The hand-drawn clock from Yugo Nakamura - I read an article about him last night and am looking more deeply into his web/visual work. I found it interesting that his background is in landscape design!

Having a bit of a conflict with a client at the tail end of a long, long project today… Part of the issue is that this client is upset about how much review and copyediting he’s had to do.

I’ve found that the majority of clients, probably 2/3 or more, don’t realize that they’re going to be required to provide written content to me in the course of their web design project. I’m not sure where this mistaken belief comes from, because most web sites I’ve seen have some amount of content (<sarcasm>) but as a rule the more complex or obscure their business, the less I’m going to be able to write on their behalf. I’m willing to take a stab at any topic, but I’m not a _______ (insert your favorite technical specialty here) and won’t pretend to be.

It’s important to me that content be accurate and credible (it’s important to Google too, btw). When my client is an expert in his/her field, they will write for me, whether that’s a talent of theirs or not. I can clean up bad writing, but I’m not going to pretend that I’m an authority in a complicated field with which I have little or no familiarity. It’s just not an efficient use of my time or the client’s money.

My SEO partner and I met with a prospective client today - and it’s a good thing we met at her shop!

Based on her existing website and the new, 28-page website that some designer has been building for her for the last 12 months (I kid you not), my assumptions about the business were pretty solid. To my surprise, I walked in the door and see something totally different!

This woman and her husband have an interesting, viable and serious business going on but the impression one gets from both her old and in-progress websites is that of a lone hobbyist.

She asked, at the conclusion of our meeting, whether we could help her with presenting a true and accurate picture of her business and getting it found on Google. Our answer was: of course. This is what we do for a living.

When she told us about the current designer, what he has and has not done, and what he’s convinced them of, I mentally shook my head. It’s sad when small businesses are taken advantage of this way; the designer is building them a site that’s not standards-compliant, valid, accessible, or search engine-friendly and says absolutely nothing about the true nature of their work.

And the fact that this redesign experience has gone on for a year now… I just want to help this company. I really do. I think they could be a strong competitor in their industry in our region - if more people knew about them and understood what they really do.

Bored with the plain old HTML divider? Try this quick tutorial and learn how to make more interesting horizontal rules.

I wrote a blog post about this a while back but now I’m adding a full tutorial so you can actually see an example as it’s created. Learn how to turn any CSS background image into a clickable image map.

Try my tute and let me know what you think:

Clickable image maps example

I’ll be adding more CSS tutorials in the coming weeks, so check back every so often.

I’m working with a prospective client who needs specialized e-commerce assistance - more than I’m capable of doing in a timely manner. So I found an experienced PHP programmer who can provide this expertise.

We met with the client today and all went well. The programmer has a good grasp of the rather non-traditional desires of the client as far as the workings of the checkout process, and that’s great. I’m not going to make as much money from the job as I originally thought, because I’m now not going to be the one doing the cart, but the client will get exactly what he wants and hopefully I’ll get a good long-term business relationship out of it.

What irked me today was the way the programmer continually referred to me as ‘the one who’ll make it all pretty.’

‘Pretty’ isn’t the tip of the iceberg. What I bring to the table goes way beyond aesthetics.

It’s 9 years of personal e-commerce experience and 12 years of building websites; a strong graphic design background; an understanding of search engine optimization practices; a deep understanding of cross-browser compatibility and web standards; familiarity with Section 508 accessibility guidelines; the ability to partner with my clients and provide as much education on the care of feeding of their web presence as they can take; an understanding of information architecture and navigation; and an understanding of how to create a website that engages the customer from page one.

Programmers think that my job is all about aesthetics, and hard-core designers think that I shouldn’t use the word ‘creative’ in my business name because I’m not really a creative if I work with code. I’ve actually been told that to my face…

What exactly am I? I refer to myself as a designer/developer on my business cards and I thought that covered the bases pretty well, but perhaps not. Should I consider reworking my title yet again? Web strategist? Web jack-of-all-trades? Web designoper? Web develsigner?

I’m running a campaign to purchase a $499 annual BrowserCam account at Fundable. You web designers should be familiar with BrowserCam for viewing your work on many other browser/OS platforms.

The cost is $25 each and 20 people can join. For your money, you get unlimited captures and unlimited 60-minute remote access sessions (on Windows and Linux, or 30-minute sessions on Macs).  Please sign up if you’d like to take part by clicking the link here.

Well I finally sat down this afternoon and learned how to integrate Wordpress into an existing website.

I followed Jonathan Wold’s tutorial - it’s pretty good, and got me far enough into the process that I understood how to finish it myself.  You can see the results here; I’m not quite done as of this afternoon, but it should be finished up in the next few hours (or days depending on my workload)…