It doesn't help that they made no offer for reparation — no offer for credit, nor any offer to move my site to a more responsive server in their cluster. They were aware of the problems their servers were having, but could give me no answer in the way of when they'd be fixed.

So I'd read great things about MediaTemple, and decided to host it there. So far I couldn't be happier.

In other news: welcome, noupe.com readers!

A lot has happened since January!

First off, I launched a site for a client, local financial advisement firm Benedict Financial Advisors. They've been a joy to work with. I'll add this to the portfolio eventually, but for now, a bit of an explanation:

BFA's old site had stagnated long ago. They had been given the ability to update the newsletter section of the site, but didn't know how to actually use it. I proposed a new site based on WordPress, they accepted, and now their site is a lean, mean, valid, regularly-updated machine. I'll be adding their site to the portfolio section soon.

The sweater has otherwise been busy lately, having been involved in several other, smaller projects, working on a freelance/contract basis. I've got some new projects coming up, though, some pretty big ones, so be on the lookout for those!

In other news, this site has had the honor of being featured on several sites in the last few months, including WeLoveWP, Shakin.ru, DesignWalker, CSSCreme, CSSArtillery, WPCube, OneStarGallery, CSSBand, and--wait for it--SmashingMagazine! If I've forgotten anybody's site, I apologize; really, I should've written this entry weeks ago. If you've featured my site and I forgot a mention above, please leave a comment and I'll link back to you. But I owe an enormous thank you to everybody who's liked my site enough to link to it, let alone to feature it in their galleries.

I should also mention, once again, that I'm currently working on a bit of an update to the site. There are several things that have just bugged me about it since it launched last year, and it's high time for a realign. I'll be keeping the tag/aged paper theme, and the color scheme, but expect some pretty significant reorganization of content, cleaning up of graphics and typography, and just aesthetic improvements in general. I've grown a lot as a web designer since this site launched; hopefully that growth is reflected in the upcoming redesign.

In the meantime, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress--2.5--and I really recommend the new upgrade to anybody using WP. The Automattic team has been fortunate enough to receive serious funding, and the money went to great use when they enlisted one of my Web design heroes, HappyCog, to redesign the administration interface. I loved WordPress before, but the recent upgrade takes it well into the realm of a professional, streamlined publishing platform fit for use in many environments.

Besides, it's just so darn pretty. Really, worth an upgrade.

Anyway, this post is quite long enough. I'll be back soon enough to announce and link to my latest projects in the works.

It's easy to get carried away with the design of a site. One would think that the site's design is the first thing most users see when they visit, so surely, the design should be the first thing to consider when building a website.

While this may be the case for something that must immediately grab attention and leave an impression on the viewer's mind, such as a billboard or a magazine ad, the fact is, the Internet has vastly different requirements than more traditional forms of advertising. On the Internet, your content must come first. People visit sites, not to see what amounts to an advertisement, but to consume content. That means, for you as a business owner, that your content must be consumable before a designer or programmer touches it; quality content almost guarantees an effective website. A quality design merely honors that content.

Producing good website content involves a few things.

• First of all (and most importantly), you must determine what purpose you'd like the site to fulfill. Is the site strictly here to advertise your business and inform consumers about what you do? Is it here to serve as an online shop? Is it here to showcase your past work? You get the idea: you must determine, in a sentence or two, why you're publishing a website.
• The second point that helps determine content: What, exactly, do you want users of your site to do once they visit it? Contact you? If so, how (via phone, e-mail, or contact form, for instance)? Would you like them to make a purchase? Or would you simply like them to bookmark it? Again, figuring out exactly what you'd like your users to do once they visit your site will ultimately help you write better content for the web.
• And third: How will the content, which hopefully takes the above two questions into consideration, be organized? It's not entirely necessary to outline your whole site; a good web designer can help you in that respect. But it's important to have at least a basic site outline in mind, because that site outline determines the structure of the site and how users will navigate it.

I actually use a questionnaire found at Creative Latitude (PDF link) as an outline when I'm interviewing clients and potential clients. Although I don't use it exactly when setting up a new project (let's face it: a questionnaire, however short and useful, is just extra work on top of piles most small business owners have already), I do use various parts of it, depending on the client (and the information I already have about their particular needs). In my experience, most people haven't considered most of the questions on that question sheet, but the answers to most of its questions are pivotal to creating quality content for your site.

My process is always evolving, but a big part of it is the initial consulting and planning stages for clients' sites; doing that properly ensures a quality result.

