Part of that is being my own project manager. I don’t need to push back on, or translate, what someone else is communicating. My standard contract specifies a single point-of-contact for every organization, which leaves little room for communication breakdowns.

In the most recent contracts, I’ve included more specific guidelines on the design process which aim to be a little more firm about what I’d like to see in the client-designer relationship. The goal should be to ensure the client is invested in the process at every level.

Most of these issues will sound familiar because they are age-old. Most of them have improved over the years, but they rear their head often enough that I’ve decided to formalize them in my contract. If “design consulting” is part of how you market your skills, conveying your experiences with the client are a vital part of that.

From my new standard contract, “Appendix B: Tips for a Smooth Process”:

A great website is the result of solid communication and collaboration between designer and client. Throughout this project, you’ll be asked to give feedback on elements of your website design. To ensure the project stays on schedule and budget, we’ll need your help and expertise!

• Designate a Contact. Please designate a single point-of-contact within your organization to handle all communications regarding this project. It may be necessary to cc: other team members in emails, but Darren Hoyt LLC reserves the right to incorporate only feedback from the designated point-of-contact.

• Avoid Committee Decisions. Whenever possible, discourage your organization from using a committee to submit website feedback. Committee-based design decisions historically lead to confusion, contradiction, broken deadlines, higher costs and an overall compromised product that aspires to please everyone while never seeming to please anyone. Please don’t let this happen to your project!

  If group feedback is unavoidable:

  • Empower your designated point-of-contact to make final decisions on all design notes collected from the group
  • Loop everyone into feedback at the beginning of the project. Avoid waiting until the design is nearly completed to begin reviewing with a CEO, board member, committee, etc.

• Organize Content. As noted in Section 4 (“Client will provide Darren Hoyt with all necessary content within (1) week of beginning the project.”) , it’s very important that web content is defined and organized before the design phase can begin. This means submitting electronic versions of all assets: logo, branding elements, colors, typography and finalized copy writing. If any of those elements does not exist, Darren Hoyt LLC can recommend a branding/identity designer, copy writer or additional content strategist as needed.

• Let Content Drive Design. Many web designs have faltered in the past because designers were tasked with creating something whose core meaning was still undefined. As the author of web design standards says: “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

  In the early phase of your project, prepare to put visuals and aesthetics aside. Starting with the homepage, work with the designer to prioritize your messaging. Consider hierarchy. Hone your taglines and marketing text so they speak clearly to your audience. Define your most important calls-to-action. Your designer may recommend a wireframing phase. Determine the products or services that represent your organization best. Boil them down and work with the designer to integrate them into your homepage.

  Copywriting greatly influences design choices, so avoid placeholder lorem ipsum text whenever possible.

• Consider Industry Standards & Competing Websites. Every website should be a success story for both designer and client. That process begins with familiarizing yourself with the highest models of web design within your industry. During the discovery phase, it may help to collaborate with your designer to share URLs and screenshots to get more familiar with great website design looks and feels like in a way that’s relevant to your project.

• Put Audience Expectations Before Personal Taste. Your new website should meet the goals of your organization, but more pressingly, the needs of your audience. Begin to think in terms of personas. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who will be finding your site via Google search. Can the content be scanned and immediately understood? Are there certain interactions vital to holding your users’ attention? Are value propositions and conversion rates being considered?

  Collaborate with your designer to ensure core design elements like color and typography are based on overall user experience, not subjective personal preference.

• Brand Wisely. The question of how and where to incorporate branding on a website is one of the oldest tug-of-war decisions between client and designer. Traditional stopgap solutions—ex: ”make the logo bigger”—won’t do anything to improve user experience. It won’t help users find your website: they are already there. Once there, good content is what will drive their experience.

  Collaborate with your designer to integrate branding elements like color and typography in a way that complements that content. Users are more likely to complain about not being able to find what they want than complain about a small or less-prominent logo.

