Jeff (left) & Robert (right)
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
End of an Era
Jeff C. has been our Account Manager since mid December 2011. At the end of this week, he will be leaving Porterware/LandscaperWebsites/GreenIndustryWebsites to take a position at The Gainesville Times. He did a great job with the account management, and we'll miss his sense of humor around the office.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
HELP SITE UPDATE 5.1.2012
Looks like this space may take the form of an online notepad as I use it to keep notes and thoughts throughout the development of the HELP.PORTERWARE.COM site, which I'll just call the HELP site from here forward. I realize that there is not a big number of hits here, so a lot of the time I will be documenting just for my own records, and also occasionally so I will have a definitive timestamp on an issue or record. This project feels like my baby, so I am hoping to see it through with maximum organizational efforts.
The reasonI think I have gravitated to this project with so much positive energy is because if it is done well, and maintained correctly, there is no question that the HELP site will be a huge asset to our team, to our time management, and to our overall sanity. No other project I have had the opportunity to work on here at Porterware has been this perfect for what I think are my best skills, and which I also enjoy doing. I guess if we were to try to attach terminology to it it would be somewhere between front end web development and technical writing, with a touch of simple graphics manipulation thrown in just for kicks.
Since the bulk of the HELP site inner pages will be built via our standard "service pages" system, all of the items will have a wiki-like quality in that they can be edited and updated at any point by anyone on the team. This allows for each how-to instruction or answer to have room to grow, or shrink, depending on the responses we get to how well each item actually helped the client who used it.
NEXT ITEMS ON TO-DO LIST:
The reasonI think I have gravitated to this project with so much positive energy is because if it is done well, and maintained correctly, there is no question that the HELP site will be a huge asset to our team, to our time management, and to our overall sanity. No other project I have had the opportunity to work on here at Porterware has been this perfect for what I think are my best skills, and which I also enjoy doing. I guess if we were to try to attach terminology to it it would be somewhere between front end web development and technical writing, with a touch of simple graphics manipulation thrown in just for kicks.
Since the bulk of the HELP site inner pages will be built via our standard "service pages" system, all of the items will have a wiki-like quality in that they can be edited and updated at any point by anyone on the team. This allows for each how-to instruction or answer to have room to grow, or shrink, depending on the responses we get to how well each item actually helped the client who used it.
NEXT ITEMS ON TO-DO LIST:
- Begin build out of home page. This should not take too long. The only difficulty might be the gigantic form field but I am sure that is just a styles/dimension issue, no worries
- Build out base inner page that will expand to fit content
- Create a scheme for formatting the posts consistently as far as fonts & font size, use of bold, use of caps, use of italics, use of color. Being consistent throughout will be VERY important to keep a precision look. NO SERIFS PLEASE.
- Begin transferring post content from this blog to the new site. Refine posts as necessary.
- Survey other team members if there are any common questions they get asked, or help requests they have to field, that I did not list on the original rough draft of the info design spreadsheet
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
LandscaperWebsites.com / Porterware
NEW HELP RESOURCE WEBSITE!
I'm very excited to report that my "How-To" posts on this blog have been working well to help our clients understand the website content management tool, which is the basis of all Porterware related sites.
After it became apparent that the posts were having a positive impact, I showed a few to my boss Chris, the owner of Porterware, and he seemed to really like the idea. He immediately remarked to the effect of, "We need to have our own help/faq and how-to site for all the Porterware divisions since they all share the same manual and terms." I asked if he minded if I still post some info in this space for some things, which he gave me the impression he was okay with. I explained that if we did a proper site with company branding, that the text content might need to be a little more formal than I present here, and I still think that is true. Also, I didn't want to have to stop creating helpful posts while the details of making a proper help site were being hashed out and put into motion which is sometimes a lengthy process. But...not in this case.
I'll be honest...the desire part is completely selfish on my end...I -desire- to stay on task with my development duties and not have to spend lengthy amounts of time on "tech support" type customer calls, which would be better answered with written instructions and illustrations/photos.
The necessity pushing this project forward is the recent and ongoing rebuild of the Website Admin System, which is the web based interface where a site owner can update, edit, and create content that will appear on their site. The Website Admin is the control center for all USER EDITABLE areas of our website packages. There have been lots of changes and improvements over the last iteration of the Website Admin, and the new Admin is already launched, but as of this writing there is no instruction manual. So we need to construct one...fast.
This new manual will not be set up for print, it will be exclusively on the new help/faq/how-to site. Since we already have launched several sites that utilize this new Admin, creating the manual as soon as possible is incredibly important in order to maximize the benefits to our clients.
STEP 1. Brainstorming and Organizing Information
For some reason last weekend, without any real prompting, I created a spreadsheet and began creating a sort of information layout based on what questions are most important, what questions we get all the time, and what information do clients need to know but do not know to ask about. The result was 4 main categories:
Next I added as many questions as I could think of to these 4 sections, and arranged them into an order that seemed to make the most logical progression. I showed this spreadsheet to Chris the following Monday, and that is when he basically put the project in my hands. So rad!
STEP 2: Design / Wireframing / Usability Contemplation
Once Chris gave the go ahead for me to head up the project I got started on a screenshot of how I envisioned the homepage to look right away. My goal was to keep the momentum going because it is very easy for "quiet" projects to get pushed aside as we try to keep up with the day to day workload...so this project will not be "quiet". This project will move fast and it will make noise.
