Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

New Client Site: JAPitts​.net

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

J.A. Pitts is an upcom­ing author with Tor Books. The first book in Pitts’ series will hit book­shelves in sum­mer of 2010. Black Blade Blues is an urban fan­tasy about a black­smith in Portland who smiths by day and moon­lights as a prop mas­ter in the inde­pen­dent movie scene by night. Pretty soon, the black­smith finds out that a sword she owns may be a very impor­tant sword of myth and leg­end. Then all hell breaks loose. Also, dragons.

The idea with this design was to evoke the feel of the book, which has the black­smithing ele­ments, as well as a Norse mythol­ogy ele­ment. The scarred wood is rem­i­nis­cent of a well-​​used work­bench, and the mast­head includes the sword and a blacksmith’s ham­mer, mak­ing the con­nec­tion very implicit.

If you are inter­ested in dis­cussing free­lance work with me, con­tact me through the Clockpunk Studios site. Or drop me an email. I’m always look­ing for more projects.

Now Open for Business: Clockpunk Studios

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Clockpunk Studios is now open for busi­ness. After sev­eral weeks of fit­ting in among the rest of my projects, I’ve finally got­ten the site to the point where I feel com­fort­able in doing a “soft” launch to my read­ers and friends here at the ol’ per­sonal blog.

I still have some lit­tle things here and there to work out–like most any web­site, it’s a work in progress. If you notice some­thing that looks obvi­ously bro­ken, I hope you will please let me know. If you do, please tell me which plat­form and browser you are using so I can nar­row down the problem.

How are things dif­fer­ent from my nor­mal mode of oper­a­tion? Not that much. I have a rolodex of other free­lancers to pitch in and help out if nec­es­sary, but for the most part, Clockpunk Studios is me. I’m expand­ing my adver­tised ser­vices with this site, and I’ve tried to present it all nicely with a good portfolio.

So if you’re look­ing for a web designer, I’m avail­able at rea­son­able rates. Even if you’re not, you could help me out by blog­ging about this and link­ing to the site itself. And if you used the phrase “web­sites for authors” or “web­sites for writ­ers” as your anchor text to help me build my google juice well, I’ll love you for­ever. If you’re an exist­ing client, I’ll give you a $10 credit to your account for blog­ging about the new site. Just shoot me an email with the link.

This rep­re­sents a whole new level of ded­i­ca­tion on my part towards free­lanc­ing. It’s scary, but thrilling. I can’t wait to see where this leads.

On Getting Your Content in Front of People

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Smashing Magazine, a great web­site deal­ing with all things web design, had a really great arti­cle the other day titled “10 Ways to Put Your Content in Front of More People.”

Not all of these ideas are applic­a­ble to everyone–some are quite specif­i­cally techy.  Most cre­atives don’t really need an Adobe Air app on someone’s desk­top, and they don’t need to cre­ate an API or wid­get (although wid­gets are often pro­duced for authors by larger pub­lish­ers.  I don’t know that they get used by fans much, but they do get made).

However, the basics, like Facebook, Twitter, guest posts, and more are all very applic­a­ble meth­ods.  Using mul­ti­me­dia is still some­what rare in the author cir­cles I fre­quent, so it’s open for some real inno­va­tion.  Book trail­ers are just a start.  I’m work­ing with one client on some­thing that takes advan­tage of all these options.  More on that when it’s done.

My approach for my author clients is that any read­ers of their online media pres­ence are poten­tial read­ers of their books.  But I don’t have them treat their online pres­ence as a giant adver­tis­ing plat­form for those books.  No, the key to get­ting more peo­ple to look at your con­tent, above all else, is to write com­pelling con­tent.

There are tricks to mak­ing your web con­tent more com­pelling when it’s in a blog style for­mat.  The specifics of those tech­niques I save for my con­sult­ing clients.  In gen­eral, pay atten­tion to the kinds of posts that go viral, get retweeted and linked all over.  And match those post styles, but within your own niche.

