At Carsonified Towers, we’re all getting super excited for May, when The Future of Web Design hits London for another three days of learning and inspiration. As ever, we kick off the show with four full-day workshops – each lead by a totally inspirational industry leader. From 9am am to 5pm, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves and knuckling down for a serious hit of web savvy. Numbers are capped at 40 for each workshop, ensuring a great learning environment.

This year’s chosen workshop topics are already proving popular. First up, we’ve got the unstoppable force of web awesomeness that is Paul Boag. Director of Headscape, Paul will be leading a crash course in Running A Successful Web Design Business: ”We like to think that being a successful independent web designer is about creating great websites. Its not. Running your own business is about a lot more than having the right professional skills. ”

After wowing the crowds as a Rising Star back in 2011, Steve Fisher has rapidly become one of our most popular speakers. He’ll be joining us again in London to lead his Rock Solid UX Deliverables workshop: “No longer something that has to always be hugely complex and costly, we’ll cover the back-to-basics approach to UX design in this workshop and how to practically dispatch a rock solid responsive web design UX deliverables package.” 

Next up, creator of the uber popular Coach to 5K app, Josh Clark will be crossing the Atlantic to deliver his Teaching Touch workshop – a sell out success at FOWD NYC last year: “The workshop presents nitty-gritty ‘rule of thumb’ design techniques that together form a framework for crafting finger-friendly interface metaphors, affordances, and gestures for a new generation of mobile apps that inform and delight.”

Last but not least, longtime Carsonified favourites, the Web Standardistas will be joining the fun, to teach their Good Ideas Grow On Paper workshop: “Armed with some fundamental design principles and an abundance of tools – which naturally includes the Standardistas’ ‘Bag of Awesome™’ (containing a veritable cornucopia of material) – we show the aspiring analogue designer a range of methods for breaking out of the stranglehold of the often clichéd digital world.”

I was looking for a new gig during the dead heat of economic recession, and lots of my friends were actually losing their jobs left and right, so it felt like a very brash decision at first. A big part of me felt like I should just be thankful for having work in the first place, and that I was an ungrateful fool.

Fortunately, finding a job I loved wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be, and becoming a part of the Treehouse team has been the best experience of my life so far. In fact, at 24 years of age, I feel like I’ve achieved a lot of my professional goals more quickly than I ever thought possible.

Meet People in Real Life

I visited South Korea in the summer of 2011, and quickly learned about their tendency to drink a little more than most cultures. Big business deals are commonly settled at a bar over a bottle of soju. Such casual environs blur the line between what’s personal and what’s professional, which makes it easier to form meaningful partnerships.

In recent years, there’s been a noticeable surge in the number of meet ups and events in the tech industry, and it’s not really surprising. People want to talk in real life in a chill setting, because if you’re nice to people and become casual friends with them, they’re much more likely to consider you when it’s time to get down to business. Not only do they already know of you, but furthermore, the step of getting comfortable with you is already done. They know what they’re getting into and they know that they can get along with you. As a general guideline, if you can no longer figure out where your social circles end and your professional circles begin, you’re doing it right and probably having a great time to boot.

BarCamp events make it easy to get involved with the local tech community and talk to fellow geeks.

Here are some ways you can establish the all important casual rapport with job generating techies:

• Go to user generated BarCamp events where you can talk to people and present on topics that interest you.
• Find local user groups that match your interests and skills, and go to their meetings regularly.
• Attend smaller meetups for drinks or coffee. These are usually hit or miss, but if you find the right group of people, it can be incredibly valuable. Meetup is a good place to look for this type of stuff.
• As Ryan mentioned in his post about securing a speaking spot, it’s a good idea to get involved organizing and helping with these events, or even make a new event yourself. For example, Jim and I helped by putting together the BarCamp Orlando marketing videos for 2010 and 2011; a small time investment that made it incredibly easy to talk to people at both events, because people were able to recognize us.

Demonstrate Your Value by Sharing Knowledge

If you’re looking for work in the tech industry, this is the most important piece of advice I have to give.

I think it goes without saying that you should continuously educate yourself and gain experience in one form or another; this is how you stay on top of your game. However, it’s what you actually do with that accumulated knowledge that’s so critical. It makes you a better worker, but it’s also your best tool for demonstrating your value to potential clients and employers. Let me say this very clearly and plainly: Sharing your knowledge is one of the best ways to move up in the web industry. It spreads goodwill so that people like you and it reinforces the knowledge for yourself. Best of all, when people can clearly see that you know what you’re talking about, it gives them the confidence needed to fork over their precious cash, whether it’s for a new career, a new client, or a web app you’re trying to get people to sign up for.

Sharing knowledge on video is a great way to offer friendly advice.

Here are some ways that you can share your knowledge and demonstrate your value:

• Write blog posts about the area you want to break into. Coding, design, video work, or whatever. Keep it super focused on one subject and informative; people want to know how to do stuff in simple and digestible chunks (like these bullet points, for example).
• Guest host a podcast or start your own. This is largely how Jim and I were able to convince Ryan that we were right for Treehouse; it was clear that we were decent on camera and we knew how to teach web topics.
• Speak at local events where you share your knowledge and experiences; again, the key with all this is to show people how to do things that they can then immediately do themselves. Free events that have speakers are usually looking for interesting people to talk to their group. BarCamp is a great place to speak too; you just sign up day-of.
• Write short (but high quality) PDF books. You can give this away for free, or even charge a small fee to give it the appearance of having more value.
• As Alan suggested in a previous post, contribute to open source projects and start your own. A full GitHub profile makes it much easier to land a software gig.
• Regularly post design snaps to sites like Dribbble. Similar to filled out GitHub profile, lots of design snaps make it easy to see the your range and skill as a designer.
• Tweet out original content, tips, and useful links that people are likely to retweet, that will increase your following (and thus, increase your exposure to potential job offers).

I could keep listing things, but I think you get the idea. When you do all these things, be sure to maximize their value by emailing other bloggers and podcasters. Really, every content provider is always looking for new stuff to talk about, so in most cases you’re doing them a favor. For example, if you make a free WordPress theme or create a new JavaScript tool, do your best to let people know that it exists and that you’re properly credited. Usually a link to your blog, Twitter account, GitHub account, or personal website will do just fine.

These are just some of the things I’ve learned along the way. In my next post on this subject, I’ll talk about how to bring unique skills to your industry and build a memorable brand around them.

The latest and most powerful version of Numbers for Startups has just been released. It’s an insanely powerful, easy-to-use, spreadsheet that helps you …

1. Decide if your business or new product is financially viable and attractive to investors
2. Understand “Red Line / Green Line” analysis, the single most important graph for any venture
3. Create realistic goals and plans based on hard numbers, including how much money to raise
4. Track the effectiveness of different Marketing Channels. Know exactly how much to spend on Advertising and when to spend it.
5. Approach investors with confidence, or invest your own money with a solid plan

Video Demo

Here’s a 3-minute overview of how it works …

Full disclosure: The creator of Numbers for Startups is my brother-in-law, but I have no financial interest in the company and I’m not receiving any money in any form for posting about it. I just think it’s an awesome tool that I wish I had before we started Think Vitamin Membership! :)

1. Decreasing the number of people that cancel (churn)?
2. Increasing your conversion rate?
3. Hiring a sales team?

Net Profit

Cash Balance

Conclusion

These results are obviously specific to Treehouse (aka Think Vitamin Membership) but it’s fascinating to see that increasing conversions by 1% has the biggest effect (huge!) on Cash Balance, but hiring a (successful) sales team has the largest long-term effect on Net Profit. Given a few more months, the Cash Balance would also be best-effected by hiring a Sales Team as well.

To clarify, the Sales Team will be selling large group memberships and their goal is 2 x 100 Member accounts per month and we’re giving them three months to spin up to 100%.

If you’ve been working on improving metrics on your web app, please share in the comments.

