In actuality, it was my “good enough” strategy. And although I’m all about the good enough versus perfectionism (since I’m a recovering perfectionist), it wasn’t until I had a long conversation with my business soulmate, Illana Burk of Makeness, that I saw the messaging for what it was: complete and utter crap.

The writing was good. The branding was good. The overall content was good.

But it wasn’t violetminded. And because it wasn’t violetminded, it was no good for our people. (That’d be you.)

When the message sucks, change the conversation.

The conversation that you and I have been having for the last three years has been about a plethora of things, from collaboration to design thinking to building your business (slow like, even). The conversation that I wanted to have was about the Big Things, like innovation, marketing, and branding.

I (mistakenly) thought that they were mutually exclusive: that our existing peeps (like you) wouldn’t be as stoked to hear about things that we’ve been talking about for years.

Bix Bickson and Danielle LaPorte talking about changing the conversation has completely undone the way I’ve approached violetminded’s branding.

And here’s what I want you to take away from this conversation.

• You’re not stuck.
• You can always pivot.
• Experimentation is the only way to know for sure. (And even then, not always.)
• If you don’t like the way your business is communicating, then change the conversation.

You’re only as small as you think you are.

So, think yourself strong and shift. (I believe in you.)

It’s about creating a buzz and riding that buzz long enough to create more buzz. Rinse and repeat.

Pretty soon your brain is buzzing all damn day and you’re getting more screen time than sleep time.

Here’s the thing: that kind of methodology is extremely tiring. Burnout is an inevitability of business, but fatigue is the Real Killer. Fatigue sets in behind your eyes and gives you migraines in the middle of the day when you should be doing client intake or heading to your event. Fatigue is what is burning in your soul when you’re filled with more resentment than gratitude. Fatigue is dangerous as all hell.

So why are we ignoring it and pretending to be okay when we’re not?

It’s okay to not be okay, you guys. I promise. Just sit with it for a moment and say:

Holy sweet mother of muffins, I am EXHAUSTED.

(Didn’t that feel better?)

Now that you’ve admitted to yourself that you’re exhausted, what’re you going to do about it? It’s not like you can run off to a retreat (at the moment) to recharge your batteries.

Here’s what I suggest.

1. Admit it sucks. Revel in the suck for a few minutes. (A few hours.) Now dust yourself off. If you ignore that it’s sucking, you’re merely slogging. And slogging, dear heart, is not the way to Great Things. In fact, it’s the easiest way to burnout and business implosion. (No, really.) By admitting to yourself (and maybe even your beloved(s)), you’re taking the first step to unsucking.
2. Create a plan. If you suck at planning (and that’s okay, darling), then hire Michelle — she will thoroughly unfuck the systems in your business and help you shine in the way you were meant to. As cliched as it may sound, Winston Churchill was onto something. If you don’t plan, you’re effectively hobbling yourself before getting off the starting line. 
3. Create a reasonable schedule to Get Shit Done. A note for you overzealous folks (including me, of course): reasonable is not putting everything in the “OMGDONOW” category, nor is setting your sights on getting Big Projects done in less than a month’s time. (Aside: the last part can be true if you are exceptionally well-rested; have a great plan in place; and you’re so driven that it makes your best friend’s head spin. But seriously, if you do this every fucking month, you will fall on your face. I guarantee it.)
4. Have a small panic attack at the insanity of your schedule. Reformat. Get input from your advisers. (Don’t have any? Be your own business adviser instead.) Now put it on an actual, for reals, meat-space calendar with many coloured markers. (I recommend Sharpies. Or Copic, if you’re an artist.)
5. Now… throw out the plan. (Just for little while.)
6. Do the easiest thing on the list. Forget about whether or not it needs to be done right now. Find the easiest thing to check off your List of Insanity, get it done in ten minutes, check it off your list, and dance a JIG. If you cannot dance a jig, the following dance moves are acceptable: the dougie, the twist, crumping, break-dancing, and moshing. (Please don’t break your furniture if you’re moshing. Up and down, not side to side. We’re not rocking out to Metallica FFS.)
7. Rinse and repeat until you’re feeling exhausted again. (Dance breaks are mandatory.) Then, go do something that rocks your world in a non-business way. That means: no business books; no business podcasts or articles; no networking events that don’t involve you networking with your long-forgotten friends. For me, it’s playing video games with my family. (The family that games together stays together.)

