designmudd

I bought the macbook (black) maybe 2 months ago with the idea of using it for all my email, calendar, contacts, and for “emergency work” while i’m not in the office. The idea was that if Im in the office, my desktop is better because the cinema display is huge and keyboard is easier to man etc. BUT, then you start to get all comfortable on one machine.. so I began using the macbook pretty exclusively, launching all of creative suite, downloading new apps, etc. I pretty much pushed the keyboard on the G5 directly under the monitor as if never to be used again. I’ll tell you what though… you can’t work on these things. I still need the cheesegrater.

Why can’t you design on a macbook? Because. Not because of the screen, keys, not even because of memory or speed… well sort of. The reason you can’t is because of the intel chip inside. The Emulation is just really painful. The macbook with intel chip is fast, the catch is you really need to be working in universal apps if you want to keep the swearing down to a minimum. Not only are the emulated apps slow, the entire system freezes up or crawls when you’ve got emulated apps running. 1 app is doable, but beyong that forget about it. ..And I’m one of those people that absolutely cannot launch one app at a time.. I jump around like an animal. I need to be able to launch photoshop, acrobat and dreamweaver simoultaneuosly – is that really so much to ask for? or Photoshop, illustrator and word.

So who are we waiting on to make macbook exclusive? Well.. adobe is the big one, I need Creative Suite, and I need Macromedia Studio (assuming they keep it, at least dreamweaver). Microsoft Office … I have entourage running all day long, i think that kills my little blackie. I actually like word’s notebook view and spend alot of time there

So for now, i think it’s safe to say, design on an intel macbook is damn near impossible …. there’s just too much waiting around until they universalize these apps. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it will all be fast and good when they do… I run Bias Peak on here without a hitch to alter large audio files. I’ve putzed around with other universals like the adobe lightroom beta which has to be demanding on the cpu… it ran perfect. It’s the emulation, it sucks and I’ve experienced it firsthand. So my advice to my fellow designers is, stay at your desk, keep grating that cheese until adobe and microsoft say you no longer have to.

So thought i’d stop in. I’ve been on a different kick lately – being on the computer has been feeling like “work”. So I’ve been off it, keeping myself busy with anything & everything else. I’m on a woodworker kick – I’m about to tackle a coffee table from scratch. I’ve been a mechanic – just yesterday actually I gave back my Wrangler lease. Sad day indeed, i took pics before bringing back, i should post those here. Ah, the wrangler – i felt one with the road. Now i’m in my crappy ‘94 Jetta – but crappy in a cool way. I do like it, I especially like the small bill. So ‘94 Jetta = Mechanic. I’m gonna tackle the spark plugs and timing belt this weekend.

That’s about it – work’s been good. We moved into the new space, it’s still a bit messy. The move is good, let’s me not think about work once i leave it. Before I was just too close to the office. Work/play, it all blended in too much. Got good separation right now.

Hopefully i’ll be posting pics of my new coffee table soon. Until then.

I’m starting a list of position titles for Web Design/Development, or Graphic Design in general. If you’ve got something to add to the list, please comment. Thanks, you’re the breast

And yes, I’m putting in the photographers, writers, editors, and so on. Anyone who belongs in a firm.

Level 1
• Partner
• President
• Principal

Level 2
• Art Director
• Chief Designer
• Chief Programmer
• Creative Director
• Director of Marketing

Level 3+
• Copy Editor
• Designer
• Graphic Designer
• Editor
• Information Architect
• Internet Application Specialist
• Interactive Designer
• Interactive Developer
• Interface Designer
• New Media Designer
• Multimedia Designer
• Production Assistant
• Production Artist
• Programmer
• Photographer
• Usability Engineer
• User Interface Designer
• Web Master
• Visual Designer
• Web Designer
• Web Developer
• Writer

Fun Names
• Pixel Pusher

You’ve heard it before and I’ll say it again, when you submit your site to search engines, you should shy away from auto submission companies that promise you top listing on all the major engines. In fact, it’s the major engines that you want to submit manually. Free Web Submission’s homepage provides a list of the top engines as rated by alexa. When subitting your website you wanna basically hand submit those top 5 engines… Yahoo, MSN, Google, About and Open Directory which refers to DMOZ. The rest of those engines are not nearly as important at those top 5, however it can never hurt to have more incoming links to your site. So you might consider auto-submission to cover those and only those, but what you need to be careful about it that you have control over the list of engines to whom your sending. I say this because you don’t want to re-submit to those top 5 engines as they’ll tag you with spamming the engine and penalize your site. Personally I stick to that form on the bottom of that same Free Web Submission Site and I make sure to uncheck Google and Alexa. Alexa is also one that I hand submit btw. Beyond those, I find that my sites make they’re way just fine into all the other little engines out there once I get listed into some of the bigger ones. So my submittion routing is Yahoo, MSN, Google, About, DMOZ, Alexa, and the list on Web Site Submission minus Google and Alexa. Enjoy!

