I want to help companies use the web to further their business ventures. I want to build websites, consult business owners, drive traffic, and make conversions. And as much as I love Boeing, I’ve come to realize that it’s not the right place for me to get those things. So how do you leave a great job, to start in a new field?

Honestly, I don’t know the answer, but I’ve got an idea: work for free.

It may not make sense at first, but there are really only two reasons an employer wouldn’t want to hire you:

• They don’t know you as a person (i.e. your character, work ethic and personality).
• You don’t have a track record to prove you know what you’re doing

There is the possibility that the company you want a job at isn’t hiring, but that’s out of your control, and, thus, outside the scope of this post.

Working for free gives your potential employer a no-risk opportunity to both (1) get to know you as a person (and employee) and (2) see if you know anything about the job you want to do. Working for free gives you a chance to prove yourself.

You can do pro-bono work for a wide array of companies, and I think that’s great. I’ve been a volunteer web designer at my church for the last year and a half. While I learned more from that experience then I have any of the small for-profit projects I’ve done, I still lacked the track record of being able to deliver results on a consistent basis.

When you go to work for a web design company for free, you get to jump right into the meat of real web business. You can hone your skills by collaborating with other professionals and ultimately you can prove that you would be asset to that company. Although, it is a sacrifice of your time, if it’s something you really want, then why not go for it. Work weekends and evenings, or get your regular schedule changed to create time and go for it.

I don’t recommend quitting your current job to work for free, but if you think you have what it takes to make a living doing what you love. Go for it! Find a company you respect and would like to work for, get a solid self-presentation together, and contact them with an offer they can’t turn down. I’m trying this, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

To our dreams!

As I sadly come to the determination that it’s not feasible for me to pay my way to the conference again this year (as they are coming to Seattle again), I thought I would do the next best thing to grow my self as a web designer/developer: read.

The folks at AEA always get a fantastic list of speakers together, and based on my limited experience, they give a talk on the book they recently wrote. If you can’t go to the conference, bring the conference to you… er… I mean read the books. It’s kind of like the poor man’s web conference.

Instead of paying more than $1,000 to get into the conference, go to Amazon and drop $150 on the recent book(s) from each author. It will cost you some time to read the books, but reading stimulates the brain (or so I’m told). But it can save you close to $900, and you could even take the 3 days off of work and spend that time reading, or you could spread the books out over the year (if that meets your fancy).

Here’s a list of some of the books that will likely be talked about during this year’s AEA conferences:

• Jeffrey Zeldman - Designing with Web Standards (3rd Edition)
• Nicole Sullivan - Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers
• Dan Cederholm - Bulletproof Web Design & Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design
• Luke Wroblewski - Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
• Aarron Walter - Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond
• Eric Meyer - CSS: The Definitive Guide, Third Edition
• Jeremy Keith - Bulletproof Ajax
• Kristina Halvorson - Content Strategy for the Web
• Andy Clarke - Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design

This technique requires a just one extension: Publisher’s Clearinghouse. It also utilizes the “New Tab” feature of EE.

In a nutshell, hide a single-entry-purposed weblog from the publish tab and create a separate tab for the one entry within that weblog you want replaced.

For this particular site, the client had a weblog to control the content on the sidebar of their blog. The weblog itself used FF Matrix and nGen File Field, so that they could add to existing content. Instead, of creating a new entry, they wanted to be able to see what was currently in the sidebar, so we decided to utilize one entry and edit it as necessary.

However, the first time the client went into the control panel, they saw “Blog Sidebar” under the publish menu and added a 2nd entry. This is where the extension comes in. You just select what weblogs you want hidden. In our case, we hid “Blog Sidebar”.

Next, I wanted the client to be able to edit the entry in the weblog easily (i.e. without going through the edit tab), so if you go to the edit screen for the particular entry and select “New Tab”, there is now a tab that links directly to the entry. You can rename the tab to whatever you’d like - I chose “Blog Sidebar”.

I now use this with multiple weblogs on every site I build, and the clients love them.

• Help my wife with her finals - I can’t take much credit for this as should did the hard work. But I will brag on her
• Help Tanya launch her new site - I’ve still got figure out how the tabs will work, but that’s it
• Finish the official launch on Canyon Creek Online v3.0 - Minor setback: This won’t happen until after I get home from Indonesia. The team and myself are just too busy
• Launch The Gas Gurus with my good friend Sam - On the list for Wednesday
• Possible jump on board with fightpastor.com - I chose not to get involved as the ‘web guy’.
• Plan out a few personal projects I’m dreaming of (WebApps) - Still in work

Here’s a little more info:

Tanya’s site looks great. She did a fantastic job designing it, and I must say the back-end ExpressionEngine integration is top-notch. This was a fun project to implement. I got to do it from beginning to end and Tanya was super easy to work with. My two favorite sections are the blog and portfolio. They both turned out great especially the typography and user interface, respectively.

I’ve been reading 24 Ways - “an advent calendar for web geeks” - and have enjoyed some great articles. One in particular related to my last list item - “Plan out a few personal projects”.

Elliot Jay Stocks, wrote about pet projects. Elliot talks about 7 reasons why have a pet project (or multiple pet projects) is a good idea. I felt like I could relate to most of them, but two of them really stood out for me: (1) to fullfill your own needs and (2) to raise your profile.

