In my day job, we've been working on redecorating our office space for the last few months. It started with new *matching* desks replacing the old ones. I swear, I don't know the original reasoning behind it but everyone literally had a different modeled desk. It was so bad that I thought our office manager had a secret blog that reviewed different models of office desks.
However, now that all desk problems are solved, we're running into issues on how to divide up the space. Again, we now have various models of dividers and partitions none of which are standard cubicle stuff.
Anyway, I found this Office Snapshots link today which I thought was cool. Maybe one day when our startup upgrades to an office, we'll have something to look forward to. In the meantime, maybe we can get some ideas to save my day job space.
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
So Back to the Startup at Hand...
Time seems to be a luxury we don't have these days. In between the day job, the Startup Weekend and my house falling apart due to a slow leak in a pipe that was finally found and resolved, I feel like we've lost a couple of weeks in between where I couldn't focus on the project at hand.
So, where are we now?
Design - the design has finally been completed, which means I can now blog about the design process and tell you guys what we learned. Overall, this has been a lot less painful than hiring programmers so it was a great experience.
Web Hosting - for whatever reason, we're still stuck here. We're at a stand still between what we need vs. what we want. Also, because we feel like we need to scale up pretty fast in terms of storage, regardless of actual usage, this has been an ongoing issue of finding the affordable, scalable solution. Of course, our limited technology know-how of how to manage the cheaper solutions may be what's killing us here. I think we'll need to make the executive decision this weekend and just get something otherwise nothing will ever happen.
Business / Marketing - We have not had time to properly search and interview for our VP of Marketing yet. However, I did meet a ton of great people at Startup Weekend whom I can learn from. Will keep the search going for now...
So, where are we now?
Design - the design has finally been completed, which means I can now blog about the design process and tell you guys what we learned. Overall, this has been a lot less painful than hiring programmers so it was a great experience.
Web Hosting - for whatever reason, we're still stuck here. We're at a stand still between what we need vs. what we want. Also, because we feel like we need to scale up pretty fast in terms of storage, regardless of actual usage, this has been an ongoing issue of finding the affordable, scalable solution. Of course, our limited technology know-how of how to manage the cheaper solutions may be what's killing us here. I think we'll need to make the executive decision this weekend and just get something otherwise nothing will ever happen.
Business / Marketing - We have not had time to properly search and interview for our VP of Marketing yet. However, I did meet a ton of great people at Startup Weekend whom I can learn from. Will keep the search going for now...
Sunday, October 28, 2007
As Expected, Money Talks...
As a desperate measure to gain some control in the matter of no communication, we decided to do a couple of things to resolve the issue of the missing designer.
1. We started shopping around for alternative shops that also provided image to code services and got a few recommendations from some friends and fellow entrepreneurs. Yes, we probably could have taken the time to do the work ourselves but given the time constraints, I felt it would have been money well spent to hire some professionals that could knock the project out of the park in a very short time. After all, the goal of this venture is to launch a business, it isn't to make sure our team members can conquer certain technical skills just to say we can.
If you are designing a new site and desire xhtml code, below are some options for you we have found over the last couple of days. We did not end up using the companies but from the examples some showed us, they are great.
www.psdxhtml.com - very impressive portfolio, $89 per page, quick turnaround.
PSD2Html.com $153+ per page
xhtmlized.com $249+ per page
One important thing to note is that you (and these shops) can probably churn these things out pretty quickly if all you're doing is one page. The value-add here is more for projects that have multiple pages with various differences in their layouts or maybe even complex layouts. Note: We did not get into details with these shops to know if they would charge more for complex layouts.
2. The second thing we did to resolve the issue was contacting Guru to see about getting what's left of our escrow money back. The idea was to take the unspent budget and apply it to one of the shops above to finish the project or to get as close to it as possible.
Guru offered to mediate the issue and also contacted the designer to let him know of the refund request. If the professional did not respond with 5 business days, we would get the money back. Guess what? Within hours, the designer came back, responded to our inquiries and provided some sample pages for us to review.
Fancy that...
As it turns out, nothing bad had happened to the designer but he has been avoiding us due to lack of progress. Again, lack of progress was not what I was concerned about; lack of communication was. I had to explain that concept to the designer again but hopefully he'll get it this time.
1. We started shopping around for alternative shops that also provided image to code services and got a few recommendations from some friends and fellow entrepreneurs. Yes, we probably could have taken the time to do the work ourselves but given the time constraints, I felt it would have been money well spent to hire some professionals that could knock the project out of the park in a very short time. After all, the goal of this venture is to launch a business, it isn't to make sure our team members can conquer certain technical skills just to say we can.
If you are designing a new site and desire xhtml code, below are some options for you we have found over the last couple of days. We did not end up using the companies but from the examples some showed us, they are great.
www.psdxhtml.com - very impressive portfolio, $89 per page, quick turnaround.
PSD2Html.com $153+ per page
xhtmlized.com $249+ per page
One important thing to note is that you (and these shops) can probably churn these things out pretty quickly if all you're doing is one page. The value-add here is more for projects that have multiple pages with various differences in their layouts or maybe even complex layouts. Note: We did not get into details with these shops to know if they would charge more for complex layouts.
2. The second thing we did to resolve the issue was contacting Guru to see about getting what's left of our escrow money back. The idea was to take the unspent budget and apply it to one of the shops above to finish the project or to get as close to it as possible.
Guru offered to mediate the issue and also contacted the designer to let him know of the refund request. If the professional did not respond with 5 business days, we would get the money back. Guess what? Within hours, the designer came back, responded to our inquiries and provided some sample pages for us to review.
Fancy that...
As it turns out, nothing bad had happened to the designer but he has been avoiding us due to lack of progress. Again, lack of progress was not what I was concerned about; lack of communication was. I had to explain that concept to the designer again but hopefully he'll get it this time.
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