Soy diseñadora web. Diseño los sitios web.

I'm trying to find good ways of saying what I do for a living in Spanish, and it gets tricky, because not only am I ignorant about Spanish, but I'm a little picky about what I call myself professionally. I don't really like "web designer", because there are people who do only visual design, and I do that as well as coding and managing entire projects. And although people keep suggesting phrases in Spanish that translate as "web page designer", I really don't like using "web page", because it sounds like the early days of the web, when everybody talked about entire web sites as "web pages", or worse still, "home pages".

In English, I tend to use "web developer", although I'm starting to dislike it too, because to a large extent it's a phrase created by and for the people in this industry, and ordinary people don't understand it as well as "web designer". (Not to mention that people in this industry have long, silly arguments over the distinctions between "designing" and "developing" web sites.) I kind of like "web site producer" best of all, because it's the most accurate for what I do, but it's not used much in English, and I doubt it's used at all in Spanish.

So, first somebody told me that I'm a diseñador web. Then I realized that I'm a diseñadora, not a diseñador*, and somebody else told me that a better phrase would be diseñadora de sitio web. Yet somebody else suggested diseñadora de páginas web.

A smart person also suggested that I could elaborate with "I design web sites" or "I design web pages", so I set about figuring out how to say that correctly in Spanish, thinking that maybe I'd avoid completely the issue of finding a perfect noun phrase. Apparently the proper verb is diseñar, which I understand is a regular -ar verb:

Yo diseño los sitios web.
Tú diseñas los sitios web.
Usted/El/Ella diseña los sitios web.
Nosotros diseñamos los sitios web.
Ustedes/Ellos/Ellas diseñan los sitios web.

So I guess I might say, "Soy diseñadora web. Diseño los sitios web."

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*Although this reminds me of The Daily Show's Samantha Bee sarcastically discussing how far women have advanced professionally, and that these days, many women are "doctresses and lawyeresses". :-)

Google Analytics

I just discovered Google Analytics. Of course I've heard of it before, but I've always been kind of lazy about tracking my sites' statistics, so never looked into it. But this past week, one of my clients asked for statistics info on his site, and since in this case I couldn't just send him to the host company's statistics pages, I asked around, and Google Analytics was recommended. Here's my experience with it so far, and some thoughts on it.

It's free, like many other Google applications. It was ridiculously easy to set up - maybe 30 seconds to create the account and another 30 seconds to add the code to every page on his site, since I use server-side includes. Within twenty-four hours, we had statistics available to us, and of course it continues to collect data.

I was also really pleased with how usable and readable the Google Analytics interface is. Like most of their web applications, it appears to have been designed by people who actually think about what works best for a user. Information and navigation really are intuitive. And I'm not using "intuitive" just as a buzzword, the way I hear it used all the time in this context. I mean that, when I'm looking for something in the interface, I can usually find it almost instantly, without having to read instructions or even think very much. I love that.

Those are the up-sides. The main down-side is my increasing discomfort with how much of my information I'm giving to Google, since I use quite a few of their online applications (GMail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Earth, Picasa, and now Google Analytics.) I don't know of anything unethical Google has done or seems to be threatening to do with that data, but as someone on a discussion forum pointed out, just the fact that they have control over so much information should be cause for concern.

Thanks to a couple of Dreamweaver forum posters, I'm now informed that Google puts lots of tracking cookies on my hard drive, and also informed that I can use Firefox to block some or all of them. I'm going to look into that next, and will report back here.

Meanwhile, I'm using it to track traffic on most of my other sites, and wishing that I hadn't been so lazy for so long, as I may very well be able to turn this information into more traffic and thus into more business. Even I have to admit that it's pretty interesting to know all about who comes to my sites, where they come from, what browser, operating system and monitor resolution they're using, and which pages they look at, for how many minutes each.

Vindicated!

I have a client with a couple of web sites, some several years old. I confess that, over the years, I hadn't been careful about validating the code on some of them. So a few months ago, I asked my client if she would approve of me spending the time to bring all of the sites up to W3C compliance. She agreed, mostly, I think, because she trusts me and believed my explanation as to this being important. Because, of course, after I spent a few hours on this, she couldn't see anything different about her sites.

Yesterday, I got an email from her, which I'll post here verbatim:

"I recommended you to several members of my Advisory Circle yesterday. One of them had been looking for W3C compliant websites and mine was the only one she found!"

As you can imagine, I was quite pleased! Not only had it been shown to my client very quickly and clearly that this matter of valid code was important to other people too, but I was already benefitting as well!

Woes of the small web dev business, Chapter 792

Over the past few days, I delivered a proposal and estimate to a client who I had had a number of conversations with. Having spent a good amount of time discussing his project and getting to know him and his organization, I felt fairly confident about the proposal I submitted (and fairly confident that I hadn't just wasted another 6-8 hours!)

Unfortunately, his response was an all-too-common one: everything was fine about the proposal except for the price and the time schedule. In other words, he was happy with my experienced analysis of his organization's needs, my careful explanation of how I would carry out the project, my choice of excellent partners to work with, and, apparently, with my reputation and portfolio. He just wants the same site cheaper and quicker!

Timing-wise, this client, though a very nice person, has no idea what it takes to produce a web site - in this case, a database-driven site with an administrative back-end as well as a number of static pages. His original request was that the site be completed within three weeks - not three weeks from the starting date, but three weeks from the proposal-limbo stage we were currently in. Any web developer with even, say, a year's worth of experience in the business knows that this is unrealistic.

I will try to be patient when I explain to the client that the process of designing a web site is a series of important decisions made by him, and that many of these decisions will take him at least an afternoon and an evening, and more likely a day or so, to make, and that he knows full well that he is a busy person already.

I'll also try to be patient when I explain that our pricing is figured on the basis of the features and functions we will be building for him, and that I'd be glad to go over the list with him and remove some features if he'd like to pay less for the web site, but that no, we're not interested in being paid less than normal for our work because of budget issues on his end.

And I could quote the old maxim about this type of work: that there's quality, price, and speed, and that he can't have a quality job at a cheap price and a super-fast delivery time.

But what this really gets down to is experience. Over the past 10 years, we have worked on about 84 web sites for some 74 clients, including producing 60 complete new web sites. We know the process, we know what it's like to work with clients, and we know how long it will take and how much is fair to charge. If this client wants to take his chances with less experienced web developers who are offering a database-driven web site in a period of 4 weeks for a cut-rate price, I'll have to wish him good luck and go on my way.