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Welcome back all, a brand new year and new blog posting – yahoodle! Okay, here goes with our ten ways of Orange.

Why?

Well, like kicking the tyres and checking that the toffees are in the car somewhere, we find it useful to remind ourselves how we do, what we do. I blogged about our general approach to our process, so this is more of an overview to the ways of Big Orange. Nope, it doesn’t related to the work of the great man himself…, it is certainly not Clockwork and won’t get you to Ibiza, but they are the words of the gospel according to Big Orange Software. Amen.

What are the ten then?

1. Bring fresh ideas to everything
2. Get good briefs
3. Measure twice, code once
4. Choose the right tool for the job
5. Basecamp the world
6. Go round and around then stop
7. Aim for 100%
8. Big clear deadlines
9. Eye for the detail
10. Review after the launch party
11. Turn the world orange
12. Launch an airline

1. Bring fresh ideas to everything

Our strapline is ‘Fresh ideas for the digital age…’ – okay, we decided we needed one, we did some **thinking** over some tea and came up with that one. We do quite like orange so the fresh part seemed to make sense but over the last few months looking back, I think we generally do try and fulfill that. There have been two situations recently where we have been invited in to companies to chat through some initial digital project ideas, mobile, web, social and so on. Both times the people we have been talking too have been really pleased with our ideas, “…instead of just suggesting blowing a large pot of cash on PPC Google ads!”. Which is nice. Living the strapline.

2. Get good briefs

What makes a project go well, is similar to a good meal in lots of different ways. You need lovely ingredients, hand nurtured, Fair Trade, locally grown, preferably cooked by Hugh Fern-Whit. However, the recipe is the most important thing after that. Good briefs on a project are the same for the digital world. They have to be right, contain all the information about what the project and the customer wants to achieve. Not reams of paper, but honest goals and objectives. With the odd chart.

3. Measure twice, code once

My father in law has taught me many things. Mostly, about looking after his daughter and the right way to carve a turkey. Another one of his good ones is about carpentry. He always says, “…measure twice, cut once…” as you cannot stick wood together. Terribly easily anyway. It is the same with our code. We make sure we chat, drink tea, draw things, plan and write it all down before we code anything as it saves confusion and poor products at the end of it. In the digital world it is too easy to think that you can just repeat or undo without thinking of the time implications on a project.

4. Choose the right tool for the job

Carrying on the tool analogy, it is always worth choosing the right tool, technology or software for the job when planning the first stages of a project. Sometimes, you might need to wireframe. Sometimes, you might be better creating a prototype. Sometimes, you might actually need to meet people and do some more talking before you can get to either of those. Whatever the project is, match the tools to the job as one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to projects.

5. Basecamp the world.

Les cartes est sur la table. Nous aimons le Basecamp. We just do. Our customers love checking and seeing what the latest is on a project. Our designers and developers can post up files or messages for comment. Everybody we give it to just seems to pick it up and run with it. It is cloud hosted so is available everywhere pretty much everywhere and all the time. It just works and we love it.

6. Go round and around then stop

To make sure things are clear for everyone and that we are not running around after our tails, we have some clear rounds of amends for our projects. Once we have delivered the first version of anything, there are two rounds of amends. An amend is a batch of feedback really, if that helps. As long as customers chug through all the parts that you send them, in one great hit, this does work very well. We can fix these as project milestones so that everyone knows where we are. It isn’t on the moon. It’s happy projectland (TM).

7. Aim for 100%

There is a great story about errors in manufacturing, an urban myth I am sure but this time, no aliens and no autopsy. The story goes that in an American car factory, cars start rolling off the line with one wheel that falls off, as they are driven to the other side of the plant. “Darn!” says the foreman and lets the line carry on chugging out shonky cars while he tries to see where the fault lies. All the while the shoddy three-wheelers are piling up, ready to be fixed once the fault is found. In a similar factory in Japan, the foreman has the same problem. “Aiiiiiiiii!” he exclaims and stops the line immediately to go and find the fault there and then, fix it, before any other shoddy cars fall off the line with three wheels. We love Japan and we always aim for 100% working. Correct. As described. Less errors, everyone happy, no pile of three wheelers.

8. Big clear deadlines

Over the years we have found it is much more efficient to work in blocks on projects. To do that, you need to work with everything you need, all the fonts, images, files, content and so on. Customers also like to know when things are going on so they can get their organisation ready and also track the progress of the project. How did we help with this? Well, we just keep to 5 or 6 steps for a project and don’t move from one to the other unless it is complete. Then, everyone is clear when we are doing what and makes sure they can either help by providing **pretty pictures** to us, or really good advice. It definitely helps.

9. Eye for the detail

Projects can sometimes seem like marathons stretched out over many months. Everyone gets fatigue towards the end and wonders if things are ever going to launch. What you do have to make sure at that point though is that you still have an eye for detail, what was the link for their Facebook page that needs to go into the footer? Are those really the right images to use? Is the Google Analytics account really that one to go into the footer? We don’t just trust our eyes though, we also have a very nice checklist to run through to remind us. There is a devil in the detail. He is called Cecil and we hunt him down religiously.

