Distilled Thoughts

What is Good Design?

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 13:53:00 GMT

A lot of people (clients, employees, partners) still think of website design in mainly an aesthetic paradigm. In reality, that's a small fraction of the equation. Good agencies know how to make a mental (or at least a documented) inventory of every aspect of a system and then bring them together into a cohesive experience.

Good design accommodates:

Aesthetics
Usability
Story-telling
Hierarchy
Simplicity
Efficiency
And much more

Want to learn more about the reality of design? Check out this great tutorial by Wells Riley.

Great Custom Homes For Sale

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

We web designers/developers like to use analogies for our work. We also tend to choose whichever analogy serves us at any given moment.

One of the most common analogies I hear is a comparison between designing websites and building custom homes. Both involve architecture. Both rely on best practices to end up with a good product. And both cost a lot more than buying a pre-fab version.

But I don't hear many web designers bringing up the custom home analogy when clients start asking for changes to the look and feel of the designs presented to them. Instead, the analogy changes to something like, "When a mechanic tells you that you need a new engine gasket, do you tell him to change your tires instead? When your doctor tells you you need penicillin to cure your condition, do you instead demand a Ritalin prescription?"

Why do they switch analogies? Because we all know the answer to, "Would you tell your home architect that you want the kitchen design to be bigger? Would you ask her to move the laundry room to the second floor? Would you ask him to change the way the entrance flows?" Of course they would - it happens every day and for good reason!

This analogy-swap sounds like a self-serving tactic, but what these designers should really do is stick to their guns. The custom home analogy is good because it works consistently. But, there is a fundamental difference between a custom home and a custom website: the audience. Dictating the design of a home in which you (and only you "the family") must live is perfectly reasonable. Dictating the design/functionality/architecture of a website that is built to serve thousands of people not including yourself, however, goes against the policy of user-centricity.

If you're in the business of deploying websites that make your clients successful, defend yourself and your designs (better yet, back up your theories through some real-world A/B testing). If your clients can't get past their own personal desires, terminate the project and sell them Photoshop training instead.

Distill is looking for an interactive designer/developer

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:57:00 GMT

Distill has an immediate opening for a contract interactive designer and front-end developer. This role could evolve into a full-time opportunity for the right candidate.

If you're considering a career as an agency executive or high-value freelancer, this role will teach you the ideal methodologies for maximizing service quality, happy clients and healthy profit margins.

This role will span the website design and development lifecycle: strategy and information architecture, creative design, content engineering and CMS integration. However, the primary duties will be limited to creative design, content engineering and front-end coding. The position will include some client interaction.

Candidate Requirements:

At least 2 years' experience writing HTML and CSS mark-up
At least 2 years' experience working with JavaScript (jQuery preferred)
Knowledge of grid/fluid/responsive/CSS layouts and frameworks
A clean and progressive creative design style (formal art training preferred)
Experience with Adobe Business Catalyst preferred
An efficient working style
A self-motivated personality
Ability to speak and write clearly and confidently

Other Details:

Candidate can work on-site or remotely
Hourly rate is $35-65/hour, depending on skills and experience
Must have own computer and Dreamweaver/Photoshop licenses
Contract is 30-40 hours per week

To apply, please submit your online portfolio, resume and/or sample work links here.

The Client Comes Second

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:46:00 GMT

There's an interesting perspective illustrated in Walter Isaacson's new biography of Steve Jobs. In it, the author recalls the story of Jobs selecting famed designer Paul Rand (he made the logos for IBM, ABC and UPS) for the creation of a logo for his post-Apple computer company. Jobs asked Rand to present several options for the new logo, to which Rand replied that he would not create options.

"I will solve your problem, and you will pay me," he told Jobs. "You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me."

(Quoted from the book)

When I first entered this field, I designed websites without really asking clients what they expected in the look-and-feel. I did it that way because I didn't know any better.

After several years in design, I heard about a practice called the "design discovery," which used a series of exercises and surveys to uncover the tastes and desires of the client. I immediately assumed that this was a superior workflow, adopted it at my agency and used it for several years.

