It’s been a while since my last post. Mostly due to the sorry internal state of this blog I have shut her down until I complete the Standardzilla redesign (which is coming along nicely). I have dozens of drafts sitting around, waiting to be released but I thought it better to wait.

But, this I have to get out, redesign or not. Cheryl and I (of Molt:n Digital) are glad to be part of new agency pinch/zoom.

Founded by Brian Fling, a ten year veteran mobile designer and author of the upcoming O’Reilly book Mobile Design & Development, in 2008 as Fling Media. Along with co-founder Garrett Murray we’ve been helping companies big and small position themselves into the mobile space. We’ve since changed our name to reflect the future of interactive and invited some of our favorite people in the industry to help us define and create the future of mobile and the web as a whole.

This is pretty damn exciting for me. I have a lot of ideas about apps and mobile applications, but never a real excuse to work on many of them as day-to-day life and paid work can often get in the way of those things you want to do.

The team at pinch/zoom are pretty amazing with tonnes of collective experience under their virtual belts. I have missed working in a team environment being a recent home office orphan so getting back into the team environment (virtual or not) should be awesome.

Time to up my game, get some more damn blogs out (sorry Angus, more diary entries coming soon) and tie up these loose ends I have on my ‘to-do’ list. We have some apps to build.

I have no idea what’s going on right now. Am I being hit from the front or from behind, they just kind of jumped me. I have an estimate to do, there is some development in the works and a blank .psd file that isn’t designing itself at the moment. Oh yeah, and I am in Canada on a semi-holiday to boot.

This is the storm they all said would come. That first three months were all about calming oneself, creating that zen-like freelance self we all so desire. The morning swims, the chilled out coffee on the deck and knocking off at 6:00 pm for a glass of red… ah yes, those were the days.

But grandpa’s knee is swelling up just a bit, and that’s a bad sign.

The calm before the storm

First it was just estimates. One after another they kept coming in… first from friends or colleagues, then general cold calls and then the tyre kickers came knocking.

The estimates were a bitch at the start. There was no system at all but once we got the templates going and some sort of idea on how much to charge or how long certain jobs would take it just starting getting a bit easier.

Pretty soon I was back on the deck drinking my morning coffee (after my morning swim) whilst kicking out a few estimates per day for a few decent jobs. Pffft, who said this freelancing gig was hard?

The storm

Hold on, now we have to start working on some of these estimates (you know, the ones that actually want us to do the work!) and while that was happening we started getting more estimates and a few invites to speak at conferences… damn, where am I going to find the time for that?

It’s funny, the last 4 years I attended Web Directions I would happily shut down my computer at work (a little too happily some might add) and turn my brain into ‘conference mode’. Workshops, conference, booze-ups - repeat and rinse.

Web Directions South 2008 was a very different one for me this year. No turning into full conference mode, there was a bit of flicking back and forth all-day, all-night.

Workshop, phone call in the hall, workshop, quick email check (star some, answer two), workshop, hand out “i like code” t-shirts, go home to work late seeing I didn’t work all day, conference, hand out t-shirts, hand out t-shirts, hand out t-shirts, conference, check email… you get the point.

Damn, when did this happen? I remember days off used to be fun :-)

The umbrella, the tarp and the bus shelter

I think there is a point in freelancing that you start to figure out the tools you need, then you kind of go back to what you were doing and forget about them because that’s gonna cost money and I really, really haven’t allocated funds for those items yet.

And now, I am starting to realise I can’t get by without some of these things that other people have in their own offices, or say “you should do this or you will regret it” in recent Web Directions presentations. I am now, officially, on your page.

Accounting software, whiteboards with little magnets, post-its and pens. These may not be exactly what I need but a mixture of similar items will create a system to create a nice shelter for me to work more efficiently, with more ease and bring the throbbing vein on my forehead back into line.

Now I gotta go, I am busy… these are the diaries of a freelancer.

Sixty-nine days into freelancing and I am truly a changed man. Why? Well, I can’t really get into that right now as I am too busy at the moment (billable hours remember?) so to keep you on the edge of your seats and give you a peep into my brain, here are is my list of top 5 things that are different since I stopped working for the man.