I’m on Firefox (mac) and have had some trouble installing the toolbar – but wait, there is a solution… right click this link and “save link as”. Save it to your desktop. Once you’ve got the file, all you’ve gotta do is physically drag the file on an open firefox window. Viola, you’ve got Google Toolbar.

Simple Viewer is a pretty awesome photo gallery. I’m building a couple sites that feature a gallery like this… I was basically pulling my hair out trying to find good tutorials or ready-made movie clips that I could tailor into my site (because I’m not as good at flash as I’d like to be). Hopefully I’ll get their eventually, but no better way than to look at good files and deconstruct them. In the Meanwhile, I bought the sourcecode for this simpleviewer MC and that definately speeds up the process of what needs to be accomplished. It was only $50, not too shabby. And there’s a free non-sourcecode version as well. Enjoy!

SELF SEO has a tool very simliar to Overture Tool, but better. It’s faster, breaks you down to searches per day, and also gives you worktracker results in addition to overture results. Give it a try.

Last night I bumped into Andre Chaperon’s Marketing Newsletter. Some Great info there and I’ll begin visiting often. Of note was his most recent entry Google Sitemaps Tutorial for WordPress – Get GoogleBot To Visit Your Site In Under 60 Seconds!.

As Andre says, THIS IS HUGE. I did this google sitemaps stuff on 2 of my sites last night and as advertised, those googlebots are their visiting your site within seconds. At first, I went straight to the google sitemaps site and was a bit overwhelmed by all that I had to do, BUT, if you watch the little video that Andre prepared, it’s very very simple. There’s actually a Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress (V2) which makes this process honestly just a few clicks. Check out the article, drive more traffic, and enjoy.

SugarCRM has got to be the most complete opensource project I’ve ever seen. It’s a web based Customer Relationship Manager which let’s you track your clients, projects, leads, sources… it’s all there. At first glance it seems like way too much, BUT as you play with this system, it very easily allows you to deactivate fields, tabs, alter the setup and so on. I’ve been using it for only a day, so please don’t understand my post as being the end-all be-all solution… more of a “Wow, i just stumbled on to this and it seems incredible”. I’m currently plugging in all my clients, projects, users, altering the applications layout and so on.

I’ve been involved in many discussions lately of finding a suitable CRM. I think the biggest problem in trying to find one has been we’ve all been calling these systems Content Management Systems when in fact there not. Content Management is a system to edit content. Customer Relation is the key.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. Enjoy!

UPDATE – I signed up for an account here but was very disappointed with the service. It’s nothing more than linkfarming which does very little for your site in terms of both ranking and relative content. My advice on this topic is to simply stay away.
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For the past few days i’ve found myself entirely caught up in SEO, Link Trading, and hooking in RSS Feeds into my sites. Basically I’m caught up in generating traffic. I have a good handle on optimizing sites to be search engine ready through use of Clean Document Structure, CSS, Meta-tags, Alt-tags, Title Tags, keyword rich content and so on. I also understand that a constantly growing document library is what makes sites big search engine players – the sites need to be constantly changing and constantly added too. What I didn’t realize to this point is that there are places (sites) where companies, people, organizations actually trade links at a very high volume. For instance, I’ve stumbled this site called Link Market. I signed up and all I can say is “Why the hell haven’t I known about this”. Well, I shouldn’t say that I didn’t know about link trading, but what I didn’t know was there was such a great place to do it and i’m sure there are more. We’ve got some big players in here, I think that’s the biggest surprise. There are sites in there with Alexa Rating of 200, 1300, 33,000 < - that's just a few that I saw, but point being they're high and they'll raise my rankings. So why am I so excited about this? Because this is the part i've failed to realize about SEO. See, I think I understand SEO just fine, I prepare the site and it's optimized and ready, but that's not enough. Engines Raise your rank based on your popularity - reciprical links. Of course content is very important too, but if you've got lots of good high ranking sites connected to yours, it will raise you. I think i'm definately seeing the light here and I'm thinking this is another one of those services to throw into the mix... Websites that actually bring in visitors. Christian was talking the other day about how he's studying and getting a grasp on building dynamic websites and how he's had more firepower with that, another tool, something that set's him apart from the rest - And I agree 100%, Dynamic is in Demand and that's where the money's at -> not to mention is just more interesting in general. But this is no different, we figure this out (this SEO business) and we’ve got ourselves jackpot… Dynamic Sites that actually pull in clients. Shopping carts that’s actually bring in Clients. Sky’s the limit and i’m feeling stupid about not knowing this already.