The ZURBlog is where we discuss interaction design and strategy.

I'm highlighting an article that was published five years ago. The dotcom era taught us a few lesson about hiring and the Web 2.0 boom continues to challenge us on building web teams. The talent question is still relevant, "Can you be successful with fewer people?"

Webmaster might be a better term to use than "Web Designer"

In the early days of the web, "e-mail the Webmaster" was found at the bottom of most web pages. With the dotcom bust and subsequent rebuilding, "Webmaster" was traded in for more "marketing friendly" e-mail addresses like "report_a_problem" or "give us feedback." Although the actual term "Webmaster" has lost steam, the role of this "mysterious" person found at the footer of pages is more important than ever.

Times Have Changed

To be honest, I never really understood what the word Webmaster really meant. I thought it was some nerdy, research-oriented, technical guy that ran websites out of his basement. It reminded me of a plumber or an electrician—the type of guy you never really think of talking to until you have a problem. The Webmaster was a technical fix-it guy.

Long ago in Internet time- yeah, a whole ten years ago- most websites were one-man operations. These were research- or hobby-oriented sites that had a single person doing the writing, programming and visual design (ok, design is subjective here). When a new breed of "dotcom" websites filled with marketing hyperbola began cluttering the web, the task of Webmaster was divided into many roles. HTML was pushed to its limits with code that stretched miles. Design was no longer just an animated rainbow GIF- it was an interactive multimedia experience. Writing was no longer about copying text from Microsoft Word- it required rewriting and repositioning text to be more web-friendly. In less than five years, the role of Webmaster turned into a dozen full-time positions.

We’ve Come Full Circle

Many "dotcoms" quickly learned that their websites, run by a staff of 30, were only generating income capable of paying the salaries of a small portion of those staffers. While there is a need for some specialized roles, today’s economy demands efficiency and the ability to perform within tight budgets. There’s no room for the luxury of a full-time copywriter, or for that matter, a full-time designer. So what is a company to do?

In my capacity as a brand engineer, I've had the opportunity to interact with more than thirty start-ups or small businesses. Over time, I've realized that most companies don’t need a huge team of people to run their website. Ninety percent of businesses in the United States are small businesses, which means the majority of companies are unable to hire tons of people with specialized skills. In fact, they might be able to hire only one person. Who do they call? Yep, a Web Designer.

How Many Roles Does A Web Designer Need To Play?

Whether you work for a nonprofit organization, are a freelancer or work at a small- or medium-sized company, chances are your website requires you to wear five different hats:

• Business Strategist
• Marketing Maven
• Code Monkey
• Content Developer
• Graphic Designer

Although a small business might believe they need a Web designer, what they truly need is a Webmaster. If you've never really thought of yourself as a guru in any one of the five positions, not to worry; 90 percent of companies need someone who is pretty good at all of the tasks, rather than someone who is excellent in only one or two of the roles. Let's examine each of the hats you must wear in order to help a company create a successful website.

Business Strategist: Start With A Plan.
It's impossible for a website to meet or exceed its goals if it doesn't align with the business's goals. I call this clarification- without it you probably won’t get any results with the website. Work with your client or your boss to gain a solid understanding of the company's history, vision and short- and long-term goals. Ask questions. Offer suggestions on how the Web can help a company meet their goals, or on how goals can be modified to take advantage of technological opportunities. This is give and take. Be a driver. Introduce ideas that can help the business grow and evolve through the website and technology.

Marketing Maven: Sell It To Your Audiences
A decent website has all of the relevant information—background information on the company, information on the products or services they offer, relevant contact info, etc. A superb website meets both business and marketing goals and fashions the information in a way that appeals to, and speaks to its audiences. It's not enough just to have the information online—like brick and mortar businesses, the companies that advertise, have an attractive and inviting look and feel, and actively market to customers are the ones that will be more successful. Whether it's making it easy for potential customers to find you through savvy search engine positioning or communicating with potential or current clients through an online newsletter, don't forget your marketing hat—or your customers will forget you.

Code Monkey—It's Gotta Work
This hearkens back to my earlier vision of a Webmaster…someone sitting in that dank corner office typing weird symbols and adjusting cell spacing…but it is still important. It is a necessity that your site is technically sound, making sure there are no broken links or images, and multi-browser functionality. As you're wearing all of your other hats, don't forget to do periodic checks and tests of the pages in different environments to make sure you're getting your message across in the way you intended. My motto here is “keep it simple”. Remember when things go wrong that you’re the one responsible for fixing the problems while juggling the other four roles.

