attribute name, attribute value) and you need ugly joins in your queries to deal with those tables?
• Have you given up on using columns for structured data, instead just serialising it (to JSON, YAML, XML or whatever) and dumping the string into your database?
• Does your schema have a large number of many-to-many join tables or tree-like structures (a foreign key that refers to a different row in the same table)?
• Do you find yourself frequently needing to make schema changes so that you can properly represent incoming data?

Other symptoms relate to the scalability of your system:

• Are you reaching the limit of the write capacity of a single database server? (If read capacity is your problem, you should set up master-slave replication. Also make sure that you have first given your database the fattest hardware you can afford, you have optimised your queries, and your schema cannot easily be split into shards.)
• Is your amount of data greater than a single server can sensibly hold?
• Are your page loads being slowed down unacceptably by background batch processes overwhelming the database?

In my opinion, too much emphasis is often placed on scalability, despite being a very remote problem on most projects. It’s understandable — large-scale computing systems are sexy, and everybody likes to think they are building a service which is going to be massively popular — but more often than not, developers would be better off focussing on their customers’ needs, and solving the scaling problem only if it actually arises.

That said, there is one more reason to consider non-relational databases: they are fashionable. It sounds like a silly idea to base a technical decision on fashion, but remember the human aspects of managing software projects. Great developers generally want to work with cool people in a cool environment using cool technology. That means if you want to hire great developers, providing all this coolness gives you a better chance of getting the best people to work with you. If you want to get on Hacker News, cool technology is also the way to go. Fashion shouldn’t be your primary reason, but all else being equal, you can probably err on the side of coolness. Don’t forget the cool people and the cool environment though. And now I’ll stop saying cool — it’s not very cool.

Document databases and BigTable

The BigTable paper describes how Google developed their own massively scalable database for internal use, as basis for several of their services. The data model is quite different from relational databases: columns don’t need to be pre-defined, and rows can be added with any set of columns. Empty columns are not stored at all.

BigTable inspired many developers to write their own implementations of this data model; amongst the most popular are HBase, Hypertable and Cassandra. The lack of a pre-defined schema can make these databases attractive in applications where the attributes of objects are not known in advance, or change frequently.

Document databases have a related data model (although the way they handle concurrency and distributed servers can be quite different): a BigTable row with its arbitrary number of columns/attributes corresponds to a document in a document database, which is typically a tree of objects containing attribute values and lists, often with a mapping to JSON or XML. Open source document databases include Project Voldemort, CouchDB, MongoDB, ThruDB and Jackrabbit.

How is this different from just dumping JSON strings into MySQL? Document databases can actually work with the structure of the documents, for example extracting, indexing, aggregating and filtering based on attribute values within the documents. Alternatively you could of course build the attribute indexing yourself, but I wouldn’t recommend that unless it makes working with your legacy code easier.

The big limitation of BigTables and document databases is that most implementations cannot perform joins or transactions spanning several rows or documents. This restriction is deliberate, because it allows the database to do automatic partitioning, which can be important for scaling — see the section on distributed key-value stores below. If the structure of your data is lots of independent documents, this is not a problem — but if your data fits nicely into a relational model and you need joins, please don’t try to force it into a document model.

Graph databases

Graph databases live at the opposite end of the spectrum. While document databases are good for storing data which is structured in the form of lots of independent documents, graph databases focus on the relationships between items — a better fit for highly interconnected data models.

Standard SQL cannot query transitive relationships, i.e. variable-length chains of joins which continue until some condition is reached. Graph databases, on the other hand, are optimised precisely for this kind of data. Look out for these symptoms indicating that your data would better fit into a graph model:

• you find yourself writing long chains of joins (join table A to B, B to C, C to D) in your queries;
• you are writing loops of queries in your application in order to follow a chain of relationships (particularly when you don’t know in advance how long that chain is going to be);
• you have lots of many-to-many joins or tree-like data structures;
• your data is already in a graph form (e.g. information about who is friends with whom in a social network).

