I design website for a living, and I have really strong opinions about the subject. It’s true, it’s a fact, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I think that we’ve made some of the best websites around, particularly for Portland businesses. And I’m really proud of that.

Once upon a time – three or four years ago, actually – we didn’t have a portfolio. We didn’t even have a business. And of course, getting started is tough. We were lucky to have built some really nice websites at first, and even though those clients got them for a song, the effort was well worth it on our part. Those sites led to more and more work, and got us to where we are now.

Back then, I did some “cold calling.” Not door-to-door, exactly, but that’s what it felt like. I can recall dressing up in a suit to pitch a website, something I haven’t done since. I was once paid in a bar, with twenty dollar bills. What can I say… times were tough. What was amazing was that it was so much harder to get paid back then, even though most websites we made were about $300! We are not that cheap anymore. I suspect that the less you charge, the less your clients will value your services.

I really hated having to sell our services. That period only lasted six months at the most, for which I am eternally grateful. We don’t pitch ourselves to strangers, and we don’t advertise; we rely on our past work and word of mouth, and it works well for us. But it still breaks my heart to see new businesses opening up in Portland, every bit as stylish as a Stumptown or a Masu, who are willing to pay the Yellow Pages people $150 per month or more for a “custom designed website.” I don’t want to name names, but… okay, here’s an example. Sorry guys, but yuuuuuck. It just doesn’t convey how nice that place is, and that’s important.

Let’s try a little experiment. Let’s say that a website that we build is useful for three years. It’s probably useful for much longer than that – several of our $300 projects still serve folks well – but let’s assume that. Hosting a website will probably cost you at most $400 for three years. At $150 per month, times 36 months, “Dex” is charging you $5400. We do a bit of work with search engines, and we make our sites updateable just like Dex does. So what does $5000 get you from Needmore Designs?

Quite a few of the projects in our portfolio at this time, frankly! Every project is certainly different, and I prefer to think of websites as evolving over time, rather than being built and then neglected. I suspect people are suckered into offerings like Dex because it looks cheaper up front, and I’m not going to argue with that. But the budgets are similar. Why not hire local, passionate professionals to do the work? And what if you decide you want to host the site yourself, and pay $10 instead of $150 a month? Who do you think keeps the website… you, or the “Yellow Pages people?”

Too bad I’m not doing cold-calling anymore.

Jason writes:

I hope you all are well and we would really love to see you at our show next Thursday, Jan 25. It starts at 9:30pm and will happen at Mississippi Studios (3939 N Mississippi). Let us not forget that Yes Father is going to play a wicked fun set right after the show. So please come over. I’m pretty sure you will find it funny.

It’s seven bucks to get in. Worth it! In fact, a bunch of our stuff is in the show, too. So consider yourself invited. We hope to see you there tomorrow night.

It’s always enjoyable discovering some random nicety with computers in general, or my Mac in particular.

Just today I was wishing I had the functionality of grabbing a “column” of text by dragging with the option key, like I do in TextMate… and lo and behold it just worked. Weird. I had no idea you could just do that. You can even start typing, and get a filled column of text, of whatever you type. It can save a lot of typing.

I was playing with this Mighty Mouse and kind of realized there’s a lot of interface elements you can roll the mouse ball over to interact with. Like the volume control in iTunes. Why grab the thing? Just roll over it.

It’s all very good, because a friend and I just got into a lengthy debate about Mac vs. PC last night, and that was weird. I haven’t had a discussion like that for a long time! Despite the fact that Mac users make up for only maybe 5% of folks out there with computers (and that’s probably optimistic), it’s rare for me to talk to someone who personally prefers a PC. Most folks who use PC’s, it seems to me, use it because they have to, for one reason or another. Which is quite understandable! It’s just strange…

IBM announced a new site called Many Eyes today. It’s a place for sharing and discussing visualizations. The idea is that you can upload any set of data, and then set up the visualization options that make the most sense for you, such as different kinds of graphs, network diagrams, tree maps, and world maps. Check out the visualization gallery for some examples. Pretty cool!

(via O’Reilly Radar)

This TheDailyGrind widget is a thing of beauty. While we do most of our time tracking in Basecamp these days, I often forget to keep track of when I’m actually doing the work, which would force me to go back and figure out how many hours I actually put in on each project from memory. Not good. There are lots of Mac programs that help you do this, but they usually cost money, and they have far more features than I need, so they just become a distraction.

