We have received the comment more than once that we do a lot of different things and people have commented that we appear to be a “jack of all trades”. That not quite true. Our name is SpinningSilk Multimedia and we do employ different form of media to help our clients get the word out about their products and services but we have definitely boundaries.

I remember as a child I would visit the home of an aunt and uncle and across the street a man had a sign in his yard the advertising Tax Preparation and Lawn Mower repair. To this day that sticks in my mind as one of the oddest combination of business services I have seen. Maybe the guy was very skilled at both lawn mower repair and tax preparation but advertised together it looked very odd and naturally I would have a hard time trusting the same person who repairs my lawn mower with also preparing my taxes for the simple fact they are two very diverse disciplines. This doesn’t mean a person can’t be good at two completely different things but they should certainly advertise them separately if nothing more than on two separate signs.

I have to admit however when we first started out business we verged on doing exactly what the guy who did taxes and fixed lawn mowers although not at those extremes. Originally we did everything through the SpinningSilk.com domain and promotes two different things; web site design and piano and voice lessons. We were just starting out and both services were very part time but since we have gone full-time in the past few years we split up our business into three active divisions; SpinningSilk Multimedia which is our core business featuring web, print, photography and other business marketing tools, SpinningSilk I.T. - covers the more technical end of our business however most of the business through that is outsourced or residual income through selling service. It’s technically not a lot of stuff we “do” in the sense we don’t provide services where we will fix your computer or come to your place or business but we are working with other contractors in the area who we feel provide the best service in the arena. Finally my wife who was a music education major/graduate from Furman University teaches piano and voice lesson as well is available for performing at events. You can find out about those services through SpinningSilk Music.com .

For the sake of argument, why would someone come to this web site and think we were a “jack of all trades?” The services we offer on this web site include, web design, print design, photography and podcasting. It does sound diverse but in reality it isn’t. Web design alone is all about being multi-disciplined, that is if it’s done right. A web design should know about back end programming of web development, graphic design, SEO, usability, e-commerce as well as various forms of visual and audio media. It’s just a fact of life. Maybe designing print documents vs. web documents looks very diverse and at one time it would have been but with software like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign those skill barriers have narrowed. The important thing is knowing what is media needs in terms of graphic quality, fonts, document dimensions, etc.

Are we a jack of all trades? In the area of media production we provide a lot in terms of our services but we definitely are disciplined in “all trades.” Here is a very short list of things we don’t do in terms starting with things people think we do but don’t;

• Repair computers
• Fix printers
• Setup Quicken finance software
• repair lawn mowers
• prepare taxes
• Windows (neither the kind on your building or the operating system)
• groom pets
• paint your house
• clean viruses of your computer
• mow your lawn
• cut down trees

Their is a reason we offer the services we do and believe it or not that are very connected to each other and conform to our motto, “Harmonious New Media.”

One of my very first paying gigs for doing Internet work was a project a co-worker called Internet Resources for Christian Growth. This site combined an e-mail newsletter and an archive of the newsletters. This was in the very early days of the World Wide Web and some of the original features and aspects included;

• It was on free service without it’s own domain
• each archived issue was created as a static page using the formatting in the original e-mail
• Their was no search feature
• The images were not original or ideal for the job

If I could change things today I would definitely make sure that the project had;

• It’s on domain name - the shorter the better
• I would set up the site primarily as a blog so that each issue could be sent by RSS and e-mail
• Include a search feature and also categories
• Take custom photos to get the message across better

In a lot of ways I have learned from these experiences over the years. Of course I have always been an advocate of having your own domain but at the time (about 10 years ago) I wasn’t aware of how one could have been redirected to another space. I see a lot of bloggers registering a domain name and redirecting it to a free blog service and at that time for that particular project that may have been ideal. I mentioned custom photos and I have set up a set on my flickr account dedicated to this project I was working on way back then. I hope to continually post new versions of the photo I wish I could have posted on the site way back then.

to spur innovation it’s always good to look back on past projects. Can you think if things you would have said differently? Different images you would have used or different technologies you would have used? Sometimes we want to kick ourselves when we wish we could have done something a different way but how often have you gone back and looked at past work and developed new strategies and workflows? We’re you ever afraid of investing in a new technology because you were worried about the cost only to look back and wish you had taken the leap to explore and use the technology? What will change today?

If you have been working at a job, involved in an organization or just been accustomed to a traditional way of doing things you may be in an innovative slump. In my business I hear a lot of assumptions for those I meet with in networking meetings, friends, family and potential clients. A fairly short list includes;

• Macs are good for graphics
• You need a top of the line expensive camera to take good photos
• Blogging is only about people writing about “nothing”
• You need expensive software to design a web site
• To make more money you need to work more hours

Those are just a few example of assumptions I hear every day and none of them are entirely true. Yes, Macs are great computers for graphics but what do you mean by graphics? Many people for some reason think you can’t run office productivity software on a Mac and not only is this not true you in fact have more choices! While it’s nice to have advanced camera equipment to have more choices and flexibility you can take stunning photos if you plan ahead, have proper lighting and smartly edit them. While a lot of “tire kickers” often blog about daily mundane thing more and more business people are using the technology as a way to update content on their web site, encourage repeat visitors to web site. You can design or rather put together a web site with as little as a free basic text editor like notepad in combination with a basic image editor. While you may get a bigger paycheck for working more hours you are not making the most efficient use of your time.

