Impressive Designs

The last few months have been exciting times at our little shop. We’ve seen an increase in activity from our existing clients and a significant increase in interest from potential clients. Our recent successes have resulted in a ton of referrals; enough that we feel we’re ready to add to our staff.

We have high standards. We believe our work should be esthetically pleasing, technically precise and, above all, serve the needs of our clients. We pride ourselves on our utlization of cutting edge technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Ajax, CSS and standards compliant coding and in our ability to communicate with our clients thoroughly enough to understand their wants and needs. We feel that design should be practical and functional, but that those criteria do not preclude creative, attractive work.

Our studio is small and we must insist on a team player mentality. Our client base includes artists, manufacturers, restaurants, governmental agencies, small businesses, telecommunications companies and service industries. We need an individual that is willing to immerse themselves into the corporate culture of our clients’ respective businesses so as to better understand their needs. Our studio has been built on the development of long term relationships and we require a thinker, not a robot.

Some of our bread and butter work is very production oriented. Our new hire will receive a mix of “make this ad this size” work and “create three web mockups, feel free to go nuts” assignments. Proficiency in the Adobe Creative Suite is a must, and proficiency in Flash is ideal. The ability to create simple animations and slide shows in Flash is required. A basic understanding of web coding is preferred, but we’re willing to teach these skills to a motivated learner.

We’re serious about our work, but we genuinely enjoy what we do. If this sounds like a fit for you, send a link to your portfolio to .

By this time tomorrow night, all our stuff will be sitting in the Coastal Federal Building on St. Albans Drive. Hopefully, our T1 line will be moved without a hitch, Time Warner will have successfully installed an upgraded service, and I’ll be back in my chair breathing a sigh of relief at the smooth transition that was our move.

Sadly we won’t be able to gauge the success of a movie’s opening, walk to a coffee shop when we need a pick me up, or grab a mexican pastry. Our old office space was in a pleasant little strip of buildings located across the street from a Carmike Theater and our neighbors provided significant entertainment factor. We’ll miss chatting up the Rainbow Vacuum cleaner folks and telling confused wanderers, “No, the hairdresser is down two doors,” but we’ve outgrown the space.

I’m sure over time we’ll meet new friends at our new offices. The parking lot seems less frantic than our old location, and Christine has worked out her route to the smoking area already. It’s also perilously close to Bahama Breeze. I foresee staff meetings with foo foo drinks in our future. Tiny umbrellas anyone?

By the way… biggest crowd ever for a Friday at noon movie debut: the third Matrix movie. I am not at liberty to divulge whether or not I recognized any of the droves of work skipping geeks.

We’ve recently completed two very challenging, large scale projects: Jobfinderusa.com and The Foundation for International Education (FIE). The FIE site was a redesign of an existing site that had outgrown its existing content management system and jobfinderusa.com was a custom built online application. We carefully evaluated the needs of each customer and decided upon two very different approaches.

The FIE project was mostly a problem of organization and data management. We’re big fans of the ExpressionEngine CMS and found that it had all the features we needed for FIE built in. ExpressionEngine geeks might be interested to note some of the modules we added: Solspace’s Freeform and Mark Huot’s brilliant Pages module. Not only does Pages allow FIE staff to easily find and edit static page text, but it makes creating a site map a breeze.

The main obstacle in the FIE project was the organization of data. Our primary contact on the project, Emma Jones, took the bull by the horns and created a comprehensive outline of the FIE content. Without this roadmap, the project would have been a complete failure. Only an FIE insider could have provided this crucial piece of the puzzle and the success and accolades the site has been receiving are probably much more a credit to Emma’s ability to organize than our ability to design and code websites.

The Jobfinderusa.com site was a completely different beast. Prism Publishing attempted to create the site with another developer but made very little progress after several months. We began working with Guillermo Haas-Thompson and assembled our proposal from his carefully crafted request for proposal. The scope of a large project like Jobfinderusa.com can be difficult to define, however, and it was inevitable that some “scope creep” would come into play. We knew from the beginning (the RFP actually used the term “fuzzy stuff") that there would be a certain amount of redevelopment on the fly.

That’s where Ruby on Rails came to the rescue. We’ve been using Ruby for custom application development for the last two years and have been amazed at the ease in which one can change direction when needed. ROR has often been described as “agile” and we could have never launched this site without that agility. A website is never truly finished — we’ve already made significant modifications to the admin functions — but making these tweaks and modifications feels more like a refinement of an already good recipe with Rails.

In the end, neither of these projects would have been a success without responsible, dedicated contacts with our clients. Imp Designs believes that all successful design is collaborative and without the assistance and contributions of Emma and Guillermo these projects would have never been completed.

