The Jake Neumann

No, I haven’t faded into the distance, you couldn’t get rid of me that easily. I know that it’s been almost two months since I have blogged, and I have no valid excuses for that. I could tell you all of the things that have been going on in my life, but those are just excuses.

Instead of my usual blogs, I have a few new designs that sort of hit me, and I”ll be posting those in the coming weeks.

As always, if there’s something that you want to see here or in one of my designs, just ask.

Some people just don’t get how much work goes into making a website. It seems to me like there are a lot of people that don’t understand that making a website takes a lot of time and effort to make it look excellent. I was recently working with a non profit which shall remain nameless. They couldn’t pay much, which was understood up front. I knew coming into this that this was going to be a lot of custom coding for them, but I felt exceptionally generous with my time at the moment. I put my time in and I finished the website that we had discussed. When the customer saw the final product, they commented on a few things, which was probably just a miscommunication when the project started. I finished the first round of fixes for them. A few days after I submitted my second round of changes, they commented on some more things that they wanted to look different. I took a look at their request and I responded that I was going to be able to fix most of them, but not all of them; that seemed to please them enough. Begrudgingly, I finished my second round of fixes for them which was on the border of taking this project to the next level. I uploaded their newest version of the website to their server. They took a couple of days to look at it and said, “it looks like you did a little bit of work…but there’s still a lot to be done.” I responded, politely, telling them that I could do the other work for them, but I would need some more compensation.

Some of you are probably thinking that I’m a jerk for not doing the rest of the work that they requested, but I disagree. While I don’t charge a lot compared to many other people on the Internet, my work isn’t totally free. The more I talk to people, the more it seems like people think that when somebody works on a website they just type a few things and they are done in ten minutes. I feel like it’s telling a painter that all it takes to paint room is take some pain and throw it on the wall.

Web developers don’t get the respect that they deserve. A lot of people think that web developers just sit at their computer all day eating nothing but Cheetos. Well, a lot of them do that, but they work hard. For a basic website, from scratch, it can take upwards of twenty hours. This may sound like a lot of time to people that don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but if you want a lot of custom pieces to your website, that will increase time and energy taken on the behalf of the developer. Some people just don’t get it.

I write all of this to let people know that it takes time to make websites well. Anybody can type up a little bit of HTML, but it takes an artist to make a great website.

It’s been a while. It’s been a while for a lot of things. One of those things is blogging, another is developing. Both of these things make me feel alive. My guess as to why I neglect them is laziness and forgetfulness. I was working on a WordPress theme for a friend, and I realized something. Every time I come back to working on WordPress sites, I remember how alive it makes me feel. I want to do that more. If you have an idea for a plugin or theme, even a subpar one, contact me. I’m always open to new ideas.

There’s a few things that you need to know about the project that I was working on. The first thing, is that it was a freemium theme downloaded from a questionable source. The second is that it was designed to be difficult to work on, or so it seems. There I was, furiously pounding away at my keyboard at three in the morning when I realized that I haven’t felt this alive in quite such time. Maybe it was something about trying to figure out how this mish mash of code came into existence, maybe it was my trying to insert some of my unique code into this ball of yarn, or maybe it was just the fact that it was three in the morning and I was a little punch drunk. It could have been any of these, but at any rate, I felt like I was doing something right again.

Let me know if you have an idea or a need for some website development. I’m rather inexpensive and I take pride in my work.

I’ve been plotting a few ideas for a redesign of my website and my wife wants me to design a blog for her. This has gotten me thinking about what is a necessity and what is a nicety in a website. Here’s a little disclaimer for you, I know that this topic has been done before, but I’m just going to put my two cents in and get some things off my chest.

The first thing that you need is a logical navigation. I was on a website for a local business today, and their main menu was made up of jpg’s and it spread across two lines. Here’s a screen shot:

This navigation makes little to no sense to me. It doesn’t have a flow to it, it doesn’t make sense that it would take up two lines, and it doesn’t make sense to me as to why they would use images for the links. While the customer is always right, they don’t always know what is the best looking. If this business requested that their menu look like this, the designer should have stood up and slapped whomever they were talking to. At least, that’s what I would have done.

The second thing that I think is a necessity is way to contact the website owner. It doesn’t have to be a fancy contact form, all you really need is a phone number, e-mail address, and a location if you are a business. It’s not hard to embed a map from Google onto your page, but so many websites are missing this. If I go to a website and I have to actively search for the way to contact the business, I will immediately go somewhere else. If you are hiding your contact information from your visitors, that tells me that you don’t want to be contacted by anybody. Let’s say that I give you a business card, if all that it had on it was my Name and what I did, that thing would be useless to you. Often times, a website is like a business card, it tells people what you do and how to contact you.

The third necessity for a website is good content. If a website doesn’t have good content, a visitor has no reason to stay at the site. There are millions of websites with the information that people are looking for, and as the owner of a website it is your job to justify people spending time on your website. if you can’t do that, they don’t have a reason to stay or come back. A couple of the ways that Google ranks websites is the relevancy of the content on a website and the freshness of the content. If you are updating your website once a week, you will have fresher content than a website that is only updated once a year.

This is definitely not a comprehensive list of everything that you need on a website, but these are the most important things to me to have on a website.

I was thinking the other day where I get my ideas for the projects that I do. The best answer that I could come up with is that I get them from everywhere. For those that don’t know me personally, I’m going describe a sliver of myself to you. I have a tendency to daydream, and often times I will start thinking or talking about something that is totally from left field, but it just happens to be what I’m thinking about at the time. I in part blame twitter for this.

