Life is Good

Those who actually check on my blog on a periodic basis have undoubtedly noticed a long dry spell here. Part of that, of course, is due to the darling angel who has decided to come live with us -- our delightful daughter, Kaylie. While she does take up some time, though, our life with her is becoming a bit more under control (as much as it can be, at any rate).

What's really taking up my time now is my business, Cyber Data Solutions.

Despite these "challenging economic times", my business is really taking off. I've picked up several new clients over the past few months and a number of former clients have been contacting me for new projects.

My cup runneth over.

Just a rundown on what's happening with CDS:

• Common Grove. I helped my buddy Blaine Roderique over at Q Ltd set up a carbon footprint calculator tied into a credit card processing system for people to purchase carbon offsets. That site should be going live any day now.
• IDSC Biotech Network. I met Mark Creswell, IDSC's glorious leader, through my sales training at Marr Sales. He called me in to help him update the content on their site and to do a little tweaking with the layout.
• Concordia University, Ann Arbor. Through a string of networking contacts which eventually led to being selected as a preferred vendor for Uproar Communications here in Ann Arbor, I got to work with the friendly folks at Concordia University -- I know, kind of ironic, right?). They were running into some technical problems and needed me to help them set up a stop-gap system which would give them time to consider their next big overhaul of their online presence -- guess who might be called in to help with that?
• Community Housing Network, Inc. Long-time clients, CHN, called me in to work on adding to and updating their existing CMS-based site. There were one or two small housekeeping projects that needed my attention as well.
• Clear!Blue. I started working on this project late last year with my friends Craig and Matt over at Defrost Design. We've now successfully launched this system. My part in it was to set up an administrative interface which allowed the C!B folks to maintain their own content on the site. Technically, this is a content management system (CMS), but unlike the work I do for CHN above (a general-purpose CMS called Drupal), this is a customized special-fit system designed to fit the customers specific needs.

There were a few other small items that I helped with during this time, but what I've listed were and are the larger jobs. Looking down the road, I've already got two or three more projects in the pipeline. At this rate, I'll have the best year ever with my business.

Now I just need to find a little extra time for some sleep!

So, what are the exciting things going on with your business or company?

A Little Catching Up

Just so you know, I haven't been filling my days solely with taking care of our beautiful Kaylie (though I will admit, when she's smiling -- which is often -- I could sit and play with her for hours!). I've also been getting some actual work done.

Most recently I've been working with my friend Craig Steen over at Defrost Design on a project for another company called Clear!Blue. Clear!Blue creates "spectacular experiences" and like to call themselves "brand superheroes" (without the "uncomfortable spandex").

The system we we've been building has been an interesting one. It's a Flash-based site. For those who don't know what this means, Flash is a product from Adobe which allows developers to create beautiful and intricate animations on a website. These animations can be so complicated, in fact, that they can actually be the website.

Anyway, I was called in on this project because the folks at Clear!Blue wanted to be able to maintain a lot of the information on the site themselves. They wanted to be able to add new people, new case studies, etc and have that new information appear immediately on the website without having to contact the web developer every single time. That's where I came in. I helped build the tools to manage the information on the site and to make it available to the Flash front end.

We're actually getting close to the end of this one. We're down to the final tweaks on the test site while we wait for the client to set up their production hosting environment (using bizland.com). I'm figuring we should be able to wrap this up in the next week or so. Wish me luck!

So, what projects have you been working on recently?

Always Thinking

Programmers are always thinking about how they can re-use what they build. Since we work in the world of thought-stuff, it's a lot easier to do this than it is when you are working with physical objects.

I just finished working on the Bruce Donovan Construction website. They wanted me to, first, just go through and get the site cleaned up so it didn't look like a template site (or at least not obviously). After a little work, the headers no longer said "Bruce Donovan Construction, put your slogan here", so that was a pretty nice improvement.

The second and larger piece of what they wanted was an online portfolio which displayed pictures of the various projects they've done. The goal was not only a record of their accomplishments, but also a means whereby their clients can actually keep an eye one what's been happening on the job site.

The project went well and Bruce and company seem to be pretty happy with it. They've already got three of their current sites up with pictures and descriptions.

While I was working on the project, it came to me that I could use some similar mechanisms to make a photo album for my lovely daughter, Kaylie. We've got relatives and friends scattered all over the world, from Ohio to Japan. Many of them would like to keep an eye on the little one as she grows.