If you’re freelancing, running your own studio or startup, you really need to understand three financial statements:

1. Balance Sheet
2. Profit & Loss
3. Cashflow

The easiest way to do this is to switch to an accounting tool that you can use whenever you want, without asking your accountant/bookkeeper to send your reports. It’s imperative that you can log in whenever you want, poke around the books, and annoy your accountant with a lot of questions about what’s happening with the numbers.

We use Xero and I freaking love it. The scary truth is I didn’t truly understand our Balance Sheet or P&L until we switched recently. Since we moved from QuickBooks to Xero, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about what actually makes our company valuable and what really affects our profitability.

The problem is that most of us in the web industry are creative people. Crunching numbers (especially boring things like ‘Amortization’ or ‘Accrued Expenses’) seems almost hawkish – too focused on money and profitability. Based on my seven years of businesses, you just have to get good at it.

If you’d like to get started, grab a copy of Business Accounting for Dummies [Amazon UK or Amazon US]. You can plow through it in a week.

Be transparent about your process.

Far too often we’re reluctant to show clients half-finished work. Throw those insecurities out the door! Don’t be afraid to show your sketches, comps and semi-functional prototypes during the early stages.  The last thing you want is for them to think that what you do is magic, or that an “easy button” really does exist. They’ll respect you more for being transparent about your process for getting from point A to B.

As Jason Fried said in his book REWORK, “Let people behind the curtain, they’ll feel a bond with you and see you as human beings instead of a faceless company.”

Don’t over-promise and under-deliver; deliver what you promise.

It can be tempting to promise more and charge less in order to land that killer portfolio project or win over a coveted account.  While it’s exciting to see the potential client impressed, it’s only smoke and mirrors if the goal isn’t realistic to begin with.

Only promise what you can actually carry through with – not the first page of Google or more “likes” on Facebook. Those are variables you can’t control, much less guarentee. Be up-front and honest about what you can and will deliver to your clients, and they’ll happily come back for more work.

Often times to keep myself from over-promising and under-delivering, I’ll refer to the project triangle and choose two.

1. Design something quickly and cheap, the quality will suffer.
2. Design something awesome and cheap, well, you get the point (that might take awhile!). This prevents me from promising all three.

I also love Trent Walton’s interpretation of Maslow’s hirearchy of needs pyramid which can be helpful in assuring that you’re embarking on a “healthy, well-rounded project.”

Make them feel as invested as you are.

Involve the client. It only helps both parties to get their buy-in throughout the whole process (this brings us back to transparency). By leaving them out you’ll likely be met with much more resistance when it comes time to present your work. Don’t depend on weekly status meetings – call or send something their way when you want their feedback. By the end of the project, they’ll feel just as invested and proud of the final product as you are.

Stay respectful but in control.

While it’s important to be flexible and respectful of your clients and their work – don’t forget that you’re the professional when it comes to designing for cyberspace, and they came to you for a reason. Take control and stand up for what you know is right. (Ex: No, the primary navigation cannot go at the bottom of the page!) The web is your turf, and you’ve got the home team advantage.

This goes for contracts, too. Establish expectations and specific deliverables to meet business objectives and user needs. Agree upon them and stick to them to keep everyone on the same page.

Remember never to ask “What do you think?” or “Do you like this?” without backing it up. Remind them that just because they (and their neighbor down the street) don’t like the color purple, doesn’t meet the users won’t. Keep them on track and remind them of their objectives and user personas.

Don’t underestimate human interaction!

Just because you’re talented and efficient at what you do, doesn’t mean you should forget about what simple human interaction can achieve. Go out of your way for that extra “Hello!” or friendly “How was your weekend?” Learn more about their industry and take an interest in them as a person. You don’t want to come off like you’re in it for the check.

Marry their industry knowledge with your expertise and people skills, and together you’ll have an overall more successful, polished product – and it’ll be enjoyable along the way!

Just because the project’s over, doesn’t mean your relationship has to be, too.

Maintaining contact is key to a healthy relationship with clients. While the project has come to an end, that doesn’t mean the work is done.

Blogs and newsletters with valuable content and advice are a great way to remind clients of your expertise and encourage return business.

Pick up the phone and give them a call. Go out of your way to send them a tweet, direct message or personal email with information about useful tools, tips, and suggestions. Be their go-to advisor when it comes to anything and everything web.

For more tips and advice on web startups and business, check out Ryan’s free hour long web business video course.

If you’re like me, you’re always worried about your site’s performance. How long does it take for your page to load on the client side? It’s a hard statistic to even gather data on, especially across a large sample of visitors.

Fortunately, Google Analytics recently added Site Speed, their solution for page load time tracking. Their load time tracking only works with IE9 and Google Chrome (browsers that support the HTML5 NavigationTiming interface), and it only samples a small percentage of page loads, but it should typically be enough data to give you great feedback about how long it’s taking your various pages to load.

Learn all about how to set up Site Speed and review Site Speed data on the Google Analytics Documentation site.

You’ll learn about choosing a founder, picking your product or service, pricing, culture, company structure, funding, banking, accounting and cashflow. It’s over an hour of free video, so enjoy! :)

If you’re feeling generous, please help us spread the word by re-tweeting this post. Thanks!

For the longest time I thought that Google Analytics was something that you just add to your site and review from time to time. I’ve learned, though, that tweaking Analytics can give some terrific data that wouldn’t be available by using their default setup. This week we implemented some new tweaks that we’ve made to our analytics setup that might be useful for others, so we figured we’d share them.

Custom Variables and Advanced Segments

One of the biggest questions that we weren’t able to answer with Analytics before this week was what the traffic breakdown between members and non-members was. You can look at new visits and assume that they’re non-members, but that’s a pretty big assumption. You can also assume that members only pages are only members, but that still leaves a lot of traffic up to interpretation. To solve the problem of understanding the split between members and non-members we’re employing Custom Variables.

A Custom Variable in Analytics lets you tag either a page view, a session, or a visitor as having a certain attribute. Since we were interested in noting whether or not a user has ever logged in, we went with a visitor variable. Here’s the JavaScript code for setting a custom variable:

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_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', slot, name, value, scope]);

Google’s JavaScript can look pretty strange, but you can basically think of the _gaq.push method as pushing commands to Google. It takes an array, and the first element in that array is always the name of the command to send. The following elements in the array are the arguments for that command. The arguments for the _setCustomVar are:

• slot – An integer between 1 and 5. The purpose for the slot number will make more sense when we look at analyzing custom variable data.
• name – A string containing the name for the custom variable
• value – A string containing the value for the custom variable
• scope – An integer for scope for the custom variable.

The scope can have one of the following values:

• 1 – Visitor scope. This variable lasts as long as the visitor’s cookie is present
• 2 – Session scope. This variable lasts as long as the current visit lasts in analytics
• 3 – Page scope. This variable is only in effect for the current pageview

In our case, we used the following code:

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_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'Member?', 'Yes', 1]);

This code sets a new custom visitor variable named “Member?” with a value of “Yes” into slot 1. In our page we wrapped this code in a conditional so that it only appears in each page if a visitor is logged in.

Initially we also included code that set the variable to “No” if a visitor wasn’t logged in, but realized that if a user logged out the value for the variable would be changed from “Yes” to “No”, so we wouldn’t remember that the user actually was a member. In our case we’d rather remember that a visitor was a member even if they log out, so we got rid of that bit of code that set the variable to “No” when a user wasn’t logged in.

So we’ve got our variable set up. What do we do with it now? That’s where Advanced Segments come into play. To set up an Advanced Segment, log in to Google Analytics and navigate to the profile that you’ve added your custom variable to. In the sidebar, under My Customizations, click on the Advanced Segments link to get to the Manage Advanced Segments page. Once you’re there, click on “Create new custom segment” to build your advanced segment. The tool Google created to design advanced segments is pretty neat – it lets you drag metrics from the list on the left to build the logic for your segment. Here’s what my segment for Members looks like:

Notice how I’m using the “Custom Variable (Key 1)” metric. That maps to the first variable slot that we used when we set the variable. Here’s my segment for non-members, which just checks that slot 1 isn’t set to the “Member?” variable:

Now that we have our segments set up, we can select one or more of them from the segment dropdown on the top right side of almost every page in Analytics to focus on those segments.

