Archive for the ‘This Designer’s View’ Category

ACME Emergency

Returning client with an additional business enterprise needed a purchased template to reflect his business model. It went from a ski wear site to a emergency preparedness site.

The template is below:

Sin City Reboot

Been working on setting up this new portal for Sin City Delights, working hard on finding the best avenue to sell their amazing product line. The last version was a step forward, but this one is the icing on the cake and can only get better.

There might be some tweaks here and there, but I think we finally hit our groove. We launched the original version back in December/11 and it started doing more business than the old version did all year.

Unfortunately a problematic Paypal, with it’s often impossible to reason customer service, put up a barrier for business on the site. We moved on to Amazon Payments with an adjusted version of the site that brought on yet another surge of business (above).

This has been a living experiment and while the goal has been to sell product on this site, it has also been a test to find the most hospitable environment and strongest platform for product sales. This new POS system will use Authorize.Net. We peeled away from Amazon only because it was requiring buyers to have an Amazon account.

The new version of the site will launch next week and will hopefully really bring a lot of momentum to sales.

My Web Site

My portfolio site holds a lot of information about the work I have done and am doing. Maybe it is not the most insightful dialog in some cases but I do take this work very seriously.

I have been a dog like a bone on some of these projects to the point of sitting back and looking at it and asking self: ‘What now…?’ A second pair of eyes sometimes can help set a project moving that stalled. A break for lunch or a quick yoga class can make a world of difference.

I work very hard and I am dedicated to breaking through obstacles. I am resourceful. I am creative. I am still unemployed

Freelance

I have wrapped up my last biggest project and am monitoring Sin City Delights right now as I am working with this client on a new ad campaign through  Facebook to see if it generates more traffic and sales. So looking on different resources for a new project to dive into.

Being entrepreneurial is a challenge as I may not be as adept to it as I thought. I run things smart and maybe have made too many concessions, but I will do my best to make a client’s projects shine.

All too many times I have laymen who want to hire me and then direct the whole thing. In one case a client’s question regarding a basically static site was… “How much bandwidth do I get?” When I asked him why he was concerned about that he could not tell me, it was something a friend told him about.

Then later, “What if I want to put video on the site?” WordPress will let you load video right on the site as easy as inserting an image, but with tools like YouTube and Vimeo around (especially for your small business) why would that be a worry?

In the end the strange questions using industry related buzzwords kept piling things on top of each other without any research or knowledge as to why it would be there. I want flash: why? I want pictures popping up when you mouse over: why?

What is the story you want to tell?

This is what I ask every client. Keep the story consistent, don’t confuse your mission, put information you want people to see so they opt into what you are selling or offering.

One client wanted to post a picture of a motorcycle he was selling on his restaurant site… my advice was to just use craigslist.

Clients are writing the checks and will get what they want, but I will do everything I can to keep them from throwing away that money. You hired me for a reason. Trust me. By working together we will end of creating something uh-maze-zing!

Trubric Project

Over Christmas 2011 into late January 2012 I was working with a couple of guys on a pretty major project. They needed to be able to demonstrate how their concept would work in their industry.

With a little HTML, CSS and javascripting we got a pseudo web site they could demonstrate some of their basic functions.

The client was very focused on using an industry site as the model for their product. We used some new images, particularly the pop of color with the Golden Gate Bridge.  Below is the site they asked me to use as a model.

Moving on…

An undefined reality seems to lie ahead as I boldly step forward open for a new transition and to bolster my career. I have a lifetime still ahead of me and look forward to and a career to yet build upon. The question of where that path may lead to is still on a blank page.

Thank you for visiting art23design.com aka StudioSK and thank you for taking the time to explore anything here you might have found interesting.

I come to you a uniquely creative person currently seeking work where I can share my creative and innovative skills.

My work has been diverse and my tenacity is my golden shield while success is my golden fleece. I am true and have a motto”

“Never Give Up, Never Give In…”

WordPress: WTF

Anyone in Technology for a while has seen arrogance by various companies who think they are the kings of their market. Among the saddest stories include the makers of Quark and the Lotus Office Suite. Oh wait, what? You never heard of them? Then you must be under 30.

Recently Adobe took a buttload of crap when they refused to support a 64 bit version of the Master Suite for their Apple computer and then there is the never-ever ending of Microsoft and their browser… what was that? Internet Exploder?

This week a product that I have personally taken to fall in love with, especially for clients who need easy back-end access to their sites, is the almighty WordPress. Unfortunately, WordPress went on a diet and forgot to tell anyone with the release of WordPress 3.2.

