My second task was to try to break away from making “yet another black website”. The last website, and gee … the website before that were all black backgrounds. Very dark and brooding … but colorful and exciting in their own way. So we went for the polar opposite, white. I also tried to keep the color pallet to green, blue & gray. I think this really made the boat images pop.

For the individual yacht information pages, I kept things sparse and clean. All photos, videos, etc were triggered by sliding menu items and shown in a shadow box. Nice effect, keeping the focus on what is being shown. Also one of the ways I like to see photos these days. A victim of the times? Maybe. But I still like it.

I also reworked their WordPress blog, so it looked more integrated with the rest of the website. I of course chose the WordPress Christmas v1.1 theme from the creative folks at InstantShift.com again. I really like how clean it looks. Once I stripped everything down to white with 1 px green outlines, and shrunk its width to the same size as the rest of the site … you wouldn’t know it was the same theme. It’s clean and slick, and really displays images well too with the articles (again after some CSS tweeking).

I realy like the end result, and so does the client. That is certainly a win win!

But there are people paying me. That’s part of what I’ve been doing the past two weeks. Setting up 4 new iPhones for clients. Most of them had a mish-mash of addresses in different phones, PIMs, mail applications & address books. This is how I plied my trade. I exported, synced, set up IMAP mail accounts on both their Macs & their iPhone. When it was all said and done … it is was beautiful thing. No more, “Damn, did I download that eMail to my desktop? Now I can’t see it on my phone. And I need it NOW!” That’s the wonders of IMAP. You see the same mail on every device you set up an IMAP account on. Desktop … check. Lapptop … check. iPhone … check.

In two weeks of use, I have some quibbles about iPhone. But for the most part, for what I need …. I’m in love. ! As a computer tech, and consultant, I use to carry around a HandSpring Visor all the time. (See I was always a Mac friendly early adopter. And that iMac translucent blue … to die for!) If I was at a client and I had to look up a password, or an IP address, I’d go to my address book & look up the info in their associated notes field. It was so much better than having to lug around my ancient PowerBook. I love that I am again able to update notes & they update to my desktop … no problem. I also love how elegantly all contact information is presented in iPhone’s address book. God … I’ve even taken to hunting down logos for companies and photos of clients and friends and adding them to my contacts. It’s just too easy on a Mac and now iPhone. But you knew that already. Hey …. I’m an ‘artist’ … so ‘the visual thing’ works for me! Oooow look …. pretty icons!

Well … I need to go now. I need to get ready … I have a date with iPhone.