I downloaded the release candidate the other day and installed on my old (but not ancient) Dell Inspiron 1501 (Athlon X2). As a dyed in the wool vista hater (due to slow boot times, bloated day to day operating, pointless clock/RSS widget permanently on the desktop, endless nagging when installing software) I have actually been really pleasantly surprised so far with windows 7.

Its quick, lovely to look at, Nags you 30% less when you try to install programs and has an amazing set of onboard drivers which had the PC working immediately. In fact the only thing I ‘had’ to update was the on board graphics drivers as my 1280 x 800 screen would only display at 1024 x 768 with a black border down the side. (Although my OCD made me get the full Vista driver pack from Dell to make sure everything was working as well as it could).

I think Big bill has taken on board the general ambivalence of the tech community towards Vista and has really done some work to ensure that 7 does not follow suit.

I haven’t thrown that much in the way of software at the system yet. Stay tuned and i’ll let y’all know if I come up against any annoying brick walls.

1. Offer you a free domain name…Bastards eh? OK this might not sound like an obvious number one but in a world where your client wants a .com and the free domain name is only ever a .co.uk it is so annoying to have to always set up a tech support request to get the primary hosted .co.uk domain switched with the alias .com domain.

   Notable exception being the wonderful Fasthosts who allow you to do it all by the control panel (well done guys!).

2. Domain transfers…Now I understand that a company is reluctant to lose business and that they are therefore unlikely to affect a really smooth and easy process to transfer out a domain name to another provider but (and Easyspace hang your head in shame at this point) I have actually needed to transfer a domain from one client (with Easyspace) to another client (with… Easyspace) and been told that a faxed letter of confirmation has to come in on headed stationery from both parties in order to make this happen… I mean bloody hell… What even is a fax machine?
3. Not giving you control…So i want to not have to force my client to use Streamline.net or Easyspace’s appalling web mail clients and instead I would like them to take advantage of an amazing service like Google hosted… Simple you say, just alter the MX record for the domain to allow Google to handle email… WRONG you cannot access the MX record, nor can the tech guys change it for you, you need to register the domain with zoneedit and manage it from there. It’s hard to know what exactly you are paying the registrar for sometimes!
4. Not being allowed to set up a ‘real’ Alias…Streamline are actually a pleasant exception in this respect and they allow you to have (for example) a .com and.co.uk properly point to the same place. By properly I mean I can deep link to both suffixes, not used framed or unframed forwarding (i.e. .com/newpage/thisone.html & .co.uk/newpage/thisone.html). Why is this so hard for other providers to set up? I understand they don’t want you to host 100 domains on the same measly beginner account but why not the same one with a different suffix?
5. No PHP…I know… It’s impossible to credit in the year 2009 but some companies (yes Earthlink I mean you) really think it is acceptable to not offer any level of support for PHP. I am speechless.
6. Not have unlimited bandwidth even though they say they do…A friend of mine runs a myspace page for a pretty famous band and deliberately sought out a hosting provider offering unlimited bandwidth so he could host videos for the page there… Turns out that (like almost all providers) there is a totally unspecific ‘fair usage policy’ which means they are within their power to arbitrarily shut you down when you reach an unspecified bandwidth amount (not not a limit). What utter rubbish.
7. Not turn around support requests with their own SLA (Service Level Agreement)Pretty simple this one, if you say you’ll respond in 24 hours… Respond in 24 hours. Oh and while you are at it: When I say clearly in the first thread that I am my client’s web designer, STOP CALLING ME BY MY CLIENT’S NAME AT THE START OF EVERY REPLY.
8. Outsourced support services closing your support tickets each time they reply to themHow presumptuous can you get? I have had to re-open some tickets 16 times in order to reach some form of resolution. I understand that a time limit should be set for ticket closure but how about 14 days of inactivity? No doubt the (usually outsourced) support companies are very keen to present results which are carefully skewed in their favour. I would guess that repeated opening and closing of tickets not only increases the amount of tickets they have ‘processed’ but also implies that they are resolving them much faster than they in fact are… Crooks? I think so, but then why are these companies all outsourcing their own support functions anyway?

There we are then, a little Thursday evening vitriol for you all. Hope you enjoy it and good luck with that next domain transfer.

He turned up as I was pushing the remains of my Sweet and Sour around my plate. It’s strange but the onset of winter always seems to kill my appetite and it was worse this year because I had just flown back from sunny places. It was like I had been charging up all the time I was away, like a battery or something. Now all the power I had gained throbbed in my head. I glared with hate at the rain being thrown at the window in buckets… Seven ten… Seven ten in the evening and already it was dark enough to have stirred the streetlights into a reluctant pink activity.

I fucking hate winter.

That is not precisely true. The optimist in me looks forward to a cosy evening in without the nagging urge that I should be doing something constructive. There is nothing like the wind howling through the telegraph wires to discourage a night out. And I love those winter mornings, so crisp and sharp that they draw your blood.

I love all that but I take a while to adjust.

The lagging time between October and December is when I hurt. I ache for the freedom of a bright and sunny life. The energy and guile in me, found each successive year in greater quantities is pulled from my head like a perfect and healthy tooth.

And every year it gets harder.