Like in most cases I updated about 4 of my sites, including this one, and was suddenly locked out out a lot of the controls used to manage the site. Did you visit in the last few days and see something far less brilliant than what you see now? Well, I had the kind folks at my hosting company www.HostHead.com restoring my site to pre-3.2!

WordPress says with their release of 3.2.1″

“After more than a million downloads of WordPress 3.2, we’re now releasing WordPress 3.2.1 into the wild. This maintenance release fixes a server incompatibility related to JSON that’s unfortunately affected some of you, as well as a few other fixes in the new dashboard design and the Twenty Eleven theme. If you’ve already updated to 3.2, then this update will be even faster than usual, thanks to the new feature in 3.2 that only updates files that have been changed, rather than replacing all the files in your installation.” – Source

In the above WordPress blog there is not even an apology. With the barest of acknowledgements to major major changes I have to wonder how much of those ‘million downloads’ resulted in jacked up web sites.

When I posted for help in the Support Forum indignant and rude people who identified themselves as volunteers wrote comments to other posters that were just uncalled for and just plain bitchy!

I still have other sites needing fixing. WordPress ‘volunteers’ basically told me I had to rebuild my sites in order to recover them. While I was lucky to restore a back-up on StudioSK, one of my sites is a very busy social networking site that my hands are tied with and will have to be done at some odd hour once I finally figure out my approach.

Other designers and developers have reacted with curiosity through my Twitter (@scott4design) because not all experienced this horrible result like I did. What got some people through an easy upgrade and so many others with a fumble with a face-plant is beyond me.

The biggest problems I experienced were:

• widgets would not open to allow for editing
• menu’s for images libraries would not open

If there were more then I did not discover them yet. On my social networking site www.gayburners.com members are having trouble logging in and posting images, setting up groups and what else? What am I not hearing about?

This update with WordPress 3.2 may have been created to be more efficient and break away from some old baggage with IE6 and more, but at what price? How come your users were not given some warning? This upgrade should have had a lot more warnings and acknowledgements, because I know I would have appreciated it.

WordPress is the best CMS on the market in my humble opinion. It is the one you can give any client and let them go with it. But if I left this update to a client alone… they would have had no where to go.

To Stay Creative – Video

I found this on Squidoo who re-posted it today and felt I needed to have it too.

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

TO-FU created a motion graphics animation of 29 Ways To Stay Creative based on the list by Life on Michigan Ave.

via David Karp

Back to Business

Although a majority of my sites lately have been in WordPress, it was a treat to take on a recent contract position through Robert Half Technology to work with a great Vegas company my last two weeks there.  The reason I want to show this work on this particular site is that I was given a Photoshop template and had to dice it up and make it fit the flavor the company was re-branding toward.

This was one of a few web sites they had me there to assist with, but this one needed to be built from scratch.

The template for this web development company was bright and colorful compared to their existing web strategy and also needed an updated logo matching the new color scheme.

My job was to make that work and then transfer all their copy over to it almost exactly with a lot of general edits.

Using Photoshop to slice this up minus the redundant elements of the graphic, or items that could be created through CSS or HTML, I had everything I need to make this in the image of the executives for the company.

With a little help from a photostock site, this is what I proposed to the management and they liked a lot.

I enjoyed working there and I do not want to take anything away from what this company offers for their design aesthetic. I worked with their principle designer closely and was graciously given some licence to prove my skills.

WordPress for the Masses

In my arsenal of design on this web site these days (05/2011) one will find a majority of the sites I feature including this one is built in WordPress.

There is an effective nature of this Content Management System (Tool) that makes posting and sharing information infinitely more effective for myself and for people I might build a web site for. The positive angle on using WordPress is that my “clients” have the ability to directly impact their own web site’s and manage their own publication with a tool that is not very far from using MS Word.

Consider many of the mainstream web sites are using similar software. Some use WordPress, some Joomla and other Drupal. Pick and choose, but the bottom line is there is a framework that comes with these packaged systems that behooves attention for serious reliability and easy access for clients.

However, a couple people I did some work for are not the most technically savvy and have not learned to access the back-end of the sites to see behind the curtain. I continue to work on their updates under the gotNurv.com business model I developed to help those people.

The future of web design is much more technical and tools like this bring it down for the average person and makes the playing field a little more friendly. We are in a world where you can make your own cookie-cutter web sites for 10% of hiring a designer. Or send it off to India for more if you need something more specialized. But have faith America, there are designers where that can give you a lot very cheap while using tools like this.

« Older Entries