Eventually, I became familiar enough with the concept of graphic design that I realized I had it right the first time. Why ask clients what colors, photos, textures and styles they like? It's typically irrelevant to the outcome. A website isn't for your client, it's for your client's customers.

We, as the experts, should be leveraging our insight, experience and intuition to design the best solution for the problem. Certainly, much of that insight should come from studying the client's customers, but surveying clients and providing options only serves to let the them dictate the outcome based on their personal tastes.

If our solutions are good, we will, like Paul Rand, find plenty more clients willing to pay for them. If our solutions are bad, the problem will take care of itself.

Agencies Should Stop Designing Websites

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:35:00 GMT

Long before I was a web programmer and even longer before I was an agency owner, I entered this industry as a graphic designer. Art is in my blood. In elementary school, my classmates would gather around my desk and watch me draw pictures instead of creating their own. In high school, I didn't even have to complete my assignments -- teachers would ace my work because they assumed I'd made something good. But even after a lifetime of art appreciation, I think the time has come for agencies to stop designing websites from scratch. Let me tell you why.

It's the natural progression of our industry.

Not too long ago, every part of a website was created from scratch. The look and feel, the HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript... even the content management systems that power the site. Gradually, the codebases were replaced with proven 3rd-party frameworks. First, agencies like mine moved away from their proprietary CMS platforms in favor of systems like Business Catalyst, Drupal, WordPress and many others. Next, handwritten JavaScript was trumped by flexible libraries from jQuery, Yahoo and Google. Then, open-source CSS resets and grid-based HTML models started popping up in many well-programmed sites.

The only virgin territory left was creative design. And it may have remained so indefinitely if it weren't for a disruptive invention called the "blog." Because blogging platforms were aimed at non-programmers, the look-and-feel of the blog sites had to be as easy to personalize as the content. Enter the Theme. Now site publishers could create a great-looking site, choosing from thousands of available layout templates. Some of them were wonderfully-designed. Some sucked. But, their use wasn't going to be limited to aspring media moguls -- even major news outlets were running their sites on these 3rd-party themes. With the demonstrated optimization of their code, it was hard to justify starting from scratch.

With custom backgrounds, icons, typefaces and logo, a template website can look professional and be unrecognizable as a 3rd-party theme.

With so many major sites within the blog category running on great-looking 3rd-party templates, can we really expect this practice to not expand into other mainstream categories, such as corporate sites, microsites, landing pages and beyond? Not when you consider these benefits:

Third-Party templates are coded better

No matter how much time and care you put into coding a custom design, you won't know how buggy it is until it's been released to the world. It's simply impossible to adequately test for every possible browser/version/platform combination.

Third-party themes, on the other hand, frequently have hundreds of websites already running on them, and you can see support forums with numerous issue threads, where obscure bugs have been uncovered and resolved. Not on your dime, but on theirs.

Further, knowing that their code will be subject to feedback from an enormous developer community, theme developers tend to use best practices for resets, libraries, optimization and conventions.

Lastly, many of today's themes come with responsive layouts, automatically serving up a device-optimized version of your site to PCs, tablets and smartphones.

The modular architecture of most good themes allows for more flexible layouts

Another great thing about most good themes is that they try to accommodate the many different needs that developers will have when implementing them. Page templates typically include options for anywhere from 1 to 5 columns, various sidebar call-outs, alternate home page layouts, tabbed content, data table formats and beyond. If your client needs to launch with 3 featured services on their home page, but then adds a fourth in the following month, all it takes is a simple swap of the CSS class -- no Photoshop work or messing with the stylesheets.

Third-Party templates save you time and money

If all other factors were equal, it would still seem beneficial to design websites from scratch. But, considering the fact that a 5-star theme from ThemeForest.com looks and works better than 99% of the sites on the Internet, costs $15-20 for all mark-up, a dozen or more page templates, Photoshop source files and free support, and can be downloaded in less than 60 seconds, the value is clear. Whether you've selected a specific theme that you want to implement or just want to pay less than $100 to have 5 great options to present to a client, 3rd-party templates are a fantastic resource.