What’s not to like about open source? A group of developers working together to create free software built to answer the needs of the public. Need support? There’s a dedicated group of geeks maintaining forums that you can simply log into and ask a question. Everybody’s happy and helpful in Open Source Software Land!

Well, not really. We first experimented with OSS when our clients started asking for content management (CMS) and e-commerce services. We experimented with Post Nuke and Mambo in the CMS world and OS Commerce and Zen-Cart in the E-Commerce world. With the CMS solutions, all seemed pretty good with both until we turned the sites over to our clients. Both CMS systems we used turned out to be not so user-friendly for computer newbies. A little to much, “to do this, do this, then this, then this and this” to suit the occasional user. Both worked great for clients that had lots of posts and activities and a dedicated employee to take care of these tasks. But for the occasional user, we’d get the “Now how do I do this again?” phone calls so often we actually started just doing the posts for them.

The E-Commerce situation was a little different. We first used OS Commerce until we discovered Zen Cart, an OS Commerce spinoff. We loved it’s flexibility and the ability to customize the look and features… until we began to notice that we pretty much had to tweak every setting and touch every button to get a site that answered our clients needs. And the more customized the site was, the bigger pain in the ass it was to update.

Our final breaking point with OSS came when we migrated to a new server. Never an easy task, we found that the migration which included an update of PHP and MySQL services, broke every open source app we had online. We had started using ExpressionEngine by then to do most of our CMS work and all those sites migrated without an issue. Then came the US Postal Service rate hike… the first couple of updated shipping modules for Zen Cart didn’t work properly and the subsequent updates were awkward to apply. To make matters worst, the default download for Zen Cart STILL hasn’t been updated with the new shipping module… and nowhere does the documentation mention that.

And those droves of dedicated developers manning the forums? Well, mostly the forums seem to be packed with fans and haters with the poor “I got a problem” folks getting stuck in the middle of the battling factions. When I say we’re over the open source software thing I truly mean it.

About 3 years ago I discovered Veerle Pieter’s blog. She introduced me to ExpressionEngine through her praise of this amazing software. It’s amazingly flexible and, with a little effort to learn it’s ways, can do an incredibly wide variety of things. Best of all, it can be customized to be very user friendly. All our clients love it. Yes it costs money, but one generally gets what one pays for.

As for E-Commerce we’re in transistion. I was quite surprised to get a response from Veerle all those years ago when I asked what she used for E-Commerce. She replied, “We usually just build them custom as we’re not satisfied with anything available on the market.” I thought girlfriend must be crazy to do that! Now I see the wisdom in her statement. We’ve learned that although some aspects are standardized in E-Commerce such as checkout and payment and shipping modules, almost everything about the actual product management is SO different from client to client that we spend an extraordinary amount of time tweaking and twisting existing softwares to meet our client’s needs. So now we’re building our own using the Ruby on Rails framework.

What’s the lesson in all this? I guess it’s that anything you get for free is worth exactly what you paid for it. 

No secrets here, I’m a Mac guy. Have been ever since I decided to go to Kinko’s and make my band’s promo post cards. I tried to use the PC’s… hell, everybody KNOWS Apple is going out of business, why waste time on a dead platform? But after a half hour of struggling I moved over to the Mac and soon had postcard art set up.

Nothing burns me up more than to go to a website, attempt to access some feature or just navigate the site and get a “You need to upgrade to Internet Explorer” or “Sorry, we only support IE” message. Worse yet are the sites with no warning at all… they just don’t work in Safari or even Firefox for Mac. The response to Mac users in the past has been “You are less than 3% of our user base” a flawed statement at best as it’s silly to equate overall marketshare sales figures of computers with actual people that use computers. Think about it, those marketshare numbers include computers used as cash registers, kiosks, and simple business machines. Until recently all sorts of businesses used the marketshare figures as an excuse for sloppy coding and lack of support for the open standards that Mac OSX is based on.

Now along comes the iPhone. Possibly the most hyped techno gadget in the universe, this little wonder will give its affluent consumer-owner a REAL internet experience… as long as the site they visit is compatible with the Safari browser. So all you “We don’t care about Macs” web developers look out. Some day soon one of your clients will ask why their boss can’t see the dynamic content on the company website on their shiny new iPhone and you’re going to fire up Internet Explorer and answer, “It looks fine to me. Tell your boss to use Explorer.”

And the boss will call us.

Imp Designs, iPhone ready since 1999.

In January I set a goal for myself to write at least one blog entry per month. I’ve failed miserably on that goal… honestly I don’t know how Veerle does it. The excuse I’m going to fall back on is how busy we’ve been. Over the next few weeks we’ll be launching websites for a wide variety of businesses and organizations; a printer repair business, a real estate office, an international organization that coordinates study abroad programs, a restaurant, and a 2-cycle motor oil manufacturer to name a few. In addition to these sites we’re also finishing up a couple special projects: an online custom order entry system and an online job posting/resume posting system.

