Oh, sorry — you were expecting something new?  Well, I’m still flying in maintenance mode.

If you’ve dug deep-enough, you’ll notice that the site is still WordPress. Not ExpressionEngine!?
I’ll spill more about that decision soon. Let’s just say — the prodigal son may have returned home.

ttfn

I’m back in the swing of things after a few solid months of freelance projects, and I’ve decided to start with some design work — specifically, font selection.

The font seen here is called Chalet. It’s a very flexible font, in that there are several faces in one family. The real challenge in my site will be “how” to use non web-safe fonts. Since this font isn’t installed on any site visitor’s computer, I’ll either need to use an image or dynamically call the font as a swf, using a technique called sIFR. If I decide to go the sIFR route, I’ll definitely give a walkthrough.

Here’s how Mike Davidson describes sIFR:

sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash.

Once I determine the look of the site, I’ll re-visit these concepts. For now, I’ll post these quick mockups where I’ve tested the font in various weights and sizes.

Font Test 1

Font Test 2

It’s been a while since my last update!

Funny thing: that very sentence shows-up 10,400 times on Google, so I know you understand.

Things have been nothing short of busy on the Creative Component front. I’ve designed and built several small sites and have even been dabbling in the vector world quite a bit on logo and print design. I’m also happy to say that I’ve learned lots about Drupal theming within the past few months.

Lastly, I won’t spill the beans just yet, but I’ve started a development project with another designer and a developer. It’s a project that you will really love. More information to follow on that soon.

I’m trying to carve-out more time to work on my site. Hopefully soon!

Content areas include:

• Static Header
• Welcome area with text links to main site categories
• Recent Blog post, with link to blog area
• Main navigation
• Recent work with link to portfolio
• Multiple links to other Creative Component properties
• Inspiration block from my Tumblr feed
• Micro-Blog block from my Pownce feed
• Status block from my Twitter feed
• Photos block from either Zooomr or Flickr
• Static Footer

More detail + site navigation to follow…

I’m happy to announce that’ I’ve begun sketching & storyboarding the site.  I’ll scan some preliminary drawings soon.

Thanks for your patience!

The rule states that an image can be divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines. The four points formed by the intersections of these lines can be used to align features in the image.

It’s not something I look for, but it can be seen in each of these sites that have caught my eye recently. I do tend to design this way, but I’m not sure it’s ever intentional.

Look for various articles online. 1 2 3 4 5 …

Unit Interactive

Adobe Developer Connection

Only Human

Art of Mission

Space Maker

We All Hate Quickbooks

Eyespot

Dibusoft

My last podcast interview was with Jason Santa Maria on the topic of Design Inspiration.

So what inspires me? EVERYTHING.

I see things as I drive that I find interesting or funny. I see many things on TV that inspire me. I will say that it really helps to have a DVR. I find myself relentlessly rewinding and pausing commercials because of something interesting that caught my eye. As I’m taking note of what inspires me on TV, I find that it’s usually typography, or the way that a font is used in a design.

I can honestly say that I find most of my design inspiration online. There are tons {a large, generic unit of measure} of sites that talk about inspiration with links to sites that inspire them. Like a sponge, I soak all of this in.

ASIDE

A few months back, I started an experimental site where I automatically pull-down thousands of articles from sites that inspire me, mix them up and serve them back to the world for consumption. The site is CREATExCHANGE, found at www.createxchange.com.

It’s been a fun experiment with RSS, and I’ve definitely found same great articles there. It’s labeled as a beta site, which means I have no clue what I’m going to do with it in the future.

For more than two years I’ve been tagging sites “design + inspiration” on my deli.cio.us account, and it’s chocked-full of interesting links to things that once inspired me, or things I thought I would return to in the future. The downside of that basic cataloging system is the fact that every site changes. If I tagged something “footer” because I liked the look of a site’s footer, it’s likely that the site will change sometime in the near future.

A designer friend Eric Anderson hipped me to the site scrnshots.com, where like Flickr.com, users can upload images and tag them. The difference is, scrnshots.com looks like the site users are primarily designers. So my new method of tagging anything cool or inspiring is to grab a screenshot and tag it.

I’m going to post less than tons {again with the tons} of screen shots in the next few days of things I’ve found interesting, and quite honestly, ideas I will borrow for my site.

Lorraine responded:

“One hour a day, first thing in the morning.”

