Sk-etchbook

This is an extract sent out by leading recruitment acency Reed:

A recent study suggests that over 50% of employers think the jobs market is overrun by jobseekers with academic qualifications and 68% think not enough candidates have practical skills and vocational qualifications.

This research is supported by recruitment specialists who attended a recent debate on the state of the graduate market. One of the main outcomes was that may graduates lack soft skills and doing a year of traveling might be a better option then continuing in education and doing a masters degree.

There is an emphasis on both schools and employers to provide better training on soft skills like team working, leadership and social skills.

If you are looking to improve on your soft/practical skills then voluntary work is a great way to do so. Why not browse through reed.co.uk's 'benefits of volunteering' or start searching for voluntary jobs now on reed.co.uk.

Internships also provide a great opportunity to upgrade your skills and it has been recently announced that a host of Premier League clubs, including Chelsea, Everton and Sunderland, are on the look out for new interns.

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I recently got asked to produce an email marketing campaign. I've been looking into some of the available software out there for client relations and mailing list management.

Opensource Newsletter & CRM Software
www.sugarcrm.com
www.vtiger.org
www.phplist.com
www.openemm.org

Paid Hosted CRM Service Comparison
Business Buy Guide

Free & Subscription Based Software
www.mailchimp.com
www.infusionsoft.com
www.sendblaster.com
www.sage.co.uk/software_and_services/customers/sage_crm.aspx

Reviews and Discussions
http://www.siteground.com/sugarcrm_vtiger.htm
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Search/email_marketing.html
http://email.about.com/od/windowsmarketingsoftware/Windows_Email_Marketing_Software.htm

Surveys
http://www.limesurvey.org/

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It's all go at the moment planning, learning and sorting things out. I'm currently spreading myself between a few training DVD's, several books, an essay, a synopsis and working towards getting PWD / major project sorted.

I'm also intending to go to possibly one seminar a week throughout May.

I've just booked to attend the following seminars:

Date: 21 May 2009
Title: Confident, stress free, cold calling to win new customers (Leeds)
Time: 09:30 to 12:30
Venue: Bodington Hall, University of Leeds, Otley Road, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS16 5PT

Date: 21 May 2009
Title: Double sales from your brochures, flyers, ads, e-shots and website (Leeds)
Time: 13:30 to 16:30
Venue: Bodington Hall, University of Leeds, Otley Road, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS16 5PT

Date: 07 May 2009
Title: Establish your Internet Presence - Quickly and Easily!
Time: 18:00 to 21:00
Venue: The Elsie Whiteley Innovation Centre, Hopwood Lane, Halifax, West Yorkshire, HX1 5ER

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Here is a sample of business cards collected from a supermarket notice board. One of my tactics is to utilize places like these to collect details of companies, preferably ones without a website shown on the business cards. This is a simple way of generating leads along with just calling into small independent businesses.

I shall also be advertising online on classified web sites such as Gumtree along with setting up a profile on all the usual networks.

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From this moment forth all information relating to current my works and projects can be viewed here:


http://www.shaunio.co.uk/genesis

I'm doing this to create some separation between the educational and the professional aspects. I'm hosting this blog on a personal site sill as it will cover both personal and professional projects as well as some experimental stuff and any collaborations. This blog shall also be a central place to find all the relevant links to various networks I'm involved with and a place to view my personal CV and profile.

However before I go I'd like to explain what you're looking at here.

Well we started on our Major Project and PPD 2 briefs a while ago now and it's my intention for these to briefs to culminate with my transformation into a web designer extraordinaire.

So the setting up of an all singing company website and polishing off everything I've been toying with for the past few years should be the final results. I have been previously experimenting in all areas and planned to strip everything down and start from scratch. This I have done I went right back to the initial phase and started everything again properly, from researching the market, the competition and reading up on marketing, copy writing and all sorts of other aspects involved.

Then I started from scratch defining the company. Working out the core values and thinking about how to best represent this. I then wanted to stick more to the natural flow of plan - develop brand - develop website. Unfortunately I'm a bit skint now so need to get a site back up asap. This means I'm still working on writing up the planning docs and am at the same time working on a beta version of the site. Not best practice but when do I ever do things how I'm supposed to!!!

Anyway I came up with a few variations on a logo. At present I'm swaying towards the PWD logo above. This card is a mock up of both my PPD presentation and my business card. I want a square one just to be different, it would also be good If I could have a rubber (3D with real rounded edges) version or something more interesting for promo purposes.

