Back for a quick update. Been busy getting up to speed with a new client who has asked me to take over maintenance on their website. I find it a great experience to get to look over another designer’s project. You see things through a different perspective and it challenges your own structures and work model. Sometimes I find something cool and useful to add to my tool bag, sometimes it just reinforces my current habits.

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.

Not much to recount as far as web work, as I have almost exclusively been doing work around the house. We did pick up a new client today, bringing the total number of clients I am actively designing for up to seven. Jessie and I did record another podcast on Friday. However, because the server that hosts canyoutellit.com is being physically moved to another facility, it may not be online until later today.

Just finished installing the reCapcha widget on our site. Hopefully it will help cut down on the bot spamming, of which I have already become accustomed. Still need to pretty the error pages up a bit, but otherwise it is fully functional.

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.

Spoke with a potential client today about his current website and a second one he was contemplating. His chief complain levied at his current site: It looks like Grandma’s Kitchen. It looked like it was designed in 1999 and hadn’t been touched since. His analysis was spot on. The content was fine, but it was presented in such a way that it’s wasn’t a pleasure to read.

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.

I know, I know. We’ve already redesigned the website once this year. To be honest, I never felt fully satisfied that the previous design put Pedantic Webspaces in the best possible light. I wanted to pull away from the minimalist art-house concept and show a cleaner, more professional side of Pedantic. In this respect I feel that we have succeeded.

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.