Cathy is one of my favorite clients (partly because she’s so easy to work with and partly because she’s a dog lover). I created her original website back in 2006, right before her book The New Yorkers was released. Cathy’s latest book – The Three Weissmanns of Westport – will be released this Tuesday so she contacted me to give her site a corresponding face lift.

The major change on the back end was that I created the new look with Thesis, both for ease of development and also to see if it will improve her search engine results. The visible changes were not really extreme. We removed the splash page she’d had on the original site, eliminated the static home page and moved the blog to the home page instead. I widened the sidebar and added all her book covers to the sidebar above her blogroll and other links. I’m still tweaking things a bit on the back end, but the site is up before the book release, so I call that a win.

Cathy’s blog and books are intelligent and humorous. Go visit cathleenschine.com and see for yourself.

I created Lisa’s original photography website back in 2005. She recently contacted me for a facelift. The great thing was that she still loved the original look of the site! All she wanted to do was make the photos larger – to take advantage of higher bandwidth and larger monitors in use these days – and add a blog.

While I was at it, I added in some CSS to preload the larger images and also tweaked the meta tags for better search engine performance. We launched the updated photo site today. The blog is ready too, but the first entry has to be written before it goes live.

I spent a good part of the long New Year’s weekend revamping the website for NYC Shiba Rescue, Inc. The site is built on WordPress and the group uses the blogging functionality extensively to share information about their foster dogs. There is a lot more information in the site than the blog entries though and, as the group has grown, that information has become harder to find. The site needed to be revamped in a way that would bring attention to fund raising and volunteering opportunities as well as the dogs available for adoption.

• I used Thesis (I told you, I drank the Koolaid) to create a new theme for the site, moving the foster dogs into a wide sidebar, highlighting important links in the header and featuring more posts on the home page than before.
• My friend, Scott Lauben, created six great new images for the aforementioned links in the banner. Scott is an NYCSR volunteer as well and has created all of the print materials, banners, etc. used by the group.
• While I was at it, I hardened the security on the site and added all my favorite plugins.
• When I have time, I’m planning to go back and edit a number of past blog posts to include a "post thumbnail" so Thesis can make the excerpts on the category archive pages look fancy.

NYCSR, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, was founded in April 2007 and is incorporated under the non-profit laws of the State of New York.

My freelance business is busy enough that I’ve recently found myself needing a better way to accept, prioritize and complete requests for clients. To fill that need, I’ve added a Help Desk to my website.

Current clients, please contact me if you have not received an email welcoming you to sign in and use the help desk. And, if you’re not a current client… well, maybe you should be! Feel free to check out my tech support and web development services.

I’ve been drinking the Thesis Koolaid folks. And I like it!

I decided a few days ago that it was time to dust the cobwebs off nycgadgetgirl.com and start lining up some new blog development work for the new year. (I have enough work for current clients now to keep me busy till February.) What better time to delve into the world of Thesis than when I need to re-do my own site?

I decided, for a test, to see how long it would take to re-theme my site using Thesis while keeping all the design elements that I still like (forcing me to figure out all the customization instead of just using it out-of-the-box). Well, I downloaded Thesis on Thursday evening and finished the site on Saturday night, after spending about eight hours on it, including checking all the plugins and removing the ones I no longer need.

Me likey! You’ll be seeing more Thesis development from me.

Snickers is definitely LOVING being back in an urban environment. He enjoyed the big yard and the big parks we went to in Indiana, but mostly I think he was almost as bored as I was. When he went outside he would check the fence perimeter and then settle on his park bench and wait for me to sit down with him. Now that we’re back east, he’s back to taking his long adventure walks and enjoying all the sights and smells a city has to offer a curious pup.

Here’s a photo I took of Snick during a long walk around Jersey City a few weeks after we arrived. (That’s downtown NYC in the background.)

Snick and the City

As most of you know, I started a new blog shortly after I moved, specifically for the dog-related material. I will continue to use Jenna & Snickers (.com) as Snick’s primary site, so if you’re looking for dogs, Shiba Inu, or Snick the Dog, that’s where you want to go.

Please, still visit me here also. I will try to think of non-dog related things to say here occasionally!

Luckily, I don’t have to say it’s been many years since I was here.

