Opinions

Get Out and Be Inspired

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How stepping away from the computer can make you a better designer.

We often have aspiring designers ask us about the best path to becoming a web designer. Almost without fail, question number one is: “Which school or program one I enroll in.” And, sure, there are likely many good programs out there for web design. (Although I still find myself arguing with teachers who teach Flash as part of web design classes.) Just know that web design as a field moves very quickly. And so, what you learned a year ago in school could be obsolete today. (You can always keep your skills fresh online at places like Lynda.)

Here at Needmore, we’ve taken remarkable different paths to get to where we are today. Raymond, with a programmer for a dad, was practically born to web design. I, on the other hand, meandered through anthropology and linguistics before landing softly in the arms of this field.

When I look at our paths and those of folks that I most admire, it becomes evident that the most important thing you can do is to develop an aesthetic point of view. If you want to be a designer of any kind, do whatever you can to expose yourself to as many different sights, sounds, and tastes as you can. Take every opportunity to travel, read, visit museums, notice architecture, talk to your clients about what they do, etc. And, by all means, get away from that computer and give yourself time to imagine.

The Importance of Restaurant Website Mobility

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There are many reasons that you should not ever put your restaurant website in Flash. We explore but a few.

This past Saturday, Ray and I had the rare opportunity to have breakfast out alone together without our toddler. Needless to say, we were thrilled. We remembered a particularly enjoyable breakfast we had months ago with friends at Simpatica Dining Hall, jumped in the car, and headed over. Part way there, we realized that we hadn’t checked their hours and pulled up their website on an iPhone. This is what came up.

When we arrived at the restaurant, we discovered Simpatica is only open for brunch on Sunday (their blog makes this obvious, but there was no link to the blog on my phone) and so we embarassingly walked into a restaurant that was being set-up for a catering event.

We’re not trying to point fingers at this restaurant. We love their food and everything they stand for. Instead, this serves as a reminder and a perfect example of how important it is to consider how customers interact with your website.

We’ve talked mobile restaurant websites before and we may start to sound like a broken record, but restaurant websites (in particular) that ignore mobile devices are doing their customers and their business a huge disservice. And designers that offer flash websites to restaurants… well, just don’t get me started.

Here’s the deal: Before Apple introduced the iPhone mid-2007, Flash websites were an attractive online option. Four years later, with Apple platforms like the iPad and iPhone, technology has evolved and enabled anyone to access the internet anywhere at any time. This changes the name of the game. Since Apple doesn’t install Adobe’s Flash onto their mobile devices, websites that are presented in Flash are completely inaccessible to iPhone/iPad users (and let’s face it, who doesn’t have an iPhone nowadays).

You work hard to satisfy your customers and send them rushing home to write winning reviews on your excellent service and drool-worthy faire. And, in foodie capitols like Portland, diners are usually on the go and use apps like Yelp and AroundMe to look up reviews and find directions to the best restaurants near by. When your stars are shining bright on those review sites, and hungry customers can’t click fast enough to learn more about you, how disheartening is it when they find out their iPhone can’t access your location, hours or menu? Who wants to lose business to a website that is inaccessible on your customers’ mobile device?

“In The Courgette Restaurant Website Survey, more than 80% of customers stated that they have visited a restaurant website on their mobile device,” says restaurant marketing website, The Blackboard. “This reason alone should probably be enough to avoid Flash.”

Finally, as designers, we believe it is our job to stand up and give you our expert opinion. There is no excuse anymore for creating Flash sites for restaurants. We know the facts about their ineffectiveness and we understand the harm to your business by creating them. We also believe in educating our clients, so in the end, everyone’s happy. Especially your customers.

Our Thoughts on Stumptown

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There’s been a lot of press and a lot of speculation about Stumptown’s independence and financial status, owing to some blogs, some reporting, and a letter from the founder himself. I wanted to add my two cents, since I feel I have a unqiue – though by no means insider – perspective on the matter.