Events

One other problem I noticed in Analytics was that we could see when a user comes to one of the pages for our videos, but just visiting the video page doesn’t necessarily tell us if the user watched the video or not. Google Analytics Events allow you to track arbitrary events with JavaScript. Our player includes JavaScript callbacks, so using Events was a perfect fit.

The Google Analytics JavaScript for tracking an event looks like this:

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_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category, action, label, value]);

• category – A string representing the category of the event
• action – A string representing the type of interaction that occurred
• label – (Optional) A string representing an additional layer of detail about the action
• value – (Optional) A integer value relating to the action

Here’s the JavaScript code that I added to our player’s callback when playback is started:

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_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Video', 'Begin', videoName]);

You can review the results of your events in Analytics by going to Content, Event Tracking in the sidebar. The views for Events let you drill down into each event action to see the list of labels and values for that action. In our case that means that we can drill into the “Begin” event to see exactly what videos were watched and how many times they were watched.

Search Analytics

One last feature of our site that I was interested in getting more information about was search. We allow users to search for videos, but we haven’t been tracking those searches at all. Setting up search tracking in Analytics usually doesn’t require any changes to your site’s code. All you have to do is go to the settings for your site’s profile in Analytics, enable Site Search, and enter the query parameters that you use for search terms on your search forms. On our site we always represent a search term with a query parameter named q.

In the Analytics dashboard you can go to Content, Site Search to review your site’s search data. Google includes information on how many searches were performed, what terms were searched for, and what pages users went to as a result of the search.

Finishing Up

Well, now that we’ve tuned our Google Analytics settings we’ve got to wait a bit and then we’ll start making tweaks to our app as a result. I’m hoping that segmenting our members and non-members will tell us more about what topics non-members are interested in and also help us figure out the best ways to get users to our sign up page. The video events and search statistics should give us interesting information about how we’ll we’re helping people find the videos they want to watch. Once we’ve gathered more data and made some changes, we’ll probably circle back and fine tune what data we’re collecting with even more custom variables and events. It really is a never ending cycle.

Do you have any tricks that you’re using with Google Analytics? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!

I love this illustration on the home page of DigMyData. The graph lines with the bubbles of text does a brilliant job of quickly explaining a very complex subject (business data analytics – talk about a mouthful).

It not only succinctly explains a complex subject, it does it in a visually pleasing way. The multiple colors and informal language really works.

This is a great example of how smart illustration can help communicate a very important marketing message.

Mark Hales and his Oxygen Accelerator concept are just another example. Here’s the deal: They offer you a £20,000 loan (not an investment – you have to pay the £20,000 loan back) in exchange for 6% of your company.

The reason why I know this is a terrible deal is because we just got a bank loan for £100,000 and we gave up exactly zero equity. The government in the UK is even incentivizing banks to loan by guaranteeing 70% of loans.

We boot-strapped the launch of Think Vitamin Membership with cash from our events and then used the bank loan to provide us with the working capital we needed to hit cash-flow break-even.

There are other options. Don’t believe all the hype you hear. Just because they have a decently designed site and a bunch of mentors, doesn’t mean you should take their money.

Not all accelerators are equal

The Oxygen Accelerator site compares their program with Y Combinator, TechStars and Seedcamp, but there’s a fundamental difference. YC, TechStars and Seedcamp invest in companies, not give them loans. The other difference is they offer mentors who have built successful web companies. The only well-known mentor for Oxygen Accelerator is Mike Butcher, and he’s a tech journalist.

I’m sure Mark has honest intentions, but that doesn’t change the facts. This is a rip off for startup founders who don’t know any better.

I was super excited when Ryan mentioned that he would be writing a series about raising your profile in the web community. It’s something we’ve all dealt with at some point, right? How do I get my name and ideas in front of others while at the same time avoiding being that person? Whether it’s good or bad, I think everyone wants to be known and heard, because we want confirmation that what we’re doing means something to others. This series isn’t about how to be a douche – it’s about how to share your ideas and work hard to make the web community even better than it is today.

With that in mind, today we’re going to look at raising your profile by contributing to the community by working on open source projects.

What should I work on?

So of course, the first question you hit when you decide that you’re interested in getting started with open source is what project to actually work on. That can be a pretty tough decision to make, but I can say from my own experience that your best bet is to scratch your own itch with your project. If you’re going to commit your free time to working on something, it had better be something that you’re interested in, but if you’re anything like me you know that what you’re interested in has a tendency to change. That’s why I try to work on projects that solve a problem that I have at work. When I started working on Handlebars.js I was in the process of starting on an app that had as much front-end JavaScript as it had backend code. When I wrote PayDay I was about to have to write yet another invoicing system and write the code for generating PDF invoices again. It’s just easier to stick with a project when you actually use it in your day to day work.

You can absolutely come up with an idea using whatever technology you use. There are open source CSS frameworks and JavaScript frameworks. Don’t let it hold you back that you don’t feel like you’re an elite rockstar ninja creature-from-the-black-lagoon unicorn. Nobody feels that way, and if they do they’re probably jerks. Just go for it.

Where should I put the code?

At first, nowhere except your hard drive. Seriously. Don’t show your open source project off until your proud of it. Ideally don’t even talk about it, except if you feel like you need feedback from a few friends. Let it be yours. That may seem silly, but there are a several important decisions you have to make early on in your project that you’ll want to make yourself, before you have outside influence from contributors. Decisions like how your API is structured, what your coding style is, and what testing framework you’ll be using.

Once you’re ready to share your code, I highly recommend hosting it on GitHub. GitHub is where most independent open source projects seem to be happening these days. They’ve got great collaboration tools like their issue tracker and wiki features, and nice download functionality. You can even host a website for your project with them. And, when you start receiving contributions, GitHub’s pull request feature is literally life changing.

If you really can’t stand git, there’s BitBucket for Mercurial and a ton of other similar sites for almost any other version control system. They’re almost all free for open source projects. Just be sure that your code is in a version control system and that all the world can see it. Otherwise, it’ll be hard for potential contributors to work with you.

Pick A License

If you don’t pick a license before you launch, someone will inevitably ask you what license you’re using. The Open Source Initiative’s license directory is a great place to figure out what the terms of all of the different open source licenses are. I almost always go with the MIT license, which basically says that people can use your software for about anything they’d like (even for commercial uses) as long as they distribute the license and copyright notice for your part of the software along with it. I like the MIT license because it makes sure that anyone using a project I’m working on it can use it how they see fit.

Write some kick butt documentation.

Great open source projects have great documentation. If you don’t have great documentation, your software will be hard to use and potential users may even create their own code instead of using yours because they can’t figure yours out. Include a README file with your source that summarizes how to install and use your software. If you’re distributing a library, be sure to write API documentation. The best projects have a real home page as well, with the information from the README and links to the source repository for the project and any other information. Don’t worry if you don’t have crazy design skills. Just trade some programming time with a designer to talk them into designing the project site for you.

Kyle Kneath gave a really great talk at Magic Ruby this past year about documentation. I’d highly recommend checking out his slides.

Eek! It’s time to launch!

So you wrote your project. The source is up on GitHub. You’ve got documentation and an amazing new website that you bartered with a designer for. It’s time to launch! But wait, how will anyone hear about your project? This step is actually really important. What good is giving something to the community if no one knows that you gave it?

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to get the word out these days. Pretty much every technology community has a few news sites and podcasts that you can contact about posting a release announcement for you. In the Ruby community that means sites like Ruby Flow and Ruby5. There are a lot more broadly focused community news sites like Hacker News and Reddit that are great for making announcements too. If you think your library is a great fit for the web community, email me and it may be something we can share here on Think Vitamin.

If you’re emailing bloggers, be sure to read Shawn Blanc’s great post about sending App Emails. It’s about iPhone apps, but it’s completely valid for almost any emails to bloggers where you’d like them to post about something.

