The initial conclusion you might jump to would be that websites are obsolete and the big brands are now just relying on Facebook. It’s true that your average non-geek internet user could happily have all their online communications, web searching, video viewing, gaming, news etc. needs serviced without moving away from Facebook, with their laptop next to them on the sofa whilst watching telly. Do some people just think Facebook IS the internet? It’s certainly less complicated – a single login (not even that if you set your browser to remember the passwords) and it’s all there. More importantly, is that what Lynx, Carlsberg, Ford, Pepsi et al think that you think.

I actually did what I was supposed to do (for once) and followed the herd to Facebook. I chose Lynx as a example (facebook.com/lynxeffectuk). Instead of seeing the brand’s website duplicated on Facebook, the landing page is dedicated to the campaign that the TV ad is part of. 236,000 likes. The updates from this are fed back into the “proper” website as well as a Twitter and YouTube Feed…and everything, of course, is “liked” and shared by those 236,000 Facebook users.

Facebook hasn’t replaced the website, it’s just another way into people’s heads. By using a familiar environment and changing your message accordingly you can get a more subtle, finely tuned message to a set of customers than a one-size-fits-all website. Facebook allows a different kind of interaction with an audience, more ways to discuss and share things and it happens pretty much instantly. If you do it right your target customers are not only potential buyers but a potential (and free) marketing team who will do your work for you.

What interests me is the fact that procrastination is almost universal in people who are normally described as “creative types”.Why? Douglas Adams used to famously avoid having to write by having baths. Several a day, in fact. Apparently his publisher once commented that he never once managed to hit a deadline…but he always smelt really nice.

As designers, we are surrounded by some very dangerous distractions. Computers. The most tempting, time-sucking creations ever made are, by a cruel twist of fate, the very things we are also supposed to use to get our work done with.

I took games off my Mac years ago. It just had to be done. However, since then the internet has sneaked up on us. Facebook, Twitter, the hundred blogs you feel you need to keep up with. Email, iChat. All of these toys with their shiny, glossy icons inviting you to come and play, and all with built-in justifications: Facebook could be helping you meet your next client. Blogging is a great marketing tool. Email is easier than phoning someone. That retro video PhotoShop plugin you just spent ten minutes downloading will, if mastered be great for some job in the future. Probably.

But it’s not all computers. There are endless possibilities for analogue procrastination as well. Never is our office tidier or more organised than when a big project has just begun. Well – you need to clean up, clear a space, get organised for the new work. And go and get some crisps and chocolate to see you through. Maybe the skirting boards need levelling off a bit. A new shelf to put all the new work on. Anything, in fact, to avoid doing the actual work itself (which, of course will be great when it is done, so no need to worry, really).

Wikpedia has some really scary things to say on the subject. Phrases like “psychological disorder”, “mental health” and “low self-esteem” kind of made me decide to go and do something else and maybe read that page later.

My own theory is that creativity is somehow in need of a jump start which can only be achieved with a buildup of adrenalin. Designers need the utter terror of a looming deadline in order to kick into action whatever part of the brain that supplies us with the instinctive solution to a problem without all that tedious thinking and planning that normal people have to go through. Also the act of thinking of something completely unconnected to what you are supposed to be somehow allows a hidden part of your mind to work away undisturbed and to quietly deliver the answer – usually at the strangest of times.

You could say rather than a negative aspect, procrastination is practised by people who have a supreme confidence in their own abilities. People who know they’ll always think of something at the last moment and know enough about how their own heads work to just let it get on with it automatically.

Either that or creatives are just people who are good at working out the bare minimum of work needed to complete a task so they can fill the rest of the day on Facebook.

Who knows? Not me. Anyway, there’s a deadline looming here so, naturally, I’m just going to fill the screenwash up in my car and maybe go and buy some crisps.

2009 was a bit of a yin and yang year for us. We began by bucking the recession due to the fact we were building online shops and other non-print projects. However the print design side also saw an increase, although the jobs were smaller and mostly relating to clients’ websites. For example, short run flyers promoting web offers or corporate IDs for new businesses who were wanting a web presence over anything else. Businesses seem to be retreating to the web due to the flexibility and ease of updating what they are offering.

The later part of the year saw a massive increase in late and non-payment from clients – even ones we have worked for for years and considered friends. It seems that when times are hard loyalty becomes a casualty. My own role became more of a credit controller than a designer which had a knock-on effect on the time available to spend with our “good” clients and developing new business. We felt that by giving massively increased credit (although not out of choice) we were suddenly doing the job of the banks, who were in retreat from lending.

