PageMade

We must start by acknowleding that the Mayans never actually predicted the world would come to an end in 2012, despite what the occaisonal History Channel Special would have you believe. It is with this knowledge that PageMade is forging ahead with optimistism.

PageMade is a growing company, with evolving goals. But before we may address our future goals, we must look back, not at our successes but at those spaces in between: I speak of quality control.

Most projects start with a great design, and smooth implementation. But the fabric of the original build can stretch with each change, causing the original concept to lose all shape. This is an area where I take personal responsibilty as I have been typically unsuccessful in explaining such mechanics to those who affect them.

So how do we fix this?

For starters we are in the process of an unsoliticed audit of all our sites.

What does this mean?

Even though we aren't getting any complaints, we're reviewing all of our clients' sites. We are looking for errors. We are making major upgrades on the core CMS and the third party components. We are optimizing the metadata, content structure, and in some cases the design work. In the end, most of clients will be unaware of any fixes. A few, however, may receive a telephone call, hearing the words, "We can do better."

There is another issue. Support. We don't actually receive very many support issues. That in itself is a problem, as it allowed us to go about disorganized. This was unacceptable.

The Solution?

New in 2012 PageMade is rolling out a complete online help desk with ticket support. We are committed to hearing our clients. With this new system each client will be allowed direct access. They may submit tickets for help or review our online resource stream for basic information. No more simple issues slipping between the cracks.

Now... about those goals:

1. Quality Control: Before I was speaking specifically about fixing mistakes already made. From here on though, it's about never making those mistakes. Our biggest mistake was having too many unqualified influences on a project.

Making body fonts 18pt because a client can't read normal text without their glasses... OUT. Using clashing color schemes that burn retinas because they match a client's prized 1972 Ford Maverick... IS OUT. Using the statistically MOST HATED FONT ever created because a client thinks it's fun... IS OUT. Putting the clients' NEEDS ahead of their WANTS... THAT'S IN.

Every PageMade site has been built to meet our clients' specifications. The problem is that our clients don't always want what their target audience needs. With 12 years of commercial design experience (as well as being people who spend 8 hours a day online), PageMade designers are ultimately qualified to recognize what makes a great website great. Therefore it is our responsiblity to always produce great websites free from unqualified influences.

We will always work to meet our clients' goals, but the design must be representative of PageMade's talented and experienced staff.

2. User Interface Improvements: PageMade came into existence because I believed, AND STILL BELIEVE, that a Small Business Owner should be able to have a website without a fulltime webmaster. We are constantly improving the user interface in order to reduce the overall amount of time a client spends managing their site. The biggest improvement in this regard is frontend editing which is coming to all PageMade sites in 2012. No remote programs, no backend keys. The client can simply go to their site, click "login", enter their username and password, click "add item", add the info, hit "save and close", and logout. We're even working with custom fields to further automate the process.

3. Improved Services: Inspite of the user interface improvements, we've learned over 2011 that not all of our clients want to manage their websites. That's understandable. Being a homeowner doesn't mean I want to mow my lawn. Sadly, the grass keeps growing. Conversely, a website stops growing when it goes without any administration. It's important to understand that having a high Google Pagerank depends largely on 'freshness'. To be fresh, you must always be adding and sharing content. No matter how easy we make that process, to some, it will always be a chore.

This is why we are happy to announce an array of new options that will allow our clients to sit back and watch their websites flourish. These Management Packages can be customized to fit each clients' needs. Our plans are a combination of two major services: content creation and online marketing.

While all of our sites are search engine optimized, that is only a small part of what affect your Google Pagerank. You must have new content, and you must link back to that content from valid sites. PageMade has the expertise to do this honestly and efficiently, enhancing our clients online reputation.

The same system clients use for submitting support tickets can be used for keeping PageMade updated on their businesses (ie guiding PageMade in the direction a client wishes their website to take). Of course, if they prefer, we can manage the content along a very basic set of guidelines depending on the plan they choose.

4. ...Goal number 4? The other stuff... company growth, turning a profit, healthy living and goodwill to mankind.

Among my most important memories is that of my mother bringing home the Apple Macintosh in the late 1980s. I can't recall what year that was or the model (128K, Plus, or Classic). What I do remember was being awestruck.

As a teacher at Edmond Memorial High School, she had access to these "lightweight" machines and would bring one of them home from Terri McGill's MacLab regularly.

