Blah, blah, blah.

So I am elated to see how well received our site has been. We’ve been listed on several CSS Website galleries, and cited as Site of the Day!!! Some screen shots to commemorate our successful launch…

We are totally stoked by all the positive response!

As it says folks, my little pet project, Scotty Valentine is now on Zazzle! I’ve got designs on Ked shoes and skate decks! It’s awesomely cute, so check it out!

Often we come across many hurdles in life, and we, creative, resourceful human beings that we are, come up with beautiful solutions to overcome these hurdles. New challenges appear everyday, and instead of hitting “snooze” I am thankful for being alive.

As a freelance illustrator, I have been blessed with the ability to turn my passion into my career, and am always looking around every corner to see what good things may be coming my way. For a brief momement, I got lost in illustrating for others – as much as I loved and enjoyed the projects coming my way, I wanted to do more that excited my creativity. So I started a small clothing line called Scotty Valentine. With this came new challenges, and it really put my brain to work as well as my creative juices. I discovered different facets of myself, and realized that I did have some limitations. But I was not discouraged and sought out solutions. Namely web solutions! I could come up with great designs, but how do I bring them to the web. And from that question I found my answer in the form of a wonderful partner in crime, Valerie. I was again hit with a new challenge – something I really looked forward to – combining our strengths to provide people with a unique and talented outlook for the web.

Everyday there’s a new challenge, a great way to experience more of life, to learn new things, to push yourself forward. It’s what I live for, my passion is for the challenges I find in design, in business, in marketing – it’s my life, what I know and love. My reason for getting out of bed.

Hello everyone!  I wanted to take a few minutes to jot down some more information on the kinds of web technologies we like to work with and services we can provide.  This post will not include exhaustive information, because we’re continually acquiring new skills and trying out new techniques.

A basic rundown of skills we possess and technologies we work with:

* XHTML
* CSS
* JavaScript and various JS libraries (like jQuery & mootools)
* AJAX
* PHP
* ColdFusion
* MySQL or Access databases
* ecommerce (Magento, Zen Cart, PayPal)
* CMS (Drupal, Wordpress)

Content management systems (CMS) are a wonderful tool for anyone who would like to be able to easily update their own site content without knowing HTML.  You might use a CMS for maintaining a blog, writing news articles for your site, maintaining an event calendar, and many more tasks.

There are 2 content management systems that we love to use.  Wordpress has an extrememly user-friendly administrative interface, that doesn’t overwhelm or intimidate.  It’s a solid platform with lots of different plugins you can add for increased functionality.  we use Wordpress for straight-forward blog sites that don’t need a lot of additional functionality, because it’s easy to use and anything else would be overkill.

The second CMS we use is Drupal.  Drupal is hugely flexible–this results in a more complex adminstrative interface.  This complexity allows for tons of added functionality, like controlling different types of content (news articles, reviews, blog posts, etc) or having lots of different functional blocks on one page (content in sidebars for example).  These things are possible in Wordpress, but Drupal is really built for that kind of functionality.

Aside from content management systems, we can also do static websites.  If you don’t need your content updated very often, a static website is perfectly fine, and is usually a more affordable option for anyone on a limited budget.

We can also provide e-commerce solutions, for those who want to sell products online.  We have worked with Zen Cart, PayPal, and Magento, and can set you up with one of these shopping carts, or another if you prefer.  Magento is a favorite of ours–it is fully customizable and offers an amazingly intuitive and simple user-interface on the administrative side.  It also offers a lot of plugins for integrating different payment processors, which makes it very flexible.

Like I said in the beginning, we’re always interested in trying new things–so if you are interested in something you don’t see listed here, please don’t hesitate to ask us about it!  More later…