Approaching Responsive Design

Post from: Foliovision

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Post from: Foliovision

When I first purchased my home, I tried taking the dandelions out with a pickaxe as the initial set were pretty big, and it's what I had on hand. I used the first class pickaxe to remove a bamboo infestation left over from the previous owner; removing 60 metros of underground horizontal pipes is a serious job. I've since bought a fancy Fiskars 7870 weeder that ladies like, but it's far too slow for my taste. Speed comes as hand tools are applied vigorously. On top of that the fancy Fiskar weeder is also next to useless in stony soil. Plus, there's a lot of plastic in the design which makes the Fiskars weeder not much fun to use: it feels like fluorescent lights and plastic toys.

Fiskars 7870 Uproot Garden and Lawn Weeder

I've used a traditional weeding trowel to great effect. Inevitably poorly made modern weeding trowel bend (which they do all the time as I've been through three of them) and become useless. This last time I've decided to try to find something better. I know my local Landhaus only offers weak weed trowels and pickaxes, so a local search was a waste of time.

I threw "weeder" into German Amazon (neat trick: the English query will pull up a bunch of dual labeled items and then, you have the exact translation next to a picture; text dictionaries are next to useless for tools). Something interesting came up: a Cape Cod weeder.

Krumpholz Cape Cod Weeder

Now I don't know whether a Cape Cod weeder is any good, and there aren't any reviews at Amazon.de, so I look at "Cape Cod weeder" in Google and find an Amazon.com listing and a more obscure little website called RedPigTools.com. Some guy making and forging tools at ridiculously high prices (try 5x the price of your local garden supermarket).

But Bob Denman has an amazing selection of reasonably solid (they could be even heftier to my taste) hand made tools, specifically in weeders. Were I in their shipping zone, despite the outrageous prices I would be ordering between three and five of the following items right now.

Exotic Handmade Weeders

The Red Pig Tools website is useful even to someone who cannot possibly buy Bob's tools.

How have Bob and Rita accomplished with their site?

• First, they are focused. This website sells hand made garden tools (not just any tools).
• Second, they don't undervalue their product. While they are pricier than others, site visitors immediately recognize this company does not mix good quality with bad quality.
• Third, they respect their site visitors and tempt search engines by offering valuable, detailed information. The Denman's give very detailed descriptions of each item, encouraging confidence that one is ordering the right thing and hence, likely receive larger orders, as well as return orders.
• Finally, they are very personable with being too personal. We don't need to know about the state of their marriage, or a struggle with anti-depressants, and the Denmans aren't telling. But there's a personal voice in all the writing and a photo of Bob with Rita's arms around him. There's a short description of Bob's life,  which allows the bourgeois gardeners who buy such expensive tools to identify with him and even make him somewhat aspirational (Bob dropped out of the advertising rat race to build a barn and make hand-made tools: those early years in marketing really paid off though).

How could they improve the site?

I would expect that Red Pig tools is a multi-million dollar business with very healthy margins. It's all run off Prostores.com, a slightly outdated Content Management System (CMS). The photos aren't even all that big (you might want to fix that Bob). However, the Denmans enjoy top rankings and lots of traffic, despite bad image URLs, and not particularly good URL structure (Bob if you find this and would like some help moving to a much more SEO friendly WordPress store, drop me a line: I will trade handmade code and design against handmade garden tools).

This, ladies and gentleman, is how you do e-commerce and build a name for yourself online on the cheap. Start by being useful.

One of the advantages of a useful website is you can get free links which other people have to pay for (if they can get them at all). Bob is not a client of ours but he is getting a first class link and write up for free.  We don't accept guest posts at Foliovision, but if we did the market price for a write up like this would about $250 and $600 including links with targeted anchor text.

Thanks for teaching me about weeders Bob. Below you will find an assortment of my favorite weeders with Bob's writeup.

Hand Weeders Gallery

A gallery of Red Pig Tools weeders for posterity: you never know when even the most well run site will disappear.

Crevice Weeder

The most difficult weeding job is to extract plants that take root in the narrow crevices between bricks or in sidewalk cracks. This tool has a thin but strong blade that slips deep into cracks (As deep as 3") and drags the weed out by its roots. The blade is not sharpened and therefore does not cut the roots, leaving them to throw more growth.

Ball Weeder

A Victorian invention, Ball Weeders have a two pronged fork protruding from a 2 1/2-inch diameter knob at the base of a short handle. While effective at prying taprooted weeds such as dandelions, they are also useful for removing weeds with spreading roots. The ball is an excellent fulcrum that gives you leverage even when the ground is soft or wet. Weeders with narrow, straplike fulcrums penetrate soft, wet surfaces and fail to give leverage. Our Ball Weeder has a full 10 inches of shaft and handle above the ball, giving a many fold increase in mechanical advantage. The forged head is strong enough and long enough to grab mature taproots by the shoulder and pop them out of the ground with ease.

