If you are interested, shoot me an email at admin at eedesign.org. I can give you more specifics then. Be sure to include your charge. This is coding only, no design involved, so bid accordingly. Ideally, I would be able to get this back from you tomorrow evening, but I can be flexible. I will pay 50% up front and 50% upon completion if you have references, if you do not, then its 100% upon completion and I’ll be happy to be your first reference.

Again, email me at admin at eedesign.org. Be sure to reference “coding job” in the subject so that it doesn’t get confused with my “increase male aggregate” messages.

Anytime there are “free” options, some people have trouble paying for an alternative. I’m not here to debate the differences between Wordpress and Movable Type, but I believe that this directly applies to ExpressionEngine.

There are a lot of free content managers. A lot. Does that mean its a good choice though? Maybe, maybe not. Here are some of the things that I’ve found with free content managers and how its different when you use a paid system such as ExpressionEngine.

1. Support. I have built many sites using free software only to hear the very loud chirping of crickets when I needed help most. The “sorry dude, I don’t know” responses are just as painful. If you are a coding god, then this may not be that big of an issue, but for everyone else, this is important. With a paid solution such as ExpressionEngine, I found a great support team and a killer forum that is quick to help. The forum is free, so one could argue that the ExpressionEngine user base is just more helpful, but, is that such a bad thing? Paying for software is what makes the official support happen. If you want to use Wordpress and you back yourself into a corner that you don’t know how to get out of, don’t think that just because they have such a huge user base that someone will have had your problem, know how to fix your problem, be willing to help you and do it.

2. Upgrades. While upgrading shouldn’t be a requirement, it also should not screw up your site when you do it. With free software, I don’t think a developer goes into it with the idea that he wants to screw up everyone’s sites. Silly developer, that would be foolish.  He/they do their best to make it work for everyone. But what happens when it doesn’t? Maybe this leans back on the support issue, but you may be completely on your own for figuring it out. Didn’t do a backup before the simple 3 click upgrade? Now you are sunk. A paid solution is typically a much more controlled environment giving you better results. Have trouble with your upgrade? Contact support and get some help and avoid the, “RTF Readme n00b!!1!” replies that plague some of the free programs.

3. Features. With free software, you get features that may or may or not be good and may or may not be useful. With a paid solution, whether or not the developer’s children get to eat is determined by people buying their software. So, they obviously have a strong reason to include the best, most usable features that they can so that people will want to buy their product.

There are probably other some other great ones that I am leaving out, but these are some that I have dealt with personally. Obviously everyone has a budget so you need to do what works for your budget, but before you rule out a paid solution because there is a “free” alternative, you need to make sure that you consider the real cost of free.

Tell us about yourself and how you got involved in web development.

I wanted to be a journalist in order to become a novelist. I did
eventually get to work at a newspaper but by then I’d been doing freelance
web development for enough years that I was more interested in reforming
the paper’s website than doing the legwork to write stories. Web
development is fun because it brings together programming, manuscript
design, thinking about organizations, and writing itself. But it does
involve spending far too much time alone in front of a computer.

Recently you ported BestNetworkSecurity.com from Joomla to
ExpressionEngine. In your opinion, why would someone want to leave Joomla
(or any other CMS) for ExpressionEngine?

Three reasons:

1) sculptable weblogs, ie, different fields for each one and the
open-ended thinking that this fosters
2) powerful templating
3) intangibles, such as support from Lisa and Robin, direction from Rick,
and taste from Paul, which together form the nexus of an ecology one can
trust.

It sounds like you may have done quite a bit of customization on the
back-end - different field sets for different weblogs etc. From an
organizational/mapping perspective, how do you personally like to go about
sorting out changes like this?

As someone once said, things should be as simple as they can be but no
simpler. Not every object to be published on a site is the same type of
thing. Rather, they can be abstracted through discussion into various
types, each of which type should be definable. That’s what I meant before
by sculptable weblogs. Without them, objects to be published are squeezed
into a standard shape of title/summary/body. When your structure is too
simple for what you’re trying to do with it, you end up complicating
things hopelessly. And people must get pretty hopeless indeed because it
appears to be no small thing to switch systems – you really must have
reached the end of your patience.

So the client and I discuss all the different types of things on the site
and how they relate and what needs to be done to each of them. To express
it another way, we’re creating a series of related database tables where
previously they were all being squeezed into one table. This review and
exploration needs to be exhaustive because it’s what determines the
architecture of the site. Revelations arriving later can throw little
spanners in the works. It’s easy and I think actually fun to discuss this,
and in my experience it’s when the client starts to get excited as well,
thinking, yes, this is how it should have been all along!

