working on creating a new shop for thinktank clothing powered by zazzle.  stay tuned.

so last week, erin and i decided to cut off iFreelance for good.  we’ve gotten a good run on Elance and we’ve only really gotten 1 fix-it job on iFreelance, the interface isn’t as good, the support and payment isn’t as easy (for either party) or well developed, and the jobs are fewer and tend to be less money.  so we closed down shop on iFreelance.

similarly, we’ve been talking about dropping heritage as a source for freelance work, as well.  we don’t make as much money, the projects are more work, the customers are often frustrated and upset by the time they get to us, they didn’t pick us as designers, but the company, and therefore the projects are typically less the types of things we really want to be doing. additionally, it’s been months since we had a project that wasn’t a pain and actually was something we enjoyed doing.  on the contrary, pretty much every single project we’ve had lately has been completely horrible, including the one i’m working on right now in which the customer doesn’t pick up the phone when i call, and responds to my emails in one sentence that does not answer what i’m trying to find out.  it’s a joke and it’s been a week and i haven’t gotten any information yet.

which has made us step up our exit strategy a bit.

the original plan was to wait and see how the off-season/winter treated us as freelancers and evaluate heritage after january and maybe drop them then.  at this point, the amount of stress and hassle and time wasted dealing with their stupid and non-functional bueracracy makes me think that we’d be making more money if we were not taking anything from them and just doing stuff on our own through our site and Elance.  more money, because we get more out of working for ourselves (since we set the prices and it all goes to us, so we make more from doing less), and because we’re not wasting time dealing with people who don’t respond to us and stressing out about it.  and time, in this business, really is money.

so.  the new plan is to drop heritage after this project.

i won’t say anything bad about heritage (well, not more so than i have already, i guess).  the experience wasn’t all bad.  on the contrary, we learned a lot, and have done really well.  but the system is flawed, the outsource department is often left hanging and seemingly ignored, with very little support from in-house staff or training material to go off of.  increasingly, and especially since we’ve been able to make money doing this outside of heritage, the inefficiencies and pain points of working with them are made more obvious and it makes the experience more abrasive.  it’s hard to be an advocate for the company as a designer dealing with customers when i’m so frustrated with the situation.  the projects have slowed to a crawl as the number of outsourcers has expanded and the amount of projects being moved to the design phase are hung up in the gathering content stage, and even those that do get moved to design are woefully incomplete.  at least when we’re dealing with our own customers, they know what they want, they have their content, or not, and know that they’re responsible to.  if they want a specific feature, we can give it to them, if they don’t, we don’t.  we don’t spend time and patience haggling about enhancements the customer doesn’t really need or charging them a gross amount for things that should have been included.  it makes dealing with customers, and the project, even more painful than it should be and takes time away from doing what we should be doing which is, designing their site.  in my mind, i’m much more able to ensure good customer service if i’ve been with them directly from the beginning.  coming into the story at the end, after they’ve already been pissed off for 3 months about nothing happening on their site does not a good customer service experience make.

but it has been a learning experience and a good jumping off point.  but it’s a lot like tech support — no one with any actual talent stays with it forever; if they knew their stuff, they’d be doing something else.  it’s a good intro job, but it’s time to move on.

after a month of being frustrated and writing bids on projects we wouldn’t get, erin and i re-evaluated what we were doing, how we were approaching the business, and what we should be doing.  since then, in a little over a week, we’ve scored 7 new projects on Elance and completed 4 of them.

saying we’re excited would be an understatement.  sure, we’ve had to cut our prices to be more competitive because many buyers are wary of new providers, but now, while we still have the new provider tag next to our name on our bids, we have positive reviews and a history of completed projects — we end up looking better than the other new providers.  and we’ve only had to stop bidding on things we didn’t really want anyway, and take projects we’re more interested in.  the ultimate decision was to play to our strengths — we don’t like making professional, corporate websites nearly as much as we like making fun, artistic websites.  and anyone who wouldn’t want to hire us because we’re not professional enough is someone we wouldn’t want to work for anyway.  so we’ve changed some of the language on the thinktank site and changed how we word our bids to be much more honest, and conversational, and less canned.  and it seems to be working — we think we’re really the only ones who talk like human beings in our bids and it seems to be attracting a positive response (oddly people seem to feel more comfortable with that…).