Of sec­ondary impor­tance, after the con­tent, is estab­lish­ing a good niche and thus an iden­tity.   If you main­tain a niche, cre­ate a solid iden­tity (and thus some author­ity), and write in a link­able and web-​​friendly for­mat about com­pelling sub­jects, you’ll grow read­ers like crazy.

As many blogs out there as there are, peo­ple are always look­ing for some­thing new that grabs them by the throat.  Something that edu­cates them, or titil­i­ates. There are a lot of ways you can be com­pelling.  Hell, we all strug­gle with that in the non-​​online types of writ­ing we have to do.  But it’s not enough to just blog about your day and your word count, or your lat­est pho­tos.   It’s fine if you don’t mind what your audi­ence size is online, but if you’re inter­ested in build­ing a fol­low­ing, you have to take it further.

That’s what I’ve been try­ing to do with these posts, appear­ances on pod­casts, and so on.   And to be nice about all of it.  I gen­uinely enjoy help­ing peo­ple with this stuff, and shar­ing what I’ve learned.  So the extra read­ers are really just a bonus on top of  the main motivation.

Forcing Creativity

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Some will tell you that it’s not pos­si­ble to force cre­ativ­ity, or that the results from “forc­ing” cre­ativ­ity are sub-​​par to the work that “just hap­pens.”  I’m here to argue the opposite.

For some cre­ative folks, such as myself, sit­ting around wait­ing for inspi­ra­tion to strike, for the mood to be right, and for the stars to align is a recipe for get­ting jack shit done.  We will write off our lack of pro­duc­tiv­ity by say­ing some­thing like “I just don’t have any­thing to say” or “the muse isn’t with me today.”  I’ve used both of these excuses even recently to myself.

Hogwash.  The truth is, noth­ing moti­vates me more than a dead­line that has some teeth to it.  A good exam­ple was the Federations anthol­ogy.  I knew about it for months, and I had pid­dled around with a cou­ple of ideas.  Nothing really set­tled out, though.  The dead­line was lit­er­ally 48 hours away when, the idea of los­ing a good oppor­tu­nity to sell work to a favorite edi­tor hit me.  I didn’t want to miss out on an oppor­tu­nity like this, and that was before I knew which lumi­nar­ies of the field are in the book.   With that dri­ving me, I wrote “The Culture Archivist” and sent it to first read­ers.  Got it back, revised it again, and sent it to JJA.  It went through some edi­to­r­ial revi­sions, and then it was in the book.

The truth I must admit to myself is that I am a cre­atively lazy per­son at times.  I want it to be easy.  And it’s not.  It never gets any eas­ier.  You just get bet­ter at it.  But you still have to over­come the same iner­tia that was there when you first started out.  That takes a com­bi­na­tion of willpower, and if you can man­age it, discipline.

This holds true for every cre­ative endeavor  of mine, whether it be pho­tog­ra­phy, writ­ing, or design.  The hard­est part is just get­ting started.  And you have to force your­self to start.  Because if you don’t even get started, you’re not bloody well likely to fin­ish it, are you?

Force your­self to cre­ate using any means nec­es­sary. Some of these might work:

  • Ask your spouse or sig­nif­i­cant other to with­hold sex until you fin­ish.  Double motivator–you’ll want it done and your spouse will be really encouraging!
  • Go on a bread and water diet until you reach your ini­tial goal. (Do not do really do this, seri­ously.  Eat healthy.)
  • Use an inter­net block­ing pro­gram when you work on the com­puter.  These are usu­ally time based, but I sus­pect that 4 hours or so with­out the inter­net will get some­thing writ­ten and/​or made.
  • Instead of the stick, try the car­rot.  Promise your­self a $50 shop­ping spree if you fin­ish the work, or a night out for dinner.

External forces have always been the best moti­va­tor for me, but with many projects, there’s no exter­nal force.  As a free­lancer, I don’t have a boss beyond the client, and the client isn’t always moti­vated them­selves to fin­ish the project.  So it’s impor­tant for free­lancers to learn to self-​​motivate.

