“When we’re starting a new project, I’ll first meet with one or two people. I try to keep the meetings small, especially when we’re doing product design. If you have eight people in the design meeting, it doesn’t work. Everybody has an opinion. Everyone wants to weigh in on what the font should look like. The end product becomes the average of eight opinions. You don’t get excellent work, just average.”

- Justin Kan, Justin.tv  from the article The Way I Work Inc. Magazine July

I felt like trying out a new look for my site but I didn’t want to lose the one I had.   So I thought I would leverage all the same pages and just create a new stylesheet and a method of selecting which style to use.  Then I thought, I’ll just create a random stylesheet selector as that would just be cool to give people a few different sides of Chase Nelson.

So I began with javascript:

<script>

function chooseStyle() {

var css = new Array('1','2','3');

var i = Math.floor(Math.random()*css.length);

var style = "style"+css[i]+".css";

return style;

}

document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.chasenelson.com/wp-content/themes/default/'+chooseStyle()+'" type="text/css">');

</script>

That  works just fine but it will randomly select a stylesheet every time a page loads.  So as you navigate through your site it doesn’t maintain the same stylesheet.  So I decided to store my selected stylesheet in the session so that if a user comes to my site they will experience the same style for the remainder of that session.

I also decided to switch to PHP because I remembered immediately how to store session variables and I wasn’t using any other javascript in these pages:

<!-- Randomize stylsheet -->

<?php

if(isset($_SESSION['style'])){
$style = $_SESSION['style'];
}
else {
$styles = array('style1.css', 'style2.css', 'style3.css');
$style = array_rand(array_flip($styles), 1);
$_SESSION['style'] = $style;
}

?>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.chasenelson.com/wp-content/themes/default/<?php echo $style; ?>" type="text/css">

Seems to be working well.  As usual there is probably a much easier way to do this… Let me know if there are any improvements that you see.

I was beginning to get annoyed at how long the twitter search was taking and then I was redirected to a page with this:

I can’t be mad now. That’s a funny visual. And, they told me what was going on. Sure, I’ll look at the pretty picture and laugh and try again in a moment.  Adding a little personality can go a long way.

I like to get people fired up in the work place.  I like when the positive energy is palpable and teamwork is turned up to 11.  I decided to make some motivational posters for the work place that will hopefully remind everyone that we enjoy what we’re doing, we’re good at it, and we’re not going to let it be boring.  I went on my merry way crafting some images hoping to print them as posters.

That done, I perused about five “Make your own poster” sites.  A few sites immediately turned me off because they did a lot of things I didn’t need like adding text or touching up my image.  They didn’t do a number of things I expected them to do: provide a good preview of what my poster would look like, let me know if any resizing of my picture had been done, were they adding a border to my image.   I wasn’t going to pay money if I wasn’t sure what my final poster looked like.

I landed on PosterBrain and, within two minutes and with under 7 clicks, I had my poster finalized, paid for, and on its way for next day delivery.  I received personalized email confirmations, when I emailed them with a question they responded within a minute.
This company is a fantastic example of finding a specific need and focusing their efforts on what is most critical to fill that need.  They aren’t printing t-shirts, coffee mugs, toilet paper: just posters.  They don’t have image editing tools to make your picture look like a water color painting, they don’t let you add text on top of it.  Good.  I don’t need those things.  There are 50 free apps to do those things. All they do is take your picture and turn it into a poster.  They sprinkle on stellar customer service and they’ve got a winner of a website.  One I’ll pay to use again and again.

All too often, web companies focus on the number of different features they offer and lose sight of solving the specific problem they initially set out to solve.  Know what core problems you’re solving for, maintain that focus, and your customers will thank you.

Thanks Poppy!  Thanks PosterBrain.

I’ve been a long-time reader of Signal vs. Noise the blog of software company 37Signals. Recently, I picked up their new book Rework and was immediately enraptured by their advice to ignore the real world:

“That would never work in the real world.”  You hear it all the time when you tell people about a fresh idea.

This real world sounds like an awfully depressing place to live.  It’s a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always lose.   The only things that win are what people already know and do, even if those things are flawed and inefficient.

Scratch the surface and you’ll find these “real world” inhabitants are filled with pessimism and despair.   They expect fresh concepts to fail.  They assume society isn’t ready for or capable of change.

Even worse, they want to drag others down into their tomb.   If you’re hopeful and ambitious, they’ll try to convince you your ideas are impossible. They’ll say you’re wasting your time.

Don’t believe them.  That world may be real for them, but it doesn’t mean you have to live in it.

excerpt from REWORK

If you’re ambitious and hopeful, you’ve most certainly been confronted by this “real world”; your excitement crushed by pessimism in the workplace; your ideas dismantled by naysayers preaching failure as a certainty. Stick to your guns and to your ideas.  Start surrounding yourself with people who share your ambition and hope.

If you’re not sure how to do this, I suggest you start with the following:

• Start an aspiring-entrepreneurs meet-up in your city or attend an existing meet-up ( I recommend meetup.com)
• Identify one friend who shares your ambitious and hopeful outlook and work with them for a few hours a week

Instead of sapping your creative energies and your confidence, the ambitious and the hopefuls will aid in focusing your ideas, creating momentum, and recharge your creative batteries.

While you’re at it, read the great book: REWORK!

Shame on you WordPress!  I upgraded my WordPress version on BlueHost using SimpleScripts and all of my customizations have disappeared into the black hole of cyber space.

Fair enough.  That is the final straw.  I will now endeavor on building my own blog.  Something I started doing a number of years ago and never finished.  We may be looking at a repeat but I’m feeling confident and dangerous.  Much of this maverick persona is the same reason that I didn’t back-up my files before upgrading versions.  Throwing caution to the wind is the only way to learn quickly.

Wish me luck and please weigh in on the question du jour:

CodeIgnitor

OR

Ruby On Rails

You essentially have 5 minute to respond…I’m starting pretty much now…

ChaseNelsonDesign is a one-man shop (me). Since high-school, I’ve worked on and off as a hobby helping friends by building their websites . Three years ago I attempted to make that hobby my only source of income by choosing the profession of freelance web developer. I fell a bit short as my initial clients never got their start-ups off the ground leaving me with nothing of a portfolio and a very inconsistent and marginal income. At the time, I had all my eggs in only one or two baskets and I was able to maintain that freelance business for only 6 months.

In that experience, I was a horrible salesperson and an equally bad negotiator. On having identified two potential clients through referrals I made no attempt to market myself via the web or otherwise. The terms of both of my contracts didn’t guarantee me any money up front and left me very little if the site was never ‘pushed live’. With nothing ‘in the funnel’ and very little cash I decided to turn back to the 8-5 workplace and regroup.

I haven’t returned to a life of full-time freelancer but I still hone my craft and business skills taking on occasional web development work. My latest project launched at the end of the summer and I missed my opportunity to announce it. So here is my self-promotion piece of the week:

You should really check out my latest web development project here

I look forward to your feedback!

After my initial post regarding Horizontal Navigations I recieved a lot of good feedback on alternative methods to accomplish the same thing.

A very simple (and apparently very well known) method is to use conditional commenting. If I were to do it again I would implement conditional commenting to dictate one style for IE and another for non IE browsers.

Thanks all for the feedback. For those looking for there own solutions here is a good introduction to conditional commenting: quirksmode.org