I was, what Jane described later as ‘off hand’, with our unexpected guest. He worked the little room, the walls wet with condensation from various dishes of ‘Value’, pasta and rice. He shook us all by the hand. It is an action I am learning to appreciate as a necessary part of adult existence yet there was something false in the way he did it. As he shook/slapped my extended palm in an overly cool manner, he reminded me of Samuel L Jackson, far off in another non-pinpointable era between the seventies and now.

He then succedded in slamming the door on any chance of my hospitality by shooting me a quick grin, as if to say, ‘It’s OK that you didn’t know how to shake hands Bro, I don’t hold it against you.’

“Hi I’m Bri, Jane’s ex.” He repeated to me although Jane had already announced this to the room.

“I hear you’re a surfer, Adrian.” He stated in the way people always do when they have absolutely nothing to say about a subject. I always wonder if they would like me to do a wacca-wave and shout ‘Cowabunga’, in joy at being recognised. What a cocksucker.

“Yeah I try to get in as often as possible.”

“That’s great.” He replied. I wondered whether it would be appropriate to insert a fork into his face.

The evening went from bad to worse just like the twilight greying to dark. ‘Bri’, had taken turns with every one in the room. Patting them down for interests he could patronise them about.

As he worked through each of my friends in turn, I became less willing to hide behind my normal winter apathy. When the flow of condescension was down to trickle I asked what he did with himself in his spare time.

“Oh, I race MTB’s for Enfield town… keeps the beer belly down eh Jane?”

Jane laughed her affirmative.
What a marvellous relationship they must have had.

“Really,  that must be very dangerous?”, I asked knowing full well that people who ride mountain bikes for pleasure are the rejects of the extreme sports world.

I wanted to see if he would further ascert his thinly veiled defensiveness at being thrust into a closed group of house-mates, by blowing his own trumpet some more. I felt a glimmer of that summer-time happiness return as he rose to the bait.

“Yeah, I don’t have to worry about drowning its just the broken bones.”

He shot a very masculine glance at Kirsten who sat next to me. She returned a smile that had to be dragged out kicking and screaming.

“I went for a cross up flip the other day and you know the bit which the handle bars go into, the headset its called, I almost impaled myself on that.”

“Ooh nasty”, cooed Jane, perhaps finally sensing that the mood of the audience was darkening a little.

I could have told him that I rode BMX for four years, that the part he was referring to was called the stem and that you cant do cross ups on a mountain bike because the front brake cable is in the way.

I could have said all these things but I didn’t. I just left him in silence and allowed that silence to show him that none of us gave a fuck and that we had all expected him to be full of shit ever since that wanky hand shake. No one spoke for a while. The TV told us about the death toll from the Tai Pe earthquake.

“The price of memory chips is gonna go sky high”, Rick said to the room we grunted our recognition. Brian looked as though he had his own little nugget of information to share but he caught my eye and didn’t bother in the end.

Round one to me.

That night sleep was a latecomer. I found many things to worry about and I seemed to have lost the ability to separate the important from the insignificant. Everything that worried me formed itself into a nasty asymmetrical lump and powered down on my mind making me paranoid. That’s the other problem with winter, too much drugs. Impaired judgement equals para’ equals depression. Then I was angry. Anger turned inward.

Sleep finally gate crashed at about four AM and I had the dream again.

We are walking through the town where I grew up. The streets are languidly covered with the sort of gentle mist you can only get in the very early morning. Bright orange halos are formed around the street lights. But in my dream it is not the dead, drab orange that filters through the exhaust stained plastic of my street light. The one that shines into my room I mean. It is a pure and peaceful light and the streets are silent and entirely deserted- Silent apart from the sound of our footsteps and our steamy breath. I don’t quite know who she is but I have a great love for her. She is a construct for which I find the closest thing I have ever felt to true love. My woman. She has no features. I feel no need to look at her, simply to be here standing next to her is enough. We wander about the streets for a while. We head along a predestined route through the town and down onto the sea front. All the time we walk she is showing me things in my town- Things that have become so mundane to me in my time here that I have stopped noticing them. With her guidance I see their beauty and only through her guidance can I see my own. We eventually reach a staircase that appears to lead down onto the beach. She takes me by the hand and leads me down the stairs. I feel that we are going to have sex- that at the bottom of these stairs there might be a beautiful moonlit shoreline and happiness. Each time I begin this line of thought the tone of the dream changes its english. I look more carefully at the walls of the stairs and see that they are the kind we used to see at the fun house at Porthcawl. I can see the grain in the cheap chipboard beneath the layers of matt black paint. As we descend, the colour scheme becomes more vibrant and artificial- Reds and yellows, the colours of fire. Finally we reach the bottom and she urges me forward. The passage ends in an abrupt dead stop with a beach painted badly onto the wall. The colours are all wrong each time. Then she urges me forward even though there is nowhere further to go. As I walk towards the wall I have time to notice two things before I awaken. First, the fact that I am alone and second, the broken glass under my bare feet.

***

I awoke to the familiar smell of last night’s rolling tobacco at about ten. It was Sunday, which I normally enjoy. I was planning all the little things which matter in October- Bacon and sausage sandwich, delaying the first joint for as long as possible, not getting out of my bed things until gone one. I only wished that I didn’t find football so gallingly shit, so that I could veg all day. But then it hit me the way something bad that you have forgotten about whilst you sleep always hits you- Brian.