Battling business fatigue isn’t easy. Hell, it’s an insidious piece of being a business owner that you’ll never really escape.

But checking in, planning, executing said plan (with dance breaks and plenty of ignoring the actual schedule), and then enjoying yourself from time-to-time means that it will suck a fuck of a lot less in the long term.

(There, I got that out of the way.)

On the outside, competition is the terrifying Other: the Other company; the Other entrepreneur; the Other website. They’re the folks that are stealing your customers and clients.  They’re not actually human. They’re the Other and the Other doesn’t have a personality, let alone a face.

What if I told you that your competition is actually made of potential co-creators?

violetminded broke onto the scene in the last quarter of 2009 amidst quite a few other designers doing what I wanted to do, except they were doing it way, way, way better. (Experience and clarity will definitely do that.)

I not-so-secretly admired Sarah Bray and Naomi Niles. I wanted to learn everything I could about these two incredible designers. I praised them publicly, with plenty of private love notes about how much I loved their work and the way they conducted themselves online.

I didn’t have to. I could have looked at Sarah and Naomi and said to myself, “I want to crush them and take their clients for myself.” Instead, I wrote about how collaboration trumped competition; there is enough internet pie for everyone to have a little slice.

I chose to attune my business to abundance instead of scarcity.

Over the last six months, I’ve put my stock in fellow designers — women like Leah and Tzaddi. I invited them to our Digital Artisan Collective because I’d rather work with my so-called competition than crush them.

I fell madly in love with their skills. (And with them as people, of course.)

I chose to work with them instead of against them.

The next time that you look laterally at your so-called competition, wonder how you can work with them. Co-creation. Collaboration. Community.

Now that is something we can all get behind.

Storm Trooper Photo by Stefan

Traditional marketing looks at where and how folks like you and me are afraid, dissatisfied, and in pain only to exploit it and sell you shit that you don’t need. Storytelling marketing — the kind that’s emerging around these parts on the interwebs — has radically shifted what marketing means (as opposed to what it actually is).

By challenging the why instead of the how, we make way for a deeper connection to our audiences. We’re focused on being of service to our Perfect People, instead of worrying about inventing the Next Big Thing. (Well, that comes later.)

Innovation defines what matters to our people; it’s how we set ourselves apart from the other design agencies, designers, photographers, coaches, and tech start ups. If we start at the how (the invention) without first considering the why (the meaning), we’ve created a user-centered product or service that anyone could create and market. It’s not special.

Once we start with the why, we’ve set ourselves apart right from the get-go, without putting a prototype to paper, let alone code.

Great leaders don’t ask, “How can I make a better product?” They ask, “How can we reimagine why people use it?”

(Tweet this nugget.)

Storm Trooper Photo by Stefan 

As I sat on a mossy log, taking in the vitamin D (we don’t get enough sunshine around these parts), I thought about — you guessed it — your website. Well, not just your website but all websites.

Your website needs to be supple, flexible, and at the same time, firmly rooted.

Trees draw their strength from their roots — the very foundation of their being. Even the youngest and smallest of trees have to have strong roots if they’re ever going to reach maturity.

Be sure that you have strong roots — your business — before you start to grow your website.

If you’re lacking those roots, you’ll have a beautiful website that will net you… nothing. No sales. No dollars. Just wasted money. A website is your best marketing tool for your business, but it can neither replace nor replicate a solid business plan and model.

Your website, much like your business, needs to remain flexible and not get stuck doing (or being) the same thing.

Letting your website stagnate is one of the biggest and baddest concerns of a business — the minute you stop updating and creating content is the minute that you become entirely irrelevant to search engines and to the rest of the online world. By failing to innovate and create content in meaningful ways, your best people get bored, unsubscribe, and fail to take notice when things change for the better. Or, worse, they actively fight against it.

Finally, your website needs to remain supple and graceful.

The oldest of trees are the hardiest, but they’re also the most susceptible to soil erosion and strong winds. If the elements push hard enough, they can knock down a strong, tall tree as though it were a sapling.

