We aren’t really into “Christmasy” bling, nor are we all that formal. I wanted to include a recent photo of the kids without it looking staged, and I wanted to include a quote that kind of sums up what we’re all about right in this moment.

Our 2012 Christmas card – designed by me

I found the background in a designer pattern pack, and I went from there. I love the bright colors and the stripes — they aren’t Christmas cliche at all. I added a stroke to the photo box and a hard edged drop shadow. I saw this effect on a site that was going for a more retro/vintage feel and I really think it works. It reminds me of the bright colors from Looney Toons in the 1960s – Chuck Jones style.

The photo was taken just a week or so ago. I had already made everyone stand in front of the camera for a family photo that we could send into the kids’ school. This was after that — I was following the kids around when I took this. Luke’s face is all weird because he had had his face painted earlier in the day, and he had wiped his own face off.

As for the quote — I was looking for something short. I googled 4-worded quotes, and I found this gem among a list on some random site. It struck me immediately, and I knew I had found the perfect one. Andy and I have been talking a lot lately about how important it is for us to nurture our kids’ – as well as our own – curiosity and wonder, and this saying from Socrates really sums it up. Plus, I love how it comes from a great philosopher – it seems like it bridges time.

I’m having this card printed by Moo – and I can’t wait to see how it turns out. I love the business cards they created for me – I always hear wonderful comments when I had out my cards – so I can’t wait to see how these cards turn out.

I can’t say enough how much I enjoyed it. The conference was small — I would guess about 500 people. Compare that to the thousands who attend SXSW Interactive and it made for a nice and intimate experience. It was two days of speakers addressing various design topics, from content and voice to typography and CSS. On the third day, I went to the companion workshop which was all about mobile design and strategy.

I loved every minute of it. It was so great to be surrounded by professionals who do what I do or something similar. The conversations during the breaks and lunch were open and inviting. I loved being able to meet so many people and pick their brains about their process and ideas for design.

I’m such a geek, too, because I got totally starstruck meeting some of the speakers. On the first day, I was sitting at my table with a few other attendees when Kristina Halvorson (Content Strategy for the Web) and Ethan Marcotte (Responsive Web Design) sat down next to me. They asked what I did, and I managed to get out a few lines thanking them for their work because of how much it’s influenced my process. They were so cool, and I had the chance to tell them about my recent launch of adclinic.com and how I had developed a content strategy and implemented a responsive design. Ethan even asked to see it, and I was thrilled to see him smile when he pulled it up on his phone.

On the third day – during the mobile workshop – I sat down at an empty table, and then the man I’ve been quoting for over a year to my colleagues and clients sat down: Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman is one of the people who started the conference and is known for his work in promoting web standards. I often quote his famous line, “Design in the absence of content isn’t design. It’s decoration.” We had a lovely chat for the next hour over lunch about Austin, kids, education and more.

I found him and so many others to be approachable, engaging and inspiring.

It was a great reminder how much I love what I do.

Ballet, brews and bosses  were just a few topics I shared this past week over Twitter.

I rounded up my top six for this week’s favorite links.

5 Responsive Design Pitfalls to Avoid

Chances are, if you make websites or you want a website built, you’ve heard someone, somewhere mention responsive design. I have been working with it for over a year now, and I love the concept of responding to the device, rather than building a separate site for each and every one.

But sometimes we get all caught up in it and we forget that there are things you should avoid when designing responsively. This article takes a look.

8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses

I promise I wasn’t sucking up when my supervisor forwarded out this link and I decided to share it. I’ve had average bosses and I’ve had extraordinary bosses. Which one do you want to be?

Star Wars burgers?

I have to admit, I’m a big Star Wars fan. Maybe not enough to brave this burger, though.

One reason to make friends at work

How much do you smile and connect with people at work? It turns out there are benefits to those connections.

Is this iced-brew better?

I’m in love with Kohona cold-brew after tasting it at BlogathonATX this year. But if this Japanese iced brew better? Hmmmm….

Ballet documentary throws back stereotypes

I tweeted out that I really want to see this documentary. My son loves ballet, and this documentary maker went out to find dancers who didn’t fit the traditional stereotype.

Happy tweeting!

Think the web is nothing but a bunch of tubes? Think again! I found so much great stuff this week! Here’s what I was passing on.