As the article at Tyssen Design brings out, the consequences of an inadequately planned site usually include extra expense in the form of revisions to design. As in my recent experience working with a client whose site ended up being about twice the size I expected it to be, an inadequately planned site can also lead to frustration on the designer's part with unexpected additions and subtractions to content. Content determines design, not the other way around, so spend as much time as it takes on your site's content to get it presentable on paper before you take it to a web designer. 

For the best experience working with any designer, you must have your site planned out down to the paragraph—and if you don't, work with your designer until you do. A good web designer knows the web well enough to help you set up the content of your site, and not just the design.

There are some that call this point of view hogwash, that it's just arrogance and hubris and ultimately, designers fill a niche in the capitalist world just like any other profession: we're there to feed ourselves and maybe make a buck or two in the process, so don't attach any undue nobility or respect to a service and skill that isn't too vastly different from anything less cerebral or artistic.

Normally, my inclination is to agree; I'm not designing for higher ideals, I'm designing to pay the rent and to add to my savings account. I certainly love design, and wouldn't be doing it if that weren't the case, and while some designers actually do affect serious societal change, they are surely in the minority.

That is, until I read this presentation (PDF link) over at Netdiver.

When I think of graphic design in the context of changing society, I think of propaganda posters and gigantic corporations. However, there are more, very subtle, ways in which design affects those who view it, and therefore society as a whole.

As designers, we do have power to affect change--perhaps not on an individual basis (at least in most cases), but collectively, as a community. The presentation, written by Nick Bell, discusses several ways in which design (not necessarily graphic design) has the power to slowly change the world.

For instance, he cites the fact that portions of food are slowly, surely growing, even as the developed world's collective waistband expands to unhealthy measurements. Without a subtle, psychological push in that direction, people would stop eating when they were full. But using the psychological tools available to us as designers, design makes it much harder to resist food on the shelf, and make it more difficult to stop eating once we feel full. The result has been a gradual expanding of the American gut--and a corresponding increase in disease associated with obesity. Design can't necessarily be solely credited with changes such as these, but the changes would be nonexistent without design.

The presentation mentions several examples of negative change in society affected by design. But, the message of the presentation is that incredible positive change can be made by us, collectively, as designers. He goes on to cite several positive examples of how design helps society.

Ultimately, it helped me to realize that, while many of us are just here to pay the bills while doing something we love, we don't necessarily have to take on projects that conflict with our beliefs and ideals. Package designers don't have to make the fattiest foods the most visually appealing, or take on projects that require them to do so; landscape architects don't necessarily have to serve clients whose corporate practices infringe on their personal morality; print designers don't have to listen to a client who demands pre-consumer paper products; we web designers don't have to take on projects for companies whose messages rub us wrong. There are plenty of clients out there, and we have every right to turn the wrong ones down.

Perhaps it's a bit idealistic, and I'm buying into the hubris that I once denounced. But I'd much rather do something, believing it's the right thing and will affect the world in a positive way, than do a project and not care either way because I'm just here for the paycheck. It's much easier to do work that you believe in.

A little background: Eric owns and operates the very awesome Linty Fresh online teeshirt shop, where he designs and sells all of his shirts. By hand. His work has gotten more attention recently, having been featured on the inimitable shirt.woot, and otherwise gaining recognition. He asked for some tips on generating more traffic from search engines without spending a ton of money, and here, more or less, is my response:

You don't have to spend a lot on advertising. Google's Adwords program is really great in that it's extremely inexpensive, compared to other advertising venues, but at the same time, highly effective. You can spend as little or as much as you want, and target your ads locally. I have one ad campaign going with a budget of $50 per month. It's led to a couple hundred clicks to my site, with three really quality leads, and if those leads turn into actual work, the ROI will be terrific (it works out to something like a 1200% return if I got one good job, if you include only the cost of the ad itself). The nice thing is, you only pay if people click your ad. So, although I have $50 budgeted to Google every 30 days, in actuality, I've only spent around $25 for the first month. Pretty cool. If you target your ads to your local area, you have a greater chance of getting hits (it limits the number of people who will see your ad, but those people have searched for "atlanta teeshirts," or whatever you want to use for keywords, and are looking to support local business).

