Pixelated Opinions

A few days ago, I was discussing the option of budget selectors on contact forms and debating whether or not having one was a good thing. One of the areas of discussion was about working for non-profits and possible pro-bono projects which left me thinking a bit more. A result of which is this post and what I plan on doing: I’m looking to take on some pro-bono projects for people that deserve it and for projects that I can really get behind. I’m not limiting this directly to non-profits either as I would like to include small business owners or individuals that still need the help but don’t necessarily have the funds for it.

I’m not sure yet how many of these I plan on doing but I’m considering making it a regular occurrence within my project calendar. Along with these, I still have paid projects to work on and bills to pay so I won’t be able to take on each request that comes my way but will be doing my best!

And now for the purpose of this post. I need your help in getting the word to the folks that need the help. If you know of any people in this category, please send them this way and if you get requests through for pro-bono projects that you decide not to take on, please send those here too.

I have shrunk down a link for you to pass along so it’s easier to remember/tweet etc. Please pass this along and consider tweeting: http://j.mp/9x9zX I have also set up a dedicated email address for requests of this kind where people can get in touch with their project details. So, if you’re one of the folks looking for help or to get in touch, you can email me here: probono@davemcnally.net

Thanks for your time, here’s hoping it’s a success!

Currently, I’m working on a personal redesign and I’ve been thinking over the contact aspect of the site. Having decided on including a form, I started thinking about what should be included within said form and along came the subject of budgets. The idea of including a field or list for prospective clients to fill in before we’ve even been introduced is a little disturbing to me. It kind of feels like I’m saying “Hi, I don’t care about your project much. I’m just interested in either seeing if you have enough money for me to bother replying or if you have plenty and I could overcharge you for very little effort”.

That may sound a little up front but if you’re being honest, is this not the reason for including a budget section? Those are the only reasons I can think of for having one and it says only one thing to me – we’re naturally greedy people who want to make as much as we can from a project regardless of the work involved. That is most definitely not the impression I want to give off and I hope it isn’t the impression we as an industry have on prospective clients.

To further this point, consider the following scenario. You are contacted by two separate people. One is the owner of a very small business and the other represents a large corporation. They both want projects that are very similar in size and technical requirements. Now, how much do you quote back to each person? I’m pretty sure you would charge the large corporation more.

Another scenario may be as follows. You have your site set up and the contact form includes a slider for budgets. Along comes a small non-profit who have a great cause which is important to you personally. Instead of hearing from them and working together on this great project, you never hear a word and have missed out on the opportunity to get involved. They seen your budget slider and were immediately intimidated by it. They decided to go elsewhere as they could never afford you anyway.

It may be the case that you’re perfectly fine with the previous example and don’t mind either way. It’s not the case with me. I would rather take on a project that I believe in or find interesting than one just for the money. I realize we all have bills to pay though too and need to get paid at some point but I would rather get to know the client and details of their project before discussing the money aspect. That’s just who I am.

You may have concluded by this point that I won’t be including a budget section in my contact form. I am, however, interested in hearing your thoughts on the subject. Do you currently have a budget slider or field on your contact form? What are your reasons for the answer? Feel free to chime in below!

It's been a while since I updated here and since my last post, I've been thinking about the branding of my projects and whether or not to move away from using my current personal domain and starting up a design agency of sorts.

It wouldn't make much sense to try and convey a message that it's a big company though if I was the only one there so I would be looking to work with a couple of other people. With combined experience and a slightly larger team, I would hope to increase the quality of client I worked for. I'm wondering if taking this route would only work if I started out with a couple of other people from the beginning.

Currently, I can't think of any substantial advantages to keeping to my personal domain and trading just as myself. We all hear about clients potentially trusting an individual more than a group and preferring a personal touch to their projects but I haven't found that to be true at all. The more I write in this post, the more convinced I am that taking the 'company' approach will work out better for me. However, all of that would be irrelevant if I didn't have the right people working with me.

I also realize that things aren't really that simple either. There's a fair amount of things on the legal/business side that I would need to learn and get help with. If something is worth doing then it should at least be done properly right? At the same time, I'm not trying to launch a corporation or anything, we're just talking about a few people with similar interests getting together and working as a team. It would be more like a collective of individuals than a company I suppose.

So what do you think? Is it worth making the transition? If so, who's with me?

I thought we were past IE6 and how to deal with it but once again, upon catching up with feeds, I see new options and even more people paying it attention. Is that not partly to blame for why we are still altering our sites for it?

There are bound to projects where it must be accommodated for as the audience may be in the majority but besides those, how about we just get on with things?

Since I signed up here, I've been wondering about the importance of having a 'blog' element on my personal site and if I really need one. Primarily, the function of my site is to showcase my work and to land me more freelancing gigs. I don't know if the blog is adding much value to the site and if it serves much of a purpose.

I added it initially as everybody else had one and it seemed like the standard feature I should have. One benefit I can think of to having it on there is potential clients may read the articles or see that I write about certain topics and see me as more skilled in the given area although I'm not sure if that's a valid assumption.

The option that now comes to mind is to split up my content and use this place as a home for all of my writing. I would then get some fancy, catchy domain and use that for my freelancing branding and work. That would just leave my current site which I could turn into one of those business card type sites people are now so fond of.

It's either that or just leave things as they are, I don't know. That's enough rambling for now, it's been a long night and none of that probably made any sense.

Having recently seen a screenshot of somebody's coding application with some open files, the first thing I spotted in said screen was the colour scheme used for the syntax highlighting of code.

This got me thinking about the use of colour within my own application and whether or not there was a better scheme than the pretty default one I was already using. On one hand, I'm thinking the right set up could make scanning through code much quicker by colour recognition and would point out any possible typos without me having to read over things. On the other hand, I'm thinking if the colours are too contrasting, it may be difficult to concentrate over longer periods of time.

If I had a third hand, I could be thinking it makes no difference whatsoever and I could possibly end up with a lack of productivity due to all of my time spent thinking up effective colour combinations; evident by some time already spent in Photoshop doing that exact thing. What do you think? Does it make much difference to your productivity?

I see a lot of recommendations from people in the web industry saying we should specialize in a chosen area in order to gain more of a reputation in a niche market but is that really the way forward? I think it's the opposite of what we need to do.

The demands of employers and clients are constantly increasing and whilst being known as an expert in a chosen area is good, I can't help feeling that we need to be known as experts in all areas. Are we just being lazy by not learning more or do we over value our jobs by breaking them down too much and giving ourselves fancy job titles?

Coming from a front-end situation, I am currently learning rails in an attempt to broaden my skillset which should open up more opportunities for me although I think I would need to be pretty damn experienced to land a rails job over somebody that focuses on just that. Maybe we do need to specialize...just in more areas.

I'm seeing more and more recently on HTML 5 and people jumping ship on XHTML entirely. When I read through the articles over at Ordered List, I was interested in how things would progress but thought nothing more of it. I presumed it would be at least a few years away before we could start using HTML 5 for our markup. Until the last couple of days that is.

Dave Shea recently made the announcement that he was moving to HTML 4.01 in preparation for HTML 5 and Matt Harris has already done so. So now I'm wondering if more people are going to join them and move over to HTML?

Personally, I'm not planning on a change any time soon. XHTML is working just fine and I'm into the thinking of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" so I don't see much point in changing until I can fully use HTML 5 without having to worry about a barrage of hacks and browser-dependant tweaks.