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Creative Trust

no i did not cut my hair at ReVAMP haircare salon
no i did not cut my hair at ReVAMP haircare salon

I recently had a haircut. Guess what, I did not ask the hair dresser for her credentials, neither did I ask for a draft. She did ask me quite a number of clever questions and I trusted her. I treated her as a professional and let her did what she do best. I mean what do I know about cutting hair, all I see is what I can see in the mirror. Most of the time, I don’t even know what I look like from behind. The outcome was fairly good.

That got me thinking. I’m in the creative industry, but there is hardly any trust. Clients insist on credentials, they insist on seeing a draft. And when they see the draft, most of the time they usually have a lot to say and there were even times when some clients dictated how they want like their website to be. They know their business better, that I fully agree, but how could they possibility know web design best practices more then someone who have done websites for more then 10 years?

As a web practitioner, we often make jokes about clients and can so relate with one another on all those hair pulling experiences. There is even a site dedicated to Clients From Hell. But I also question myself. Is it true that most clients are idiots? Do they also have their hair pulling moments about vendors? I did a check… no vendorsfromhell.com and vendorsfromhell.net does not exist. Then again if clients banded together to create such a site, then there is no need for vendors already. har har…

Yes its true, sometimes clients catch the obvious lazy alignment issues, the amateurish design that was done by an inexpensive freelancer and the half baked proposal that was done grudgingly over the weekend. But the more fundamental issue is that sometimes there is a clear lack of business understanding from web design companies. To clients, their website is an asset that not only represents them online, but it may also be there to provide a service or to meet certain business objectives. Looking nice is just a hygiene factor. So the question now is how many web designers actually have good business acumen?

Clients are idiots. Web designers are hopeless. Stalemate!

I think web practitioners need to make the first move. We need to better understand our clients’ business. We need to understand their pain points. We need to understand that it hurts to pay so much money only to get something that might look nice, but does not work. Go try your client’s products. Go experience your client’s services. Go spend a day with your client.

The day we stop thinking our clients are idiots may be the day our clients start treating us as professionals and give us the creative trust we finally deserve.

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Bloggers’ Meetup with Breeze

Fullerton Waterboat House
Fullerton Waterboat House

“Breeze is a whole new way of banking that lets you manage your money like never before.” That was what the evening of 10 Aug 2010 was all about and it all happened at The Waterboat House.

Those who know me will know i’m currently working at Qais and that I was helping my client organise this meetup with local bloggers. I feel very blessed to be working on stuff that I personally like and on a product that I actually believe in. This is my personal blog ok, so in no way will I be biased ok ok. ;)

The best part of the night for me (although officially I was working) was I finally managed to meet quite a few people i’ve known online for quite some time and I also managed to make a few new friends that night.

Joan getting up close with Jack the magician
Magic by Jack

There was magic that night literally. lol… Above you see Joan going up close to experience magic tricks performed by Jack. He was really fast and there was so many OMG! moments. I got no idea where he hides his stuff as he got his sleeves all rolled up.

Jarmon showing us how much he have
Jarmon showing us how much he have

After quick explanation of what Breeze is, Jarmon from SCB demo-ed the Breeze Online interface and shared with us how much he really have in his bank account. lol… There was also a Q&A session and you can see some of the exchanges at Hisham’s blog.

Breeze Calendar View
Breeze Calendar View

One of the coolest interface was being able to see all your debits and credits in a calendar view. But instead of using normal banking terms like “Debit” and “Credit” (which I struggled with in accounts while in school) red means outgoing money and green means incoming money while grey meant reminders. I really feel this is very cool and so easy to understand especially when i’m trying to visualise where my money in my bank account went in the month.

Breeze Celebrates NDP 2010
Breeze Celebrates NDP 2010

As it was NDP week, the login screen even on the Breeze iPhone app had a nice celebratory touch to it. Sweet.

Grilled Fish for mains
Grilled Fish for mains

There was food of cause and the main dish was grilled fish! I’ve been craving for good grilled fish for quite sometime already and when you see the skin STILL nicely on the fish, you know its prepared with much care. You can also check out Sparklette’s review of this place.

