Not much has been written on this site about WordPress, but over the last few years we’ve pretty much become a WordPress only shop – with 90-95% of our projects built on the platform. Here’s why.

Every site we’ve created in the last few years has been developed within a Content Management System (CMS). This gives our clients easy access to update their site through a web browser, without the need for a complete knowledge of HTML.

We’ve tried a few over the years (Drupal, Joomla, Expression Engine) and found that, while they’re all a huge improvement over static html files, they each were lacking in some fundamental way or another. Even the early versions of WordPress were not suitable for full fledged site content management.

Far and away the most glaring flaw in each of the above applications is in the ease of use for the end user. They each required too steep of a learning curve to use effectively. Far too many things that should have been easy weren’t.

Enter the WordPress

WordPress started out as blogging software and we’ve used it for quite a while to build blog-centric websites. A few years ago, however, enough features were added to allow for building full blown sites on it. Once we gave it a try and saw how easy it was for end users, we didn’t look back.

Here’s a quick list of WordPress features that are the reason we love it so much:

User Friendly

I taught Kari how to manage her own site in about 20 minutes. Enough said.

Open Source Software

While we don’t mind paying for quality software, kick-arse software that is free to use and manipulate is even better.

Community Support

WordPress is fast becoming one of the most popular CMS software platforms around. It’s constantly being developed and improved (at least 3 major updates per year) by a passionate community. If Spigot gets hit by a bus, someone will be there to pick up our sites. No obscure software here!

Standards and SEO

A site built on WP is as solid a foundation as a website can be. It follows the rules and makes the search engines happy.

Plugins

If you need special functionality, there’s probably already a plugin for that. And if not, it’s easy to build one.

One click updates

Right from the administration area – click – click – done.

Easy Theming

Of course everything we do around here is custom, but if you’re short on design skilz, there are thousands of free themes out there. Too bad most of them are crape. Better just hire us to build it from scratch. :)

Lastly

There are a few other things about WordPress that, as a developer, I really like. Most of them won’t make any headlines though. Things like its clean and easy file structure. Or it’s well documented Codex. The Famous Five-Minute Install. And communities like Theme Hybrid.

If you’ve got any questions about WordPress, don’t hesitate to leave a question here, or contact us directly. Love talking about the WordPress.

If you happen to host a website with Spigot’s hosting company Cinch, you’ll know that we also provide email hosting with your account that is connected to your domain (e.g. joe@joes.com). It’s a decent service, but very basic. And I mean very basic. Here’s the account specs: We limit each hosting client to 5 email accounts, and each account has a mere 50mb inbox limit (We’ll often bump those numbers up if you need it, but that’s the basic set up). We’re careful to let everyone know that this service is basic, and if a more robust email hosting is needed, there are many options that can be looked at.

The Google

One of those options is Google Apps, a free service that not only provides email, but calendars, online documents, and a few other services are also provided. The email service is a definite step up from what Cinch provides, with unlimited email accounts and a whopping 7gb storage per account. You’ll also gain access to Gmail’s excellent webmail interface. Cinch also supplies a webmail interface, but compared to Gmail, it’s clunky, non-intuative, and bug ugly.

But perhaps the biggest benefit is having Gmail’s superior spam filtering engine on your side. Most spam will be caught before it even gets to your inbox, and what does get through can be flagged, reported, and teacher will post their names on the blackboard. neah neah.

We’ve recently switched all Spigot emails and calendars over to Google Apps and couldn’t be happier. The extra space is nice and the spam flow has all but stopped. Highly recommended if you’re having any sort of email issues.

If you’re a DIY’er here’s a link to getting started with Google Apps. If you’re too busy running your own business, give us a call and we can help you make the switch for a reasonable price.

UPDATE: Two weeks into the switch I find that emails coming from people who are on the same server as us (which would be most of my clients) are getting lost into the ether – Nothing arrives in my inbox, and the sender gets nothing bounced back. Turns out I didn’t turn off the email services within my hosting configuration. I also missed a few CNAME records and failed to delete an A record. If this all sounds like Greek, here’s a couple links that may help if you’re having issues:

1. Creating Your MX Records & CNAME Records for Google Apps: (mt) Media Temple
2. Creating an SPF Record for Google Apps

Getting Organized in Park City

Doesn’t it seem like life just keeps getting busier and busier? With work, kids, playtime, and the overall day to day things in life, staying busy isn’t an issue. So it would make sense to try and streamline those portions of life that seem most cluttered. That’s where Michelle Powell and Spruce Organizing can be an invaluable resource. Michelle has a knack for transforming cluttered spaces into useable rooms. Or streamlining an office so that every item has a place – letting you get more work done.