Grampa Weeder

One of the simplest, easiest to use, stand up weeding tools is the Wrench now being marketed by an Oregon company as "Grampa's Weeder." Invented back in 1913, the Weed Wrench was once produced in a number of variations by a variety of manufacturers. (I have one in my collection produced in the 1930's in Riverside, California.) Today there's just one version and, fortunately, it's a very good one. The tool consists of a cast iron head on the end of a three foot long wood handle. The head is essentially a 2-prong fork with an L-shaped, 2 pronged foot pad lever riveted to it. You center the 4 prongs over a weed, press your foot on the footpad and push the weeder into the ground. As the lever hits the ground the prongs grip the weed's roots tightly. You lean the handle towards the footpad and, "Pop," out comes the weed, root and all.

Two Tine Hand Weeding Fork Jekyll Weeder

Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) is firmly ensconsed in the pantheon of great gardeners. Her opus, Home and Garden, first published in 1900, contains chapters on TheWorkshop and The Kinship of Common Tools and includes a tender paean to the pleasure of wielding an old, worn spade. Her favorite weeder was a short handled, two tine fork now commonly called a "Jekyll Weeder". Overall, the tool is about a foot long. It penetrates soil easily and is used to pry, twist and extract the most stubborn weeds.

Weed Yank

This is a light duty weeder and cultivator of my own design, although I wouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere, sometime in the past had come up with the same thing. To use this tool, you just swing it so that the curving tines enter the ground just on the far side of a weed. Then jerk. Out comes the weed, roots and all. While this isn't the tool for overgrown, deeply rooted weeds -- the direct pull requires too much strength -- it's fine for the little weeds.

Weeding Fork Long Handle

Before the era of chemical weeding, when slicing, prying and yanking were the weed removal methods of choice, weeding forks were the big guns. Sometimes called spade forks, these tools were used to pry overgrown, tap-rooted perennial weeds such as dandelions, docks and thistles. If you live on rural acreage and eschew Round-Up, Crossbow and other weed killers, this is your tool

Cape Cod Weeder

Designed decades ago by a woman living on Cape Cod (or so it was told). The cape cod weeder was a regional favorite until the late 1980's when Snow & Neally of Bangor, Maine began to market it nationwide. It is now well on it's way to ubiquity. Our version adheres closely to the orginal design albeit with a longer shank and shorter handle. We also forge it a bit thicker for longer life and better performance on overgrown weeds. The tool cuts on both the forward and back stroke -- it's a scuffle hoe -- and can be turned on its side and driven in by its point to nick out weeds snuggled up to valuable plants. Properly made, the cape cod weeder has a slight back angle to the blade that makes it exceptionally effective on the pull stroke.

Red Pig Tools Weeders: a Parable about Effective Websites

Post from: Foliovision

So if we've built a relatively large business with Basecamp and have so many projects in there why would we leave?

It's exactly that: Basecamp was great up until a certain point. For the last couple of years, the appalling search has been a real burden. The poor search is surprising as lead developer David Heinemeier Hansson is brilliant, even if he spends a lot of time in race cars these days.

David Heinemeier Hansson in the winner's circle

David, why could you guys not put some decent search code into Basecamp (SOLR for instance) and allows us to sort by date and relevance as a minimum? It's a week's work. You claim 8,000,000 projects managed by Basecamp in your marketing materials. That's a lot of unhappy users, wasting a lot of time searching with what cannot be found with your broken search.

Basecamp search results with no order by date: why oh why?
Dates are all over the place sometimes putting results from 2007 ahead of 2013

At one point, I'd almost had enough of 37signals slow updates but then there was a miraculous update to Highrise a few years ago which made it useable. I thought perhaps this would happen to the other products. The introduction of the flat rate Suite was a blessing for those of us with a bunch of different accounts (Basecamp, Backpack and Highrise).

Then came New Basecamp. The launch was a fiasco. At first 37signals wanted us legacy users to pay for both systems if we used both. Typical 37signals arrogance. After seeing an almost zero adaption rate, they smartened up and changed the system to allow you a free New Basecamp plan in line with your existing Basecamp plan. But by that point the excitement was gone.

