When reading customer testimonials on websites I sometimes wonder how genuine the words are. There is often no way of knowing whether the quote even came from a real person, whether it was unsolicited or how old it is. As a business owner you have to keep these testimonials fresh and remember to request new ones from customers and clients. Despite these problems customer testimonials feature on many sites and can really help to reassure people before they purchase.

When we launched Perch, just over a year ago, we used Twitter extensively to get the word out and to respond to our potential and new customers. Drew and I have been using Twitter socially since not long after it launched so it made sense to promote Perch that way. As people started to buy and use Perch, they began to post nice things to Twitter and so we added them as favorites for the Perch account on Twitter, over time building up a large list of nice comments from our users.

When we launched the recent redesign of the Perch website we used the Twitter favorites as a way of putting testimonials on the site. In the footer of the Perch website is one of our Perch birds tweeting a tweet drawn from that list. These display randomly, so as a visitor moves around the site they will see a variety of different testimonials. Each tweet links through to that status on Twitter – so the testimonial is verified as being from an actual person. On Twitter you can see the date it was posted, so it is possible to tell how old this testimonial is. In addition the visitor is able to click through to the grabaperch account or search and see all of the mentions of Perch – not just the ones we really like!

You can get your favorites from the Twitter API. What you should avoid however is having something running on your site that gets the favorites every time someone visits. Instead, use the API to pull back the favorites and store them locally (in MySQL, another database or a text file) and then display your latest or random favorite from that data store. Twitter is often unresponsive or very slow and that will effect your site if you do this in real time.

Using the favorites list to add content to your site gives you a very simple way to add moderated Twitter content to your site. High profile sites have had problems in the past by displaying content based on a hashtag, as then anyone using that hashtag can get their thoughts displayed on your site. By using favorites you keep control and choose what goes into the list. Although you have chosen which Tweets go into your favorites, the visitor can use Twitter to find out more about you and the person providing the testimonial. This is a very open and transparent way to display testimonials and I believe this makes them far more useful to a potential customer or client.

You can take a look at my slides, and also resources and the worked examples here.

I was pretty relieved once my own presentation was over so enjoyed just being part of the crowd for day two. The day opened with a keynote from Andy Clarke, who is a friend and inspiring speaker. I certainly could learn a lot from his presentation style. Afterward several people asked me my thoughts on the presentation – given that my pragmatic approach seems on paper to differ so much from Andy’s Hardboiled ideas. I think that one of the things Andy does really well is cause people, including myself, to think. He challenges current wisdom – which we definitely need in our industry. I would love my design agency clients to hear Andy speak as I think they could learn a huge amount about the modern web from his thoughts, ideas and sheer passion for the web.

However, I do feel that some of the fantastic stuff that Andy has to say gets lost as soon as he shows that slide of IE6 being served completely barebones, no-design CSS. I think it gets lost when he says it is ok to have a much simpler design for IE8 – the current version of Internet Explorer. I think it gets lost because the reality is it is not difficult to serve IE6 a simpler version of your design, not perhaps trying to hack in support for opacity and Alpha PNG images, but a reasonably designed experience. I don’t spend a lot of time messing about with IE6 these days – but the sites we develop all have a decent implementation of the design in that browser and one that our clients are comfortable with.

When it comes to IE8 – or even Firefox which lags behind Webkit browsers in some instances – I don’t think it is helpful to say simply design for support. I think it is entirely reasonable for clients to expect a site to look pretty much the same in the most recent desktop browsers. Understanding and designing for the different experience of a phone, games console or iPad is one thing, but the desktop – clients and designers generally expect that to be one thing. I say that as someone who has long been a exponent of the fact that sites do not have to look the same in all browsers and all devices – I wrote this in 2002! However that has to be balanced by practicalities and the reasonable expectations of the people we do this work for. In addition, the fact remains that it is very easy to add support in IE8 for most of the things Andy demonstrated with some pretty trivial jQuery (for example). If you are going to use Modernizr to detect support and write different CSS you are already using JavaScript, why not go the rest of the way and implement transitions and so on with JavaScript? Yes there will be a very small number of visitors potentially with IE and no JavaScript but very few, a much much smaller number than those who will lose out on the interface if you cut out everyone with Internet Explorer.