Site features:

• Custom design
• Coded for search engine friendliness
• Gravity Forms form management
• WordPress powered Content Management System

Of course a web design agency would say that

At first, that may sound like a web agency simply trying to get more business, but if you take a look at some of their arguments, it may make sense for some businesses. Their point is basically that a site owner can get caught in a cycle like this:

1. A website owner decides he needs a new site and pays a web designer big dollars to scrap the old site and build a new one.
2. The designer goes away after the project, and the site slowly deteriorates as it gets neglected.
3. The site owner eventually stops promoting the site and decides it’s time for a redesign to bring it current.
4. The cycle begins again.

This cycle becomes a large waste of resources and can potentially confuse users due to dramatic changes in the design of the site.

The long term partnership approach

The antithesis to this cycle is to form a long term partnership with a web designer. This gives a site owner a web professional on the team, someone who’s dedicated to keeping the site up to date on an ongoing basis. This gives the designer a better understanding of the business and how best to reach their customers. The need for a full fledged redesign will be reduced, opening up the opportunity to realign rather than redesign.

The article goes into greater detail, and is worth the read if you’re a site owner who’s tired of this cycle.

You can also contact us for more information on our maintenance contracts, and how Spigot Design can become an ongoing partner with your business.

Get Organized!

This is a busy life we lead and often times keeping the things straight and organized gets out of hand. Thank goodness for professional organizers such as Michelle Powell of Spruce Organizing. Michelle has been around Park City for quite a while but recently was forced to go through a complete rebranding. You’ll know her from her former business name, Contain Yourself. A little outfit in Texas apparently had a trademark on that name so Michelle came to us.

The concept for the logo spawned from the previous logo, which also was an armoire. The new logo is more playful and a pared down version of the old, and you can expect to see some fun new colors with it as the seasons change.

Identity package included:

• Logo
• Business Cards
• Letterhead

Stop the leaks with a CRM

As a client-based small business it’s very important to keep track of clients and prospective clients and the communication between them. Emails, phone calls, in-person meetings, tasks, follow ups, introductions, handshakes, and games of charades – losing track can mean losing business.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) apps are designed to help wrangle all this information in easy to update and easy to digest ways. Finding the best one depends on your needs and your workflow.

Why use a CRM?

For anyone who deals with more than just a handful of clients on a daily basis, the question of why use a CRM is obvious. There’s simply too much information flying around to remember it all. Before I began using a CRM, here’s how the interaction with a prospective client could (and probably often did) transpire:

1. Prospective client calls on the phone about a website project. A meeting gets scheduled.
2. Meet with the client and discuss project. Leave feeling good about the prospect.
3. Proposal is created and sent.
4. Two weeks go by without hearing from client.
5. Prospective client gets forgotten.
6. Weeks later a vague recollection of a prospective client haunts me. What have I forgotten?
7. Prospective client is lost to the ether.

With only a few clients a prospect or two here or there this probably doesn’t happen. But once two, three, four new prospects a week start calling, it soon becomes impossible to stay on top of who said what without a little help.

CRM Software to the Rescue

Sure you could write it all down on sticky notes or in a notebook, but with the way our devices are synced these days with calendars, voicemail and apps, finding a good CRM application makes the most sense. Using a CRM and taking the above scenario, my interaction with a prospective client now transpires like this:

1. Prospective client calls on the phone about a website project. A meeting gets scheduled.
2. New contact get entered into CRM with as much detail as I currently have. Client is tagged as ‘prospect.’
3. Meet with client and discuss project. Leave feeling good about the prospect.
4. Project details are entered into CRM, task to send proposal on specific date is created.
5. Proposal is created and sent. Task created to follow up in one week created.
6. A week goes by without hearing from client. CRM sends reminder to follow up.
7. Follow up email is sent. New task is set to follow up again in one week.
8. If two weeks go by and client still hasn’t contacted me, a final follow up task gets created.
9. If client still has not contacted me after final follow up, client gets tagged as ‘dead prospect.’
10. More likely however, client has gotten busy, and by the second follow up has contacted me and the project begins. Client is then tagged ‘client.’

