If you take a basic skill like learning to knit, traditionally you were taught across generations by your close family circle. The world doesn’t so much work that way any more, and there are tons of things I want to know how to do you may be able to teach me, from container gardening to makeup application to driving. I like the ability to list and market lessons to make money, but mostly I like the idea of learning from my neighbours and meeting new people this way.

Site is a mashup of off-the-shelf directory software plus WordPress and BuddyPress. Soft launched a few weeks ago, it was long-listed for the Irish Web Awards in Best New Web App and was already covered in the Irish Times!

A few months ago, while chatting with my mother about an editor she works closely with and who I grew up with – literally, Patrick worked in our living room and saw me in my pyjamas every morning for all of my teenage years – I Googled his name and found he didn’t have a website to promote his freelance work.

This struck me as a spectacularly poor plan for 2010, and my mother agreed. Since my mother might charitably be described as “forceful”, Patrick wisely agreed as well. A so few days later, when I woke up very early with nothing pressing to do, I sat down to create PatrickMerla.com.

I hadn’t done a small-scale site in a long time, and I was curious to know how quickly a serviceable result could be achieved. This is actually a good and important question, because your average client doesn’t get value from setting the design world on fire, doesn’t care about winning awards, and doesn’t want to pay you for a selection of five increasingly courageous design iterations.

In fact, the average client just wants a website that looks okay, is appropriate for their market, can be found by search engines, can be understood by humans, and costs as little as possible. And I wanted to know how little really was possible. So, out of curiosity, I timed myself.

To start, I was armed with three pages of bio and credentials, a budget of precisely zero, the idea of using license-compliant Creative Commons images off of Flickr, and a cup of coffee. Years ago I had mentally bookmarked the free Aquatic themplate from Template World, and with few sections to create, the simple navigation finally seemed like a good project match.

For the record, nobody can ever accuse me of being up my own arse, since I just freely admitted I have used a template from the dreaded Template World. Luckily I lack the gene for shame. (I get that from my mother, too.)

Things I did:

• Created new images for the site and swapped them with the old layout images, because I am exactly that lazy;
• Played with these classic fonts used for print typography to render the name as a title, and grabbed a preview screenshot to avoid paying for a font I’ll never use again because I am exactly that cheap;
• Sourced a header photo licensed for commercial use from Flickr to avoid paying for stock because my budget was exactly that tiny;
• Edited the CSS to change colours from aqua to something more suitable;
• Edited the HTML to remove from the template several major classes and divs not used in the production site.

All in all, this site took four hours from putting the coffee pot on at 4 am to emailing my mother to say “What about this?” at 8 am.

Things I did not do:

• Consult with the client(s).
• Edit the text.
• Put it in my portfolio.

To be fair, even the most naive client would realise that several things I did not do here are normally fairly core elements of the web design relationship. What most clients don’t realise is how much of the project time is taken up by the missing elements, and how much that time contributes to the total project cost.

A lot of the hours of a project’s total budget are spent talking to the client about the project, rather than actually producing work for the project. For this reason and many others, I am not a huge fan of client collaboration. Generally I find it vastly more efficient to understand the goal, figure out a way to achieve it, and get it done. In my experience, if you’re good at your job, people are generally very happy to accept the solution you’ve built for their problem.

In this particular case, I was extremely motivated to keep a lid on Pandora’s box and simply deliver an acceptable result without discussing it beforehand because the client was effectively my mum. It took my mother six years to choose paint colors for the interior of her house. Several rooms were repainted more than once. One was remodelled three times. This is not an experience I want to replicate on a five page website. Or ever, really.

In addition, clients generally provide very poor copy for their websites. I pretty much never, ever put client copy onto a website as delivered, unless the client is my mother. Typically I spend anywhere from one to twenty hours fixing or writing web copy, depending on what if anything is delivered in the first place. All I did here is add additional paragraph breaks for web readability and remove one comma.

I will never reveal to her which one because then I will have to argue about putting it back.

Finally, not all sites go in my online portfolio. The ones I put in there tend to be the sites I like the best and would like to do more of. But not every site hits that mark; the reality of freelancing for most designers and developers is that a certain percentage of your body of work is the stuff you do to pay the bills, rather than to satisfy your creative yearnings. I don’t dislike this site; it’s nice enough and does its small job just fine. But it isn’t, let’s be honest, a great site.

Could it have been? Sure. With a twenty or forty hour budget, I would have taken a totally different approach and done something dramatically different. In this case, we didn’t want to do something elaborate and out of the ordinary; we just wanted to play it safe and quickly bring the client up to par with his peers so that when you Google Patrick’s name, his contact details are readily found. My reason for writing about a site I am the first to admit is entirely middling is to show that entirely middling is obtainable in about four hours, but only if we don’t have to discuss how we’re going to get to middling.

