I’ve gained much knowledge from the authors and contributors of these sites and I owe much debt. If you’re interested in any of the things I do for a living, then this list is MUST read.

In alphabetical order…

• A List Apart - design, development, content
• Copyblogger - content
• Freelance Switch - business
• Matt Cutts - SEO, Google
• Michael Gray - SEO
• Official Google Blog - SEO, Google
• Pearsonified - SEO, WordPress, content
• PSDTUTS - Photoshop, freebies
• SEOmoz - SEO, content
• SEO Book - SEO
• SEO Theory - SEO
• Smashing Magazine - design, freebies
• TechCrunch - business
• Weblog Tools Collection - WordPress
• Yahoo! Search Blog - Yahoo!
• Yoast - SEO, WordPress

Now onto the news…

Why Freelancing?

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of owning my own business. In it I see opportunity to do things the way I think they should be done, I have much more freedom than I would have anywhere else, and I can hone in on exactly what it is I do best and utilize those talents to their fullest.

There’s been much speculation on the changes younger generations bring to the workplace. Those changes come from ideologies that younger people hold to tightly. A few of those, I think, are quality time with family & friends, transparency, and quality work.

I want all of those things. I want the freedom to have the time to deepen relationships with the people that mean the most to me and I’ll have more time to do that now. I want to be transparent about who I am and who my company is. I’d rather be completely open and honest and lose some potential customers than paint a picture of perfection and pretend that my company is all things to all people. It’s appalling to me to watch the number of companies I’ve seen sell their services for an arm & a leg and produce crappy work. It almost seems as if it’s the standard to produce crappy work and every once in a while come across something good. I guess this is the product of the American dream — everyone thinking that they need to take their shot, even if they aren’t qualified. Boy, that statement could really come back to bite to me!

What I love about working with other people is finding strengths in others. It was really neat to see how a handful of people made up the company at Lead Maverick and each excelled at what they did. Knowing this, I also know that I’m not a jack of all trades. I’m good at a few things and it’s those things I want to focus on and make even better. My job now is to take what I know, apply it, and get better at it all the time so that I can assure clients (and myself!) that I really can produce something really great.

Leaving Lead Maverick

I left Lead Maverick last week and it was harder to do than I thought I would it be. I made great relationships there and exciting things are happening for them. For those of you not in the loop yet, Lead Maverick is a search engine marketing company in Dallas, TX. I was the web designer among other things.

I left an environment of security. Having a consistent paycheck sure is nice, and what’s even greater is that someone had to be trusting enough to offer me a salary. In one hand I was comforted by the fact that someone was giving me money to survive on, and on the other hand I was comforted by the idea that I was trusted enough to be privileged with that money. It really is a neat thing to think about.

Friendship is much more easily grown in close proximity, something I’ll miss now that I’ll be working alone all day. Sure I’ll have the phone, meetings, and now I can work from a coffee shop if I want to. It’s quite different to work alongside your friends though. I’ll miss that part.

Where to Begin?

Well, I’m open for business. I’m praying for guidance throughout this process. I’m only a man and I can fall easily. All the support you can give is grealy appreciated. That’s where I’ll begin.

Welcome to Develop Daly.

This Youtube clip (and the 5 other parts following the clip) are quite biased, a little over the top, and at some points irrelevant, there are still many facts that remain to shed light on the history of Barack Obama and his close ties to extremely controversial leaders.

“Obama & Friends - A History Of Radicalism”: Obama’s ties include Jeremiah Wright, Black Panthers, Bill Ayers, Louis Farrakhan, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Bernardine Dohrn, ACORN, and Weathermen Underground.

The big news, however, is that I’ve begun redesigning my site. I’m moving on the bigger and better things with this site. There will also be a goody attached to the launch of the new site. Stay tuned…it’s not too far away.

Design & Home Page

In designing the site I wanted to achieve two things: simplicity and elegance.
The site needed to be conducive to an audience I’m only vaguely familiar with, yet constantly surrounded by: young women in dire need for wedding decorations. I ended up giving the site a very rustic, yet smooth feel. The dark colors are a stark contrast to the traditional white wedding sites (though I will be implementing a style switcher to go between the dark scheme and a lighter one). I feel as though the browns make the site feel a little smaller, but in a good way. The perception is that the site is well maintained, updated, local, non-corporate, and easily accessible to customers.

Photos

Pictures are huge in a business that is selling services based solely upon how good they look. We used in-window popups to show off the larger images, and allow visitors to browse through the many pictures. We’re taking advantage of the WordPress built-in gallery feature to make photo browsing and management easy.

Search Engine Optimization

As with all of the sites I build, I take great care into how I build a site so that it out performs competitors in search engines. This section is for those already familiar with SEO.

Headers

On the home page I used the text “Wedding Decorations in Dallas, TX” as the H1 tag. While the business is located in Denton, TX, their service is as wide as the DFW area and Dallas is a more trafficked keyword than Denton is, so it made sense to draw from the bigger pool, rather than limit ourselves to Denton.