Content Developer—Words Matter
Certainly, an attractive website is important. Make sure, however, that your online home has words and messages that are meaningful, relevant, up-to-date and consistent. All this while still incorporating keywords and content that drive search traffic. How many times have you visited a website and read through its pages only to disgustedly realize that it hadn’t been updated since 1999? And how many times have you looked at a website rife with grammatical errors, typos and confusing information? How many times did you return to either of those websites? In the play Macbeth, Shakespeare writes, "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. " Make sure that your website's sound and fury signifies your company's messages.

Graphic Designer—Yes, It Has To Be Pretty
The Internet was developed initially for use by government agencies and institutions of higher learning—not exactly the sorts of entities that bring thoughts of unbridled creativity to mind. Visual design, brand awareness and marketing savvy weren’t exactly high priorities. Since the Internet has evolved, however, designers are pushing the boundaries of what the web can do. An attractive website that maintains consistency with offline marketing elements and images is imperative. Empty visuals that promote unattainable promises will hurt your marketing efforts. Instead focus on creating a simple visual message that can be carried over into other mediums. This not only makes your life as Code Monkey easier, it gets you kudos as a Marketing Maven. Create a visually compelling online home that maintains key branding elements from your offline campaigns. The synergies created will produce results that both your company and customers will appreciate.

Design isn't about creating elements in a screen- it's about solving user problems. And anytime there's a design decision for a user, there's sure to be an argument. Here are eleven ideas for winning the design battle.

1. Be cool. Stay relaxed and unmoved by criticism. A designer's use of empathy goes a long way to relax a tense situation.
2. Don't highlight that the other person is wrong. The other person might not have a clue about design, but a designer needs to express the disagreement subtly. Even if you think they are wrong. Design decisions are not always qualitative, so expressing ideas as opinions can go a long way in building trust.
3. Back it up. Bring in research or numbers to back up your claims. Show competitive examples where something worked or failed.
4. Give them the floor. Often it doesn't take any effort to win the argument. Let your competitor seal their own fate. Focus on listening and let them hear themselves talk.
5. Make them be agreeable. Get them to agree to something. Anything. If you find a common agreeable point it makes it easier to win other ideas.
6. Be wrong. Modesty is a great quality. If you made a mistake or misjudged the situation, then say so. Don't be *that* designer that is always right.
7. Stay open minded. Sometimes those critical thinkers on the business side are right. Open yourself up to other ways of looking at a design decision.
8. Let them own the idea. Sometimes getting the best ideas into the mix is to let them have it. It's not always fun, but ultimately your sound ideas will survive the design process.
9. Best practices. If it's a definitive truth in the world of design, then it's going to be hard for an opponent to justify a decision that contradicts this idea.
10. Figure out what they want. Identify their real desires and re-frame your argument around their needs. A shift in perspective and a few concessions works wonders.
11. Bring the hammer down. Make them reach a boil and make them uncomfortable about sticking their neck out on something they can win. Close the deal.

I have to admit that it's easier to highlight these tactics than actually use them. Experience plays a big role in adoption- there's no substitute for learning from mistakes and putting that into your work flow.

Ten years of managing the design process has taught me a few key ideas. Here is a short list of the ways I've seen designers lose their value in a project and suggestions for how to get energy flowing and work your way out of it.

1. Creative block. Eh. Things need to get done. If the left brain isn't working, switch to the right brain. Find a method to get the ideas out on the table. Force them out.
2. Wrong tool. Photoshop is great for visualizing ideas, but it isn't ideal for rapidly exploring ideas. Use appropriate tools for different phases of a project.
3. Details too soon. Design is in the details, but the idea isn't the details. Focus on details at the right point in the iterative process.
4. Wrong conversations. Don't get stuck trying to figure out the purpose of the page while working on the rounded corners in Photoshop. Having a conversation about the "business goals" while in implementation mode is a recipe for disaster.
5. Follow through. Starting and stopping can be a huge momentum killer if things can't get done. Binge sessions are necessary to get closure on an idea.
6. Business goals lost. Staring at a computer screen and creating beautiful curves for extended blocks of time creates distance from the business goals of design. Be nimble.
7. Designing for the screen. Design for the eye, not the screen. Good design is made by people to solve a problem for other people. 10 hours in front of a monitor will convince you that the problem you've solved is solved *by* Photoshop. Shake that idea off.

Have another to add?

We're letting the cat out of the bag, folks. We're redesigning, and in a big way. We're overhauling our website, blog, extranet, and much more. As part of our redesign process, we needed to rethink how we approach our work and internal projects in a way that better facilicates activity. We needed a dashboard.

