I decided it was time to retool my website and take things into a new direction. My web services are now targeting real estate agent websites and bloggers. Mainly I’ve been doing CSS XHTML work, but would like to get back into design a bit. If you know anyone that needs either, send them my way! Let me know what you think of the design change. I think Yellowstone had a little bit to do with my inspiration :)
As my business has grown beyond leaps and bounds over the past year, I’m getting more and more inquiries. Job requests such as database structuring and php work are becoming frequent, but I keep turning them down. Why you ask? For starters, I truthfully do not know how to write php, ruby or any other dynamic programming languages and really don’t have the desire to learn them. Secondly, it can create a stressful situation when outsourcing this type of work to contractors, especially if you only know the contractor through the Internet. Dependable programmers are rare and typically hard to find as well. While most web entrepreneurs advise me to make the big bucks, a web development company must embrace both the creative beauty of making a website as well as the functional side, I beg to differ. I think it’s important to recognize your strengths and continue to improve upon them. Some would say that you should try to improve upon a weakness - I wouldn’t consider programming a weakness at all - just an area of expertise that I do not have. Maybe when there’s a demand for back-end work I’ll add such a member to our team, but right now the numbers aren’t urging it.
If you are looking for nice high resolution photos or nice smooth vector images for your design work, I highly recommend istockphoto. It’s a great design resource and fairly inexpensive.
Today Tony suggested that I put in a nice scrolling javascript testimonial section on slicemydesign.com. It features a scrolling preview of all the testimonials on the frontpage. With a bit of javascript and some css styling from Dynamic Drive, I was able to provide a nice and simple display of all my thumbs up!