However, after talking with my creative director after the call, he made an interesting point about how what they were doing didn't really fit our long term strategy - our brand doesn't want to just shout products at people on Facebook or on their phones. Our target audience is people who love the majestic beauty of nature and the great outdoors. We need to show them the respect they deserve and serve up content that they are interested in, not just throw products into their newsfeeds hoping a few click "buy." It was pretty apparent that the salesperson on the other end of the phone didn't know our brand, and wasn't taking into account that our customers might not be interested in having their Facebook pages filled with products.

So What Was My Epiphany?

When I first started doing freelance work, I thought that my competition was going to be local designers. I'm finding out that those people are turning out to be my friends and confidants, however. My competition is actually big companies, agencies, and "solution" providers who can cold call all the potential clients in my region and sell them a line of junk, just because they have some big name clients. The salesman today actually used the phrase "checkout experience" as if it was some magic incantation. Seriously, does the phrase "checkout experience" really send chills down anyone's spine? When I think about those words I think about standing in line at Wal-Mart. A checkout just needs to work quickly and without problems, not be an experience. The web design world is just the same as the rest - it's a few big box stores trying to sponge up all the available business and sell one solution to everybody, regardless of their needs.

These big companies might have bigger sales and promotional budgets than I do, but I do have many advantages they don't have. I know this region, it's people, and the needs of the businesses around here. I talk straight, work hard, and sell the right solutions to my customers based on their budgets. I take pride in making my clients happy and I don't stop until they're satisfied with what they've paid for. I'm not sure these other companies think the same way, they just view clients as billable hours, not as people in their own community.

In Summary

If you're looking for a website, and you're being sold a solution that isn't right for you or your company, don't buy something just because the salesman dazzles you with industry jargon and magic marketing words. Look instead for a designer or design company that really understands what you need, and won't try to sell you an expensive "solution" that doesn't fit your brand's needs.

Who Your Competition Is, And Why You're Better.

I'm going to start out by telling you that your main competition will not be other web development businesses in your home town. If you live within 100 miles of a major city, you'll likely be competing for jobs with companies reaching in your direction for business. Working in Franklin County, Missouri, 50 miles to the west of St. Louis, I've often found that many of my customers have sought out bids from bigger companies in the city. You'll also be competing with national companies that specialize in certain industries. Recently, I bid on a job for a local dentist who had been considering going with a company based in Minneapolis that made websites specifically for health professionals.

In order to sell your services effectively, you have to figure out what advantages you have over these other, larger companies. In my case, my biggest advantage is: I'm closer to my clients, able to meet with them face to face, and they can hold me accountable for the problems that arise. A nice selling point for me is that I can tell my customers that I'll be the one to answer the phone when there's a problem. If they have a problem with a larger company, that company may not be agile enough to respond. The customer might spend a lot of time on the phone with a call center or receptionist unfamiliar with their needs. If you make these promises, however, you have to be able to live up to them.

As for local competition, if possible, try to make friends with them. You probably have more in common than you think, you're facing the same challenges from outside competition, after all. You never know what the future may bring - someday you may need to call them for a job, or you may wind up finding out you can do more by partnering with them than by competing. Remember, however, that you are still in competition with them, but don't try to compete with them on price or resort to dirty tactics like badmouthing their work. Instead, take the difficult path and try to find a service that they don't offer or aren't selling effectively, and then sell that in addition to your current services.

Landing Work

Admittedly, getting that first person to trust you will be one of the hardest things you'll have to do - it's their business, after all, and you may have never tackled a project like that before. So you might have to knock on doors, but be persistent, because eventually someone will say yes.

In my case, landing jobs was especially difficult at first because I didn't have a wide portfolio of commercial work. In order to succeed, I had to keep a positive attitude and be perpared to seize opportunities. I was fortunate that my Capstone course in Graphic Design at East Central College ended with a portfolio review with members of the local business community, including Ben Ziglin of Ziglin Signs. I made a good impression, and that lead to some consulting work, which lead to my first major paying website gig. I also volunteered my services at my local church, Zion United Church of Christ, and built them a small site. In doing this I was able to help a group I liked while also adding another site to my portfolio.

