I have an amazon.com account and I buy Kindle books. I don’t have a Kindle, so I read those books on my iPhone or my iPad. And I share the account with my husband, so sometimes he buys Kindle books and reads them on his iPhone. Sometimes we want to read the same book, sometimes my daughter wants to read one of our books on her iPod Touch.

I don’t think we’re a particularly unusual tech family in this way. Now, bear with me for a moment while I explain my frustration with Amazon’s separate mobile site.

I buy a Kindle book with one-click. That means the book is sent to my default device which is my iPad because I can’t set the order of the list. It’s just alphabetical and I can’t rename my devices once I’ve put them in (another post topic perhaps).

So, the book goes to my iPad, but I read on my iPhone. I happen to be somewhere other than my computer when I fire up my Kindle app on my iPhone and see that my Kindle book isn’t there. No problem, I just need to go to amazon.com, to my account and send the book to my iPhone.

I open up safari, type in amazon.com and am redirected to Amazon’s mobile site. It does look nice on my small screen. I click on my account, log in and I can’t get to my digital downloads. They didn’t put that on the mobile site.

Now I have to click on the link to the real site, deal with the fact that it’s not designed for my device at all, and make my way down into my account to get my book on my iPhone.

The designers obviously forgot about all of us Kindle app owners (how many thousands of people is that?).

Why am I even talking about this? Because Jakob Nielsen recently posted his advice on mobile user experience. The summary is quoted below:

Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.

I completely agree with the first sentence. You do need to serve a different design to different screen sizes. But I completely disagree with the second sentence. Two sites means that one will almost always be a cut down version of the other. There is barely enough time to keep one site for a business up to date and working, how are we going to find the time to do two?

Wait a minute, this is giving me a huge sense of deja vu. We web designers have been through this before, back in the bad old days when we wanted pixel perfect layout and we had to serve a different site for different browsers. How did that work out?

We decided that was a waste of time and went against the very nature of the web. The whole idea is that we can publish the information once (the HTML) and we can make it look like we want for different users (the CSS).

That’s what responsive design is all about. It’s not perfect, but we’re getting there.

Naomi Beard and Associates is a firm that provides coaching and consulting services to lawyers and law firms. The site is informational and includes a client only section where they can download resources and a forum for clients.

Since the site needed to stay up to date, we chose a WordPress installation and used the Thesis theme with some modifications.

Visit the site at naomibeardandassociates.com.

The Celiac Disease Foundation is a non-profit organization that works to increase awareness about the disease. The site is both informational and a way for users to find out what CDF has been doing with the money that is donated to them.

Most visitors are looking for information on Celiac Disease and the first button in the navigation leads to that information. The home page includes upcoming events and news items that are updated weekly. Past event and news information is archived on the site so that people searching for that information will find their way to Celiac.org.

New Joomla Site

Celiac Disease Foundation redesigned their site and created it on Joomla. I didn’t participate in the redesign and coding of the Joomla site, but I maintain it for them now. I also re-coded the AJAX shopping cart for donations, memberships and conference registration to use their Cybersource payment gateway.

I also added Mal’s E-Commerce shopping cart so they would have a shopping cart that persisted across the site.

Visit the site at www.celiac.org.

Old Static Site

I inherited the basic look of the static site, then updated it to make it easier to change and more search engine friendly.

Online Donations

The online donations section of the celiac.org site lets visitors quickly donate to CDF. The pages are coded in php and they interact with Cybersource (working with Bank of America) on a secure server. The forms gather all the information required by CDF for their different kinds of donations like tribute donations and gift donations.

I also code the forms for the CDF Annual Conference each year to allow online registration.

Gradillas Court Reporters is a court reporter company in Beverly Hills. The site is informational and needed to convey the sophistication of the firm.

As many lawyers aren’t Internet savvy, we kept the site simple. We also made sure the text was easy to read.

Visit the site at gradillas.com.

Bouve.com is an ecommerce site selling head scarves.

It includes information on the product and an Interspire shopping cart.

Visit the site at bouve.com.

Went to a client’s house the other day. He had been without email on his desktop computer at home for 2 weeks. He could check his email on his iPad and iPhone – but his PC just kept giving ‘timeout’ errors. After a lot of time spent messing around with Outlook settings, system and Outlook updates, and even creating a new Outlook “profile” I stumbled across a website that suggested disabling your anti-virus program.

Now, he’s had the same program on his PC for years (it came bundled with PC-Cillan), and hasn’t changed any of his settings. But, sure enough, when I disabled it Outlook started working. So, there must have been an update to the software that decided that to make his PC safer, it would block email. NICE!

This is why I recommend a plain-jane antivirus program called AVG. It’s free and it just checks for viruses. The big boys have gotten into blocking everything in a desperate attempt to make the PC more secure – but they end up making the PC useless. Techy users can certainly handle these apps, but your average user just ends up with a brick on their desk.

So, if your PC’s email suddenly stops working, check the settings with what your provider recommends and then try turning off your Anti-Virus software. It might save you days of frustration.

One of the things I’m doing to try and get my name out there is answering questions on Linked-In. I hadn’t realized this was even on their site before I can go into their questions section and answer questions other people have posted. It’s fun and challenging, plus I have the hope that someone will see my answer and hire me to fix other problems they have.
I love helping people and solving puzzles, and this seems like a good way to keep my hand in. I’ll be reposting some of the more interesting questions and answers here.

Consulting is a strange business. You’re only selling your time and expertise. So, my client’s are cutting back and downsizing, which means less work for me. How do I get new clients? Especially, when businesses everywhere are cutting back! Normally, I get all my new business through word of mouth and it’s a slow process. I don’t mind – I keep my clients for the long term (most for more than 10 years), but because I don’t have a real method for getting new clients I’m in a bind now.

So, I’m going to start blogging here.. and I’m letting all my clients know I need more work. I’m joining Linked-In and answering questions there. Other than that…. not sure.

Any suggestions?

Ted and Josie are both participating in the Renaissance Faire this year: Josie in the games booths and Ted as a Friend of the Faire (FAF). We all went  up to the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area last weekend to check out the yard sale and get them set up. It was fun wandering around on the Faire grounds while it was being built and Josie completed her costume.

Now Josie and Ted have to take their classes (accent, character building, costume, etc) and then they’ll be ready to greet and entertain the public.

That means goodies to eat, like Lebanon Balogna:

[flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/kayjummac/4187618133/[/flickr]

Cougar Cheese from Washington State University:

[flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/kayjummac/4188380880/[/flickr]

And pretzels from Pennsylvania:

[flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/kayjummac/4188380936/[/flickr]

We also got our Christmas tree up. We had to put it in a new place (where we normally have the futon), but it looks good there:

[flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/kayjummac/4188380982/[/flickr]