<?php edit_post_link(__('Edit','mytheme'), '', ''); ?>

The only problem is I don’t like displaying it inline with my content, especially if it breaks something. I’d rather see the layout exactly as a user sees it.

Lately, I’ve been fixed-positioning the link in a less obtrusive way, using the standard “post” icon as a link. Here’s what I see on the front end when I’m logged in:

Repositioned ‘edit’ link

It’s out of the way of the layout, but stays fixed when you scroll. It’s easy enough to implement. Just paste the edit_post_link function above anywhere within the Loop. Then use this CSS:

a.post-edit-link {
	background: url(../../../../wp-admin/images/menu.png) 119px -35px;
	text-indent: 100%;
	overflow: hidden;
	display: inline-block;
	text-indent: -99em;
	white-space: nowrap;
	height: 24px;
	width: 24px;
	position: fixed;
	top: 5px;
	left: 5px;
	}

Note: this only works if your stylesheet is in your theme’s root. If you use a subfolder like /css/ you would need to add an extra ../ to the background path.

Around the time Mimbo Pro got a major retooling (responsive design, HTML5 and CSS3 improvements, webfonts) this February, we also began working with the awesome theme team at WordPress.com to re-code a few things up to their standards. They made it really easy for us to track progress and communication, and the vetting process happening more quickly than we’d hoped. You can read their official release post here.

It’s exciting to now see it included in the “Shop->Premium Themes” section of WordPress.com blogs in a marketplace that is still relatively small:

Big, big thanks to Ian Stewart, Michelle Langston, Lance Willett and the rest of the WP theme team and Automatticians for making this happen.

In that time, web design standards have also changed. Instead of retiring the theme, we wanted to give it a makeover and help keep its popularity going—

Improvements include:

• Responsive design for mobile devices
• Web fonts via Font Squirrel
• CSS3 enhancements for navigation, colors, gradients
• Semantic HTML 5 markup
• Inclusion of sub- and sub-sub categories in breadcrumb nav
• Improvements to Custom WP Menus
• “Related Posts” widget uses WP categories, instead of tags

• See Live Demo
• Buy It Now

Important to note: Mimbo 3.0 is a standalone product. Significant changes have been made to the core code so it should not be used to overwrite older versions of Mimbo Pro without some breakage. Existing Mimbo Pro users will have access to both versions in the accounts system.

This anxiety is about more than failing to keep up with a serialized source, though. It’s also about the primitive pleasure of constant and arbitrary stimulation…

And it’s losing track of this distinction—between reading and seeing—that’s so shameful. It’s like being demoted from the category of thinking, caring human to a sort of rat that doesn’t know why he needs to tap that button, just that he does.

There are no illusions about technology making our lives better. Just stretching us thinner, making us more numb, more dependent, less able to experience life authentically:

Shteyngart says the first thing that happened when he bought an iPhone “was that New York fell away . . . It disappeared. Poof.” That’s the first thing I noticed too: the city disappeared, along with any will to experience. New York, so densely populated and supposedly sleepless, must be the most efficient place to hone observational powers. But those powers are now dulled in me. I find myself preferring the blogs of remote strangers to my own observations of present ones.

As book reviews go, it’s pretty bleak. I’ve probably read it 10 times this year and I can’t remember a piece like it hitting me on that specific emotional level.

There have been similar pieces like Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“, Sharon Begley’s “Does the Web Change How We Think?” and more recently Bill Keller’s “The Twitter Trap” (and its critiques).

But I keep coming back to “Sad as Hell.” Consider that the author, Alice Gregory, is only 23 years old.

For years we’ve been led to believe, and almost encouraged to fear, the idea that younger generations who became technologically savvy in adolescence would never understand the significance because it’s all they’ve ever known; they would integrate it into their daily lives, develop a deeper understanding of it than you, identify with it more, master it, maybe even use it as a tool to eventually usurp you (you, a fading middle-aged person who is unable to keep up).

