Generally, when people approach me to work with them, they come bearing a certain number of assumptions about web designers. While it’s nice that someone somewhere who has clearly never met me thinks I’m a latte-drinking, WACOM-owning, Mac-plugged hipster, the reality is that I sit here most days in my pyjamas, working away on an ageing Dell desktop and trying to figure out how to open those new-fangled .docx document types.

And while I do take my coffee very seriously, my credibility in this arena is greatly diminished by the fact that I do not know how to roast my own coffee beans. It’s very hard to hold my head up at conventions for swanky web designers, which explains why I don’t go to those. (That plus I don’t get invited.)

So here, for your Monday morning amusement, are the Top Ten Things You Never Want to Hear About Your Web Designer:

• I am completely self-taught. I have never taken a web design, coding or marketing class, and am thus entirely unqualified for pretty much any job you might want to hire me for. I’m pretty OK with that.
• I learned to code HTML creating free pages on GeoCities, because I wanted to edit the colours on the provided templates.
• I learned to build an SQL query in FrontPage. At the time, it was the only visual builder around and it opened up the world of databases to me. I will be forever grateful.
• On the very rare occasions when I actually need to create a table for, you know, tabular data, I still use FrontPage, mostly because it’s so rare I can’t really remember how to code tables any more.
• I learned basic CSS from a woman named Vee McLaughlin over many hours in an ICQ chat window. She was incredibly patient and to a huge extent, I owe her my entire career.
• I live in the Motherfucking Bank Guilt Spiral. It is impossible for me to blog if I owe any client work. I always owe at least one client work; therefore I almost never blog. Or do laundry. Or buy groceries. Or go to the bank.
• I do not use PhotoShop. I mean, I can, but 98% of the non-vector graphics I create are done in PaintShop Pro. The version I use was released in March of 2000. I will never upgrade it.
• I overwrote a client’s live site by accident in 2001. There was no backup. I still have nightmares about it and have never made that mistake again.
• I stuck the color #92BD5D in my palette back in the day when we used only web-safe colours, and waited more than 10 years for it to become trendy so I could use it pretty much constantly. When it becomes passée, I may never work again.
• I am overwhelmed by data and have not opened my RSS reader in a year. 99% of my reading list comes from Twitter. I do not subscribe to Smashing Magazine, Mashable or anything else I’m supposed to be reading, including your blog.

The final blow to my credibility:

I own no Apple products and there is no part of me that wants an iPhone.

I make no bones about the fact that I freaking love permission based marketing, which is marketing wanker speak for email newsletters. Dollar for dollar, this is the absolute cheapest form of marketing you can engage in, and even if you’ve never thought of having a newsletter before, chances are that when we work together, you’re having one.

There are two reasons I love newsletters. One, anyone who would turn down the opportunity to put their brand in front of hundreds or thousands of people each week or month and generate click-thus for their site for pennies is a moron. Two, because these subscribers have opted in and asked to hear from you, they already have an affinity for your brand, product or service. These are essentially pre-qualified buyers, and if you can get them to open your mail and give them a strong call to action, you can pretty much convert the snot out out of them.

Plus I love doing them. I make a lovely looking HTML newsletter if I do say so myself, and the metrics you get from Campaign Monitor are like crack bananas for monkeys. Every mailing is pretty much 24 hours of stats porn, and the market intelligence in those stats is worth 1,000x the cost of the mailing. It’s fantastic.

So when I work with a new client, some portion of the time is spent on the mechanics of building their new subscriber list. People new to email marketing generally have a vague notion that you go out and buy a list somewhere, but in fact you never do this. You build your own list, slowly and carefully, with a combination of cunning and brute force.

The standard “sign up to our newsletter” form on most websites (including this one) isn’t, let’s face it, enormously appealing. If you want people to sign up – and I assume you do even though I do not – you need to help them do that:

• Incentivise People: Very few people want more email. However, many people would like the chance to get discounts, to enter a contest, to get industry intelligence, or whatever carrot you can offer.
• Bribe People: “Would you like to give me your email address?” is not really a winning sales pitch. “Would you like to enter to win a free Wii?” works surprisingly well, however.
• Catch People: Catch them at checkout with a tick box when they’re buying from your online store, and catch them at the till with a clipboard list if you have a retail shop. Don’t be aggressive but make sure you give them an opportunity to opt in.

The best example I have of guerilla list building in action is Ciara Crossan at WeddingDates.ie. Ciara does six trade shows a year, mostly bridal fairs. She doesn’t have a product to sell to brides that would make doing shows worth her financial while, which is sort of a bummer. On the plus side, the aisles are literally crawling with women who are perfect for her mailing list.

So that’s what she does. She parks herself next to a display stand with a champagne bucket and a romantic arrangement of bubbly and fluted glasses and says “Would you like to enter to win a free champagne draw?” several hundred times a day. The first time I saw her do this, she signed up 400 subscribers on paper entry forms, and then nagged one of her brothers into entering them into her database. (Ciara does not have siblings; she has staff.)