Speaking of which I was looking into printers which can do dye cut cards and also started thinking about other promotional items. Something useful or funny would be good, at present the best I idea I've had are for screen wipes either fabric or disposable. They could have a relevant comment on them.

I had wanted to get the Wordpress blog completed and get all the relevant imagery and text uploaded however it's the fist time I've edited a Wordpress doc and It's a pain in the arse!

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Magpie is a new design & communications agency targeting the education industry, specifically Student Unions. The company is a recent formation, here is what they have say about themselves:

"We were inspired to form Magpie after many years experience working for Leeds University Union’s Marketing Department. Here we gained extensive knowledge of the student market and implemented award winning design and communications for the Students’ Union, University of Leeds and external public sector organisations such as the NHS."

So what's this got to do with me?

I've been working with the guys at Magpie, converting their designs to HTML/CSS web pages. This is the first time I've done the coding and back end stuff only and it has been a constructive use of time.

Project overview:
Magpie provided me with PSD files for the pages, they wanted these converting to a basic brochure style site. After speaking to them about the project initially I suggested they incorporate a blog into the site as this would meet their requirements in terms of wanting to post news and info on projects. I've been learning about blogging for marketing and SEO recently, even though SEO was not one of their requirements (they plan on presenting themselves directly to their niche market) they're still benefits in terms of inclusion in relevant search results and page rank.

They wanted to get a site online asap as they planned on attending a conference this weekend so at present I have just created a faux-blog feed using a scrolling div. Once we have discussed the matter further this will be replaced with an embedded feed, the full blog may then be incorporated into the news page.

In terms of coding and conversion it was pretty straight forward. First off I transposed all the text and created a semantic layout. Next I sliced up the home page layout, the design is a clear and uncluttered one so there were only a few images required. Then it was a matter of coding the CSS, following best practice all the CSS should be stored in an external file. I use Dreamweaver to design in however I am finding myself hand coding more and more as it's quicker and more flexible than the Dreamweaver interface, the code it produces is also quite heavy and unoptimized.

Through the magic of CSS a text document is transformed to beautiful layout. Or is it? I use Firefox on a Mac and usually test pages in this first. There are discrepancies between browsers which I'm getting more familiar with. Most of these are to do with measurement or rendering of some tags. There is a default style sheet built into the browser, you can override the default margins and padding for all elements in the document but it's debatable whether this is good or bad. The benefits are you get greater control of positioning however the downsides are you have to write more code, you loose some useful defaults on buttons and other page elements and if there is a large amount of content it can be processor intensive. I tested the design in Firefox, Safari and IE on the Mac and Firefox and IE on the PC. It is a case of trial and error in correcting the differences but I got there eventually.

Bob's ya uncle, Fanny's your aunt... A working website.

Oh yes, beta version up and running. Less than a days work too which highlights to me where a lot of the time goes on projects. When I'm doing the full site design - completion the design can take much longer than it should as it's a matter of waiting for the client choosing, amending, changing their minds etc. The creative side is not as black and white as the development side either, sometimes you crank out designs like one of them cigarette pooing camels other times if feels like you just sat there having a stare-off with a computer. Definitely a nice change, working with designers. They know what they want, do the design and hand it over, I do my thing, job finished. Very smooth.

Still to do:
As mentioned before we are going to add a blog and embed this on most pages. There are a few additions to make but it is mostly just back end stuff. This is what is usually involved:

Add meta data to pages.
Visually test on major browsers.
Automated cross browser testing - http://browsershots.org/
HTML validation - http://validator.w3.org/
CSS validation - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator
Accessibility testing - http://wave.webaim.org
Optimize code
Search engine submission

Testing and SEO
http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters
http://www.alexa.com
http://www.goingup.com

Learning outcomes:

As I previously said this was a constructive exercise. Working on just part of the project gave me a different perspective and more insight into how much time should be allotted. I've got some good coding practice and have learnt a few new things. The most notible of these are working out how to bypass an issue with IE not rendering list based menus correctly. IE doesn't like you not specifying widths sometimes and also handles the box model differently, anyway a mix of these and using inline positioning was the solution which worked. The other new snippet of knowledge was using actions in Photoshop to create slices and save the graphics. Very useful if you have a generic page layout and just need to change one area.

Nice little project really and maybe the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

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Firstly this is one of the rough options for a business card. I already had psd & ai templates for the dimensions from my previous attempts. Am thinking stark and minimal is better at the moment but not certain, need to settle on a main design concept first. Don't want to print them until I've sorted the domain and don't really want to use Vistaprint again. The colors were crap last time and also want a better quality finish as the card gives off as much impression as the content.