If you let your website become insular and it ignores the rest of the online world, it will weaken your brand. That’s why it’s important to go through website realignments every six months to make sure that all of the parts are working the way they’re intended, as well as providing support to the parts that need it. Without a check-in, your website will harden and become difficult to change. And when that happens, it’s only a matter of time until everything falls apart and you have to start from scratch anyway.

Remember: violetminded is actively taking on projects. Tell your friends. We’ll send you a unicorn. (Well, it might only be a plushy unicorn but those are still awesome.)

Towards winter, she inadvertently introduced me to web design.

Her stuff was incredible, even by today’s aesthetic standards. It was high-contrast, asymmetrical, and the typography was as exquisite as it could be on the web at the time. She used a lot of J-Rock photography — particularly of members of the J-Rock synth-rock group, Malice Mizer. (We had a shared love of everything Japanese. Made our small-town BC lives more exotic, somehow.)

When she showed me that website — in all of its high-contrast beauty — I thought to myself, “I’ve got to figure out how to do that.”

(PS. Hi Erin!)

It was an obsession that started off small.

I started making websites over on Geocities — y’know, with terrible scrolling marquees, blinking text, clashing colours, an animated background, and a sparkling trail that followed the mouse when you dragged it around the screen. As my first foray into web, I was hooked. Good ‘n hooked.

I moved away from Geocities shortly after starting up there. I attempted Angelfire, but found it clunky and useless. From there, I moved onto Homestead, where I spent a considerable amount of time learning how to use div layers and style using embedded CSS. My final resting ground before I started up my own domain in 2004 was Pita, where I migrated blogging from LiveJournal (and DeadJournal) into a platform that was easy to customize and tweak.

I moved in and out of the pixel art community (mostly as a doller), as I mainly taught myself pixel art using MS Paint. In fact, I stayed with the community all throughout high school and into my first two years of university. (From 1999-2006, actually.) Somewhere in 2002, I started using Photoshop 5 at my high school, where I would putter around and create graphics for our school newspaper and lay out the entirety of the newspaper itself in Corel. (Oh Corel.)

In 2003, I made my first professional website for a woman who sold her services as a garden landscaper. I used way too many filters and didn’t understand the first thing about how to properly lay out a page so that people could, y’know, read it.

I didn’t make another website professionally until 2007.

But I continued to hone my skills.

I wasn’t really sure if web design was something I wanted to do as a hobby or if I wanted to do it professionally, but I did know that I enjoyed it quite a bit. There was a lot of freedom in pixel craft and code — putting together lines of data to spit out a lovely website that looked somewhat like my feeble attempts at mockups.

Ultimately, web design is what drove me into an education in computers and technology. I tried my hand at software, which was genuinely fun and creative. But after my post-secondary education — usable and useful though it may have been — my heart has always been on the web, not on the desktop in Visual Studio.

The evolution into professional web designer

So when I kicked everything to the curb in 2008 (okay, well, I was fired), I knew that I wanted to try my hand at professional design. As it turned out, professional design school was not for me. My professors insisted that I didn’t have an eye for print design. And, in all fairness, they were right. (That’s why I stick to the web, people.)

Since the first time I saw my friend’s website in 2000 to this incarnation of violetminded in 2013, all I ever wanted was to play. I’ve always been extremely good at mucking about, playing around, and experimenting until I got the results I wanted. Even when I started violetminded in 2009 (almost ten years after my first website), I knew that I wanted to approach web design as something playful and enjoyable.

Now I want to give that playfulness back to you.

Sure, you can peek around violetminded’s corners and check out the irreverent Star Wars imagery, coupled with nerdery and the occasional photo of me grinning like a madwoman. (It happens.)

But what if you could bottle playfulness and unleash its potential each and every time you created something new? Often in business, we get so caught up in trying to be successful that we end up looking and feeling like everyone else. (Which is kind of the opposite of what designers do, mind you. We want you and your biz to look and feel like, well, you!)

Say hello to, “You Are So Damn Brilliant”.

You Are So Damn Brilliant is a free quarterly e-magazine that captures the playful and joyful things that business owners like you are doing, seeing, experiencing, and well, enjoying! It’s a celebration of collective creativity and brilliance throughout our various industries, with particular nods to design and technology.

