Spero Consulting

The Design Template(s)

Before we started design­ing sites for oth­ers, we used a tem­plate by Nate at www​.refu​eled​.net. Our cur­rent tem­plate is a much refined ver­sion of one of his will all new graph­ics, header, col­ors, etc. We refine it every six months or so – some­times with small changes and some­times with large ones.

Web design involves a huge and un– or under-​appreciated trade-​off between appear­ance and uni­ver­sal­ity. Graph­ics cards, mon­i­tors, browsers, installed fonts, color ranges and var­i­ous other set­tings affect how a page is dis­played. We hope this lat­est tem­plate is at the opti­mal point where it looks good on a lot of screens and in a lot of dif­fer­ent browsers.

That being said, we designed our desk­top site with Google Chrome and Inter­net Explorer, ver­sion 8, in mind.

We use a num­ber of free add-​ins includ­ing the ultra-​cool vis­i­tor loca­tion map and our trans­la­tion fea­ture, which trans­lates our Eng­lish into 40 other lan­guages. We doubt that the sen­tence and para­graph trans­la­tions are con­tex­tu­ally or gram­mat­i­cally cor­rect, but we sus­pect that the words trans­late cor­rectly and appear appro­pri­ately in search engines across the world, and that brings vis­i­tors to the site (and the poten­tial for business).

We have a sep­a­rate tem­plate for mobile phones. When our server iden­ti­fies a mobile phone browser, it auto­mat­i­cally redi­rects vis­i­tors to http://​Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.mobi that fea­tures a scaled-​down, less-​graphics-​intensive design. That fea­ture allows for much faster speeds and improved leg­i­bil­ity on small screens. (The wid­get on the left allows vis­i­tors to switch back-​and-​forth.) For cer­tain top­ics, the exact same post will appear in the top ten of Google search at both the .com and .mobi “sites,” though they are not dis­tinc­tive sites – just dif­fer­ent domain names and skins. It’s very cool, and very inexpensive.

Our Motto or Tag-​line

For nearly two years our motto was “Thought before Cal­cu­la­tion.” That’s always the way we oper­ate –but our prac­tice is much broader than mere quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis. So, our motto had to change. It’s now, “Thought­ful Man­age­ment Solu­tions ~ Cre­ative Web Design.”

Annual Cost

Exclud­ing the time needed to man­age the con­tent, which can be sub­stan­tial, the entire site costs less than $100 per year to oper­ate. Not bad, eh?

Feeds

Finally, if you use Google Chrome, like we do, then you prob­a­bly already know that feeds (from any­one) are illeg­i­ble in it. If you didn’t know, you now know it’s not our fault.

The Royal ‘We’

In our blog, we write about items that inter­est, amuse or annoy us. Our most not­i­ca­ble affec­ta­tion is the use ‘we’ rather than “I” in our posts.

We do that for a few rea­sons. First (and for­tu­nately), Jill and Andy share very sim­i­lar per­spec­tives. So, if you ask one’s opin­ion, you’re most likely get­ting the other’s, too. So, while Andy writes all of the posts, the blog speaks for both of us. Sec­ondly, much of what we write is our think­ing and opin­ions and we want to be clear (and hon­est) that such com­ments are our opin­ions and reflec­tions and not state­ments of fact. (We know the dif­fer­ence and know that we can be wrong.) Given that goal, there would be far too many “I“s if we wrote in the sin­gu­lar. Some­how, “we” seems softer and less ego­tis­ti­cal than “I.” That’s why ‘we’ do it.