Creativity can be expressed in the strategy

All of this isn't to say that our designers should be fired and everything should turn cookie cutter. There's still plenty of room -- and need -- for creativity in every project. Unique styles, including branding, colors, background images, photography, icons and fonts must be customized. Even more importantly, the overall strategy for the site and its associated marketing must be established. This means social media marketing, search strategies, email marketing, messaging and so on. At the end of the day, it's these decisions that really matter, not the layout of a website. Leading ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky makes no secret of the fact that they've outsourced much of their award-winning web development over the years. Why? Because their clients know that it's not the execution of the deliverables that require real talent -- it's coming up with the concept.

When customized correctly, themes can be just as unique as most custom designs

Some people are reluctant to use 3rd-party themes because they believe their sites won't be unique enough. What they don't realize is that good themes don't like themes -- they just look like websites. And with over a quarter of a billion sites on the web today, even a popular theme (1,000 implementations) is statistically unlikely to ever be seen by the same person twice. Factor in the ability to easily customize these templates and the chances of ever picking a theme out of a lineup is extremely unlikely, except to the very trained eye.

In other words

Once you learn how to separate the great themes from the rest, you can save yourself (and/or your clients) thousands of dollars in custom design time and shave weeks (sometimes months) off the project lifecycle.

At the end of the day, the client ends up with a beautiful design and clean, tested, proven code, written to the latest standards. And if you think happy clients and great results stifle your creative spirit, you might need to adjust your perception of art.

Why You Should Pay As Much As Possible For Your Website

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 05:40:00 GMT

Everyone loves a good deal. Groupon, Black Friday, yard sales and a flatlined housing market. But when is a great price not a good deal? When you're paying for a service that has yet to be performed.

When you buy a new iPhone, you know exactly what you'll be getting. So why not pay $99 for it instead of paying $599? It's the same phone either way, right? While this argument works for consumer products, it doesn't hold true for many services. And if you're not careful about your frugality, you may find that your bottom-dollar negotiations do more harm than good.

Let's take your website as an illustration. I (and my agencies, more specifically) have designed and developed hundreds of them over the past 15 years. Our budgets for these projects have ranged from a few hundred dollars each to annual retainers exceeding $1 million each. And can you guess which clients got the most attention, the most creativity and the most bang for their buck? You guessed it -- the ones who didn't beat us up on price.

Einstein Bros' budget allowed us to focus on the details of extending their stores' feel to their website.

This concept certainly isn't limited to web design, though there are certain services where it may not apply. Tooth whitening, sprinkler blow-outs and drywall repair, for example, are likely to have the same result whether you pay full price or half price. The difference comes from the creativity and discretion inherent in the delivery of some services and not others. With web design/development, for example, the work doesn't start until the price has been established. And that price sets the tone for the execution of the service.

When I write a proposal for a new website for a prospect, I offer a fair price and a quality solution. I know how much effort is required to fulfill the project well and I price accordingly. If the prospect pushes back on that price, I begin suggesting ways to remove features and complexity from the project scope to reduce the cost. Often, this solves the problem. Occasionally, though, a prospect wants to keep all the features but pay less for them. This is where things get risky for both parties.

First, remember that agencies have limited manpower. While adding designers/developers is always an option, it typically doesn't (and shouldn't) happen quickly enough to affect pending, tight-timeline projects. So, the question for the agency basically becomes, "should we push other, full-price, work so that we can do this work for a lower hourly rate?" Aside from friends/family projects and charity work, the answer is typically "no."

If the agency does decide to take the work, for whatever reason, the price paid by the client will become a factor throughout every step of delivery. Few other services involve as many decision points, where a feature can be designed myriad ways and those decisions can result in a feature that is somewhere between acceptable and awesome.

Should we use standard web-safe fonts or enhance the design with embedded fonts?
Should we use standard content management features for this section of the site or build a custom, user-friendly feature for the client?
Should the "Contact Us" page have a phone number to call or can we include an interactive lead form that builds the client's marketing database and gives visitors a 24x7 method for reaching out?
Should we simply include a link to the Facebook fan page or integrate social widgets throughout the site to maximize viral visibility?

Designers, developers and agency teams are universally conditioned to base most of those decisions on the project budget. If the client paid full price, the tendency will be to complete the feature the best way possible. If the budget was negotiated to a minimum level, the tendency will be to complete the task as cheaply as possible -- typically omitting desirable aspects.