He would be there, asleep on the sofa, unless Jane had relented and allowed him to shag her. No, even if she had done, he would have been banished to the land of the sofa straight afterwards so that she could keep her ‘Lady of high virtue’ image going for us (her flatmates of dubious repute). So I had a choice: go down and enjoy polite conversation with that munchkin or sit here stewing…

Or plan B.

There is always plan B. In this instance plan B was have a wank, have a J and go back to sleep until Brian had tired himself out impressing everybody else. Plan B has an uncanny habit of winning hands down- this was no exception.

The next time I looked at the clock it was Mid-day. Not a bad testament to the value of plan B. However the danger of living in a household made up of students is that no bastard rises before two on the weekend. I could still end up being the first into the lion’s den- But my stomach growled in an affronted way at the thought of delaying breakfast for even a second longer so I hauled myself out of bed and started for the bedroom door.

The first thing I noticed about the tiny lounge we have in our basement was the smell- more specifically the lack of it.

The lounge in that house was about 3 Feet Square and ventilated like a cheese sarnie wrapped in cling film. Even those who took their personal hygiene seriously could not avoid giving it that old sleeping bag smell- (a hint of must with a twinge of musk) when circumstance forced them to spend the night in there.

But now it smelt OK, sort of like onions with that same old tobacco scent that was in all of the rooms in the house. Brian lay diagonally across the floor covered in a yellow blanket- the kind that they put in the wardrobes of two star hotels. Lying diagonally was clearly the only way he could stretch out his legs. I hadn’t noticed how tall the guy was last night but now I could see that he had to be six foot six. I suppose if I had bothered to get up and meet him when he arrived, he would have towered over me. His head end was nearest the little patio door, there was no condensation on the glass.

He’s dead.

The thought came like a massive red bus that had somehow managed to sneak up behind me. It was followed by.

Yeah right.

I saw me running around the house, waking everyone, and how much they would all laugh at me. I could hear old Brian, through fits of his noxious laughter, ‘Gave you a bit of a fright there did I old man… snort snort!’ No thank you. So I stepped over his legs and into the adjoining kitchen- turned the grill round to five and opened the fridge.

I realised after a couple of minutes that I was trying to be overly noisy with the pans and cutlery. It dawned on me that I was trying to wake him up. Why the fuck did I want to wake him up? I had stayed in bed three hours to avoid seeing this prick and now I wanted pillow talk? The stupidity of the questions showed me what I was really doing and why I was really doing it. I wanted to know if there was a corpse in my front room. I wanted to make enough noise to wake him, so that he would not be dead.

I went back through the doorway and looked at him.

He was on his side and facing away from me so I had no clues. He was even being awkward when I thought he was dead.

“Brian… Brian!”

I pushed gently at him with my bare foot. (One of my nails was still painted green from a stupid evening in, with Kirsten on the previous Wednesday.) It was quite a callous action in retrospect- nudging him like a road kill- but there was a part of me that didn’t want to touch a corpse. A superstitious part that thought death was contagious, one of those millions of little psychological fuck-ups that we spend so much time repressing we don’t notice them shaping our lives. I didn’t want to touch death (and I wanted to have shoes on when next I walked through the broken glass.)

Brian remained motionless.

I took two breaths and then  I plucked up sufficient courage to lay the backs of my fingers on a piece of pale neck- he had a little mole framed between black hair and worn yellow blanket.

The second I touched him I regretted it. He was utterly cold- Stone cold.

Skin is only skin when it is presented at body temperature. When you get it at four degrees (I could feel a gentle icy draft blowing through the badly fitted patio door) it is like perished rubber. It has a texture that once touched can never be forgotten. A texture that when felt by my hand, could immediately be felt by my teeth. I felt dirty.

His body had become a redundant rubber sheath, filled with nothing but dead matter.

I was sickened and yet a tiny bit fascinated.

I rolled up a newspaper and used it to turn him over. His body was stiff and heavy. You have to try to move a corpse to truly understand the phrase ‘Dead weight’. I wondered briefly how a feeling so unique could have spawned such a general saying. I suppose that it must have come from a time when death wasn’t the taboo it has become. From a time when death was an unsanitised way of life.

“What the fuck are you two doing?”

I spun, with my heart in my mouth to see Jane in her silky oriental nighty and hair in bunches, at the door open mouthed. I could suddenly see this bizarre stage set from her perspective, as clear as day. I was astride Brian on my knees trying to hook a copy of the daily mail under his arm pit and grunting in frustration each time it got stuck and the top pages tore on his cold flesh. She thought we were shagging. I thought about Jane composing her ‘Gay Boyf.’ Letter for Just Seventeen. I could almost see relief in her. Relief that she now knew why he had dumped her all that time ago. But she was wrong and I suddenly found it hysterical that any one could be so wrong. The paper gave way and I fell sideways onto the ashtray, projecting ash and rolly filters in a perfect arc over and onto dead Brian’s face.