So today I started creating Kaylie Kimiko's Korner, our daughter's first marketing platform. I'll keep you apprised as I get things up and running. First up will be that photo album, but, who knows? She may be starting her own blog soon!

So, what other offerings do you think friends and relatives would like to see on a baby site?

Best Laid Assumptions

About a week ago, our area had almost a foot of snow fall on us. Flights were cancelled, schools had snow days. It was a veritable Winter Wonderland. With that much snow, we were pretty much guaranteed a White Christmas.

Now, due to temperatures in the 40's and the torrential rains we had overnight, I'm looking out on a landscape which definitely doesn't fit that definition.

Of course, the lack of a White Christmas probably won't kill me or even inconvenience me much for that matter, but it does put me in mind of more serious examples of counting on things staying the same.

I'm working on updating and upgrading the website for Bruce Donovan Construction. In talking with Bruce it was clear that he understood that he not only had to be on the Web, but he had to look good on his site and provide his visitors with what they wanted -- in this case a portfolio of current and completed jobs, including photos.

Bruce could have ignored the situation, but more and more people are making their decisions based on information they get from the Web. If he hadn't met the need, I'm sure one of his competitors would have.

Construction isn't by any means the only industry where the technology of the Web is changing the playing field. Think of the difficulties that travel agents have had over the last decade. Now, you'd better be able to plan my whole vacation for me (at ridiculously low cost), otherwise Expedia is waiting. Local booksellers? As if the 800-pound gorilla which is Borders weren't competition enough, the 80-ton dinosaur of Amazon might easily crush you and never even realize you were there.

Even in my own business of web-development, nothing is assured. Tools are coming out which could easily make me obsolete. Website templates, gadgets and widgets, high school students who can undercut me -- these are all factors which I must be aware of. What value can I add which can offset them (and, worse, offset those which I never would have expected)?

I don't really have any answers right at the moment, but you can be sure I'm keeping an eye out.

So, how has technology changed your business, for good or for ill?

What I Meant to Say Was...

When I wrote that post about being back on track, what I actually meant to say was that I was careening hopelessly out of control.

Kaylie is an absolute angel of a baby. Oh, she gets a little fussy in the evening, but that's not unusual for newborns (or so I've been told). She does take up a little bit of my time -- time, of course, that I am glad to spend with her.

The other challenge in my life right now is also a good one.

I've got a lot of work coming in.

I'm cleaning up the last details for the big upgrade for Community Housing Network. I'm also in the middle of cleaning up the Bruce Donovan Construction website and adding a portfolio tool so they can highlight photos of their projects. I just finished fixing a response form for Pink Papaya Parties (using ASP.NET, no less!). Tomorrow is the big kick-off meeting for the project I'm working on with Defrost Design and today I got a call from my friends at the Michigan Venture Capital Association to add a new file upload facility to their site.

My cup runneth over.

In the meantime, I at least got the most recent issue of my ezine out the door (only 12 hours late). You can check it out in the archives or, if you prefer, you can sign up for a subscription.

So, what are the joyous challenges in your life right now?

A New Beginning

I got started on the Bruce Donovan Construction project this evening. One of the first steps to this or any project is to set up three copies of the site.

The first copy is the one that is on my desktop computer in my office. This is the copy upon which I will be doing all of my work. Having everything directly on my local computer makes editing files or adding graphics a lot easier. Also, since I try to make my local machine look like the production server as much as possible (i.e. it has the same files and directories), when I finally move the files to the production site, I have a fairly high chance of the system working right from the start.

The second copy is on a test site which my client should be able to see. This is so that after I have made some changes on copy one (the one on my computer), I can then upload the files to the test site, where the client can take a look and give me his or her approval. Quite often I'm able to make what is called a subdomain on the production server and use it as a test site. For example, if you can open the production site by pointing your browser at http://brucedonovan.com/, then the test site might be at http://testsite.brucedonovan.com/.

The final copy is the production site itself. Of the three, this copy changes least frequently -- only when testing on the other two copies clears up most of the potential bugs.

By doing this, I reduce the number of problems which might otherwise crop up on the production website, without giving myself too much overhead.

So, what are the first things you might do when you get a new client?

Re-Use and Re-Imagine

I worked some more on the Community Housing Network site upgrade today. I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is a good thing as two other projects are starting to heat up a little. Never a dull moment.