Anyway I was banging on about defining myself. As a company I need to work out two main issues initially. Core values and Mission statement. I have a rough idea of these in theory however refining these and whittling them down to communicate as effectively as possible requires quite a bit of research. Once these are appropriately settled upon the design progression shall become more natural.

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Right I need to pull my finger out and get back on with the paperwork and research for establishing myself. Well I haven't exactly been slacking recently but have been more focused on learning Actionscript, philosophy, psychology and some theories relating to design/advertising/perception and other areas. Predominantly I'm focusing on these areas because I'm basing my Critical Studies essay around the subjects of human perception/misperception but I also find some of the subjects incredibly interesting and beneficial on a personal (and professional in terms of strategy) development level. I've also picked up a good few tricks on the design front, have started on some PHP, and tried to start on learning more about Joomala and Wordpress but not got far yet.

Anyway back to the point. As I may have previously mentioned I'm trying to amalgamate everything into superbriefs. Here we have the Major Project, merged with Enterprise and Innovation. It's also kinda merged with PPD2 (a poor excuse for a brief if ever I saw one), which I'm not convinced is not just a good way of getting the students to build a database for the college to use for shameless self promotion. Slave labor or what!



So far I have downloaded Wordpress to document the set up but I'm not sure where to put it! The Primitive Ink domain is not going to be used for web design any more so no point putting it there. I'm not yet ready to register my final domain and it wouldn't look very professional either having a blog about setting the company up attached to the main website. It can probably be attached to my Shaunio domain as this is going to host personal and experimental shit whenever I get round to sorting through it all.



Leading nicely on to my next subjects, the hosting of domains and my domain name. I have been researching reseller hosting for a while. The choice out there is phenomenal and the variations in facilities, allowances and prices is huge. I started referencing reputable magazines, reading forums and also using Whois requests to see who hosts some sites designed by companies of interest. At the present time I'm still swayed towards Media Temple as they are extremely reputable, offer excellent functionality and are very competitively priced. The cons however are they are based in the US. In this day and age this has an unnoticeable effect on the download speeds and is more cost effective then UK hosting however it can negatively impact on search listings. The SEO war is paramount to any company marketing itself online and localization is detected using both the domain and the IP of the host. Not so big an issue if you want a .co.uk but a .com would be trouble.

So I'm still undecided. I have however decided to use an alternate domain name for myself as I want to get "web design" into the URL. The downside is this is making the URL quite long so I'm looking to use an abbreviated version for printed documents and email addresses. I'm just struggling to find a short and relevant abbreviation that hasn't been bought by one of them awful bulk buying companies! Needless to say there isn't much point printing off any new business cards until this issue is sorted.

Onward then to planning and documentation. I need primarily to finish my Business Plan and write a Brief or myself. Sounds easy. No, it isn't.

To produce something of use the Business Plan needs to incorporate financial predictions of annual turnover and a breakdown of expenses etc. The documentation from Business Link used in conjunction with docs from E&I along with several online resources are useful in doing this in as far as calculating outgoing expenses goes. The same sources are somewhat useful in predicting also how much you need to earn. The problem for me and where the real leg work is involved then comes from working out everything I actually do when working on a project. Finding how much time is spent at each step of the project then working out what extras a client may ask for and how to charge for these accordingly. This is however only one approach. You also need to check out the competitions pricing, see what similar end-results are priced at then see if your prices are competitive. Then you are left with a rough idea of what you can charge. What you need to survive on up to what you think you can get away with based on skill, experience, your portfolio etc. Then it's decide on which pricing strategy to go for and how to synchronize this with how you plan to market yourself. By this point I had most definitely lost interest. This is an example of what was needs to be covered when costing for an average project. For each of these I worked out an average hourly rate for myself then estimated how long needs to be allowed based on past experience. I have no idea how anyone could do this if they don't have existing experience?

