Life has a way of wearing away at you, the way a river wears away at its banks. It’s easy to feel like it’s our job to resist at all costs. It seems right to remain strong, to hold ourselves rigid against all that comes, and all that tries to break us down. Inevitably though, we break down. We’re human after all … not granite. All those grains of sand and pieces of dirt that made up the river bank are lost forever. Washed away never to be seen again. We fear loosing everything we use to identify who we are. So, we gather our strength, look for hope, and weather on. That mode of thinking produces a life of struggle and of hardship. We fail to consider the wonderful amazing journey that is possible if we just let go. We fail to believe there is more to ourselves than everything we have surrounded ourselves with. What would happen if we let go? What would happen if we put our energies into minor course corrections as we flowed with life? Who would we become if our identity was defined by our journey and not our hardships?

– jeff

When we move from one house to another we pack up everything and transport it to the new house. Some of us have employ the time honored tradition of beer, pickup trucks, and friends to make the physical move happen. It’s time consuming, tiring, and when you’re done … still expensive. Something always breaks. You always need more something than you planned on, which costs those precious dollars you were trying to keep. When you wake up the next day you are often exhausted and surrounded by a mess. The other alternative is professional movers. Professional packers and movers come in and pack each room, label each box, and deliver those boxes to the correct rooms. You find yourself familiarizing yourself with your new surroundings and getting comfortable as the moving effortlessly happens around you. The difference between the two experiences is budget. If you have an old website and you want to move into a new one, both options are available to you. We provide training in moving content or we can do it for you. It’s a matter of budget.

If only moving were that simple. What about mail? It’s easy. You simply fill out a change of address form and the Post Office takes care of it for you. Guess what? It’s just about that simple. You supply us a list of email addresses and we setup your new mail and transfer it over the weekend. When you come in Monday, you check your email one last time to clear out any remaining messages, then change your email settings to the new server. Once you point your mail client to the new server, your mail will function like normal. If normal means you get a lot of spam, we can one up the post office. Simply upgrade your mail boxes with Graphics & Motion SecureMail. You will be amazed at how much less spam (read junk mail) you receive. Additionally SecureMail provides protection against Viruses and Phishing attacks. In case you don’t know, Phishing is where someone pretends to be someone they aren’t (like your bank) in an attempt to get your personal information.

I’m certain that every time you’ve moved you do your darnedest to make sure everyone you can think of knows where you moved. I don’t know about you, but every time I miss someone … okay a lot of people. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put up an invisible sign that only your friends could see that would direct them to your new house? On the web, we have these giant long addresses called URL’s. You know, that string of text at the top of your browser that goes from http://www.address.com to something so long you wouldn’t even want to attempt to read it? Those things change when you move and it makes it impossible for the search engines to know where those old pages have moved to. In comes 301 redirects. These redirects are custom coded and act as that invisible sign pointing your old pages to the new ones so your visitors find you. Mapping redirects from an old site to a new one requires planning and can be time consuming. Redirecting every page might be cost prohibitive, but if you get all the key pages it can go a long way to making sure you keep those hard earned visitors.

I hope this website moving/updating guide helps you understand the key steps to a smooth transition.

Bill Drennan of Performance Systems recently asked me:

If we expect to get different results in these challenging times, what are the few critical things that we must personally do differently…starting now?

My answer:

Progress happens by doing things mostly right and correcting along the way. The very idea of doing things differently suggests that you were on the wrong path entirely. When people feel pressured they often leap to extreme measures. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “Extreme times call for extreme measures”. While this expression may have some truth, we need to be careful about the decisions we make and our outward communication.

Companies and individuals have contacts, skill sets, and experience. Utilizing these three things and adapting is key to success. A business may need to retool or an individual might need further education to adapt to a changing environment. What’s critical is to adapt or correct … along the way. Endurance is key in challenging times and we must continue to endure as we improve as well as inspire confidence in everyone around us. Businesses and individuals who choose to see this as an opportunity to stand out from the competition will benefit.

• Discuss strengths and opportunities for collaboration.
• Find your unique voice and let everyone in your contact list know what you have to offer.
• Be available to participate when opportunities present themselves.
• Never give up.

Traditional print design starts with the premise of a static size and shape. The designer then takes into consideration the material printed on and the dynamics of any surrounding or competing visuals. The web however is dramatically different. The size and shape are not guaranteed and there are no competing visuals. Furthermore different browsers display the code that constructs the web page differently.

You might be thinking to yourself, “I thought there were web standards”. You are indeed correct. The web standards are created by a group called W3C (www.w3c.org). However, there isn’t a browser created that is fully compliant with any of the specifications put out by this organization and some interpret the specification differently or ignore it all together! This means that as a web designer you end up coding for multiple browsers. Even if a customer wanted to pay for the time to code a site for all browsers and all their versions, it would be nearly impossible to produce an identical visual result across the board.

Browser Compatibility Bang For The Buck

Internet Explorer: 67.55%
Firefox: 21.53%
Safari: 8.29%
Chrome: 1.12%
Opera: 0.70%
Netscape: 0.57%
Other: 0.22%

Data Provided by Wikipedia

Targeting Firefox and IE7 and Above you end up addressing over 70% of web users. To boost the number over 90% graceful degradation of the code should be considered for IE6. With this practical and economical approach to target browser consideration you can guarantee wide target audience delivery. This does not mean that display will be identical from one browser to another, but the differences should be minimal.

Creativity isn’t a constant it ebbs and flows and yet for the last 16 years I’ve been paid for consistency. It’s a tough gig, but i love it.

My house and the houses of others are decorated with my paintings, but I’ve only completed 1 painting in the last ten years. I’ve completed countless designs for print that are likely occupying space in landfills. Electrons and pulses of light that carried my designs to the screens of computers around the world now deliver others creative endeavors. The paintings remain. I might have to start painting again.

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on how creative people can create a protective psychological construct to mitigate the taste of failure that comes with daring to create.