Virtual Water Cooler Talk
Last Friday morning I was at the Coeur d’Alene Online Marketer’s Group monthly meetup at Calypso’s Coffee in downtown Cd’A enjoying a remote presentation by Matthew Ray Scott on “Virtual Business” (did I get everything?), and during the presentation Matthew mentioned that while there are many benefits to being able to work from home, that he still needed a virtual water cooler environment (yes, I know that I am violating one of Matthew’s recommendations to get rid of the word “virtual”, but for this story it applies). I had just been thinking about that very thing yesterday and realized that my combination of IM (iChat) and Twitter (Twitterific) sort of filled that need but I was trying to put my finger on what was missing that you receive from a real water cooler environment (besides cooler water).
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WDWerks.com Redesign Is Live
Filed under: "Whitestone Design Werks", Design, Tech
The new design for WDWerks.com is now live. It actually went live on Tuesday (as I posted last week, I was aiming for Monday), but I was still working on the portfolio pages and getting the slider jquery code to all work properly and just had a scrollable list as an effective placeholder. I was waiting to make any type of formal announcement until that part was ready.
I still have several things to finish on it. In addition to rewriting a lot of the copy (I’m always on the look out for good copywriters!), I will be implementing more jquery effects on the frontpage main image area. I am also working on new CSS for the form on the Contact Us page and will be applying the design to a WordPress theme and launching a dedicated blog for WDWerks. Currently, the blog link directs to this site but that will change soon.
Would enjoy getting anybody’s thoughts or feedback on it. And definitely let me know if you see any problems with it.
Channeling Cesar Millan
Filed under: Coeur d'Alene, Life, North Idaho
Cesar Millan has transformed our household into a bunch of Dog Whisperer wannabes. Being as that we’re in Idaho (and not just Idaho, but NORTH Idaho!), we’re not expecting Cesar to come toolin’ down our cul-de-sac in his Jeep and camera crew in tow anytime soon, so we’ve had to resort to the next best thing: throw all of his episodes into our Netflix queue and start “shushing” our dog ourselves. And our next-door neighbor’s dog. And our next-door neighbor on the other side. And our neighbors down the street and basically any dog that comes around our neighborhood.
Sneak Peak of WDWerks Redesign
My design business website, Whitestone Design Werks, has been suffering from a painfully outdated design and what is even more inexcusable, an embarrassingly outdated portfolio. My cliché excuse is the classic “cobbler’s kids have no shoes” and the fact that I have had plenty of business coming in to keep me more than sufficiently busy–even website design! I haven’t been totally slack. I actually began work on the redesign last December and have sporadically kept plugging away at it and have really been in earnest the past month to finish it up. It is the classic 80% of the time is spent on the last 10% of the work.
Well, I wanted to whet the appetites of anybody who may have visited the site recently and been disappointed with the lacking portfolio that there are better things to come. So, I thought I would throw a little bone and post a screen shot of the new site as it currently stands. Now I know that someone might think that its easy to post a Photoshop comp of a non-functional site, but you’ll just have to trust me that this is the real deal. My target goal is to get this finished by this weekend and have it up and running by Monday, 11/17. It will also involve moving the site from its current hosting service to Media Temple as well as all the email server configuration, and WordPress setup, etc., so that’s a tall order, but doable.
So, without further ado…
Pixar and the Reshaping of Disney Animation
This is all old news, but thought I would still go ahead and post this as we’re anxiously awaiting the release of WALL-E on DVD on November 18. Came across an inspiring article on the Hollywood Reporter’s website chronicling John Lasseter’s career that began at Disney after attending Cal Arts with peers Brad Bird, Tim Burton and John Musker, but came to a disappointing end after he was fired for going around a manager to pitch a project. The original 1977 release of Star Wars was an inspiration to John and so it seemed a natural for him to land at George Lucas’ nascent computer animation lab, hooking up with pal Ed Catmull that he eventually sold to Steve Jobs and which most know became Pixar Studios and as we all know, was bought by Disney just last year, bringing John Lasseter back around, full circle to not only return to the fold, but to become the shepherd of the whole flock that had been wandering in the wilderness of straight-to-DVD-sequel hell.
