This is the first post I’ve made in over two months. A crazy amount has happened in that time. I’ve become a new dad. This is picture of my new daughter, Libby Joss Mabbitt. She’s the one in the picture with lots of hair.

This is a good time to revisit a post I wrote last August: Fork in the Road. I talked about how one of my biggest clients was in need of more and more work from me as the months went on. It was reaching a cusp where they needed to bring on an internal person to handle what was starting to approach 40 hours worth of work each week.

I brought up the idea in the post that the position could be filled by me or someone else, but the freelance opportunity with this client was disappearing. I started talking about this phenomenon in very general terms, but I never explained how things were working out with me. Cody left a comment on the post and said he assumed I didn’t take the job.

For the most part, Cody is right. I have accepted a position with this new company. Then why am I qualifying this? Well, I’m taking a part-time position with this company that is 32 hours each week. I am still going to be working on independent projects like Patron, but during most regular business hours I’ll be working as a traditional employee.

How does this change affect this blog?

I am not going to be closing down Best Practices, although I probably won’t be posting weekly. Between a new job and my new role as dad, I doubt that I will be able to devote as much time to the blog as I have in the past. If the last two months are any indication, then that’s certainly true!

I don’t really know if I’ll be posting every two weeks, every month, or just on occasions when I feel compelled to talk about something. Probably the latter. So if you don’t use RSS feeds, this is a great time to start. There’s certainly no need to keep checking the site every Wednesday morning because there often won’t be a post. If you can just add this site to your feed aggregator, though, then you can just kick back and wait for new posts to come to you.

photo credit: Jaako

I’m sure I’ll be mentioning several times in the coming months the work I am doing pursuing a new target market: local theatres and performing arts groups. I’ve started working with a marketing firm to develop some promotional material. The materials have a few blank spots where we will eventually be inserting screen captures and testimonials from the first few theatres that I work with.

Here’s the catch: right now I haven’t worked with any theatres. My clients have all been small businesses since I started freelancing a few years ago. I need to find a few theatres that are willing to work with me based on my existing portfolio of “commercial” websites.

That’s where I need your help. Yes, you! Who do you know that’s involved with local theatre? It doesn’t matter where they are located. Would they (or someone they know) be interested in a business-caliber website even though they probably can’t afford a business-caliber price tag?

Now many of you are freelance web designers yourselves. I certainly encourage you to take on any gig with a theatre if it is a good match for you. (There’s plenty of theatres in the world, and I’m not really worried about all of them getting snatched up.) If you know someone who needs a site, but isn’t a good match for you, then think of me. Also if you aren’t a web designer, then I’m talking to you.

Tell all your thespians and friends-of-stagecraft to get in touch with me through my contact form of give me a call at 317-222-1460.

photo credit: pingnews.com

I love movies. I love going to the movies and spending far, far too much money on popcorn. I met my wife while we were both working at a movie theater. So I didn’t really need a solid business plan to create Single Sentence Movie Review. I knew I wanted to create that site. I included it in my web development portfolio, but that’s not why I built it. Interestingly enough, though, it has led to bigger and better things. And I imagine that your passion projects can lead to bigger and better things for you.

Last night I joined the board of directors of the Indianapolis International Film Festival. First of all, I really like the other people in the room. There was a lot of good energy focused on the idea of growing and improving the festival. It’s always good to be in a room with those types of positive vibes.

My first responsibility on the board is going to be lending my expertise to the development of the festival’s website. This is probably going to be the highest profile website I have worked on since I started my business. It’s a great talking point when I’m meeting other people in the Indianapolis community. This position is going to go along way in establishing my credibility in the local market.

So what does all this have to do with Single Sentence Movie Review? When I contacted the festival about doing some work on their website, I included a link to Single Sentence as a way to demonstrate both my development skills and my love of movies. That approach seems to have been pretty effective.

Now it’s entirely possible that I may have eventually ended up on the board for the film festival even if I had never created Single Sentence. But I can tell you that the board president was very excited about it. Viewing my site actually spawned some ideas of how the film festival’s site could be approached differently. I also had a lot more confidence when speaking to the board members (who voted me in) because I wasn’t giving them a theoretical pitch of what I could bring to the table. I had already created a website with a database backend to store all the movies.

photo credit: John-Morgan

For a while now, I’ve been making posts on this blog at 10am (-500) on Wednesdays. Last week I shook things up by waiting to post until Friday. Then I asked if anybody noticed. There were only a few responses (three) to the poll I created. I know I have a lot more than three readers, so it seems the most popular response was not to respond at all.

