Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case…

I found this at twasink.net.

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Here is the image we will work with:

To start, create a new layer. Next, select the red parts of the eyes using the circle marquee tool.

Using the fill (bucket) tool, fill the new layer with black in this area and switch the layer style to Hue. This will get rid of our red eye but will leave her looking a little freaky.

To fix this we’re going to add a little bit of color the gray-scale eyes we just created. If there is a good color sample of the general color of the eye, select it using the eyedropper. Otherwise select a good color that matches the correct eye color you need.

Create another layer and use the same selection we used for the last step to fill in your color. Change this layer style to Color. You may need to adjust the opacity.

Since her eyes still look a little strange because the red eye without color is much lighter than a normal eye would look. So we’re going to remedy this by adding one more layer and brushing in a small amount of black on the opposite side of the eye highlights for a natural fix.

And that’s about it! Now, to fix the girl in the background… but to save time, I simply cropped the picture.

Photo credits: Picture from the tutorial found at this link.

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The shirt says:

Geek test:

if ($computers_owned > $girlfriends_had) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}

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Usually.

While the above remains true, there are some things that you may want to be optionally manual. Especially for the pieces of information that enable the essential functionality of your site.

Say that you run a mobile site. You can automatically detect what kind of phone they have. When you do, you enter it into the database. The functionality of your service to them banks on knowing what kind of phone they have. What if you detected it wrong? What if you couldn’t detect it? You should have a back-up option, such as: Not your phone model? Select here (link).

I actually thought about this because I was using the restroom at the mall the other day, and it was those automatic toilets that I hate. One too many times have I had one not flush when I was finished. I don’t like leaving my remains in there! How embarrassing! But these restrooms were different. There was a little manual flush button at the top, should the sensors not detect your presence (or lack thereof).

This was a perfect parallel - flushing is the #1 functionality of the toilet when you are done with it. If it is automatic, there should be the manual backup to flush if something goes wrong with the mechanics.

Think about it next time you use automatic toilets.

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I feel there is a certain irony in that. How can I write a review until I have used your service?

But yet, I conform.

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Design & Image Editing:

Adobe Photoshop - $649 or $999 for the extended version

Photoshop is the most expensive program you need- but you will want this piece of software. There are a lot of different image editing tool but this is the industry standard. Sometimes you can get a student discount, or even get your company to buy it for you.

Text/Code Editing:

Mac

TextWrangler - Free: This is a great piece of software for writing your code if you don’t want to spend any money.

TextMate - $50: If you are serious about building websites, you should probably invest the 50 bucks in this software. It is highly customizable, can generate basic templates, and has code helpers and bundles to boot.

Windows

HTML Kit - Free: This is another neat little piece of software that will help you write your code and keep it organized. Not the best there is, but hey- it’s free!

EditPlus - $35: While I cannot personally testify to the usefulness of this application, I have read some pretty good reviews for this one.

FTP Client:

Mac

Classic FTP - Free: This is a viable option if you don’t want to spend any money. Works fine, but Transmit (see next) is much faster and more efficient.

Transmit - $29.95: This is my favorite FTP client for the Macintosh. Definitely worth the money.

Windows

FileZilla - Free: This is my favorite FTP client for Windows. Quite the bonus that it’s free! It is also available for the Mac, but that version is much too buggy in my opinion.

Domains & Hosting:

GoDaddy.com - My go-to source for domains. Easy to manage, great customer service, and very affordable. No monthly fees, either. Make sure you get coupon codes before purchasing.

I would not recommend getting hosting from GoDaddy (too many limitations) but from…

HostGator - My go-to source for hosting. Again- easy to manage, great customer service and very affordable.

I hope that this list can be of help to any other freelance web designers out there. I wish I had found this list when I first got started…

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Imagine that you are an architect. Someone asks you to build them an office. You ask, well, what do you want in an office? The equivalent answer to “Attract more clients” is: “I want to be able to put my employees there so they can work.”

As you can see, this is not a helpful answer. How many employees do you have? What kind of resources do they need? What kind of environment should they be provided?

The same goes for a website. The following are some basic steps to designing a better and more focused website that will accomplish the goal of your client.

Step One: Define a specific goal.

Some good example goals are:

• A phone call from the visitor
• An online response from the visitor (email, comments, etc.)
• To answer questions the visitor may have (provide information, thorough FAQ section)

You cannot simply say that the goal of a website is “to generate more clients”. Simply owning a website does not mean anyone will visit. That is a marketing issue. Once you have the potential client on your site, what do you want them to do or what do you want to do for them? That should be the main goal of your site.

This goal will change depending on what kind of organization you are running. If you provide an online service you may want them to Register for your service. If you run a company with an actual store-front, you may want them to visit the store. If you provide consultation services, you may want them to call you, or fill out a feedback or contact form.

Step Two: Define the steps.

Now that you have a goal, you need to define what steps the visitor needs to take in order to reach that goal. Say that you are a freelance photographer and want them to contact you via a feedback form. The following may be an example:

Visitor arrives on site:

• Answer the question: What do you do? (Landing Page or About Us)
• Answer the question: Why choose you? (Portfolio)
• Answer the question: What are my options? (Services)
• Answer the question: How can I contact you? (Contact Page)

You have just determined all of the pages you need! Those should be the predominant pages in the main navigation. Any and all other sections (such as a blog) are secondary, and should be featured smaller in a separate area- they should not distract the visitor from the main goal.

Step Three: Sometimes Less is More

When designing, every time you add a graphic or words ask yourself: “Does this benefit the goal?” If the answer is anything but a resounding YES, then take it out. Frills may look nice but if a frill doesn’t specifically benefit the design or goal it should be taken out.

Step Four: Usability Testing

Once you have integrated your new design, take it for a test-run with Internet non-savvy friends and see how easy it is for them to get around. Sit them down to a computer and give them the URL and give them a specific scenario that they can role-play.

Don’t intercept any of their mistakes and don’t interrupt the process. Simply be quiet, offer no help and see where they get confused and perhaps afterwards ask them their opinions.

If you found these tips helpful, or if you have any suggestions yourself, please leave them in the comments!

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The picture quality is pretty decent on this phone. I uploaded a picture of myself and my best friend Rachel, just so you can see for yourself.

Other than that, the buttons are a little small but texting is still pretty do-able for me. Everything is easy on this phone so far. It even has great options like setting an alarm clock to go off at the same time on Mon-Fri or Sat-Sun or even day of the year except for holidays! Pretty neat if you ask me. It’s convenient if you, say, wake up for work at the same time every day.

For surfing the web, the browser is pretty good as well, and there are some pretty cool apps that come installed.

So far I am totally satisfied with this phone. Anyone else have this? Comments?

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This tool is very handy, easy to use, and lightweight to top it all off.

Help spread their awareness on Digg or visit the official site at www.nicedit.com

This tool will be accessible on my ToolBox page in the near future.

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