[thelist] Redoing a site's design from the grounds up (LONG)

[Susan Wallace]

Hi Stef,

I have been following the thread and interestingly, about the time you
posted this I was struggling with some of the same questions.

To answer your original question:
>I've noticed that the more a site looks professional, the less people tend
>to write to its owner to congratulate/comment/criticize.

I would have to agree - the sad thing is in my case, I get more comments
from the site I slapped together that holds together a certain community
than I do for the one that I agonized over for weeks with trying for it to
be "professional". However, one is for fun, the other is to make money, and
most of my business is word of mouth and based on portfolio.

I started thinking about this because my "business" site is very boring and
dated. My business is web development, and when I built the current site
(about 3-4 years ago - I've been doing this particular job for 7 years), my
intention was to attract businesses that wanted more to their site than
just "Here is my dog, send me some mail, you can have this item if you mail
me your CC number"..  and to let them know that IMHO it's not possible for
_one_ person to be able to do every single piece of what goes into a site
and do them all WELL - the way I work is to realize my shortcomings and
hire sub-contractors. It has worked well for me.

I also use my domain for other things  - I am a drum circle facilitator and
needed to post information about drumming, so I have that on my site in a
sub-folder. You would never know that from the main page - it's not what I
do to make money, it's what I do for fun... but because of what I do for a
living, I am able to produce a reasonably professional/accessible site
about drumming, although it looks nothing like my business site...

My struggle is with the business information - I have a portfolio, I have
some articles, and some others on the way,  the standard "About us" BS, and
I have a fairly popular site among a specific community, in short - a
heterogeneous mix of things that I would like to somehow incorporate into one.

Someone here has a site (I think it's rudy... could be wrong) where they
show off their talents with CSS and other things, and specifically point
out that "Yes, I can do these things, but I also have clients with a
diverse audience who still need me to use the most common items, even
tables" - and that's exactly how I feel - I realize the worthiness of being
a current developer and keeping up with the latest, but also the reality
that not every client needs a site with the latest CSS and no tables, or
the flashiest graphics - and I still have yet to find a client that says
"Money is no object, hire the best designer in the business and then you
build the back end." I am not all about constantly playing around with new
stuff because I have other things to do - I'm not a super geek but I know
most of what's going on, and that I need to learn Table-less CSS, but I'm
lazy. ;)

SO - is it a "bad thing" to mix a business site with some personal
interests? I'm not talking about "Look at my cat", these are all community
building related things that I do in addition to what I do to make money.
I'd be interested to see how others have handled the fact that they do run
a business as a sole proprietor and work from home or a very small office
without a staff. Do you "pretend" to be a company, or just have a business
name but the site is all about you as a coder/designer/etc?

I have about decided that since my portfolio is a bit stagnant right now -
I have long term contracts - that it might be advantageous to me and others
to do a blog-type main page (because it's easy for *me* to update) that
would outline different projects and some of the obstacles that come up,
possible solutions, resources where I found the information etc. Not
because I have some kind of thing about writing everything down, but since
it is so hard to explain to someone what goes into what I can do for them,
it might help the terminally bored to see how I think - maybe it will help
someone else, or maybe it will prompt them to hire me to help with their
issue - either way is Ok with me.

Wow - this is really getting long - I'll shut up now.

Any comments on some of these other cans of worms? ;)

Susan Wallace