Doing these jobs has lead to positive word of mouth. Ziglin's company is pretty established in the region, and I've already run into a situation where someone else was willing to trust me because he already had. This experience has taught me that while landing work is essential, doing good work and making sure your customers are happy is much more important, because what they say about you will determine whether you get clients in the future.

Attend Industry Events (if possible)

Because St. Louis is just 50 miles away, it's still economical enough for me to drive in to AIGA events and other social gatherings where I can meet and mingle with other talented people. During one events, I got lucky enough to meet some recruiters for Creatives On Call, a company which helps find work for creatives. I wound up having an interview with them, and that lead to me subcontracting some web production work for a fast growing company, All Volleyball. In addition, during my time at All Volleyball, I was able to learn a little bit from their organization about e-mail marketing, social media, and search engine optimization, which admittedly are areas where I needed more experience. I think I've learned a lot there, and all that I've learned will be able to help my clients in the future.

I'm not going to lie, I was very nervous when I attended my first event. I think all designers are a little afraid of running into people more dynamic than they are - however I've found that one of the best ways to learn and improve is by hanging out with those people, sharing ideas and discussing the processes and diffuculties we run into in our work. If nothing else, at least try going once with an open mind, and force yourself to say hello to everyone you meet.

In Closing

The key to success for me has been doing good work when I can land it, and learning as much as possible from the new experiences I have to go through. It definitely hasn't been easy, but I've weathered the initial storms and it looks the second half of the year will be twice as busy as the first.

Fortunately, Windows designers and developers have the last laugh. The majority of our audience is viewing our work on Windows systems, and the majority of those users are using Internet Explorer, which ceased development for Macintosh years ago. This means that we are developing on the same system that we would have to test and troubleshoot on anyway. In addition to to this advantage, there are a number of tools for PC's which are extremely useful for web design and development.

IE Tester allows a developer to test sites in multiple versions of Internet Explorer from one machine. This allows you to see how well your site is holding up (or falling apart) in browsers you probably don't use. The application does a very good job of giving you an approximation of how your site will behave; However, it will not be 100% accurate all of the time. You can use this tool to find 99% of the bugs, but there will still be a few quirky ones that only show up on the native browsers.

IE tester requires the DeBugBar add-on for Internet Explorer, which is a very useful extension itself. From the DeBugBar, you can launch IE Tester from your main installation of Internet Explorer.

One of the advantages of using a Mac is that there are a number of great text editors available for the platform, like Coda and Textmate. Windows has many comparable alternatives, and among them, Notepad++ is the heavyweight champion - and it's "free as in both 'free speech' and 'free beer'". The program has all the features you could want from a text editor, including code coloration, support for every major web language, the ability to launch files directly in multiple browsers, and the ability to record and run macros (if you're a designer who doesn't know what that means, it's the coding equivalent of Adobe's actions panel).

When designing for the web, the readability of our text needs to be in the forefront of our minds. However, being geeks, most of us have computer screens with better contrast and brightness than the majority of our users. This can create some problems - it can be tempting imitiate Apple's style of using gray type on a white background, but how do we know if there's enough contrast on a less powerful monitor?

Enter the Color Contrast Analyser. It's a very simple, lightweight program that uses the W3C's contrast ratio algorithm to check background and foreground colors for readability, and warns you if you're using a combination that won't work well for your visitors. It has very few, easily manageable settings, including an option to show the contrast ratio for the colorblind. If you're a good designer, most of the time you won't need this tool - but when in doubt, it can be a lifesaver. The best part is it only takes seconds to use.

HFS allows you to turn your computer into a file server, which you can use to share files directly with members of your development team across the internet. It can take some effort to configure, but once it's up and going it's a great way to transfer large files (like raw video) without having to deal with size limits imposed by e-mail accounts or 3rd party file storage services.

Generating a sitemap is very important for search engine optimization. Submitting sitemaps to search engines is one of the best ways to improve rankings, and keeping a sitemap on your server will help search engine spiders find pages and files that they would otherwise miss.

