Turning a potential customer away in a business situation was never a good idea to me, but recently I have seen that when you choose your customers wisely the benefits to you and your customers can be great. I guess I always looked at work as work and you need to be after the dollar and my personal business as a way to help others and a way for me to have fun and learn... A little conflicted I know but it made sense to me.

Personally I have been doing web sites for almost 10 years now and when I look back on the sites that are still kickin' I see they are the ones I tend to baby and nurture. Sites I do on the side tend to be for people and products I truly care about.

• While the June Jam site is a bit outdated as far as code and layout - it is what the customer wants and I understand that because I talk to that customer daily. He really doesn't want or need to grow the June Jam concert any larger than it currently is. I tend to want more and more but they like being able to manage the shows with a personal feel. People get to know one another and tend to bring friends.
• The Jazz and Blues Festival has actually come a long way in just 1 year. Their second annual festival is coming up and the site has been updated and taking orders via paypal. They are starting small and building popularity. The site is averaging 20 unique visitors daily and out of those 12 are looking at the tickets page. I am sure this will increase as the event gets closer. I have been working with the customer daily for the last couple of weeks and making huge improvements to the content and code of the site. While the customer tends not to be technically savvy they understand the basics of what it is that I am trying to achieve through coding the site ("search engine stuff")
• My wife's site www.anitasgarden.com kicks ass and takes names - an awesome example of letting her do her own thins and exploring the possibilities. Anita is content, right now, blogging about her life, pets and children... nothing wrong with that, right? Well she is also stock piling recipes and talking about selling products... will she do it? Maybe, but in her own time. The site has unending potential and now she has total control over the content.
• My friend Albert Alfaro and his family of Drabbits (www.imaginariumgalleries.com). This was me finding something I truly had a passion for and running with it. Albert and his family build and sell these awesome works of art that you just can't find at Wal-Mart. I can honestly say that his passion is contagious. When we initially went to the PA Renaissance Fair and saw these creatures we were like wow! those are pretty cool. But then we talked with Albert first hand and watched as he created a leg for one of the puppets. Anita and I were engrossed in the process and noticed right away that Albert seemed to get the most enjoyment out of seeing the expressions and hearing the comments that the visitors blurted out while walking past. I decided that anyone with that cared that much about his art needed as much support as I could muster.

At work we are focused on some really large customers and becoming more personable with them. The idea that 10 large customers that truly understand the benefits of working with Inclind, Inc are better than 100 customers who don't. Crazy way to approach a business? Apparently not. We are 14 employees strong with 2 seasonal interns who help in the summer, but it doesn't seem that big... Its like an extended family environment where all the kids get along. We recognize each others strengths and really work well as a team. Of course I am the insane one.... Loud, obnoxious at times - but funny as hell and proud of it.  

Labels: Inclind, web design, web developmet

After two nights of no sleep I think I finally got Anita's site hooked up and ready to go. We grabbed all the old content that had never been crawled by search engines and posted it as blog articles. This is my first site using nothing more that blogger and google components (widgets). Unfortunately I am not able to use the Blogger Page Layout feature because I host the site via ftp... Not ready to give my wife's site to blogspot yet.

I learned quite a bit about how blogger pulls in the widgets and how all the Blogger tags output to html pages. This is not as easy as it first appears. While you may be able to use one of the readymade templates with out too much issue - there is very little room to modify the information. Since this is Anita's site I decided to use Blogger as a Content Management system for her. So the limitations didn't seem as though the would effect the site too much.

I chose Blogger over WordPress because of the ease of use with Google widgets and since Blogger is owned by Google it stands to reason that they would play nicely with one another. They do work together pretty darn good - definitely room for improvement but solid integration all around. I found myself involved with all sorts of possibilities (calendars, custom search, youtube and more). I will probably work in additional widgets and components as time goes on.

There were a few Blogger Hacks needed along the way and a lot of trial and error. I did not sleep or eat Friday night to Saturday afternoon... In the zone you know.... After a power nap (4 hrs) it was back to work and making improvements as I went along. I did go to bed Sunday morning at 4:30am. Spent some time with the family Sunday morning and back to it Sunday afternoon. The layout was done the template was working but post positioning and linking wasn't working real well. Not to mention the gallery and contact form being out side the blogger format.

In order to get the Flash component of the Gallery to display always at the top I had to be very creative with the code. Not sure I would call it a hack but it works and validates. Basically I wanted to include a swf file only on the photogallery page (which I created with the Label/Tagging system in Blogger). I tried an iframe which was a suggestion from a blogger forum... Not a fan of iframes... just felt wrong and not as clean as it should be. Next was a virtual include which would have worked except I didn't want the blog to be shtml or php for search engine purposes. Almost gave up and just made the entire thing php. Then at about 10pm Monday night while watching Indianapolis destroy Jacksonville it hit me. Javascript could probably do what I wanted with out too much overhead. After a couple of hours of research and 3 samples of javascript that did parts of what I wanted to achieve... I wrote my very own javascript solution:


Please note I am not a programmer and this took me a lot longer than it probably should have but I haven't really found a downside to this solution as of yet. The script is small - at most 3k... I know that has to load on every page but 3k is not enough for me to worry over. I know some hard core coders are shaking there heads right about now. Give me a better solution with out using php or virtual includes and I will take it under consideration. Maybe a nudge to Blogger to implement some features for those of us who choose not to host our sites on the blogger servers. I am too new at this to start making demands to Blogger.... give me a week to kick the tires.... Did I mention I am also a usability tester :)

Some of you may have noticed that my site recently got overhauled... I decided to build a better mousetrap of sorts and clean up my css and xhtml to show off my abilities a bit and drive traffic to associate sites (Inclind Inc., June Jam, DE Jazz & Blues etc.). I wasn't sure if it would help but knew it couldn't hurt. Since I have redesigned this site it has been featured on several sites (screenalicious, designsnack, w3csites.com , proWebArt, MostInspired ... )and seems to be spreading. While not quite the digg effect it is still driving a lot of traffic to my site and therefore increasing the exposure of my associates and other sites I have done.

I am in the process of redoing my wife's site now so stay tuned to www.anitasgarden.com. We are deciding now what will be on the site but the design is already established and approaching roll out status. It too will be laid out to the current industry standards including css 3 and xhtml. So all you IE6 users be forewarned - upgrade, switch to Firefox or suffer.

Since I am on the subject of Microsoft products - I thought I would take a look at the microsoft.com site and see how it matches up with the current industry CSS and XHTML standards. I plugged their url into the w3c validator and guess what happened.... it failed!




You know mac folks get a bad wrap - PC users see us a zealots and think that we think we are a better class of computer users.... they simply have now idea of what it is like to have an OS and applications dedicated to exceeding industry standards. We as users are no better than our fellow man - we are just betted equipped.

Labels: CSS standards, DesignSnack, Screenalicious, Valid XHTML