One other great way to let people know about your app is to speak about it at conferences. In the Ruby community there are literally 12 bazillion conferences every year, and pretty much every single one of them includes talks about open source libraries and tools. Ryan’s post about how to get a conference speaking slot will certainly help out there.

This sounds like a lot of work. Is it worth it?

Absolutely. Especially if you’re a programmer, open source is the easiest way to prove to a potential employer that you can do what you say you can do. Instead of listing things like “Proficient at JavaScript” on your résumé you can share a link to your JavaScript project’s source code. Instead of saying that you know how to lead a team of developers, you can show the fact that there’s a community that you lead around your open source library.

Open source projects are also a really wonderful way to meet people in your community. I’ve gotten to know some really amazing people that I know I wouldn’t have met if I hadn’t been working on projects with them. If you’re from a town without a huge web community like I am, that’s a really big deal.

Last I’d say that once things come full circle and you’re helping other people start their own projects, you really realize just how valuable this all is. The web is much more a community than an industry, and it’s amazing to have the opportunity to help the next generation of developers and designers start contributing to the community.

Thanks to Sebastian ter Berg for the great photo above.

We’ve been running conferences for over six years and we’ve learned a thing or two about speaking, exposure, and credibility.

As soon as you’re on stage, you automatically join the ‘experts’ strata. It’s not fair or logical, but it’s just a fact. Humans naturally attribute credibility to someone who is speaking from a stage.

So if you’ve never spoken at a conference, how do you get an invite? It’s easier than you might think. Just follow these steps …

1. Go to the conference and meet the organizer in person. The best way to do this is agree to volunteer for free. You’re doing the organizer a favor and he’ll feel obligated to return the favor at some point. This might seem Machiavellian but it’s not. It’s just How to Win Friends and Influence People 101.
2. Do something really creative. Create an open-source tool, do a fake re-design for Berkshire Hathaway and explain why it’ll work, use the web to help a charity raise money. It doesn’t matter, it just needs to be creative and attention grabbing.
3. Record a three-minute video sampler of a talk you’d like to give about the project. Tips for the video: head and shoulder shot, good sound, simple one-color background (not the wall in your bedroom), decent lighting, do NOT be boring. This video is about convincing the conference organizer that you’re going to be a great speaker.
4. Send the video to the organizer and say that you’ve created something really interesting, recorded a three-minute video sampler of your talk. You’re willing to pay for your own flight, hotel and expenses. All you want is a chance to really delight their audience.

As long as you have just a little bit of charisma and excitement, I guarantee you can get a speaking slot if you follow these steps. Once you get your first speaking gig, approach another conference with the same tactics. Once you’ve got two big speaking gigs under your belt, you should be able to land almost any speaking slot.

Once you land the speaking spot, you need to do a TON of prep work and speaker training, to make sure you really wow the crowd. I’ll try to blog about this in the future.

Thanks to Laughing Squid for the photo.

The Copywriting Essentials Workshop was run by the super talented Fiona Humberston, Founder and Managing Director of Flourish Studios, a small but perfectly formed Graphic Design and Marketing agency based in Guildford, Surrey.

As this was our first workshop outside of the Carsonified events spectrum, we were curious to see how another company would run their own workshops. But of course that wasn’t the reason we attended! As we are a small events team, our job as Event Producers ranges from researching content, scheduling the conferences and liaising with speakers to booking flights, hotels and ever increasingly – marketing our events and writing copy on the site.

Given that none of us have been specifically trained as copywriters we all admit that it can be difficult to consistently write newsletters, blog posts and content on the event sites without sounding like a broken record. After all – we want to deliver new and exciting information to our subscribers, as well as make it sound fun and interesting to read. That’s why you signed up, right?!

So it was particularly interesting to find out having reviewed some of our work, that we had quite a bit to learn in one day! Given that we had 7 hours (which didn’t seem a lot) we were ready and raring to go. The day was split up into theory and practical writing, handy tips on writing engaging subject headlines and most importantly ‘know who your audience is’!

It was a varied, small group of people (8 in total) and everyone was very friendly which for me, really helped me feel relaxed enough to engage in the group discussions. I’m sure I’m not the only one who hated putting their hand up in the classroom of 30+ people at school!

We’ve actually had quite a few Copywriting workshops and speaker sessions at our events from the likes of the fab Relly Annett-Baker. In fact, there will be a scheduled copywriting session on the 2nd track at this years Future of Web Design, London. And whilst it’s hard to find the time during a hectic event, I am most definitely going to try and take advantage of this and sit in on the session.

In conclusion, the workshop was a real eye opener. Personally it really helped me take a step back, look outside the box and reevaluate my writing style for our marketing materials, as well as on our event sites. I came away feeling totally inspired, ready to write and wanting to learn more! All we have to do now is put it into practice and wow you with our ninja style skills.

If you’d like to know more about our events please check out our event sites and get in touch if you have any questions.

Future of Web Apps (Run by me)
Future of Web Design (Cat)
Future of Mobile (Natasha)

Thanks to Fiona Humberston for the photos.

1) Google Documents

Google has added a commenting feature in Documents that is tremendously useful for discussing various ideas and recording the comments. Once a decision is reached in the discussion, the thread can be closed. This removes it visually from the right margin, thus removing distraction.

In addition to this handy discussion feature, you can also see the real-time edits of your Team.

2) Google Drawings

Google has added several features that make creating diagrams very easy, including snappable arrows and real-time multi-person editing. If you create a flow diagram and decide to move the nodes around, they stay connected automatically, without having to re-connect all the arrows and nodes.

The real-time editing is super helpful when discussing wireframes or User Flow Diagrams live over the phone or Skype.

Here’s a diagram that Alan made demonstrating the new hosting infrastructure for Treehouse …

However, the great thing about Facebook Questions is that it’s already integrated into the powerful ecosystem that is Facebook. You simply write up a question, create some multiple choice options, and then post it to your wall. This makes it easy to compile quantitative data, as opposed to asking a question in plain text and then sifting through a list of comments.

My buddy Bob Baldwin was the lead on Facebook Questions, and for as much as I gripe to him about Facebook (sorry, Bob) I think Questions is my favorite feature. Why? Because Facebook Questions aren’t exclusive to user profiles; You can also ask Questions on a Facebook Page. This is a very powerful tool for Page owners, because you’re able to quickly gather market research from your existing community, negating some of the need for site surveys, contests, and more intrusive methods.

For example, say that you run a bakery, and you need to decide between three different baked goods for next week. Why not crowd source the decision to your Facebook fans (likely your best customers) and ask them what they would like to buy? With a large enough sample size, a perfectly split result is quite rare, so you should be able to make business decisions more confidently.

There’s no word yet on whether or not Questions will be coming to Groups, but it certainly is fascinating to watch Facebook continue to evolve. What do you think of Facebook Questions so far?

It’s been about a month since I last posted & I apologize for the hiatus! To explain, I began a wonderful new role at Mozilla Firefox, as team lead on the creative team under the awesome art direction of John Slater (freaking talented awesome boss). Just as I was getting my bearings though, I went to SXSWi to present on a topic dear to my heart, open source design. It’s been a crazy few weeks, but I’m back in full force!

It’s Monday, so this roundup is devoted to all things and people in design, UX, UI, & editorial!

• Brilliant! Method & Craft recently launched & here is just one of their most recent treats, Unique Vector Shapes In Illustrator by TX-based designer Gerren Lamson
• Friend & Forrst founder, Kyle Bragger, shares The State of Forrst & you might want to sign up for Around.io (#justsayin!)
• After a round of bbq, I ran into @hemeon, designer founder of @fflick & one of my *many* high school crushes (awkward, definitely). He’s turned out to be a good egg (in spite of his high school football days) and this is a great interview from a founding designer that covers his passion, but also a bunch of struggles that took him away from the web & back again towards success on it or maybe in spite of it.
• As if I couldn’t be more addicted to him in real life, Yaron Schoen @yarcom, writes on the Virtual Designer
• And, then there is “Read & Trust,” easy to get addicted to, but bereft of creatives of the female type (‘ehem, cough. ehem)

Wildcard: Ian Adleman, design director of nymag.com, moves on to become design director @ the New York Times, I urge you to follow him. You can be certain that there is greatness ahead from apps to the web experience (did you see nymag’s Fashion Week?! coverage). Ian is nothing if not a splash of color (yellow & blue) & a dash of brilliance. @khoi may have moved on from the post himself, but he’s also up to interesting things these days.

