I use the word ‘tools’ because it allows me to include just about anything I use to get work done: software, hardware, products, services … whatever gets me through the day (and, too often, night).

Last year, there were three that rose to the top of the heap.

ManageWP

Technically, ManageWP is a WordPress plugin. In reality, it is a complete maintenance system for WordPress sites, with its own dashboard and a series of options that satisfy most of the needs of someone tending multiple WordPress sites.

I use ManageWP to manage 33 websites, including my own and those of  many of my clients.

To give you an idea of what this lets me do, from a single dashboard I can:

• update plugins and themes across my site portfolio with a click
• get rid of all spam comments with a click
• review each site’s Google Analytics
• monitor my sites’ uptime
• back up any and all sites by schedule or at will
• check all my server logs
• review, search and manage posts, themes, plugins, comments, users and links across any and all of my sites.

I should note that I tried several different facilities that promised much of this functionality, but ManageWP is the only one that not only delivered on every aspect of my site maintenance wish list, they thought of a few I hadn’t even considered.

As if this cake needed any icing, the folks at ManageWP know how to keep me engaged. A weekly email newsletter has never failed to tip me off about some previously unknown aspect of MWP, or a great article or blog post. It’s meaningful, non-intrusive and actually helpful.

1Password

This is another case of having tried many options to address an ongoing problem and finally stumbling on what has been a perfect solution for me: 1Password. The problem in question is one that just about everyone has now: how can you juggle the many passwords required to access secure online sites without compromising security?

I’ll admit that my practice has been to keep all my passwords in a single text file. Sure, I set passwords of minimum 12 character length, and I use upper case and lower case and letters and numbers and symbols, and I change my passwords regularly, and I keep an updated paper copy just in case.

So, out of all available options, why did 1Password work for me?

• I get an icon on my browser toolbar (any browser) that lets me get at all my passwords by signing in.
• When I’m at a site I need to log in to, I open up 1Password and it suggests the login for that site.
• 1Password not only fills in the login details on the page, but submits them.
• I can review all my passwords and settings by loading the 1Password app on any device.
• The passwords controlled include to websites, my credit cards and bank accounts, software licences, my different online identities and my many email accounts.

Probably the greatest piece of mind 1Password gives me is that I can comfortably set very long passwords for everything and I only have to remember the one for 1Password. 1Password allows me to back up my data in secure files on my various devices.

Adobe Creative Cloud

I may be a victim of clever marketing in the case of Adobe Creative Cloud, but I can live with that. I signed for a deal with Adobe that gives me access to a suite of Adobe software, the likes of which I simply could not afford to buy stand-alone. For $39 a month, I get:

Yeah, OK, I don’t exactly know what all of those programs and apps do, either. But I do know that the combined cost of the programs I do use (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Typekit, Acrobat and Business Catalyst) means I’d have to spend forty bucks a month for a lot of months before it became a losing proposition.

Add in that I get to learn programs I’ve known but not really tried before – like Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver – as well as all those others that sound like they do interesting stuff, and this will be a bargain for many years to come.

I love that all these programs update so quickly and painlessly. My copy of Acrobat Pro had upgraded itself to XI before the press release crossed my SitePoint inbox.

The Toolbox

A short list of other tools of continued indispensability:

Zone Alarm Extreme Security Suite (having used it for many years, ZA has learned my set-up and habits and is extremely reliable)

LinkedIn (still the most effective social media tool for business)

Google (they keep adding the right pieces to the big puzzle)

TuneUp (again, use over many years has taught it how to look after my devices)

Adblock (possible the most under-rated – and underfunded – way of managing the commercial side of the web)

WordPress (my framework and CMS of choice)

Outlook (still the best at managing all aspects of email, without question)

Swish (Flash made easy, at least for folks that think in terms of movies)

Pandora (so glad I can now access this legally in Australia, personalised themed music stations)

TextPad (my text editor of choice: enough formatting to make it easy without going overboard)

Dreamstime (still the most economical source of good quality, licence-free stock images)

Dropbox (moved up to indispensable status this year, becoming my main offsite backup)

DNSStuff (everything I need to know and every tool I need to use related to hosting and email issues)

Crucial Paradigm (possibly the best web host on the planet: they really understand that the key is more about knowing how to deal with crises rather than pretending they can avoid crises)

Dishonourable Mention

I want so much for iTunes to be my perfect solution for storing my 13,500+ audio tracks in the cloud and sharing them across my devices. It’s not.