In Getting Things Done, David Allen says don’t be afraid to add another folder to your system even if it only contains one item, and to therefore always keep a
stock of empty folders - around a hundred. A hundred! Similarly, I don’t
flinch from opening up another weblog and field group. In fact, it’s only
much later, when it’s been demonstrated that two weblogs actually do have
the same shape, that I go back and eliminate one of the field groups,
allowing both weblogs to share the same field group.

One of the real power features of ExpressionEngine is the ability to shape and mold the manager to your site. That is very refreshing when you are coming from a more rigid management system. This freedom can also be intimidating but once you get your head around ExpressionEngine, the possibilities are nothing short of exciting. If you are new to ExpressionEngine, or maybe just checking it out because you are tired of other content management systems, take a few moments and check out the ExpressionEngine Video Tutorials which walk you through some of the basics. Be sure to check back for the continuation of our interview with Adam.

Animated graphics, don’t by default, make your site better or more sophisticated or whatever. They may just be bloat. That isn’t to say they can’t, but saying they do just seems so 1998. It doesn’t help that Adobe gives such a poor example.

When making animation/graphic decisions, here are some good rules to follow:

1. Does it matter? Does the graphic add meaning to the message? If not, then its just filler and you should move on.
2. Will it be good in five years? Ten? Sure, five or ten years in Internet years is forever, but when you make yourself think of how something will look down the road, you may realize that your dancing baby graphic holding a banjo is really just lame.
3. Is it cute or funny? If it is, it probably isn’t. Lame web graphics have been around for a while and no matter how great that hot dog doing the macarena may seem, it isn’t that great.
4. Is the animation/graphic good? I realize this is subjective (like most things in design) but pick a site that you think is really great and see if you think that graphic would ever show up on their site. If you don’t think it would, then it isn’t good.
5. Don’t use an animated graphic when a static one will do the job just fine. Repetitive animation is annoying. We knew it ten years ago, we just didn’t know that we knew it. Dump the fast looping GIF for subtle or static. Your audience’s eyes will thank you.

Feel free to add your own rules to the list. Like most rules, these are [probably] made to be broken. The trick is to know when and how to break them. Thats where you win the cash and prizes.

Tell us about yourself and how you got involved in web development.

I’ve been working in the creative industry since 1995.  I began my career as an illustrator while a student at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta.  Since 1996, I’ve spent only three years working full-time for “the man” (while freelancing).  I’ve pushed myself to learn everything I could about art direction, design, web design and front-end development, motion graphics, and animation.  After the Internet bubble burst in 2001, and I found myself unemployed (from my second full-time stint), I started 16toads.com.  I haven’t looked back since.

The Portfolio Center has a reputation for producing great talent. Back then; I’m guessing most of the work was more traditional media though. What lessons or skills did you learn from there that have helped you the most with designing for the web?

Definitely.  I started at Portfolio Center in 1995, at the time when the “internet” had just been deemed a “commercial” industry by the NSF (National Science Foundation) and was nothing more than a curiosity to anyone outside of the American university system.  Web media wasn’t a lexicon on anyone’s tongues.  The lessons I learned were simple.  I was one of a handful of students who entered PC with a bachelor’s degree and a few years of “rough” experience in the real world.  The few of us who had real-life experience took our time there exceptionally seriously and treated our educations like a job, not like college.  I realized that for the school to benefit me, I would have to work three times as hard as anyone else.  I studied illustration at PC and completed their two-year program in a year and a half.  Twelve years later, I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only illustrator from my group still working in the industry in some capacity.  And, I continue to work harder than anyone else.

Tell us a little about 16toads?

The first question I am normally asked is, “Where does your name come from?” It’s a combination of my birthday and a nickname a friend gave me back in my days as an undergraduate fine art student in the studio program at the University of Utah.  Why did I choose the name?  Simple.  There were, even in 2001, far too many companies that ended their names with “ture” and “cent” and used some type of ridiculous ‘techno’ swoosh in their logo designs.  I was shooting for a memorable name that reflected my sense of humor and would lend itself to an “illustrated” look and feel.  It might sound ridiculous at first, but people remember the name and, in the end, that is all that matters.

What do we do?  Same thing as a million other independent design studios ... Web design and development, branding, illustration, etc. ... only, we do it all better.  We have perfected our ability to read the client’s mind.

When you started out in 2001 with 16Toads, how many clients did you start with? Do you have any funny clients or projects that you are less than proud of from the early days?

Zero.  But, truth be told, I had never given up my freelancing even when I was employed full-time, so I had six years of a reputation to build upon.  Do I have projects I am not so proud of?  No, everything I have done is phenomenal ... I’m kidding, of course.

