Being Self-Employed

I've been self employed again for a few months. So I wonder if I have learned anything since last time. The biggest problem I had before I still seem to have. Time-management.

I became self-employed because I am an Adobe Instructor. I train maybe 10 or so days a month. A normal job wouldn't allow me to be a Instructor. So I fill the other part of my time with production work. This time around I paired up with a marketing firm downtown. I thought it would be good because they had nobody that did web. Well, it turns out, they don't even have a website themselves. Wow, yep in 2008 they didn't see a need. Amazing.

I also thought I'd be able to do some design work, but it turns out that he didn't want to insult his print designer and I am never going to be able to design there. Her designs look like print. Plain and simple she has never cut up a page for HTML so she has no idea what it takes to make a web page and it shows. We had a bit of a fight about her designs once because I mentioned I don't do tables. She thought I was a nut. You could hear the laughter in her voice. Amazing. She was laughing and looking down at me because I use pure CSS to lay out my web pages.

Lets say it didn't make me want to go hang out down there. They have a client that keeps me semi-busy so I just do the work from home. Again, turns out he didn't want me working at home and was expecting me to hang out down there so he could ask me questions and learn about the web from me. HA! Seriously thought I'd just hang out and work from there even if I wasn't working on his stuff. No thanks, my office is much more comfortable.

I still do some production work for the guy I train for, but none of it makes up what I made at my last contract gig. That was nice making that kind of money. So the question is do I help get more training gigs? Do I just market myself better? What do I do to get my career back on track without having to go back to work for someone?

The biggest issue I have is time-management. I tend to get up early with our 3 dogs, work for awhile, then take a nap. Then I get back up and do a few chores around the house. I get back to work and then get dinner ready. It seems that after 8 o'clock is when I really like to dig in and work. I sometimes work until 2 or 3 in the morning.

So I have decisions to make. Can I actually learn time-management? Can I be more productive? I like working for myself. I've become tainted over the last few years. Only getting a job at somewhere like Adobe would give me enough incentive to stay happy at a job. I do miss working with a team. I'm a pretty social creature. I look for my UGM and Community Expert friends online and I couldn't do that in a regular job, so I guess I'd better make it work is my conclusion.

Design for non-designers and developers

Alright, last time on KCWebCore.org/blog I went on a bit of a tangent. I started talking about fireworks for design elements, and ended up talking about CSS. It's hard though, because CSS is such an important part of design these days, it's hard to talk about one without the other. For this edition, we will just focus on design elements.

Fonts:
I want to start with fonts because there are too many designers out there using weird fonts for their mock ups. This throws developers off. I got an email from one today asking if non-standard fonts were the norm these days. NO, they are not! To many print designers are designing web pages these days. Designers who have never made HTML from one of their designs. To them... STOP IT. So I might as well start from the top and talk to designers and developers alike.

Everything that is text besides the company logo, and maybe some headers should be live. So, when someone puts together a mock up of what the page will look like, they should be using one of the 11 fonts that that are common to both a PC and Mac. Another thing to consider here, and this is indeed for the developers, is that all text should be included in your mock up. Why? So you can see how to design the page for more text. It could be greek text if you don't have real content, but the most important thing is not to have any anti-alias. For those who don't know what anti-alias is, it's where the program fills in the pixels to make it look like it's smooth. In a program like Photoshop, there is a setting in the Control bar to change it from Smooth, to either Crisp or none. That will make the text more like the text in XHTML.

Colors:
Colors are something us designers don't think anything about, but seems to be something developers find to be a foreign concept. My suggestion is to spend some time with Kuler. Kuler lets you easily pick from their favorites, or create on your own 5 colors that go together. So, you can have your main color and accent colors for your site super fast. No fuss, no muss. Of course, you will likely base those colors off a logo. Just think in terms of what will compliment the logo. Plus, all gray doesn't cut it. I've seen my share of sites that are just shades of gray. There are other colors you can use, not that an occasional gray doesn't work, just not all the time.

