Posted by John Sundberg in Life in General Saturday, July 31 2010
Earlier this spring my other company had an opportunity to build a pretty big remodel project, and so we did. I knew it was going to be somewhat hectic running two businesses at one time, but I didn’t realize just how crazy it would be. One expression that comes to mind is “burning the candle at both ends”…but this was more like burning multiple candles simultaneously at both ends!
What ended up happening to Black Hills Web Works is that I put it on autopilot for the last three months with little to no blogging and no new projects. We continued to maintain the websites for our current clients, finished up a church website project and did some on-site training with their staff, and helped our current clients with any issues or problems that came up, but for the most part my time and energy were committed to the remodel project for Sundberg Builders.
A nice side-benefit of taking an active break from a project or task is that you can let your mind do some subconscious work on whatever that is, and in this case, it was Black Hills Web Works. So I’ve got some ideas and plans for the company, this website, and future projects that I’m looking forward to working on and implementing. As for my other company, I think it’s time to start winding it down so I can focus on Black Hills Web Works exclusively. Time will tell how that works out in reality.
In the meantime, I thought I’d post some before and after photos from the previously mentioned remodel project. If you’re interested in this type of thing, enjoy!
Before
After
Posted by John Sundberg in Website Projects Saturday, May 29 2010
Our latest project at Black Hills Web Works is a new website for Parkview Evangelical Free Church in Rapid City, South Dakota. Parkview recently changed the name of their church and moved into a brand new building, and the new website was timed, more or less, to coincide with these significant changes.
The Parkview website, www.parkviewefc.org, is powered by the Joomla CMS (Content Management System) and was built using the Crystalline template from RocketTheme. Crystalline is built on the Gantry Framework and I have to say that I am impressed with the flexibility and power of this framework for building websites.
Posted by John Sundberg in Business Saturday, April 3 2010
I brought Seth Godin’s book Small is the New Big home this week and have been doing some reading. Not all at once, of course, since that’s what he advised in his “Warning” preface: “Don’t read this book all at once. It took eight years to write, and if you read it in one sitting, it’ll give you a headache.” And so I’m taking his advice.
One chapter towards the end of the book is called “Start Now – Hurry!”, and though I haven’t read the entire book yet it seems to me that several paragraphs out of this chapter capture the essence of his message, or close to it. Here they are:
Here’s the crux of the matter: Organizations where the people doing the work are the very same people who are making the decisions are more likely to succeed in the long run. Just about all the sins of American business (from environmental despoliation to accounting fraud) can be pinned on the anonymous bureaucracy. Entrepreneurs can’t be anonymous — it’s your decision, your policy, your work, your business — and so you’re fast and honest, or you’re out. There’s nowhere else to pass the buck.
Is it scary? Well, just for a second, consider the alternative. You could work for Motorola or Adelphia or even AT&T, always wondering when the company is going to downsize at the same time that you are busy doing whatever the boss asked just to be sure you’ll be the last to get fired.
Sounds to me like running a tiny business is totally safe in comparison.
I’ve been “running a tiny business” or two for the last ten years, and even though there are plenty of challenges and hardships, when he puts it like that, I’m going to have to agree with him. Here’s to all the “tiny businesses” and one-man (or woman) shows out there in the business world!
I recently noticed that sometimes the Joomla core contact form will give an “Invalid Token” error page when a website visitor uses the contact form to send a message to the owner of the website. This screen is unmistakable, and somewhat shocking to the unsuspecting website visitor, as it is completely blank except for the words “Invalid Token” in the upper-left corner of the browser window.
What also happens, and this is the really frustrating part, is that their message does not make it to its intended recipient, the sender of the message probably won’t try again, and it makes you and your website look rather incompetent. What’s also frustrating is that you may not know your website is doing this unless you try your own submission form several times in a row.
I discovered the problem by checking the Moovur/Mollom log of one website we’ve built. This log keeps track of all contact form submissions, both spam and ham. What’s recorded is the date, the name, email address, message subject, and a brief excerpt from the message. What clued me in is that there were messages listed in that log that the owner of the website had not received. (How did I know they hadn’t been received? I happen to know the website owner very well – she’s my wife!)