and this is working for ourselves, not through a third party.  which means that when we do work for someone they can say we did a great job, not the company we’re working through, which all just reflects better on us.  we’re really just excited we’re doing so well.  and it means we can cut down the number of projects we need to take from that other freelancing job.  it may be a while, yet, before we feel comfortable cutting them off entirely, but since doing these Elance jobs, we’ve had to chase down our customers much, much less, and they’ve been much easier to work with, and we don’t need to worry about calling them during business hours or really talking on the phone at all.  And oddly enough — although hws says that their customers are the type that want their site up cheaply and asap — the projects we’ve been working on outside of hws have gotten done faster than those for hws.

it’s all just so much more satisfying and rewarding and we’re really starting to feel like we know what we’re doing.  and, you know, i’m excited, too, because we’re expecting our business cards to arrive tomorrow.

so we’re back from our road trip.  i really meant to post a list of the fun and interesting stories that happened, but, you know, i didn’t have time.  as per usual.  i would like to state outright, however, that hitchhiking for gas in the middle of Nowhere, Utah isn’t very fun, but truckers can be awesome in a pinch.  (I’d like to thank the guy from Underground Solutions who was driving to SLC from San Diego who picked me up, and also the guy from a local utah trucking company I can’t remember who gave me a ride back to the car.  For anyone interested, we ran out of gas here — note how there’s nothing around…)  that was the most interesting, but not the most stressful event that happened.

alas, we’ve been busy.  we added a new phase to the thinktank reconstruction and that is converting it into a Wordpress CMS type site.  i’ve said before that if you want to do a CMS, probably Wordpress isn’t the best option, but we want to have a bunch of wordpress themes that we’ve built that we can show off so we can show that we’re good at them, and for something small (although getting bigger all the time) like the thinktank site, it works fine.  we’re still doing the theme switching thing, but we’ve only integrated one theme thus far.  the prototype site is up over here and the old site will be pulled down once we finish doing the other themes (and then build some more).

also, we did a redesign of the kidsblog and imported that into wordpress also.  erin did the design and we’re super-excited about it.  i helped with the integration, but mostly it was her.  meanwhile i’ve been playing with the laptop and discovered i can use the iSight (that’s what the camera is called, apparently) to make movies.  gavin really likes seeing himself on the screen so we’ve started encouraging that by starting a vlog that’s posted on the kidsblog.  i’m really hoping to make that a regular feature in addition to the usual news, updates, stories, and pictures of the kids.  i’ve considered doing the vlog thing myself, but i still haven’t settled on it.  so, until i do, this is all you get:

in other news, i want to test out Elgg when it’s released next week and i need volunteers to help beta test it for me.  head over here for info or to voice your interest.

i nixed the single sign on due to the fact that a) it was kind of buggy and b) i didn’t need it anyway.

but in better news.  WII.  seriously.  wii.  it’s wiitastic.  i’m wiidicted.  it’s wiilicious.  and i’ve got wii-arm now.

gavin’s b-day is coming up so we decided to get him a wii.  okay, he’s 3, but he likes crazy weird cartoony animals and games involving such, and the controls are more movement based meaning active and easy to learn, and it’s nintendo which means more games for kids, and it’s a more family oriented thing and it’s cool and and and…anyway, he likes it and it won’t be long before he starts playing.  but that’s getting ahead of the story cuz the point is the wii rocks.  i mean seriously.  more so than i had really considered.  it’s amazing how much more fun what would be a boringly simple and basic 3 inning baseball game or single tennis game is when you’re actually swinging a (wiimote) bat or (wiimote) racket.  even the dumbest minigames become more interesting when that leaning thing you do with an old school nes controller to make the car (or whatever) lean in one direction ACTUALLY DOES SOMETHING.  it’s like someone watched videos of people playing video games and turning the controllers and leaning on the couch in weird angles and said “you know, i’ve got a great idea….”

a wii wasn’t something i’ve been planning on for forever.  actually, it wasn’t until we had the “what do we want to get for g for his b-day” conversation a month ago that i even really considered it.  but when i did, i thought it was a brilliant idea.  and i have been sort of following the press around the wii over the last year and the wii continues to be the most impressive in how it’s been able to grab people who aren’t gamers and appeal to them.  and it’s all in the innovativeness of the movement-based controller.  because nintendo isn’t nuts — it really is more fun to do rather than sit on your arse and watch, even if you remote control the guys on the screen with your fingers.  it’s a visceral thing.  it gets your body moving and your blood pumping and it feels good. and that’s what makes the wii rocktastic.  and it really takes doing it to realize just how wiitastic the wii is.  it makes me want to pack it up and take it with me wherever i go just so i can say “d00d, you gotta play this.”

otherwise it’s been busy, hence no posts.  we set up a freelancer account on elance where the projects and the site seems a lot more professional and businesslike.  i’m excited about that, and about making more money on our own work.

