Come for the Ride…

As far as corporate blogs go, I would rate “customizing” a very low priority item. This is especially true since we only have a limited number of readers and EasyAutoSales.com, the main business, lacks a working beta for testing. Also in all honesty, people go to blogs for content, not their design; when was the last time you cared about how TechCrunch or TechMeMe looked?

However, since I’m not familiar with our chosen code platform and I can’t help in that department, upgrading and moving the blog was what I’ve spent the last few days on as I took some time to learn more about WordPress and everything that it offers. As of this post, our new home is now at http://comefortheride.com

Compared to Blogger, Xanga, TypePad, LiveJournal, MySpace and various other platforms, WordPress seems to be the blog platform of choice for serious bloggers who want to make money and host their own domains; cause well… personal domains = BIG time. For once, I am happy to say that I am not a first adopter and that hopping onto WordPress this late in the game had the benefit of using a number of templates, plugins and migration tools that made the customization and transition from Blogger to WordPress a piece of cake!

I remember back in 1998 when I first started blogging, I literally had to create my own platform, first from static pages and quickly thereafter via a database. Creating a look required even more work as I literally had to spend days in Photoshop working up a template and then cutting everything to work as a html document; bloggers sure have it easy these days. WordPress templates (free or paid) are everywhere… and installing them was also cake. Blogger.com unfortunately only had a number of templates available and being a visual person, it was unsatisfactory.

So with a little manipulation of the CSS file and some simple installation instructions, our new blog is now fully customized and most of what we cared about: SEO friendliness, custom look, RSS feed, transferring content, etc. were all setup without too much sweat. As I dig into other needs, I’m sure I’ll be pleasantly surprised with additional features that WordPress can offer to help. Let’s just hope I don’t go overboard with it.

On a somewhat related note, Google Analytics now offers new code on its admin console for tracking and reporting additional stats (ga.js). It’s unclear what more they will be reporting for now but if you’re a stat freak and want to test out their new features in the near future, it may be worth logging in now and grabbing the new html code to place on your site. Had I not upgraded our blog to a new domain that required new codes, I probably wouldn’t have remembered reading about this a couple of days back.

A couple of months ago, I talked about the importance of designing a website in wire frames. Now that we finally secured the design and the xhtml code, I can finally go into some details into the thought process behind the whole thing. By-the-Wei, if you haven’t checked out our old post, you should check it out and the link that’s associated with it. It will give you a much better idea of the information below.

Because our site isn’t officially launched yet, I will only cover part one of the design process for now. We feel comfortable disclosing this part because it actually looks like nothing like the final product, but maybe this will give you some ideas for your site while we wrap up our stuff.

Before we officially began the project, I did a quick research to see what web 2.0 design was about. Whether you think “web 2.0″ is a fad term or not, there is definitely something about the look of the new breed of websites that gave you a cleaner, more Zen like feel. Web 2.0 design is about balancing text with white space; it’s not about cramming as much text and information as you can above the fold to get the most out of your real estate. If you get a chance to check out many of today’s new start-ups, you’d get that feeling.

Some of the examples I’ve found… Oodle.com vs. Craigslist.org, Apple.com vs. MSN.com. When you go there, you see a distinct clear vs. busy.

Some other things I’ve noticed while doing research… web 2.0 sites are mostly about 960 pixels wide and most of them have a bold statement, text explaining the site. While our site will still be catering to people with 800×600 resolutions, future web logs will tell me if width expansion will be necessary.

The first mock-up our designer came back with was the above image. Like most of you are probably thinking, I too was wondering why certain elements are positioned the way they are. There just appeared to be so much wasted space around the logo; even if the goal was branding. Also, the bold line of text was new for me… new being uneasy.

I went back to the designer and insisted that we needed to do something about the prime real estate that was wasted up top. Even though I’m all for embracing web 2.0, some things as a biz dev guy, I just can’t let go of. Unfortunately, real estate is one of them.

