I’ve gotten my new WordPress up! I was sort of working through Livejournal, before, which means I had my personal stuff mixed in with my industry blog (or the other way ’round, rather).
Instead, I wanted a blog on my site specifically for computer/design/web topics.
I copy-pasted all my old stuff in here, which took forever. I’m not sure if it’s because of my internet connection (which seems to have outrageous latency).
So now I’ll try to keep this current.
While I’m blogging, I’ll talk a bit about my site:
As it is now, the site is a second-fiddle affair. I’ve spent a tremendous portion of my time, these last few months, working on The Embroidery House, as it was imperative that we roll out a working version before I took a break.
Because of this, my personal website is still using style and tricks from back when my designing was all red and beige. I stole those tabs straight from an A List Apart article (the sliding doors of CSS, by Doug Bowman), which brings me a shameful pang every time it crosses my mind. I just haven’t had the time to make a replacement, as of yet. All I could manage was to make the site somewhat presentable.
My next goal, then, is to bring my site up to speed. My main page is useless, and my blog could go there. I might divide my site up in a more logical way than is having a smattering of tabs with different content behind each. I need to completely redo my style, and try to make my domain original to me. At the moment, it’s something of a placeholder.
Furthermore, I need to create a brand for myself. There’s no way I could expect people to hire someone from a site called icosidodecahedron.com. The site is hosted on a small, cheap server not meant for business.
Ideally, I’ll find a short, memorable domain and shape myself to it; I tend to work better when I have some base on which to apply my inspiration and creativity. Once I’ve got the basic brand laid out, I’ll get proper hosting. Once I have enough clients to keep myself running steady, I have my eye on Media Temple, which seem to host everyone and everything I respect. jQuery, Mootools, Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, and so many others. It’s really caught my eye.
I’ve always been the type to do things for myself. In art, especially — because of our human tendency to get a feel for a person based on their looks, — I feel that I need to draw and design all of my own stuff. The logo must be mine, the design must be mine, and all those little background images must be mine. ALA’s recent paper talked about design and how we viewed beautiful sites, and I was suddenly reminded of a pairing of Penny Arcade comics in which Tycho and Gabe had a falling out and decided they would each do their own strip. In the writer’s strip, there were a bunch of badly-drawn stick-figures waxing poetic about philosophy. In the artist’s strip, the characters looked exactly like they usually did, though the language was crude and badly-spelled. I realized that the artist was who I looked to for my perception of that world and its characters.
And so I’ve toyed around with the idea of pairing up with some sort of graphics specialist, but something deep in my mind cringes at the thought. I think what I want more is to closely examine the technique of a true artist.
That’s about it for now. I’m still trying to decide on a final price for my services. I flit from $100/month to $200/month, and wonder if one might be too low or another too high, but when we get right down to it, I’d say I’m an acceptable web designer, now, such that I could be payed $200/month for continual development and improvement of a site. Once the infrastructure is down, I might even decrease it to $100/month.
I’ll leave you with that.