carvingCode: carving unique nooks in the web™

Listened to Bob Edwards’ show on XM Radio this morning.  He interviewed Howard Gardner and discussed aspects of education reform.  Gardner was discussing his theory of “multiple intelligences”, which I’ve heard/read about some time ago, probably in graduate school.  One thing he said that struck me was his reference to teachers needing to “conduct the orchestra” when teaching. 

I’ve been thinking and designing my lessons like this for some time and now have a phrase I can use to describe what I do.

A classroom full of students is very similar to an orchestra.  Many different instruments which require different types of instructions in order for them to reach their ultimate potential in the particular piece of music.  How wonderful is that!

I’m mailing off a formal proposal to a client today.  I spent a lot of time on this, as I wanted to get it right.  Determining fees is a tough one for me, as I want to give value, but can’t give my time away.

Looking over articles and websites of other web designers, I know what the typical fees are for services.  Clients can have different views about the merit of specific fees.  Some understand; some don’t.  Clients won’t question a $75 an hour fee paid to their mechanic, but can question this same fee when paid to their website developer. I don’t blame the client, especially if they have had a bad experience with another web design firm; an all too often told story.

The fee I charge for a project is worth every penny.  The client gets more than they ask for, a true value in today’s business environment.

I just replaced the theme I had re-launched this site with just over a week ago.  That’s the problem with web development—it’s so easy to make changes that I find myself tweeking the site instead of doing other things.

While the previous site was fine, it wasn’t my own.  I bought a theme and re-worked it.  Nothing wrong with this; I often recommend reworking themes, but in this case—for my own site—I decided, after the fact (and over 20 hours of work), that it wasn’t the way I wanted to go.

Process

I started with the grid of the homepage and placed borders around everything so I could see the margins and padding.  The previous theme was a little too tight, so I designed in more white space and created a two-column design instead of three.  This give more room for the content and allowed me to increase the font-size a bit.

I then worked on the header region, creating a shorter space for the logo and site navigation.  I’ve enjoyed designs I’ve recently come across that minimizes space requirements for header stuff, allowing users to get to the real purpose of the web site quicker.

Main site navigation went through a few versions before deciding, again, on a minimalistic approach.  Many sites are using a tab-based navbar, so I decided to steer the other direction and keep it simple.  I then followed up by placing the site navigation in the footer region also.

The color scheme stems from the basic and white with the black moved a little toward gray.  For a third color, I originally used a shade of purple, but in the end opted for a brilliant blue.  As I’m using that is only a few places, it counters the starkness of black and white well.

Still to do

I’ll be adding a portfolio section soon, but I need to rethink how I want to present that.  I also may be combining the “articles” and “blog” sections as I’m not sold on having those independent.  Expanding categories and using them to selectively display content seems to be the way I’m leaning.  I’m also going to do something with the image region on the homepage, possible a little rollover effect which displays a color version of the image.