I could do nothing else after that but piss myself, great rolling peels of thunderous laughter that seemed to fill up the room. As the last of these faded, I could suddenly smell fat burning. For the briefest of ridiculous moments I though I had set Brian alight somehow. The very stupidity of this notion renewed my hysterical laughter. As I hauled myself off the floor and ran through to turn off the grill I realised that Jane was going to despise me when she realised that Brian was dead, however the only reaction I could find was a final guffaw of laughter.

I always thought that death would command a vast and unerring respect from me when it finally penetrated my sheltered existence. I was sure that when it came it would be final and terrifying. I would fantasise about losing my parents or my girlfriends and dread would take full hold of my senses- but with Brian it was different.

Kirsten phoned the police  in a calm and business like fashion after I had woken her. This serenity came about from the very second she saw the corpse. I think she used to work in a rest home for a few years and clearly she was a little more used to the scenario than the rest of us. She even knew which department of the police to ask for. I set about sanitising our house for police inspection. I put the weed plant we had been nurturing so religiously for nearly three months, into a cupboard and emptied the ashtrays of roach. Then I went under Rick’s bed and pulled out a mirror we used when we got Base or Coke. I slotted it with reverence back into the medicine cupboard in the bathroom and noticed a new vacancy on my own face in the reflection, clearly the time for laughter had passed. Then I went back down into the basement-lounge where the 4 other members of  my household sat silently with a corpse.

The mood of the room hit me full in the face as I wandered in.

Jane was sobbing a little onto Kirsten’s shoulder- which served to convince me that she did fuck him that previous night.

Rick had his feet pulled up to him and was just staring at the body, a lump wrapped in a cheap yellow blanket.

Rob was watching the muted TV.

Nobody said a word.

I know that we were all in shock. Logic told me that as powerfully then as it does now. But that was not the way it felt. The room felt as dead as Brian did when I had laid my hand upon him.

It was not a sorrowful feeling, not even particularly melancholic one but just… nothing. It felt as though a whirlwind had screamed down the stairs and through the room tearing life from everything it touched- leaving behind a vacuum.

There is an interesting phenomenon which I have observed in small and close-knit surfing communities. All the surfers who like to think that they know what they are doing, will generally be wearing the same wetsuit.

This is not always a good thing. When I lived and surfed in the windy brown waters of Brighton (East Sussex) you were not anybody in 2007 unless you were wearing the West Edge 5 4 3. Sadly although it was a very warm suit, it was both stiff and restrictive and really ‘felt’ like the winter suit it was. I believe that my season, and the season’s of a few other people, suffered distinctly for that fact.

For this reason, I was very weary of the Excel Infiniti 543, if only because all the guys I was seeing surfing around my new home (Guernsey) were wearing one. The reason for the prevalence of the Excel was the same in Guernsey as it had been for the West in Brighton, allow me to explain.

It seems that most coastal towns in the UK now have three types of surf shops:

Shop 1 is in the main shopping district of town and caters for the section of the land dwelling population who would like to buy into the surfing aesthetic by wearing a t-shirt which commemorates a vintage surfing competition in Hawaii which they never attended.

Shop 2 is a price driven store with a large range of gear, often catering across the extreme sports range (i.e. Surfing, Snowboarding, wake boarding, Mountain boarding etc..). This is normally a solid place to get reasonably priced gear, but it will have become a victim of its own success because expansion will have meant the need to employ shop floor staff and will have distanced the management team from the surfers. Old salty seadog surfers don’t want to buy their gear off of bored teenage girls who don’t actually go surfing themselves; they want to have a good gas about surfing and the forecast for the coming week etc. And that’s where shop 3 comes in.

Shop 3 is the slightly naff around the edges, but without doubt a proper ‘underground’ surf shop. Run and manned by ‘real’ surfers and usually providing some level of local sponsorship to the best of the local groms. That sponsorship invariably includes (yes you guessed it) a wetsuit deal and that deal is going to have a huge influence on the choice of wetsuit for all the ‘real’ surfers in that town. If the best of the best have one then everyone else is gonna want one too.

So what’s wrong with that? Nothing at all as long as the suit in current favour is a good suit. Its important to remember that just cos everyone’s wearing a certain kind of rubber, don’t make it the best thing since the absence of bikini tops in Hossegor.

So, back to the Excel (I bet you’d forgotten that was what this review was about huh?) and it was with notable trepidation that I handed over my £230.00 and picked up my Infiniti one month ago. I have to say that my resolve was a little strengthened because the Excel had been named ‘wetsuit of the year’ last season, but you can never tell till you duck dive that first icy close out can you. What follows are a few brief jottings which honestly cover my experience of this wetsuit.

First Impressions
People might shout me down here but I think the Excel is an ugly suit. OK then, not ugly but lacking in a lot of the things that got me so excited about suits like O’Neill’s Psycho series when I first saw them.

Let me demonstrate what I mean by comparing the Infiniti to the equivalent suit in O’Neill’s range the Psycho 1:
The Excel doesn’t have glued liquid seams running down the outside, it hasn’t got the weird but wonderful rubber ribbing reinforcing the kneepads and there is a notable absence of edgy black on black graffiti type design running over the suit.
Instead the Infiniti has stitched outside seams (yes, horror on horror, I can actually see thread!). The kneepads look like a good size lump of Kevlar has been hacked out and sewn. The neoprene seems thicker than it should be when compared to other 543 suits. Graphics wise, the Excel has nothing to offend the eye but, truth be told, little draw it either. It just looks… well like a wetsuit I suppose.

