Here are some of my favorites from the set.

It’s something that I try to strive for in my photography, but I imagine that I often fail. Too often modern architecture or fashion steal the focus of an image.

The photo-a-day project does continue, even though I’ve not updated it recently. Let’s call it performance anxiety after my photos were featured on DCist a few weeks back.

This photo was originally (or most recently) published on burst sausages

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

When it’s appropriate to embark on a company redesign, following the right process will take a good deal of time, a great deal of thought, and an even greater deal of work and stress before you’re done. If you prematurely redesign your site, and without the right process, it might be the last mistake you make in your job.

1. You’ve become “bored” with your site’s look

This is the most common, and most ill-advised reason to redesign a website. You look at your site every day, your customers do not. Your customers come to the site when they first find out about your company. If you sell products online, people come and purchase, and maybe come back for support. Almost without exception, you see your website more than any customer. It can be tough to see your site through fresh eyes, but when evaluating for a redesign, this is what you have to do. Remember, when customers see your website, it’s often the first and last time that they do so. Web-apps are a whole other situation, which I will explore in the future.

2. You saw something cool on k10k, FWA, 6 Revisions…

There is a lot of great art out there. Most of it doesn’t belong on your company’s website. Every item on a business’s webpage should have a reason for existing, a reason for being there. If you can’t think of one, rip it out. When customers come to your website, they have a specific goal in mind. Everything on a page should be in service of helping the customer accomplish that goal. People don’t come to your corporate website to see the latest in online art, or to see a nifty animation. They come to learn about your business.

3. Someone wants to sell you a new website

This might sound strange from someone who sells and produces websites for a living, but it’s true. If someone calls up trying to sell you a website, make sure that they can give you sound reasons why you actually need to redesign your website. In a later article, I’ll be giving you some questions to ask your agency.

4. Keeping up with the Jonses

Building a website has nothing to do with looking cooler than your competitors. You web marketing is your web marketing, not your competitors. You need to establish your unique selling position, not copying that of your competition. If your competition has a new website that does a better job of communicating with your common customers, then you need to redesign your site. if they’ve updated the look and feel of their website for no reason whatsoever, your customers won’t care, and you shouldn’t either.

5. You don’t get enough visitors

Redesigning your site won’t get you any more visitors. If you want to drive traffic to your site, you’ll need a campaign of search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM). Old fashioned marketing is also a great thing to do here. A coordinated messaging strategy will help you make the most of your advertising and marketing dollars.

6. Looking for a PR Opportunity

PR opportunities come in many shapes and forms, but should always tell a unique story. There are a thousand unique stories to tell about your business. If the only thing that you can think of is the redesign of your website, then you’re not thinking hard enough. It’s a fine excuse to write a release and send it out over the wire, but you should always be thinking of new and better ways to tell your unique story.

7. Your Chairman / CEO / VP / Receptionist says you need a new website

Any of these people might have a great reason to redesign your website. Just make sure that it isn’t one of the ones on this list.

8. You can’t afford it

This is the most important reason. Take a hard look at the costs associated with redesigning your site, the time commitment and the financial commitments. If you get halfway into the process before figuring out you don’t have the time to do your redesign properly, you’ll end up with a product that no one is happy with, including your customers. As time goes by, know that it might become a question not of “how can I afford it,” but how can I afford not to?

Disclaimer: I consult on web redesign projects for a living. Why not contact me for free consult on getting started with a web redesign project.

He Shoots, He Scores!

On Canal Road, out of Georgetown, we went drove by a car park that was mostly full. Interested to see what had drawn folks to this particular spot, we parked. Looking to the C&O canal nearby, the whole thing was frozen.

We walked down the bank to the canal, and slowly walked out onto it, nervous as to whether it would hold our weight.

As we made our way onto the ice, we saw a winter wonderland. Families out ice skating on the frozen canal, the snow shoveled aside, and a hockey game here and there.

There were two games going on as we arrived, one with nets, and one with 2″ x 4″s for goals.

All these folks out on the winter ice, enjoying the day, just doing what they could to forget just how cold it was was quite the sight.

Though we were tempted to go back to the house and get skates of our own, we were quite happy to just walk along the canal, enjoying the day, just like everyone else.

Snow Dogs

Today was a great opportunity to get out and take some photos. The difficulty today was finding just one picture to go in my Picture a Day set. I found one eventually, but I did upload quite a few of them to my flickr account.

I’d love to hear what any and all of you might think of the photos in the sets, and hear if any of you got out on the ice today.

Photo a Day #4

The photo today was a challenge. It got to be about 6pm before I even remembered that I needed to take one today. Luckily, I wasn’t completely spaced and did have the camera with me.

Looking for a good while on my walk home, I ended up with this shot of K St NW at Connecticut Ave NW. I like the way that the lights work with the 4″ exposure, and I think that sometime soon I’ll have to give a try to getting a similar shot down Pennsylvania Ave. I know that it’s a kinda overdone shot, but I’d like to have one of my own!

A tripod would have been nice to have with for this long exposure, but I was able to use a traffic lamp as a stand-in.

I’m interested to see where this project ends up taking me this week, and into next weekend.

Until tomorrow.

Frozen River

For the third day of the photo project, I ended up with a photo of the partially frozen Severn River, in Sherwood Forest.

To get this shot, I had to climb out onto the jetty in front of the house, in the bitter cold and wind. I’m not fully happy with most of the photos that I took today. I would have certainly taken more, but my fingers were about 30s from freezing and falling off when I did come inside. Well, that’s not completely true, they were already frozen, but hadn’t yet fallen off.

