To my two fans... I got an email from someone that read one of my posts that lead to a little email communication that lead to me giving a little more back history about Brent that the dude probably didn't even want to hear and my two fans probably don't want to hear this load of crapola about Brent either...so I'm posting it anyway! Now Brent has zero fans.

I'm also posting this without much editing because I'm lazy tonight and don't give a crud. :) Maybe if I'm board and think it's worth anything I might use the content to update the about me section. Keeping it real dawg (two chest thumps). I'm out...

Thanks for the link to the College of Architecture site. One of the things I appreciate about your sites is that they aren't overcrowded and cluttered. So many web designers today feel as though they must make things graphically intense or stunning, or pack as much info as possible into each page, while forgetting how much more effective a basic look and feel can be, and how very important "white space" (or at least empty space) is. Some "basic" looking sites with a clean design look that way because the designer obviously has little skill. That's clearly not the case here and I find it refreshing that someone out there is still designing clean, clear and easy-to-navigate sites.

Is Epicserve your full-time bread and butter? I've been considering starting something similar on the side here in my area.

My Reply

My bread and butter that supports my family, is working for the College of Architecture, Planning and Design (http://www.capd.ksu.edu) as the Web Manager. I've been working here for just over two years and in that time I've totally re-done the college's website. That includes working with Friesen Design (side note: I programmed their site in flash and the design concept was theirs) on the overall design concept. I'm a designer as well and it's a sort of a long story about why we went with an out side design company for the overall concept. The long and sort of it is that Architects are very, very, very, very critical about design and it's a wonder we were able to get anything agreed upon. I had some designs of my own that I purposed which got close to what they wanted but didn't quite fit the bill for them. That was partially because they are very critical about design and I think partially just because I don't have a degree in design which can make people in education a little bigoted, and partially because my designs weren't as "refined" then as they are getting to be now.

I took Friesen Design's concept and implemented it using XHTML and CSS which was a challenge because Friesen Design is a print design company and didn't know much about web design. I then integrated the design into the CMS that I had developed in house using classic ASP. Classic ASP was used at first because originally they wanted to use the CMS enVivo which was crap. So for PR reasons I convinced them it was crap and I could write one in house that would be better. And rather than convince them that we should also go with a new platform and language all in one shot I stayed with classic ASP, which in hind site was a bad choice. Later after we were using version 1 of the CMS written in classic ASP I decided it was time to convince them that it would be better to move to PHP / Linux for the CMS and website. After convincing them of the change I re-wrote the entire CMS with in a manor of about 3 weeks.

The current version of my PHP / MySQL based CMS is using my own custom framework and includes features like (article management, event calendar, page management for static html pages, Access Control System and more). In my opinion it's getting pretty good and has most of the features of any Open Source CMS out there.

As far as Epicserve is concerned... I've done pretty good with it as well as a side job. I can put it this way, I've made enough this year that I'm not looking forward to taxes this year and that's even with being able to clam our first baby. I say that not to brag but just because you asked and to give you an idea that it could be a source of extra income. It's hard to break in to any business enough to support a family right away. I'm looking to create a web application to open up to the world in order to hopefully support our family someday without having to have a "day job".

Some websites that I've done that are fully my design that I'm adequately pleased with are:

http://www.letshelpinc.org
http://brent.epicserve.com
http://www.cskitchenandbath.com

Additional Thought

I haven't been able to spend as much time on the design of my sites as I would like because I've always been a one man shop, doing everything from making custom CSM's / backend programming, design mockups, and coding the design into XHTML / CSS.

I feel that I've got some talent in all areas that God has given me and I like working in all areas but it stresses and stretches a dude pretty thin sometimes. If I had to give up one area... even though it would pain me, I would give up design over programming. I love design but design isn't as gratifying for me when designing for others because everyone is a designer. I'm thick skinned and can take it good but designing for others is only gratifying for me when I nail a design and the client is blown off their socks.

Talking to other designers that are a lot more talented than myself, say the ones you just nail dead to the wall are few and far between. And maybe it's part of my perfectionist personality but I want to nail everything I do.

With programming its fun because most of the time you can nail it, it either works as expected or it doesn't usually. I guess it's my hope that my creative design aspects come across in my code. To me code can be a thing of beauty, but only your newest code. Everything older than 6 months usually turns into that one baby that everyone comments, "oh your baby is... um... cute!?" Coding / programming for me is an evolution and grows as you grow, which is cool when you think about it. But can be frustrating because when you see old code you want to update everything even if it's not practical time wise or project wise. And then it evolves into a new programming language love (see latest posts about Python Django).

Ok that's it I promise.