I think that what Andy showed us was inspiring and I hope every designer and developer in that room was encouraged and excited by the possibilities. However my take is that an approach that attempts to recreate that experience at least for all modern desktop browser users is a requirement for most of us. The good news is, of course, that with Internet Explorer 9 we are going to find that the latest version of IE will support a lot of this stuff, and so the scene shifts again and the decisions we and our clients make may well be different in a few months time.

Other highlights of day two for me included Relly Annett-Baker‘s presentation, “All the Small Things”. Relly is an engaging speaker and understood that the audience she was talking to were designers and developers who sometimes end up having to write microcopy because no-one else does it. Her presentation was very funny but also drove home serious points about how to help our users with the messages we display at login or through a checkout process.

The day finished with a presentation from Scott Berkun – “Myths of Innovation: remixed and remastered”. When I saw his name on the schedule I thought it looked familiar but until the session started didn’t immediately place him as the author of a book I was reading while preparing for presenting at @media, “Confessions of a Public Speaker“. If you do any public speaking, and particularly if you are nervous of speaking I would recommend this book highly. I have read many books on the subject but this book has a practical tone, and contains advice from Scott’s many speaking engagements around the world. Having now had the chance to see him present I would recommend it even more as he obviously knows what he is talking about as his was an excellent presentation. Thinking about ideas and innovation was a great way to finish the conference, the subject speaks to everyone in all the different roles attendees are employed in on the web. I am going to try out the idea of writing down ideas and thoughts in a journal for the next few months to see where that takes me. Scott also comes highly recommended if you need someone to order Dim Sum for you. I think our group of assorted geeks may well still be in the restaurant right now had he not taken charge and made sure that the non-fish eaters and vegetarians were all catered for!

@media 2010 was a thoroughly enjoyable event. John and Maxine from Web Directions managed to bring their own organisational style without damaging the feel of a conference that is pretty important to a lot us in the UK. It would have been sad if it had turned into a import from outside rather than keeping a distinctiveness about it. In terms of content, even as someone who gets information better by reading than listening, there was some truly great stuff. I have returned home tired but I feel that my work and thinking has been refreshed by the experience. That is what conferences should do. A chance to sit back, listen and find ways to improve what we do and how we do it.

To celebrate we rolled out our 1.5 release, a free upgrade to existing licenses, which contains some very exciting new features which we think will change the way many people use and think about Perch.

Since launch, people have really taken to Perch and we get a lot of emails and suggestions on our forum for new features that users would like to see make it into the product. The thing with Perch though, is that we want to keep it really simple. We have never aimed to make it a competitor to some of the big CMS products out there. We want people to be able to be up and running with an editable site in a few minutes, with no fuss and only the most basic of hosting requirements.

One of the biggest features that people have requested is the ability for people to add new pages to their site. However many other users absolutely don’t want the client to be able to add new pages to a carefully thought through site architecture. Adding new pages also adds an additional layer of complexity and server requirements if, for example, you then want to do url rewriting to give friendly page URLs.

Thinking around this issue carefully we came up with the plan of creating a Perch API. The API allows us – or other developers – to create “apps” in PHP that can add new functionality to a Perch site. These just drop in and appear in the Perch admin and could be used for all kinds of functionality that you might need in an otherwise simple site. The Pages app is essentially the first Perch app and allows creation of new pages – for those users that want to use it.

Drew and I recorded a quick podcast last night discussing Perch apps and other new functionality added in this release.

The University had asked me to come and speak about what I felt was important in terms of web design and development today and also what I saw as being important in the future, given that students on the course today had anywhere from 1 to 3 years to go before they would be graduating and working in the industry. This is a pretty broad subject, and I knew that students were interested in a range of web roles, so I decided to home in on some of the core skills that anyone working on the web needs to have and also look at some of the interesting things that are becoming a possibility.

