1. Get feedback from users as early as possible.

   This is something that really hit home for me as a designer. Following the designer’s mantra of “Fail early, fail often, fail cheaply,” always get feedback from users as early on in the process as you can. You’ll learn a more than you expected and probably save precious time and money. You might be tempted (as I was) to “finish” the first version of your project before showing it to people, but this eliminates the invaluable feedback you need about your proposed work flow. You might find yourself needing to start over (again, as I did) because you have to make a major change in the structure of your interface, something easily avoided by showing users wireframe concepts and ideas for the general flow of whatever process it is you are working on.

2. Communicate about the little things.

   Many times, you might not comment on something that you find problematic–something that you disagree with, annoys you, or could be better–because it is relatively minor. These sorts of things can go unmentioned and unnoticed, eventually turning into much bigger problems or feelings of resentment that lead to unhappiness at work. Everyone knows communication is key, but being vocal about the little things can be just as important as being vocal about more obviously important issues. Speaking up about something small can lead to improvements and optimizations that build up over the long run (and keep your team happy and running smoothly). Of course, always be careful about how and when you deliver your comments, but definitely be sure to not wait too long make them heard.

3. Go above and beyond your duties.

   The simple truth is, if you always go above and beyond your assigned duties, those you work for will have no choice but to reward you. Results speak for themselves.

4. Support your team.

   Get your job done, and do it well, but also take time out to help others on your team perform at their best. You might not give a flying hoot about what they are doing, but your teams success is your success. As a bonus, you’ll build strong interpersonal relationships that can be very advantageous in the long run.

5. Never let the chance to learn something new pass you by.

   Never choose not to learn something because you think you wont need it. Only pass up the opportunity to learn something new if you really need the time to get something important done, or you want to prioritize learning something else. Ignoring an opening to learn something new will leave you stagnant in your position, and there’s no way of knowing when having that piece of information might be useful. Particularly for people like designers, who collaborate as part of multidisciplinary teams, knowledge is power. New ideas can only come from your collective set of experiences, so every new one increases the size of your toolkit.

6. Spend time to make time.

   Spend time planning your work and making sure your workflow (and workstation) is set up to be as comfortable and efficient as possible. Getting rid of small annoyances  and inefficiencies in your process leads to huge savings in the long run. This is especially true for highly repetitive processes (save tons of time) and ergonomics (save your health and comfort). Also make sure to double check your safeguards (make sure your backups are actually backing up). You’ll be glad you did when something goes awry, as happened to me several times.

7. Ride the wave

   Not Google Wave, that’s not doing so hot…I mean that you should look for areas and industries where a lot of things are changing. Find out where the movers and shakers are and jump right in there with them. Being in that sort of environment means that you’ll be there when that once in a lifetime opportunity comes and you can ride that wave to success.

SEO can be confusing for even seasoned web developers, so it’s no surprise that there is a lot of debate on how exactly you should be using that all-important h1 tag within a site you make. What is the best approach that is both practical and semantically sound (and will give you the most Google juice, of course)?

The Answer

The main name and purpose of the page should always be in the h1 tag, so this means that on the home page, the tag is a good candidate for image replacement. You can put the name of the site or service between the h1 tags, or the same thing that is in the title tag in the head, if that’s more relevant, and then use the image replacement technique to replace that with your logo. Then, on secondary pages, use a simple linked image for the logo and use the h1 tags to enclose the name of that specific page or its purpose on the site–the closer to an actual description of the page, the better.

Always aim to have the most important text of the page in the h1 tag. If you don’t do it because it supports the whole semantic ideal of HTML, do it because Google sees the tag as the most important (which, by the way, is why you should also never have more than 1 h1 tag on a page).

If you are wondering, this is generally an acceptable use of “cloaking” and you won’t get slammed by the Google ban hammer for doing it.

The Problem

You’ve installed MAMP to run a local testing server on your development machine. Its all been going swell until all of a sudden, you can no longer access the MAMP start page! The MAMP start page is gone and you have no idea why, so what’s wrong?

The Solution

I found that this problem can happen right after you’ve performed the automatic installation of some software in a directory in or under the Apache web root. What can happen is that the software installs a .htaccess file in the root of your hard drive, which interferes with MAMP’s operation. Certain versions of WordPress are known to do with when you run the famous 5-minute install. To fix it and bring your MAMP start page back, simply go the root folder of the hard drive where MAMP is installed (probably “Macintosh HD”) and delete the .htaccess file there. If you can see it, it might be because you haven’t enabled the viewing of hidden/invisible files (Files that start with a “.” are automatically hidden). To show hidden files on a Mac, follow these instructions. And here’s a bonus tip, check out this sweet Automator action to quickly enable and disable the viewing of hidden or invisible files.

I was working on a web page for a client the other day and all of a sudden, a page that had previously always worked across browsers stopped functioning in IE (specifically Internet Explorer 7). In IE, I was greeted with, “Internet Explorer cannot open this site, operation aborted.”

The Solution

Needless to say, I Googled it. I came across this solution, which includes a lot of detail about the problem. The short of it is, shifting the JQuery code that was previously right before the tag to right after fixed my problem. Curse you IE!

Unity is in that perfect place between a completely static HTML site and one that runs on a CMS. It doesn’t require a CMS, database, back-end interface, or new proprietary tags, but gives the client an in-browser content editor. You can check out a video demo of Unify, and see how it just snaps into normal, semantic markup to allow editing without breaking the layout or risking the client editing the HTML themselves. Its mind bogglingly simple, and lets truly front end developers only worry about their design and the CSS/HTML. Plus, at a price of $16 per domain, it’s too good to be ignored. I’ll be offering it as an option to future clients effective immediately.