Agenceum IntranetAn Experimental Open Agency

This week is largely a catch-up production week, so there hasn’t been much in advancing in terms of template building and documentation. The content and images are largely in from the first round of clients; now it’s a matter of making it as easy as possible to populate the existing templates and posting them somewhere. Ideally, my benchmark is to be able to do this in no more than an hour per template, but for right now I have to discover where the efficiencies are.

I’ll be documenting each client as I begin the process.

On a side note, I’m starting to handcode HTML/CSS documents on-the-fly, as a means of getting more familiar with what’s possible with the basic layouts. I think this is a necessary part of the engineering “discovery phase.”

Via the Smashing Magazine Twitter Feed, I came across this list of 10 Absolute “Nos!” for Freelancers. It is a good summary of the common wisdom that pervades the experienced freelancer’s mindset: client requests to which you must say no if you want to maintain any sense of sanity. What’s particularly interesting is that there are several “No!” points in this article that I’m deliberately trying to convert to “Yes”.

Being a freelance web designer who isn’t “known” in some way is a tough gig. You can either decide you want to reduce the amount of pain you’re going to get, or you can decide to somehow deal with it in exchange for something else. If you want to avoid pain, by all means you should take the List of 10 Nos right to heart. You’ll be happy you did. You’ll also have to harden your heart against the pleas of people who really aren’t evil and need a break.

The way I’m trying to crack the barrier is to create a service offering that is based on microtransactions for microproduct. In other words, you pay $25, you get something in return, and that’s it. You don’t get a lifetime subscription to free technical support. You pay per incident. And that’s what I am going to try to stand firm on. Right now it’s tougher because I’m also figuring out the system, but that’s the goal.

I have a lot of catching up to do with my various productivity form updates, so I’ll be back in January. There’s quite a pile of things to plan and execute!

It’s been less than a week since we’ve launched Agenceum. We’re operating in stealth mode, quietly getting up to speed and organizing our resources. And yes, I’m using the “royal we”; it’s just me here. But I’ve decided to add a few more frills to this experiment:

• This is turning into a kind of learning simulation, sort of like my own version of the Kobayashi Maru training scenario from the Star Trek movies. There’s the slight tinge of doom, certainly, to this entire enterprise…run an open agency and be successful? That sounds crazy. At the same time, the Kobayashi Maru scenario was not designed to be winnable; it was designed to test the character of future commanders. And so, this is a kind of character test for me. And of course, there’s always the chance that I could beat the no-win scenario. That’s probably why Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan is one of my favorite movies.
• As a simulation, this blog now becomes the company intranet. It’s going to be ugly, but hopefully useful and informational. Agenceum is the agency I might have founded if I were 19 years old and full of optimism, and actually knew what the hell I was doing. So, I’m using what I know: WordPress! We’ll figure out the rest as we go along.
• As a company intranet, the Agenceum blog is now going to have postings from various “departments”. This should be pretty fun because I’ll get to write a story at the same time I’m documenting best practices (or at least the practices Agenceum has).

So now it’s really getting interesting, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Hee hee.

Since launching this project, I’ve had a couple unpleasant dreams involving failure and ridicule by people close and far from me. I take this as a sign that it’s making me uncomfortable enough that it’s definitely something I want to do. Anything new and scary is going to create a sense of doubt. Doing a quick safety check, though, I don’t see anything that can immediately hurt me outside the realm of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

The past few days since staking my claim have been spent figuring out how best to deploy my “git” repositories, which will be part of the information technology setup for The Agenceum.

Backup and storage is actually my primary concern right now, because I’m in the middle of it for my old projects, and I want to start Agenceum with a meticulously clean slate. At the same time, I don’t want to be meticulous to the point that I fritter my time away.

Speaking of Agenceum, I’ve been also thinking about how to write in this blog. I have registered Agenceum.com, and by now the rest of the world can see the underwear of the website plainly flapping in the wind. I’m thinking of keeping the blog right here on davidseah.com, but using the clean Agenceum.com website as the “outward facing” side of the Agenceum; it’s the public site. That makes this blog the “inward facing” side of Agenceum; it’s the intranet.

The next step…probably write up the first business plan in a form that is easy to measure against. Then document the current offerings in the Agenceum stable.

This is the current home of the “open design studio” that I’ve been yammering about over on davidseah.com. I’m planning on creating all the collateral necessary to restart my own small design business from scratch, and make it available while blogging and documenting the process. I think it will be interesting and fun while giving me a sense of purpose, which is important to me because without that I’m unlikely to feel quite as motivated.

The progress so far…

Although I have not yet put them online yet, I’ve created two starting templates:

• A very simple single-page website template that is using some very cheesy techniques. I’m almost ashamed to put it up, which is why I am totally going to
• A slightly-more complex multi-page website, which is based on the code I made for my friend Angela a few months ago.

Behind the scenes, I’ve been pulling together the support technology:

• Upgrading my web hosting server, which means moving 15 sites from my old server to the new. The reason for this is that Media Temple, my hosting company, has a new server architecture that has PHP5 and MySQL5; my current server is still running the older versions, which are increasingly being phased out. Plus, the new server (dv) 3.5 has twice as much memory as the old 3.0 version, and the upgrade is free. However, it’s a multi-day process. This has occupied about 3 days of my time.
• Consolidating my digital media server organization and choosing a backup strategy. This has taken another 3 days of my time, consolidating all my disk backups and creating one easy-to-backup uber system while purging and recategorizing.
• Choosing a source control system. I’m planning on storing the web templates and other media using a public repository of some kind. I actually lost my old Subversion repository on the old (dv) 3.0 because I forgot about it. I still have sources on local backup, but I’ve lost all the history. It’s not a huge blow as there are no projects in active development there, but it does make me think I need a better repository backup strategy (Subversion doesn’t make it particularly easy).  After evaluating the current hot source control solutions, I narrowed it down to either Mercurial and Git. And Git wins, at least in theory, because of its distributed nature (everyone has a full copy of the repo), its ease of creating speculative branches (which encourages experimentation), and its patch-distribution features. Mercurial has many of these same features, but apparently does not support named tags and because of that, loses my interest. Mercurial has the reputation, though, of being much clearer in its documentation and ease-of-use. This ordinarily would have been the big win, but after reading up on Git’s underlying design philosophy I’d have to say that I just want to be a part of it. We’ll see. I’ll be setting up the Git repository after getting it configured…I’m still wrapping my head around how I’ll organize that repository.
• Flip-flopping on how to document and store the materials online. The reason you’re reading this post now is that I’ve decided to go back to WordPress for this blog for two reasons. First, WordPress is a great blogging CMS, and I’ve really missed it. My main site runs off of Expression Engine, and while I like it now that I’ve lived with it for a couple of years, WordPress is much more useful as an inexpensive dynamic platform (read: free)  for small business clients.

I’ve also registered the domain name agenceum.com, riffing off the word “lyceum”. This design business niche thing is kind of like the new media school I once imagined starting; perhaps at some point in the future, I’ll move some content to that separate domain. Just thinking ahead.