Here’s how to fix it…
Posted by John Sundberg in Business Wednesday, March 3 2010
If nothing else, this strip shows the importance of business systems and the challenge of keeping things, such as vendor contracts, organized and current. Beyond that, I thought it was pretty funny.
If you’re using a self-hosted version of WordPress you may have noticed that WordPress is keeping copies of every post revision you make. While this can be helpful in rolling a post back to an earlier version, the number of revisions can quickly get out of hand. These revisions are stored in your database, and once a post is published you probably don’t need them anymore. There are a few plugins that can help you manage these revisions, but in my opinion, if you can do this without adding another plugin, so much the better.
There’s a lot of information on the web about this topic, and I filtered through it recently and came up with this solution.
Posted by John Sundberg in Joomla Extensions Saturday, February 27 2010
After you’ve built one or more Joomla websites you will start to realize that there are a handful of Joomla extensions that, in your opinion, should have been included with the standard Joomla package. As it is, you’ll need to assemble your personal collection of tools and add them to your website. Everybody has their own list . . . here’s mine:
Posted by John Sundberg in Tutorials Saturday, February 20 2010
Let’s face it: the default Joomla 404 error page, while useful and perhaps necessary, is one of the uglier web pages in existence. The shock value of seeing one of these pages for the first time is memorable, and diminishes only slowly over time.
Creating a custom 404 error page for your Joomla website isn’t all that difficult, though there are several different approaches to making it work, and this blog post explains the process I’m using on this website and a few others I’ve built. I should also add that inspiration for this method came from this lengthy thread on the Joomla forums.
Creating a custom Joomla 404 error page – the process
The image to the left is a screenshot of the custom 404 error page I came up with, and you can see a full-size version of the page by clicking on the image.
For more ideas and to see what other web designers have come up with, Smashing Magazine has put together a collection of some of the best 404 pages on the web, with links to some other collections as well.
If you’re going to be making these changes to a ‘live’ site, then I recommend that you make them in roughly the following order. Also, as a general rule-of-thumb, make a backup of your website before making any significant changes.
Posted by John Sundberg in Resources Friday, February 19 2010
Two related events inspired me to take another look at my online backup strategy this week – building a new desktop computer to replace my aging Dell 690, and moving from XP Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate. The move to Windows 7 had a few small “bumps” along the way, mainly with some software and hardware that weren’t
compatible with the new OS, but overall it has been a very good move. However, this post is not about Windows 7, it’s about comparing two online backup services, so here we go.
As an afterthought, I should add that if you’re not backing up your data, why aren’t you? Speaking from experience, hard drives fail, computers stop working, and disasters happen. Online backup services are easier to use, more accessible, and cost less than ever before, so why wouldn’t you want to use one to protect your stuff (data)?
Posted by John Sundberg in Website Projects Thursday, February 18 2010
Our latest website/blog project is ‘A Heart for Justice.’ This website was built for an individual who is planning to use the site and the blog to spread awareness about modern-day slavery and human trafficking, and provide links to resources to help people and churches become better informed about and more involved in this great cause. Perhaps I should have said “individuals” — my wife is the blogger and I’ll be handling the website updates.
A little history
My wife started blogging on this topic in November of 2009, using a free blog hosted at WordPress.com. I had suggested building a website to go along with the blog, and she finally agreed to that last month, though it wasn’t until two weeks ago that she picked out a Joomla template and a WordPress theme to go along with it. As it turns out, her choice was the Affinity Joomla template and matching WordPress theme from RocketTheme, one of my personal favorites.
Joomla and WordPress combined
We originally planned on building both the website and blog from the same WordPress theme, but we finally concluded that WordPress was going to be too limiting for some of the features and layout options we wanted to have in the website, so we then brought Joomla into the project. Still, WordPress can’t be beat for blogging, and RocketTheme helped us out by having both the template and theme available. Combining the two platforms can get a little confusing sometimes when you’re customizing the design, but it’s certainly doable.