We don't like the new Basecamp and can't use it. Missing in action:

• Private items. We don't want to run parallel projects to be able to talk about the messy details out of the client's site. While I'm a big advocate of transparency and fairly often talk about too technical matters in front of the client, it's a big mistake, often frustrating the client. "Making me feel stupid" is something which has been written sometimes: don't do it. Not all of us have the technically gifted clients which 37signals probably enjoys when they do client work. Another reason the New Basecamp doesn't include private items is 37signals does not do client work anymore. 37signals are out of touch with why Basecamp was created: a way to manage client projects.
• Time tracking. We bill clients. Running parallel task and time tracking systems costs Foliovision about 10% of staff time as they just try to keep reasonable notes on what they are doing so that they get paid and so that clients get billed. 37signals does not. They just don't give a toss. Time tracking integration between Freshbooks and Basecamp Classic was never good enough to want to fully implement as you had to keep a whole lot of things in sync (people/projects). Creating better time tracking and time tracking integration is not easy. The engineers at 37signals could have done so if they cared. They didn't.
• Migration. Migration was dicey as the feature set was more limited. Surprisingly, there is a lot of manual work to move a project from Basecamp Classic to New Basecamp.

New Basecamp looks great but can't do very much: no time tracking, no private items
let's not even get started talking about GANTT/resource charts or other tools to
scale project management and/or improve efficiency in even a midsize company

Deep issues with Basecamp Classic apart from the weak time tracking include:

• Slow. Basecamp has always been slow. Ruby on Rails let's you build great looking apps fast, but it's always been a bit heavy.
• Search. As described above, Basecamp search is appalling. I literally lose hours looking for design files and specs from four or five years ago. We keep our clients for many years, many of our projects have been open for five years or more.
• Retirement. Basecamp Classic which is still pretty good software has been retired. None of the above will be getting better any time soon. 37signals customer support is snippy and condescending about it.

Basically, 37signals have put us in a position where there is no way forward for us with them. Outside of project management, we've never really loved Highrise the way we loved Basecamp, although it's been much better since a few years ago. Strangely Highrise has never been properly integrated with Basecamp: client contact info at a minimum should be shared between the two applications.

As a CRM, we always liked Javelin/CapsuleCRM a bit better but at $12/user we preferred the Highrise flat fee model. Especially when 37signals put the unlimited suite package together at $149 and later $249 for us. Yet, in terms of per user billing, it turns out most of the people in Foliovision do not need access to our CRM (and probably shouldn't have). The CRM is for sales and admin. That's all of 2.5 people here in Foliovision. The other thirty have more important work to do for the clients already in project management. So the flat rate issues is a smaller one than I thought. So by leaving Basecamp we can have a better CRM environment with better email integration and can finally get on with some projects for which the Highrise process overhead was just a bit too high.

Returning to project management, all of those Basecamp issues with speed, search, features, privacy and time tracking are solved in TeamworkPM.

• Search whatever you want however you want. The search is really sophisticated, allowing you to cast both wide and narrow nets. Sure it's not a single box, but neither is Google at the end of the day (advanced users use all kinds of query syntax like site:domain.com or - just to get through their day).
• Time tracking is awesome: just track wherever you are and assign it to a task. When you are done the integration with Freshbooks is a bit counterintuitive at first but is brilliant in its simplicity. Basically you don't try to match the people in Freshbooks but just dump all the hours, notes and rates straight into a Freshbooks invoice assigned to a client. Then press send. I no longer have to keep parallel structures in both project management and billing. Hurray, hurray, hurray. This is the feature which made the business case for the hassle of making the switch.
• Privacy is very granular for every item. I'd even say it's too granular and fiddly. But I'll get used to it. Much better than no options at all.
• Writeboards/Notebooks are searchable at last so we don't need to create a separate company wiki (yet more software and logins for our team to manage).
• Notebooks export to quality html with a single click (HTML view) plus copy so we don't have download Writeboards, open them up and edit them to get drafts into WordPress or other CMS.
• TeamworkPM has the same unlimited user pricing model as Basecamp/37signals. Thank you again. We have a lot of people working part time and paying for project management per user is so Salesforce and antisocial.
• We can even take our projects and put them on our own subdomain without branding. Thank you TeamworkPM, this was the feature which closed the deal.
• Product Improvement. TeamworkPM are actively improving their product. TeamworkPM like users and like to make things better, sometimes even adding too many features. But they are quite good at making the extra features fairly invisible so clients can still use TeamworkPM without too much coaching or too many tears. There are even GANTT charts (beta).
• Support. TeamworkPM are ready to go into the backend and run database queries when necessary to clean up import issues. I cannot imagine 37signals offering this kind of help on anything but the most exceptional basis. In the 37signals universe, there is almost only user error. If the product doesn't work right, it's the bioware. The dedication of the support team at TeamworkPM makes difficult issues child play.

TeamworkPM search granular preferences

It was not an easy decision. Any switch of system annoys (busy) clients and takes time for staff retraining (staff use more sophisticated features). Right now we still need to get our files back (TeamworkPM's migrator is broken in this regard, they could move the files via API if they wanted to) and put everyone's headshot back up - with 300 plus people in Basecamp just adding the headshots back is a substantial project. We'll try to use the built-in gravatar functionality but it's broken too (gravatars turn up very low res in TeamworkPM): workaround is to hand upload all the headshots. Basecamp API let's us grab the headshots but TeamworkPM API does not allow us to add them.

