I was recently asked what I love most about my job and as tends to happen, I fluffed my way through the answer, not really doing the question any justice.  So I thought I’d write a post about it.  I’m well over a year in Webstrong now and have gotten to do a vast array of different things such as websites, content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, old school email marketing templates, forums, SEO work,  e-commerce websites and most importantly for me, breaking into the development side of things. I thought recently how different it could have been…

I think that’s one of the great benefits of working in a small company, you have to be able to throw your hand at anything or have an idea how to do a bit of everything.  If starting off I had of gotten a job with a big company,  I probably would have been pigeon holed into a particular task and not been given the chance to do anything else. “Oh you know HTML, CSS, bang….you’re our frontend guy, sit over there do the same thing all day over and over again.”  I’d go on to frequent murky bars like a lost soul, destined to lead a life of ordinariness and un-fulfilment.

Whereas in a small company it’s the complete opposite. You get exposure to everything, the learning curve is much steeper but as a result you grow a lot quicker. Yeah this can happen in a big company too, but the chances are a lot less of it happening for you, you’d have to be ‘in’ with the right people, do a bit of brown nosing, show a bit of leg maybe, all that politics stuff that I would never have the patience for myself (or the legs I’m told).

So to answer my own question, what do I love about my job? The fact that everyday I come in I can be working on something different, I’m always learning new things along the way and becoming better at what I do, each project undertaken throws up fresh challenges and I can apply new things I’ve learned from previous projects and constantly fine tune and tweak them in the never ending search for perfection. You have to love what you do or what’s the point? The repetitiveness of a 9-5 was my worst nightmare, one nightmare I’m glad to say I’ve awoken from.

So what do you love about your job?

We started exploring CSS frameworks a bit last year so thought I’d share what we’ve learned. Overall I’m very happy and delighted we made the move. I must admit at first I didn’t give them much thought, “I don’t want to be using someone else’s code, I want to write my own” I’d think. These are the ramblings of a foolish man.

With projects ever growing in size and scale, when starting a new project you want to be hitting the ground running and using a good framework plays a huge hand in this. Within minutes you have the whole skeleton of your site up and running and ready for the trickier more unique elements.

I first looked into Blueprint, but was put off by the unsemantic naming structure. So after that we cast our shadow over OOCSS and decided to give it a try. Out of all the files you get in the download, there are 3 in particular that I use constantly now in every project. I’ll link to the files and you can Firebug the hell out of them, then I’ll go through each of them.

• template.css
• grids.css
• content.css

Template

The template is obviously the frame of your site. In here you have eight main classes, throw these onto your page and you’re instantly ready to start focusing on the unique parts of your site and skip past all the repetitive parts. The classes are…

• .page (your page container, which is 950px wide, if you want a narrower / wider page you just extend this with a nicely named class of your own ex. “.myPage”)
• .liquid (takes up the 100% width of the screen in a liquidy fashion)
• .head (your header)
• .body (for clearing floated properties, for instance your leftCol or rightCol)
• .rightCol (yep)
• .leftCol (that’s right)
• .main (this takes up the full width of your container)
• .foot (exactly)

The left and right cols are great and easily changed, if halfway through the site the client decides they want the sidebar on the left instead of on the right, it’s just a matter of renaming “rightCol” to “leftCol”, without ruining the structure of your site. By default the leftCol is 250px and the rightCol is 300px, but like the .page if you want a custom width you simply extend it with a class of your own.

Grids

The grids I was most impressed with, they’re just so handy and flexible. I could explain them in grave detail, but simply study this page a bit and it will explain it perfectly, with great code examples under each section. You can have complex pages laid out in no time. Again if the structure of your site changes halfway through, these scale beautifully and are easily changeable. No more sleepless nights worrying of sudden changes from awkward clients.

Content

Finally there is the content.css file, the best part of this is I rarely ever have to bother worrying about sizing h1-h6 tags. They’re all sized in perfect proportion to the rest of the content on your site. For instance your h1 is 196% bigger than your normal font-size, your h2 is 167% bigger and so on it goes down the chain.