The cat is now my co-worker, seriously.

I mentioned my blossoming relationship with the cat in a previous post but today I caught myself sneaking into my bedroom on tip toes as the cat was sleeping.

“Don’t want to wake the cat”, I thought carefully. Think about this statement for just a moment, it’s a cat, sleeping up to 18 hours a day on my bed while I work! OK, time to go visit the coffee guy down the street.

Gourmet leftovers

Leftovers are the nouveau cuisine of the budding freelancer. How long can you make them last and how varied can your week get based on the same leftovers from Sunday night? The push test, the sniff test and the straight out “man, that looks like mould” visual check can go a hell of a long way.

This weeks meals have ranged from kangaroo steak sandwiches to the simple, yet elegant chip butty.

The elastic budget

How far can we stretch this puppy? While waiting for your next paycheck you can learn some phenomenal money saving techniques. It is all true what they say about not knowing when you are going to see your next paycheck, but it’s still coming and I figure that is what counts.

I am making money everyday at the moment, but in the end it’s kind of like having stocks… until you sell them (aka ‘get paid’) you are nothing but a paper millionaire.

This doesn’t stress me out so much, but for others it could be a nightmare. Cutting out the corporate breakfasts, lunches and three o’clock coffees is seriously keeping my trips to the ATM to a minimum. Cutting out on other luxuries are creeping up organically but seem quite natural and aren’t really disrupting my life.

Coffee at home more often, eating in for dinner and getting more creative with cooking or not buying so many things until the money is actually in my possession (although I still am an Amazon junky). These things are what budget conscious people do anyway, but for some of us it takes a different reason to pickup these valuable habits.

Work clothes (or lack of them)

I am a bit pedantic about my clothing ritual in the morning and have been since high school (I didn’t wear a uniform in Canada, so you had to attempt to look cool everyday). This habit has passed right through to my adult life and I will line up my next days clothing selection at the foot of the bed ready to go so I don’t have to think in the morning.

Now it’s quite simple (although still prepared). Going out? Going to the gym? or staying home to work? I have a brown hoody that I wear in the house. This clearly means, “Staying home and working all day”, usually accompanied by my trusty UGG boots seeing it’s winter… soon to be traded in for flip-flops. This also double as my “going for coffee” hoody, although UGG boots don’t dare go out the door.

Got a meeting? or simply going for a drink? Time to go to my trusty “going out sweaters”. My sweaters are now a flag or roadmap to those in the know of what is going on in my day. One look at my clothing pile at the foot of my bed and you pretty well have me pegged for the day.

Sleeping is the new insomnia.

Yeah right you say, “A freelancer that sleeps? You must mean during the day?”. Nope, something strange has turned my normally insomniac ways into a true sleeping junkie. I have had terrible bouts with insomnia all my life. Sometimes I invite it, like when I went to university and used to work all night and think I could sleep like a normal human in the days to follow.

Most times now though, I just can’t sleep. I exercise, I got to bed at a decent hour and get up at early… all to just get to bed again at night and stare at the ceiling for hours on end fighting the thoughts in my head and trying to zone out and just get a decent nights sleep.

Ever since I started freelancing though I find I can really shut off. I get up early, go to the gym or start work right away and put in a hard day in front of the computer. Some days I knock off early but mostly around dinner time if I have a lot of work on. Then that is it, I turn off. A glass of wine or a non-techy book and my brain wants no more of it, just relaxing time.

And now I can sleep, sometimes even before midnight… who would have imagined that? These are the diaries of a freelancer…

It’s been a month or so since I ditched the corporate life and decided to head for the freelance hills, despite my previous predictions of the good and the bad of freelancing things have been surprising me day by day.

Nothing has really turned out as expected but this is not a bad thing, it’s just interesting to see how things really are on the other side once you step over that line. A friend of mine always use to quote a saying that someone told her many years ago:

It’s not bad, it’s just different.

