Safe from the Losing Fight

It’s been about eight years since our company website has had a major redesign. But that changed today.

The old design simply wasn’t meeting our needs. Specifically:

• It didn’t communicate clearly what exactly we do here.
• It had a search box which, as far as I can tell, didn’t, and has never, worked.
• It had several pages describing services we don’t perform, at least not when a cop is around. Some of these pages just had boilerplate text in them. e.g. “Item 1″, “Item 2″, etc
• The visual design was really old and unprofessional. The new is at least not old.
• The old feedback form demanded a lot of extraneous information like title, company, telephone number, home address, when you shower, etc.
• It had a copyright date at the bottom of 2002, which caused people to ask: “Are you guys still in business?” This was apparently a barrier to them sending us money.

Fortunately, we mainly rely on word of mouth to get clients, but a bad website certainly doesn’t help our business. We could be missing out on clients who find our website, but don’t contact us for any of the reasons listed above.

I’ve recently had some time between contracts, which I used to think about how a software contractor’s website should be structured and what kind of information it should present. Also, I slept in late a lot. I came to some conclusions:

• It should immediately obvious to a visitor what the company does, no matter what page they land on.
• It should have a portfolio so the visitor can see what kind of work we have done in the past, and see if that matches up with what they want done at the quality level they want.
• A brief description of services that we do provide, explained in layman’s terms.
• It should be obvious and easy to get in touch with us. The form for submitting a message should have as few requirements as possible.
• It should contain a brief overview of the company, and the people in it. It should put a human face to the company.
• Noon really is not a bad time to wake up.

I also decided to add a page for products, mainly for future use.

Overall the project was a fun — and hopefully financially rewarding — exercise. It was interesting to think about what would induce a visitor to stick around on our site, and then actually contact us. I’m not sure if I got it completely right, but it’s at least a step in the right direction.

In preparation for C4[3], Wolf has put up videos of the talks from C4[2], including the one I did on contracting. Hopefully someone will find it useful.

As I mentioned at C4[2], I’m working on my company’s first product, which is an iPhone application. I’ve gotten to the point where I need a graphics designer and one those sound creator type people (sorry, I don’t know their professional title).

My app is a game, so in addition to an application icon, I also need avatars for players and some game backgrounds (like wallpaper), among other things. Basically, I’m looking for recommendations here. Anyone have someone they’ve worked with and really liked?

I also need sound effects, which I’m pretty lost on. I mean, if I ever need a twoosh sound, I know who to go to, but for more complex sounds, I’m just don’t know. For those of you who have done games, who did your sound effects?

After I get some real artwork into the game, I’ll see about posting screenshots and whatnot.

I typically don’t write about my cartoon obsession here, but I recently ran across one that seemed appropriate.

This is Zits from 7/14/2007, in which Jeremy, the main character, learns a harsh reality about life.

I bring this up on my blog because I became more acutely aware of how much “that FICA dude” was getting when I became self employed. When you start writing the checks yourself, as opposed to your employer taking the money out before you even see it, there is an even more stark realization.

The issue of our company logo came up again recently because of WWDC. Both Jim and I will be attending this year, and we thought it might be nice to have some business cards to hand out. Unfortunately, we’ve never had real cards printed before, and then there’s the question of our questionable logo, which can be viewed at our site.

I should point out that the current logo was a gift from a client, who simply pitied us, and our non-graphic designing ways. Since we were doing engineering services for them, they didn’t want their clients to think they had partnered with a firm that consisted of four year olds with a bad case of the shakes, when they saw our logo. Anyway, not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but we felt it might be time to upgrade our logo to something more modern and less busy.

A sane person might have taken that as a cue to go hire someone qualified, but not me. Instead, I fired up my copy of Fireworks, the greatest web graphics program ever, and started working on my abomination before God… I mean… business card.

Here’s what I came up with:

Sorry. I probably shouldn’t have just flashed that up there without some sort of warning. Hopefully no one stabbed their eyes out with a rusty pair of scissors just to get the images out their head. As a community service I give design teachers permission to use these in their classes as what not to do. Just make sure you’ve hidden all the sharp objects and the students are wearing the appropriate eye protection (blindfolds) before exposing them to my designs.

Anywho, after my partners got done whining about their bleeding eyes, we decided we might should hire a professional. So we’re in the process of looking for logo designers, and pricing how much such a thing would cost us. Unfortunately, between the four of us we apparently only know one designer, which somewhat limits our options.

I have to admit, it was a lot of fun doing someone else’s job. I mean, graphic designers have it easy. They just need one of them graphics editor thingies and beret, and they’re all set. I think tomorrow I’ll do someone else’s job. Maybe a neurosurgeon’s. I hear that it’s all the wrists, and last I checked that’s what was connecting my arm to hand. Maybe I’ll get one of those cool bibs they put over their faces when cut open someone’s brains.