Finding the CRM that fits your needs

Finding the right software is a matter of your needs. I’ll be writing a comparison of the two that I’ve used extensively in a future post. For me though, a good CRM should be able to do the following:

1. Easy entry of a new contacts, including up/downloading in the standard vCard format – both single and multiple contacts.
2. Tagging or grouping of contacts for easy sorting.
3. Notes – there should be plenty of room for keeping date based notes.
4. Email/file attachments.
5. Date and Time based task lists.
6. iCalendar subscriptions to task lists.
7. iPhone/mobile application

I don’t claim to have used most of the CRM software out there, but of the ones I have, they all easily fit the above criteria.

Output = Input – or – You Reap What You Sow

Once you’ve found your software solution, it’s time to start entering. Every correspondence you get should immediately go into the CRM. If you take good paper notes of phone calls or networking encounters, you could also set aside time each day dedicated to keeping your CRM up to date. For some, this might seem like a waste of time. Yes, I  spend what seems like an inordinate amount of time looking at, updating and referring to my CRM – but since I’ve started using CRM software I’ve landed more jobs simply because I’ve been able to stay in front of my prospects minds, with timely follow ups and gentle reminders.

What do you think?

Do you use CRM software? Do you have a solution that works better for you? I’m famous for spending an hour to save 5 minutes, so I’d love to hear what you’ve been doing to stay on top of your prospects and client tasks.

With the launch of the new spigotdesign.com site I was very excited about the possibilities of using @font-face to spice up the typography on the site. Typekit was to be my weapon of choice here but it turns out that it’s still unusable (for now).

Dejected, I went back to the old web-safe font stack and resigned myself to be ok with it. Then one fine day,  this article, Opera loves my webfont showed up in my feedreader, which pointed me to www.fontsquirrel.com as a way of rolling your own @font-face stacks.

FontSquirrel claims to offer “Only the best commercial-use free fonts” in an “easy to use format.” They’ve gathered what they feel are the best free fonts out there that have been licensed for use commercially on the web, and packaged them up into ‘@font-face kits.’

Each @font-face font kit come with:

• Original TrueType or OpenType Fonts for Firefox 3.5+ , Opera 10+, Safari 3.1+, Chrome 4.0.249.4+
• EOT fonts for Internet Explorer 4+
• Demo.html and stylesheet.css so you can get going fast

As great as the font kits are, the highlight of the site for me is the @font-face Generator, which allows you to upload your own fonts (provided they are properly licensed) and the system will generate a full kit, complete with all the web fonts you’ll need and the css code. Upload the fonts to your server, place the code into your stylesheet, and away you go!

Cross browser/OS font rendering

The real test is how well the fonts render across browsers and operating systems. I’m very happy to say that the fonts FontSquirrel generates render beautifully in every browser I’ve tested. And that was that, I was a FontSquirrel convert.

What do you think?

These fonts render great on every system I’ve tested, but I’m still interested in what you think. Do the fonts on this site render ok for you? If not I’d love to see a screenshot and a rundown of the system you’re using.

Webkit is the experimental version of Safari and you can download their nightly build and essentially stay on the bleeding edge of what web browsers can do. You too can be on the bleeding edge, as long as you don’t mind daily browser updates.

With the recent update of this site, I noticed a minor bug with the way Webkit renders the a:visited {background: transparent;} style. In every other browser the background is rendered as expected: transparent. In Webkit, however, the backgrounds were rendering in pure black.

To fix the problem, I simply changed background: transparent; to background: white; and all was well.

Developing for Disease Prevention

Every year we find a non-profit organization to lend our design/developing skills to and we couldn’t be happier to have been able to help out a truly worthy cause this year in The People’s Health Clinic. Located in Park City, Utah, the PHC is a primary care facility that serves the uninsured in Summit and Wasatch counties. In a time when our legislators bicker over who should be covered, for what, and who should pay for it, PHC rises above and provides quality care no matter what.

Two to Tango

This project was designed and led by Park City designer David Napiwocki. When David approached me to be a part of the project I jumped at the chance to work with someone with his caliber of talent. Overall the project went as smoothly as any I’ve been a part of, and that’s a testament to both David and the staff at the People’s Health Clinic. I look forward to continuing to help them with support of the website. I also look forward to future projects with Mr. Napiwocki. Read his write up on the PHC Project.

