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The stream—that great glut of ideas, opinions, updates, and ephemera that pours through us every day—is the dominant way we organize content. It makes sense; the stream’s popularity springs from the days of the early social web, when a huge number of users posted all types of content on unpredictable schedules. The simplest way to show updates to new readers focused on reverse chronology and small, discrete chunks, as sorting by newness called for content quick to both produce and digest. This approach saw wide adoption in blogs, social networks, notification systems, etc., and ever since we’ve flitted from one stream to another like sugar-starved hummingbirds.
Problem is, the stream’s emphasis on the new above all else imposes a short lifespan on content. Like papers piled on your desk, the stream makes it easy to find the last thing you’ve added, while anything older than a day effectively disappears. Solely relying on reverse-chronology turns our websites into graveyards, where things pile up atop each other until they fossilize. We need to start treating our websites as gardens, as places worthy of cultivation and renewal, where new things can bloom from the old.
The stream’s focus on the now isn’t novel, anyway. Old-school modes of publishing like newspapers and magazines shared a similar disposability: periodic updates went out to subscribers and were then thrown away. No one was expected to hang onto them for long.
Over the centuries with print, however, we came up with a number of ways to preserve and showcase older material. Newspapers put out annual indexes cataloguing everything they print ordered by subject and frequency. Magazines get rebound into larger, more substantial anthologies. Publishers frequently reach into their back catalogue and reprint books with new forewords or even chapters. These acts serve two purposes: to maintain widespread and cheap access to material that has gone out of print, and to ensure that material is still relevant and useful today.
But we haven’t yet developed patterns for slowing down on the web. In some ways, access is simpler. As long as the servers stay up, content remains a link away from interested readers. But that same ease of access makes the problem of outdated or redundant content more pronounced. Someone looking at an old magazine article also holds the entire issue it was printed with. With an online article, someone can land directly on the piece with little indication of who it’s by, what it’s for, and whether it’s gone out of date. Providing sufficient context for content already out there is a vital factor to consider and design for.
You don’t need to be a writer to help fix this. Solutions can come from many fields, from targeted writing and design tweaks to more overarching changes in content strategy and information architecture.
Your own websites are good places to start. Here are some high-level guidelines, ordered by the amount of effort they’ll take. Your site will demand its own unique set of approaches, though, so recombine and reinvent as needed.
Emma is a travel photographer. She keeps a blog, and many years ago she wrote a series about visiting Tibet. Back then, she was required to travel with a guided tour. That’s no longer the case, as visitors only need to obtain a permit.
The most straightforward thing to do is to look through past content and identify what’s outdated: pieces you’ve written, projects you worked on, things you like. The goal is triage: sorting things into what needs attention and what’s still fine.
Once you’ve done that, find a way to signal their outdated status. Perhaps you have a design template for “archived” content that has a different background color, more strongly emphasizes when it was written, or adds a sentence or two at the top of your content that explains why it’s outdated. If entire groups of content need mothballing, see whether it makes sense to pull them into separate areas. (Over time, you may have to overhaul the way your entire site is organized—a complicated task we’ll address below.)
Emma adds an <outdated> tag to her posts about her guided tour and configures the site’s template to show a small yellow notification at the top telling visitors that her information is from 2008 and may be irrelevant. She also adds a link on each post pointing to a site that explains the new visa process and ways to obtain Tibetan permits.
On the flip side, separate the pieces that you’re particularly proud of. Your “best-of” material is probably getting scattered by the reverse-chronology organization of your website, so list all of them in a prominent place for people visiting for the first time.
I hope that was easy! The next step is to look for old content you feel differently about today.
When Emma first started traveling, she hated to fly. She hated waiting in line, hated sitting in cramped seats, and especially hated the food. There are many early blog posts venting about this.
Maybe what you wrote needs additional nuance or more details. Or maybe you’ve changed since then. Explain why—lead readers down the learning path you took. It’s a chance for you to reflect on the delta.