Designers and developers get a lot of satisfaction from delivering superior solutions, but rarely at the expense of their paychecks. This isn't a matter of integrity -- I'm not suggesting for a second that I would ever deliver less than what I promise. What I'm saying is that good designers/developers like projects with fair budgets because it allows them to go above and beyond without worrying about paying the bills.

If you think you've found a designer/developer who is really good, but who works for a lower fee because they have a lighter workload, you may be disappointed with the results they generate (there's probably a reason they don't have much work). If you use your wife's nephew because he'll do it for free, you may find yourself in the same situation as many of the clients who have come to me with a story of how they tried exactly the same thing (such projects never turn out well).

Instead of trying to negotiate a junior pay rate with a senior consultant, revisit your project wish-list and remove the items that aren't essential to the success of the website. I've seen wish-lists where 80% of the time necessary covers features that will generate 5% of the return-on-investment. Focus. Keep it simple. Build the essentials and let their success fund future enhancements.

At the end of the day, the lessons we've learned from other industries apply to website design and development:

You'll get what you pay for.
GOOD WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT ISN'T CHEAP. CHEAP WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT ISN'T GOOD.

Become the Hottest Agency In Town

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 06:00:00 GMT

What's truly unique about your agency? The services you provide? The creative you produce? The results you achieve? The awards you've won? Nah. Those things can certainly bring attention your way, but all good agencies have similar stories, so yours probably aren't that unusual. The only thing that's truly unique about your agency is its personality. And whether it's hip or not, it's the only thing that you can use to generate huge buzz, immediately.

A client of my first agency once said, “Working with Creation Chamber is like working with a bunch of robots.” As a company, our attitude was very much “Let’s get the job done and done well.” While that’s a valuable attitude (we were, after all, the hottest agency in town), we reached a point where we found it necessary to evolve by also making our services fun, engaging, educational and unique. In short, increasing our value-add. So, I spent some time drafting a basic structure for what I called our "Experience Process."

The Experience Process

Experience Marketing is a term that started gaining attention several years ago. It refers primarily to a set of practices that allow a player in an otherwise commoditized (or soon to be commoditized) market to continue to price itself above its competition by increasing the value (or perceived value) of its offerings. Web development continues to evolve into more of a commodity and that's a trend that you can buck for your agency. By making your services more of an 'experience' than a 'process,' you can alter effects of commoditization for your business.

In the brainstorming session, I introduced a concept called E³. This is a program I was taught by a previous employer, who happened to be a former CFO for Eli Lilly (one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies). The 3 Es stand for Educate, Excite and Expand and they are currently defined for us as:

» Educate

Educate customers about the Web and about maximizing the results of their projects.

» Excite

Build excitement for your services and capabilities by engaging clients in a fun and unique experience.

» Expand

Expand the opportunities for repeat business through long-term client strategy and evolution of clients' systems.

I used E³ as the backbone for our experience/process, but I relied heavily on the input of the team for ideas on how to build that strategy. The initial session was a true brainstorm (scroll to the bottom of this post to download the notes) -- everyone throwing out all ideas (good, bad, ugly) to get the juices flowing for subsequent strategy sessions. To give the team a few very basic examples of experience marketing, I offered some teasers:

Kick-off meetings: we need to give away Creation Chamber schwagg, meet in more fun places (roof top patio, on a Frontier jet, on Invesco Field, etc… any place that will provide inspiration for the client in question), start with some warm-up games/exercises, special guests/speakers -- Paul Rudd (his sister was one of our account executives) -- more toys, food, drinks and white-boarding. The Art of Innovation (Ideo.com) is a great book on such things. And what about a Creation Chamber reality show, a la The Restaurant, Wing Nuts, American Chopper, Airline, etc.?
We need to provide a better description of how we do what we do. Right now, our strategy with clients is "sit back and enjoy the ride… we'll let you know when you need to do something." It would be better for everyone if clients were educated on our process at the beginning, so that they understood what was waiting around the corner.
During projects: we could spend more play time with our clients… take them to games, out for drinks, to an AMA luncheon, etc.
End of projects: Big launch parties (again, at cool venues), great gifts, Dom Perignon, all project files delivered on DVD with a machined titanium disc case featuring our laser-etched logo.