More information will be available in the coming weeks, with the first issue of You Are So Damn Brilliant dropping in July.

So hey, if you want more info you’ll need to get your name on the A-List. Why?

Because you are so damn brilliant.

{Photo by JDHancock, as always}

Let’s look at a few factors.

In any given web design project, these are some of the factors that add together to compute a real cost:

• Business strategy
• Visual design
• Copywriter, branding, marketing, and PR
• Project scope
• Site traffic volume
• Custom business logic (read: sexy, super custom code)
• Development timetable
• A ton of support
• L.O.V.E. (It’s not a value-added-service: it’s just how we do our work.)

Since your website is a visual representation of who you are, what you do, and why you do it, let’s reframe the cost in terms of its physical incarnation: wardrobe.

You’re willing to invest in high-quality pieces. You’re tired of going back to the same shops year-after-year only to be disappointed in how the fabric starts to pill and tear after only a few months of wear. It’s not working anymore; it’s too much work to err on the side of economical shopping.

We’re looking at the high-end of the retail experience: BCBG Max Azria, Kate Spade, French Connection, JCrew, and the online outlets like Bluefly. It’s great fashion with higher-quality without busting the bank for the big designer pieces.

As in web design, this budget will net you a beautiful website that is tailored to what fits your biz. We might be using crystal instead of diamonds to make sure you shine, but shine you shall.

Picture yourself standing inside Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City, sipping your latte. That Stella McCartney dress is just to your left. You’re approached by a stylish sales person, who asks you if there’s anything you need. You’re admiring the dress, but you could certainly use a bit more help in putting together your perfect Spring/Summer wardrobe this year.

So many options. So little time.

As in web design, this will net you a larger team of our wonderful artisans to make your dreams come true. Need a bit extra support for launch? We’ve got a few project managers that would be brilliant for you. How about someone to go over the best way to word your sales page? Copywriters. Oh, and if you’re struggling for the right name, we’ve even got a naming expert in the collective. (Seriously. She’s amazing.)

You’re standing outside of Chanel with your heart in your throat. Those suede boots that you’ve been coveting for ten years? You can finally afford them. That little piece that you saw walking down the runway during New York Fashion Week – the one with the hand-stitched everything?

The couture.

You’ve got expensive champagne, a personal stylist, a whole team of fashion-savvy people at your beck and call… you know that your every need is going to be met swiftly and gracefully.

This is the fully-loaded option, with the entirety of our collective’s, well, collective expertise at your call. Your biznez is at the point where you need a team of advisers, makers, and implementers to bring your vision to life.

You’re busy being your brilliant self. Let’s make it even easier for you to bring your brand of amazing into the world.

(Oops! Sorry Mike!)

Yesterday, I started to unpack the language of what violetminded’s going to accomplish around here with the new biznez paradigm and why “agency” is really not what we’re going for around here.

We’re not bound by location anymore.

I’m located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where I live with my little family in a beautiful apartment overlooking the Fraser River. (You damn straight I’m grateful for this epic view of the river.)

My team, on the other hand, is scattered to the four winds. While I’m deeply looking forward to my BC design counterparts coming on-board in the new year, the current team is entirely American (okay, well, Nikki’s an ex-pat from the UK). The best part of this arrangement is that we’re not bound by proximity anymore. We’re bound by mutual adoration.

An agency isn’t what you think it is.

Just like people tend to have many opinions about web designers and developers (usually negative, in my experience), there are even more opinions about agency work, both from prospective clients and freelancers.

Sometimes, an agency is a few friends who happen to have complementary skills — one’s the Face (*ahem*) and perhaps the visionary, another handles design, and the last handles the code. Together, they’re an unstoppable team of awesome. Why? Because they can focus on what they do best, that’s why. Structure is usually circular: each team member is ultimately responsible for their part of the project but tend to refer back to one another throughout the project’s life cycle.

Other times, an agency follows the old paradigms of business with a traditional approach: they have an office, regular employees, outside contractors, and generally function as a formalized hierarchy. The CEO is not necessarily the creative director and vice versa.

