Occasionally, people ask me to create XHTML/CSS template based on provided .PSDs. Most of the time, such projects are pretty straight-forward — I tell the hourly rate and the estimated hours. The prospective client then accepts the offer or not.

It could be zillion reasons why clients reject offers and I’m used to some neutral (read: polite) arguments, like “It exceeds our budget” or something like that. However, today I received an interesting response:

“You are a little-bit too expensive, XXX is an hourly rate for a programmer.”

Funny, huh? Or sad?

Why on Earth would anyone compare client-side coding with programming. What is it that people (or just this particular client) think some cog of the same engine should be valued more than others?

Is it because the work of accessibility consultant, CSS coder, SEO engineer or usability expert is not something you can point your finger at? Or is it ‘cause people tend to care for web standards in a way of questionably increased initial exposure on endless, but completely irrelevant CSS showcase lists?…

The first post in this year (better late, than never) and I present you 2 (that’s right: two) brand new web logs by my two fellow colleagues — Marko Kršul (the creative) and Tomaš Trkulja (the methodic).

I was more than happy to contribute in the development of these two beautiful WordPress themes, spiritually named Balance White and Balance Black. The White was deployed first on our company’s flagship project’s development blog in it’s original setup and Dudikoff and Roseanne (link removed for offending content :p) have been customized later on. (Ed’s note: Dudikoff and Roseanne is not a WordPress theme, it’s customized version of Balance White.)

Anyway, download Balance White 0r Balance Black and if you care, let us know what do you think.

Sample sites:

• Croportal Dev Blog
• Zytzagoo’s Den

Barcamp Zagreb session slots are almost all filled. I reserved mines in the very last moment (thanks Mislav) risking the clash with other presenters which sessions I planned to attend. Everything went well at the end, and BTW I finished up with the two topics:

• Superfast web sites in 20 minutes beginning at 19:20 and ending at 19:40 in Gray room and
• Typography for web, 10 dirty tricks from 20:00 to 20:20 in White ‘the Geekier’ room

Just a few more seats are available, so hurry up and grab yours for an intensive Wednesday afternoon.

How is the tag based advertising done at Coolinarika.com?

1. users are tagging recipes
2. advertiser reserves a desired set of tags
3. in this case, the company brand “Eva sardine” reserved the following tags: fish, shrimps, main course, sea food, sea, … eva (the name of the company brand)
4. if the recipe is tagged with some of those preselected tags, there is a relevant ad displayed.

Clever, huh? But the most interesting part is the following edge case.

Update: “Eva sardine” is actually a brand, not a company. Spotted and pointed to by lekke.

YEY! The first BarCamp in Zagreb, Croatia will take place on Wednesday, December 5th, at the Grey and White meeting rooms at FER, Zagreb.

The event is organized by Initium, the guys behind the successful web.start conference, held earlier this year.

At the time of this writing, I already got a booking confirmation from EventWax and if you are coming (and I hope you are), keep an eye on the official web site.

BarCamp rules for attendees are pretty simple: all of the crowd should participate actively in some way. I’m still not quite sure about the topic which would be the most appropriate for me to join with, but I have a few dirty ones — if I am lucky enough so the others would find those interesting:

• Typography for the web
• DIY high-performance web sites
• Usability testing on a shoestring
• Bit-literacy on the web

Now, I whipped this list in hope that I will at least make myself publish an article or two in the near future about the mentioned matters.

Earlier this week, I already wrote about FOWA Expo, but here are more informal bits — moments and quotes written down, remembered or experienced.

Networking

Prior the conference every attendee was asked to sign-up to FOWA Crowdwine and choose her interests, so the organizers can help us meet more people. Those who did, received unique badges at reception with their tags, matches and opposites.

My tags were naturally: user experience, web standards, typography… and my matches were Robin Christoperson, Andrew Pendrick, Sarah Ward and George Zafirovski. I actually met George, who moved from Macedonia to London some 10 years ago, so we easily switched to Croatian (Macedonia and Croatia are both former Yugoslaw republics).

There was a couple of considerable job offers on the conference and if one was available, she could walk away with a brand new position.

