Transcript

Jen

This is The Web Ahead, a weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. I'm your host, Jen Simmons, and this is episode 80. I first want to say thanks so much to today's sponsor, Squarespace, and also to the 5by5 bandwidth sponsor, Cashfly, who supports all of the serving of all of these amazing audio from all of 5by5. Thanks to them both.

You know, it's fun and interesting to talk about technology. One new technology after another after another. But the reality is that, frequently, our ability to build an awesome website or some sort of web-technology-based-project isn't really determined by the technology. [Laughs] Or our mastery of that technology. Or our lack of mastery of that technology. It's really much more in the hands of human beings — all the meetings that we go to; the ability to get clients in the first place; to find interesting projects to work on; to work at a company where you really like your job and where, when a group gets together and starts working on something, the process goes well.

In the last, I guess it's been now 5 or 6, 7 years, as the technology has changed so much — of course, the other conversation we've been having is all about process. Process needing to change. Successful projects where the process did change. Especially big companies — it's harder in big companies — so stories of big companies having a successful transition to a kind of new set of ways of working together, a new way to structure the team… on today's show we're going to talk about these kinds of things.

We're going to talk especially about bigger projects, bigger teams, higher stakes, bigger budgets, and about all those things having to do with the humans that are involved. And how to transition people from what we formerly thought was web design and development to what we are now (or in the future) think of as web design and development.

My guest today is Trent Walton. Hello Trent.

Trent

Hi Jen. How are you doing today?

Jen

Good. Trent is a founder and 1/3 of Paravel, a custom web design and development shop in Texas, near Austin, up in the hill country. And he has experience. You've worked on some big projects, like, I don't know, microsoft.com homepage. [Laughs]

Trent

Yeah, a small startup out of Seattle, Microsoft found us. I don't know if you've heard of them. But yeah, that was a fun job that we got to do.

Jen

Yeah, so tell us a little bit about — for those people who haven't been following you and are not yet fans of you — tell us about that project. How did you get three people in a little shop to be working on microsoft.com? And how did that go?

Trent

That was a right place, right time kind of a thing. Multiple times over. And you could actually kind of trace the day we walked into the offices at Redmond back to, like, friendships, relationships we had made, like in the web community. And it all started, I think the year was 2009. We were included on a project called Lost World's Fairs. Which was specifically for the launch of Internet Explorer 9. They contracted some agencies or small teams to build sites that sort of showcased what IE9 supported. And I lucked into this team with Jason Santa Maria, Frank Chimero and Naz Hamid. My friends at Paravel, Dave, Reagan and I were working with them to build some pages that just showcased and highlighted Internet Explorer 9's support of WOFF, the Web Open Font Format. So basically just pages with lots and lots of web fonts showing how nicely they finally render in IE and how happy we were about that. So we built some pages that were, it was called Lost World's Fairs. It was fictitious Lost World's Fairs that never happened or haven't happened yet. So, like, on the moon, El Dorado and Atlantis, sort of mythical places. We had a lot of fun doing that but the whole reason we got into that project was because Dan Mall couldn't. Jason asked Dan if he could help him, and he was like, "I'm busy." I think Big Spaceship was where he was at the time and they had a job for IE as well. Somehow our names came up and we got the call and we immediately said yes, probably before the sentence was even finished. The ask. [Laughs] And that was when we met all of those guys, all of them. I mean, that was great. So through that job, the guy that set all that up was Nishant Kothary, who used to work at Microsoft and specifically he was working with the team at Internet Explorer. And we met him, met him in person at South by Southwest one year and hit it off and he asked us to do a couple of jobs since then. One year at South by Southwest, we were having lunch and he just looked at me and said, "Would you guys be interested in doing the Microsoft homepage?" [Laughs] And, I mean, my face is red now and all flushed 'cause it sounds ridiculous, 'cause it was at the time and maybe it still is now. But, uh, yeah, I said, "Well, yes. The answer to that question always should be yes." And it was specifically because we had kind of gotten into responsive web design a little bit early on, I guess, and built some responsive sites and kind of knew our way around that and that was where he kind of thought things ought to go at Microsoft. And sort of did a whole lot setting up, and I think this will key once we maybe get into talking about how that project went, and I didn't really know how much he had done until way, way after the fact. But he had done a lot of explaining to the organization, the greater organization at Microsoft, and specifically to the homepage team. Like, what does it mean to hire a consultant in this one area? And I think that was the one reason we had a seat at the table, so to speak, was because we had some experience and practice with responsive web design. But by no means were we coming in, like, some sort of like gifted or amazing individuals who were smarter than everybody there. We walked into this room and, you know, were humbled by A, being involved in the first place, and the more we got to know, kind of like, how smart and clever and talented the people were, it was even more so. But he set it up, and really, I think, kind of, set the stage for ideas and intentions to remain unchanged or undiluted throughout the course of the project and really, I think, more than I realized at the time, I probably would have in the middle of the job said, "Wow, thanks to Nishant to getting us in the door," but I think that he really set the stage knowing how organizations work and knowing, really, that the code and the design and figuring out what was the best solution for the Microsoft homepage at the time, that's the easiest part by far. The hardest part was navigating the organization as a whole. And I think that's true for any organization. Definitely not a critique of Microsoft because I would actually argue that it's a miracle and amazing thing that they were able to put so much trust, as you said, into three goofballs from Texas who work out of their houses. [Laughs] And really meshed well with us, listened to us and let us be part of their team for a good six to eight months.

Jen

So how much do you think Nishant or other people at Microsoft had a real vision of what they wanted and that they knew they wanted it to be responsive, and probably they knew it was going to support where Microsoft went with Windows 8 and this sort of switch to the tile and the whole new operating system? Maybe the folks on the web team didn't know about that stuff, or maybe they did or at least I'm sure they knew that the business leadership was going in that direction. Or how much do you feel like you guys had to come in and sort of sell your perspective, the kind of perspectives that we talk about a lot on this show, when it comes to, like, mobile-first and responsive and content-first?