And, once in a while, we come to a boutique web agency where each team member is handpicked for each project based on both their skills and their personalities. Rough Ride Creations creates freaky websites for crazy-talented horror writers, artists, and film-makers — their team members come and go, depending on what’s needed for which project. Abby Kerr’s newly launched Voice Bureau follows the same flow — she works alongside other creatives to craft websites from the copy to the visuals and beyond.

Let’s abandon “agency”.

When I visit artisan markets and artist-owned and operated studios, I encounter the same pattern: passionate play coupled with disciplined and skillful execution creates magic. When artists and artisans are left to the devices of their own creative hearts, what they can achieve is truly remarkable.

The new creative agency is exactly that: a finely-honed and curated experience that delivers the highest quality experience to each client based on their needs and desires. 

After having a conversation with a decidedly awesome chick (with whom I share a first name, marking us as girls of the 80s), we both decided that what I was actually creating was… a collective. An artisan collective.

Digital Artisan Collective. Boo-ya.

Each and every person on the violetminded team, both currently and in the near future, is an artist and/or artisan. We have spent years and years honing our craft, focused deeply and broadly all at once. We’ve learned technologies. We’ve sketched, slaved over sentences, plotted layouts on graph paper, put together mockups, and still managed to keep our freelancing businesses afloat.

What violetminded Design has always been about is digital elegance: beauty, simplicity, and power in all things.

Each artist and artisan that comes onto the team for any specific project follow those tenets in their work. If it can be said in an elegant sentence instead of a paragraph, that’s how it will be written. If it can be visually represented as black and white instead of a rainbow, that’s how it will be designed. If the project requires only three people instead of twelve, then that’s how it will be executed.

Primed for warp speed, cap’n.

I’ve been scouring my rather enormous network for the most interesting digital artists and artisans, in order to make sure that I’ve got a range of amazing personalities and talent to spread across the projects. And believe you me, the peeps are all kinds of amazing. I’ll introduce you the (soon to be) enormous new team at violetminded Design in the new year.

Thanks for stickin’ with me.

xoxo

Uh.

“You’re just not a fit for us anymore.”

Um.

“Please clean out your desk and vacate the premises.”

I sat there, tears in my eyes, and nodded firmly before leaving the office to collect my things. Hot on my heels, my then-boyfriend-now-husband grabbed my hand so we could walk out of that place with our heads high. We both knew that this was a long-time coming, what with our mutual sowing seeds of dissent in the office over our long hours and lack of compensation for our hard work.

Still, it hurt a lot more than I thought it would.

I’d never been let go, fired, or laid off before. No one had told me, in so many words, that they couldn’t stand to see my face anymore. As an archetypal Lover, it was an excruciating pain.

It was also extremely motivating.

The Genetic Imperative of Entrepreneurship

My dad’s side of the family (including my dad) has an exorbitant amount of entrepreneurial tendencies. Most of my family members on that side work for themselves. We’re loud-mouthed folks with big ideas and even bigger dreams. If you ever got a bunch of relatives from my dad’s side in a room, we’d make the building explode with volume and hot-headedness. It’s kinda what we do.

I’ve always been the kind of person to defy satisfaction. The idea of being satisfied with what I have/who I am makes my skin crawl.

So, as soon as I was fired from my first job out of university (see above), I started to hop around from job to job to see if anything fit. I’m a decent sales person (figured that out at Best Buy selling computers). I like to help people (figured that out by working at a work search center). But I’m also adverse to people telling me what to create, how to create, and when to create it. (Hello one semester in design school.)

What’s a dissatisfied twentysomething gal to do?

I’ve been designing websites since I was 14. (To give you some context, I’ve recently turned 26.) Something clicked in my head in 2009, as I was winding down my summer working in a work search center in my hometown. What if, instead of looking for work when I moved back to Vancouver, I started my own business designing websites?

Sure, web designers and developers tend be seen as a dime-a-dozen… but what could it hurt?

I had nothing to lose.

(Well, except a bit of pride.)

And so, I bought this domain and started looking around for work. I tried Craigslist, oDesk, and eLance. Aside from the occasional scam, nothing really came of it. The third month into my freelancing, I was starting to lose hope. I contacted a writer that I very much admired and said, “I’d like to redesign your website free of charge. Your writing has changed my perspective so much that I want to give something to you, just as you gave to me.”

She agreed. (Cue fangirl gushing from 23-year-old me.)

