Recently eLocal Listing was a sponsor at the Local Search Summit conference during SES San Jose. Local Search Summit was one of the first conferences with it’s main focus being local search. Some of the highlighted speakers were Jason Calcanis (Mahalo), Steve Stukenborg (Google), Jeremy Stoppleman (Yelp), Jennifer Chin (Google), Sarah Smith (Facebook), and plenty of others.

Since Local Search Summit was only one day each panel was jammed packed with today’s thought leaders on local search, social media, and mobile technology.  Steve Espinosa moderated quite a few panels, and eLocal’s Todd Johnson made an appearance on the panel about “What kind of products do small businesses really need” and shared his sales experience and knowledge with the crowd. I personally was honored to share a panel with Will Scott of Search Influence, and Sarah Smith of Facebook where we discussed social media’s impact on the ability to drive and convert leads for small businesses. You can see my presentation here, and Sarah’s presentation here. (make sure to turn up your volume, as the audio is a bit low).

Overall I enjoyed every session and was able to take away something valuable from each one. eLocal’s Own Steve Espinosa headed up the conference and was well applauded for a great event that ended up being the talk of SES San Jose.

Here are some links to other blogs that covered the events and their feedback/wrap up’s.

SES San Jose YouTube Chanel

Local Search News Wrap Up

Aaron Irizarry Social Media Session and Q&A

Expand 2 Web by Don Campbell Summit Wrap up

Stumbled across a good read over at MediaPost…

Effective search engine optimization (SEO) can improve query rankings, but companies also need to give consumers easy-to-use Web sites to boost conversion rates and close the sale. More visitors to the site is great, but if the price of average orders drop, marketers should rethink strategies, according to panelists on a Webinar Tuesday.

Search Engine Land Executive Editor Chris Sherman moderated the Search Marketing Now Webinar, “SEO and Conversion Rates: Hand-in-hand,” sponsored by Range Online Media. Herndon Hasty, senior SEO evangelist, Range; and Chris Knoch, principal search engine marketing (SEM) consultant at Omniture, presented and fielded questions. [READ MORE]

In pt.1 of building a successful dev team we looked at a very practical way that we can enhance the value of our dev team by writing code that easy to use and update by other members on our team…

In this article we are going to touch on something a bit less tangible but no less important, actually it is probably the most important element in establishing a successful development team. Communication is, in my opinion, the most foundational piece of a strong development team.

Where skill, and resources may come up short, if strong communication is in place a team can overcome prepare in advance, and address some of these shortcomings more readily, setting them on the road to success.

With many teams built of diverse parties setting up solid lines of communication is key. Developers, project managers, marketing, front end designers, and quality assurance personnel are just a few of the many parties that make up a solid dev team for products and projects. With so many different people, perspectives, and skill sets touching the project it can become very easy for details to slip through the cracks that end up slowing down the workflow, hindering progress, delaying deadlines, and contributing to headaches and frustrations on all ends.

Those of us who work in this team environment have experienced this in one form or another, and more than likely something will slip through regardless. With this in mind I have compiled a few simple practices, along with a couple of applications that can help open up the lines of communication.

Learn to Dabble in Disciplines.

One great way to increase the value of your contribution to the development/project team is to gain an understanding of the other team members disciplines. This doesn’t mean that we have to become experts in their fields but gaining an understanding of their roles and responsibilities will help us to provide the right information in the right format to make their job that much easier (not to mention score some brownie points with them).

In our team I have found it helpful when preparing front end designs to ask alot of questions of our engineers, so as to avoid providing files, designs that simply aren’t practical from a development perspective. I am still a pretty big noob when it comes to .net but since that is the framework we develop in I have made an effort to understand their world, and what would make life easier for them. I would suggest even going beyond frameworks and code, and find out how to prep designs, and deliver files in a way that makes life easier for them.

By expanding our horizons to understand each of the team’s disciplines we make life a bit easier for everyone, and learn to communicate more effectively in ways that help others be more efficient, and well equipped in their roles within the team environment. Besides the initial benefits we also expand our skill set which opens up new avenues within our current jobs, as well as in our future endeavors. We should never stop learning.

Go get your Intel

This is a very critical point. We can only be responsible for ourselves, and I would strongly encourage all of us to be proactive in getting info about projects/products. If you are unsure about something, ask, and then ask again until you feel comfortable with your understanding of the scope, and your role in the project.

This brings the focus to the most important aspect of communication… Listening, don’t just hear what is being said, listen, ask questions and make sure that you understand, repeat what is being said back to the team, that way there is little room for misunderstanding, and mis-communication, it will also validate your team members, showing them that you value their input and efforts in the project. Some of this may sound pretty rigid, but if we can take these extra steps it will really help us in the communication process.

Tools of the Trade

In some circumstances team members may work remotely or off-shore this can also make communication a bit tough at times. Using tools/apps can help bridge the gaps, and keep everyone on the same page.

For project collaboration, task management, file sharing, time tracking, and version tracking we use Basecamp by 37signals. I am sure there are other project management software/apps out there but this one has proven itself to be a very valuable tool, and is very affordable.

For more immediate communication we also use Skype as this allows for instant access when questions, and issues may arise.

There are other resources out there, and if your team isn’t using something I would encourage you to be proactive, find something that will fit best with your team.

Wrapping Up

By no means is this a call to arms, my hope is that we can be encouraged in our efforts to better our development team. This effort starts with us, team development is an investment in our projects and fellow team members. Listening, learning other skills, and being proactive in communication are just a couple of foundational ideas for better team communication, as projects come and go many different situations will arise, and they will provide new challenges, as long as we are communicating openly the challenges can be faced, overcome, and turned in to successful solutions.