Getting in and Getting out
Despite approaching my 14th year of surfing and buying a new winter suit pretty much each and every season, the Excel Infiniti is my very first top entry (front Zipped) suit.
It has to be said that this makes getting into the suit a little more challenging than using a traditional rear entry suit like the Psycho. But if you thought getting into it was hard, then just wait until it comes time to drag your sorry ass back to the car and take it off. The first couple of times it is a bitch. In fact, on my ‘worst go’ I managed to get both of my arms simultaneously locked to my sides and was physically unable to move. I was just hopping up and down on the spot, looking like an escapee from a passing sunshine variety coach until a fellow wave slider took pity on me and helped me get out!

Surfing it
So far this might have seemed like a very negative précis of the Excel Infiniti. How on earth has this suit won the accolade of wetsuit of the year you might be asking? Is it just a product of local-surf-shop-induced peer pressure and weird viral marketing on the part of Excel?

The answer to that question is no. This is because something very important starts to happen from the first second you have got this wetsuit on and you start to paddle out.

The Infiniti suddenly becomes a part of you.

The suit is extremely warm (the warmest I have ever surfed) and I understand that it’s bigger brother (the Infiniti Drylock) is warmer still, but what impressed me even more than the warmth is that the Excel Infiniti is unnervingly flexible. Paddle into your first wave and I challenge you to recall any of the negative things you might have perceived about the Infiniti: (How thick the rubber looked when the suit was hung in your bathroom. How hard it was to get on. How haphazard the kneepads seemed.) All the little things which might have given you pause are suddenly rendered irrelevant in light of how totally unrestrictive the Excel is to actually go surfing in.

Conclusions

This wetsuit is a wake up call for the industry and consumers alike. It wasn’t until I donned the Infiniti for a few sessions that I began to realise things like: “The seams on a wetsuit don’t need to be liquid sealed on both sides for it to be warm” and “Good neoprene doesn’t need to be wafer thin if it’s fantastically flexible” and “Knee pads are not a zone which needs to be flexible or aesthetically pleasing so why not just make em really, really strong?”  as well as “Wow a winter suit doesn’t need to strangle you at all” and “My wetsuit just looks black to anyone standing more than 3 feet away so who cares how good the graphics are?” and “Not having any Velcro on a wetsuit is the best idea EVER because I have no bobbles and tears anywhere”.

So yes, I am sold on the Excel Infiniti. I now dance down the beach towards the freezing grasp of the English Channel looking like everyone else in Guernsey and I don’t care! I know I will still be in the water in 2 hour’s time and I’ll be toasty.

The Excel Infiniti is a very good wetsuit. It has been made by people who know how to produce very good wetsuits. The gents and ladies at Excel have clearly had the balls (and boobs?) to go out on a limb and create a suit which is overbearingly practical and resolutely prepared to do exactly what it is supposed to: Help you surf in the winter.

So believe the hype, get out your wallet and do what needs to be done. Your backside top turn will undoubtedly thank you for it before the season is over and life is much to short to get strangled by the bobbly neck of a naff wetsuit.

I am trying to get serious with the web, flash, print, design business just now and its actually left me feeling really conflicted about my working ethos…

Thus far I have taken on work after gaining email sign off from clients on a basic agreement of work terms which has a fixed quote for a list of requested actions… This actually seems to have worked really well for me despite allowing an awful lot of room for interpretation… I actually quite enjoyed not having to send reams of small print to people who just want a web site setting up and being able to respond in a relaxed fashion during a potentially nerve wracking situation (submission of quotes, negotiation etc etc).

Weirdly I have just undergone a rebrand of the business and decided that it was time to draw up a more formal contract, and it was at this exact time that a few jobs have come right back to bite me on the ass because I have not had a contract in place when I took them on.

With my 20:20 hindsight the necessity of having a contract is plain and not just to avoid getting into the situation I outline below… there are hundreds of reasons to lay out in black and white, exactly what part you play in the process of realising a client’s creative vision. Scope drift is a killer!
It might seem obvious to you that as a web designer (for example) , it is not your job to write the copy for the website, to provide the pictures, to work up all the business cards and letterheads for the company, to host the site and pay for the domain name and to do so on and ongoing basis, or to provide technical support to the end of time.

Why not? Because that’s not what a web designer does.

How do you know that? Because you are a web designer?

Why doesn’t your client know that? Because they are a gardener/recruitment company/sushi restaurant (etc etc).

The perils in sharp relief!

In my world some weird situations have developed where clients seem to have commissioned me to do something (create a system in flash for example) and then just gone quiet for months, finally coming back and saying they are not sure if they even want it any more. This leaves me in a weird situation… I’ve done the work (barring some final refinements and sundry updates, but the guts and mechanics are done) and put a prototype online for them already so what am I expected to do? Just say “OK, no problems” and forget about the job?

I don’t even know if there was any malice of forethought involved to be honest… I just think I made it so easy for these guys to commission me, and responded with working prototype’s so quickly, that they have been green lighting stuff without properly considering the if it’s a requirement or an aspiration.

