Web Toolbox and the Ideal Website
We often get requests from smaller companies asking for design or consulting services within the 1,000 Dollar range. Even though most of the jobs would be routine work that can be done in a couple of hours, the nature of our service oriented business and the incredibly expensive place we operate from (Tokyo) makes any job under 10,000 Dollars a programmed loss.
Services like “X3″, our easy-to-understand online brand experience evaluation system used to be reserved for premium clients. In the future we will offer standardized consulting services per online credit card payment.
Reasons
Administration
Even though we use efficient templates, the standard administrative time alone takes an average of about fifteen hours from the first estimate to the contract to the invoice to the final book keeping. And twenty hours of work in the most expensive city of the world doesn’t allow us to take on small jobs, as much as we would like to do them.
Service
Consulting and design services require a lot of client communication. To deliver a design that exactly meets a clients desires always goes back to many meetings and an intense email and telephone conversation. As much as we like that part of our job, it is one of the most time and thus cost intense elements we are dealing with.
Solution: iA Toolbox
Reduce to the essence
If we were to offer our work for smaller companies, we would have to cut down on administration as well as communication and reduce our engagement to what we do best: Work.
In order to cut the whole and communicational administrative process, we decided to offer an iA Toolbox with templated design and consulting solutions for smaller clients, who are ready to implement our core work by themselves. Therefore we will start offering MS Office templates (Word, Powerpoint, Excel), Illustrator business card masks and even standardized consulting services through an online shopping solution. The client downloads our templates and standardized yet project specific recommendations and then moves on by himself.
Imagine you can get an understandable usability analysis plus recommendation from a professional within 24 hours under 1,000 Dollars. You choose the service, pay per credit card and three days later you get a nice document that tells you what to do with your website. We plan to add new web tools to the box, such as text control and translation.
Next Steps
We are currently adapting iA’s website to meet the new requirements. We will base the new design on an idea that has haunted us since we began making websites. A website with a basic grid fully based on Fibonacci’s Golden Cut. After weeks of pushing and pulling here it is – the ideal website:
The ideal website, based on Fibonacci’s Golden cut will soon be available as a paid download in different colors including free template-updates for the period of one year
And we are thinking about offering the current iA template (wordpress) as our first paid download. Hopefully by the end of next week.
Excitement
We are very excited about this, as we have been thinking about this for quite some time and we also believe that it has not been done before – or at least not been done well enough.
The “ideal” website looks great. I would happily use that design for all my sites if I could!
Feel free to advertise your paid downloads on http://bla.st/ for free when they are ready.
I did a flash-based website designed around Fibonacci stuff here - http://www.farishams.com/ - it was the artists idea, she’s really into it.
I don’t suppose you have a vector path of Fibonacci’s cut that you’d be willing to share? I’ve always wanted to play around with it, but couldn’t find a good way to construct it electronically.
A website built with divine proportions– what a beautiful idea!
@Adam: You can get a curve for Illustrator and Photoshop on http://shanzcan.com/photoshopahol (Tutorail #28) or create it yourself: Learn it here: http://textism.com/bucket/fib.html
@Adamn: Wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fibonacci_spiral.svg
I made a very simple little tool to help with this kind of thing. Phiculator! http://www.thismanslife.co.uk/phiculator/
Er, can you tell me what is stopping anyone who wants to copy your CSS just .. uh .. copying your CSS?
It would seem to be the simplest thing in the world.
Well,
as you know a full on wordpress template is not just a CSS. The free templates around are not very advanced. Ours is pretty easy to handle. And that is the main benefit.
Secondly, as for the CSS as such: Using other people’s digital work one to one without paying is like using pirated software. Kind of OK for individuals, but really bad manners for companies. Note: Our target are not individuals.
Third, our download would not look the same as our website. We don’t like to see exact copies of our design. Just like you don’t like to see people dressing the exact way as you do. (Just so we understand each other: We don’t mind people using our design as a base for a clearly new design at all).
Fourth, it would not be a single simple download. It would work like a subscription. The template will be updated and improved at least three times throughout the year and as a subscriber you get the updates for free.
Five: Download a perfect finished template is much more economic than fiddling around by yourself.
fair enough Oliver. Thanks for the reply.
Personally, I’m thinking about building a new website and I’ll be heavily inspired by your work, which I greatly admire. Your WP template will be useless to me because I’m so sick of the constant security problems that I won’t use WP for anything new - or any PHP based system, for that matter. Are you considering any other platforms? I think one of your happy crew are at least somewhat involved with Radiant .. will you be doing anything with that?
Also, WP is a mess. Good luck implementing localisation - I note that this site does not have any japanese content, despite being in Japan. I further note you have no “new media” such as podcasts or the like, or any interactive functionality beyond comments. It is possible for WP to be shoehorned into more flexible functionality, but it’s hardly ideal, and as I said earlier - the constant updates will kill you. Do you have any plans to implement a custom solution?
Anyway, sorry for the long comment, thanks for the reply.
Ether,
Wordpress is not as bad as you depict it. The security argument always comes up first when one talks to tech people, but it is more of a hypothetical problem if you ask me. The fact that you condemn PHP for security as such tells me that you must be such a tech guy. Tech guys of course have a strong bias against a nasty language like PHP. To break that bias look at the economic side of this: On the user and owner side Wordpress is extremely efficient.
