I’ve also souped up the metadata that gets output in the page’s code, so that I’m now outputting a meta description tag – this outputs whatever I’ve typed into the page’s Description field in MODx.

I’ve also started using MODx built in meta keywords system, so some pages now have some keywords set.

A little while age I also added a Creative Commons license to the page footer but forget to mention it on the blog. This means that the site’s content is now actually marked as copright of Codeistry now – which it wasn’t before. As I’ve chosen a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, this also means that anyone can re-use, re-mix, translate or re-purpose any of the stuff on here for whatever they want, provided it’s non-commercial and they credit the original source.

Anyway, here’s the old footer:

and here’s the new one:

This list is intended to make you think about your own website and give you practical, actionable steps that you can take right now to improve things. None of these things are difficult and most of them can easily be done in an hour or two. Print this off, mark the ones that you think you need to work on, and tick off one a week.

See the 9 Steps to Improve your small business website article for the steps!

One of the ways I want to give back, is by getting more involved in the MODx community and to start contributing some of the snippets and code that I’ve created for MODx over the last year. This is code that I’ve created for my own use that I think would benefit others in the community and that we can all help improve. I’ve started this process already with the ChunkIf snippet (below) – but there’s lots more where that came from.

I realise that I have a pretty nice life, working for myself, working at home on my own schedule and doing OK, financially. So the other thing that I had in mind was helping those less fortunate. I’d like Codeistry itself to do some good for other people, as well as me. To this end, I’m planning to start investing a portion of the proceeds from each job Codeistry does into small businesses in need around the world. Small amounts of money can go a long way in Africa or rural South America and provide seed capital for entrepreneurs to start their own businesses, lifting themselves and their families out of poverty; this is called microfinancing.

Best of all, there’s a really simple way to do this called kiva.org – a site which makes it easy to invest in small businesses in the developing world.

The plan is for each Codeistry job to invest in one entrepreneur in the developing world, via Kiva. I can then link to the progress reports on Kiva and see how they’re doing – and maybe get my clients involved too, forming a connection between all our businesses.

New ventures

I’ve also got a few ideas for new web based businesses and sites which I want to get off the ground this year. I’ll be talking more about these later, so watch this space!

Build up Codeistry

In order to do all of these things, I’ll need to keep myself clothed and fed – which is where Codeistry comes in. We had a pretty good start but there’s lots of potential in my niche, so I want to do even better this year.

I’ll be blogging about progress with all these throughout the year. Hope you had a good 2008 and have a prosperous 2009!

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been as much holiday as we’d hoped – as I’ve suddenly got more work than expected – but for me, it’s proved to be a very useful and successful experiment in flexible working.

While I’ve been sitting in our apartment on Sutter Street, I’ve been continuing some web development work for clients in Memphis, TN & done some consulting for a client in London, followed up with a transatlantic training session via Skype.

My wife had a job interview in beautiful and (unusually) snowy Vancouver after the conference, so we spent a day there too. I ended up doing a couple of hours work there, including a Skype call to Memphis, all on my little laptop – which I bought last time I was in Vancouver.

Back in San Francisco now for a few days of proper holiday and then back to the UK for Christmas Eve – it’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks!

Tools for flexible working

There were a load of bits of software that helped to make seamlessly working on the road possible, even easy. My laptop is a HP NC6400 that’s been upgraded to 4Gb of Ram and runs the excellent Ubuntu Linux (Intrepid 8.10). This setup is easily capable of running a full LAMP stack, so I can develop websites on the go. I generally use gedit for code editing, setup basically like textmate as explained here, minus the ruby specific bits.

I keep a copy of everything – the contents of my /home folders from my desktop and laptop – in the cloud using SpiderOak. This means that I have rolling versioned backups of everything, automatically kept, all the time – this is very handy on its own. It also means that I can download anything from any of my computers, wherever I am, given internet access. This is very useful when you’re away from home, as you know that you can’t really forget anything – if it’s available on your desktop PC at home, then you can access it via SpiderOak.

As a last resort, Ubuntu ships with remote desktop support built in, so I can also just connect to my desktop PC over the internet and use it like I was at home, albeit rather slowly.

I also use Basecamp for project management which means that my clients and I can manage projects together and keep in touch, wherever I happen to be.

Those are the bits of software that really shone on this trip – but all the other little ones that I use everyday, most of which are open source, were also just as useful as they always are: gmail, pidgin/empathy, dropbox, firefox + firebug, tomboy, GnoTime, bazaar, etc…

I also don’t want the support contract to be onerous or expensive – it should be good value and you should only pay for what you use. I want to create the kind of support contract that I’d want to sign up to myself, basically.