But all of these are details in the larger scheme of things. The two to four hours per week each team member at Foliovision will save time tracking will pay for the costs and productivity loss of migration within two or three weeks.

TeamworkPM design cutdown the way we like it for client view with no distractions
we've removed Time | Milestones | Billing | Files | Risk Register | Links
available tools can be customised per project and per client
the background colour (customisable) matches Foliovision
company colours: login screen is even better

On the plus side for 37signals:

• 37signals products look much better than other project management tools. Looks are important. Enough so that we could put up with the technical limitations for a very long time (nine years).
• 37signals take security and privacy very seriously. I haven't heard of a data breach in nine years as an attentive customer and haven't seen anything close to data leakage in my use of their products.
• 37signals are stable. They've been making money and running their own servers for a long time. They've refused many offers of buyouts and appear to be in it for the long haul. TeamworkPM is now sufficiently stable at this point (two offices, one in Ireland, one in Australia) so almost equal points to them. TeamworkPM are still cutting corners though, moving the core application out to Amazon instead of maintaining their own high quality infrastructure (two data centers would be enough). To be honest, the MySQL export goes a long way to giving me confidence. If TeamworkPM ever cripple the product with too many features (a real danger) or go belly up or get bought out, we can take our data and run. Login is now on a subdomain of foliovision.com so we could do a migration to Chiliproject (a Redmine fork) and be up and running within a week (albeit with a smaller feature set).
• 37signals believe in building and not patenting. We applied for a single patent in the project management are a couple of years ago for an important innovation which we came up with. While doing due diligence, I couldn't find a patent assigned to 37signals or its owners. That shows principle and putting your money where your mouth is. Respect.

The main issue over at 37signals is that since they don't do client work anymore, they are living in an ideal bubble. People have salaries, they work on features, products get done. It's sort of like a Marxist paradise what they have going on over there. To each according to his contribution, with a big enough pie to keep everyone happy. It would be wonderful if we could all live like that.

If on the other hand you still face clients and hourly billing, 37signals software is the wrong tool these days. In the meantime, TeamworkPM is a great solution to our issues.

Why we moved from Basecamp to TeamworkPM

Post from: Foliovision

Aaron Wall of SEObook: would you take SEO advice from someone
living in a trailer park. In the case of Aaron Wall, mostly yes.

I was astonished at how facile and amorphous Aaron's answer was, apart from the first sentence (which is a very important distinction). Enough to comment on it and write this post.

Here is Aaron's original answer.

There is a huge difference between enterprise-level SEO & ranking a small local website. Search is large & complex enough that there are great resources on local search, great resources on paid search, great resources on video search, etc.

There is no single individual guide that is the best at every aspect.

And then there are different resources that would be better or worse depending on someone's capital to invest, someone's desired level of risk, etc.

I would encourage one to read a number of sources (and, more importantly, get some experience & compare what people say works vs what you find works in practice on your own site), as many sources parrot hypocritical ideals espoused by the market monopoly that are inaccurate dogma. Only through reading a number of sources & learning the biases of the various offers & seeing where people differ on things will you really have a strong/deep/rich set of background context to inform the lens of what their writing, how they are writing it & what they are writing for.

The original poster is clearly looking for a concrete answer. I'll try to provide some.

Resources (work in progress)

• Aaron's own SEO Book was the right answer years ago before he move to his $300 month private membership model. Aaron's blog is still pretty good, even if the guest posters whom he employs or gives space to are rarely as interesting on search as he is.
• Someone else mentioned Neil and Sujan Patel's Guide to SEO. Neil is a good and persuasive writer so even if his guide covers much of the same ground as other writes, at least it will be readable. Just the guide itself is a fairly brilliant example of link building. By putting out material of this quality, Neil has just scored free editorial links at both Quora and Foliovision.com (with anchor text, no less). Neil is heavily focused on quality content strategies (hint: content is not always writing, it can be tools and/or calculators) but a strong site is the starting block for any useful SEO these days.
• The British SEO's are pretty good. English people have many centuries of experience of successfully lying, cheating and manipulating with words. How people carry gifts of tuberculosis infected blankets to innocent Canadian Indians got a reputation for fair play indicates just how good they are at it. Our friends at Distilled run a nice weblog about search and have a paid training section (free May 8) which is just $40/month. If you are in a hurry to learn search, you can learn everything in there in a month or two and you've just done $2000 of SEO training.

Now a little bit more about SEO itself.

On Page SEO

To answer the original poster, on page SEO is relatively easy. If you're using WordPress for example, grab a good plugin like our FV Simpler SEO or Yoast and most of the on page work is done for you just by filling out the form (our FV Simpler SEO will even tell you when what you are writing is too long or borderline).

