Mark Whitcher

If you have ever wondered what Facebook is all about, let me tell you a little story. I am not going to explain what Facebook is; that is discussed enough a around the net. The Facebook home page explains it clearly enough.

Ok, the story. Newton was our little 5-year-old Yorkshire terrier. We had had him ever since he was a puppy. He had annoying traits, but he was very lovable and loyal.

At 7:30 pm on October 29, Newton and Boomer (our boxer) were on their tie-outs outside doing their evening business. The same place they have done their business every night for the last 5+ years.

Tank is a one-year-old pitt bull that lives in the house behind us. When I went out to get my dogs, Tank was hovering over Newton biting him. I tried to kick him off but to no avail. And the biting soon turned to mauling. I ran to the garage to get a shovel to try to defend my dog, but by that point it was too late. Tank had him by the neck and was shaking him. Newton was gone.

Needless to say, it was a fairly traumatic event for our family. It was for me because I was witness to and played a part in the scene (by trying to defend my dog). The kids were crying. A police officer and animal control officer were sitting at our kitchen table going over the event. It was a big deal.

By around 9:30 things had started to calm down. Reality was setting in. We had a cry or two.

When an event like this comes along, it is a big deal. Big deals always create a feeling that the event needs to be shared with someone. I thought of Facebook and decided to write a status report saying what happened. I just said “Mark and his family are mourning the loss of our Yorkshire Terrier that was mauled by the neighbor’s pitt bull”. I’ve got about 80 friends or so on Facebook and thought I could share it there.

About 20 minutes after I wrote the note, one of my friends wrote on my wall (if your don’t know what that means, it’s a Facebook thing) expressing fealings about it (“kill the pitt bull”). This person and his wife was someone that I worked with while they were students about 6 years ago. I have had no real contact with them since they left but had seen them on Facebook and reestablished a connection. I am not even sure where they are living now but through Facebook I have a connection with them and was able to share something with them (on both giving and receiving end).

So that is what Facebook is. It is about sharing things with people that you are connected with. This is so easily translated to business and personal and anything. It is really kind of an amazing thing.

These are just initial thoughts about CS4 that you might find interesting. I had almost considered getting CS3 instead of CS4 for the simple fact that my studio computer does not fall within the system requirements laid out by Adobe. My studio computer is a dual 1GHz G4 and CS4 requires a minimum of a G5 to run.

Now, I went ahead and purchased CS4 because I spend the vast majority of my time on my Macbook, so I thought I would make due with CS2 in the studio if needed. But on a chance I went ahead and installed CS4 last night just to see if it would even run.

So far, so good. In fact, it runs at least as good, if not better, than CS2 ran on my Macbook (CS3 was the first version to go universal).

Now, like I said originally, these are just very initial thoughts. I have not thoroughly tested it. I am not going to be surprised if there is something somewhere that makes it all come crashing down. So if your only computer is a G4, you might not want to take this commentary as a go ahead to upgrade. But you might also give it some consideration.

Yesterday I took the plunge and purchased Adobe Creative Suite 4—Design Premium. I was blessed to get the upgrade price even though I only owned the education version of CS2.

The main reason I purchased it was because of some animation I will be doing for a website I am working on. I am really looking forward to this site as it will be a nice break from business sites (I am calling the upcoming look “techno-grunge”).

Another thing I am planning on using flash for is creating a new audio player for Net-at-hand sites. I am hoping that the flash player will make playback much more consistent between browsers and remove issues some of the people have been having. I am not real savy when it comes to embedded media on the web so this will be a nice learning experience for me.

Flash is completely new to me. I haven’t used it at all before. It is going to be interesting to see how I can use it on my web pages but still maintaining accessible content in the html. I am never, ever going to build a complete flash site. It goes against what I am all about when it comes to the web.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the black art of tweaking a website’s content so that search engines not only index it properly, but send you targeted search engine traffic. SEO can turn a nice-looking website that doesn’t produce the desired results (sign-ups or whatever) into a steady cash flow (through sign-ups or whatever).

The problem with SEO is that once a visitor is on your site, it has nothing to do with effective communication and conversion rates. A designer could come up with the simplest, most concise message and means to call visitors to action, but that might not get visitors to the site in the first place if the content doesn’t provide enough for the search engines to go on.

To be honest, this is the problem I am having with the net-at-hand website. I am under no delusions that the website is any great work of design (causing the visitors to gladly go to the sign-up page and give their email address while doing so with grace and beauty), but its main problem is an SEO one. I am getting virtually no traffic from search engines that has anything to do with what Net-at-hand does.

So, it is time to turn that around. I am going to start on a new version of the Net-at-hand website that I will take live when it is ready. Net-at-hand is almost one year old and the only marketing efforts I have made with it are word-of-mouth with clients and friends. I don’t have any money to spend on marketing, but good SEO doesn’t cost anything but time. Right now time is easier to scrounge up than money is.

I am putting a link to it here so you can see the progress on the site as I make it. I am also putting a link here because I want google to cast its eye on it so I can start gauging the effects of my efforts.

Well, I have to say that this little experiment sure has gotten the creative juices flowing. Today I gave myself 25 minutes to execute an idea I had, though I worked it a little bit differently by reading the design brief last night before I went to be.

I guess I felt too comfortable with the 25 minutes (previously I had only allowed myself between 6 and 13 minutes). So when I went to see how much time I had left, I had only 1 left, and I still hadn’t colored it yet.

So I threw some colors on and tried to submit, but I MISSED IT! It was kind of an adrenaline rush though. Pretty cool.

I took 5 more minutes and colored it properly. I have posted the results of my work in the portfolio, but here they are to see.

I liked the idea too much to just let it go, so I sent the client a private message with a link to my blog so she could at least see it. I might end up getting kicked off the site, but it was still fun!

I have set up a new album in the portfolio section for my submissions to 99designs contests. I want to show them off, but I don’t want a blog post for each of them.

This is another logo I did for my little experiment. Unfortunately, this logo was too complicated to finish in time. I guess that is why I am posting it here; so my little exercise doesn’t just get tossed. I am not totally happy with this, but I think the idea is sound and it would have been a good logo with some refinement added.