Now that she’s gotten more busy and has to frequently make back-to-back trips for clients, she finds that planes are the best time for her to edit photos from the last trip, catch up on email, and have some space for reflection. So she writes about how she fills up her flying time now, leaving more time when she’s at her destination to shoot and relax.
Or expand on earlier ideas. What started as a rambling post you began at midnight can turn into a series or an entire side project. Or, if something you wrote provokes a big response online, you could gather those links at the bottom of your piece. It’s a service to your new readers to collect connected pieces together, so that they don’t have to hunt around to find them all.
Hopefully that takes care of most of your problematic content. But for content so dire you’re embarrassed to even look at it, much less having other people reading it, consider more extreme measures: the act of culling, revising, and rewriting.
Looking back: maybe you were completely wrong about something, and you would now argue the opposite. Rewrite it! Or you’re shocked to find code you wrote one rushed Friday afternoon—well, set aside some time to start from the ground up and do it right.
Emma started her website years ago as a typical reverse-chron blog, but has started to work on a redesign based around the concepts of LOCATIONS and TRIPS. Appearing as separate items in the navigation, they act as different ways for readers to approach and make sense of her work. The locations present an at-a-glance view of where she’s been and how well-traveled she is. The trips (labeled Antarctica: November 2012, Bangkok: Fall 2013, Ghana: early 2014, etc.) retain the advantages of reverse-chronology by giving people updates on what she’s done recently, but these names are more flexible and easier to explain than dates and timestamps on their own. Someone landing directly on a post from a trip two years ago can easily get to the other posts from that trip, but they would be lost if the entries were only timestamped.
If the original structure no longer matches the reality of what’s there, it’s also the best case for redesigning and reorganizing your website. Now is the time to consider your content as a whole. Think about how you’d explain your website to someone you’re having lunch with. Are you a writer, photographer, artist, musician, cook? What kind? What sorts of topics does your site talk about? What do you want people to see first? How do they go deeper on the things they find interesting? This gets rather existential, but it’s important to ask yourself.
If it’s really, truly foul, you can throw it out. (It’s okay. You officially have permission.) Not everything needs to live online forever, but throwing things out doesn’t have to be your first option when you get embarrassed by the past.
Deploying the internet equivalent of space lasers does, I must stress, come with some responsibility. Other sites can be affected by changes in your links:
Everything we’ve done so far applies to more than personal websites, of course. Where else?
Businesses have to maintain scores of announcements, documentation, and customer support. Much of it is subject to greatly change over time, and many need help looking at things from a user’s perspective. Content strategy has been leading the charge on this, from developing content models and relationships, to communicating with empathy in touchy situations, to working out content standards.
Newspapers and magazines relentlessly publish new pieces and sweep the old away from public view. Are there opportunities to highlight material from their archives? What about content that can always stay interesting? How can selections be best brought together to generate new connections and meaning?
Museums and libraries, as they step into their digital shoes, will have to think about building places online for histories and archives for the long term. Are there new roles and practices that bridge the old world with the networked, digital one? How do they preserve entirely new categories of things for the public?
No one has all the answers. But these are questions that come from leaving the stream and approaching content from the long view. These are problems that the shapers and caretakers of the web are uniquely positioned to think about and solve.
As a community, we take pride in being makers and craftsmen. But for years, we’ve neglected the disciplines of stewardship—the invisible and unglamorous work of collecting, restoring, safekeeping, and preservation. Maybe the answer isn’t to post more, to add more and more streams. Let’s return to our existing content and make it more durable and useful.
You don’t even have to pick up a shovel.
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When I recently read Geoff Dimasi’s excellent article I thought: this is great—values-based business decisions in an efficient fashion. But I had another thought, too: where, in that equation, is the money?
If I’m honest with myself, I’ve always felt that on some level it’s wrong to be profitable. That making money on top of your costs somehow equates to bilking your clients. I know, awesome trait for a business owner, right?
