As software designers, your work deserves to be protected as much as any other author’s does. Thanks to headlines featuring big companies like Google and Oracle, copyright law is an often-discussed but frequently-misunderstood topic. This article was created specifically with software developers and designers in mind. Though this article Kimberly Bond will provide an overview, perhaps this information will be helpful to those of you who work each day to create and improve the software programs that enrich our lives.
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If you feel that your own confidential business information needs to be protected, a mutual NDA might be a great idea. It’s normal to feel a little intimidated when reviewing a legal document. However, NDAs are a part of life for developers. If you want to work for top clients, you will be asked to sign them. If you’re not sure whether to sign an NDA as a developer, Kimberly Bond will guide you to make an educated decision.
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Retrospectives and reflections allow you to codify what you’ve learned from experience, to document mistakes and avoid future ones, and to increase your potential to grow in the future. In this article, Victor Yocco will show you a few approaches that you and your team can immediately incorporate into your practice. He’ll walk through post-project retrospectives in this first article, and in a second article, Victor will present some lessons learned and researched-backed techniques that those who wish to engage in reflection can attempt to include in their routine.
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Success means many things to many people. However you choose to define success, it will require other people’s cooperation. It will involve landing the right job, winning the right kind of work and being able to charge enough money for your services. It would be great if that were all defined by the quality of your work, but it’s not. There is another factor at play here; your reputation. Think of reputation as a currency. A currency that you can spend to advance your career, win new clients or ensure projects run that little bit easier. It a currency that you can spend to achieve your version of success. People should respect ability, not reputation. But most clients don’t know what good looks like and so have to fall back on how other people talk about you.
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Most BFA and MFA programs don’t cover traditional business skills, and companies certainly aren’t investing in cross-functional training for creative professionals. McLean Donnelly shares his personal experience.
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The performance and effectiveness of internal marketing campaigns should be assessed, as this is one of the most powerful instruments for generating more leads, more conversions and more revenue on your website. In many cases, web analysts use Google Analytics’ UTM campaign parameters to track internal advertising. The problem is that UTM parameters are intended to be used in external campaigns. Unfortunately, they are not suitable for tracking internal campaigns. In this article, Christian Ebernickel will explain why you would corrupt your Google Analytics data when using UTM parameters for internal tracking purposes, as well as presenting the solution and including a precise description of all the necessary steps.
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Pricing isn’t a matter of calculating a rate based on hours spent or return generated. It’s your time, and if people are willing to pay, you can charge whatever you like. Paul Boag has read many posts about the pricing of a project. From value-based pricing, to billing around Agile cycles. These are all great approaches, but in this article, he is going to share with you the rather inelegant approach (which has allowed him to run a lucrative business for the last 15 years) he takes to the subject. It begins by knowing the minimum you have to charge per hour.
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How do you make sure the team gets up to date with everything that’s being released? As a team leader, Alecsandru Grigoriu was faced with a new challenge: making sure there’s enough recurrence in his team’s communication to facilitate the team’s development. Enter the weekly design meetings. Having a structure and a template to work with is not enough. They’ve settled on a few ground rules in order for the meetings to unfold properly. Looking back at the first 10 meetings, they went through over 100 resources and tackled 2 main design challenges.
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Wouldn’t life be so much easier if we didn’t need to get other people to buy-in to our work? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, especially in digital. What we do involves so many different disciplines working together. We have to get the support of colleagues, stakeholders and management. In this article, Paul Boag will show you that there are things you can do to make life easier. We begin, by planning ahead.
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In this article, Steve Benjamins shows you what he discovered after asking the owners of several websites built with e-commerce software, if they’d recommend a particular software. Typically, they’d reply and I’d record their response in a spreadsheet (and personally thank them). Occasionally, I would even go on the phone to speak with them directly (although I quickly found out that this took too much time). Steve created a guide to help others find the e-commerce software that suits them best.
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