Trent

Yeah, yeah, and the whole, I guess, device-agnostic thing. That's a really good question, almost shockingly good, because that was exactly sort of the climate we walked in to. We had no idea... so the Surface was coming out. Their sort of, like, hybrid-tablet-laptop. It was all about touch and what you said about Windows 8 at the time, it was still, I think, metro. But just that touch-friendly, typographic, minimal, you know, that immediately applied to sort of, like, if there's any sort of design aesthetic that we maybe revert to more often than not, it's that. We like that at Paravel. That was the agenda that made... I don't know if Nishant knew specifically about it or not. Maybe he did. But for sure, from high up they were developing this thing and they needed a site that worked well in a variety of environments and was touch-friendly and all this kind of stuff. And we would get this sort of random feedback that was I really shocked by. About, like, "Is this gonna look good on tablets?" [Laughs] And we're like, "Sure. Like, err, yeah. I mean, the point is that it will work and look good everywhere." Eventually, being completely out of the know, that reinforced to me that our kind of device-agnostic philosophy was right, 'cause it just worked out that way.

Jen

You designed a major, important website for a device that you didn't know existed.

Trent

[Laughs] I like that you... that makes me feel cool. [Laughs] When you put it that way. But yeah, I mean, you would think that we would be given dimensions or something. But no, I mean, it was like, maybe somebody on the team knew, but I really kind of don't think that anybody had that kind of specific... it was really just all about getting it done well. They were really receptive to it. I think it was surprising. I was prepared to go in and sort of have the, like, responsive discussion debate or whatever you call it. Just, like, that perception shift. And there were definitely people, you know, in an organization as large as Microsoft or any organization, they weren't around for Ethan's article or book, so fair enough, they've been building static pages their entire lives. You can't really expect everybody to get it overnight. But I was shocked at how the homepage team that we were specifically day-to-day working with and reporting to, they got it immediately. It was delightful. Especially the engineering side of things, they were ready to do it, they got it. That sort of spirit that we possessed and I think we kind of thought that was limited to maybe, and ignorantly thought that it was like, "This is what it's like to be on a small team. We care about the web." Or something like that. But as soon as we walked into those doors and met these people, they were just like us. [Laughs] And that's our own... you know, we were nervous and we were to sort of walk in to, like, the Empire.

Jen

[Laughs] The Evil.

Trent

Yeah, yeah.

Jen

As a Mac person since '89, I can say, like, "The Evil Empire!"

Trent

Yeah! Yeah. And I mean, we sort of... there was a lot of... even before, we were pretty quiet about it. I think we just wanted to be, while we were working on the job. But I mean, man, and that's another totally separate subject. They gave us just a very few, like small PDFs of, like, Metro and then Windows 8 standards and kind of all that. And we started using... we all bought phones and computers and installed Windows 8. We really wanted to catch the vibe or whatever. Man, we really, really got it. And that was sort of a... it was the turning point for me, as well. That like, yeah, I was on a Mac and I use Mac and to sort of get into Windows 8 and start using that UI. A lot of things I think are influenced by it now, but it was very inspiring. To the point, like, I remember the first time I got into iOS and I was like, "This is just amazing. This is changing everything." For me, it was equally as refreshing to do that. It was a good... yeah. Everything that we thought, leading up to it. Everything we thought about how it'd be and we came through the doors defensive and maybe insecure, a little bit. But as soon as we met the team in person that we had been talking to. We had, like, calls... I don't know if they were interviews. I guess they were interviews. But we had phone calls to make sure Paravel wasn't jerks and we weren't completely delusional. Just verify what Nishant probably said, the nice things that he said about us. Had a pretty good sense of what we were walking into. I remember the first day, as soon as we started talking and hearing what they had to say, there were nuanced debates about any kind of a design process that were to take place. We knew the core understanding, we all wanted the same thing. So it was very, very encouraging and a really cool thing to fall into.

Jen

And what's something that you feel like you've learned through that process? When you got done with it, however much long later, you had a, sort of a new skill or a new understanding about responsive design, specifically, but also perhaps just web design in the modern era. You know, something that you just didn't expect to learn, but there you were, totally having a deeper understanding.

Trent

Well, there's maybe two things. Let me say both so I don't forget them and then I'll do them one at a time. But one was just that the scale we launched a responsive site on verified a lot of opinions that I had. And I'll get to that. But the other one would be that I think that back to what Nishant did for us, I almost think it painted a... it's not fair to say to him, but it almost painted an unrealistic expectation of how jobs would go in the future. Because he did so well for us and Benson Chan and he was kind of like our product lead for the day-to-day, once we got going. Those two guys almost, like, put us in some sort of like, spinning reality bubble of like, what life should be like. And it kind of hasn't been every time since. But back to the, just the scale aspect of it. I'm sure someone's maybe said this on the podcast before, but once responsive web design made sense to me, I sort of felt this urge to repent for all my fixed width Photoshop focus. Not that Photoshop's bad, but focused on that as the source of truth. Once I got my brain to stop thinking that way, I saw the web totally differently, for what it was, what people like Jeremy Keith have always been kind of saying about it. [Laughs] I finally got it, you know? I believed in that with all of my heart, as cheesy as it sounds, I was like, "This is what we should be doing as web designers." That's all well and good, and you go to Microsoft and you get the sense that they believe that, but to see it launched on the scale that it was, across something like 98 different locations in different languages with different departments adding content, I mean, it was a thrill to say the least. I don't know what the proper word for it is. But it really verified having fluid width sites and basing things on the idea that, like, everything's going to flex and scale and we're designing things to fit into containers and we're designing a system that's going to work with a network of content, versus some sort of a mentality of trying to be pixel perfect and lay out one page at a time. That sort of approach in conjunction with scalable CSS, all of those things played in, and even performance and accessibility, but putting all those things together on that scale, I guess, really verified the belief and the ideal we had set forth about what it's like to be a web designer, what we should be doing as web designer and what we should be advocating to clients. It was cool that this idea worked.

