Now that 2010 is just starting, many web designers have to update the copyright year on their own websites, and their client’s websites.

Many end up doing it manually and waste a lot of time with this tedious task, but some use a better method, and it’s as simple as one line of PHP.

Copyright <? print(Date("Y")); ?>

No longer do you have to manually edit the footer of your websites with each year that passes!

If you would like to be included and are under 20 years of age, whether you are a graphic designer, web designer etc.. please fill out this form and then subscribe to my rss feed so that you will be notified when you are featured!

This is a chance to gain some nice exposure and a little link juice to your portfolio, and I look forward to seeing some great work by those young designers in our online community.

Over the years, I have heard clients say a lot of things, and some of them are more clear in their message than others. For those starting out in the design industry, whether it is at a firm, or as a freelancer, this list of “5 things clients say and what they really mean” will surely help you to be educated when interacting with various types of clients.

1. “I designed it myself and just need you to ,,,”

99.9% of the time, if a client says this to you when they first inquire about your services, and ask you for a quote, they are really saying, “I know enough to have an opinion on YOUR profession, and I understand what it takes to do what you do. I don’t really think your skills are anything that hard to do, I just don’t have the time to do it, or I don’t have the little amount of time it probably takes to learn it. Knowing all this, I won’t be paying you that much to do this work as it shouldn’t take you that long at all…plus I’ve already done most of the work for you.”

2. “Can you do it for $xxx now, and when we become more successful, we will pay more?”

This is a pretty easy one. What they are really saying is “I probably have the money to pay you fully for what you quoted me, but I’m gona try and see if I can make a deal and get away with paying you less than what you want. After all, you seem like a bit of a pushover….I don’t plan on paying you more when/if we are more successful, because your work isn’t really the thing that made us successful so why would we feel obliged to pay you again months after the project is over?”

3. “I don’t agree to your contract terms. Please remove section 1a ,,,”

Red flag. This is like meeting a girl in a bar who talks about her daddy issues for 2 hours, and ends up crying in your arms while I drink as much whiskey as possible in the hope that I may secretly pass out with my eyes open, standing upright, but not able to hear her myopic whining…..wait, whoa….sorry, back to the article.

It is probably a fact that a large majority of freelancers / design firms have fair and honest contracts. There is rarely any reason for a client to question any of the terms in the average contract designers use, so when a client requests different terms and changes to the wording of the agreement, this is a serious warning sign. By rejecting some of your contract terms, depending on what they are, the client is really telling you, “I don’t really trust you or your company that much at all, so I am going to try and get this contract to be much more favorable for me before I sign it. Due to the fact that I don’t really trust you that much, this project is going to be a struggle to get completed, and while I will blame you for the delays, it will really be my fault because I continue to fight for the power in this project, and I really don’t want to give you any sort of control or power. Oh, and that 50% payment you want just to start the project…make it 25% and you’ve got a deal. I’ll pay the remainder when the project is done…in 2 years.”

4. “I’ve never hired a web designer so I’m not sure about this whole process, but you guys are the experts ,,,”

Lovely. Time to be happy and smile. What this client is really saying is “I honestly think you are the expert, and realize that I know absolutely nothing about the skills that you have. I can’t even imagine trying to do this myself. It would be like trying to build my own house, or telling the air conditioner technician how to fix the air condenser. I will be a good client to work with as I value your expertise and I will not request that many revisions during the project. I figure that you do this all day everyday and have a successful career out of it, so who am I to tell you to what to do.”

5. “We need a website built, my Husband’s cousin made one for him but he is in Detroit ,,,”

This is pretty similar to #1 above. Most likely, what this client is really saying is “My Husband’s cousin is a receptionist and she has Photoshop on her computer (or she is a granny from Tennessee), and she put the site together using Go Daddy’s “Website Tonight” service. We really like that website and want something similar.”. Unless her Husband’s cousin is an actual experienced web designer, chances are that the website she developed for her Uncle is pretty bad. If the client says she likes the site that was created, it pretty much means that she doesn’t understand the difference in quality in web design. As a result, she will probably choose the cheapest web design firm she finds. If she doesn’t understand the quality difference, why would she pay you $5,000 when someone down the road quoted her at $500? She will get a $500 website, and will be happy with it, until one day when she realizes that her site isn’t getting any leads and nobody ever compliments her on it.

