As might be obvious from the lack of updates on this web site, Metro Girl is no longer much of a going operation. Nearly four years into a full-time position at Emory University, I’ve been winding down my independent consulting and currently service only a few clients. After more than a decade of it, designing, launching, promoting, and maintaining web sites is no longer something I really want to do or something I have time for.

And now for the good news…

In my full-time position, I’ve had the opportunity to have hands-on experience with an ever-widening variety of technologies and communications media. Twitter? YouTube? Content management systems? Tagging? WordPress? Video editing? I know all that and more. Further, I believe that I can help others to understand, plan and embrace these technologies. I can’t do it for you, but I can explain what you might do, how to do it, and how to stay on track. Below are a list of technologies I am available to consult on:

• Facebook - including FB fan “pages” and FB image management for business
• Twitter - personal & corporate Twitter
• YouTube - leveraging YouTube for business, non-profit
• WordPress - setting up, customizing & managing a blog or WP-powered web site
• Video Production - creating & editing original video on a budget
• Podcasting - producing & editing audio content for podcast delivery
• Google Analytics - Using Google free web traffic tool to analyze web traffic
• Writing for the Web - How to write content that people will read & search engines will find
• Social Media Management — Getting Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. to work together

Interested?

Contact me at wdarlingweb@gmail.com. You can also find me via Twitter and LinkedIn, among other places.

Also, if you’d like to read about what I think of Twitter, read this article I wrote today, called “Twitter: The Return.”

I’ve been to a fair share of web design / development / usability conferences over the past ten years, including huge events hosted by Thunderlizard and Macromedia Adobe, but I’ve often found that it’s the smaller events that have been most valuable to me. This “Jam” event had an admission cap of around 250 and sold out, meaning that in actual fact the sessions were jammed. But since each of the two main session rooms had video monitors with sound hooked up in the hallway, even full-up rooms didn’t stop me from enjoying the sessions today.

Here’s what I learned today, in brief, and how those lessons will influence my work, both at my full-time job and at Metro Girl / personal web site work:

• From “Managing Your Personal Brand” with Brian Oberkirch:
  • Believe in your work, your vision, yourself: If you don’t, who will?
  • “Fully embrace your unique quirkiness” — in a business sense, this can work
  • Your brand doesn’t equal logo designed in Photoshop — it’s so much more (sense of humor, tone, phrases, attitude, reputation)
  • In today’s world, you need to “anchor” your identity — your various IDs, sites, YouTube should have a site/domain in common
  • “Behold the power of the side project” — stay creative, stay happy, and it could leader to bigger
• From “Universal by Design” with James Craig
  • Key point: “Judgement should not be outsourced to a tool”
  • Think about designs that are better for all users / audiences — not just disabled
• From “Design Disrepair” with Jason Beaird
  • Web sites are like houses — they need to be renovated, sometimes completely!
  • Think about “timeless” design versus chasing trends, copying popular looks of the moment
  • Metro Girl has been on the route of redoing web sites to comply with modern standards — CSS, table-free design, etc. — and after this inspirational talk, I’m inspired to do a lot more of this!
• From “The Web Planning Process” with Jason Ford
  • Planning is critically important — if you skip it, you’ll regreat it
  • Four main deliverables: 1) competitive/comparative analysis, 2) input session / brainstorm, 3) audience needs map, and 4) content matrix.
  • I actually have a lot of experience with web planning and see that I’ve been doing it right, according to Jason Ford, but learned about some new tools
• From “Design for Email 101″ with Ben Chestnut
  • Rich/web email faces a lot of obstacles, which you need to be aware of
  • Avoid spamming and avoid sending email that people might think is spam
  • Stick to basic design and code: “Design like it’s 1999″

I really look forward to tomorrow’s sessions and meeting some more people. With so much web-based socializing and networking, I really am lacking some “real” friends in Atlanta, esp. in the industry, and today I made a couple of contacts that made me smile.

UPDATE: Day 2 was indeed great and I met several new people. I also enjoyed the “after party” at Bazaar, although the music grew so loud that I really couldn’t hear anymore. Since my goal was to talk, I decided to just go home.