However, on the upside, in terms of new business, 2009 must go down as a record year for increasing our client base with a surprising amount of startups coming to us and also established companies looking for a change, or for better value from their creative partners.

I’d be interested to hear some feedback from others in the creative industries to see if we had similar experiences.

As for our direction in 2010, 2009 has laid the foundations for a slight shift in our approach to website building. Every site we built had some sort of content management element. It’s something you can’t escape from now. Unfortunately this makes it difficult to add sites to your portfolio as you’re never quite sure what the client has done to the site after you’ve “handed over the keys”. The majority of sites were based on WordPress (including this one) which has now matured from a blog system into something that can transparently run a normal-looking site…but with the added advantage of a massive amount of control for the owner.

We also built several online shops based on the Zen Cart and X-Cart systems as well as creating a couple of totally bespoke systems ourselves in-house for clients with specific needs. A significant development here has been the wider acceptance of PayPal as a payment gateway. As it can also process standard credit and debit cards it allows the site owner to avoid having to jump through the hoops of the banks and also to avoid the nightmare (and often prohibitive cost) of PCI compliance. The surge of online shopping is something we hope to continue taking advantage of, and I think I’m going to have to just bite the bullet and start using the words “cart” and “store” instead of “shopping basket” and “shop” to save time when customising (or should that be “customizing”) these American systems.

Final thoughts:

We got to love:

• Lazy loaders
• Fat footers
• SIFR
• JQuery
• WordPress
• FML
• Filthy Dukes

We got to hate:

• Rouge clients
• The continued existence of IE 6
• Courses on how to use Social Media to increase sales

Glad to see the back of:

• That crappy swirly / spirally / flowery illustration style that everyone likened to Art Nouveau but clearly wasn’t
• The paint-splat / run effect

Design and in particular, web design are fields which require practitioners to keep constantly up to date on what’s going on within their chosen field. In the case of design, its important to keep up with the latest trends, themes and motifs, while trying to figure out where to go next. In the case of web design you also have to keep up with technology, APIs, frameworks and a whole host of other technobabble that occasionally fills me with dread.

Recently I’ve recently been learning the intricacies of x-cart. X Cart is a solution for building safe and robust e-commerce sites and supports all the sort of features that you’d expect to see in an online shop, by using it we can offer our clients a powerful shopping solution that should cover almost all their needs for a nominal charge. We’ll be adding a couple of shopfronts we’ve been building to our portfolio soon.

I’ve also been burying my head in the innards of WordPress to allow us to build ever more complex blogs and websites, I’ve also been working my first custom widget for the Sensora 2010 website.

I’ve also been busying myself with learning Action Script 3. To be fair, I’ve been learning bits of it since it was released, but I seriously knuckled down to it in 2009 and can now use it – together with away3d to deliver fully interactive 3d experiences straight to the user’s browser. Working with Flash and AS3 is a bit of a weird one for me personally, I used to hate it, then I had what I guess you could call an epiphany and everything seemed to fit together in my head. Now its an area I actually enjoy working with – go figure.

Ok… so I kinda revel in the technobabble, but when you can use it to actually come up with something it’s sort of seductive.

Search Engine Optimisation is something that people get hung up on too much and it’s mostly because there is so much misinformation, half-truths and outdated ideas floating around about the subject. The current state of affairs has been brought about as the result of spammers trying to ruin everything for the rest of us, and search providers – mainly Google – desperately trying to keep it all in check.

The problem with many SEO experts is that they engage in practices that have negligible effect on actual search rankings, and in some cases can actually get you punished by the big G.

From my run-ins with various self-proclaimed SEO experts (and they are all self-proclaimed) here is a (non-exhaustive) list of the methods they employ and why I think they’re bunk:

1. Meta keywords – this is worthy of a post in it’s own right.
   I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve talked to who are convinced that meta keywords mean a damn thing. Thankfully Google has finally put the idea to rest. Stuffing the meta with keywords will most likely drop your site down the rankings as Google will think you’re trying to trick it.
2. Stuff your content full of keywords you put in the meta tag
   While it does make sense to have some keywords in your text, many SEO companies will advise you to stuff it full, until there’s barely any words left in between to hold the sentence together. Remember, it’s your customers who buy your products, not the search engine, text that is jammed with jargon and keywords isn’t pleasant to read and will most likely make people go elsewhere.
3. Change your content regularly
   This is usually the kicker of the whole shebang. Now, it’s true that Google likes sites that are generating new content, because you’re contributing to keeping the web fresh, however unscrupulous SEO experts go so far as to change a few sentences a month on pages that already exist. Now this isn’t too bad from a technical point of view (it’s not breaking the way the web should work), but its not uncommon to hear of people paying a £200+ retainer on a monthly basis.
4. Traffic shaping
   The above methods range from pointless to reasonably harmless, this is where we start getting into the dark underbelly of SEO practices. Traffic shaping is done by adding ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ to links that they don’t want a search engine’s spider program to go down. This is an attempt to increase certain page’s rank within their own site and while the “nofollow” attribute does have some good uses, it’s generally frowned upon as you’re artificially increasing the apparent usefulness of the page in question.
5. Link Bombing
   Now we’re well and truly in the dark recesses of the SEO world. This is the practice of spreading links all over the web with specific keywords, the idea being that search engines will associate these keywords with that link eventually. These methods usually involve employing 3rd world labour and paying them pennies per link they create.
6. Spam bots
   Similar to link bombing, although usually they operate by posting comments on blogs and in online forums. These are the cases where the nofollow attribute is useful, as it effectively renders the link pointless.

So, that’s some of the nefarious practices employed by SEO agents, what about good SEO?

Powazek writes:

“The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious…”

Thing is, its not really. Good SEO practices are all wrapped up conversations about semantics, page order and code execution.

Here’s another non-exhaustive list of what I consider to be good practice.

1. Header tag order
   Headers should always flow down the page in order of importance, the website’s title should always use the <H1> tag, titles for posts (for example) should use <h2> and so on. If you need more than the 6 levels provided by HTML, you’re doing something wrong.
2. Content at the top
   It’s important to get the content of the document as close to the top of the HTML code as possible for two reasons.
   1) It makes life easier for the blind: if you have to listen to a screen reader walk you through a bunch of unrelated garbage before you get to the content, it’s just unfair.
   2) It ensures that when a search engine takes a cache of your page it actually captures the important bit first.
3. Menus at the bottom (of the code)
   This is related to point 2, the navigation bar should always get put to the bottom of the code. It saves blind people having to listen to the options over and over like an infernal telephone menu system stuck on repeat and also guarantees that Google doesn’t return your menu on its search results. So long as your web designer knows what they’re doing (and I do) the menu will still appear at the top (or where ever you want) of the actual page.
4. Use semantically correct tags
   This is a point that’s going to become increasingly important in a few years as the web moves towards a true relationship-based network of pages. This means using list elements for what they’re intended, rather than trying to make one using carriage returns.
5. Write good content
   Which is hopefully what I’ve been doing here. What’s the point of having a beautiful, semantic, optimised website, when there’s nothing worth looking at when you get there?

So there you have it, I don’t completely disagree with Powazek’s position, I just think that perhaps instead of bleating on about how ‘obvious’ it all is, he could have at least touched on why he though it was all so obvious.

After a few setbacks (The Full Monty, the National Centre for Popular Music, the Airport), the city now has a reputation for creative and technical innovation worldwide. We have a thriving Cultural Industries Quarter, home to designers, media, musicians, filmmakers, digital innovators and artists all centred around the Workstation and Showroom Cinema. Across the city, the Digital and New Media sector is growing faster in Sheffield than any other country in the UK according to InvestInSheffield.

Creative and technology businesses can work anywhere – we’re all linked up via the web, these days. That means that, rather than being located here for a specific reason, people working here have chosen to be here. Investors from outside the region appreciate the strange geography of the place that makes us as near to the wilds of the Peaks and Derbyshire as we are to Leeds, Manchester, Doncaster and Nottingham.

A good proportion of design, creative and media companies are based in Sheffield’s Cultural Industries Quarter. We are not! The advantages of having non-city-centre premises are obvious in terms of overheads, which we can pass on to our clients. And we can always get into town in five minutes if we need to.

Sheffield is a tough place to do business – we know the value of money and are not easily convinced by marketing and spin. Instead of saying “Hello”, Sheffielders will often greet you with the phrase “What d’yu know?”. Guaranteed to put anyone on the back foot – but also an unexpected invitation dispose of smalltalk and to share your thoughts.

Several of our clients have described themselves as having “short arms but long pockets”. Dry humour, a no-nonsense attitude, and honesty prevail in Sheffield. This has shaped the way Sheffield is now as a business and creative force and influences the way we do business with all our clients.