Lorraine’s responce was simple, and makes sense. If it means that much to me, I will take the extra effort to move this forward, if not to hold-off on new projects.

Lorraine was a featured interview, who waxed poetic on Branding.

After interviewing Jason Santa Maria, I was left wondering, who should I interview next? Or more — should there be further interviews, or should I just build the site already?

The areas where I needed the most help was in branding and learning what it is I do as a freelance designer. I can say I was succesful in getting the answers I needed to move into the design phase.

I’m very sure at this point that I want to get this new site launched soon, so instead of further interviews on web design and development, I’m going to focus on actually designing the site. I’ll still blog about the progress, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll produce some tutorials on prototyping, mockups and creating XHTML/CSS for the ExpressionEngine build.

Once I’m over this small bump of client work, I’ll begin with what inspires me and where I want to go next.

Oh, and I’ll still be doing the web design podcast over at CreativeXpert.com!

{if you were wondering}

We talked about Jason’s history, and how he got to where he is today.

Grab the MP3 File | duration 38:34

Jason answers these questions:

• When did you first decide to become a designer?
• You consider yourself a Graphic Designer, but you must be involved with UI design and User Experience. What do you do most?
• What type of design do you like the most?
  
• What things inspire you most? And where do you find them?
• I know lots of designers say that they don’t seek inspiration online, that you can get inspiration from things not web-related, but since we work on the web, and our work shows-up on the web, don’t you find that it’s necessary to pick-up some things online?
• Do you use a sketchbook?
• What do you do to stay current or fresh?
• Are there techniques that you have yet to try? Any new tools or software?
• We have a comment from Brad Thomson on the WordPress design. Brad says: “Great job on your WordPress work! How did you get that gig, and how long did it take you? Can you describe the design steps?”
• Another question from Kelsie J: What’s your favorite donut, both in brand and in flavor?

It’s another good way to exercise my blog chops. I’m keeping things pretty light and on the ‘fun’ side over there, so go check it out: Creative Component on the Indystar…

Check your local paper’s site to see if they allow Reader Blogs. It’s a great way to reach new readers!

Have a great weekend!

oh–that’s me?…

My brand, my services and my site all needed a make-over. I’m at a point in my career where I need to take a big step back and think about who I am, and what I do. I can honestly say that it’s been the most-rewarding decision I’ve made at Creative Component.

Especially including the podcast! I’ve met some great experts so far, and I’m thrilled at the up-coming discussions about design, development and marketing.

Normally, it just wouldn’t work for any company to set-out animated barricades with “excuse our dust” signs. These images are about as helpful as the Baby-on-Board or Where’s the Beef? signs. {not going to lie — I love that one}.

But I digress…

If doing the public re-design has taught me one thing, it’s: BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF AND WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS. Ok… two things, and the second is: DO IT WELL, AND DO IT VIRAL.

Grab the MP3 File | duration 38:34

These are some of Kate’s comments during the interview…

“A crucial element to site evaluation is — Make sure you understand what kind of questions your visitors will be asking of your site, and designing to fit those needs.”

“If you’re starting something new, it’s important to look-around and find-out how other people are doing that. For example, if people are looking for “software providers”, as they’re looking for tools, then what kind of forums or questions are being asked to help them make decisions around that? Very often they will go to peers, other social networks, other information support systems that are outside of the competitive, or even service area that your site will live in. It’s important to look outside to get that kind of information.”

“The key thing about evaluation, when starting something new is putting a really firm stake in the ground and deciding who you want to be, and for whom. Until you have a pretty good sketch of what that looks like, you can do allot of research and exploration for very little impact and very little usefulness.”

“Deciding who you are, and who your audience is, how you want to engage with them, and how you want to bring value to your site and your company, as well as the users you’ll be engaging with is the crucial question.”

“From Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience, the five different elements that he defines are an excellent structure for accessing to what degree do you want to evaluate what really matters to you. The elements are a great mental container to figure-out how to approach this big open beast of pure evaluation.”

If you have a site, taking a fresh look by asking:

• How is it performing in the strategy — what you’re trying to accomplish, how your users are going to engage with you?
• How is it performing as far as scope? — the features and functionality you bring to it.
• How is the structure/the relationship of the features? Is it working? Is it usable?
• Is the arrangement of the elements on the pages understandable?
• What does it look/sound like? What is that surface telling people?