Ok, how about a 6th! “Make the logo bigger”

When clients say this they actually simply, and sadly always just want their logo bigger! Perhaps you need to stock up on some “Make my logo bigger cream”

Well, that’s it! “5 things clients say and what they really mean”. Most clients are good people, and great to work with, but there will always be those that make life a little more difficult, for whatever reason. With some education, and understanding, you can turn even the most high maintenance clients into decent, profitable ones. Client management is an underestimated element of being a designer or project manager, and the successful ones are able to handle each level of communication that they have with clients.

I would love to hear about any additional experiences you’ve had with clients, things you’ve learned about the different types of clients etc. Please discuss in the comments below and let’s start the conversation!

It happens to even the best design firms; you send out a proposal, you have a face-to-face meeting, and then you receive the email.

Thank you for your proposal and your time to discuss our project with us, but we have decided to go with another firm”

Depending on how much time and effort you put into the proposal, this can be a tough pill to swallow. If it is for a project worth less than $1000 to you or your company, it is pretty easy to move on and not be bothered by it. Regardless of how big or small the project is, and no matter how much time you put into the proposal, it is important to always try to understand why the potential client did not choose you or your company.

There can be many reasons why you or your company were not chosen for a particular job, but if you do not find these out or even try to acquire that information, the entire proposal process becomes a complete waste of time. When you receive the “we chose someone else” email or phone call, why not turn it into something that will help you in the future? A simple “thank you” response can be coupled with “Can you please describe some of the reasons why we were not chosen for this project, and what we could have done better? This will help us to better our sales process in the future.”.

If you spent hours on a big proposal, and then you don’t get the job, your emotions naturally want to reply with “Good luck and call me when the company you chose under deliver or screw you!”, but obviously this is not the way to go. Even when you know your local competitors have nothing on you or your company, and could never provide the creativity or expertise you can, it is vital that you keep it positive and professional.

So, you send your “thanks” response, and you hope for a reply. From my experience, a lot of these people will not respond back to our request for more information, and that is fine. You just have to let it go. Others however, typically the more professional ones, will take the time to respond to you and give you some decent feedback. They are the ones that understand the purpose of your email and your request for feedback. This also shows them that you and your company are dedicated to improving all aspects of your operation and services.

If you record the responses you receive over time (hopefully you don’t have many of them because you acquire most potential clients!), you will have the knowledge to better understand what you need to improve upon. With that being said, let’s take a look at 3 of the main reasons why a client didn’t choose you for the project that got away.

1. Price

Depending on your rates, the number one reason you didn’t get chosen for that project was down to the price on your proposal. Many potential clients just don’t understand the difference in quality in services like graphic design and web design. You may have met with them in person, discussed their exact needs, prepared a proposal that contained the perfect solution for them, but they still did not choose you because of the price. It is common in most industries, a lot of people will select the less expensive option, especially if they are unable to differentiate in the quality being offered by each option. Many times a client doesn’t understand that the 5 page web design solution one company offers, is completely different from that of another. They may not understand that a CMS-based website in CSS is much better than a static table-based HTML website. In your meeting with the client, they told you that they really wanted to have control of the content on their website, but after not choosing you, you see the new website that they received from another company, and it barely resembles anything like what the client said they wanted.

This is the main reason why the web design industry has made so many enemies in the general population. So many clients get screwed by half-assed web designers, and they end up spending more time and money within a year to find someone to develop a website that they actually want and need. Clients get screwed by not doing enough research and not understanding the difference in web design quality. They end up hiring the cheapest option and 9 out of 10 times this will not work out well for them.