It’s not just that those devices include Windows desktop PCs and laptops, as well as an MBA, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and an Android phone. The whole syncing thing, with iCloud and playlists and iTunes Match just does not do what it should. I have not been able to access everything I own on any single device.

I’m not unclever (also, I don’t dislike double negatives), but iTunes defeats me.

I have hopes for Google Music, but have to wait until access here in Australia becomes available.

Shane! Come back!!

A couple of years ago, I bought a fantastic plugin for Outlook 2007 called  SpeedFiler. Each time I would use the Move command to store an email, SpeedFiler would suggest an appropriate folder based on previous contact with that correspondent. I don’t know what algorithms they used, but SpeedFiler made the right suggestion 19 times out of 20, at least.

Bear in mind that I deal with 100+ incoming emails a day, and I rarely delete anything. I have a highly detailed and deliberately structured folder system that allows me to quickly find correspondence with clients going back many years – which has often been an absolute godsend. SpeedFiler made using this dead easy.

Sadly, SpeedFiler does not work with Outlook 2010 and it doesn’t look like there are any plans to update it.

I miss SpeedFiler.

This refers to the principle of not letting your skills preparation getting in the way of delivering a natural performance. Don’t overthink things, trust your training and let it happen.

I see this as a balance between art and science, the same balancing act required in web design and development. For a recent project, I found this principle could also be applied to the way content itself is presented.

Wall Media provides management services to some very prominent Australians regarding speaking engagements of various kinds. Six years ago I inherited a design that looked good, was all Flash and had no real presence in SEO terms.

Using exactly the same design and structure, I converted it to a static HTML site, which made it much easier to be found in a very competitive search market.

The site has done a fine job so far, easily accommodating changes in Wall Media’s talent roster and competing pretty well with rival sites – some spruiking the same speakers.

Principal Peter Wall finally decided it was time to move to a dynamic site, letting him get more hands on and aiming for a leg up on the SEO front.

It will surprise no-one that I went for a WordPress framework (honestly, I do consider other options but so often I find a complement of framework, themes and plugins makes WordPress irresistible). I used the latest version of Atahualpa, one of my favourites because it’s so easy to customise and invites you to tweak elements you might not otherwise even have considered.

At this point came the directions from the client. Let’s just say that I’ve never seen so many red flags emerge in one go: advice from family members and good mates about which fonts to use, sites to resemble, how to show photos and a lot more. All well-meaning and none easy to apply.

In the end, I found a path that managed to combine most of this advice with my own feeling about a design direction. I decided the key was to not get in the way of the content.

This is a site for a second-party service provider, someone who can arrange for a high profile person to MC a public show, or facilitate a celebrity panel, or host a conference or run a corporate event. The content that will make or break the site is the talent, so that’s what the site should focus on.

Yes, information that establishes the credibility of Wall Media to provide the services claimed is important, but that comes after the site visitor is impressed by the talent.

Some text content was removed, some was abbreviated and the presentation of the remaining text was made simple, clear and direct. Biographies are being rewritten now, and are made available for download in PDF. Images were given every opportunity to make an impact, and are also easy to download. The home page gave as much focus as possible to the people on the Wall Media roster, not hidden behind a splash page or text about how good the company is.

I sketched up a wireframe but quickly moved to the browser. I focused on the content, gave it a nice font, a bit of CSS and … left it alone.

It’s very white, spacious and – hopefully – puts all the immediate focus on Wall Media’s impressive roster. I’ve yet to find out if family members and good mates approve, but the Wall Media boss seems pretty happy with it. And so am I.

Title: Practical CSS3: Develop and Design
Author: Chris Mills
Publisher: Peachpit
Link: http://www.peachpit.com/store/practical-css3-develop-and-design-9780321823724
Why: A well-organised, practical and thoughtful step through of what CSS3 can do, by Opera Developer Relations Manager Mills, a stalwart of open standards, accessibility and usability.