Site features:

• Custom design by David Napiwocki
• Coded for search engine optimization
• Gravity Forms form management
• WordPress powered Content Management System

What the Client Said

Bryan and Dave were extremely professional, with their attention to detail and desire to create the most appealing and functional website for us. Neither of them had experience with our Clinic before starting the project, yet, by studying our existing website, they quickly grasped who we are and knew just how we would want to present ourselves to the community of patients, volunteers, and donors. Sarah Klingenstein, People’s Health Clinic

Update: Dish Park City, while a good concept, never fully gained traction, and the founders have decided to let the business go. This logo is all that remains. :(

Simply Delicious Food

The concept is simple: Provide quality meals to busy people at an affordable price. Dish will come into your home and cook an entire week of food for your family, store it in your freezer and leave you directions on how to serve it.

This simple concept was the basis for the logo and identity system. Provide a simple, memorable identity that is easily digestible. From the simple shapes to the fun and playful font, this logo simply delivers.

Identity package included:

• Logo
• Business Cards
• Letterhead

Here’s a list of the site enhancements:

• Site-wide Google Translation
• Site-wide Search function
• Breadcrumb Navigation
• Improved News layout
• Improved Archives (now search articles by date, category, and tag)
• Admin Improvements

This transition marks the end of our Expression Engine era as it was the last EE site we had on our roster. WordPress is such a superior CMS in terms of administrative experience as well as in programming. This means that our clients win and we win!

Step right up, be a winnnah! Everybody’s a Winnnah!

So I got myself a free (hey, you got to try it first, right) typekit account and loaded up my font stack. Plugged in the requisite javascript, aligned the stylesheet code, and crossed my fingers as I refreshed the browser.

As expected, things looked great in Safari. (Ah Safari, how I adore thee). Unexpectedly, things looked like crape everywhere else. Firefox, IE8, IE7, IE6 (Ha HA! Gotcha, I didn’t really check IE6). The text was largely readable, but too many characters looked fuzzy, or had specks of lint stuck in the corners. Opera looked ok, but who uses it? I was confused (still am) as to what all the buzz about typekit was if it wouldn’t even render nicely in Firefox, and prompted me to question the true issue with @font-face.

Briefly, I wondered whether I could live with it. Slightly unreadable text vs some KICK ARSE design! Saying I pondered it briefly is a stretch. No design is worth poorly rendered text. So typekit was scraped and reverted to the fallback stack. And keeping the faith in the Holy and the Mighty became just a little harder.

Then a couple of days later, this article, ‘Opera loves my web font‘ showed up in my feedreader… Read part 2 of this post: FontSquirrel.com saves @font-face.

Small business R&D

The term ‘R&D’ is usually heard in context of big industrial corporations and the pharmaceutical industry. It also brings to mind big budgets, big spending, big dollars, big big big. The most successful big companies in the world all have a Research and Development division who’s sole purpose is to push the limits and find new innovations and technologies. Governments give out grants for this kind of research because it’s well known that innovation drives a big portion of our economy. There’s no reason these same ideals can’t be similarly implemented on the small business scale.

Big Ideas

Let’s add another ‘big’ to that list in the context of small businesses: big ideas. Even though small business owners don’t have big budgets or a dedicated R&D division, carving out time to stay ahead of what is new and innovative in their industries is essential to staying viable and in the vanguard. Finding efficiencies; New ways to sell goods; Expanding into new markets – these are the ideas that expand businesses and drive local economies. Most business owners and entrepreneurs understand this, but knowing where to find the innovations isn’t always easy. Here’s a few things to take to ensure you’re not falling behind:

Research the Competition

To know how you stack up to what others are doing, start by finding out what others in your industry are actually doing. A simple Google search such as ‘Your Industry blog’ will turn up links to who’s saying what about what you do. Not every cutting edge business will necessarily have a blog, but more and more industries are finding each other and creating communities online where collaboration and innovation are pushing everyone up: a rising tide raises all boats sort of thing.

Join the Conversation

These new communities are in need of industry experts such as yourself. Become a part of the conversation by leaving relevant comments on articles you come across. If you have something of worth to say, it will be appreciated when it’s said. You won’t always agree everyone in the community, but that is the point. Hash out the bad ideas, harvest the good.

Another benefit of leaving comments on others articles is that it gives you an opportunity to leave a link back to your website or blog. This is the new way of ‘link sharing’ that is more natural and conversational that the old way of link farm sharing (yuk). What? You don’t have a blog or a website? Then the next step is for you.