Only pay for what you use

There will be no monthly fee or retainer – you only pay for what you use. I’ll keep track of the support time spent and invoice you at the end of the month. If you don’t need anything for a few months, that’s fine – no charges & no invoice.

I’ll provide a fully itemised list of all the support incidents and follow-up work done, so that you know exactly what’s been going on and where the money went.

Free stuff

I think it would be nice to offer some free pro-active support, on the same pay for what you use principle.

Periodic website health checks might be something that people would find useful.

This would consist of an automated health check, making sure that the site is available and that all the links, pages, images and files are present and correct. This report would be automatically supplied to you, for nothing. I’m thinking that a sitemap, with broken links highlighted in red, plus a text report, might be quite nice.

Optionally any issues (missing pages or whatnot) could be followed up, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

I ordered them from Goodprint, the same place I got them from last time. The only changes I made was to get the newly available rounded corner option and to order 2 boxes of 50. I did this without changing the card design at all – which was probably a mistake. I think the text comes too close to the edge near the rounded corners and looks unbalanced. These aren’t bad but on the whole I think I prefer the old rectangular ones.

It’s strange but it feels like it’s finally an official business, now that I’ve got some little cardboard rectangles to prove it!

I ordered the business cards from GoodPrint, an online printing company here in the UK. Their prices are reasonable, they allow you to upload your own artwork as PDF and the ordering process is very good. You upload the PDF and they show you a preview of the finished item, along with all the margins, borders and cut lines – so you can make sure that you’re going to get exactly what you want, without any edges getting chopped off or anything.

I decided that the cards were worth doing properly, as these are going to be in the hands of prospective customers; I wanted them to look elegant and feel high quality.

Most online printers have a range of pre-designed cards that you can choose from, and customize with your name and logo. These are by far the cheapest option – and some of them aren’t bad – but they aren’t what I want. I’m supposed to be a designer, as well as a developer, so I really need to design these myself.

I played around for a while with different designs (which I didn’t keep, unfortunately, so I can’t show them here) using Xara, my drawing program of choice on Windows.

This is the design I ended up with, this is the front:
and this is the back:

I ordered 50 cards, on GoodPrint’s standard card, with a nice silky matte finish, for £32 plus delivery. Fairly pricey but not outrageous. They also arrived the day after I ordered them, which was nice. All in all, I’m very pleased with them. Now all I have to do is find people to give them to!

I wanted a contrasting font to go with Tahoma for use with body text – what you’re reading now. I wanted a font which would continue the theme of contrast between the technical and the artistic set-up by the logotype, but couldn’t use Candara, as almost no-one has it installed, so they wouldn’t see it when viewing the website. Candara also inevitably looses some of its subtle curves and arty feel when you get down as small as 11 or 12 point.

I also wanted to give an organic feel overall – I wanted the ‘artistic side’ to win out in the overall feel of the design.

I ended up using the font that you’re reading now, Georgia. This is another very nice font, very readable at body text sizes, with a large x-height and open letter forms. It’s also a serif font – which are generally felt to be more readable for longer passages of text. It contrasts nicely with the Tahoma headings and gives the page a very organic feel overall.

My general design preference is for simplicity and elegance, if possible. I also wanted a design which would work well on the web, as this is primarily a web based company. I decided that I wanted a simple logotype for the logo and a set of colours and fonts that would work well with it, for both print and web. I’ll talk about the colour choices in a separate post and just concentrate on the font choices here.

The portmanteau name ‘Codeistry’ lends itself to a two font logotype, with each part of the name picked out in an appropriate looking font. Something computery and technical looking for the ‘code’ bit and something softer and more arty for the (art)istry bit. I played around with this idea for a while, with different fonts, combinations, weights and kerning.

I eventually ended up with this one:

This uses Tahoma for ‘code’ and Candara for ‘istry’. The Candara bit is condensed, with the tracking set to -20 ems/1000, and then I’ve manually played around with the kerning on the whole thing from there. I had to fiddle with the font sizes and spacing by eye to get it to look like a coherent whole – the Tahoma section ended up being 84.95% of the font size of the Candara section.

I chose the fonts because they worked well together, having a similar humanist san-serif look and fairly similar weighting. The Tahoma gives a subtle technical look to the ‘code’ bit while the Candara looks more arty, with its gentle curves and slightly hand brushed feel. I felt that some of the other alternatives, like the top one in the first image, were a bit too dissimilar and made the name start to look like an obvious pun. Tahoma also has the advantage of being available on almost everyones computer, if I wanted to use it for web work.

That just left me to decide on fonts to use for other copy – the headings and text for the codeistry website and any print material. The choice of these fonts was influenced by my choice of colours as this all feeds into the overall feel – so I’ll cover that in a follow-up post, after I’ve talked about the colours.