That’s a great frame of mind to be in when you are encountering things that don’t make much sense to you. Whether you are traveling overseas, learning a new language or simply trying to start your own business these words are something I think about or occasionally pass on to others.

So what exactly is different then?

Time Management, or lack thereof

Time has a strange way of bending in the home office. Something seems to just move a lot faster and you are much more conscious of things you are doing at home, whether they are counting towards your work day or if they are in fact wasting them.

Working in the office, you could often stop working for 15 minute social stints but just because you are in the office there is something non-threatening about this distraction to your work day. At home, these minor distractions can add up and before you know it the day ends with just a blank screen and a guilty feeling festering inside you.

On the other hand, a good 3 hours sitting down tends to be better than a full eight hours in the office. This comes in bursts, but I am finding the real talent of home office efficiency is getting to know when these times are and knowing when to leave the computer and go do a load of laundry. You need to do both I find, or you can remain in a sort of limbo… getting neither home or work duties done at all.

So far I am having no issues with this, I am at my desk around 9am every morning and usually end at 6pm. I play one album on iTunes and once that finishes I go out and buy a coffee, or have lunch and break from the computer. Routine is my friend at this stage and is keeping me on track.

Social Interaction

I have never hung out with the cat so much in my life… this is true. A good session just chilling on the couch petting the cat is now equally therapeutic for us both. Any blog post or friend will tell you working from home is isolating and not to do it for too long, or you go crazy. I am starting to see the truths of these statements.

It’s easy sometimes to get bogged down in a job when you are busy and realise by the end of the day you haven’t even left the house to get the mail. When you do, everything moves a bit faster and it’s like you have lost a bit of that social edge and it’s all a bit overwhelming.

Get out of the house, this is my mantra each day. I have to go get a coffee, the mail must be gathered and hopefully I can fit in a gym visit, a journey to the shops, breakfast or a lunch with a friend or anything else that keeps me on the social norm.

Luckily, my old team was a good crew and we keep in touch and I see them almost weekly for the odd breakfast or beer and we talk shop and it gives me a bit of that corporate catch-up that keeps me in the loop. I am, I fear, that guy now. The one that left and still hangs out every Friday like he’s still on the team, I always loved bugging that guy when I worked in corporate.

Quotes, Quotes and oh, Quotes

The jobs haven’t been flooding in quite yet, but if you asked me about quotes I might have to tell you some other time. I would be too busy filling out quotes.

Something I never even considered going into this, how do we estimate a project? More importantly, how much time is invested in estimating the hours, money and work that has to be done for an individual project.

This is time consuming and I can’t tell you how surprised I am by this process. It feels as some days you just do quotes, never hear back from people and then it’s your billable hours that suffer in the end.

This is definitely a skill that would be refined over the months and years of freelancing, but the initial effort and choices of time tracking applications out there at the moment can be somewhat overwhelming. This process is all over the shop right now, crossing out certain methods as we find flaws in each of them or disagree with a joint decision on one way of doing things.

This will continue to be a pain for the next while I am guessing. It’s a pretty integral part to the whole freelance situation. Here are my prices, this is the work. Do you want my service? For now it seems to be convoluted and this needs to be answered for sanity’s sake.

The Emergency Stash

This is the last bit of advice that you would always hear about when anyone advises you on the jump to freelance. This is the advice that I will end with and stress that it is also extremely accurate and should be accounted for anytime you decide to make this jump.

I had (and have) a surplus of money to ride me that 3 months while things are slow and slowly build up over the initial stages. The reasons provided are essentially as money to allow you to live while you wait for work and don’t have a steady stream of income. You might have mouths to feed, mortgages to pay or simply iPhones to buy, whatever your vice.

Another important reason is you need to have the ability to say no to work that doesn’t suit your own needs. I may not be flooded with work at the moment, but I have also turned down a few jobs. If you can’t do this then you will end up doing work that does not reflect the whole reason you started on your own in the first place.

It’s not easy to turn down something while you are watching your bank balance steadily decline, I find it a bit nerve racking actually. But I do still feel like I am running my own show, cash or little cash and that still makes every day quite empowering as a freelancer. This is the reason I want to work like this, I want to choose what we work on.

