Clever Web Design

Adele isn’t good just because she’s fat and you know...

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 09:15:41 -0500

Adele isn’t good just because she’s fat and you know that’s the ONLY reason you think she’s so amazing. “Oh she’s big like me! Maybe that means I can be famous too! Go fat girl”… someone’s gonna kill me one day hahahaha

This is the only kind of Mayonaise I like. The other kind is...

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:37:46 -0400

This is the only kind of Mayonaise I like. The other kind is gross (tell me it doesn’t remind you of spreading semen on your sandwich. Don’t lie just to be mature about it).

My taste in music hasn’t changed, only expanded. Greatly.

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:35:37 -0400

My taste in music hasn’t changed, only expanded. Greatly.

Mr. Blue Sky sample!

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:40:25 -0400

Mr. Blue Sky sample!

Monkey Mace: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others, don't owe us anything.

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 01:41:40 -0400

Monkey Mace: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others, don't owe us anything. :

monkeymace:

Articles have been cropping up that lambast Craiglist (1, 2), Netflix (1) , and LinkedIn (1) for policing their APIs and criticize them for stifling innovation.

API access is not a charitable offering to the start-up community for these obviously for-profit companies. The goal of…

"I’ve always liked attractive girls."

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 07:42:23 -0400

“I’ve always liked attractive girls.”

- George H.W. Bush, 41st President of the United States

WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 21:37:14 -0400

The bottom of the ocean. Any ocean.

Thanks for the suggestion! I've applied at gohealth! Hopefully they hire me and pay me loads of money. Or at least enough to eat AND pay my student loans.

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 21:22:38 -0400

I don’t know your background but I think you’d have a good chance. I got in on my skill and experience. I’m not even finished with my bachelor’s yet. So if you know what you’re doing then you may very well get it. Good luck!

Bill takes interesting photos and says smart things

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 07:49:30 -0400

Bill takes interesting photos and says smart things:

If you follow Clever Web Design you should follow Bill Patrianakos even more. Or better. Anyway, he’s Clever’s founder and an interesting guy who posts far more often than anyone on this blog does.

"I couldn’t even draw a straight line if my life depended on it, and had no formal training under my..."

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 20:55:58 -0400

“I couldn’t even draw a straight line if my life depended on it, and had no formal training under my belt. But I’m pretty good at visualizing ideas in other ways and knew I could make it work if given the chance.”

- Christopher Bastin (via plaintshirt)

The future of our company is uncertain

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 09:14:30 -0400

For those of you who don’t want to read this, here’s the short version: Clever Web Design may shut down in the next six months. However there’s no need for past and current clients to panic as we will continue to support and offer you the same quality service we have thus far for as long as you either use our work or our hosting. Of course there’s more to it than that so please read on for details.

As you may or may not know, Clever is run by Bill Patrianakos who not only handles day to day operations but also develops 90% of all Clever projects himself. It’s tough to find good help and so for the past two years Bill has been forced to work alone. Business has been great for Clever and steadily grew since the company was founded in 2010 however the income generated was still not comparable to what other developers make and he had always planned to make the move to working for another company anyway. The past two years were an experiment and an exercise in gaining experience and gaming the system. The whole thing was a success because recently Bill was offered and accepted a position as a web developer at GoHealth, a Chicago based tech company.

As of this writing Bill has begun his first day of full time work at GoHealth and that is where the uncertainty comes in. Clever’s ability to operate as it has since 2010 is gone. A full time work schedule imposes certain restrictions that just cannot be worked around. These restrictions all center around the inability to have a flexible schedule for client meetings and Bill’s ability to juggle both his position at GoHealth and the business.

There are two possible outcomes from this situation:

Clever Web Design shuts down for good. This is an absolute last resort but it is a possibility. We currently have no plans to go out of business but the possibility cannot be ruled out. But to be clear, we do not want to shut down and will do everything in our power to continue to do business.

