Over the past two years, I’ve noticed a significant drop-off in the number of enquiries from local(ish) businesses coming through Google. I wondered whether that might be down to the fact that the opinionated design isn’t to everyone’s taste, so I tried something. A year ago, I set up a fake web design company.

For the past couple of days I’ve been looking at the software and services I pay for as I want to streamline costs where possible and reduce the amount of my money that ends up in the USA.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, or another type of web professional, successful client projects all begin with a killer proposal. While web design project proposals have no set format, effective proposals all outline the brief, deliverables and scope, timelines, and costs.

When I first shared my Contract Killer in 2008, I had no idea it would become so popular and be used by so many people. Even after thirteen years, it’s still the most visited page on my website. Now, I’ve added a GDPR policy and NDA template to the bundle.

When I first shared my Contract Killer in 2008, I had no idea it would become so popular and be used by so many people. Even after thirteen years, it’s still the most visited page on my website.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on May 25th 2018 and web designers and our clients need to be prepared. This open source GDPR privacy policy template is designed for web professionals.

A few weeks ago I was writing content for my speaking information for conference organisers page and I wondered about other speakers’ ‘terms of business’ and how much—if anything—they charged. To get a feeling for how people approach the business of speaking, I set up a quick survey.

Andrew Fairlie tweeted to tell me that he’d open sourced his company’s ‘Getting Good Feedback’ document. Inspired by @Malarkey’s Contract Killer, I’ve started a “Good Design Feedback” open source project https://t.co/zVe6WPTCyX

Today Microsoft announced that end of support is coming for older versions of Internet Explorer. This is great news for designers and developers who suffer from having to support legacy versions of that browser and it prompted me to update the public version of my Contract Killer, the popular open-source contract for web designers and developers.

In the 1960s, advertising legend David Ogilvy offered advice on how clients should choose an agency in his book Ogilvy On Advertising. In it, he wrote:

Regular Unfinished Business co-host Laura Kalbag’s started to work with her partner Aral Balkan on their Indie Phone project. She wanted to hear about Sue and mine experiences of working together for sixteen years, so she emailed her some questions. I hadn’t heard her answers until Laura read them on the show, but I think that made for interesting listening. We didn’t get through all the questions and answers on the show, so here are her complete answers. I think they offer some insight into what it’s like working together at Stuff and Nonsense for as long as we have.

Although there seems to be plenty of choice, I haven’t found any CRM software that tickles my fancy yet. I need to get better at keeping on top of prospective business though, so the first step was to make a spreadsheet. If it’s useful to anyone, I’m happy to share it. There are Apple Numbers and Microsoft Excel versions in a ZIP file. I’m keen to hear your suggestions for improving it, as well as your recommendations for CRM software/services. Download the ZIP file

One of the things I was talking to Liz about this week on Unfinished Business—you know, the ‘ Net Awards Podcast Of The Year’nominated podcast— was how at Stuff and Nonsense, we devote twelve days every year to supporting good causes pro-bono.

Keith Devon wants to find out how freelance designers and developers handle contracts. So do I, so go spend a minute filling in his survey. As it stands at the moment, 45% use something like my ‘ Contract Killer ’ (or the contract itself) and another 9% wrote their own based on it. Although responder numbers are small so far, that’s brilliant. I’m prouder of ‘Contract Killer’ than anything else I’ve ever done. Keith Devon’s Freelance contract survey

For the second year running, Cole Henley has compiled the results from his survey of freelancer demographics, rates and working practices in the UK.

Even within a business culture of openness and transparency, some things are meant to be kept secret. NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, are meant to help with this, but most NDAs are the opposite of open and transparent because they’re written in the same jargon-laden legalese that I avoided in Contract Killer. So I’ve written ‘ Three Wise Monkeys ’, a plain speaking, easy to read, open source NDA.

It’s coming up on four years since I published my original Contract Killer over on 24ways. The reaction to it was astonishing and over the last four years the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. I feel very, very happy that so many people have found Contract Killer useful.

I’m glad that people like my financial buffer business post the other day. I don’t think people write enough about the business side of what we do and from what I hear, not enough about it gets taught at universities either. I’m not a very good businessman, truth be told, but I have learned a few things over the years, so I thought I’d start sharing them.

