It’s not a routine. I do something different everyday. It’s 2 miles away from home. Cool coworkers. Bosses are my friend’s parents. And flexible hours.

A joint project by Jordan and I, Indie Read is a site producing reviews on indie rock albums as well as sparingly reporting on industry news.

Check it out.

I just ordered the (gs) plan from Media Temple. I’d pretty much given up on shared hosting after trying many, and receiving terrible service. (*ahem* eleven2, dreamhost)

Client: J&G Automotive
Website: www.jandgautomotive.net
Work: Design, content creation, photography, management.

This is a site done for my local mechanic. We basically brought his business online and opened up a new channel. The yellow pages are outdated nowadays (who still reads that?). It’s how he’s been advertising and now he can just send people to a website that lists all of their services.

I’ve always had a hard time when it comes to selling a website. The problem is POTENTIAL. Have I gotten the most out of a website that I could have? Is there still potential left in it? And if so, can I reach it?

I’ve always sold my websites when I felt like there was nothing more to be had in the niche. Maybe someone else could take it to the next level, right? Selling a website does not work like selling cars/houses and other things, because you can’t just “sell when the demand is high”…You sell when you don’t see a clear future for it anymore. Will the niche die down in a few months? For examples, proxies are generally sold before summer comes because traffic is literally dead come summertime (in comparison to the rest of the year).

Style Ignite has a great article on 8 tips to remember before designing your next site.

I feel that the most important thing before setting out to build/design a website is to know your niche. It’s very likely that someone else has thought of the same idea before you and has it published on the net already. In fact, it’s highly likely that your niche is polluted with competition. This does not mean that you cannot produce some sort of success. (Just take a look at how many web proxies are out there.) “Knowing your niche” means that you know who the big time players are, the audience they go after, and why they are doing so well.

My CTO mentioned that it seems like there are 75 “web 2.0″ templates out there and people just change the colors and text around for each new site. Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t “designers” harbor their creativity and just make something nice. The rise of flamboyant colors, images, and white space is great for many sites that target the new generation. But how many 30+ people like it? 40+? Have you ever asked someone other than your 18 year old web design buddies? If you take a look at BaseCamp and CentralDesktop’s websites. It’s clear which is more of a simple web 2.0 application, and which is more of an enterprise level application. If you are building a website that targets grandmas who want to organize photos *ahem*, don’t use bright colors. You are just hurting their eyes. Their eyes are tired. They just want to lay down and drink tea and eat the scrumptious crumpets that they baked in the morning.

The next point, is noticing what your competition is doing. Look at their landing pages and product tours. They may not be the very best executions, but their success *might* be attributed to how well their campaigns are converting.

Search Google for some news, comments, reviews, etc on your competition. See what their users are saying. Learn from their mistakes. Find out why people aren’t using their services and figure out how you can capture those users.

Here is a good article titled, Stealing Business Away from your Competition.

I’ve recently been using a TOPS legal pad. It’s one of those classic yellow pads that normally people use the first 1-2 pages of and never touch again. It looks like this.

Our office has a stack of these in supply and I’ve taken to using them as a way to jot down my thoughts and list things to do with brief details. If you are a busy person like me, several thoughts are running through your head at any given time and I feel that this is a great way to not lose anything that might have been useful or important. Not everything I write down is work related. Sometimes I will just list something that I need to do when I get home (such as putting on my windshield wipers since it is going to rain these next few days).

Forget online lists such as 37 signals’ Ta-da lists. It is applications like this that are the epitome of web 2.0 uselessness. Keep it simple stupid. Pen and paper is all you need. You can glance over at it anytime. No need to open up a new website, log in to your account, and type some shit in that you will never check later. By then you’d have been fired.

I’ve never been much of a partier but this holiday season was pretty daft. I didn’t really get into the “spirit” this year.

Anyways, I just figured I’d throw another useless, waste-of-time-to-read post out there because soon we will be updating our blog over at Central Desktop to wordpress. Rather than just overwrite the old installation of simplephpblog and lose all posts, links, and pagerank, I proposed installing it in a new directory (/blog).

The bosses liked it, and suggested that everyone who works here write a blog post at least once a week just about our jobs, the industry, and other interesting mojo that relates to running a successful software company. One thing that CD as a company has not done too well is build that huge web 2.0 reputation that 37 signals has done. This is one reason why BaseCamp seems so much more popular than us. The fact that 37 signals developed RoR can only help this. They also had a 22 month head start on us and focus more on the VSB’s, for example, a small team of 2-5 working on one web project. CD targets the SMB’s, maybe a team of 5-50, or more. As a platform, CD is very robust and flexible. It’s a lot more difficult to “outgrow” CD than BaseCamp. Anyone who has bothered to try out both softwares will know what I’m on about.

I will admit, when I went in for my interview, I thought CD was basically BaseCamp, just not as popular. You could say that working here has inflicted some sort of bias on me, but the truth is that no product really can be directly compared with us. It’s sort of like this. You could compare a Honda S2000 and a Mazda RX-8 directly - many have done so and it’s accepted that the RX-8 is simply a four door, four seat alternative to the S2000. You could also compare the RX-8 to a BMW 3 Series sedan, but you cannot compare the S2000 to the BMW 3 Series. I’m not entirely certain the importance of this post, but it’s some nonsense to get me back into blogging mode.

Today is day 1. I like this job so far.