I get pretty nervous about presenting and like to be very organised and have time to set up so I was a bit thrown by the fact that so many people showed up to the talk we had to move from a small informal room to an incredibly steep lecture theatre. The experience of presenting in this room was a bit like speaking to people some of whom were on eye level and others stood at the top of a hill. I also ended up presenting without my notes and onscreen timer as with only a short time to set up I could only get the projector and my laptop showing the same slide – rather than having Keynote’s presenter view on my screen. Thankfully, I’d rehearsed this a few times and so knew the presentation well enough to do it without my notes. I had printed out a copy of the slides and notes – 4 slides to a page – using Keynote, however somehow they had ended up in a strange order on the page which was confusing rather than helpful!

Despite presenting uphill and without my notes I think the session went well. My hope had been that I wasn’t coming to speak to the students with anything amazingly new, but that what I was saying would underline the things they were already learning and demonstrate the importance of these things in the real world. In the second part of the presentation I talked for a short while about some of the interesting things that are on the horizon with regards to HTML5, CSS3 and also with typography on the web. Many of these students have 2 years to go before they graduate so by the time they are looking for work these technologies will have far better browser support and be skills they need. As students also get to do a larger project in their final Honours year this is potentially a great chance to play with technologies that might be harder to use commercially at the current time but make a great study for a final project – and mean that the project is an interesting concept to show off.

I finished up the presentation with some suggestions gleaned from my recent blog post as to how students can best prepare themselves for work in web design and development so thank you to everyone who contributed to that.

In the evening I re-ran the presentation, slightly tweaked for an audience that consisted of people from local design studios. Having had to get up at 4.30am to travel to Dundee I was pretty tired by that point and grateful to be in the smaller room and to be able to get my notes up on screen!

I really did have a lovely day, the feedback that I gave had so far has been good and I really enjoyed talking to all the students and hearing their questions. Many thanks to Malcolm and all the folk at Abertay for making me feel so welcome.

I’m also going to be heading off to Dundee in a couple of weeks time to present to the students on the Web Design and Development course at The University of Abertay. I’m really looking forward to speaking to these students and I’ll be taking lots of your advice with me.

I would love to include some tips from other people working in the industry. It would be great to hear the thoughts of employers, of experienced web professionals and of recent graduates. Please leave a comment and let me know what piece of advice you would give to someone who will be graduating in a years time, what would you suggest they are thinking about now to help them be as employable as possible upon graduation?

I also took the chance to have a play with Typekit to render a font for the heading. I haven’t used Typekit before and clients have been asking me about it so I thought this was a chance to see how well it works and how tricky it is to implement. I was really impressed with the ease in which I could implement Typekit, it really is as simple as choosing a font, adding a couple of lines of JavaScript and then assigning which bits of text will be rendered. After battling with sIFR on a number of projects this was a breeze.

To try and make my text more readable I read through and implemented some tips from The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, the background image is from istockphoto member smilewithjul and I found COLOURlovers helpful in coming up with a neutral colour scheme. I thought I might use some different background images in future so I wanted to have a colour scheme that would work with different backgrounds. I used the Starkers theme by Elliot Jay Stocks as a starting point to save me having to clean up WordPress templates myself.

This was a very quick attempt to tidy up the site over the weekend, and if I get chance I’d like to add some things to it. Your comments are very welcome, especially with regard to the readability of the blog posts as that was something I wanted to sort out.

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

Elliott has also gone on to clarify his thoughts in a blog post and I thought I’d add my thoughts to the debate given that I spend most of my time working with designers.

At edgeofmyseat.com we specialise in developing web applications using PHP, and the majority of our clients are web designers and agencies who subcontract to us the development side of their projects. For many projects we develop everything – the mark-up, CSS, JavaScript and back-end code. Given that our job is to build things for designers you might think that we would be very pleased to work with web designers who can’t write mark-up and CSS, more work for us! However in my experience, asking someone to design for the web who has no idea how the web works, will result in frustration for both the designer and the developer, and a substandard end result.