Backgrounds:
We'll start with a super simple background that looks great with fixed width sites. Take a look at MacCORE and you'll see a site that was made to go with a fixed width and has a background image that is 2100 pixels wide, by 20 pixels tall. In the CSS, the slice is first centered, then given a repeat of Y. We'll look at the CSS later.
This is a scaled down example of of a background color, with a white box centered. The box gets a drop shadow with zero distance, and about a 9 pixel size to make it stand out.

I'd like to take a second here and talk about other types of sites, and looks. We could have chosen an elastic or liquid layout for the page. Many developers like the look because the page expands with the browser. Sprint's site is designed like this. It is possible to make a site look good, and be liquid at the same time, but a little harder then a fixed width site. In my opinion, it's all in the content. If a site doesn't have a ton of content, but more graphics, a fixed width works best. It keeps the text from re-wrapping around graphics in an odd manner.

If a site has a ton of content, liquid works best. It is nice to use when a 1024X768 size is the target. For those with large monitors, they can decide how much text in on a line at a time. The design would be much different, so we can explore that next time.

Headers:
Some times, a header is just that, a header for the page with the logo in it. The one thing you want to avoid if possible is for the header to overwhelm the page. Not that you won't see many pages where it was a design element for the header to take lots of room, like on Pownce's site. It works for them because the login is also in the header and it's more important then the content to regular visitors. The initial pages information should always be visible above the page fold. That's when the page is viewed at the target size (800X600, 1024X768) in the browser.

On our sample site, MacCORE (a local Mac user group), I wasn't sure when I made it if we were going to put a login in the header, or on a specific page, so I know it was going to be a background image. The plus of that would mean I could use text over top of the image, have just the logo be on the page itself. That could allow for a better printed page because the logo would be the only graphic that prints. Keeping ink to a minimum.

Navigation:
This site called for a 2-column page with header and footer. Because I didn't want to take precious room for navigation on the side, our navigation is under the header. The main objective with the navigation was to make 1 button with an up, and an over state. The client wasn't sure what the wording would be, so it was important that the text be live text that could be changed at any time.

So I made them all the way across the page and experimented with width and text until I thought it looked good. The plan was to have the over state visible when the user was on that page to show them visually what page they were on. A easy bit of CSS makes that happen, which we'll show later in the series.

Breadcrumbs and secondary navigation:
With a set number of menu links, there needed to be secondary navigation on this site. I used a simple gradient for this. This could have been used for breadcrumbs instead of secondary navigation.

Content area:
For the content area the client wanted something more than just a white background. So, we had to include a gradient that went to white, which is our background color. This is a very important concept in design; allowing for longer pages. So we took a gradient and went from that color to white in a distance that would allow for a short page, or longer page. Our gradient here was just 350 pixels tall and 10 pixels wide. It was just a repeat of X, and not Y. We could have made it the same width as the page, but it would have been a much larger image, and the goal is always a fast loading page.

For the side pod this is just a colored box, so no graphic was used here. It is purely a CSS element, but next time I'll show how to make a good pod with rounded corners.

Footer:
The footer on this site is 100% CSS. No graphics here either. We decided on this just because we knew Apple needed certain legal information, and wasn't sure what else we might need in there.

Next time:
We'll look at some design choices for liquid layouts, and how to make pods. See ya next time.

Dee

Not blogging here as much

There are too many different places these days to blog at. What software to use? Where will the people who need this information find it? Will they care when they do? Twitter seems to be totally useless, but I find myself looking at what others are doing once or twice a week. But then again I am a geek. I only know 1 person well that is what I'd deem non-geek. How sad is that?

So, I have a blog on the UG's website (www.kcwebcore.org and we use Ray Camden's CF blog) that I normally use. Today I was directed here from Ted Patrick's blog after entering a comment. Hmmm. Why have I abandoned Blogger? So... I think I'll look into other examples of blog software/online solutions and see what others are using. I am going to bet right now, it's WordPress that gets the vote. Who knows.