G Sitemap is a webcrawler that you can use to spider your site and generate a valid XML sitemap. This is a great tool for most users, but if your site is using WordPress or another popular content management system, it might be more efficient to find and install a plug-in designed to specifically generate and submit a site map for you (for WordPress, I use the wonderful Google Sitemaps Generator.

The Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick is the tool that I use the most of all. I list it last because it was never specific to Windows like the others were, but rather cross platform by the beginning. It's always a shock to me when I find out a developer or designer doesn't use it; Partly because it's so helpful, but mostly because the people who do use it can't shut up about it.

The toolbar is available as a browser extension for both Firefox and Chrome, but in my experience it works best in Firefox. The extension gives you a plethora of cool tools and abilities - including the ability to edit CSS directly in the browser and watch your changes live, outline capabilities (so you can see how the page is fitting together), validation tools to measure code against web standards, and a myriad of miscellaneous design tools.

In Conclusion

With all of these great tools at your disposal, you definitely don't have to feel like a second class creative because you aren't on an Apple. In the end, the effort and ability you put into your work is a thousand times more important than the hardware you make it on.

An easy way to manage and create content

A content management system, or CMS for short, is a web application that provides an interface through which the owner can manage the content of the website. From the interface, you can edit your pages, create new ones, upload images, and much more. I am familiar with installing and configuring both Joomla and Wordpress content management systems, and from experience I can tell you that both are very easy to learn and use. In fact, I use the WordPress CMS on this site.

Do I need a CMS?

A CMS isn't for every business. Some businesses may just need a simple page which provides basic information and location details. For these businesses, setting up a CMS can bring unnecessary costs when a static HTML page may serve them better.

However, if you want to be able to update your content without incurring the cost of calling a web developer for every simple change, you need a CMS. It will wind up saving you a lot of web development costs.

What type of CMS do I need?

For most organizations, either a WordPress or Joomla CMS will provide all the tools they will need. However, there are advantages to each system that may make one better than the other for your organization.

Joomla's advantages - Joomla excels at user management, which means that you will be able to create many different access levels for the members of your organization. For example, you can grant writing priveleges to one group of employees, and editing priveleges to another. You can also easily restrict which parts of the site employees have these priveleges on, which is great if you want to allow one group to post news but you don't want to give them access to the rest of the site.

WordPress's advantages - WordPress is the world's most widely used CMS and blogging platform, and it is great for regularly publishing content to the web. A built in commenting system makes it easy for your users to give you feedback and start discussions about your business. Wordpress is widely known as a blogging platform, but it can be used for a lot more than just blogging.

You'll have the ability to extend your site

Both Joomla and WordPress have a wide developer base, which means that there are thousands of plug-ins for both platforms (+6,000 for Joomla; +10,000 for WordPress). Many of these plug-ins are free to use and can make your site much more powerful. For example, I have a plug-in installed on this site which detects if a user is accessing the site through a mobile phone, and serves up a mobile template of my site accordingly. There are also many shopping cart plug-ins available, which can be implemented at a much lower cost than developing one from scratch. Through utilizing plug-ins, you can greatly improve your site without substantially raising your costs.

I hope this article has helped you learn about how a Content Management System can give you a more powerful website. If you're think you need a CMS, or if you need another type of website, please contact me and we can figure out which solution will be best for your company.

First, You Will Need Help

No one is going to be a true natural at this, in order to develop skill you're going to need good sources to learn from. The following were the resources I turned to throughout my development process:

AS Gamer - This was the site I learned the most from in developing my game. The tutorials are well written and easy to follow, and the code examples are invaluable to first time developers. I also liked how this wasn't just a how-to site, the authors also explain why you should develop in the prescribed manner. Using the principles learned, you can then apply your knowledge to create a game different than the ones produced in the tutorials. In addition, there are also several great articles on getting sponsors and marketing your game.