The Story of Stuff is an incredible, innovative video that presents the unworkable economic/resource/environmental system of the world. It explains the ways in which the “ideal” model presented by economists and as understood by most folks just doesn’t match reality and how eventually this bad equation is going to doom our planet, if it’s not doomed already. But it’s not all depressing — it’s funny, it’s smart, and at the end it gives you ideas for what you can DO about it. So check out The Story of Stuff!

In the meantime, here’s where to find my “station”:: http://www.thesixtyone.com/wdarling

And here’s the profile and songlist of one of my favorite mysixtyone groups, My Robot Friend.

These shows include transition effects and even sound. Almost all aspects of the player — size, color, features shown or not shown, font, etc. — are customizable and all the programming of what pictures to use and what captions is stored in an XML (simple text) file, so it’s easily updated.

So far my work has been for my full-time employer, the Woodruff Health Sciences Center at Emory University, where I work with health and medical content. Over the past six months I’ve been regularly producing slide shows, most of them with audio. Here are a few examples:

Emory University Hospital’s 500th Heart Transplant Patient

Emory Med Students Celebrate Match Day 2008

Joint Simulation for Emory Medical and Nursing Students

The Global Diabetes Research Center

I even used SlideShowPro to present videos. Here’s a player that gives users access to a set of “Four Patient Stories”:

For background on these slide shows, including an explanation of the more technical aspects, take a look at the article “More on SlideShowPro” I wrote for my tech blog, Wendy’s Words.

Think a slide show like this would work for your site? Let me know and we can talk.

One notable feature of this site is its online image preference survey. This is the first time I have used this particular software package, called phpQuestionnaire. It’s a nice kit from Chumpsoft and can be had for around $200. Easy to set up and great GUI. Far superior to Perl-powered system I used for surveys in the past. Check it out (but please don’t take survey, as it’s designed for area residents):

Inception Magazine
www.inception-magazine.com
July 2007

E-zine / fanzine inspired by sci-fi/fantasy author Storm Constantine, with Storm’s encouragement and the contributions of Storm fans.

When author Storm Constantine put out a mention that she’d like to see her defunct fanzine Inception rise again as an e-zine, I stepped up to the plate — I love Storm way too much to say no! This web site was for many years a quarterly publication and has been operation since November 2001. In 2007 I decided to move to a new design and format, moving to year-round submissions and a Word Press-driven blog design for easy updating. It’s much less work for me now and users find it much easier to access past content, now that all posts are tagged with keywords and sorted by date. All posts can be commented on as well, making the site more interactive.

Storm Constantine
www.stormconstantine.com
July 2007

Web site for cult favorite, British author Storm Constantine.

After many years as Storm’s friend, editor, and fan organizer, I finally decided it was time I take on her web site. The previous design did not match her style and difficult to maintain. The new web site takes advantage of new technologies, such as WordPress and PHP-driven galleries and forums. The entire web site can be updated via a web interface, allowing both Storm and I to easily update it.

Forrest Briggs
www.forrestbriggs.com
December 2007

Online gallery for Atlantan Forrest Briggs, who takes pictures around the world.

As soon as I saw Forrest photographs, I wanted to make him a web site. Fortunately for me, he asked me to, and together we created a design that shows off his photographs of people and places from around the world. The design is minimalist, with an emphasis on the photos.

Forever Wraeththu
foreverwraeththu.wordpress.com
April 2008

Archive of creative fiction based on or inspired by the world of Wraeththu.

Wraeththu fan fiction — writing it and reading it — is one of my passions and over the years I’ve been the main caretaker for its existence online. In April 2008, I tossed out the antiquated web site the archive was on and moved to a WordPress blog format complete with tags, RSS feeds, content management, and more. Nifty!

Tom Haney Automata
www.tomhaney.com
June 2008

Web site for Atlanta-based professional artist Tom Haney, maker of one-of-a-kind, hand-crafted automata and other works of modern folk art.

Tom Haney spends weeks crafting his one-of-a-kind creations. Because of the nature of his work, it’s often hard for people at shows or show organizers to describe — you have to see it to “get” it.

With this site, Tom has a great marketing tool and something to help out anyone who wants to see his stuff in action. In addition to great pictures, there are Flash movies.

The current design came online in June 2008. A previous design of mine was online for 4-5 years prior.