In a recession, it takes forever to get things off the ground. Clients take their time gathering (lots of brutally competitive) proposals, interviewing (lots of hungrier-than-usual) prospective design firms, calling back and forth with minute (and trivial) revisions to the proposals, and finally selecting the (perhaps-not-so-lucky) design firm to get the assignment. Then they go back and renegotiate all the terms of the proposal. Then they delay the start of work several times, put the project on hold several more times once it’s underway, and generally take lots of time to brood over every decision every step of the way. Once the project is delivered, they wait longer to launch, print, or build it. And then when you submit the invoice…well, you get the idea.

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the client: The Purple Monkey Boutique

the challenge: A new children’s consignment sale in North Alabama needed a website to provide shoppers with information and consignors with tools to make the selling process painless.

the solution: The fun graphics combined with great photography keep it upscale and funky. Consignors can log in and print tags for their sale items. Potential shoppers get a first look at what types of items will be available at the sale.

Visit the site

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I’ll tell ya, it would be nice to have a laptop. I’ve got an iMac, so I just packed up the computer in it’s original box (spectacular design on Apple’s part). It was heavy and a pain to move, but since I was there for the week it was worth it. I also included my external hard drive and the job folders I was working on.

Here are the things I’d recommend if you’re thinking about getting away for awhile, but can’t afford to take time off:

1. It’s completely worth it to get out of your normal routine, especially if you’re in a creative field like me. Even if you don’t feel cooped up in your work environment and it’s a pain to pack up everything you need, the change of venue gives you a whole new perspective on whatever it is you’re doing. Just do it.

2. Communication is key. Since I wasn’t taking the week off, I only told a few clients to be sure to call my cell when they needed me. The rest never knew the difference. This is where a smartphone comes in handy—I can respond to emails quickly, even if I’m not in front of the computer.

3. If you’re going to change your locale for a bit, you might as well switch your routine up too. Even though it was freezing at the beach while I was there I walked the dog in the morning, went out for lunch, and got a little shopping in. I tried to do as much work as possible after it got dark so I could enjoy the daytime.

All in all, it was a great week and I’m glad I made the effort to go. Especially since I’m having a baby in a couple of months and getting out of the house will be much harder for awhile!

Now, anybody got a mountain place you want to let me borrow?

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But then a little Google informed me that this guy had the same problem I did, and figured it out over a year ago. If you have this problem, here’s the solution.

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Unfortunately, the rescheduled trip was a terrible time to take vacation - the week before the actual Thanksgiving holiday, when everybody would be off, and right in the middle of a huge project. So instead of taking off, I just took work with me. The beach house had wireless internet as a feature, so I was counting on everything running smoothly.

And…it did. And as soon as I’m caught up on everything that needs to be done today, I’ll do a real post about it.

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Just now, on the radio, I heard a guy talking about Charles M. Schwab. Not the investment guy; the first president of U.S. Steel in the early 1900s. He  Apparently he was a superb businessman with a wild streak and a willingness to take risks.

The story (which I have not been able to find online yet - will keep you updated) was about a guy who came to Schwab, who at the time owned the second most profitable business in the U.S., and told him he could make the business more profitable. Schwab told him that if he were correct, he would pay him anything he wanted within reason.

The guy’s advice was this: Look at your to-do list for tomorrow. Number the items by importance. Now, whatever is number one, finish it before you more on to number two. Even if it takes more than one day, finish the first thing before you move on to the second.

As someone who has a few unfinished projects sitting around, that’s pretty stellar advice. For me it’s more personal projects than professional - if I’ve told a client they’re getting a proof today, I have no problem doing whatever I have to do to get it knocked out. But there is definitely an old door in my basement that’s been sitting there for six months because I started stripping the paint off and got tired. And in the meantime I’ve finished 100 other projects that could have waited.

So maybe I’ll apply this technique to my personal projects and let you know how it goes.

