I am looking out the dining room window at the freshly rained on houses around us that are now bathing in the morning sunlight. A cat on my lap and my newest knitted sweater on I am quite comforted that the seasons continue and life feels to be moving forward again. On my side of the city we have everything, running water, electricity and sewage! We are still boiling everything we drink and flushing sparingly but having these things we are used to has helped me let go of a lot of stress. Although not the guilt.

The guilt will go when everyone else in Christchurch has all the need to move on as well. The reality is there will be people with nowhere else to go living in houses that drafty, surrounded and sitting in silt and damp. With no water, or sewage. Fortunately the power people have been amazing at restoring power to much of the city already. I hope the water people can move as efficiently in the next week. Then there are those scrambling trying to find somewhere to live after loosing their homes.

I am still very much overwhelmed by whats happened and the job we now have ahead of us but I keep focusing on what I need to do right now. One of those is move into the new house – first as a rental because the banks (to add to everything else) have frozen all lending. Even though we have a contract saying we will get the money. Plus full insurance. Hopefully very soon the fact we still have jobs and the house is fine means the bank will go back to being helpful. Or we may just be out of a home, although I am trying not to think about that!

Today I work  and call the carpet cleaners to come in the clean the carpets ready for the new tenants in the place we are living in right now. Keeping moving and buying things in Chch will mean that it bounces back much faster.

Righto then – time to work!

Hello everyone! First things first Kylie and Myself are well. My Dad and his Wife and Daughter are also well. All immediate family in Christchurch accounted for! We have a full house at the moment. The unit seems to be standing strong for the moment. The cats are a little more clingy and after taking off last night but still staying close I am reassured they are not going to go missing when they get a fright!

To recap what went down yesterday after the quake in my little world, the shakeup was not so bad out here as in town. I knew it was big and would damage afterwards, but being in a single story house is alot less worrying than Kylie in a six story building! After frantically checking in on people, I got word quickly from Dad and Kylie that they were well and on their way home. So I went around the house collecting water storage vessels and tidying up the glass that broke all over the place. Once I had what water I could store stored I paced and worried and kept in touch with people via text and email on my iphone (loving the iphone right now).

Thankfully I can do something and we now have people staying whose houses are now questionable if they should sleep in them or not. We have a few more people un accounted for, but the texts are flowing in thick and fast about everyone being ok! I am getting more optimistic by the minute! We have lots of work to do now and and I am sure the news will not all be good. But we have power, next essential thats pretty critical if we stay in christchurch or not is water. We will see what the day brings… NZ is getting loads of help and assistance from all over the world. Its very overwhelming!

To everyone including all my clients stay safe, dry and warm. Look after you and yours. Right now I am on hold work wise, but in emergency call me on the cell phone 021 610 706.

Seriously I’m 31 already? WHEN did that happen? Last month was a little busy and this month looks to be shaping up pretty similar. For my birthday I brought myself a wee album off itunes and luckily the cats can’t talk because I have listened to it ‘like’ a hundred times already – actually its 6 times according my “plays” in itunes. What is it? Well they are the decemberists and the Album is called “the king is dead” if you like folksy, country-ish rocky music I would have a listen. Thanks to soulemama for mentioning these guys.

I have signed up for a pinterest account and thus far I rather like it. There hasn’t been massive amounts of time to play with it, but I do like getting an email each week with what other people are pinning in the categories I am interested in. It’s going to be fabulous to use creating online moodboards for decorating when we finally get a house to decorate. Not to mention using it to help inspire website designs!

Hi Everyone! I hope you all had a fun Christmas and New Years. We had Christmas at ours this year so I was running around non-stop until Christmas and then followed up with a relaxed few days off. I am going to take a small break from the blog to get some other work done this month. I have one big re-design to do on a e-commerce site – that needs most of my time and attention, followed by tweaks on alot of client work. So I am unable to accept new clients work until the end of February at this stage. Which is good right!? Although I have so little time to start it, I am determined to finish the re-design for this site and a new blog for all my crafting adventures at some point! If any of my existing existing clients need things doing then do let me know – I am here to support you guys. Just not able to support new clients at present. So stay tuned in – I will be posting quick updates on my facebook page. Have a great January!

