I decided to pull them together and give them a little bit of recognition. I’m also going to give a little insight into what I think of the design, which I’m no expert but I figure it couldn’t hurt to list my thoughts.

iPhone App Design

Creator: @gracesmith
Link: http://drbl.in/20798
What I think: First of all the colors are amazing – the ever so slight texture does so much justice to this shot it’s not even funny. After that you notice the super snow globe which really gives life to this app design. Last but not least you can’t forget the call to action and the amazing typography. I’m not sure what font these are but I sure would love to know.

Add Transactions, Fast.

Creator: @kevinkalle
Link: http://drbl.in/22507
What I think: No idea what this app is going to be but it looks awesome. The icons are small but great they make the point without being obnoxiously over-sized. Kevin clearly understands mobile develop as the important elements are not only in-your-face but they are crisp and clean.

iPad UI for cookbook

Creator: @softfacade
Link: http://drbl.in/21667
What I think: Personally I don’t cook all that often but this app might change all that. Okay so, probably not. But I would like to open this app and look at it. The fonts on the left aren’t generally my favorite but they really work for this app. The icons work really well on the textured navigation bar at the top of this app as well. I really hope I remember to check out this app if I ever see it in the app store.

This is more of an internal list but I figured I’d make it into a blog post because this might help other designers/developers who do work for small businesses as well.

This list covers just the final checklist for a small business site, if you have any ideas to add to it please leave those in the comments. We would love to add more ideas to help out our future and current clients.

1. XML Sitemaps

Every site, large or small should have a sitemap. If you’re using WordPress there is a great plugin that will create a sitemap for you called Google XML Sitemaps. If your not using WordPress (you should be), you can use the XML Sitemap Generator.

2. Google Webmaster Tools

Adding a site to the Google Webmaster Tools seems like a minor detail, but it can provide a vast amount of information and details about your site.  A few features of Google’s webmaster tools include: Malware diagnostics, Crawl errors, Crawl stats, search queries, and links to your site.

3. Analytics

Even if your client doesn’t want the statistics for their website, you should install analytics so you can track the site and set goals. Personally, I think Google Analytics is top notch but some other good ones are Mint and GoSquared.

4. Google Local Business Center

To allow your client to get the most bang for their buck, you should make sure they are listed in the Google Local Business Center so they will appear in Google Maps and related search results. If you can’t do this for them then consider shooting them an email with a link to the local business center, so they can do it themselves.

5. SEO Checkup

This seems minor but I often over look setting the page titles and descriptions. The key to the SEO checkup is making sure none of the pages have the same title tags or descriptions, as this could have a negative effect on your rankings. Some prefer to do this while building the pages and some prefer to do it all at the end. It is all personal preference – no right or wrong way to do it as long as it gets done.

6. Social Security

Not the program run by the United States, but  take the opportunity to lock up names on social media sites for your clients such as twitter, facebook and more. This will not only allow them future room to move into social media but prevent someone else from taking the names.

Wrap Up

Some might think this list is common sense, but you would be surprise how often I forget to do one if not more of the above before we launch a site. Most of these take only a few minutes, but it’s time no less. We budget in an extra hour into each project to make sure we can accomplish all of the above for our clients.

At the least we send the client an email with instructions on how to do this themselves. I’ve found little tips like this really help build trust with your clients and it shows that you care about their business and that you want their business to succeed on the web.

Many thanks to Meredith Marsh of FLX Creative for proof reading this post!

We may be bias but this is probably the best interview you will ever read. Okay so maybe not, but thing is certain this is the best interview you ever read that features John O’Nolan. And to find out what animal is to the right, you will just have to read the article!

First may I call you Big John?

Hell yeah you can! In fact that’s what she said! Though other preferred pseudonyms include “John Teh Awesomez” and “Beaver John” – why? I just love Beavers. In fact if you have a picture of a Beaver, this would be a great place to include it! I could talk about Beavers pretty much all day.

Prefect! Well that’s interesting about your love for beavers. So our topic is client acquisition. You seem to be quite good at acquiring clients. What do you attribute your success to?

Well my current strategy for this is to focus all of my time and energy on NOT acquiring clients. Seriously – that’s actually what I do.

So far I’ve found that my very best client relationships have been with companies who have gone to tremendous effort to research designers, and have hand picked me cause they wanted to work with me. On the flip side when I’ve worked with local clients, who just wanted to use me cause I was “convenient” – it’s almost always ended up with a poor relationship.

So now I put out as much cool stuff as I can – I submit designs to places like Smashing Mag, and I do some guest blogging on Web Designer Depot and The Web Squeeze. The more places like this that I get my work featured, the more likely a great client researching designers is to find me.

Whenever I get an enquiry I tell clients I’m booked up way in advance (even if I’m not, but usually I am) – my strategy is to make clients really want to work with me. In the long run this means they respect me more, and are a lot easier to work with as a result.

Anyone who knows Big John knows he has been featured a lot of places including places like Smashing Magazine. Does this mean as designers/developers we should all shoot to have our work featured in Smashing Magazine or places like it and if we don’t we won’t become a big time designer/developer?

