Now that the new site has been live for a while, MIX invited us to write in-depth expositions of our process. In Parts III and IV of a 5-part series, Matt and I talk about our content strategy/web writing and design processes. If you get a chance, check out our articles: A Common Sense Content Strategy and Designing Trustworthiness.

Also check out Parts I and II of the series, Nishant’s wonderful articles on The Anatomy of Web Design and The Future of Wireframes. Evan Sharp, the front-end developer on the project, will also discuss his process later this week in the final part of the series.

If you’re there for the education, you can also come here us speak…

SXSW Interactive

I’m moderating a panel, Writing Web Content for a Living, with three smartypants content strategy experts: Ian Alexander of Eat Media, Erin Anderson of Brain Traffic, and Dan Maccarone of Hard Candy Shell. We’ll be talking about the mechanics of writing web content: what’s involved, how content strategy fits in, and how to start doing it.

The panel is on Sunday, March 14th, at 12:30 PM in Ballroom C.

The rest of the time, Matt and I will be attending other peoples’ presentations and going out and about at night—at the Twitter Happy Hour on Thursday, Happy Cogaoke on Saturday, and Mashable’s MashBash on Sunday, at least.

Also, if you’re into content strategy and web writing, here’s a list of must-see panels.

MIX10

My talk, Treat Your Content Right, is scheduled for Wednesday, March 17th, at 12:00pm in Breakers J. I’ll be giving a high-level overview of principles that can help your team improve your content and incorporate basic content strategy practices into your process.

Matt’s talk, Running With Wireframes: Taking Information Architecture Into Design, is scheduled for Wednesday, March 17th, at 1:30pm in Breakers D. He’ll be talking about ways to better integrate UX and IA into design through a flexible process and open collaboration between content folks, information architects, and designers.

We’ll be at the MIX on Tuesday and Wednesday, and will be attending presentations all day. Hope we see you in the hallway!

Strange gripe, considering that most the time we run into the opposite problem—people who think a good design can solve all their business problems, even though there’s no content (or content strategy) to support it.

Fortunately, investing in solid, web-optimized writing can do a lot for your website: it can make it easier to navigate, more appealing, increase your readership, and help your audience connect with your message. But just like design, IA, or content strategy in isolation, good writing is not a magic tool for generating sales or refining your brand.

When it comes to the web, cohesion between your business strategy, writing, IA, design, and functionality are required to tell the perfect story. That said, it’s still very important that your site be professionally written. If you’re in the market for a writer, here are a few things to think about:

Before You Hire a Writer.

Editors, Writers, and Content Strategists do different things (even though some people do all three). If you’re pretty confident with the writing you have and just need someone to nip/tuck or make it a little more web friendly, an editor who knows the web should be fine. If you need someone to define high-level messages that will drive the content on your site or write content from scratch, start with a web writer. If you need someone to create a long-term plan not just for the static content on your site, but also for the content you plan to publish in the future (blog posts, articles, etc.) then a content strategist would be helpful.

However, if you need someone to help you figure out what your business model is (aka, what kinds of things you offer or what your brand attributes are), it’s not time to hire a writer yet.

There are many kinds of Content Strategists. Some Content Strategists focus on keywords and metadata. Some focus on SEO. Some focus on optimizing the back-end technologies you need to publish your content. Some focus on defining what channels your content will be distributed across. Some focus on defining what messages you’re trying to communicate on your website, and how.

Don’t expect that any one Content Strategist will be able to address all these issues. And if you need someone to address all these issues, hire a multi-person firm that specializes in Content Strategy, like Brain Traffic or Eat Media. See Kristina Halvorson’s article in A List Apart for more.

Copywriter doesn’t always mean Web Writer. In theory, web writers should understand how to create marketing copy, and copywriters should understand how to write for the web. In practice, this is not the case. If you need content written for your website, don’t assume you’ll get good results by hiring a seasoned copywriter—only a good web writer who’s familiar with UX, IA, and how people read on the web will do the job right. If you don’t know whether your copywriter understands the web, take a look at the design and writing on his or her website. This should give you a good indication.

A linear processes is not always best. Usually, a redesign process goes something like this: content strategy, copy and web writing, information architecture, design, templates, programming. You might find, however, that you don’t need a complete content strategy, that you need to generate more copy after you’ve finished IA, or that you have to rewrite a lot of your copy so it harmonizes with the visual design. No matter how good a planner you are, a linear process in which each phase is rigidly locked after it’s finished does not necessarily produce a great product or project experience. Plan for an organic process, and expect that all your web specialists will need to talk to one another.

