Collaboration
Working with Google Drive
Do you hate going through piles of emails looking for messages and attachments? So do we. That is why we like to keep all your web assets in a shared drive online.
A free Google Drive account is ideal as we can also use it to store backups of your web site.
Collaboration is easy when either of us can upload and download any of the files we need to work with. You can share proofs with friends and colleagues for their approval or criticism.
File Sharing
In the process of building a web site a lot of files need to be shared.
We recommend you use your Site Plan and the Asset Folder structure to hold the relevant documents and name those documents according to your Site Plan.
Before we create your Brand Board and Design Plan, you will need to set up a free Google Drive account using an email address related to your domain and give us access to that account. This is where you will upload any images and fonts for your Brand Board and the bullet point Site Map used to create the Design Plan.
We will upload a Notes folder which contains information outlining What you need to do, Why you need to do it and How you can do it.
Once you approve the Brand Board and Design Plan we will upload your skeleton Assets folder, with subfolders based on your site map, to help you upload your documents to the right place.
When you’ve added the text files and images to your Assets folder. We will check that everything we need is there and start to build the site.
Once your site is complete, we will add a backup of your site to your Google Drive account.
If we are updating and maintaining your site, we will send updated backups to your Google Drive.
Preparing Your Images
Image names should be all lower case with no spaces or special characters. Use underscores _ or hyphens – to separate words in image names.
You should stick to a simple Asset Naming Convention based on your Site Plan. This speeds up development and is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Examples of good image naming would be business-name-your-name-your-title.jpg or for an online shop product_name_product_variation.png.
In other words
jimmys-farm-jimmy-jones-farm-manager.jpg
or
ladies_guernsey_sweater_sky_blue.png
Images should ideally be the same size and have the same aspect ratio. This allows Image Editing and Optimisation using a batch process which is cheaper than editing and optimising images individually.
If your landscape images are 3 x 4 then your portrait images should be 4 x 3 for example.
Image Editing & Optimisation
We never work on your original images. You will have a folder in your Assets folder for your original images which we call Master Images. If you have asked us to edit images for you, your original images should be placed in the Master Images folder. We will upload the edited images to the Web Ready folder.
Website Asset Naming Convention
For the sake of disambiguation, you may also want to specify a Naming Convention when referring to your products or services to maintain consistency of Assets throughout the site. This allows the web assets to be understood easily by anyone who works with them.
An Asset Naming Convention can, and should, be used on sites where many related goods or services are involved.
In the case of Ecommerce, this might include the ISBN number of books or the SKU number of products. It might also include the brand name and variations such as size or colour. Another example might be a Directory site which would need an Asset Naming Convention or folder structure for images.
With Ecommerce, where large inventories can be imported using a CSV file, a good Asset Naming Convention can be used to automate the creation of image names using concatenation.
API KEYS – for Google and Social Media
API keys will only work on a live site. When we build your web site it is normally in a subfolder of one of our test sites. Once your site is live we will be able to fully test the keys to make sure that content created outside of WordPress shows correctly within your WordPress site.
Many Social Media keys require your site to be operating on https so you will need an SSL certificate on your site.
Social Media API Keys
If your site includes Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or other feeds, you will almost certainly have to go to your account within that application and create an API key or other credentials that the plugin needs to embed that remote content securely in your WordPress site.
Search Engine Credentials
Google, Yahoo and other search engines require a small piece of code or a page to be uploaded to the site to identify your site, associate it with your webmaster account. This in turn allows you to track traffic on your site and identify errors.
You will need to provide the relevant information for us to upload unless you want to do that yourself.