Next up in the series “There is no “I” in Team, and no “U” in Win” dealing with conflict, and disagreements in development.

1) Building a Successful Dev Team

2) Coding In a Team Environment

3) Building Development Team Communication

For the 1st part of the series we are going to look at code, but we are not going to talk about perfect html/css semantics, many others have done that, and it is probably a series in itself. The goal with this article is to provide a few simple tips that will help when working in a team environment, as well as provide some solid resources for further learning.

For many of us single line css, our own routines, choice of naming conventions and personal approach to writing and organizing code is a way of life, and we are very comfortable in it. When working as a part of a development team a lot of these comfort-zones can be challenged, but the ability to be flexible not only saves frustration, but also says a lot to those we work for about our ability to be a productive part of a team, which goes along way in the work place. Here are some things that I have learned, tried, and found to be very helpful. I will provide reference links so you can do more research if so inclined.

1) Link / Import your stylesheets, and scripts.

This may seem like simple beginner css/html, but we must remember that everyone on our team my not be well versed in our areas of expertise. The cleaner and more organized our html (and css) files are the easier it is for others to pick them up navigate through the code and execute their project responsibilities.

One of the ways to do this is to keep all styles out of the html in an external style sheet that you link or import to the html file. The same goes for scripts wether we are using jquery, mootools, or some other scripting we should do our best to keep it out of the main html document (there are exceptions… google scripts, flash, and browser detection to name a few).

The main idea is to keep our code very clean, readable, and easy for others to use. When we compartmentalize our different code elements it makes it easier for others to know what to expect, where to find it, and keeps a solid framework for team development from initial development to revisions. For more on this check out Jina bolton’s presentations on Sexy Stylesheets there are some great insights.

2) The Name Game – Responsible Convention Naming

When creating our html and css files it can be easy (for times sake) to cut some corners and name our div id’s and classes very general terms. Initially I can understand this thought process, but I think we do out team members a disservice by taking this simple approach.

If someone were to pick up our work and need to edit it would our naming conventions help them get to the section they need to edit quickly, or would they have to search through our files filtering through general terms to try to find it?

As you can see this isn’t very efficient, I am sure that many of you are thinking “that sounds great in principal, but it just isn’t practical.” I agree there are times and environments that don’t lend to this idea, but as much as we can we should make our best effort to help our team by clearly defining “id’s” and “classes”, so that when someone else picks up one of our files to edit, they can easily find the section where the edits need to take place.

Using terms like main, left, right may seem easy and even familiar to us, but can lead to frustration when digging though files looking for content to edit/update. We should try to give our id’s and classes names that describe their purpose and placement on the page.

Andy Clarke put it well when he said.

“ That is why I think that establishing a set of naming conventions makes sense, not because I’m some kind of Maoist revolutionary who thinks that we should all wear the same grey boiler suits, but because it can make life easier for us and our end-users. “

Our team members and end-users should be the driving force behind setting up good practices. I encourage you if you haven’t to check out his site, and especially his writings I have found them very informative, and helpful.

Again for those of us who use css/html on a more advanced scale some of these concepts may seem simple, but we must remember that the focus of this series is to work towards bettering our development team.

3) Use Comments

If we take into consideration the above ideas and build upon them further by implementing a comment system we all but serve up great mark up on a silver platter for our dev teammates.

Working with Mike A (@miacevedo) we implemented commenting for easy browsing through code, as well as version tracking to help keep track of when revisions happened and who executed them. This allows us to both work on the same style sheet, or html pretty seamlessly, and will without a doubt increase efficiency of our front end development efforts.

This is something that I also picked up from Jina Bolton’s “Creating Sexy Stylesheets” presentation.

 As you can see a them the idea is to communicate well by the code we write. At times this will cause us to have to take some extra steps, and go beyond what is asked of us, but in the end it will lend to a better end result, not to mention earn the respect of our teammates, which will go a long way. The only way we can see improvement in our development team is if we start with our contribution.

Wrapping Up

These are just a few simple tips that I have picked up along the way. A lot of the concepts and inspiration comes from talks that I have heard and blogs that I have read. There is a wealth of knowledge out there just waiting to be soaked up.

If you have any input, or tips that you have used, please feel free to share them.

1) Building a Successful Dev Team

2) Coding In a Team Environment

3) Building Development Team Communication

Here at eLocal I find myself doing less “web design” and doing more User Interface design, as well as a lot of UX research/design/testing. This has caused me to really step back and see team development in a new perspective. The more interaction I have with our engineers (local, and offshore) the more I understand their world, and how it relates to me as I develop the front end of a lot of our applications, and the more user testing, and UX related research I do the more I have really come to a good understanding of all of the components and effort (individual and team) involved in making a great product (and or website) that is visually appealing, easy to use, and truly beneficial to the end user.

So this is the start of a new series on designing/developing in a team environment and how to take steps to ensure that you and your team are working towards success. Whether you are a team lead/manager or one of the cog’s in a bigger mechanism each role is important and if we can learn what we can contribute to the team we can help insure the success of the products/web sites that we are a part of creating.

The series will be split into four parts:

1) Building a Successful Dev Team

2) Coding In a Team Environment

3) Building Development Team Communication

Hopefully as we look at these (an possibly a couple extra) points we will be able develop a focused pursuit of development team bliss, granted it may not be as easy as it sounds, but developing a solid dev team that works together to accomplish a common goal is instrumental to the success of any design firm, start up, and or top secret missions.