A desire to cre­ate some­thing great is often not enough moti­va­tion.  Sometimes, you have to prod your­self into get­ting started.  But once the ball is rolling, it tends to stay in motion for as long as you can afford the time.  For me, the sin­gle best thing about cre­at­ing things is los­ing myself in the process.  Time becomes mean­ing­less and my left-​​brain takes a nice long nap.  Call it what you will–the zone, in the moment, or some­thing else– it’s one of the great­est rewards of being a cre­ative per­son.  That plea­sur­able expe­ri­ence is almost rea­son enough to make things.  The fin­ished prod­uct is just a bonus sometimes.

What are some meth­ods you use to moti­vate your­self when you have the desire, but not the will?  How do you keep your­self on task?  Share your meth­ods with us.

Tomorrow, I will talk about strate­gies for mak­ing time to make things around a busy life.

How to Communicate the Importance of a Modern Web Strategy to Skeptical Clients

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My col­lege pal, artist, and teacher Ed asked last week:

I belong to a pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion of teach­ers that has been slow to embrace inter­net tech­nolo­gies. I am inter­ested in propos­ing improve­ments to their web­site but I am unsure how to com­mu­ni­cate the ideas. What for­mat­ting do you sug­gest for a writ­ten pro­posal to an organization?

I’m going to broaden the topic a bit, because the answer to your last ques­tion is, I don’t know, and I wouldn’t try to con­vince an orga­ni­za­tion with a writ­ten pro­posal. In my work, which is pri­mar­ily done for indi­vid­u­als and not orga­ni­za­tions, I only write pro­pos­als to make it clear what we’re going to do after we’ve dis­cussed it. I do the con­vinc­ing before I write word one of a proposal.

In my expe­ri­ence, you’re not going to get very far with a prospec­tive client, or very far with con­vinc­ing your orga­ni­za­tion to update their web­site, if you haven’t sold them on the ben­e­fits. The eas­i­est way to do this, in my expe­ri­ence, is to start with hav­ing them iden­tify and acknowl­edge a problem.

For exam­ple, “we’re not get­ting any leads from the web­site.” Or, “I keep get­ting email about how hard our web­site is to nav­i­gate.” Management or the client can deal with con­crete specifics. They have goals, some­times ones that they don’t even know about, so your task in early meet­ings is to iden­tify what those goals are and then explain how an updated tech­nol­ogy can solve those problems.

Problems and solu­tions may be a good for­mat for a writ­ten pro­posal as well, if you’re still deter­mined to go down that route. Provide the prob­lem, and describe the solu­tion. Relate these solu­tions to the over­all goals of the com­pany. We should improve X because it will cause Y, which is good for the bot­tom line. Or whatever.

Explaining why cer­tain tech­nol­ogy is bet­ter than oth­ers, or why a web­site shouldn’t look like it was built in 1997 can be more spe­cific and dif­fi­cult. One thing I try to explain early on is that web­sites are about pro­ject­ing an image. Your web­site should reflect the image that you wish to con­vey to your clients, cus­tomers, what­ever. If your website’s image is that of an old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, that might not be in line with your organization’s over­all strategies.

There’s a lot of resis­tance to change in the world in gen­eral. Change is costly, it’s hard, and it doesn’t always result in improve­ments. I can under­stand com­pletely why some peo­ple might become resis­tant to change because of that. How you con­vince them oth­er­wise is no dif­fer­ent a task than con­vinc­ing a per­son of any­thing. Listen to their objec­tions, con­sider them, and describe how you will over­come them.

Hopefully some of these basic strate­gies will help you, Ed. If worse comes to worse, find a com­pet­ing web­site that does it bet­ter, and pull up the two sites side by side, and let them stare at it for five min­utes. Then ask, “any ques­tions?” I’ve never tried that before, but I wanted to at my last day job. Let me know how that goes if you try it.

How about the rest of you? How would you approach a skep­ti­cal boss or client that a web­site or other tech­nol­ogy needs to be updated? Do you have any suc­cess sto­ries or hor­ror stories?