“If you break it down into all of those components, then you can figure-out which of the elements to I need to focus on to get this right. It’s going to really depend on how much information you’ve got out there, how many new features you need to build, etc.”

On The assessment of a site:
“By loose definition, the assessment has to live as a comparison from something to something. For each of the chunks of a site, there should be a purpose why that stuff is there. Has it always been there? Ask the simple question: What work is this piece of the site doing? If it’s not contributing to helping the users make decisions; if it’s not working to close that gap, then it’s probably not working for your site at all.”

“It’s considered R.O.T., which is REDUNDANT, OUTDATED, TRIVIAL. Those things you can just let go of; when you do, it’s very cathartic.”

To repeat the five layers of user experience you should bake-into your assessment cake are:

• STRATEGY: What you do, what your users do, what you get out of the site experience.
• SCOPE: What features and content is contained.
• STRUCTURE: The relationship of how the features and the architecture fit together.
• SKELETON: The placement and arrangement of the various elements.
• SURFACE: The images. text, brand, look & feel — the voice.

LINKS PROVIDED BY KATE:

The Elements of User Experience
Jesse James Garrett
http://www.jjg.net/elements/
(You can download the summary diagram of the elements from here.)

Content essay with Kristina Halvorson & Kate Rutter
http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000959.php

Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic
http://www.braintraffic.com/

Jeff Veens old but still great essay on content inventory
Doing a Content Inventory (Or, A Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site)
http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000040.php
It’s a great way to start a site assessment.

• Why is site evaluation important?
• The best way to improve the effectiveness of a Web site is to have data that indicates how it’s performing. That would primarily be based on visitor’s experience. How do you get this information?
• Using tools that we’ve talked about before, like Google Analytics or Woopra, I can view the number of visits to a page, etc. But how can I measure satisfaction?
• I can know my audience through research: Surveys, Phone Calls, What about Profiles or fake personas? How are these effective? Like designing a site based on needs and expectations?
• I want to collect both quantity and quality results. What sort of Web Metrics or Web Analytics?
• What about Usability testing?
• What about Quality and Compliance?
• What about Usability Goals — setting performance goals for your users. Can you talk about that? (the time it takes a user to find specific information, or submit data) — I sometimes think about this topic when bailing on an e-commerce form, hoping they’ll see me running-away from the transaction.

Special thanks to Kate and Adaptive Path for providing such great information!

I began tonight with a list of adjectives:

Clean, Direct, Un-Complicated, Provides Solutions, Knowledgeable, Funny, Experienced, Creative, Innovative, Technically-Savvy and Drop-Dead Gorgeous.

On the podcast interview I conducted on Developing a Mission Statement, Henning Fischer mentioned the sheer simplicity of Jet Blue’s mission statement, and I have to agree — it’s very straight-forward. It goes like this: “Jet Blue Is a low-fare, low-cost passenger airline, which provides high-quality customer service.”

I could “borrow” theirs:

Creative Component is a low-cost design consultancy, providing high-quality results.

But that’s too easy, right?

On the point of “borrowing”: When Macromedia MX first rolled-out, I attended a special roadshow event. I remember one presenter’s comment about stealing content. He said: “If you borrow it from the internet, and put it back-up on the internet, it’s not stealing.”
That’s a joke that will be stuck in my head forever, but I digress…

I thought something with Creating, Defining and Refining might sound cool, but that might be more of a catchy subtitle. I’ll probably use that as an in-line title a bit later.

We create clear, concise, productive results in any marketplace.

That one’s short, but not very tightly-focused. It sounds like I do everything for everyone, and while this could be a truth, it’s also something that needs to be fixed from a business stand-point.

Taking a closer look at the work I do, I considered a mission statement with a slant towards a partnership, as a large percentage of the work I do is to assist other design/development/marketing agencies.

We’re your creative partner. Together we’ll create visually-exciting, cost-effective marketing solutions for your business.

This one also sounds like a title or a catch-phrase of sorts, but I do like the uniqueness to the delivery.

I also do full-service design and development for small companies, which pushes me in this direction:

Creative Component provides a unique combination of experience, creativity, and leading edge technology to provide businesses with the solutions that match their needs and contribute to their success.

I think I’m going to sleep on it.

Here’s a short {somewhat corny, but poignant} video on developing an Elevator Pitch.