But value for money wise, i really think Ashton’s grilled fish is great too. I just did a search for their website and realised that their website is running on blogspot!! You really have the “we are not so expensive” feeling lol…

SG Bloggers Deafknee, MoleMole, nickpan, Preetam, Aloysius, Lester
Sharing the table with local bloggers

From left: Deafknee, MoleMole, me, Preetam, Aloysius and Lester.

I believe I sat on the table with the most bloggers. There was lively discussions and everyone have extremely interesting jobs, but I doubt anyone can top Aloysius who had no choice but forced to finish SC2 in 2 days in order to review it. I think i’ve only finished 7 campaign missions up till today.

Its really nice to finally put faces to people whom i’ve known via domain names and twitter accounts.

Group Photo with Kevin Lim
Group photo together with Kevin Lim and members from the Breeze team

The above 2 photos are from Kevin Lim. See more of his photos here. I think he had some of the best photos of the evening. Unfortunately I did not manage to take photos with the other bloggers like PatLaw, Sheylara, Jayne, Hisham, Joan, Howie and Stephie.

SCB Breeze Wishlist feature
SCB Breeze Wishlist feature

So now Breeze Online is available and i went ahead to setup my favourite feature. Wishlists!

My Wishlist
My Wishlist

The wishlist feature to me is like virtual accounts. You see I only have one saving account, but I can use wishlists to partition my money and set money aside for stuff.

So i’ve setup 2 wishlist items for the 2 holidays I’m planning next year. Currently Pearl is expecting #3, so December holiday is out. So the aim is to go Tokyo in June 2011 with Pearl. The last time when we went Tokyo it was just too brief as we followed a tour group, so this time we must go for a real exploration. Can you believe I DID NOT even go to Akihabara at all that time.

And in September 2011 I hope to bring the kids to experience farm stay in Australia during spring. They are too metro already, must rural-ise them abit.

So having tried almost all the Breeze Online features, I have to say its really impressive and intuitive, but problem is also because it appears to be so easy to use, hence I sort of expect it to be perfect, but its not. For example, although its cool that I can set cute icons to specific payees, but if i’ve already created these payees in my classic Online Banking it seems like there is no option for me to change the default drug abuser silhouette icon. The only workaround I can think of is to remove the payee and recreate the payee via Breeze. I’ve lodged a feedback via Breeze’s internal inbox, hope they do something about it.

Do you have a SCB account? Have you tried Breeze? What do you think of it?

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National Day 2010

This year I sang the National Anthem, recited the National Pledge for a total of 3 times. The first once was at my daughter’s school where a National Day celebration was held in her school. It was really cute to see little primary school girl guides doing the drills of marching towards the flag pole with the flag, the unfolding and raising of flag.

Clié’s class performed two dance numbers and I have to say dancing is something she excel in. You can see her in the above photo. She is the middle one on the front row wearing the white skirt.

Cleo also performed this year and it was at the Punggol National Day Observance Ceremony. She did a dance number too with her classmates and they sang We are Singapore. The kids were in four groups and when the chorus came around each group represented a different aspect for “This is my country, this is my flag, this is my future, this is my life”. Cleo was the third group, so when it was her group’s turn for the line “This is my future”, she raise a roll of paper which represented certification. Quite cute.

At the Punggol event, there was also a decorate your bike contest, so you can find all sort of bikes decorated with red, white, flags, stars, etc. It was really carnival-ish feel to it. Very nice.

At the Punggol event, there was also the traditional National Anthem, Pledge reciting too, so that makes it my second set.

In the evening, our good friends came over for dinner. We just ordered pizzas and watch NDP on TV. Living in Punggol, we get to see all the planes from Paya Lebar airbase taking off, getting into formation and flying eastwards in their formation, then turning south over Changi and then heading towards the Padang where the main celebrations were. On twitter, I can see so many people from all over Singapore tweeting about the planes flying over where they stay. Suddenly I felt Singaporeans were so close to one another and how dense our tiny country really is. But no matter how small we were, “NDP” made trending topic on twitter.

So during NDP on TV, I sort of did the National Anthem and pledge thing once again which completes my third set.

A few interesting NDP related links:

  1. Singapore Swing (Singapore songs done with a Jazz touch. Free MP3 downloads.)
  2. Fly our Digital Flag (an initiative started by Victor and myself to encourage Singaporeans to put up their flags online. Just before the NDP parade, we manage to get 2500 supporters. woot! You can also see Victor’s post here.)
  3. Tweets with “NDP” on 8 Aug 2010 (NDP became twitter trending topic during the parade time.)