Crucial Freelancer Skill: Estimating Your Time

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

In my busi­ness as a web designer, the first thing a client often wants from me, after we dis­cuss their project,  is an esti­mate.  For me, this is purely a mat­ter of esti­mat­ing how much time a pro­posed project will take.  But that’s not as easy as it sounds.

As I advance in skill, some projects tend to take longer.  They look nicer, but they cost more.  And that’s some­thing I failed to take into con­sid­er­a­tion on my most recent project.  I’m going to eat quite a bit of time because I over­stretched myself in the design and cod­ing phase.  It took me quite a few hours longer than I had esti­mated with the client, and I still have a cou­ple of promised com­po­nents to go too.  My mis­take, cer­tainly not the client’s.

Another mis­take I made was not doing my site pro­posal process.  In my site pro­posal, I out­line the dif­fer­ent aspects of the process and how many hours I think it will take for each area.  I named a sin­gle fig­ure for this rush job, and didn’t put enough time into eval­u­at­ing the job.

Every mis­take is a learn­ing oppor­tu­nity.  Here’s what I’ve learned from this project:

  • Always do a site pro­posal doc­u­ment first.  Setting the scope out in paper makes it clear when, if the client requests some­thing that isn’t in the pro­posal doc­u­ment, it will cost more.
  • Take into con­sid­er­a­tion that you will take more time as you become a bet­ter designer, spend­ing that time on lit­tle details that make a design go pop.
  • Research the tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­ity of fea­tures before you offer them and include them in your designs. (oops)  Otherwise you can end up burn­ing hours of your own time try­ing to fig­ure out if some­thing is even possible.

It’s been a long cou­ple of days this week, but this project is nearly done.  I’ll do some train­ing tomor­row and fig­ure out that last bit of tech­nol­ogy when the com­pany I con­tacted writes me back.   I’m look­ing for­ward to adding the project to my portfolio.

Now, to take a break for a cou­ple of hours and rest, before div­ing back into another project.

Previous Advice For Author Websites (and some new)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This week, we con­tinue our trend of answer­ing ques­tions from read­ers.  Right now I have enough ques­tions to get me through at least another week of posts.  So BlueTyson asked in the post of ques­tions last week:

Not for me, obvi­ously, but ‘here’s how to con­sider doing a site about a book/​author’?

I have writ­ten about this sub­ject in great detail in pre­vi­ous entries, but it’s been a while since I’ve done so.  I’ll break things down into a few points, with links to pre­vi­ous posts:

  • First of all, hire me.  I’m avail­able, I work at a rea­son­able rate, and I know author web­sites well.  Some of my clients include Mike Brotherton, Jay Lake, Rudi Dornemann, Shannon Page, and more.
  • Plug out of the way, read this post: 10 things your web­site should have if you’re an author.
  • When con­sid­er­ing hir­ing a pro­fes­sional or even build­ing it your­self, I’ve writ­ten this arti­cle advo­cat­ing for good, standards-​​based design:5 Reasons Why SF/​F Author Websites should be (more) standards-​​based
  • At one time, your web pres­ence was pretty much lim­ited to a web­site and a blog.  Now, we have microblog­ging sites such as Twitter and social net­work­ing sites such as Facebook.  It behooves the seri­ous author to main­tain a pres­ence on each one of these services–basically any­where you might have fans, you should be.   One of the things I have started doing is, rather than just build­ing a web­site for an author, I attempt to develop a com­pre­hen­sive online strat­egy for them to develop an audi­ence and to main­tain their read­er­ship.  It’s about build­ing rela­tion­ships through the tools that are out there.  Your web­site is impor­tant, but it’s no longer the only impor­tant thing.
  • That may sound like a big time com­mit­ment, and it can be.  A good exam­ple is Twitter, which can suck up time like noth­ing else.  But you don’t need to post to Twitter 50 times a day to be avail­able and acces­si­ble.  Y0u need to answer ques­tions directed at you, make a few new com­ments each day, and respond to direct mes­sages.  Share your work, your­self, and your inter­ests on these ser­vices.   One thing I do is make man­ag­ing all these sites cen­trally very easy but installing plu­g­ins into the con­tent man­age­ment.   No longer am I just the guy who builds the web­site.  I also help you man­age all these tools.   A good designer/​developer/​web mas­ter will do so as well.