Grab the MP3 File | duration 29:24

During the interview, I asked the question: “Should small businesses have mission statements too?”

Henning responded:

“I don’t believe that any business has ever really suffered terribly from having a mission statement. They are incredibly good tools for an organization to help people focus on what they want to put out into the world — whether it’s products or services.

A good mission statement describes not only what you’re going to do, but the way that you’re going to do it. The way you’re going to do it is the key thing that any organization can benefit from. That in many ways is the essence of strategy. — The style that you’re going to do something is inherently different than the way anyone else is going to do it.

Mission Statements are tricky things to develop, but a tool that we like to use is something called The Elevator Pitch. It was developed by Geoffrey Moore and found in his book Crossing the Chasm. It’s a kind-of a fill-in-the-blanks way of putting together what the essence of your offering is to folks. It’s a very short statement that really gets to the heart of the matter.”

Every organization and every human being struggles with sticking to what it is they say they’re going to do.

To this point, Henning adds:

“A mission statement might be as easy as I’m going to lose five pounds. And that never happens. Mission statements are often-times easily tossed-off as this is what we’re going to do, and as long as we say it, it’s going to be a reality. A mission statement is a hard thing to execute-upon, and you need to be realistic about implementing one. If you’re not going to hold yourself to a mission statement, then what’s the worth of really having one? Not living-up to your mission is almost more harmful than not even having one in some ways.”

Based on the advice I’ve heard from speaking with Henning, I’m in the process of developing the Creative Component mission statement.

So what’s your elevator pitch?

• Do small companies need mission statement too?
• How do I create a mission statement for my company?
• What are the differences between a Mission, Vision and Value statement?
• Should a mission statement be specific, or simply a 30,000 foot view?

Show listener Anonymous asks this question about living-up to a mission statement:

“I’ve worked at many organizations that had mission statements straight out of Dilbert, and don’t live the values they espouse, they’re just words on paper that have zero impact on action. Why does this lack of vision-transfer happen from the C-suite down? How can you get companies to wake up in middle management and start walking the talk?”

On the topic of Web Design & Development…

• Why is scope important, or even necessary?
• How do you determine Project Scope?
• In terms of the visitors of a website, it’s probably best to know your audience?
• On planning, what about setting objectives? Does this come from asking the hard-hitting questions?

Listener Elbowroom Design in Calgary, Alberta asks this question:

“Sometimes we get great ideas for a website once we’re halfway into the development project. By that point, it’s not called a good idea, it’s just something that gets in the way of meeting deadlines and budgets.
– What are some ways to shake out the important epiphanies at an early enough stage?”

Join us next week, when we speak with Kate Rutter, a Senior Practitioner at Adaptive path, who will be speaking on EVALUATING YOUR CURRENT WEB SITE.

Learn more about Henning and Adaptive Path on their web site.
Henning Fischer’s bio: www.adaptivepath.com/aboutus/henning.php
About Adaptive Path: www.adaptivepath.com/aboutus

JERRY MAGUIRE’S MISSION STATEMENT
The things we think and do not say: thoughts of a sports attorney

Special thanks to Henning and Adaptive Path for providing such great information!

Over the past several weeks I’ve had the great opportunity to speak with some incredible experts who have all given great advice on planning a design project. I’m putting the finishing touches on my planning documentation, and I’ll share this with you soon.

If you missed the podcast episodes, you can listen to the interviews here:

Michael Boyink on Site Architecture and the basics of building a site in ExpressionEngine. Blog Post | Podcast

Lea Alcantara about Branding for Designers. Blog Post | Podcast

Lorraine Ball on Branding for Clients. Blog Post | Podcast

Henning Fischer on Developing a Mission Statement. Blog Post | Podcast

Lorraine believes that the only way to be successful is for a brand to stand for something, and to own that position in a consumer’s mind.