On the other side, a client may not choose you because your prices are too low! It may sound crazy, but it is true. My company always asks clients why they chose us after we receive their business, and sometimes they respond with the following:

Even though we received quotes from others that were way below what you quoted us, we want to work with you because your portfolio and professionalism exceeds the rest, and that is what is important to us.”

This is a great email to get. It immediately creates the perfect client / vendor relationship. It shows you that this client understands the value of your services, and is able to see the difference in quality between you and the other companies that they spoke with.

2. Professionalism

I’ve discovered that a lot of web design companies (in my area especially) are quite unprofessional. If you receive an inquiry from a potential client and respond back with an email that looks like a 12 year old typed it, this can be an instant turn off. Also, if your phone manner isn’t professional your company image will be hurt during the initial phone conversation with that client.

I personally don’t think it is that difficult to be professional, because you simply understand what clients expect from you , and you provide it. I often make a note of the things that I expect from companies when I purchase services from them, and it makes such a difference when they do their job professionally. You feel much more confident giving them your money, and you also intend to return to give them repeat business.

Every way you interact with the client is reviewed, whether they do it knowingly or subconsciously; they are forming opinions about you and your service. They attach these opinions to your overall brand and that is what they store in their mind each time they communicate with you.

3. Portfolio

Sometimes, you get inquiries from clients that are the type that really want to see that you have developed a website or designed some print advertising for a company in their industry. For example, a client needing a website for their restaurant may only work with someone that has previously designed a restaurant website. Some clients really rely on this, and others don’t. It is all part of the comfort factor. The client wants to feel completely confident that you can provide a perfect solution for their needs, and no matter how good the rest of the work in your portfolio is, if it is not industry related to their company, they may not choose to work with you.

I recently had a potential client that wanted my company to carry out a complete branding of their real estate agent services. They said that they really liked what they saw in our portfolio, and were excited to move forward with us. Before we received the contract and deposit, we spoke with one of the partners over the phone. She voiced her concerns over the lack of real estate related design work in our portfolio. I personally worked in real estate web design for about a year and half as a full-time job, and once I became self-employed I decided that I wouldn’t work with any clients in the real estate industry for a while. I needed the break from it, especially when it was all I did for 5 days a week for over a year.

So, I had to drag up my old portfolio from when I worked for this real estate web design company to try to show the potential client that I had experience in the real estate industry and that my company could provide excellent creative design services for the real estate industry. The difficult part of a process like this is the fact that you, as a designer, are confident that no matter what industry it is, you can design for it. If you are skilled and experienced, and understand different markets and different demographics, you know that you can design anything for that industry. Some clients are unable to see it this way, and it can often be an added “dance” you need to do during the sales process to acquire their business. It becomes your job to go that extra step to give them the confidence to move forward with you.

So, there you go, the 3 main reasons why clients don’t choose you! Obviously there are many other reasons why you may not get chosen for a particular project, like the fact that you smell odd, or that you wore your “Frankie Says Relax” t-shirt to the meeting, but those 3 discussed above are pretty much the main ones.

Do you have any to add from your own experiences?

When I re-designed my company website, I wanted to display client testimonials in a creative way, something a little more interesting than just a paragraph of text with their name. So, I took inspiration from some other websites, mainly WordPress themes and the way some comments are displayed on blogs, and implemented this into my idea for the testimonials on our company website.

I wanted to display the testimonial copy within large quotes, and then a picture of the client below the copy. In effect, there would be 3 columns, two thin sides with the quotes in them, and the center column with the testimonial copy.

One thing I had to think about was the fact that all testimonials would be different in length. So, I had to come up with a way in the HTML and CSS to ensure that the right hand side quote was always positioned in the correct place, no matter the length of the testimonial.

Let’s start:

First, we need to create the container box for each testimonial.


