PAU L OCKENDEN
Paul hosted a large online meeting for some of his clients, and the main thing they wanted to ask him about was software
Paul hosted a large online meeting for some of his clients, but the main thing they wanted to ask him about was what software he uses. Here, he shares all.
Last week, I hosted a big online meeting with the digital marketing and development teams from several of my company’s clients, as well as a few other interested parties. The purpose of this session was to show them some of the things we’ve been working on recently, and to try to get them to think about how their online strategy needs to adapt and change in the post-coronavirus world.
I can’t tell you much about the meeting because of a shedload of client confidentiality clauses. What I found interesting, though, was how these clients – all unrelated – were willing to share experiences and best practices with each other. None were direct competitors, but despite that I’m sure that if I’d got them all into a big conference room and done a pre-Covid-19-style meeting, they wouldn’t have opened up to anywhere to the same degree. There’s something about online meetings that makes people more willing to engage with each other than they would be in a face-to-face environment. I found that really encouraging, especially as GoToMeeting (in this instance), Zoom, Microsoft Teams and all the other tools are likely to figure much more prominently in our futures.
Less encouraging was when this session exposed communication issues in the companies themselves: marketing people not being aware of the things that the development teams have been working on, the tools they have available or the reports that they’re able to create. Likewise, development teams not being aware of the promotions the marketing teams had been working on during lockdown. It was sad to hear a constant stream of “I wish we’d known about that earlier”, and sadder still that it takes a meeting in front of strangers to expose such weaknesses. Company communication is crucial, now more so than ever – more on that in a moment.
Once all of the main sessions were over, I opened the virtual meeting up to questions and it turned into a bit of an “Ask me anything” session for several of the online attendees, including yours truly. When it was my turn, apparently what most interested the 60-odd people sat around the virtual table was what software, apps, websites and online services I find indispensable in my job. It was a surprise question, so I’m not sure I answered it properly. It needs some thought because so much of this stuff is so frequently used that it just becomes background noise. I use many of these tools without even thinking about them.
It also sparked a rerun of the age-old discussion about apps versus software. Some people – mainly from the development teams – argued that apps are just software, and that it’s daft to draw a distinction between the two. I guess that from a purely technical point of view they’re correct, but if you extend that logic then isn’t a website just software too? If I’m honest, I used to be in the “app is just another name for program” camp. But then a few years back I received a wireless router to review. There was no CD in the box, nothing to download on the manufacturer’s website and, most infuriatingly, no web interface on the router itself. The only way to set this
“It was sad to hear a constant stream of ‘I wish we’d known about that earlier’”
router up and configure it was by using a phone or tablet and an app downloaded from the Apple or Google store. I’m pretty sure that was my
“Oh, I get it now” moment. I was able to put apps and traditional software into their own boxes.
As this topic seemed to interest people, I thought I’d do an expanded version here. Just for reference, these are all things I use in my day job, as owner of an agency building websites and internet-hosted business tools. I’m not one of those “spends all day smooching clients” company owners; I’m hands-on with the techie stuff too. Of course, the people I employ are better at this stuff than me – that’s why I hired them – but I like to keep my hand in too.
Peeling back the Layers
So, here goes. I think one of my favourite bits of software is something you’ve probably never heard of called Page Layers. What does it do? It effectively turns Photoshop into a web browser. You point Page Layers at a web page and it spits out a PSD file containing all of the structured elements that make up the page in separate layers. Those layers are even structured, based on the HTML
As a web developer, I find it incredibly useful. If a client wants to try some new branding ideas on its site, I can just run the site through Page Layers and very quickly do things such as changing colours and graphics – it’s much easier than working on a live HTML web version.
Once you have the site as a layered Photoshop file, you can also do things such as move stuff around. Navigation on the right instead of the left? No problem at all: simply move the grouped layers built from the
I also like shoving other people’s websites through Page Layers – it gives great insight into the visual structure and in a clear format. It’s much more intuitive than digging through source code or using the developer view in your web browser.
Page Layers is Mac only, I’m afraid. There have been various clones over the years, but none has been as good as the original. Page Layers costs £34 and I reckon it’s probably the best £34 I’ve ever spent.
Old and still gold
Which leads neatly to my second bit of essential software: Photoshop. I have a full Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but Photoshop is by far the application I use most. It’s a monster, containing an incredible amount of functionality. I reckon that I probably touch less than 20% of it, but despite its age and its size it’s still slick, responsive, and powerful.
Competitors are starting to nip at Photoshop’s heels, though. Affinity Photo is good, cheap and constantly catching up with Photoshop’s latest features – in fact, some people on my team prefer using it. But I find Photoshop much easier to work with. Its handling of large files is faster, and that’s important for me as I always like to work with high-resolution images, only downsizing to web resolution at the final stage of the workflow process.
The thing I like most about Photoshop is the innovation. I was happy with it two decades ago and couldn’t think of anything else that it needed, yet every year Adobe rolls out a version with new features and many of them are truly useful. A few years ago, we saw a new Content-Aware Fill feature, for example. If you’ve not seen this, it guesses what would be in an area of the image, and normally does a great job. It really sped up a process that was previously quite manual and tedious. Needless to say, Affinity Photo now has a similar tool too – funny that!
Inspector Sitemorse
The next indispensable thing for my job isn’t actually a bit of software at all but a service called Sitemorse. I reckon any digital agency that cares about things such as code quality and accessibility needs to have a Sitemorse subscription. Various options are available, but at its most basic you tell it a web address and it will go away and scan the site for errors. These might be code errors such as badly formatted HTML, as well as functional errors like broken links, accessibility problems, spelling and grammar mistakes – and even the quality of the hosting.