Oh noes! I totally should’ve bothered to read all the questions before I started typing out my answers! I guess you already know the answer to this is that Smashing Mag features have made a big difference to my career, and landed me some big name corporates. So in penance of prematurely answering this question, I will submit to 5 lashes of your finest whip.

If you could give three tips on landing a client what would they be and explain why.

This is easy – only put your best work in your portfolio, make contacts in the industry, and always make sure there are lots and lots of easy ways to get in contact with you.

Remember there are some really awful web designers out there (I won’t name any names) who are doing incredibly mediocre work but still getting featured in blogs / magazines / conferences. To an extent it’s always going to be who you know not what you know – so you might as well capitalize on that as much as you can.

In the long run though – you need to focus on doing really good work. Good work leads to more work

What do you think (or know) got the attention, and eventually lead clients like Virgin Atlantic Airways and Ubisoft to choose you?

I would say that this most definitely has to be down to the fact that I like Beavers – I think both of those companies heard that I was called “Big John” and “likes Beavers” and they were pretty much sold right then and there.

Aside from my love of furry things with big tails, they both told me that they’d seen my work on multiple blogs and they were impressed by my level of interaction with the design community on Twitter – so I think that helped!

On another note it’s worth mentioning that on both occasions I won the projects over big-name studios. Like you’ve probably been to a conference that they hosted or read a book that they’ve written – that’s how big. This just goes to show that small companies and freelancers definitely can compete in this marketplace, you just have to go for it.

Is Chris Spooner your hero? I mean after all he did get you a ticket to DibiConference.

Dude, Chris Spooner is TOTALLY my hero. I once told him that if he wasn’t quite so tall, and had a more womanly physique, I’d totally marry him. I was very lucky to win the ticket from Chris to attend the DIBI Conference next month, and I literally can’t wait to go!

While we’re on the subject of Chris – he recently designed a stupidly awesome logo for my biggest side-project for 2010. You can check it out and sign up for updates about what it actually IS, here: http://www.biothemes.com

Well that about wraps it up if you have any further questions feel free to comment below as I’m sure John would be happy to answer any questions you may have, after all he’s just a nice guy who likes beavers.

Below are some ways you can contact/keep up with John:

• Twitter
• John O’Nolan
• Lyrical Media
• BioThemes

Developers looking for work? Agency looking for a developer? Let us help with this simple business card exchange we have setup we will do it all for free! (Not to mention give some free stuff away!)

We are going to be collecting business cards from developers of all kinds from PHP/MYSQL to iPhone App developers and beyond. But we are not only going to collect them we are going to send them to agencies who are looking for developers!

But wait we are going to do you one better! The developer with the most creative business card gets a $25 gift card to their choice of iTunes or Starbucks.

Details/Rules

• Limit 100 Registered Developers
• Limit 50 Registered Agencies
• Tweeting it would be great!
• Share it on Facebook

With out any more boring details we give you the registration form:

Developer Registration | Agency Registration

You all rock! Thanks for participating!

Strengths

Inline editor

Personally I like to be able to have a WYSWYG and an HTML option much like WordPress offers but I can understand why the Eden Platform uses inline. Our clients are more visual so this helps them edit the site and see exactly how it will look. So we feel the inline editor, while not made for the advanced user, is a great strength to the Eden platform.

SEO Features

Business owners are always looking for easy ways to SEO their sites they want to rank higher and achieve more page views. While this feature is basic knowledge and a reminder at best for the experienced web design/developer it is a must have for the clientele Preation is trying to reach with the Eden Platform, small business owners. So for the Search Engine Optimization feature Preation get an A+.

Drag & Drop interface

Raise your hand if you like drag & drop! If you don’t have your hand up you’re not being truthful. Well Preation gets another A+ for their drag & drop interfaces. You can not only drag and drop the navagation and layout of your site but the actual layout of the page as well!

Pricing

Pricing is great and affordable for any business large or small. Not much more to say here!

Training

Personalized training is included with every Eden Platform account which is a must for a small business owner looking to dive right into building and managing their web site.

Weaknesses

While we have highlighted many strengths we have to be fair and note a few things that we see as weaknesses.

Hosted

Eden platform is a hosted solution built on the SaaS model, this can be viewed two ways. Some people see this as an advantage because they don’t have to manage hosting and they never have to upgrade software manually. As a web design/development company not being able to touch and update our software and code is something that can make us cringe. So depending on where you stand you can see this as a strength or weakness but as a web design/development company we view this as a weakness.

URL Structure/Control

The URL’s Eden spits out are rather funky. As you can see below eden uses a plus(+) versus the popular dash(-). Also a content folder is added to the URL, along with a lot of unneeded numbers. Anyone who has spent more then 15 minutes studying Search Optimization will know that the more relevant your URL’s are to your content the better your chances are to rank well in search engines such as Google, Bing,  Yahoo! and more. Preation does let you create custom URL’s similar to Facebook’s vanity URL’s but it will still redirect to an address like the one below.