Oct 26
Jamie Pittock - The Art Of Proactive Parenting
- Categories:
- Business, ExpressionEngine, Freelancing
- Tags:
- clients, design, erskine, expressionengine, jamie pittock, wysiwyg
- Published:
- 12:27pm on Monday 26th October, 2009
Jamie Pittock is Operations Director for Nottingham-based Erskine Design. He discussed effective ways to develop ExpressionEngine sites that increase understanding and remove uncertainty for your clients.
Jamie’s slides can be viewed on SlideShare.
Managing client expectations
- Design your content model around the client’s existing content - take example content from client, and identify the fields, types and field names needed
- WYSIWYG - clients come wanting total control of their content. They are proposing a solution before you understand their problem. Often they just have specific issues. Designers get lazy and clients shouldn’t design
- You need to think about how you would write this content. Create a template to give to their content creators. nGen File field is the best solution for files at the moment
- Live Demo: The new ed_imageresizer plugin from Erskine does image resizing on the fly and caches results. It will be available soon
- Don’t always have to give the client what they ask for. e.g. No WYSIWYG, just multiple images/captions/alignment fields for main body and extended text. We use Textile. What if they want more images? You can only design and model content based on what the client tells you at the time. Don’t be afraid to tell the client that
- Audience comment: “Publishing online is not creating Word documents.”
- Influence and advise client using size of fields, instructions, options available
- Make it fun. Clients need to enjoy managing their site. Make them feel like designers. Enable them to do something they never thought they’d be able to do. Make it feel less like work (and less like Word)
Improve the Control Panel
- #8 Signpost using tabs. Make tabs for things the client needs access to
- #7 Remove what isn’t needed. Current dashboard is laughable; get rid of notepad, bulletins, comments, etc. Same on Edit tab - opportunities to remove confusion - remove trackback column, comment count, etc.
- #6 Improve usability. Add hover dropdown on edit tab, install Edit Tab AJAX extension
- #5 Add extra content. Add extra columns to Edit page (e.g. Categories)
- #4 Content Previews. Use Live Look. Fix the Publish page buttons and kill the default ‘Saved’ page using the Publish Tweaks extension
- #3 Use jQuery to change stuff. For example, change the label for the title field on Publish page depending on the weblog they are using. Avoid client confusion. Remove Options checkboxes dynamically. Tiny changes can make a difference to client understanding
- #2 Use field instructions. Include image dimensions, or more complex details. Use jQuery or extensions to add additional detail. Say how content will be displayed
- #1 Create a new theme. This is a lot of work. Does this breach the license agreement? Don’t know, maybe
Q&A
How much training do you provide?
No documentation - we create videos and offer staff training. It’s important to bring the client in as early as possible and get them using EE.
It was also interesting to note that Erskine keep their templates under an /assets/templates/ folder (outside of the system folder).
I'd love to hear what you think - please use the form below to leave your comments. Some HTML is permitted:
b,i,em,del,ins,strong,pre,code,blockquote,abbr. URLs or email addresses will be automatically converted into links.Austin Siewert at 12:23pm on 28th October, 2009 #
Matthew Pennell at 1:26pm on 28th October, 2009 #
Jamie Pittock at 1:58pm on 28th October, 2009 #
Austin Siewert at 2:04pm on 28th October, 2009 #
Jamie Pittock at 3:29pm on 28th October, 2009 #
Jason Tipp at 1:46pm on 14th December, 2009 #