A friend of mine works as an in-house designer. He emailed me the other day with a question that’s come up a few times recently. It’s a question I’m asked by people at various stages of their careers, from students to those, like my friend, who’ve worked for somebody else for a long time. The question? “What financial advice do I have for anyone who’s planning to go self-employed?” Rather than write that advice in an email, I thought it might be more useful if I wrote it as a short post.

My long, lost brother Mikey sent me an email today with a link to a video made by his company, ADP. I just had to share it. Watching the ADP video made me wonder if, in the light of our recent public relations problems, should the Britpack make a video?

I had looked forward to it for a year and it certainly didn’t disappoint. For me, this year’s SXSW Interactive was the best so far. Every year seems to be a little different.

This morning when I opened my inbox, I found a flurry of messages discussing the Britpack and what it is, could and shouldn’t be and about whether or not the wider perception of it was elitist and somehow harmful.

It’s been a while since I wrote about CSS on And All That Malarkey, ( Ed says: It’s been a while since you wrote about anything here Malarkey!.) I’ve been busy documenting some of my working methods and thought that I would share Stuff and Nonsense’s current…

Drawn has a cute story about Picasso charging for his work. It helped me remember a story that an old photographer friend once told me. A printing company calls in an engineer because their press is printing out of register.

The end of this next month should see me taking the longest flight of my life; from London to Sydney for Web Directions, then on to Spain for Fundamentos Web. Two conferences, a world apart.

Hicks’ (justifiable) excitement about his logo design article appearing in.net magazine (#152 August) has brought back memories for Malarkey.

Even after only the briefest of spells travelling in the USA this year, I became accustomed to those creature comforts that make a travelling designer’s life so much easier.

With everything else that has been going on lately, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything much about CSS. It’s not that I’m any less interested in CSS; infact s e ven’s recent Beta has me more excited than ever about what we will be able to do on a…

It’s time to tell the remaining untold stories from Arno Zimmerman. Unfortunately not all of Arno’s attempts at domain name acquisition were successful, but thanks to everyone concerned for being great fun to play with.

In today’s Arno Zimmerman episode, Paul Scrivens hones in on the money in’The Nine Rules’. Of all Arno’s contacts, Paul was the only person to name a figure. Arno would have been pleased to pay it too, if only life were so simple.

My good friend Arno Zimmerman has been busy this Easter weekend, attempting to procure domain names for his nefarious purposes clients. In today’s episode, Jeremy Keith smells a rat (rather than the sweet smell of money) in Adactio Pour Domme.

Being the proud owner of a new PowerMac Book ProMac Book BookPro Mac MacBook Pro with its dinky Apple Remote, I wondered what fun or naughtiness could be had with this (where the hell does the battery go) IR doofer.

I often feel blue wishing I was old enough to have seen the blues greats play. Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson II, T. Bone Walker and BB King are rarely far away from iTunes for more than a few days.

A busy few months of travel are ahead in Malarkey world. I’m very much looking forward to what’s coming up, to meeting old friends and making new ones.

With awareness of standards and accessibility being raised by groups such as WaSP, companies and organisations across many sectors have adopted standards. Sometimes their decision to do so might have been commercial, other times out of a need to comply.

So, according to those slipping the new IE7 Beta Preview out of it’s sleeve and slapping it down on the music-center, Internet Explorer 7 breaks my site. I can’t say that this was much of a surprise.

A new year and tv commercial breaks are full of advertisements for partworks magazines. The choice is so vast that I really don’t know which ones to choose.

Today I heard a rumour that there’s gonna be something big happening in London this summer. When I say big, I mean big and pulled off by some of the biggest names in the business.

I’ve alluded to it recently, and now after not much blood but one or two tears I’m ready to show and tell. The new design for Karova.com is out there. The new site is geared towards promoting Karova’s development framework).

Over the last few weeks I have had several interesting conversations with web standards enthusiasts who work within institutions.

I’m not sure if this has come up before or if indeed it is of any interest (after all, why would anyone want to hide CSS styles from Safari?). But if you’re still here, this is a new (to me) method.

I’m very lucky. I get to work with some great clients and I’m currently working with a very cool consultancy company. Part of the brief was to do something which no one in his industry had done before and I wanted this to involve code as well as design.