Lead the Conversation

Joining the conversation on another site is a very good and important thing to do. But even better is to start a conversation on your own site. Blogging is simply the term for writing about what you know – Or in my case, what I think I know :).

If you don’t already, seriously consider adding a blog to your site. There’s no need to even call it a blog – in fact I call my blog a ‘Notebook.’ The point is to have a section of your site dedicated to starting a conversation about your industry – what you know about it and how others can benefit.

I was standing in the shower thinking

Everyone has a place that they do their best thinking. Mine’s the shower – a place that I can just think without distractions. It takes cultivation, but listen to that voice inside when you’re able to let the mind wander. There are ideas there – be sure to write them down, perhaps in your new blog! They won’t all be great, or even good ideas, but know this: In the design process that I go through when creating a new site or logo, etc., there are bad ideas that need to be hashed out before the good ideas come. The bad ideas are usually the easy, or obvious ones. If I stopped at those ideas, I’d never get to the good ones. The process for great business ideas is the same, in my opinion.

The point is to take time to do this. Yes, you are busy running your business, but keeping up is important. Waking up tomorrow to find your business has become irrelevant is enough to push me

Obvious, or insightful?

If you’ve made it this far into this article, perhaps it was insightful for you. I also wonder if most business owners would find this obvious. What do you think?

Innovation in Professional Engineering Exam Prep

The exam that civil engineers take to become certified professional engineers is a difficult and grueling task – equivalent to law students taking the bar exam. Traditional preparation techniques centered around book study – Until PE Review came along.

The site has been around for about 4 years now, and has been steadily growing since. The company that operates PE Review, Online Technical Training, wanted a fresh site that reflected their innovation in online technical education options. They also wanted it to be clearer and easier to use in order to cut down on the growing number of customer service requests they received on how to find certain things.

Rebuild rather than remodel

The previous site was also peppered with minor technical glitches that, on an individual basis, were more of an annoyance than a call to start over. But after numerous attempts at fixing each glitch one at a time, the decision was made to start from scratch. This was a smart decision as it allow Spigot Design to build a clean foundation from which the site can continue to grow. The site is now built with the future in mind, and the ability to keep the software upgraded to the latest versions will keep the technical issues to a minimum.

Site features:

• Custom design
• Coded for search engine optimization
• Subscription management powered by aMember
• Gravity Forms form management
• WordPress powered Content Management System

Is there life after MobileMe?

About a month ago I received an email from Apple informing me that my MobileMe subscription was coming up for renewal. I’ve loved the services that MobileMe provides since signing up over a year ago, and had planned on keeping it going. But with the holidays coming up I decided to look into the possibility of dropping MobileMe while retaining the capabilities that it provides.

Turns out that it’s not only possible, but pretty darn easy to replicate most of the services MobileMe provides, for free. I’ll go through each service, in order of importance to me. Note: These steps were all taken with an iPhone and a mac, but similar options exist for PC/Other Phone users.

Cut the MobileMe tether

First things first. Giving up on MobileMe meant turning it off across all devices. It may feel a little strange at first, like you’re hanging free in the wind, but it’s a necessary step. After one final sync to make sure everything was updated, I created a backup of both my calendars and contacts. Then I turned off MobileMe on both computers by opening System Preferences > MobileMe and logging out. I also deleted my @me.com account from Mail.app and on the iPhone.

Note: Anytime you monkey around with your contacts and calendars, it’s a good, no – GREAT idea to create a backup first. Just in case.

Contact & Calendar Syncing: Google Sync

The ability to keep contacts and calendars synced across all devices (Mac Pro, Powerbook, iPhone) was the single biggest reason to sign up for MobileMe in the first place. Google provides excellent documentation on how to use their sync services, for all kinds of phones and OS’s. The article explained nearly everything I needed to get my contacts and calendars synced.

Contacts

To sync both contacts and calendars, you’ll need a Google account of some sort. I’ve got a Gmail account, which includes a contact list. If you don’t have Gmail, Google has an article on how to manage contacts outside of Gmail.

Once you get a Google Contacts account set up, open Contacts, and in the General section of the Preferences, select “Synchronize with Google,” and enter your account credentials. Do this across all of your machines. If your contact lists on each machine differ, there may be a period of time that you’re asked to review duplicates, or resolve conflicts. Eventually everything will be synced and you’ll no longer be bothered with these notices.