But here’s a bright person who came of age in an ideal period when the web was maturing and becoming social…and just out of college, she’s already feeling burned by the same things she sees in Shteyngart’s science fiction:

Like all great science fiction writers, Shteyngart deals in absurdist teleology, taking what is farcical about the present day to its logical extreme. Everyone in this world is ranked within categories: “personality,” “fuckability, “anal/oral/vaginal preference,” “male hotness.” Often, Lenny scores within the lowest of these percentiles.

The premise is super funny but also super true. What else are we doing on the internet if not asserting our rank?

These days when I open an email from Twitter telling me I have a new follower, my eyes hover on those stats (“Number Following | Number of Followers | Listed”) and my subconscious decides it’s okay to rank a stranger according to “influence” or the extent to which they might be able to entertain me or help my career. Then there’s a feeling of guilt like my friend Kai described after experiencing a surge of new followers.

This is part of life now, unrecognizable from how it looked at 23.

1998, the year I turned 23, was the year I learned to design and build websites to support myself. I didn’t know much about computers, but I would spend all night wandering the web, following hyperlinks from page to page like a Choose Your Own Adventure book with no beginning or end. I explored every web-ring and online community. I would email total strangers if they seemed interesting. Sometimes it was just for the thrill of striking up a conversation with someone who was unlike me, as it had been writing to pen-pals as a child.

I remember each time I launched Netscape Communicator, it was like diving in a submarine, down into a weird world of exotic outposts. The visuals could be loud or clumsy, but the experience was “quiet.” The 1998 web never provoked panic or made me feel like I needed to have 20 apps and browser windows running. No one expected my constant presence or feedback or “Likes” of their content. It was not a substitute for my brain; it was a place for my brain to get lost for awhile.

(Was the web ever that quaint? Is anything as quaint as you remember it?)

Almost 15 years later, I go through phases of spending embarrassing amounts of time online. It’s like someone flipped the hourglass and all the contents of the real world trickled down into the virtual world, which is where all the exciting stuff happens now. But people my age have had 15 years to gradually accept how the web was changing the ways we experience life. We can claim we “lived more” in those days, in ways this generation cannot:

You really want to know what it is about 20-somethings? It’s this: we live longer now. But we also live less. It sounds hyperbolic, it sounds morbid, it sounds dramatic, but in choosing the internet I am choosing not to be a certain sort of alive. Days seem over before they even begin, and I have nothing to show for myself other than the anxious feeling that I now know just enough to engage in conversations I don’t care about.

There is no mention of limiting the iPhone usage, taking breaks from Twitter, or modulating the anxiety by simply unplugging for awhile. Unplugging isn’t a serious option, not even close. She’s a reluctant internet Lifer like the rest of us. The choice is whether to surrender and accept the permanent changes to your brain and nervous system, or to be the lone defector among your family and friends who unplugs from all their status updates and feels like the most isolated person on earth and the only one who understands what a mixed blessing that is—how many 23-year olds today are capable of that?

They become alienated from the sound of their own true voice, their identity, their sense of self.

It’s possible Alice Gregory is one voice in a tiny minority of younger people who are especially sensitive to the anxiety, and part of an even tinier minority able to express that it’s happening at all. She dreads her iPhone (“that little monster in my pocket pushing me an uninterrupted stream of distractions”) while everyone else her age treats it like their body’s most precious appendage. Maybe the majority of them really are swimming along, happily juggling their multiple devices and avatars and feeds and email accounts without feeling the weight of it.

On Twitter I follow around 500 people from a range of backgrounds. I imagine them sitting at glossy Apple displays, drinking coffee, complimenting each other, ogling typography, holding down a dozen simultaneous conversations, waking up the next day, doing it all over again. You couldn’t find a more tame, good-natured environment, like watching friends sit at a bar having a drink together. But for some there’s an element of performance taking place that leads to what Sherry Turkle (Alone Together) calls “presentation anxiety” as people become addicted to asserting themselves online. They become alienated from the sound of their own true voice, their identity, their sense of self.

