Editor’s ViewPoint
Sadly, Chris White (a.k.a. chris_fuel) has decided to step down as the editor of Community Crier to pursue other interests. I’ll be filling his shoes for this month’s issue while we search for a permanent replacement.
We’d all like to thank Chris for the hard work he’s put into SitePoint’s Community Crier over the past few months, not to mention the work he’s done on the forums. We really appreciate the part that he’s played, and his presence will certainly be missed!
I joined SitePoint’s staff a few months ago as the new Lead Blogger, which has been a blast (I’m actually writing this from SitePoint’s offices in Melbourne, Australia, before I hop on a plane in a few hours to head back home to the United States). You may remember me as a former Team Leader on the forums, under the moniker of Bleys; I also edited the Crier for SitePoint from April 2006 to March 2007. So editing this issue means a bit of a walk down memory lane for me.
In this issue, I’ll take you on a short photo history of where it all happens, SitePoint’s headquarters—from our first tiny office to our current swanky digs—and bring you an interview with out-going Crier Editor, Chris White.
Josh Catone
Lead Blogger, SitePoint
Summary
What's New?
Buy One, Get One Sale Is Back!
For no other reason than that we wanted to run a sale, SitePoint is bringing back the buy one, get one free offer. For a limited time, for any SitePoint book you buy, you’ll receive a free PDF as a bonus. And any book or PDF applies, so there.
Forum Threads on sitepoint.com
This isn’t exactly a new development, but did you know that forum threads are often featured on the main page of sitepoint.com? If you see an awesome thread that you think should be featured, you can private-message any Advisor or Team Leader with a suggestion.
Once threads have been featured on SitePoint’s forums, one of sitepoint.com’s editors can then also feature it on the main page! (Don’t be shy about suggesting your own threads, as long as they rock!)
Behind The Scenes at SitePoint HQ
One of the ideas Chris had for this issue was to offer a peek behind the scenes at SitePoint HQ, and take a look at the various offices the team has inhabited over the years. We loved that idea, so we decided to go ahead with it. Remember to also check out the Photosynth of SitePoint’s office break area, which we recently put up on the blog.
Here’s designer Alex Walker hard at work in SitePoint’s first office on Regent Street in Richmond, Melbourne.
This is a view of SitePoint’s second office, on Smith Street in Collingwood, Melbourne. That’s the back of Simon Mackie’s head in the foreground (Simon works at ThinkVitamin now).
And here’s our swanky new digs at Cambridge Street, Collingwood. It’s comprehensively equipped with a balcony made for barbecues, a 52-inch plasma with x-Box, a foozeball table, and our overworked and underpaid coffe machine—and art gallery neighbors on the ground floor.
That’s Matt Magain working away in SitePoint’s current office, which we moved into just under a year ago. It’s just a couple of streets over from the old Smith Street offices; I sat across from Matt while I was visiting for the past couple of weeks.
So that’s where it all comes from! You can see more photos of SitePoint HQ in the gallery on the Forum.
Interview with Jeff Veen, User Experience Guru
Jeffrey Veen is a high-profile author, speaker, and user experience consultant who has been involved in the design of such sites as Flickr, Blogger, Typepad and Google Analytics. Jeff took some time out with SitePoint's Josh Catone to answer a few questions submitted by the SitePoint Forums community.
SP: Jeff, thank you for agreeing to answer a few questions from the SitePoint community.
No problem, Josh.
SP: The differences between doing client work at Adaptive Path, where you were creating your own product (Measure Map), and then moving to the corporate culture at Google, must have been profound. Can you talk a bit about your transition between these contrasting work environments and what it was like?
In some ways, it was a pretty straightforward transition. When we founded Adaptive Path, our goal was to do the highest-quality work possible for the most interesting array of clients we could find. We were extremely fortunate to achieve that, choosing which projects satisfied those goals. I quickly began to focus on startups, because I loved the momentum.
Working with companies like Blogger, SixApart, Technorati, and Flickr, I realized that the sort of rapid, web-focused product development they did was very satisfying to me. Eventually, Adaptive Path started up the Measure Map project to try to achieve that as well.
We had an amazing team develop that product, so the transition to Google was smooth. We were acquired with the clear task of redesigning Analytics, and the people at Google were focused on helping us achieve that goal. They left us alone to integrate into the Analytics team and work very quickly. Essentially, we were able to keep working the way we had as a startup.
SP: Can you share some effective strategies for team communication and keeping everyone on the same page? How much understanding of back-end processes does a designer need to have to communicate with programmers, and how much in the way of design principles does the programming department have to be able to grasp?
I am becoming less and less concerned in the difference between designer and programmer. Instead, I like small, highly-motivated teams that can work together on the entire process from start to finish. As soon as you have different people working on different stages of a project, you're mired in process and artificial communication like specifications, product requirement documents, and style guides.
Instead, I try to work with programmers who are focused on positive user experiences and designers who have strong technical skills. If you get enough overlap between the two, it all just blurs into a team that works well together to make great products. On the Measure Map team, some of the best design insights came from our Ruby developer, and our interface designer wrote the bulk of the visualization code. So really, I don't care too much about roles and responsibilities.
I realize this theory doesn't translate to large organizations very easily. But that, in a nutshell, is one of Google's key differentiators. They effectively empower small teams of people to achieve innovative work, feeding them the resources to make sure they're successful. This doesn't mean creating some sort of Xerox PARC or Yahoo Brickhouse lab where you reward talented employees by removing them from the rest of the organization. Rather, it means delegating product decisions out to the people who are closest to your users. And maintaining that advantage will be Google's biggest challenge as they continue to grow and mature.
Read the rest of the interview
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This edition of the SitePoint Community Crier was brought to you by Josh Catone, Lead Blogger for SitePoint.
That's all for this issue -- thanks for reading! I'll see you in a few weeks.
Chris White
crier@sitepoint.com
Editor, SitePoint Community Crier
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