The independent design space is crowded for sure.  Can you shed a little light on what it is that you feel you do differently that helps you succeed? How does it impact your designs? 

I’m absolutely honest.  I don’t promise anything I can’t deliver and never compromise my integrity to land a job.  The result is I get to work with people who truly “want” to work with a professional designer and understand implicitly that design is process that requires their participation in order to be successful. 

I also subject myself to yearly rejection by the Communication Arts Illustration Annual to keep myself grounded.

Why did you choose ExpressionEngine for this project?

ExpressionEngine chose me.  I have experience with Drupal and Joomla on Linux and DNN for windows.  I hated working with all of them.  I am a designer, not a programmer.  As much as I know about GUI development, I am keenly aware of my coding limitations.  PHP baffles me.  I spent over a year testing and implementing CMS solutions before I, literally, stumbled across ExpressionEngine.  I was able to do two things with ExpressionEngine that I could not accomplish with any of the “open-source” solutions I have worked with:  (1) I was able to learn the code.  Granted, the learning curve was a bitch, and there were plenty of long nights filled with cursing, but I finally got there.  (2) ExpressionEngine allowed me to do the one thing none of the other CMS platforms could accomplish; ExpressionEngine allows a designer to design and wrap the CMS into the design rather than forcing the design to conform to the CMS.

Like you, ExpressionEngine kind of chose me out of frustration with all of the other systems. I tried Drupal (too confusing), Joomla (too lame) and DNN (UGHH). Can you talk a little about your experience with other systems versus ExpressionEngine?

Drupal. I hated working with it for a number of reasons, but the biggest factor in my decision to figuratively drop Drupal in the circular file revolve around templating.  Drupal templates, for me, a non-developer, were like translating the Rosetta Stone.  I started with a stock 3-column CSS/HTML template and spent countless hours trying to figure out how to adapt the template to my design.  My opinion is that it installing a CMS should not involve “hacking a template” (the results still give me nightmares).  Drupal templating simply isn’t flexible and that lack of flexibility seriously impedes the quality of the final design. It also requires far too much PHP knowledge to be of any use to a developer who is not a skilled IT person.  Not to mention, from a client standpoint, the control panel (CP) is like flying a Russian orbiter. 

On the other hand, ExpressionEngine is akin to Silly Putty.  Pull and twist it in any direction and you can make it fit virtually any design solution.  Granted, CMS is CMS and there will always be limits to how much a template can be designed, but there is simply no comparing the flexibility of ExpressionEngine with any other CMS platform. 

I’ve run out of similes.

What was the most difficult part of the site?

The first 100 hours of self-education on an earlier job prior to starting my own site rebuild.

What part of the site are you most proud of?

All of it.  I am not a programmer by nature; therefore, what may have taken a programming whiz a few hours to understand took me hours of trial and error.  Fact is, it’s not a complicated ExpressionEngine implementation, but I am thrilled with the lack of effort I now have to exert in order to update content.

Tell us about your approach to planning this site out.

Over many years, I have redesigned and rebuilt my site seven times.  Each time was an attempt to streamline the architecture and improve my ability to manage the content.  That said, I can’t really say I had a plan so much as an idea of what I did not want. ExpressionEngine allowed me to explore design possibilities and then implement the one design that would provide me with infinite scalability and ease of maintenance.

You mentioned that this is your first Expression Engine site. What lessons did you take from this one that will help you with future Expression Engine sites?

The Ellis Lab Knowledge Base talks of a “light bulb” moment.  I am not so sure I experienced that apogee ... If I did; my cursing must have drowned out the light.  Nonetheless, at some point, something did click, and ExpressionEngine started to make sense.  My method of learning can be compared to forcing the square peg into the round hole, so I can’t shed any light on a particular lesson.

Can you give us some insight into how you used categories and the embeds to manage the site? 

I could have used a single weblog for most of the content entry site-wide, but I opted to create five weblogs in order to help organize the “edit” page and make searching for section-specific content easier.  Each weblog corresponds with a physical section of the site - header, left column, right column (main content), and weblog.  The “Work” weblog is the only one with page-specific criteria.  I then created categories to help manage all the content on each page.  Each weblog entries tag pulls in a specific category entry to a specific location.  I used the “limit=” parameter to control how much the layout could potentially shift vertically in a given location.

Embeds.  I embedded everything it made sense to embed.  Navigation, footer, lists, etc.  Basically, anything that I could possibly include on future expansion pages, I embedded.

Are you using any special ExpressionEngine Add-ons (modules, plugins, extensions)?