.testimonial {
width:620px;
float:left;
margin:15px 0 30px 0;
}


and the HTML for this is :


<div class="testimonial">
...................
..............
</div>


Now, let’s create the 1st column, which will contain the left quote image. The CSS for this is:


.left-quote {
float:left;
background:url(/graphics/quote-left.jpg) no-repeat top;
width:68px;
height:77px;
}


…and the HTML is:


<div class="testimonial">
<div class="left-quote"></div>
</div>


Now, we will create the center column, which will contain the testimonial text. First, the CSS. Notice the position of the right quote on this style. This is what will keep it positioned at the bottom right of the container text box no matter the length of text. Also, the padding on the right of the div will create room on the right hand side of the div for the quote to show up without text sitting over it:


.testi-text {
float:left;
text-align:justify;
width:470px;
padding-right:65px;
background:url(/graphics/quote-right.jpg) no-repeat right bottom;
}


…and the HTML now looks like this:


<div class="testimonial">
<div class="left-quote"></div>
<div class="testi-text">
Testimonial text here....
</div>


Finally, we can add a picture and the client’s name to the bottom of the text area. The CSS for this is:


.testi-pic {
float:left;
width:77px;
height:104px;
margin-left:70px;
display:inline;
}


and the HTML:


div class="testimonial">
<div class="left-quote">&nbsp;</div>
<div class="testi-text">The logo design process was very easy. You always answer my e-mails and calls quickly, and get back to me right away even on weekends and evenings. I like that the studio is very flexible, provides suggestions, and is open to input from the client. The response time is very good, and the designs were terrific.</div>
<div class="testi-pic"><img src="/graphics/clientpic.jpg" alt="Client Name" width="77" height="109" /></div>
</div>


and the text area containing the client’s name:


.testi-name {
float:left;
padding:30px 0 0 15px;
}


and the finishing HTML:


<div class="testimonial">
<div class="left-quote">&nbsp;</div>
<div class="testi-text">The logo design process was very easy. You always answer my e-mails and calls quickly, and get back to me right away even on weekends and evenings. I like that the studio is very flexible, provides suggestions, and is open to input from the client. The response time is very good, and the designs were terrific.</div>
<div class="testi-pic"><img src="/graphics/clientpic.jpg" alt="Client Name" width="77" height="109" /></div>
<div class="testi-name"><strong>Client Name Here</strong><br />
Owner, Company Name</div>
</div>


Final CSS code:


.testimonial {
width:620px;
float:left;
margin:15px 0 30px 0;
}
.left-quote {
float:left;
background:url(/graphics/quote-left.jpg) no-repeat top;
width:68px;
height:77px;
}
.testi-text {
float:left;
text-align:justify;
width:470px;
padding-right:65px;
background:url(/graphics/quote-right.jpg) no-repeat right bottom;
}
.testi-pic {
float:left;
width:77px;
height:104px;
margin-left:70px;
display:inline;
}
.testi-name {
float:left;
padding:30px 0 0 15px;
}


Instead of placing the client image file within the HTML, you could also place it in it’s own style in the CSS; for example, you could add #client1 and give it a background image of that client pic file, and then in the HTML, give the .testi-pic div an ID of “client1″, without the quotes.

Here is what it looks like on my company site for Brian Joseph Studios.

Try it for yourself on your next website or blog comment area!

So, the design in photoshop, and all of the coding was done in 2 days, and I am more than happy with the outcome. I believe this new design is right where I want it to be visually. The overall look and feel is light, yet I think there is a perfect touch of artistic flair in the graphic elements and overall aesthetics. It was important to me to have a clean design, but I still wanted to create an image that presented me, my personality and characteristics. This balance is difficult, especially with a somewhat sketchy design, but I think it came off nicely.

I first learned about WordPress around February 2008 when I was trying to increase backlinks to my company website. After finding David Airey’s website, I proceeded to add several comments to his posts, and enjoyed his articles and writing style. David quickly realized what I was doing, and told me off! So, I learned all about the blogging and online design industry by being a dirty search engine optimizer concerned with acquiring backlinks from design related sites. Thanks David! I learned the error of my ways, and understood the “blog commenting etiquette” that was in place, or was supposed to be in place.