In this scenario we would wind down all our current projects and simply not take on any more. All past clients will continue to receive the same quality support as we have always provided included no interruption in any services related to your site including editor functionality and web hosting. We will finish all current projects and the same scenario as above will apply to current clients. For those in the proposal/pre-contract/negotiation phase, we will still gladly take on your project and the terms of our proposals will not change. Our ability to meet in person may be hindered but we will follow through with your project and deliver on all promises we made. Once all these projects are complete we will then operate in a support role only. All agreements made with all clients will continue to be honored for as long as you use what we have set up for you.

We wind things down and simply take on less work. In this scenario we would be limited in our ability to meet with clients but would still continue to provide web development services to all who ask. We would limit ourselves to 1 - 2 clients per month and our deadlines would increase by 10 days per contract. Besides that everything would stay the same. We just operate in a little more of a low key way. Also, we may not be able to take on clients from certain professions in the healthcare industry, namely insurance agents but not limited to them, because of contractual obligations Bill has with his new employer.

So what’s the bottom line? Well, Clever might shut down. If it does you won’t notice a thing and we will continue to service your account as if nothing has changed. This applies to past clients and anyone we are currently in talks with. Or we may just continue to do business and be more picky about pricing, number of clients, and project sizes.

In most cases you won’t notice a thing. We will keep you updated and outline our final decision by July 1st. Until that time Clever Web Design most certainly is still very much alive and in business. Over and out.

Bill's Blog

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 08:01:02 -0400

Bill's Blog:

The personal blog of our founder and fearless leader, Bill. Find out what makes him tick and learn more about the life of a web developer.

Write.app

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 08:50:02 -0400

Write.app:

Read notes. Write notes. Save notes. For your iPhone, Android, iPad, and desktop.

Goalie

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:55:40 -0400

Goalie:

Get things done. Write a todo. Check off finished todos. Organize them into categories. Simple.

Obligatory "Hello World" Post

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 08:32:14 -0400

This post was written back when our blog was running Jekyll on a different server but it’s a better introduction to who Clever is and what we do than our original one so enjoy this:

I know we haven’t written an inaugural post introducing ourselves. Shame on us but we’re super busy with client work, our one year anniversary, and our web apps (GatsbyTrack and Write.app). Anyway, it’s 5am here I’m Chicago and we’re excited to announce we’ve just published our first open source project as a Christmas gift to the web design/development community! It’s called Fraction.less Boilerplate and you can find it at http://Fractionless.info. Before we get into what it is and why it’s great let us give tell you the story behind it really quick.

I know we haven’t written an inaugural post introducing ourselves. Shame on us but we’re super busy with client work, our one year anniversary, and our web apps (GatsbyTrack and Write.app). Anyway, it’s 5am here I’m Chicago and we’re excited to announce we’ve just published our first open source project as a Christmas gift to the web design/development community! It’s called Fraction.less Boilerplate and you can find it at Fractionless.info. Before we get into what it is and why it’s great let us give tell you the story behind it really quick.

A year ago we started this business with absolutely nothing. All we had was our knowledge of programming and an iMac. For the better part of that year we were building every website from scratch. It was a pain, there were tons of errors and there were no guarantees that any part of our sites would work. Then one day Bill got into reading about grid systems. They were great. They cut down on development time and they generally made life easier for web design companies like ours. The only problem was that they were complicated. You had to either do all sorts of weird math or learn some convoluted grid or complex system of classes that you’d add to all your div elements. There has to be a better way. Then Bill stumbled upon the 1140 Grid System. It was the simplest yet but we could do better. So Bill set out to create a grid system of his own. The first version was called HTML5 Billerplate (named after HTML5 Boilerplate, the project that it was almost a clone of at that time. Bill adapted the 1140 grid , converted it into a LESS stylesheet, created a custom folder structure and added in other default boilerplate tools and Fraction.less Boilerplatr was born. Fraction.less, despite the name, is all about fractions. If you can add a few simple fractions to equal 1 then you can use this grid. It comes with some great jQuery effects as well as jQuery itself (v1.6.4). It’s a great boilerplate and grid for beginners but pros can get a lot out of it as well. The great thing about Fractionless is that it doesn’t force you to work Amy one way. You still have total freedom over your markup and you start off with an amazing set of commonly used tools. It’s a great project and we’re really proud of it. We actually open sourced it a couple months ago but it now has an official site. Anyway, Bill was working on the site all day (on Christmas eve!) so please check it out and spread the word on Facebook and Twitter. We hope you check it out and find it useful. We’re more than happy to get contributors to the project too so don’t be afraid to submit a pull request on GitHub or send us an email. Merry Christmas!