Title: Photoshop CS6 Unlocked
Author: Corrie Haffly
Publisher: SitePoint
Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/photoshop2/
Why: Now that my Creative Collection subscription gives me every Adobe tool under the sun, I’d better start making better use of them, strating with Photoshop.

Title: Jump Start CoffeeScript
Author: Earle Castledine
Publisher: SitePoint
Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/jumpstart/
Why: A new series from SitePoint, shorter in format and heavily focused on practical knowledge. Disclosure: I don’t read SitePoint books because I work for them, I work for them because I read their books.

Title: Offscreen No 3
Author: various
Publisher: Offscreen
Link: http://www.offscreenmag.com/
Why: Continues to impress as it profiles web and design professionals. A great example of text being beautiful to read. The Chris Coyier interview alone is worth the price of entry.

Title: 8 Faces #5
Author: edited by Elliot Jay Stocks
Publisher: 8 Faces
Link: http://8faces.com/
Why: More interviews and profiles. Again, beautifully put together. Web people create some of the best print experiences. Take a bow, Elliot.

Title: Web Directions South 2012
Author: Web Directions
Publisher: Web Directions
Link: http://www.webdirections.org/
Why: Because I’m in it! No, really, because Web Directions South just recently in Sydney was again a mind- and skillset-expanding experience. Each year, I retrun to my tribe. I use the conference program to make notes to later prompt myself to follow up and explore the topics. Rich pickings.

That’s a tough market, with some unfair advantages built in for certain players – not including my client.

It was easy enough to build a site for The Cottage, but I knew I was also taking on a serious search challenge.

In order to spend some real time studying the metrics, selecting keywords to target and deciding on their optimal placement, I deliberately kept design and development time to a minimum.

For a project like this, that’s no too difficult, for two reasons.

First, this kind of website lives and dies according to how many site visits turn into bookings. The website itself does not take bookings; they come through either a third party online booking service or by contacting the owner or agent.

The website’s main function is to make the site visitor want to make that booking. It requires good writing: a sales spiel that doesn’t come across like a sales spiel; stunning photos beautifully rendered; site structure that is easy to navigate; page layouts that enhance the content; and a clear call to action.

Based on the content I had to work with, I looked for a WordPress theme that would give me 90% of what I wanted in terms of structure, layout and visual design AND one that provided at least some search engine optimisation in its theme management options. I settled on Colorway from InkThemes.

As often happens (to me, anyway) when there’s a free and a paid version of a theme, it quickly became obvious that what I wanted would require an outlay of US$45. Given that this would give me just about all I was seeking, it seemed a worthwhile investment. The visual design was close enough to what I wanted to require only minimal customisation, theme management options provided a lot of flexibility (I know we can just edit stylesheets and php files direct, but it’s much easier for clients and with regard to theme updates if the theme provides an admin interface for it) and, importantly, the theme was optimised to respond to different device, screens and display options.

As far as responsive web design goes, Colorway Pro is about the most impressive WordPress theme I’ve seen – so far, at least. It’s not perfect, in that some browsers do some odd things with the menu in certain screen sizes, but by and large it displays the right content at sizes best suited to various screen dimensions. That’s important for this project, as people searching for short term vacation accommodation are just as likely, if not more likely, to be searching the web using a phone or a tablet as a laptop or a desktop computer. In this case, responsive design isn’t for show, it’s acknowledging user behaviour.

Given that this was a new website going up on a new domain, I set up a placeholder HTML file and worked on WordPress behind. That way, pages would start being indexed as soon as they were created, while actual visitors would only see the placeholder page. I do this because if I prevent robots indexing the site until its official launch, my clients are always disappointed that they have to wait to see their site appear in search results. For me, by the time a site launches it should have been indexed by Google.

I won’t go into too much detail about the SEO research, strategy development and implementation plan – not because it’s secret business or anything, only because I wouldn’t want anyone drawing conclusions or making comparisons to their situations. One thing I have found is that no two SEO projects are alike, or even similar. Whatever success I have is down to me understanding my client, their clientele and how to bring the two together. It’s different every time.

I will say that in the month or so that the site has been live, it has started to rank well for key terms.