My previous design was pretty much my first attempt at creating a custom theme for WordPress. I loved the textured website designs around the net, and wanted to do something along those lines. While I was happy with the original design for a while, my interface and graphic design skills had progressed past the image the website was giving off. Since February 2008, I have immersed myself in everything to do with developing custom WordPress themes, from reading tutorials, to mashing the code up to see what works and what doesn’t. I learn the most by simply hacking away at things using only educated guesses, and once something works, I remember how to do it forever.

Quickly I found myself understanding WordPress a great deal, and ended up working with it on almost a daily basis using it as a CMS system for client websites. For about 5 months or so, I have tried to plan the time to re-design this website, and just the other day I just decided to go for it. I went through my notes, my bookmarks and everything else that I had saved for inspiration for a new re-design, and I was ready.

The new logo came first. While I don’t see this is aspect as too vital for my reasons or goals as a design blogger, I thought it would still be fun to create a unique identity for myself and my website. I blog predominantly for the fun of it, and for networking with others, so I’m not overly concerned with my “online brand”. My company’s brand is what I put time into.

I wanted to find a way to put the “B” and the “Y” together, but had struggled with this in the past. They are not the best initials to work with. I decided to draw a custom font in Adobe Illustrator for the two letters, and after some variations on the arrangement of them, I found a format that fit well. Then, I decided I wanted the logo not to just represent my name, but I wanted it to also display what I do, what my interests are, what my personal site is about, and what readers can expect to see on my blog.

I didn’t have to go far for inspiration, as I simply thought to myself “What do I do, what do I blog about?”, and the answer was right there on the left hand side of the programs I use every day. The pen tool and the brush tool in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator were perfect little symbols to represent what my blog is about. Designers will know what the imagery means, and represents, and after all, I am not too concerned about marketing my personal site to people outside of the design industry.

After drawing the two elements onto the “BY” initials, and changing the colors of the letters, I asked my Twitter followers if they had any feedback. Martin Kulakowski came back to me with a great suggestion, and even sent an image showing his idea. He added a slight amount of separation between the stem of the letters and the design icons. I thought that was a perfect addition.

So, the logo was ready to go, and immediately I started working on the website design. I knew I wanted to create a light, watercolor/sketch look, and its color scheme would include teal / turquoise (my favorite color). I also knew that I wanted the website to be 1080 px wide. This would provide me with a nice amount of white space and room to work in some design elements.

During a quiet night staying in, I put together a header design that I was really happy with. It had a classy / artsy feel but wasn’t heavy like my previous design. I also wanted to include a personal image but didn’t want it to look out of place inside the overall design. A little saturation and play with the hue of the image, and it fit into the color scheme nicely. The before and after can be seen below.

The previous design was way too heavy, and I went a little crazy with the paper texture brush. I think I had just found that brush or something, and was a little too excited to try it out!

The new header has much more style, and helps to give the new design a light, clean feeling.

From my notes, I knew I had a lot of little touches of quality that I wanted to put on the website, whether it was some type of creative rollover or a unique way of showing information.

A look at some of the new elements and features…

Obviously the layout of the homepage is important. If it is good, your bounce rate will be low, and visitors will want to click-through to the various pages and posts on your site. I decided to get rid of the “Featured Post” spot on the homepage, as this started to have no meaning to me. In my opinion, for a site like mine, the most recent post WAS the featured post. So, I simply decided to just list the posts in order of publish date.

Comment Count

One small note I had written down somewhere was to display the “post comment count” in a speech bubble. This is a nice way to display this information, as it is simple, takes up very little room, and looks more interesting than a simple text link saying “3 comments”. It also allowed me to have fun with a rollover inspired by sites like Web Designer Wall (rollover the main navigation). You can see what I did if you rollover the little teal colored speech bubble at the top right of each post page, and on the homepage and category pages.