Protect Your Dreams from Those Who Would Crush Them

Have you ever had a dream shot down by someone else?  If you have a dream — go after it! This post was a great reminder.

Adobe Officially Unveils CS6

Yes, I’m a geek. And yes, I use Adobe. A lot. Particularly Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Premiere Pro. I’ve been holding out for the latest version. It’s coming out soon.

The More You Sit, the Sooner You’ll Die

If you sit at a desk all day, you might want to take note.

Be rewarded by picking up after your pet

I laughed pretty loudly when I saw this story. I wonder if Austin would ever do this? My dogs would generate a lot of wi-fi.

Real-World Google Map Pins

I saw this story about an artist’s installation of giant Google maps pins just as I was in the thick of implementing a series of Google maps on a website I’m working on, and I LOVED this.

Recharge your motivation

I know I’ve felt a lack of motivation for certain tasks or activities. Sometimes all I need is a short break, but it also requires getting to the root of what’s causing the problem. This article takes a look.

Transparency defines social media success for doctors

Health professionals may — on the whole — be the last to truly embrace the importance of “being real” online. Dr. Randall Wong brings the case why doctors need to learn to be open in order to learn social media.

Eventbrite Tickets Add-on Is Live

I was really excited to see this add-on released from Modern Tribe, which developed the events calendar plug-in I use on many projects. I’m looking forward to trying it out and seeing how the events calendar and Eventbrite integrate.

Without further delay, here are my favorite posts of the week:

Automattic’s Worldwide WP 5k

Automattic – the people behind WordPress – want everyone to get up on April 29 and run a 5K. It involves 79 cities and 24 countries. How cool is that?

Jalapeño-Garlic Butter

The folks over at America’s Test Kitchen post a bunch of amazing recipes on the Feed. I LOVE food, and I adore really hot and spicy food — the hotter, the better. This recipe seemed right up my alley.

What’s Going On In The WordPress Economy?

I’ve been working with WordPress for several years, but in the last year, it seems like it has exploded in use. No longer just a “blogging tool,” WordPress is being used to power some very complex sites (like the ones I’m creating). This post shows how much of an influence WordPress has.

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

I was fascinated by the video of an art project to explore the reach if WiFi in cities. It’s amazing how connected we are!

Do you have a bad-assed sales pitch? Jim Henson’s did

Check out this film that Jim Henson created to sell the Muppet show to CBS. Anyone can take a lesson, because it’s just awesome.

Should you be using Pinterest for your business?

Pinterest is huge right now. I use it, but should every business be on it? Not necessarily. This post explores when it’s right, and when it may not be the right fit for your business.

Business Relationship Basics for Freelance Designers

I don’t think you need to be in business to gain a lot of insight from this post — it’s really all about people, but it’s a good reminder not to invest solely in social media for generating or maintaining contacts.

Why Using Social Media Is Essential for Today’s Business

Again — it’s about people here. Social media is about building those people relationships. People want to know you’re real, you’re transparent, and you’re going to help them. Plus, if you don’t participate in some kind of social media, you’re likely to be left behind.

The 5 mistakes press release writers make

I actually know of some PR firms that make all of these mistakes, and it was eye opening. We live in a new world for PR, and it’s time to adapt.

Clean or Replace These Things Regularly, Because If You Haven’t Noticed, They’re Absolutely Vile

Awwww come on — you know you haven’t cleaned at least one of these things.

How Social Media Is Taking Over the News Industry [INFOGRAPHIC]

I haven’t turned on a TV in my house since 2010 — but I still keep up with the news. How did you find out about the last big story? Chances are pretty good it was through social media.

Job Recruiting and Social Media: Is Social Recruiting Really as Advertised?

I’ve been asked a lot about how best to recruit employees and how to use social media to do it. I ran across Mark’s article and thought it summed up some ways employers annoy job seekers — and why follow through is so important.

It must come from my days as a news producer. When I worked in the newsroom, deadlines were tight. There was no choice but to work, and work and work. Breaks were annoyances. We had a show to prepare, and there was not question about whether we would make slot. It had to be ready. Period. End of discussion.

Gosh, I can’t believe it’s been nearly 10 years. Old habits die hard I guess.