It wasn't anything like the old TI-99/4A my grandfather gave me and it was very different from the computer Michael Seymour's dad kept in his office. Unlike those machines, this one didn't have any games. What it did have though was a very simple and clean GUI. No need to remember command lines for DOS, this was as simple as point and click. Such simplicity gave license for my wild explorations into the depths of the machine. My mother quickly determined that her child was less likely to break the pricey piece of hardware than herself and pretty soon I was logging countless hours going from application to application. I certainly spent the most amount of time on MacPaint.

The family's experience with Apple was so positive that when I was about 14 my mother bought our first family computer: a Macintosh LC 550. I used this computer for nearly everything I use computers for today. I played games like Myst and Lemmings (both of which ran dreadfully slow), I researched with the CD-ROM encyclopedia, I digitally painted, and I connected with people (then on Bulletin Board Systems) using a 2400 bps modem (That's 2400, not 24000).

Next came the internet. I remember watching as the screen slowly formed an image. We sat in front of the display like drooling idiots wondering what was to unfold before us.

One might think this was a disappointment, but I assure it was not.

Of course we quickly upgraded modems, and I used the 550 to design my first webpage which was dedicated to Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas and other 70s action stars. Pages like mine were the norm. They usually featured one or two pages of HTML with low-res gifs.

Not long after that I became the most spoiled kid I knew. My mother bought a new PowerMac 6116-CD which I had all to myself. As my uncle said, it belonged in the Taj Mahal, not in some teenager's bedroom. Maybe he was right, but I treated it well, and it lasted me 5 years. With this computer I was able to play Doom 2, 'Surf the Information Super-Highway', and make a nice fake ID.

It should come as no surprise that at 20 years old I easily landed a job doing graphic design layout with Fleming's AdCentral (later Ivie and Associates) working with <you guessed it> Macs.

All these Macintosh computers came to be because of two men who began engineering personal computers encased in wooden boxes before I was even born. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were innovators. They founded what may be the world's most powerful tech company. This week, as everyone is well aware, we lost Steve Jobs. 

It's true that in recent years I've had more criticism than adoration for the man. I stand by calling him a control freak. I also stand by my accusations that he put marketing above performance. I even stand by my claims that Jobs' approach to FOSS was all take and no give.

But damned if I don't admire the man's foresight, his recognition for potential, and his ability to push people to do their very best work. He was always a man of great vision. It is the actualization of that vision over decades that has inspired individuals like me. The child who sat in front of that Apple Macintosh in the 80s was freed from a boring, confusing, and intimidating DOS prompt. He entered a new world where application met imagination and from this he learned.

Do I owe my entire career to Steve Jobs? Yes, I think it's perfectly fair to draw that conclusion.

I'm really excited to share this little trick with everyone.

I owe a great deal of thanks to Peter van Westen, nonumber users mbms and John T for putting me on the path and the good people at JCE for providing the right tools for the job.

Modal Pop-ups for anyone who is less than familiar is a method of linking with a pop-up iframe in the least obnoxious way. You can link to internal site content, an external url, an image, or even a video. Notice how clean they look. What's most important about these is they don't require the user to leave the page. This greatly reduces bleed, meaning your traffic stays where you want them to stay.

Using modals in articles and in modules has long been simple thanks to this guy and has been getting easier thanks to the J! Content Editor project. Menus, however, present a wholly unique challenge. Most modal linking is done via css or with plugins that direct the CSS. Menus in 1.5 seemed to work fairly well with Modalizer, but in 1.7, I had all but given up on the concept. I was recently pushed on the Tukru project to solve the problem, and thanks to the direction of the aforementiond gurus, I was able to blend some solutions.

For this trick, you require only JCE and MEDIA BOX. These are both items you should install on your J! regardless of this trick, because they are so handy. Should you want images instead of text you will also want to install yvBBCode (you may be able to use the core system, but I didn't have any luck). 

Once you have installed and configured all of these, all you need to do is:

1. Create a new menu

2. Set "Menu Item Type" to "External URL"

3. Add Your Title to "Menu Title"

4. Add to "Link" the following (including quotes): 

http://locationDesired.com" class="jcepopup" data-mediabox="width[1000]"

Where http://locationDesired.com is the URL you wish to appear in the modal link.

5. Click "Save" because you're done!

HERE IS MY EXAMPLE:

As you can see, the domain in my URL is Weather.com.

You may also notice that I'm using BBCode to place an image where the title would go. It's just an easier way for me to do this than to figure out why the core functions available aren't working for me.

This is designed so that when the user clicks the menu button here:

Well, click that and find out.

I will link the site once we are finished with it.

If you have any questions, I'll try to help.

gene[at]pagemade.com