Grab the MP3 File | duration 25:28

Visit Lorraine online at www.roundpeg.biz

Earlier, I posted a topic, asking the question of “Who is my Target Audience?”
On the topic of Designing a web site for site visitors or clients, Lorraine adds:

“…You need to design your site based on the objectives of your business. If you have a strong customer base, and what you’re looking to do is maintain and strengthen the relationships with your existing customers, you need to design for them. If you’re primarily in an expansion mode, and you’re looking to attract new customers, you still don’t design for everybody. My recommendation is that you think about your ideal client. You put a picture of that person on the wall in your office, and you talk to, and write to, and design for that client. The one thing I don’t think you should do is — design for other designers. It’s fun, but unless your business is about freelancing for other designers, then you need to impress them. Designers standards are high; they’re going to look for the pithy, the clever, the edgy. If your target clients are business owners, who tend to be a little more conscious, as it’s their money they’re spending, they want stable/interesting design. They’re not going to get your inside jokes or your humor, and so my recommendation is your core site is perhaps a little more straightforward, then it’s ok to have some fun & clever pages tucked in there; little surprises for the designers who will appreciate your humor…”

Specifically, if you have questions about “Setting Goals and/or Developing a Mission Statement”, I’d love to {literally} have your voice in the show. Get them to me ASAP.
Head over to the Contact Page for info.

Thanks!

Grab the MP3 File | duration 25:28

During the interview, Lea talked about CONSISTENCY, and how this is is the most important aspect of branding.

After doing some self-examination, I feel that consistency is one area I need to improve going-forward, both in presentation and site content.

Lea says:

Consistency is hard, weather you’re a big corporation or a small little shop. I think there is an idea with big companies that, while they have more resources and they can have someone focused on branding… it’s very difficult, but that’s part of the reason why brand guidelines exist, and you should have some sort of document, weather it’s a formal several-page document, or if it’s just a cheat-sheet. Keep double-checking to remind you of what your goals are and what kind of general scheme you need to follow. The big companies — they have a similar arsenal, they just have more people to help keep it in-line. You can just pair that down for a one-person shop too.

The biggest take-away in our discussion was the part about keeping things real with your visitors/readers.

On the Creative Component blog, I would often post anything that came to mind — the funny, the interesting and sometimes would even write articles on Web Design. I’ve come to realize that people were likely confused when visiting my site. These posts were definitely an extension of me, but I think the direction for the new site will be to carve-out a specific area for the ‘fun stuff’ and to make a distinction between all things business-related and wacky.

Lea says:

Some people {meaning: the better blogs} do a mix successfully, but when you really stop and take a look at their blog, it’s not really THAT much of a mix. It’s really focused on whatever their niche audience or articles are, and then occasionally, they put-in slices of life, but they tend to be really meaningful slices of life, as in “I just got married”, so for example, that’s a big enough thing that people wouldn’t mind you interrupting the flow of your general business/design talk. I think if people are going to your blog for a certain reason, then if you put-in the more-qwerky, less epic events in your life, that turns-off lots of visitors. They expect a certain type of quality, and consistency.

Always be aware of your visitors expectations.

It is a bit of a balance though. One reason why blogs are so appealing, and another strength of branding is you need to evoke and express your personality. Say you have a huge passion for food, but you only have a design blog. If you want to talk about food in your design blog, it needs to somehow relate to design.

Visit CreativeXpert.com for the rest of the show notes

Visit Lealea Design

I’m pretty excited to share some new ideas with you!

Tuesday PM, I’m recording a face-to-face interview with Lorraine Ball, a local Marketing expert from roundpeg. This should also be very eye-opening.

I am too busy to edit the show this week, so I will likely be posting next week.

It’s a Shaker quote posted by Ward Cunningham from Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. — Home of WardsWiki, also known as the WikiWikiWeb – the original wiki that has been around since 1995.
{Its official name is the PortlandPatternRepository, the World’s first wiki!}

If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it.

If it is useful and necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to enhance it by adding what is not an integral part of its usefulness or necessity.

And finally: If it is both useful and necessary and you can recognize and eliminate what is not essential, then go ahead and make it as beautifully as you can.

Genius, right? Read the rest here…

In March of this year, my WordPress blog was hacked. It was my fault, as I neglected to upgrade to the latest release. Apparently, there was a security concern with WordPress2.1.1 that I wasn’t aware of. I thought I was safe, until further investigation. I know it’s not the fault of WordPress. I’m the webmaster of my site, and I should know to keep my eye on news and security releases.

It wasn’t until late April that I even noticed, but it came with more than a hand-slap. Google found one post with nearly 100 links to various ‘V1@gra’, ‘Rolex Watch’ and ‘Gain Inches’ type-sites. The perpetrator simply edited a post and moved back out. I had no clue how, or why, but it was too late.

The post had styling set locally, using the simple:
style=”display:none”

Google sent me an email telling me they were temporarily removing creativecomponent.com from indexing.

