(We wrote the book on WordPress. Well, a book, anyway.)
Click here to get your tickets! Don’t wait too long; the event sold out last year and it’s almost certain to do the same this time around. I’ll be talking about Business Blogging for Non-Writers & we’ll be giving away copies of our book as well. Hope to see you there!
Last year we did a round-up of the apps that make it easy to run a design company on the fly, and it’s high time we updated that list. Some things have changed, some have stayed the same, but one thing’s for sure: we’d be lost without these!
Part 1 of 2 (Matt will post his in the next few days).
Jessica’s list of must-have apps: I work exclusively on a Mac (well, two, actually) so these are all Mac-friendly.
Mark Wyner‘s presentation on Experience Design As the Sum of Its Parts was fantastic, and we liked his tattoos, too. It’s nice to be in an industry where tattoos are just part of the everyday and not something to be hidden, furtively, like a pvc fetish or a penchant for furries. At our last “day” job, we found ourselves deeply resentful of the fact that we had to keep the tattoos on our ankles covered. Now that we work for ourselves, our intricate Tengwar runes (that’s Elvish, for the less dorky among us) are free to see the light of day, assuming said day is not drenched in rain. And isn’t that what web design is really all about?
Mark Wyner’s presentation had very little to do with tattooing (or being a big dork, although he did compare the internet to ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books) and more to do with the way design and development can learn to work together to create a more useful and comprehensive whole. Basically it comes down to Information Architecture, Visual Design, Interface Markup and Functionality holding hands and playing nicely together to create sites that are not only pretty, but also functional, easy to maintain and accessible to a wide variety of consumers.
We’ve been devouring information about accessibility and semantic markup lately, so this session was particularly topical. We’ll link to the slides once we upload the pictures from the “good” camera and can decipher the URL on his closing slide. Seriously, you’d think that all those notes would have included that one vital bit of info, but you’d be wrong.
Technorati Tags:
webvisions, portland, web design, mark wyner, experience design
WebVisions, here we come! We’re ridiculously excited to be spending the next couple of days hanging out with the best of the web. If you’re in the Portland, OR area, head on over!
Technorati Tags:
webvisions, portland, web design
CouldBe Studios is finally live! We’re crazy excited. There might be dancing involved. We promise nothing.
Building this site has been a bit of a comedic adventure in Why Designers Should Hire A Designer. Despite all our proselytizing about keeping things simple, when it came to our own site we found ourselves trying to cram it full of every idea we’ve ever had. Seriously – the first iteration of the site practically did your dishes for you. And then, inevitably, we’d hit a wall. Pound our keyboards in frustration. Let the site sit for a while. Each time we came back to it we cut it down a little bit more, but there was still too much information and too little breathing room.
Finally, about a week ago, we started over. Clean slate, blank page. We had a brainstorming session in which we wrote down the three most important goals of couldbe studios: being able to offer affordable, quality design to people who don’t think they’ll be able to hire a designer; making accessible, standards-compliant sites; and providing complete identity solutions to small and home-based businesses. With those three things hanging out all by themselves on a piece of notebook paper, we went back to designing our site – and we knocked the whole thing out in a little over a weekend. Go, us!
We’re sort of glad it took so much work to get the site going, actually. Now that we know exactly what our clients are going through, we’ll be even better at helping them through the design process. And it is a process, you know? Getting from Point A to Point B isn’t always a straight shot.
So, yeah. Have a look at couldbe studios. Drop us a line if you want to hook up with a new site or a spiffy logo. And enter your name and e-mail address in the form on this blog to get our newsletter and stay on top of our latest happenings.
The couldbe studios site: almost live. Want to be notified the moment it’s ready to go? Sign up for our handy-dandy newsletter. There’s a link in the sidebar. Nothing is stopping you.
Jumping the gun on our main site launch is the unveiling of our newest service. That’s right, folks – couldbe studios is already producing offspring. Can it be long before we start talking about diapers and preschools?
Like I was saying: Buzzverb launched today! Buzzverb is the answer to your prayers, assuming you pray for good copywriting. Who doesn’t, really? We’re excited, because it means we can flex our writing muscle for creating more than just code.
Since November is National Novel Writing Month, and in honor of our auspicious launch, Buzzverb has decided to bring you 30 days of links to the best writing resources on the web. 30 links in 30 days! Whether you’re doing NaNoWriMo or not, this isn’t something you’ll want to miss.
Well, Webvisions 2006 has come and gone.
For CouldBe it was an eye opening experience. Our creative juices are now overflowing with ideas sparked by the seminars.
You can see some of our pics from the event here.