All these projects have challenged our communications skills and have pushed me to find more effective ways to coordinate the work. We’ve made a couple internal changes to how we approach development, most notably we now place all new development work in Subversion. With the amazingly wonderful service at SVN Repository, we can utilize Trac to document the progress of our projects and, when applicable, give our clients access to a ticketing system. For overall strategy and planning of our projects, we’ve discovered Basecamp. Developed by the people that created Ruby on Rails (another blog entry on THAT is forthcoming!), this amazing little web app allows a group of people to collaborate and communicate on a project. If you’ve never seen Basecamp, you should click on the link above and check it out.

Well that’s enough for now. I’m a “glass half full” guy, so I’m sure I’ll get another entry in soon!

When’s the last time you checked the WHOIS information for your domain name? The WHOIS database (Wikipedia entry here) is a protocol that allows one to see the contact information on a domain name. Although technically no one in the world really owns a domain name except the Network Information Centre (NIC), it’s generally accepted that the Registrant of the domain name is its legal owner. If you look up your domain name information and no one in your organization is listed among the contacts, you may have difficulty establishing your rights to retain use of the domain name in the event it expires.

A simple way to look up your domain name information is to visit the website of a domain name Registrar such as Godaddy and enter your domain name in the Domain Search feature of the site. Entering a domain name already in use results in a “(domain name) is already taken” message and a link to click for more information. Clicking that link will reveal the domain name contacts. There are four types of contacts listed: registrant, administrative contact, technical contact and billing contact.

The registrant is considered to be the legal owner of the name. In exchange for an annual fee paid to the domain name registry, the registrant is in effect issued a license to use a given domain name on the internet. A registrant may name an administrative contact to manage the domain name. It’s the responsibility of the administrative contact to keep the information on the contacts in the WHOIS current and to manage access to the domain name settings. The technical contact would typically be responsible for the name server settings for the domain. The billing contact is responsible for making sure the annual fee for the domain name’s usage is paid on time.

In practice what usually happens is that a business contacts a web development company and they obtain the domain name for the business. Since the developer typically maintains an account with a registrar, all contact information for the name(s) are initially set to the developer’s default contact information. At Imp Designs, we go back into our account and set the registrant information to match our client’s contact information. We leave the other contact information to point to us, since we usually take on the responsibility of managing the other aspects of the domain. If our client prefers to manage their own domain, we facilitate it’s transfer to new account. If you find that your domain name information doesn’t list anyone in your organization, start trying to contact those who are listed. A reputable internet company will not try to block your being listed as registrant. You should also have login information for your registrar in case you decide to move your domain or modify any of it’s parameters.

A little investigation on the status of your domain name can save you lots of headaches. It’s not unusual for this vital bit of information to get lost as most businesses initiallly buy 2-4 years of registration and then forget about it. Making sure someone in your organization is listed as the registrant contact is much easier than trying to re-establish your authority to use a domain name if it expires and no one in your company gets the renewal notice.

When we redesigned our site last January, I decided we needed a blog. Something for me to write my thoughts in and hopefully share a little insight into our company. I had visions of including tutorials, comments about technology, and trends in web development and design. Looking at the pitiful number of entries, it is plain that didn’t happen! I could use the excuse of being too busy, but honestly I just am too picky about my writing.

So for better or worse, I am going to try to make at least one entry per month for the rest of 2007. It’s a modest goal and, hey! Looks like January’s entry is complete! 

Our recent work for Ticon Properties presented us with a challenging problem: the efficient display of floor plans. Many real estate sites display floor plans by having them display in pop-up windows. After launching a few of these, a visitor’s desktop can become littered with pop-up windows making comparisons between plans problematic. We felt that the plans should appear on the same page to allow comparisons, but traditional coding methods could only achieve this by reloading the page each time another floor plan was requested.

Designer Chris Sloan began to look for a solution and soon “discovered” AJAX. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is a relatively new technology which was developed to make interactive web sites seem more responsive. Basically it utilizes the JavasScript XMLHttpRequest object to communicate with a server without the reloading of a page to display new content. In the Ticon site, it allowed us to load requested floor plans without having to reload the other elements on the page. Here’s what Sloan has to say about AJAX:

“With AJAX being a new technology, there is still a lot of buzz going around. Here at Imp Designs, we are just waiting to hear what Jakob Neilsen will cry and whine about with AJAX! As for right now, many people are praising the use of AJAX. Apple Computer utilizes AJAX found in some of their new applications and Google uses it with both their GMail email client and their mapping API. Many developers are creating “tool kits” to help the ease of interacting with the XMLHttpRequest object. A great tool kit that we have used is called SAJAX.  SAJAX is OpenSource BSD and takes care of all the code for different browser support, connecting to the XMLHttpRequest object, and processing the functions you pass to it through the server-side scripting language.  If you are at an intermediate level with JavaScript and your choice of server-side programming, a good tutorial on how to get started with AJAX can be found here. This will show you how to call the XMLHttpRequest object and gives examples of the JavaScript functions to process your server-side functions.

