Ryan Stemkoski » Design

2010 Yakima Advertising Federation Chinook Awards

Ryan Stemkoski — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:29:37 +0000

Zipline Interactive has been a participating member in Spokane Advertising Federation since we opened shop in 2005. Our team members have attended a number of programs, helped with events, sat on the SAF board, and even helped develop and host the SAF website.   

We believe the SAF is an important resource for Spokane creatives. The SAF helps to educate, inspire, and motivate our creative community. This in turns raises the image of Spokane and all regional companies that rely on the SAF members for their marketing and advertising needs.

This year we had the privilege of hosting the judging for the Yakima Advertising Federation at our office on Madison Street here in Spokane. It was a great event. There were a number of good entries from both students and professionals.

The judges for the event where:  
Kevin Armstrong – Addison/Kimberly
 Jesse Pierpoint – Pierpoint Design & Branding 
Rick Hosmer – Klündt | Hosmer
Ryan Stemkoski – Zipline Interactive

Judging took several grueling hours but in the end kings were crowned. We won’t share the winners now but hopefully once they are announced we can share some of this great work with you.

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Software to Automatically Make a HTML version of a Dynamic Website

Ryan Stemkoski — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:00:07 +0000

It seems like there are a million different content management systems out there. Some like the ZLCMS system we use at Zipline are transferrable to another web host but occasionally we have run into web development companies with ‘proprietary’ content management systems. Many of these companies won’t allow their customers to transfer their website to another hosting company. Often, when we run into these situations the customers are willing to forfeit their content management just to get away from the web development company they are working with. On a few of these occasions we have been forced to hand backup an entire HTML website, updating images, links, etc.

Years ago I had a software program that would copy down an entire HTML site fairly accurately. Unfortunately, as the web transitioned to dynamic websites this software package could not keep up with the advances.

Today, I discovered a website backup utility that has done a fantastic job in my tests. I backed up several of our complicated dynamic websites and it has done a great job making them work in an HTML version. If you run into a situation where your website, or your customers website is being held hostage by a web design company this could be the perfect solution for you.

The software is called HTTrack Website Copier and it is a free GPL licensed software package.

Click here to download HTTrack

If you have any comments or questions please leave a comment below.

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The SEO Rapper… Again

Ryan Stemkoski — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:57:57 +0000

I am not a big YouTube person. Every once in awhile, I will watch something like Charlie the Unicorn or Lebron James high school highlight reels when I am super bored. Today I had a web developer friend send over a link to a video called Design Coding. Obviously, many of you beat me to this video because as I am writing this it has nearly 445,000 views.

The video is from the Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) The rap is actually pretty funny. I have seen a couple other videos from the SEO Rapper but I hadn’t come across this one. Some of my favorite lines are:

“Don’t use italics use emphasis”

“Don’t duplicate it or you might face a litigation”

“Your photoshop functions, slice that design, do your layout with divs, make sure that its aligned”

“Please don’t use tables even though they work fine, when it comes to indexing they give search engines a hard time”

“The competition will get bitter, you’ll shine like glitter”

It isn’t every day you hear a rap song about web design. In fact I have only heard a couple and they were mostly done by white guys skinnier than I am. In all honestly I can’t believe this exists but since it does you have to check it out. If you’re really bored check out some of his other videos. I know some of you may have seen them already but if you’re like me and missed out on the SEO Rapper thus far, you need to check him out.

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Is it your fault if your clients suck at what they do?

Ryan Stemkoski — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:26:07 +0000

Let me tell you a weird but funny story. (It’s worth reading, trust me) Over the weekend, I was chatting with a web developer friend of mine who shall remain nameless. For the sake of this post, we will call him Herman. Late Friday afternoon, Herman was working away in his office when he got a phone call from a number he didn’t recognize. Hoping for some new business in a slow economy he answered the call against his better judgment. What he found on the other end of the line was not a new lead but instead a very, very, dissatisfied customer. The twist to the story is the customer on the other end of the line wasn’t his, nor did she even own a website.

It turns out this Ann Coulter like figure, was in fact a CUSTOMER of one of Herman’s previous web development clients. So things don’t get too confusing, we will call this angry lady Rosie O’Donell for the remainder of the article. Anyway, it turns out Rosie was irate because she had hired a contractor to assist with some remodel work at her home. The contractor had taken her money, started the work, and had disappeared for weeks without notifying her or returning her calls. Her house was now a disaster, her money was gone, and she didn’t know what to do.