There is less choice in graph databases than there is in document databases: Neo4j, AllegroGraph and Sesame (which typically uses MySQL or PostgreSQL as storage back-end) are ones to look at. FreeBase and DirectedEdge have developed graph databases for their internal use.

Graph databases are often associated with the semantic web and RDF datastores, which is one of the applications they are used for. I actually believe that many other applications’ data would also be well represented in graphs. However, as before, don’t try to force data into a graph if it fits better into tables or documents.

MapReduce

Going on a slight tangent: if background batch processing is your problem and you are not aware of the MapReduce model, you should be. Popularised by another Google paper, MapReduce is a way of writing batch processing jobs without having to worry about infrastructure. Different databases lend themselves more or less well to MapReduce — something to keep in mind when choosing a database to fit your needs.

Hadoop is the big one amongst the open MapReduce implementations, and Skynet and Disco are also worth looking at. CouchDB also includes some MapReduce ideas on a smaller scale.

Distributed key-value stores

A key-value store is a very simple concept, much like a hash table: you can retrieve an item based on its key, you can insert a key/value pair, and you can delete a key/value pair. The value can just be an opaque list of bytes, or might be a structured document (most of the document databases and BigTable implementations above can also be considered to be key-value stores).

Document databases, graph databases and MapReduce introduce new data models and new ways of thinking which can be useful even in a small-scale application; you don’t need to be Google or Facebook to benefit from them. Distributed key-value stores, on the other hand, are really just about scalability. They can scale to truly vast amounts of data — much more than a single server could hold.

Distributed databases can transparently partition and replicate your data across many machines in a cluster. You don’t need to figure out a sharding scheme to decide on which server you can find a particular piece of data; the database can locate it for you. If one server dies, no problem — others can immediately take over. If you need more resources, just add servers to the cluster, and the database will automatically give them a share of the load and the data.

When choosing a key-value store you need to decide whether it should be opimised for low latency (for lightning-fast data access during your request-response cycle) or for high throughput (which is what you need for batch processing jobs).

Other than the BigTables and document databases above, Scalaris, Dynomite and Ringo provide certain data consistency guarantees while taking care of partitioning and distributing the dataset. MemcacheDB and Tokyo Cabinet (with Tokyo Tyrant for network service and LightCloud to make it distributed) focus on latency.

The caveat about limited transactions and joins applies even more strongly for distributed databases. Different implementations take different approaches, but in general, if you need to read several items, manipulate them in some way and then write them back, there is no guarantee that you will end up in a consistent state immediately (although many implementations try to become eventually consistent by resolving write conflicts or using distributed transaction protocols; see the algorithm of Amazon’s Dynamo for an example). You should therefore only use these databases if your data items are independent, and if availability and performance are more important than ACID properties. For more information, read about Brewer’s CAP Theorem, which states that amongst Consistency, Availability and Partition tolerance, you can only choose two, and no database will ever be able to get around that fact.

Richard Jones, co-founder of Last.fm, has written up an excellent overview of distributed key-value stores. Also Tony Bain gives an introduction to the conceptual differences between relational databases and key-value stores, and recently there was a NOSQL event in San Francisco at which a number of different non-relational databases were presented.

Distributed systems are hard… really hard. I suggest that you use them only if you really need the scaling aspects they offer (or just for fun outside of a production environment).

Closing remarks

In this article I have concentrated on open source projects. If you are willing to bind yourself to a particular vendor/hosting provider, Google’s Datastore, Amazon SimpleDB, Windows Azure Storage Services or Force.com might be worth considering. They are good technologies, but keep in mind the business risk of potential lock-in.

I can’t make judgement about particular projects’ suitability for particular purposes. There is some very clever software out there, but also some very new and unstable software. If you want to consider using them, you should do your own research:

• look around their websites for a list of sites using the database in production (and for which aspect of their service they use it);
• check if they have a lively open source community, in case the original developer loses interest and stops maintaining the software;
• try to find some benchmarks (though beware that many benchmarks published on the web are methodologically flawed and/or outdated, so if you are serious about it you should run your own tests, using data which matches your application’s characteristics).