To see just how “organic” things can be, check out Nishant Kothary’s visualization of the process we followed during the MIX Online Redesign. (Read his wonderful article, The Anatomy of a Web Design, too).

A website is like a book in at least one way. If you remove an entire chapter from a book or rearrange its chapters, you’ll have to spend time rewriting it in order for it to make sense. If you change the thesis statement that the book is based on, the writing will have to be adjusted accordingly. Likewise, if you completely rethink a site’s information architecture or remove or condense pages, the messages and writing will have to be reworked accordingly. And if you change your web strategy (from “this site is oriented around my public speaking” to “this site is oriented toward my company’s portfolio,” for example) mid-stream, you will have to go back to the drawing board with copy.

Like a book, most marketing websites have a certain narrative quality—one page/thought should lead naturally to another, and the whole thing should work together to tell a great story. If you rethink one part of your story, it’s likely that another will be affected.

Writing and pictures are in love. You should not think of copy and design as mutually exclusive. Much of what makes the copy on your website on-tone, on-brand, and on-message depends on how well it harmonizes with your visuals, and vice versa. A great design/copy combination is the best way to tell a great story—and the best way to tell if your strategy and messages are working.

I’ve written about this before.

A well-written site is not cheap. Prices for good web writing span a wide range, but don’t expect it to be cheap. $25.00/hr is not enough, unless you’re hiring someone to edit your footer. Content Strategy will be even more expensive than web writing. Like good design, great writing is an investment that takes lots of research and revisions to get right.

Common sense is gold. Do not go rushing out to hire a content strategist just because everyone on the web is talking about content strategy. Do not spend 60k rewriting and designing your site until you have a good idea of why you’re doing it, with a rationally prioritized list of goals you’d like to accomplish. Before you hire someone to tell you what your goals are, sit down with a piece of paper and work them out yourself. Don’t hire anyone whose services you do not have a basic grasp of. Et cetera.

Don’t hire a writer if you don’t understand the value of good writing. No writer wants to work with a grumbly client who doesn’t see the value of her work. No client wants to work with someone he didn’t want to hire in the first place. To understand the value of good writing, start by doing some research.

Know your goals and business, first. I’ll say it again: no amount of copy, design, or organization will save you from a bad business model, a poor understanding of your business and audience or lack of a web strategy. If you don’t know these things, it’s probably smart to hold off on hiring copywriters, content strategists, or web designers until you’ve worked out your business plan. Because the most beautifully designed and written website in the world will fail if there’s not a solid purpose behind it.

The Case for Cohesion.

Everyone’s hot and bothered about content strategy and web writing right now, but that doesn’t mean that a good content plan or writing alone can solve all your problems. In fact, no one service can make your website successful. It takes a cohesive, thorough, and artistic combination of all these things, plus a deep understand of your own business model, to do that.

My suggestion is to take a practical, thoughtful approach and hire web specialists who work well together and understand one other’s disciplines.

Here, I’ll talk about the differences between the partners and vendors, and offer a few solutions to figuring out which category best describes your business.

The Difference Between Partner and Vendor

The difference between partners and vendors revolves around one central question: Does your agency simply fulfill job order specs handed to it via an RFP or per the client’s request, or does it actually help craft the strategy that drives the RFP or client’s requests? In other words, is your agency involved in critically thinking through the marketing and business objectives that determine what work should be done, or not?

If clients come to you for advice and look to you to help them work through strategy-related questions, you’re probably in the partner category. If clients come to you primarily for your technical expertise—your excellent command of photoshop, ability to pump out pixel-perfect XHTML, or unbelievable turnaround times—you might be in the vendor category.

Another way of putting it: Vendors carry out tasks (often beautifully, I should add). Partners help create the tasks, and then carry them out.

When Vendor Is Right

Although the way I’ve framed this conversation makes it seem like being in the vendor category might be bad, this is not necessarily true. Some businesses are built on a vendor framework: they usually know the scope of their projects, have a very crisp, predictable biz dev process, and pump out consistent work. Because their services are roughly the same from project to project, vendors are often nimble, expert craftsmen who are able to turn on a dime and accommodate last-minute changes and feature requests with ease. The same is not always true of partners.

When Vendor Is Wrong

Problems arise when agencies who’ve been hired for their web or communications strategy skills are treated like vendors. A common scenario for those in the partner category goes like this:

You’ve gone through a thorough strategy phase and helped your client discover the main problems with his website—the tone is off, the design doesn’t fit the branding strategy, and the user experience is poor. You’ve helped him create a strategy for his content, worked with him to generate high-level messages, made wireframes that display page-level requirements, and agreed on a look and feel for the design after submitting a round of moodboards. You’ve long-since signed the creative brief.