Jen

[Laughs] Yeah.

Trent

Yeah. It was a relief. I mean, it was about a six or eight month process. A lot of it, you could break it into thirds. The first was sort of design. And that actually got baked pretty quickly. It's actually very close to what we showed up thinking we would do. So that's kind of a bit crazy. But there was a lot of nuanced stuff. And the second half, they launched a test in the middle of the project and it went over well. It got good press. We're freaking out 'cause people are talking about it and nobody knows it's us so any kind of, like, friendship goodwill that we would have had, it was actually really nice. Maybe you have friends who say, "Good job on that website, you're my friend, I have to say this." But nobody knew we were working on it. So to see some people say, like, "The Microsoft homepage test looks really great today." It made us feel really good and I think the whole team, it sort of fueled us. Because the last phase was like, putting it into the CMS. Putting it into the deployment system. Bug testing for two months. [Laughs] Constantly. And their support matrix is really, really broad. It was on that scale and through that process, it was a really good experience and it reaffirmed the whole, why we should be doing responsive design from the beginning.

Jen

Nice. So then you talked about, I mean we talked a little before we started recording this show, about other clients that you have and that you have a lot of experience now on working on big projects. With big teams. The clients that you cannot name. [Laughs] Which I think it's the case for a lot of us, that we've worked on all these projects that we can't really talk about either because they... there's a NDA, you signed a contract with somebody, maybe there was, for me, there was people in the middle and they want all the credit and they don't want me to get any credit so, like, I can't say that I worked on that project, 'cause then that would take away credit from them. Or projects that haven't launched, and so you can't talk about them until they've actually launched. I guess I want to get at some of that. Other lessons that you've learned or advice you have or stuff that you, I don't know. You said you feel like it went really well at Microsoft because of Nishant's leadership and then since you've sort of learned, yeah, it doesn't always go that well.

Trent

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was funny, because the site had launched and we had been pretty busy after the fact. We had some other jobs going. I never knew until, almost a year after the Microsoft project, like, what really went into setting all of that up. As Nishant and Dave and Reagan and I, and his wife Peta, we were all at dinner and he's explaining... and she was at Microsoft as well, so she was involved in this. He was sort of outlining all the things that he had done to explain. I guess the high level way of phrasing what they put forth, and very specific and detailed and... as Nishant would say, "Honey badger terms." Where, like, you don't hire a consultant and then tell them how to do the job. They told us that on day one. I didn't realize, I think it was probably something they had to kind of remind themselves. Like, "We've always done things X way, oh, wait, we're trying to make a change." As I'm listening to him go through on each level of the organization, from very, very high up to the people that we were working with directly, he just explained how that goes. And I think that anyone who's gotten into a job, even just a middle man or multiple departments, I mean, honestly, from my experience, the larger the site or the client or the business, the more difficult it is to sort of get things through undiluted. Of course, things can go through testing and be smartly evolved and tweaked but almost, like, to where it's not a committee decision and people are making decisions because they want to get out meetings. Rightfully so. But it's that really sad place. [Laughs] Oftentimes. Where sites kind of lose their way, I guess. And I think that... let's see... if there's any one thing I could... let me see the best way I could put it. It's like, with these large organizations especially, but I think this is true for any website, they are, as the internet changes and as businesses change from needed brochure sites to where maybe the website's the entire product for this company. The sites are... they're, like, a manifestation online of that organization, as a being. To redesign a website... because those things are so linked, it's almost like, you may need to be redesigning an organization, in a way. It gets into a very, really... it gets intense and it's almost like a rabbit hole immediately. So you show up and a site's navigation is built based upon how the organization is structured, from a vice-president-down level. So if you need to change a navigation link, well, I mean, and you're not saying, "These five navigation links don't make sense," or "we should have four," or "we should have six, the fifth one should be different." You're saying, "This organization..." Not that I'm some business consultant expert. But I mean, you sort of get into these things and you realize that you're peeling... the web is just the most consumer, or user-based layer of that. But you start peeling those back and you start exposing more problems and more problems. In all the jobs since Microsoft, it's everything you mentioned. Some have launched and then we couldn't talk about them. More than anything, they're just not finished yet. Or we're still working and it's like a really big process. That's actually kind of what we're doing right now. I think what I've learned is it takes more time than six months or a year. If you're going to peel back these layers to whatever limited or deep level you're going to have any kind of an influence or whatever it is, from a consulting standpoint, you have to take time and be patient and do all those things that, kind of, I don't like to do. But maybe that's becoming what we have to do if we're going to build websites on any sort of a scale. Which is, like you said, meetings and email and Basecamp and thinking very critically about, like, the decisions that you're making. Not just from, like, what's best for the website, but what's it going to mean for the organization? For example, we're designing a site that has an entire floor of people who fill that site with content. What does my one tiny design decision potentially do to make their lives easier? More difficult? Or prevent future decisions from changing... a decision would prevent us from changing something later on, because they have to change a high level of infrastructure. I'm making myself dizzy and this is boring me [Jen laughs] but this is what life has become. It's what it is.

Jen

Yeah. It seems like, I mean, all of these companies, whether, I mean, some of these companies that people who are listening to this show, who do this professionally, right? Some of these companies are big media companies. They're newspapers, journals, or they're television or entertainment or they're, whatever, right? Some companies are stores, some companies are... all of these other different industries, financial industries, financial products. I mean, we've been going through this arch, right? Originally all of these different industries did all of this without the internet. [Laughs] Without the web at all.

Trent

They made money and everything.