As with any fashionable topic, there are many people with strong opinions, both positive and negative; don’t let yourself be put off by them. I hope I’ve given you an overview of the kind of things you can do with different types of databases so that you can choose the right one for your application.

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There’s a worryingly high web app mortality rate right now. I think the primary cause is the lack of marketing knowledge and how to apply it to web apps.

I spoke at FOWA Tour Leeds on this subject so I’m going to summarize the major points below for you. You can also watch the complete video which is synced with my slides.

Marketing has Changed Forever

As recently as one year ago, everyone worked hard at making sure their brand was portrayed in a positive light. The message was tightly controlled and as a customer, you had very little power to express your love or hatred of a product.

As you all know, that’s impossible now. You could spend $10,000 on banner advertising for your new web app, proclaiming it to be “The World’s Best Solution for XXXX”, only to be ripped apart on Facebook, Twitter and the blogs.

It’s not about advertising anymore. It’s all about Conversation and Empowerment.

Get the Conversation Started

All of us are cynical and disloyal. To be honest, I don’t really care what you tell me about your product. Let me try it out and I’ll decide what I think. Then I’ll probably Tweet about it. It’s what happens then, that really matters.

Are you there, ready and excited to enter into conversation with those folks? If they hate your product, it’s even more important you get in touch. If they love it, say hello and that you appreciate them spending their valuable time and effort using your app.

Here’s the key: Be a real, accessible, honest person. Don’t spin the truth or try to trick people.

We’re trying out CoTweet right now, and I really like it. Essentially, it allows everyone in the company to log in and see mentions of Carsonified or our products on Twitter, and respond accordingly. Everyone else in the company can see when tweets have been responded to and what was said. You can also ‘assign’ tweets to others on the team and see who’s ‘on duty’ and should be responding to tweets.

View full size

Empowering Your Users

The important thing to remember is this: No one cares about your company. They’re into their journey. Let me quote Kathy Sierra on this topic (it’s lengthy, but definitely worth the read):

… building community is both tricky and time-consuming. But if you’ll forgive me for using lolcatspeak– if it takes two years, “ur doin it wrong”. The painful, least-effective way to ‘build community’ is to hire a Community Manager who tries to connect users with the company. Far quicker/better to hire a “Director of Kicking Ass” whose sole job is to help users get better and better at whatever it is you can help them do, and to connect users to other users who share that passion and can help.

A look through Gary’s WineLibraryTV comments shows why he is so successful… it’s not because Gary is the guy everyone wants at their dinner party–it’s because he helps his *viewers* become the guy everyone wants at a dinner party.

Some community managers appear to have a strategy modeled after: “Get users to want to party with you.” More sustainable (and do-able) might be: “Give users a reason to party… *without you*”

Meetups and beer are awesome — especially when they’re about connecting users with other users. Our job as community builders is to not so much to connect with our users, but to give them more and more compelling reasons to connect with one another. And the best way to do that is through helping them learn and grow and ultimately–kick ass. The “at what?” doesn’t matter nearly as much.

I agree that the marketing budget could be far better spent on community–especially when community means putting the user–not the company–at the center of a passion-fueled ecosystem. Even things like openness/transparency matter *only* to the extent that they dramatically support (or potentially harm) our users’ ability to do whatever it is we’re helping them do.

Think about some of the things that truly make your life more interesting, engaging, productive, etc. — and most of us can find things where the product, service, support, user community is so damn useful that we really don’t even notice (let alone care) that the company isn’t “engaged”. In the end, we’re just not that into The Company. And a community manager that tries to change that is in for a long, painful, ultimately disappointing journey.

We are “into” our own journey, and any company that helps us do it–either directly through products/services that help us kick ass — or indirectly through sponsored community efforts that help us learn/grow/kick ass at something (even entirely unrelated)– will win our hearts. Excitement for a company/product is simply a wonderful side-effect of a company/product that helps us do something amazing. When a community manager makes passion for the company as a goal, two years or even ten will likely never be enough.

