creative briefing

I picked up my brother from the station the other night and on the drive home we were catching up on life during the past four months during which he was away studying.

He asked me, “How’s your business going?”

I responded, “It’s going well - I’m comfortable with the amount of business that’s coming in and the money I’m making.”

He then said, “Don’t get comfortable. You can be as comfortable as you want when you’re 40. At this stage you should never be so comfortable with what you have that you’d stop pushing for more.”

A nice reminder that I thought was worth sharing to all entrepreneurs.

I know. I promised that there would be a post coming soon on WordPress techniques. Hell, there’s even an unsaid promise that I would update at least once a week in exchange for your loyal readership. I know! I’ve been totally MIA from the blogosphere this past week both in writing and reading (I never thought something could look as intimidating as my inbox… but my Google Reader has done a pretty good job of going above and beyond that). But I swear it’s for good reason.

I’ve been working hard on an aforementioned project and am looking to launch by the end of the week. So in the mean time, sit tight. You’ll all be the first to know when it’s launched and when I’m back (though the former is probably more exciting to you than the latter).

See you all when I come back up for air again.

An interview with Satish and I was just posted over at HatchThat.com. In the interview we talk about our latest project, cantwaitforchristmas.com - how we came up with it, what the response has been like thus far, and also what happens when Christmas finally arrives. Give it a read here.

HatchThat actually has a pretty strong history of good interviews under its belt. 37 Signals, Mahalo, Mint, and Amp’d Mobile have all had the opportunity to leave their two cents on the site. Be sure to check out their interviews when you’re done reading ours!

PS - Stay tuned for the post-project report. It’ll have all sorts of juicy insights for WordPress and social media lovers. And there’ll be a guest blogger!

If you’ve noticed that you haven’t heard from me in the last few days (since my Inspired post), it’s because I’ve been completely submerged in the wonders of WordPress! I had the hang of it after the first night, but I’ve spent the last few days diligently perfecting the ins and outs of this underestimated platform.

Most of my time has been dedicated to building out my new agency site. The technical development progress has now sped far beyond the development of the content for the site, so it’ll still be some time before it’s ready to launch.

But to give some proof of my progress, and to alleviate some of the WordPress energy, my buddy and I decided to run our first project marathon last night - 24 hours of pure creative magic with the end result being a polished, functional, and stylish website. With that, I present to you the launch of cantwaitforchristmas.com!

In light of the holiday season, Satish and I decided to build a simple site that would celebrate all the things everyone is looking forward to come this Christmas. For extra umph, we added a giant timer so that we could countdown the days, hours, minutes, and even seconds left til all the wonderfulness of Christmas would arrive.

I will do a follow-up post soon to share some of the tricks and techniques used in the development of this site. But in the mean time, I hope you guys can go and support my first marathon project and join us in the countdown to the official best day of the year!

If anybody is particularly feeling the holiday spirit, you can also help spread word of the site by blogging about it or sharing it with friends.

Looking forward to seeing what you’re all looking forward to this Christmas!

I met with a local distinguished graphic and web designer this past week and came out of a two and a half hour enlightened, thought-filled, and inspired. It was great to get the perspective of a formal designer (by formal I mean someone who has gotten formal education in design - whether it helped them or not) on the industry and how businesses operate in the marketplace. For the past 4 years, I’ve been running a design agency as a business professional (it may or may not come as a shock to you that I have no formal design training - just a business degree and a passion for creative work), so comparing my outlook and heuristics to that of an actual designer running a design agency was refreshing, to say the least. I’d like to think that my twist in perspective was also helpful to him, so all in all it was a enjoyable chat for both of us.

We left the Starbucks with a few takeaways and potential areas of collaboration to think about. One thing that excited me the most and made me want to rush home and get straight to work was his expertise on using WordPress as a full-fledged CMS. That’s right, the same platform that runs this simple blog used as the backbone editor for an entire website. If you haven’t already labelled me as being slow to jump on this bandwagon, then you may be skeptical about the concept like I had been prior to this conversation. I’ve read about it, but always doubted its potential to be flexible and adaptive enough for sites that require more than just the blog functionality. I stand corrected!

Eager to add a new skillset to my arsenal, I dove into the WP infrastructure the next night and came out sometime between 3 and 4 am feeling on top of the world. I’ve learned a lot in this short amount of time, and I plan on sharing a lot of these lessons soon. In the mean time, I’m happy to say that there is hope for those who’d like to believe that WordPress can be used as a CMS, and I’ve possibly figured out a way to finally advance the development process of our new agency site. Score!

Stay tuned to see what I’ve been playing with in my sandbox. :)