All this was brought to mind when reading an article called, What’s the Ultimate Creativity Killer? on Copyblogger.com in which the writer gave some quotes by very famous and influential people who were completely wrong in their assumptions such as;

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” ~Ken Olson, president and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” ~Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. ~Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” ~Michael Dell on Apple, 1997.

The lesson and tip of the day is don’t rest on your assumptions. The above quotes may sound crazy today but at the time they all may sense from a certain perspective. Western Union knew the telegraph was proven as opposed to the experimental telephone. As much as I love Apple products and think Michael Dell was crazy for saying such a thing I probably wouldn’t blink an eyes of somebody said something similar about another computer in financial trouble. Are you making assumptions about your business, marketing strategy, etc. Try this. Take those assumptions, turn them around and see what happens.

The official story we have on this web site only tells the official part of our business in recent years and doesn’t go into the very beginning of when I first started exploring web design as a new skill I was learning in the mid 90’s. I created two web sites almost back to back. The first one was my first attempt at starting a business or service online. The web site was called, “The Creation Station” and it was my intent to offer custom writing services. I had intentionally first bought my computer as a tool to working on and store creative writing, photography and graphic design projects.

I had first learned about the ability to design web sites via someone I meet in a chat room on the service known as “Talk City” which I learned about from a friend of mine. I think the first service I started learning web design on was called Angelfire one of the many “free” services that started springing up at the time. I soon became dissatisfied with the limitations of Angelfire and discovered Geocities. This was before Geocites was acquired by Yahoo.

The site I developed on Geocities was called Bridging the Gap. By this time I had learned about how to incorporate images, layout a site in table and add other features like forms and other more, “advanced” features. Today Bridging the Gap would be called a “personal development site or maybe a personal development blog. At the time I was interested in the whole concept of developing the whole person; mind, body and spirit.

The technology I used back them pales in comparison to what I have learned since then but another thing I have learned since then has nothing to do with technology but rather more along the line of being a more focused person. Both the Creation Station and Bridging the Gap had very high ideals but they were also too broad in scope. In some ways I am doing the Creation Station through this web site and business by providing custom web design services, photography and graphic design with a focus on compelling content that is optimized for both search engines and the minds of potential customers.

Bridging the Gap is another story. If I was relaunching Bridging the Gap today I would do in the form of a blog and only focus on some key areas. Instead of exercise in general I would probably focus hiking or maybe even a more niche area like suburban or urban hiking. Instead of an overall mental development I would probably focus on something like business innovation, strategies to keep ones brain young by thinking like a child, etc. Instead of a general spiritual focus I would probably focus on prayer, evangelism, etc.

One of the key things I remember about Bridging the Gap was an image I found elsewhere online of a couple people walking across an bridge at what appeared to be an old college campus. I’m seriously thinking about creating a set on my Flickr account where I can post my own custom photos of people crossing bridges of various types.

Some of these early attempts at “web design” were basically “kicking the tires” but I’m glad the services were available for me to explore and learn the technologies. Not long afterwards I started setting up “real” web sites under domains I could fully control. What were some of your early explorations in Internet technology and what have you learned as far as skills and even your mindset since then?

In the past 10 or so years the term “web design” has gone from describing an almost mystical trade to an over saturated term often misunderstood among those not in the “industry.” I go to networking meetings and often that have one to three types of businesses represented more than any others, real estate agents, insurance agents and web designers to the point a guy stood up at a recent event in Greenville,SC and said, “We should rename this group as the insurance-real estate-web designer network.” While it’s true that getting into those lines of work may involve a very minimal cost to enter in terms of equipment or office space their is still a lot of issues in regards to constant education that you don’t see.

I think however both real estate and insurance agents can agree with me in that they are a lot of myths and misconceptions in regards to their work. I’m sure a real estate agent does more that give tours of houses a few times a week, insurance agents do more than sit in an office waiting on someone to buy a policy. In the very same way those who provide web design services should be doing the following’

• Keeping up with changes in technology
• Being aware of and adhering to legal issues, especially in regards to communication law
• Studying usability methods that make a web site easier to understand by site visitors
• Optimizing a web site for search engines
• Working with the client to have the best content in terms of images, text, audio and video on the site
• Making security a top concern from good passwords, secure servers, secure back-end code
• Knowing the difference between proprietary software that get a site up quickly vs. a full-featured site the adheres to Internet standards
• Giving clients the ability to make site changes via an easy to use content management system (CMS)
• In addition to knowing good design principles know good development principles

Those just a few of the things you may not thing about when hear some says the are a “web designer.” I’m sure others could chime in with things clients were surprised that needed to be done. For all practical purposes the “design” is the easy part. Yes, we can get something up relatively fast to start with but if you want to sell items online or integrate a secure content management system be prepared for the process to take longer. A web designer doesn’t just draw up a pretty picture you can see on the web, a good web designer is also draws out a process. What have you been surprised by? As a company that provides these services what would you like to learn more of less obvious services?