I want to start pet project that I can use. Moreover, I hope that the project is so useful for me, that others might find it useful. I believe and Elliot talks about this being a natural flow into raising your online profile.

Being a relatively new to this field/industry, I feel it’s important to find ways to get involved and get my name out in the web design community. I hope that my upcoming projects help take me there.

Ultimately I think Elliot left off one major point. Self-Development.

I don’t want to mention my new projects yet (I will as I develop a better scope), but I’m doing them to learn new technologies. There are two in particular. I want to build a fully JavaScript (with the use of jQuery) application that feels as natural as Mint. And I want to build something using CodeIgniter to help with future ExpressionEngine Projects.

We spent spent a week at this resort in a room bigger than our condo. We got a boat rental everyday (the boat was a 22’ long speed boat). And every time we went out there were Dolphins everywhere. Check out the video we shot. On top of that, we had a $1,000 credit to the Spa and $600 at the restaurant.

It was a vacation unlike any we’ve ever taken and possibly ever will. Normally we’re more of the rent-a-house-and-cook-dinner-together-kind-of-vacationers. So it was fun mixing things up a bit.

When we got home, the temperature in Seattle had dropped about 30 degrees and was painfully cold, but we’re getting back into the swing of things. We travel to Indonesia at Christmas time for my brother’s wedding, so there quite a list of things to get done before we go:

• Help my wife with her finals
• Help Tanya launch her new site
• Finish the official launch on Canyon Creek Online v3.0
• Launch The Gas Gurus with my good friend Sam
• Possible jump on board with fightpastor.com
• Plan out a few personal projects I’m dreaming of (WebApps)

Look for lots of work to be done before the end of the year. I’ll try and post some updates as I finish things.

The front page is extremely important for first-time guests. It’s a chance for them to sum me up in a matter of seconds, and my highlighted work wasn’t providing the impression I wanted to leave. Basically, it was a conglomeration of one image from every project on the site and it randomly displays 6 of them each time the page loads.

So first, I created a field to designate which projects make the front page which helped greatly. Pretty simple, right? This helped, but there was still a lot going one.

I looked at lots of other sites and noticed how clean their images were, so I adjusted my front page images to be much more simpler. Often this involved custom making the image (as opposed to a screen grab).

The results have made my homepage much easier on the eyes and generally more enticing.

I’ve also revamped the about page with a photo and some recent online recognition I’ve received on current work.

Next up is the services page. In the mean time, check out Tanya’s newly re-launched site. I had the opportunity of coding the HTML/CSS/JS (JavaScript still in work) and implementing ExpressionEngine. It’s a great design.

I’ll get back with you soon.

While things are getting worked on, take a look at my resume.

Hours are spent not just fixing the footer, but redoing the exact same fix to all the other pages on your site. Then you get done and tweek something else, and you’re back at changing every small detail again. You know the drill.

We wonder “there’s got to be an easier way to do this”. There is. Infact, there are many ways.

I’m gonna highlight something that will be the greatest thing since sliced bread to anyone whose still learning about web development. It’s the ability to share one particular element on your page with multiple pages. By doing this, we can make one change to a central location that occurs on the rest of your pages.

I’m going to talk about ExpressionEngine, because that’s were I first experienced that power of embeding (aka sharing) code from one place to another. (Note: You can download ExpressionEngine Core for free for personal use, and visit their getting started section to jump right in.)

Your footer is identical on every single page. A link to each of your pages and some contact info that’s it, right?

1. Create a template group called “_embed”. We’re going to place all our templates that we want to embed in this template group.
2. Create a template called “footer”. In this template take all your code that belongs in your footer. Typically my footers are surrounded by a div with id=“footer”. So start with the opening div tag and go until you reach the closing div tag.
3. Now go to your homepage at the bottom of the page put in {embed=“_embed/footer”}. That’s it. Any and every page that needs your footer on it just needs that small segment of code. Then when you didn’t validate your code until after you made all your pages, and you forgot one small piece of information in the footer, you just go back to your footer template and change it there. Easy, huh?

The great thing about this, is you can embed all your constant elements. On my site, I have embed templates for each of the following on just about every page:

• Header
• Footer
• Sidebar
• HTML Head (everything from my DOCTYPE to my closing head tag

CMS have MANY advantages, but I believe this is the most simplistic and a fundamental element of a CMS. If you only use your CMS for one thing, us it to setup and edit your pages with ease.

I just installed REEOrder, a module/extension from Elwin Zuiderveld. This module allows you to manually change the order of entries for any given weblog. In my case, I am working on Canyon Creek’s site, and we have a front page slider where we have a handful of different images cycle through. With REEOrder, I am now able to quickly and easily determine which order I want the slides to show up, and it’s done in under a minute. Even better, the add on utilizes jQuery in the control panel, so the interface is so easy I’ll be able to hand off the responsibility to someone updating the site down the road.

Thanks Elwin and ExpressionEngine.

We have now decided that one of our goals in life is to get on as many game shows as possible because it is an absolute blast. So if you ever have a chance to pursue getting on a game show, go for it. You won’t regret it.

I will try and get Jen to blog on the audition process and/or her time on the show, so keep your eye out for more updates.