I can’t say I’m really surprised by that. While this blog does have a modest readership, it does exactly have a thriving interactive community. Some posts have a couple of visitor comments, but most don’t have any.

My guess is that many of you follow the posts here via an RSS feed. If you’re viewing a post on the website, the comment form is waiting for you when you get to the bottom of the article. In an RSS reader, though, what’s waiting for you at the end of a post is your next feed.

What I can take away from this, though, is that it doesn’t seem to be a huge deal to you guys if my posting schedule is a little erratic. Whenever a new post is ready, it will show up with all your other new feeds. I’ll still try to keep things consistent, but my wife and I are adopting a baby that is due in December. I anticipate things could get pretty chaotic around that time. It’s nice to know I’ll have some flexibility with posting around here if scheduling gets tight.

photo credit: goldberg

It’s actually Monday night as I’m writing this post. Normally, I’ll have a new post published each Wednesday at 10am local time. Even though I’m obviously writing this post in plenty of time to meet that self-imposed deadline, I’m running a little experiment. I want to see what kind of response I get if no post goes up. So please take a second to select one of these options and let me know what reaction (if any) you had on Wednesday when there was no fresh Best Practices post.

A List Apart is ramping up their second annual survey of web professionals. You may be wondering what is the point of this survey. A bunch of people answer questions. Then we learn that 0.3% of the world’s web developers live in Argentina. Okay. And?

One of the questions on the survey (at least if you’re a freelance developer) is where your business comes from. One of the options is referrals from your past clients. For the sake of argument, let’s say you don’t get any business this way. Should you be concerned? If the results from the survey come back and most web professionals don’t get business this way, then I wouldn’t worry too much about it. That could indicate that website customers just don’t talk much about who did their site for them.

What if the survey comes back and 90% of the respondents do get referrals from past clients. Now you have some information to work with. Since you know this usually happens in the industry, you can go to some of your previous clients. Find a few that will be honest with you and ask them why they’ve never referred someone to you. Is there a problem with their site? Are you hard to work with?

The survey results give you some benchmarks.

I was checking through the site logs this morning, and I noticed that I was getting a lot of traffic on two phrases in particular. At least at the time of this writing, I have a post from this blog at the number two spot in Google’s search results for both talking to clients and audit trail database. I’m no expert in deciphering search engine algorithms, but here’s me talking out loud as I try to understand why I’m occupying such a high spot on these terms.

Competition

I don’t know that a lot of people specifically target these phrases as part of their search engine marketing strategies. A lot of people do seem to stumble onto these phrases by accident, though. “Audit trail database” has 745,000 results, and “talking to clients” has over 27 million.

Age of Page

The first thing I notice is that both of these posts are from 2006. I haven’t tried to determine how old some of the other pages in the search results are, but I would assume a lot of them have to be more than 2 years old.

Social Networking

As far as I know neither of these pages has ever received any serious traffic from a social networking site. Truthfully, I haven’t paid as much attention to social networking as I probably should. The advantage here, though, is that I can at least eliminate one of the many variables that go into search ranking.

Holy Cow

I just noticed that my database audit trail post ranks ahead of the Wikipedia page for “Database audit”.

Comments

Both of these posts have comments, but only one or two. Certainly not enough that the amount of content on the page is higher than most of my posts. Actually the database post is unusually long, but the clients post is one of my shorter ones.

Internal Links

The clients post just has one internal link showing up in Google’s index. The database post has a ton of internal links and one inbound link from a blog carnival.

Conclusions

I’m not sure I have any. The fact that both pages are from 2006 is probably a big factor, in which case my search traffic should just continue to rise as my archives get older and older. Any readers have any possible explanations for my freakish good fortune? Is Google in the middle of a big update?

Special thanks to GoogleFont.com for the “Lucky?” image.

Long overdue, I finally did a redesign of this Best Practices blog. I was motivated to do this because I decided to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. (I had been using 2.0.3, and the admin interface has gotten a lot better since then.) Since I was going to all the trouble, though, I wanted to give the site a facelift, too. In for a penny in for a pound, right? So this also seemed like the right time to prune my unwieldy category list. And I figured I should also go through old posts and update broken links. I made sure the formatting was consistent across the multiple years of posts. Before I knew it I had almost completely rebuilt the blog

I believe all the changes are for the better, though. I hope you enjoy them. For RSS followers, here is a shot of the new homepage:

If you have a reaction to the new design (good or bad) that you can put into words, I’d love to hear it in the comments section.