We come in 6th at Google for “cottage merricks north”. The five sites ranked higher are a listings site (including my client’s property), a listings site (including my client’s property), a listing site (NOT including my client’s property), a competitor (which is not a cottage: hiss, boo), and another competitor (which IS a cottage). More listings and competitor sites follow my client in the search results (NB this order can and does change more often more fluidly than you might think).

I will also share with you one specific element of our strategy. It comes from my being aware that I’m the type of person who would look for accommodation like this by searching the web. It’s exactly how we found brilliant, inexpensive, privately owned and run holiday accommodation in South Australia recently. This is a double-edged sword, of course: yes, I have intimate knowledge of one consumer’s experience but is that necessarily representative of others’ experiences?

Anyway, one of things I found when looking for accommodation that the results became much more intelligible and appropriate the more specific I became with my search terms. This would only work up to a point, however. Become too specific, or add too many qualifiers, and I might well miss a good option that didn’t happen to mention the one term I specified.

What I found was specifying the accommodation type, the location and one or two additional must-haves or selling-points gave me the best set of results.

Now, if you Google “merricks north cottage stove”, for example, my client’s site ranks first. Not because it’s the only one with a stove, or because it has the best stove, but because I’ve made it easy for search robots to register that the property has a stove and thus give this site a better ranking for that term when it’s used in searches – in association with and in relation to the other terms used (very important to understand that last bit).

Where it gets interesting is in predicting what potential customers will search for. What qualifiers will they add to “cottage merricks north” or “mornington peninsula weekend cottage” to give them a list of search results that is manageable? Terms that I found came up often included pets, children/kids, pool, patio/verandah, microwave – all of which you’d expect. Less common, but clearly important for some searchers were beer fridge, fishing gear, corkscrew and internet.

Even harder, how will they spell their keywords? Currently, my client’s property ranks as follows at Google:

“cottage merricks north barbecue”         8th

“cottage merricks north barbeque”          4th

“cottage merricks north bbq”          7th

I don’t think any of the competing sites rank top 10 for all three variations of the key term, so at least we’re covering the bases.

I hope this gives you some idea of the detail I go into on SEO projects. It’s a fascinating set of tasks and extremely gratifying when you get it right, judged by search rankings for key terms, subsequent clickthroughs and eventual bookings (or whatever your target outcome is). I’ve never felt tempted to indulge in dodgy SEO tactics (like putting “cottage” in your meta data but not in your visible content when you’re not a cottage), as the penalties are potentially so devastating.

Of course, getting good search ranking placement is only part of the story. The text that you ensure is displayed on those search results pages must so entice the searcher that they click through. That can easily happen if your pitch is significantly better than competitors that may rank higher.

And then, once they do click through, they have to be so enchanted by your client’s site that they make a booking.

Let’s hope it works for The Cottage.

I’m no expert, mind you, but I’ve been through a fair bit myself and I’ve seen other people go through a lot more, good and bad.

I’m happy to pass on what I’ve learned.

Mostly, I reply personally and in private to these correspondents but sometimes one pops up that seems worth sharing. This is one.

Hello,

I’m a web designer and i have questions about web designing.

When you want to design a website (UI), do you check another portfolios on the web just for getting ideas? not copy!

What another professional designers do?

Is it against with copyright law? or is it illegal?

At end, Here is my portfolios: www.oreallove.deviantart.com What are you think about my design?

What’s wrong with my designs?

Here is my response:

Thanks for your email.

With regard to your first question, the line between inspiration and plagiarism in web design is a matter of judgement, as finely balanced as it is in any venture that focuses on the communication of ideas. Just as with poets, novelists, playwrights, artists, sculptors, scientists, inventors, interior designers, journalists, academics and anyone who ever “made something up”, web designers can easily be accused of copying others’ work.

Personally, I am constantly inspired by the work of others. I don’t ever set out to copy, but I am quite sure it is possible to point to aspects of my work and identify an inspirational source. Whether that is a problem is a matter of degree, and determinable intent.