At any rate, my work today allowed me to re-use some code from another system. For programmers, this is somewhat of a Holy Grail. Using or re-tooling old code can often save quite a bit of time and effort in a project.

In this case, I had designed a chunk of PHP code a while back, which automatically switched testimonials on a page. Each time you reloaded a page it would grab a random testimonial from a directory on the server. You can see the results of this on both the CNP of Ohio site and on my own Cyber Data Solutions site.

Now, the folks at CHN wanted a series of different images on their front page. I could have used Flash to create an animated slideshow, but I personally think that such things actually detract from the page. So instead, I used my "random testimonial" code and tweaked it a little so that it would display different pictures instead. You can see it on the CHN test site, if you are interested.

So, what do you think about having animated slide shows on a web page? Do you find them fun or distracting?

Bag of Groceries

Every once in a while, the stars align and I mysteriously don't have any networking events or one-to-one meetings for the day. Oh, I still made a phone call or two this morning and Lisa and I went out to lunch with some friends. Other than that, though, today was a work day.

My focus today was to convert all of the content for the new Community Housing Network site and get it published on the test server. I think I went through about ten or fifteen files, checking for errors, making slight tweaks, and, in general, preparing the data for public viewing. When I had finally completed the last file, I updated the search index on the test site and looked for all of the incomplete pages.

There are still 25 of them left to go.

It's funny, but I don't think a lot of people have a good understanding of how much work goes into creating even a moderately large site like this one. Between designing and implementing the look of the site, structuring the data to make it easy for visitors to find what they need, and creating the content that they will be using, weeks or even months can go by before everyone is satisfied.

And that isn't even going into more complex sites which might require backend databases, or those that require a significant effort for search engine optimization.

I'm sure other professionals run into problems like this, too, but I almost have to laugh when someone asks me how much a website costs. One of my friends came up with a snappy answer (though I think I would be gentler with my prospects):

How much does a bag of groceries cost?

So, how do you deal with the "How much does it cost?" question?

Missing Pieces

I was assembling the new baby bouncer seat that we received as a shower gift. I know that a lot of parents dread this aspect of receiving gifts for their children (or even for themselves), but my puzzle-solving nature just loves to see an assembly instruction sheet. Lots of fun!

Unless you can't find a part.

I had unpacked all of the pieces and spread them out on the floor. I checked each off on the parts list to make sure that I had everything before I started working. Much to my chagrin, I couldn't find the screws that I needed to hold the whole thing together. I looked through the packaging and shook out every piece of plastic and cardboard I could find. Nothing.

I was about to start looking for the customer service number when the glint of metal caught my eye. There they were -- taped to the end of one of the larger parts. I guess sometimes you just have to look a little closer. It may take a little more time, but you tend to be faster in the long run because you've laid out everything before you and you don't waste any time going down wrong trails.

I wish I had remembered this lesson when I was working on my project with Community Housing Network. We're in the middle of a complete overhaul of their site, including a new look and feel and an update on the structure and content of the site. As I mentioned in a previous post, we've pretty much got the appearance under control. Now I'm working on the content.

Kirsten Elliott, my contact at CHN, sent me a bunch of files containing the new copy that I was supposed to add to the site structure I had already built. I started working on it right away, but quickly ran into a problem. The second file I was trying to process wasn't fitting into the site structure that they had originally told me that they wanted. In fact, it appeared to have partial data which belonged on three or four different pages. I finally had to call Kirsten to find out what was happening.

It turns out that the file with which I was working didn't belong where I thought it did. If I had actually taken a quick look at all of the files she had sent me, I would have understood what they had been trying to do.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that skipping steps in the process is a good way to waste my time.

So, when was the last time you took a "long shortcut"?

No Good Deed...

One of my earliest projects was the Community Assistance Directory that I did for the State Outreach department at the University of Michigan. The system went live eleven years ago and is still running as of this writing.

Looking at it now, you wouldn't know it, but back in the day, it was actually a pretty good example of web programming. It largely did what it was supposed to without too much muss or fuss.

Recently, the current administrator of the site contacted me because some of the data had become corrupted. I was able to go in and fix it fairly easily. The only bad thing was that I was brought face-to-face with an occupational hazard.

I had to look at work which I had done more than a decade ago.

I'm sure people in all industries face this problem. As you work in your chosen field, you, of necessity, develop and improve your skills. If you have any sort of early success, you must eventually face that earlier work and wince at its complete lack of elegance. You'd almost be willing to work for free, if only you could erase the evidence of your former lack of competence.