Because here’s the thing: a business can’t last forever skating on the edge of viability. And that’s what not being profitable means. This is a lesson I had to learn with Bearded the hard way. Several times. Shall we have a little bit of story time? “Yes, Matt Griffin,” you say, “let’s!” Well OK, then.
At Bearded, our philosophy from the beginning was to focus on doing great web work for clients we believed in. The hope was that all the sweat and care we put into those projects and relationships would show, and that profit would naturally follow quality. For four years we worked our tails off on project after project, and as we did so, we lived pretty much hand-to-mouth. On several occasions we were within weeks and a couple of thousand bucks from going out of business. I would wake up in the night in a panic, and start calculating when bills went out and checks would come in, down to the day. I loved the work and clients, but the other parts of the business were frankly pretty miserable.
Then one day, I went to the other partners at Bearded and told them I’d had it. In the immortal words of Lethal Weapon’s Sergeant Murtaugh, I was getting too old for this shit. I told them I could put in one more year, and if we weren’t profitable by the end of it I was out, and we should all go get well-paid jobs somewhere else. They agreed.
That decision lit a fire under us to pay attention to the money side of things, change our process, and effectively do whatever it took to save the best jobs we’ve ever had. By the end of the next quarter, we had three months of overhead in the bank and were on our way to the first profitable year of our business, with a 50 percent growth in revenue over the previous year and raises for everyone. All without compromising our values or changing the kinds of projects we were doing.
This did not happen on its own. It happened because we started designing the money side of our business the way we design everything else we care about. We stopped neglecting our business, and started taking care.
“So specifically,” you ask, “what did you do to turn things around? I am interested in these things!” you say. Very good, then, let’s take a look.
Besides my arguably weird natural aversion to profit, there are plenty of other motivations not to examine the books. Perhaps math and numbers are scary to you. Maybe finances just seem really boring (they’re no CSS pseudo-selectors, amiright?). Or maybe it’s that when we don’t pay attention to a thing, it’s easier to pretend that it’s not there. But in most cases, the unknown is far scarier than fact.
When it comes down to it, your businesses finances are made up of two things: money in and money out. Money in is revenue. Money out is overhead. And the difference? That’s profit (or lack thereof). Let’s take a look at the two major components of that equation.
First let’s roll up our sleeves and calculate your overhead. Overhead includes loads of stuff like:
In other words: it’s all the money you pay out to do your work. You can assess these items over whatever period makes sense to you: daily, weekly, annually, or even by project.
For Bearded, we asked our bookkeeper to generate a monthly budget in Quicken based on an average of the last six months of actual costs that we have, broken down by type. This was super helpful in seeing where our money goes. Not surprisingly, most of it was paying staff and covering their benefits.
Once we had that number it was easy to derive whatever variations were useful to us. The most commonly used number in our arsenal is weekly overhead. Knowing that variable is very helpful for us to know how much we cost every week, and how much average revenue needs to come in each week before we break even.
So how do we bring in that money? You may be using pricing structures that are fixed-fee, hourly, weekly, monthly, or value-based. But at the end of the day you can always divide the revenue gained by the time you spent, and arrive at a period-based rate for the project (whether monthly, weekly, hourly, or project length). This number is crucial in determining profitability, because it lines up so well with the overhead number we already determined.
Remember: money in minus money out is profit. And that’s the number we need to get to a point where it safely sustains the business.
If we wanted to express this idea mathematically, it might look something like this:
(Rate × Time spent × Number of People) - (Salaries + Expenses) = Profit
Here’s an example:
Let’s say that our ten-person business costs $25,000 a week to run. That means each person, on average, needs to do work that earns $2,500 per week for us to break even. If our hourly rate is $100 per hour, that means each person needs to bill 25 hours per week just to maintain the business. If everyone works 30 billable hours per week, the business brings in $30,000—a profit of 20 percent of that week’s overhead. In other words, it takes five good weeks to get one extra week of overhead in the bank.