Use Other Industries For Inspiration

Experience marketing is all around us:

Bananas foster prepared tableside
Hot nightclub vs. hole-in-the-wall pub
Listening to an MP3 vs. seeing the band in concert
Benihana
Las Vegas
Would you prefer to share 3 Honda Accords for a bachelor(ette) party or take a limo?

For another good example, consider Southwest Airlines. They’re known for their clever and humorous versions of the standard pre-flight announcements. “Welcome aboard Southwest Flight XXX, to YYY. To operate your seatbelt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seatbelt, and if you don’t know how to operate one, you probably shouldn’t be out in public unsupervised. In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child traveling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are traveling with two small children, decide now which one you love more."

Take every component of your process, validate that it’s effective and then convert from a task into a memorable experience.

Obviously, you can get really silly with some ideas, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Your primary objective will be to come up with ideas that enhance the quality of your process, but you can also make changes that simply increase the fun of the experience. After all, not many of your clients have jobs as interesting as yours, so the more you make their experience enjoyable, the more likely they are to spend future dollars with you. Plus, clients who have fun will tell their friends about it, and that leads to more clients for you.

Take-Aways

There are only 2 ways that you can be successful in this business:

Produce amazing results for your clients
Provide an amazing experience for your clients

The first requires having the right people on your team, having the right opportunities to put your team's skills to work and having a strong process. Most importantly, it can take years of such work to build a portfolio that demonstrates your agency's value.

Understanding your agency's true personality and injecting it into everything you do -- from pre-sales to post-launch (and internally) -- can be accomplished now. A great experience doesn't require 12 months of analytics after you release a site -- clients (and employees) will tell others about it the day it happens. You'll build buzz -- and more importantly, value -- immediately. And you'll be amazed at how quickly word spreads about your agency.

Downloads

Still not sure how this could actually be put into practice? Get the juices flowing by downloading the original Creation Chamber brainstorming notes my team came up with in '07 (as usual, unedited):

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*****

I'm curious: how have you used experience marketing to generate buzz for your operation? Chime in through the comments below!

Building an Agency is Easy - If You Have a Documented Vision

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The most important part of starting an agency is having a good vision. With my first 2 agencies, that vision was lacking, primarily because it's considered inappropriate to communicate a vision that consists primarily of "I want to sell this company for as much money as possible." With Distill, I wanted to do things differently.

For starters, I wanted to build the agency without the desire to sell it down the road. That would allow me to focus on establishing a great infrastructure, process and culture. This wasn't just a mind-trick; I really have no intentions of selling Distill, ever.

Next, I sat down and brainstormed the concepts that I thought knew would make that vision a reality. Here's the actual, original, unedited document that resulted from that brainstorm:

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Reading back through this document today, what I find most interesting is that it describes Distill perfectly (except for the part about revenue split with Brandon). After a year and a half, it's still how I run the company. And even without reading that document once during the past year, I just managed to build a blog and (phil)osophy that is perfectly aligned with the ideas I jotted down 18 months earlier.

My point is this: when you start (or reinvent) your agency, begin with a well-conceived vision. Write that vision down. Share it with others. If it's truly a viable vision that's congruent with your personal values, you won't have to work to achieve it -- it will just happen.

*****

What are your thoughts? Don't just sit back and read... tell the rest of us what your vision for your agency is. Use the comments field below. -P

Essential Concepts for Building a Fulfilling Agency

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 06:00:00 GMT

It’s pretty easy to find advice on starting and growing a web development operation these days, but it seems to revolve primarily around a unique kind of agency: one that doesn’t have to worry about launching sites in our lifetime. There are so many complex strategies, formulas, philosophies and Extreme Iterative Agile Spiral Scrums that it would almost seem that being really successful in this business is beyond the reach of most of us.

