pkbowen Design and Technology http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm Patrick Bowen's thoughts on website design, business, web usability, and everything else! Tue, 19 Jun 2007 en-us BES (Holland Job) Finally Done! 7-23-07 http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#besdone http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#besdone Mon, 23 Jul 2007 Wow. I'm finally done with the Balanced Enterprise Solutions (BES) job. I started in...February? Maybe? It was a loong time ago in any case. Things finally slowed down for them, the planets aligned, and now the site is done! The address is www.bes-llc.com. Quote System Revision http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#revision http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#revision Mon, 23 Jul 2007

After doing work with Masana Design (www.masana.com), I realized that my pricing is way off. I should be charging much more than I am, even for small businesses. I still have Masana beat as far as pricing for a custom website, but my prices are a little higher now.

Also, any future print work that I do will have to be a little more expensive than it is now. If I were a professional print designer, I would be starving right now.

Anyway, these are considerations for the future, and not so much an urgent issue.

 New Quote System http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#quote http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#quote Mon, 25 Jun 2007

After looking at other designer's websites, I came to the conclusion that they are inadequate when a customer wants a quote. To be honest, I don't really care to contact a representative from the company to get a simple quote. Especially if I'm shopping around.

Because of this, I came up with a price structure, and I made a PHP-based form that gives you a genuinely no-obligation quote on the spot. Of course, the results are forwarded to me so that a) I can see who's getting quotes, and b) if ESPN wants their site redesigned, it's going to be more than the $825 ceiling.

That's the other thing...the "official price range" is now $200 (3-4 pg website, no frills) to $825 (21+ page monster and everything else). I hope that this new system gets some hits...otherwise, what good is it?

 Holland Web Jobs http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#holland http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#holland Tue, 19 Jun 2007 In case you didn't know, the first two jobs I took were leads from a buddy of mine...Jason Mulder. I met Jason about a year ago in Wisconsin at the World Affairs Seminar (WAS). I acted like a big enough geek in front of him that he decided to hook me up with some web design jobs. The first was the Holland Transplanter job. I took that in February, and I am still working on getting some updates from the old webmaster...hang tight! That project should be laid to rest soon. The second was the Balanced Enterprise Solutions (BES) job. That company is actually co-managed by Jason's father, Don Mulder. He was kind enough to give me this job even though I had very little to show in the way of a portfolio. The website isn't really much, just a table-style assembly of some vector graphics. It looks alright, but the important thing is that it is much more functional than their old website. I'll probably be making a trip down to Holland here in the near future (week or two, maybe?) to wrap up these loose ends. We'll see. We Are Online! http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#online http://www.pkbowen.com/blog.htm#online Tue, 19 Jun 2007 OK! Welcome to the brand new pkbowen Design and Technology website! Let me give you the basic rundown. At the top you see a 100% custom Flash banner. The flames were made in Macromedia Fireworks MX, and imported as raster graphics (actually, GIF images). The rest is HTML tables supplemented by a CSS text style sheet. Simple enough, eh? It only took a few days to put together. Actually, the content was the hardest part. The content is often the hardest part of the website, even if you know exactly what you are going to say. At first, the "5 Steps to a Great Website" page (link available at bottom) was the content page, but I decided that it was not informative, and it was much too lengthy, so it became a new page.