David Seah / Agenceum
Process Journal: Running a Pretend Design Agency

It’s been a couple weeks since the last update. The big news is that a lot of the lessons learned in the Agenceum project have moved over to my own design website at design.davidseah.com. It’s not quite done (I have to add the contact page coding) but it is starting to reflect an idea that’s been growing in my mind: I like the idea of being a “country designer” a lot more than being a “big city designer”, because I want to have clients I work with one-on-one.

So now I have two distinct design practices in development: this one (which will likely continue to be my R&D website), and the “solo designer” version at design.davidseah.com. I’m not sure exactly how this will work out, but I think this experiment has been fruitful.

That’s really all for now. I’m kind of pleased by the HTML/CSS coding on the new design site because it applies lessons I’ve learned through the Agenceum projects. Things are starting to come together.

The next big marketing push: how to target those one-on-one customers.

Another day, another staff meeting!

When I started this experimental agency five months ago, I wasn’t sure if it was going to fly. The idea of making cheap web templates seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t know if it would fly. Making the collateral and defining the products seemed, to me anyway, based on my own guesswork. It seemed to take forever to make things, and I was frustrated with the lack of progress. Good thing I was blogging the experience, because looking back it suddenly seems like I’ve done more than I thought. The time spent building that first website, putting together that first half-finished catalog page, and playing with logo concepts has actually given me a technical base to work from. And, I’m starting to see the existence of an actual market. It’s surprising! I’m rolling up what I’ve learned from the Agenceum experience into a general design studio offering under my own name; I’ll continue to document the processes here, of course, because this is my behind-the-scenes R&D lab.

I’m very tired from a long day of meetings, so I’ll expand on this later.

Whoops, I forgot to post the staff meeting for over two weeks! Not a lot has happened, but there is related news.

The templated website package has caught the eye of an illustrator friend, who knows he needs to get on the Internet but is not quite sure what to do. The price has risen effectively to $250.00 from the original $50-$75 range, which is still a good deal but covers more of the effort involved. I’m doing a barter, however, because I just want to see this guy get on the Internet. In exchange, I’ll be getting some illustrations I can use for my other products, such as the Groundhog Day Resolutions stuff. I’ve needed a groundhog illustration for quite some time.

A great deal of the Agenceum material is turning out to be pretty handy as I slowly put together my “main” design site (which is secret for now and under development…shhh). I’d call it “light graphic design”. As I mentioned before, the experience of trying to meet the $75.00 price point may not have paid off directly, but it helped establish a base of new and refurbished techniques that I am applying daily: a vastly improved intermediate knowledge of CSS, an improved understanding of what people are looking for in a website, and a slight refinement of my development process. Keep moving, keep making…that’s what Agenceum has taught me so far.

As the current round of projects comes to an end, I foresee the next stage of Agenceum to be marketing process and execution. I have a passing knowledge of what marketing should be, but the actual put-your-feet-on-the-ground and pounding pavement is something I’ve never done. I need to experience it and push past my comfort zone. I hate bugging people for my own needs, so  I shy away from cold-calling. However, there’s a middle way of doing this that is much more about mutual benefit.

Technology-wise, I’ve gotten my stand-alone LAMP server running in a Virtual PC Virtual Machine (VM), which is cool because it means I can develop dynamic applications in PHP without actually having Internet access. This is an important consideration when I’m working remotely without Internet. I don’t need this capability all the time, so it’s good to just turn it off. And, since I’ve installed CentOS 5 as the OS in the VM, a lot of the configuration I do in there is applicable to my Media Temple (dv) 3.5 setup, with the exception of the Plesk-related system variations (Apache configuration, for example).

The brief dive into C# and ASP.NET got hung up earlier this month, but it was nice to get reacquainted with the development environments. Visual Studio is a very nice Integrated Development Environment (IDE). C# is a pretty nifty language, too; combined with the VS IDE, it’s a lot of fun to work with. I found myself trying to adapt it to work with HTML/PHP, without much success. I was even willing to try Microsoft’s Expression Web 3 IDE for this, hoping to find a better HTML authoring environment than the increasingly-tired Dreamweaver CS4. However, EW3 reliably crashes on my computer when I open a file dialog box. It may be related to my anti-virus software (Avira Antivir Premium)  not liking it, as I actually get the dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH in the avipbb.dll module if I right-click anywhere in file window. And it happens only in EW3. The other source of BSOD is my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra Pro driver, which does not handle wake from sleep well; otherwise, my machine (an older MacBook Pro 17 booting straight into Windows 7) is very stable.

