This week on Unfinished Business I’m joined again by Elliott Kember to talk about Speedos, fitness tackers and—one day before Nike announced they’ve stopped making hardware—my Nike Fuelband. We discuss Cennydd Bowles’ Letter to a Junior Designer and if there are differences between designing a website and designing a digital product. I ask if designing with data is just an excuse for not having enough confidence in an idea and suggest that banging on about ‘empathy’ deserves a punch in the face.

Special guest Jeffrey Zeldman joins me on Unfinished Business this week to talk about how important is it today for designers to be able to tell stories and sell ideas to clients. We talk about whether designers need empathy or strength of character and conviction in their ideas, whether the web needs ‘account’ menpeople and what it feels like when people you’ve mentored go their own way.

It’s a packed show and as we both love advertising and Mad Men, we end by talking about my Don Draper depersonalisation disorder theory and what we expect and hope from the final season which starts next week. Even if you’ve not seen Mad Men, I think you’re going to like this episode.

New regular Ashley Baxter joins me on this week’s packed Unfinished Business to talk about eating well and staying fit, my goal to lose 14lbs and why my competition with Paul Boag is spurring me on.

We also talk about how happy I am that Stuff and Nonsense has been shortlisted for Agency Of The Year at the Net Awards. Last, but not least, there’s Ashley’s Scottish slang word of the week. I’m also over the moon to learn that Unfinished Business has been shortlisted for Podcast Of The Year. When you listen to the show, you’ll hear I obviously wasn’t expecting that.

On this week’s Unfinished Business, Laura Kalbag and I talk about the business of speaking at conferences, why it’s essential to be paid to speak and the importance of contracts that cover the paying of expenses, who owns the content of a talk and what conferences can do with that content after the event.

Illustrator Josh Cleland is back for this, the sixtieth episode of Unfinished Business. We talk about Milton Keynes, losing my voice and what can go wrong if you suck too many Strepsils. (Spoiler: diarrhea.) We discuss how we’re both trying to achieve a better work/life balance and what’s been driving us to work all the time.

Despite possibly the worst Skype connection in history, I chatted with Ashley Baxter on Unfinished Business this week about her semi-professional photography business. We talked about the photo walk and workshop that she recently organised in her home city of Glasgow and why conference organisers should host more photography workshops at their events. Aye. And let’s not forget Oor Wullie!

Laura Kalback, Kalbang, Kalbung, Cowabunga! Kalbag is back on Unfinished Business this week and we talk about her troubles at her bank and how changing your name once you’ve built an online persona might be a challenge. We follow up on our previous conversation about business ethics, then discuss how much time is reasonable to spend on researching requirements to provide a client estimate.

This week on Unfinished Business, Elliott Kember and I talk about how Director Lottie Dexter introduced the Year Of Code initiative and most importantly the message we think it sends about our industry and what we do.

If you haven’t got sick of the sound of my voice on Unfinished Business yet, last night I spent a very enjoyable hour in the company of Jeffrey ‘Thundercloud’ Zeldman on The Big Web Show.

The last time I spoke with Jeffrey ‘on the air’ was back when The Big Web Show was on the 5by5 network, episode 27, when he and Dan Benjamin still hosted video interviews. That time I had a book, Hardboiled Web Design, to promote. This week it was just two old friends talking about what matters to us; business, design and people. There’s some personal stuff in there too, about my therapy and being called Andrew again.

I rarely listen back to my own podcasts once they’re edited, but I listened to our chat this morning and it made me smile just as much as I did while we were recording it.

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This week, Josh Cleland is back on Unfinished Business. We talk about updates on our various piracy issues and whether it’s necessary to add copyright notices or watermarks to our work. We also discuss why people at large put a low value on creative work.

This week on ‘Net Awards Podcast Of The Year’ nominated Unfinished Business, Liz Elcoate, from some other podcast, joins me to talk about why it’s acceptable to admit when we’ve availability and to ask people for work. We talk more about having flexibility in our rates and why it’s reasonable to quote different rates to different people. We also touch on whether web designers should charge ‘rush rates’ and why working for free can be good for the soul.