That’s not a super great system, is it? How many quality billable hours can a person really do in a week—30? Maybe 36? And is it likely that all ten people will be able to do that many billable hours each week? After all, there are plenty of non-billable tasks involved in running a business. Not only that, but there will be dry periods in the work cycle—gaps between projects, not to mention vacations! We won’t all be able to work full time every week of the year. Seems like this particular scenario has us pretty well breaking even, if we’re lucky.
So what can we do to get the balance a little more sustainable? Well, everyone could just work more hours. Doing 60-hour weeks every week would certainly take care of things. But how long can real human beings keep that up?
We can lower our overhead by cutting costs. But seeing as most of our costs are paying salaries, that seems like an unlikely place to make a big impact. To truly be more profitable, the business needs to bring in more revenue per hour of effort expended by staff. That means higher rates. Let’s look at a new example:
Our ten-person business still costs $25,000 a week. Our break-even is still at $2,500 per week per person. Now let’s set our hourly rate at $150 per hour. This means that each person has to work just under 17 billable hours per week for the business to break even. If everyone bills 30 hours in a week, the business will now bring in $45,000—or $20,000 in profit. That’s 80 percent of a week’s overhead.
That scenario seems a whole lot more sustainable—a good week now pays for itself, and brings in 80 percent of the next week’s overhead. With that kind of ratio we could, like a hungry bear before hibernation, start saving up to protect ourselves from less prosperous times in the future.
Nature metaphors aside, once we know how these parts work, we can figure out any one component by setting the others and running the numbers. In other words, we don’t just have to see how a specific hourly rate changes profit. We can go the other way, too.
One way to determine your system is to start with desired salaries and reasonable work hours for your culture, and work backwards to your hourly rate. Then you can start thinking about pricing systems (yes, even fixed price or value-based systems) that let you achieve that effective rate.
Maybe time is the most important factor for you. How much can everyone work? How much does everyone want to work? How much must you then charge for that time to end up with salaries you can be content with?
This is, in part, a lifestyle question. At Bearded, we sat down not too long ago and did an exercise adapted from an IA exercise we learned from Kevin M. Hoffman. We all contributed potential qualities that were important to our business—things like “high quality of life,” “high quality of work,” “profitable,” “flexible,” “clients who do good in the world,” “efficient,” and “collaborative.” As a group we ordered those qualities by importance, and decided we’d let those priorities guide us for the next year, at which point we’d reassess.
That exercise really helped us make decisions about things like what rate we needed to charge, how many hours a week we wanted to work, as well as more squishy topics like what kinds of clients we wanted to work for and what kind of work we wanted to do. Though finances can seem like purely quantitative math, that sort of qualitative exercise ended up significantly informing how we plugged numbers into the profit equation.
Figuring out the basics of overhead, revenue, and profit, is instrumental in giving you an understanding of the mechanics of your business. It lets you plan knowledgeably for your future. It allows you to make plans and set goals for the growth and maintenance of your business.
But once you know what you want to charge there’s another question—how do you charge it?
There are plenty of different pricing methods out there (time unit-based, deliverable-based, time period-based, value-based, and combinations of these). They all have their own potential pros and cons for profitability. They also create different motivations for clients and vendors, which in turn greatly affect your working process, day-to-day interactions, and project outcomes.
But that, my friends, is a topic for our next column. Stay tuned for part two of my little series on the money side of running a web business: pricing!
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I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.
So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My leave starts next week. Currently I’m scheduled to be gone through October. Thanks to a deep bench of smart engineers and spam fighters, the webspam team is in more-than-capable hands. Seriously, they’re much better at spam fighting than I am, so don’t worry on that score.
One critical point is that I won’t be checking my work email at all while I’m on leave. My friend and colleague Amit Singhal took about six weeks off not too long ago, and his #1 piece of advice was to unplug from work email. So that’s what I’m going to do. I will set up Gmail filters to forward some of my outside email to a small set of webspam folks, but they won’t be replying to emails.
Q: Is this because of some specific event?
A: Nope. I’ve been talking about doing this with my wife for a while now, and it feels like the right time.