UPDATE (2-27-2012):

Recently we released Fraction.less Boilerplate version 1.5 which includes an optional (albeit much better) responsive grid so most sites you create will reformat themselves for mobile with very little to no extra work required. The other great thing about version 1.5 is that you get more control over the grid. The new grid (which you can activate by simply changing the @import statement for the grid to 12col.css) does away with the fractions and is now simply a 12 column grid with containers, rows, and columns 1 - 12. Watch out for version 2 coming soon! Version 2 will make the grid more stable, focus on server configurations, and more.

What is our stand?

Thu, 31 May 2012 16:54:04 -0400

A business is more than a product, a service, customer service, profits, size, etc. A truly great business takes a stand. They turn some people off but they choose their customers and they turn them into more than customers - they become your biggest fans. So what is our stand? What does Clever believe in?

I just picked up my copy of REWORK by the guys at 37Signals. It’s a great book that I’ve read from cover to cover a few times already. Every now and then I like to crack it open and get inspired. There’s a lot of great business advice in REWORK and tonight I ended up reading the chapter on taking a stand.

So what is our stand? What does Clever believe in? Clever is about bringing a web presence to everyone. No, really. Everyone. It’s 2012 and every single business on earth needs a website. We’ve got amateurs running around doing cheap work that looks awful and helps no one, we’ve got big firms who cost more than most businesses could raise in a year, your nephew who “is good at computers” won’t be able to give you what you need (as many have already found out), and the few companies that are affordable are full of dinosaurs who were once skilled programmers and designers but now produce work that looks dated. Free websites ultimately look hollow and cheap, and there are no good options between free and professional. That’s where we fit in. We believe the kind of professional design you can get from some bigger companies should be accessible to everyone.

We’re not cheap and the honest truth is that our prices continue to rise as we make a name for ourselves but we’re still an incredibly affordable option and our clients get value that’s too good to be true in most cases. We think that when you ask “How much does a website cost?” you should get a straight answer and the price we name is the price you pay. No add-ons, no extra fees for any reason. That’s why have package pricing and every project we take on has a clearly defined feature list. Everyone needs branding no matter how big or small. Anyone and everyone can boost business with a web presence and you don’t need to be a millionaire to afford it. Web design and web marketing should be accessible to everyone.

That’s what we believe. We’re experts with all the same skill and tools as the guys at BigCo but we’re within your reach.

How to speed up your site and rank higher in Google

Thu, 31 May 2012 08:52:52 -0400

Did you know how fast your site pages load can affect your site’s search ranking? Yep, it sure does. Google (and now other search engines) have incorporated page speed into their ranking algorithms and they take load times very seriously. I hear you asking “So how do I make my site load faster”? This is how we do it… in plain english.

So you we hear you want your site to rank at the top of Google, huh? You made sure to sprinkle your body copy with keywords, filled in your meta tags, added titles and alt tags to all your images, made sure to get all the right helper accounts (that’s what we call Google Webmaster Tools and such), and you have plenty of backlinks pointing to your site but you’re still not happy with your ranking. What do you do? Well did you know how fast your site pages load can affect your site’s search ranking? Yep, it sure does. I hear you asking “So how do I make my site load faster”? This is how we do it… (Don’t worry non-techies, this is in plain english.)

Why it matters (it’s about more than just search rankings)

Search engines (Google especially) take page load times very seriously and so should you. But besides just search engines caring about load times your page loading times do have a very real impact on sales. Studies show that every 100ms added to your page load times have the effect of decreasing sales by 1%. So if it takes 500 milliseconds for a page on your site to load you’ve already lost at least 5% of the potential sales or leads you would have generated otherwise.

