Pedantic Webspaces is pleased to announce that starting in January 2011, Troy will be leaving his post at Avanti Computers to work for Pedantic full time.

This summer has been our busiest and we feel that our service quality has suffered as a result. By dedicating his time to Pedantic Webspaces fully, we will provide faster response times, a greater attention to detail, and an overall better experience for our customers.

Our passion for online marketing is stronger than ever and we want to use that to help your business succeed.

Over the coming months you may notice further changes at Pedantic. If you’re interested in staying abreast of these changes, we invite you to sign up for email updates. Your email address will never be shared with anyone.

To sign up, please visit http://eepurl.com/Zno-

Thank you so much for your continued business and support as we grow.

The other day I was reading Smashing Magazine, a fantastic resource that any web designer should consider a must read, where they had a wonderful article about planning your web project right from the start. ( See Starting Out Organized: Website Content Planning The Right Way )

It was in that article that I learned of Jumpchart. Jumpchart is an easy to use project management solution for web designers that combines the best features of a wiki with a streamlined interface geared toward web developers. It makes it easy for me to sit down with a client, plan the content of each page, and organize them in a hierarchy without any unnecessary mucking about.

They have a free trial account that lets you kick the tires, and I highly recommend every web designer give it a shot. It is going to save me a lot of time and effort and is easily worth the cost of the subscription.

Picked up a job doing some branding for a local non-profit which will be fun. While I enjoy the challenge of integrating a site’s design with a company’s current brand, you can’t beat the feeling of designing someone’s identity from scratch; To place all their ideals and attitudes in a few colors and geometric shapes. ( Okay, sometimes it isn’t so geometrical. ) I can’t wait to get started on it.

Finally, I am making great progress on a network management database project that has sprung up. Besides giving me a greater understanding of SQL ( which is never a bad thing ), I hope to integrate it with real time network monitoring tools running outside Access to really give the project a depth of purpose. Hopefully I will get to show it off in the next few weeks.

That’s it for tonight. Have a good one all.

Otherwise stayed pretty busy today. I managed to squeeze in work for three clients. We’ll be blocking off all of tomorrow for a fourth, which hopefully will have me caught up enough to have some time off this weekend.

Oh yes, and we also hope to record another podcast tomorrow night. Both Jessie and I have been really busy this week, but we both want to make an effort to keep the ball rolling. Once we establish some consistency, I hope we can start to grow our audience.

While I agreed that the style was a poor choice for his business, my chief concern was the text. It was presented in paragraph form but it was so bunched together it was a big, low contrast, wall of mush. It is so important to present your content in an easy to digest way, especially on the web where you may only have someone’s attention for 10 seconds.

This client recognized that something was wrong because the overall look and design was antiquated, but would they have noticed if the design was clean and modern, but still had bad text formatting? Maybe something would have felt “off” but they can’t quite put their finger on it.

The next time you wonder about how you’re presenting your text, use my “Wander” test. Read the text, and pay attention to how often your eyes wander or stray away from the content. If you do it more than once every other paragraph, you probably need to change your formatting. Likewise if you find that you have to reread a section of text to understand it, your eyes may by giving up on you and looking for something they can grasp.

Aside from the updated look, we’ve improved the site’s expandability and functionality too. Take this blog as an example. It is now built upon the ubiquitous WordPress framework, using a custom theme ( my first for WordPress ) that unifies it’s styling with the rest of the site. This not only makes it easier for us to do updates, but also provides a tried and true comment system to boot.

In addition, we’ve included more detailed information about the services we offer, as well as a Frequently Asked Questions section. We’ve also made it easier to access our Twitter page and our joint podcasts with Dynamic Networking Solutions called Can You Tell I.T. In short, anything and everything you could ever want is right at your fingertips. Our hope is that the Pedantic Webspaces site can become more than just a contact point for our company, but a tool to help our customers better utilize their own Internet strategy through tips and best practice suggestions.

We’re excited about the new site. What do you think? Please leave us your thoughts and impressions on the new design as a comment on this post. Feel free to leave us feature requests too.

We’ve also begun an online marketing campaign. At present we are running ads on the Google Adsense network, and in time hope to expand to Microsoft’s adCenter. It feels good to not just talk the talk about Internet advertising, but to actually get out there and do it for ourselves.

Now, on a very unrelated topic, most everyone who knows me personally knows that I am a big fan of Redskins football. Yes, I know that Alabama and Auburn are the teams to watch around here. However, I grew to love football when a was a teenager in Maryland… Sixty miles from RFK stadium… In 1987. That was a good year to start liking the Redskins.

So to celebrate our upcoming success, I whipped up a desktop background featuring a picture of Clinton Portis on the first day of training camp. If you like it and want more, let me know!

Anyway, I decided to incorporate a blog into this redesign so that I can keep everyone updated about the goings on at Pedantic and across the design community. While we can’t promise constant updates, I’ll do my best to make coming back worth your while.

An easy way to keep up with our updates is through Twitter. You can follow us by clicking the link on the top right.