Having a blog is great—and yours is regularly updated, even better—for SEO, but it helps to have it all under the same domain (as in, a part of your site, instead of a blogspot.com account in conjunction with a Big Cartel account). Hosted solutions like the one you're using are terrific for online stores, especially if you're just getting started, but having exact control over the look/feel of your site and the content of it will ultimately help search engine rankings. For instance, if you designed the LF site to be all fancy-like and it got attention from online web galleries—arguably something that won't happen with a Big Cartel powered site as they control the layout, if I'm not mistaken—some good, quality incoming links will result, boosting your search engine rankings (not to mention the fact that those who view web galleries are exactly the demographic that would buy your shirts). I know this from experience: no less than three galleries have featured my site, and the resulting boost in search engine traffic has lasted for awhile. I don't do a lot to the site, either, but now, around 33% of the traffic to bigsweaterdesign.com is from search engines—and it's totally organic, naturally-occurring traffic that has gradually built. I don't get work directly from web galleries, since most of the folks that visit them are also web designers, but any increase in search engine ranking is a good increase in search engine ranking.

Regardless, use your blog. Visit forums with a link back to either LF or the LF blog as your signature. Look for other blogs that serve a similar demographic to the one you're after (or even sites that are only peripherally related to teeshirt design—or unrelated completely, for that matter), and comment on the articles that interest you. Comments on blogs with a link to your site in your name will often lead to more clicks and more interest in your stuff. Adding quality, interesting commentary to a blog (or blogs) written by somebody who gets lots of traffic and has good influence will in effect lead to a relationship with the blogger, and if you're consistent, you'll get a really high quality incoming link to your site in the form of their blogroll (or, for that matter, a nice feature in a post, like Entreprenuts did with my site).

One of the biggest things you can do to help your SEO stuff is to offer something on your site (or blog) for free, and then promote that. For instance, you could write a tutorial using your next teeshirt design. People love cool shirts, naturally, but inquiring minds would love to know how you design your shirts. I know that when I read designers' blogs, the articles that describe their processes are often the most interesting to me. You could even write a tutorial on how to go about searching for a teeshirt printer, or whatever. If you did one a week, consistently (and that's the key: consistency, as Google indexes sites that update more often than sites that don't, and users stop trusting sites that stagnate), or one every two weeks, or one a month, or whatever, and people liked what they saw, you'd get incoming links and your search engine ranking would steadily climb. If you give stuff away for free that people like, they'll buy your stuff to compensate for the free stuff, and it'll lead to bigger, more profitable work.

A classic example of this: Jonathan Coulton went for a year where he released a song on his site for free once a day, and from that, he got lots of traffic (legal free music!); now, he plays sold out live shows at small venues and has even written songs for videogames (I'm thinking of the end credits song for the game Portal, which is supposedly one of the best games ever, but there could be more). So who knows; if you do enough self-promotion in the form of free knowledge (or free vectors, or whatever, just something that you don't charge for and that other people find very useful), eventually you might be commissioned by a bigger design agency to put together a cool shirt. It's sort of a machine that fuels itself, once it gets going.

Ultimately, organic Google (et al) traffic just takes time to build. It's slow going, but once you're ranked highly, it's well worth the investment of time.

Your one-on-one promotion is important, too. Business cards and free shirts can be a pretty powerful marketing tool. Nothing will ever replace human interaction: going to trade shows and selling products out of your car, as mentioned, will not only help people put a face to your business (and therefore encourage them to buy), but it will also potentially help your search engine rankings. But that's an entirely different post.

A recent discussion on the FreelanceSwitch Forums, however, led me to defend the use of Web standards in my work. One designer questioned why, exactly, standards-based sites are such a big deal, when essentially the same visual result can be obtained by using a tables-based site?

His argument was valid, from a purely visual standpoint: one can create a visually appealing website using nothing but tables in their code. People have been doing so for years, and in some cases tables are more versatile for layout and design than valid CSS and HTML.

But, that's just the problem. He was thinking from a purely visual, print designer's standpoint. The Web is not a purely visual medium. The decision of going with Web standards or table-based design is nowhere near as trivial as, for instance, the decision of whether to use InDesign or Quark. It's not just the tool you use, in this case; while results obtained by using tables can be visually similar to CSS-based sites, for many people using the Web, what a site looks like is the least important thing about the site. The Web is purely content-driven, and it's used by many millions of people, each with different needs. The problem with table-based sites is a simple one: while the site's content may appear intelligible for many people using standard, desktop-grade Web browsers, those using different browsers—whether screen readers for the visually impaired, mobile phone browsers, or even just people with a larger default text size in their browser—often see a garbled, unusable mess.