The H2 tag is “Wedding and Event Décor Specialists” so that we can emphasize even more specifically what the site is about, including a broader range of services.

Tags

For our purpose, what traditionally are called “tags” we’ll call “styles”. I wanted brides to be able to find exactly what they’re looking for. Not only did we categorize rentals into a categories like candles, candelabras, and cake toppers, but implemented a tagging feature that will tag about 700 adjectives automatically. If you look at the screen shot below you can see a demonstration of which words could be tagged. This is pretty useful for users looking for a decorations of a very specific style and for search engines because it allows optimization of hundreds of long tail searches.

Conclusion

The live site doesn’t reflect everything mentioned in this post as some of the content has yet to be entered. However, I think you’ll find the site to be beautifully simple and very well optimized for search engines.

Visit Simple Elegance.

Link: The Well of Denton Bible Church

Home Page

The home pages consists of a featured section that scrolls through however many featured posts you want.

We’ve also got 3 “ads” that display next to the featured posts. The point of the “ads” is that they are much more static parts of the site that need constant attention, so we’re using the “ad” terminology, but in reality they’re just important posts.

Below the featured posts is a photo stream from an internal WordPress gallery, and below that are two columns of recent sermons and recent resources (books, blogs, songs, etc.).

To its right is a list of upcoming events that are being picked up from a Google calendar.

A lot of things are going on on the home page, and mostly in part to using the loop to call specific categories.

Pages

Many of the pages have unique sidebars, achieved by adding unique IDs to the widget code and allowing site administrators to add and remove widgets of their choice for specific pages. Some of the pages take advantage of unique templates as well.

Because there are many administrators of the site, those writing their own content have their own author pages to display biographical information as well as a list of their content.

There pages dedicated to photos, audio and video. The photo management was all achieved using the NexGen Gallery WordPress plugin - I strongly suggest using this for your photos!

Coming Soon…

I’ll be recycling this theme, adding to it, cleaning it up, changing the design, and optimizing it even further for release as a premium theme. Stay tuned!

You can subscribe to these without hesitation, because they’ve stood my test of time.

SEO Related

• Joost de Valk’s SEO Blog
• Michael Gray - Graywolf’s SEO Blog
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
• Pearsonified
• SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
• SEO Book

WordPress Related

• Joost de Valk’s SEO Blog
• Weblog Tools Collection

Design Related

• A List Apart
• Smashing Magazine
• Yahoo! User Interface
• CSS Remix

General Web

• Techcrunch
• Read/WriteWeb
• Yahoo! Search Blog

I subscribe to many more feeds than that, but these are some of the best.

So WHO ELSE should I be subscribing to?

My question is this: what would be an even better prize than an iPod shuffle?

If, let’s say, I were to have some sort of contest, what would you want out of it. Assume this contest requires some time and effort (much more than posting how much you love me). Would it be enough to be blogged about being a winner in some contest? Would you like money? Would a book be good enough? Tell me what you think.

Now, bear in mind, that I’m no game show host willing to dish out $1,000,000. So, what are some other prizes comparable to an iPod shuffle (or probably even cheaper than that) that would make it worth your time to participate in a contest on my website or any other website?

Before I get to the web designing…Things are changing here. Denton is rounding out this triangle (Dallas, Fort Worth, Denton) quite nicely, or perhaps some think the rounding out is less awesome. I like the coming changes, however. Denton is becoming less of a leech to the other cities and gathering quite a crowd to place into its many newly built and yet to be built homes. The largest shopping attraction is being built as I write and is certain to bring tourism to Denton. Several corporations are moving into town, bringing more jobs, more opportunities, and more options.

For me, I’m excited about the chance that more web design work may be available here. Dallas has a great reputation for advertising, marketing, and creative services like web design. I’d rather not move to Dallas for work though. In the coming years, I’ll probably be able to stay right here and offer the traditional Dallas services right here from Denton.

Of course, I work on the Internet, a world-wide platform, but I like working with people in my community. It’s also easier and more efficient to meet with people sometimes. I always hope that my work is solving a problem, making something more efficient, or serving people in some such manner. Being able to watch that up close is more special to me, so I’ll try to keep it that way.

I may be pretty busy right now, but I’ll have more time soon to take on additional projects, and hope to serve Denton, TX more directly. Email me if you’re looking for a new web site.

Nearly everyday I have a new idea of something I’d like to build. Most of these are quasi-doable, while others stem from frustration and are pretty much impossible. Some ideas are:

• local social music sites (ahem, hearDenton…still on the the very last back burner)
• software that tracks drivers’ bad driving and penalizing them for it (maybe sending their stats to their insurance companies - also, not a project for me…I’m a web guy)
• a site to compile LOTS of information on good worship songs (I started this and accidentally deleted…oh well)
• a more stream-lined CMS solution built on WordPress
• build a premium WordPress theme
• turn the Shuttle design into a real theme

The list could go on. The point, though, is that I always have this feeling of wanting to accomplish another project. Of course I’m prevented by time mostly. If only I didn’t have to work full-time. One day…

So do you feel like this?