Mrs Cake

Mrs Cake is an inspirational food blog written by Rosa Wakefield in Wellington. She had been writing it for some time before deciding to get a professional design done by myself! I had so much fun coming up with something to suit her personality and style of writing. Rosa by then had some pretty firm ideas on the technical side and just needed me to make it happen.

I have decided I rather like designing blog themes – they are such personal things, its like a visual form of writing up a cool character. MMMmmm, maybe i should think about book covers next! I have been inspired by this job to look a little further into template design for the likes of blogger – if I ever get the spare time I might try my hand at creating a few pre-made ones for purchase. In the meantime I get to create ones from scratch for inspiring writers like Rosa (be warned her website will make you want to bake naughty yummy things!)

Here’s what Rosa has to say about her new site and the design process:

“Dealing with Simone was a fantastic experience, and I was amazed at how spot-on her design was – everything about it was perfect first time round. She was very thorough and asked me many questions to understand where I was heading and what I wanted – which was great, since I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted my site to be but completely lacked the skills (and design finesse!) to make it happen.

The go-live had me super excited and as soon as the new design was up I started getting fantastic feedback on how great it looks now, and also how much easier it is to navigate. My blog profile has improved heaps since the re-jig, which for a hit junkie like myself is pretty exciting.

I’d definitely recommend Simone – she was very attentive and really understood what I wanted, and came up with then implemented a stunning design which exactly fit the brief. I am completely happy with the outcome and am so glad I asked her to do this for me – thanks so much, Simone! “

Thanks Rosa!

Avoiding all the cliches on how fast time is flying by I will jump right into it today. Its Christmas people! That means alot of different things to different people, to me it means avoiding town, malls and Christmas music. I have yet to get sick of decorating for Christmas though – I love decorating for the sake of it – it must be the designer in me.

Some of you may not know but I grew up in retail. Because of that I know how big Christmas is – how it can make the rest of year possible and how it is definitely not a holiday. If the conversations on facebook are anything to go by online shops these days are really coming into their own. People will buy the all their presents online to avoid traffic (the vehicle kind) and the Christmas shopping madness – and the awful Christmas music that comes out EVERY year (scroooge). For this reason if you have an online shop you need to be looking at what your customers may be wanting out of it – and how you can introduce products to them that suit their needs, making the money you need to get through the rest of the year.

Here is a list of things you can do right now:

*Go through your products and segment them into groups – example groups could be: Budgets, sports, hobby, father, daughter ect. Create a page that recommends a list of products for each segment, link to it from your home page, your newsletter, facebook page, twitter account ect.

*Use your “related products” the part of the site. When your in the backend of your site within the product details page and you can often choose what other products people may like – that then appear on the product details page on the front-end of your site. Start relating them by your segments – be it price, sport, craft type and the like. Keep the ideas flowing for your customers, they will appreciate it.

* There is a little less money being splashed around these days. People becoming more careful with what they spend.  They still want to buy gifts but now its more important to get something the recipient will actually want – not a gift that will go straight to the Salvation army in the New Year or be used to be given back to you the following year! Vouchers are getting pretty popular for this very reason. So promote them on the homepage and throughout the site.

* Email Newsletters – Nothing annoys me more than newsletters that offer me no value whatsoever – its just news about the company when really right now I have shopping to do, work to finish and BBQ’s to go to. In this busy time Newsletters can be useful or a hindrance. Giving away information and special offers make a difference in how many people will open and actually read your newsletter without hitting delete.  Its here you can help by giving ideas on what to get people – offer them rewards, list gift ideas give them the odd discount code, let them know your Christmas opening hours and wish them a Merry Christmas. To coin a phrase think “outside in”. Make the time they took aside to read your newsletter count!

* On the blog. Use your blog to create not only news about your company, new products or product reviews but news about the season and whats going on over Christmas. Even create gift idea lists for “the father in law”, “the sister who lives far away” not only linking to your products but even other sites that have products that compliment yours, this is not only good to your reader and the other company – but will create goodwill that may end up in links back to your site – which is all good for google! The point is to create a buzzing festive atmosphere on your sites with great content.

