Customer Service

Customer service is a critical factor for succeeding in today’s Web Design industry. The main goal of any Web Designer is to satisfy its customers, any way possible. Finding new strategies to accomplish this is always necessary because customers’ expectations are forever changing. Satisfying customers and giving them what they want, not only keeps them coming back, but it builds a very strong customer-business relationship. Customers will trust your services and feel comfortable when doing business with you or your company. Identifying your customer’s expectations and exceeding them will create exceptional customer service and a successful company.
Delivering  On Customer Service -
In today’s fast-paced and increasingly competitive Web Design industry, the main purpose of a Web Designer’s marketing strategy is to make profits and to continue the growth of the company. Customer satisfaction, quality and retention are huge issues that affect all companies, whether it’ small or large,  local or global. Many companies are interested in studying, evaluating, and implementing marketing strategies that aim at improving customer retention and maximizing its share of customers. It goes without saying that customer service is a key factor in achieving business success. Without customers there is no business.  Great Web Designers develop a solid understanding of their customers’ needs and expectations and continually monitor their performance to ensure that customers are not disappointed. Once a Web Designer understands its customers’ needs and expectations, it must then define a strategy for how he/she expects to deliver a superior product to customers.

Diversity

Cultural diversity is defined as the variety of human societies or cultures in a specific region, or in the world as a whole (Wikipedia).  It is based on the values and practices of society.  People absorb culture through early process of socialization and the process carries over to the way in which one perceives themselves and the world.  Some people agree that cultural diversity in the workplace develops our country’s skills and contributes to it’s growth.  Many corporations have recognized that diversity contributes to the bottom line by making it easier to retain good employees, lowering costs by developing skill in-house and developing a reputation that helps attract new employees.

Many problems arise when a person begins to argue or believe that only his culture seems right, adopts the right values and represents the right and logical way to behave.  Difficulties certainly arise when there is diversity within an organization.  Most of us have limited information about other people’s worldview.

Cultural diversity changes the workplace by providing new resources and managerial challenges to employers. This often involved with employees who have different attitudes toward time, status and roles, relationship, responsibility, decision making and technology.  To effectively manage diversity, managers and supervisors must be aware of the values, motivations, communication styles, attitudes and needs of their employees.

Take Charge

Today I spent the day researching and watching tutorials for Photoshop CS4. There is a ton of good podcasts for tips and tricks using Photoshop, I also started through some tutorials on Lynda.com to gain more knowledge and experience using Photoshop.

After viewing others Portfolios and websites I see that there is a need to learn Photoshop so that I can incorporate better graphics and images into my designs. It will also help me in being able to offer more services to my future clients, like logo designs. There is much to learn when beginning Photoshop, it does so much and has so many features that it takes some time to learn what all it is capable of doing and what you can do with it as a user. I enjoyed going through the tutorials, podcasts and viewing others work so I could get ideas on what can be done using Photoshop.

I thoroughly enjoy the web industry and have a passion for learning it; it’s ever changing technology and standards  make it a profession that you must continually keep yourself up to date through continuous study, research and learning. Though being a new web developer there is a lot to learn already, you must stay current because as you are learning something new, that something is already changing.

Home Page Design

Non-Mainstream

My first 5 second test was done on a non-mainstream site called Prison Planet.com

• At first review the site has its logo and slogan across the top banner.
• It has access to all its newest news and content on the home page along with books & DVD’s that are for sale.
• The Navigation has a link to the Home page to access from anywhere within the site. There is also links to archived material, shopping cart, search, and many other easily accessible links on the Home page.

I don’t believe this site needs to do anything to improve its business needs, I believe they have everything in place to meet its costumer needs.

Successful Website Home Page

NASCAR.com
Nascar.com Home Page I feel is a success because the continue to update the Home page several times a day to keep race fans up to date with everything that is going on in stock car racing. The site has the logo at top left corner of page along with Navigation accessing all relevant content across the top of page. There is search box at the top right corner along with the sign in link and sign up link, there is also easy access to the navigation link to Nascar store for customers to purchase racing items.
The one negative I see on this site is the excessive advertisements that users must tend with before being able to view videos.

YOUTUBE.com
YouTube has their logo displayed at the top left corner of the site along with a search box that it’s right next to the logo for easy searching of content/videos. They also have very simple and easily accessible Navigation links to get to the content you are looking for and to get you back to the home page. There is a create account and sign-in at the top right of the home page along with an upload button to quickly get your videos uploaded to YouTube. They also have videos of the most watched, videos being currently viewed and most popular videos on the home page.

YouTube has done a great job with their site making it simple and easy to use for the consumer. It is laid out very well making videos easy to find, watch and upload.

Unsuccessful Website Home Page

Drudge Report
At first sight this is a very ugly site. The Home page is a 3 column page field with a ton of links to outside stories and resources with no way to get back to the home page without using your back button or typing the link back in your browser when clicking a link. The contact information for the site is at the bottom right of page with the same font on look of the rest of the site. It blends in with everything else.
The first thing that I would do, would to be; give the site some color and some styling and a logo so that it would be a little more pleasant to the eyes. Then break the stories and news into categories. I would make Navigation links for the categories then create pages for them with brief description of the stories or news then link it to the source the news is coming from. I would also be sure that the link would open in a new window so that users could get back to the site Home Page easily. I would only put the newest and late breaking news in the body of the home page and archive the older news on the site. With some better organization of all the news links and some styling the owner of this site might actually get some quality advertisements on there along with user that would stick around to use the site.

