Jason Ruyle

1. How long have you been in business?
2. How old is your website?
3. Have you ever worked with another SEO company?
4. If you’ve worked with another SEO company, why was the relationship dissolved?
5. What is your monthly budget? (ask delicately or destroy the deal)
6. What are your goals and revenue models of the business?
7. What are your goals with a SEO campaign?
8. Do you have an in-house designer/ developer/ copywriter?
9. When do you plan to make a decision on your project?
10.What is your current internet marketing strategy?

The Microformats community is making more headways with updated extensions and functional applications.  The below post is a reprint from the microformats website.

New implementations

• Alex Faaborg of Mozilla Labs has announced availability of ‘Operator’, a Firefox extension written by Michael Kaply at IBM (download from Firefox Add‑ons). Operator detects hCard, hCalendar, geo, hReview and rel-tag and allows you to combine those microformats with desktop applications and web services such as Google Maps and Yahoo! Calendar. Alex has also written some accompanying introductions to microformats and collected comments in mozilla.apps.dev.firefox.
• Also for Firefox, the popular Tails extension has been updated to 0.3.6.
• Nick Peters has written a Greasemonkey script called Social xFolk to highlight xFolk microformatted bookmarks. It appends ‘Add to Delicious’ and ‘Add to Magnolia’ buttons in the page.

On the Wiki

• Andy Mabbett has started work on an hReview cheatsheet. It’s a work‑in‑progress and he’s asked for help in getting it completed and validated.

From uf-discuss

• Ted Drake is interested to see if the recipes microformat brainstorming can move on with a request for real-world examples and experiments
• With Mars and the Moon getting in the news, Andy Mabbett has redrawn attention to the Mars and Luna extensions to Geo.
• Jason Garber asked about rel=”muse” in XFN, wanting a means to indicate professional respect towards a person, rather than ‘romantic’ respect. For clarification, that category of values in XFN is ‘romantic’ as-in ‘romanticism’, and are not intentionally restricted to love-interest.
• Off the back this XFN discussion came discussion about a so-called ‘XPN’ (an ‘XHTML Professionals Network’ microformat). In response to this, there’s interest in identifying real-world implementations that could benefit by publishing professional relationships (think employee/employer, clients, sub-contractors and so forth). If you are involved with or know of sites that could harness such distributed professional networking, please get in touch on the list.
• Taylor Cowan is looking for more semantic detail on Q&A mark-up; going beyond the humble definition list. As usual, real-world examples are collected on the wiki and discussion should take place on the list.

On the web

• Following the healthy bloom of new cheat-sheets Brian Suda has updated his Microformats Cheatsheet PDF.
• Roger L Costello has created a comprehensive hCard presentation (using S5). Not only does it provide an introduction to using hCard it also provides detail on use of class="value" for properties, and the flexibility enabled by an oft‑overlooked feature.

‘This week in microformats’ aims to highlight the most active microformats discussion published in the preceding week by monitoring the microformats discuss mailing list, and the microformats tag on Technorati (and elsewhere). If you’d like to alert the editors to something, add a ‘thisweekinmicroformats’ tag.

I just finished reading an interesting article called Faster Development with CSS Constants by Rachel Andrew and felt a bit inspired to start a new project that would implement these techniques with another popular online services that has been recently released.

It would be really useful to be able to define certain values initially and then use them throughout a CSS file, so in this article I’m going to take a look at some of the methods we do have available and provide pointers to more in depth commentary on each.

Hopefully I can have a working model of this idea up within the next week. I’m keeping the guts of the project a secret for now, but hopefully it will be an inspiring and easy to use automated system! Wow, talk about a lot of jargon.

If you are interested in learning more about accessibility, but do enjoy those javascript benefits, you should check out the latest article at 24 ways:

The article discusses Special HTML elements, Problems with the onload event, and then provides Alternatives solutions. Check out the article.

24 ways: Hide And Seek in The Head

powered by performancing firefox

Bryan Zmijewski  outlines four more skills in this second part of a two part series.

4. Real-time performance
The best business people are ones who can adjust their thinking quickly. Pressed with tough decisions, they must be able to rally a team around business and financial goals and plans. If a big deal is on the line, tough decisions have to be made quickly…and once decided, they’re done. You can’t hit CTRL-Z to ‘undo’ a business deal.

Design should be no different. As a designer you must be able to use your unique skills of visual thinking to rally people in a room. While this may come more naturally to some over others, it is a skill that will improve with practice. You need to be comfortable presenting whiteboard sketches in front of a group–no matter how much you wish you could call a time out to whip up something on your laptop, you’ll lose momentum. If you can’t think and draw at the same time you’re going to limit your ability to listen to other ideas in the room–so practice at your own internal meetings until you’re ready for your public debut.