God I love this topic, Ryan. Thanks.

The Basics

There are number of analytics basics (we use Google Analytics) that you need to be doing when it comes to marketing your web app. If you’re not doing this stuff, then you’re just asking to fail:

1. Measure your conversions religiously.
2. A/B test every page on your site. 
Read bit.ly/ab-testing.
3. Use words like ‘View prices & plans’ 
instead of ‘Free trial’.
4. Visits should be increasing by 10% per month.
5. Spend at least two hours a week on your analytics.

Building Social capital

We’re big fans of The Whuffie Factor here at Carsonified. Tara’s primary point is that the most powerful way to do marketing in this day and age is to build ’social capital’. It’s a lot like Karma: do good and help others and it will come back to you.

Three amazing examples of this are Stack Overflow, Baby Centre and Wiggly Wiggler’s Wiggly Podcast (try to say that three times fast).

Stack Overflow is a site where programmers can ask a question and other people answer it. The answers are voted on and the person who asks the question picks a ‘winner’.

Here’s the crazy thing: StackOverflow.com is getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month … and it only launched nine months ago. That’s right, nine measly months ago.

So what’s the catch, and what can we all learn from it?

Facilitating Ass Kicking

The simple reason why Stack Overflow is growing at an astronomical rate is this: It helps programmers kick ass – and they love the site for it. Here are just a few of the literally hundreds of Tweets declaring undying love for the site:

And it goes on and on …

So what does Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Overflow, do with all of the social capital he’s building with the site? He’s using it to launch Stack Overflow DevDays, a one-day conference for developers (which we’re helping him with). He’s going to be speaking at every one, and he’s going to mention that they’ve just launched a new version of FogBugz, their bug-tracking web app.

All five cities quickly sold out (at the original 300 seats – we’ve since found bigger venues) and we’ve launched five more cities. It’s insane. The Stack Overflow audience is passionate, opinionated and most of all, powerful. I can guarantee you that the audience will be more than happy to hear about FogBugz because Joel has earned their respect and loyalty.

Baby Centre & Wiggly Wigglers Podcast

Two other great examples of sites that are building a huge amount of social capital are Baby Centre and Wiggly Wigglers.

Baby Centre is an amazing resource for Mothers and Fathers. It’s like the Stack Overflow for babies. So why are they putting so much time and effort into the site? Well, it’s owned by Johnson & Johson who sell baby-care products. I can guarantee that readers of Baby Centre are definitely going to check out J&J products next time they’re at the grocery store.

Wiggly Wigglers sell gardening products and they have a fabulous free podcast. It’s packed with tips, hints and opinion on gardening. It’s won several awards and is respected by a huge number of gardeners. Again, they’re building social capital, which will be cashed in next time you’re looking to order gardening products online.

So Now What?

I hope we’ve inspired you to think about how you can build social capital to market your web app. Please share your methods and ideas in the comments below!

The Video and Slides

Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/grufnik

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We’ve compiled six useful tips for all you web designers and developers out there. They cover various topics including: accessibility, SQL, web developer plugins for Firefox, HTML emails, design and jQuery.

Feel free to disagree or add your own in the comments below. If you’d like to submit a tip to be considered for future articles, just head over to Tipster and add your own.

Alt Tags and Screen Readers

By: James Fenton

I can’t claim these tips as my own, though my web accessibility hero Bim Egan (of the RNIB) recently gave me a few simple tips regarding alt tags and screen readers.

1. Keep your alt tags as concise as possible.
2. Don’t just describe exactly what is going on in an image, describe what message it is trying to convey.
3. It is OK to leave the alt attribute blank (alt=”") as it can be more of a hindrance to blind users than a help.
4. When an image is essentially just style, use it as a background-image.

