Designing websites can be a long and complicated process. Dealing with clients, designing prototypes, coding, programming, and testing – there’s a lot to keep track of and a lot to make sure gets done. That’s where checklists can make your life a whole lot easier. With lists of points covering multiple areas from content to usability, from accessibility to standards, you’re a lot less likely to overlook important parts of a site.

You can create checklists for very different points. For example they can be focused on making the relationship with your clients better. You can use the checklist to gather information from your clients or prospects at the beginning of each project, so that everyone is on the same page.

Also, you can make checklist just for yourself. The list should help you to design your website. There are probably many items that could be added on the checklist and it’s important that you pick the ones most significant to you.

You can create sections with all your check points included. Here an example:

Planning
- Briefing
- Develop a business plan
- Budget indication
- Initial timetable
- Choose a good domain name
- Choose high quality web hosting

Design/Layout
- Basic website Elements like navigation, content/body and footer
- Logo and Branding
- Attractive Design
- Avoid information overload
- Effective colour scheme
- Develop focal points
- Readable font size
- Use of space

Usability/Accessibility
- Usable, easily accessible, and consistently placed navigation
- Check for dead, broken links
- Test the website on real users
- Compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Content
- Unique content, presented in an exciting, straightforward manner
- Regularly update content
- Break content up with headings, captions, images, videos

Website Optimization / Standards
- Standard compliance / cross-browser compatibility
- Optimize page size (images, content, video, audio)
- Clean code for updating / multiple programmers

“If only our translation quotes were produced automatically”, the translation agency fintrans thought. Today, with the help of Spoiled Milk, they are.

fintrans is a different kind of translation agency. Based on
 the principle of “thinking globally, acting locally”, the
 organisation has established itself as a “lean and mean“ agency that can count on the support of inumerable specialised translation professionals in their respective fields and located around the world. As they say
 themselves, there is hardly any language combination, for which
 fintrans could not offer a translation.

The agency has undergone steady growth throughout the last
 decade, and recently, fintrans sought to optimise its flow
 of producing real time quotes and receiving orders. The channel for this
 change: Their website.

Spoiled Milk was pulled in to do what we love doing: Implement solutions in order to make business processes smoother. We built the
 new fintrans website around a web application that allows
 users to submit their own document and instantly receive a quote
 based on the size of the document and the deadline.

In the back-end, users can retrieve an overview of all their
 orders, choose to approve or disapprove translations, set a rating
  and download finished translations. Similarly, fintrans’ agents can have a full overview of orders and assign tasks
 to specific translators.

Visit Fintrans to have a look for yourself.

Wildcards in Ruby’s regular expression (reg-ex) are by default greedy, meaning they will capture as much of the string as possible.

Let’s say you have to parse some strings which will be either “Sweet entertainment!” or “Great entertainment!”. Now, for the sake of this example, let’s say you want to grab the first word of these strings (”Sweet” or “Great”) using a regular expression with wildcards.

If you wrote the regular expression like this /^.*t/ it would capture “Sweet entertainment” because it’s greedy by default, so everything up to the very last “t” will be captured, hence, “entertainment” is included too.

Luckily, there’s a simple way to make your wildcards non-greedy: Just append a question-mark to it like this: /^.*?t/. Now, the wildcard is non-greedy and you get the wanted outcome “Sweet” or “Great” without the “entertainment” part.

The highlighted characters represent the matching part of the string:

/^.*t/ = “Sweet entertainment!”
/^.*?t/ = “Sweet entertainment!”
/^.*t/ = “Great entertainment!”
/^.*?t/ = “Great entertainment!”

So there you go. Just append a question mark to the wildcard to make it non-greedy. This rule also applies to the plus character, which by default is greedy too, but can be turned non-greedy by appending a question mark the same way: /^.+?t/.

Predictions say more about the presence than about the future.

However, they may serve as inspirational food for thought to act (or counter-act). I here bring you a short selection of the more interesting ones. Feel free to add comments or links, if you consider yourself more clairvoyant than these authors.

• Brian Solis provides a “Social Network Advertising and Marketing Outlook for 2010“
• Christopher S. Penn believes 2010 is the year that calls to “Play To Your Strength“
• Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch makes guesses for “Top Ten Digital M&A Deals For 2010” and lists “Top Technologies That Will Rock 2010“
• Frederic Lardinois of ReadWriteWeb questions: “Will 2010 Be the Year of the Smartphone?“
• Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, advocates that we have reached “The year of the products + a new way of working“
• John Baldoni shifts the table and asks “How Will You Make a Difference in 2010?“
• Mike O’Toole from MarketingProfs assesses “2010 in Social Media“
• Paloma Vazquez of PSFK collects “Lessons Learned from Google: What to Expect in 2010“
• Robert Scoble indicates “Hot Startups to Watch in 2010” + Pt. 2
• Springwise brings to us “Top 10 business ideas for 2010“
• Taly Weiss has 34 slides on “Trend Predictions in 140 characters“
• Tammy Erickson from Harvard Business Review believes 2010 brings “Five Changes in the Way We Work“

A highly popular travel book series meets a revolutionary ecosystem. This is the story of how Phaidon requested Spoiled Milk to bring their Wallpaper* City Guides to the iPhone platform.

CHALLENGE

Phaidon Press is the world’s leading publisher of books on the visual arts, with offices and distributors worldwide, and a history dating back to 1923. Last year, the publishing house was looking for ways to push their Wallpaper* City Guides into new digital formats and had fallen for the outstanding usability of the iPhone.

In Phaidon’s own words, “Wallpaper* City Guides present a tightly edited, discreetly packaged list of the best a location has to offer the design conscious traveller. Here is a precise, informative, insider’s checklist of all you need to know about the world’s most intoxicating cities.”

The iPhone and iTunes platform is a revolutionary ecosystem that not only brings an intuitive new interface to the mobile industry, but also opens Apple’s tested iTunes model and fan base to a whole new market. As the community grows, so does the users’ expectations that their favourite services will be available for the iPhone.

The match between the audience of the Wallpaper* City Guides and the users of iPhones and iPod Touches was striking and the decision to bring the unique content of Wallpaper* City Guides content to the mobile format appeared mandatory.

Phaidon decided to start out by producing 10 iPhone applications for the best-selling books: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Paris, Rome and Tokyo. With proven skills in merging strategy, technology and aesthetics, Spoiled Milk was chosen as the digital partner for the project.

 
SOLUTION

The look, logic and structure of the Wallpaper* City Guide iPhone apps largely follow those of the printed books. Clean design, simplicity and consistency.

In the section ‘the city at a glance’, a horizontally gliding image features a number of handpicked locations around the city. The different neighbourhoods of each city are characterised by varying colours and each area contains a list of places to visit. What you are able to spot in the city’s skyline is likely to be included in ‘landmarks’ with more information about the site.

You are able to filter by hotels, cafés, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, architecture, shopping, sports and out-of-town activities. If you only have a limited amount of time to spend in the given city, ‘24 hours’ tips you on how to spend your time, or you can choose to receive tips from an insider – e.g. Berlin’s gallerist Lisa Bosse.

The GPS comes into play when choosing ‘Directions’ on the bottom of each item page, which takes you directly to a Google Maps visualisation of the route from your current location to the requested destination.

• Continue to all 10 Wallpaper* City Guide iPhone apps in iTunes
• Hurry up getting Berlin while it’s free
• Read more at Phaidon’s showcase