5. Balance prep with w/ implementation
Everyone likes to see that you’ve done your homework–lists, research, interviews, overviews and competitive reviews. It’s an important part of the process of designing ‘stuff’. It validates that there is thinking involved.

Sometimes, however, it makes sense to just jump into a problem based on your hunch and your experience, and then go back and think through all the homework parts. There are times when simply taking action, creating movement and momentum are preferable to investing loads of time up front–in other words, sometimes any action, even a potentially ‘wrong’ one, is better than no action at all. It’s the blue-collar part of design that the rest of the business world lacks…that good ole roll up your sleeves and just get it done.

6. Justify decisions with the right kind (and amount) of research
Contrary to point two, there comes a time when the emotional side of design needs a good helping of “reality.” Designers need to drive research- otherwise we’re stuck with the research of others (and some of those ‘findings’ may include an ever-unhelpful 50-page document of how many people liked the color blue.) Large focus groups and studies are nice, but they rarely help you create a marketable product. Why? Two reasons: One, they’re really expensive–that money could be better spent in the actual production. Two, they’re prohibitively time-consuming: By the time all the data is gathered, your competitors are already building the product.

Designers have the unique ability to notice trends…and the ‘way things are’. Heuristic evaluation and small tests are often all that’s needed to keep a product team focused on the ‘wow’.

7. Everyone is a design expert
Everyone has their own favorite color or font. They can move elements on a whiteboard, write content to describe actions, photocopy a competitor’s website or talk about their great experience. Use this to your benefit and coach people through your decision making. Everyone wants to be an armchair design ‘quarterback’- let them play fantasy football by helping them make better decisions.

Involving team members in design decisions that are isolated from the ‘core’ design will help you gain more control of the final product. Being open to ideas that really don’t impact your original vision shows that you’re willing to hear others’ input. Design is a team sport–be the best coach you can be, remembering that you’re ultimately responsible for the end product.

There’s More…
Stay tuned for the conclusion of So you Wanna be a Design Strategist?

User Interface director Bryan Zmijewski from ZURB has began a series on Design Strategies. I’m going to reprint these articles for personal reference.

So you Wanna be a Design Strategist?
By Bryan Zmijewski

After consulting for nearly 9 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that being a designer doesn’t automatically entitle you to the collective benefits of any industry. You have to sell yourself and talents every time you walk into a room. Is that good? If you have the skills to drive ideas, it allows you to set the rules and process; if being the person who pushes ideas forward just isn’t your thing, you might find yourself becoming the disgruntled designer.

Here are eleven skills of a Design Strategist:

1. Read people
What’s the most important skill of business decision making? Knowing what drives people to make decisions. Getting groups of people excited about an idea requires understanding what motivates them. You might have the best ideas in the world, but if you fail to understand the dynamics of the room, you may never get past your first idea.

In my first consulting gig I was invited to present a proposal at a board meeting, unaware that this public company’s entire executive team would be in attendance. There were two billionaires sitting at the table. Really. I was wholeheartedly unprepared to sell a single idea to this crowd. I tried getting the group to brainstorm, using some techniques that had been successful for me in past situations. But in less than 5 minutes I was told, ‘I think we’re done here’. Ouch. It’s a lesson that rings in my head all the time.

Reading people is a skill that can be learned, but getting really good at it comes as the result of years of practice. Every meeting, every conversation is an opportunity to hone your skills.

2. Don’t over research
By its very nature, a designer’s job requires using both left and right brain functions. Sometimes over-thinking a solution makes it hard to get people excited about the emotional content of our work. You do need to present research that helps your point, but don’t make the mistake of devaluing your gut instincts or hunches.

Designers have an innate ability to sense and feel out a problem based on experience. This is a characteristic that many people wish they had. Sometimes, you’re just going to know something is ‘right’ and you won’t have the luxury of time to do the research to back you up. Train your clients to be willing to take a chance on your hunches.

3. Build in the metrics
No matter how right-brained and creative we are, in the business world, clients want quantifiable results. Building benchmarks and metrics into your projects will ensure that you get the chance to really show them what you’ve got, by giving them enough numbers during the process that they feel comfortable.

Remember, lots of people think that Excel spreadsheets and pie charts are the best way to justify budgets and map out next phases. Don’t send your clients into metrics withdrawal–with a little work on your part, you can devise a numerical report card that helps the left-brained clients to feel more in control of and informed about the whole process, meaning that there’s a better chance they’ll sit back and let you work your magic uninterrupted.

There’s More…
Continue to part 2 of So you Wanna be a Design Strategist?