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

However with the web world being unique in that new ‘inventions’ are released and used without going through the age-old process of rigorous testing, is it time to air a word of commercial caution to those delivering websites and web applications for clients whose businesses may depend on them, or embrace the opportunity to speed up the momentum and support for what is inevitably the next evolutionary step in our industry – and if so – how do you go about spending the time learning and implementing new technology while remaining commercially competitive?

Why the Web World is Different

I’m assuming most of you have seen Dragon’s Den or America’s Inventor where an entrepreneur pitches a new business or invention idea to a panel of venture capitalists in the hope they will gain an investment ñ TV shows like these have brought the traditional process of taking a product or service to market into our homes and it goes something like this:

1. Smart businessperson, or crazy Doc Brown-esque inventor, come up with a new business or invention idea (we’ll refer to both as a “gizmo” from here on in)
2. Market research is performed to assess potential demand, target audience and competition for new gizmo
3. Gizmo gains funding from third-party
4. Funding is used to develop the gizmo further through a series of closely scrutinized testing and feedback loops
5. Once the gizmo has been refined and tested by a wide variety of sources it’s ready and the marketing and distribution begins
6. The gizmo is finally released to the public

The key difference between this traditional process and new technologies, like HTML5 and CSS3, is that they’re not individual ‘things’ that can be fully tested before being released. This means the minute a device or browser semi-supports a new technology it’s jumped upon by web designers and developers and being used on real client projects the next day, and it’s this paradigm shift that both drives our web world forward at an ever increasing rate, but also causes commercial dilemmas and problems for digital freelancers, agencies and clients alike.

So what exactly is the commercial dilemma?

The Commercial Dilemma of HTML5 and CSS3

The dilemma is simple to articulate and difficult to solve ñ with only some devices and browsers supporting some of HTML5 and CSS3 in the foreseeable future, and of those that do, not all supporting all of the same elements as each other, from a commercial perspective, what approach should a digital professional or agency take when deciding if, when and how to use these new technologies and how does it affect their project and clients…

OMG Shut Up You Can Use It All Now!

The countless articles on HTML5 and CSS3 can be chronologically categorised as follows:

1. What you’ll be able to do with HTML5 and CSS3
2. Which devices and browsers support which elements
3. Experimental demos showing the capabilities
4. How you can use it all now before it’s supported

All four categories of articles are fantastic and it really shows how amazing the people in our little world really are by how they creatively push the boundaries and overcome limitations of slower moving device and browser manufacturers, but the commercial dilemma is most evident in the fourth category.

These articles focus on using things like HTML5 Boilerplate and Modernizr to allow development of websites and web applications that use HTML5 and CSS3 elements where possible and degrade gracefully, or facilitate progressive enhancement, for those that don’t currently provide support ñ and this is all great, except when it comes to the commercial reality of production time, now and in the future.

The fact of the matter is it currently takes more time to implement these solutions than to not, and unless you’re a world-class front-end developer or agency with enough cash in the bank to allow for this additional time, this can cause you a commercial problem… how do you stay on top of the game while remaining competitive and in profit?

Sensible Approaches to Adopting New Technologies

By sensible I mean learning and using new technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 in ways that are appropriate and minimise risk for you and your clients. The following advice may sound like common sense to some of you, but because the web world is different there are many out there that are using new technologies on real-world projects with perhaps more enthusiasm for the effect rather than healthy cash flow.

So what approaches and strategies can you take that balance the need to stay current, and the time this takes, with the need for commercial competitiveness?

Use New Technology Where Commercially Appropriate

This isn’t just applicable to HTML5 and CSS but to web development in general, and although it seems so obvious, I still see many young, but also experienced people in our industry just itching to use the latest and greatest thing on the next project, but I don’t blame them ñ this is their passion in life and without their enthusiasm and excitement we would never have progressed as far as we have and so quickly, but to every Ying there must be a Yang and in the digital business world the Yang is commercial reality (often present in the form of a Web Project Manager or Director) ñ and that is a ‘fun killer’ to some, but business survival to others.

So what’s the answer to this riddle? Simple, one reason to use new technology is if it will benefit the project or account from a financial perspective. This financial perspective can be tangible on multiple plains that affect the commercial decision, but below are a few examples that could influence a decision to use new technology:

1. Creates a better user experience – so much so that it should yield a return on investment for the client (and the digital agency in the long-run) by increasing usage and thus revenue from the project
2. Brand awareness through early adoption can be used as a way to increase return on new technology implementation investment because, if done well, people will promote your new site or application as a showcase for the new technology, thus gaining more positive exposure for your brand as a forward-thinking and pioneering company
3. Enables client’s internal strategy ñ Currently many companies are starting to think seriously about their internal and external digital infrastructures and a big part of this is a move to equip staff with modern devices, such as iPhones and iPads, which would be used on a daily basis to interact with internal systems such as Intranets, CRMs and Stock Systems
4. Enables client’s external strategy – Some clients are also now thinking about making changes to their external services, such as public-facing websites and applications, so that the issue of ‘when to go mobile’ becomes less of a hurdle / big project than it will in two or three years
5. Target audience / platform ñ If the primary, or majority, of people that will use the website or application will be using ‘modern’ browsers or devices then it is commercially justifiable to deliver something that will offer the optimal user experience and functionality that takes advantages of technology advances

The important point here is make informed commercial decisions on when to use new technology and when to not, ensuring at all times that it’s use is not only beneficial to the end-user but also financially viable to your client and yourself before considering committing to the production and management hours it will require.

Ok so that’s the client-focus sorted, but what about your own plans for the future?

Alignment with your Company Strategy

As well as carefully considering your client’s strategies it’s also important to factor in your own plans in terms of where you’re aiming to be in the future when making decisions on spending the time adopting and implementing new technologies ñ after all, while you’re not learning your competitors may just be, and starting to grab all the new business in your area while you’re left lagging behind in the cold.

For example, you may be working on, or pitching for, several projects that would not necessarily benefit from new technology use, however your company strategy includes plans around increasing work in the mobile arena ñ how do you use these current projects and new business opportunities in order to help you achieve steps towards your strategy goals?

There are three answers; either work out a way that new technology could in fact benefit your client and then explain (sell) it to them in order to get paid, or, decide to invest non-billable time in using the new technology on these projects with the full acceptance the client hasn’t asked for it and so may not keep it, but the knowledge gained cannot be un-learnt and can be used on more appropriate projects in the future.

The third answer is to actually invest time to adopt new technologies on an internal project, such as the company website. This has many advantages in that it can be used as a real testing ground with minimal risk, but the disadvantage that it’s unlikely to deliver immediate return on investment.

However, as with the first two options, what’s learnt cannot be un-learnt and so using internal time to develop new technology competencies is not wasted time, plus if thought about carefully internal work should always try to be revenue building in some way, for example, developing a modern device version of your company website should not only make your website more accessible, but also be able to act as a showpiece you can show clients as demonstrations of expertise in new technologies and contextualising any sales patter you provide about desktop to mobile browser strategies.

Of course, there are articles floating around, like Andy Clarke’s “Ignorance is Bliss” that encourages you to use new technology on a client project without telling them:

“Often when I talk or write about using progressive CSS, people ask me, “How do you convince clients to let you work that way? What’s your secret?” Secret? I tell them what they need to know, on a need-to-know basis.”

But this is something I do not advocate at all and could land you in hot water in my opinion.

Always Be Honest With Clients

Ok, so Andy Clarke’s post is from 2009, but I’m still hearing and seeing this attitude today and I don’t believe it has to be that way and just adds an element of risk to the project and your relationship with the client.