Update: Apparently contact syncing only works if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and have synced with Google before. Fortunately, Lifehacker has a workaround for non iPhone/iPod Touch users.

Calendars

Syncing calendars follows a similar path as syncing contacts, using Google Sync. You’ll need a Google Calendar account, and you’ll need to already have your local calendar synced with that account. Here’s an article from Google on how to sync iCal and Mozilla Sunbird with Google Calendar using CalDAV (and here’s how to do it using Outlook). I use BusyCal, a more robust calendar app for the mac that allowed me to sync calendars with G Cal before Google Sync existed. It’s also a great upgrade iCal and I highly recommend it.

Once you get all your calendars synced with Google, consider all your calendars synced. Add an event to any of your calendars, and in a short while you’ll see them across all calendars.

iPhone

To get contacts and calendars synced on the iPhone, this article from Google explains the steps I took to get the phone set up. Once you get the account set up, you’ll be asked to select the services you’d like to sync. I selected them all, and when prompted, chose to delete the existing information on the phone. If you don’t, you’ll end up with duplicate contacts and calendar events. If you didn’t back up your data in the beginning, this step may prove a bit nerve wracking. Back up your data first, then come back and turn on the syncing services.

That’s all it takes, really. Your contacts and calendars are now synced between all computers and your phone. For free. Sweet.

Email

Since MobileMe had nothing to do with syncing email between my iPhone and my computers, there was nothing to do here. I have numerous accounts set up through Spigot Design, all set up as IMAP accounts. They sync just fine to the phone via wifi and Edge (it’s a first generation phone). I’ve never set them up for ‘Push Notification‘ but emails often come in on the iPhone before my regular mail app. In a year and a half, I received a total of 3 emails on the .me account, all test messages from myself. Nothing to see here, moving on.

iDisk: Dropbox

Having the iDisk show up in the Finder sidebar is an easy way to keep things backed up and share files that are too big to email. Dropbox does the same thing, for free. Well, sort of free – The free account only includes 2GB of storage, while the iDisk holds up to 20GB. I’d been using Dropbox before MobileMe came along, so there was no switch needed as I didn’t use the iDisk anyway.

Gallery

The MobileMe gallery was another reason why I initially wanted the service. There’s no denying the design skills of Apple, and the Gallery is a great example. Easy to use and nice to look at. But I found myself not really using it. It doesn’t have the social aspect of Flickr, and it’s hard to get to unless someone knows the address. I wrote an article about how I was rethinking Flickr and MobileMe gallery options that might explain my thinking further. I used the gallery mainly to store pictures of the kids, and found that most of the visitors to their site preferred to stay on the site rather than be taken externally. I opted for a simple jQuery lightbox script that displays a slideshow on each individual post, and it’s been working great.

Bookmarks: XMarks

One small thing that MobileMe introduced to my world was bookmark syncing. I never really knew how important that was to me until it was gone. Fortunately xmarks comes to the rescue. Sign up for an account, download it to each computer, and your bookmarks stay synced. Xmarks for Safari installs itself as a preference pane item, and with a little configuring, I was able to let it do its thing pretty much in the background by disabling Growl notifications and taking the icon out of the menu bar. Xmarks for Firefox installs as a plugin and is set up in a similar fashion. Free free free.

Xmarks actually turns out to be a nice little upgrade over MobileMe, now that I can keep both Safari and Firefox synced.

Bookmark syncing on the iPhone is no longer done through the air, but I’m still able to keep them fairly well updated through the iTunes/iPhone sync. This isn’t an issue however, as my bookmarks are rarely updated and therefore don’t need up to the minute syncing.

Find My Phone

This is the one service I wasn’t able to replicate. There is an app called Undercover for the iPhone that allows for tracking of lost or stolen phones, but it costs $4.99. I’ve heard that this MobileMe services is the one that truly makes the $99/year worthwhile, but not for me…

Conclusions

MobileMe is an easy to use service with all the design and usability bells and whistles that Apple is known for. With a few extra steps, however, it’s entirely possible to have nearly all the services it provides, for free. There may be a day when I go back to MobileMe, but for now I’m getting along just fine without it.

What do you think?

Have you given up on MobileMe too? How has it gone? If you have any thoughts on this article, please let me know by leaving a comment below!