The added problem is that this client belongs to a group of clients which I would definitely consider to be my best and most profitable source of business so that last thing I want to do is piss them off.

It’s hardly the most amazing advice in the world but I would say to anyone reading this who is in the freelance business (Digitally speaking or otherwise) and doesn’t ask for a signature on a contract before starting work, STOP NOW!!!

Beg, Borrow but don’t steal!

Get a contract drawn up or steal someone else’s e.g http://24ways.org/2008/contract-killer  (don’t steal, ask permission!) and make sure you use it… it may feel cool to be different to the rest of the market and to say stuff like “Don’t worry, I only work with people I trust” (This was exactly what I was saying about a month back) but as your workload increases, your projects become more in depth and therefore take longer to complete you might well end up on your butt like I am just now.

With regards my own situation – timelines so far mean that the person could well be off on holiday or something so I am not calling in the dogs just yet. I must confess to feeling a little upset too. I work extremely hard and to very tight deadlines and I KNOW I am significantly cheaper than all of the serious competition. Sadly it doesn’t look like that’s the kind of thing that always gets you paid!

Whatever the outcome, it has brought into sharp relief the fact that if these guys do choose never to email me again I am stuck with the choice of losing thousands of pounds or causing a stink with my best clients which could cost me even more… After all, I have no recourse whatsoever to demand anything from anyone, due to the lackadaisical approach I had to accepting new business.

Yes it is hard to conceive of a payment schedule at the start of a project… How can you request final payment in a month’s time if you are still waiting for client sign off on images from I-stock for the first page? But even if that schedule goes completely out of the window (by mutual consent) at least it’s there to fall back on, or use as leverage in a silly situation (“You signed this contract indicating you believed this job would be completed by December and I have budgeted for that, it’s now February, what can we do to make this OK?”).

Learn from my pain people!

I can access everything from anywhere… No, I really mean everything… Business receipts from 2006, an attachment which a client sent me a year ago, and I can do it all from anywhere in the world at any time.

Today I discovered something horrible whilst researching something unrelated about Gmail. I found out that an alarming number of people using Gmail have had their accounts disabled (seemingly at random) and have not ever been able to get them back…

Google’s response seems to be “Did you not see the little label in the top left hand corner saying Beta?”. I have to confess that the colour drained from my face as i thought of all of my digital life for the last 3 years draining clockwise into the cyber-space sewer… I cannot imagine the terror, pain and gnashing of teeth that would ensue.

I had considered this possibility before of course. To give you a little insight into my character; I keep an external hard drive back up of my whole computer which is updated once per week and left in a different room to my main PC in case of a fire!!! But I figured, as I am sure many of you Gmail evangelists out there would, that Google are a trustworthy entity. The unchallenged leader of usability, thoughtfulness and care. Surely they will be backing up to a secondary server on my behalf? Surely a carefully placed business continuity plan will exists which means that, in the event of all out nuclear apocalypse, my email will be carefully and immediately transferred to a secure concrete bunker in the Utah badlands? Well if the sheer volume of comments i have read today are anything to go by, this trust has been horribly misplaced.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Google but I have breathed a considerable sigh of relief today when I stumbled upon this http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-backup-your-gmail-account-to-your-computer/ (yes you guessed it, its a piece of software which you can download and use to back up every aspect of your Gmail account to your hard drive (or if you are me, to both of your hard drives in case of fire, flood or tempest).

Go there now, do as I will be doing tonight and turn off those other less important downloads, retrieve your Gmail and sleep well.

”I am a web designer… and I have a flash-only portfolio site”.

Sits quickly and hangs head amidst the gasps of horror and shame from peers.

————

Ok so maybe it’s not quite like that but that is the feeling I often get when I read through the many websites I use to influence my work and keep myself up to date with developments in my industry.

Yes I use flash for my portfolio site…

I happen to like having actual control over all of the presentation and also over the carefully crafted transitions used to move from section to section. I like that once the movie has loaded, the content is quick to display and the rhythm of the site is within my control as a designer (rather than the control of the user’s bandwidth).

Even though the site is now rather out of date and could benefit from a spruce up, prospective clients still invariably rave about it (often citing elements of it and requesting that I use similar conceits in the designs I create for them). In fact I feel that in a world where web designers still harbour an irrational fear of having to use a plug in (shock horror) to display their site, my flash presence is actually a differentiator. It stands out as being distinctly different and I feel my business has grown exponentially because of this (making both flash and XHTML/CSS sites for clients in the process). Even if my clients don’t want a flash site, you can be damn sure they have been just a little bit impressed by mine and that is invaluable.

I don’t provide an HTML alternative because I want to wow clients from the very outset, not ask them to decide (often arbitrarily) whether they want to see flash or HTML site. I have to say in the main the majority of my clients don’t really have a proper idea of what the difference between a flash site and one written in XHTML actually is. (Comments normally range from: “Those are the ones where the back button doesn’t work” to “those are the ones which are utterly invisible to search engines”.) So asking them which they want to see when they visit my portfolio is rather moot.

