Every night for about the past year I’ve said to myself, “tonight I’m going to work on my website.”

Yeah right. You all know what I am talking about. It’s the feeling that your looking at 100 miles ahead of you with fumes in the tank. You just can’t find it in you to work on your own website. You stare at others websites all day long. Work long hours trying to solve unique, interesting problems with websites. It can be fun, saturating, and ultimately mentally exhausting.

But what about MY damn website?

• I have this whole website redesigned in my head.
• It’s partially redesigned in Illustrator right now, meaning what little time I’ve had to fiddle around getting what’s in my head onto the screen and into binary.
• I really like it.

I’ve done the above about 15 times in the last 18 months. A jolly good recursive loop.

Well tonight I’ve taken action. I took the first step at actually making a real, substantial change to the website.

For a long, long time I’ve been using Contact Form 7 to create forms on this site so that people could start a dialogue and tell me about their business, projects, and ideas.

Internally that comes to me in a raw format email. I then have to copy/paste everything into Highrise (I use it for contact management). Total pain knowing that there are tools that will automate all this, but I always feel like there is no time.

Wufoo to my emotional rescue.

I got into Wufoo forms and built out a new “intake” form for new projects. Wufoo, through the use of API goodness, integrates into Highrise to eliminate all the data entry I was doing previously. So now I’ve streamlined my intake and made an improvement on the website.

Actual concrete progress on the website.

I have many more things in store for the website and plan to share what I do to the website as I go along.

Some things I imagine will become tutorials along the way—who knows?

Until then…

In all seriousness I am happy to see 2011 come to an end.

The past few weeks of this year have helped crystalize a series of separate thoughts I’ve had about both professional and personal issues that have surfaced, and come to the forefront for me this year.

There are times in your life when your life takes turns whether big or small. Sometimes you have no idea that you’ve turned until later reflection. Sometimes you have the luck to see things coming at you, and can see the turn coming. In this instance the turn in your life offers you a chance to make some decisions about how to move forward, what actions to take, and ultimately more of a say in how things turn out—essentially more pro-active than re-active.

This is something I’m in the midst of right now.

I have more to tell and some new things planned.

Wishing you peace and prosperity in 2012.

Happy New Year to all.

There is nothing I can say that someone, somewhere will say much more eloquently and succinctly about the life and times of Steven Paul Jobs.

Love him or hate him, the man was simply a genius.

I think everyone who knew of him and his health knew the end was coming. Particularly after his recent resignation from running Apple.

However, is still leaves me sad that he is gone.

The news of his passing acted like a wakeup call to me.

I’ve had my head buried in the sand for quite some time. Suffice it to say that I’ve not been very motivated, as if in a long state of burn-out, slump, or “creative block” and its been going on for a while.

This news woke me up.

It’s time to Think Different and get back in gear.

So thank you to Steve Jobs for his contribution to the advancement of technology and for helping people take notice of the importance and impact of design. Thanks for making great products I use everyday like the MacBookPro I am typing this on, and for the Apple IIe I used 29 years ago.

Thank you for your inspiration.

Thank you for your creativity.

Thank you for your contribution.

Thank you for “one more thing…“

Right now I am in an airplane flying back from Saratoga Springs, New York. I took a 5 day trip to visit my Uncle Nick who, a few weeks back, was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer. Needless to say this was a surprise to the entire extended family. Fortunately this extended family is quite strong and supportive. Being in the presence of the love, kindness, and humor of my uncle and family these past few days has left a lasting impression with me.

I’ve known my Uncle Nick for well over 20 years. He is a “one-of-a-kind” person and personality. Always kind and giving, with firmness and one of the best sense’s of humor I know. He is a solid man, a presence in the room, but as he would say he’s “just a simple country boy.”

There are many long-standing jokes and mythologies he not only created but helps to maintain up to this day. For example, he has the unwavering belief that my father has numerous coffee can’s filled with money buried throughout his backyard. My Uncle thinks my father’s claims of not having money are B.S. and that he keeps putting money in cans, and burying them. Over the years any time the topic of money would come up, Uncle Nick would be sure to mention to my father that he needs to stop being so stingy and dig up some of the coffee cans and “give the kid some money.” Of course this drove my father nuts, and everyone would have a good laugh.

I visited with my uncle 3 times over this week. Each visit he seemed to be a little better than the last primarily because he has decided to stop radiation and chemotherapy.  Being at stage 4 with his type of cancer, combined with his age (77) puts him in a situation of either enjoying what time he has left as best he can, or to poison himself and be in pain for his remaining time on Earth. He has come to terms with the idea that the finish line of life is near. He is blessed in that people that love him can come and say their goodbyes as I did. His passing is imminent but he has time left and has decided to live it as best and comfortably as he can and for that I admire him as I always have.

This visit to see my uncle for the last time has reminded me that money and work, while nice to have, is not the end-all be-all of our daily existence. Having strong connections with friends and family is very important and those people show up in your life when you need them.

The TIME you have to spend in life, doing whatever it is you do, is the most valuable and important thing we all have other than life itself.

Ever since I started to focus on Berchman.com I realized that my former “company” website, HamiltonBerchman Design Group, Inc., was no longer maintained, correct, or relevant. However, at the time I was fortunately too busy to even think about doing anything to the site.

Then one day I was doing research on a project and stumbled across a free portfolio template that stood out to me in more than one way. The template is called medifolio, by Dirk Leys who generously posted it online. I was particularly drawn to the “sliding” action when you click on a portfolio thumbnail image, and the return to the main page. There was a simple elegance to the whole thing. I looked at it and thought, “how can I do this type of page in WordPress and Thesis?” The original medifolio is a single, flat html page. How could I generate all the content, in the right order, with the right tags and syntax? I thought about it a while. A long while.

In the time since I first saw medifolio I was working on a client project requiring the listing of individual portfolio pieces, complete with images and text. It required a complete custom solution. By creatively using categories as parents I created blog posts that then occupied specific categories. I could then create custom loops to not only create a listing of the portfolio pieces at the top of the page, but I could have them link to the actual full description and image display further down the page (by using custom generated anchor links). You can see the work in action here on the website ckwrites.com. There are four custom lists generated across the top of the page after introductory text. All done within WordPress and Thesis with categories and custom page templates, and custom loops.

Since I had completed design and development of ckwrites.com I looked back at medifolio and the previous experience lent itself directly to making medifolio a reality. After some long nights tinkering with custom php and css solutions I got the basic page to work as the original static medifolio page. All the content was being dynamically generated from individual posts for each and every portfolio piece. All the tags, divs, etc. were being dynamically generated as well.

Once I had a basic working model the next thing to do was to implement. I’ve done this right now in two places where it lives, live on the Internet. The first implementation was at HamiltonBerchman Design Group, Inc.

I set out to rework, or basically remove, all the non-relevant content from the website and was left with a stripped down, single web page that tells what the current state of affairs is, and shows a sample of work that I completed in my time operating HamiltonBerchman Design Group, Inc.

Once I had this complete, I wanted to take it to another place and that was on the Dennison+Wolfe Internet Group website where I am a partner. This implementation allowed me to refine and rethink some things to how the portfolio is implemented.

I think both of these came out looking quite nice.

It will be a part of the new, upcoming Berchman.com redesign.

My next step, I think, is to clean this up, write a tutorial on how to implement this, and release it on an “as-is” basis. What does that mean? It means if you want it, download it, and figure it out.

That is what I had to do.

Let me know what you think.