The first screenshot was very basic, and I wanted to do something with several different shades of white, with the colors having a very minimal impact against one another. It was -okay-, but not great. After reviewing it with Chris I reworked it using some of his suggestions and started to really visualize a final version. Once more I sent a version to Chris, but by the time I got to work the next day I had already reworked the screenshot AGAIN.
This morning Chris viewed the most recent screenshot, and gave the go ahead for me to move into the build out phase! View the HELP.PORTERWARE.COM screenshot
One thing that was helpful is that this site will be mostly text, so there was no need to get extremely fancy or complicated with the design. We want people to be able to get to the info they want from this site with the least amount of distraction as possible, so there will be no flash, jquery sorcery, no animated gifs, and no forced login procedure to access info.
One interesting thing I am suprised I got away with was deliberately NOT putting our phone or email address on the most visible parts of the site, and especially not on the homepage. The idea behind this is that I wanted to prevent users who might visit the site to try and help themselves from seeing a giant phone number that says to them "just call and someone else will solve your problems for you". That is exactly what we do NOT want to happen. The goal is to provide enough guidance that a customer can get through just about any issue or update to the user editable areas without our help.
I intend to continue posting to this blog about the progress on the HELP site and our other projects. Now that this blog does not have to function as a help resource for clients, the tone will probably change dramatically. A little less stuffy, business type vibe and a little more self expression. I like it.
After it became apparent that the posts were having a positive impact, I showed a few to my boss Chris, the owner of Porterware, and he seemed to really like the idea. He immediately remarked to the effect of, "We need to have our own help/faq and how-to site for all the Porterware divisions since they all share the same manual and terms." I asked if he minded if I still post some info in this space for some things, which he gave me the impression he was okay with. I explained that if we did a proper site with company branding, that the text content might need to be a little more formal than I present here, and I still think that is true. Also, I didn't want to have to stop creating helpful posts while the details of making a proper help site were being hashed out and put into motion which is sometimes a lengthy process. But...not in this case.
As of Today the new HELP/FAQ/HOW-TO site is being fast tracked into a reality, both by desire and necessity!
I'll be honest...the desire part is completely selfish on my end...I -desire- to stay on task with my development duties and not have to spend lengthy amounts of time on "tech support" type customer calls, which would be better answered with written instructions and illustrations/photos.
The necessity pushing this project forward is the recent and ongoing rebuild of the Website Admin System, which is the web based interface where a site owner can update, edit, and create content that will appear on their site. The Website Admin is the control center for all USER EDITABLE areas of our website packages. There have been lots of changes and improvements over the last iteration of the Website Admin, and the new Admin is already launched, but as of this writing there is no instruction manual. So we need to construct one...fast.
This new manual will not be set up for print, it will be exclusively on the new help/faq/how-to site. Since we already have launched several sites that utilize this new Admin, creating the manual as soon as possible is incredibly important in order to maximize the benefits to our clients.
STEP 1. Brainstorming and Organizing Information
For some reason last weekend, without any real prompting, I created a spreadsheet and began creating a sort of information layout based on what questions are most important, what questions we get all the time, and what information do clients need to know but do not know to ask about. The result was 4 main categories:
- Admin Instructions
- Info that Helps the Purchasing Process
(domain name info, hosting info, seo info, what to know before you buy)
- Billing, Financing, and Accounting Issues
- Miscellaneous FAQs and Advice to Beginners
Next I added as many questions as I could think of to these 4 sections, and arranged them into an order that seemed to make the most logical progression. I showed this spreadsheet to Chris the following Monday, and that is when he basically put the project in my hands. So rad!
STEP 2: Design / Wireframing / Usability Contemplation
Once Chris gave the go ahead for me to head up the project I got started on a screenshot of how I envisioned the homepage to look right away. My goal was to keep the momentum going because it is very easy for "quiet" projects to get pushed aside as we try to keep up with the day to day workload...so this project will not be "quiet". This project will move fast and it will make noise.
The first screenshot was very basic, and I wanted to do something with several different shades of white, with the colors having a very minimal impact against one another. It was -okay-, but not great. After reviewing it with Chris I reworked it using some of his suggestions and started to really visualize a final version. Once more I sent a version to Chris, but by the time I got to work the next day I had already reworked the screenshot AGAIN.
This morning Chris viewed the most recent screenshot, and gave the go ahead for me to move into the build out phase! View the HELP.PORTERWARE.COM screenshot
One thing that was helpful is that this site will be mostly text, so there was no need to get extremely fancy or complicated with the design. We want people to be able to get to the info they want from this site with the least amount of distraction as possible, so there will be no flash, jquery sorcery, no animated gifs, and no forced login procedure to access info.
One interesting thing I am suprised I got away with was deliberately NOT putting our phone or email address on the most visible parts of the site, and especially not on the homepage. The idea behind this is that I wanted to prevent users who might visit the site to try and help themselves from seeing a giant phone number that says to them "just call and someone else will solve your problems for you". That is exactly what we do NOT want to happen. The goal is to provide enough guidance that a customer can get through just about any issue or update to the user editable areas without our help.
I intend to continue posting to this blog about the progress on the HELP site and our other projects. Now that this blog does not have to function as a help resource for clients, the tone will probably change dramatically. A little less stuffy, business type vibe and a little more self expression. I like it.
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