There wasn’t much color in the late afternoon sun, so this ended up being another good candidate for a black & white photo. I do want to make sure that I don’t end up with nothing but B&W photos in the photoset.

I generally enjoy black and white photos, but wish that there were an easier way to work in black & white on my Nikon D90. It would be useful if it had a feature whereby one could see shots in B&W, but still have them be recorded as full RAW format images. Not that that’s a complaint mind, just a nice to have.

Today it’s back to the office and the start of the real challenges with keeping the photo project going.

All is Quiet

Although it’s taken me a little while to get around to posting these, I did start taking them yesterday, as was planned. It’s been an interesting exercise so far, and one that I’ve seen a number of others do. I just hope that I can keep with it.

The first image is of Eastern Market in Southeast DC (near the Eastern Market Metro – natch). I took it relatively early on the morning of New Years Day. Well, not relatively early in an absolute sense, but in a it’s early if everyone is hungover sense. I had to lay in the middle of the street in order to get it, but I really like the way that the brickwork comes out and how you can even see the random little specks of snow.

It also wasn’t as quiet as it appears in the photo, there were people around, but a careful angle selection, a little bit of patience, and a little bit of luck made it happen. I think that it works. It’s not exactly worthy of the met, but, for a first day’s effort, it’s not too bad.

Sleeping Beauty

The second photo is of my wife, Christina, sound asleep. She had had a late night the previous night (hound related), and was catching up. Our bedroom doesn’t get a ton of light, but there is almost always great early morning light. She hates it when I take pictures of her, but she’s actually quite photogenic, despite what she may think.

Of course, the issue now is that I’m fresh out of ideas. Tomorrow being Sunday, I’m sure that I’ll be able to come up with something. But Monday frightens me. First day back working in almost two weeks (yay Christmas vacation) but also a much, much busier one. I’m kinda wondering where I’ll be able to find take to take the photo(s), or of what I’ll take them. There will certainly be plenty of fodder around town as people go about their daily business, but I fear it will be cumbersome to lug the camera everywhere I go.

I’ll make it work. That’s why it takes effort.

Generally, we don’t write them down, so that we don’t feel too bad when we look back and see we didn’t keep them.

For 2010, I’m going to break that.

Each and every day of 2010, I’m going to do the following things:

• Take a photograph
• Take more notes
• Do something wonderful for Christina

Every month, I will attempt these things:

• Analyze and refine my approaches to all things
• Read at least 2 books
• Write at least 4 blog posts
• Make a new friend in DC
• Make several new business contacts

By the end of 2010, I will have achieved the following:

• BMI below 29, still headed toward a goal of 24.5

So, there you go. I’ll be sure to give periodic updates for any who care.

You might think that this isn’t too tough. You’d be wrong.

But the point of this post isn’t to complain about the DC vehicle bureaucracy, it’s to celebrate being home. Home means that, even though I take metro or walk most everywhere I go, I can have my car here if I need it, and not in another state. Home means having the closet be well lit, and the downstairs warm without the upstairs roasting.

Of course, there are the other aspects of “home-ness” that I’ve not yet fully achieved. There’s the part where you have somewhere you belong. Working on that, not quite there. But then, maybe no one ever feels like they belong. It’s been getting better, but still, not where we’d like to be, I don’t think.

Not to let this turn into a meandering process, but more to just get things flowing after having been off writing for so long.

Let’s get this running and see how it goes.

Now what?

In this post I’m going to take you through all of the prerequisites to getting up and running with your own blog to start building your personal online portrait. Read on below the jump for the skinny on doing these setups, or you can just hire someone to do your blog setup if you’re lazy.

1. Choose a Hosting Provider

You could use a service like blogger or livejournal, but if you’re serious about building your online brand, you need to have complete control of your message. I use mediatemple because they have a great control center that makes it super-simple to do the things that I’m going to be telling you to do in this article.

2. Buy your Domain

I’m not going to spend time telling you how to buy your domain, there are a million posts that do that. If you’re using mediatemple, it’s easy to do, and part of the signup procedure.

3. Setup WordPress

Grab the latest copy of wordpress and unzip it onto your server. Alternately, use MT’s “1-click app” setup to create the software.

(2π-3). Make your blog trackable

Feedburner allows you to track subscribers to your blog, and lets people signup via email. Google Analytics let’s you track your visitors and get all sorts of fun facts and stats about them.

Once you have these installed, make sure you install both the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin and the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.

4. Link Yourself

If you’ve been using the internet lately, you’re probably on facebook, and on twitter, and on linkedin, and on digg, and on last.fm and on myspace, and on two dozen other social networking sites. All of these sites have profiles, and all of them will let you link to your own website. Now is the time to do that.

5. Link Your Friends

Explore your social graph, look at your friends who have websites and blogs. Put them into your blogroll, and ask them to link to you. The sooner that you start getting links inbound, the sooner that you’ll have google indexing and ranking your site.

6. Create your message calendar

Now that you’ve done all this wonderfully fun work, you have a blog, but nothing on it. The next step is creating a calendar where you plan out what you’re going to be writing about, and how you create compelling content. Look for this in the next post.

This is tough/Technical stuff bores me/I’m Lazy

Then hire someone to do your blog setup for you. A good setup of all these technical pieces should cost you around $1k (it takes time to do), expect to pay about that much again for a decent design.