If I set out to convey an original idea and in the process use a set of words that have also been used by someone else, it may not be plagiarism in my mind, but a court may find that I have been influenced by the other work. If the author of the other work can establish that I had been exposed to their work, a court would probably find it is plagiarism. This is the principle under which George Harrison was prosecuted for plagiarism with his My Sweet Lord. He conceded that he may have heard the song He’s So Fine before he wrote his song, and that was enough for a court to find he may have been influenced and thus My Sweet Lord copied the other song. In other words, copying doesn’t even have to be intentional to get you into trouble.

The other example I look to, however, is that offered by the quote attributed to Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, by which he meant his considerable achievements would not have been possible without the work of scientists who came before him. I know in my design work, I have stood on the shoulders of people like Zeldman, Bowman, Meyer, Stocks, Boulton, Pieters and dozens of others. I don’t think I have plagiarised anyone.

So, my answer to you is, “Yes, I look at other designers’ work all the time, and I actively seek inspiration from it”. You have to judge for yourself whether you are copying anyone – ultimately, your own conscience is a better ruler than copyright law, but you have to be aware that others may see it differently, especially if it’s their ideas being copied.

With regard to your own work, you are clearly very accomplished in both the technical and aesthetic aspects of web design. What you need to take this to a level of a profitable business is to work with more clients who will stretch you and focus your talents on how to present content. Ultimately, to make a living out of web design, you need to be a service provider. Now, I know there’s an age old conflict in there: “How do I get more clients if I can’t get more clients?”

For me, the answer was – and still is – to do pro bono work, typically for someone who otherwise couldn’t afford it, like community groups or small businesses. By executing designs for some clients for free, I am able to build my portfolio of completed designs, demonstrate my ability to work to a brief, extend my skills by trying something new in a low risk environment and – and this is the bonus – lay the ground for turning some of those pro bono clients into paying clients. This has been very successful for me over the years and I still do it now.

This will also give you a single key skill for a freelance web designer: the ability to market yourself. Most of my clients have come about because I talked them into it: I embraced their needs, figured out a way to meet them, explained how I would go about things and then executed my designs with as much style and effectiveness as I could muster. The more you do it, the better you get.

Note that when I aim to fill a client brief, I always look at their competitors or sites that serve a similar purpose. I’m looking for the type of content, visual design and functionality that I can or should incorporate into the work for my client, to make them competitive.

This is where your first question comes into things again: by aggregating ideas from different sources, I’m less likely to stand accused of copying any one in particular. If I do copy something directly – typically more in code than in visuals – I acknowledge it by including comments and links to the source. Website visitors won’t see that but a potentially aggrieved designer will.

Ultimately, it is you who will know whether you have nefariously copied or been justifiably inspired by someone else’s work. Trust yourself not to copy, and never stop being inspired by others’ work.

Good luck (because that’s also useful).

My experience is the not the same as yours, of course. You may feel that undertaking pro bono work is a trap – I know many people feel like that. Would you give different advice?

I was this week voted on to the Committee of the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA), as part of a process that will see the Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA) unite with AWIA to form a single national industry body.

At the same AWIA AGM, outgoing Chair Miles Burke was made a life member, and I was invited to write a few words describing Miles’ contributions to the web industry in Australia.

Miles Burke is one of the people who defined how to join the words ‘web’ and ‘professional’.

I first met Miles at – no, wait for it … OK, you were right – a web industry conference.

It was 2005, the second and (as it turned out) final Web Essentials event in Sydney, to be replaced the following year and thereafter by the increasingly global conference juggernaut that is Web Directions.

That was the year the fire alarm went off at the UTS venue, causing an evacuation of some of the globe’s greatest web talent onto an Ultimo street. Back in the auditorium, I started chatting to the chap next to me who was, of course, Miles.

The great thing about these kinds of conferences is that you’re pretty well assured that anyone you talk to will be interested in at least some of the things you’re interested in. Miles and I clicked, as we talked about web standards, design, freelancing, and his company. We exchanged business cards – with a wry smile, as not many web professionals yet handed out business cards.

And that’s the thing about Miles. He is the consummate professional. Like many of our vintage he had a life before the web, and what he learned in publishing, advertising, marketing and graphic design gave him a great platform for building a web career. What turned that into a very successful career, however, were his business skills.

In 2007, I had to call on Bam’s services to help out on a large scale international project that was in danger of collapsing under the weight of high expectations not being met. I brought in Miles and Bam as troubleshooters. At short notice, working off very scratchy specs, they handrolled a completely tailored CMS and implemented a complex and demanding design inside 10 weeks.