Jen

[laughs] Right! They made money, they had products, they sold those products, they had information, they had entertainment, they sold that, they made... right. And then the web showed up and it felt like we went through this period of time where it was, many of us were in this kind of stance of, "Hey, there's this thing, it's called the web. It's the wide world web. See this, type this, 'h-t-t-...'" Right? You did teach people what the web was. And teach companies, all the way from giant companies all the way down to little ones, little individuals and say, "Hey, guess what, restaurant-around-the-corner? You really should have a website," "Hey person over here, this company, this lawyer, these lawyers over here, this law firm, you really should have a website." And it felt like most of the work we did was that. Getting everybody on the web. And then we hit this era of, you know, more powerful tools and these big CMS' and they were annoying to use and really hard and awful and terrible and you had this whole newsroom of people who were cursing the CMS everyday but that's what they had to do. And now it feels like... part of it's mobile-responsive, but really I think it's just timing, as well. It feels like we're going through this giant set of... for some people it's the second round, but for a lot of place sit's like this third round of massive redesign. Where those old business models are not working at all anymore. And these new designs are sort of reflecting the entire shift and change from the old business model to these new business models. And digital becomes prominent and equal rather than this stepchild or this afterthought. Or now, even, being the dominant... like, paper's gone, it's just digital. And the tools and the need to be efficient with the tools and realize that, yeah, if you've got a hundred and fifty people sitting there adding content, if you make an efficient to use tool that works really well and you store your data in ways that are really super organized and helpful, you'll get a ton of business value out of that. So it's worth taking the time to restructure everything. And it feels like we're in the era, where everybody's trying to completely restructure in that way. You're not just redesigning the way it looks, you're designing a new business infrastructure at times. Or maybe it's not the web designer consultant who's doing that but it's the business leadership inside the organization who's doing that and they're bringing in a web designer at the same time to make some of that more concrete.

Trent

Yeah and in the experience we've had recently, sometimes the business totally gets that. They know that they have to change. I mean, it can be something as simple and small as, like, you know, even if you get into just dealing with multiple devices. And building sites that aren't tied to any one use case. Just changing the way the workflow goes from that. A small, kind of easy example that's actually made some projects in the past very difficult is just, like, getting sign off and realizing that a JPG or three JPGs or whatever [laughs] at different sizes, it's not really representative anymore. That's the simplest, easiest version. It gets into, how are project managers planning for deliverables, or who's on what? A lot of jobs will come in, too, and a designer will be working and in three weeks or whatever, a month, we'll bring development in. That's tough. That's problematic from the beginning. Because we, at Paravel, and I think most that do that sort of responsive web design, would want to be prototyping. It's easy to say that, and you could probably get the designers and the engineers to say, "Yeah! I want to do that! How do we convince whoever, the higher up, to let us do that?" I've written a couple of posts about this stuff in the past and then somebody will, it will resonate, and there was somebody, I think it's Tom Maslin* wrote... it was the post, the last post I wrote, which has been, like, four months now. He ported that over into the context of, I think, the BCC. It was like, "Hey, I'm frustrated," or, "this is hard," or "this isn't ideal," and I don't want to put words into his mouth. [laughs] We can find that and put it in show notes to something. But to me, this is happening everywhere, just like you said. And on a small sense, like, yeah. How do we deal with devices? But then it's like, how do these departments work together and how are we organizing jobs and how are we organizing staff and meetings or whatever? But then it does even further, probably, because all of those decisions, like I was getting at, are probably pretty high up, you know, the funnel. Whether it's like a C-level or a manager-level, I don't know. It made me think, I just pulled up weightshift.com, Naz and Scott and Jen and all those. Another small web team we love and respect a lot. But there's this paragraph, I forgot about it until the day they launched it. But it's on their about page, weightshift.com/about. Sometimes you'll read things people write and know that it's based on, positive experience or negative experience or maybe, in my case, half the gray hair I have is based on, like, things. And there's this paragraph that talks about that he keeps the company small and they perform best when they function alongside decision makers or those who are invested in the project at hand. Talks about direct access to leadership and forming a dedicated partnership. I read that when the site launched and I was like, "That's nice, that's nice, whatever." And then I had a hard week at work and I was like, "Oh my god." That paragraph equals at least one or two severe, or whatever they are, significant learning experiences.

Jen

[Laughs] Right.

Trent

But I mean, I think that's, I'm like, "That's it, basically. We could have just build websites." My first website was for a fraternity, Dave and I did it for, like, 300 bucks, a long time ago and we did whatever we wanted, we used terrible fonts and all that. And we did brochure sites for five or 10 years or something. And, man, like, that paragraph, to me, it sums it up. I'm speculating, but if I were to... let's not talk for Naz. But let's say I take that paragraph and apply to my own life and try to rewrite it and reuse it in the context of my site. It would basically be saying that for me to do my job, for us to get this thing launched, for us to get any kind of impactful change, or to help you in any way, we can't just go in and build this thing. We have to mind-meld or something and it's going to get messy and we have to be able to argue and dialog and it's not gonna be about, like, what colors we use. [Laughs] That's not it. That's part of it, but it's... we have to learn about your business. Maybe that was always the thing if you're doing a brochure site. But, man, it just seems like, we may get to the point where we have to talk about how you're going to do this. I think the biggest mistake we've made since Microsoft was actually something we've launched. We worked with a client, build this thing, we loved the client, to this day. And the people that we were working with, our product manager there was fantastic. It was just like with Benson and Nishant at Microsoft. But we did not... we built this thing that would be updated regularly. It wasn't a news site but it's kind of similar, we're building this container, but really what it needed, the most important part, was who was going to be filling that container with content and how it would look. These weren't articles, so it wasn't some sort of cut and dry thing, where we knew there was somebody controlling that. If it's a magazine or newspaper, there are editors and writers and the quality of their work is important. But for this we didn't know any better. [Laughs] Now we do. But we didn't know how that site would be populated with content. So we messed up because we didn't ask those questions. Part of the design, the biggest part of the design process, looking back, was, "How is this going to be populated with content? Who's going to be doing it? What are their limitations? What's the real world implications of that?" We had no idea we would ever need to ask that. We thought, well, we just design this thing. It's a big company with lots of people, they would know what to do. They would allocate, they would read our minds. [Laughs] It's one of these things where, this is the design. That's how far it goes. It wasn't about even a support matrix or it wasn't even about user tests. We did all that stuff. It was about how this business would keep this page going and update it. I think we kind of superficially had an idea. We could instruct them on how, but we didn't even worry about whether they could or not. It's a really good example, looking back, for me, of, like, man, that's what we're doing. It's insane to me. It's cool and it's adventurous and it makes things really dirty and scrappy, like of all over again. But I mean, man, the web design books I've read and all the articles and everything I've done up until this point has not prepared me for this. This is different. This is hard. It's just straight up luck or you try to just make good sensible decisions.