The following is taken from mypaper.sg where the “Fly our Digital Flag” initiative was covered.

So, we should do something for next year! Feel free to share your ideas here and we’ll see what can be done.

Once again. Happy National Day Singapore. This is HOME truly.

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Your clients don’t know HTML

After doing many websites, sheer experience tells us a lot can be done just using XHTML, CSS and Javascript. If you are doing it for yourself and maintaining the site yourself, it’s easy, but if you are handing it over to your clients who do not know HTML and will be updating the site using a CMS, things can get a abit tricky on how you go about on your XHTML and CSS.

Clients (the normal kind) do not know HTML and they usually manage content of their website via WYSIWYG editors in the CMS. The common WYSIWYG editors that are used by popular CMSs are like TinyMCE (used by WordPress, Joomla, Squarespace, Interwoven, Umbraco and more) and CKEditor (used by MailChimp, DotNetNuke, FatWire and more).

The following are the most common stuff your clients will do:

  1. Add headings – Titles, subtitles
  2. Add paragraphs of text – with bold, italics, underlines, links + sometimes different font colours for highlighting text
  3. Add images – left and right align and sometimes with links or captions. upon click, some might even launch a larger view
  4. Add list items – ordered and unordered
  5. Add Tabular content – for displaying data, not meant for layout
  6. Highlight Quotes – to highlight specific catchy phrases
  7. Maintain Definition lists – glossary like content, but used rarely
  8. Create Forms – rarely, but maybe

So we need to ask ourselves, if our clients don’t know HTML or CSS, will they be able to achieve the layout we proposed? Jason Santa Maria’s articles are beautiful. They are what I call handcrafted pages. I’m sure your clients won’t be able to do that with a normal CMS implementation.

So when marking up XHTML and CSS for client managed content, we should always think of using the basic default HTML elements. But of cause if really really need be, these WYSIWYG editors mostly allow custom CSS class declarations, but don’t expect your clients to remember applying classes to many many items on one content page. Having a CMS is meant to be easy for maintenance for them.

So when designing a template, do make sure in the content area, all the basic HTML elements that will be used by the WYSIWYG editor is declared and styled. If you want a quick start, have a look at Mollio, Tripoli, BlueTrip and HTML-Ipsum.

I’ve always told myself, if my clients knew advance HTML and CSS… i’ll probably be out of a job soon.

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WebSG Aug 2010

The Web Standards Group (WebSG) met on 4th Aug 2010 and it feels like its been a year since we last met.

Andy Croll started the night with his experience on running a web business. He shared his personal tips and tricks of the key stuff that matters. From day rates to distractions, from client issues to payment collections.

The point that really resonated with me is how he mentioned about designing within the browser and how its like sculpting and chipping away at a huge piece of rock while photoshop was more like a modelling tool. So designing within the browser meant using HTML to design and build the end product step by step and getting closer to the end product just like his sculpting analogy. I read something like this before but can’t seem to remember where. This concept is sound, just that it might not work for a traditional-new-media company (if you know what i mean).

Yuhui was up next. He shared on his 2 weeks experience on HTML5’s canvas element and how he used it to create his Lantern Corps logos and Singapore flag. Cools stuff. It reminded me of my primary school days when my dad sent me to computer classes to learn logo programming which I really loved.

The above photo is of Dr. Kevin Lim sharing about how game mechanics can make productive work fun. He shared hardcore stuff and I think his knowledge came from years of experience and research during his PHD. It felt like a real crash course, somewhat like chicken essence for your brain. Real good stuff. You can find his slides here.

My take away was not really the content in his presentation, but instead on how receptive he was to comments and feedback. I could literally see “+1exp” rising up from his head like an RPG game when he listened attentively to those in the audience. I see too many people trying to be defensive, but his receptiveness was a real breath of fresh air.

I finally met Winnie Lim. I’ve know her online for eons and had never had a chance to meet her till this WebSG. I’m glad she came.

So the first official WebSG meetup happened in 2007 and its been 3 years now. How time flies. Looking forward to the next one. Once again, thanks to Lucian who made all these possible.