“There are many possibilities where AJAX can be used. I am finding out more about AJAX each time I work with it. As a web designer, I feel that AJAX is a great tool to help the web progress forward with usability standards.”

Every week I receive resumes from aspiring designers. They tend to fall into one of three categories: the e-mail with a Word doc attachment, the elaborate package with novelties, and the e-mail with a .pdf and/or web link.

The e-mail with Word doc variety get a reply e-mail explaining that I prefer to see examples of work and creative abilities. The classic resume format of objectives, qualifications, education, employment and references set in Times New Roman or Arial just doesn’t say, “I’m a creative person and will be an asset to Imp Designs.” Everyone’s objective is the same (to get a job) and most new designer’s qualifications are the same (a list of programs they know). I don’t really care where or even if you went to school for design; I want to see what you can do. Employment listings only mean something if they are relevant—internships for example.

The packages always get looked over pretty thoroughly, but not necessarily right away. If we’re busy or on a tight deadline, the mailed in resumes go in a pile on the corner of my desk until the schedule eases up. When I get around to looking at them, I usually scan the material for a website link that hopefully will show more work examples. Sometimes the packages contain a little novelty; I don’t know when the trend of sending little novelties started, but I think they are mostly a waste of money. I once received a softball sized inflatable beach ball with a resume… it was cute, but what the hell does a beach ball have to do with CSS coding ability or layout skills?

So by now, you probably have figured out what I consider to be the perfect resume for getting work with Imp Designs. A brief e-mail with a link to a website is my favorite. No matter how busy I am, I tend to click that link out of curiosity. I can look over the site in an instant and get a feel for the applicant’s coding, design, and organizational style and abilities. The .pdf attachment works for me as well, especially if the .pdf has been properly compressed and includes a link to a website!

Whatever format you decide on, make sure you proof it before sending out that e-mail blast. A resume with clumsy grammar or misspellings has to have some AMAZING graphics attached to it to escape the trash can. My two favorite “bad” resumes both involved misspellings. One applicant sent me an email proclaiming her “attentoin to detail” as being her biggest asset. Another, in an attempt to display his ability to handle responsibility, wrote of his duties as a night manager. “I am responsible for the nightly depositits,” he wrote. Depositits? Now THAT sounds like an interesting job!

I’m not sure if it’s real or imagined, but there seems to be a glut of articles in trade journals recently discussing how graphic design firms often neglect their own marketing. Imp Designs has been getting more web development work than print design work of late, and our old website didn’t reflect our abilities. All those articles seemed to be nagging at me to do something, so I decided it was time for a good old-fashioned redesign.

A complete redesign of any website can be a big undertaking. This redesign was particularly challenging because I wanted to experiment with ExpressionEngine, a content management system. Designer Brian Herring accepted the challenge of mastering the EE software and seemed willing to subject himself to my half sentence descriptions of the “look” I wanted. I’m a big fan of the neo-retro, ‘60’s pop art look (probably the result of too many Saturdays watching the Jetsons) so that’s the graphic direction Brian took.

We wanted a site that would showcase our portfolio and help potential clients learn how we work. Brian and I spent a considerable amount of time looking through website galleries like CSS Beauty, CSS Vault, and Style Gala for features we wanted to include. Two sites seemed to jump out at us; Weightshift because of how the portfolio worked, and Happy Cog because, well, it’s Jeffrey Zeldman!—and the text tells great stories.

Last of all, I wanted to add this blog. I’ve become a huge fan of Veerle Pieters’ blog; it’s entertaining, educational and inspiring. If you’ve never seen her site, I strongly recommend a visit. Veerle’s articles on CSS, her approach to color, and the tutorials have been a constant source of inspiration. I can only hope this blog can be half as “impressive” as hers!

Welcome to the new and improved website of Imp Designs, and to our online journal, Impressive Blog. Pardon our dust while we clean up some little things from the renovation.

Our new website is powered by ExpressionEngine, a content management system released by pMachine. We’ve been very impressed with ExpressionEngine’s flexibility and ease of use. They’ve just released ExpressionEngine Core, a free version for personal use.

The new website has been designed to focus on our broad portfolio of services and to provide more information on the stories behind the projects. The website has been launched in conjunction with a brand new logo, celebrating the evolution of our company over the past year.