A colleague gave me an article about things you have to do and things you do not have to do during a project. I found it very funny, true and usefull. Thus, I allow myself to recopy it on my blog.

One thing to do before starting a new project

1. Invest time in getting organized.

2. Clean up your desk.

Getting rid of the visual clutter around you will establish an environment where creativity can flourish.

3. Estimate your capabilities and capacities.

Always ensure that you have enough time and resources to do the job justice, otherwise you’ll end up cutting corners, pushing back deadlines, and deliver a sub standard experience to the client and the user base.

4. Be updated about current trends.

React to, don’t blindly follow, trends. Ask yourself, “Will those new practises look as perfect tomorrow?”

5. Get to know your clients.

Ask questions. A lot. Don’t be afraid of sounding stupid, or being a pain in the butt. Its better you get a complete grasp of a project before embarking on it.

6. Communicate and listen to your clients.

Immerse yourself in who the client is and who the visitors are. Get to know the client as well as humaly possible, understand motivation, their golas and really listen to their responses.

Ensure you incorporate what tehys have to say into your thinking rather than deciding everything in advance.

7. Make sure client’s needs are defined.

Get to know what the project is all about and what the client needs. Not what they want, what they need.

8. Make sure the scope is defined.

Dive deep into any data you can find to help frame your project. That includes xisting product metrics, custromer feedback, market landscape, and more. Saturate yourself with context. Find out excalty what’s involved and work out (in your head, at least) how you’re going to go about delivering.

9. Make sure the goal is defined.

Talk with the client. Understand their goals. Once you know this, your solutions can target those goals. Without it, it’s hard to defend a design. With it, you can explain how and why your design solves those problems.

10. Make sure you have a good plan.

Planning on paper helps you stay focused and ensures you won’t forget any of your ideas as you dive into work. You don’t have to come up with a rigid schedule, but identifiying key milestones, and what steps you need to do to complete them BEFORE you start will help keep you on track.

11. Affirm the vision for the project.

Often objectives summaries and punch lists aren’t enough even a seminal vision should be reviewed in a casual brainstroming session to be sure that the initial steps taken are going to be productive and adversity averted.

12. Observer the competion.

You want to learn from the mistakes of your competition, event if you’re not out to make a buck on whatever it is you’re creating. Find out what they did right, what they did wrong, and what they didn’t do at all.

13 Get money up front.

Did is say get money up front? No matter how small you are, the client should respect you enough to pay you to get started.

14. Clear your mind.

If possible, finish up previous projects or at least major milestones before starting a new project. This will help take any pressure off and clear your mind.

15. Brainstorm, sketch !

Write down as many random ideas and sketches as you can on pieces of paper. Nothing has to make sense or have any real value but just get the ideas out on paper.

16. Discuss your decisions.

Bounce off your ideas with someone who has a keen critical sense. Research till you drop. Get as much collateral information about the market, similar projects. Clarify the brief till there are NO gray zones, because this will become your twilight zone.

One common mistake you should always avoid developing web-sites

1. Starting with a strong approach

Never assume clients have the same goals as you. At least an hour out of your day should be dedicated to email, IM, phone. Never try to fit an idea into a design or CMS.

2. Designing before planning

Building the design before planning the structure of the HTML templates can too often result in last-minute hacks.

3. Thinking that at some point you’re done.

Successful webistes are organic. You are never done.

4. Rushing in.

Don’t rush into production. The ink is barely dry on the contract and already they are opening Photoshop and editing code. Not enough time is given to laying the ground work. A good web designer needs to understand the context of the project. Why is the site being built ? Who is the target audience? What call to action do you want them to complete? Who is the competition? How is the sites success going to be judged? Having all of this informationat your fingertips makes the design and development stages much easier.

5. Having a print mentality

A web page isn’t a piece of paper, and accommodating different font sizes, or even different window sizes (or different media!) is a brilliant, powerful feature of the web.

6. Not accounting for unknowns.

Schedules change. Availability changes. Things happen. This kind of gets back to organization. Good planning is difficult and takes a significant amount of time.

7. Planning up front

Thinking about the results before you’ve done the process. Don’t just split out a site that fits the CMS template.

8. Copying ideas.

Looking to much at other sites to determine what the design should look like, instead of thinking about the specific needs of the site on which you’re working. Don’t worry about what the other guy is doing. Think for yourself. If all social networking sites had the same features and design, what would be the point of having more than one?

9. Copying yourselft

Don’t settle with what’s comfortable, or try to force a style on yourself. This goes for fonts, colors, techniques… try to something different every time. If you have a distinct style, it’s going to come through anyway, without having to force it.

10. Putting yourself or/and your clients first.

Don’t design or develop for yourslef or for your client instead of for your client’s visitors. The best sites always focus on the needs of the user and are designed from the outside in.

11. “I’ll fix it later”

Never writepoor markup or programming and say “Oh, I’ll fix that later”. That seldom works out well. No, do it right the first time. Every time.

12. Leaving the content until last.

Creating structure based on appearance as opposed to the role of the content. Deciding to use a heading element because “the text is big” is the wrong way to go about it. Instead you want to pick a heading element because the content in question is a page or section title/heading.

13. Making it more complicated than it needs to be.

Keep it simple. Do a little research; understand the technology you’re working with.

14. Never concentrate on only one thing.

A good site needs good concept, writing, design, and code. Details are great but you can still care for them when 90% of the work is done. Try to give every aspect of the webpage the time it deserves.

15. Sticking to your plan – whatever happens

Build to scale. Don’t think that your initial plan is all you want to build and end up building it in such a way that you can’t extend it later. Otherwhise you’ll be regretting it when you realize you need to add new functionality and you end up having to rewrite a lot of things.

16. Starting to test your site with IR.

Make sure that you always start coding for a standards compliant browser. After that you can fix the remaining IE related bugs.

17. Norrowing your perspective.

Don’t design looking solely at your enormous uber-designer-friendly monitor. Take a look at your design on multiple resolutions right from the very start, so you can keep problems down the line to a bare minimum. Don’t just think about today’s desktop browsers – keep forward compatibility in mind whenever possible (even if that’s just writing clean markup).

Filed under: Agile on May 13th, 2009