Why was she mad at Herman though? Well, Herman had created a very nice and professional website for his client, the contractor. In fact, the website was so good and professional that Rosie hired the contractor without meeting him in person. The website was so professional, that she thought she was working with a large construction company and was incredibly surprised to find out it was one man show and he was a part-time handy man working out of his home.

Rosie’s argument was that Herman had helped the client misrepresent himself. Herman’s argument was that his client was a nice guy and he has no control over how he performs his business. Herman, like most of us, was hired to help his client create a professional image. This story really got me thinking though. As web developers and marketers, we often try to position our clients above where they actually fall in their market. Are we doing consumers an injustice? In addition, should we be liable for misrepresenting our clients? Is it wrong for us to help companies try to look better than they actually are? Should we actually be positioning them on par with comparable competition?

This is an interesting story that brings up some intriguing questions. Let me know what you think! I am anxious to hear thoughts from other marketers and web developers on this story.

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Should I throw feces on them?

Ryan Stemkoski — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 15:04:34 +0000

This week, there has been a highly publicized “feud” between John Stewart and the douchey bald guy from Mad Money. Unlike most web developers, I am very interested in the financial markets and pay close attention to what is going on Wall Street. Obviously, these days there isn’t much good news coming from Wall Street. Since the bottom fell out of the huge pyramid scheme formally known as the U.S. banking system, there has been a lot of talk about how the U.S. public was terribly misled. John Stewart was complaining about exactly that when he sparked a feud with CNBC. His argument is that CNBC helped hyper-inflate the bubble. Instead of telling the American public that U.S. financial institutions were terribly overleveraged they encouraged Americans to buy stock in companies on the verge of failure and Americans did it. As experts they failed to perform their duty. Why did Americans fall for it? Not because they’re stupid but because they don’t understand the increasingly complex financial markets and because they trust the so called experts.

Web developers are experts but the main problem I see in web development is blatant disrespect for customers. Web development is a confusing topic for many. If our customers understood design, programming, and SEO they wouldn’t need to hire us. As experts, it is our job to guide them in the right direction and to give them all of the information and advice necessary to make a good decision, even if the result is they work with a more qualified company. Much like CNBC we have a duty to our customers.

Recently, I have been getting bids to do some landscaping and fencing in my backyard. If I really, really tried I could probably do these projects myself. In reality, I know very little about fencing and less about sprinklers, I have some opinions but I am no expert and that is why I am hiring someone to help. When talking with the various contractors, my lack of knowledge really got me thinking about how web development customers feel in meetings.

I don’t think of myself as a dumb person. In fact I feel like I am pretty good at what I do but what I do is web development NOT landscaping. Our customers are smart people. They run businesses, have families, and shape our community. The problem with web design customers isn’t that they’re dumb, the problem is that they don’t understand web design and that is exactly why they’ve hired you! Instead of criticizing your customers for their lack of knowledge you should dance circles of joy. If everyone was a web development expert then you would probably be watching Oprah from your mom’s couch.

As a fellow web developer I challenge you all to try to provide your customers with a good value, good information, and the respect they deserve. Customers are a requirement of running a web design agency but they’re also people with families and lives. Web developers, SEO experts, and marketers in general should work hard to avoid the snake oil salesman reputation that is often given to financial professionals. Both web developers and financial professionals deal with complex topics. Working to provide customers with good, honest advice will help your customers get an ROI, help your reputation, and help the reputation of our industry in general. Don’t become the Bernard Madoff of web development.

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An Iron-fisted Personal Development Policy

Ryan Stemkoski — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:12:49 +0000

I have been thinking a lot lately about personal development. In a constantly evolving industry like web design, if you want to stay relevant, you need to stay current. Every day there is some new development, product release, or technique developed. If you don’t continue to learn, try, explore, and grow, eventually you will go the way of the dodo bird.

Realizing just how important personal development is to the graphic and web design industry, I’ve been seriously considering the implementation of a mandatory personal development policy for our employees at Zipline. What would it have in it, you may ask? The answer is, I am not quite sure. At this point I am thinking out loud. I have seen bits and pieces over the years about companies encouraging employees to partake in personal development. Some companies offer tuition reimbursement, others offer expense paid trips to conferences. While these are both great ways for employees to expand their skill set, they’re often cost prohibitive for small businesses.

My primary source of personal development is this blog. Every morning I get up at 4 AM and I read dozens of articles on marketing, advertising, graphic design, web design, and programming. After I have digested all of that content I will write an article relating to something that caught my eye, or something I experienced or learned the previous day. Then I will head into the office and attempt to put into practice the various interesting techniques, methods, and ideas I absorbed during my morning read. While I have learned a great deal by doing this, I am quite aware it would be unreasonable to ask my employees to work from 4AM – 5PM everyday, mostly because they’re a bunch of sissies.

