Me too!  Unfortunately our markets have wrapped up for the year.  Maybe you’re lucky, and your local market operates year-round, but even then it may only be one or two days of the week.

We’re working on a new project built on top of BuddyPress to help local consumers hook up with local producers.  Moveable Feast allows people to go on and fill out a profile.  Everyone identifies their locale down to the city/town/municipality level.  People can identify themselves as either a producer or as a consumer.

Producers can then fill out additional information about what they have available.  BuddyPress is extremely versatile, and the option is there for any user to create a blog, or to make short posts on their “wire” (kind of like a short-form blog).  Producers can elaborate on the food they have available, consumers may opt to blog about recipe options for various types of food, or offer kudos to local producers.

It’s in the early stages.  As with all communities, it will have to hit a critical mass in order to be useful to anyone.  We’re going to start actively promoting Moveable Feast on Mayne Island, and would encourage like-minded individuals in other places to do the same (it’s free for everyone).

Eric Erickson put together the design for this Calgary, Alberta-based moving and storage company. The goal was to update the look of their site, and to provide it with a great foundation to score well in search engines. We did both by semantically marking up the pages, and by re-organizing the URL structure.

The main goal of Dawson Photography was to create a web site that wouldn’t be impossible to maintain, and that would show off the tremendous portfolio of Lisa Dawson.  The various galleries can be updated simply by uploading photos by FTP (no need to mess with anything else), and setting up client preview galleries is a one-step process.

We’ve finished off the discovery and planning stages for RE/MAX, and we’re working actively to produce the web site now.  Expect an updated portfolio entry soon!

After repeatedly hearing from people that it must be so idyllic and peaceful (and really, it is at times), we thought that it’s high time that we started writing about all of the wonderful, and occasional negative aspects of island living.  DiscoverGulfIslands.com is a perpetual work in progress, as new posts are added and ideas expressed.

The biggest goal of the application re-design for Mailmanagr was to introduce a high level of consistency across all sections.  It’s now much easier to work your way around Mailmanagr and quickly add addresses for your projects.

We’re actively developing Mailmanagr and adding new features on a regular basis.  We’re happy that the response has been positive, and that our user base continues to grow.

Mailmanagr was released quite quickly with little work put into designing the public-facing web site.  It seemed like most people who used Basecamp found out about us, and didn’t really care what the site looked like, they just wanted the functionality.  It turns out that that assumption was wrong as the stats are now showing that sign-ups have increased, and support requests are down following the re-launch of the Mailmanagr web site.

At the top of the dashboard, I’ve got a countdown showing me how many days are left in the month.  It’s amazing how often this information surprises me; today I opened it up and realized that we’re half-way through August, and my billings are behind for where I’d like them to be.

I keep a running tally of how many billable hours I’ve put in each day of the month, and the total.  As you can see, I didn’t bill anything for the first week or so of August.  Normally, that’d be bad news, but I was on a bit of a vacation then (my sister was visiting, and I’d rather spend time with her and my nieces than bill hours).  This is probably the single most important metric I’m tracking right now, as billable hours translates into cash flow/survival.

The next section is what I call “Mailmanagr at a glance”.  I’m not completely satisfied with this section at the moment, as it focusses more on Mailmanagr growth, than on current revenues.  The first chart gives a bit of a “heartbeat” of conversions.  If this is trending upwards, it means I’ve got new sales happening daily (you can see that things have been flat for a few days).  The next chart reflects new account signups; most days there’s a few new users registering to try out Mailamangr.

The final chart shows mail volume flowing through the system.  This is probably the chart I’m least satisfied with because high-volume days will completely skew the chart, and make it difficult for me to see the “averages”.

I need these charts to be a better reminder of how much Mailmangr is making/how useful it is for people.  It would probably also be worthwhile grabbing the number of open tickets out of Zendesk to remind me that there are outstanding issues to address.

The newest addition to the dashboard measures the number of SVN commits I’ve made to Mailmanagr over the past two weeks.  This reminds me to keep moving forward, at a steady pace.  My goal with this chart is to have something every day, not just peaks of activity (as you see here).  It’s tough balancing it off with client work.

What do you keep your eye on?

Industry Interactive was more than happy to provide all three.  Now this team elite agents can get on with making Mayne Island a cleaner place to live.

Singing Hearts came to us with a partially complete project.  They needed some labels and print material to take their company to the next level.  They had a logo, and concept that they only really felt luke-warm about.

We worked closely with Singing Hearts to revamp their look and to really make their labels soar.  We then worked with our friends over at INDUSTRYimages to produce some really great-looking packaging.  Everybody wins!