alexandragraham.com

Is there a legitimate reason for witholding your telephone number in business?

I have recently changed my phone setup in the office to divert to my mobile if the business line isn’t answered which has given me a better insight into the people who are calling my office. As a result I have noticed that every single caller who has witheld their number so far has been a call-centre or telemarketer making an unsolicited call usually to “save me money on my phone costs”.

It has reached the point where I am considering ignoring all calls from “private numbers”. Continue Reading »

As my business expands to a point where I may need to consider taking on an extra pair of hands to keep up with the workload, I have been thinking a lot about the next generation of web designers and developers and how prepared they are for the real world of web design on completion of their studies.

When I became interested in working in the web industry I wasn’t even 100% sure there was one! I was 16 and remember trailing into town with the family to get some books on this HTML thing that meant I could make a website of my own and that’s where it started, with books. I taught myself, often neglecting my traditional studies and ended up studying multimedia at TAFE after high-school. Continue Reading »

I’m not talking the “Wild West” kind, more the kind that give the web industry a bad name. I have been lucky in the last 6 years in that I haven’t come across any of these so called cowboys and as a result I was beginning to think they were a myth. A project I have recently become involved in, however, has changed my viewpoint entirely. Yes, cowboys in the web industry do exist and they are giving us a very bad name.

Everybody hears the horror stories that people have apparently experienced but until now I had never been so close to any such activity. You know the kind; project misses its deadline, design work isn’t up to scratch, no reporting on deliverables is made, there is no firm plan, money is demanded, team members are sacked, clients are held to ransom with no functioning product, each party blaming the other for the project’s failings - the list goes on.

I don’t know about anybody else but this sort of thing makes my blood boil. Continue Reading »

I got into a debate at last night’s Port 80 meeting with another attendee over websites and the importance of design. Having mistakenly made the assumption that I was a designer (my background is in Front-End Development, which sits somewhere between designing and programming) my opponent explained to me how design served little purpose on the web and all people were interested in was information and being able to find it easily, therefore the only eyes we need to please are those of the search engine. Now, I am paraphrasing what was said but that was the gist of their argument.

My response was that design is required to make the information usable and easier to understand, to help the visitor make informed decisions. It’s all well and good to have a single page website with a white background, line after line of black text separated by some headings – it presents the information to the visitor. However, it does not encourage the visitor to actually read the text or engage them in your offering and it doesn’t help them find what they are looking for. Continue Reading »