You’re halfway through template development, when suddenly your client (after talking with his boss or wife, let’s say) decides he wants to move everything on the home page around, change his concept for the blog, re-write the about page, and switch the colors on the whole site from orange to green. What happens next?

The difference between a vendor and a partner is, in some respects, the difference in how each gets treated in this situation. If you are treated as a vendor, your client will usually expect that you simply make the changes he requests—you can often (but not always) ask for a change order and add more to the budget if the changes are out of scope, but you probably won’t be invited to submit your opinion about the logic behind his decisions.

If you’re treated as a partner, it’s feasible that you can raise issues (beyond just budget and scope) with the changes. Do they make sense? Do they fit with your strategy? What business conditions caused your client’s boss/wife to suggest them? Are they really a good idea?

When Partner Is Right

Where you fit along the partner-vendor spectrum depends on what kind of ship you’re running, where your talents lie, and how well you tolerate and resolve uncertainty; when you start a strategy project or partner with a client, it’s not always clear where you’ll end up.

For our agency, partnering with clients is the definitive answer. We like high-level problem-solving about business goals and marketing strategy. We like the difficult conversations and back and forth it takes to come up with the right solution. We like helping our clients find new ways of communicating with their audience. Most of all, we like the long-term relationships that come from a partnering situation: clients come back to us for our opinions and advice, or to just think through a rough idea.

The same is not true for every agency. You may be more comfortable with a more clear cut, product-like rendering of your services, for example: you deliver the same wonderful thing every time, like a hot cup of coffee.

These days, it seems like every agency wants to be known as a strategy-oriented, problem-solving, critical thinking group of creatives. But I’m not sure this is actually true—there are just as many great reasons for being a “vendor” (as I’ve defined it here) as there are for being a “partner.” It all depends on your business model.

In my opinion, the trick is to spend a good deal of time discovering out where you fit along this spectrum. Then, you must communicate your decision clearly to clients, so they hire you for services you actually offer, have reasonable expectations about what you will and will not do, and respect your way of working.

2009

It’s been a Bubblicious year for Matt and me. In July, I left my good job at Blue Flavor, joined thingsthatarebrown, and started my own business. Since August, I’ve finished 18 projects of various sizes and written four articles. Matt worked his face off, completing over 26 projects, speaking, attending conferences, and writing — thingsthatarebrown has grown furiously.

In the personal sphere, we went on seven big trips, bought our first car, and got married. Matt took up boxing. I dabbled in trapeze.

As I mentioned in a Second and Park blog post, we have been fortunate. We’ve got good friends and supportive colleagues cheering us on. Our families like us. The recession didn’t bash our business in. Working together has actually brought us closer, rather than straining our marriage (as many suspected it would).

Still, there are some things we sucked at. We didn’t cook enough, and didn’t allow enough time for making and seeing art. I said yes to way too many projects. We didn’t always begin and end our days crisply. But hey—bygones.

2010

Next year, we want to take things up a notch. Our #1 goal is to seriously improve our thingsthatarebrown work and grow into a deeper, better agency. We want our work and process to more accurately represent our tastes and talents. We want to collaborate more. Here’s how we plan on doing it:

Reposition thingsthatarebrown. This year, we’re rolling out new services and refining our process. Instead of focusing on design, templates and development, we’ll be focusing on strategy, art direction, copywriting, and design. In other words, TTAB is no longer one guy cranking out IA and design. It’s the both of us, focusing on really solving our clients problems and helping them communicate the right message. This critical thinking-heavy, strategy-not-tactics approach is what we’re good at, and what we like.

Rethink Second and Park. Second and Park has been an unexpected and fast success, but it can’t be my full-time job. A while back, I wrote that copy is not enough—meaning that it takes strategy and copy and design to really get the right message across. Accordingly, I’ll be doing most of my copy and strategy work in conjunction with design projects this year, and therefore spending more time at thingsthatarebrown.

More and Better Writing. This is our pet project. The brown blog is nowhere near what we think it can be, and we plan to fix that. Expect us to complete our thoughts, pursue ideas further, post more often, and write articles and how-to’s in addition to regular old posts.

More Speaking. I’m speaking at SXSW and both Matt and I are speaking at Microsoft Mix10, so we’ve already beat last year’s record—but it would be really nice if we could find one more conference in, say, Paris or Berlin to speak at. Just to keep it mixxy.