Navigation

I really didn’t like my navigation on the previous design, and it bugged me every time I thought about it. I had used some junky javascript and images for the rollover effect, and that was not cool to be doing in 2009. For my new website navigation, you can see similar rollover effects, but the entire navigation uses one single image, utilizing the CSS image replacement technique. I am a strong believer in this type of navigation, especially because of the fact that text links remain in the source code. The search engine bots don’t see the image file with a link, they see plain textual links. I like (insert Borat accent). High five

A little more insight…

Another small addition, is at the bottom of each post page. I thought it would be nice to have some little snippet of information about what was going on in my life or what I was thinking at the time I published a post. So, I added some custom fields and the necessary php code to pull them into the website, and on each post, it will now have a few lines of “when I published this post, I was…”. Prepare to see things like “planning world domination” or “eating a big mac and judging myself”.

One major part of this website re-design included the display of visitor comments, and the comment form area. I really wanted this to look unique and in-line with the rest of the website. I spent time working on the layout of the comments list, and finally landed upon a format that I was happy with. First, the visitor’s name, twitter ID, and the time and date the comment was made. Below that line, the avatar, and the comment text.

I’m quite happy with how the comments list turned out. A little addition to this area is the “Highlight Author Comments” plugin (by a god of WP plugins, Rob Marsh) that allows me to make it easier for visitors to read my comment responses. With a bit of padding, and my new logo, it now provides a subtle difference to make it easy to follow my responses in the comment thread.

Next up was the comments form area. This was another area that I neglected with my first custom WordPress theme design, mainly because I was too afraid to hack up the code that controlled the form. Not anymore!

With some simple CSS on the form fields, and correct positioning, I was able to use a single background image for the form, and keep the overall look consistent with the rest of the website. I still have a few additions to this area of the website, and will probably get to them in the next few days. They include: adding a “comments policy”, and creating a nicer submit button.

A before and after screenshot can be seen below:

Another major piece of the new design involves how the categories and archived posts are displayed. I didn’t want to have a giant list of categories going all the way down the right hand side of the website, so I decided the best way to keep the site clean was the hide the categories until a visitor activated that area to see them. I did the same for displaying “Popular Posts” and “Random Posts”. This keeps the sidebar nice and simple and drop down slider is a fun way of presenting information.

On the old site, I had a section I called “Today, I am reading” and this was a small list of some of the various design related blogs that I regularly visit. For this new design, I moved this to the footer where it fits much better.

I will be changing the RSS feeds that I pull into this area regularly, but for now I am happy to display Randa Clay’s, David Airey’s and Six Revision’s latest posts. There is some weird character issue with the RSS feed script in WordPress in the way that it deals with apostrophes and different characters, but this may be more of a character set UTF-8 issue. Not sure just yet, but I will try to fix this soon.

So, all in all, I am quite pleased with this re-design. My main goal of this new design is to re-ignite my energy into posting more regularly and being more active on here. The old site just didn’t encourage me to do this, and I think this new design will.

Thanks to everyone on Twitter for your feedback and comments on the design, they are much appreciated. If anyone is interested in seeing a tutorial on any aspect of the creation of this theme, please leave a comment and I will be happy to write a post about it if a few others are interested also.

What do you think of the re-design?

So, I thought I might as well share my response to him with you, and it may end up helping someone else similar to this 14 yr old that emailed my company.

The three pieces you sent are quite impressive for a 14 yr old (for any age really). You obviously have a natural artistic ability and this is vital to being a good graphic designer. You can only learn so much but you need that intrinsic ability to know what visually appeals and works for the look you are trying to achieve.

It is important to learn how to combine your creativity and natural artistic ability with the business aspect of being a graphic designer. As a graphic designer, you also play a large role as a marketing professional, and you need to learn how to apply your art and design skills to the business world. This is vitally important as this will allow you to make a living from your craft. I know many designers that are extremely creative but lack the ability to use that creativity in a business / advertising environment.

