• IKEA Fans
• IKEA Hacker
• IKEA Lovers’ Flickr Group

The bathrooms seem to be the toughest to furnish using only IKEA, but I bet some of their kitchen cabinets could be re-worked into vanities and wall-hanging cabinets.

Today I cleaned out the gutters just in time for the huge storm that’s just passing through now.  I also finished putting together the MANDAL bed from IKEA in the master bedroom.  Next I’ll be painting and re-trimming the entire upstairs.

I’m also weighing ripping up the floor and putting down new hardwood or at least refinishing the existing, but perhaps in the meantime I’ll stick with area rugs like this one by FLOR.

From Read Write Web:

Online sellers are increasingly finding the web to be a more competitive market, and with management and rules changes at eBay, many are in search of a new home as well. Where are they going? And where can you go as a buyer to find alternatives to the online auction format that has been so dominant the past ten years?

Doodle 4 Google

Doodle 4 Google is a competition where we invite K-12 students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo. This year we asked U.S. kids to doodle around the theme “What if…?”

Our winning doodle, selected from over 16,000 entries, was created by Grace Moon, a 6th grader at Canyon Middle School from Castro Valley, California. Grace’s lovely doodle, “Up in the Clouds,” will grace our homepage, Google.com, on May 22nd, 2008.

To do this I’ll actively try two new things:

1. Value My Time A Little More - Colleagues at work always ride me for charging too little, so from now on I will make a better effort to charge for value, not for time.  Through this I’ll probably piss off a few more people, but the clients I do take will be much more valuable.
2. Ask For Help - If there are several interesting or profitable projects running in parallel, I’ll turn to colleagues, outsourcing websites, and other outlets to offload and share work.  I’ve already started to do this and it has worked out well so far.

May will be Snowdrop’s biggest month ever in terms of profit and revenue.  Since the beginning of the year, business has grown almost 300%, but to maintain that type of growth we need to be smart about our decisions.

Hopefully with this dedicated office space I’ll be able to separate my work from my sleeping and relaxing spaces. That’s always been a problem for me - I would sit up in my bed late at night doing work before going to sleep, but I never could fall asleep right away. Now I have a room for work, a room for play, and a room for sleep. Perfect.

Anyway, today I got the go-ahead on a very large project over at Snowdrop so I’m pretty excited.  Although I’ll be booked up pretty much solid for the next two months, I hope to make more of an effort on this blog and maybe even use it as a little vent when work starts to pile.

I really like this design because it’s more personal.  The image at the top was taken at sunrise in Wildwood, NJ, where I’ve vacationed with my parents practically since birth.  The color scheme is better suited to a website with the word “sunrise” in it, which I also like.

Sometimes it’s hard to sell a business - especially a small business - on the concept of search engine optimization.  Despite having concrete numbers to analyze ROI, I think many business owners are less willing to go into something when they don’t quite understand how it works.

For example, would you pay someone a huge chunk of change to take your existing website, rework the underlying code (which you don’t understand), and then put it back online, only to have it look more or less identical to the previous version?  Would you pay someone to rewrite the content on your website to better match what people search for on the Internet? Believe me, it can be a tough sell.

This afternoon, however, I had a Snowdrop client who was originally skeptical about an SEO evaluation call me to say that sales are up by roughly 40% since February 15, the day we launched the newly optimized site.  Being an online content provider, search engine visitors are absolutely critical to the success of his business. Needless to say I was very happy to receive the feedback and the kind words, and it gave me even more faith in the rising SEO industry.

Once feedback like this makes its way down to small business owners and business at the local level, I think we’ll have much less difficulty finding local SEO work.