But, I know that’s not the case. I’ve spent the past decade building agencies ranging in size from 1 person to 70 people. And while financial performance of these groups has varied over 10 years, I’ve always known how to be successful. It’s not through size, complexity or popularity. It’s a simple formula that addresses each discipline within the operation and it must begin with a solid foundation. Here are a few recommendations to establish your own foundation, based on my experience.

1. Figure out if you’re a strong manager or a “rugged individualist”.

Being able to effectively lead a team is a worthwhile pursuit, but if you’re not good at it or simply don’t have the motivation to deal with with employee drama, you won’t be doing anyone any favors by assembling a team before you’re ready. The larger you grow your agency, the more you need to embrace the challenges of human resources. Do you enjoy those challenges or are you more effective being responsible only for your own performance? This is no time to sing the praises of teamwork. Instead, decide whether your past coworkers have generally inspired you or annoyed you. If it’s the latter, you may want to consider the growing industry of independent contracting. It’s typically not as glorifying (sometimes it is), but it can offer equivalent income and truly does afford the kind of freedom and flexibility that other people only dream about.

There was a time when being an independent contractor meant that you had to do your own sales. Today, “sales” frequently consists of having your buddies recommend you for freelance work at the agencies where they work or simply presenting a few solid project case studies to local shops (Most are outsourcing these days).

2. Grow for prudence, not ego.

It’s a common misconception that the larger your agency is, the more you’ll make as an owner. Revenue means little if you can’t get your team to turn a profit, so focus on quality, not quantity. You may be able to bill $100,000 a year as an independent consultant, but the moment you bring on 4 employees with total annual compensation (salary, health/dental, taxes, unemployment insurance, 401k matching, equipment, and operational costs) of $75,000 each, you may find that you can only keep them 85% billable and that you yourself are only 30% billable because of your management responsibilities. After increasing your billable staff size by 400%, you’re now personally making $30,000 less than when you worked by yourself. Once you start adding non-billable staff (sales reps, receptionist, managers, etc.) and factor in increased recruiting and training costs and you’ll see that profit-per-employee drop consistently -- unless you have a very strong operation.

As Seth Godin points out in his article "An Atomic Theory of Business Size", expanding your agency is not a smooth growth curve -- there are thresholds at which the rules you've been operating under simply break down with one incremental change to your structure.

It’s a fact that a big difference between an independent contractor and an actual agency is that the agency can be sold down the road, resulting in a bigger payday if you own a substantial portion of your entity. If this is your vision, then you may consider lower compensation up-front an investment in your potential sale in the future. This is a worthy pursuit that I have shared over the years, but it should still not drive your growth. Grow for prudence.

3. Reconsider your desire to have partners.

Sharing risk with partners can ease the pressure of entrepreneurship and partners may offer skills that you don’t have. But, they can also take a huge share of your profits and stunt your progress as an agency if your visions are not always aligned. It’s been said that “When two men in a business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.” I would add “When two partners in a business frequently disagree, neither of them will be effective.”

4. If you decide to have partners, plan for the worst.

Business partnerships are a lot like marriages: both require patience, compromise and trust -- and both fail frequently. But unlike marriages, no partner automatically has the ability to end a business partnership; dissolving a business entity typically requires unanimous consent. In other words, if one owner is content to maintain an unfriendly partnership with you, there may be nothing you can do about it.

Ask your attorney about shareholder agreement stipulations such as the buy/sell clause (Typically, any partner can offer to buy out another and that offer must be accepted or counter-offered at a higher level, resulting in a guaranteed and fair exit for any partner.), deadlock resolutions (if partners cannot reach a consensus, the entity is dissolved) and other “stalemate” protections. These are common stipulations, but they are not automatic -- you need to include them in your agreement.

Even better, try to avoid “equal partners.” Sharing ownership 50/50 with another shareholder is a risky bet. While it can be tempting to show how fair the arrangement is by splitting ownership equally (or even worse, having Co-CEOs), this frequently results in stalemates: disagreements that cannot be resolved because nobody is officially in charge. If it makes it easier, require that the 51% partner earn the extra equity and power by requiring him/her to contribute more to the seed funding, carry more responsibilities or agree to swap positions on your next joint venture.