Professional graphic design is all about communicating a message as powerfully and memorable as possible. If you become a professional designer, you will have clients that have messages (products , services etc) that they need to communicate to their market through advertising, and it will be up to you to figure out how to use your design skill and knowledge to present that message in the most effective way possible.

Another piece of advice is to always continue learning and expanding upon your skill set. Never settle for the knowledge you have at any point. Always strive to learn more.

Some other recent posts that I have published that provide advice for young designers are "50 Reasons Why You Will Not Make It As A Freelancer ", "What Not To Do When Designing a Logo " and "Most Important Thing I Would Tell A Design Student "

Rather than discuss this as an argument, I would like to see statistics on opinions from fellow designers, internet users, general garden gnomes etc.

Please select below, whether you prefer to create/visit/browse center aligned websites, or left aligned websites.

If you have a good argument for either, please comment below. I am interested to hear it, thanks

[poll id="2"]

**update – submitted this article to Just Creative Design’s Group Writing Project for charity along with a monetary donation over at Just Creative Design’s fund raising page **

Static design visuals: all web designers use them as a way to present the designs to a client. I personally upload a jpg of the visual to my server in a client specific folder, and then email the link to the client with a paragraph explaining the design, the inspiration, the purpose of each element and so on.

Along with this explanatory paragraph, I always find myself spending time writing notes for the client about each piece of functionality that they will NOT SEE . Kind of a downer if you are the client I imagine. As these are static visuals, I cannot show the client the cool Ajax stuff that I have planned for the site, the hover and the click effects I plan for the navigation, and the really slick jquery slide show I plan for the homepage! "Client, you will see none of that, so have fun just looking at this bland visual. It looks good though…right?"

With the online technology that is available today, we should all be coding websites more creatively than using simple images and html/css . Our clients have come to expect a higher level of functionality and interactivity as they visit more and more websites that utilize things like Ajax, and JavaScript. So, often a client is disappointed when they receive the very first static visual from you when it has none of this interactivity.

Static visuals are used for one good reason….Time . Once we have designed the homepage of a new website, we can simply jpeg it and upload it to our server or email it as an attachment to the client. Simple, quick and easy. This process does not take much time at all. When the client replies to us with a few changes, we can go back in the layered mockup file, make the changes, and jpeg it again, and send it to the client again, and await approval.

Often clients will struggle with receiving these static visuals, especially the more experienced, high-end clients. My company, Brian Joseph Studios , has grown a lot over the past year, and we are now obtaining clients with bigger budgets, higher demands, and higher expectations. This means that what they see on CNN.com or their favorite online shopping website, they want to see that on their new site that we are developing for them. Imagine their disappointment with a static visual jpeg.

Of course, as stated earlier in this post, you can spend time explaining to them all of the things that you have planned for the website, all of that great interactivity….and much more, and that right now they don’t get to see it……(not fun to receive a response as to "why can’t we see all of this now?" even after explaining it already. Open. Can. Worms.

So, for some time now (almost 1 year) and for most projects (not all) , I have stopped sending static visuals to clients during the review process.

What do you replace static visuals with then?

It takes a little extra time to do, but I have found that it greatly reduces the overall project development time and streamlines this process tremendously. I design the homepage after carefully learning about what the client’s goals are for the website, and then I cut it into css/xhtml, and add any pieces of interactivity that I have planned for the site. I upload the "working" page to a client folder on my server, and send the link to them. Again, in this email I explain each element, and it’s function and why I think this is a powerful solution for what they are looking to achieve with their site.

Then I hit "send". No time spent writing notes about what they WILL NOT see, why they won’t see it, and why they can’t see it. Also, I will not receive a reply from the client saying "I understand what you are saying about not being able to see all the stuff you have planned, but why is that not possible? I know you explained it, but I guess I just don’t really understand the web that well". No matter how much you explain it, some clients struggle to understand it. That is why you must find a way to prevent this discussion from even coming up.

After all, do you really want to have any type of negativity in your very first email to the client during the design process?

The words "won’t", "can’t", "unfortunately" etc are not great to hear when receiving a service from someone, and I am sure some clients think that.

