I’ve also started making a new template for my blog, and as an exercise I drew out a layout quickly to see how fast I could convert it to css/html.

The HTML-ized layout is in the Agenceum Public Web area as 07-seah3. This took a couple of hours to work out, and it generally worked as expected. There is a minor mystery as to the best way to layer background images, and under what conditions they “pass through”.

So it goes.

The next big advertising push will be to make a much simpler “Simple Web Sites” advertisement. I need to keep things VERY simple, and at the same time be VERY CLEAR about the limits of the template approach. There is some balance to strike. I have some advertising ideas on this, and will pursue it in the coming weeks.

I recently had the opportunity to work with someone else’s CodeIgniter project, and he gave me the 10-minute overview, which I will boil down into the following steps:

• Installation consists of dropping the “system” folder and index.php file to your website. The index.php file is the “application start”, which points to all sorts of stuff in the system folder.
• CodeIgniter interprets URLs as commands, starting with everything after the index.php. For example, the url http://mysite.com/index.php/hello/there/sam runs a command “hello” with the method “there” with the parameter “sam”.
• CodeIgniter “routes” commands to a Controller (as in a Model-View-Controller pattern) . The command is the name of the controller file, in this case “hello.php”. The method corresponds to a function name in the controller file.
• Each Controller can manipulate data through the Model class, and load web pages through the View class.
• Controllers, Models, and Views all live in the system/application/ folder.

The rest of CodeIgniter is helpful classes to do things, like generating form data and accessing databases. What I like about it is that it provides a nice structure to develop PHP applications using some form of best practices. I just never knew where to START with these things.

My first CodeIgniter project is the “contact me” form on my design website. It does all kinds of form validation and then sends me an email in a NICE way. And, by using their provide form_validation class, it didn’t take the days it would have otherwise taken me to learn how to make this. It did take 8 hours of learning how it worked on-the-fly, but they were hours well spent figuring out how I wanted this to work.

So now I have two distinct design practices in development: this one (which will likely continue to be my R&D website), and the “solo designer” version at design.davidseah.com. I’m not sure exactly how this will work out, but I think this experiment has been fruitful.

That’s really all for now. I’m kind of pleased by the HTML/CSS coding on the new design site because it applies lessons I’ve learned through the Agenceum projects. Things are starting to come together.

The next big marketing push: how to target those one-on-one customers.

When I started this experimental agency five months ago, I wasn’t sure if it was going to fly. The idea of making cheap web templates seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t know if it would fly. Making the collateral and defining the products seemed, to me anyway, based on my own guesswork. It seemed to take forever to make things, and I was frustrated with the lack of progress. Good thing I was blogging the experience, because looking back it suddenly seems like I’ve done more than I thought. The time spent building that first website, putting together that first half-finished catalog page, and playing with logo concepts has actually given me a technical base to work from. And, I’m starting to see the existence of an actual market. It’s surprising! I’m rolling up what I’ve learned from the Agenceum experience into a general design studio offering under my own name; I’ll continue to document the processes here, of course, because this is my behind-the-scenes R&D lab.

I’m very tired from a long day of meetings, so I’ll expand on this later.

The templated website package has caught the eye of an illustrator friend, who knows he needs to get on the Internet but is not quite sure what to do. The price has risen effectively to $250.00 from the original $50-$75 range, which is still a good deal but covers more of the effort involved. I’m doing a barter, however, because I just want to see this guy get on the Internet. In exchange, I’ll be getting some illustrations I can use for my other products, such as the Groundhog Day Resolutions stuff. I’ve needed a groundhog illustration for quite some time.

A great deal of the Agenceum material is turning out to be pretty handy as I slowly put together my “main” design site (which is secret for now and under development…shhh). I’d call it “light graphic design”. As I mentioned before, the experience of trying to meet the $75.00 price point may not have paid off directly, but it helped establish a base of new and refurbished techniques that I am applying daily: a vastly improved intermediate knowledge of CSS, an improved understanding of what people are looking for in a website, and a slight refinement of my development process. Keep moving, keep making…that’s what Agenceum has taught me so far.

As the current round of projects comes to an end, I foresee the next stage of Agenceum to be marketing process and execution. I have a passing knowledge of what marketing should be, but the actual put-your-feet-on-the-ground and pounding pavement is something I’ve never done. I need to experience it and push past my comfort zone. I hate bugging people for my own needs, so  I shy away from cold-calling. However, there’s a middle way of doing this that is much more about mutual benefit.