Bigtime site for Bigtime Jimmy

Jimmy Bigtime is the world’s most renowned and inept outdoor sportsman. So renounced is he, in fact, that he has his own TV series on the Outdoor Network. According to the network, “Miller is an enigma, wrapped in a mystery and tied together with a bow of awesomeness.” All I can say is enough said. Just go watch an episode or two and you’ll get the gist.

The Process

The initial design direction for the site was something along the lines of – ‘Jimmy screws up everything he touches, let’s make sure the website looks that way.’ Putting us in the strange situation of creating a website that looks like the neighbor kid did it, but functions like any top notch site. I think we landed somewhere in between.

Site features:

• Custom design
• Coded for search engine optimization
• E-Commerce powered by Shopp
• WordPress powered Content Management System

The latter has been my form plugin of choice, for its simplicity and flexibility. That is, until I heard about Gravity Forms.

Corralling Form Data

A client on a recent project requested two special sections on his site: 1. A page a user could leave feedback; and 2. A ‘Help Desk,’ where a subscriber could submit a trouble ticket. Both sections needed to be stored in the database and easily retrieved and reviewed. None of the form plugins I’d previously used provided this functionality. Gravity Forms came highly recommended from a few people on the Theme Hybrid forums, so even though it’s a ‘premium’ plugin (yes, premium as in I paid for it) I gave it a go.

For what I needed to use it for, GF has worked like a charm. Form submissions are stored in the database and my client can easily view, delete, or mark each submission as read. He can mark certain submissions with a star if he wants. There is also an export feature, with the ability to selectively limit the data fields, as well as a date range. The file then gets downloaded as a .csv file. For collecting data over a longer period of time, this is obviously far superior to tracking down hundreds of emails with one submission each.

But Wait, There’s More!

As easily as Gravity Forms has handled my clients request, this plugin actually does a whole lot more. Here’s just a few of the features, most of which I’ve yet to even play with:

• Dynamic Field Population: Save users time by automatically filling in fields
• Form Scheduling: Define a start and end date to a form
• Limit Entries: Limit the number of entries that a form can receive
• Respond to Entries from WordPress: Manage and respond to entries right from WordPress
• Autoresponder Emails: Send automatic responses to submissions
• User Created Posts: Allow users to create a post when the form is submitted

That last one makes me smile big. I can just see the possibilities: user submitted stories, job boards, lost and found submissions, etc. For a more complete list of features, check out the full feature list, or try out their demo.

Conclusions

Plugins such as Contact Form 7 have served me well for a long time. CF7 is still a great form plugin for those who just need to get notified via email when a user wants to leave a message. For those who need a bit more, however, Gravity Forms is the way to go.

But isn’t it too pricey?

For me, no. I opted for the 5 site license for $99, and it’s been worth ever dime thus far. The potential future uses for this plugin make it even more valuable.

For those who believe that since WordPress is free to use so shall all plugins be free, this plugin is not for you. Because it costs way more than a penny. And good luck finding this kind of functionality and flexibility out of any of the other guys.

What Do You Think?

Am I right? Wrong? Have you used Gravity Forms? Is there something better out there? Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas below!

Forecast for 2010: More Weather

The The Conrad Group is back this year for another set of calendars, for Colorado and Arizona. The overall design remained similar to last years calendars, with the same stunning photography and informative bits of weather information.

If you’re the wall calendar type, either one of these two would look stunning on any wall. Order online.

Chax 3.0

Chax comes to Snow Leopard

A while back I came across Chax, a great little add on for iChat that, among other things, allowed me to consolidate my AIM and Google Talk accounts into a single contact window. It’s never made sense to have separate lists for each account, so this little gem made iChat more useable, and ultimately allowed me to stick with it rather than using an alternative application such as Adium (I prefer iChat over Adium for the screen sharing feature).

When Snow Leopard came out a few weeks ago, iChat surprisingly reverted to it’s multi-window ways. Chax had installed as a preference pane option in Leopard, and it was simply gone. The reason why gets into 32-bit vs 64-bit stuff so here’s Kent Sutherland, Chax developer:

As many people have already found out, Input Managers do not load into 64-bit applications. They still function in 32-bit mode, but forcing everyone into 32-bit is obviously a subpar solution. Instead of using a passive system such as Input Managers, I’ve switched to using an application loader. This change has its pros and cons, but I believe this is the best solution for now.

Since iChat in Snow Leopard is a 64-bit application, the preference pane option doesn’t work and Kent chose to build a stand alone application instead. Great, let’s get it up and running!