First, full disclosure. I was Stumptown’s first employee. I worked closely with Duane in the early years, eventually parting ways to start a web design company with my future wife. Stumptown was our first client, and they’ve been our client ever since. We’ve been with them through several website designs, through thick and thin.

Like I said, I can’t comment on the speculation. I have learned that they found an investor, and that they have a bigger budget now to do the things they want to do.

Duane has always had big, long term vision. I haven’t always understood it, but as with many visionaries, his wild ideas usually work out. And he has changed less than you might imagine. (Basically, he has a beard now.) I had a reliable job with health coverage when he started Stumptown, and I wasn’t entirely sure he could make a hole-in-the-wall roastery work way out in Southeast Portland. I figured he could. Clearly, he did.

I will speak to what I know. Stumptown could hire some big fancy New York web design firm, full of people who ate at “fancy restaurants” and “wore suits” and didn’t “smell funny.” They could behave as if they were “selling out.”

But that isn’t the case. We’ve been in meetings with the Stumptown crew, and I can tell you it’s the same locals we’ve always worked with, in the same neighborhood. And I’m happy to report that they’re working with the same small, scrappy Southeast Portland independent web design firm they always have.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that’s changed in the past few months is that they can finally afford to move forward with this project that we’ve all been excited about for a year now. Nothing else has changed.

Over the past week or two we’ve been to all of the local Portland cafes to get a perspective to help in our redesign efforts and once again, I’m struck by how many of these people worked behind the bar with me ten years ago. The same people, the same smiling faces, making coffee that’s better than it’s ever tasted before. They all seem excited to know that Stumptown will be able to get even better and that the family will continue to grow.

Duane Sorenson is a good guy, with as much compassion, vision, and integrity as anyone I’ve ever known. I can’t see into the future, but I believe that his decisions will turn out to be good ones.

Signature

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We take a tremendous amount of pride in our work. Nothing is as exciting as the next project we get to show you, and we love that our clients are kind enough to let us put our signature on their websites. We look at that signature just as any fine artist would, and if for some reason another designer takes over the work, we’re the first to insist that our name be taken off.

But there’s a dirty little secret among web designers about how you sign your website.

You see, when it comes to search engines, one of the keys to getting your website ranked more highly is to have people link to you using the keyword phrases that will help your business.

So if you’re a web designer and you want more people to find you in Google because they’re searching for “Portland web designers,” you would link to your website with that phrase. Rather than what we use, something like “Made by Needmore Designs.” Google will think more people consider you an authority on “Portland web design,” and more people will find you there by searching.

This is good advice if that’s your only goal. However, our goal is to make great websites, without compromise. Indeed, our best clients find us by looking in the footers of other websites they like, or by asking their friends. That’s where a good client comes from. Our best clients don’t come to us randomly from a Google web search.

But more importantly, we think it’s ethically questionable to leverage your work for a paying client to benefit your own business, especially without disclosing that fact to your client. We don’t want to be that kind of business.

That’s why you will only see “Made by Needmore” on our sites. Not a bunch of keyword phrases.

Reservations

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In a recent open letter, Mark Pastore (of San Fransisco’s restaurant Incanto) wrote a passionate and informative letter about the difficulties of working with OpenTable, the most ubiquitous online restaurant reservation system boasting to be Trusted by 15,000 restaurants & 175 million diners.

Mark points out that OpenTable not only co-opts a restaurant’s relationship with their customers, but that it also

[takes] home a disproportionate (relative to other vendors) chunk of the restaurants’ revenues each month and [this creates] the feeling of being trapped in the service…too expensive to keep, but letting it go could be harmful.

He quotes one restauranteer as saying,

OpenTable is out for itself, the worst business partner I have ever worked with in all my years in restaurants. If I could find a way to eliminate it from my restaurants I would.

Mark makes a passonate plea. He asks that,

the next time you’re planning to dine out, consider picking up that 19th-century device, the telephone, and calling. I know I speak for many restaurateurs when I say that we’d love to hear your voice.

While I couldn’t agree more with Mark and his reservations about OpenTable, there is a reason people choose a system like it—convenience. And, thinking about the phone as old-school ignores the very real fact that phones (as mobile devices) are the future of websites, not the past. And this is good news for restauranteurs like Mark.