The second comp the designer came back with was the above. This one was heavily influenced by me jamming my ideas and requirements into the mix. Since I didn’t understand the research section, we condensed the top to focus on just buyers and sellers. After all, we’re thinking that someone who comes to our site has a need… and we’re here to fill that need for speed (to buy and sell).

However, the second comp above presented a problem. Even though it crams more data together, we have two ad units placed right next to each other. Although this may be okay for some of our competitors… we felt that it would be unfair to our potential advertisers to be grouped that close to a potential competitor. So with that, we made a minor tweak to separate the two a tad bit.

This iteration of the design came out pretty well and it was something we stuck with for some time as we moved towards designing the internal pages. The next time we cover this topic, I will finish up with what we did for the home page and internal pages.

Time seems to be a luxury we don’t have these days. In between the day job, the Startup Weekend and my house falling apart due to a slow leak in a pipe that was finally found and resolved, I feel like we’ve lost a couple of weeks in between where I couldn’t focus on the project at hand.

So, where are we now?

Design - the design has finally been completed, which means I can now blog about the design process and tell you guys what we learned. Overall, this has been a lot less painful than hiring programmers so it was a great experience.

Web Hosting - for whatever reason, we’re still stuck here. We’re at a stand still between what we need vs. what we want. Also, because we feel like we need to scale up pretty fast in terms of storage, regardless of actual usage, this has been an ongoing issue of finding the affordable, scalable solution. Of course, our limited technology know-how of how to manage the cheaper solutions may be what’s killing us here. I think we’ll need to make the executive decision this weekend and just get something otherwise nothing will ever happen.

Business / Marketing - We have not had time to properly search and interview for our VP of Marketing yet. However, I did meet a ton of great people at Startup Weekend whom I can learn from. Will keep the search going for now…

As a desperate measure to gain some control in the matter of no communication, we decided to do a couple of things to resolve the issue of the missing designer.

1. We started shopping around for alternative shops that also provided image to code services and got a few recommendations from some friends and fellow entrepreneurs. Yes, we probably could have taken the time to do the work ourselves but given the time constraints, I felt it would have been money well spent to hire some professionals that could knock the project out of the park in a very short time. After all, the goal of this venture is to launch a business, it isn’t to make sure our team members can conquer certain technical skills just to say we can.

If you are designing a new site and desire xhtml code, below are some options for you we have found over the last couple of days. We did not end up using the companies but from the examples some showed us, they are great.

www.psdxhtml.com - very impressive portfolio, $89 per page, quick turnaround.
PSD2Html.com $153+ per page
xhtmlized.com $249+ per page

One important thing to note is that you (and these shops) can probably churn these things out pretty quickly if all you’re doing is one page. The value-add here is more for projects that have multiple pages with various differences in their layouts or maybe even complex layouts. Note: We did not get into details with these shops to know if they would charge more for complex layouts.

2. The second thing we did to resolve the issue was contacting Guru to see about getting what’s left of our escrow money back. The idea was to take the unspent budget and apply it to one of the shops above to finish the project or to get as close to it as possible.

Guru offered to mediate the issue and also contacted the designer to let him know of the refund request. If the professional did not respond with 5 business days, we would get the money back. Guess what? Within hours, the designer came back, responded to our inquiries and provided some sample pages for us to review.

Fancy that…

As it turns out, nothing bad had happened to the designer but he has been avoiding us due to lack of progress. Again, lack of progress was not what I was concerned about; lack of communication was. I had to explain that concept to the designer again but hopefully he’ll get it this time.

Sometimes as a graphic designer you just get stuck with a good color scheme for “the next big thing” website you’re doing. I get my block at times and I know plenty of artists who have the same problem. Anytime you can come up with some non-subjective tool that can help you get back in the groove, productivity is always helped. So, I give you the following tool:

http://colorblender.com/

Color Blender uses an algorithm to create a sample of 6 colors (the first is the one you give it) that will go together well in a swatch. This is the AutoMatch feature. You can also do a DirectMatch mode that will allow you to play with the colors once it AutoMatches for you. It’s not a tool that will change the world, but it might make your future web designs easier.