I’ve posted the email here for you to read: www.redesign.creativecomponent.com/hacked

By ‘being removed from Google’s indexing’, means that all of my past efforts at SEO were now out the door. Completely gone.

I’ve since cleaned-out the junk posts, upgraded WordPress and have made the official request for Google to reconsider this judgment, but there’s still been no movement to have things re-indexed.

I started making a list of all of the Google services that I use and love, and it’s pretty clear that life without Google would not be nearly as cool.

• Google.com – set as my browser’s homepage since 2001.
• Google Maps – Is there a better online map?
• Google Analytics – on every site I manage.
• Feedburner, owned by Google – on every RSS feed that I manage. I even did a joint podcast with them.
• GoogleAps – using Gmail and Google Calendar, and LOVE it.
• Picassa – used for all of my local photos.
• Google Webmaster Tools – used for sitemaps on sites that I manage.
• 1-800-GOOG-411 – I use this free service almost daily.

There’s no better time than to focus on a re-design, eh? It’s like starting from scratch!

UPDATE:

As of June 6, 10pm EDT, Creative Component is indexed again. The good news is — the ranking has not changed. In-fact, all of my recent posts on this re-design site are indexed as well. Thanks Google!

I’ve used Google Calendar, which I’m sure you’re well-aware, is quite handy. When you have a GoogleApps account, it’s easy to keep adding more calendars, so I added a calendar just for this re-design project.

When a client has needed a free calendar solution in the past, I’ve used a 30-boxes calendar. What I didn’t know is that Google Calendar allows you to post in three formats: MONTH, WEEK and AGENDA, and the display properties are quite flexible. By selecting to display the agenda version, it looks pretty good in a sidebar. There’s also RSS that comes with it, but when routing the RSS through Feedburner, the dates that appeared were the dates of my last entry, or edit to the calendar. That’s not helpful to anyone.

Next-up: more on planning…

This is the first podcast in the new Re-Design Series, branded as a CreativeXpert podcast.

Grab the MP3 File | duration 17:46

Michael is known for his online ExpressionEngine training both on his site, and his EE training site, Train-EE.com. This interview covers the basics of building a site with ExpressionEngine, a commercial Content Management System {CMS}. We also discuss site architecture, specifically for ExpressionEngine.

ExpressionEngine is a content management system, designed by EllisLab. It is available in a free “Core Version”, and in both “Personal” and “Commercial” versions after paying a one-time fee. The current version is 1.6.3. Version 2.0 has been announced for “some time in the summer of 2008″.

ExpressionEngine is intended to be a simple, yet powerful content management system; for instance, it requires no knowledge of PHP, (but allows you to use it, if you want) and has extensive online documentation and a very active community of users and developers, with regular participation of the company’s lead programmers and other key personnel.

While a public web site is available to everyone, it’s apparent that the generic term “everyone” isn’t an appropriate use-case.

If this were an e-commerce site, I might divide users into “browsers and buyers”, but since I’m painting a general picture, I will segment users like this:

• Current/Past Customers
• Researchers {potential customers}
• Competitors
• Partners
• Friends/Family
• Spammers

Obviously, I’m not building my site to attract spammers, so I should probably remove that, but they do exist. In-fact, in a two-year period here at creativecomponent.com, the WordPress plugin Spam Karma 2 blocked over 95,000 attempts at comment spam.

So I could say that spambots are my biggest target audience! Sad, isn’t it?

View the Slideshare Presentation below, {or listen to the MP3.}

| View | Upload your own

The biggest takeaway for me was the importance of setting goals and developing a Mission Statement.

More on this to follow for sure!

The answer is yes, but this feedback really opened my eyes to my target audience. Who are they?

I’ve been using Google Analytics for years, and while I don’t know the names of my site visitors, I know lots, including their geo location {thanks again googlefight}. I also know that only a tiny percentage of these visitors are actual clients of mine. {We’ll cover Google Analytics and WOOPRA down the road.}

You see, 99.9% of the people I do design or development work for, are people I know in the real world — living and breathing humans, who could care less how I Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Tag, Tumble, Listen to Music and Blog.

If you’re on this site now, you probably feel the same way about all of these awesome social apps, because you’re fueled by this same creative passion to experiment with new things.

So the question still remains: do I build the site for corporate America, keeping things safe and on-point, or do I continue to post my standard “design-inspiration-marketing-humor” content?