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My problem was this - I manage a client’s website that only partially uses Wordpress. The client had an existing photo gallery, but wanted it to show a list of categories in the sidebar. Say you just wanted to see photos of water features he’d installed; you’d click on “water features” and voila. Simple, right?

I found the NextGen Gallery plugin for Wordpress and it looked like just the thing. Not only did it support tagging images, but it also had Thickbox built in, included a flash slideshow, was capable of watermarking, and best of all: would import images from a folder and automatically create thumbnails to my specifications. I’d been manually creating thumbnails so this was a huge plus.

After I got the NextGen plugin up and running, I started tagging images—only to discover that NextGen doesn’t have a simple way to output tags into a list of links. It only uses the tags to perform a “related images” function on your other blog posts.

I did, however, find some helpful code in the Wordpress forums which helped me come up with the final product. A list of tags in the sidebar which load only those images when clicked.

So here’s the step-by-step:

1. Create a new page to help display your tagged images. Mine is called “tags.” The simpler the better. Paste this into the body of the page and publish/save it. This isn’t the main gallery page, but when you click a tag it is the page where the tagged images load. (I never said this would be pretty.)

[albumtags=]

2. Make note of the page slug and ID. My slug is /tags/, and the page ID is 46. (Because the newer WP versions make it difficult: here’s how to find out your page ID.)

2. Use this code to output the list of tags wherever you want it (courtesy of Eric Li). I inserted it directly into my template for the gallery page. However, if you install the Exec-PHP plugin, you can create a text widget and paste this code there for the same effect.

Show photos of:<br/><ul class="galtags">
<?
global $wpdb;
$results = $wpdb->get_results('SELECT name, slug FROM wp_ngg_tags');
foreach ($results as $row) {

echo "<li><a href=http://www.fathernaturelandscapes.com/nggallery/page-46/tags/";
echo $row->slug;
echo ">";
echo $row->name;
echo "</a> </li> ";
}
?>
</ul>

This outputs an unordered list of tags with the class galtags.

3. In the code above, change “www.fathernaturelandscapes.com” to your URL, the number 46 to your page ID, and “tags” to your page slug.

4. To make the “Overview” link work once you’ve clicked through to a set of tagged images, open the file nggfunctions.php and go to line 732. There you’ll find this piece of code:

<div id="albumnav"><span><a href="'.get_permalink().'" title="'.__('Overview', 'nggallery').'">

Replace the text ‘.get_permalink().’ with the link to your main gallery page. I also changed the Overview text to Show All. (This could be prettier - surely there’s some PHP that will point back to the main gallery page. I’ll keep working on that.)

And voila.

I couldn’t tell you exactly why or how it works, but it’s working for me. I’ll be happy to answer any questions I can in the comments; or feel free to leave advice on how to improve upon it.

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My requirements:

• A more commercial site than before. I need to do a better job of selling myself.
• A new color palette. I really liked the neutral/bright splash of color combo, but it’s getting dated.
• A real blog like grownups have.
• A client area so that clients can login and see progress on their projects. Hopefully more reliable than email.

So this is what I came up with. I widened the template and incorporated three columns. I’m using Project Pier for project management. It functions like Basecamp, but is hosted on my own server. I’ll let you know how that works out.

I’ve still got a few kinks to smooth and hopefully, more features to implement. I’d love to have a sidebar quote form, but I’d like to use AJAX so the page doesn’t reload on submittal. That will require some expansion of my current skills.

I begin any project by looking around for inspiration, and this one is no different. Here’s a list of sites that inspired me in one way or another:

Method Arts
Designsensory
Typechart
Andrew Bradshaw Media
fortuitous

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Looks like I was right.

Good Magazine went to a pay-what-you-want subscription model last month, and here’s the breakdown of their revenue since then:

Old Subscription Model (average 41-day period)
Total orders: 1,025
Average price: $20.00
Total cash raised for nonprofits: $20,500

New Subscription Model (first 41 days)
Total orders: 2,789
Average price: $13.49
Total cash raised for nonprofits: $37,624

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