Q: You’re not going to check your work email at all?
A: That’s right.
Q: No, really? No work email?
A: Really. I’m thinking of it like a 30 day challenge, except for longer than 30 days. 
Q: If I can’t email you, how should I communicate with Google about search topics or find out about new things in search?
A: I’m so glad you asked! There’s still tons of ways, from our webmaster forums to Office Hours Hangouts where you can ask questions to experts. On the social side, instead of sending SEO-related comments to me on Twitter, you can ping the Google Webmaster Central account. Likewise, make sure you follow Google Webmasters on Google+. A bunch of different Googlers will continue to speak and answer questions at search conferences too.
For broader search-related news, read our Webmaster blog or Inside Search blog. To understand how Google thinks about search, we’ve made hundreds of webmaster videos and they’re designed to be evergreen.
Our web documentation is superb: Google Webmaster Central is the best place to start. From there, you can find our Webmaster Academy, our help documentation, and our SEO beginner’s guide. We even made a mini-site about how search engines work.
One of the most important ways to hear from Google is to add and verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools. That’s the primary channel to find out about issues with webspam or other errors or notices.
Q: Are you doing anything fun?
A: Yup! I’ve been taking a ballroom dance class with my wife, and we’re going on a cruise in late August. Our 15th (!) wedding anniversary is next year, so we might do some early traveling to celebrate that too. We’ll also be spending more time visiting with our parents. I’m also trying a half-Ironman race.
And just to reiterate, the webspam team is in great hands while I’m out. I’m looking forward to trying this, so thanks for your understanding.
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When I was a junior designer, my creative director asked me to design a mascot with the rather uninspiring instruction to reorder the shapes of the famous 2012 Olympics logo. Having little choice but to accept my task, I threw myself into it with all the boundless, panicked energy that comes from needing to impress the powers above, trusting my superior to steer me in the right direction.
Three weeks later I was distraught, the entire weight of our complete and utter failure to win the pitch resting on my shoulders.
It would be easy to put that loss down to inexperience—after all, I totally missed the brief, and every other pitch was better. But when I think about it a little more thoroughly, I can see that the real problem was one of access. I longed to understand the full project details, but was instead privy to mere bits and pieces of projects, attempting to cobble together an unknown whole. It was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle whilst looking at it through a keyhole.
Many organizations—faced with the challenge of bringing together multiple projects, departments, and skillsets—fall back on the traditional combination of hierarchy, method, and structure. This can breed a culture of complacency, leading to outcomes that are narrow in their vision, team members who feel restricted and undervalued, and a workforce that operates under ceaseless pressure to either get it right, or get out.
When I look back on my ill-fated Olympic experience, I can see that I didn’t have the full picture. I was unable to bring my own ideas to the table, powerless to create change. I was subordinate; my relationship with my superiors was distant, and the most integral aspects of the design process—research, exploration, and discussion—were entirely absent. It wasn’t collaboration of any kind. No wonder that I lost both the pitch and the plot!
It doesn’t have to be that way. When I co-founded the creative studio Gravita, I learned what collaboration really looks like: multiple minds working together to solve problems. By doing this, our complementary skillsets are free to blend together in surprising ways—unconstrained, we’re better equipped to deliver inventive solutions.
This kind of collaborative culture is possible, whether you’re freelancing, in an agency environment, or in-house. You only need to do three things:
Here’s how we’ve accomplished each one at Gravita.
When I first established Gravita with two other designers, we found that there was real synergy between us. The feedback was exceptional. We had stumbled across a dynamic that worked, even in our earliest projects.
However, the path to uninhibited working was far from smooth, because I started making assumptions about my value to the team. I weighed my own skills against theirs and—deciding that I came up short—assumed my ideas weren’t as good. Agency life had drilled into me that my contributions weren’t worthwhile.
My insecurities created walls. I became terrified of showing my work, afraid of failure. I found any excuse not to contribute. This created frustration and tension in our working space, and hindered progress on my first project.