Last summer I decided, rather suddenly, to take a A Four Year Vacation from NYC. I quit my job, packed my stuff, wrote about What I Will Miss About NYC and What I Will NOT Miss About NYC, loaded up the U-Haul and drove to Indiana. A couple weeks after I arrived, I blogged about the many Wonderful Things I had experienced as I was preparing to leave my NYC life behind.

Well… Indiana didn’t turn out to be quite the vacation I’d hoped for. It was gorgeous and peaceful. I got lots of sleep. The house and yard were awesome. I spent more time with my daughter and my sister. I worked freelance (set my own hours!) and got to spend lots of time with my darling Shiba Inu, Snickers.

But, I was bored. And "real" work wasn’t forthcoming. The cost of living there is low, but not so low that I could stay there four years without a real job!

My first visit home to NYC was in early February, for Westminster. Before I arrived, I reached out to the CEO of a tech firm I’d become acquainted with shortly before moving away. They were hiring. Hmmm…. interesting! I met with them while I was in town for Westminster and by the time I arrived back in Indiana, I was planning my move back east. Three weeks later I was settled into a new job and a new apartment (both of which are right across the Hudson from my old job and apt).

Like the KISS song says… "This place was meant for me!"

I received this email yesterday from Rick and Colleen, who adopted Kaos/Kayla from me a year and a half ago. I wanted to share it because so many of my blog friends helped with rescuing Kayla from Miami Dade Animal Control and taking care of her for six months until she was adopted.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KAYLA!!

HI EVERYONE RICK HERE. KAYLA IS 3 YEARS OLD! DO YOU BELIEVE IT?? MY WIFE AND I WOULD ONCE AGAIN LIKE TO THANK EVERYBODY INVOLVED IN KAYLA’S LIFE. WE HAVE NO PROBLEMS WITH KAYLA, SHE IS A WONDERFUL PART OF OUR FAMILY. SHE SHE IS WELL ADJUSTED TO OUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. DAILY WALKS AND CHASING RABBITS IN THE YARD HAVE KEPT HER HEALTHY AND AT A WEIGHT OF 65 LBS!!

THANKS AGAIN RICK AND COLLEEN

Makes ya feel good, doesn’t it?

At 3:00 AM this morning I put fabulously fresh sheets on my bed. I _love_ fresh sheets. This act is only noteworthy because I had to do it around Snickers. He’d already "gone to bed" in the pile of clean sheets I’d left there after I did laundry. He didn’t want to get off the bed, so I shooed him from side-to-side as I put on the sheets. Then I just wrapped the comforter around him as I covered the rest of the bed.

At 7:10 AM every week day, T puts Secret in my room before she leaves to catch the school bus. Secret hops on the bed and curls up with me & Snick till we wake up several hours later. I love this arrangement because I get to wake up with both warm, fuzzies each day.

Around 10:30 AM today I realized Secret was licking the sheet. When I checked to see what she was up to, I found several small spots of smelly, poopy stuff. UGH! (To her credit, she was apparently trying to clean it up.) So much for my clean sheets (and my leisurely morning).

So… Secret seems fine, the bed is stripped and the washing machine is running.

Life with Dogs. What a pain sometimes! On the upside, I get to go to bed in perfectly fresh sheets, two nights in a row!

PS If you haven’t visited our new site, Jenna & Snickers (.com), please drop by and let me know what you think.

The Client
Pierson Bark Park is a privately owned, four acre canine recreation area in Fishers, Indiana. I met Heather Pierson shortly after moving to Indiana.

The Need
Heather had a website but was ready for a redesign. Her content was out-of-date and she had no idea how to update it herself. The link to get directions was broken and she was also unhappy with the restrictive layout of the site, primarily because of the extremely small content area. She wanted to maintain the existing identity of the site and also needed to be careful to maintain her Google rankings.

The Solution
The new Pierson Bark Park site is in WordPress, so Heather can easily make her own content changes without worrying about accidentally breaking the layout or format of the site. I created a WordPress theme using the same colors and some of the same graphic elements from the original site, so the site is still familiar.

There is much more focus on the content in the new site than there was in the previous site. We’ve also made it more useful by adding more content and by using the Google Maps API to include an interactive directions page for new visitors. I put 301 redirect instructions in the .htaccess file to maintain the existing page rank and incorporated some SEO WordPress plugins to optimize the pages and hopefully improve their rank over time.