I gained an even better understanding of Miles’ business nous when I became an editor at SitePoint, where my tasks included editing a fortnightly column Miles wrote on business and the web, which appeared as blog posts on a website that gets 100,000 pageviews a day and in an email newsletter sent to a quarter of a million people around the world.

It’s all still there now on sitepoint.com, this collection of articulate, personal and communicative gems about what it is to run a web-based and web-focused business. You could pull it all together into a book. And, of course, he did: The Principles of Successful Freelancing was published in 2008.

Which is pretty funny, because Miles has more recently become the poster boy for the freelancer-come-good, having moved on to not just form an award-winning company but go on to open up its ownership to staff.

Also in 2008, I joined the Committee of the Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA), while Miles was a founding and active Committee member of the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA). By the following year, while Miles was still Chair of AWIA, I was President of WIPA. We got our heads together and wrote a letter to both organisations telling them (and ourselves) that we really should work this out so there is just one truly national body for the web industry.

It’s taken three years, but as Miles steps down as Chairperson of AWIA (again!) he does so knowing that he has finally seen it through. Which is just like him, really.

I couldn’t think of a better person to be the first life member of AWIA than Miles Burke.

For me, Ron Allum is a case in point.

Until 2006, I lived in Lilyfield, a lovely inner western Sydney suburb tucked between Balmain and Rozelle on one side and Leichhardt and Annandale on the other. True, the Citylink expressway did cut a swathe through the middle, but then we also had the terminus to the delightful light rail to take us into the city.

The street I lived in was a short one, mostly cottages that had been there for many, many years – as had some of the residents. One of our immediate neighbours had been born in the house across the street. We had annual street Christmas parties, and it was the kind of place where kids were looked after by everyone.

When we lived there, the older denizens were being joined by younger, trendier residents – most of whom settled into the existing ambience rather than trying to turn into a yuppie paradise. One of the residents was a chap who did a bit of work with underwater cinematography, including working with some Hollywood types.

With a growing family, we decided to leave our rented Lilyfield cottage to buy a house, which is how we came to live in lovely Corrimal.

In the last week of June this year, I received an email from Ron and Yvette Allum saying they had some business prospects happening and needed a website set up quick smart to take advantage of the opportunities that might arise. They had a Powerpoint presentation, some PDFs, photos, some links to other websites and not much more to work with.

The “Hollywood types” that Ron worked with turned out to include Canadian film director James Cameron, who tapped into Ron’s genius for underwater engineering to create entirely new ways of using deep sea cinematography for a few little projects like filming the wreck of the real Titanic.

Their working relationship blossomed, and in March this year Cameron went to the depths of the Mariana Trench – the deepest water in the world – in a submersible designed and constructed by Ron. To do this, Ron had to invent a new material that could withstand the huge pressures at the bottom of the ocean while still being able to be shaped into a craft that could be reasonably navigated and controlled at such depths.

That material – which really is revolutionary – is what Ron wanted to bring to general market now, and a website was required to promote it.

What made that a challenge was that the website had to be ready to be promoted at a speech Ron was giving in Sydney on the 29th of June. I was contacted on the 24th of June.

That’s the kind of challenge I love, and I’m pleased to say we made the deadline. I’m pretty happy with it, not just for a site that went from nothing to launch in five days but in comparison with any of my sites.

So, ThinkSmart BeWize.

Recent discussions on the topic have made me consider whether what I did was a redesign, a realignment, a redeployment or a reskinning.

Until recently, I would have called what I did a redesign without a second thought.

The sites of all my clients of five years or longer have undergone significant change, from the application of new visual designs and rearrangement of site functions (realignment) to designing and installing totally new replacement websites (redesign).

I’ve also had instances where the structure and design stayed the same, but the way the content was brought to the website changed (redeployment), for example turning a static HTML website into a CMS-driven dynamic site.

There have also been site revisions based on modifying only surface elements of the visual design, driven by my client having changed their branding (reskinning).

The reasons for the changes – or, at least, for the nature and timing of the changes – are as individual as my clients and their websites are. All the changes have been driven by them.