Looking back over the years I have been working with designers I can say that all of my favourite projects, those I as most pleased with, have been those where the designer really understood the medium they were designing for. As a developer it is so refreshing when a designer can fire up Firebug and play around a little themselves to fine tune the end result, has already considered what we will do with IE6 when a particular design will rely heavily on transparent PNGs, or has considered the experience for users without JavaScript on a page that has a slider for some content.

To be clear, I wouldn’t expect someone who is primarily a web designer, to be able to build a cross-browser CSS layout at the speed that I can, develop a complex JavaScript UI, be able to design a database or develop in PHP. In a small agency it may not be commercially sensible to tie up your lead designer doing front-end development, even if they are capable. However being able to put together a layout – even if it does only work well in Firefox – means that the designer has some understanding of the constraints we work under. They will also have ideas as to how something should be implemented in the medium of the web rather than just expecting a replica of their Photoshop comp no matter what text size or screen resolution the user has.

When you move into the field of interaction design a lack of knowledge on the part of the designer becomes even more problematic. How are you supposed to design user experience when you don’t know what tools you have to work with? I understand Mark Boulton’s argument and don’t believe that simply knowing how to write HTML makes a good web designer, and there are many other factors to take into consideration. However, time and time again I have seen designers from a print background struggle with designing for the web. Once they have taken the time to actually play around with HTML and CSS and gain a basic understanding, they start to become far more creative with the medium instead of constantly fighting against it.

In a large agency, or team developing a single product, where a designer who doesn’t know anything about the web can sit next to a developer the whole time and ask questions then I imagine it would be more possible to design for the web, without understanding the web. However it seems to me a very inefficient way of working, and isn’t a situation that many people are in.

Basic mark-up and CSS, even a bit of JavaScript using a library like jQuery, are not difficult to learn. The tricky things – ensuring a complex UI using a lot of JavaScript remains accessible, making sure things don’t blow up in IE6, actually being able to do this stuff really quickly, is what you need developers for.

On the flip side, I would also say that developers – especially front-end developers – should have a basic grasp of design principles. Having an understanding of why certain things are important to the designers you work with will ease the working relationship and ensure that you can work together to create an end result that is visually beautiful as well as being technically solid. I believe that the web needs specialists, but those specialists need to have an awareness of what the other specialists do, be sympathetic towards them and willing to work together to find good solutions to the challenges of working in this medium.

Firstly, I did not expect this to touch the nerve it so obviously has with so many people. I wanted to offer my support to the women who had been treated like this, ensure this behaviour does not go uncommented on and also start the discussion in terms of how we can stop this kind of thing happening. I didn’t want it to take the shine off what was an excellent day and achievement for Boagworld, and I apologise if that has happened.

I’m going to pick up on a number of the themes that came through in the comments yesterday. I’ve linked directly to some comments just to save people new to the discussion reading through all of them but generally the same points were made by a number of people, either here, on other blogs or on Twitter.

“We should just ignore this behaviour”

Several commenters suggested that we should just ignore these people and they would go away. I would agree that in many cases ignoring trolls and nasty comments is the way to go. During the show in fact the comments were ignored for the most part, we certainly were not giving air time to these people by detracting from the conversations to respond to it. A backchannel for a conference or chat on a live stream however is different to a normal message board setting. These comments were very visible to people participating and watching, not bringing this subject up in some way would really have meant accepting that this behaviour was ok and that boys being boys is perfectly appropriate in a professional setting.

I do not need to be told to “avoid schoolboy chatrooms“. I was dealing with trolls on usenet when many of the people commenting on Friday were still in primary school, so I have a thick enough skin to not be personally hurt by this stuff. What I am concerned about is the message it gives to other women, particularly young women, who want to work in the industry.

“These aren’t people from our community”

The Boagworld community is a really friendly place. I’m not a participant but have read many threads there and the attitude there always seems incredibly friendly, supportive and helpful towards newcomers – even if they are asking the same questions everyone else has asked a million times before. However the 200th podcast attracted an audience from the wider web community. Some of the nasty comments may well have been from kids who had just discovered a lively stream on Ustream, however some of those commenters quite obviously knew of the people they were making comments about, outside of the podcast, which makes me believe that at least some of those posting are people who work in some way in this industry. In addition, the Boagworld chat was not a unique event. The same attitude has been taken towards women on conference backchannels, by people attending a conference, presumably not 15 year old boys.