You might imagine that accessibility specialists are slightly odd folk. Close your eyes and imagine them sitting quietly in the corner of a pub, sipping mild and wearing Hush Puppies.

Travelling around the London Underground, it is difficult not to notice a series of posters for the British Legion’s Victory Thanks campaign. Among all the advertising for theatres and stores, these Victory Thanks posters stand out as striking and evocative.

School music teacher: (To class) Who would like to learn a musical instrument? Teacher: What instrument would you like to learn?

Positive steps which governments could take to promote a more rapid move towards an accessible web. Following on from Accessibility and a society of control;

Since I delivered my (slightly modified) Anatomy of a Mouse presentation at @media2005, I’ve had time to formalise my thinking about my answer to one of the questions from the audience.

Don MacLean may have sung it before in American Pie, but today surely must be the day the music died. Well perhaps died is too severe, but today for me must be the day that popular music reached an all time low.

I want to say a huge thank-you for all the kind comments about my new design. As you can imagine, a lot of time goes into making a total redesign, and often designing for yourself is harder than designing for client projects.

Well, I’ve been hinting at it for a little while now and now here it is, an all new And All That Malarkey. Not simply a lick of paint, but a complete new design, ground-up re-code and a CSS shake-up.

Some of you may remember that one of my first (and most visited) columns way back in May last year was about creating colour palettes from only two colours plus black and white.

As some of you might know, I like to work on e-commerce store designs. Part of what fascinates me about making sites designed to do business is the psychology of designing for e-commerce.

Spending five minutes exploring Google Labs today, I came across Mr. Google’s Site-Flavored Google Search, not by any means a new Lab experiment (6/17/04) but one which was tantalisingly labelled Improved!. To quote Mr.

Oh my, I’m a sucker for bad movies! I’m sure we all have our favourites, but here is one of mine. Janice Starlin was the face that sold a million cosmetics, but eighteen years on, her business is declining as she grows older. Then she meets the eccentric Dr.

Drive through most towns in the UK (and probably elsewhere in the world) and you’ll see a hairdresser in the main street.

A while ago (when I couldn’t sleep), I sat up late watching re-runs of home decorating shows on UK TVStyle, a channel wall-to-wall with house make-overs.

I’ve written in previous columns about how working with wire-frames and grey-box page layouts during a site’s planning and early design stages can improve efficiency and enable client sign-off points.

It’s always gratifying when someone calls or emails out-of-the-blue and says something like, Can you do… for us?. It’s even nicer when that person is halfway across the world.

Just like Scrivs announced this week that the CSS Vault has been sold, this site too has a new owner and I’d like to introduce him to you. His name is Malarkey. (Ed: What are you rambling on about now?) OK, I’ll get to the point.

An open apology to all sales-people adversely affected by recent columns. Please accept my heart-felt apologies for potentially causing you so many wasted sales calls.

OK, I can’t resist it. If you enjoyed Dealing with telephone salesmen, Dealing with window salesmen or Dealing with kitchen salesmen (and I hope you did) here is one last bash at cold callers.

As a company, we give each member of the team a ’25.00 per month allowance to spend at Amazon on anything they think will benefit the company. We don’t vet what people buy, it’s a way of encouraging them to expand their knowledge (and our range of skills).

It seems to be the season for discussion on rips, with Shaun Inman and Dave Shea both again highlighting design theft and the most professional methods for dealing with such occurrances. I’m not interested in going over old ground.

Jason Santa Maria recently published a highly insightful article Fighting Off Design Stagnation in the latest issue of Design In-Flight magazine. This is the first time I have read DIF and I am genuinely impressed.

Whether working alone or as part of a team, there are many separate tasks in any project. If you are working as a team it is important that everybody involved understands the structural requirements needed to implement a design, and even if working alone it…

Testing a site design to ensure the widest practical audience should be an essential part of the design process on every web site. Of course in an ideal world, every web site developed would be tested both for usability and accessibility using real people.

I’ve been meaning to write more about my current thoughts on accessibility for a while now. In the last week I received (among many) some interesting emails on the subject and this has spurred me into writing.