Jen

Yeah. I think that's huge. I mean, I've launched many, many, many sites where... and it's part of why I made a decision to go away from smaller clients to bigger ones, is because it felt like the bigger clients had at least a chance of update their content. That they would want to, and they would put their energy into doing that. It feels like we... there's still, the emphasis is constantly on designing the presentation of content for the end users who read that content. But you see very, very few people, although Karen McGrane is one of them, she's been talking about this for years now, and Jeff Eaton, and there are definitely people out there. We've talked about it on the show. But it feels like, you know, yeah, if I stack up a huge pile of web design books, they're not talking about the other side, which is, actually, we're not just designing the presentation of content. We're designing a whole system, and that includes, how are you going to enter content? And some of these decisions about, "Do you want to use Jekyll or do you want to use Drupal?" or "Do you want to use this or do you want to hand roll your own application in Ruby?" or should you use... we debate these frameworks, but it's like, what really matters for those kinds of questions, to answer that kind of question, I think, is, "Who's writing the content or shooting the photos or making the illustrations? How are they putting them on the website? And what are their technical limitations?" or what kind of... does it need to be fast? Do they need to be able to do it over and over and over again? Does it get updated rarely? What is that experience? And designing that experience so that you've got, you have a hundred and fifty reporters who went to journalism school and trained to be photographers and writers and editors and they're going to be updating content. How can they have the tools that they need to be... to create the kind of work, to put it on the web in a way that they're really proud of it? And that they have some flexibility and they have a few superpowers to do things without having too many powers. They can't change the font to green but they can set the image to be on the left or on the right or make this one have a big image, make this one have a medium sized image. There's a lot of complexity there and a lot of, I find, really fun puzzles to figure out. But it's not something that people... I don't know. We're not talking about it enough yet as an industry, I don't think. We're sort of just, like, well, we designed the heck out of how it's going to be presented, but behind the scenes, we'll just use Drupal. It will be fine. It's like, well, Drupal out of the box is really hard to use if you don't think about the way it's getting built. Don't just have random developers randomly assemble a system that no one's thought about. [Laughs] Or you're going to end up with a website that nobody can update. It's just... yeah.

Trent

And then what do you do if, in designing this thing, or even if you're doing it right and planning from the beginning, if you find out that the capability of the staff or the department or whatever it is, is not there to execute? To populate the site with content? What happens if maybe Photoshop or some sort of a... even just image editing, cropping skills, become necessary? Then you find yourself in a position where... and let's assume, everyone agrees, this is where the site should go. This is what we should do. Well, you find yourself inevitably in a situation where you're basically, now, back into advising on a business decision. It's not that I'm not confident in doing that to some extent, but it's just not... it's just different. It's this thing where, you know, if we believe that good content and a solid UX and all these things are the path to success, well then inevitably you're going to hit a place where that capability doesn't currently exist. [Laughs] You find yourself writing these emails or sitting in these meetings where you can't even tell how... you look down off the edge of a cliff and you couldn't see where your pay grade ends anyways, you're just sort of, like, "What am I doing here and what am I saying?" I think it's scary and it's different and it's weird. I'll be really candid. I don't love the fact that we don't have a thousand sites to talk about that we've launched last year. It's the way it is, but, man, there's also a lot of talk about, like, if you want to... part of being in design, I think, now, especially with the way the web is, is you have to be able to articulate and stand up for what you believe it. And you have to sit down at these tables. It'd be fun just to sit at home and design whatever I feel like, put my headphones on, just vibe it out and have a good time and design, that's what I would prefer to do. I think I also find a little bit of solace in the heat of this, like, being places I guess I feel like I maybe have no business being otherwise. Or just sort of, like, really going for it. Trying to convince the people who are smarter than you are or just differently... their specialties and expertise is somewhere totally different. But you find yourself having, the cliché, a seat at the table. Having these arguments or having these discussions or making these cases as concisely as possible. I think, you know, the work we do at Paravel I really believe the value, any value we provide, it's rooted in this idea of, the three of us will probably talk more about an email than design decisions sometimes. This is a very important email and morale hinges upon it and if we say this the wrong way, the whole project could change. Or if we don't make this argument concisely and respectfully, the whole project could change. It's a very delicate balance when you're navigating all of these things. And it can be frustrating, I'd rather design, I just want to code. I do have days where I get to do that. But a lot of days are spent doing that other thing. I have days where I come home and I'm like, "I haven't done the thing I'm good at in, like, a week." But then there's days where you feel like, "Wow, we could actually do this at some sort of larger scale and change things." I think it's just the reality of it. I'm definitely not gripping about having a job and being able to work [laughs] and working with clients. But it's just, I think, more than anything, I'm very fascinated with how different it is.

Jen

Yeah, it seems like things have gotten very... they've just gotten very hard. And clients or companies need help understanding it and they need help understanding what the options are and they need help understanding what the impact is on their business and on their staff. It seems like there's a level of being a therapist involved.

Trent

Yeah!

Jen

It is a business consultant kind of thing, like, I'm going to come in and help you shape your business and then it's also, like, I'm going to come in and be a group therapist for all of your dysfunction because it's going to come up and we need to either work through it or work around it or figure out how to not let that dysfunction end up on the website.

Trent

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.