“Preventing anonymity is not the answer”

Some commenters were concerned that preventing people from being anonymous just creates another problem. In this setting I disagree. Being able to be anonymous is one of the web’s strengths. There are many reasons and places where hiding behind a nickname is appropriate and allows people to ask questions and get support on sensitive subjects, or speak up when they would be in danger if their identity was known. However, if you are contributing in a professional setting at a web design conference or in a chat, then you should be very happy to be identified and stand behind your words. My suggestion of Facebook Connect was really just a throwaway suggestion – I’m sure we can create better solutions – or offer a range of ways to confirm someone’s identity. I’d love to see more discussion on this.

“Women need to take responsibility as well and not act flirty or suggestively”

I have some difficulties with this point of view, and I don’t think that Jen in her comment meant any of the women on the show. If a woman is overtly flirting and then complaining about attention, well then she probably needs to stop doing the former before she can complain about the latter. However that was not the situation on Friday. The fact that some women, and men, behave in a provocative way does not give anyone a free pass to treat all women like that. If we start down this line then, once again, we are telling people they have to conform to be accepted, that as long as they look dowdy and unattractive we will believe they have a brain. Well, hooray for computer engineer Barbie, is all I can say to that!

“This should have been addressed during the show”

Kimberly makes a very valid point that perhaps it would have been better for this to have been addressed during the show. It’s difficult, obviously the show had a schedule to get all of the participants in and able to do their segment. There were people coming on via Skype from different timezones who had set apart part of their day to come on the show. A discussion about these issues could well have totally derailed the schedule and also taken the whole show to somewhere far less fun and positive.

That said, I think that anyone planning on having any kind of backchannel does need to consider, in the light of this and other situations, how they will deal with issues like this if they arise. Both from a technical point of view – being able to identify people, ban effectively and so on, and from the point of view of how it is dealt with by presenters and those running the channel in terms of what they say in reaction.

“This is just jealousy”

I have seen suggestions that the comments – particularly those expressing the opinion that someone is only involved because they are attractive – come from jealousy; from the attitude of, “why is SHE there and not me? It must be because she is pretty.”
Sarah has addressed this issue head on in her own post, which is worth a read. The issue of jealousy and bitterness directed towards people who are well known in this industry is a whole other subject, and one I might address here another time. What I would say though, is that in general, the “names” in web design and development are some of the nicest and most open people you could ever hope to meet. Most people you hear of regularly, you hear of because of the huge amount of time and energy they put into their work and in giving away freely their talents and knowledge. Most of us only get to write books and speak at conferences because we spent years giving stuff away for free on our blogs, and it got us noticed.

If you are doing cool stuff tell people about it, write about it, find small events that ask for speakers and talk about it. Find high profile people who are involved in that area on Twitter and drop them an @reply. If what you are doing is good, you’ll be amazed how quickly word spreads. Get yourself involved in discussion forums, help people out, show them you are an expert, and you can get the sort of attention you want. That is the beauty of this community, give something and you will get stuff back. Sit in a corner and whine and you’ll be ignored.

What happened on Friday was not a one off, it was simply a very overt example of this kind of behaviour. Writing it off as a non-issue, and blaming a few bored kids makes light of the fact that this type of thing happens all the time. No-one is suggesting you cannot criticise a person’s work – far from it. However, you criticise their work, you present an argument against their viewpoint, you do not make personal remarks that have absolutely nothing to do with whether they do good work or have a valid point of view.

For those who weren’t following along, at The Barn was an impressive set up of mics and webcams so the whole show could be streamed live as video, in addition to the audio recording. The show was going out live using Ustream, which also has a chatroom displayed under the video so that the room can join in with the show – something that seemed like a great idea as Boagworld is so much about the community around it. There were hundreds of people watching and a good number commenting given the speed the chat would scroll up off the screen.