Lastly, consider your corporate structure. Income pass-through entities like S-Corporations can save you money on taxes, but they can also be a huge liability for owners who aren’t in control of disbursements. Any profits in such entities are considered taxable income for all shareholders in relation to their equity, but there is no automatic requirement for companies to actually distribute those profits. Therefore, you may have to pay taxes on $100,000 of income you never actually receive (this is referred to as "phantom income").

Again, such scenarios can be planned for in strong shareholder/partnership agreements. Don’t skimp on legal fees at this stage or it’s likely to bite you later.

5. Build a strong process through simplicity, not complexity.

Many agencies believe that a complicated delivery methodology is the best way to ensure quality. When their process breaks down (i.e. a client complains), they try to plug that hole in their process with even more complexity. Sometimes that involves forking their process into several different variations to accommodate semi-unique project types. Other times it means adding more decision points to an already bloated flowchart. Remember that complexity is not a prerequisite to success, but common sense is. Instead of documenting a process so comprehensive that asking employees to memorize it is like asking Christians to memorize the bible, build a simple flow around your core values and then train your team to accurately interpret those values as they complete their work (read the free audio book “Tribal Leadership,” offered by Zappos.com - http://www.zappos.com/tribal.zhtml). Instead of having separate processes for “Website Redesign,” “Static Website Design and Development” and “CMS Website Design and Development,” have a universal set of project tasks and have the entire project team eliminate unnecessary tasks during each project kick-off. You’ll probably find that this results in far more than 3 static variations of your process and the deliverables for each project will be based more on reality and less on assumptions.

Summary

Starting an agency is a relatively easy and very exciting way to practice entrepreneurship. But, don’t let that enthusiasm trick you into building your business on poorly-planned decisions. They can make the difference between having an established operation in 5 years or starting from scratch in 5 years. Be honest with yourself about your personality, plan for the worst-case scenario and execute strategically.

And trust me on the partners.

******

What do you think are the *most* important things to consider when starting out in this business? Chime in through the comments below!

Stop Wire Framing and Start Prototyping

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Seven years ago, I used my agency's proprietary CMS to establish an efficient process for prototyping all of our projects instead of creating PDF wire frames. Since then, I've fine-tuned this concept to save thousands of dollars on each project, while simultaneously benefiting the delivery of sites in numerous ways. This walk-through demonstrates the basics of the proven methodology.

Stop Wire Framing and Start Prototyping from Phillip Lockwood on Vimeo.

The Prerequisites of Prototyping

To take full advantage of this methodology, your projects should conform to a few prerequisites:

The information architect / interaction designer needs to be capable of using your chosen CMS platform.
The project needs to ultimately be deployed on that platform (this process works regardless, but to realize the full benefits of time savings and increased profits, you should build the site on that platform)
Your site should be HTML/CSS/JS-based for the most part. Full-Flash sites won't see the same benefits of the process.

Your Process When Prototyping

By replacing traditional wire framing with prototyping, your new process should look something like this:

Discovery (research and strategy)
Site Mapping
Prototyping
Creative Design
Integrate the Creative Design into the CMS
Final Testing and Configuration
Launch

Notice that there is no longer a "Development" phase. It has become one and the same with wire framing.

The Benefits of Prototyping

As you'll see in the video, there are some major benefits to replacing traditional wire framing with prototyping on the production platform:

Clients comprehend prototypes more easily than they do static wire frames.
The prototype can be used for efficient usability testing.
The prototype IS your final codebase, so you are essentially eliminating an entire phase (the development phase) from your project timeline.
Because the site is developed before creative design even begins, bugs are discovered and resolved earlier.
Because the site -- including the CMS -- is developed before creative design begins, you (or your clients) can be busy inputting content during the creative design phase, further shortening the project lifecycle.
By combining the "wire framing" and development phases, you have dramatically increased your profit margin and/or reduced the price you have to charge the client.

*****

This isn't a theory; I've been using this process for 7 years with great success. It has literally saved me tens of thousands of dollars and impresses the hell out of my clients. That said, I'd love to hear your thoughts... do you see potential shortcomings with using this process in your projects? If so, chime in through the comments below. Chances are, I've encountered the same challenges and found solutions!

All About Honeymoons

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:00:00 GMT

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