* Buying local. For all sorts of reasons people are doing this more and more. If you have local products, organic products, free range – anything thats a buzz word being used and people care about – make sure you more that just mention it in the small print. Its a BIG selling point.

* Social Networks – If you have a Facebook page or Twitter thing going on. Use them! A few ideas: Post one day only specials, facebook competitions, ideas for gifts, cool links to anything online your customers might like… the point is to get them seeing your logo on their feed so they remember you when its time to shop. Its a fine line, but be careful not to overdo it so they don’t hide your updates! Outside in, outside in!

* Seasonal changes to the site. Every site does something different to promote the season. Banners, specials, Merry Christmas’s at the end of auto emails. Anything like this is awesome and gets people in the mood to shop. Just make sure you write yourself up a list of exactly whats been changed and when its all over take it down – remind your web designer to take it down, make sure that stuff is not up halfway through January…. even worse November the following year!

Alright I have bombarded you with enough tasks to do! Have a great Christmas. If there is anything I can help with let me know!

snowpool.org

Snowpool is a website for people who are taking a vehicle to mountains for a ski or snowboard to post their plans and offer space up for those needing a ride. Its a custom built system by Patrick Davey back when he was a carless student that loved a day skiing on New Zealand ski fields.  I finally got my paws on the site to give it a wee face-lift. Its now setup to be able to work in Australia, US and Canada. So help save the planet and share car space to your favorite mountain at the same time!

This is also where you can order your Christchurch Earthquake tea-shirt – get in before 3rd of December for the last order. Tea-shirts designed by me!

The online world is a MAD one. Things change overnight and the ways to market yourself online are growing everyday. There is so much out there sometimes I just want to, one – plug myself in Matrix style and have all that knowledge right there to fly my SEO helicopter in and save the day, or, two – bury my head in the sand and deny that the nothing changes and eat chocolate. Lets just say since neither one is an option.

Today while I write up some little posts on the latest sites to come out of the QDM web design studio I wanted to share with you where I pickup my tid bits to help myself and my clients along when it comes to marketing.

Newsletters
Join up and unsubscribe if you don’t like them!

• Campaign Monitor – Newsletters on email marketing.
• Etsy – Joining up as a “seller” will get you the emails aimed at marketing your business.

Blogs

• SeoMoz – Search engine stuff
• Google webmaster Central – Search engine news and important info.
• Seth Godin’s blog Awesome author who writes about marketing and business anthropological style and is funny too.
• One Woman Marketing – One woman who does it all and talks about it. Great place to get ideas on workflow and general marketing.

Books and Online Guides

• Mail Chimps - Resources on email marketing
• Google Guide – Search engine optimising guide
• SeoMoz Guide – Search engine optimising guide

Podcast to listen too

• Internet Marketing

Right thats it, I don’t want to bombard you too much. Flick around have a look and subscribe to the ones that appeal. Off to eat some chocolate.

The Entomological Society of New Zealand

The Entomological Society of New Zealand is run voluntarily by a group of people passionate about bugs. “Bugs” or rather the study of them, “Entomology” to those in the know, is a rather important and fascinating field, there are numerous types out there who need to know what’s going on in the smaller eco systems that exist around us. This society brings these people and what they write and talk about together for conferences and publish their work into journals.

I had the honor of getting to design the latest website update. Pretty happy about it really, how often does one get to design with bug pictures and earthy colours and get away with it? Due to its academic nature I went with the stretchy layout, favored by those who read alot. Despite the fact many designers do not like designing sites that stretch, I do quite like it.

Ento.org.nz is built using WordPress and various plugins that do the job nicely. I also have almost finished integrating the design into their own existing journal distribution systems. Go and have a look around…

KiwiPyCon 2010 is ” is an event for the community that uses and develops the open source Python programming language.” On this weekend for all the programmer peoples.

Kiwi PyCon 2010

Since these guys have many talented programmers and web types in their midst all they needed me for was some design work. For this job I started out with a briefing followed by a wireframe then the design.

This design was handed over to them in Photoshop and they cut it up and got it working by themselves. I helped out a bit later with a bit of CSS trickery. But it was all their hard work really. Hope the conference goes well guys!