More Art. This means more art of every kind in our work and lives. Our refined strategy and discovery phases will reflect this thinking, as will the little choices we make daily about how we spend our time. And yes: by art I do mean the standard menu of museums, music, flights of fancy, and books.

More Travel. If all goes well, we’ll squeeze in some quality overseas time. Eventually we want to live overseas part-time; this year is our trial run.

Fewer Projects. We simply can’t meet our goals and take on the project load we did in 2009. So, it’s fewer yesses and projects for us in 2010.

Remember What We’re About. In addition to wanting freedom and flexibility, we started our companies because we think that good, honest communication makes businesses better and more exciting.That’s what our writing and design are about. We’ll try to keep this thinking front and center as we tumble through next year. Thanks to Howard Mann for framing the concept.

And that’s it! We hope you have a happy 2010, and that you feel clear and energized the whole time. If you’ve got any goals or inspiration you’d like to share, feel free to bring that ruckus here.

The concept was to cut through the overloading of technical information surrounding digital cameras, with some simple and direct advice. Just spend a few hours on a site like Digital Photography Review, and you’ll quickly realize that having all the information possible, doesn’t make it easier to make a decision — especially for those new to photography.

Not that simple

Designing this site was easy. I’d been itching to make a very visual, simple product pitch page, and this project gave me a great avenue for that — big, juicy, product photography with dramatic rollovers. Hoo-ha, I’m in heaven.

Writing the actual copy and coming up with a strategy for the site — that was difficult. My hat goes off to any copywriter or agency who has to tackle how to market and promote a modern camera. It’s unbelievably painful. You see, digital cameras are just little black boxes packed so densely with technology, it’s amazing they can function at all.

But how do you market pure technology? All these cameras have roughly the same feature sets. They all take mostly the same quality of picture (for type, price range). They nearly all look identical.

Give benefits

I was lucky enough to have Tiffani around to help to sort through the copy dilemma. Originally, I had resorted to the crutch of listing features like “this camera has xxx sensor that blah blah blah”. Obvously, this is a flawed approach — who cares? To list a feature presumes that the reader can translate that into a reason to care. One should never place the burden on the customer to understand why they’d benefit from a feature.

So we scratched our Marketing 101 itch, and came up with a list of benefits to pitch these cameras on — what does each camera do that makes a user’s life easier, or photos better. Focusing on benefits also helped me articulate why I thought these cameras stood out — in a crowded market, they offer some real-world benefits to beginning photographers.

Anyhow, just a little insight into how complicated and challenging even a ‘little’ project can be. Strategy and writing are always the most important elements of any project — even if they’re the most difficult.

Share the love

In the new year, I’ll expand the site a bit, recommend a few other camera types, and give some links to photo resources for beginners. It’s still a work in progress.

However, if you know of anyone looking for a new digital camera, pass ‘em the link. Both are solid, unique cameras that offer an awesome value for the money.

This is what working as an independent, design agency is all about: good work, good people.

This week, three projects that I lead design on are launching. Here’s a quick run down of what’s out:

MIX Online

http://visitmix.com/

It’s a very rare project, especially one with such high-visibility, where you’re given the creative license to essentially ‘go nuts’ with the art direction—to design it for yourself and create something you care about. To make it yours. But that’s what Nishant Kothary and the Mix Online team encouraged me to do.

It took a lot of iterations, a few false starts, and some soul-searching on my part to find a look I could say that I loved, and which also nailed our much more concrete objectives. But I think we got there.

To me, Mix Online always felt like a community magazine, so I focused on making every element on the site feel considered, thoughtful, and balanced—the way a great magazine feels, and begs to be read.

It needs to be noted, in bold, that none of this would have been possible without the amazing support of Nishant Kothary. He’s a project leader like no other—sensitive, thoughtful, articulate, and understanding. He really pushed me to expand my design skills, without ever feeling pushy. Also, this was an awesome project because I got to work with Tiffani, my business partner and wife, on the copywriting and messaging. Her work is what really takes the design to the next level, and makes the site feel warm and inviting.

Lastly, a big thanks to Evan Sharp, a good friend who translated my designs into awesome xhtml, css, and js. Code never tasted so good.

But enough backstory. The end result is what matters. Here’s a look and a link below; there will be a more fleshed out, design analysis post coming soon. Congrats to the MIX Online team for launching this so quickly.

MIX 10K Smart Coding Challenge

http://mix10k.visitmix.com/

Another awesome project for Microsoft. The 10k Smart Coding Challenge is part of Mix Online; our goal was to re-align the Challenge as a separate and distinctive (yet still related) brand and site.

