We are very happy to announce that BirksWorks is now part of the 1% for the Planet network.

We wanted to make sure that we are doing all we can to ensure that our business leaves no footprint on the Alberta environment, so besides our Canadian hosting facility being one of the greenest in North America, we felt that joining 1% was a great way to show support for local environmental non-profits in a tangible way.

No business is perfect. Sometimes we drive when we could take the bus. Let’s face it, most Calgary businesses derive some revenue from Oil and Gas. But life is about balance so giving 1% of our revenues to green causes is our way of showing that ethical business and the environment can coexist.

Web design and development is a broad church. That is to say, there are competent professionals working in the field from a range of diverse backgrounds with varying levels of experience. A junior designer with a solid understanding of CSS and design principles can put together and reasonable website. Likewise, a seasoned coder with a lifetime of C#, VB, ASP.net and Perl can do a pretty good job too. If they both approach a project with a respect for standards based design, usability, accessibility and cross browser compatibility, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t hire either one of them.

But finding a good web designer can be difficult. No doubt a Google search of your local area will return plenty of listings. But who shouldn’t you hire? Here’s our favourite bad web designer warning signs:

• Your web designer uses visual editors (Dreamweaver/Expression Web) as their primary tool to design and maintain pages.
• Your web designer is prepared to work on a spec basis (for nothing).
• Your web designer talks a lot about how to get ‘guaranteed front page listings’ on Google.
• Your web designer is also a Social Media Consultant, Social Marketing Consultant or SEO Consultant.
• Your web designer still calls themselves Webmaster
• Your web designer is still in High School
• Your web designer was recommended by someone with a terrible website
• Your web designer is cheap
• Your web designer tells you to host your website with a $6.99 web hosting company
• Your web designer uses tables for page layout
• Your web designer makes extensive use of text in images
• Your web designer tells you Accessibility doesn’t really matter
• Your web designer uses Internet Explorer 6 as their primary browser
• Your web designer tells you they are experts in web design
• Your web designer doesn’t have access to both Macs and PCs
• Your web designer can’t tell you what an .htaccess file does

If your designer fails more than 3 of the above tests, we suggest you run and don’t look back.

Recently, we’ve attended a few events with other members of the Calgary business community. I’ve exchanged brief elevator pitches, listened to life stories and met some weird and wonderful people, some successful in their fields, others, well, on their way. When the subject of web design inevitably crops up, it has been interesting to hear the range of responses. Everything from ‘that’s so such a cool job’ to ‘aren’t web designers everywhere these days?”.

But to paraphrase a typical Calgary business owner’s response – “Oh yes we’ve got a great website; we’ve had it for years. We were one of the first. We look at other websites and we just think they’re terrible. We have a really good Flash landing page. And whenever we need to make any changes, we just ask my cousin’s nephew, because he’s really good at video games”.

One could almost believe that there was no way in the world there is room for any more web designers in Calgary. Clearly, our teenage competitors have the market sewn up. What’s more, our potential clients, these entrepreneurs, business leaders and startups already have fabulous websites that couldn’t possibly be improved, right?

So in an attempt to reassure myself that we are not in the wrong business, I took the last 10 business cards I had collected from my pocket and thought I might take a look at some of the websites listed thereon. Here is what I found:

• 10 out of 10 failed W3C Markup Validation
• 10 out of 10 failed Section 508 Accessibility Test
• 8 out of 10 had less than 5 pages indexed by Google
• 7 out of 10 had identical or similar page titles/descriptions
• 6 out 10 had menus/layout broken on Blackberry or iPhone
• 5 out of 10 used inline styles
• 5 out of 10 had no commenting in markup
• 5 out of 10 were hosted in the United States
• 4 out of 10 had no script level analytics tracking
• 4 out of 10 contained spelling errors
• 4 out of 10 used tables for layout
• 3 out of 10 contained low quality stock photography
• 3 out of 10 used the same font size for titles and body copy
• 2 out of 10 had no h1 or h2 tags
• 2 out of 10 had layout errors/bugs using Firefox/Safari
• 1 out of 10 showed an Under Construction page

And that was just a quick review. I suspect that more problems would come to light under closer scrutiny. In fairness, not all of these issues are dealbreakers. Markup doesn’t absolutely have to validate, particularly if a site is powered by a CMS running multiple plugins and addons. But markup should be semantic, well structured and commented even if it isn’t 100% valid.

It isn’t always obvious from the code whether or not a site is powered by a content management system or blogging platform but I suspect that only 2 or 3 from the 10 had any form of content management.

In summary, this exercise reinforced our certainty that there are still very few standards based web developers in Calgary, building quality sites that are usable, accessible and findable. Of the people I have talked to recently, many remain convinced that their sites are ‘optimized’ for search engines, no doubt encouraged by the army of self proclaimed SEO Consultants and Social Media experts. The SEO industry feeds off clients with bad web design and poor quality content. If sites are built and maintained properly and have useful and relevant content, appropriate search engine ranking will follow. Stuffing meta tags full of keywords is not optimization – it’s sloppy and counterproductive.

For the avoidance of doubt, the three pillars of accessibility, usability and findability are not achieved by keyword stuffing, black hat search tricks, Flash landing pages, 1990’s clipart or animated .gifs. Effective websites starts with hiring meticulous designers and developers, committed to web standards and the separation of styling and content.  And avoid anyone describing themselves as expert. They almost certainly are not.

And what does this mean for the small business owner? In short, a website that actually does what it is supposed to do. Attract, inform and convert new customers – and allow you to measure it’s success in doing so. Added benefits include reduced long term cost of maintenance, easier updating, reaching a wider customer base and reduced downtime.

So, I’m glad we are based in Calgary and delighted that the market for high quality web design and development appears, for now at least, to be wide open.

Recently we attempted to install Ubuntu 9.10 on a MacBook Pro, already running Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Windows 7 side by side under Bootcamp, to create the ultimate triple boot environment. Bootcamp doesn’t officially support Linux partitions but there are reports of it working for some.

Bootcamp prompts for Windows OEM media during set up at which point we inserted the Ubuntu disk image DVD. All appears well for the first few screens but we lost our nerve when faced with the various partitioning options, unsure as to whether or not the OS X partition would survive. Before committing to a new partition for Ubuntu, we hit ‘cancel’ and backed out of the install screens. On reboot, while holding down the Option key, both OS X and Windows 7 partitions were shown. OS X booted up perfectly but selecting Windows 7 presents a blank screen and the ominous statement – “missing operating system”.

Undaunted, we turned to rEFIt. rEFIt is an alternative boot menu for EFI-based Macs, including the 2008 onwards Intel Macs. In short, rEFIt allows you to choose between multiple operating systems at system startup.

So if this happens to you, a simple (.dmg) install of rEFIt on the OS X volume and a restart brings up the eEFIt GUI, offering a choice between OS X and Windows. Choose Windows and voila, your orphaned Windows partition is rescued and you have a handy rEFIt boot menu whenever you login in future – without holding down the Option key, as required by Bootcamp.

You can install and run rEFIt on your main OS X volume or from a USB drive.