What they wanted was a newly-graduated designer, looking for work experience, and getting them some solid commercial experience. They contacted two of the local colleges (including one with whom we’ve had a previous positive experience with getting in a web geek) as well as UEA and the STEP programme, both of whom have services for finding placements for graduates. They believed all the media pap about “[x] graduates applying for every job“. What a mistake.

The entire process turned into a nightmare. The colleges didn’t come back with anything – the one they’d previously used didn’t even bother responding – and UEA and STEP between them threw back ten applicants, of whom six were useless from the start, and not even qualified as graphic designers. Three of those had decided that “designing a new site” meant “developing a new site” – which it doesn’t and didn’t – despite the company specifying that it was a graphic design role.

Of the four interviewed, three were incredibly awful. I understand that they’re just out of university, but if that’s the level for recent graduates, it’s a real concern. Even the CVs they sent out were all formulaic and dull – if I’m looking at potential designers, I want to know they’ve got an eye for at least how a CV should look, something “designed” to make it stand out from the pack.

Now maybe it’s unrealistic – it’s certainly an opinion based on the other graphic designers I know and have worked with before – but if I’m interviewing a designer, I shouldn’t receive a blank look when I ask what things inspire their designs, or to name me a design that they really love. I wouldn’t have cared at that point whether it was something on cars, bikes, office equipment, technology, websites, anything – I just wanted to know what they thought of the industry they’d chosen to be part of, the sphere they had just graduated in. Three of the four responded to both those questions with a look of total incomprehension, no spark, no nothing. Not one of those three could name even one designer they liked.  I could whiff on for ages about certain designers, concepts etc. – I love design, I just can’t draw to save my life.

The company have finally found someone who I think will be really good. His work stood out from the first moment – a CV with a design to it, even though I personally hated the image used, it was still designed – and the projects he’d done at university, including his final project which was fantastic.  In interview he brought in a portfolio (none of the others had) and could talk about what inspired him, the stuff he liked, the way he worked and so on. It was a reassuring interview after so many let-downs, and I’m really pleased that he’s come through.

It’s been an awesomely frustrating experience – one that’s put the company to the edge of saying “Screw it” and going a completely different route. For myself, I’ve found it utterly amazing how bad most of the people who applied for the role were. And it’s not even like they were trying to get the role as an internship, which seems to be the new ‘latest greatest’ way of getting work experience. The designer is being paid – after all, good work should be rewarded, not got for free as an internship – and while it’s not great money, it’s better than nothing. (We’re using the standard established STEP rates) So it’s not as though anyone is taking advantage of the graduates – it just seems like they don’t know what the hell they’re actually doing.

A very sad – and scary – state of affairs.

It purports to come from Amazon, and tells you that your order has been despatched, along with some links that are clickable.  The links actually go off to a russian site, but I’ve no idea what that does, and have no intention of finding out.

The biggest clue that it’s a spam/scam are

• the prices are all in dollars (which is a bit of a giveaway for us in the UK)
• you haven’t ordered anything from Amazon
• it’s got a link to “see the ordered items”, rather than just listing them in the mail
• the email address it’s been sent to isn’t the one you’ve got listed with Amazon

But all told it’s one of the better spam/scam/phishing-type emails of the moment.  Best to publicise it and be aware of it.



How Not To Do It

So a few pointers…

1. You really expect your voters to type in www.linlithgowandeastfalkirklabour.org.uk ? Get real.  A quick search on any domain registrar shows that sites like LabourLinthgow, LinlithgowLabour, LabourFalkirkEast, and FalkirkEast Labour are all available – you could have those four snappy easy-to-remember domains all pointing to one site, and make it easy for people.
2. And separate sites for each constituency? Really? I guess joined-up communications and corporate message just kind of got by-passed.
3. A hotmail email account? For politicians? You’ve got to be kidding me. (Mind you, the actual site doesn’t even appear to list proper email addresses, and just uses a contact form) Hotmail’s OK if you’re twelve and don’t have any other ones. As soon as you’ve got a domain name of your own, use that instead of some freebie email that makes you look like a clueless twelve-year-old.  Hotmail’s fine as a personal email address I suppose, but not for anything remotely professional or business like. (The same also applies to emails from yahoo, gmail, myspace and others)
4. It really helps to have the proper names in your Twitter and Facebook contact details. Not “site.com/yourname”. Even more impressively, I can’t even currently find their proper account on Twitter.