So what if we paid our employees to blog, read, and network? During a time when many companies are banning social networking and other personal Internet usage it may seem counterintuitive to encourage employees to browse the Internet while on the clock. I think however that a couple hours of personal development per employee, per week would help the company become more innovative in the long run. I also think that this would help employees stay motivated. I know I personally feel excited and refreshed when I find new technologies or ideas to try. It helps to stave off the feelings of monotony that many developers begin to experience after their 1000th contact form.

While a personal development policy is an interesting concept, the question most managers will have is, how do you control it? In truth, I have no idea. Perhaps the first 30 minutes of every day is devoted to reading articles in a mandatory Google reader account and then it’s back to work. Maybe each employee is required to produce 2 work related blog entries a week. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer. Personally, I hate to try to govern creativity. Personal development should be something fun and enjoyable. I don’t want to have to stand over someone’s shoulder with a ruler like a Catholic school nun and force them to read Sitepoint or listen to BoagWorld. In reality, if they love what they do it should be something they want to do not something they have to do.

My intent with posting this article was get some ideas out there. I am sure some of you work at companies that have some sort of personal development policy. Please share any ideas, thoughts, or comments you have about what should go into a personal development policy like I described above. Whenever I get a good, comprehensive policy developed, I will share it on the blog open source style for all of you to read, adopt, and share.

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A Not so Nostalgic Look at Pixel GIF Spacers

Ryan Stemkoski — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:55:36 +0000

If you’re new to web design you’re very lucky. You get to jump right into CSS based layouts. You have the ability to create clean, beautiful code. When I first started learning web design it was just prior to the birth of CSS and long before CSS was used as a layout tool. Back in the old days, complicated layouts were constructed with a web of nested tables and padding and spacing was handled with spacer gifs. The net result was code uglier than Michael Jackson’s nose.

What the heck is a pixel gif spacer?
The pixel gif spacer is to web design what the rusty coat hanger is to back room abortions. It is a tool of utter destruction, likely commissioned by the devil. For those of you lucky enough to bypass this dark period in web development, I will quickly explain what gif spacers were used for. Basically, before CSS layouts, there was no way other than uniform cellpadding and cellspacing to build padding into a design. If you wanted 10 pixels of padding between a column and text you had stretch a transparent spacer gif to create that space. The picture in the top right of this post uses dotted lines to show where table and nested table borders would likely appear and the red lines show stretched pixel gif spacers being used to create padding.

Was it really that bad?
In this old style of web development the net result was incredibly bloated and messy code. Many sites were very complicated and poorly planned. If you needed to add a line of code, a good portion of the layout needed to be reconstructed. To make layouts even remotely flexible you had to rely on a huge web of nested tables. On many of these sites, adding even a single line of text would cause the layout to explode apart creating something akin to Randy Jackson’s outfits on American Idol.

Even still was it really that bad?
YES, YES, YES. It was worse than Sarah Palin trying to sound intelligent. If you don’t believe me I have included some sample HTML from an antique website that shows an example of an average b to b website that still utilizes this technique. This code belongs to a hosting customer at Zipline whom we really enjoy, unfortunately her designer unknowingly created some very messy HTML. This is not nearly the worst I have seen but it is quite outdated and uses spacer gifs. Please, and I must stress PLEASE do not try this at home:

 




 
@import url( "Templates/style.css");
@import url( "Templates/style.css");






 
      



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Simple iPhone Emulator for Windows

Ryan Stemkoski — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:06:59 +0000

This post is short but sweet. I discovered today an iPhone emulator developed by a guy named Shaun Sullivan. Unfortunately, there is no way to totally emulate the iPhone on Windows but what Shawn has done is made an executable that runs a Windows build of WebKit and embeds it inside an iPhone-like shape. I had a play with it and it isn’t perfect by any means but it is the best solution I have seen for helping Windows users understand how their website shows on the iPhone.

If you’re a Windows user try it out: http://code.google.com/p/ibbdemo2/downloads/list?can=1&q=

Most things rendered similar to how they actually appear on my iPhone but the use is much clunkier than on the actual iPhone.

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All flash sites for local businesses? Really?

Ryan Stemkoski — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:35:32 +0000

Flash is a fantastic tool. We use it frequently as an ELEMENT in the websites we develop. Flash is the best way to show online video and it is a great presentation tool for telling the story about your client through a short animation or some sort of interactive tool. It is not something that should be used for an entire website unless you’re a movie, a band, or a doing some sort specific promotion that doesn’t require search engine success beyond the name of the site. I am going to compare a couple of Spokane area companies that deal primarily in Flash websites. I realize very few of you are in my local market but Zipline works through-out the United States and I see the same types of negative Flash use in every market we hit so I think many of you will identify with my examples.