People think about website accessibility primarily as a legal thing. It is, and quite rightly too. But it’s also really important for search engine optimisation (SEO). Well-structured semantic markup is exactly what Google and the other search engines want to see. For good SEO, you also need to avoid functional and code errors, and that’s why Sitemorse is so useful. It’s very strict in the way that it applies these checks, but that’s no bad thing.
SEO is the main subject that our clients seem to be interested in, but I reckon there’s an even more important metric that you get with an error-free website: it won’t piss off your site visitors! For example, I was put off buying an expensive German car the other day because the company’s UK website is so broken. I don’t know how much profit it would have made if it had sold me a £70,000 car, but I suspect that it would have covered the cost of fixing its site. This is why tools such as Sitemorse are so important.
“Sitemorse is strict in the way it applies these checks, but that’s no bad thing”
Picking up the Slack
I mentioned in the preamble to this month’s column about the lack of communication inside companies. We try to avoid that by using Slack. At first, I wasn’t sure about it – surely it’s just another messaging system to keep track of? But it quickly became part of our corporate culture, and an indispensable part too. We have Slack channels for clients and projects, naturally, but we also have social channels. You see lots of “How was your weekend?” messages flying around between people on the team. This level of communication is key for team cohesion, especially in a world where more people are now working from home.
Sticking with communication, I tend to favour Outlook as an email client. Actually, no, “favour” is the wrong word. I’m pretty much forced to use Outlook because, for a number of legacy reasons, we have an in-house Exchange Server setup, and attempting to use Exchange with a client other than Outlook can be extremely painful.
I say I use Outlook, but really I use Outlooks, plural, because Outlook on the Mac is a completely different beast to Outlook for Windows. They might look vaguely similar but they behave completely differently. There’s stuff that’s missing on the Mac: there’s no VBA, no MAPI support, no external calendar sync, no… I’d better stop now because I could probably fill the column. There’s also stuff that’s just plain different. Even a simple thing such as sorting a folder by received date works differently in the Mac and Windows versions. As does being able to send an email with a different “from:” address – Mac Outlook support is quite limited.
A huge irritation with the Mac version of Outlook is that the search function is prone to breaking. It relies on the in-built Spotlight search functionality in macOS, but quite often you’ll find your mailbox and the Spotlight index are out of step. Search for an email from bloggs.com and it will say “No results”, even though if you scroll through the messages you’ll see the very email right there. There’s a fix for this, but it’s a horrible kludge, and will probably work for a week or two before the Spotlight index and Outlook move out of sync again.
If you find search is broken, open System Preferences, click on Spotlight and go to the Privacy tab. And then, separately, open a Finder window, press Shift+Cmd+G and, when the go to folder dialog appears, type in: ~/Library/Group Containers/ You’ll see many folders there, but look for one called
UBF8T3 46 G9 . OFFICE – there are other UBF8T346G9 folders, but you only want the . OFFICE one. Drag that folder into the Spotlight privacy folders list. Wait 30 seconds and use the minus sign to remove the folder again.
What you’ve just done is told Spotlight not to index your email messages, so it will remove the broken stuff from the index. And then by removing the folder from the list you’ve said it’s okay to index it again now. That re-indexing won’t start instantly, it might take a few minutes to begin, and it will also take a while to complete. You can check on the progress by clicking the search icon (the magnifying glass) in your Mac’s menu bar and then typing any old word – I normally type “indexing”. While Spotlight is rebuilding the index, you’ll see a progress bar. Once that’s complete, your search in Outlook will work again. Oh, and you can leave Outlook open while all this is going on.
We’re promised a new version of Mac Outlook soon, but the preview builds have been limited. No IMAP or POP3 support. No connections to in-house Exchange Servers. From what I’ve been able to see, I don’t think this new version is going to bring Mac Outlook any more in line with its Windows counterpart – in fact, I think they’re likely to diverge even further.
In the meantime, if you’re using one of virtualisation tools such as Parallels or Fusion on your Mac, a good option is to use this to run the Windows version of Outlook instead of the Mac one. It will save a lot of frustration.
Last but not least…
To finish, I’ll quickly run through a few more of my essential tools. For coding, I normally use Visual Studio Code. It’s great because I can use it on Windows, Mac and Linux. Don’t confuse it with Visual Studio, however: Code is a completely different differen product and is also free! Some developers pooh-pooh it because it’s from Microsoft, but I reckon it’s one of the most productive code editors available.
I mentioned apps earlier. The main work things on my phones and tablets are the web browsers and social media clients we use for checking jobs. We have a proper test lab for this, but the first step is always to check things on your own phone.
A really useful app is WhatTheFont – you’ll find it on both the Google and Apple stores. It uses the phone’s camera to identify fonts in magazines, on posters, product labels, or even on your computer screen. It’s pretty good, but there’s another slightly more techie one on Android called Find My Font, which I use when WhatTheFont fails.
Finally, I’m going to recommend a very simple website. Go to asm.ca. com/en/ping.php and type in an IP or website address – perhaps just use google.co.uk to test it. It will very quickly check that the website can be seen from over 60 monitoring stations tions around the world. There ere are many other services that at offer a more sophisticated take ke on this, but this tool is quick, ick, simple and works well. It’s s great for when a client phones hones saying its website is down own – you can assure them that at it’s visible from Russia, Malaysia, alaysia, Canada, India and so on, and that perhaps they should hould check their own internet nternet connection! If you look ook in the left-hand menu, you’ll ou’ll see a Check Website function unction that goes beyond a ping, but uses fewer monitoring points.
I hope you’ve found all of that useful. Please feel free to tweet me with your own suggestions for an essential software list.
“Outlook on the Mac is a completely different beast to Outlook for Windows”