The only way out of this debilitating dead-end was to lay out my insecurities and discuss them. Once I was brave enough to open up to my colleagues about how I was feeling, and accept a gradual process of support and positive feedback, we were able to move forward.
On our next project, we began by talking openly about how we all felt. I was amazed to discover that I was not alone in feeling apprehensive; having everyone’s cards on the table was cathartic. We sat together as a team and worked out what we could each bring to the task, what we were afraid of, and how we could work together to get around potential problems.
Collaboration offers a vehicle through which assumptions of the self can be overridden. Don’t bottle up what you’re feeling, and don’t be afraid to ask questions you assume others will find stupid. Voicing the concerns you have about yourself opens up an ongoing dialogue—one that can identify your strengths, encourage praise, and allow your confidence to blossom.
Job titles can be useful, but they’re also confining. They can stifle entire projects and hold back personal development. They’re labels, and just like on a can of soup, they create a clear expectation of what is inside—if anything else emerges, it comes as a nasty surprise.
I had the first inkling it didn’t have to be this way when I was working for a large charity, stuck with the title “web master.” The management noticed how confining this was for me; they gave me the green light to take on new responsibilities that allowed me to branch out. I realized it was perfectly feasible for organizations to adopt this kind of open, flexible thinking.
I’ve found this way of thinking works at Gravita too. We recognize that it’s the role, not the label, which should be the focus of the work. We don’t have job titles at all, opting instead to rotate roles. We sit down over a cup of coffee and see who fancies doing what on a new project, whether that be project manager, information architect, iconographer, or anything else.
Removing permanent titles is liberating. Suddenly, like a long-distance runner, you’re only ever really competing with yourself. It becomes more about self-improvement, less about climbing the ladder. You’re free to bring whatever you want to the table, and to grow as a designer.
Ideas should always be heard, regardless of what form they’re in or how complete they are. Instincts and hunches—proto-ideas, neurons sparking with other neurons—need a free environment where they can mingle, collide, and flourish, ultimately producing something greater than the sum of their parts. After all, as Steven Johnson explains in his talk, “Where Good Ideas Come From,” “chance favors the connected mind”—connectivity and flow between people create stronger ideas.
It can be challenging to achieve flow, but it’s very worthwhile. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as “the internal state of energised focus which characterises the mind at its most productive.” We look past the separate spaces that we inhabit as individual bodies and come together as minds. It’s a form of intense, unified working where people relax from their inhibitions and see themselves as being fundamentally interconnected on a project.
Recently we were evaluating concept designs for a healthcare project. It just wasn’t quite working, and individually none of us had figured out what was wrong with it. Together, we began passing ideas back and forth, until someone uttered the words “less cold.” Suddenly we could see what we needed: a new and more gentle typeface, a softer and more comfortable palette. It took all of us, working together in a connected way, to hit on the solution.
Flowing mind-to-mind in this way allows us to fuel an idea in a shared headspace. Collaborative thinking enhances the brain’s natural capacity to make new links, which in turn strengthen the initial idea. There’s no place for ego—it’s important to be open and welcome this flow of others’ thoughts.
Collaboration means bringing different minds and skillsets together in a way that doesn’t make assumptions about what someone is or isn’t good at. It means dispensing with limiting roles, and introducing a fluidity of thought and activity into the design team. Above all, it means putting interconnectedness at the heart of every action.
So is collaborative working the elusive Holy Grail? Certainly a lot of people aim for it, and like to think that they do it even if there is a wide variance in form. What I do know is that by changing the way I think, I’ve helped bring about a safe, assumption-free space with an even distribution of authority that allows ideas to flow freely.
Collaborative culture helps us discover unique solutions—and continuously redefine ourselves. Designing for the online community means operating in an ever-changing environment, where adaptability is key for keeping up with new technology and scenarios.
A collaborative culture can push us into spaces more conventional practices fear to tread. Everything is open to question. Ideas are heard. People feel empowered to make real change.
Finally, I feel like I’m seeing the full picture.