FV Simpler Seo: note the nice preview and the warnings for too long a title
and too long a description. We include intelligent defaults so clients
can post their own articles without any risk.

Cardinal rule: don't be boring. Boring will never get you links or positive attention. You want to be challenging and often somewhat controversial. Take a position. The technical stuff doesn't matter too much.

Brief On Page SEO Guidelines (from top to bottom)

• 60 character engaging title filled with keywords
• short URL with two to four keywords in it
• tasty one sentence meta description (145 characters or less) which will show up in Google's SERPS as the short text most of the time
• body of text uses your keyphrase in the first paragraph and a couple more times
• body of text includes relevant synonyms (natural writing almost always does this so you don't really need to worry about it)
• link out to some high quality resources so Google knows you know what you are talking about
• best to structure text in subheadings, lists and bite size paragraphs but implementation of this rule partly depends on audience/subject matter
• choose two to three social services for which you will provide easy one click sharing (Google, +, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, Stumbleupon). Do not confuse the reader with too many choices: they will choose none
• attractive easy to read design
• a few appropriate and engaging illustrations with titles which include your keyword

Following these rules are enough to get you to the 90% factor for on-page SEO.

Off Page SEO

For off page SEO, at this point you want quality links. Quality links are largely obtained by building relationships or evangelising.

The days where Aaron or I could rank crappy websites at will are almost gone.

You'd better start with a website worth visiting with both good information and useful tools.

And yes you should read Aaron's SEO Blog as normally he writes really intelligently about search. He's been farming a lot of the posting out lately so the overall quality has fallen but is still much denser in terms of signal to noise what you will read on SEOmoz.

As Aaron points out, large enterprise SEO is a different beast. You will start by managing 15 or 20 substantial domains across the world who can cross-link and you can order up links from thousands of partners of which the smaller guys can't dream. On top of that if you do something really sneaky, Google will only punish you for a week or two instead of forever.

So with your smaller client or your own website, you want to get out there and interact with people. If you are an intrinsically boring or lazy person, please don't even start on SEO. The internet is now filled with interesting, engaging and passionate specialists. Your mediocre blatherings about something you don't really care about will not interest anyone. If you are successful in search via tricks, you will just get thrown out of the SERPs when you get to the top. The Google penalising and manual review of ranking sites is working pretty well these days in competitive SERPs. We all report one another for obvious violations.

The only successful long term way to do search is to offer more and publicise yourself better. The merging back of SEO and PR is nearly complete at this time. Cultivate your media contacts and your relationships. You'll need them in competitive SERPs.

In less competitive SERPs, making friends with other interesting engaged people will probably be enough. Interviewing them for your own site is one good shortcut.

This is the shorter version of a 45 minute Wordcamp presentation on SEO and WordPress. I will try to post the full version soon. You have just learned more than $1000 of SEO in five minutes. I hope it helps someone.

Quora SEO: Best single resource to learn SEO

Post from: Foliovision

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Post from: Foliovision

Jeff Utecht first contacted Foliovision when he needed to redesign his own blog, The Thinking Stick. As many bloggers, he took care of the site for some time. It is not extraordinarily difficult, if all you want is to share your thoughts every once in a while. However, Utecht‘s blog quickly expanded and reached “the point where I wanted it to do things that were above my coding expertise.” While browsing online, Utecht came across a few of Foliovision‘s clients. He liked what he saw on their websites, and in November 2010 he decided to contact the company and ask for assistance.

First of all, the blog had to be moved from TypePad to WordPress. Foliovision’s programming team took care of the entire move: the client did not have to invest his time in this part of the project at all. “I love that there are specific people that work on specific issues. A designer for layout, a coder to make it work. It's nice to be working with a team,” Utecht stated. It was clear that The Thinking Stick needed a redesign, which included a new logo. Utecht encouraged the designers to use their imagination to the fullest, as he did not want to limit them by asking for specific fonts or colours. There was only one condition they had to fulfill, and that was incorporating the baseball bat that has always been a part of the logo to their creations.

New logo design for The Thinking Stick blog

Regarding specific features, Jeff Utecht had a clear idea of what he would like to have on his blog. After looking for inspiration on various blogs and websites in the field of education, he knew he was eager to have a fast website with integrated social media and a community-like look. Utecht wanted the homepage to display as many previews of articles as possible, with each of them showing exactly how many people liked or shared them on social media. Furthermore, he was keen to have direct links to his own social media profiles, as well as his most popular articles visible right away. The integrated Google search bar is also worth a mention. Quite simply, Utecht put together a list of his favourite features seen on other sites and he wanted to be able to offer them to his readers as well. Connecting is crucial for this client and his requests show it very clearly.