The fact that we have no other “new media” has nothing to do with Wordpress. It’s simply a matter of free time. Especially since we got involved in that newspaper project, we have to fight for the time to work on this.
Last but not least: Yes, Radiant is a fantastic platform, but it needs more love. What we want to offer at first is a downloadable economic, solid, quick and easy solution. And it’s really hard to beat wordpress there.
(Why do you know that we are involved there?).
Any progress on the project?
Assuming it’s a reasonable price I’m interested in it and since I can’t afford a designer for a personal website your theme intrigues me (the old one that is, I’m not terribly fond of the current one) because most themes are pretty horrible and I don’t have the time to make my own design.
Hi Wednesday,
We are working on the shop right now. Hopefully we’ll go online this week. Actually we aim at small to mid-sized companies, so I am afraid it won’t be too affordable for people with personal websites.
Also, we decided to go with the current theme, as we believe it works better. What do you not like about the current one, btw?
Currently our price scheme is:
We are aware that it’s not cheap, but as you know, nice working design isn’t cheap either. The price is rather low for companies and too high for private people. But well…
Best
Oliver
Ah well. Reasonable enough for a company website though and I may take a look at it for that purpose.
As for the redesign, I’m unsure about the details. I’d have to see both side by side and you’re not listed in the Wayback Machine so I couldn’t find an old copy of your website.
Quick problems though: The search field is ugly. The black on grey simply doesn’t look good (the font doesn’t help) and the square search field bothers me – though that’s probably from being a Mac user.
I do like the navigation at the top showing how you arrived on the page, but not in favour of the standard navigation. It’s now impossible to go from this page to one of the other main pages (such as services) without retracing one’s steps.
Thanks Wednesday,
The search field was a misunderstanding between me and Chris (the programmer). I was too busy to imitate the correct form field in the sketch, and he thought I wanted a designed one.
The new navigation system is in place as most users requested an easier way to navigate through the posts.
We figured that as most people are interested in the blog and not in the company side we’ll create two main sections: The service one and the blog one.
Being in the service one, you can easily flip through all the pages. The template will allow you to have submenus as well, btw.
Reading through the blog you have an easy way to go through all the blog posts without scrolling or going back to the overview page.
It would not be too difficult to integrate the navigation in the blog, but it would be an overkill…
Hi Oliver,
I know bodhi has contibuted to Radiant because I have also contributed to Radiant : ) Agreed it needs more love, in fact I am pretty much writing it off as stalled/dead at this stage.
You underestimate the risks of WP and misunderstand the motivation of crackers. Although the software is indeed patched quickly after the frequent flaws are revealed, there is no guarantee that all the flaws are public. Furthermore, even if the delay between the flaw announcement and an available patch is just 40 minutes, will all site owners update anywhere near as quickly?
Updates are far from painless unless you use subversion tricks, which almost no WP do, to my knowledge. And just recently the WP team had an almost unbelievable hack where the actual download file was replaced with a compromised version! I know at least one person who pulled every WP site he had after that little demonstration of total incompetence on the WP team’s behalf.
Crackers are not interested in defacing your blog, nor are they working manually. Almost all cracking these days is automated scripts, and the goal is to compromise the server, not the blog. A script kiddie couldn’t care less about your blog - he wants to run botnets, send spam and use your server to compromise others. You misunderstand this at your peril.
And you’re right, this is all from a techie perspective. But when you can’t send email because your mailserver is blacklisted because your server’s been cracked and some jerk is sending two million spams an hour from it, you’ll come around to the security-first way of thinking real quick. I speak from grim experience : (
Very good points Ether,
I really appreciate your contributions.
I am aware of the real dangers, very upset about the latest sloppiness of the Wordpress team. If there were any economic alternative to Wordpress, I’d go for it. Radiant - stalled or not - doesn’t work as a packaged solution and most comparable systems (Drupal etc) have the same problem. What we did half a year back was a sweet and secure system but it required quite some programming and Bodhi’s excellent skills to get it there. The problem you have nowadays with a customized solution is also that the client constantly compares the available functionality to his private Wordpress blog and get kind of upset comparing features…
I have some experience with bigger commercial expensive CMS packages (won’t name no names) working on the T-Online project and what I have seen so far doesn’t makes me a big fan of those either. Neither when it comes to security nor when it comes to usability or administration.
Wordpress just seems the best trade right now. It is a super sweet system and the upgrade took us 15 minutes. That’s not too bad I guess. Of course it depends what modules you use, but our current setup won’t require too much modules.
However, we are currently considering to design and reconfigure wikimedia so it works as a corporate website CMS. It would be interesting to hear your take on that.
Hi:
You must’ve made an enemy somewhere down the line because when I clicked on your link for Fibonaci’s Golden cut it is somehow linked to whothefuckcares.net–just thought you’d like to know.
Thanks Vickie. I took the link out.
The original website was remade and moved; the link to the article about fibonaccis golden cut is here on whothefuckcares.net:
http://www.whothefuckcares.net/information/art/techniques/the-golden-cut/the-golden-number-and-the-golden-cut.html
Have fun, enjoy