Wow, it's been awhile.

Massage Therapy Site a photo by trippykel on Flickr.

Things have been getting crazier here by the day. In a good way. Our house is officially sold, and the new owners take posession on the 25th. This means that we get to take a weekend sometime soon to drive back to the old homestead to get our things and drive them down to a storage locker.

Mom and Dad are visiting for the weekend, which is pretty cool. They watched Cade for us last night so J and I could head out for a date night. We went to see The Adjustment Bureau, but it was sold out. We ened up watching Just Go With It, and it was really funny. And strangely clean for an Adam Sandler film. Two thumbs up.

In the vein of child-moment sharing, Cade was had a good moment the other night. He's just learning a few words, and I explained that he had peas in his stir fry. He spent the next 15 minutes finding every pea to pick out of the stir fry and said 'pea' for every one. He then pretended to eat them - bringing them up to his mouth, opening/closing, saying 'mmm', and putting the pea back down. Oh, the funny things kids do.

Oh yeah, and the design to the left is one I did a few months back for a massage group site. I'm happy with how it looks :)

Anyway, the 'rents will be here any minute. Oh, speak of the devil!

Web Design

Dueck Brothers Website
Originally uploaded by trippykel

I finished the Dueck Brothers website awhile back, and finally got signoff on it. It's officially done. I am happy to say that it turned out fairly well. Most important is that the Duecks love their new site. I created a skin for a CMS called Dot Net Nuke (pain in the butt, after using the software I'm not a big fan), then rewrote/reformatted all the content, added a flash gallery, and just made everything a lot more cohesive. Seems to work fine in Firefox 2 & IE6. Check it out at http://www.dueckbrothers.com/

No matter how often I say that I'm not going to do any more design work for awhile, another little contract always seems to pop up. It seems like spring is working her wiles on me, and sending creativity breezes my way. Just can't say no!

I took a couple of hours 2 weeks ago to evaluate a friend's website and make suggestions for him to implement, so that wasn't a lot of work. I've also been asked how much it would cost for 3 t-shirt mockups / 1 final design for the town fair coming up. It sounds like kind of a fun job, so I've given them a quote. We'll see where it goes from there. I really was trying to stop working though, especially since it's almost to the point where baby could arrive any day and I won't have much design time. Not getting jobs done on time = bad.

Question of the day: why do people still make websites where you have to choose Flash or HTML? You're duplicating your content, which leads to content differences and errors. You're forcing your users to think, instead of just using the website intuitively. You're wasting homepage real estate! Forcing users to choose is such a designer's-way-out option! Grr.

You need options? Run some stats on the browsers surfing your site, and choose either all flash or all HTML, based on your users. Better yet, integrate both: just make sure the navigation isn't flash if you've got a lot of old-browser nonsense going on. You could also do a browser/bandwidth-detect to decide which site to send them to if you absolutely must have the two separate options. Invisible is best! Let people use your website without thinking so hard, and let the code do the work.

Rant over.

Almost.

My other pet peeve of the day: a design company who makes a website and does a shoddy job. Our town spent some dough to get this website, and it's not living up to the task. The WYSIWYG editor control (word-type-editor) isn't saving changes and frustrates the users who have to update the site. They don't get consistent support or timely answers to their emails in response to problems they're having. And to top it off, the site is visually ugly, has poor navigation, lacks content organization in a bad way, and could really do with a ton of UI changes. It looks like a poorly-customized frontend template to me. Joomla backend - at least they did that right! Many bah-humbugs go out to the design company.

Poor websites are just something that gets me up in arms. Can we ban them? Or at least start a TV Show like the home makeover ones. Introducing... *insert drumroll here* Extreme Website Makeover! Watch us peel away those ugly layers of bloated code, heavy graphics, and poor UI. We'll start with surgery, then stitch it all back together and leave it with a gloss not topped by any wax on the market today!