“With my personal blog TheThinkingStick.com I love being able to say what I like about different websites and what I don’t like and we add those into the site’s next updates”, he noted. Foliovision worked on Utecht’s ideas and made them a reality. The new site was launched on January 7, 2011, and for two years, it was perfect. However, Utecht realized that it was time for a small refresh if he wanted to keep up with the newest online trends. In February 2013, he started to discuss an upgrade of the site with Foliovision. The Foliovision team is already working on that, and the results will be available in the near future – keep checking The Thinking Stick if you are curious.

As it marked the start of a lasting cooperation, The Thinking Stick was somewhat special. However, the greatest project Utecht and Foliovision worked on together has been, without a doubt, COETAIL. “Hands down the COETAIL project has been the best project“, the client agrees. Coetail.com (formerly coetail.asia) is a community portal that Foliovision has helped create and build up from the start. Let me guide you through this impressive piece of work in more detail.

COETAIL, the abbreviation of Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy, is a website that aims to “help educators learn to use technology in a meaningful way through a 15 graduate credit program.” Its goal is to offer “a community approach to learning”, and you can sense ‘community’ all over the site. It was the keyword that the whole team working on the project had in mind since it had been launched.

Before devoting full attention to design and specific features on the website, however, it was crucial to solve technical issues. Foliovision’s programmer and the supervisor of this project Martin Vicenik particularly remembers the bad hosting server, which caused the site to be very slow. To offer the website visitors the best possible experience, switching to Foliovision’s hosting services was a clear choice. On April 7, 2011, this issue was settled with a dedicated West Coast server in place (to serve Asia faster), and the focus shifted to the much-needed new design.

“Everything from colour to functionality was talked through with the (Foliovision) team. They helped to create our logo and a website that meets our needs and the needs of our participants,” Utecht noted. He provided a few examples of sites that he found appealing, so that the designers got a rough idea what the he aimed to achieve. Utecht’s dream was to create a community portal. He knew he wanted a site that looked fresh and friendly, and the choice of colours (purple and green) correspond to that. While creating the logo, designer Michala had in mind that it should symbolize community, technology, and at the same time, friendliness – as you can see in the picture below, it indeed does.

For Michala, the COETAIL project was unique because a lot of time was spent on discussing the experience of the two types of visitors to the website. Utecht and the Foliovision team had to consider different user-experience for non-registered visitors and those, who are members of the site. Just as Utecht wanted, the website displays slightly different data to the users before and after they log in. COETAIL really is a very user-oriented website, and its owners want to offer nothing but the highest-quality experience to every single visitor of the site.

One of the most crucial parts of COETAIL, the BuddyPress plugin, also helps to make the site visitors feel welcome. This feature contributes to the overall community feel of the site perhaps the most significantly. Thanks to BuddyPress, COETAIL is somewhat similar to many of the popular social networks. It is not your regular educational website, really. Coetail.com is a membership site, it pulls out information from its members' blogs and social networks (it has nearly 500 members at the moment), and for many people, it has become a place where they can express their opinions.

The site members want to contribute to one another's learning process, and they do so by discussing various topics, share their opinions and experience in blog posts, and commenting on each other’s views – the site undeniably turned into one big community, and it is clearly visible on the homepage already. COETAIL displays the most recent articles written by its members (on their own blogs) and Tweets (yes, from the members' Twitter accounts) on the homepage, just like your news-feed on some of the social networks does.

As Utecht said, “this project has seen amazing growth over the past couple of years and we even moved the domain from coetail.asia to coetail.com. Alec (Kinnear) and team did this without missing a beat”. Indeed, COETAIL has passed Asia’s borders quickly. It was therefore logical to move it to coetail.com in December 2012. Of course, no content from the original website was lost, our programmers made sure that all the old URLs would redirect properly.

In summary, COETAIL truly has been a dream site for Utecht, and it makes him, as well as Foliovision, proud. The client described the cooperation on his most valued project followingly:

Alec (Kinnear, creative director of Foliovision) and team helped us scale the wordpress multi-site install from a few blogs to over 500 blogs and growing. The best move we made was hosting our site with Foliovision as they keep the server tweaked to best serve our site and our community. They watch the site, and as the site grows and needs more resources they add the resources to the server. It's great to know that you're only paying for what you really need at that time.

Jeff Utecht (c) TED/Davis Apas

The clearly expressed high level of satisfaction motivated the client to seek Foliovision’s services on (so far) two more occasions. Firstly, Foliovision was asked to create a website for an international education conference taking place every fall, Learning 2012 (this year, it is Learning 2013, and the number will, obviously, keep changing every year). The site informs its visitors about the conference, it contains details about registration, program, conference speakers, pictures and materials from the previous years, and so on.

As Learning 2012 is a website devoted to one event, it is not the busiest one of Utecht's sites, and thus did not need as much work as COETAIL, for instance. The biggest tasks for Foliovision's programmers were taking care of integrating Google Custom Search to the site, installing and adjusting BuddyPress, and making sure it works correctly. Maintenance of the website belongs to their responsibilities up to this day. Foliovision's designers were not involved in this project, the theme was purchased from WordPress.

