About to Launch

It's a cool and cloudy day. The rain has been making attempts at taking over the day, but it's been off and on this morning. I just checked on weather.com, and there's a big old gob of rain headed straight for us; should be here in about an hour.

The Pasadena green parrots are hanging out in a nearby tree, hollering and screaming like they always do. Sounds like about 20 or so of them, and they are loud! I think they're bitching about getting wet. Word has it they were released back in the late '50s from the pet department of a local store that closed.

The last week I've been working like a crazy man on getting my new website up. I've been adding bells and whistles that were not present on the previous site and I'm picking up the coding and style sheet markup to render specific fonts on the pages, rather than having to make a jpg of the type to display. And, of course, Internet Explorer is being a pain in the butt, since it renders pages differently from any other browser.

Please, people, dump this browser off your computer. You can download Foxfire or Google Chrome for free, and it's easy to move your IE bookmarks over to the new browser and start using it right away. The other browsers are also much quicker to adopt the latest in HTML5 and CSS3 capabilities (which is where internet technology is going). And since Microsoft doesn't make a version of IE for the Mac (which I work on), I have to do all my design on my machine, then put the website onto a flash stick, move it over to Steve's PC and check it out on IE. (Adobe does have a BrowserLab where you can dry-run the layout, but it doesn't check all the interactivity on the page).

I'm in the final phase, which is editing and rewriting the copy on the site. And, even though I have Flash animation on the main page, I've figured out a way to display a static graphic on devices that don't support Flash (which is most smart phones). This means you can browse the whole site on your iPhone, iTouch, iPad or Android-driven phone. This is getting more important, since a lot of folks, especially busy businesspeople, are relying on their mobile devices to connect on the internet when on the go.

I've picked my printer, two guys who've been around for years, with a great reputation and costing about a third of the big-time printers in town. I guess I have a soft spot in my heart for mom-and-pop dive print shops. Anyway, once the website's finalized, the brochures and business cards go to press. So the end of the month should see me ready to put out my first promo mailer. Then comes the part I hate the most: follow-up calling.

Well, I just got some work in: Pearce Plastics needs me to resize some UPC bar codes for them, so it looks as though I'll be making some money today.

Wooo-whoo.