But then again, talk to me in another month :-) These are the diaries of a freelancer…

I moved to Australia almost eight years ago. Since then I have become somewhat of a coffee connoisseur (or snob, depends on who you talk to) and no longer sit in ignorant bliss sipping back on Tim Horton’s coffee while downing a box of Timbits.

I now join in enthusiastically at international web conferences with fellow Aussies, complaining bitterly about the state of coffee outside of the motherland (yup, I’m talking to you Austin, Texas) and secretly yearn for a good flat white upon arrival home to Sydney.

But here’s the catch, it’s not just the flavour of that coffee that I crave, it’s the whole experience. A good cup of coffee starts before you enter the cafe and lingers with you while you are still back at your desk working away, sipping on those last dregs.

This goes the same for websites and the experiences we have loving them, ignoring them or huddling in a group together openly tearing them to pieces. A lot can be learned from a simple cup of coffee.

Location, Location, Location

A great location is just the start. Whether it is a good shop just down the road from your workplace or like my coffee today, a new spot discovered as I was just leaving the gym, serendipity can add that extra bit of pleasure to the greater coffee experience.

Nobody likes the coffee shop that is too far from work, is across on the other side of the park or is simply in a place that lacks any kind of atmosphere all together. Often you will compromise the coffee’s quality to compensate for bad location. A trip to the ‘good coffee shop’ becomes a treat, rather than the daily routine.

Online, this can be translated into being findable and discoverable. Recently I have been looking for t-shirt printing services in Australia yet the websites I find are either in America (no shipping outside the States, thanks very much) or are straight up horrible.

To find what I need I have had to do a lot of digging. Emailing connections, finding names of actual companies and looking harder than I should. Being findable via major search engines such as Google, Yahoo Search, etc. means you will get more incidental traffic. This organic traffic will eventually lead to more routine and frequent visitors to your website.

Acknowledge my Existence

When I enter a cafe I expect to to make eye contact with someone that works there, I want to place my order and then stand aside. You can take a while to make my coffee, that’s fine, just acknowledge me and establish a connection so I understand you are working on my order in the background.

Making coffees, handling the cash register and trying to pop toast in the grill while I stand there for 5 minutes being ignored starts to agitate me. I feel unimportant… and suddenly I feel like I am at the bar on a Friday night desperately trying to get the attention of a bartender who knows they have the upper hand.

This goes the same for users first entering your website. You need to acknowledge them, meet their eyes and get to know what they want. This includes knowing your demographic, knowing why people initially visit your site (what search terms are driving traffic? Are they the terms you anticipated?) and making sure the information is there for them to consume.

My t-shirt search lead me to many websites with all sorts of random information that had nothing to do with what I needed. I want to know the price and location, so give it to me right away. Some websites had prices upon email only, this wasn’t good enough. Others had convoluted online ‘t-shirt quoters’ that would take me ten minutes to fill in, yet give me almost useless information.

Don’t show me blogs, news or weather apps if they are not relevant. Know why I am using your website (at least attempt to, it’s not always black and white) and provide me with that eye contact so I know you are working on my order.

Cheap Cups, Cheap Experience

There’s nothing I hate more than cups with blatant advertising on them. It’s not just the advertising but these cups are usually made of cheaper material, feel wrong in your hands and (I swear to this day) change the taste of a perfectly good cup of coffee.

This is exactly the same for online experiences. A professional website should look just that, professional. If you are in e-commerce, online retail or any other service trying to win the trust of users or customers you need to make a site that looks trustworthy.

Unfortunately, this usually means spending more money or putting a bit more research into those designers and developers that are going to assemble your companies website. You don’t have to break your budget, you just have to present a website that looks like you have invested some time and effort into your own product.

Make it Easy for Me

A cafe I used to frequent last month would take your order alright, but after that it all fell apart. You would be tossed back into the scrum of others waiting for their coffee and soon it would resemble the mosh at a Henry Rollins concert.