Randoms bits

• Erika Hall said Users don’t complain about wording as long as you don’t change colors. (Copy is Interface)
• Matt Biddulph said Internet is small pieces loosely joined. (Coding on the Shoulders of Giants)
• If you need reliable standalone “DOMContentLoaded” JavaScript function, take a look at the shortloaded by famous Stuart Langridge.
• Identity Matcher, extracted from dopplr.com codebase, enables you to pull in social network information from sites such as GMail, Twitter, Flickr or Facebook.
• This one’s my favorite; Daniel Burka said You simply have to say ‘No’ to more features. Look at the Firefox and Mozilla Suite. Firefox would never be so popular if they didn’t decide to keep it simple.

The default options are the ones, that the majority of users understand well. With defaults designed to facilitate the basic tasks, all users will be able to start using web app right away.

Advanced features only make sense if they increase the accuracy and reduce time spent on a task. Advanced options made up-front, without real demand from the user-base are often only something glossy and shiny. Inviting users to learn a feature which main purpose is to be a cool widget that differentiate the application from the others — will fail for one very simple reason.

The kind of users who would appreciate such a feature are often anxiously seeking for the next gadget once the master the current one. In most cases, those visitors are not here for the content, but for the context, most notably the coolness factor. Unless the coolness itself is your product, you are probably not targeting those users.

Add advanced feature when you are absolutely sure you need it and after you have real user’s feedback.

Advanced feature should be gently introduced once the user is familiar with the basic functionality. In desktop applications such advanced options are often hidden in the ‘settings’ or ‘preferences’ panel. In web application those could be placed somewhere in ‘my profile’ area. However you decide to do it technically, don’t create the interface noise by polluting the content.

With well known web services, like Amazon, the extensive loyal user base is a good excuse to place an advanced feature right up-front. With a new project which need yet to prove its’ credibility, one has to be careful not to reject valuable first comers by unnecessary complicated interface.

Related reading

• Alertbox: Feature Richness
• Good Experience Best-of

The FOWA Expo was more business oriented then the previous one (Expo extension is for sponsor’s stands on the entrance to the hall, where some interesting product/service demos were held). A vast majority of talks were about lessons learned and dos and don’ts when it comes to startups.

On to presentations… or better yet, speakers

Super-optimistic Chief Performance Yahoo! Steve Sounders, the author of YSlow for Firebug, confirmed what Nate Koechley first introduced at @media this Spring about speeding-up web pages.

You can’t fight the numbers and High Performance Web Sites surely whipped some shocking ones out. I already saw some of the graphs at YUI Blog earlier, but many attendees were left surprised.

Following the High Performance directions, any site can be 50% leaner within a few hours. Given the fact that the companies/organizations invest considerable amounts of money into hardware infrastructure and/or back-end development (for instance, a development of an advanced caching system), it is just silly to skip this first and the easiest step in optimizing site’s performance.

If you’re ready to start making faster web pages, but don’t know where to start, I encourage you to buy a book.

Robin Christopherson, a Web Consultant at AbilityNet, held pretty impressive demonstration about how visually challenged people use the internet. Listening to screen reader playing the endless strings of meaningful text was scary, but at the same time enlightening experience.

The curiosity of the session was — it takes approx. 20 minutes for screen reader to start reading the main content on Amazon.co.uk, because they simply didn’t provide skip to main content link.

Daniel Burka, a lead creative behind Digg and Pownce was a true refreshment. His presentation about community feedback was honest and authentic. He was surprisingly patient to rivers of attendees, without a blink of celebrity pretending. Thanks to his feet standing firmly on the ground, we’ve collected some pretty valuable tips & tricks during the informal discussions afterwards.

Erika Hall from Mule Design in her Copy is Interface gave a bunch of great examples of how careless choice of copy used on the site’s interface can make a site either miss-interpreted or completely blunt. She also pointed out that without knowing your users/audience, it’s difficult to come with the right choice.

The sweet desert of the second day was a survival/essential startup session by Feedburner co-founder Dick Costolo. He extended the presentation well over his minutes, but with a good reason and greatly approved by the crowd.

Launch Late to Iterate Often provided a great insight in common pitfalls in the first year or so of a projects life-span. Pointers like Ask for money when you have it, There’s no such thing as a Standard Deal and Flat Organization are just a few of 14 selected bullets I wrote down; and there was even more… What’s more important — he covered every thesis with a valid example.

All in all, many bits collected and a few randoms I will hopefully post in the next couple of days. In a mean-time, check out the available presentations at SlideShare.

Seats secured. Hope to see you there.