Spending a few hours watching (and listening) to a blind user on the web is a mind blowing experience and will totally change how you approach accessibility

Shorter SQL statements by abbreviating table prefixes

By: Joris Heyndrickx

Instead of writing:

SELECT books.title, books.short, books.releasedate, authors.firstname, authors.lastname
FROM books, authors
WHERE books.author_id = authors.id AND authors.id = 21


You can write:

SELECT b.title, b.short, b.releasedate, a.firstname, a.lastname
FROM books b, authors a
WHERE b.author_id = a.id AND a.id = 21

My Top 6 Firefox Plugins for Web Development

By: Simon Hamp

FireBug with FirePHP FTW!

1. FireBug (getfirebug.com)
2. FirePHP (firephp.org) req. FireBug
3. ColorZilla (colorzilla.com/firefox/)
4. HTML Validator (users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla)
5. YSlow (developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) req. FireBug
6. Web Developer (chrispederick.com/work/web-developer)

Image headers in table based HTML Emails

By: Pete Roome

If you have an image as a header on a table based HTML Email it is likely you will find you have a very annoying gap beneath it between your two <tr>’s. Simply add the following styling to your image to close this gap:

{vertical-align:bottom;}

Lighting effects on boxes

By: David Smith

To make a box stand out in your design simply:

1. Choose a colour for your box
2. Create a subtle gradient starting from a slightly darker version of your colour (bottom) to a lighter version of your colour (top)
3. Make sure your gradient is SUBTLE!
4. Draw a horizontal line across the top of your box so that it spans the whole width.
5. Pick a colour from the top of your gradient and lighten it still more. Apply this colour to the line you just created.

You should have an effect which looks like light is hitting the top of your box making it stand out. The blue Tipster banner uses this to good effect.

Manual filmstrips in jQuery

By: Michael Peacock

Here’s how to create a really simple manual photo film-strip in jQuery. It can be used to swap a large image on a page with that of a thumbnail elsewhere on the page, such as different photos of a product in an e-commerce store.

$(document).ready(function(){
imageSwapper(".thumbnails a");
});

function imageSwapper(link) {
$(link).click(function(){
$('#largeimage').attr('src', this.href);
return false;
});
};

Just link the thumbnails to their larger versions and pop them in a div or paragraph of class thumbnails, and give the large image an ID of large image, and you are good to go!

Any tips you can add?

If you have any tips you’d like to add, please do so in the comments below. Thanks!

[Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/dunechaser]

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Google recently announced their most ambitious project to date called Google Wave. According to Google, Wave is “what email would look like if it was invented today.”

If you haven’t made time to watch the one hour video, I’d highly recommend you do so today.

What’s the big deal?

I believe there are six reasons why Wave is going to have a huge impact on you. However, this is all predicated on mass adoption of the technology. If no-one uses it, then obviously it won’t have a world-changing affect. However, I strongly believe Wave is going to achieve mass adoption for these reasons:

1. Google has the world-wide audience necessary.
2. Google has the cash in order to market Wave and promote its benefits.
3. There is a huge financial benefit to working more efficiently. People who use Wave will be able to work faster, thus leaving behind those that stick to good-ol-fashion SMTP email.
4. Wave is open-source (more on that below). If you want, you’ll be able to run Wave on your internal corporate network, without ever sending a single byte of data to Google.
5. You can run it on the cloud, thus reducing in-house IT costs.

Now I’d like to explain why I think Wave is going to have a life-changing affect on you and your business:

1. Extensions

Google is making it easy to augment the power of Wave by writing Wave Extensions. These are similar to Firefox Add-ons and they fall into two areas: Robots and Gadgets. Here’s an explanation from the Extensions site:

1. A robot is an automated participant on a wave. Robots are applications which run in the “cloud” and can modify state within the wave itself. A robot can read the contents of a wave in which it participates, modify the wave’s contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves. Robots perform actions in response to events. For example, a robot might publish the contents of a wave to a public blog site and update the wave with user comments. Check out the Robots API Overview and a Tutorial.
2. A gadget is a small application that runs within a client. The gadget is owned by the wave, and all participants on a wave share the same gadget state. The only events a gadget responds to are changes to its own state object, and changes in the wave’s participants (for example, participants joining or leaving the wave). The gadget has no influence over the wave itself. Wave gadgets typically aren’t full blown applications, but small add-ons that improve certain types of conversations. For example, a wave might include a sudoku gadget that lets the wave participants compete to see who can solve the puzzle first. There’s a tutorial if you’re interested.

