Category: Productivity


Magazines for web professionals, Part 2

Filed Under: Diversions, Productivity, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
April 28, 2007

We’ll start with Create Magazine since their web site just crashed my browser for the umpteenth time and made me lose this post that I’m now irritably rewriting.

  • Create Magazine. This regionally-focused magazine is okay, but nothing that jumps out as being very special. They have a web site that doesn’t work – I wouldn’t look too deeply if I were you, particularly on their Awards section. I’m not providing a link because I don’t want to tempt you.
  • Website Magazine. I’m not sure how I got on the mailing list for this one, but this free trade publication is certainly worth looking into. This is really the only print magazine I know of that focuses on the business of being a web professional with all of its broader roles.
  • Photoshop User. This is a good if you want to get better at Photoshop. Join NAPP for $99 for a year and get the magazine for free.
  • Business 2.0. This one’s from CNNMoney – I like this magazine and have subscribed for a few years. Basically tech news.
  • Entrepreneur, Fortune Small Business and Inc. Similar to BusinessWeek Small Biz, these are all pretty good but I like Entrepreneur and Inc better than the other two. I like their clean layouts and these two tend to have more articles about online businesses and the digital realm than the others, at least lately.

There are a few titles that I’ll only pick up occasionally – Communication Arts‘ Design Annual is full of eye candy and worth its high price.

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Magazines for web professionals, Part 1

Filed Under: Diversions, Productivity, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
April 28, 2007

So today I’m going through the ridiculously tall stack of recent magazines that I’ve read and kept because they have an interesting article or two I wanted to save.

What magazines do I read, you ask? Can some of them be useful to me too, you say?

Perhaps. Here’s what’s in my stack:

  • PC Magazine. I’ve subscribed to this off and on since I was in high school. Most of these are keepers, at least for a few months.
  • GDUSA (Graphic Design USA). This one I’ve gotten for about a year, but I’m probably not going to resubscribe. It focuses heavily on print, is overflowing with ads and always has this huge section about all the major stock photo companies – I don’t need to see that every month. Sometimes there are pretty good articles; this month’s issue had a big feature on trends in logo design. Their awards issues are worth keeping, however.
  • Practical Web Design and .net. A British import that’s packed with code examples, free software, and usually some good articles. This is a pretty good magazine but it’s very expensive, so I don’t get all the issues. And I’m not sure what’s going on with this mag right now – supposedly it was closing down in favor of sister magazine .net in January, but I’m sitting here with a March 2007 issue…
  • Dynamic Graphics. This is one of my favorites and definitely a resubscription is in order. A lot of good, practical info for both digital and print design, and not so many ads.
  • BusinessWeek Small Biz. A pretty good one for entrepreneurs, tailored to small and micro businesses.
  • Print. I won’t be renewing my subscription to this one – way too much focus on (duh) print design, and way too many ads.
  • HOW. This on the other hand is a keeper – big on creativity, great awards issues. Always a few interesting articles on things like typography…

Okay… back to sorting and I’ll finish up this article in a bit.

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Web design skill sets – prioritizing the learning process

Filed Under: Business Nuts and Bolts, Productivity, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
April 26, 2007

I’m a perpetual student and right now I have two new books on my desk – ‘Teach Yourself Javascript in 24 Hours’ (like I have that kind of free time) and ‘Learning PHP5.’ I also have ‘Head Rush AJAX’ which I haven’t read yet. I’m halfway through the Javascript book.

I was wondering, in what order should I read these books?
I went hunting on Google this morning for ‘web designers important skills’ and found this article in Slashdot’s archives.

Now this is a long one, and there are some strong opinions about what to know and what’s useless information. But I found myself reading a lot of it this morning and thinking about where I want to be with my work in 5 years.

Right now, I call myself a designer/developer, since I do it all. But I do the graphic design and (X)HTML/CSS parts better than the PHP/MySQL parts. I know only enough Javascript to modify scripts I get elsewhere. I know enough PHP to comfortably customize open source e-commerce, CMS and other scripts without much of a problem – I can generally figure out how most things like that work, but couldn’t write it myself without a lot of hair-pulling.

So if I want to increase my level of understanding on the development side, what should I concentrate on, technology-wise? What should I not waste time on? Is it better for my future career to pick one or the other (design over development in my case) and focus mostly on that instead? Will getting better at JavaScript do me any good down the road?