also, just a reminder, i’m sure you all have your calendars marked and have been keeping up, but today is the last day that dr. horrible will be available to watch.  after today, that’s it, it’s off the air and you have to wait for the dvd.  after watching all 3 acts i can say it was good.  not fantabulously awesome, but it was good.  it wasn’t knee-slappingly funny, but it was amusing.  the only real LOL bit was after the “hero” Captain Hammer steals Dr. Horrible’s (Neil Patrick Harris) love interest and they meet in the laundromat and Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion) is gloating and says “She’s with Captain Hammer now.  And these [his fists] are not the hammer.”  He walks away and a full ten seconds later comes back and says “The hammer is my penis.”  the timing and the schoolyard-ness just cracked me up.  and Nathan Fillion is really good at being ironical (to use a Firefly word).

we’re going to california in about a week and i managed to get a macbook on ebay for $700 bucks (2ghz, 2gb ram, 60gb hard drive, office, logic, ilife  pre-loaded — i’m stoked, altho not so much about the office, i’ll probably dump that and get open office), so maybe i’ll do a road journal or something.

also, we’re giving the thinktank site another overhaul, with a dropdown menu to select the site theme.  it’s pretty exciting, and awesome.  we’ve got 4 themes up so far.  we need to figure out which one to use as the default.  behold the awesome.  we’re still working on more, but it’s functionally complete.

wired ran a blog post on what everyone in the tech biz is thinking (namely the iphone).  it’s called wordle and what it does is take a body of text, or a blog, or something, and creates a tag cloud (like what i have on the right) based on the word usage.  a  pretty one at that.  so i decided to run my own based on content from the blog and my wordle looks like an ad for thinktank studio.  not that this is a bad thing.  at all.  (in fact, i’m kind of trying to up my thinktank page ranking by talking about it and linking to it a lot in the blog…so far it’s not working.  this also brings out some of the particular idiosyncracies of my vernacular, which is interesting.

verily it was decided that it was time for a makeover of the thinktank site.  this came down from on high because we went to some other web designers’ sites and realized most, if not all, our contemporaries tended to be a lot more conservative in their presentation on their own website.  now, this seems counter-intuitive to me — i mean, it’s your site — you should show off how insanely badass you are.  but no, most of them are fairly boring, professional-looking sites.

well we didn’t want to do that.  but we did want to make it a bit more like what other people were doing.

so i had a brilliant idea to try to find a script or something that would allow for a dropdown menu that would choose the theme for the thinktank site.  so you could pick which one you were looking at.  not only would it be cool just for the cool gadget factor, but it would showcase our skillz and make us look more badass and give a lot of variety to the site.  it would (in theory) be as good a representation of what we can and do…do…as the portfolio itself!

BEHOLD!  thinktank-studio.com and the glorious dropdown of awesomeness!

(as a sidenote, we’ve been watching way too much how i met your mother recently…..)

i’ve got a couple more themes for the thinktank site in the works and erin’s gonna make some so it should be pretty sweet.

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in other news, it’s not quite done yet, but i’ve created a kickapps community for jazzsequence.  you might remember me talking about kickapps a couple weeks ago in this post.  mostly this was an experiment to set it up, get it working, and know what it’s about so i can start building it for other people.  but it’s also cool in its own right and i think could take the place of the now-dead forums and such if, you know, i still *have* a community….if you have a login on the jazzsequence.com blog, you should already be able to log into the members area with the same info.  if not, make one, and be awesome.  there’s blogs and message boards and stuff (at least when i set it all up).  you can see what i’m talking about at members.jazzsequence.com.

so we got a new client for thinktank.  it’s a wordpress blog, and it’s mostly maintenance and updates, but it’s still pretty cool.  our client wants to build/integrate a social networking component, so i did some researching and found KickApps Social Networking Software.  the more i read into it and compared the alternatives, the cooler (and more KickAss) KickApps became.  they run a SaaS — Software as a Service, an intriguing concept Wired wrote an article about a while back.  what it means in this case is that the social networking software is provided by and hosted on KickApps’ servers.  you setup the gateway, and everything else lives on their side.  which means less twiddling, infinitely easier setup, no maintenance (other than cosmetic stuff) and also means, for them, that they get to control the flow of traffic and how things work monitarily.  you see, as a free service, they control 2/3 of the ads that show up on the site.  1 of the 3 ad banners you control and can set up as you please.  there’s an option to buy out the ads, but according to the video on their site, it starts at $100/month for 5000 clicks — not a small-scale deal.  they have an impressive client list though; professional sports teams, vibe, npr, universal music, etc.  and it plugs right into the standard cms apps.  not just joomla! and drupal but also wordpress.  it’s exciting enough of a concept to tempt me to create an account and set one up here.  even though, you know, no one visits me, really.

