I’ve been working with the wonderful and talented Jehan Abon to bring a new version of this site to life. It’s long overdue. The original version (the one you’re looking at now) was built in four hours (give or take) with Whit Nelson and a theme we did a bit of customization on.

All I’ve got left to do is good time content fun. Tweaks, edits, proofreading, etc. Then we flip the switch.

Here’s a sneak peak:

urban_worm_girl_13 a photo by TimFrick on Flickr.

Urban Worm Girl came to the office this week and set us up with a thousand new colleagues. And I thought the office was crowded before.

We blogged about it on the Mightybytes site and embedded a sweet slideshow of the Flickr pics:

http://bit.ly/urban_worm_girl

These new roommates will eat up to a half pound of organic waste per day and offer a fantastic fertilizer in return. Why not consider adding some worms to your own kitchen?

Am heading off to Drupalcon this morning for the first of three days chock full of all things Drupal. Interesting tracks in the conference this year: Coder, Implementation and Config, Drupal Community, Business and Strategy, Theming, and Design and UX. Today starts off with a keynote by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert followed by sessions on accessibility, wireframing, UX strategy, and designing for mobile. And that’s just the first day! Other sessions include jQuery Mobile, Avoiding a Frankenstein Website: How to Collaborate with Clients, Interface Patterns, Internet Marketing, Semantic Web, and a whole lot more.

Most of the Mightybytes crew are going. Anyone else headed there?

I’ve been putting a lot of time in lately, along with Steve, our new content developer, updating the Mightybytes site portfolio. For years, most of our projects featured only a paragraph or two of descriptive text at best. The original thought was to let the work samples speak for themselves, but we have found our new take on describing projects not only offers potential clients the context they need for how we approach both large and small projects, but also offers us plenty more opportunities to use SEO-friendly keywords as well. Because keywords are fun.

Here’s what we are now trying to include on all projects:

• Our Approach, in which we outline details for doing the project.
• Implementation, wherein we discuss how we actually did a project.
• The Return, in which we cover tangible benefits clients derived from our work.

Not every project warrants this level of detail, but we have already overhauled our fair share of them. In addition to new project copy, the portfolio also includes the following features:

• Larger work samples.
• More testimonials from happy clients.
• Captions describing image content.
• Links to awards, press releases, and other relevant project info.
• One sentence pull-quotes to briefly sum up each project.

We are also in the process of including a list of services provided on each project as well. View the portfolio and let me know what you think!

A huge thanks to all the folks who came out to Chicago Artists Resource Artists at Work Forum on Monday, October 4th, 2010. I really appreciate that nearly everyone stayed for the entire duration, despite the fact that we were almost a half hour over time. If you would like to review the slides used in the forum, you can download them here (3MB PDF file).

Also, if you have any feedback, suggestions, or ideas for how this presentation could be improved, please drop them in the comments field below. I would love to hear them. Thanks again!