NB: This article refers to a prior version of the WWF UK online store that I designed in 2004. I was pleased to learn yesterday that our work has won the ECMOD 2004 (European Catalogue and Mail Order Days) Best Charity/Good Cause Related Catalogue Award for…

I thought that it might be fun to talk a bit more about design for a while rather than standards, and release a few work-in-progress designs for sites that will be launched in the next few weeks.

Here it is, the new Stuff and Nonsense portfolio site. I always find it hard to design our own company portfolio site. So this time I took a different approach and decided to concentrate on the content first and let content dictate the design.

Saturday afternoon was spent in pleasant company at Tate Modern, walking the galleries and thumbing through hefty books in the shop. Conversations were often focussed on the arts and there were some very thought provoking works to see.

It’s funny how you build up a mental people before you meet them. So this weekend was going to be interesting as a band of Brit Pack bloggers, accompanied by their roadies and groupies, met up in London for art, beer and a bit of a chin wag.

(For the non-Brits (or anyone too young to remember), the picture is actor Robert Lindsay in the BBC’s 1977 sit-com, Citizen Smith written by John Sullivan who went on to write Only Fools and Horses.

Day three: I ran through how the 2004 Disney Store UK was developed, looking specifically at XSLT. The 2004 Disney Store UK website was developed using an ecommerce platform called Karova Store.

Day two: First of all I wanted to say the biggest “thank you” to everyone who gave their time to review the accessibility decisions that I made during the design and build of the 2004 Disney Store UK.

Day one: A skip through some of the markup and styles I used on the 2004 Disney Store UK store. One of the things that I found fascinating then about working with CSS was the application of new techniques to solve the real dilemmas which crop up during a site…

It was a busy ten days in the web-standards world. Jeffrey Zeldman was a new dad (congratulations) and Dave and Doug made big noises in Australia at Web Essentials. Here was my news in October 2004.

I’m working on the early stages of my new design company web site and I have become interested in the subject of accessible, ’alternative’ content for complex graphics and images, in particular portfolio images and screen captures of client sites.

I need your advice on something please guys, if you can spare the time. I started this site for a number of reasons, most of them pretty half-baked.

This is likely to be my last column before I take off for France on Saturday for a two week holiday with Sue and Alex. We have just completed a small site redo for a long standing client, the Empire Hotel in Llandudno, North Wales.

Stuff and Nonsense is in the final stages of testing a new e-commerce store for a client (more about that when the site goes live on Wednesday).

Looking back at an old site I made for a client made my rethink the way that that I have been coding my sites over recent months. So much so, that I thought I’d look again at the code structure of this blog and redevelop the HTML in a totally different way.

Simon Collison opened a can of worms recently when his (rather fantastic) personal site launched with the now famous’ticks’ for visited navigation links.

I love you. I have loved you as far back as I can remember. I think I have always loved you. I visit you many times every day and sometimes when I am sleeping, I dream that you come to visit me too.

An eagerness to please should always push a designer to do the best for a client. But there are times where just when you thought the job was finished, a client will say, Can we just add… The four stage sign-off sheet can be our best friend.

Today I discovered that the fantastic Cameron Adams had nominated our work for Goppa Fireplaces for a Web Standards Award. My smile got so big that my face almost split, thanks Cameron!

When I am designing a colour scheme for a client site, I am often lead by the colours used in existing logos or publicity materials. But when the client only uses one or two colours, I use a favourite technique for creating complimentary tones.

When I sold my shares in Karova earlier this year, many people wrote to me asking whether or not I was still using Karova Store (KS2) accessible, css based e-commerce software for my clients and whether I would still recommended it to them.

Back in June 2004, I wrote about a new chapter in the story of Stuff and Nonsense, the design company that I have owned since 1998. It was at that time that I combined the running of the two businesses that I owned, Stuff and Nonsense and Karova.

Working life at Stuff and Nonsense has been very hectic of late, infact there has rarely been a day off in the last twelve months.

About thirty years ago, my Mum had a friend called Reg, an ex-army chappy with a gruff manner and a rhodesian ridgeback dog called Simba. It was a huge creature. But this is not about Reg, or his dog.

With the many excellent design and CSS resources and blogs available, there seems little point in my humbly chiming in. Nor can I compete with the staggering talents of Shaun or Jon.

While conferences are still at the front of my thoughts, I thought it about time to announce the WOW Web Design and Project Management Conference in Silicon Valley in September.