Jen

I want to hear more about business leadership. So there are people who are in charge of things. And sometimes they have unbelievable levels of understanding and skill and they know how to do things that the rest of us don't even know exist. And then, also sometimes, they don't really know much at all about the feet-on-the-ground, day-to-day reality of what a website really is, or what it could be; what the digital space is or could be; or what new 21st century business models are turning in to. Sometimes it can be hard to work with such folks because sometimes — not always, hopefully not frequently — but sometimes they seem to be the last people to understand what's going on. Yet, they are the ones who get to make all of the final decisions.

What are some of your experiences with how to… and you said before, part of it is just to even get access to such folks so that you can work with them, collaborate with them directly, instead of working with somebody who's much lower down on the food chain, who then sends things to their boss, who sends it to their boss, who sends it to their boss, who vetoes the whole thing and you don't know why and the veto just comes back down the chain… What've been some of your experience with collaborating with business leadership and getting something really-great built because that collaboration has gone well?

Trent

One of the projects we worked on was a company that had lots of brick and mortar stores. They had all these ideas for, like, digital or web based things they could build to enhance those stores. It's almost the exact same thing that goes back to, like, if you get feedback on a design specifically from a client. And it's very, very specific feedback on, like, "You should make this larger. You should make this a different color." The thing you do is you ask, "Why?" What's the reason there? Instead of basically, tell me the problems and let me work with you to solve them instead of, you shouldn't have to riff and solve these by yourself. And on a larger scale, I think it's that thing exactly. There's a problem or there's this new business opportunity. Whether it's being able to pay for something in a different way, maybe it's a business that wants membership and to give, I don't know, whatever. Whatever it is. What I find happens is these initiatives get spun up off of really good intentions and really good ideas but the actual execution of those... if the execution of those is something that needs to be designed or needs to be built on the web, oftentimes, at least sometimes, in my experience [laughs] the people who would be designing and building it are involved in the process of answering that question or solving that problem way too late. It may be that those people are involved in, like, it could be as bad as, "This is what we're building. You get to design how it looks and you get to code it." But those people may have value to contribute further up the funnel or further up the chain of command, I guess. That's kind of the simplest, most boring example of that. These intentions are good and these ideas are really good but it's more, it should be more a thing of, if we're going to establish the things that we're going to be building and setting the projects we're going to be working on as an organization the next couple of years. Let's involve the people who work on the web earlier than later, sooner than later. We get into that a lot. If it doesn't happen, what I kind of see is it turns into something that people maybe have different ideas and sort of working within this idea that's too fully baked to really have any room to create anything. Or they feel just held back in other senses. It can be a little bit of a morale hit as well. But I think that's kind of it. I remember having a specific discussion a couple of years ago about a responsive site with somebody who I had not met previously, he was super high up. He said, "What's next? This responsive site's great. I get it. This is really cool. We should do that. But when you finish that, what's next?" I was speechless. Because I didn't know. I was like, "This. This is the thing, man. The content's getting to users and now you have... you don't have three web properties. You have one. Everybody's working on making this one thing great as opposed to these three or four things, like, not sync." And all this. But I think that really paints the picture of how things are seeming, now the web is more product-based. It's, "What's next? What's next? What can we do to meet business goals and make financial gains?" That's fine. Like we were saying, the reality of how things go. But it's always going to be better to start with the problems and, I mean, I'm sure that's how that is from the beginning. But I think a lot of people who are further down the chain of command, they see solutions already spooled up. Like, this is what you need to do. Here's the directive. Here's your mission, just execute it. So, yeah, I think that's been a pretty interesting thing that we run into a lot. These objectives are cool, but inevitably we'll say, "Well, why are we doing this anyways? What about this idea? Did anybody think about doing this?" "Well, it's too late. We have a plan. You gotta do it. Just do it."

Jen

Yeah. It feels like that's part of why small companies and small teams can come in. Maybe it's not part, maybe it's the reason that's possible. [Laughs] For small teams and small companies to come out of no where and take out these big companies. That a company that's been around for 20 or 50 or 100 years and they've got a staff of 400 people working on this thing. That kind of specialization and separation into these layers, there's a point at which doing that too much makes it very hard to make a big change. A small people, you know, five people in a five person company, can show up and just sort of wipe out that other company's business model.

Trent

Well, I mean, we've seen that a lot recently. There's a lot of small startup-type companies that can achieve a lot very quickly. Yeah, and take the legs out of a larger company that has the infrastructure.

Jen

Yeah, and part of it is that ability to collaborate between the folks that are more business-experienced and business-minded and the folks that are more technical or more visual or more whatever.

Trent

Before, a lot of our clients were small. It was like, you'd have one point person and that was truly very truly it. It may be the only person. We built sites for Mark Simonson. He's a type designer, he runs his business, it's Mark. We got to know Mark and it was his vision and our vision and that was all there was. Those were the facets and that was easy in that respect. The more you add, the trickier it is. I think my thought, going in to the transition from pretty much exclusively fairly small businesses to sometimes doing these larger jobs is, like, I would have assumed, like, these people... all of the staff there, they don't know how to do it. But you show up and just what I said about Microsoft, was like, "Wow, these talented, smart, gifted people with really pure intentions and good ideas." It's like, how do you harness that within a large organization? I don't know.

Jen

Yeah, and I think sometimes the reality could be that those people actually totally do know how to do it, but they don't have the - and I don't know that this is true about Microsoft at all or not - but I've seen situations at other places where they just don't have the authority to do it. [Trent laughs] So by bringing in an outside consultant, that basically says exactly what they've been saying for the last two years, they're able to be like, "Yeah, you must listen to the outside consultant. Listen to them. They're famous. They have all of these amazing... look! Yes, let's do it that way. Never mind that's what I've been saying all along." [Laughs]

Trent

I've been in rooms and, like, I think it's really the... Dave and Reagan, I've worked with them for almost eight, nine, maybe... I don't know. We've been working together a really long time. They hear my voice all the time. They can tune it out, they're used to me. I think the outside consultant thing, it's like, if we're new or we're kind of, like, temporarily engaged, oh, for sure, we're saying the thing that somebody has been saying for five years. It almost feels disingenuous. I think it's really been a good experience, though, because it's like, "Yeah!" In no way are we, like... we have some crazy perception that nobody else has. It's just the tone of my darn voice hasn't been numbed to them yet. [Both laugh] They haven't learned, they haven't crafted, like Dave and Reagan have, how to ignore Trent Walton. They're the fortunate ones. So when we show up and we start talking, I mean, yeah, it's different. We're a new voice, we're a new perception. But, man, more often than not, it's us repeating verbatim, what somebody or a lot of people have been saying. I think that's natural, though, I don't think that's... you could say, "That's why organizations are bad." That's just human nature. My kids know how to tune me out just the same. [Both laugh] So, yeah.