I agree that in some cases this approach will work, and neither client nor users will ‘mind’ if the experience is different on certain browsers or devices, but what if you take this approach and during development or after launch you find out you’re wrong?

More than likely it will be the client that comes to you and it will be in a state of confusion as to why one thing happens in one and not the other, and more importantly why they didn’t know about it given that they’re paying you…

My advice, always be honest with the client. If you want to implement new technology on their project, tell them, and tell them exactly why. If it’s something that will clearly benefit them, explain that to them in their language, return on investment, why it will make them more money. If there’s no clear financial gain, then before you embark on development work, take the time to educate the client on why you want use new technology that may result in slightly different user experiences and how you intend to do it.

I’m yet to come across a client who reacts negatively to complete honesty when communicated in the right way, and even to the knowledge that you want to use their project in order to advance your own company ñ this is not a dark secret. All the client will likely care about is if it will impact their project timeline, budget or quality ñ if it won’t ñ because you won’t be charging for it or extending the timeline to cater for internal work, then you should be all good to go.

Obviously it should go without saying that you need to choose which clients or pitches to suggest this to, and if you detect strong hesitation at all you should immediately back down ñ there will be other opportunities (perhaps in the same project) ñ but if the client is right, the education is right and the openness, hence trust, is there ñ you will probably get a positive reaction and even make the client feel happy about getting something ‘cool’ and ‘cutting edge’ on their web project.

Added Value through Incremental Experiments and Metric Tracking

Assuming you have found a financially viable way to make the decision to invest time on researching, learning and trying out new technologies ñ how can you increase this decision’s value beyond simply being able to show peers something cool?

How about adopting a strategy to actually conduct incremental experiments and track the enhanced features you’ve developed against the basic features and against each other? By putting into place some pretty simple A / B testing, using great guides like Smashing Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing, you can not only continue your new technology learning and skill set advancement, but start to show how it’s being received in the real world.

If you can combine introducing new enhancements to the user experience using new technologies with tracking key business data on how they’re affecting key business metrics, like conversions ñ then you’re starting to talk the client’s language ñ and that’s when they really start to listen.

For example what if you decided to implement new technology on a client’s registration form and through tracking and analysis you could show that the conversion rate was higher on browsers that had the enhanced user experience than to that on less-compliant browsers? That could prove a powerful sales argument to your client that they should consider paying you to use workarounds in order to get the non-compliant browsers behaving in the same way ñ everyone’s a winner!

Summary

Finding a way to adopt new technologies in order to keep up with, or ahead of, your competition while ensuring your ability to consistently offer your client’s the best possible solutions, where expertise and experience are not barriers, is one of the most challenging aspects of running a digital business today.

Because the web world is different to traditional we don’t get as much time to prepare as other industries, yes we get the raft of articles from industry leaders and web celebs, but this isn’t as public and highly exposed as the traditional new gizmo process and so ‘when’ to actually start preparing isn’t as clear and is left to the freelancers and directors out there to decide when the time is right for them.

Admittedly it’s not the right time for everyone at the same time ñ diving in early is scary and risky but potentially advantageous commercially, waiting too long is lower risk but possibly business crippling as your competitors race ahead snapping up all the new work in that arena ñ not to mention the more passionate staff members you have who really keep up to date may be attracted away to your competitors, leaving you with a diluted enthusiasm and service offering.

However, when you break it down to its bare essentials, finding a way to adopt new technologies isn’t that much different to expanding your array of services you offer as a company ñ the only difference is you choose when to create a new service – new web technologies and standards creep up for months then and bang, are right in your face!

After realising the need to keep up, like a new digital service offering, you need to decide how you’re going to keep the company running while you start from scratch on researching and finding ways to spend the internal time required to turn it into an idea to a solid service you can offer ñ and therein lays the challenge that you have to overcome ñ but there are ways.

By carefully and ethically balancing your client’s requirements and relationship, plus being alert to new opportunities, there are several approaches you can take that will benefit your client and your company without breaking the bank.

Resources

• Hold off on deploying HTML5 in websites? Remy Sharp
• HTML5: I couldn’t (quite) do it, Big Red Tin
• HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World, SitePoint
• HTML5 and CSS without Guilt, Net Tuts
• HTML5: The Facts and the Myths, Smashing Magazine

You can add Annotations in Google Analytics for any major events that might effect conversion rates (or any other metric that’s important to you in Google Analytics).

Annotations are simple notes that you can tie to a specific date. They show up visually on the timeline as you view any graph. Super simple, but very powerful.

Here’s why it’s a great idea: You can look back at your traffic and see how different events affect your conversion rates. Trust me: You’ll forget when and how you changed the site, which means you won’t know what’s positively or negatively affecting your stats. Annotations solve that. Bam! :)

Throw a parade

OK, don’t literally throw a parade, but do something completely unexpected and fun. Ryan’s post about Walt Disney really got me thinking about this. It’s boring at Disney before the park opens, so they have a parade. It’s simple and unexpected, and turns a bad experience turns into a great experience. A great way to do this would be to send your user a great gift, like a cake or a t-shirt, along with an apology note. Say you’re sorry in a super creative way. Just keep it unexpected and make sure it’s fun for your user.

Great error pages

I was completely tickled when I came across GitHub’s 404 page. Dropbox’s 404 page isn’t nearly as funny, but is still really interesting. Take time on those error pages, because whether you want them to or not, users will bump into them. A little bit of delight can really smooth over a problem.

Give a refund

The other day we had a bit of video downtime on Think Vitamin Membership that affected a few users. The downtime was short, but we went ahead and contacted the affected users and gave them a credit. I was really surprised to get an email from almost every user that we credited thanking us for being proactive and letting us know that we really didn’t have to give a credit.

There’s an obvious direction that this can be taken that’s completely wrong. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t worry about having problems with your service because you can patch things up with a funny image or a gift. That’s not the point at all. It’s more just that there will be times when you’ll bump into problems, and when you do being creative and proactive can go a long way.

I’d love to know how you impress your users when you mess up. Let us know in the comments.

I am getting ready to launch Comp Versions any day now, and one of the last few things I had to do was to sort out my financial dashboard. I used Ryan’s spreadsheet and took it a bit further.

A Quick Rejig

The first major thing I did was re-organized the line items so that the structure more accurately resembles that of an Income Statement – which I am more accustomed to reading. For example, here is Apple’s. What you will see is that all the revenue related items are at the top, then the first thing deducted from the revenues are the costs of those revenues.

Those things are typically variable drivers specific to that revenue. So in Apple’s case, that would be things like inputs needed to actually create Apple’s products (the material needed to create the unibody of the Macbook Pro, or the glass for the face of the iPhone/iPod/iPad, etc.). As they sell more Macbooks they have to buy more of that metal for the unibody. The same applies to the glass. All monies paid to their manufacturers also go in this line item.

Ryan’s original version lumped more general things in ‘COGS’ (Cost of Goods Sold). Specifically salaries. Salaries belong further down the income statement. If you are looking at Apple’s Income Statement, they typically get lumped in the line item ‘Selling/General/Administrative Expenses’.

So in my modified version, I still have the breakdown of customers, churn, etc. at the top because all of those are revenue specific. Then for ‘Cost of Goods Sold’ for webapps, you typically have hosting costs (I broke them down into two separate categories, variable and non-variable).

Hosting Costs

Variable Hosting Costs are any hosting bills you have to pay due to higher usage (on a per unit basis). So in my case, since designers will be uploading images and they will be stored on AWS & CloudFiles, my variable hosting costs are not my regular server costs. They are costs associated with both AWS & CloudFiles, because I only incur them when people upload images.

Non-variable hosting costs are server related costs – so if you rent a server with Rackspace, your monthly Rackspace bill would go here. Now I know this might be a bit confusing, because if 1 server can only manage X amount of traffic (say 500,000 uniques per month), if you double your traffic you will have to add more servers.