Finally, the fourth project Utecht and Foliovision worked on together was a new parent portal for International School Bangkok. The website aims to inform parents of the children who attend International School Bangkok about news from the school. The school already had a few existing portals for parents, including one where they could log in to see the grades of their children, or one for the school’s cashless system where they couch check cash balances and top-up. Utecht's goal was to have all the existing portals, and possibly new ones, incorporated in one single website, and once parents logged in, they would have access to all of them.

The new portal is absolutely secure – not everyone can register on the site; the employees of the school are in charge of the database of parents, and they manually add or remove members. The database currently contains about 2,600 people, and this number changes as the number of the school's students changes. Besides the obvious activities, such as controlling how their child is doing at school, all the registered parents regularly receive a newsletter to be as well-informed about happenings at school as possible. Designers did not have much work with this project, Utecht has chosen to use some of the already existing banners and colour schemes. Nonetheless, Foliovision makes sure the website is well-maintained.

The aim of many websites is to attract as many visitors as possible. While it is fairly important for Utecht’s sites as well, their main goal is different. In his words:

The aim of our websites is to create a community of learners. The number of visitors is not our focus...they come through great content that is written from our community members. Our learning community is focused on sharing openly and publicly their learning journey. Foliovision handles the SEO of the site and it's great for our participants to see their material find its ways into search results pretty quickly. Our site is more about promoting the work of our participants than it is about the hits to our site.

Over the years of cooperation with Foliovision and several projects, Utecht has become quite an experienced WordPress user, but the company’s help is still needed regularly. If there is any problem with any of the four of the above-described website, Foliovision is ready to step in immediately. As Utecht describes it, “I would send them a request 'Can we do this?' and next thing I know Martin (Vicenik, Foliovision's senion programmer) has it up and working on the site. That's been the best part having someone that has access to my site where I just have the ideas and they make it happen. I love how quick they are to respond to issues. Usually I get issues fixed within 24 hours or less.”

For Foliovision, Utecht has been a reliable client, who knows what he wants, is responsive and eager to learn. Simply said, this client has been brilliant to cooperate with, and Foliovision's staff is more than ready to work on more of his ideas and projects. Utecht also expressed his sentiments clearly, saying that he will “continue to trust Foliovision with my websites and communities moving forward. It's great to know you have a team you can trust to make your dream site a reality”. Upgrades of the already existing sites, as well as new projects, are undoubtedly on the horizon, stay tuned!

Jeff Utecht Case Study

Post from: Foliovision

We have high presentation standards and as this is an art/cultural site, the requirements are even higher. The calendar has to look good. What we don't need yet is bookings and/or ecommerce. When/if we move to selling, we don't mind paying for a pro version but not before.

Our three contenders were:

• Event Organizer. approx 100,000 downloads. 4 stars plus. Very few low ratings.
• Events Calendar. approx 380,000 downloads. 4 stars plus. More low ratings.
• Events Manager. approx 600,000 downloads. 4 stars plus. More low ratings.

Why did we choose Event Organiser:

wordpress event organiser

• uses built-in WordPress functions from custom post type.
• does not hide essential features behind pro version.
• very good user reviews.
• lightweight: won't slow down clients sides or give us hell with caching (as it's using core WordPress functionality).

What Event Organiser may lack: some advanced e-commerce functionality in comparison to its two primary competitors. This doesn't matter to us as we are right now interested in publicizing events but not selling into them.

Runner up number one: Events Manager

events manager wordpress calendar

What we like:

• longstanding plugin
• everything we need is freely available, only limitations for pro versions have to do with ticket sales (if we were selling tickets paying for pro upgrade is no issue)
• sincere developers who are really trying to improve the WordPress universe offering most of the code for free and asking for payment only for ecommerce features
• moved to using custom post types

What we don't like:

• probably a bit worn down by legacy code base (although it's recently been rewritten)
• resource heavy, too many features: we don't like overly complex plugins which try to incorporate too much into core functionality. KISS
• don't like the look of a few screens (probably legacy): we prefer better out of the box presentation as it's one less thing to have to customize when hurrying out a large site
• have to install an additional calendar display plugin to get proper calendar display: not the most elegant either

Runner up number two: The Events Calendar.

Wordpress Events Calendar

What we like:

• very good looking
• very actively developed
• very active support
• not many complaints about slowing down a site

What we don't like:

• hides essential features like saved venues and saved organisers behind pro version. I mean we really don't like this. The Events Calendar is crippleware in its current form.
• per site licensing

To Avoid: All-in-One Event Organiser

As a final note, here's a plugin to avoid: All-in-One Event Organiser. It appears to be almost as bad as Semper Fi's adware ridden AIO SEO pack.

wordpress all in one event calendar

What we don't like:

• slow, resource heavy
• damages database on occasion in attempt to extort users. Flowerpoint writes: ""I had this plugin installed and it worked fine. Then they upgrade and destroyed my data and put in place the horrible version that takes features away. I uninstalled it and switched to Event Organizer."