So why are Wave Extensions such a big deal? I believe that developers and designers will be able to sell Extensions to their clients or to a wider audience, possibly in an Extensions marketplace. This means a huge potential source of new income, providing there is mass adoption of Wave.

2. Embedding APIs

Google has created a huge API to Wave, but one of the really interesting parts is the ability to embed a Wave into any web page. A great example of how this could be used with blogging. You can create a Wave and then publish it to your blog. Then whenever someone comments on the blog post, it appears as a reply to you Wave in your Wave client – no need to visit the site.

That’s the kicker, embedded Waves remove the need to physically visit a site in order to interact with it. This is a fundamental, and very exciting, change to the way we currently interact with blogs and content.

So why is the Wave Embedding API such a big deal? It means that content is king and consuming it will become even easier. Really understanding this and taking advantage of it’s power will make you much more effective in reaching your audience.

3. Collaboration

The separation between documents and emails will be completely removed with Waves. This is because Waves can be edited by more than one person. A great example would be taking notes for a meeting. Here’s how it might work:

1. I create a Wave titled “Notes from website branding project”
2. I add the other people in the meeting as participants in the Wave
3. Everyone who is a participant in the Wave can take notes simultaneously
4. After the meeting, everyone’s got a copy of the notes

An added benefit is that people can “chat” during the meeting, by creating private replies right inside the Wave. The writer can choose whether or not to make this chat visible to other participants.

4. Open Source

Google doesn’t intend to ‘own’ Wave. They have open-sourced the technology and created the Wave Federation Protocol. A brief explanation from Google is:

[Wave Federation Protocol is] the underlying network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers.

Yes, that’s between wave providers: anyone can build a wave server and interoperate, much like anyone can run their own SMTP server. The wave protocol is open to contributions by the broader community with the goal to continue to improve how we share information, together.

To help potential wave providers get started, our plan is to release an open source, production-quality, reference implementation of the Google Wave client and server, as well as provide an open federation endpoint by the time users start getting access.

This means you can either use Wave hosted on Google’s infrastructure, or you can have it hosted on your own server, without ever interracting or sharing data with Google.

This makes it completely different from Microsoft Exchange Server, and even Google Apps (which isn’t available to host on your own infrastructure).

5. Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Wave is written entirely in Google Web Toolkit. GWT allows you to write HTML 5 web apps in Java, which are then cross-compiled into optimized JavaScript. If you want to learn more, this video explanation is very helpful.

I’ve always been wary of auto-generated code, but I think this might be an exception to the rule (providing your ensure the HTML is accessible and standards-compliant). All you have to do is look at the Wave demo in order to realize GWT is seriously powerful.

What does this mean for you? I means if you’re a web developer, you need to have a serious look at GWT and the potential benefits it has to offer. Programming in Java gives you all the traditional benefits of breakpoints and being able to step through your code.

There is also a plugin for Eclipse if you’re interested.

6. Playback

The increased collaboration that possible with Wave might actually make it confusing for someone to be added to a Wave after a lot of editing and replies have been made. Enter ‘Wave Playback. The best way to explain it is by jumping to minute 13:00 on the Wave introduction video.

This feature allows you to step through the changes to a Wave as they happened over time.

What do you think?

Obviously we think Wave is a big deal, but what do you think? We’d love to hear your comments below.

If you’re interested, there are two other videos that are worth watching:

1. Live Collaborative Editing: A short video explaining concurrency control and operational transformation in Google Wave
2. Natural Language Processing: A short video explaining how Google uses their vast search history to implement spell checking.

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/philipgibbs

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I’ve noticed that when I get stressed at work, it’s often because my email inbox is out of control. I’ve got hundreds of unread emails, with no idea which ones are important. I finally decided I needed to learn how to be much more effective with email, so I came up with a few strategies.