And these people are indicative of the type of politicians who brought in the Digital Economy bill?

They’ve obviously no real clue, and have taken advice from either an SEO shyster (“Oh, you’ve got to have all your keywords in your web address”) or an agency who know some stuff but not enough, nor how to communicate it to their clients.

I’m in half a mind to send them a spec letter asking if they want it done properly.

We’ve been doing some work to update the website for Cathryn Moulden, a reflexologist based over in Suffolk. The site was originally created by a freelancer, and it’s distinctly SEO-hostile. So while we’re working on that, we’ve also launched a Wordpress-driven version at Suffolk Reflexology. The content is the same (for now) and all the contact pages go direct to Cathryn, so she’s not losing out on any business either way.

What we’re interested in – and we haven’t charged for – is seeing how the two sites compare over time. The Suffolk Reflexology site is being done with a serious eye on how it can be optimised for search engines, and while we’re doing a number of things for the original site, we’re using some new and experimental techniques on the Suffolk Reflexology site.

As always with SEO techniques, the results won’t show up overnight – they never do. But it’s going to be an interesting project, regardless.

I think I’d probably have been more impressed if it had been a bit more organised. For a conference based on web stuff, it’s a bit of a worry to go in and be checked off with bits of paper, no tech in sight at all. It’s even more of a worry when it takes them the whole morning to sort out internet access over the wireless network.

Those niggle aside though, it was a pretty good day.

Session One was a talk on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) by Alan Hamlyn from Wuup, which was pretty good. There were some useful takeaway points from it, although I personally found it was aimed at a bit of a lower tech/knowledge level than I’d expected. Mind you, it’s good to know that not everyone believes Google Sitemaps are the way to go – something I’ve said before. They’re useful for getting the site registered into Google in the first place, but more of a pain after that. Let the Google bots do their thing properly once they know the site exists.

Session Two was from Dan Gates (@danblog) on Marketing on Social Networking sites. He discussed using Twitter for marketing and customer service stuff, as well as making use of Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and others. While it’s an interesting thing to be considered, the bit that wasn’t really discussed was how much infrastructure is needed by a company in order to monitor their Twitter feed for customer service issues etc. Sure, it’s nice to get the feedback, but if you’re complaining about a company and they take even eight hours to respond to a Twitter feed, then they complainers will be even more annoyed than when they started. Not so smart.

Session Three came from Joel Hughes on Web Project Management – something I need to learn far more about managing, whether for work with the current main client, or for work with smaller everyday clients. We do a lot of it already, but again it’s always good to see how other people and companies do it.

Session Four, the final one before lunch, came from Dave Asheden, and contained a lot of really good information and ideas about team-building, project management from a human point of view, and essentially what makes both good develops and development teams.

After lunch Session Five has fallen out of my brain entirely. No idea what it was – I’m sure it was good, I just can’t remember it at all.

Session Six came from Cenydd Bowles of ClearLeft and Relly Annet-Baker, about user-experience and usability, plus the benefits of a good content strategy in order to build a successful site.  Again, a good and useful session that I’ll take a lot more from than I thought I would.

The final Session was presented by Elliot Jay Stocks, about progressive enhancement to websites and why we shouldn’t worry about whether these enhancements are only visible by a few people initially – so long as they don’t break for the majority.

All told it was a good day, and I’m sure there are plenty of things I’ll recall from it when the time comes that I’ll need them.

Worth the money? Definitely. And still some room for improvement too, which is no bad thing for the future…