And to point out that since few clients really want to work that way, even fewer designers will give you a quote for a four hour website.

Time is money, baby.

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.

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.

Recently, I got “busted” in the comments on a blog post for using a template to create a website. The website in question is WordCamp Ireland; the template in question is the suitably named Fun Design Theme.

Except there really isn’t a question. First of all, that theme was specifically credited on the WordCamp site – a credit cleverly hidden in a page on the menu called, you know, Thanks and Credits.

Second of all, I am pretty transparent about the fact that I freaking love templates. While I bill myself as a web designer, the fact of the matter is that clients really hire me to solve a problem. Generally that problem is that they don’t have a website, but sometimes it’s that they don’t have a website and don’t have any budget either.

Solving both of those problems at the the same time is my job. While a client with unlimited imagination, a healthy budget and at least a few weeks in their schedule is the ideal, it is not always the reality for the people I prefer to work with. MarketingWriteNow had 24 hours; they got Concise. Fuchsia Cottage was done as a swap; they got EarthlyTouch. Radisens wanted something blue and efficient; they got BlueLight.

While it is theoretically possible I am the slowest web designer in the universe, I don’t think I am; a new design for a homepage takes about 8 hours, and XHTML and CSS takes about 5, even for fairly simple sites. Then there are all those hours of content bludgeoning, cross-browser tweaking, and custom functionality. It adds up.

But, using a template, I can often get small sites out the door in a single day, at significantly less expense to the nice person paying the bill.

Some designers consider this cheating. I do not, for a few reasons. First of all, I see it as being very similar to buying stock photography or stock vectors, both of which are very standard practice. More importantly, I think there is a skill set in picking templates and stock, and that that skill set has value. Most clients browsing through templates are stuck on the visuals, but choosing the right template for a project is all about the layout. If the structure of the container is right for the content, you can pretty much make it look like anything.

That’s because a good portion of the billed time is usually spent customising the theme’s graphics; The Good Wine Show does not, I like to think, look the same as Prominence, even though the layouts are duplicates. And quite often, even the most perfect templates require at least a few hours of customisation – template makers are obsessed with Java script hover menus, for example, but no hover menu will ever appear on any site I put my name on.

At the same time, I know a lot of designers will never, ever use a template on principle. I completely understand and respect that commitment. But frankly, I also know a lot of designers who bill out considerably more than I do each year. I made a decision a long time ago about the kind of clients I wanted to work with as a freelancer, and that client is most often a small business start-up. While the financial profile of these companies varies, the people behind them are also often broke.

And at my house, even broke people deserve nice websites.

My mother will, at the drop of a hat, tell you the story of how as a child, I very nearly didn’t get into my competitive fee-paying primary school because I stubbornly refused to put the blue peg in the red hole during what passes as an interview for three year olds. While my mother likes to see this as a testimony to my non-conformance and independent spirit, the fact is that I simply could not do it then and would very likely struggle to do it today at 37. My particular instances of Dyslexia and  Dyscalculia are pretty mild, although a lot of this Wikipedia entry applies to me, particularly:

• An inability to read a sequence of numbers, or transposing them when repeated, such as turning 56 into 65.
• Problems with differentiating between left and right.
• Difficulty with everyday tasks like checking change and reading analogue clocks.

I was 13 before I knew that calm and clam were two different words. Sixteen was an interesting year in that for the first time I was excelling in a math class (geometry) but was still struggling to read the clock on the wall. And I still remember London’s The Big Number Change in vivid gory detail because at 22, it very nearly drove me over the edge.

Despite the fact that up until last year, I thought Tommy Collison was one of the Collision brothers, this is all generally a less cumbersome problem as an adult then it was when I was in school. Spell check, spreadsheets, calculators and a husband who doesn’t mind saying “Your other left” 27 times a day make life vastly easier. There are really only two things that regularly frustrate me in the real world: dialling long telephone numbers and sending even short text messages, both of which are a slow and arduous processes.

The internet, however, drives me insane on a near daily basis. Here are three things I commonly encounter that are often rendered badly on websites.

Exhibit 1: Logins

The fact these boxes are presented out of order makes it three times as hard for me to log into my bank, because I have to count off the numbers in my PIN on my fingers three times – quite often out loud, which rather defeats the security reason for re-arranging them in the first place. Bank of America, on the other hand, has a login system that entirely avoids this issue, with a pictographic site key that works well.

Exhibit 2: Telephone Numbers

There are worse offenders out there but still, there is no chance – zero – that I could dial that Swedish Swiss number. While Europe does not have the standard (212) 555-1212 format that the US and Canada have, some breakdown of the number is always possible, even if the decision on where to split it is entirely arbitrary. The German number is much more useful, except I don’t speak German (or Swedish, for that matter.)