In contrast, I recently visited one of my older haunts and noticed a great improvement. They added a small table divider to their restaurant, causing those ordering takeaway coffees to naturally form a civilised line without really thinking about it. Before you knew it, you were on your way with the correct coffee in hand, totally stress free.

This can apply to websites when you think about how to direct your users and ‘not make them think’. What tasks might the users need to accomplish from your homepage and how might they approach each of these tasks? What path might they take, or create to get what they want?

Test these scenarios, are the users breaking anything? Is it something you have overlooked and can now plan for through better information architecture? Don’t think that users will establish their own order or figure out your own in-house conventions. This will lead to people leaving your website in frustration and spreading the bad word.

Finally, Don’t Burn the Milk

Okay, now that we finally have our coffee it better be good. Don’t make it too hot, don’t make it too cold, don’t put too much sugar in and finally, don’t burn the milk! It all comes down to the taste of the coffee and no matter how many great things you have going for you, if the coffee sucks you won’t go far.

Same with online, you can mask crappy content in the shiniest, reflective, rounded-corner web 2.0 interface. If the content is not there to support it your website will fail.

People will hang around and play with the gadgets, slider bars and gallery fades for just a little while, but in the end it comes down to the quality of the content and if it’s not there then people will move on to the next thing and most likely won’t be back for more.

In my last article, Developing your Descriptions (Part 1, The Problem), I discuss the importance of meta-data descriptions for all websites depending on any organic traffic through search engines.

I also briefly discussed some of the obstacles in getting this data implemented correctly on larger websites.

These obstacles include:

Not understanding the negative impact of not including description meta-data on each page.

Populating this data can be tedious, causing many people to avoid it like the SEO plague.

If not included in the project plan, this information often just falls through the cracks and sometimes will never be complete.

Not learning from the last job… this mistake often just repeats itself over and over on each new website that is launched.

So what to do? How do we make meta-data population just another part of launching a website? Essentially it should just be one more checkbox to tick off before going live. Much like validating your HTML, browser testing on different platforms and even ensuring your content is actually all there ready to go and formatted correctly.

Have a list, check it twice

This is not specific to SEO or meta-data, but a list of pre-launch activities to assess and confirm that everything is correct before launching a live product is essential. People change projects, staff turnover from time to time and people just plain forget some small details when working on larger projects.

I worked in a large company for many years. Each time we launched a large project we left this step up to each professional (whether that is back-end, front-end or if the producer is co-coordinating the show) to take care of their own area. Depending on who this was per project, the criteria before launching a product could vary greatly and so would the results.

A checklist of pre-determined criteria for basic quality control could really make everyone’s life easier in these stages of manic development and testing. Not only does this establish a set of common expectations within a project team, but it also delivers a more consistent product across a large company.

This shouldn’t be complex and this shouldn’t create unnecessary obstacles. It should start simple and just get people involved in thinking about what needs to be on a website when it goes live.

Define roles, share responsibility

The SEO is too busy with strategy, the back-end guy wants nothing to do with populating meta-data and the Information Architects don’t really even give it a second thought. Well, somebody has to be dobbed in to do the work and it must be understood throughout the organisation.

Let’s just first define what is not SEO work. To get meta-data going you have to make sure there is some sort of automation of the process, meaning the back-end guys need to ensure that there is a way of harvesting this data (be it a database of description data or a tricky way of scraping this data eg. title tag + headline of story + stock phrases). So there you go, back-end guys you are in on this… but not alone, you need help.

Which leaves us with the creating and sorting this data. What do we do to ensure that the data being created for each of these pages is unique and describes each page accurately? There can be a few ways to make this happen, but I have an idea I would like to share with you from my past experiences with this exact situation.

Spread the <meta-love>

Nobody wants to get stuck with the boring, tedious part of a job but there is some aspect of each role that will no doubt have you inwardly cringing. Browser testing for developers, vague functional specs for back-end developers… these are no different when it comes to certain aspects of usable and finable websites.

What I am about to suggest isn’t going to work for everybody but if you have a large team that involves information architects and SEO professionals under one roof, then you are indeed a) lucky and also b) well-equipped for the following process.