There are other benefits to using standards, besides universal accessibility of your site, like cost savings in bandwidth (and, in the long term, development). I outlined it pretty well in my forum post:

While (in some cases) a tables-based site might appear to have the same functionality ... a standards-based site beats a table-based site in terms of functionality.

You might be surprised at the number of people using their phones (or smartphones or PDAs) to access the Internet. It's a sizeable number, and growing. Having websites that phones can easily, quickly read, is becoming more and more important.

And anyway, the point isn't really whether or not browser makers support the standards. (They do, for the most part, actually. Once you learn a few hacks, you spend no time hacking and most time building great sites, while occasionally reaching into your bag o' CSS tricks.) The point is to have standards. It could be compared to, for instance, color fidelity in the print world. If it wasn't for Pantone's (or any other) color-matching system, Home Depot's orange would be a different color on every piece of print material. IBM's blue could be anywhere from navy to purple. But the fact is, Pantone (and, again, others) set up a standard by which inks could be measured, resulting in consistent color results no matter the printer. The idea is similar: with Web standards, no matter what browser a person is using—Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or the one built into their mobile phone—the content is presented in a way that's consistent and sensible, not to mention decipherable. In many instances, it also means that people can control exactly how they view content (RSS readers, for instance), which would be completely impossible in a table-based Web. It has very little to do with actual design and everything to do with content. There are plenty of analogies, though, like standards in building homes, or standards in highway traffic control, or standards in building a Big Mac.

So, no, table-based sites don't offer near the functionality that standards-based sites do. It's an outdated practice, building sites with tables, and pretty soon OP's designer is going to be obsolete.

The Pantone analogy makes sense to other designers, but as I mentioned in the forum post, the analogy could be extended to any field that involves some form of standardization. There are standards and codes for building bridges, houses, skyscrapers, and cars; why not websites?

By building your sites using Web standards, I'm ensuring that your site will look the same in Web browsers of tomorrow as they do today. I'm also ensuring that I'll always have a job in Web design, honestly. Standards are the way of the present (and the future), and I'd hate to be made obsolete so early in the game by not adhering to proper standards.

Which is pretty darn sweet, if you ask me! Thanks, CSS Artillery (and whoever submitted it!) and welcome, new visitors. The front page and portfolio section will be undergoing some changes in the next few weeks; I'm aware of the site's shortcomings and will be addressing them soon.

In the meantime, click around! Hope you like my work. Leave a comment or drop me an e-mail if you'd like.

I'm even mentioned specifically in the write-up. That's quite an honor. I've been a regular reader of Design Meltdown for awhile now and go there for inspiration every time I'm starting a new project. Hard to believe, especially as many loose ends as I feel there are here. I was recently getting to the point that I'm no longer satisfied with the look and feel of this site and feel that it could do with some major restructuring for the sake of highlighting important content. So this is very validating -- a huge boost to my confidence! I'm also considering doing away with ZenPhoto and featuring only my best work, using WordPress and custom fields...but that's another post.

Anyway, welcome, new visitors. Hope you like my work. Hire me if you do.

I'm booked for the next month and a half or so.

Three projects going at once. Unprecedented. Well, four, if you count the pro-bono stuff.

It's going to be a busy few weeks. In the meantime, I'm moving out. After 23 years living with my parents, I'm finally taking the leap and joining the ranks of the self-sufficient.

I hope I can keep this momentum going, work-wise. We'll see.

It has been a great pleasure to work with Vincent Maglione of Big Sweater Design on our new website.

For one thing, we are delighted with the results. We received feedback from clients and prospects that it is:

• Attractive.
• Readable.
• Functional.

For another thing, Vincent's competent and patient coaching helped us grow in our own understanding of "technical stuff." I confess that prior to Vincent's coaching, I not only worried about breaking something out there in cyberspace; at some level, I was also afraid it could do something back to me!

And (as if that weren't enough!):

• His instructions were very well written.
• When something didn't work they way we expected, he dug in and figured it out.
• Because of his careful and competent work, there were actually very few problems to work out to begin with.

I recommend Vincent Maglione and Big Sweater Design without reservation. And if you'd like for me to repeat that recommendation to you individually, just e-mail me or give me a call:
Ruth Middleton House
President, Middleton-House & Company
Consultants for Project, Organizational and Business Alignment
Senior Faculty, Keller Graduate School of Management
Adjunct Faculty, Fielding Graduate University
Phone: 770-425-5244
Fax: 770-426-7095
 www.middleton-house.com