Exhibit 3: Booking Calendars

This calendar system BREAKS MY BRAIN. As far as I’m concerned, I’m now departing Prague three days before I arrive. Trying to book tickets on Aer Lingus literally made me shriek with rage last week. Things that are presented side by side should match up. (I don’t know why; they just should.) Otherwise, vertically arranging calendars that have offset dates is vastly clearer, every time.

I’m a firm believer that good design makes a better experience for everyone. If your login directions are so complex that a low-literacy user can’t use your system, it sucks for everyone. If your calendar is so confusing that a mildly dyslexic person can’t book anything, it sucks for everyone. If your navigation is so convoluted that a blind person using a screen reader can’t browse your website, it sucks for everyone. In other words, solving 90% of the web’s user interface problems are not about “special” design, they’re just about good design.

And Christ knows, Aer Lingus could use some of that.

Here’s a free tip: if you are on a low-carb diet, do not not not drink alcohol at the Irish Web Awards. You will get three times as drunk twice as fast, especially if this is the first booze you’ve had since June. After one drink, your feet will disconnect from your body, and after two drinks, you won’t be able to feel your face. Arguably, however, these are signs of a great night out, which this year’s IWAs definitely was.

Highlights of the evening for me:

• My incredible genius of a husband winning Best New Web Application or Service for KildareStreet.com. This site represents well over 400 hours of entirely unpaid volunteer coding and development to make Irish government more accessible to voters, and was done for no reason other than that it is desperately needed. It means the absolute world to me, because I love him, to have this work and dedication recognised, and I am so grateful to the judges. Thank you for making me cry.
• My favourite client Michael Kane winning Best Ecommerce Site for Curious Wines. He gave a lovely speech that very nearly got him divorced, and then bought us all a bottle of champagne – trust me, you really, really want a wine merchant for a client. He was over the moon, and I was utterly delighted for him. (And me!)
• My client Aidan O’Callahan at Amit.ie making the short list for Best Technology Site. To be honest, I built him his website awhile back and he asked for a blog, so I added one and never read it because I suck. Well, bloody hell if he hasn’t turned out to be a first class tech blogger – I am so impressed and proud of him.

The low point is that I again failed to thank Katherine Nolan for her hard work on Curious Wines. (Did I mention I suck?) We work together on all of the ecommerce sites I take on, and she is a GODDESS. If you get a chance to send her a congrats on twitter, it would be nice because these awards are genuinely more her foo than my foo at work.

Also, it broke my heart to find out that Marcus MacInnes, whom I love from the bottom of my cynical little soul, is leaving Ireland for London. I demand he return regularly to stay connected to the Irish web community, and if he doesn’t, we need to take away his passport and pelt him with potatoes.

On the plus side,  I did get see a ton of my favourite people, meet a ton of new @twitter folk, listen to the Greater Dublin Gay Men’s Glee Club sing my requests in the smoking lounge, and eat a mighty fine cupcake or two.

My sincere thanks once again to all of the judges, all of the sponsors, to Fran at Made In Hollywood for the fun swag, to Colm Lyon at RealEx for not swinging for me, to Rick O’Shea for doing his usual first-class job, to Mrs Pat Phelan for babysitting, and to Mulley for making it all happen year after year in enormous style. Thanks lads.

I am very, very happy and really, really need a nap now.

Although I’ve been designing and developing websites since 1996, I’ve only been freelancing for the past two years. I thought most of the learning curve was going to be about taxes and time management, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Most of what I’ve learned is actually about my own professional strengths and limitations, in ways that didn’t become apparent until I struck out on my own.

Here are five things I’ve learned that I wish I’d know then:

1. Work Good Projects with Good People

This took me a long time to figure out, and along the way I seriously cocked this one up a few times. The biggest mistake I’ve made is working with people I really, really like on projects I liked a whole lot less. These projects tend to be the very last ones finished, and the people who really, really liked me to start out with probably like me considerably less at the end.

Lesson: Love both the people and the project.

2. Agencies Suck

The money is often tempting, but these projects almost always go to shit. The agency sits between you and the client, and any client large enough to employ a PR or advertising agency is probably less of a client and more of a committee anyway.  Not a single agency project from the past two years appears in my portfolio. And not a single one ever will, because I am never taking another agency job ever again.

Lesson: Do not return agency phone calls.

3. Clingy Clients Cost Money

This one was hard to learn, because I get a lot of calls from people who are being screwed over, have serious site problems, or are completely clueless. And I really, truly want to help these people but I have learned to be a little more streetwise about why they are facing the problems they are facing. There are clients out there who will very sweetly suck all your time, energy and patience and while they may be nice people, they are not good clients.

Lesson: You can’t help everyone.

4. I’m Not an Ass (Wo)man

Probably the most important thing I’ve learned in the last two years is that back end design is not a good long-term project for me. I have always previously done this work leading teams, and now I know why. I can certainly look at your back end, spot the problems, and help you reorganise it to be much better, but if I have to design and code every screen, I’m going to die of boredom and you are going to die waiting.