Marketing & Promotion
Pitching
Inception
Consultation & Concept
Market research (outsourced)
Semantic Content Creation
Graphics Design Site (3 options)
Logo creation (3 options)
Photography & Product shots
Stock Photography
Studio/Location Photography (outsourced)?
Video Content Production (outsourced)
Copy Writing
Coding
Programming
Graphics Design Flyers (3 options)
Graphics Design Business cards (3 options)
Search Engine Optimisation
Testing
Image Galleries (how many images?)
Product Galleries
Updateable galleries
Updateable shop
Updateable text content
Updateable image content
Databases
Forms
Message Boards
Blogs
Further Consultations
Updates

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Before, when I was trying to define my market, I realized that this is a somewhat difficult task when it comes to pigeon-holing the type of person who would start or be running their own business. The possibilities are so diverse and I want to appeal to all types of business across all industry sectors. So then the types of people cannot be defined. This means the design needs to either be generic, please the majority satisfactorily or somehow flexible itself.

This, plus the fact I'm new to the market and have limited portfolio, means I have decided to try create a semantic site with a selection of different CSS style sheets which the user can switch between.

The designs will vary to fit different artistic styles and the focus of communication will be placed on transferring the companies values of such as quality, responsibility, reliability, service, etc.

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I had a preemptive think about this brief and thought there are two significant areas which I need to complete in terms of launching my little web-design-a-majigy.

The first option would be to take this time to work on the development of my main website. This would be an issue of pulling together all my unfinished bits of work to create a polished portfolio incorporating predominantly CSS and Flash sites but also including examples of graphic work, branding/logos, games, animation, illustration, copywriting and possibly photography. I've not decided whether or not to include everything I do as I have a quirky/experimental/warped side which it may be better to develop separately and keep it separate from the web design professional looking stuff.

The other option (which I have decided against) was to develop the flash application I'm going to build as one of the options to meet the needs of the bargain end of the market. This would be and interactive drag, drop & resize type thing which would output all the code for you. I went wit the other option as this app is less urgent, I can start advertising for work without this but not without a suitable website.

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"Do you mean confused?" I replied, "Don't worry so am I".

I had a manic weekend trying to sort out all the stuff needed by Business Link and for the Enterprise & Innovation module. There seems to be a million smaller questions that need answering before you can answer any of the bigger questions.

Anyway Monday comes and I had to get my Ident project handed in. Managed to get everything edited in After Effects, I used markers to highlight significant points in the soundtrack and tried to sync the visuals to the music. This could of been done a little better but by this point I wanted to get the thing finished. I believe this alternate approach worked out better than my original idea for me as to get the first idea to look right would have taken some precision editing and quite a bit of patience.
The red and black coloured masks work well for the obvious associations to fear and danger. Even though I used stills for the footage as they are only seen briefly it seems to add some kind of creepiness, like your seeing evidence photos similar to what police take of crime scenes, culprits or the public take of Bigfoot and UFO's.

Got everything polished off on Monday but unfortunately the Library was closed so couldn't get the flippin thing burned to disk. Went off to go find a disk, burned all my files but by the time this was done there was nobody left at college. Bugger!

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Had a meeting with an adviser this morning to go over my plans and to find out more information. It was a really positive meeting, we covered all sorts of subjects and I now have a better idea of what is urgent and what can wait. Something that needs to be worked out first is a business plan and cash flow projections. This is pretty difficult for me at the moment, I've been working on pricing systems and calculating chargeable items but until I've perfected my own site and started to actively promote myself it's impossible to say. My initial target audience is individuals and small businesses. These will be pretty cheap options, some template based some custom made. As this is the case each client could be paying anything between £50 - £5000 depending on how much content they want to be original and how many technologies they want.

I can produce basic designed and coded sites for some people this will be enough for others I'm gonna have to use freelancers.

Going to have a meeting with Briget next to discuss what the college has to offer but at the moment things are looking good. The adviser even said there is a possibility I could be added to their database and they could refer new businesses to me! Another bonus is that they may also be able to arrange a meeting with a solicitor to sort out contracts and T&C's.

This is pretty much what we covered:
My Business - Progress & Future
Contracts, copyright & legalities
Business Plan
Funding
Cash flow & forecasts
Business Address & Insurance
Training
Tax & Accounts
Networking

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We were discussing Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the seminar on Monday. This is the first time I had come across this and thought it was worth a quick post. I think it is quite an accomplishment to break down anything as complicated as humans down into such a simplistic yet effective model. Cleaver bloke is all I have to say!

More - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

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It was our first lecture for this module this morning and Shaun is impressed. Last year some of the modules were covering subjects I already knew or didn't want to know as they were not the most relevant subjects to me.

The lecture was good, it covered loads of relevant topics and I also like Bridget's presentation technique (people laugh at me for my OCD tendencies of coordinating things, but I did spot her coffee cup went well with her outfit, get in girl!).

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