Designer v Developer Death Match
There’s been some interesting buzz going around about the role of designers and developers in the modern web development process. The demi-gods at 37Signals sparked some controversy when they posted about why they skip photoshop. Andy Rutledge posted an entry on his Design View blog about how to be an employable designer. James Bennett summed everything up nicely with his Designers and Developers: FIGHT! entry.
I’m surprised (and not at the same time) from the reaction from both designers and developers. Both want to keep their “I know something you don’t know” status while insisting that their jobs and skills are important. However, once we inject some professionalism into the debate it becomes clear why combining talents is the best scenario.
The Secret to Greedy (but ethical) Hourly Billing
The typical client project goes something like this:
- Provide estimate
- Complete work
- ???
- Bill time spent
- Profit
So why do so many people insist on killing their projects profitability with endless tweaks and free-bees? Take a page out of Gordon Gecko’s playbook and get a little greedy with your billing, your bank account will thank you later.
Sculpting Your PPC Campaign with Negative Keywords
When painting you start with nothing, add material, and have something. Conversely, when sculpting you remove material and have something. The average Pay-Per-Click campaign only focuses on the painting aspect (adding keywords) and ignores the sculpting aspect (negative keywords). Unfortunately this strategy results in low click through rates and inefficient budgets. By defining your campaign as what it is not you can get into the sculptor’s mindset.
Who Needs The Show Action Anyway
We all know that Rails has seven standard REST actions, index, show, new, create, edit, update and delete. Usually there are only views associated with four of them, index, show, new and edit with new and edit usually being the same. This all makes perfect sense for the public facing part of the application, but what about the administration portion of your app? Do you really need that show action? Are you going to be displaying the information in the same way as the public facing side of things? I’m starting to think that skipping the show action in the administration portion of the application is not a bad idea.
Blog Improvements and Updates
Tonight was the night of much needed updates and improvements to this here blog. It’s been a while since I spent a considerable amount of time doing anything major, but I did make some kinda-sorta-major updates, but those were mainly to the back end system. Hope everyone who’s visiting keeps enjoying it!