I love my job because it encompasses so many areas. I’m guessing that I’ll be leaning more and more toward standards-based front end development, user interface design and information architecture as time goes on. But since I’m still a one-person shop for the time being, I need to be as fluent in PHP, MySQL and a few other things as time allows. I want to be a well-rounded designer that understands a bit more than just the basics of back end development.

There’s always so much to learn. I like that part too – it gives me an excuse to buy books.

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Work = suffering?

Filed Under: Productivity by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 28, 2007

I’ve just started the first chapter of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Immediately it strikes me as very Zen – it’s all about hyper-organization for the purpose of clearing one’s head so that one can more easily achieve flow at work, whatever that work may be. I get that, and I’m interested.

One thing struck me as amusing. David Allen says that ‘work is whatever we want or need to be different than it actually is.’ And Buddhism suggests that ‘suffering comes from wanting things to be different than they actually are.’

Is work therefore equal to suffering? Sometimes I think it is, but other times, work is effortless, when you crank on something for hours and then suddenly look up and notice that it’s 5:00. This is the best way to work – without distractions, totally focused and in the zone. That’s Zen, and it’s definitely not suffering – it’s more like joy.

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OptionCart’s getting easier

Filed Under: E-Commerce, Inspiration, Productivity, Web Design by Debbie — 1 Comment
February 27, 2007

I’ve been using OptionCart as my shopping cart frontend for awhile – I’ve used it for two clients plus my own retail site.  It’s a frontend for Mal’s E-commerce, which I’ve used since 1998 and about which I have nothing but good comments.

These two work together much like ZenCart or X-Cart by itself, but OptionCart has an advantage for me as being totally based on PHP includes. I can drop a cart interface into any existing HTML or PHP-based site, there are no templates to create.

However, there are a lot of include files to edit. The first time I used it, for a site with about 500 photos for sale, it took me weeks and weeks to get the formatting done.  It’s all in tables (a disadvantage) and I’m a CSS user so that took some getting used to again.

The results looked really good, but I ate a good number of hours getting it the way I wanted it to look.

The second project I used it on was my retail site. Since I’d written down every procedure I used for editing and reformatting each included file, this one was easier – it probably took half the time of the first one, and looked as good.

Over the weekend I tackled the formatting of a site that’s just about ready to launch. I’d already installed OptionCart a few weeks earlier but had done no formatting. I sat down on Saturday morning to start on it, took a break to see a movie that afternoon, and finished it all up on Sunday night.

It looks really nice, and it took me, again, far less time. I think I’ve done it enough that I know where to look for what needs changing (there’s a lot of PHP code to wade through). 

I’m building my first X-Cart site now, so it will be interesting to see how the two compare. I know that X-Cart has many more features, but for most of clients, OptionCart is an inexpensive and very attractive package. Even more so that it’s becoming so easy for me to customize nicely.

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Too many rocks

Filed Under: Productivity by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 18, 2007

Today I picked up a copy of David Allen’s book about productivity and creativity, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity“>Getting Things Done, the predecessor to the other book I mentioned here, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life“>Ready for Anything. Ready for Anything is quite good, but there’s terminology and references in it that rely on the reader having already experienced getting things done, so I’m going to read GTD first. Probably makes sense…

And as a productivity aid, I got a 2007 refill for the paper-based planner I used religiously a couple of years ago. I loved this planner, it was the best one I’ve ever used because it’s so oriented around prioritizing and realizing that everything cannot be done at once, and one of the reasons I like it is because it encourages you to think of tasks like rocks. (Why wasn’t I using it recently? Because I got the Windows version for my computer and because my handwriting is horrible. But having a paper-based system that I can take anywhere has its values too).

Every week you have a big glass container. In it you can put a few big rocks and a lot of little rocks. The major things you need to accomplish are the big rocks and all of the other little tasks, errands, and distractions are the little ones. Big rocks go in first, and little ones fill in the gaps. This is a visualization that makes sense to me.

However, this week I’m going to be working out of town for several days so I have a lot of things to get done before Thursday. What happens when you have too many rocks for your glass and you wind up with rocks on the table and rocks rolling onto the floor…

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