i also just finished optimizing this blog for search engines.  from which i learned a few things about seo-friendly coding, and hopefully does something to counter the last part of the paragraph above.  all this seo’izing and working on a new blog made me think of making affiliate buttons for thinktank.  well, the other thing that made me think of that was the email i got that said that firefox set the world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period for the firefox 3 download day campaign.  it all made me think that creating more ways for people to link back to thinktank couldn’t hurt, and the buttons are prettier than my cleverly unobtrusive “website designed by thinktank” tag at the bottom of our sites.  oh, the other thing the seo stuff taught me (or reminded me, really, i already knew it, but i wasn’t implementing it) was that it’s better to link the whole phrase “website designed by thinktank” than just the “thinktank” which is what i was doing before.

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in other news, i got my computer working again, although i haven’t had a chance to look at the old hard drive, see if it’s usable, and figure out wtf happened.  for, you know, fun, and because i wanted to figure out what hardware i should get, or more accurately, if the hardware i was planning on getting would be comparable, i downloaded 3Dmark06 — the standard benchmarking tool that gaming magazines use to rate.  it seemed kind of silly to be using this benchmarking tool that i’ve read about in computer gaming world, but i wanted to see how erin’s system (roughly the equivalent of my broken system) compared with the media center which i was using (roughly the estimated equivalent of what i would be using).  i made a fatal error in doing this — while the mainboard and processors would be comparable (the mainboard i got was a mini version of the one i’m using in the media center) the fantastic graphics i was experiencing in guild wars on the media center was not due to a highly advanced onboard graphics processor which was my assumption at the time.  in fact, it was from the graphics card i got for the media center specifically because i needed s-video out to go to the tv.  as such, erin’s computer with an nvidia geforce 6600 ranked about a 600 and some change on the 3Dmark06 test.  the media center (not designed as a gaming computer by any means and only holding 1gb ram) ranked a 300.  these were, of course, piddly compared to the high scores of people who actually cared to build a gaming system and uploaded their scores to futuremark’s database.  so my plan was to get 4gb ram to overcompensate.  but, as i wrote in one more to file under “it’s always something”, i only had 2 ram slots and my power supply wasn’t spiff enough anyway.  so, having to order a new power supply, i also ordered a new graphics card as well, an off-brand nvidia geforce 8400gs.  it was the cheapest and most powerful solution.   when the power supply came, i started installing vista ultimate, and when the graphics card arrived a couple days later i started transitioning over to my new/old system.  in all, it’s performing well.  my new 3Dmark06 score is around 1600, and guild wars nightfall looks gorgeous — pretty much like the screenshots on their site.  so i’m a fairly happy camper and using a mostly functional operating system again.  while vista isn’t as simple and intuitive as osx and the start menu is all fuXX0red — seriously more messed up than previous versions imo — it works, the glass effects are pretty and it is better than XP and it’s no 95/98 by any means.   it’s definately an advance, albeit not a ground-breaking one.  there are a couple issues:

when i started using vista on the media center i discovered a problem — while i could create new folders (and new files through the right-click option) i could not NAME them.  i.e. New Folder.  New Folder (1).  New Folder (2).  etc. etc.  no matter what i did, i couldn’t get it to work.  apparently, after googling a bit, i discovered this was fairly common and required a registry hack to fix.  annoying, and a waste of a couple hours of banging my head on the computer screen.

random lockups and freezes in explorer, especially when accessing files on a shared network drive.  both vista computers do this so i can only assume this is fairly normal as well.  also, having to log in to the network drive after every reboot is obnoxious and i’m still trying to figure out how to save my password.  :/

so that’s the scoop.  a few quick, final closing remarks:

to answer the comment in my last post: avatars are user icon things for social apps like blogs and forums and messaging programs, but also are used by microsoft to visually represent different users.  it’s sort of the digitized representation of yourself to the world.

i’m planning on sending off my 8mm reels to get transferred to dvd in the next couple weeks.  once i get the dvd back i will rip the video, add new soundtracks and post them here (possibly to youtube as well).  i’m also going to do something about the gavin video and the guy in a hat video (guy in a hat might need to move to youtube also, just for kicks).

i want a google phone.

yes, i’m playing guild wars again.

look for joss whedon’s Dr. Horrible in a couple weeks.  it’s gonna be aweX0me.