We set to work.

We launched her new look in November 2009. (It’s still standing.) In January 2010, her business picked up and as a result, so did mine. As she referred more people my way, I got busier and busier. At the time, I took every single project I could. (Because that’s what you do in the early days of freelancing.)

As the year wore on, I wore down.

By the time the fall came around, I was so burnt out that I considered throwing it all in the fire and getting a Real Job. I even had one picked out at a local design agency, which was run by a profoundly wonderful woman. She rejected my application for project management, but she did it beautifully.

She wanted me to succeed with my own biz. I figured that if she had faith in me, I should have more faith in myself.

Cue the QLC.

Partway through the fall of 2010, I managed to contract this odd syndrome known as… pregnancy. I watched myself spiral out of control. Thank goodness for Molly at Stratejoy — I cannot begin to tell you how important this woman was in my QLC recovery. I went through The Joy Equation and eventually started writing at Stratejoy through my pregnancy (and all the way up to the birth of my son.)

Pregnancy: the great motivator…?

Pregnancy was a great motivator for me. In 2011, I doubled my income, doubled my client base, and took on more and more complex projects with more and more amazing women.

I got to July 2011 without a lot of drama, although there was some. I tightened my intake process, developed the Creative Insight, and started to put boundaries in place. (The latter was the tough one for me.)

But it was clear by the fall — as that’s the time of Great Epiphanies for me — that I couldn’t do all of this alone. I brought on Mana Drake as my Logistics Commander and assistant. She started to handle the requests that I didn’t have time for or that I simply couldn’t take on.

Suddenly, I found myself in a peculiar situation: I was too popular. I had too much work. So, I did what any good biznez owner would do: I doubled my pricing. (With only a small anxiety attack.) Much to my surprise (and delight), I managed to maintain my workload and people were still signing on with me at a rapid rate.

2012: the year of the location-independent agency

I had been talking with Catherine Caine for a good while at this point — I went through her Pilot Light program, which I heartily recommend to anyone who will listen. She had told me that I was terrible at upkeep and taking care of my clients after we’d launched. The process was magical… to a point. She told me to bring on some help so that I could maintain that magic.

I needed a developer. So, she referred (a phenomenal) one to me. Sarah Lewis joined the violetminded team to pick up my slack and continue to make my clients feel special, even when I couldn’t.

Nikki Groom approached me about joining up to fill my need for a copywriter. Of course, I accepted. Nikki is an exceptional talent.

Keri Honea, SEO and SEM expert, stepped up and rocked out the search engine optimization side of the equation.

Suddenly, I had a team.

I was no longer a solo entrepreneur or a freelancer: I had peeps!

We were able to take on complex projects that I couldn’t do by myself and, as the year carried on, business just continued to flourish. There was a lot of magic. The violetminded team sparkled and shined. I couldn’t be prouder.

And I couldn’t possibly be more grateful than I am for their hard work and overflow of talent.

There have been a fair few kinks to work out in our project management process, including expectation management and scheduling, as well as my usual demons with establishing boundaries.

In May, I started working with Tara Gentile so that she could somewhat-gently whoop me into the next level of business. With her help, I formalized even more of my processes.

(And, contrary to popular belief, process management is so much better than project management. I’d rather have a strong set of processes than be entirely reactionary.)

Around that time, I found out that I was pregnant… again. This time, with a daughter. (She’s due in December.)

Um. Panic?

Yeah, I did a bit of that.

And then I pushed even harder and stretched myself farther than I thought possible. Somewhere at the beginning of my second trimester, my project schedule exploded and I spent three months launching site after site, with varying degrees of success.

Clearly, this wasn’t working.

And so, the fall. Yes, the fall. We all know what happens to me in the fall: I redefine, realign, and refine.

Here’s what this means for you, me, and violetminded Design.

Starting in 2013, the team is shifting once again.

We’re going to be amping up our game and really moving into Agency mode. We’ll be bringing on three or four new team members early in the year to help fill the gaps in our projects. This means a higher quality experience for our clients.

It also means that I’ll be taking a step back from the day-to-day operations. Not a step back in the company — more of a step up… towards my starring role, some might say.