So we built one! From a late night team brainstorm before heading to Red Robin, Dashboard was born. Great name, huh? We think so. Our Dashboard acts as the pulse on everything we do on the Web, and is a unique look at our team's activities. Twitter feeds, del.icio.us links, ZURBword.com searches, and activity on the blog are all routed through Dashboard.

Act and React

From Dashboard, we do everything. We tweet, we link, we blog, we monitor, we create. Your typical dashboard is a jumping off point, a way to quickly and easily access data and actions from a central page. Here we've blown that model out to encompass several tools and sets of data. We're looking to keep an eye on everything we do so we can act, and more importantly, react.

For instance, when I finish this blog post, it'll show up in our Activity feed. The rest of the team will see my post and be able to jump right in to add their own comments and engage those of our readers. Just like a blog post, we're also notified of things like newsletter sign ups. Those numbers are encouraging and offer a unique look at our business that we otherwise wouldn't have.

As a side note, we considered e-mail updates for blog comments, but we decided against it in the end. Instead of e-mail updates for our team, we have a central repository for everything ZURB. This keeps our head in the game while we work, but still keeps us apprised of how we're doing. Also, e-mail is a bottleneck and acts like cold storage more than an heat lamp for activity.

The Big (Little) Reveal

Here's just a taste of what's to come. It's small, but we're keeping a lid on most of it for now. We're only a few weeks in, but is this baby handy.

Those blue boxes across the top are actual business stats, but for now, we're hush-hush on which is which. So why the blue boxes right in our faces? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the point of any great dashboard is to serve as a stepping stone to something else. For us, this means easy access to key drivers of our business, like blog comments and tweets between team members.

Most importantly though, we're encouraged to do more. Having important metrics and a single point of distribution for all our online content means we're activity engaged in moving content. Really, we're on top of it.

This month Bryan and I had the chance to speak on a panel at SXSW along with Christina Wodke of LinkedIn and Luke Wroblewski of Yahoo!. Armed with an inflammatory title, "Logos: Why They're Irrelevant and Can Actually Hurt Your Business," we went head-to-head in the same time slot with keynote speaker Mark Zuckerberg and managed to get a full house into Room 10 of the Austin Convention Center.

"Man, what a title! I just heard 3 designers pass out across the hall. But now that I've read it in its entirety, I think I can hear those same designers pulling themselves up off the floor and nodding their agreement with you." — Comment by Will from an article by Virginia Ingram reviewing the panel

Our panel started with a very brief history of the logo that set some context for web startups. Over a hundred years ago the logo emerged with a purpose: companies needed a way to differentiate their products from the 'generic' brands crowding the limited shelf space of local markets. Logos were about maintaining a trustworthy identity in markets where a company wasn't physically present to represent itself. The logo attached to the product gave companies a way to be recognized and remembered.

Today the web has reversed this trend. The URL is the great localizer, pointing everybody to the same destination online. Every site becomes its own corner store, leaving logos with less of a role, whereas the URL has taken center stage.

Phishing was one of the more dramatic examples to come up during discussion. Spam email can contain the logo of a reputable company like PayPal or eBay, but you have to pause and verify that the company speaking is in fact who we think. Will I take the action the email asks me to? First, I'll check the URL. If I don't recognize the URL, I don't trust the message.

The panel aso considered how syndication and digital distribution of content alter the importance of logos. When I can access a web site from my phone or read a blog from a web application, I lose touch with the logo as an identifier. I may not even encounter so much as a favicon, that vestigial remnant of the logo, during these experiences. With Twitter, for example, I have the text message number '40404' as an identifying mark. With a blog on Google Reader all I have is a byline and a link. The logo is not central to these experiences and yet I can still identify these positively with Twitter or the blog authors I read using Google.

One last key point is that in early stage Web startups, a logo is not central to success. Getting your product to market fast has to be your goal. Working with over 75 startups, it's been ZURB's experience that spending time on a logo early on is usually a waste of valuable time and a potential momentum killer. Instead of a logo, focus on your company's positioning statement, get your team on board with that goal, and then get your product in front of customers as fast as possible.

We think we're seeing some evidence that companies understand this today. A quick look at a lot of web startup logos reveals a lot of logotypes, essentially just font treatments with Photoshop embellishments. The logo isn't the focus of these companies, their product or service is their focus. Succeed or fail, they are in the market having conversations with customers, adjusting to the opportunities as they play out each day. Most successful companies, even ones with big, recognizable logos, have evolved this way. Yours can too.