Gone are the days of assum­ing the Inter­net is a pass­ing fad. No web­site is as bad for busi­ness as no busi­ness card or tele­phone num­ber. Even if all you want to do is a sim­ple about us page with some con­tact infor­ma­tion, it’s vital that you get this done. That being the case, I can direct you to some folks who will do it on the cheap (I might even do it if I have the time). If you want to take full advan­tage of all the web has to offer, how­ever, you’ll need to develop a strat­egy and talk to some­one who can help you develop it.

The site was designed to be kitschy and obnox­ious, which I think we accom­plished, but it was also sup­posed to be sim­ple. No move­ment (that isn’t an ad) and no crazy plu­g­ins that do crazy things… Just a site where you can go and get a laugh at the expense of others.

There are sev­eral more plu­g­ins I find indis­pen­si­ble, but these three are the post edit pow­er­house I use to keep things tidy and user friendly. Two of them require API keys, but all are free, like most other Word­Press related plu­g­ins. Give them a shot. I can’t blog with­out them.

We started with a wood grain photo (from my old house) and faded it to a bright brown, then laid some graph­ics on it with a translu­cent con­tent pane. He is actu­ally a very good writer, and he also does a lot of legal work with ani­mals and ani­mal related orga­ni­za­tions. He’s actu­ally help­ing the state of PA write anti-abuse and anti puppy mill laws.

We took a few back­end items in this site and made them work together, so there is an under­ly­ing mem­ber­ship (con­ti­nu­ity) com­po­nent, as well as a pay­ment gate­way and newslet­ter func­tion. It has an auto-responder and a few other nifty gad­gets, all on a sim­ple, almost min­i­mal­ist sub­strate. The whole thing involved a great deal of edu­ca­tion so that the client could man­age the site himself.

I did this site for fun, but I still dig it. I want to have more time to update it and put inter­est­ing things on it. The pur­pose of this site is to chron­i­cle my jour­ney toward energy inde­pen­dence. It hap­pens to be pretty green.

…they wanted a classy web­site that resem­bled wood and had a good deal of nat­ural color. I got to play around with this design, so there was a lot of room for experimentation.

Most good design­ers don’t want to get a client spec­i­fi­ca­tion fol­lowed by a pay­check. They want to get to know you, your busi­ness, your clients or cus­tomers and find out what will appeal to every­one involved. Spec­u­la­tive work cuts out that per­sonal por­tion of the process. There is no way to nail a design of any kind on the first try, and believ­ing it should go that way is only going to hurt the client. Most design­ers will have an open loop, gath­er­ing feed­back from mul­ti­ple sources as they go through the process.

I enjoy sites like this. They’re a-traditional, mildly grungy, not dark, but not light and use com­pletely non-standard col­ors. I have to hand it to the client on this one. She had a vision and made me real­ize it. I love work­ing with clients who know exactly what they want and wring it out of me in the short­est pos­si­ble time. This is […]

Since I started work­ing inde­pen­dently, I’ve had to learn a few valu­able lessons that I don’t think I could have learned with­out them smack­ing me in the face. I learned that out­sourc­ing those things that you aren’t good at is a good idea. I’ve learned that no one per­son can do every­thing. I’ve learned that good time man­age­ment is more valu­able than a good assis­tant. I’ve learned that a PDA is only as good as the infor­ma­tion you bother putting in it. I would have learned them all faster if I had dis­cov­ered Sim­ple­ol­ogy sooner.