As we all know a site laid out carefully with all the correct meta tags and titles will still rank (and actually rank pretty well) in Google, regardless of whether it’s just an HTML page holding a flash object. Just search “Tacit Digital” or even “Tacit Web Design” to see my site come out at the shiny top of the search listings!

“What about accessibility? You could be losing business” (I hear the assembled circle of peers mutter)

Why are we all scared to create anything which is flash only?

“Flash Player is the world’s most pervasive software platform, used by over 2 million professionals and reaching 99.0% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices.”
See http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/

And in fact, who amongst you knows even the most tentative internet toe dipper who has decided they don’t need to install flash player (an extraordinary simple process). An internet user who doesn’t want to see anything on You-Tube, doesn’t fancy seeing the Auctiva content on Ebay auctions?
Flash is extremely prevalent in the modern internet and it’s hard to see how that might change…
Yes, users with extremely old equipment (pre 1990) or very poor connections may not be able to view my site. To be honest it doesn’t bother me, I don’t get that much work from developing countries or time travellers.

Flash is a wonderful thing. It has provided me with a gateway into running my own business. Learning flash and learning how to make flash interface with other technologies has provided me with a founding in such a huge range of internet related skills that I lose count. ActionScript 2.0 was the first language I ever learned and I am really enjoying coming to grips with ActionScript 3.0. Can’t all the accessibility junkies just give it a break?

So here I am, unrepentant and standing proud in the internet community… I have a flash portfolio site and when it comes to the redesign, I shall have another. Get over it. Tie me to the stake and fetch the butter.

(For the generally intrigued, check out www.tacitdigital.com )

Although on the plus side I have a lot of clients still with me from that time who no doubt couldn’t believe it when they received an invoice for (shock horror) exactly what I had quoted them for the site (plus a few i-stock images I bought on their behalf), it has been incredibly important for me to realise how damaging this approach can be to a business.

So there I was doing good work, and doing it cheaply for happy clients, where’s the problem with that?

Well for some time there was no problem but then word started to get around, my client base increased and obviously so did my workload, skillbase and consequently the complexity of my jobs. It was this which began to cause problems… When you have 6 or 7 jobs clamouring for attention in your in box, and one of your clients suddenly decides they want to make a large revision to their design, or they decide they want a new functionality which (although arguably not completely out of scope) means you need to learn a new technology or solve a complex problem, things suddenly stop being fun. Stress jumps on you and starts gnawing at your brain. You begin to try and justify why it is a good idea to start smoking again. Working as a web designer turns into a bit of a war. You cannot help but feel that your client is taking advantage of you because, after all, they are getting a quality job for peanuts. And that’s the nub of the problem.

Pay peanuts, get peanuts. It’s one of those cliché’s which, like so many, is suddenly thrown into sharp relief for you one day when the words turn into a concrete and personal concept.

Web design should never ever be a war between client and designer. You should never approach a job by thinking “well you asked too much at the design stage therefore I cannot be bothered to suggest a great marketing idea to you because I know how much extra work it will be”. You end up putting projects together which (although perfectly serviceable to the bare minimum) do not fully demonstrate your skills or the client’s vision for the potential of the site…

Although I might not have believed it a few months back, charging a realistic figure for the quality work you do, makes all the difference in that crunch moment where you come across and idea that could make or break the success of a project. Instead of quickly pushing that idea aside and trying to forget about it in favour of getting the site online and getting paid, you mull it over and you learn how to do it. You pick up new skills in the process, the site you create is more successful, your client is more likely to recommend you and so on and so forth. Much of the time you can reuse the code you create in your next project which means you can maximise return vs time over and over again if only you grab the bull by the horns at the start.

For me, knowing I am being fairly remunerated for what I am doing has had a very direct bearing on my responses to that decisive moment, and consequently a very positive impact on my professional life.

So how do you know how much to quote?

There is a significant acreage of information on this subject on the internet and there are even programs which claim they can do it all for you if you plumb in a few simple pieces of information (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/13/15-useful-project-management-tools/ ) but I found the first and most important thing to do was simple…

STOP SENDING QUOTES… Start sending estimates…

Its only a single different word but it’s a very important one… I still state clearly that as long as requirements do not change, I should be able to bring any project in exactly on budget, but I also make sure my client understands that fixed fee quotes are no-one’s friend – and that asking for more, means paying more.

In a perfect world your client would know every aspect of their requirements before the job starts but this is a totally unrealistic expectation. How can you ask your client to know as much about the world of digital design as you do? How can you expect them to have covered off all the relevant possibilities before they even come and ask you for an estimate? Part of what they are paying you for is to come up with great ideas to make their vision a concrete reality.

You must leave yourself open to the possibility that something unforeseen will come up, and that you might need to be paid to spend significantly more time on the project than first thought, in order that it fulfils its every ounce of its potential.

I am aware I have still not answered the question of how much should you charge for a project. I would love be able to lay out a simple equation or to send you to an incredibly useful link, but I can’t.

A few tips might be constructive though, so here are a few of my own, less obvious-considerations.

·         Is the client tech aware?
I have done quotes for clients who do not even have email addresses and you must take this into account. If a client doesn’t even have email then many potentially basic things are going to become longwinded and involve lots of careful nurturing… Make sure you take into account this extra valuable time which you will lose.

