Craig Soup Web Design Blog

Well, the Flash Forward conference is in full force, and Boston is beautiful! The weather here is absolutely perfect right now! The sun is out in full force but without the oppressive heat of late-summer Texas. In this weather, I’d be just as comfortable in a light sweater as in a short sleeve polo . . . which is fortuitous, because all I brought was short sleeve polos and t-shirts!

The sessions so far have been great! Thus far I’ve been to sessions on Flash games, the SWX data format for Flash, and website branding on social media sites (digg, twitter, MySpace, etc.)

One quick note on MySpace . . . Even though it’s ugly, bulky, and downright icky, MySpace can still be a very powerful tool for driving traffic to your website. There, I said it. Enough about MySpace!

I’m really excited about the next session I’ll be going to. It’s called “One Man Bands - Flash Animators Going it Alone.” Aaron Simpson will be the speaker, and I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.

More later!

I’ve created a set of web icons with a very clean, glossy look to them. They’re available in red and green, and they’re FREE! Should you desire them, you can use them for whatever you want, as long as you give props to craigsoup.com.

The file is in Adobe Illustrator format. Anyways, check them out, and let me know what you think.

Click here to download

Hemmy.net recently posted several images showing how Disney animators have reused animations over the years. The pictures were very interesting and entertaining to look at.

I’ve never noticed this before, but it makes perfect sense why they would do it, and I think we could all learn a little bit from it. As Mathias Meyer talked about on his blog, if in the course of your work you’ve had to do something twice, automate it.

For example, if you’ve had more than one customer ask for the same type of Flash slideshow, then there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. Tweak the slideshow you’ve already created. Keep a directory of files that you could possibly reuse, and when the need arises, resurrect the desired piece and reuse it.

Often it takes a lot of time to generate good, organic search engine results that drive traffic to your website. Search Engine Optimization can often be a tedious, lengthy process that takes months and months, especially if you have keywords that everyone else is fighting for.

Which is why it’s absolutely crucial to target very specific key words and key word phrases in your SEO pursuits. Specific, targeted search terms are much more likely to get you to the front page on a listing of Google search results. For example, if you build a website selling golf training videos, you’re not very likely to get good search engine results by going after the keyword “golf.” On the other hand, if you get more specific and try to target a search phrase like “free online golf training videos”, then you’re much more likely to someday wind up on page one of somebody’s search results. Even though there are probably millions more people searching for the keyword “golf”, those millions of searchers are going to get you NOWHERE if you’re constantly winding up on page 60 of the search results. Most people never even navigate past the first page of search results before they find something that they’re looking for.

Anyways, I’ve said all of this to say that I’ve finally reached the first page of Google for the search term “web design, keller”. Keller is a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, where I live and work. By getting specific, I’ve been able to bring my website to page one of the search results for my targeted phrase, making it much more likely that searchers are going to find my little piece of internet real estate!

From time to time, I thought it would be cool to show off a particular piece of work from my portfolio and talk about how it was done.

My first show-off piece was actually just an experiment — a little bit of tomfoolery, if you will. A few years ago, I decided, against my better judgment, to see if I could create a photorealistic graphic of a guitar in Photoshop. I say “against my better judgment” because I knew that it wouldn’t be a quick project that I could just throw together.

Sure enough, after many hours of hardcore Photoshopping, I created the image to the right.

Once I finished, I showed it off to several of my friends, and I knew it was a success when they just shrugged it off with a half-hearted “that’s nice.” This meant that they thought it was just an unimpressive photograph of a guitar. Once I explained to them that it wasn’t a photograph, but rather a work of sheer genius and unadulterated talent, they were genuinely impressed . . . as well they should have been.

And now, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think.

The fear of not knowing enough has often hindered me from doing the things I love to do. For example, four years ago, I was working for a small web design firm that consisted of my brother, my boss, and me. Unfortunately, my boss was a self-centered jerk who preached good works and then cheated me and my brother out of thousands of dollars in taxes that I’m still trying to pay back to this day, but that’s another story for another day. The point is that my boss’s inability to run an honest business resulted in the downfall of the business, and I was left with no a job (and a $6,000 tax bill).

While unemployed, I was often tempted to start up my own web design business, but all I had done for my previous employer was web design. I would design the sites and then hand them over to my brother to do all the hardcore back-end programming. So for fear of what I didn’t know how to do, I never did start that business. Instead I started studying web development in more depth, which was a good move, but I never got to the point where I felt confident enough to find clients and get busy.

Only recently have I realized that I don’t have to know everything there is to know about web development in order to create killer websites! Instead of dwelling on my weaknesses, I’ve started focusing on my strengths, and I’ve been able to create some great stuff.

This morning, I stumbled across a post by one of my favorite bloggers, Josh Mullineaux, where he talked about ‘Why It’s Okay to Suck Sometimes’. This post reminded me of how I got where I am today by overcoming this feeling that I wasn’t good enough. Thanks, Josh!

Don’t forget to back up everything you do, boys and girls!

Due to a minor slip-up, the entire layout for the June issue of Business 2.0 was deleted from their servers just 2 weeks before the magazine was supposed to go to press. Fortunately, they didn’t lose any of the text from their articles, but all of the layout had to be reproduced from scratch.

Talk about your disgruntled employees!

If you’ve ever lost five hours of work because you forgot to save and suddenly your computer crashed, then you might have an inkling of what the writers and designers of Business 2.0 had to go through. Creating something from scratch once is an exciting, invigorating process. Creating the exact same thing a second time is an excruciating ordeal. I’ve passed kidney stones that have caused me less pain than an accidentally deleted file.

According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, the backup servers at Business 2.0 apparently just weren’t working.

So before you shut down your computers for the day, make sure you’ve got everything backed up properly. It may seem like a pain, but it’s paradise compared to what you’ll go through if something goes wrong and you haven’t taken the necessary precautions.