This was an extremely difficult decision for me, since I’m so used to being right in the thick of things with my clients: answering emails immediately, fixing problems the same day, and being Little Miss Johnny-on-the-Spot with everything.

It’s not a sustainable approach to running a team, nor is it particularly helpful to my clients if I’m constantly burning out.

So, I’ll be taking on the role of Creative Director within violetminded Design. I draw upon a wide range of skills as a designer, biznez owner, code monkey, and strategist; while I’d like to share each of these things with each of my clients, it’s not possible. 

I’d be working 24 hours a day and still not get anywhere! (And I’d rather not do that with a little baby on the way for December.)

Instead, the team will grow to accommodate the needs of our Perfect People. This includes:

• Streamlined project management for each of our new clients
• Responsive web development, so that each of our sites continue to be beautiful (no matter how it’s viewed and on which device)
• Mobile application development
• Graphic design, including identity, print, and illustration
• Copywriting, including strategy for public relations and help with press releases
• WordPress security and support
• … and a whole bunch of other things that we’ve yet to discover!

2013 and beyond.

As you can see by the sign on the virtual door, we’re closed up for client intake until 2013. This will give me and the rest of the violetminded team ample time to get our processes worked out before we start to take on any new projects.

What this means for prospective clients (which might be you!):

• I won’t be personally taking on all of the responsibility anymore, so you’ll be dealing with the Whole Team: me, the project manager, our developer(s), SEO expert, security guru, and our Logistics Commander.
• Since we’ve got a Whole Team to work with, we’re amping up the quality of work as well as the quality of the experience (which was pretty damn high to begin with, according to our beloved clients).
• The timeframe is going to vary, as is the pricing. No longer can I say, “Oh yeah, packages start at this price.” Because really, I won’t know until we start talking!
• I’m still going to be doing the intake process. So, when you decide that you wanna work with violetminded (and you call me Amanda in the email), you’ll still be chat-talking with me about it in the beginning. After a certain point in the project, we’ll transition you to chatting with the project manager, who will handle all the details.
• Gone are the days where I do all of the maintenance work. We’ll have measures in place for clients that need a bit of extra help or need some love at the end of a project.
• And, most importantly: client intake for 2013 won’t start until most of the way through January. If you wanted to get booked in for a mid-February project, drop me a line.

And what’s a post without some love in it?

Gratitude is a huge part of how I live my life and run this biz. These people have been integral to the success of violetminded Design, either indirectly or by supporting it in a Big Way.

Allissa Haines, for being my first paying client and for trusting me for all these years with her online space.

Danielle LaPorte, for recommending me to her people long before anyone knew who I was, as well as for the love and genuine support.

Naomi Niles, for being my unofficial design mentor and a constant source of inspiration.

Catherine Caine, for being the first person to whoop my ass into realizing that my good wasn’t good enough.

Leah Shaver, for being my design soul sister and biznez sounding board.

Tara Gentile, for being the first person to help me unpack my money issues and to force me into actually structuring my biz. And then again for being my cheerleader as I move into this New State of Biz.

Hiro Boga, for catching me just as I was about to fall on my own sword(s) and being an overall angel.

Fabeku Fatunmise, for completely changing my life with a Rev-o-Rama. He is one of the biggest instigators for this change.

The Pilot Light gals. I adore you all.

Candice and Alex, for being fun and sweet and always there for me when I need you.

Teresa Deak, for picking me up when I’m down.

Mia, for giving me a safe space to vent and be frustrated. And also to giggle uncontrollably about the bizarre nature of life.

The awesome people I get to share Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram with — you always make my days better by posting weird memes and pictures of your lives.

My amazing family, including an awesome set of parents (in-laws too!), a whip-smart and super loving husband, and my small man.

Each and every one of my clients: without you, violetminded would still be struggling to fill its rosters. With you, we’re stronger, better, brighter. 

The violetminded team in its current incarnation: Sarah, Keri, Nikki, and Mana. I love you gals.

And…

… you. Yes, you. Readers. People who share my stuff. People who’ve loved me and my people up. People who make the whole damn world brighter just by existing.

“I hate my website. I need to redesign… again.”

How often do you find yourself on your website, wondering why yet another redesign has left you deeply unsatisfied?

“I just redesigned and I already hate it.”

