http://www.allchorn.com Website Design Consultant & Designer Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:18:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Since I've recently taken a step back from certain aspects of website design and development (specifically hosting, coding and marketing), I'm delving more and more into the layout and aesthetic concerns of creating a website. That doesn't mean that I don't go through the proper discovery steps that precede the ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/06/28/reconsidering-my-stance-on-flash/ Mr/Mrs Client: "Whip me together a quick newsletter to send to my subscribers. Oh, and make it look like this design"... I am then handed a design created by a print designer. Background images, fancy fonts, overlaying text etc. "It needs to look exactly like that and must work in all mail clients." Wow, ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/06/13/designing-email-newsletters-properly/ Managing my time is something I used to struggle with. Nowadays, I seem to have more spare time than a lot of people and even making a decent living. I don't believe I've stumbled onto some secret, but rather through reading up a bit about it and actually acting on ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/06/12/my-thoughts-on-time-management-and-productivity/ Please note: This is all meant in good humour, but it's the gospel truth, so pay heed. Really people. I know it's exciting when you first start using the internet and you think: "wow, imagine if there was a web site where people could list their company, and I could charge them ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/06/11/enough-with-the-generic-web-directories-already/ It's good to be busy again. It seemed as if things went into a bit of a recession over the last few months, but lately things have been getting busier around here. Some nice new clients, some exciting work for existing clients, and a lot of my own stuff on ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/05/23/content-management-or-not/ Call me slow, or whatever. I have finally decided to give Flickr a serious chance. I've always known about it and had a profile on there for as long as I can remember. For some reason I always just saw it as another one of those "photo sharing" tools that ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/05/12/joining-the-world-of-photo-sharing-and-social-networking/ I've decided that I am going to re-brand myself. Starting with a new logo. Quite honestly, I'm sick of my glassy globe with cheesily gradiented AD. The direct metaphor of the earth representing the "world" wide web being the audience of my creations is replaced with a pretty direct graphic representing ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/05/09/stage-one-of-my-re-branding-the-logo/ High levels of stress and a reasonably obvious truth have driven me to write this post. A rather corny title it may be, it's pretty spot on to what this is all about. It all stems from the true nature of the internet, and the common misconceptions of what that ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/04/30/website-design-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance/ I'm busy writing about three articles concurrently. All of which lose my interest after sitting in front of them for longer than 10 minutes. I need to step back from them for a bit and this is why I'm writing this interim post. One is a piece on big brands ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/04/22/while-i-ponder-getting-real-by-37signals/ Being the fact that I am in the website design industry, this post relates first and foremost to that specific line of design, but some parallels can surely be drawn with other forms of design. First and foremost, my favourite saying is: "Design is not about making things pretty, but rather about ... http://www.allchorn.com/2008/04/07/what-design-means-to-me/