A lot of times when I get an idea for a theme or a plugin, I’m doing something completely unrelated to whatever it is that I get the idea for. I then usually try to write it down somewhere, because I will forget it quickly if I don’t. I guess it usually happens when I am not actively thinking about anything, but the task that I’m doing requires some thought, like driving. A lot of times, I will be driving down the road and then a thought will hit me like a brick wall. Fortunately, I am able to hold on to the thought long enough to get to my destination before I have to write it down.

There are also many places on the Internet that you can get inspiration from. If you look around for websites concerning what you want to do, you will find hundreds of other websites on that topic. My suggestion is to steal a small part of each one and make it your own. When you start to look at what everybody else is doing, you can get a feel of what is expected of you in your field and you can get inspired by what other people have done.

I also recently found this tool called thinkerbot, which will give you a steady stream of random Internetness. I’m copyrighting that word, if you use it, you owe me 5¢. It’s a fun tool when you just want to be inspired. It’s only goal is to bring you random images, video clips and sound bytes to get inspired from. If you are in a creative field, and things are feeling pretty dry creatively, it’s a great tool to use.

That’s all that I have to say about my inspiration for today. For any questions or comments, feel free to call or write.

Put simply, you shouldn’t pay for a website. There are plenty of free options out there. Go ahead, do a google search, you’ll find a lot of options. Some of theme are going to be through reputable online dealers looking to upgrade you at a later date and there are others that operate a little more shady. Either way, the free option isn’t always the best one.

The problem with these options is the fact they look like all of the other free sites on that service. While a website that looks similar to another website has nothing inherently wrong in and of itself, if it is related to the websites that it is modeled after. Let’s say that there is a shoe store, Joe’s Shoe Store, and Joe gets himself a website from some free website service. Then let’s say that Sally opens up Sally’s Beauty Salon, and she gets a website from the same free service. If these websites look similar enough, people that have visited both sites are going to make a connection between the two, whether Sally and Joe want a connection or not.

In order to get a quality website, you are going to need to pay some money to somebody. You’re probably wondering, how much money is the right amount. I’m sorry, but that is a discussion that you need to have between yourself and whoever you are getting to help with your website. Something only has a dollar value if somebody is else is willing to pay it. If it comes down to price, I know this great guy that does websites for a great price. Here’s his link, he works for a great price.

You do have the option to do it yourself. If you are using wordpress, you will need to understand how theme files work. If you follow this link, you will find everything that you need to know to start making your own WordPress themes. If you’re still reading you either didn’t care enough to follow the link or you followed the link and you are interested in what I have to say. Either way, I’m still talking.

You know the old adage ”You get what you pay for?” That is true with everything, especially visual medium. Contrary to popular belief, websites are more than just brochures that can be easily updated. They are a way to communicate with a much wider audience than you would otherwise be able to communicate with. Something that a lot of people forget is that communication is a two way street. Communication requires both parties to put forth effort. If you are talking, but nobody is listening, you are not communicating.

When you want a nice website done, just remember that you if you don’t want to pay for it, you don’t have to. But also remember that when you get a free website, you are going to be judged be each of your visitors either consciously or subconsciously. I can’t tell you which is the better option, only you can make the decision

About six months ago, I released a plugin for NaNoWriMo. I haven’t done much with it since it was released, but I need to update it. I’m wanting to add a report card, like the spreadsheet that is floating around. What other options would you want to see in the NaNo Word Count plugin?

I’ve been thinking about myself a lot lately. And I realized that I should lose some weight. As the audience, you are probably guessing what the magic number is that I’m trying to reach, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’m trying to lose weight and I need a person or group of people to keep me accountable. This is where you come in.

I need the Internet in all of it’s infinite eyes to watch me for everything that I do. I have a few goals that need to be met. The first is that I need to release at least one plugin or theme for WordPress a month. The second is that I need to lose the weight that I mentioned. I’m not going to release any number right now, but I might in the future.

For my first goal, I am going to release a plugin that will allow me to track my second goal. I’m thinking something of a thermometer that you see when schools try to raise money, but instead of going up, it goes down as you lose weight. There will also be other options in there for graphs and stats to see the average weight you lose in a week. If there are any other things that you would like to see, I’m open to suggestions, as usual.

Before I start this, here’s a little disclaimer. I love wordpress and all of the options that it has, but I don’t think that it is a one size fits all solution. When an Internet ignorant person comes to me for a suggestion on how to set up their website, they expect to get some knowledge and wisdom out of me, not the same stuff I give to everybody else. I feel like people are often given wordpress, because that’s what everybody else uses, not because that is what they need. WordPress is great, it has a lot of plugins available, and it is customizable to no end. It also has a lot of things that a small website might not need, such as the ability to blog.

I recently found a CMS called Concrete5 it is a free open source CMS. While templating isn’t as intuitive as wordpress, what the end user sees is simply stunning. It has a feature that I have wanted to see in WordPress for a while now, inline editing. This alone wouldn’t make me change my mind, but everything  on the concrete5 dashboard seems much more intuitive to me.

I know that lot of people have invested a lot of time and money into developing for wordpress, and there is a lot of money available in supporting wordpress. But I also know that designers should be more worried about the end user, than making a quick buck. If you could make your customer happier without using wordpress, why wouldn’t you?

I finally finished my NaNoWriMo word count plugin, you can find it here. I for one think it’s does a pretty good job at what it does. I wrote this plugin, because I noticed that there was a lack of plugins in the word count department that fit my needs. I am planning on doing NaNoWriMo this year, but I wanted to use wordpress as my editor. I found that there was nothing to track my word count on my way to 50,000 words. So, I unveil to you the NANOWRIMO WORD COUNT PLUGIN!!! With this plugin, you can view the titles of all of the posts in a category, see their individual word counts and the total word counts of all of the posts.

You can see this plugin in action on my Table of Contents page.