Benefits

So these three files I found enormously helpful in speeding things up. One of the main differences was less cross browser issues, at the end of building a site before using a framework, I’d always check it in Safari and Chrome, “yeah, that looks fine”, then check it in Explorer, “oh for the love of god…”. Now when I check it I rarely ever have any issues and if there is they’re pretty minor. Also I don’t have to keep checking to see what I named things, I know of the top of my head what everything should be called, you have the consistency factor across all your projects. There are much more in the download, but I’ve just covered the main one’s I found most helpful.

Check out the whole package yourself here and check out the creator here.

Every day people like you waste hours of the day doing stuff that’s unnecessary and unplanned. You’re wasting your time doing things that don’t matter.

You probably work 9-5 and find ways to fill the day just so you can go home at the end of it and tell everyone you were really busy.

But what did you get done? What did you do that day that actually brought you closer to what you want? Could you have done it in less time? Could you have been more focused on the important stuff and gone home early instead?

We’ve had the same problem here at Webstrong, working on stuff that doesn’t pay, doing jobs that don’t help us reach our goals, while all the while making us busier then we’ve ever been before.

It had to stop. We had to find an easier way.

Having recognised this, we’re now finding ways to cut through the bullshit, get more done, and make ourselves a lot less busy, doing the more important work first. The stuff that’s enjoyable to work on and the stuff that pays. But we’ve had to go through a very tough time before we got there. A few months ago, we nearly went bust. Not from a lack of work, but from a lack of cash. In this post, my first in a long while, I’ll try to explain how it happened, and what we did to fix it.

The Moving Target

People ask me all the time “how’s work Iarfhlaith, you busy at the moment?” and the truth is that we are always flooded with work and we are always busy. But up until recently, we’ve been busy in an uncontrollable way. Too many projects, too many people looking for progress reports, not enough resources to get it all done. We simply couldn’t handle the work that was coming in the door. For every project we finished, two new ones would land on our desk, and the pile just got bigger and bigger.

Now this isn’t some excuse to boast about how well we’re doing, in fact it’s quite the opposite. Being too busy is a very serious problem and working on a lot of projects simultaneously can kill a business.

The Cashflow Problem

This business should be simple. It should be a piece of cake. You get a project, you work on a project, you deliver it completed, and then you get paid. Sounds simple, and it is, but only if you work on one project at a time. In reality, what can happen if you’re not careful is that you take on a project, then halfway through you take on another project and start it immediately, making the first project late. You are now juggling two projects at the same time and taking calls from two customers looking for updates, wondering why the work isn’t getting done on time.

Now take that scenario, and add on another 20 projects into the mix. All going  on at the same time, all with estimated timelines based on an imaginary clear schedule. This is where we were a few months ago. Obviously, problems arose. Deadlines got pushed out, projects got forgotten about and very little got delivered.  And very soon, because projects weren’t getting delivered, we began to run out of cash.

Up to our eyes in work, with no money coming in the door.

Active Project Management

Obviously, we had to change fast or we were doomed. I took advice from some close friends in business and I began to restructure how we manage ourselves and our clients.

We identified a few key areas that needed attention, and we made our first big change:

• We started to really manage our client’s expectations. They needed to know when we would start, when key milestones would be delivered and how long the project would take.

And, we couldn’t realistically give that information accurately unless we knew how busy we already were. So we made our second big change:

• We started scheduling our time, in advance, in a very strict way.

These two changes seem so simple, but actively managed, they turned a struggling business into a profitable business almost instantly.

I come from a technical background, and in all honestly, until recently the extent of my client management skills extended to saying ‘yes’ to almost all of their requests. Now however, before saying yes, I’ll check when we’re available to start the work before I make any promises.

You would think that by telling the client that you can’t start their project for another three weeks would be an issue for them, but I’ve found so far that it isn’t and they’re just happy to know when it’ll be started, and when it’ll be finished. Provided you deliver on those promises of course, you’re doing yourself and your client a huge favour by knowing how busy you are before you take on more work.