Lesson: Learn your professional limitations.

5. You Can’t Work All the Time

I’ve tried. My jaunt to Florence in December was my first vacation since my honeymoon five years ago. But I’m 37, and it’s become obvious I cannot maintain the same pace I could at 27. I have been seriously ill three times in the last two years, which is something of a record even for me, and I’m pretty sure it’s my body’s retribution for relentless 18-hour days. Scheduling time away from work is very hard, but it also recharges my creativity and focus.

Lesson: If you don’t make time for down time, you’re going down anyway.

I’m a big believer in the power and potential of newsletters, but the truth is that few of them are done well. That probably explains why the only newsletter I recommend to other designers and avidly look forward to each month is MyFonts News. It’s an excellent newsletter built on a very simple premise: interview one rocking typographer, fill the newsletter with fontastic eyecandy, and provide download links for absolutely everything.

It’s basically free porn for font freaks. Yeah baby.

This month, however, I was doubly delighted as the featured type designer is Ray Larabie. It’s very hard to pin-point where design trends emerge from, but I’m pretty confident that back in the mid-90s, Larabie single-handedly gave birth to a web design fad simply by releasing a stream of vintage-inspired fonts for free download. Windows came with crappy fonts, Adobe still wanted about a million bucks per typeface weight, hardly anyone was designing downloadable type, and suddenly retro websites were all the rage.

And so, Ray Larabie’s fonts have accompanied me through a web design journey of almost 15 years.  Back then, Euphorigenic was my all time favourite font,  though Mufferaw was used heavily in my blog graphics. Several years later, Echelon made an appearance on our wedding invitations. Nueropol X and Teen have made more than one appearance in a logo under my hand, but these day, Blue Highway is one of my favourite identity typefaces and I’m just waiting for the right project for Sexsmith.

Leafing through the Larbaie fonts is a walk down memory lane for me, with different typefaces bringing back memories of people, projects, and places specific to the period when a particular typeface was in heavy rotation – much the same way, I guess, perfume or food or wine does those things for other people.

I have used many, may fonts through the years, from expensive classics out of major type founderies to quirky free fonts hand drawn by hobbyists. But of the 241 fonts that make up my primary library, Larabie’s appear more than any other single type designer – and quite often, they’re the fonts I hit first.

So thanks, Ray, for all the fonts through all the years – and for all the memories, too.

One of the many reasons I have been quiet on this blog for the past few weeks is that despite having any number of things to say, whenever I sat down to blog, the only thing that wanted to come out of my mouth was variations on OH MY GOD I HAVE TO PRESENT AT FOWD PLZ KILL ME NOW.

For those of you not familar with FOWD, it is a big deal. Despite never having heard of FOWD until a few months ago, that fact that FOWD is a big deal was made crystal clear to me by 300 people all saying “Oh my God, you’re presenting at FOWD? That’s a really big deal!”

Though nervous about this gig, I was excited about my topic and happy with my presentation. I didn’t know if the audience was going to be happy with it, but I knew it was what I wanted to say.

Granted, a talk called Stalinist Web Design is never going to be the easiest sell, but I was totally prepared to win, lose or draw on my own merits. What I wasn’t prepared for was getting completely and utterly thrown by failing technology when my presentation refused to advance the split screen (Slide view for the audience, Notes view for the speaker) after the first slide.

This is, apparently, how the universe punishes web designers who refuse to use Macs.

One the plus side, the endless interval between slide one and slide two did mean I got to hear several hundred people sing Happy Birthday to me, which was deeply embarassing but also delightful.

On the minus side, it also meant that when technology was finally beaten back into submission, there were no longer any notes on my visual view. No doubt someone more polished at this than I am would have made a more graceful recovery, but at that moment in time I was so grateful that I had an old fashioned, dead tree printed copy of my notes that I might very well have cried had I not been busy trying very hard not to vomit.

And so for Episode #308 of Do As I Say, Not As I Do, I actually read my presentation directly off the 13 pieces of paper in my hand.

For those of you not familar with the cardinal rules of presenting, they are:

• Never read off your slides;
• Never read directly from your notes – use them as prompts;
• Never blow your nose whilst you are mic’d.

Luckily, I blew my nose beforehand.

Anyway, this turned out to be one of those presentations people mostly either loved or loathed. (The fact more people hated Microsoft totally doesn’t count – that’s like shooting fish in a barrel.) I like people with strong opinions, so I’m as accepting of “was arrogant” as I am happy with “was fabulous.”

Mostly, I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad Carsonified invited me, glad I turned 37 in London, glad I got to meet a ton of genuinely nice and interesting people, and glad I got to speak at FOWD.

And really glad I didn’t vomit.