Other effects of slow load times:

Users are more likely to press the back button, immediately leaving your site before they’ve even gotten to see the content
Visitors perceive slower loading sites as being low quality
Studies also show that every extra millisecond it takes to load a page results in a site being perceived as less attractive (even if the site is beautiful already!)
A slow loading web page results not only in a visitor being turned off by the site but in many cases perceiving the company itself as being unprofessional

How anyone can speed up their website

Now that you know why it’s important to have fast loading pages, you’ll probably want to fix your pages. There are some quick fixes anyone can implement and some that may require just a little bit of coding knowledge. For the fixes you can’t implement yourself ask a web professional to help you! This stuff is important and in most cases these fixes are incredibly quick, easy, and cheap.

1. Choose a good web hosting company

Your web hosting company needs to put a sane limit on how many other sites are hosted on the same server. With shared hosting, which is by far the most common type of hosting out there (if you don’t know if you have shared hosting then you most likely do), your site shares storage, RAM, and processing power with a number of other sites. Cheap shared hosts will put your site on low powered servers with hundreds of other websites. This means that if one site is hogging all the resources by getting a lot of traffic or running memory intensive web apps then your site can suffer. Shameless plug: At Clever we offer our clients web hosting through MediaTemple using their shared hosting service but at a lower rate because we get special deals like that. Though we aren’t big fans of shared hosting it is by far the most common and our clients usually don’t need anything more powerful. We’re so impressed with MediaTemple’s shared plan that our main site, chooseclever.com, is hosted on the same basic hosting service we offer our clients.

Of course, sometimes shared hosting isn’t enough. A VPS plan offers you far more control over your server which means you can configure your server so that it allows for blazing fast page load times. We run a number of other websites using a few different VPS companies. Our premium hosting uses Linode’s servers and yes, we also use the same plan that we offer our clients so we know its good.

Anyway, the lesson here is that choosing a reputable hosting company in itself can speed up your page load times.

2. Compress all files!

Most servers these days have the ability to serve up compressed versions of your files for faster load times. The thing is, most servers don’t do this automatically. To get around this little problem all you have to do is create a file called .htaccess and put a directive in it that tells your server to compress all files that get served. This can reduce the size of files to the point where they are just a fraction of their original size in storage. You visitors won’t even notice the change. All they’ll notice is faster page load times.

3. Control your JavaScript

JavaScript is a huge offender when it comes to slowing down page load times. Tone down all the flashy effects on your sites. Be sure that if you use JavaScript effects for anything there’s a very good reason for it. Flashy effects for the sake of “it looks cool” will hurt you in the long run.

Besides toning down all the superfluous effects, you should also concatenate and minify all JavaScript. This means you put all your JavaScript code into as few external files as possible (we try to keep it at 3). To do this you simply copy and paste all the code you can into a single file. You’ll need some basic JavaScript knowledge to do this however as you often have to be sure to put all the code in the right order and such. Ask your friendly local programmer for help. This is a trivial thing.

After you’ve concatenated your JavaScript you need to minify it. There are a ton of online tools you can use to minify your code. Minification means that all the whitespace is removed and a few other nifty things. You’ll see big improvements in load times from this.

Then after you’ve done all that you should be sure to put all references to external JavaScript at the bottom of all your pages. JavaScript blocks the loading of all other files. Web browsers usually download 2 - 6 resources at a time. This means that when you visit a website your web browser can be downloading the HTML document, the CSS styles, and a few images at the same time but as soon as the browser needs to download a JavaScript all other downloads are halted and you end up loading just one file at a time once you hit that JavaScript file. That’s why your web developer should be putting all those files at the very bottom of the page. This allows your browser to quickly load every other resource your site needs to display and leaves the JavaScript to the end. We’ve seen page load times go from over 4 seconds (which is abysmal) to just 100ms! At 100ms people perceive load times as instant.