10. Review…after the launch party

For every project we do, it is nice to celebrate the launch. Caaaaaaaaaaake! After the sugar rush has subsided however, we always meet up with customer over some vitamin shakes and chat through the project. What went well, what didn’t go well and what can we do better our the three most important questions. Three is a magic number.

What’s next?

Over the next month or so, I was going to blog a little about **the process that Dares not speak its name** namely, testing. In a few different forms and with some nice, fancy but free tools. Nice. Yep, that met my test script – yahooodle!

A lovely cup of tea...

Kicking back in the office with a fresh brew, after finishing another proposal this week, I realised that I had included quite a large section on ‘how we do it’, namely our process for tackling web projects. Web development or project management strategies are like diets – there are so many of them out there and most web people have probably tried them all. Actually, not many based on cabbage soup to be fair, so maybe that doesn’t quiiiiiite stack up, but you get what I mean. Scrum vs. Agile vs. Waterfall, the list goes on. So, which do we follow? Hmn….can I duck that question and instead let you know:

1. What we do
2. What we don’t do
3. What we have learned from our join experience

as that is probably more illuminating. Over the next few weeks, I will break apart the individual elements above and give some examples from recent projects to illustrate how they work in reality. Do you do any of the following when starting a web project?

What we do

1. Research - put on a very large brew and grab a pen and paper, its research time! Before we put finger to key and set out what the project is going to be, we throw ideas around, talk about what we have seen recently and browse around to check out similar projects that have succeeded or fallen at the wayside, to see if anything can be borrowed.

2. Proposal - all of our best ideas go into one of our proposals, designed to be easy to read and to allow you to pick and choose what you want to go ahead with. We like to give you more than you were expecting, maybe even some surprises and things you weren’t thinking of, to give you some real choice there.

3. Kickoff - the most important meeting in the world! We like meetings about as much as you probably do, but the first one, the kick off is the most important. Its a chance to meet everyone on the team from our side and yours, as well as sketch out the main details of the project. When we say sketch, we do mean sketch. The large paper and pens come out to draw new pages and discuss.

4. Survey – after hearing from you about what you want from your digital project, we really recommend you ask some of your current users / listeners what they think. It might re-inforce what you are current thinking, it might well not. Even so, it does give you a good baseline opinion to return to later on, once the new shiny project is installed. We can help you set this up so don’t worry if this sounds daunting.

5. Moodboard – once we have heard what you think and what your users think, its time to make a moodboard. This is really a collection of colours, fonts, layouts and other rough design ideas to match your early thoughts. We find it a very useful first step to show you some early ideas and get a quick response to feed into the next stage.

6. Write – it is very easy to forget that websites actually need to be written. Before anything can really be designed, the design team need to know what type of content they are going to have to include.

7. Design – coming with a design that suits you and your project can be tricky. It should always be done with the users in mind, which may or not equate to your own personal taste or not. We have collected a large amount of visual bookmarks that you can flickr through, to see what sort of styles you think are good for the project and the ones you don’t. We then create a design and revise it twice before signing it off.

8. Build – one of the most exciting and probably the longest phase in any project, is the welding together of the design and content created so far, to build the project. This is usually in our Content Management System VEBO on our staging servers. This allows you and us to play around with it before it goes live, so we can perfect it, polish it and tweak it as much as we like.

9. Test – an area that we could easily devote several blog posts about, testing the project is key. This will usually involve lots of different types of testing including browser testing, code validation and more. Do ask if you want to know more about this before we cover it in a future post.

10. Redo – you only test, because you want and need to redo things. This is an iterative process, gradually refining the project until its ready for final launch.

11. Launch – break out the sparkly, its launch time! Usually, in the two to three week period before this, we will help you roll out a marketing campaign to make the most of this event, through social and conventional media. We do this because we want your project to succeed as much as you do. It’s also fun, being able to tell people how good the new thing is.

12. Re-survey – remember those user surveys we did way back when? Yep, now is the time to repeat them. You could either do this with the same group of people, or just ask random visitors to the site to repeat the survey work. This could also involve elements of A / B testing on key parts of the site, to make sure they are doing as much as they can for you.

13. Measure – it is all about the numbers these days. Well, I think it probably always was, but anyway, visitors, page view times, referrers and more are all important. Are the numbers up or down? Are they the right numbers? Where is successful and where isn’t?

14. Review – two to three months after the project launches, we like to arrange a review of the whole process with you. How did you feel the project went? What was great about it all? Anything we can do better for next time? The main focus of the review meeting is to assess whether the project was a success based on your criteria and what the future holds for it. Rarely does a project get launched and just end there, there is always a future for a project, even if it has to change form slightly.

What we don’t do

Rush. Use Comic Sans. Impose Ideas. Do The Same Old. Be Too Conventional. Take Too Long.

What we have learned from experience

Get Content Early. Listen. Revise and Adapt. Get Feedback. Survey and Test throughout. Have Fun. Launch great things.

The Big Orange 14 Steps – 2 more than the average bear

Coming soon, the more complete guide in the next issue to the first few steps here, with some practical examples and great links. Honest! Stand by for incoming…