Occasionally, I still find myself in that news producer mode where I want to work and work until I finish my task. But I finally learned an important lesson: you THINK better when you walk away.

Today I struggled with a feature on a website I’m working on. I want to display a list of the departments associated with a location. The departments are related to the location through a custom taxonomy I set up. But the php function I was using wouldn’t display the list alphabetically. I tried other functions,, different variables and arguments… to no avail. It was quite frustrating.

Then, driving home, it hit me. I had one of those eureka moments when I gasped and actually yelled out, “I got it!”

I had been half listening to NPR and half mulling over the problem in my head when I suddenly realized what I needed to do! Then I kicked myself for not thinking of it sooner.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. Researchers have found that taking breaks actually helps your attention. By giving your mind a break, you can come back to the task at hand more focused than you were before.

How to take a break

Breaks are really important, but I don’t recommend letting yourself get sucked into an activity that doesn’t actually give your mind a rest.

Walk away

I could probably sit at my desk all day, but I force myself to stand up regularly and walk around. I fill up my water bottle, socialize with my co-workers, make a phone call — whatever it takes. I just need to stop staring at that computer screen for 10 minutes. Then, when I come back, I feel refreshed, and many times, I’ve thought up a solution to what I was struggling with.

Take a shower

OK, so you can’t take a shower at work, but it’s still a great way to focus. Showers are usually a transitional thing for me. I’m just getting up, or I just worked out and now I’m getting ready for work. Either way, the transitional break is the perfect time for me to think about what I need to accomplish. And it’s not just tasks I find myself thinking over in the shower. Sometimes design inspiration strikes me, and I come up with an idea that I love for my client.

Play on social media

Yes! Social media can help! True, it can be a distraction, but it is invaluable for helping me solve my problems. First of all — it’s fun! And fun is a really important part of taking breaks. Second of all, there’s a lot of awesome information on social media. I connect to a lot of people I’ve never met in person, but they share interesting articles and posts that inspire me, teach me, and help me grow as a designer, developer and entrepreneur. I learned a lot about WordPress development t, CSS and PR through Twitter — it’s just one way social media can help you focus.

I think the key to taking breaks is figuring out what works best for you. Not every one will get the same benefits from the same techniques. Some people swear by exercise. For me, exercise is a terrible way to focus or solve problems. It takes every instance of my concentration and energy — that’s why I do it in the morning. But hey! It might work for you — who knows?

You would think that being a professional, it wouldn’t worry me so much, but it always does. I mean, a website launch is HUGE!

Is the content in place? Has it been checked for spelling, grammar and punctuation? Do all of the links work? Will visitors and search engines find the site? Will users understand how it works? The worries go on and on.

And then there are my worries about whether I rushed the launch? Or maybe I didn’t go fast enough? Will the server handle the additional traffic? How will the site perform? Did I follow the right pre-alunch checklist?

San Saba Wine Cellars

I just handled a site launch last weekend for San Saba Wine Cellars. It was a taxing experience, because I was determined to launch my clients’ website by April 1 and there was much work to do in the days leading up to launch. It turned out well, but it launched without some of the features the site will eventually need — like the e-commerce site. This was planned because my clients are not yet ready to sell their product, but they wanted their new web presence to build some buzz. Even though it was a soft launch, it was no less nerve-racking.

ADClinic.com

My team at The Austin Diagnostic Clinic also just set a launch date for our redesign, which is a complete overhaul of the site design and content management. I’m excited, yet completely freaked out because there is so much left to do.

I don’t think the worries will ever go away, not matter how experienced I become at launching websites. and I think that’s a good thing. It means I’m on my toes — I’m more likely to check and re-check my work and make sure everything is in place. It’s when you get comfortable that things can slip. But the key to success is staying calm. And that’s where I tend to shine.

I work extremely well under deadline, which is why I always ask my clients to give me one. All of the years I spent under the gun as a TV news producer and later a web producer have helped me hone how I react to deadline pressure, and to be honest I work better under tight deadlines than loose timelines.