If anyone else has some solid suggestions please let us know. We'll post back on how we do with Event Organizer.

Calendar Plugins for WordPress for Cultural Site

Post from: Foliovision

Sometimes I comment over there. I'd even share my comments on Twitter as per Forbes request. Take this perspicuous story about American companies are losing their production capacity by focusing on the patent wars and litigation: Apple Will Lose Friends And Markets With Its Patent Strategy. But every time I think about sharing a Forbes story on Twitter, I get this warning screen.

forbes asking for too much twitter access

This application will be able to:

• Read Tweets from your timeline.
• See who you follow, and follow new people.
• Update your profile.
• Post Tweets for you.

This application will not be able to:

• Access your direct messages.
• See your Twitter password.

This is insane. I'd be happy to allow Forbes to post tweets for me (at my request). But there's no way on earth that I'm going to let them follow new people or update my profile or even get direct access to all of my followers.

I don't understand why companies ask for too much access all the time. It diminishes trust and reach very seriously. I'm really, really tired of LinkedIn trying to make a grab for my email address book. That fat prick Reid Hoffman just has no idea of the damage he is doing to his brand. At one point, LinkedIn had a clean reputation and an upmarket image.

LinkedIn grubbing for my email address book

Now people just want to get out.

Back to Forbes, due to excessive use of javascript sliders at the bottom, it's almost impossible to login much of the time. Will someone please rein in the marketing department (or design department)?

forbes javascript killing own logins

Just because a feature is possible does not make it desirable. We have the same issue with man of our clients. We spent the Easter Weekend debugging an IE9 display issue for one client which came down to a conflict between the ads she runs and a social plugins she uses.

The particular issue cost us a lot of our top-end man hours tracking down (it's non-reproducible at this point in a standard install of IE9), a lot of her hours getting the troubled readers feedback on our test versions and her a lot of money for our time.

Website owners are burdening themselves with overkill every day. Website should be about communication, not taking over the client's computer, grabbing his/her email address book or freezing his/her browser.

The worst living example is The Huffington Post. I like the stories there but I won't visit without javascript disabled. Even then I worry about what THF will do to my browser memory use and stay away. I hope Forbes gets around to trimming back their Twitter access requirements so I can tweet some of their stories.

Forbes ask for too much Twitter access: Doing Social Media Wrong

Post from: Foliovision

Ideally you want any important services hosted on a URL you control. That way if you later decide to do something different, you have a full control over your old URLs and can redirect them to the write place.

Alas that's not the case of Feedburner, as it uses URLs in form of:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/your-feed-name

Fortunately there's a way around the Feedburner dead end for those on WordPress. With our new plugin FV Feedburner Replacement you can include a custom message for all of your Feedburner subscribers, letting them where to find the new feed. When Feedburner RSS readers hit your site we force them to resubscribe on the correct new URLs and give them an opportunity to sign up to your new newsletter subscription form. Fortunately you can also export your existing email subscribers so you can move many readers over by hand to your new service.

For all the crowing about abandonment, Google has made Feedburner migration much more painless than it could be.

FV Feedburner Replacement - Subscription page

The great thing about FV Feedburner Replacement is that it lets you use whatever newsletter service you like, whether Mailchimp, Aweber, ConstantContact or iContact. Whatever newsletter service you are using now, it's very easy to include its signup code.

By default we support Satollo's WordPress Newsletter plugin. We chose Newsletter as it will run in the back end of your WordPress install and doesn't require a monthly fee. We've both used Newsletter Pro ourselves and even contributed code, so we know it works just right.

How to make the move: DIY

Our aim was to make the plugin simple, but here are the basic steps and checks to do:

1. Install the plugin
2. Follow the plugin activation messages to test feed validation and disable feed caching
3. Enable the "Enable Feedburner Tweaks" option in Settings -> FV Feedburner Replacement
4. Refresh your Feedburner feed and test if clicking an article loads your site with a subscription form and a link to your article

We recommend reading our FV Feedburner replacement page and installation guide to find out more about the features.

Download our FV Feedburner Replacement from its WordPress.org plugin page.

How to make the move: Turnkey Service

If all of this moving around from one feed service to another sounds complicated and you would like our help with full subscription migration and set up of your own Newsletter service, including set up of a full feeds page, we have put together a headache free done for you service. We've done this a few times and can save you lots of pain. Don't hesitate to contact us.

How to move Feedburner to self-hosted with no monthly charges and without losing any subscribers

Post from: Foliovision