Working with an awesome logo and identity by Wexley School for Girls, I extended this work through the site, and blended it with the “mixing” circles of the MIX Online site. It harmonizes with Mix Online, but still stands as its own bold brand.

I used clear, large, modern type (Helvetica Bold) and gave the page room to breath with lots of whitespace. I handled the template development on this project (using 960.gs), and really wanted to make the design feel interactive and “highly clickable”—so there are subtle :hover states on just about every page element.

A big thanks to Ian Muir (@WoogyChuck) for developing the site from my templates/design and Amy Conklin (@Amyrc) for managing the project.

Professional Bowlers Association (pba.com)

http://pba.com

The PBA.com re-design gave me the perfect opportunity to design within constraints. PBA had worked with an outside firm to develop a great new branding package and very high quality athlete photography; they needed me to seamlessly integrated this branding work into their current website, which was also due for a HTML code clean up.

Given the project’s scope and timeline, we opted not to address IA and site organization issues. At its core, the project was a targeted re-design and usability tune-up for the entire domain.

I designed the look from the new branding elements, and worked in the great photography wherever possible. A strict grid (960.gs, again) helped organize the new look, and gave PBA’s in-house development team a pattern to apply to the many different page types in the site. Lastly, I developed bulletproof HTML code that works great in IE 6-8 (not easy!), a large part of their audience.

Big high fives to Johanna Miller, Tim Morelli, Aaron Sprague, Barry Miller, Adrienne Frank, Louis O’Callaghan, and the entire PBA.com team for being open and easy to work with. When you get Miller Lite-themed bowling ball from a client, you know you’re in good hands.

Refreshed

This is embarrassingly tardy, but I wanted to say thanks to all those attended my Seattle Refresh presentation a few weeks ago. My presentation was largely a follow up to a previous Refresh talk I gave, about my first few months of freelancing.

This time, I talked about my recent switch from strictly freelancing to a more strategy, collaborative, and ‘agency-oriented’ model of business. It’s a big topic to cover in a short presentation, but I tried. I’ll be talking about it more in the upcoming months.

Yes that’s right — I’m finally going to start posting here again.

For those that couldn’t attend or wanted to look through my slides, here they are:

Big up

It’s always a pleasure and an honor to speak at any event, but there’s something special about the Seattle Refresh series. It’s an intimate, warm, and friendly community event that we need many more of in our industry — big thanks to Nick Finck and Kevin Tamura of Blue Flavor for putting on the event.

His talk is called Growing Pains: From Freelance to Agency. So as you might suspect, he’ll talk about the aches, pains, and joys of growing your freelance business into a real agency.

He’ll cover a little bit of everything—from organizing your new business and dealing with a heftier workload, to seamlessly bringing someone else into your process and staying motivated & inspired all the while. The details:

What: A presentation about growing your business
When: Thursday, 10/22/09 at 6pm
Where: Fremont Public Library
Important: Seats are limited and you have to RSVP.

In case you don’t know, Refresh Seattle is: a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in the Seattle/Puget Sound area. Refresh promotes design, technology, usability, and standards.

Hope you can come!

This is something I’ve always found a little fascinating with our industry; the barely contained contempt for the people whose projects we’re supposed to passionately care about (and whose money keeps us gainfully employed). It’s hard not to smell the air of smug satisfaction amongst web designers — we get the Internet and everyone else is just dense. This needs to change.

Noah’s opening salvo hits the nail on the head:

First, stop thinking your client is stupid. Your client is not stupid… We are in the services industry. Get used to it. Your client is your lifeline. Show them the respect they deserve, even if they don’t deserve it.

Words to live by. If you don’t play well with others, you might want to go build that “bug tracker two point oh dot fart” web-app (I kid, because I’ve tried). Seriously — if you can’t find the headspace to realize that designing for clients is all about empathy, patience, and understanding, you need to find a different line of work.

Why so serious?

Why do I care so much about this? Because I’ve committed myself to working in this field for the foreseeable future — web design is what I do, and where my passion lies. I love the chance to work with a new medium, and solve design and communication problems for real people.

But this industry is a shared house, a co-op if you will, and one that we all need to maintain. It reflects poorly on us all when some people leave their dirty laundry around this house, and forget to mow the lawn. It’s a fragile garden, and it needs constant tending. All of our jobs will be easier if we focus on service, and not whatever new HTML5 spec is trending on Twitter. Technology isn’t the problem, it’s our collective poor attitude and lack of focus.

The gist — don’t become a web designer just because you can. Do it because you love it, want to grow professionally, and enjoy working and helping others. If we all focused on being ‘best friends forever’ — designers & clients together — we’ll be better for it.