I often think about how much faster we could have gotten our business to the point it is now if I had only known the things that I know now. I know a lot of other designers feel the same way when they start. Kind of lost about the business side of things. Most likely, a lot of the reason for that and the same reason it took us so long to get off the ground is that there is just not very much information around about it.
If you’ve been involved in making websites for several years, like I have, I’m sure you know about many of the best practices involved. In fact, it’s usually easy to pick out websites that were done by amateurs because of obvious violations of said best practices.
I purchased Charlie Gilkey’s Premium Action Planners because first of all, Charlie is pretty darn awesome and knows his productivity stuff so I trust what he puts out, and secondly, well, because I really needed them. The last few months I’ve been feeling the overwhelm. After our site redesign, business picked up more than we had planned for and my old systems (GTD using email as a todo list, a cork board, a notebook, and google calendar) were no longer sufficient.
Alexis Neely approached us in December to redesign her personal blog site. She wanted to do something different and make a fresh start, so at the same time she also named it to “Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Truth”. Sounds both noble and brave at the same time, doesn’t it?
When a potential client approaches us, they often ask, “How you done any other——web sites?” This——may be Wordpress, ExpressionEngine, Magento, etc. etc.
In honor of our 7th anniversary in business, we would like to introduce Intuitive Designs, version 7.
The last two versions of the site design were very clean, white, and minimalistic. This time, we felt like doing something a little different. So, we went the opposite direction, dark and colorful.
1. You have been sued by more than one person because your blinking gifs sent them into an epileptic seizure.
2. The first reaction that people have when visiting your site is “Arghh, my eyes! They are burning!!”.
3. The traffic counter you so proudly display on your site says, “10 visitors this year”.
Why do we present one initial web design concept? Isn’t that a little arrogant? What about giving the clients the option to choose? Isn’t that what they are paying for?
These are some of the types of questions we’ve been getting lately. Strangely, this issue didn’t come up much before, but now that it has, I figure it’s a good time to take a moment to talk about it.
