Be Careful What You Offer
A few months ago, I wrote a post called 5 Things About Design and Me. I was bored one day, so I came up with some questions that I thought would be fun to answer, but didn’t realize that 2 months later it would come back to haunt me.
I will refresh your memory by posting an excerpt from that:
If you could design one blogger’s site for free, who would it be?
A while back I stumbled across Whoorl, and have loved reading it ever since. Last year her blog was basically prego mommy meets the OC - Sarah spent a majority of 2006 pregnant with her adorable little baby Anders. Whoorl is a witty depiction of motherhood, the pains of parenting and living in Southern California. I have even mentioned to her that if she ever wanted a blog redesign, I would do it for free. (Sarah, the offer still stands, even if you are Jayhawk fan!)
Well if you scroll down to the bottom of the comments, you’ll see one dated October 21st. I wasn’t quite sure if she was joking, so I took a spin over to Whoorl’s website and saw a “This blog is in Maintence Mode right now” splash page. Now I knew she was serious.
Those who have been reading my blog for some time now know that Whoorl is one of my favorite blogs, as seen in this post I made at the beginning of the year.
I’ve been a longtime fan of Sarah’s blog, and knew that I needed to act immediately - after all, she literally gets thousands of visits a day, so I knew I needed to respond pronto.
We ended up having a great phone conversation about what she was looking for, and thankfully she’s tech-geek enough to have been able to supply me a PSD. Although knowing she’s a mega pixel nazi set the bar high for me, because she’s been know to obsess over things being perfect, down to the very pixel.
Anyway, over the past 24 hours, we successfully made it happen - the brand new theme is live, and her visitors seem to like the design. The moral of the story here is simple. Be careful what you offer to people, you never know, one day they may take you up on it!
Comments
6 Responses to “Be Careful What You Offer”
Brian Gardner, you’re my hero!
Sarah, it’s all your fault - if you wouldn’t have entertained me so much with your blog, I would never have offered that to you.
P.S. Remember, I’m billing you for the dedicated server I’ll need after my site crahses from the traffic you’re sending me.
J/K
Wow, what a lucky girl! Hehe congratulations Sarah!
It’s been a while since I’ve read a blog that’s REALLY made me laugh out loud.
That lady is nuts and I like it!
And I quote “I am addicted to instruction manuals, green olives (preferably in my vodka), Fantasy Football, hairstyle consulting (is that an actual term?), online shopping and the color of grass.
Great, just what I needed, ANOTHER dang blog to check out on a regular basis.
thanks,
dave.
Hi Brian,
I’m using one of your themes and have a question for you. It’s not about custom work or anything, just an error I have been banging my head on my desk trying to fix. It might be something simple, but I think the error is with the theme itself. Is this something you’d have time to look at? You can email me if you wish and have time.
My photoblog (www.dennistonphoto.com) is based on your Whitespace theme and although it doesn’t look much like the original now, it was your basic structure that allowed me, a complete novice in CSS and php, to shape it into what is now, which is very close to what I want.
I’m writing to tell you what attracted me to the theme and how that applies to creating a photoblog theme if at some time in the future you decide to produce one.
First, Whitespace is very easy to change the size horizontally so I could experiment with different picture sizes and it is also very easy to reduce the header and tagline depth. The header height is important because I only want one picture on the page at a time and I want it as high on the screen as possible. Also, because the theme allows pictures to overlap the content box, I can have the text set to a narrower width than the picture and by coding a picture to align right and the text with it to align left it gives the appearance of centering a vertical picture in the box. It’s a kludge, I know, but it seems to work.
I also like the tagline because it lets me put the navigation arrows in a place where they will not move if the size of the picture changes, something that drives me crazy on other photoblogs. I’ve thought about adding the search form to the left side of the tagline but for some reason it looks awkward so I keep returning it to the sidebar. I’m still experimenting with changing the background colour of the box which I think is what bothers me.
The site is not yet finished, I have some details to add and some learning to do to make them work, but I will put an acknowledgement to Whitespace somewhere on the page when it’s done if you don’t mind.
I’m replying in this way as your other email is down.
Regards, John Denniston