Of course, the real challenge is to recognize that the very fact that your work is still around after ten years must indicate at least some minimal value that you have created.

And that in ten years, the elegant system that you build today will appear as crude as bearskins and flint knives.

So, when was the last time you looked at work that you did ten years or more ago? How well did it hold up?

Accomplishing the Task

I spent a good portion of this afternoon and evening doing a conversion of a graphical treatment for the Community Housing Network project. What this means is that they are doing an overhaul of the look and feel of their site. My graphical designer drew up some beautiful pictures of what the site would look like and, after getting CHN's approval, I got busy turning those pictures into an actual website.

I've still got a few tweaks to go on the look (I'm missing some pictures of people for the front page), but I finally got things looking just about right.

This project was complicated by the fact that the CHN site uses a content management system called Drupal. Drupal is a wonderfully powerful system for controlling the content of a site and gives the site administrator a lot of options for what they would like to display. The one disadvantage is that sometimes the look and feel that it wants to generate isn't easily converted into just any graphical layout.

As with most of these things, though, as with most puzzles (which I love), it's just a matter of perseverance. If you try enough combinations of things and don't get too discouraged when you have the occasional "one step forward, two steps back" moments, you will likely accomplish your task in the end.

So, what was the last task you performed which required perseverance?

Finishing the Job

I always love that day when the project is complete. You get to look back on everything you've accomplished and feel a certain amount of pride in a job well done.

I had one of those days today.

You might remember me mentioning that I got a consulting job with AJ Boggs & Company, a local eBusiness solutions provider. I met the president, Jim Anderson, when we were classmates together in the Leadership Ann Arbor course.

Working with Jim and his people was a good experience. We took an old program that his clients had been using for years and made some adjustments to make it more robust and a more seamless experience for the user.

After months of work, we installed everything last night. We worked late so as not to disrupt the client's normal schedule. I finished the upgrades at 3am this morning. Matt Sebenick, the system administrator, put everything into production this morning and for a whole day we heard exactly what we had hoped...

Nothing.

When you install new systems, no matter how much testing you do, you always worry that there was that one catastrophic bug that you missed. So far -- knock on wood -- so good.

So, for tonight at least, I get to sit back and rest for a while. Maybe I'll even pop some popcorn and throw on a DVD. I think I received "The Guns of Navarone" the other day from NetFlix.

So, what projects have you completed lately? How does it feel to have them done?

Music to My Ears and a Change of Heart

I mentioned a while back that I was working with Suzanne Smith of cellochan on getting her set up with a brand new website. After several months of work, everything is up and running and it looks great!

Suzanne is quite happy with the site we designed and has apparently already received a number of compliments. She's also quite happy that my initial foray into the world of search engine optimization has landed her on the first page of Google search results for a variety of search phrases which she's hoping will bring in some more business. If you are looking for "cello teachers in Ann Arbor", you should check out cellochan!

I had a good time working with Suzanne, but in the process, I discovered that designing websites, while interesting and challenging, really isn't the true calling of my heart. I admire anyone who has the skill to bring together the beautiful pictures, great typography, and focused layout necessary to make a great website. In the process of building the cellochan site, though, I discovered my passion is in building features, not making them look good.

I like the work I did on the design, but I love the extra tools I built. The page which displays excerpts from Suzanne's blog was fun because of the programming challenge it presented, not for how it looked. Setting up the means for Suzanne to update the quote in the upper right corner of the page was much more fun to me that trying to place the quote there in the first place. Building the tool which contacts Google Calendar to retrieve the event information was a heck of a lot more fulfilling than making sure the text was the right color.

That all being said, I now want to figure out how to reposition myself so that my business supports this passion for me. After all, if the work I'm doing isn't truly fulfilling me, then I might as well go work for someone else.

So, have you discovered your true passion of your job or business? What is it?

Quick Updates

Update #1: Business

I'm working on a quick database project with Sagient, a web development and design firm in Ann Arbor. It's on a bit of a tight deadline, so I may not be posting much this week.

Update #2: Useless waste of time

If you feel like blowing a couple of hours, check out Desktop Tower Defense. It's a remarkably simple game, but with an addictiveness level similar to Tetris for me.

The Work I Want to Love

As I have continued in my journey as a sole proprietor and business owner, I'm trying to do more than just get the work, get it done, and get paid. I'm also observing myself. I want to know what parts of the business excite me. What makes me love what I do? What areas should I focus on? For what parts should I find a good subcontractor to help me out?

