Happy to report that Expect Success Coaching and Training went live over this past weekend. Created by Steve Thornton and Lynn D Spencer, Expect Success is a business coaching and personal development training system hosted online.

It includes over 100 video and audio "modules" on topics such as gaining and increasing wealth, managing a team effectively, setting and achieving life goals, and many related topics.

Going one-step further, to the benefit myself and many other business owners, Steve and Lynn address these topics from the Christian worldview. That’s not to say the principles are unapplicable to non-Christians. On the contrary, I think the spiritual grounding will provide unique insights not found in many other books and coaching materials.

The content is delivered via video, audio sessions, and weekly live webinars – and each module is nearly one hour long.

Currently the team is adding about 10 new modules every month, often directed by the needs and requests of those members who are actively involved with the program.

My role with Expect Success was an afterthought, and only happened because I called Steve one afternoon last April to catch up and discuss new business opportunities. Eventually I was brought on-board to fill their website conversion needs and offer guidance with the marketing overall.

The result was an entirely new website design, auto-responder sequence, testing and tracking guidelines, SEO, and the list goes on.

Accepting work from a client where I’m not an equity partner is a rare choice these days. However, the system was rolling, the men leading have a good track record, and affiliates were already promoting.

Without sharing details, I agreed to be paid based on results, on-going. This aligns with my firm belief that designers should look for projects that provide long-term income after the initial work has been completed.

This topic will be expanded in the future, but the bottom-line principle is to find clients where you can deliver value and get paid more than once. The obvious (and greatly discouraged) alternative is to work hourly – or flat-rate – for a client and not get a dime more once the project has been uploaded to the server.

Website Design / Development

The website was developed using WordPress and the Thesis theme. It was my second Thesis theme customization, after my personal blog, and required I dig further into hooks and custom functions – especially for a homepage template that was greatly different from the inner pages.

One trick required adding a div region for the drop shadow – seen along the left and right side of the inner pages, and around the opt-in box on the homepage.

That allows a different background (in this case, a dropshadow) on the homepage, blog, and inner pages.

Followed by:

That closes the div opened by the first set of code. Without this, your page layout is likely to break.

Also, I’ve joined the club that officially refuses to consider IE6 in the development pipeline. If you visit the site with decade-old software, you’ll receive a kind greeting and reminder that you should embrace 2010 by upgrading your browser.

On a side note, I impressed the management team (and myself) when I remembered the name of the font used in their logo. For whatever reason, I’ve always considered font memorization as a sign that you need more time away from the computer…

Six years (plus six days) ago Heather and I said “I do”. We wish to express our thanks to the friends and family that sent cards, gave presents, and took a moment in their day to think about us and say congratulations.

Each year has presented its own circumstances and challenges as we begin our life together. When we started, I was still in graduate school, and since then Heather is well on her way to completing another degree. Eventually we’ll get to spend time together without the prospect of homework looming in the background!

We’ve started to plan the next steps for when she graduates, including the idea of moving to an entirely new and different location. (More on that another time.) And we both are looking forward to the future and the blessings to be experienced.

I love you, Heather! Thanks for six years of love and support.

This blog redesign has been in the works for many, many months… probably as early as May 2009 I was beginning to play with a variety of WordPress themes in search for the right balance of design, functionality… and design.

I finally settled on Thesis.

But Thesis is far too “plain” out of the box. Getting it to behave and display content as you see now took countless hours of tweaking and playing around. The positive is the experience gained: the hooks are tamed!

The direction of the blog itself, and frequency of posts, has been in flux as I scratch out ideas for content. The bottom-line is that I don’t want to have too much “work” stuff posted here.

[Going to cut this one short for now, it's late...]