So that’s the update! Not much else going on with the Agenceum front. I should contact two clients to see if they are still in backburner mode.

Yet another week of non-Agenceum work. However, all that templating work from months ago has been coming in handy as I build new website shells elsewhere. I have a small handful of tips that I am reusing over and over again:

1. Faux Columns.
2. Centered Fixed Layout.
3. Using a Reset script to start everything from scratch.
4. Using position: relative on a parent div to allow children to use absolute positioning, which makes layout a lot easier.
5. Using float: left to force a parent div to fully-contain its child divs instead of letting them overflow. This is actually part of a set of techniques that seek to control div behavior.
6. Standardizing on a 72-pixel or 60-pixel grid size for layout (I need to print out a reference chart for this to make things easy to add/subtract).

This seems to solve the vast bulk of my layout needs, which are very simple. Then I have a typography.css file that builds up the type in a way that I find pleasing, again based on a 72-point grid broken down into 12pt or 18pt linespacing.

So although I’m not doing a whole lot with Agenceum at the moment, it’s helped me get over a hurdle with doing faster, simpler CSS layouts that are relatively bulletproof.

There hasn’t been much movement on Agenceum-related stuff for the past week. In fact, I completely forgot to do my staff meeting post last week.

Although I don’t have anything to report here on the Agenceum Blog, there’s plenty of stuff going on elsewhere on my other blog and behind-the-scenes. Some of the Agenceum material, particularly the Wiki, may be re-purposed. And I’m thinking a lot about how to package websites again to meet more specific market demands at specific price points. When I get those packages defined, I’ll post them here. There are few technical challenges that I need to solve immediately, this means I’m past the technology building stage and am now in the business development stage. There’s the need to create marketing materials and put them in the hands of prospective clients, once I find them. This is an entire process in itself that I will be looking at more closely.

In the meantime, there is some old business that will be closed out this week,, which will perhaps lead to continued business.

There hasn’t been much going on at Agenceum this week, though I am spending more time looking at C# and the .NET framework on an unrelated programming project.

One very cool new development, however, is that producing new web templates is much faster than before. This is due to having a fairly strong grasp on how to effectively use CSS to create the kinds of cross-browser compatible layouts that I typically need. As a result, I am feeling pretty comfortable with what I can make work. My rough CSS notes, collected over several months, have helped me grok what’s going on with the simple layouts I am using. At some point I will revisit them and reformat them into a cheat sheet / howto guide.

Current Push

There are a few areas that I can work on:

• Creating the simple low-cost packages
• Designing simple templates for specific kinds of entrepreneurs and artists
• Distributing information about the packages to organizations that have members crying out for promotional websites.

This is all marketing. I am feeling the need to collect all these strands of effort into one tracking system that uses a simple formula to manage dozens of different marketing channels. I can feel the shape of it in my mind.

Things are slow right now, but there have been a few key developments:

• I printed 35 sell sheets for the $500 Photo-Website package at DigitalLizard. The quality was quite acceptable, as was the price: US$13.00 for those 35 double-sided prints, and $7 UPS Ground shipping.  This was 1/4th of the price I had quoted from another POD place. I had previously requested a print sample kit from Digital Lizard but never got it, so it was with some trepidation that I placed my small order. Their automated system is pretty good, I must stay. I’ll be using them again for some of their post products.
• I got a chance to catch up with client Mark Pensgen, and he clued me on on the value of step-by-step guides that go through the very basics of writing content. Essentially, anything I can write that illuminates the process of making anything for a website is well worth while, even things that may seem really basic. Those basic steps help anchor the more complex ones.
• I downloaded the trial version of Camtasia Studio for Windows, with the idea of using it to make screencasts describing how to use software to upload websites and edit HTML. It’s US$299, but it’s very polished and easy to use. I’m impressed.
• I converted my davidseah.com website from Expression Engine to a WordPress Template as a favor to a new acquaintance. This has given me more up-to-date knowledge of the current WordPress page architecture, which opens up WordPress as a new platform to offer customized websites

That’s really it for now. There are a few lingering projects that I need to unstick. The low price point that I’m setting for the work is proving difficult to work with if I want to maintain a “cost-effective” work to revenue ratio. I’ve decided, though, that no matter what the cost is, the work should be the same. I believe I mentioned that a few weeks ago; the trick is keeping the process moving along.