4. Don’t use a CMS

Many sites use a blogging system or CMS to manage content. Apps like Wordpress, Drupal, and others will slow down your page load time by a lot. With a CMS all your content is stored in a database so when you go to a site run with a CMS like that, the CMS needs to connect to a database, find the content for the page, create the HTML for the page on the fly and then on top of all that it has to load all the same HTML, CSS, images, and JavaScript. Plus, a CMS takes a lot of control away from you and often forces you to load JavaScript at the top of the page which is a web design sin. This is why you’ll often notice that blogs load slowly. You can tell when a site is using these systems when much of the design and layout will load before the actual content of the page which is totally backwards! Content is king on the web, not design contrary to popular belief.

Of course sometimes you have no choice. That’s okay but please choose wisely when to use such applications as they are not always necessary.

5. Images suck

If your site uses a lot of pictures and image files you may be in trouble. Images aren’t all bad but they should be used wisely. Often times images are used as design elements like backgrounds and such. These days simple solutions exist like using CSS3 for background gradients and creating buttons with code instead of images. Cut out all images and replace them with stylesheets where you can. Then make sure that all images used within the content of your site are really necessary. Be sure to specify the dimensions of those images in your HTML and please, for the love of God, make sure your run all your image files through an optimizer before you publish them. You can reduce the size of images by 50% or more without losing any quality just by running them through programs that use compression algorithms to reduce the file sizes. Many are freely available if you just Google for them.

6. Double check your work

Go back and rethink how you’re serving up your site. Here at Clever our site has very good load times over both our secure SSL connection and our normal HTTP connection. We’ve optimized all images, our files are served compressed, we’ve optimized our server as much as possible through a .htaccess file, concatenated, minified, and put all our JavaScript files at the bottom of every page, minified our CSS, and we’re still not done.

We don’t use a CMS here. If you’re observant you’ll notice that our site serves up PHP files which is usually indicative of a CMS but that’s not what we’re doing. What we’ve done is quite clever. We created our site as a series of components. We have a standard header and footer file that is used for almost all our pages. Then we use a different middle section for each page which calls up the appropriate header and footer files as a PHP include call. We make sure that those files get cached by the server and browser so every time the file gets called we don’t waste a HTTP request. We’re also working hard to make sure that our JavaScript and CSS is cached too. So in a best case scenario a visitor to our website would download all our external files just once and when they move through other sections of the site those cached files get used and the only thing the user’s browser needs to load is the content portion of the page between the header and footer files and even those files are optimized as much as possible.

Our grade in YSlow is a B which is pretty good but we’re working on improving it even more. Remember, there’s almost always more you can do to improve your site. Just be sure to take a second look.

Now you know…

So now you know how to decrease page loading times. Next time we’ll go over things like using the cache and some server configuration (with example code!). In the meantime you can test the speed of your site using tools like YSlow. We recommend YSlow because the results are easy for anyone to understand. You’ll get a grade between A - F. You get an overall grade and then a breakdown of several things you should be doing to increase load times. We have a B in YSlow. A B is good but you should always shoot for an A. After you test your site be sure to go over the suggestions. They’re easy for non technical people to understand and quite practical to implement.

Page speed is important. It can mean the difference between a top ranking and a low one in search engines. Improving your site’s page load times, especially when used in conjunction with other tips, can have a noticeable difference in sales and the perception of your business.

My workshop as seen from above #ifttt #save (Taken with...

Wed, 30 May 2012 19:05:42 -0400

My workshop as seen from above #ifttt #save (Taken with instagram)

Beautician

Wed, 30 May 2012 18:47:08 -0400

Beautician:

Generate beautiful printable documents from plain text or Markdown. Type in-app or upload a file. It’s awesome

Introducing Fraction.less Boilerplate

Wed, 30 May 2012 18:27:01 -0400

NOTE: This post was written on the even of the Fractionless launch which was a very long time ago and is reposted here because our old blog is being transferred here.

I know we haven’t written an inaugural post introducing ourselves. Shame on us but we’re super busy with client work, our one year anniversary, and our web apps (GatsbyTrack and Write.app). Anyway, it’s 5am here I’m Chicago and we’re excited to announce we’ve just published our first open source project as a Christmas gift to the web design/development community! It’s called Fraction.less Boilerplate and you can find it at Fractionless.info. Before we get into what it is and why it’s great let us give tell you the story behind it really quick.