However, you don’t have to pay hosting costs per unit. In this case, you don’t get charged by Rackspace per Unique Visitor. That’s the major difference. For instance, for the same monthly fee you pay for 1 server, you could tweak the server so much that you increase the # of visitors it can manage to say 750,000 unique visitors without paying anything extra. With a true variable cost, you can’t do that.

Gross Profit

I also added Gross Profit lines. These lines are very important because you need to get an idea as to how one of the most fundamental costs of your businesses are working. For instance, if you are experiencing phenomenal revenue growth, but your gross profit margins (%) are reducing, you know that likely indicates that your Cost of Goods Sold is increasing – which should be a worrying trend.

Usually what happens is as you push more volume, your unit costs should come down significantly. Not just in the tech industry, but in most (if not all) industries. So while your revenues are increasing, your COGS should be decreasing – for instance, if you look at the pricing chart for AWS you will see the cost per GB reduces as you go up in volume.

However, at some point in the future – it might become less beneficial to host my images with Amazon rather than hosting it on my own. 37Signals is famous for discussing outgrowing Amazon’s web services for their primary storage – because it has gotten too costly. I suspect, this is likely what happened. At some point, they realized that their Gross Profit Margins are getting thinner and thinner – which would cause them to look at the variable costs associated with their revenues. If it didn’t, it should have

So in my case, I suspect that at some point in the future, my gross profit margins will stop decreasing and start increasing again. At that point, I will want to look at other options.

COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)

I added a ‘COGS’ sheet, which breaks down the entire Cost of Goods Sold. If you have other variable costs (aside from the ones I have included) this is the sheet you will want to update. Once you update that sheet, you can then link it to the main sheet with a line item that has the total of the new variable cost, and update your Total COGS.

At the top of the main ‘Figures’ sheet, I added the breakdown of the pricing plans and the distribution of the % of customers on each one.

This is to give you a quick overview for which plans make sense and which don’t.

On the COGS sheet, I also broke down the Gross Profit ($ and %) of each plan – which can quickly tell you which plan makes most sense for you. With my default numbers, you can see that the gross profit margin (%) reduces steadily as the plans increase in cost.

That is because I chose to give each plan more space and transactions (relatively speaking) – for the purposes of this article, that is. So the $99 plan gives more than double the storage space than the $49 plan does. As a direct result, you can see that the gross profit margins (%) decrease from 89.69% to 89.14%. This trend continues as you go up in price. So even though you are making more money per plan, you aren’t keeping as much as the lower plans. This is an important figure to watch as you decide to tweak your pricing and value proposition.

Please note though, that the Gross Profit amounts in the ‘COGS’ sheet are plan specific, and do not include transaction fees (e.g. Paypal, credit card processing, etc.) and other things included in the true COGS from the ‘Figures’ sheet.

Quarterly to Monthly

Lastly, another key change I have made is getting rid of the bottom section that spells out some key metrics quarterly. I have put Net Profit (% & $) monthly, and have re-calculated CACR monthly. I have very low marketing costs – because I am bootstrapping, at the onset – but I expect to boost those significantly. As a result, my CACR ratios look pretty high early on. But that will change as we progress.

Please remember that all of the figures here are just placeholder default values – that are approximates according to my needs. Feel free to tweak, add, subtract, multiply & divide as your needs see fit.

See for Yourself

To see the spreadsheet online, go here: http://bit.ly/compversions-spreadsheet

If you haven’t had the opportunity to see Alex at Future of Web Apps before then check out the video below from FOWA Miami, it’s certainly worth 20 minutes of your time.

Alex has worked for some of the biggest online brands and knows a thing or two about creating a successful digital marketing strategy as well as how to use bleeding edge techniques to keep your brand ahead of the competition. He’s also written a number of articles for Think Vitamin on startups, marketing and more.

Early bird passes are available for £295. Visit the “Adventures In” web site for full details.

• I love you, I love you not. TEDtalk about a user interface product for desktops that Google bought years later & it sort of died.
• Great lessons in online business, Jason Fried on “How to Turn Disaster Into Gold”
• Newcomer, The Startup Foundry (by Paul Hontz), files a great story under “Bootstrapped/Funded” about, “Forrst: Raising Money, Goals, & Monetization”
• Audience development en fuego! 2 million users in 4.5 months for Instagram, an app that only works on iPhone and has no web signup.
• HTML5 Valentine’s Easter egg from Google IO  http://flic.kr/p/9ibaC4 (live: http://google.com/events/io/2011)
  

Wildcard: The team at nymag.com continues to dazzle & delight during NY’s Fashion Week. Simply stated, this is how great design across mediums is done! The Cut on the Runway made app of the week! (it’s drool-worthy). Follow @cutblog @nymag & embarrassingly talented @ianadelman

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• After spending the afternoon over @typekit‘s SF office, I’m feeling font-friendly! Fonts In Use (via the fabulous Victoria Pater or @typeis4lovers)
• As amazing as ever. Top 6 “Help” Design Patterns for the iPhone (via Inspire UX & Catriona Cornett)
• Grid-locked or -loved? 978.gs Perhaps a little bit of both!
• Type study: An all CSS button by Dan Cederholm of Simplebits
• Paravel Inc. pays tribute to The many faces of Leonardo Dicaprio (do not forget to scroll all the way down & participate in “Leo Libs” awesome illustration @raygunray)

Wildcard: The team @weightshift clearly have a sense of humor & a love for 80s pop culture with this 404 page

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

Do you measure happiness with your users and customers? If so, how?

The Creatives

Our design team consists of Tom (Creative Director) and Liam and Gareth, the Creatives. Between them, the guys work on branding, print and web design projects and Gareth is also a pretty great illustrator, which comes in handy!

Having this range of skills means that we can manage several projects on the go at any one time ranging in scope and priority. Whilst it’s essential to have good designers, we still need to be efficient and have processes in place to provide the best service possible.

The Ideas

Everyone at Bluegg has contact with clients and although we try to filter all work through myself there are inevitably times when someone else in the team receives a brief or request. As mentioned in last week’s article, we are able to quickly share information like this by all working in the same room, but when a new project comes in, the creative team spend time together discussing the brief, confirming the requirements and brainstorming initial ideas.

The scope of the project will dictate how long this session needs to be but as an example we recently kicked off a small branding project and so the team spent about an hour together looking at the brief, competitor websites and agreeing a way forward regarding the concepts to be designed. We also allow time for research, whether this be from books or online. Inspiration presents itself in a number of sources so we actively encourage time for the team to look at blogs and books.

Another key part of the Bluegg way when it comes to design work is time to filter out the weaker ideas. We tend to have quick fire sketching sessions when looking at a branding project. That way we can quickly get down to a few key ideas which can then be refined. As a result of this the studio is often full of sheets of paper with doodles, sketches and ideas on. To help with this the creatives head into the meeting room for some undisturbed thinking time. You just can’t underestimate the importance of having this time to fully understand the story that the brand needs to tell and finding the best way to show and tell this story.

When there aren’t strict deadlines to be met, we encourage all the team to take time out to research new ideas and techniques that can help with future projects. We’re ‘big on fun’ at Bluegg. We really believe that banter, humour and a stress free environment produces better results. Of course there are times when we’re a little stressed, as all creative agencies experience, but we always try to overcome this by having time away from our screens for a coffee or a doodle session. The Bluegg Doodles have become very popular among visitors to our site!

The Creation

It’s hard to describe a ‘typical’ project for the creatives because they can vary so much in scope, especially as we do print and web. We try to streamline as much as possible though without getting bogged down in admin. We don’t have meetings for the sake of it and the creatives don’t get involved in paperwork. Their focus is on creating beautiful work. This can consist of everything from identity design including brochures, folders, leaflets and advertising through to building and vehicle signage, website UI’s, web elements and flash animations.

This wide range of experiences is great for a creative team. It helps make sure work doesn’t become monotonous and stale. We also always try to complete projects with the minimum of delay so we stay fresh and ready for the next challenge.