Early in the day the chat was very positive. A few moans whenever any technical glitch happened, but generally people were enjoying being part of the show. It was quite difficult in the “studio” to really respond to the chat questions because there were so many people commenting and they would scroll off our screen very quickly. There was a really funny moment at the beginning of our section on eCommerce where somehow the camera that was pointing at me was playing a mooing jingle. We couldn’t hear this in the room at all, so people in the chatroom are complaining about this mooing, pointing out that it was in fact me that was mooing, and we were none the wiser as to what was going on.

Drew and I took a break for lunch as Jeremy Keith and Anna Debenham showed up to do a segment, and then came back to chat a bit about the Joel Test. That was our main segments done but as we weren’t on a deadline to get back we hung around to chip in on various things and generally just to enjoy the atmosphere at The Barn.

I’d noticed the odd stupid comment on the chat earlier in the day, I’m pretty thickskinned about personal comments, and so chose to ignore them. However from this point in things started to get really quite unpleasant. During the afternoon Relly Annett-Baker, Sarah Parmenter and Inayaili de León were all doing segments, on copywriting, iPhone design and CSS3 respectively. All three are established professionals in their different fields, with lots to offer, they did excellent segments on the show. Ah yes, and they happen to be women. As Relly later said on Twitter:

Play the #bw200 chatroom drinking game. Everytime someone says ‘it’s a girl!’ in the chat, take a swig of gin and weep for our industry!

I’m not going to repeat any of the things that were said in the chatroom here, but there were a number of comments that basically suggested that the only reason certain women were invited to be on the show was because of the way they looked, there were comments more suited to an AOL chatroom with regard to what people may or may not be wearing. If the room didn’t like what a male contributor was talking about the comments would be that it was boring or arguing against their point of view, for the women there was this idea that they were only there due to their physical appearance.

We, as a community, need to stamp out this attitude whenever we see it.

I believe that women in any industry should be there due to their own merit, and the same for men who wish to follow a traditionally female career path. That is what feminism has given us, equality. We should stand or fall on the contributions that we bring to the industry and as web designers, developers, scientists, systems administrators etc. our physical appearance is not part of the package.

What frequently happens in traditionally male industries is that women who want to be part of that dress down, become like “one of the lads”. What message does that send out to young women who are interested in careers in IT? Are we telling young women who are interested in looking good, in clothes and shoes and taking care of their appearance, that if they want to succeed in web development they will need to make sure they don’t look too good, as otherwise they will not be taken seriously? This is potentially hugely damaging to the cause of getting young women to consider our industry as a career path, and once they are here to get them to consider speaking at conferences, something which we discuss again and again.

The chatroom on the Boagworld show was essentially a backchannel, and similar issues have happened in conference backchannels in recent months, I believe this is something that needs to be addressed in two ways. Firstly, the community need to be ready to stamp on this kind of behaviour as soon as it is seen. If you are in a channel that starts to go down this line make sure you are not contributing to it, and speak up against it. Can you help to turn the general mood to something more positive? Or offer constructive criticism? I’m certainly not suggesting we shouldn’t be able to disagree with a female speaker! Quite the opposite, we should be dealing with everyone in exactly the same way, I’m not a fan of positive discrimination either.

Secondly I think there are technical solutions to some of this. If you have a live chat or backchannel, people should not be able to post anonymously, or behind nicknames that do not link back to a real person. As a thought perhaps we could have a system where everyone has to sign in with Facebook Connect? Facebook is about real names, real people. Would yesterday’s commenters have been happy for their comments to go out next to their photo, real name and the company they work for? In a conference situation the organisers usually have all those details, so a system can be created that ensured that comments only go out on a live channel that are identified to individuals. There are some people who will quite happily stand behind unpleasant comments but I would suggest they are far fewer than those who switch personalities when they can hide behind an anonymous nickname.

If we are serious about encouraging young women into our industry then we need the women already in the industry to be visible, and for them to be seen as normal. If the female role models are only of a certain type (the stereotypically geeky type for example) then a young woman would be justified in thinking that you need to be like that to be accepted. This is then reinforced by the sort of comments we saw yesterday when young women who do not fit that stereotype were speaking. As a community we need to ensure this behaviour is called out as wrong, every time we see it.