W3 <MARKUP /> <!-- code is art -->

We’re always trying to improve the order process and workflow experience for our clients and partners and while we do have some wonderful surprises around the corner, one that we’ve been working on is the horizontal order form treatment.

If you haven’t seen or used it yet, please have a look and let us know what you think. Does this approach make it easier to move through the process compared to the long vertical layout? Reach out, let us know or leave a comment below.

Also we’re happy to see that many of you are taking advantage of the production profile facility in the client area. For those who have not checked it out, after you place an order say for a Drupal project with all of your style/preferential settings, you can go to the order summary for that page and place another order with all of the settings of that order “pre-set” for you. Please login to the client area and check it out and take advantage. We’ll be adding more functionality to this feature in the coming weeks as well.

Our friends up north at ConceptShare have been working quite hard and responsively with us to put together the first milestone of something quite special and unique for the world of code production. Our clients are now able to use the innovative ConceptShare technology to provide design/creative briefs for their projects. Why is this significant? For a number of reasons:

• Creatives can now (contextually) mark up their designs instead of producing written documentation or countless pages of commented wire frames to communicate with front-end developers,
• Communication is vital and often time consuming in the user interface development process, ConceptShare streamlines this,
• The threaded comment facility of ConceptShare facilitates dialogue beautifully,
• Multiple stakeholders can now participate in the process of providing relevant input on a project, costs to produce polished and usable interfaces are dramatically reduced,
• The "risks" and "challenges" associated with outsourcing (or remote collaboration) are virtually destroyed thanks to the ability to "show and tell" using tools that are extremely easy to use

We’re really excited to have added this increased level of interaction for our clients. Communicating today’s Web 2.0 design, usability and user experience requirements to remote teams can finally feel just like sitting at the same desk with your own professional coding staff. This the first time in nearly 6 years that we can say that outsourcing for cutting edge code production has never been as accessible to freelancers, back-end developers, designers and agencies until now.

To get started:

1. Click the “I will provide design brief in conceptshare” check box (shown in the figure below) in section 1 of our order form and we’ll automatically create a ConceptShare workspace for you and send along the details for you! In the future, those clients will ConceptShare accounts will be able to give us access to workspaces they work with so that we can directly jump into their workflow process.

   
   The checkbox at the bottom of section 1 of the order form allows a ConceptShare workspace to be created for your project.

2. Next, add w3-markup.com and conceptshare.com domain names to your email account whitelists and check for email from our client area (support intranet) and also one from ConceptShare inviting you to the workspace created for you.

3. Login to the ConceptShare system and upload your comps (or mockups or design treatments or whatever you like to call them), label them appropriately and begin adding your comments and notes to each comp.

   
   Upload your comps to ConceptShare

   
   ConceptShare sample comment

4. When you’re done pop into the client area and let us know that you’ve finished providing your input

   
   Login to the W3 MARKUP client intranet

   
   View your ConceptShare design brief in the client intranet

   
   Review your Design Brief in the lightbox window

5. Our staff will then review all of your comments and ask any questions via the client area if we have any questions.

That’s it! No more 10 MB Microsoft Word / Project / Power Point documents or rifling through layer sets to try to make clear overlays and comments in your PSD files directly!

For those new to ConceptShare, please make sure to have a look at their tutorials and other relevant info at their site. ConceptShare has also received a lot of love, you don’t have to take our word for it; the Smashing Magazine guys loved how easy it made our WordPress theme project. Give it a shot and let us help you improve your efficiency, reduce headaches and get more projects completed every month.

What’s next? We’ll be improving/increasing the level of communication and integration with the ConceptShare system to provide even more support for projects requiring more than design brief level of detail for projects; that is projects that require dialogue and consult from W3 MARKUP code production staff.

Have any questions, comments or suggestions for us? Please let us know by leaving a comment below!

First of all, thank you to all of our loyal customers, this post is for you. Not to forget our outsourcing partners that we’ve served for more than half a decade.

You may have noticed some changes of late on our site as we finally made time to roll out some features previously available only to select partners.

We’ve opened up our client intranet for all customers now, with it you’re able to:

• Track multiple project statuses with ease
• Communicate directly with the team working on your projects
• Easily make subsequent orders with your existing account

It’s one thing to receive great hand coding work, it’s yet another to get the code exactly the way you would have done it! So we’ve added some additional features:

• Our order form now contains most of the coding styles, techniques, javascript libraries and software (blogs, shopping carts, CMSes and frameworks) we support. No more asking us in live chat if we "support Magento" (now released); any software package we’ve ever worked with is listed right there for you!
• Within the client area, you can now use past orders as templates for future orders. We call this feature “production profiles.” A great use of this feature is for repeat orders with identical specifications; i.e. WordPress blog themes or ShopSite shopping cart themes projects for example can now be ordered in a few clicks.

We hope you enjoy the increased simplicity of the outsourcing process! Stay tuned there’s definitely more goodies to come. Let us know if you can think of anything that would make your outsourcing experience better.