We just launched Skip’s new web site. Like most of my recent work, Skip McDonald Photography is a WordPress site. The thrust of the site is to publicize Skip’s upcoming  presentations and workshops, detail the philosophy behind Skip’s work, and to show a sampling of his work through several galleries.

Working with Skip is an absolute pleasure and I’m sure you’ll find his site to be engaging, educational, and inspirational.

MSRPO (Minnesota Seasonal Recreational Property Owners) Coalition speaks for recreational property owners at the State Capitol, seeking tax fairness, and greater support for families that own cabins, lake-shore, hunting shacks and seasonal property in Minnesota. In order to effectively carry out this mission, it is paramount that they are able to communicate effectively with their constituents.

• They wanted to have the capability to log in and edit web content from any browser.
• They needed to be able to get news and information that affects Minnesota cabin owners published quickly and easily.
• They wanted to provide a way for their constituents to write letters to their respective state legislators.
• They needed a way for their members to to  donate and/or pay membership dues as painlessly as possible.
• They needed a vehicle for their constituents to give feedback on published articles and ask questions.

MSRPO Executive Director, Jeff Forester, asked me to help them create a web site that would fulfill these business objectives and at the same time provide a place for Minnesota cabin owners to celebrate the family traditions surrounding cabin life in the North Woods. Their tag line is “Cabins are where family happens.”

That’s a lot to chew on at first glance! However, three of the five main goals were on their way to being achieved by setting up a content management system (CMS)/blog. WordPress would have been my platform of choice, but I knew that there would be some extensive programming involved in this project down the road, and since I work most comfortably in ASP.Net, I chose Umbraco as the CMS/blogging platform. Umbraco has proven to be an excellent CMS and I definitely recommend it for projects that need to be built on ASP.Net.

The home page of the site incorporates a jQuery content slider that displays featured content. Each slide links to the relevant page or blog post. The left column shows a list of the most recent news items (blog posts). There is a form where users can sign up for monthly “E-mail Blasts”, and Umbraco provides a comprehensive site search feature.

I created two forms that facilitate members joining and renewing their memberships. We are currently evaluating contact relationship management (CRM) software to handle all of the membership, donation, contact aspects of the organization. At this time the open source package, CiviCRM is looking like the best candidate.

Overall, this project has been a great leap forward for the web presence of MSRPO. They have moved from a static web site with a single membership form to a CMS with a robust blog system, updated W3c standards compliant design and more solid membership forms. The next steps will be to integrate the membership forms into a CRM system, and implement an application that will allow users to find who their state legislators are and easily write letters on current issues.

The line up of speakers was top-notch as always. Topics ranged from Luke Williams’ “How to Spark Disruptive Innovation” (opening keynote), to Shashi Bellamkonda’s “Personal Branding”, to nuts and bolts stuff like “Designing Our Way Through Web Forms” with Kimberly Blessing and Christopher Schmitt.

I came away from this conference smarter, more connected and more inspired to keep learning, and keep building awesome stuff for the web!

(photo by Shashi Bellamkonda)

I am a fairly linear person, especially considering that I’m a designer (we tend to lean toward the creative and quirky). It has been my habit to want to jump in on a new design project, open Photoshop and bang out the design template straight away. I have a pretty good idea up front what will work in HTML/CSS and what wont, so I usually feel confident that I can come up with a good, usable design on the first couple of attempts. This approach has worked well for me for the most part, up to this point.

There is that inevitable moment however, when I’m finished with the draft of the template and I’m ready to post it for the client. I invariably think to myself, “What if they don’t like it? What if it’s not what they had in mind? Will I have to re-do this whole thing from scratch? Should I defend it? (I am the designer after all.)” At this point, I’m already too far along in the prototyping process to afford starting over.

I realize now that by keeping the client out of the process between the initial meeting and the reveal of the first comp, I’m really doing both of us a disservice. The client potentially can feel left out at this point and if the design is a departure from their initial vision, it can shake their confidence in me as a designer. It also means that I am ignoring some potentially great creative input from the client.

I have always tried, in the early stages of a project, to get as much input as I can from the client about the look and feel of a project, asking about other sites that they like or don’t like, talking about colors, logos, etc. But I’ve come to realize that most clients don’t have a clear vision of what they want from the beginning. It’s all too common to spend hours on a finished Photoshop comp only to have the client realize that it’s not what they want (even though they may not know what they want in the beginning).

A mood board is a quickly thrown together collage of photos, colors, typography elements, scraps torn from magazines, etc. that together, give an overall feel for the visual direction of a design.

Mood boards accomplish several things all at once:

• They are a useful tool for the designer to very quickly put down visual ideas for the design.
• They separate the overall “mood” of the design from the interface elements and content. This effectively removes potential distractions for the client at this early stage.
• They allow the client to give creative input very early in the process, thereby avoiding back-tracking after the design comps are viewed.
• Mood boards speed up the visual prototyping process because the style has already been established.

I will definitely be including mood boards in my methodology for all future design projects.

“Thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Beg, borrow, or buy a Blue Beanie and snap a photo of your mug wearing the blue. (Or get creative with Photoshop). Then on November 30, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, (and any other social network) and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group … watch for more information coming soon.

Tweetups and Beanie-ups are being planned all over the globe … watch for more information coming soon…

see also http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2009/ ”

I always wear a blue hat (beanie?) but this one is special.

Here’s a great article by Scott Stratten at UnMarketing which sheds some light on how you can use Twitter to help engage a local market.

Designed specifically for small and medium business marketers, graphic designers, and web developers, Concept Feedback provides a simple tool to get quality feedback on marketing concepts. Best of all, it’s 100% FREE!

There is a full review at Fuel Your Creativity.

I’ve just had my second look at Umbraco, an ASP.Net content management system (CMS). When I first stumbled on Umbraco about a year ago, I misunderstood the license agreement to mean that in order to use the open source version of the software, you were required to put “Powered by Umbraco” on the home page of the site.  After a closer look, reveals that this is not true. The only Umbraco branding that you’re stuck with is in the control panel. This works just fine for my purpose which is to give my clients a framework within which they can edit their own content.

The main feature of Umbraco that has me excited is the text editor. It uses TinyMCE as do many CMS packages. The difference I’ve found from some of the others (such as InsiteCreation) is that Umbraco gives you full control over the editor in terms of what buttons are displayed to the person doing the editing. This way, you can completely hide the Font and Font Size buttons which will effectively eliminate the problem of people inserting Font Size inline styles or worse, font attributes directly into the markup.  As an example, the editor within InsiteCreation will actually insert “<span style=“font-style:italic”>” instead of simple <em> tags.

The other factor which I LOVE is that the designer has full control over the markup that the editor outputs. This makes it easy to maintain the standards compliance of the markup of the site without the need to coach your client in the nuances of editing standards based html using the editor.

I’ll post more on Umbraco as I get more deeply involved, but my initial response is extremely positive. If you call and talk to me about content management in the near future, we’ll likely be discussing Umbraco.