Let’s break down a few loose definitions of some key roles in this process:

Information Architect = meaning “organising content into a structure” and “intuitive navigation”

SEO = meaning “more traffic through targeted keywords” and “increasing (or fine tune) relevance of search terms”

Back-end Developer = meaning “integrating technical solutions” and “defining architecture”

So if you look at that list again we can break the meta-data problem into three separate components or stages to deal with seperately. Structure, copy writing and integration.

Structure

Now as far as I am concerned, description meta-data is content that needs to be structured logically and intuitively. It may be hidden inside the <head> element of your documents but when it is revealed on the search engine results pages it can expose numerous usability issues for a potential visitor looking for your webpage.

This content needs the eyes of those who understand these navigational pitfalls, the Information Architect (IA). Below is an example of a basic wireframe an IA might put together for a website, this is a crude example but it will convey my idea sufficiently.

Regular wireframe

Most charting software allows you to work in layers, much like Photoshop. This is where I suggest the IA start thinking about another output layer in their wireframing process, the meta-data layer.

Regular wireframe with meta-data layer

As mentioned before when breaking down the definitions of each role, this meta-data layer would be looked at from a usability and navigational perspective. When a user sees a description on a search engine result page, does the description make sense to the user? Does it require much cognitive effort to associate what the user is searching for vs. what the description meaning is conveying?

Does the description make the user want to click on the link and aid them in ending their search? This is the required information and structure from what the SEO must now base his further work from.

Of course, much this data will be available in the page view wireframes in more detail but what we are looking for here is a snapshot of the important information to provide the SEO with a basic, descriptive meta-data foundation.

Copy writing

Now that we have a basic structure and layout for our descriptions the SEO can concentrate on what they are experts at, fine-tuning phrases and content into SEO-friendly material.

From this basic wireframe layer the SEO will have direction and can start to analyse current trends in search, discover common search terms that may conflict or support the IA’s labeling and finally they can enhance this bare-bones wireframe with a more SEO-friendly flavour.

This is what an SEO should be concentrating on, not the IA work such as labeling, or influencing basic usability or getting their hands dirty and constructing confusing navigational elements.

This is not to say the SEO does not have insight into providing a better solution to the problem at hand. This is a suggestion that this should be an iterative conversion between the SEO and IA during the project, and not all of this responsibility should be automatically dished onto the SEO’s plate.

From this stage the SEO can now build a database (or most likely a spreadsheet) of description and title data that is a finely-tuned, SEO enhanced version of the content the IA had originally created earlier in the this process.

Integration

Finally, it’s time for the back-end guy to get involved. This should be early and should be well-documented by now. The SEO can also liase with the programmer to discuss optimal output of the data he has structured, what is acceptable for output across a large website and also what to watch out for while putting it all together.

The back-end guys don’t want to be bothered with vague specs on how to populate meta-data. It needs to be documented well or else it’s bound to fail or have to be dealt with manually for the rest of that website’s life.

A couple of extra tips

NOODP attribute

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />
This code will prevent Google from pulling description data from the Open Directory Project abstracts and forces them to use your provided descriptions.

NOYDIR attribute

<meta name="slurp" content="noydir" />
This code will prevent Yahoo from pulling description data from their own Yahoo Directory abstracts and forces them to use your provided descriptions.

Empty <description> elements

<meta name="description" content=" " />
Don’t do it, this will just result in some random copy on your website being pulled into your description on the search engine result pages. This could be the copyright text, testimonials or HTML code.

Throw us a bone

This is an idea I have had brewing that is probably more specific to larger organisations that have these larger teams, larger projects and often lack many logical checkpoints or role definition causing many of the problems I discuss in both articles.

Smaller companies still need quality control and methodologies that guarantee they do not make these same mistakes, but it’s easier for smaller companies to adapt to such issues and for one person to take on more of the responsibilities whether it is actually theirs or not.

I would love to hear what people think of this concept, what works for you or simply why it won’t work and should be shelved. I think it’s hard to cross a lot of these disciplines and get more teams to work together seamlessly personally, but it’s not impossible.