This widget just lets you set up a number of timers for each project, and your only options are start, stop, and reset. Simple and elegant.

Well, if you’re a Mac user, you may be please to note that Apple’s Dashcode Beta is now out for real, and available for download on Apple’s website. This is a development tool to help you build dashboard widgets, and it looks like a really great tool.

I guess I’ve been “out of the loop” a bit in the Mac world, because I completely missed Parallels’ announcement about the new Beta 3 version of their software, with a new feature called Coherence. The first I heard of it was in an article by Brady Forrest in the O’Reilly Radar, in which the author claims he isn’t holding his breath for Office 2008 for Mac because he’s got Office 2007 for Windows.

While we’ll be purchasing Office 2008 to run on Kandace’s G5, and so we’ve no need of a Windows version, the idea that this new feature allowed you to run your Windows apps in their own windows intrigued me. Could I really just have an IE6 window open beside a Safari window? Could I really run a PowerPC app (with Rosetta), a Windows app, and a Universal Binary at the same time? Could my computer really be three computers in one… flawlessly?!? Have a look:

Yep, here I am running IE6, Safari, and Photoshop on my Mac. It works amazingly! The Windows apps run at full speed, and the Rosetta apps are not too shabby themselves. Being able to run Internet Explorer like this makes it a ton easier to test multiple platforms at the same time. You even get the windows toolbar across the bottom of the screen, so you can launch programs from the Start menu. Pretty neat. I’m hooked!

Like most Apple fans, we had a hard time concentrating on work yesterday. This is, of course, because of the much-anticipated release of Apple’s iPhone and the accompanying keynote. But as web developers, we couldn’t help but notice some changes around Apple’s website, too.

First of all, they added a tab! Apple has, for years, had seven tabs – allowing the website to fit well enough on an 800×600 display. Now some, but not all, sections of the website have an additional, eighth tab. See if you can spot it! Funny thing is, it’s only there on about half the main sections. On the home page, it’s there. In the store, it’s gone. OS X it’s there, .Mac it’s gone. So it appears that the designers didn’t really have time to do a proper job. Likely that will change fairly soon.

There was a section overhauled, as well – the downloads section. Two things are particularly noteworthy to us. First, the use of JavaScript to enable the tabs halfway down the page, without needing a page refresh. Pretty cool. Second, the new header text. Helvetica. Throughout much of Apple’s existence, a narrow Garamond font was the signature typeface. Around four or five years ago, Apple switched to Myriad, which is the font associated with the iPod and other breakthrough Apple products. But it was the narrow Garamond which sold the classic, colorful iMacs.

Finally, the iPhone has another typeface-related peculiarity about it. When the first iPods came out, they used Apple’s old display font, Chicago). The subsequent iPods used Myriad instead, which puts the default font on OS X, Lucida Grande, to shame! But now the iPhone (and surely the next generation of iPods as well) is using yet another font – Helvetica!

Now, I love Helvetica. Even more than Myriad. I think they’re the right choices. Yet I’m surprised to see Apple changing their mind so often about the iPod font – three times in five years! However, I understand that the iPhone’s display is 160ppi, which is nearly double the displays I’m used to. I have no doubt whatsoever that they chose the right font for that display… and I sure am dying to get my hands on one of those phones!!

I’ve been reading the book Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape and I’m constantly amazed at the great ideas it contains. Ideas from other disciplines, that might well translate into programming or design or whatever you’re working on…

In the Railroad chapter, I found the story of George Westinghouse’s breaking system clever:

The air pressure is carried from the locomotive throughout the train by an air pipe that runs under all the cars, and is joined by rubber hoses at each coupling. In the earliest air-brake systems, the brakes were applied by letting pressure into the pipe; the pressure moved pistons, which in turn forced brake shoes against each wheel. There is an obvious problem with the scheme: if the compressor quits or the air pipe springs a leak, the train is left without breaks. Westinghouse turned the whole idea upside down. The brakes are activated not by applying pressure but by releasing it; that way, most malfunctions will lock up the breaks and stop the train—an inconvenience, but preferable to not stopping.

What ideas can you turn upside down today?