Thanks to David Allen and Tim Ferriss, I created a few simple rules to keep me on top of the madness, and here they are:

1. Check your email twice a day, but never right when you get into the office
2. Mark important emails with a star or label
3. Mark other emails that require a response (but are not urgent) as ‘Later’.
4. Archive them all to clear your inbox
5. Finally, master keyboard shortcuts to make answering and writing email much faster

In the video below, I walk you through the whole process. Hope you enjoy it. If you have any tips you’d like to share, please do so below!

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/christopherdale

We live in hectic times. As information professionals we regularly have to battle overflowing email inboxes, monitor a flood of Tweets, craft attention-grabbing blog posts and on top of all that, remember to buy some milk on the way home.

I’ve developed a pretty effective methodology for making sure you stay focused on the important stuff. Grab a cup of coffee and let’s begin …

Organize Your Todos

The first thing you need to do is get all of your todos in one place. Gather them from all the various places you store them (sticky notes, notebooks, your brain, etc) and write them down in one place. I use Things, but anything will do (even pen and paper).

Once all your todos are in one place, group them into projects. Make sure to only use projects that you’re currently working on right now. Things that you’d like to do someday, but aren’t important at the moment should be filed away in a ‘Someday’ folder.

You’ll notice in the screengrab above that I’ve got ‘Active Projects’ and ‘Areas’. The basic difference is that Projects are discreet projects that will be finished at some point in the future, whereas Areas are general things that won’t ever be complete.

The Monday Morning Roundup

I wake up at 5am every Monday morning, stumble downstairs and fire up Things (my todo list program). I go through each of my ‘Projects’ and ‘Areas’ and tag things that need to be done this week with ‘This Week’. I also tag anything super important with ‘Important’.

When I’m done, I have a big list of things that need to be done this week. I then select about five of them that are tagged with both ‘This Week’ and ‘Important’ and I put them in the ‘Today’ list.

I repeat this each day, moving a few items from ‘This week’ to ‘Today’.

The key to the ‘Morning Roundup’ is that it’s done in a quiet place where you can concentrate on what’s really important. This is why I do it at 5am. My wife and 14 month old son are fast asleep and the house is absolutely quiet – it’s perfect for focusing and determing what’s really important.

Another benefit of this ‘quiet time’ is that it gives me some time to examine my life and ask questions like “Am I being a good father and husband?”, “What’s the big picture for where Carsonified is heading?”, “Am I happy with where my life is heading?” etc. We all need time to reflect on stuff like this – and it has to be done before the hectic activity of day-to-day life sets in.

Evil Email

The biggest killer to your productivity is email. Here’s the trick to making sure you don’t get sucked into the email blackhole:

Don’t check your email until you’ve ticked off at least two important things on your ‘Today’ list.

This is vital to making sure you don’t get distracted by what other people deem to be important for you.

As a wise man once said: “Your inbox is a todo list that anyone in the world can write to.”

Of course, if your boss emails you and asks for something to be done ASAP, then it’s best to listen. However, most everything else can wait until you knock out a few of your todos. This will leave you feeling refreshed and empowered.

A great tip is to tell your co-workers that if they need you to do anything urgently, then calling you is the best option, as you only check email occasionally.

Summary Tips

To sum up, here are few vital takeaway pionts:

1. Spend time every Monday morning to organize and prioritize your todos for the upcoming week. You have to do this before you get into the office and everyone starts asking for your attention.
2. Organize and prioritize your todos for the day before you do anything else.
3. Knock out at least two todos before checking email.

Good luck! Please share any tips you have in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/dieselbug2007

I think we have a serious problem in our industry.

I believe it generally started when Basecamp became quite successful and 37signals started to talk about their theories on the subject. Their basic mantra was “Don’t quit your day job to build a web app. Build it in your free time and use your day job to pay the bills until your new app brings in enough money to quit your day job.”

I used to agree with this, but now I think I’ve come full circle.