Remember: like any other busi­ness, you should think about what pur­pose a web­site serves, and what are your goals.  Everything about your web­site should reflect those goals.  It could be as sim­ple as “to sell books” or it could be com­pli­cated like “to share what I know about web design, pho­tog­ra­phy, and writ­ing. Also, cool links.  Also, to show­case my pho­tog­ra­phy and my designs.  To build read­ers for my fic­tion, but in gen­eral to make friends out there.”   Okay–so that vision isn’t very coher­ent, and could use some focus­ing.  I’m work­ing on that.  In the mean­while, you’ll still get every­thing but the kitchen sink.

Bragging Rights: My Clients Rock

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

SF Signal /​ Blogs​.com recently ran a list of the 10 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Author Blogs. I just wanted to say that 2 of the 10 are my clients, Jay Lake and Michael Brotherton.  Woot!

Don’t worry, though, I don’t have any illu­sions that their pop­u­lar­ity is based on my designs.  They’re get­ting atten­tion because of the fan­tas­tic con­tent they write with­out fail each week.  These guys are good writ­ers and blog­gers.  So go check out their sites if you’re not read­ing them already.

jQuery Experiment: Looping Clouds Header

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m work­ing on a new design for this website–one that shows off my skills as a designer a bit bet­ter, and so on, to help secure the job.  In doing so, I’ve been build­ing lit­tle exper­i­ments to teach myself new tricks.  I thought I’d share this lit­tle trick with you today.

Experiment: Clouds

The idea started out pretty sim­ple– I just wanted to loop some mov­ing clouds.  But as I thought about it more, I wanted it to be more and more arti­fi­cial look­ing, like an old stage set.   I’ve got a lot of fea­tures I need to add, but the basic the­ory is there.  You can view source and see exactly what javascript I’m using to move things around.

Don’t bother look­ing at this with IE6.  The trans­paren­cies won’t work.  And yes, the pngs make file sizes kinda big, but I real­lly wanted the trans­parency effects. It’s an exper­i­ment, like  I said.

More later!

How Can Your Computer Help You Write More, and Better?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The title is the ques­tion I’d like you to think about, my writer friends, estab­lished pros, aspir­ing authors, and any­one who car­ries a torch for the writ­ten word.    What could com­put­ers and tech­nol­ogy do to make the writ­ing life eas­ier for you?

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1.  I’d like (and am think­ing about build­ing) an online sub­mis­sion tracker soft­ware that’s as easy to use as Gmail and that can actu­ally rec­om­mend mar­kets to me for pieces.  I’d like it to track key­words asso­ci­ated with my work.  And after I sell a piece, I’d like to keep track of what rights I’ve sold, where to, and have it sug­gest reprint oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­sider.   In addi­tion, the site would pro­vide detailed sta­tis­tics on mar­kets, with graphs, culled anony­mously from user data.

2. I’d like this same soft­ware to track my head­count progress and help me set goals.  I’d like it to graph my pro­duc­tiv­ity, and com­pare it against the aver­age user of the site.   I’d like a sim­ple script to add to my site that will act as a word progress bar that updates itself auto­mat­i­cally based on what I enter in my software.

3. I’d like to be able to actu­ally load my sub­mis­sions into these pro­grams.  Then I’d like to tell it where I am sub­mit­ting next, and have it auto­mat­i­cally for­mat my cover let­ter and story in the pre­ferred for­mat and present it to me for printing.

4.  I’d like to be able to set a queue for each story, so that when a story is rejected, and I enter it into the soft­ware, it read­ies it for the next loca­tion auto­mat­i­cally.  Basically, automat­ing my workflow.

What else could your com­puter do for your writ­ing?  And yes, be fore­warned that I may bor­row your idea as a fea­ture for an appli­ca­tion I’m con­sid­er­ing building.

So what are some prob­lems you’d like to see solved?