A while back, I started on a project with a local cello teacher, Suzanne Smith. She has a cello school called cellochan and she wanted some help setting up her website. Now, I've done some of this stuff before, but this is the first time I've gone solo on such a project. Despite that, we are making real progress with the site. Suzanne is a lot of fun and has a great artistic and creative talent (as one would expect from someone working in the arts).

The personal challenge I am running into is that the work is "squishy".

Let me explain. When I was in school, I loved the "hard" sciences and math. Every question you could ask had a hard answer. If you found that answer, you were right. If not, you were wrong. The subjects had very little in the way of gray areas. By the same token, the humanities and "soft" sciences always plagued me because the answers were much more subjective (or so it seemed to me). With a math problem, you could always work it backward to make sure you got it right. The same process didn't work so well with an English essay.

I've noticed that my work tends to fall into similar categories. Most of the web applications I help develop tend to fall into the "right or wrong" category. Either the system works or it doesn't. Oh, some minor details about user expectations can introduce a small amount of "gray" to the equation, but for the most part, it's either one or the other. Ironically, these projects tend to go quickly for me. Witness the recent MVCA project -- three weeks from initial meeting to final deliverable.

The cellochan project, on the other hand, is full of gray. Most of the work to date has been designing the user interface. It's all about images and color and fonts. It's about wording and formatting and layout. Each person involved in the process has different ideas on what looks right and what will work for the end user. While it can be an enjoyable process -- I do love working with creative people -- it is also time consuming and can be frustrating. It's kind of hard to back-check my answers to make sure I'm right!

So, what's the upshot?

I guess I continue on as I have been for now. I can't judge all of my future business on a single data point. Still, I will be on the lookout for projects which allow me to do those things for which I am particularly suited -- online databases, membership directories, and other similar applications, and the administrative facilities to support them all. This means, too, that I may have to refine my target market a bit, too.

Of course, this is all part of the fun of being a business owner, right?

So, what, if any, aspects of your job have you discovered that you may have to avoid even though they might be enjoyable?

Warming Up to Defrost Design and MVCA

It's been a bit since I wrote about the state of Cyber Data Solutions and my exciting life as an entrepreneur. I've been working full time in my business now for just shy of four months. What's it been like? Have I had to sell the cats for food? How do I enjoy setting my own hours?

That last one was prompted by an acquaintance of mine who, when she found out that I had gone full time, told me that it must be nice to be able to set my own hours. I laughed and assured her that, indeed, it was. Of course the hours I set are from 7am to 2am! After all, if I don't work, I don't get paid.

Other than the long hours, though, things are going quite well. I recently started and completed a project with a new client, the Michigan Venture Capital Association. I met the Executive Director of MVCA, LeAnn Auer, through her husband, Joe. His company, High Seas Consulting, does a lot of the same things that mine does, except where I work in the realm of Unix, they focus on the Microsoft market (kind of like giving in to the Dark Side of the Force).

MVCA already had a Web Design company, Defrost Design. They just needed to have some back end programming and database work done.

This is exactly the kind of project I love.

I had a client who wanted the project done quickly and was willing to devote her own time as needed. The actual work was interesting without being impossible. Finally, I got to work with professional web designers, Craig Steen and Matt Raup, who really knew what they were doing and got their part of the project done well ahead of schedule. If I got to work on more projects with folks like LeAnn, Craig, and Matt, my life as an entrepreneur would be a decidedly cheerful one.

To make a long story short, three weeks after my initial meeting with LeAnn, we had completed setting up a membership directory, an executive talent search database, and protected it all with a password system based on the members listed in the directory. LeAnn was presenting it to the MVCA Board today, so I can't wait to hear how it went.

All-in-all a very satisfying project.

So, what makes a project satisfying to you?

Catching Up

Just following up on a few previous posts.

The Cell Phone Blues

I wrote a short while ago about not being able to import my contact list into my new cell phone. I realize that cell companies have no real incentive to support you after you've already signed up, but I thought it a bit rude that something so obvious seemed to be ignored.

Well, it turns out that they didn't ignore it. A few hours after posting that entry, I received a response from the support request that I had placed on the Verizon site. They do indeed have such a facility...

... and they'll sell it to you for $24.95.

