Recently I've been doing a lot of website design and custom development for
clients. I have developers that code the ASP.NET and HTML, and a separate
designer that do the graphics. All are offsite.

My clients are not very good PC users, so they communicate horribly. They
are not local, so it is all done via fax, phone and email through my
partner, the salesperson.

My partner is colorblind and has really bad taste in design (the two are
unrelated. ;)

The jobs are relatively quick (2-4 weeks) and aren't huge in terms of cash,
but they can be a lot of them, so the cumulative income is great.

I'm finding that my communication is taking up more time than the projects
are worth... and I'm trying to streamline it.

The hardest part is expressing the changes needed from the client, via my
partner, to my developers and my designer. When I do coding projects
(non-graphical) it is much easier, I can do psuedocode or UML diagrams. With
webpages and content, it is much more difficult.

Right now I create bulleted lists with detailed descriptions of the work.
For instance, on page.html, below the first header, remove the text that
says "Blah blah blah" and replace it with "Yada Yada Yada" using the same
style as the fourth paragraph from the bottom.

I need a better way.

I'm thinking about screen shots of webpages (there are tools and products -
some available via ASP members) that can take a snapshot of an entire
webpage. I can put callouts that number or letter sections. I can then have
instructions that reference the callouts. I can of course, mark a piece of
paper and scan it... but I'm not always near a scanner. Every time I do this
though, I need to create a new callout image...

This is just one thought. What are some other ideas? How can I
quickly and effectively communicate design changes?

Just a thought, don't shoot me...

I'm a Word geek, so that's what I immediately think of.

Use SnagIt from www.techsmith.com to take your screenshot only of the
area needed. Paste it right into Word.

Use the drawing toolbar in Word. If you need to, you can record a
macro to immediately throw a callout onto the document, and format it
properly. You can Ctrl+Click and Drag to create a 2nd callout
instantly. You can hold the Alt key to perfectly position a callout or
arrow. (Lots of people don't know these little shortcuts.)

You can get people to do it in FrontPage and make the changes yourself
(sometimes this is MUCH quicker than communicating changes). You can
find yourself a *local* designer. I assume you're going overseas. I've
been there, done that. Used someone from Japan to do a US business
application in Excel. Well, by the time all my time was spent
communicating tweaks and changes, heck--I could have learned VBA
myself! Tho I cannot complain. They are hard workers. I now have a
real friend in Turkey who does all my coding and anything else I need
and, yes, he truly is a friend.

Have you tried Yahoo Instant Messenger? Sometimes, when you
communicate that way, the immediate back-and-forth can be
ever-so-helpful in ironing out little stuff. I highly recommend it!
People think YIM is for chatting...LOL!!

If you have other problems using Word to communicate the changes, let
me know and I'll help you iron them out.


I wish you luck!

Thank you very much for your comment... I usually use plain text
email, so that could be the beginning of my problems. ;)

I don't want to do the work myself, so using Frontpage (or
Dreamweaver, my preference) is out of the question.

Yes, I am going overseas and have done so for 5+ years with 20+
developers. No problems with the coding, but with the design, it is a
different animal. There doesn't seem to be a standard here... but
screen shots and callouts appear to be a must.

The problem with Word is the file size... too many images, the files
get huge, slow, etc... but I suppose I could create PDFs to help.

I think your comment about using the ALT key helps. I just tried it.
That makes a big difference.

I use FullShot, but SnagIt may have other features that can help.

Thanks again.

For a larger Web site it's desirable to have a consistent "look and
feel" and navigation scheme.  So an ideal would be to decompose the
design into shared aspects and content-driven aspects that (for
specific pages) can be changed "in data" (ie. without changing code).

HTML itself is often accused of blurring the distinction between
presentation and content, and on a multi-person project it can be
difficult to decide where a customer-requested change is best made. 
Given that you as the site architect have a clear notion of what
changes are required, communicating the change request to the project
team and to individual project members is facilitated both by pictures
and words.  In addition to "visual prototyping" keep in mind the need
to hone a "project vocabulary" that allows team members to discuss the
tradeoffs among design decisions.

The initial stages of any design project are usually fraught with
volatility and backtracking, unless the design is of an especially
familiar kind.  As the site emerges from this phase, capturing the
overall site design philosophy goes hand in hand with developing the
"project vocabulary" and with setting up a versioning/change
management system.

regards, mathtalk-ga

One way is to have a 'staging' phase where there is a feedback box at
the bottom of every page, which stores the desired design changes.

Once the site is fully approved and ready to go live, these feedback
boxes are removed.

Another way is to use CSS/DHTML floating layer boxes and allow the
commentor to add text to these boxes and move them to the relevant
position like sticky notes, to record this data you would need to
press print or make a screen capture, as the comments and positions of
the layers won't be saved with the webpage.

regards

lot-ga

I like the feedback box idea that was mentioned.

As for Word and image sizes...here's a couple of rules/ideas:

1. Use the drawing toolbar to put a textbox instead of the graphic,
and inside the textbox, type the filename of the graphic. No graphic
required in the Word doc.

2. Whenever inserting pix into Word, resize, THEN cut and Edit-Paste
special, as a picture (JPG preferred--if available--for most
purposes). When you resize, Word stores the original and the resized,
which causes bloating. Word also tries to store too much info about
the original graphic if you don't paste as picture.

Hope it helps!!

A while ago, for this reason, I was looking for a tool that extracted
images (in there original size) from a Word document and saved it to
the hard drive. I would get 5MB files from customers, and do a lot of
manual work to extract the images from them.

Anybody know of a tool that can do this?

Hee hee...much to learn, cornchip.
Have you tried saving the doc to HTML?
This creates a folder of graphic files.
That's how I learned it saves the graphics before AND after sizing--I
had two copies of each graphic!
So...just save the doc.
Then save as html and look at the folder of images that gets created.
Cool, right?
:)

... save doc file as html and then post it on a site where programmers
and designers can access them.