FixedEarth
It took me some time to find a Home Page I thought was ugly enough to use and I finally ran across this one using a google search.  The Home Page is entirely to long and makes me not even want to bother reading any of it or even seeing what the site is even about. This site needs some styling done to improve the layout of the site. The sections with the tan background could actually be made into a Navigation link to a newly created page for that topic, so that it would reduce the size/length of the Home page. The subject area menu at the bottom could be made into its own link named Resources and then have all those links listed on that page.

November Blog: Compassion

The word compassion has two basic definitions: {1} A deep awareness of and sympathy for another’s suffering. {2} The humane quality of understanding the suffering of others and wanting to do something about it {WordWeb thesaurus and dictionary}.

Though compassion does not come easily for many of us, it is very important in life; because it allows us to try and have some since of understanding of a person and what makes a person the way he or she is. Having compassion does not make you sentimental, wishy-washy or weak. Compassion allows us to see a person or persons, however bad they may be, whatever walk of life they came from, despite how dangerous or terrible he or she may be, as a human being. Through whatever life experiences that has made them who or what they are, having Compassion allows us to want to help a person who is in need, having problems or is in some type of trouble. Without compassion, it is all too easy for us to dismiss a person and to treat them as badly as he or she treats others. I believe everyone wants to have compassion whether they admit it or not. So compassion is a very important part of our life.

Taking Stock

• What are your web design goals? To become a professional web designer? To make personal web sites only?
• Which aspects of web design interest you the most?
• What current skills do you have that will be useful in creating web pages?
• Which skills will you need to brush up on?
• Which hardware and software tools do you already have for web design?
• Which tools do you need to buy? Which tools would you like to buy eventually?

ANSWERS

• My goals in web design is to become a great programmer with the skills necessary to theme websites. I am hooked on building Drupal (CMS) based websites so my goal is to have all the abilities required to be able to work in every aspect of Drupal, from theming to building custom modules. I do want to become a full-time professional web developer some day and I also will use the skills I learn to continue working on my personal websites.
• I like the theming side of web design but I feel that having the skills and ability to be a programmer; to create and develop the back-end of a web site is the direction for me to go.
• Currently have some knowledge of basic html and knowledge of the proper syntax format for html.
• This isn’t directly related to web design but I believe I will need to brush up on my studying skills since it has been since the early nighties since I last went to college and had to study.
• I have a desktop that meets all the requirements needed to design and create websites. I also have a laptop that I do a lot of my work on that I can use to write code and do most of my ftp work on. I currently have Dreamweaver on my laptop, this is what I have used in the past on some of my hobby sites and simple text editor which is already installed in windows and Linux on my desktop.
• I just ordered Adobe SC4 Web Premium for the Web Design & Development class. I would eventually like to do some computer upgrading to get a few more features that I want to have.

October Blog

How Accountability is related to the Web Design & Development profession. There is no doubt that there is a lot of responsibility and accountability on a web designer and developer. He/She has the ability to impress a client with their skills, communication, getting the job done on time and to the clients satisfaction or specifications. As an example of this, I have a hobby/business site of mine where I found a developer to create a custom Drupal 6 module for my site. He had all the skills and the ability to create the custom module and the opportunity to gain a long-term business relationship with a client (me). I gave him 1 week to review specifications for the project and research everything and decide if it was something he was able to do and wanted to do. After the one week he came back and said that he could do it and it would take him 3 weeks to complete the project. After discussing a few things I hired him and the project began. After the 3rd week I was unable to see any progress, I emailed him numerous times with no response. I told him that if he was having any issues to let me know so we could work through them. he finally responded back a week later and said that he was having some issues but he was certain that he could work them out. To make a very, very long story short; I ended up firing him and doing what needed to be done using CCK & Views. I then hired a gentlemen named Rick Destree from Colorado to do my theming. Rick was a true example of how a Web Designer/Developer should be. His communication was awesome, he kept me up to date daily on what was going on without me having to ask and he got everything completed early. I can’t say enough good things about Rick and his abilities.

I have experienced both sides of this from a client’s point of view, from a Developer who didn’t take accountability for their work and actions to a Developer that was a true professional in every aspect of the word. Who took his work seriously and was accountable for what he said he could deliver.

The Excitement of Webdesign & Devolpment

I am very excited about what Francis Tuttle Technology Centers Web Design & Development has in store for me in the many months to come as I learn the tools needed for a great and succesful career in Web Design. I’m also very excited about what my future and career has in store for me once I have learned the tools needed to design dynamic web sites. I have been teaching myself web design for the past several years using applications like Frontpage, Dreamweaver and over the last year and half I have been using Drupal 6 to build my websites. I know some simple html but when it comes to getting into hard coding with XHTML, CSS, PHP and database work, I have had to rely on others for help in this area to get my Drupal sites where they needed to be. XHTML, CSS and PHP can be very rewarding when you have the understanding and knowledge it takes to put them together to create an awesome web site that a client has entrusted you to build.  Now that I am in Francis Tuttle Technology Centers Web Design & Development program, I now have the opportunity for an exciting and challenging career that has no end to where it can take or lead me.