Fortunately, my buddy Al pointed me to the Howard Forums, where the user community has gathered everything you could possibly want to know about the cell phone industry. I started reading in the section devoted to my phone, the LG enV and within twenty minutes had found a free application called BitPIM which did everything that I needed and more.

New E-zine Issue Released

My report about the Howard Forums above is the core of my article for the most recent issue of the "Clearing Up the Confusion" E-Zine. I sent out Volume 1, Issue 2 shortly after midnight, right on schedule. Well, that's two out of two! Really, the process of creating and mailing out an e-zine is much easier than I thought it would be. I wish I had started a long time ago.

If you are interested in subscribing, go to the subscription page and follow the instructions there.

Still Waiting...

For those who were interested, I still haven't heard back from Concordia University. I presented a proposal to update their web presence at their business school on Thursday morning. I'm guessing that, in this case, no news is not necessarily good news. The project does have a time crunch, so I can't imagine that they would really want to delay any longer than necessary.

Ah, well, at least it's a better quality of rejection than I'm used to. ;-)

So, what's the coolest website, application, or online toy you've found out on the Web?

A New Season

Today we made cookies.

For me this is the start of the Christmas holiday season. My mom comes up from Toledo and we spend many hours baking batches of cookies. Cut-outs, almond crescents, thumbprint cookies, plus new ones every year (this year Lisa made some mint chocolate cookies that she found in the American Airlines inflight magazine). By the end of the day, we have six or eight different kinds of cookie all ready for our enjoyment over the next several weeks.

In other seasonal news, I've almost completed my first post-decision project. My friend John "Jake" Jaksetic has a website devoted to high school wrestling in northwest Ohio. He's created a site which allows his subscribers to search for the records of just about any student or school in the area. A lot of people were pretty excited about the site last year, so this year he had me put a little spit and polish on the system to make it that much more cool. If you are into the high school wrestling scene you should really check it out.

So, what sports do you follow or what's your favorite Christmas cookie?

29 days.

Getting Things Done

Finally! After many late nights and as many long days, we finally got things up and running. Oh, there are still one or two things to get done, but my last big deadline working for U of M has passed. Now, I will spend my time cleaning up my code, documenting everything I've done, and packing up my office. Going through this big rush has reminded me of all the projects I've been on in the past. The deadlines, the site reviews, the software releases.

I've worked with some truly talented coders in my time at the U. I've been on projects that excited me with their possibilities. I've served researchers, like George Furnas, who had a grasp of the world which exceeded my own, but whom I helped make their ideas into a reality. Of course, traveling right next to the good were those moments which I would just as soon forget. Frustrations caused by bureaucracy, by small-minded empire builders, by those who wouldn't trust that I knew my job -- they all deserve their positions in my personal Hall of Shame.

Still, I've enjoyed my time at the U far more than I've regretted it. I've met some great friends, from Ken Alexander, my first partner in crime, to Dan Kiskis, a great boss and a great friend, all the way to today, with my newest coworker, Sarvagya Kochak (whom I have to thank for these pictures of us down at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). We've shared the long hours and the last-minute pushes and come out at the end with great memories and stories.

So, I guess, in my rambling way, this is sort of my tribute to all my years at the U. It's been a great place to work and learn. I only hope that my next adventure will be as challenging and rewarding as this one has been.

So, how many of your closest friends and cherished moments have come about from where you work?

45 days.

I'm Back! TLA Tutorial: CMS

As many of you know, I've been a bit busy lately, finishing up a big project for Community Housing Network. CHN is a great group with which to work. As with most folks at charitable and non-profit organizations, they bring an excitement and passion to everything they do which is a breath of freash air in our sometimes cynical and business-as-usual world. In this case, we performed a massive overhaul on their website. Amongst other things, including a more intuitive look and feel, we added a content management system (CMS) to the site.

What's a CMS, you ask? Well, essentially it provides a framework full of tools and features which allows a website owner to update her own site more easily without having to know anything about HTML, how to upload files to their server, or how to create and maintain a search index for the site. There are a number of different packages out there, some commercial, some open source. The one I used was called "Drupal".

I know your eyes just glazed over, so let's just say that, once set up, it allows even the rankest beginner to have and maintain a website which has cool features such as searching, discussion forums, individual user logins, online glossaries of terms, and even advanced features such as online surveys -- all within a consistent look and feel. If this sounds intriguing to you, you might want to ask your current webmaster whether it is something to consider.

So, what features would you love to have on your website?