Staffing and Time Tracking

I’ve been in the web design business for about 8 years now and employees always amaze me. We’ve just opened up a restaurant that is taking up more of my time then I would like but as I’m standing outside one of my employees, from my web design business, rides by and waves.

She is suppose to be at work and I already had a feeling that she was leaving early. But to wave and smile, come on, you should be at work.
And if we had staffing companies here you can bet you’d be replaced this afternoon. However the good news is that I’m looking for some time tracking software that will track my current staff as well as keep up with the projects that they are working on.

It’s sad that I have to spend more money because of my employee’s refusal to do right however; it does appear that the new software will do a lot more than just keep up with my current staff.

Web Designers Need To Have Skills

As the internet grows it has become more and more complicated for custom web designers to make a living. On one hand we have the clients who want to penny pinch us to death and on the other we have the ever changing landscape of the internet as well as the web browsers.

Custom web designers are an important part of the future of the internet however we treat them like red headed step children. And in lots of cases they treat each other worst. While we learn by criticism and not by praise, it’s nothing new to see a web designer being attacked by other designers on anything they can find and ignoring the talent being poured into the website.

It has become impossible for a one man show to operate and become successful online. It’s a full time job to master one part of the task much less trying to master the whole job. We have to worry about programming, graphic designs, search engines, browsers, shopping carts, check out systems, photo manipulations, CMS, WordPress, Drupal, hosting, domain names, prices, ecommerce, flash, logos, graphics, site maintenance, static sites, dynamic sites, and let’s not forget about conversion and having to hold the clients hand throughout the process.

As I watch twitter I notice designers who have been in the business for any length of time getting out of it and every high school graduate getting into it. And as I run my own business I notice collage programmers being so far behind on the trends that they need to be trained for a year or two before they are of any use to the business.

Most collage graphic designers lack the skills and talent to ever be anything more than a helper. Graphic designing is an art, you’ve got to be able to look and know what colors are going to blend together and how the graphics are going to layout to make a truly magnificent site. A graphic designer is not a programmer and a programmer is not a graphic designer. If you have two in one then you know for sure that you’ve got neither.

I currently run a very successful web design business that does it all and as I write this post I realize that it’s not what I want. I want to be the very best at something and the web has gotten too complicated for that to be a “does it all” web design business.

Colombia is a country based on art; we have over 3,500 years of history that covers a wide range of media and art styles. The earliest examples of gold craftsmanship are attributed to Colombia. And the oldest pottery that has ever been recovered was recovered from Colombia, which leads me to believe that we were either the first or maybe just the best.

The artistic ability can be seen on any street in Colombia. It’s for this reason that I want to get out of the programming business and spend my time and energy focusing on the graphic design business. I want to tap into the resources I currently have at my disposal and it’s not programming.

I’m looking for some good programmers that I can start sending new clients to.

Marketing with YouTube

I do believe that video is the way to the future and I’ve heard some people getting some pretty remarkable results from YouTube.

It’s one of the things we plan to get into this year and to show just how easy it is to market on YouTube I’ll show you a video that made me go in search of a Chameleon.

Now, if you had a custom designed website selling Chameleon’s could you see how affective this video could be?

We’d need a call to action and of course our contact information and web address but if you were in driving distance from me you’d just sold a Chameleon.

I guess in the real world if your graphics are good enough there is very little that needs to be said.

The ads pictured below prove that and shows that some big names in the electronic world believe this to be true as well.

But here’s the thing, it also works online.

If you’re willing to spend a few extra bucks you can get a web designer that can make your website speak without saying a word. Or you can nickel and dime your current web designer to death and hope for the best.

In the past years one of the hardest things to find has been inspirantional church web designs. However, it seems that Churches are finely stepping up and for that reason I’ve decided to show a couple good Church web designs.

The use of colors, graphics and images cause these Church web sites to stand out from the past Church web designs.