Installation

1. The first thing to do is to download Chax 3.0. Kent has been updating frequently, so grab the latest version, which as of this writing is Alpha 4.
2. Once the Disk Image mounts, drag Chax.app to the Applications folder.
3. If you have iChat running, quit it and drag the icon off the Dock (if it’s there).
4. Launch Chax.
5. As Chax launches, you’ll notice it’s icon will change to the iChat icon. If you’d like it in your dock, drag it to your preferred postion. You can also right click and under Options, choose ‘Keep in Dock.’
6. Open the preference panel, choose Chax, and you’ll find this beauty:
   
7. If iChat is a login item, open System Preferences › Accounts › Login Items, add Chax and delete iChat. (This step may or may not be necessary).

A big thanks to Kent and his solid work on Chax. If you like it, be sure to donate. Happy Chatting!

No hate for Flash

Let’s start by stating that we’re not Flash haters. There’s as much to love as there is to find distasteful, but Flash is just a tool. If you look at some of our early Flash-based work, you’ll find there was nothing about those sites that really needed Flash. The animation was limited and relatively unnecessary. The effects used could just as easily been created with unobtrusive javascript. At the time, it was simply the way we built a site.

While Flash still has an important role to play on the internet, our focus has shifted. It no longer fits our design sense (and never really did) and it doesn’t fit with how most of our clients need to use the web.

A story to sum it up

Here’s a story that pretty much sums up why we don’t do Flash much anymore:

At our CSA end-of-season pot luck dinner last week, a conversation was struck with a fellow member. He and his wife had pulled up stakes from their corporate life and moved to Park City for a more relaxed lifestyle and to pursue a new business venture. His wife is considered an expert in her field, and they developed a solid plan on how to bring that expertise to a web-based business model. He explained the long site development process – over a year of thought and effort to get system just right. A large portion of that time was spent in designing how the site should function, perfecting the navigation, and streamlining the overall user experience. It took a team of 6 a little over a year, and the site was launched last April. The process went very smooth, and they are very happy with the results. The only problem, he said, has been the lack of satisfactory search rankings – and the resulting lack of business.

Since the site had been launched only 4 months before, I reassured him that it was probably only a matter of time before their search position picked up. High rankings do not happen overnight, after all. His concerns that too much of the site sits behind a members-only wall that the search engines can’t see should be mitigated by the fact that they have a regularly updated blog. Which should give ample opportunity to tickle the search engines fancy.

I asked him if the development firm had talked much about the coding process, or how it related to search engine friendliness. He couldn’t recall a conversation along those lines, but I still just brushed it off and reassured him that it was probably just an oversight. I told him I’d take a look at the site and let him know what I thought.

You can probably guess where this is going – Yes, the entire site was built within Flash. From the home page to the membership pages to the blog, it’s all Flash. There are bits and pieces of straight (search engine loving) html in there, but it’s too far and too few between to matter. Throw in the fact that there’s no doctype, limited metadata, the page titles are the same on every page, and the result is there is little for the search engines to see. Search engines still cannot see what’s inside a Flash based site. Technically speaking this means they cannot index this site. (Google is making attempts at better Flash indexing, but there are still best practices that need to be followed. From our experience, most Flash sites don’t follow them). So they don’t know what’s there. So they can’t point anyone to this site who may be really interested in what they have to say (sell).

The business model they have is solid. The website they’ve staked that model on, unfortunately, is not. Without a large and sustained marketing effort it’s likely that the site will never achieve results they are hoping for. All the time, effort, and capital, are potentially wasted.

You can’t get there from here

So what’s a business owner to do in this situation? Keep forging ahead with the mentality that you’ve come this far, might as well just keep at it? Or do you cut you’re losses and start over, with the hope that this time it’ll be done right?

There are others out there who will tell you that we’re full of it – that a Flash based site can be just as effective as html. Don’t buy it.

Research research research – then buy

For this couple there is no easy answer. I can’t say for certain that starting over is the right choice. It would have been better to have never gone down that path in the first place. Right there you’ll find your best bet – be as sure as you can that you’re making the right choices in the first place. Ask lots of questions – to at least 3 or 4 developers. Be certain that they understand your business and what you are trying to accomplish. Then choose the the one who understands the web – or more importantly the business of the web – and sleep well with the security that you’re in good hands.