There is a way out from working with businesses such as OpenTable and the like. To do so restaurants need to start thinking about how their customers are going to interact with their own website and how they can make it as easy as possible for them to pick up the phone and call them. Or find out where they are. Or see their latest specials.

Consider that I’m downtown, a passenger in a moving car, and want to ring up a restaurant about a reservation. I’m out of luck with most restaurants as their website are in Flash. Incanto’s website, which I think is lovely, gets kudos for not being in Flash. However, on my iPhone, I still find it difficult to quickly figure out how to call them.

Have we made websites in Flash for restaurants in the past? Or, websites that make it difficult to touch base on a mobile device. Yes, yes we have. But, time marches on and we’ve seen the writing on the wall. We are moving in a new direction here at Needmore—gorgeous websites on your computer, simple and clear websites on your mobile device. No fuss, no Flash.

The Ona Restaurant website is finished, by the way, and we hope to tell you a lot more about that project in the next few days.

 

Tom’s of Maine

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Tom’s of Maine is one of those companies you almost don’t notice. They’re just there in the background. When you brush your teeth. When you wash out your mouth. I’m not sure how long I have been aware of them, but I didn’t think they had been around for all that long.

Turns out, they’ve been around since 1970, when they were started by a couple with five thousand dollars.

One of the few things I did know about them, however, is that they had been bought out by a big health care company. And that did confuse my image of them just a little bit. Turns out that rumor was true.

In 2006, a controlling 84% stake in Tom’s of Maine was purchased by Colgate-Palmolive for US $100M. The Chappells kept a 16% share in the company. The terms of the purchase stipulate that Tom’s of Maine’s policies will be retained.

Well that’s good, it sounds like the story has some kind of a happy ending. And in another sign of their changing times, they appear to have redesigned their identity late this year. Here is a before and after.

It’s interesting, and I do myself prefer it, but I think it fell slightly short of the mark.

For one thing, we found that the two colors seemed… odd. Why is “of Maine” blue, but the rest of the extra design green? Probably because the name of the company is “Tom’s of Maine,” but using the two colors almost seems like an afterthought.

Also, the “Since 1970″ is an interesting addition, and in fact it’s what prompted us to write about this. Yet the big win with the old logo is that it didn’t need to say it was 40 years old. It was obvious in the design!

Between us, we suspect there was a lot of internal debate about this logo. I would be very curious to find out who designed it (VML?) and what the process was behind it.

 

Why We Recommend Twitter First (Then Facebook)

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We at Needmore have become very interested in social media, and when you talk about social media, you are probably talking about either Facebook or Twitter. These are the two kings, and it can be hard for folks to figure out what the difference really is, and what that means to their business online.

There are a lot of obvious difference between them, but in order to get to the heart of the matter, you have to look at the underlying way people connect to each other. From these differences, you can extrapolate a whole lot about them both.

On Facebook, you connect directly to another person, and it is a two-way relationship. This relationship is a lot of work, and it is intended mainly for connecting to friends, to people you already know. No one on Facebook can ever have more than five thousand friends, no matter how big of a celebrity or business they might be, so friendships on Facebook just don’t work. What does work, for many people, are the “pages” feature, designed to let you put a business page on Facebook, which can have as many friends as you want. But this doesn’t change the underlying architecture of Facebook, and it doesn’t change the nature of, and reason for, visiting the site.

On Twitter, however, the relationship is asymmetric. Which is to say, it works just fine one-way, that’s how it’s built. Someone like Ashton Kucher can have a billion followers, and you can have just a few, and it makes no difference. Celebrities obviously aren’t going to follow a billion people back and, on Twitter, it’s never an issue. As a consequence, the way people “follow” others on Twitter has a very different pattern. Whereas on Facebook, you are likely to follow people you already know, on Twitter you are likely to follow people you are just interested in, or want to learn more about, or think you might be friends with in the future. It’s more “aspirational” in nature, and that’s a very important difference.