Last year British psychologists studying the link between internet addiction and depression concluded:

Young people were significantly more likely to show addictive symptoms than were older people. There was a significant difference between the IA and the NA group in their levels of depressive symptoms, with the NA group firmly in the non-depressed range, and the IA group in the moderately-to-severely depressed range.

20 years from now, the demands on our attention will be even more intense. Either we’ll collectively adapt or there will be much larger movements among people to unplug as a legitimate means of therapy. Alice’s generation might be the last to experience the growing pains of constant connectedness. Each time I read it, “Sad as Hell” reminds me that there are some who are not happily surfing the web or even swimming in it. It’s more like they’re drowning in it.

Rich already summed up the new Readability very well, as did Anil Dash:

It’s been extremely gratifying to hear a roomful of coders and entrepreneurs talk passionately and at length about how important it is to them to support great writing, and great journalism. They speak honestly and sincerely about being on a mission, and about building a meaningful business that’s thoughtful about the way it does its work and the impact this product has on the web.

The design process itself was a three-month sprint. The core ideas of the “new” Readability were ironed out long ago, but many new ones crept in during the design process. Things moved so fast that wireframing went from impractical to impossible. There was no existing branding, but the primary guideline was to create something that spoke to the tradition of a calm, comfortable reading experience; a conservative idea with a radical payment plan that aspired to change how we fund online content. Wrapping that message in a restrained design was a big challenge.

In the early phase, my buddy Yaron Schoen came in on a freelance basis to pour the concrete: color palette, logo and style guide stuff. For supporting illustrations, we contracted a Brooklyn illustrator who digitized and “mastered” old public domain images to support the design. The project also introduced us to the talented Erin Kissane who brainstormed with us during the day while editing a new A List Apart book at night.

Today Mandy Brown from Typekit summed up what became the final product:

The new website sports Adobe Minion for a classy look. Subtle shifts in color, placement, and type size create a clear hierarchy, while the subdued color palette suggests a calm, quiet reading room.

When that phase wrapped, I took the building blocks and began laying out the homepage, reading lists and dashboards. As the development scope shifted, the design happened more in the browser than in Photoshop. There are pieces I’d still consider ‘first drafts’, but that is a lesson of working in a startup where the priority is to launch first and then iterate.

After a series of all-nighters, 10 of us gathered in the board room Monday night to begin final testing and deployment. We were coordinating with the NY Times article which published around 10:00pm. We went live to the public around 11:00pm and began immediately tracking questions, blog posts and tweets. Within 20 minutes, the launch was a Top Tweet on Twitter’s homepage. At 2:30am we finally we stumbled out of Arc90 and into the snowfall outside.

Since launch, sign-ups for both Publishers and Readers have been magnitudes greater what we’d predicted. We’re continuing a dialog with users to address any misconceptions and remind folks that the extensions and bookmarklets will always be free. What’s obvious is the desire for converting web content to an e-Reader format with TiVO-like features resonates with many people, especially as publishers struggle to find a model that suits readers and publishers equally. The “new” pay model has worked for generations: pay people directly for their talents in return for a great experience.

I’ve started a reading list here. If you like similar stuff, drop me a line on Twitter and send me yours. In upcoming months, we will have methods to share and recommend that content, so stay tuned.

Read more Readability press from this week:

• New York Times
• Ftrain
• Fast Company
• Lifehacker
• Anil Dash
• Giga Om
• MacWorld
• WebMonkey
• Typekit
• Forbes
• TechCrunch
• The Economist

Working life and personal life have changed a lot in a year. For a number of reasons, I can’t commit any time to the CodeWise sites that we’ve grown, unfortunately. I am full-time at arc90 working on a couple projects I care a lot about, plus holding down other real world responsibilities that I can’t sacrifice to make WPQuestions and the other sites work.

