What motivates you to excel?
Is it something intrinsic, or an external influence? To answer my own question, it simply takes interesting projects to motivate me to do good work. The trouble comes when there is no real work available.
Things have been very quiet in the Angus world. In consequence, things have been very quiet on this blog. With 2 genetic defects recently discovered in the Angus breed, the breeders have postponed their usual sales as they scramble to test their animals. Add a recession as the cherry on top and you have one very quiet company.
June and July are typically quiet months for this business anyhow. What makes it unbearable is the side projects drying up. Every summer and every quiet period between breeders’ sales, I have made a mad dash to work on or finish up a side project. They have varied from posting the sale books online efficiently to improving our web sites en masse to solving the Photo department’s cataloging issues to building prototype web apps to campaigning for improved Angus Journal and Angus e-Classifieds sites.
With no side projects to focus my energy on, the boredom is driving me up the wall. I like identifying high-level problems and solving them. There are plenty of problems left to solve, I just keep running into a wall of red tape and No! answers. My nose hurts and the last wall nearly broke my glasses. 
Since there aren’t any interesting projects going on, I’ll share a few good links instead:
- For recent graduates and anyone looking for an unconventional road to changing careers, try Recession Proof Your Career, by Charlie Hoehn [via I Will Teach You To Be Rich].
- If you’re looking for deep, thoughtful writing, try any of Paul Graham’s essays. Pick one at random. You won’t be disappointed.
- Inspiration and instructions on how to live simple.
What’s New in Web Services
Some of our long-awaited projects have been released, so I thought I would make note of them. Web Services now has a respectable web site to represent our department. Now that Creative Media and our department’s sites have launched, I wonder when we will be working on one for Special Services?
Our parent company has launched their touched-up design with a brand new back end. A revamped Angus e-Classifieds site has also arrived, all ASP.NET powered and compliments of the IS department.
The e-classifieds site was the first project where the Web department had the chance to work directly with the IS department. It was exciting to get the chance to collaborate with them. From a technical standpoint it was refreshing to find others who read Lifehacker and wanted to argue the finer points of jQuery versus MooTools. From the business perspective, the e-classifieds will finally become a viable revenue source for our department. The old site was so archaic it was actually losing money every time someone called to post an ad.
One step forward: our e-lists are now sent using a less-spammy/less-amateurish method.
…and one step backward: our e-lists no longer have a limit to the number we can send per day. We used to tell clients that they needed to book in advance, because we only scheduled 2 full page e-mails to be sent every Tuesday and Thursday. (Still too many, IMHO.) Now we have no limits. April is one of our busiest months. We sent out 83 e-list messages in April alone. Talk about e-mail overload! It’s no surprise our e-list subscribers never hover far above the 4,000 mark.
There are other projects waiting for the IS department’s attention, but hopefully they can help us with the Sale Books problem next. Maybe they can help us create our own Issuu-like application. A Flex app (built by us) powered by ASP.NET with a Microsoft database (built by them).
Spring cleaning
Flex 3 projects and news coming soon: I have a list of useful resources for beginners, a few sample projects of my own to show and a short progress report on my own RIA in a post for next week.
For now, just another clean up project…mostly a running list and reminder to myself, so I know which sites have been touched and which ones have not. This week it was BJ Angus.
Reinterpreting Wardens Farm
Wardens Farm is a new client with an existing web site – what we call “takeover sites.” Built in Front Page 5.0, it was my responsibility to reinterpret their old site into something a little more palatable. I was instructed to keep the color palette the same and “clean up” the design. Here you can see their original look:
complete with a snapshot of the scary code Front Page generates:
We had a clean version of the Wardens Farm logo on file, so I plugged it into PhotoShop and created a design file. Here is the reinterpreted design:
Although I still don’t consider myself a web designer, I do push my limitations and improve my design skills as often as possible. I focused on the typography, since my color palette and design element choices were pretty limited. As for the code, Dreamweaver does a much better job generating clean HTML (well, compared to Front Page anyway):
This was of the fastest and most enjoyable clean-up projects I have worked on in a while.