Because of these differences, it’s easier for people to “follow” your business on Twitter than on Facebook. When people follow a Facebook page, they tend to think of it as a one-time activity, as if they were “voting” for that page. They are much less likely to want constant interruptions from businesses on Facebook, alongside updates about their friends. But on Twitter, users are very comfortable browsing through a long timeline of tweets. They use this timeline to keep up not just on other people, but also on news sources and media. Because Twitter is so simple and one-directional by design, it tends to have as many characteristics of news media as it does characteristics of social networks.

This is just one reason why we tend to advise you to focus your business’ online networking on Twitter first, and then Facebook. We feel that it’s better suited to the kinds of things our clients do, it is easier to get started, and more likely to bring value in the short term.

 

Why You Should Build Your Mailing List Now

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With the deluge of ways to market to potential customers online, you likely wonder why on earth you would want to send out newsletters to a mailing list. I mean, that costs money, right? One of my favorite design blogs, Design*Sponge, has an insightful article up today Jordan Moore about email marketing. She advises gathering emails right away, possibly even before you know exactly what you’ll send out to your list.

The reality is that all small businesses should gather contact information from their interested audience over time. Even if you don’t think you have a need for this information right now, you may in the future and will be glad you took the time to collect this data.

Jordan has a point. There is absolutely nothing stronger than permission to market to an individual; permission marketing means that someone has gone out of their way to ask you let them know what you are up to. And, signing up for your newsletter is one of the easiest ways for them to do so.

Sure, there are a myriad of ways to get your message out (blog, Facebook, and Twitter, to name a few). And, all of these are important venues for your message and should certainly be part of your larger social media plan. Interestingly, though, Jordan notes that newsletters are far more personal than blog posts or RSS feeds. She suggest, perhaps rightly so, that getting an email directly from you is a more intimate experience than happening upon your blog’s RSS feed.

The takeaway is that these addresses, given freely to you by your customers and fans, should be treated like gold. They are, after all, a gathering of individuals interested in hearing about what you and your business have bee up to. What can be more valuable than that?

 

Display

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It’s amazing how much the new Apple displays resemble the iPad. It’s uncanny. Clever, actually. Because when Apple wants to show the iPad in use, running demonstration videos that everyone can see from the store windows, they just use the new display. You could be forgiven for thinking there was a new, giant 27-inch iPad out.

Which is kind of funny, because people made so much fun out of how the iPad was just a “big iPhone.”

Apple tends to use the same materials – aluminum/steel and glass – so effectively that it’s hard to compete in terms of build quality. Other manufacturers have standardized on plastic bodies for their consumer products, so it becomes hard for them to distinguish themselves in a cost-effective way. They would have to start from scratch building products with those materials. But since Apple’s designs all use those materials, rather than simple plastic shells, they can.

The designers at Apple are always thinking about the manufacturing process.

So it’s almost as if I have myself a brand-new 27-inch iPad. It’s heavy.

 

Digital Agencies of the Future?

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This morning we stumbled across a collection of screen shots from a ton of digital agencies. The catch? The screen shots are all taken on an iPhone.

It’s surprising how bad these sites are. Here is a representative sample.

Oops, you don’t have Flash installed. The simple fact is that the number of mobile devices with Flash installed is effectively zero. And even if this does change, it’s going to be a challenge for a three inch touch screen and a very weak mobile processor to keep up with the Flash they are using.

That’s unfortunate, because mobile visitors are such a large and fast-growing segment of your visitors. And it’s why we don’t make Flash sites anymore. And it’s why we test every single site we build on several mobile devices.

Ours is by no means perfect, but I want to post it to be fair.

Even the portfolio slide show works. All the special effects work, in fact, because they don’t rely on Flash. While I’d like to spend more time getting it just right, I’m very happy with it.

I think everyone should expect their website to work at least as well on mobile browsers as on desktop browsers these days. And I think every web developer should assume that needs to happen.

Even if only a small percentage of your visitors are using mobile devices now, you can expect this to change in the not-so-distant future.