So, the client goes to the link that I sent them; they rollover the navigation and see an underline appear or a color change. They click on the latest news tab and see a nice slider effect that shoots over some latest news headlines (that are being pulled dynamically from live news feeds **because this is NOT a static visual!**). The impact of this is much more positive than the static visual I used to send, and because they are able to get the exact feel of a working website, they (100% of the time) have less revision requests.

What if the client wants a lot of graphic changes?

With today’s web standards, usability factors, and all of the other aspects that control how we design websites, in my opinion, modern websites should be low on the image file count on each page . Not only is this better for SEO purposes (visible content, faster loading times), but it also means that the website will most likely be clean and user friendly. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of exceptional, modern websites out there that are heavy with image files, but with the advancement of CSS, a user friendly and interesting user interface can be designed with a few images and excellent use of CSS.

So, if you regularly design your client’s websites keeping image files to a minimum, it will be extremely easy to revise the design you send to a client when they request changes. Your "real" website page that you sent the client may have only 10 image files on it, and the rest of the colors, and format are controlled by CSS. If the client requests changes, you only have 10 image files at the max to modify, or some simple CSS tweaks.

Take this "Surf in Paradise " website for example. It is clean, organized, and very low on image count. The client may have asked for a different water background, or a different girl image. Making these changes takes just as much time to complete in Photoshop as they would in CSS. In addition, you save the time that you would have spent jpeg’ing the image, and uploading it to the server or emailing it to the client.

Another point worth noting about design revisions and working with clients. Clients differ greatly in their approach to a web design company as most of you know. Some hire us and outwardly acknowledge that we are experts in this field and we will provide a solution that we think is best for the client . Other clients, well….they want what THEY want, and it is often difficult for them to be open up to a designer’s opinion. Just today, I saw a tweet on Twitter from a fellow designer that read "doing an advert for a client who has 1200 words to go on an A4 Ad and their company font is Comic Sans".

So, if you obtain clients that more often than not, understand that you are the expert in web design, and once you get to know their company and their website’s goals, that you can provide a design that they need….then you will probably see that they will usually have very few revisions to the design you send them. The working website page you sent them now looks perfect, and they love the way it works. Guess what! Now you have the format laid out in CSS/XHTML and your client is happy with the overall design. Imagine how quickly you will get the project completed now!

What are your thoughts on static design visuals? How do you present your website designs to a client? What works for you?

I was recently hired to re-design Hawaii Real Estate’s most popular website, Adrhi.com. While the old website did it’s job in the past, it was extremely out-dated in both design and usability. Under the hood, the html was a table based layout with inline styles that needed to go.

So, Brian Joseph Studios got to work on a new design for the site, working closely with the client. The re-design not only had to be clean and organized, but the usability of the site was the number one factor. This website has a lot of powerful tools for someone looking for real estate, and creating a friendly user-interface for these tools was vital to the success of the project.

We began with the real estate search engine. This is the number one reason why the visitor to the site is there, and so we made the search engine a prominent feature on the homepage. In addition to the search engine, the homepage is heavily optimized. The website has ranked #1 on Google for "Hawaii Real Estate" for a few years, and this new website is going to not only continue that ranking, but also target additional search terms to increase traffic.

The CSS based layout allows for extremely clean code and highly visible content. The internal linking system ensures that all pages will receive some strong juice from the more prominent pages on the site. Users can sign up and receive email updates, edit profiles, save searches, save favorites and much more. There will also be an interactive Google map search function on the site soon when that piece of functionality has been completed.

So, check out adrhi.com when you get a chance. We put a lot of effort in the overall layout of the site, use of white space, organization etc to really keep the user experience a relaxed one. There is still a lot of programming to be completed on the site, bugs to remove etc, as we had to launch sooner than expected, but once it is all complete, you will see some additional features that are currently not available.

I would be interested to hear from fellow web designers/developers and their thoughts on the new site! Please comment below, thanks!