So, my big dilemma these days is to break out of the designer mold and become a better at AS. Not that I wouldn't like to learn other languages, cause I would. I'd like to learn MySQL too, but I am l already certified in 5 Adobe programs, so why don't I just get better at the ones I do know. I teach Flash, but the designer classes, not the hard hitting AS classes. I've taken many AS classes before, but the designer brain in me can't seem to grasp the concepts. For instance, Methods have always eluded me as to when to use what in AS. Now it's true OOP, which I like, so it's time to woman-up and learn the stuff.

What gets me from the books out there, is that for designers, they try and use stupid analogies of People as the human class. Blah, blah blah. Give me an example I'd use? Teach me how I'd write my own darn code. I can follow along just fine. It's writing my own code that hurts my designer brain. I'll try and watch the Lynda.com videos. I'll try and read the books. I am so far behind it seems. I am glad I could only get so far in 2.0 now. I like OOP, so I am glad to use it instead. I like Flex and AIR. I've had training in both, and it makes total sense while I am sitting in the chair listening. It does. I am a XHTML hand coder. I love writing CSS by hand. What is the stupid mental block I have about AS? Who knows.

Countdown to MacWorld

It's Sunday morning and I am trying to remember why I didn't start packing yesterday. At least make a list of items. I don't think I even have Lisa's cell number. what a drag. I do know she is, we are suppose to be staying at the Holiday Inn. I need to write down all the numbers today.

My goal is to make sure I get there soon enough, at the registration, to get my pass and hopefully they won't be out of passses to the Power Tools conference, which has FlashForward. I'll cross my fingers and hopefully get into the Apple User groups University which already starts before I get there. I just couldn't get a flight sooner. Oh, well. Wish me luck!

I'll be taking pictures, conducting interviews, and of course blogging all week. Fun stuff to come.

Dee

Practical Web Design magazine

Lately I've been reading a new magazine, Practical Web Design. It's a magazine out of the UK, and I just love it. It's not for the hard core developer, but it is a nice blend of knowledge that not everyone will have. It comes with a CD wich has some really great stuff on it. Both Mac and PC solutions are used, which I love.

There are articles for designers and developers (well... developer to be) alike. Design, CSS, Flash, PHP and more are not only talked about but they have tutorials on things you'd use all the time. I think their intended audience is for the part time web person. Not necessarily for someone who does it for a living, but I'd say there is something there for you either way. For instance, there have been some great articles on RSS feeds, building a Flash aggregator and PHP lists.

I also came across the podcast from the magazine. The CD has it on there, but you can subscribe via iTunes as well. They are from Paul Boag, a designer who has his own design business in the UK and gives some great tips. I think they are bi monthly, but are usually about 45 minutes long. He also has some great podcasts at BoagWorld, as well as some fantastic book buying advice. I agree with pretty much all his favorite books.

There is a great section of 20 sites he finds interesting, and they are. Go take a look. I recently took a trip and listened to the podcasts on my way home. I was tired after my long drive, but couldn't stop thinking of ideas I'd gotton from these podcasts. Can't say everyone will gleen something from every single one, but I bet it'll get the creative juices flowing, which can be a wonderful thing.

Dee
KCWebCore manager

CFUnited

We (Ryan Hartwich KCFusion's manager, Doug Boude, his coworker Scott, and myself, Dee Sadler) will be posting from the CFUnited conference. There will be several different levels of skills and interests represented. I will be there in a "press" capacity and be attending the tracks for the beginning level. I'm really excited about some of the CSS and Flash related sessions. I've had one CF lesson so far, just a taste really, and I am ready to learn more.

Some of you may know if you attended the last KCWebCore meeting about the CF magazine I just helped design, Fusion Authority. It's a brand new magazine from the folks at House of Fusion and Fusion Authority. They classify it as a technical magazine and even I can say I've learned a little from reading it. I can imagine it's very helpful for those who use it every day. Lots of CF 7 tips and tricks. So, Judith, the magazine editor is letting me go to the conference to help with their booth and write articles from a beginners perspective.

Hear the interview podcast from ColdFusion Weekly. I think it's in the CF_Hotseat section. It just came out today.

We hope you join in here to get our thoughts on the conference. We will be posting every day, with pictures and the typical goings on, so feel free to post questions for us.
Thanks,

Dee Sadler
KCWebCore Manager