Jen

So tell us about the... you not only designed, you folks over at Paravel, the current microsoft.com website. You also rebuilt the original Microsoft... totally change the subject.

Trent

Yeah, web archeology, as Dave likes to say.

Jen

Yeah, so tell us about this. 1994. The original microsoft.com homepage, was lost, it was replaced many times, and then you guys were hired to come in and rebuild it.

Trent

Yeah, I mean, we became friends with those guys. So Benson Chan was sort of the product manager over there when we were working and he moved to a different department and Chris Balt, who we had met during the job, he's kind of working on the homepage now. Chris, this was pretty much his idea. How cool would it be to basically rebuild this thing? I think that he was smart because he was thinking about something like Space Jam. I mean, Space Jam, I don't know what the URL is, but the Space Jam website, like the a Bugs Bunny, Michael Jordan film, it's like from the early 90s or something. It's still online. It's amazing. That's, I think, a thing that a lot of people on the web are really passionate about. I guarantee you, if you went to the Paravel site and clicked some of the URLs from our portfolio, they are gone or they've changed. You know, and that sucks. I think that's something that I feel more inclined after doing this job, is to take more responsibility for. You know, archiving these things or making sure I've got a copy that can be hosted somewhere if I care about it, if I think, like... if we built a site and we thought that it contributed to the shape of the web in a very, very small way. Maybe we built a JavaScript plugin or something. [Laughs] Whether it's significant or very small, I feel like I should have or should be taking control. We should archive these things so that we can learn from them. Just appreciate them for what they are. When you think about a website in '94, we've kind of hinted at this, but it was like, going above and beyond to have a website. It's like, "Wow, you did this thing that wasn't necessary. It's not required of you. But now we have a website. Really cool." Like it wasn't a prerequisite for being legit in the world of business in '94. And you look at the page, it's gray and it has this funny little sunset GIF degraded kind of star spacey graphic. I mean, it's just somebody, like, "That's how I feel today. I'm going to make this graphic and throw it on the internet." [Jen laughs] Recreating it, Dave took the lead on this, so I think that, from our portfolio, there's a post that he wrote called... is it Web Archeology? Yeah. We just started talking about how we should do it. The first question was, like, "Should we make it cool or whatever? Should we make it responsive? Should we put picturefill?" [Laughs] Or something. Should we use CSS animation on this thing? And we really, very, very quickly came to the conclusion that would be really bad. It looks silly, whatever, but it's a masterpiece. It's the beginning of the web. It's somebody... and I mean, this sounds a little bit cheesy, maybe, but somebody had that, like, the same spirit we all have when we build websites. "I can build this thing and I can put it on the web and I don't have to go to a printer, like, I just hit this button and this thing lives on the internet. Anyone can see it. It's magic." To think that a company as large as Microsoft had... there were a couple people who had that feeling and they did this for the very first time, I mean, it had to feel great. We don't want to lose that. We don't want to update that temporarily. I mean, it's like plastic surgery or something. We just want to let that be what it is. We had to figure... and I don't know if we got it exactly right, but we started figuring out, "How do we put an image on a website?" And maybe that technology wasn't available. It sounds ridiculous, but, like, putting an image on a website and then mapping text over it. It isn't, I mean, we couldn't, we wouldn't do that now the way we did it. Or we can't do it. The way they did it then wouldn't be the way we do it now, by any way. It was a lot of research and guess and we went through old file formats and I'm sure there are a lot of people who know a lot more about how things were in '94 than we do. Though, it should be said that Dave was building websites either then or maybe a year or two later. Dave's kind of always been building websites. But, man. We didn't know any of this would be done. So we kind of reverse engineered it and made some guesses but it's all inline and there's a readme file attached to it. To me, the special thing about it... I love Microsoft because they put responsive first and they went for it and they did that kind of before a lot of other businesses had done it. Yeah, and this sort of felt like another kind of cool, endorsement that they "get" what the web community, the web design and development community, are trying to achieve. And I think a lot of the conversations we've had now are about, like, "Where does our work go?" And maybe we should have a web museum. Greg Story from Happy Cog has, I think, maybe the post is called Web Museums or something like that. But all these great posts. Christopher Schmidt has a great archive of all these things. I mean, you could even take that deeper, into the people who were... Tim Berners-Lee and all the people who started all of this. I mean, we should be capturing their intent and their belief. You could take it from just simply, like, the craft of web design and development into the intent for what the internet should be used for. You could take this really, really far if you wanted to. If you were to think about a web museum or just sort of really capturing the initial, what it was like to be on the web and what the hopes and dreams of the people who built this thing for us, were. You know?

Jen

It feels very much like we need to really start capturing a lot of the early web now before it becomes too late. Because at some point it will be too late, the people who made, all of us who made the early web will be gone.

Trent

Yeah.

