We Grow Beautiful Websites
Our project management wiz, Eric, just had his first kid a few months ago and is already busy carting the family around in a new SUV. How domesticated can you get? So you can imagine his delight when he came across this product for SoundRacer, the gizmo that turns your boring family automobile into a muscle car.
The client wasn’t happy. We’d worked with her for a number of weeks now, and this was the second time she felt we “just didn’t get it” and she was getting frustrated. We felt we “got it”, but each time we met with her our presentation didn’t live up to her expectations.
“She’s difficult,” we said to one another while working on the project. As the next meeting approached a growing sense of dread loomed over us, curdling our creativity and eroding our confidence. When the day came to present, the design fell flat. She compared our work to a “doodle on a napkin”. Discouraged, we left feeling like we’d put forth our best creative efforts only to have them tossed aside. It’s a day I’ll never forget.
Does this scenario sound painfully familiar? Well, you can’t make everyone happy, right?
Wrong. Dead wrong. Close-the-doors-and-give-up-now-if-you-don’t-believe-me wrong. You CAN make everyone happy with a simple process I’m going to outline today. For those of you in a hurry, here’s the pseudo-code:
Oh, and this process has a name: Discovery.
The purpose of Discovery is for your team to learn about the client’s goals, values, customers and competitors. The client already knows these things, but you don’t. Oh, and when you go back to the client with your results from Step 4, you almost always get a smile. You see, you took all their rambling and hand-waving and turned it into a coherent document. You did all the hard work to “get it”, and that says you really care. Your document should have, at the minimum:
Let’s recap: they spoke, you listened; you summarized, they smiled. 😉
Oh, and did I mention you get to CHARGE MONEY FOR THESE EFFORTS? This is important because Discovery is as important to the project as writing HTML, coding JavaScript, or all the other stuff you used to *think* the client hired you to do.
In fact, the client hired you to solve a business problem. They didn’t hire you to write HTML. They don’t care about HTML/CSS/JS/blah/blah/blah. They don’t care about AJAX, Validating XHTML, or any of the other things you care about. If you talk to them about how cool your new Drupal module is, you really don’t get it. But now, because you clearly understand their business goals, you “get it”. And “getting it” is a wonderful way to start a relationship.
Oh, and my client who hated our designs? In time she came around. In fact, she was one of the first we tried our new Discovery phase with, and you know what? When we were done she smiled and paid us.
That’s also a day I’ll never forget.
Working on pricing for something new. Sometimes a simple drawing can help process ideas and determine where to focus your time.
Considering the woes that can come with installing a SSL certificate. Yesterday, we ran into an issue with a client that I wanted to note, just in case anyone else may benefit from the scenario and solution.
We had the Magento integrated with SVN and have a post-commit hook that auto-deploys into our root directory on the server, using great server services from sites as ServerMania Montreal Data Center online. We originally had the httpdocs folder and the httpsdocs folder mirroring each other so that the httpsdocs folder would handle SSL (https) requests and the httpdocs would handle all other non-SSL requests.
As we were installing our SSL certificate, we changed the base_url and the secure_base_url to the appropriate (specific) URLs in place of the {{unsecure_url}} and {{secure_url}} generic values. All of a sudden, as soon as SSL installation was complete, the frontend would no longer transition from the “shopping cart” (url: http://cart.crankbrothers.com/checkout/cart/) into the “checkout” (url: https://cart.crankbrothers.com/checkout/onepage/). The checkout URL would redirect back into the shopping cart.
We realized that the sub-domain and shared docroot setup (httpdocs and httpsdocs, together) could be creating the issue. Thus, we simplified our setup (cheers Eric Dennis) to make httpdocts the separate docroot for both HTTP and HTTPS requests.
Game, set, match. Problem solved. By the way, you should check out Crank Brothers for a working example 🙂
Hope this helps save time for someone else!
Hi All,
Figured I’d share a quick Magento snippet (There are several I’d like to share each day. For some reason this particular one seemed quick enough to post).
Want to change the number of products that display in the Magento Category listing?
You’ll need to modify these two files:
See the screenshot for the variable columnCount()? In order to change that, go to the following file and add in this snippet:
<action method="setColumnCount"><columns>3</columns></action> <!-- set your own number -->
And also this snippet:
<action method="setColumnCount"><columns>3</columns></action> <!-- set your own number and insert <em>inside</em> the "search_result_list" block tags-->
