Monthly Archives: February 2009

Project 1up: The Launch of Debut Creative

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I’m entering my third year of freelance and contract work with my business identity Debut Creative, and the website still looks like this.


Yes, as a web designer and developer it is incredibly ironic that I don’t have a proper site. I have rationalized it in several ways:

  • I’m too busy with paying work

  • I’ve never needed to advertise at all, why start now?

  • I love irony

At the same time my colleague, long time friend, and business rival Tim Lum has an equally un-website for his studio PixelFlex.

Tim and I have a friendly competitiveness going on (despite the fact that we routinely subcontract to each other), so we have decided to take part in this years CSS Reboot. Essentially we are going to completely overhaul debutcreative.com and pixelflex.com respectively and launch Alpha on May 1st 2009. At the same time we are going to release “before” shots of our sites as they are before the reboot, along with some site traffic / popularity statistics.

After one year (May 1st, 2010) we are going to compare numbers again. Whichever studio site comes out on top in terms of popularity, wins! The losing studio will then donate time to the charity of the winners choice. We’ll have more details a little closer to the date.

This is a friendly and competitive way for Tim and I to pit our SEO and marketing wits against one another while hopefully finishing the sites that we may otherwise never make the time for.

The Pressure of the Internet

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This past weekend as a part of celebrating our two year wedding anniversary, my wife and I turned the house into a rustic resort. For two days we had no lights, computers, internet, video games or TV. We used only kitchen appliances and music. It was very nice, and more relaxing than the average long weekend.

When we did return to civilization I booted up my laptop and found it doing one of its classic moves: not connecting to the internet for absolutely no reason. With this came the return of some familiar feelings toward technology.

This lead me to some interesting thinking about the internet and what it represents in my life. I find with daily internet use come some pressures. I feel a need to be up on the latest content on my regularly visited sites; news, social networks and emails. Looking back I’ve been feeding this monster daily (with the exception of some vacations.

This information craving can’t be all that healthy, so I’ve decided to have more computer + internet-free days. Preferably at least one a week.

If you agree, high five! Here is one of the results of one of my constant content-hunting;

The Perfect Storm of Romance

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This last week was an avalanche of wife-oriented special days. It truly was a perfect storm. In addition to our anniversary and Valentines day we also celebrated her four month pre-birthday. This year she turns 30. Rather than let her get all secretly worked up about the next paradigm of “old age”, I’m hyping it up with pre-birthday surprises on the 10th of every month for the six months preceding the big day. We had some fun. Surprises included treasure maps, waffles, and skating at the local rink which I had rented out (as a result I can barely hobble 3 days later).

Though we celebrated on the weekend, today is in fact our two year wedding anniversary. Happy anniversary baby, I love you!