Freeform, TruncHTML, LG Social Bookmarks

Anything else you want to talk about or promote?

Recently, I launched a web site called stopworkforehire.com (which I am in the process of converting to ExpressionEngine) in an effort to educate creatives about work-for-hire and to act as a resource for independents to learn which companies utilize work-for-hire in their contracts.  Work-for-hire is a means by which companies strip our rights of copyright to the work they hire us to create and gives them carte blanche to repurpose the work for their sole profit.  Huh?  An example:  When you pay for a meal at a fine restaurant, you are paying for the right to eat what’s on your plate ...Your payment does not automatically give you rights to the chef’s recipe ... which you could then use to your own advantage.

Work-for-hire is a problem that has been around as long as artists have worked for companies, but it is a problem that has made resurgence in recent years due to a saturated job market and flagging economy.  As long as independents continue to sign rights-restrictive contracts, we, collectively, will never be able to negotiate fair prices and fair usage for our work and the consequence is that employers will continue to take advantage of our talents.  Educate yourself and understand that your business decisions affect everyone in the industry, not just your bottom line.  The only way this project will be successful is to find individuals who have the courage to say “no” to work-for-hire and ask them to consider supporting this effort.  Please visit www.stopworkforhire.com and judge for yourself whether or not you believe it is a worthwhile cause to support.  And, of course, if you do, spread the word.

Thanks Paul for all of your insight and entertainment! Be sure to visit 16toads.com and stopworkforhire.com when you have a chance.

Link: jQuery Tutorials

You can find Wordpress 1.2 CSS templates at Alex King’s site. While the 1.2 templates may not be the greatest ever, it does give some additional starting points for templates, which seems to be needed for some using ExpressionEngine. Take a moment and checkout the wiki page when you have a chance. Thanks Doug for the links! You can check out Doug’s site at Creative Karma.

Well, I’m Zlatko Najdenovski and I live in Macedonia. Four years ago I started learning web design and technology in an IT academy in my home country. The courses lasted for a year and since then I have been involved in the web world where I’m constantly keeping up with the latest web technologies and design trends.

Tell us a little about TheHotMag?

It’s basically a blog, at least the community declares it as such, but my aim is to make it more like an online magazine. I decided for this celebrity niche because I found it quite attractive. TheHotMag is mainly focused on celebrities, but doesn’t exclude lifestyle and entertainment in general.

Why did you choose ExpressionEngine for this project?

The good thing about ExpressionEngine is that I have the complete freedom to modify, delete or add new functionalities to my site whenever I want and in a matter of minutes. If I had to hire a developer, it would cost me not just extra money, but extra time also. Now I’m not just a designer but a developer too, and ExpressionEngine has become my CMS of choice.

What was the most difficult part of the site?

Hmm… I’m not sure there was such a part. Thanks to the EE community I always received quick and detailed answers to all my questions during the development process.

Can you share a particular problem you ran into that the EE community helped you out with?

It seems all the folks on the EE forum are willing to spend a good amount of time to help the EE newbies (like me) with detailed answers. As for a concrete problem in my development process… well I had a few: I remember wasting hours trying to figure out how to show categories from two category groups in my articles listing. The people from the community helped me with quick answers and also suggested new ways to solve my problem.

Tell us about your plans for the future of the site.

My plans for the future are to make more unique content and if it’s profitable enough, find creative writers to write interesting stories that will attract a younger audience.

Are you using any special ExpressionEngine Add-ons (modules, plugins, extensions)?

Yes, so far I’m using “Allow EE Code”. That gives me the freedom to write EE tags in my weblog content, which I find quite useful. Soon I’m planning to implement “Gallery Categoree” and “No-follow” plug-ins.

Anything else you want to talk about or promote?

Well, again I would like to say a few nice words about ExpressionEngine. I like the complete freedom of EE and I won’t forget the helpfullness from the community forum.

Thanks to Zlatko for taking the time to share a little about his project!

From the article:

To my surprise however, given a few short hours, I’ve gotten much further in getting ExpressionEngine to replicate my existing functionality than I thought I could. I literally started with zero knowledge of the software at the beginning of the week, and with less than six hours’ worth of labor, I’ve hobbled together a rough but serviceable, EE-powered re-creation of Subtraction.com.

Khoi provides a visual representation of the parts of the site that are powered by ExpressionEngine (in black) and the parts that are static (in red).

Check out Subtraction and the article. Don’t miss the comments from the always passionate ExpressionEngine crowd either.

Fear not, we’re here to help. What is it that frustrates you when you are designing for ExpressionEngine? What questions do you have that you can’t seem to find the answer to? ExpressionEngine is flat awesome, and we will help you see why.