An Added Benefit

There’s an added benefit to this simple approach to project management. It reduces the risk of growing your team.

For instance, if your existing team is booked out two months in advance, then taking on another coder or designer is far less riskier then if you didn’t know what you’d be working on in a weeks time or a months time.

So, with a few simple changes, I’ve managed to turn this business around. And with the bit of free time I have now, you should expect to see a little more of me on the blog.

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If you’ve had a similar experience and have any wisdom to share on the subject, please leave a comment on this post, because I’m certain there are a lot of folk in this industry still making those mistakes.

This is the first post by Webstrong’s web designer, Philip Brant. Philip has come from a background in website design and recently went on a 14 week introduction course to PHP and Smarty, two of the core technologies we use here at Webstrong. This post gives Philip’s views on the course and it’s benefits.

Greetings all, this is a brief rundown of the course I underwent from February-May of this year.

First off, some background…

August last year I landed a job at Webstrong, plucked from obscurity by Iarfhlaith. The first employee of an up and coming startup, things were looking great. “I’ve made it I thought, I’m a success”, what a great job I now have! Off to town I went and immediately invested in a top hat and monocle to accompany my new found position. This delusion wasn’t to last long however.

Now there was a bit more to it than this, but to sum it up this is roughly how it went. Upon my first couple of days at Webstrong, I quickly realised “yeah it’s great I can build websites, but look what else is possible”, “my god” I thought, “I must be trained in the arts of programming to truly achieve Nirvana in this industry”. It was like having your wardrobe door opened and seeing “Alice in Wonderland”. With that in mind, off I went back to the classroom, dreams of grandeur shelved until I master these new skills that have been brought to my attention.

Fast forward to February 2009

My journey began on a frosty February evening in iBat, Swords. “PHP and MySQL” 14 week course, we were also treated to some Smarty, jQuery (write less, do more, all hail mighty jQuery) and even a small bit on Joomla, the juggernaut CMS.

It was a small enough class, with people from all sorts of different backgrounds. Our lecturer was a Zend qualified PHP expert, so we had all the right ingredients to get going.

Starting on the first night we got PHP up and running on our machines, for this we installed WAMP Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP), I was hoping we would go through the hardcore installation of PHP but as were pressed for time with so much to get through, I understand the need for speed. For anybody starting out, WAMP is a godsend and I’d recommend it to get the ball rolling.

Now that we had it up and running on our machines and after the industry standard “hello world”, we were ready to get down to business. The first few weeks were all functions, arrays and variables, without these nothing would get done so it is of vital importance these are understood well. At first they can be quite confusing, but after writing them out a couple of hundred times, the formatting quickly becomes second nature to you and you get the “parse errors” out of your system. With this under our belt we then started putting it all into practice

• passing information through forms
• writing login scripts
• connecting to a database
• populating tables with information
• eCommerce section
• sessions
• starting out your own CMS
• integrating PayPal with our shopping cart

From about halfway through until the end we started using Smarty for all our work. Although it’s a big step to take so soon I think it’s definitely worth while, our lecturer highly recommended it and it’s what we use at Webstrong. It was one of the things that most impressed me when I started at Webstrong, seeing the size of some of our projects, yet the code is so tidy and easy to read, a neat freaks dream.

So what will the course give you?

If you’re serious about becoming a programmer, I’d definitely recommend a course like this. You may not be a programming expert at the end of it, it will however give you a solid foundation from which to build on. It will guide you in the right direction, set you on your way.

The rest is up to you and how badly you want it. For me, it’s a great advantage that I get to work with it everyday. With a lot of hard work, practice and zero ego, you’ll get there. Write the code, make your mistakes and learn from them. With each project under your belt you become a stronger, all round better developer until one day you can take the top hat off the shelf and say “I’ve made it, I’m a success”.

I’d like to thank our lecturer for the past 14 weeks for always making the classes interesting and enjoyable and I wish everyone who was in my class all the best in your future endeavours.