Impressive Designs

“Hello sir, my name is Joseph,” said the very un-Joseph sounding individual. “I’m representing [insert impressive sounding non-company name here] and I’d like to speak with whoever is in charge of your website.”

“Well, Joseph, that’d be me,” I replied.

“Sir, our company has authorized me to offer you an exclusive opportunity to increase the performance of your website. For a limited time I can offer you tremendous discounts on our ground breaking technology. For only....”

“Excuse me… Joseph, is it?”

“Yes sir, I am Joseph...”

“Joseph, have you even looked at our website?”

“Um. Excuse me sir?”

“Have you seen our website? I’m just wondering because I believe a company as important as yours should be sure of who they’re doing business with. I mean, how can you be sure your ground-breaking product will work on our website?”

The sound of furious clicking comes to me over the phone as poor Joseph tries in vain to circumvent the proxy access his cubicle has to the internet. “Um, sir… I’m uh… having a little problem here...”

“We’re not just a name on a list are we, Joseph?”

“Um, well sir… to be honest...”

“...Because I’m not sure I could be persuaded to do business with a company that doesn’t take the time to get to know their possible clients.”

“Well… um… I could take you off our calling list...”

“WHAT!? Take me off your list? Why would you do THAT?”

“Um… I didn’t intend to bother you sir… I just have you on my list and...”

“SO! Now we’re not good enough for you?”

“Sir, I never… “

“WELL. If we’re not good enough for you… if you’re SO willing to hastily remove us from your calling list, then I think that’s JUST what you should do. GOOD DAY, sir.”

My only regret is that I haven’t the skill to deliver the last line in a clipped, proper British accent. 

I met with a new prospect this week and their story about their previous web firm inspired me to create this list. If you’re a web development company and you’d like to drive your clients to Imp Designs, be sure to follow this list of practices carefully.

Tell your clients they can’t have access to their files. Nothing makes a client happier to move to Imp Designs than being told that their site files are held in a magic box on the internet that they may never have access to. Make sure to point out that they are obviously incompetent about the web or they wouldn’t have hired you in the first place. At Imp Designs, we gladly give our clients full access to their hosting account. We educate our clients about what they can freely edit and what they may need us to edit. If our clients inadvertently break the site, we bill them to fix it… but in the end it’s our operating philosophy that our clients own their website; we are just the site’s caretaker.

Completely ignore your client’s input about their business. We love working with clients that have worked with ‘know it all’ web firms. The ‘know it all’ firm already knows everything about every business ever created and can shoehorn any business into a cookie cutter web solution. Imp Designs feels every business has unique qualities and goals and that their website should reflect these qualities and function to attain these goals.

When you don’t know how to do something, tell your clients that what they are requesting is stupid. Yessiree, nothing like hiding a weakness with bluster. At Imp Designs we believe in honest answers to clients’ requests. If we are asked to perform a task that we’ve never done before, we ask for a day or two to research and then reply with an informed response.

Use lots of catch phrases, technical terminology and buzzwords to describe what you’re doing. Nothing endears your client to Imp Designs like making them feel really stupid. We can geek-speak with the best of them (it’s a hobby), but as Jerrod our code ninja says, “Sometimes people just want the sausage. They don’t care how it’s made.” We realize not everyone shares our passion for high tech geekery, so we’ve learned to identify the eyes glazing over stare that goes with “I don’t really care about that” and will quickly switch to simplify mode.

Deliver a poorly coded product and demand more money to fix the flaws. An extremely effective device for driving your clients to Imp Designs is to deliver a site with broken links and malfunctioning scripts and then state boldly that you require additional funds to fix the site. This is a proven method for ridding yourself of pesky, gotta have their site working, demanding clients.

Tell your client that Internet Explorer 6 compatibility is just something you won’t do… regardless of their site visitor stats. There isn’t another web firm in the business that will be happier than Imp Designs the day IE 6 dies a gruesome death. We plan to have a day long party on the happy day that we officially discontinue IE 6 support. But the fact of the matter is that some market niches don’t upgrade equipment very quickly. If you refuse to support a browser that a significant number of your client’s target audience uses, please help them out by sending them our way. We’ll grit our teeth and make it happen.

I hope you find the above tips helpful in your quest to drive clients to Imp Designs!

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!

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!