The first company I will name because they’re actually using Flash correctly. The company is called Seven2. They create Flash based websites for movies like Rush Hour 3 and online games for places like Nick Jr. I believe it is fine to build these types of projects in Flash. These companies, organizations, or promotions are using traditional means to drive users to the websites. Movies like Rush Hour 3 are going to be found by searching for their name directly and users expect a certain amount of interactivity from a site for a major motion picture. While I still hate the amount of time all flash sites tend to take to load, the guys at Seven2 know what they’re doing and they create some great marketing pieces for the right clients. Their clients are the exact people that need interactive Flash websites.

Unfortunately, the “Company 2” doesn’t do things quite as well. This company whom I won’t name works with local businesses in varying industries. Their clients include a broad range from realtors, to shops, restaurants, to manufacturing firms. Almost every one of the sites they’ve developed is 100% Flash based. Just like Seven2, this company creates some great designs. Unfortunately, unlink Seven2 their clients don’t need all Flash websites. This company’s clients are primarily local companies, and companies in industries that really need successful search engine optimization to thrive. Customers of this firm do not rank well in the search engines. Over the last year, we have talked to a few previous customers who have never gotten a lead from their website. Not because it isn’t well designed but because people simply cannot find it. Often websites designed by “Company 2” cannot even by found by searching for the exact name of the company. We work with a number of local companies that generate a lot of business through their website. Before working with us, many of these customers had a website for years and had began to see it as black hole not as a powerful lead generator.

All Flash websites serve a purpose but they’re not a good fit for most local or even national businesses who intend to drive traffic from the search engines. I feel firms that are out there selling and creating these are doing their customers a serious injustice. The goal of any web developer should be to create a return on investment for their customer. Not to win awards or impress their developer friends.

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What is so Hard About Writing Content?

Ryan Stemkoski — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:59:14 +0000

The toughest part of any website project for us at Zipline is not the concept, it is not the sitemap, it is not the design, nor is it the programming. The most difficult part of any website project is obtaining content to put into the website. To be honest, at Zipline we’re not writers. I may make fun of Britney Spears, my fiancé, and IE6 users on my blog but that doesn’t qualify me to write compelling sales copy for our customers. That leaves us with a couple of options. We can hire a writer and get good quality copy at a premium or our customers who know and understand their business, can write their own copy. Unfortunately, due to budgets most of our customers opt for the second option with greatly varying results.

Don’t get me wrong. I find that most of our customers are very intelligent and really understand their market. If they weren’t good business people they wouldn’t be running successful businesses. The problem I find is that just like me, most are not writers. Part of writing for the web is creating web friendly, search engine optimized copy. Admittedly, these are not easy concepts to understand. When you write for the web you have to realize most people aren’t going to read the copy start to finish. If you are lucky enough to have someone read it they will probably scan the headline and read the first couple lines. If you haven’t hooked them by then, they’re already moving on. On top of that, writing is hard and it takes a lot of time most people don’t have. For many, writing marketing and web copy is worse than homework. Sometimes I feel like the parent, trying to get my 6th grader to write a paper on the civil war while a Family Guy marathon is on.

On many occasions, we have had a website completely programmed and then spent weeks waiting for our customers to provide the copy. Had they been willing to hire a writer the website would be online generating business. To solve this problem we came up with a couple of solutions I thought I would share. The first, we have started offering two prices for each website. We create content managed websites so our customers have the ability to populate their own content if they so desire. In these instances, the customers get a lower price on the project but they must populate the site once the framework is completed. The customer must pay the balance of the project before the website framework is turned over to them. Once paid, they can take as long as they want to complete the project and it won’t affect our cash flow. If they would prefer to have us populate the content, they are given a deadline to provide us with the content. If they do not meet this deadline they will begin getting billed for the project. For most this serves as a firm deadline and a motivator to the customer to get the content created in a timely fashion.

We realize our customers are busy. We have had customers stretch out content creation for more than 6 months after development was complete. This obviously causes workflow, cash flow, and tracking problems for us. In addition, it means there is no ROI on the customer’s new website investment. By encouraging the customer to get the copy done in a timely fashion we both benefit. Also, thanks to this strategy we’re no longer in a losing position, as long as we follow our own policies! If any of you have any good ideas I would love to hear them. This strategy works for us but it won’t work for every company. I know we’re not the only interactive firm facing these types of issues. I have talked to numerous friends who are in the same life raft we are.

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