One top of that, I’m appreciative of the multitude of posts out there about launching sites and checklists. Here are a few of my favorites:

• What Is The Last Thing You Do Before You Launch A Website?
• The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist
• Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics & Marketing

I was thrilled to be in the thick of the Interactive festival. It was five intense days of workshops, panels, product demonstrations, meet-and-greets, and more. Even though I live in Austin, I feel like I left my whole life for SXSW, and when I came back, I hit the ground running again.

I’m still decompressing from all of the action.

I’m amazed my those people who were able to find time during the conference to write about the sessions they attended. I don’t know how I would have found time! I was all eyes and ears, and I didn’t want to stop the experience to take a break and write anything other than notes, which I took extensively.

I’ll be sharing what I learned over the next few weeks. For me, the huge takeaway was mobile development. It cannot be ignored. And, hand-in-hand with that is the importance of the user. I’m already a huge proponent of user-centric design, but it was nice to hear more people singing the chorus this year.

In the meantime, to end on the title of one of the sessions I went to with one of the rockstars in the field of web design and development — Jeffrey Zeldman — go forth and make awesomeness.

That’s how I’ve felt the past two days. I knew I needed to leave. My eyes hurt. My head was swimming. And my brain felt like it was about to explode. But it felt like I was so close to figuring out the issue that I didn’t want to leave.

I’m working on a custom-post template display for my current project. It’s the most complicated piece of development I’ve ever done. The custom-post is a biography, and it collects all kinds of information about each of the providers. The page displays a photo of the provider and pertinent information about their experience, background, and current practice.

My vision for the entire site is to collect information in just one place, so that if that piece of information changes in the future, it only has to be altered in one place, not in dozens of places across the site, because it’s easy to lose track of those place and that can lead to costly mistakes and inefficiencies.

The easy part was figuring out how to display information from the custom meta fields I created to go with this post-type. I’m new to PHP, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out how to call the meta information. I even figured out how to make the display conditional, so the page wouldn’t creak if a field wasn’t filled out.

What been more difficult is calling information from other parts of the site.

Today, I spent the better part of my time figuring out how to show videos on the provider page. But not just recent videos. I want to show videos that the provider was in — like TV appearances or in-house productions.

It turns out it’s pretty complicated. I thought ahead and created a “Provider” taxonomy that is used both on posts and biography pages. I needed to compare the provider taxonomy term on the biography page to the posts, filter out only those posts that are video format, and display them.

I spent a long time researching the options for writing the code on various WordPress sites through Google searches. It seemed like there was a lot of information, but nothing addressing a query as advanced as mine needed to be. In fact, most examples were also hard-coded, so they used specific terms to search and compare. But my search term is dynamic. It all depends on the name of the provider.

I finally found an excellent post on how to use the WordPress API to write a function that compares the taxonomy of one post type to another. Once I had that up and running, I was able to display all posts that used the taxonomy term I was searching for. Yes! Victory!

But I ran out of time before I was able to filter out the video posts.

Ah well, a task for Monday.

And once I figure out this feature, I’ll be able to do it much more quickly in the future.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to a long weekend of working on the winery site and going through some Javascript tutorials through Codeacademy. Should be a good weekend!

Today I got to spend time with my newest clients — Lynn and Mike McHenry of San Saba Wine Cellars.

I took Andy and the kids up to San Saba, TX for the day. It’s about 2 hours northwest of Austin in the Hill Country, just north of the Highland Lakes. I’m such a city girl, but Mike and Lynn took us to an awesome pit barbeque joint, toured us around downtown, took us to various natural wonders, visited an old mill near a farm where my son collected fresh eggs, and then we tasted wines at one of the wineries Mike supplies grapes to.

Lynn and Mike McHenry stand inside the construction of the new tasting room for San Saba Wine Cellars.

I took a ton of photos for their new site, which will be e-commerce. Content is the heart and soul of the site, from amazing images to beautiful graphics to well-crafted words. I wouldn’t be able to create any of these elements without getting to know my clients and understanding their business. San Saba Wine Cellars has a unique set of needs — different from any of the businesses or individuals I’ve done websites for in the past — the major being the way they will need to sell their product online. There are tax, legal and shipping concerns to take into account.

Of course, it’s possible to work remotely with a client and never meet face-to-face. But I really like that personal contact whenever it’s possible. Plus, now that I’ve visited the winery and tasting room site, I’ve created a mental map of the area and I have a better understanding of the winery vision.