I’d love to hear your opinion! Please comment below…

I’m looking-forward to a future podcast interview, where I discuss these points with a Brand expert!

Rather than just add the hyphen, I summoned the great settler of all debates: GOOGLE.

If you ever wonder if you should use words like “WEBSITE” or “WEB SITE”, then head to GOOGLE FIGHT. It’s simple: you pit one word against the other and through the glory of the Google rank, and in the words of Alton Brown, you see which word reigns supreme.

Google Fight Results of “MAN IS ALWAYS RIGHT” vs “WOMAN IS ALWAYS RIGHT” …

The designer needs to be aware of the content types that will exist on the site, and it’s best to know where to connect the hoses and pipes to ExpressionEngine to best-handle these content types.

Those who know me, will not be surprised that I am going to add a podcast to this project. I think this will be an excellent way to provide interviews with experts, as the project inches-along.

As I’ll be developing my new site with ExpressionEngine, and we’re going to talk about architecture, I cannot think of a better person to interview than Michael Boyink from Boyink! Interactive. Michael is the wizard behind the curtain of Train-ee, provider of ExpressionEngine training.

Look for this interview early next week!

It was time this afternoon to temporarily close the doors on the Creative Component site, and to do this gracefully, I needed a way to redirect all of the in incoming traffic to creativecomponent.com.

Like all major WordPress decisions, I sought-out the advice of a technology partner, HANDY SOLO at Solo Technology. You will probably see his name dropped here often, especially around the time when I try to merge my WordPress data with my ExpressionEngine data. He’s probably shaking his head right now as he reads this.

Handy suggested that I could either do an .htaccess redirect, or I could add a simple html redirect hard-coded in the meta data of my selected theme. We agreed that the .htaccess redirect at the server would be the smartest way to handle it.

All it took was this simple addition to my .htaccess file, which basically says anything in the root, then redirect to this URL:

/ http://www.redesign.creativecomponent.com

I also had two other WordPress installs in two other directories, so in each .htaccess file, I typed the name of each directory:

/portfolio/ http://www.redesign.creativecomponent.com

and

/podcast-portfolio/ http://www.redesign.creativecomponent.com

I’ll add a few links in a moment from what I found, but let me tell you that I took the easy way out. This is going to bring some sour-faced comments, but I opted to just press the pause button on my search rank. It’s true — the best way to go-about a proper redirect would be to bring all of the old data over here first and maybe redirect each directory. All I did was tell Apache to send ALL traffic to the root of this site.

So all of the links that once existed are put on-hold, which is better than flys smacking-into my windshield. No they’re flying into something completely new, unexpected, but new.

Here’s a WordPress plugin called Redirection, that looked pretty powerful, but didn’t do the simple redirect I was looking for.

…And a few great articles I found that address the technical side of .htaccess:

http://www.bookmarkbliss.com/…
http://www.javascriptkit.com/…

I just noticed that any original Creative Component feed subscribers are also now redirected.
I guess that’s a good thing, in a way.

Why would I bother blogging about it?

To answer my own question: because I love reading well-documented tutorials. The web is full of how-to articles, but I haven’t seen many designers pull-back the curtain to show every detail of a web redesign. And more — aside from client projects, this is ALL that will be on my mind.

So yes, I’ve chosen to develop my site using ExpressionEngine. I’ve read countless posts from the current EE rockstars that EE is the designer’s choice. I’ve already purchased my ExpressionEngine commercial license; I’ve had it since January, so it’s time to plow-forward.

Hopefully, what you’ll soon find is lots of discussion on planning, designing and building my site. It should be a fun ride, and I’ll need your input on many decisions I make along the way.

Back in the early Summer of 2008, I decided to jump-into a re-design, and while I was at it, I would write about the steps as I learned. I even did a podcast series too!

Life happened.

Being a freelance designer, I like freelance opportunities, and fortunately for me, there were many. I’ve also found that by blogging about what I’ve learned, it’s been somewhat limiting.

So anyhoo, I’m jumping-into the design once again, and I will be posting updates, but I’m just going to get the site launched, ya know?

The blog entries below are all set to display in chronological order, giving readers a better idea of the steps I took to get here. Each bold title has content; feel free reading and sharing your comments, and don’t forget the podcasts! One last thing: Click to view the progress on the new site.

See you on the other side!