Sometimes my clients have just wanted to make the website “fresh”, sometimes they have employed teams of analysts who have come up with web-based “redirections” that improve the company’s bottom line in some way.

To many, these may be fairly esoteric distinctions, but web professionals are becoming more refined in their understanding and analysis of what they do, and we are evolving a language that lets us quantify and manage that.

My clients probably don’t care whether their site is being redesigned, realigned, redeployed or reskinned but it gives me a context to ensure I’m doing the right thing for them.

All of this is built, of course, on building and maintaining long term relationships with my clients.

Those kind of relationships hold no guarantees, though, and it’s no coincidence that when I’ve lost long term clients, it’s typically been either just before or during a website revision process.

Interestingly, I’ve recently regained a couple of clients who tried other designers and developers and ended up coming back to me.

Then again, I’ve also had occasion to walk away from clients, including one who had been with me for eight years. That decision was based on my belief that they needed a change.

It’s an interesting life, being a one-man-band web designer/developer. It’s a niche position in that my approach won’t work for everyone, but I believe more than ever that there is plenty of room for people like me: generalist managers of a client’s web presence.

If you’re a web designer or developer and you’re up for some self-directed professional development reading, these titles could be useful to you, too.

Title: PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja, 5th Edition
Author: Kevin Yank
Publisher: SitePoint
Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/phpmysql5/

Title: Offscreen
Author: various
Publisher: Offscreen
Link: http://www.offscreenmag.com/

Title: Design Is a Job
Author: Mike Monteiro
Publisher: A Book Apart
Link: http://www.abookapart.com/products/design-is-a-job

Title: The Smashing Book #3
Author: Various, via Smashing Magazine
Publisher: Smashing Media
Link: http://www.smashingbook.com/

Title: Web App Success
Author: Dan Zambonini
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Link: http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/web-app-success

Title: The CSS3 Anthology
Author: Rachel Andrew
Publisher: SitePoint
Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/cssant4/

Title: The Icon Handbook
Author: Jon Hicks
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Link: http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/the-icon-handbook

It was a lovely idea, beautifully executed, that included some fascinating and unexpected choices from people not necessarily usually associated with faith and reflection.

It’s four years later, and Ros is about to launch the sequel. A World of Prayer has applied the same principle as Mosaic, only on a global scale.

This time, contributors include Nobel Peace Prize winners Lech Walesa, Mairead Corrigan, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, as well as the Dalai Lama, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Rabbi Jacqueline Tabick, theologian Hans Küng, and writers Richard Rohr and Joan Chittister. Artists and musicians such as Pete Seeger and Yusuf Islam are also included.

It’s another lovely piece of work, sure to find an appreciative audience. The overwhelming impression is of how much the proponents and followers of various faiths and philosophies have in common with each other. Our shared humanity shines through, even as we wonder how such like-minded people can differ so widely – and often so violently – in the way their beliefs are applied.

I’m not a person with a lot of faith in organised religion, nor do I have an unshakeable belief in any one particular deity. If any label can be applied to me, it is probably fair to call me a humanist. Although I do have a sneaking hippy/boomer empathy with pantheism.

Designing the new site did throw up a couple of interesting issues. The site for the first book was based at a domain of that name, ie mosaicbook.com.au. The obvious strategy was to get a new domain for the author (rosbradley.com) and build a new site that incorporated the old one and offered room to cover the new book and anything else that might eventuate.

The shift from a .com.au to a .com domain is largely symbolic, but does give a sense of moving from a local to a global scale.

I was also asked to keep the site very low key. I interpreted this as an invitation and licence to embrace minimalism. Fortunately, I like white.

I followed the path of least resistance in keeping most of the Mosaic site structure intact – except the pages about the author and her links, which I turned into pages linked to from the home page. In this way, the site became focused on the author and the Mosaic site became a sub-site.

It then made sense to set up the pages for A World of Prayer in the same way, using the same styles and structure used for Mosaic adapted to the new book’s colour scheme and the available content (eg no reviews, as yet).

Using this method, the whole thing took very little time. Each book sub-site has its own stylesheet, as does the main site.

I’m sure there are better ways to do this, but it was quick and the result is reasonably elegant.