FlashKit - FlashKit is a great source of articles, tutorials, and resources for flash development. The site features thousands of royalty free sound loops and effects that you can use to make your game a richer experience. If you have a question in your development process, the best thing to do is search the forums of this site - it's probable that another developer has run into the same problem. If you still can't find what you're looking for, you can post your question, just be prepared to wait a while for a response.

If all else fails, press F1 - Adobe's own actionscript documentation is extremely helpful for learning how to code.

Second, Flash Isn't Perfect (But it's Nice)

The debate about using Flash vs. HTML5's canvas element as a development platform has heated up in recent years, and it seems like everyone has an opinion. The truth is that it's possible to create great games with both platforms - it's just a bit easier with Flash. In order to make an effective flash game, thought, you're going to need to minimize the downsides of using it.

Flash is horrible at error handling - If your user does something that triggers an error, your game may stop functioning correctly, and you may even wind up making their browser crash. Before you release your game, it's going to be important that you eliminate ALL errors. You're going to need to do extensive testing. You'll want to do about as much testing as programming. A benefit of this is that playing your own game will give you more ideas about features and enemies that you can add to it. I would advise you not to do all of your testing yourself, however - because you'll be playing the game so often you'll get a skewed view of its difficulty. Ask your friends to test it, and make sure to take feedback about your game into consideration.

Also, when coding, try not to make things too complicated. The simpler you make your code, the easier it will be to fix your errors.

Flash can have memory problems. There are ways to minimize this, however. In order to add functionality to your game, you're going to need to add a lot of event listeners. These listen for events in the game and make the objects they are attached to move across the stage and interact. When the objects move off the stage these listeners are no longer necessary, but they are still active even though you can't see the object. You're going to need to do some garbage collection and remove these listeners. It's a good idea to start thinking of how you will remove a listener at the time that you add it. The best way I found to do this was to write a function that runs when the object is removed from the stage and removes all listeners.

So, taking account of all these disadvantages, why even develop in flash at all? The answer is because flash is an easy to use development environment for rich, interactive content. Graphics can be imported from Photoshop and Illustrator, and once imported they can be re-opened in their native applications or futher edited with flash's graphics tools. Flash is also reknowned for being an animation program, and newer features like 3D tools and inverse kinematics give you more options than many other platforms. I haven't yet found a program for creating games using the canvas element that is as accomodating to designers. In addition to the design advantages, Flash also has a robust environment for coding which was vastly improved in the CS5 version.

One final note - don't get discouraged if you read about someone bashing Flash, or any other platform you develop in. Just keep making cool stuff.

Third, Start Planning Ahead

Abraham Lincoln once said "If you give me six hours to cut down a tree, I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe." It will be wise to remember this quote and develop a strategy for developing your game and a list of all the features you want to implement.

To illustrate why this is important, I'll share this story: the most frustrating part of my game development experience was adding a pause functionality. Writing the code to actually pause the game was extremely simple, but I didn't do it until I was almost finished with my game. Adding this functionality meant I had to figure out how to stop all of my character animations, and I had to rewrite several character movement functions that had been based on timer events. I had to do this in over 30 files, which was repetitive and time consuming. If I had done a little more planning, I could have addressed all of this early in the development, and it would have saved me a lot of time at the end. Moral of the story: implementing simple features will become more difficult the further you get into your game.

I keep getting asked questions about my domain name, so I'll answer them in my first post. My previous web address (which still points here) was http://www.matthewneilcowan.com, which can be hard to remember and difficult to type on a phone. I wanted a short and easy to remember domain name for my relaunch. I read an article about how all the four letter dot coms had been bought up years ago, but that there were many 4 character domains that mixed letters and numbers available. So, I decided to check for my initials plus a number, and this was the available domain that worked the best for me. Mnc4 - four letters, easy to type, easy to remember.

This site is built using the Wordpress content management system, with a bit of customized PHP that I threw in to make it easier for me to construct the pages the way that I wanted. The coming weeks will probably see a few tweaks and improvements as the site expands. However, done is better than perfect, so it's time to click a little button and launch this puppy. To Infinity! and Beyond!