·         Will the job require a domain transfer?
This sounds really specific but I cannot count the number of times it has taken 5 – 6 weeks of constant battling to do something as simple as transfer a domain from one company to another (or even on one occasion – between two accounts with the same provider – be very ashamed easyspace).

·         Do you like the client?
Don’t scream prejudice at me! I mean are your interactions with them positive, have you found the client to be speaking your language? Can they express their ideas clearly and concisely or do they have severely inhibited communication skills? Be aware that if a client doesn’t know what they want, or is not able to clearly express it to you, you are going to burn ALOT of time and potentially you are going to spend wasted time doing something which the client doesn’t actually require. If you are not sure then make it your business to find out. Conjure up a reason to call them and send a few emails, you won’t regret it.

·         Don’t quote for time
Sounds weird this one but don’t do your quote based solely around the time you will spend on the project. You are not a brick layer (not that there is anything wrong with brick laying of course). You are selling the value of your knowledge. For example I have built applications which perform a certain function for a client (like an RSS news aggregator in flash), this might have taken me 6 hours to construct and in the first instance I might bill for (you guessed it) 6 hours. But what about when a new client wants the same thing in their site? Its built already and it only needs 20 minutes of tweak and a restyle to make it work on a new site. In this case I definitely wouldn’t bill for 20 minutes, I would bill for the ‘value’ of the application and for my knowledge in making it work for them. This may not be for 6 hours work again but you can be damn sure it would not be for 20 minutes.
Try wherever you can to quote for the value of what you are bringing, not the time it may (or may not) take you to complete a necessary set of tasks.

If I was being honest I have to say that I tend to quote nowadays very much on gut instinct. I don’t have any equations or tricks. I think about the job and apply the context of previous jobs to its various aspects, from there I put a figure into the estimate, stare at it for a minute or two, amend it, save it, send it.

Please don’t misconstrue this article as being carte blanche to charge Saatchi and Saatchi prices for a job which is simple and straightforward. That is a sure way of annihilating your business in no time at all.

Instead think carefully about value and ensure you are communicating clearly with all of your clients as soon as you feel that familiar scope drift climb onto a project. Most importantly of all remember that if your projects feel more like wars, ask yourself why and make changes accordingly.

How weird is net rage? Forums, message boards and any other internet based open communication platform seems to have a nasty habit of being overrun with arguments and anger (even twitter has sometimes fallen victim to intense vitriol in 140 characters or less).

I spend time on a surfing message board and it has really gone downhill in recent months… For those of you who don’t know: People who ride waves using a certain implement maintain a level of contempt for anyone who chooses to ride the waves on a different type of implement… It’s like a weird genetic memory. Long boarders hate short boarders, short boarders hate boogey boarders, everyone hates ocean kayakers, blah blah blah.

Anyway it’s tedious, but it is also intensely emotive for people on surf related message boards. The most recent post I read (before giving up on this particular message board) basically just said long boarders are twats. Perhaps even more interesting than the totally facile thread title, was the fact that the angry responses ran to three pages. This in response to a post whose purpose was so blatantly inflammatory (posted under a false screen name set up purely for that purpose) that it should just have been ignored. But no, it was not ignored, people cannot resist piling in, shouting back, threatening, puffing up chests and generally giving and taking as much virtual-affront as possible.

In a moment of reflection it actually reminded me of a strange effect which can be observed on the nation’s roads where if a driver pulls out in front of another, the party who has to do the avoiding can often find the presence of mind to actually beep the horn before they apply the brakes. I actually have a theory on why this happens and yes, I am going to share it…

People in the main are actually pretty sad cases…

On a superficial level we all seek moments in our lives when we are unequivocally in the right about something. Someone pulling out dangerously in front of us is one of those (precious) few completely un ambiguous moments where we know we are in the right, and damn if we don’t want the guilty party in front of us, and everyone else in the vicinity of the incident, to know it.

On a much deeper level what we are doing is looking desperately for catharsis. It would seem that we are all leading such utterly buttoned down and repressed existences that we desperately need to let off some steam and we are pre-programmed to do so whenever a pertinent situation arises.

I realise this is not a very optimistic view of society but I challenge you now to not be remembering situations (virtual or otherwise) where such a response has occurred.

So what are the parallels here between the desperate search for catharsis on our roads, and on the information super highway?

Two words, ‘perceived anonymity’. Whether we consider ourselves safe behind the glass of our monitor, or that of our car windscreen, we feel cocooned and invulnerable. Our emotions are not in check in the same way they would be had we made the conscious effort to begin some sort of social interaction with another party. We feel we can respond exactly as we wish without meter or a second thought.

This is pretty strange in itself because whether on the road or on the net, we are wrong. The cocoon can be destroyed in the time it takes a tire iron to smash a window or a moderator to identify an email address and ban a user from a community which they might have got a lot of pleasure from being a part of.

What’s the answer?

That is way out of scope for me I’m glad to say. In this post i choose to be a commentator not a problem solver… Why do you think our society is so good at generating repression?

Personally i don’t claim to be immune for seeking emotional release but I can’t help thinking that if everyone found a creative outlet for their pent up aggression, there might be less dead people on our roads and more quality message boards available online.

Further reading http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/disinhibit.html