position: relative;

Wow, it’s Saturday already. What did I accomplish this week?

1. Got a contract for a big new job over the next year.
2. Got a contract for at least 10 hours of site updating each month – that’s good ongoing income!
3. Got included on a team to redesign a prominent local business’ website.
4. Got a bunch of new database work on a site I built in 2007.
5. Finished my homework for the database class I’m taking.
6. Found a bunch of resources to share on Twitter when I talk about it to my business leads group in January.
7. Got another quote to write.
8. Was shortlisted on a large site in Minnesota.
9. Integrated WordPress into one site, two more to go.
10. Had lunch with my SEO partner.
11. Arranged breakfast next week with a networking colleague I don’t know very well, but want to.
12. Fixed a major CSS issue on the interior designer’s site I’ve almost completed.
13. Finished the last set of revisions on the wood flooring site.
14. Working on a test mailing on Campaign Monitor, with the hope of adding newsletter design and campaign tools to my web design services.
15. Added all the new green hosting info to my two main websites.
16. Sent in an announcement about green hosting to the Northern Colorado Business Report.
17. Mailed my holiday cards to clients.
18. Hired a subcontractor to do some little things that take more time than I have available (she’s working this weekend, and I’m not!).
19. Finished all three Simpleviewer slideshows on my interior designer’s site.

I felt like I didn’t get much done, but I suppose that’s rather a lot.

Wow.

I’m sending out Christmas cards to clients and others. I had to go check for a mailing address for someone, and their website is truly atrocious.

If I were a potential customer, I would think: wow. They sure don’t spend any time/money/effort on their site – it says 2004 at the bottom! I wonder if that carries through to other aspects of their business?

I know that not everyone thinks like that, but if it were me, I would look for someone else. Especially if it’s the kind of business service that requires significant trust on my part towards them. Even if I’ve had someone recommend them to me, I’m still extremely likely to judge a business on the quality/care that they’ve put into their website.

I don’t need to be amazed by the latest web flash – I just need to feel that they are a solid business entity. Maybe having a very old, very bad website indicates that they can’t afford to keep it up? Not very likely. It’s just not that expensive to do – it’s more likely that it speaks to a lack of care, or a lack of understanding as to how business is really being done today. Not Yellow Pages but web pages.

Recent article on WotLK from the NY Times.

I think these are really important for creating top-of-mind awareness for your business; I usually get like a 35% open rate, which apparently is really good, and often get a few calls or emails from clients about new work each time one goes out.

This morning I’m up early so I’m working on the December issue of Fresh Web Ideas, my monthly email newsletter. Here’s the last issue.

I’m going to be moving from PHPList because it’s such a pain; trying out the new Campaign Monitor this time and if it works nicely I’ll be offering the email service to my clients.

This year was the first time I’ve participated in Masks at MOCA – the participating artists (or artist wannabes) get a sculpted, fired ceramic mask and design/embellish it for showing in the April fundraising exhibit. Masks are sold to the highest bidder to benefit MOCA, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art.

I decided I was going to learn how to use polymer clay. After considerable research and an outlay of funds, I got started and things seemed to go well for the first few sessions; I even learned how to create a passable Skinner blend with a pasta machine. Then I got in way over my head and it quickly degenerated into a polymer clay nightmare.

It was so bad I couldn’t see continuing – I was totally frustrated by what I couldn’t do (or rather didn’t have time to properly learn how to do). So I got out my sketchbook and started thinking again – less than one week before the project deadline.

I wound up creating something I liked much better in a tiny fraction of the time it took to figure out the clay. I revisited an old hobby and found out I could now do it better; I was very pleased with the results of my mask-as-landscape experiment.

I’m not a Javascript person – I know the bare essentials but I don’t program.

That said, today I downloaded the Yahoo User Interface library (YUI) and started working on tabsets for a client for whom I’m doing an interface design. I’ve never, ever done anything like this before, but I actually got pretty far. I have three tabsets on my page, I’m about 2/3 of the way done skinning them. I just need to find out if I can apply a background image to the content area because I wanted to have a gradient there. Otherwise, it’s all good so far.

It’s one of those days. I missed my meetup group this morning due to lack of advanced planning (kept plugging away at the CSS sliding doors menu I’m working on rather than getting ready to go in time); a second meeting was postponed because I don’t have the WordPress blog setup on a client’s site yet; and a third meeting was canceled.

So now I’m almost done with my sliding doors menu. My wood floor client decided they’d rather have tabs than text links, and I found a nice example at Stu Nicholl’s site. I like his style, but not the colors, so I’m recreating his three images with my own in colors more fitting to the client’s woodsy green and tan palette.

Found this nice Photoshop tute for making round badges this morning:

http://www.photoshopstar.com/web-graphics/nice-simple-subscribe-badges/

I’m making a Green Hosting badge for my hosting company site.