Vitamin has four good tips to remember when redesigning your home page.

1. 60 percent of users enter the average site from somewhere besides the home page, so focus on consistent site wide navigation.
2. Start out by designing a standard text page to establish the style and usability of the design before it gets hit by the home page land grab.
3. Show your love to the white space and keep it simple.
4. Forgot about the idea of “above the fold” because in reality every user has a different folder and over 75 percent of users scroll to some degree.

Thanks for the link Chris.

A List Apart has some great articles in it’s most recent issues covering dealing with clients and staying fresh. Kevin Cornell gives us a list of tips to stay motivated to create and Jack Zeal helps us figure out the right design metaphors to use when talking with clients so your clients aren’t always expecting Ebay when you gave them Facebook.

Seth Godin has a great post on his blog asking is good enough enough?. Instead of good enough he says we should redefine the objective to be “makes some people uncomfortable, changes the entire competitive landscape and is truly remarkable in that many of the key people we reach feel compelled to talk about it.”

Godin goes on to say that going to that extreme to succeed is synonymous with risking failure, getting fired and exhausting because you raise the bar every time, but at the same time, when you succeed, it’s worth it all of it.

Photo portfolio sites are moving beyond the simple Photoshop/Fireworks exported images thrown onto a page to where the site should showcase the photographers vision and personality while being cutting edge in order to attract new clients. Layers Magazine looks at three distinct approaches to photographers web portfolios.

My favorite photo portfolio sites are CSS driven sites that are easy to navigate and showcase the images with plenty of white (or black) space. I really don’t care for the flash driven sites with images thrown all over the place where you to make your mouse do back flips to get around.

When I first started designing websites one of the biggest problems I had was creating forms because I had no clue when it came to programming and servers. If I had access to a service like Wufoo I might not have had to learn vbscript, php and cdonts. You can try it for free on three different forms with up to ten fields.

Jakob Nielsen’s words were the bible of my web design (and I take an authoritative view of the Bible) when I first started putting web pages together back in the late ’90s. I have very dog-eared copy of his book Designing Web Usability and read every article on his web site.

Unfortunately, I think he may be losing it. His latest alertbox, Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, trashes web 2.0 and how web sites and blogs create conversations. He insists that the authority of well written article far exceeds the value from the realism of the conversation that a good blog will create (this blog is NOT an example of that kind of conversation). I have to admit that the Google search algorithm’s tendency to rank blogs higher have helped blogs become more popular, but that was a reason to blog in the search driven era of the Internet that we just passed out of and doesn’t account for the conversation driven blogs we are now seeing. It shouldn’t surprise me that he doesn’t get it. This is probably the first alertbox that I clicked through on all year (and that is just because everyone else is trashing him for it).

I sure hope Steve Krug understands how the web is evolving.

Jeffrey Zeldman cries out for companies to create web divisions solely responsible for their web sites instead of placing them in IT or marketing/communications.

It used to be that web sites were created in IT departments because of the technology components, but most companies have moved the web creators over to marketing/communications departments because of the communication nature of the site. I certainly see arguments for the web to exist in both places. I know of one large private university whose web office reports to both IT and marketing/communications.

Portals with a high degree of programming and server administration belong to IT, but websites that target costumers or internal clients fall closer in line with marketing/communications. But, I guess both of those definitions of websites (portals and targeting customers) are early web ideas with today’s mature “web 2.0″ working on building a conversation with your target through portals, blogs, message boards, etc. So, maybe it is time for a separate web division or at least a division in one of those offices with some independence.

Adobe has a new online color tool called kuler. It’s got some pretty nice options.

I took the 2007 Alistapart web design survey. Have you?

As students in my Online Design class embarked on their final project, I lectured on the overall site planning process and working with a client. Monday by noon posted their site planning process focusing on what questions to ask your client.

The more web sites I freelance, the more I realize how important client communications is. I have a lot of experience working with internal clients at the newspaper or my university and I communicating with them seemed easier than my freelance clients because we already had common ground from working at the same organization. As I reviewed the times I communicate with clients with my students, I realized I have five different checkpoints where I make sure the client and I are on the same path.

• Proposal & Estimate: Review the site outline and special features, talk about the advantages of the way I design (CSS, future proofing), sale them so they don’t get sticker shock.
• Wireframe focusing on general layout and navigation labels.
• Image comp created in Photoshop or Fireworks.
• Template/homepage laid out in HTML/CSS
• Final review

The more freelance sites that I’ve designed, the more steps I’ve added to the process. I think one of the most important aspects of communicating with a client is to make sure the final decision maker is reviewing your work along these steps. On one site that I designed, I got all the way to the final step and the client told me her boss didn’t like the colors and wanted me to add a shadow effect to the header and the footer. If the decision maker had actually been reviewing the work, this should have been picked up on step three rather than at the end of the design. The second bit of wisdom that I gained from that incident is to not quote flat rate designs, but rather quote hour estimates and hourly rates and when they pull a stunt on you, bill them for the extra hours.