I’ve seen a lot of web apps launched recently which haven’t succeeded. They’re not failing miserably, and they’re not wild successes. They’re just kind of puttering along, sapping just enough resources to be a problem, but not succeeding enough to really take off.

The majority of these apps were built by small web design firms or freelancers who bought into the dream without really understanding how much time it takes to make an app succeed. I speak from experience as this is exactly what happened with Amigo (which we sold in a firesale a few months ago).

Who Died, Who Survived?

There’s a really interesting post over at Meish.org with a great graphical example of the various web apps that have gone under. Here’s the graphic Meg put together:

It’s a sobering reminder of how tough it is to launch a successful app.

So what’s going on here?

I believe there’s a general misconception that goes like this:

1. Identifity a niche need that you have that’s currently under-served
2. Bang out somewireframes (or better yet, just start HTML’ing)
3. Ask a designer or developer to help out, in return for a bit of equity
4. Tweet about an invite-only beta
5. Listen to beta feedback and make tweaks
6. Launch
7. Get TechCrunched
8. Build recurring revenue till you can quit your day job
9. Live the good life

The major problem occurs between step #7 and #8. Most apps will fail here, not because there’s a problem with the idea, but because they don’t know how to market it. The reason for this is that it takes significant passion and time to properly market an idea. Sure, you may get lucky and the app magically spreads itself, but the cold hard truth is that most apps need serious time and effort in order to make them a success.

We need to consider that 37signals and the success of their apps are probably outliers – anomolies that aren’t easily repeatable.

So now what?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of 37signals, but I think that unfortunately a lot of folks are getting the false impression that it’s easy to build a successful web app.

It takes time, passion and more time in order to make something succeed.

With that in mind, here are my suggestions for avoiding the web app Deathly Hallows:

Make time for marketing

Plan for the fact that marketing the app is going to take at least two days a week. I’m talking about about 16 solid hours of work, at a minimum.

How will you do this if you’ve got clients banging down your doors for changes or updates every day of the week? I’d highly recommend saving up enough cash so that you can take at least two months off from normal client work in order to make your app a success. This is two months after you launch. Keep in mind you might not be making a single $0.01 during this time, so you’ll need plenty of reserve cash.

If it’s impossible to make time for marketing, you’ll have to get investment in order to hire someone who can do it for you. This is pretty dangerous though, as this new recruit isn’t going to have your passion or understanding of the app.

Create a resource that helps your customers kick ass

One of the reasons why 37signals has been so successful is because they have built a large blog that’s aimed at their potential customers. Signal vs Noise has around 90,000 RSS subscribers and it does one thing really well: offers great advice, opinion and tips for people who might subscribe to their products.

If you read one thing about building a community around your products, read this comment by Kathy Sierra. It sums up this idea in a couple paragraphs.

Spend money on advertising

I think a lot of us are lulled into believing that if you tweet enough about your new app then it’ll surely succeed. Wrong. It’s very likely that the only way you’ll be able to get the word out to the masses about your new idea is by spending cold-hard-advertising-dollars.

Now, if you’re going to go down this route, it’s vital that you can track the effectiveness of your ads. You need to know:

1. Conversion rates on clickthroughs
2. Percentage of clickthroughs
3. What keywords are converting well for you
4. Where people are dropping out of the conversion process
5. Which ads are working (always test different copy and designs)

A/B Testing from the Start

One of the keys to increasing conversion rates on your site is to test the hell out of it. Plan on doing A/B testing from Day One, and never stop. If it’s a bit overwhelming, just tackle one page at a time, starting with your home page. Google Website Opimizer is the way to go on this.

To wrap it up

The most important piece of advice I’m trying to communicate is that you need to prepare for the huge amount of time it’s going to take after you launch to make your app succeed. Of course you need to believe it’s going to kick ass, but make sure you’ve got a  plan for making that happen. It might take several years of work to really make your web app a success, so be prepared.

Plan on building a business, not just a side project.

I’d love to hear if you agree or disagree, or if you have tips of your own.

Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/david_han