Speaking of the Net Awards, did I mention that Unfinished Business has been nominated for Podcast Of The Year at the Net Awards? No? If you’ve liked what you’ve heard over the last 55 episodes, please vote for us. After-all, this is the only podcast where you hear about the things that are really important. Apes (obviously,) soap, weeing in kettles and of course Purple Rain.

Laura Kalbag is back on Unfinished Business this week to talk about how far in advance we book client projects and what we you do if a client wants more work done, but we’ve other work booked for the next few months? We discuss upping our day rates and how Laura’s client suggested she charge more.

No Unfinished Business would be complete without talk of pirates and smugglers and the Milton Keynes Geek Night All Dayer conference which took place last week.

It’s a really good, funny episode of this week. I’m joined again by Elliott Kember to talk about whether being acquired is just a poncy way of saying that you’re taking a job at a big company. We discuss Google buying a nest thermostatNest Labs for $3.2billion when they could’ve got one for a hundred quid at B&Q and why some people have reacted very negatively to the deal.

Best of all, we start and end this episode with a song that sounds absolutely nothing at all like Purple Rain. You don’t get singing like that on The Freelance Web or The Big Web Show, I can tell you.

Thanks to our sponsors this week, they were Espresso and Shopify. Please support our show by visiting them.

This week on Unfinished Business, I’m in a relaxed mood as I’m joined by Josh Cleland to talk about how we filter enquires from potential clients through our websites and emails. We also try really, really hard not to talk about moviesfilms.

For the first Unfinished Business of 2014 I’m joined by my really good friend Dan Davies to talk about film marathons, what we’d hoard for the apocalypse and Dan’s totally unrelated career change from front-end developer to UX designer.

For this, the fiftieth episode of Unfinished Business, I’m joined by regular guest Laura Kalbag. We talk about ethical statements and whether we, and the companies that people work for, should set out what they will and won’t work on our websites.

I would like to say an enormous thank-you to Anna Debenham for helping me get started with this podcast. To all our guests and sponsors for making the show possible and to you, our listeners for being lovely people. I’d like to wish you all a very happy Christmas holiday.

This year’s been a really good year for British web industry podcasts and I’ve loved making Unfinished Business. It’s become a great way for me to wind down from work on a Friday afternoon and has been my main outlet for the things I’ve had on my mind, largely replacing me writing on this blog.

Well it seemed like a good idea at the time. If you haven’t been keeping up with this week’s Christmas crossover podcasts, we’ve just wrapped up the week with yours truly and Sarah Parmenter guesting on Boagworld with Paul And Marcus.

We talked about what we all want for Christmas, whether we can switch off from work during the break, how we deal with clients who insist their site be live by some arbitrary point and what our web design new years resolutions are? (All made up questions, obviously.)

We thought that getting together with friends to record a series of Christmas crossover podcast episodes might help us, and you, get in the mood for Christmas.

The wonderfully generous Sean Johnson joins me twice on Unfinished Business this week to first answer a listener’s question about competitive payment terms, then to talk about our downs and ups of 2013.

The Net Awards returns for 2014, but unlike previous years, this time I’d actually appreciate your vote.

Illustrator Josh Cleland is back on Unfinished Business this week to talk about his work on the new Stuff and Nonsense go, go, go, rillas header, the difficulties of designing our own branding and how we can make visits to our sites more memorable by improving the design of pages we often forget.

Nominate Unfinished Business for the Net Awards 2014

One way you can say thanks for the time we take making our podcast every week is to nominate Unfinished Business for Podcast Of The Year at the Net Awards 2014. We’d love, love, love you if you did that.

This week on Unfinished Business, I’m joined by Elliott Kember. We talk about listening to feedback and the differences between client feedback on design projects and customer feedback about apps. Then I amuse Elliott with my adoration for LINGs CARS and that I think Ling is a marketing genius.

In this week’s extra length special episode of Unfinished Business, Jon Hicks and I talk exclusively about Doctor Who, so there isn’t a single piece of business advice anywhere in the show — not that there’s usually much.

In particular we talk about the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary episode, so if you haven’t seen that yet — spoilers! Before that we talk about ‘An Adventure In Space And Time,’ the story of the First Doctor William Hartnell and ‘The Night Of The Doctor’ mini episode that set the scene for the 50th Anniversary last week.