This is, from a guerilla marketing point of view, a brilliant result though not entirely unexpected – Ciara could sign Eskimos up for ice. What’s interesting from a mailing list point of view, however, is the unsubscribe rate. Our strategy with these gigs has always been to announce the winner of the bridal fair draw in the next newsletter, so that those manually-entered subscribers are very definitely getting the content they signed up for.  Still, you’d expect a lot of people to unsubscribe when they a) don’t win, and b) get a newsletter they had never seen before and didn’t exactly wake up that morning desperate to join.

But they don’t. These subscribers are such tightly targeted, high-value acquisitions that they stay. They unsubscribe at a rate of less than 1%. Complaint and bounce rates are so low as to be statistically insignificant.

And that, my friends, is pure marketing gold.

I’ll be honest with you and say that most people who are start-ups are absolutely horrified when I suggest not only that they go outside and talk to real people, but solicit them as well. You absolutely can do this kind of marketing online from the safety of your PJs using social networks, but you cannot target it on Twitter the same way you can at a trade show, gig, or conference. You can do a pretty good interest-targeting job with Facebook ads, but your click-thrus will be shit.

I am nothing if not the queen of Do As I Say, Not as I Do, so as a concrete example here’s how I would build my list if I was interested in increasing the subscriber base for the newsletter I have no idea what to do with:

• I would have launched my re-design with a contest for a free Bootcamp session and a Wii, tied together with a marketing strapline like “Get Business Fit” except less lame.
• I’d Tweet my contest once and rely on people with whom I have credibility and karma to re-tweet it for me, then pray it trickled down. I’d also run a Facebook campaign for cheap kicks and reinforcement.
• I would embark on a round of Barcamp talks, Open Coffee rounds and maybe a local tech conference or two. At the end of each talk I did, I’d send round a clipboard for signups and pimp the online contest.
• I’d Tweet and blog about it one more time before the contest entry closing date, and then call and yell at myself for being tacky and embarassing.

I’m pretty sure that with a bit of effort there, I could gain several hundred subscribers for the price of a Wii. Luckily, I don’t have €169 at the moment, so you will be spared from a campaign designed to get you to sign up for my newsletter, and I will be spared from having to actually decide what to put in it and sending it.

And really, isn’t it better when we all win this way?

Photo: ©Rob DiCaterino

Yesterday, while up to my eyeballs in CSS and transparent images, a surprising thought occurred to me for the first time:

Despite the fact that I’ve been pushing pixels out the door for paying customers for almost fifteen years, I have never had a website.

I have always been a blogger, and I have always used a blog to represent myself online, even when there were no blogs and I was writing in a hacked guestbook script. I’ve never had a website that, well, does what this one now does.

Some web designer.

Anyway, it was an interesting process, one which I have attempted and abandoned on two previous occasions. I think that what made the difference this time was the IWA Best Business Blog award at the end of March; blogging has been light not just because of the train thing, but because winning that award really stunned me.

I barely think of myself as a business; certainly not as a company or a service or – God forbid – a brand. And I certainly don’t think of myself as a business blogger, either; I mean, I blog about getting accidentally drunk and my dog, for pity’s sake.

But probably it was time to get a little more grown-up about this whole work thing, and that award was just the uncomfortable kick up the arse I needed. I’m grateful now in a way I wasn’t three months ago, and I feel a little better dressed for the occasion with the new design.

This redesign was a good exercise, though weeding out my portfolio was a bit of a shock – there were something like 35 sites in there, now trimmed down to a much more manageable 20. The hardest part was writing the About page, which was called “Services” for exactly ten seconds, all of which I spent wanting to kill myself. Now I just sound like the Internet’s Troy McClure instead.

No site is without its issues, so I would just like to go on record as telling any future clients, “Do as I say, not as I do.” No, you cannot have a 220k background image, for a start.

Some nice things:

• All old links still work, although you may want to re-point any links to SabrinaDent.com specifically to the blog.
• There is a colophon if you’re interested in the pieces that went into this.
• I now, apparently, have a newsletter. Trust me when I say: very infrequent.
• Social icons now behave like normal people’s social icons behave.
• And lo, there is a search box, like normal people have.

The search box makes me ridiculously happy.

PS: We lost some comments on the last entry when moving – so sorry.
PPS: My husband is a saint; I’ve put him through three days of hell.

Dear Internet:

I love the fact that you love this website. I love the fact that when people meet me, the first thing they say is “Oh, I love your website! It’s so beautiful!” It’s lovely to be known for a beautiful thing.

Unfortunately, I fucking hate it.

I cannot stand to look at it. I hate it so much, I cannot stand to blog on it, which more or less explains the extended radio silence. I’ve hated it since about ten minutes after I won the Most Beautiful Blog award in 2008. I’ve been meaning to change it ever since, but I’ve been rather busy making websites and falling off trains.

I’ve been waiting for a good time to sit down and issue forth a redesign, but lately I’ve realised that there is no good time – I’m always busy making websites and falling off trains. So that’s it – I’m committing to a new website design and I am not returning until I have one.

I have no idea if you’ll like it, or if I’ll like it for that matter. I have no idea what it will look like, but I do know this:

It will have social networking icons that actually function instead of just looking pretty. It will actually achieve the accessibility I keep banging on about. It will sensibly hold and present the content it needs to contain.

And by God, it will have a search box.

Love,
Sabrina