Technology-wise, I’ve gotten my stand-alone LAMP server running in a Virtual PC Virtual Machine (VM), which is cool because it means I can develop dynamic applications in PHP without actually having Internet access. This is an important consideration when I’m working remotely without Internet. I don’t need this capability all the time, so it’s good to just turn it off. And, since I’ve installed CentOS 5 as the OS in the VM, a lot of the configuration I do in there is applicable to my Media Temple (dv) 3.5 setup, with the exception of the Plesk-related system variations (Apache configuration, for example).

The brief dive into C# and ASP.NET got hung up earlier this month, but it was nice to get reacquainted with the development environments. Visual Studio is a very nice Integrated Development Environment (IDE). C# is a pretty nifty language, too; combined with the VS IDE, it’s a lot of fun to work with. I found myself trying to adapt it to work with HTML/PHP, without much success. I was even willing to try Microsoft’s Expression Web 3 IDE for this, hoping to find a better HTML authoring environment than the increasingly-tired Dreamweaver CS4. However, EW3 reliably crashes on my computer when I open a file dialog box. It may be related to my anti-virus software (Avira Antivir Premium)  not liking it, as I actually get the dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH in the avipbb.dll module if I right-click anywhere in file window. And it happens only in EW3. The other source of BSOD is my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra Pro driver, which does not handle wake from sleep well; otherwise, my machine (an older MacBook Pro 17 booting straight into Windows 7) is very stable.

So that’s the update! Not much else going on with the Agenceum front. I should contact two clients to see if they are still in backburner mode.

1. Faux Columns.
2. Centered Fixed Layout.
3. Using a Reset script to start everything from scratch.
4. Using position: relative on a parent div to allow children to use absolute positioning, which makes layout a lot easier.
5. Using float: left to force a parent div to fully-contain its child divs instead of letting them overflow. This is actually part of a set of techniques that seek to control div behavior.
6. Standardizing on a 72-pixel or 60-pixel grid size for layout (I need to print out a reference chart for this to make things easy to add/subtract).

This seems to solve the vast bulk of my layout needs, which are very simple. Then I have a typography.css file that builds up the type in a way that I find pleasing, again based on a 72-point grid broken down into 12pt or 18pt linespacing.

So although I’m not doing a whole lot with Agenceum at the moment, it’s helped me get over a hurdle with doing faster, simpler CSS layouts that are relatively bulletproof.

Although I don’t have anything to report here on the Agenceum Blog, there’s plenty of stuff going on elsewhere on my other blog and behind-the-scenes. Some of the Agenceum material, particularly the Wiki, may be re-purposed. And I’m thinking a lot about how to package websites again to meet more specific market demands at specific price points. When I get those packages defined, I’ll post them here. There are few technical challenges that I need to solve immediately, this means I’m past the technology building stage and am now in the business development stage. There’s the need to create marketing materials and put them in the hands of prospective clients, once I find them. This is an entire process in itself that I will be looking at more closely.

In the meantime, there is some old business that will be closed out this week,, which will perhaps lead to continued business.

The 1.x to 2.x jump requires quite a few little changes here and there. The internal layout of files has changed, definitely, as has the use of some of the tags. All plugins, as far as I can tell, need to be updated, and that is where I’ve been spending my time for the past several hours: working through the plugins I need converted now to get davidseah.com looking and working correctly. Right now, I’m stuck on the PHP Markdown Extra plugin, which has been further modified with the image thumbnail code I wrote way back in 2005 for my old WordPress blog. Thankfully, there’s an Expression Engine 2.0 conversion guide available to make the process relatively painless. And it’s important to note that the CodeIgniter documentation also applies now, so some functions that used to be in EE are now in CI.

This kind of stuff always gives me a headache, and I end up taking a lot of brief naps, but this is what the learning process is like for me when engaging with a foreign development environment. Still, that I even was able to get this far after a few hours is a nice reminder that I’ve grown more comfortable with programming (or at least modifying) web applications. I just realized I’m actually pretty close to having this transition completed, which will start to unlock an entire new web platform that will serve well for the next couple of years. Gotta remind myself that the dozen hours of slow progress now will pay off many times over.

One very cool new development, however, is that producing new web templates is much faster than before. This is due to having a fairly strong grasp on how to effectively use CSS to create the kinds of cross-browser compatible layouts that I typically need. As a result, I am feeling pretty comfortable with what I can make work. My rough CSS notes, collected over several months, have helped me grok what’s going on with the simple layouts I am using. At some point I will revisit them and reformat them into a cheat sheet / howto guide.

Current Push

There are a few areas that I can work on:

• Creating the simple low-cost packages
• Designing simple templates for specific kinds of entrepreneurs and artists
• Distributing information about the packages to organizations that have members crying out for promotional websites.

This is all marketing. I am feeling the need to collect all these strands of effort into one tracking system that uses a simple formula to manage dozens of different marketing channels. I can feel the shape of it in my mind.