So Lawrence will continue growing those sites over the next year and need design and CSS help in the meantime. We’re currently speaking with interested parties who would be a good fit. Mainly we’re looking for people with an entrepreneurial interest as well as design skills who want to get involved, at least at first, just for the enjoyment, but also with an interest in expanding and seeing more profit.

Mainly I just wanted to clarify what’s happening so no one is confused why I’m not able to promote those sites much these days. I will post again on this blog and at WPQuestions as things progress.

“The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry is that ‘nobody knows anything’. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

Great formulas (ex: attractive cast, epic storyline) fail as often as they succeed, even after 100 years of filmmaking. Goldman admits there are so many moving parts to assemble, it’s a miracle any film gets made, much less a great one.

Everybody Knows Everything

Compare with the decade-old web design industry. The formulas for successful websites have developed mighty fast. We’ve got tons of books, tutorials, blogs and conference lectures to learn from, plus disproportionate numbers of experts, consultants, coaches, evangelists and assorted gurus.

So on the surface, “everybody knows everything”. Information is plentiful. Methods are transparent. There should be no excuse for a mediocre website. Why doesn’t “guru”-level knowledge translate into launching better websites?

Easiest conclusion—interesting, addictive content is not valued enough. Often it’s an afterthought, barely discussed with the client. It’s like magic dust and neither guru nor client knows where it will come from. The final product is a sparkly site with forgettable content. It’s like building a car and considering the engine last. Or just as often, neglecting to install one.

The Original Gurus

Geeks and gurus could learn something from their advertising roots. Consider the Mad Men era of advertising, defined by stuff like Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Volkswagen ad campaigns.

“[The Volkswagen ads] changed the rules. Agencies were no longer punished but rewarded for arguing with clients, for breaking the guidelines of art direction, for clowning around in the copy, for using ethnic locutions and academic references and a myriad of other once-forbidden formulae. Seemingly overnight, a great wave of originality engulfed the advertising profession…”

DDB ad men were notoriously flamboyant, but they had the vision to back it up. They looked at the big picture and wanted their ads to have cultural impact. They studied human behavior. They wanted their product to be smart. Can that be said of today’s gurus?

To generalize greatly, there is too much time spent lost in the tunnel-vision world of shiny gadgets, tech trends and empty “social media” promises and way too little time on basic human psychology and the fundamentals that made 1960s advertising so powerful—figuring out what the public wants and finding smart, persuasive ways to give it to them.

Missing Ingredients and Healthy Content

William Goldman says the elusive element of success is timing. Even with great acting and a great story, the stars rarely align so that a movie gets released at the perfect time of year in the perfect stage of the actors’ popularity in a way that overlaps with what the public wants.

Of the 771 movies released in 2010 so far, how many have you heard of? How many got good reviews? How many really spoke to the public’s needs and wants?

In web design and blogging, most would say “compelling content” is what eludes us. But even after 10 years, no two people even agree on what “compelling content” means. If anything, it’s a constantly moving target, consumed by a fickle audience who travel the web too quickly to differentiate between fast-food addictions like Mashable and healthier “slow web” addictions to sites like A List Apart, Design Observer, Good, N+1 or The Smart Set.

Web design conferences could use an equivalent to Jamie Oliver’s “Teach Every Child About Food” speech to remind people of how nourishing good content can be.

Solving the Content Mystery

In one sense, it’s a fine thing that so few know how to crack the mystery of making great, addictive content. The elusive nature keeps us creative, makes us chase abstract ideas, forces us to put human psychology at the forefront of the things we create.

Client projects should include in-depth discussions of how the content itself (not jQuery effects or “social media” tie-ins) is going to propel their site. Setting them up with a WordPress theme, giving them the keys and waving goodbye just isn’t enough.

2010 is still the Stone Ages of the internet. With all our expertise maybe we still don’t “know anything”, but by now we should at least know enough about our fellow humans to deliver them something they benefit from rather than selling our expertise in the form of a dull, hollow wrapper of a website that no one cares to visit more than once.