From a technical point of view, whilst we encourage sketching with the good ol’ pad and pencil, all the Creatives inevitably end up on their Mac’s using Creative Suite. As we’re a mixed studio of Creatives, Developers and Managers we have a mix of Mac’s and PC’s which all link to a central exchange server.

The Chain

Before any design work is sent to clients it is approved by Tom. This doesn’t mean that Tom acts as big brother or doesn’t have faith in the designers but we have to ensure that anything that leaves the studio is as good and accurate as possible. This is especially true of our print projects and once approved by Tom I then check the artwork against any emails with amends to ensure everything has been actioned.

We don’t have a formal sign off procedure such as a physical sign-off sheet (Bluegg tries to be as paperless as possible) but we do have to be stringent. The designers will pass latest proofs to Tom, he’ll make his checks and then pass them to me to check and send to clients. By channeling everything through me (cc-ing the Mike and Tom at all times) it means that when the clients feedback they come back through to me. This allows me to be across all work coming in and out of the studio but also doesn’t interrupt the creatives when they are working on their next task.

There are exceptions to this though. We like to be as open and transparent as possible with clients so if they ever need to speak to the creative team regarding amends or queries then they can. They then update me on what the request is so I can note this and when the request has been actioned the latest proof/visuals is then passed via email down the chain to Tom and myself.

Mike, Tom and I tend to manage the start of the project and then we brief the creatives when the client has signed off the terms and conditions and project approval form. No work starts before we receive this document and have agreed the payment terms. Similarly once the project is complete the creative team move onto their next project whilst we wrap things up with the admin and project sign off sheets.

Our creative team have to work closely with the web team for our digital projects and in next week’s article, the last in the Studio Life series, we focus on the web team and where they fit into Bluegg.

• Not sure about the name, but it’s lovely. jQuery Deconstructed, a series designed to visually and interactively deconstruct the internal code of JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Prototype, and MooTools
• Aptly named, however, Treesaver, a JavaScript framework for creating magazine-style layouts using standards-compliant HTML and CSS is amazing  (demo here) /via @darcy_clarke (via @nickla)
• T-shirts, tags, placards, & beyond! Go behind the scenes of Facebook’s f8 Conference design collateral with Ben Barry to drill into the creative & collaborative details of the job
• A quirky site for Type-lovers and Tumblrs alike, Seinquote
• “Users will tell you when they are unhappy, but not so often when they are happy” via Judging User Happiness by Adii of WooThemes

Wildcard: Now that the BBC is scaling back & AOL has NOMd HuffPost & TechCrunch, the timing couldn’t be better for Paul Hontz who just launched The Startup Foundry & stirring the proverbial pot & possibly now between internet scandals @kennymeyers just may become web famous himself for this article.

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Our monkey-lovin’ friends at MailChimp expand to four-footed branding, launching “Longrep.ly” for when you care more than 140 characters
• Darren Hoyt on one of the best posts this week, “Designing Readability” (Readability.com here)
• If you haven’t already found this treasure, Under Consideration Quipsologies chronicles the most curious, creative, & notable!
• Tiny Speck’s Glitch released a wonderful treasure-filled wiki with over 1,200 articles written by & for the community
• Possibly the best article on Kickstarter to date, learn more about successful fundraising through Kickstarter, “KickStartup” by @craigmod

Wildcard: One of our readers, Sacha Greif, shared an app with us, Locomotive CMS, an open source CMS for Rails & another reader, Marc Gayle of Jamaica, provides some interesting (possibly controversial, but very supportive) insight into How Dropbox is Printing Money”

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

Small Change, Big Difference

It didn’t take a massive overhaul of Bluegg in order to get things more organised and structured relatively quickly. In fact they had already achieved the more difficult side of things such as building a broad and long term client base, hiring a team of creative and passionate people who all like working together, and achieving year on year growth.

The hard work had already been done so I was brought in to bring a bit more structure to the studio as well as wear a variety of other hats as needed. What I do is not rocket science really, it’s simply about preparation, organisation and communication. Luckily for me, The Bluegg team were ready for a change and so they were willing to embrace any tools and changes I suggested, based on previous experience in other studios.

Preparation

This is essential to be efficient. We prepare for each day by having a morning catch-up. This is where I allocate tasks, get updates from the team and we discuss any project issues. It is also a chance to remind each other who is in or out of the office during the week. Our catch ups last no longer than 10 minutes at most but it means that we all know what’s going on, who is working on what and who is where.

That’s the daily preparation sorted. I also try to prepare for the week ahead where possible. As any studio will tell you, schedules change and priorities shift but even a broad idea of what is coming up over the next week can help. For this I use nothing more than the whiteboard.

This is divided into five columns, one for each day of the week, and I list the tasks to be completed with the initials of who is to do it next to it. I also add in any deadlines and meetings, in a different colour pen of course. You could divide the board per person too I suppose but it’s a small board and there are 8 of us so I went for the lo-fi approach. It works wonders for the Studio though because everyone can see the board at all times and it helps us plan ahead.

The only downside to the whiteboard was that the creative team I work with felt it necessary to doodle on it! I have eliminated that issue by adding in a special doodle zone on the board. Bluegg, if you are reading this, stay within the zone!

Organisation

Being organised is something that comes naturally to me. I believe everything has a place and tidiness improves efficiency, but I still need to use some tools to be as organised as possible, and to organise others.

To-do lists are integral to my day to day role. Previously I used Teux Deux to keep track of things and this was perfect for managing my own workload but I don’t think it scales up for a team of eight. I sometimes still use it to quickly capture some things that I need to do whilst on the phone to someone but it’s no longer an essential tool for me. Similarly with Basecamp, I no longer use this but have previously found it to be very useful, especially when clients are located far away.

At Bluegg I use pen and paper. Yep, old school I know but tasks come into the studio from phone calls, emails, word of mouth and if Mike is out and about, text messages! I chuck everything down onto one A4 sheet and that is an overview of everything that needs to be done. This then forms my agenda for the morning catch up and is used to update the whiteboard. We do have an in-house Project Management Centre that we may update in the future to act as a to-do manager and studio overview.

Harvest is another important tool for being organised as we can easily manage budgets, track time and invoice. The reporting functionality of Harvest is a great way of assessing if you are finishing projects on or over budget. Remember that Basecamp or Harvest won’t run your studio but can help with organisation.

I’ve also brought other small changes to the studio such as a consistent way of naming files for print jobs (proof 1, proof 2 and AW for artwork) and I’ve also had a good tidy up. Tidy studio, tidy minds. The Bluegg gang also used to send a lot of emails with no subject title! That soon stopped as even something as simple as an accurate email title helps.

As part of the Bluegg way we try not to get bogged down in process and paperwork and this actually makes us more organised and efficient. This way we can spend more time on actual client work or for me personally, conducting content audits, reviewing copy and writing content for the Bluegg blog.

All work goes through Tom as part of our quality control and when signed off I pass this to clients. That way we know the standard of work is perfect. Simple, no sign off sheets or misunderstanding.

Communication

Any client can speak to a designer or developer as needed at Bluegg and this is helped by the fact that we all sit in one room. So we can easily share information and keep up to date with what’s going on.

One thing we try to live by is not to rely too heavily on email as it is often much more efficient to speak to clients on the phone. We find one phone call can get something sorted instead of three emails where tone of voice and exact requirements are so easily misunderstood and lost.

Another big part of my role is client liaison. I have to manage their expectations and part of that means being honest with them, keeping them updated and advising them as needed. They come to us for our expert opinion as well as our creativity. As well as day to day client contact we also send weekly updates so that they know what has been achieved in the past week and what we are looking to achieve in the week ahead. A single email can answer so many questions and keep everyone on track.

Finding your Own Process

No two studios will be run the same so you may find Teux Deux answers your needs more than Things, or that Basecamp is more suitable than Daylite. Regardless of the tools you choose to arm yourself with I think the key is in how they fit into your process of preparation, organisation and communication.

It also helps having a team that are open to change, structure and someone nagging them. The designers here have welcomed such nagging from me and next week we look in more detail at their role within the team.