I’ve been so blessed with Debut Creative that I’ve never needed a website: I’m insanely busy though I haven’t advertised. I rank well and have never worked on my own SEO. Websites today are more important than ever, and I needed something to show my clients the kind of work that I do.

In the coming months a similar look and feel will be on this ArleyM website. Stay tuned!

http://debutcreative.com/

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.

You can see it here http://www.nipissingu.ca/prospectivestudents/

The other site I wanted to feature on this recent work post is a charity piece I did for the North Bay & Area Community Foundation’s Stache Bash fundraiser. This was a quick-turnaround site that had to be out the door in a couple of days, but it was a lot of fun. I even got to do some of the ‘manly’ writing encouraging men from my old community to grow moustaches for a good cause.

http://stachebash.ca/

With the launch of their redesigned paper we wanted to give the site a bit of an update too. This version of Independent is made with the Drupal CMS and is a lot more interactive for readers. I didn’t want to alienate the current reader base so I kept the redesign simple and familiar.

This is the first Drupal site I have made to this scale, check it out
The Kincardine Independent.

Today I had a call from the owner of a website looking for someone who could do updates to her site on a regular basis. I can sympathize with a non-geek that the idea of updating something so code-based could be unthinkable or intimidating. Rather than quoting on a maintenance contract I explained how tools like Adobe Contribute allow a relatively web-illiterate person to maintain their own sites!

While it doesn’t really grow my business at all, I hope it shows that I’m more interested in the clients ideal work-flow processes. It’s ironic, to do the best for the client I couldn’t make them my client… I got talking with this woman and learned that in the process of quote gathering other agencies were propsosing that she do an entire site redesign! While any site has room for improvement, this was definetly a needless upsell.

Here’s a lovely picture from a friends first day playing guitar hero. Somehow she missed the last note when in the red, failing at 100%. Neat!

Below is the video of my buddy Tim. He was commissioned to make a piece for a concert, and this is a video of him working. Pretty cool. I once collaborated on a collage with him called “America was there” or something like that…

Now A Daze from Pixel Flex on Vimeo

I have decided to take the time to say that my site will return to weekly updates in the second week in September.

In the meantime here is my newest web 2.0 profile; Technorati Profile. I have to post this link to activate the account.

Have a great summer… unless any of you have anything better to do.

It was an easy decision for me to skip the silly self-indulgent titles like “president” or “CEO”. I mean c’mon, it’s a one man operation (and I don’t intend on making it look like something it’s not). For me, even credible titles like “Creative Director” are also out the window since there is no one but myself to direct.

I have decided to delve back into past job titles I have had…

Graphic Designer (2002 – 2005)
Ah, my green days. “Graphic Designer” was so prestigious sounding! To me this is as massive a title in scope as “civil servant”. With so many outlets from print to media to web; these boots are too big – without focusing enough on the web aspect of my job.

I can remember my first time seeing my name with this title on a business card. Pretty cool. It was Mail Boxes Etc (and I had passed on the title “Manager” to have that title alone)

IT / Junior Designer (2005 – 2006)
By far the worst job title I had. I didn’t mind the Junior designer bit; I was a fresh face in Benjamin James Marketing Communications working with much more experienced designers. I hated the slash and the IT before it. IT is a huge misnomer, but I guess my higher ups wanted me to bear it for client reassurance or something. Aside from being the most computer literate in the office of 12, I have no qualifications for this title. Being “IT” has lead to many terrible (yet now somehow funny) stories of lost files, emails and time.

Even though I’m on contract with this agency still, AND the fact that hasn’t been my title since 2006, I was still called that today. Old habits die hard.

Multimedia Developer OR New Media Developer (2006 – 2007)
“Jack of all trades, master of none” is more like it. To me this title is also a sweeping stroke of a large brush. Being a graduate of Interactive Multimedia means that I am well versed in Audio, Video, Flash, dynamic web development and database design. Now with the emergence of Web 2.0 I feel that these facets almost go without saying. That said, I don’t think a Multimedia Developer should be expected to be a one-stop shop either. Each one of these disciplines is vast enough to easily fill a lifetime career.

To me this job title is begging clients for scope creep!

Web Designer (2008)
I have been keeping an eye on peers to see what labels we give ourselves. “Web Designer / Developer” is the one I see the most, but I find the slash to needlessly complicate the title. I don’t know any web designers who aren’t competent at reading and creating code on some level. Web Designer sounds so nice and simplistic. Yes, it involves multimedia, databases, CMS, RSS and a handful of languages; but the title doesn’t need to say all of that.

One of the most important jobs of the web designer then becomes educating his clients as to what it is he or she does. The job title shouldn’t have to do that in this industry – many clients are already intimidated by the internet. I think “Web Designer” is soft and approachable, while being universally understood and more practical than fun (but pretentious) made-up titles like “internet architect” etc.

It’s not the perfect solution, but I really like this title for now. The internet is always changing and evolving – as are peoples perceptions of it.

It’s been a very busy summer for me! I’m working on several larger sites that employ varius Content Management Systems (or CMS). One that launched recently was for PADDLE. This site has two parts, the public side as shown, and a private blog for members of PADDLE. These sites were built in WordPress which I feel has the most user friendly backend dashboard.

http://paddlenorthbay.ca/

Here’s to a productive summer!

Also in recent weeks I have been diving deeper into the world of CMS. With sites in Textpattern, WordPress and Drupal on the horizon it’s very exciting times indeed!

http://jakeandthefundamentals.com/