Clients will come to me with tales of woe (more often than I’d like) that have them pining from lost months and reparations for overstretched budgets. The end result? Fear, resentment, and an itchy Google finger.

It’s that sticky comparison game: you find sites that you love and wonder, “Why can’t I have that site? Why am I always redesigning and it never, ever works?”

You (and your site) deserve better. I’m going to give you the tools to take what you’ve got — your brand, your visuals, and your website’s structure — and help it truly reflect who you are, what you do, and why you do it.

And, if you’re dying for more juicy info on refining your website, I’m holding a free training call next week — Tuesday, September 11 at 11AM PT / 2PM ET. To get the deets, just make sure you sign-up at the bottom of this post.

Redefine. Realign. Refine.

Before I determine if a site really needs an overhaul, I put it through the RRRinger. I ask myself (and my clients, if need be):

1. Does this site effectively communicate who this person/business is, what they do, and why they do it?
2. Can the existing visuals be brought into harmony once the site has defined, measurable parameters?
3. Will editing the space (cleaning up the sidebar, refining the home page, tweaking typography, etc.) yield the best results?

Getting clear on goals, re-aligning visual elements, and refining the existing space is a much more efficient use of your most precious commodity: you.

Redesigning your site every six to twelve months is a waste of your time and your money. (There, I said it.) Without a solid plan to facilitate your new design, you’ll end up with the same thing over and over again — it’ll be something you thought you wanted (or someone told you that this is the Best Practice for your industry) but still doesn’t manage to reflect you in any way.

Redefine.

Who are your people? Why should they give a damn about anything that you put on your site? Why should they buy from you and not that dude over there?

Design is one-part science, one-part intuition, and one-part psychology. You, as a biznez owner and digital entrepreneur, need to be concerned with the latter: the psychology. If you don’t care who your people are, they sure as sugar aren’t going to care about you.

(Re)Define who your people are. I’m not talking about putting together stodgy demographics (although useful, they’re not what we need right now). I’m talking about writing their story. Who is this person? What are their daily habits? What do they care about and why? How do they spend their money?

Things like that.

Naomi Niles, veteran web designer and conversion specialist, gave me this advice when putting together the strategy for a site:

“What do you want people to do first when they land on your site?”

(That’s why Naomi is my not-so-secret design mentor. She’s the Mr. Miyagi of Design. But with boobs.)

“Buy stuff” is not a valid response. “Purchase a copy of my latest eBook”, on the other hand, is. Redefine how you want people to interact with your online space. You’ve gotta be the shepherd on this one: lead your flock to the best grazing on your site or they may just turn into lemmings and jump off the cliff to watch YouTube videos instead.

Realign.

With your goals and your people in mind, you can bring the visuals into harmony. If you’re a brilliant, sassypants chick with more flair and style than she knows what do with — and you’re using muted pastels and wishy-washy typography — then there’s definitely something out of alignment for you and your space.

Realign your visuals to better communicate who you are, what you do, and why you do it.

One of the best ways to do that is with colour. Realigning your palette to attract your people (and make you feel awesome when you look at your site) is far more manageable than going back to the drawing board. Starting from scratch over and over again really, REALLY sucks.

Refine.

I’ll admit it right now, guys. My apartment can get completely out of control with clutter. I mean, I’ve got a toddler. He makes messes. Mama sometimes cleans it up (and sometimes leaves it to the gnomes… I mean, husband… to make it better).

It’s no different for your website. Have you noticed how easy it is to let things go around your online space?

Ah, I don’t need to worry about that broken link. No one cares. (Trust me. Someone does.)

But all the things on my sidebar are important! (Sadly, no. In fact, your sidebar is getting kinda fat. Might want to watch that badge intake.)

I don’t really need to worry about colours, do I? I mean, does red really clash with this buttercup yellow? (Yes, yes it does. Also, it’s hurting my eyes.)

Refining your online space is a lot like cleaning up the clutter around the apartment.

“Do I really need to have all those badges kicking around? I don’t know. Maybe?”

Figure out what’s really, really important to you on your site. Remember to keep in mind your goals and your people. What do you want them to do? How do you want them to interact with your site? Do you really think that they’re going to want to scroll all the way through those badges, just to get at the juicy “New Here” information?