Jen

Even before people are gone, it's just getting harder and harder and harder to even remember what it was like. Which year was which. Yeah. There are so many new people who were kids in 1994 who are now professionals and who have just grown up with the web sort of the way... when I grew up, TV was just TV. Like, of course we have TV. And TV's changed radically throughout my life. Like, it was black and white when I was a kid. We had black and white TVs and of course no remote controls then it became different very quickly. In a way, it's like, everybody should go check this out, this original Microsoft website, and see what you're talking about with the gray... like that was just the very early web, which was, I guess '93. There was no choice. Of course your website's going to be gray. [Both laugh] And now it defaults to white. But, yeah, there is a need to tell that history. People, I'm sure, who listen to this show, know about The Web Behind and all of the episodes and all the.. I have some people coming up, actually, who I'm talking to right now about coming on and talking more about what you were talking about, with archiving and sort of, how can we better save the early web? Or even now, the web of now for the future?

Trent

Yeah. And the experience of this project, I mean, it turned me on to what you and Eric were doing there. It's just like, it's almost like the responsive thing with me, personally, all over again. It was like, it took a job or a project or really, probably, more than anything, an experience, to open my eyes to, hey, fixed width sites are bad. This is the same thing. I think that this experience and looking back and realizing how special this one this is, made me realize how special everything is. It's super important. I mean, yeah, look at that site but then I almost just think about, and in two respects, maybe going, finding the old sites or companies valuing keeping those online or maybe even recreating those could be cool. But then you could go further and, like, just right now, maybe we should be taking... I think that's the takeaway for me at Paravel now. We should be taking responsibility for archiving and maintaining these things. Like, the Wayback Machine is wonderful but I think it's something along the lines of, if I think that... if I want to believe, to some extent, that what I'm doing with all these lines of code and meetings and everything we were talking about before, counts for something. Like, maybe just a tiny, tiny thing. At least, I mean, for the love. At least it should be archived. At least it should be available to go back and look at. This is how we used to do things. Look how hard it was to round corners. Just stuff like that. Having all that archived, I don't know. The questions I asked myself, or the thing that I said to myself, after finishing this job was, if you believe that what you're doing counts for anything, even if it's tiny, you should be taking responsibility for it and you should be archiving it, keeping it online. In some form or fashion. I don't know what that looks like. I kind of like the idea of, especially with large sites, or significant sites or whatever, that there would be some sort of, like, a way to say, "Hey, things are gonna be versioned," or "this will always be available forever and ever." That initial design of wired.com, it would be really cool to not just look at a screenshot, but, like, web inspect that thing.

Jen

Yup, well, there's a web standard that people are working on to create a kind of archive system baked right in to the browser. So I'm talking to the folks who are working on that about coming on that show.

Trent

Well, I need to listen to that. [Laughs]

Jen

Stay tuned.

Trent

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, it's like, this is perfect. Synergy. I have ideas for things I'd like but zero ideas about how we should do it.

Jen

Yeah, they're talking about baking it right in to HTTP itself.

Trent

Huh. I like that there's way, way smarter people...

Jen

[Laughs] Yeah, way, way. Like, you know why they're not on this show yet? Because I have a list of links I need to go research and figure out what's going on and learn more about it. Yeah, but they'll probably be on in September or October.

Trent

I'll love it.

Jen

Cool, well, all of these links, the one to Space Jam, to the original Microsoft homepage to you and your colleagues and the blog articles that you've been talking about, they'll all being gathered in the show notes for this show, which are going to be at two places, before too long. At first they'll be in one place but the soonest place they'll be in is 5by5.tv/webahead/80. And in the not too distant future they will also be at thewebahead.net/80. A website that does not exist quite yet but will. And there will be all sorts of extra stuff there besides the show notes. So that's going to become the canonical, long term archival type place. And I guess that's it. I should say thank you to Squarespace for supporting the show. And to Trent for being here.

Trent

Yeah. Thanks for having me. This has been 100% delightful.

Jen

Cool.

Trent

I love it, yeah, I've been excited about this for a long time. So this is great. Thanks for having me.

Jen

Yeah. People can follow you on Twitter @trentwalton or trentwalton.com is your website. Which is beautiful, by the way.

Trent

Thanks, it's hanging on. I got a post maybe coming one day. [Laughs] But, uh, yeah.

Jen

Yeah, I mean, I'm in this epic quest to redesign jensimmons.com that I should not even mention because it's so embarrassingly slow, that quest. Every time I start to get serious about it and look around the web to see whose websites... I look at your site and I'm just like, "Oh my god. Like, just go home. Trent's already..."

Trent

Let's be honest. You have a white page with the centered column of text. And, ok, I'm going to go to my site, it's a white page with a centered column of text. [Both laugh] Yeah. Like.

Jen

That's part of it, is I don't want that, and I can't figure... you know, yeah.

Trent

Yeah, I've never been able to...

Jen

But you don't have just white pages. You design every article with its own art direction and it's own color.

Trent

Yeah, it takes a little while. It's been awhile. I used to kind of try to do once a month and now it's kind of gotten into like two or three or four or a year. It's still fun, I think at this point it's become... a lot of the recent ones, I'll just maybe slightly change the background color because I feel like it, and there's very little other design. But it sort of depends on the mood. A lot of times I just do it to, if I have, like, a color or some sort of an aesthetic that I sort of... it wouldn't be appropriate for a client site but I just sort of need to exercise that demon out of my brain. So I stop trying to make the job, the task at hand, to be something it's not, I'll just put it on the blog, get it out of my brain and get it out of my system. Yeah, it's fun to have. It's a nice sandbox.

Jen

Yeah, yeah, that's what it feels like. Anybody who knows how to do this stuff, we all need to be messing around with it, putting on the web. I should take my own advice. [Laughs] But meanwhile, I'm working on this website for the show. Anyway. What else? That's it. Oh, people can follow me on Twitter, @jensimmons, or the show @thewebahead on Twitter. Or sign up for this email newsletter that I'm working on. If you go to 5by5.tv/webahead there's a little button you can click and actually that is going to work. [Laughs] It's been there for a year or two now but it didn't really do anything in the past. [Trent laughs] But this week I hunted down what's up and I'm taking over that mailing list and it will actually do something in the future. If you want an immediate notification that the new website has launched, you can... email newsletter or Twitter follow the show. So that's it. Thank you for listening.